James Galbraith:
            I want to start—this is our last formal gathering at a meal, so I do want to take a minute here and say a word about the people who made this remarkable conference possible and ask them to stand and take your thanks … They seem to have disappeared for a moment, but I would like to thank the caterers, Alan and his staff, for providing us with these very lovely dinners and for doing so with such great efficiency. And I’d like to thank—and I don’t see them—Susan Howard and Linda Christendon of the Levy staff for their exceptional assistance to Thea in every aspect of the logistics of our first EPS conference at the Levy Institute; so a word of thanks will be conveyed to them later on.
            But most of all I want to thank the person who really made this conference, and who not only organized it from a logistical point of view, but also from a financial point of view, and also from an intellectual point of view, and that actually is Thea. So Thea, could you stand up?
            And now, if I may, I will turn to an introduction of our speaker for this evening.
            Barbara Bergmann was early in her career a member of the senior staff of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Kennedy administration. She then had a long and illustrious career at the University of Maryland, later American University. She’s now emerita from both. She’s known for her work in macroeconomics, in simulations, and I would be tempted to say, as a leader, but I’m not sure that feminist economics has leaders, so I will say as a pioneer and an inspiration in the development of feminist economics, and as a comprehensive and incisive and all-wise commentator on every aspect of social and economic policy.
            But as I said of Michael Lind last night, there’s an aspect of polymathic qualities also in Barbara. She’s the only economist I know of who is the author, co-author of a cartoon guide to the phony crisis of Social Security, and it’s the only book of cartoons that it has ever been my privilege to referee. She’s also known for the extreme delicacy and sensibility to the feelings of her adversaries that’s animates every choice of words that she’s famous for. And I will only call your attention to the subtitle of a recent article on the work of the deeply beloved Gary Becker which is subtitled “Preposterous Conclusions.”
            That said, I first got to know Barbara in my very first professional job as an economist, when I came as a not-yet-degreed Ph.D. student to lecture for a year at the University of Maryland, and also had my very first experience of that institution with which we are all, I think, drearily familiar, the faculty meeting. And the faculty meeting at the University of Maryland in those days had an interesting sociology. There were a great many prominent, even distinguished people on the faculty; but when they got into that room, there was a remarkable tentativeness about everything that they said. And you quickly realized, if you were at all observant, that they were just waiting and passing the time until Barbara Bergmann decided that she was ready to tell us what to do. And I have to say that’s exactly the point at which we of Economists for Peace and Security have now arrived.
            Barbara is a founding board member and now trustee of Economists for Peace and Security. She’s been one of the people who brought me into the organization, one of the people who has been most steadfast of the support of what I’ve tried to do, and what we have tried to do, over my entire time associated with the organization, a person with the clearest sense of direction, of what this organization is about. And so I will now invite you, Barbara, to take a few minutes and tell us, please, what to do.

