Editorial Published in The New York Times, July 15, 2009
An unlikely alliance of senators — led by Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and including Edward Kennedy and John Kerry of Massachusetts and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut — is backing an indefensible defense budget boondoggle: the wasting of $1.75 billion on seven additional F-22 fighter jets that the Pentagon says it neither wants nor needs.
. . .
The F-22’s main contractor, Lockheed Martin, and its multiple subcontracting suppliers, have spread its 25,000 jobs across 44 states. And a majority of the members of the Armed Services Committee proved unable to resist that lure. Senator Chambliss, whose state is home to Lockheed Martin’s primary manufacturing plant for the F-22, sponsored the committee amendment adding the seven planes, which was approved by a 13-to-11 vote. Senator Kerry, who is not on the committee, has since said that he also supports the purchase. . .
Read More At:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/opinion/16thu2.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
July 16th, 2009
by Howard Zinn
Published in Progressive Magazine, July 3 2009.
There are things that happen in the world that are bad, and you want to do something about them. You have a just cause. But our culture is so war prone that we immediately jump from, “This is a good cause” to “This deserves a war.”
You need to be very, very comfortable in making that jump.
The American Revolution—independence from England—was a just cause. Why should the colonists here be occupied by and oppressed by England? But therefore, did we have to go to the Revolutionary War?
How many people died in the Revolutionary War?
Nobody ever knows exactly how many people die in wars, but it’s likely that 25,000 to 50,000 people died in this one. So let’s take the lower figure—25,000 people died out of a population of three million. That would be equivalent today to two and a half million people dying to get England off our backs.
You might consider that worth it, or you might not.
Canada is independent of England, isn’t it? I think so. Not a bad society. Canadians have good health care. They have a lot of things we don’t have. They didn’t fight a bloody revolutionary war. Why do we assume that we had to fight a bloody revolutionary war to get rid of England?
. . .
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July 11th, 2009
