Sequestration? Yoo Hoo, Congress: Cut the poster child of Pentagon waste!

C'mon, Sean (and all the rest of you Congresspeople).

The F-35 is the NY Times and my favorite boondoggle program -- it's ABSURD -- and yet it goes on because our Congressional campaigns are financed by it.

Hey, FIVE F-35s for every Congress member -- @ $1,000,000,000 each ... what fun! Lockheed/Raytheon/Boeing Industrial Complex. It's ABSURD to continue this program even if you're the highest flyin' hawk. If you like flying machines, we could buy 100,000 drones to spy on all the rest of us (200 for every Congressional district!). Or, we could pay for the VA and DoD retirements for decades.

Or, we could put 3 deep geothermal EGS plants in every Congressional district and power the US "forever" with NO greenhouse gases and no Commodities Industrial Complex, no XL, no frackin', no gulfin', no No.Dakin'.

I love you guys, but pullease spend our money on something just a bit less absurd.

_____

PS: All we talk about are the contract costs ... operational/program costs are also ABSURD. These babies are so cute and so delicate and so ROLEX, that maintenance and fuel go into the $10,000s/hr of operation. Hey, my plain old corporate jets cost me only $5 million each and run only $1000/hr. ( And we can write it off ... you can't!)

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: The plane that ate the U.S. budget
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2013 15:03:12 -0500 (EST)
From: Mary Zerkel and Peter Lems, AFSC
Reply-To: actioncenter@afsc.org
To: vlashua@thnktnk.net


Wage Peace, a campaign of the American Friends Service Committee

F35

Tell Congress to cut the poster child of Pentagon waste!

Sequestration kicked in on Friday—and we think you’ll agree that these blanket cuts are not a smart way to make decisions about federal spending.

Congress doesn’t think so either. As they negotiate the budget in the coming weeks, we need to remind them that just a few smart cuts from the bloated Pentagon budget could easily account for the $1.5 trillion in cuts that the sequester mandates over the next 10 year.

How? Take the F-35 program, the most expensive and least effective weapons system in history. The total lifetime cost of the F-35 program is $1.5 trillion—making it equal to the entire 10 years of cuts mandated by the sequester.

The F-35 program has been grounded twice and has a history of being overdue and over-budget. Why should we continue to throw money at outdated and ineffective weapons systems like the F-35 while cutting vital social programs instead?

Email your members of Congress today to say that there are some easy ways to eliminate waste without cutting programs that create real security.

Wage peace,