Meet the New Boss...
Still same as the old boss. A fan of the site sends me this Boston Globe article, which discusses how prominent Democratic politicians pushed to get the second F-35 engine into the final DOD Appropriations bill prior to President Obama's signature. You might remember that F-35 second engine as one of those costly gold-plated things that DOD really didn't ask for and that President Obama said he wouldn't stand for. First it was gone.
The Obama administration has signaled for months that funding for a second F-35 engine in the fiscal 2010 defense bill could become veto bait. Gates spent months, most recently at the beginning of September, making the case that the Pentagon does not need the alternative engine, built by a General Electric-Rolls-Royce team.
Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) said
Wednesday that he decided against funding the engine because he was concerned about the floor vote on the entire defense spending bill.
Senator John F. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, said that GE officials had told his office that 1,000 jobs in Massachusetts will be saved or maintained once full production begins on the backup engine.
"There will also be some jobs gained, but maintaining jobs right now is very important,’’ he said yesterday, defending his efforts to persuade fellow lawmakers, including the highly influential Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania, to overturn Obama’s proposal in a final vote on Saturday.
Inouye chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, while Murtha oversees a House panel with jurisdiction over defense spending.
Kerry also used his influence with the White House to get it to back off a threatened presidential veto. He told the Globe that he ultimately got assurances from Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, that the president would not veto the fiscal year 2010 defense appropriations bill if the money for the engine was included. Obama signed the bill which totals $626 billion, on Monday.
What utter bullshit. This is just unjustified crap, and it doesn't smell any better coming from a Democratic politician than a Republican. In talking about defense acquisition with a colleague, he said that he might believe in Santa Claus, but he didn't believe in acquisition reform. With clowns like this in the Senate and White House, it's no wonder that the Defense Department can't get clear of its huge funding bills and massively overpriced, behind schedule programs.
The VH-71 presidential helicopter program also got $85 million to "wind down" its efforts. Must be a big office. The USMC's Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle is getting $293.5 million, despite its many troubles. I'm severely disappointed.
but to keep people alive, never.
No, just enough to keep people alive. Always being re-evaluated.
"Someday somebody related to some of these sufferers, these victims, these collaterally damaged souls, may try to kill you. And I have to tell you, I think you’ll have it coming." - Christopher Cooper
we have the ability to kick ass and get the oil and gas we need.
Your supposed to be grateful.
That stinking SOB has lied about everything, I hate him more then I hate GW Bush. Do we really need this black man in the White House asking for change.
...why do you feel the need to point out that the President is black?
Because it is funny.
That the Democrats are the same as the Republicans. Sure there are individuals that are progressive, but over all, when it comes to the big issues like war and "trade" and education, they are on the same page.
They are in fact two factions of the same Money/Power Party that runs this planet.
What ever gave "Jason Sigger" the notion that John Kerry was a man of the people?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcCPlkw6dO0
makes great engines for these killer flying machines. Screw Rolls Royce and England.
The F-35 and F-22 engines are from Pratt & Whitney. The GE plant in Lynne, MA makes mostly commercial aircraft engines. Having two ongoing engines for the same aircraft is a good way to have a bad problem, and GE has no business demanding part of the contract won by P&W.
Kerry's just one of the many minions serving it.
in both the house and the senate that many of these wasteful projects be killed. As long as the jobs that die with them are in some other state.
Hasa Diga Eebowai
The sudden shutdown of Arrow Trucking Company left many drivers stranded, some far away from home, and all of them are looking for work just three days before Christmas.
Employees were told Arrow Trucking was suspending operations. There would be no benefit packages, and trucks and trailers would be repossessed. Hundreds of drivers all across North America were told to leave their trucks where they were. And offered a bus ticket home or $200.00.
that wasn't a Chapter 11 was it?
Hasa Diga Eebowai
I hear that their paychecks bounced too.
Well, the NAME of the POTUS has changed. What else?
We should have listened to Dwight D.
He warned us all and we ignored his words at our collective peril.
"I know that there are people who do not love their fellow
man, and I hate people like that! " ~ Tom Lehrer (1928 - )
Would we be defending this country with nothing but massive conscription and retooling auto factories to produce cheap tanks in a hurry every time we got into a real war?
The military-industrial complex has its flaws, but it's what enables us to have an all-volunteer military with a low casualty rate. It's easy to rant about the current system, particularly when blatant pork barrel politics gets put in the spotlight like in the above article, but the grass is not always greener on the other side.
your drinking.