Barbara Bergmann:
            Now Jamie, how did you know that was my subject? Thank you.
            This organization, of course, was founded—It used to be called Economists, I believe, United for Arms Reduction, Allied for Arms Reduction. And a little bit more forthright than Economists for Peace and Security, but I presume we still have the same aims. And this particular period should present us with an opportunity, if ever we’re going to have one, to make an impact. The situation in Iraq, now the general public realizes, was a stupid, disgusting, and deadly mistake, and perhaps, perhaps, this is a good time to advocate the reduction of militarism in this country and even the reduction of defense expenditures.
            But if you look around, if you read the newspapers, what you’re seeing, of course, is that even the Democrats are suggesting that we raise the number of people in the military, and increase military expenditures even further from where they are now. So we would have our work cut our for us.
            But I have a dream, to paraphrase Martin Luther King. I think that out of this conference we could have a wonderful publication, and who knows, if we did it right, maybe it would knock the socks off The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and the people in the Congress, and get a lot of publicity, and maybe even make a difference.
            So let me try to say what this publication would say, and perhaps even have the management of the organization to put out something like this.
            Now in what sense are economists able to contribute to discussions of defense strategy and defense spending? Well, I suppose we are known as smarties, so maybe that could serve us. But I think we do have some unique contributions we can make. For example, we’re adept at cost benefit analysis. And we have the idea of opportunity costs. So let me, under those two headings, discuss how we might be able to contribute to arguments that would reduce defense expenditures.
            Let’s talk first about cost benefit analysis. Well, Linda Bilmes has told us of the monetary costs, so we could certainly put that in our publication. I think, in addition to that, we would want to put something about the benefits of defense expenditures. And if you start to look at the benefits, a helluva lot of them are negative. Of course, Iraq is, you might say, just the successor of the useless and bloody wars we have fought in the postwar period. I’m old enough to remember the Korean War. It started as a defense of South Korea, which had been invaded by North Korea; but of course they got a big ambition that was General MacArthur, and they then invaded North Korea, and they were essentially defeated there by an invasion of the Chinese across the Chinese-Korean border. And the war went on with lots of casualties, and I remember in ’52, Eisenhower, who was running for president, and he was the first Republican elected since Herbert Hoover, he said that he would go to Korea. And the point of his going to Korea was virtually a promise to end the war. And it was ended on a sour note. We certainly didn’t win over North Korea, although we did keep them out of South Korea.
            Then came Viet Nam and Iraq. And I think that we ought to emphasize that these military adventures have had virtually no benefit. They’ve had negative benefits, and considerable costs. I gave you a copy of a list of places the United States has bombed since World War II. This is thanks to William Blum. The list contains about 30 or 40 places, and Blum says, Guess how many of these have become democracies, to which the answer is--I guess except for South Korea, certainly North Korea has not—the answer is none. So here’s an example of what militarism has accomplished since World War II.
            Now, if Iraq has proved anything, it’s that the expenditure of huge amounts of money has produced a military which is ineffective. It cannot even keep under a small backward country. So again, the benefit that we get from all this expenditure is very minor.
            However, big defense expenditures and lots of equipment give presidents like Bush, when they happen to get into office, the temptation to wage war. We used to say, “the boys like to play with their toys.” And if you recall the Bridge to Nowhere, that Alaskan bridge, you can say that defense expenditures are a bridge to war. Michael Lind told us about the dreams of hegemony, and Lloyd Dumas also spoke about that. To me, as I said last night, the most amazing thing is that this suggestion that we would maintain our hegemony and not allow anybody else to come up to where we are sank without any discussion of it. I’ve spoken around people and asked why that happened, why The New York Times, why The Washington Post, why almost any discussion has been absent; and some people said, well, they just wanted to suppress it. But my theory is I think they assumed that everybody was in favor of it, so there was no discussion needed.
            But we might ask about this hegemony. What is the point? What would we get out of it except of course what sports fans get when their team wins the World Series. You’re able to say, We’re Number One. Maybe that’s not nothing, but it’s costing a lot of billions of dollars.
            Does it help our business? These days you might ask, Is our business ours? I mean, in globalization, a company is all over the world, and in what sense does any company belong anymore to any country? The theory, I think, of the British Empire was that it was supposed to enrich the British; but I think, again, that was doubtful.
            How about access to oil? Well, last I heard there was a worldwide oil market, and I don’t think that anybody is going to get any access that they don’t get by paying the world price. So I fail to even understand what the point of it is again, except this ability to say, We’re number one.
            Okay, so much for cost benefit analysis. The answer being, there ain’t no benefit.
            Let’s talk about opportunity cost. And here let me point out this wonderful cartoon by Jim Groveman. “What’s in Your Wallet?” We can have this on the cover of the publication. And of course it shows Uncle Sam spending billions on universal war, and not having any money for universal health care.
            Now, I haven’t read it, I’ve been out of touch with civilization since I came here, but I understand Martin Feldstein an op ed saying we ought to increase defense, in which I guess he’s one with the Democratic congressmen, and keep non-defense steady. Well, I happen to think, and I think we could make a very good case, that there are expanding needs for non-defense spending. In particular, surely global warming is going to occasion important expenditures.
            But as a student of social policy, let me tell you, if you didn’t know, if you hadn’t noticed, that the institution of marriage is slipping away. Last year more than one-third of the children born in the United States were born to unmarried mothers. And this demise of marriage, which is after all one of the basic institutions of our civilization, is inevitably going to, and right now is creating a demand for social spending; because children brought up by single mothers tend to be poor. And the number of poor children, or the percentage of children who are officially designated as poor, is rising, and the only way we can—I don’t think, let me say, I don’t think that abstinence education and marriage counseling are going to bring back marriage. It’s possible that perhaps a more libertarian approach, maybe open marriage a la francaise, might do it; but even that is rather doubtful.
            So if we are going to rescue these children, and I think we need to rescue them, we’re going to have to spend amounts for the government to supply them with things that essentially their fathers used to supply them, such things as medical care, child care so their moms can work, and college subsidies. College subsidies, even if we didn’t have the demise of marriage, I think would be a priority for expanded social spending.
            So we’ve got a lot of things we need to do, and I think Feldstein is not correct.
            Now, we might ask—I mean, to me, these reasons to reduce defense spending, the ineffectuality of the result, the evil of being drawn into war so we can play with our toys, and all the other bad things that happen, to me it’s very obvious that we ought to be reducing defense spending fairly fast. So we might ask, Why don’t these facts have more currency?
            Well, I think the American public is very gullible. We had a terrorist attack, and, as I watched the towers fall on 9/11, I knew that very soon the fight against the people who had done that was going to be defined as a war. And sure enough, about two days later, it was. But the real way, the real need for measures to find and root out the people who were doing that is of course a detective story. That’s what the fight against terrorism is. We need Interpol and what have you. Going after these people is not something that can be done by infrantry men in a tank. So the public, I think, has been grossly deceived by defining the reaction to 9/11 as a war. I don’t think that it was bad to invade Afghanistan, but obviously Iraq was another story.
            A second reason for the prevalence of the idea that we should continue, and in fact rev up, our spending I think has to do with the economics of pork. Winslow Wheeler spoke in one of the sessions about a plane that was not needed, that was being developed at vast expense; and when he brought this to the attention of Nancy Kestenbaum, the senator he was working with, she said, Oh, I can’t do anything about it. Well, why couldn’t she do anything about it? It’s because of pork.
            Again, I remember General Eisenhower, President Eisenhower, warned us against the military-industrial complex having undue influence on the legislative process, and it certainly has turned out that his warning was needed, but alas, not heeded. If you read the papers, you can see that there is a yearning in the defense community for China to take the place of Russia. And it’s not because the Boeing executives really worry that China is a threat to their community, at least from the defense point of view. No, it’s because they won’t make as much money as they would if China is not viewed as an enemy with whom we must compete, with whom we must match two and three times the dollars append with dollars we spend. By the way, if they start spending a lot of dollars, it will be the dollars that they’ve got in their treasury from the deficit in the foreign exchange.\  Now we might ask, what are benefits from pork? When a congressman gets a defense project assigned to his or her district, how many people benefit? How many people get employed as a result? I think that it would be a very good project to undertake a study of the actual benefits from pork. Now of course the main benefit is that the pork recipient, that is the company that gets the project, makes more profit and holds a fundraiser for the congressman who got it for them. And of course what is this from? This is from the fact that we have an election process which depends very heavily on people collecting campaign funds.
            Let me read you a very disillusioned quote from a professor of history. It was in The Washington Post about a week ago. This is Andrew Bacovics, whose son died in Iraq recently. And he says that—he’s in Massachusetts—he says:

