Corporate Welfare

During the month of November 1940, four months after its completion, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, affectionately known by the locals as “Galloping Girdy,” spectacularly collapsed during a 40 mile per wind. Local officials were dumbfounded and after several unsuccessful attempts to explain the disaster, Theodore von Karman from the California Institute of Technology was called in to help. Von Karman was an expert in fluid dynamics (how liquids and gases move). Immediately Von Karman built a scale model of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and placed the model in a wind tunnel. The scale model was accurate in every possible way including duplicating the tensile strength of the steel girders used to construct Galloping Girdy. After several months of testing, Von Karman concluded the cause of the bridge collapse was the 40 mile per wind. Like a window rattling when a helicopter flys over, or an opera singer breaking a wine glass with her voice, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge had a natural resonance frequency that matched a 40 mile per hour wind. The bridge simply rattled itself to pieces when the wind blew at precisely 40 miles per hour.

Before Von Karman, engineers never thought to use scale models to test their designs. Today civil engineers and especially aeronautical engineers use exact scale models in wind tunnels and a variety of other stressed environments to insure the air worthiness of their air planes and missiles.

Last week George W. Bush announced he was going to tear up the Anti- Ballistic Missile Treaty and build the antimissile defense shield known as “Star Wars.” The idea behind Star Wars is to build a “defensive” missile capable of shooting down an “offensive” missile. These offensive missiles typically move at about 25,000 miles per hour. Using the method of scaling pioneered by Theodore Von Karman, Star wars would be equivalent to shooting down a bullet with a bullet. Since the fastest bullets travel at no more than about 1,500 miles per hour, the task becomes even more difficult. To complicate matters, suppose the 25,000 mph bullet could release thousands of highly light reflecting BB’s designed to hide the bullet within the cloud of BB’s. Which target do you aim and shoot at?

Is it possible to shoot down a bullet traveling at 25,000 mph hiding in a cloud of BBs with another bullet ? The answer is no. No one knows how to do that nor will anyone in the next 20 years, if ever, figure out how to do it. Then what is President Bush up to? The answer is obvious: Corporate Welfare.

Corporate Welfare is just one example of the reactionaries in the Federal Government and on Wall Street waging class warfare against the American middle and working classes. Billions of hard earned tax dollars will be spent on the Star Wars program which has no hope of being built . On the other hand, the big corporations who will get the Federal contracts to build Star Wars will become wealthier and more powerful endangering our democracy.

May 2001