[1 SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 1985 The following are…]

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1 SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 1985 The following are excerpts from the presentation by William W. Winpising: ir to the panel on the nuclear arms ri Ice. Winpisinger is the president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, AFL-CIO.

Welcome to the BIG LOTTO! Or as Business Week is prone to call it, the ca -sino society. And that's what our country is today, without a shadow of a doubt: one big, gigantic, pie-in-the-sky, genuine brasscoated, military lottery game and craps shoot.

You know it's true in politics. The 20 biggest weapons contractors poured $3.4 million into congressional campaigns alone in 1984. And god knows how many millions more were poured into the campaign of Ronald Reagan.

And I think it's equally true in economics, where the nation's leading right-wing prophets, like Milton Friedman and George Gilder, see everything in terms of a child's world of choices. A mound of Swiss chocolates for the few and a mound of feces in the bean patch for all the rest of uS.

The liberals sit around and duel each other with their desk-top computers, coming up with high-tech solutions that sound amazingly like the craps-shoot of the 1920s that brought us first the Great Depression, shortly Take the federal deficit for instance. The current fiscal deficit is so gargantuan that the actual numbers just numb my mind. It goes beyond anything that I can reasonably comprehend: $2 trillion dollars. And this from a bunch of wackos that want a con -titutional amendment or a constitutional convention to make a balanced budget the law of the land. And I'm here to tell you that if they get their constitutional amend -ment, they'll have to repeal it.

By 1986 the daily interest on the debt is going to be $387 million a day. That is $141.3 billion dollars a year, paid John Henning (left) and am Winpisinger on anti-nuclear eapons panel

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