SecDef Gates was, in the recent past, talking about the need to lessen the number of "gold-plated" acquisition projects that are soaring above their documented costs and schedule, without providing that much more capability than currently fielded weapon systems. We lack the leadership that has the willingness to lower the requirements, make affordable defense equipment, and beat back the Congressional weakness that supports the continuation of horrible defense projects like the EFV and the VH-71. No one is suggesting going to the British model of stripping its military to the bone.
It would be great to be rid of some of these budget-killing boondoggles. My post was exclusively directed at handypants' comment about "We should have listened to Dwight D." (who made the famous warning about the pitfalls of the military-industrial complex).
There *should* be sensible alternatives. Unfortunately, such alternatives would most likely have to be enacted by the very people who profit politically from the nonsensical alternatives. :-(
The Marine-1 helicopter was slated to replace the current fleet of Vietnam-era aircraft. What is 'horrible' about that? The fact that it went beyond the document cost and schedule is because the pentagon revised the requirements constantly and to a point where it would be impossible to maintain the original price. There is not a contractor anywhere that could have shouldered the changing specifications. Now there's NO new helicopter. Yes, a 'sensible' alternative would be to build a modern aircraft with one contract and modify it as needed in its future.
You're not really suggesting that the only alternative to a bloated, porky, trillion-dollar defense complex is "nothing but massive conscription"?
Here's a concept: we get our money's worth on our contracts. They aren't written to be deliberately wasteful, there's actual competition for bids, and there's OVERSIGHT so we don't have soldiers electrocuted in the shower and drinking tainted water served by third-world slave labor.
Why would you jump straight from "I don't like corruption" to "I want an unworkable system".
Also, note that if we DID have to go through conscription and retooling factories every time we got into a real war... don't you think our government would be just a LEEEEEETLE less eager to throw our boys into "fake" wars, like it's been doing nonstop for the past 40-50 years? Haven't you sort of hit the nail on the head without meaning to?
See my response to Jason Sigger, above. I was only referring to the comment about listening to Eisenhower, not saying that I'm ever so happy with the status quo. We definitely do get less than our money's worth on most contracts. However, read the OP again: this wasn't even really a contract issue. This was naked political logrolling. If it were just a contract, the SecDef had basically said he was willing to pay whatever the breakup costs were and get out. The defense bill will apparently prevent him from doing that.
If we did have to go through conscription every time we got into a war of any stripe, it could mean we got into fewer wars. However, those fewer wars would be infinitely deadlier, since they would be fought by conscripts and with inferior equipment. Much modern military equipment really does take a trained professional to operate.
I won't defend how we waste money on war equipment, Pentagon contracting, and all that. This F-35 announcement actually struck me as a yawner--too normal, cynical as that is to say. I don't prefer the status quo to all alternatives. I only prefer it to the one raised by handypants.
"...the grass is not always greener..."
That's it? That is the reason we shouldn't be calling for fundamental changes?
"Someday somebody related to some of these sufferers, these victims, these collaterally damaged souls, may try to kill you. And I have to tell you, I think you’ll have it coming." - Christopher Cooper
... on what "fundamental changes" you mean.
Do you want to go back to the pre-Eisenhower model?
The insanely obscenely bloated Perpetual War Machine budget is $1 trillion per year. Divided between the Department of Defense which doesn't actually do defense, the Department of Homeland Security (which does do defense), the Department of Energy (Nukes) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (or missing body parts as the case may be).
The next most insanely bloated Defense Budget in the world is less than one tenth of ours.
NOAM CHOMSKY c/o Democracy Now: "The Unipolar Moment and the Culture of Imperialism" here
Excellent talk on the development of the post Soviet pretext for the maintenance of the Perpetual War Machine.
statusquObama, change you can only pretend in
one day heard that a major movement of Left-Right-Center-Upper-Lower-Sideways-Backwards coalition of pissed off Americans united was on the way to Washington to address some grievances . .
did you have for breakfast today?
one House speaker, one minority whip and a nice cup of Kona with creme.
to see all these pissed off Americans from all walks of life, come together for a common goal. To end the political bullshit. To stop the continued dumbing-down of society. To proclaim "Enough is ENOUGH" and show these villains the door. And should they put up a fight while being escorted out (Oh, I WISH they would!), they'll get the backhand.
