In This Issue

 Peace & Justice Store

October 28, 2014

- Althea, age 7

Join us at The Ed Everts Social Justice Activist Award Event to celebrate Migrant Justice/Justicia Migrante with special guest Julia Alvarez and live music by Alejandro & Grupo Sabor. Migrant Justice is dedicated to building the voice, capacity, and power of the migrant farm worker community in Vermont.

 

This PJC fundraiser will take place on Saturday, November 15th, 7pm-12 midnight at the beautiful Main Street Landing Train Station, 1 Main Street, Burlington.

   

Ms. Alvarez, an acclaimed author, poet and activist, best known for her novels In the Time Of the Butterflies and How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, will offer a reading.

 

Hailed as Vermont's hottest Latin Music band by the Burlington Free Press, Grupo Sabor's sound is a heady mixture of Merengue & Jazz infused with the infectious beat of traditional Afro-Dominican rhythms.

 

Co-Sponsored by Main Street Landing and Radio Bean.

Click here for ticket information.

 

Please consider purchasing a ticket so a farmworker can attend and offering transportation if you are coming from Addison or Franklin Counties.  Contact Rachel if you can help. 

Bombers, Bellylaughs, and Burlington

or

One Flew Over the F-35 Cuckoo Nest

 

By Colonel Rosanne M. Greco, USAF (retired)

Former Chair of the South Burlington City Council

 

On a recent mid-summer evening, I settled down to read some articles from national and international media assessing the world's largest defense program, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. It didn't promise to be a night of light reading with titles like: "Will the F-35 be another 'Widow Maker' for the Canadian pilots?" "The F-35 Fighter Jet is a Historic $1 Trillion Disaster," "The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere," "Americans Have Spent Enough Money on a Broken Plane to Buy Every Homeless Person a Mansion," "Rough Ride for the F-35" and "The Troubled F-35."

 

Mid-way through the articles, the sheer absurdity of what we were undertaking struck me as manically hilarious.  Were I to title this summary, I would call it "Bombers, Bellylaughs, and Burlington or One Flew Over the F-35 Cuckoo Nest."  

 

We intend to spend $1.4 Trillion to acquire and operate the F-35. It is the world's most expensive weapons project -- ever. Originally, the cost per plane was promised to be $35 Million. Now, the average cost per plane has risen to $160 Million. Cost overruns are projected to be over $167 Billion.  

 

The $1.4 Trillion we are spending on the F-35 could: 

• Provide health care for over five million veterans for 32 years, or
• Pay off all of the student debt owned by all 37 million Americans, or
• Repair all of our national infrastructure (roads, bridges, railway, etc.), or
• Care for the thousands of children on our southern border, and fund every other humanitarian crises around the world, or  
• Feed all of our 55 million schoolchildren (K-12) for the next 28 years, or
• Purchase a mansion for every one of the estimated 600,000 homeless Americans living on the streets.

But we are not using the money for those unmet needs. We are spending $1.4 Trillion on an aircraft that:

• Has such poor maneuverability it is ineffective in dogfighting, and susceptible to anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missiles, and
• Carries a smaller payload of weapons and has a shorter range than current fighters, and
• Relies on stealth technology that has failed in past combat, and is easily countered by savvy enemies
• China stole F-35 classified data, which may make the F-35 outdated before it's even deployed
• China, Russia, and Iran are fielding (and selling) radars that detect stealth aircraft
• Has 24 million lines of software code, which is repeatedly failing tests, and
• Is not agile or survivable enough to support troops on the ground, and
• Is restricted from flying in the rain, or near thunderstorms.

And, according to General Hostage, the Commander of Air Combat Command, it needs other aircraft to protect it! He said, "The F-35 is not built as an air superiority platform. It needs the F-22."   Translation: the F-35 needs ANOTHER multi-million-dollar plane to fly nearby to protect it! Are you laughing yet?

 

The craziness extends to the politicians who support this outrageously expensive, grossly incompetent weapon system. One would expect Department of Defense critics like Vermont Democrats Leahy, Sanders and Welch to oppose it. Nope. Rather, they actually want this absurdity based in Burlington -- Vermont's most densely populated area -- despite the fact that it will directly jeopardize the lives of our airmen, and the safety, health, and home values of close to 7,000 residents.  

 

In contrast, Republican Senator John McCain calls the F-35 "both a scandal and a tragedy." He decries the fact that the military are buying the plane before its testing is complete. McCain says the F-35 is the worst example "of the military-industrial-congressional complex."

 

Backers claim the F-35 will maintain or create jobs. However, the relatively few defense jobs it may maintain pale in comparison to what we sacrifice [see above]. And 'reluctant' proponents, who lament that the F-35 program is unstoppable, perpetuate the madness. If insanity is contagious, then these presumably sane people have been infected.

 

Astronomical costs. Dismal performance. Incongruous support. Total madness! Still laughing?