            Senator Kennedy and Senator Kerry telephoned to express their condolences, [and so did his congressman] but when I suggested to them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brush-off. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence, ‘Don’t blame me.’ To whom do Kennedy, Kerry, and Lynch [his congressman] listen?

And the answer is, wealthy individuals and institutions. He says:

             “Money maintains the Republican-Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewed channels. It preserves in tact the clichés of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement, and the nation’s call to global leadership. It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent. This is not some great conspiracy; it’s the way our system works.” So that’s what you might say we have to fight; that is, to get rid of pork, we may have to get rid of the system of the private financing of elections, electioneering.
           
            But of course that’s the father of a dead kid. He’s, you know, bitter.
            Another reason why we go for this stuff has to do, I think, with masculinity. If I need be a little Freudian, which is actually uncharacteristic of me, but it’s very tempting, you may say it’s gender anxiety. It’s the fear of being considered soft. And of course Hillary Clinton needs to show she’s man enough to be president, so she’s got it even worse. Michael Lind said that this is mostly found in the south, this kind of anxiety. And of course that is where the rednecks come from and our well-known for their masculinity. So we have a lot to fight to get this to happen, an improvement to happen.
            Now there are, let’s face it, real needs for the military. There’s defense of the homeland. But, you know, Costa Rica abolished their army, and I don’t think anything bad has happened to them. Of course we’ve got two wonderful oceans defending us, and so if we don’t provoke the North Koreans into sending us missiles to Alaska, I think a relatively small defense establishment could probably deal with the homeland defense.         There are humanitarian interventions. Alan Cooperman in one of the sessions perhaps told us that perhaps we shouldn’t do as much of that as we’ve been doing. I think—[End Side A] . So there are some real needs for a military, but they are not anywhere near as large as the present provision.
            We should obviously try to think about what Michael Lind has said about a concert of powers, or the U.N. I’m a little bit scared of a “democratic” U.N., which was suggested by Mr. Abt, I think; but nevertheless, there are problems here, because the U.N. is not a strong organization, it’s not a good organization in many ways, and it cannot serve what I think a sensible alliance would serve.
            So I think to close—and you’ve had a long day, so I will close—this would be a wonderful time to try to get, you might say, an extreme and courageous message across that we could improve our cost benefit situation with far lower defense expenditures, and we could improve our domestic situation with all the things we could buy with the funds. Thank you.