It will be on the news for weeks. Speaking of news, the giant crowd will make a few other stops. Fox anyone? :-)
NOBODY 2012
the military industrial complex is the engine of our economy. That is what it's true purpose is. It's a huge jobs program, with some of those jobs being far more lucrative than others. That's why the decisions about what weapons stay and what go don't make sense to the general public. I know, I've worked in it for 30 years.
We're gonna put a boot up their ass.
that drowns out the others voices, while peace avoids us and power exploits us.
Let them build windmills.
"Someday somebody related to some of these sufferers, these victims, these collaterally damaged souls, may try to kill you. And I have to tell you, I think you’ll have it coming." - Christopher Cooper
So when a defense contractor CEO throws a $10 million bat mitzvah for his kid, and invites Tom Petty and Steven Tyler to perform, that's providing jobs? For whom, Petty and Tyler? They already have jobs.
Corporations don't provide jobs. Local contractors do. Corporations maximize profit, often by outsourcing jobs to slave labor and/or eliminating positions entirely. If a corporation provides a job, it's only because it has no way around it at the moment. Don't kid yourself. PEOPLE are engines of progress, not corporations.
aren't corporations? Since when.
Hasa Diga Eebowai
Beat me to it.
You're vastly overstating your case. The defense budget makes up just under 4 percent of US GDP - that hardly qualifies as the "engine of our economy." Housing, healthcare, food services, financial services, and transportation are just a few of the sectors of the economy larger than defense. Defense is not an insignificant part of the economy, but it's hardly the engine.
Not to mention the noise pollution, the military is already facing strong opposition at these planes being at different bases. They are said to be nine times louder then a F15 and being a person that lives 7 miles from the Portland Air Guard that just about daily flies F15, I can’t imagine a plane nine times louder, my windows shake as it is now. Are there any other people here from Portland that hears the F15?
Dude, you're nine times more misinformed. An F-15 has two engines, an F-35 has one. Now if we only had a calculator....
But when the Air Force issued a preliminary environmental study in June showing an F-35’s single engine would generate more noise than the two engines of an F-15, people started paying attention.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facili...
there will zero fighter jets out of portland well before the F-35 comes online for any guard deployment.
Also the new engine will make significant more noise then on the one the Air Force reported on.
The USAF reported on one F-35 engine and now there's one they didn't know about?? Right now there is ONE engine specified, and it's been specified for a long while. Your news source is making this up, either that or you are.
Read the topic of this article, the military want to have a bigger more powerful engine for the F35; the F35 is currently in operation. This is to replace the engine on some of the F35.
The military does NOT want a more powerful engine than the current Pratt and Whitney one, Senator Kerry of Massachusetts simply wants General Electric (in Lynne, MA) to be in on the action and built an identical one.
And no, the F-35 is not in action yet. It is in testing.
Are you thick or just joking?
WorkersWarmongers of the world unite!Jeremy Scahill here
statusquObama, change you can only pretend in
A good war because he's President! A War we can believe in!
Evet you will go down in C&L history. You dominate with over 40% of the comments on this thread alone. Over fifty yesterday.
I was trying to think of something to say. Umm.... Brevity is the soul of wit?
I don't know. Any other good quotes about word economy?
Bubblism: (’bub’ uhl’ism”) A complex financial scheme lasting several years consisting of three or more parts: Creation of an asset-class bubble (such as real estate, egregious excess and ebullience, followed by horrific losses which are transferred onto the shoulder of bubble victims while ill-gotten gains are retained by the bubble creators. A Bubblism may be conceptualized as a a ‘financial concerto played by crooks with financial instruments.’
No no. The economy of words. As in using as few words as possible to convey a message. Didn't your English teacher ever tell you to keep it short?
being productive?
LOL only in America
Quantity is not quality.
No I'm not suggesting you be banned. In fact, I think you are slacking. You shouldn't let up until 90% of all the comments on any given thread are yours.
Other commenters have no idea where you stand on the issues.
Okay here we go again it's about "issues"
It's no wonder this country can't solve our problems. We think we don't have any.
We're trained to discuss and yap about issues not solve problems. Thanks for the reminder though I forgot.
OK. The gentle approach didn't work. sarcasm undetected.
I guess what I'm trying to say is you don't need to reply to every single comment. And if you have so much to say that you need to reply to your own comments, sit back a moment, collect your thoughts and put them into a paragraph.
Really evet. Up to half the comments on a thread are yours. you don't think that's a little bit weird?
