Star whores

A 40-foot “Moneymobile” pulled into Ann Arbor last Saturday afternoon as part of Pax Christi USA’s “Bread Not Stones” bus tour designed to raise public awareness about the U.S. government’s “horribly misdirected budget priorities, specifically over-funding of the U.S. military versus domestic spending programs.” Earlier in the day at the federal building in A2, a group of about 30 protesters, a handful of whom were dressed as Darth Vader, showed up to protest the multibillion-dollar fiasco known as the Star Wars ballistic missile defense program. According to Peace Action of Michigan, tens of billions of dollars have been spent to date on the project that 50 Nobel laureates recently said was fatally flawed. And Dwight Eisenhower thought the military/industrial complex was a threat in his day.

“Think about it,” says Peace Action’s Keith Gunter. “A country firing nuclear warheads at us might as well inscribe their return address on the missiles and include the message ‘Please vaporize us.’ It is much more likely that any nuclear attack would come in the form of a high-tech Timothy McVeigh.

“The most sophisticated and expensive system imaginable would be useless against a nuclear weapon hidden in a boat in a harbor or in the back of a Ryder truck.’”

Star Wars, indeed. Like the signs said last Saturday, the farce does not need to be with us.

Curt Guyette is Metro Times news editor. Contact him at 313-202-8004 or cguyette@metrotimes.com