Seymour Melman

Catholic New Times, Jan 30, 2005 by Ralph Nader

In the rarified world of economics and industrial engineering, there was never anyone like Columbia University professor Seymour Melman I grew up reading and listening to the prophetic, factual and hard-nosed arguments he made for his anti-war and worldwide disarmament causes in the specialized and occasionally, the major media as well. There were Seymour Melman's op-eds and letters to the editor in the New York Times starting in his twenties. There were his cogent Congressional testimonies about the permanent war economy and its damage to our civilian economy and necessities of the American people. His economic conversion plans and his advocacy for a muscular peace agreement with the Soviet Union illuminated what kind of economy, innovation and prosperity. could be ours in the U.S.

Melman's work was detailed and he challenged what President Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" like that of no other academic. He would show how talented scientific and engineering skills were sucked into this permanent war economy to the detriment of civilian jobs and economic development as if people's well-being mattered. "To eliminate hunger in America = $4-5 billion = C-5A aircraft program, he would say, referring to Lockheed Martin's chronically bungled, defective and costly contract.

Into his eighties. Mr. Melman probed the arcane regions of weapons systems. He meticulously look apart the wrong ways the corporate-dominated Pentagon priced the corporate cost of subs, ships, planes and other modern weaponry, by way of explaining the staggering spiral of weapon budgets The titles of his books spoke to his concerns--Our Depleted Society, Pentagon Capitalism and Profits Without Production.

Seymour Melman will leave a legacy of wisdom, insight, humanity, consistency and diligence. In a society whose rulers and corporatists seal the people off from such magnificent minds and inundate them with trivia, distraction and the hot air artists daily bellowing their lucrative ignorance, sagacious Americans like Seymour Melman will not receive the attention the citizenry deserves unless we the people, who own the public airwaves, begin to control and use our own media rights.

For more information, visit www.citizenworks.org