You're severely disappointed? Severely disappointed? I am severely pissed off (I know, so what?). John Kerry is an asshole. I have hated the jerk since he didn't fight for his election as POTUS. After I worked hard for him he shit on me in the blink of an eye. He let himself get shit upon during the election and did nothing about it. To hell with this jerk. It would probably be cheaper to just pay the 1000 people who will lose their jobs over this than to continue to build the stupid thing. Kerry doing this does nothing for the liberal side of any equation. What a dickhead.
I wan this fighter to be the first thing Putin sees when he rears his ugly head over Alaska.
by not fighting for his election. Now we've got Barry. Oh boy!
the title of the song should be "Will Get Fooled Again."
"the president would not veto the fiscal year 2010 defense appropriations bill if the money for the engine was included. Obama signed the bill which totals $626 billion, on Monday."
The signing and the reason the prez couldn't veto is because the R's held the bill up until it was necessary to sign it or run out of money on many things. (obviously $626 billion covers many things not just this)
It is how politics work.
If you are going to get so upset about a funding bill maybe you shouldn't try to follow the details so closely?
Just a thought.
We have a over bloated MIC that eats up more than half of every tax dollar and you're going apoplectic over a back-up engine? Go nuts over the cost of military in total - let's cut it in half! This engine is the small print - the larger issue IS the military cost in total.
"I know that there are people who do not love their fellow
man, and I hate people like that! " ~ Tom Lehrer (1928 - )
In order to see the forest through the trees, one must first cut down the forest.
Curtilingus, 2009 A.D.
there's NO reason this country has to spend more than the rest of the world combined in its military. someone posited (sic) that the MIC is a big jobs creater. BFD -- if we had infrastructure projects and green initiatives there would be plenty of worthwhile jobs.
Those green jobs would also have the added benefit of putting us one step closer to being able to tell OPEC and the whole middle east to FO, further reducing the need for such a bloated military.
Who woulda thunk that energy independence makes us safer? I bet the terr'rists hate us for that...
I keep trying to make the same point to a friend who worries incessantly about what will become the next great economic engine for this country. Every productive economic activity requires energy, and the nation(s) that lead the way in developing the next generation of industrial fuels will be poised to recapture both jobs and revenue that are currently being shipped overseas.
We will keep building these things until we can't print anymore money to pay for them.
We have a depression because we had an intentional bubble economy to replace the real economy that we sent to China. Now we are not buying enough Chinese goods with our phony dollars for them to be recycled in buying our phony treasuries which is how the Chinese keep their currency artificially low, thus guaranteeing the continuing US market. This in turn funds our very real and lethal military hardware which we use to incinerate brown people with. Mostly on the periphery of China.
But the Treasury auctions go on unimpeded nevertheless.
Where is the money coming from? One analyst says it is a Ponzi scheme.
Zero Hedge here
statusquObama, change you can only pretend in
It’s not just the United States it is a world wide increase of weapons, look at Turkey buying three brand new submarines from Germany, why the hell would they want these for.
Democracy Now here
statusquObama, change you can only pretend in
Are you seriously saying that we would not have had this recession if we'd kept our factory jobs here?
The depression is a result of the great credit bubble. That replaced the real economy that has gone to China.
Booms and busts are part of the capitalist business cycle. This one is different.
Robert Brenner UCLA Historian: The Asia-Pacific Journal features the Introduction to an updated version of Robert Brenner’s Into the Eye of the Storm, R. Taggart Murphy here
Brenner uses the Marxian model of the decline of the rate of profits in his analysis. He makes a compelling case that since the early '70s complex finance and the expansion of debt we have been on a collision course with catastrophe. At 70 pages it is meant as an introduction but is actually a stand-alone piece. A heavy read but worth it, here
Brenner doesn't use the fraud word nearly enough to describe what the Wall Street Crooks have done.
statusquObama, change you can only pretend in
http://theslrevolution.files.wordpress.com/20...
Seems like they coulda used:
http://pics.livejournal.com/meganj28/pic/007c...
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Breaking . . . ! LOL I'm going go out and start collecting on my bet. Back later.
It isn't like the wealth those socialist infrastructure jobs would create if we ever got that through congress. But, hey, it isn't like we have bridges falling into rivers or anything, is it? Hell, no. Always more money we can create out of thin air or promise to the Chinese by-and-by for a damn fighter jet engine.
1000 jobs? Building the pyramids created a 1000 jobs. Look what that got them. Kerry whoring for the military/industrial complex for Christmas. Dumb bastard. Bah Humbug.
The U.S. Military is the biggest oil and gas guzzling racket on earth.
... and treat every other user as not part of anything larger, maybe. The military uses a lot, but if we're just talking sectors, the transportation sector uses much more than the defense sector. The manufacturing sector as well, I believe.
The real problem is that the defense sector (and possibly aerospace/aviation) are likely to be the last to be able to switch to alternative fuels. Electric cars are much closer to the market than most people realize, and clean electricity to fuel those cars is not that much farther off: rooftop solar is within a generation of technology (probably only 5-10 years) from grid parity. In some parts of the Southwest, concentrated solar will soon be able to produce enough for manufacturing and similar industrial uses, too.
It's going to be a long time before we see solar powered fighter planes or 747s, though.
Kerry could just as well have written a proposal to re-train or re-employ those 1000 workers for PRODUCTIVE jobs.
When will government of the people, by the politicians, for the corporations perish from this Earth?
Not soon enough!
I guess socialism is only ok if it's to build weapons and not to give people healthcare.
but maintaining projects we can't afford right now is very important. No one in Washington thinks anymore.
Goodnight, Frau Blücher
The only jobs program we can get through Congress is a contract to make killing machines or things that blow up. Doesn't anyone understand the concept of building something useful like a wind farm or a university or a bridge?
Yes general electric will keep a 1000 job in mass if you will just pay us 1000 times what it worth.
I for one am sick and tired of these multi national corporations filling their fucking pockets with tax payer money!
$465,000,000/1000 jobs = $465,000 spent per job saved
Not only jobs, but good paying jobs.
I was stationed at NAS Miramar in 1974 when the F-14A first became operational. It was built with the TF-30 engine. Like the F-35 it was not the engine that they wanted. Frankly, it was a piece of shit. They crashed a lot and people died. Long after I left I heard they finally got the TF-100 for the F-14D and things got better. It is all politics at that level. Build it and hope that you get what you want for it later. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. I believe that our guys should have the best, within reason, but I question why some of these things are so outrageously expensive. Also, sometimes the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)philosophy really is the best route to take. As Scottie on Star Trek said, "The more sophisticated they make it, the easier it is to gum up the works!"
Local contractors are corporations in the truest sense of the word. Every local contractor knows the name and face of every guy working for him. He or she knows the decisions effect these people in real ways. What corporations, the large multinational ones that exist today, have become is a way for humans to take the face-to-face aspect of work away. The decisions that the corporate office makes, thousands of miles away, affects everyone who works for the corporation, but these people never see the faces of the other people. They don't know one another's names. They don't see on a daily basis the hard work one does for a company. Thus they can more easily justify low wages, little to no benefits, and in this recession, longer hours and doing more with less people. Welcome to Corporate America.
I am a 2 tour Vietnam Veteran who recently retired after 36 misguided years of working in the Defense Industrial Complex on many of the weapons systems being used by our forces as we speak.
The Department of Defense, headquartered in the Pentagon, is one of the most massive organizations on the planet, with net annual operating costs of $635 billion, assets worth $1.3 trillion, liabilities of $1.9 trillion and more that 2.9 million military and civilian personnel.
It is difficult to convey the complexity of the way DOD works to someone who has not experienced it. This is a massive machine with so many departments and so much bureaucracy that no president, including Obama totally understands it.
Presidents, Congressmen, Cabinet Members and Appointees project a knowledgeable demeanor but they are spouting what they are told by career people who never go away and who train their replacements carefully. These are military and civil servants with enormous collective power, armed with the Federal Acquisition Regulation, Defense Industrial Security Manuals, compartmentalized classification structures and "Rice Bowls" which are never mixed.
Our society has slowly given this power structure its momentum which is constant and extraordinarily tough to bend. The cost to the average American is high in terms of real dollars and bad decisions. Every major power structure member in the Pentagon's many Washington Offices and Field locations in the US and Overseas has a counterpart in Defense Industry Corporate America. That collective body has undergone major consolidation in the last 10 years. What used to be a broad base of competitive firms is now a few huge monoliths, such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Boeing.
Government oversight committees are carefully stroked. Men like Sam Nunn and others who were around for years in military and policy oversight roles have been cajoled, given into on occasion but kept in the dark about the real status of things until it is too late to do anything but what the establishment wants. This still continues - with increasing high technology and potential for abuse.
Until this machine runs out of the credit to run it and the credibility to sustain it we will continue to feed it young American lives:
http://rosecoveredglasses.blogspot.com/2006/1...
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