Tonight at 7pm Burlington has a historic opportunity to speak out in City Council and ask our local government reject Lockheed’s F-35 fighter plane.

City Council meets at Contois Auditorium on the second floor of City Hall 149 Church St in Burlington

To be part of the speak out you need to sign up at the table to the far left when you enter the auditorium

Please RSVP and invite your friends: https://www.facebook.com/event…

Some of the Many Reasons for Rejecting the F-35



Jobs:

The same number of Vermont tax dollars spent on education, health care, mass transit, or construction, creates many more jobs than military spending like the F-35. This according to 2007 and 2011 studies from the Economics Department at the University of Massachusetts. Twice as many jobs, at higher average pay, are created by spending money on education than on defense. The F-35 program sucks our Federal money away and employs fewer people. And more people will be left unemployed.

http://www.peri.umass.edu/file…

Noise:

Sound level, sound intensity, and loudness are explained in the Air Force draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). The bottom line is, according to figures in the EIS, the maximum loudness of the F-35 is more than four times louder than the the maximum loudness of the F-16 both at takeoff and landing.

According to South Burlington City Council President and retired Air Force Colonel, Rosanne Greco in a must read Burlington Free Press Op-Ed:

“Noise is causing the demolition of homes. For example, 1,578 homes are currently in the noise contour area. So far, 200 South Burlington homes have been identified for purchase and demolition. 1,366 more homes, for a total of 2,944 homes, would be in this noise area if the F-35As were based here. And, the FAA home buy-out money is not guaranteed; nor is the airport under any obligation to purchase homes. In fact, last week, the airport said they were not going to purchase any more homes.”

http://www.burlingtonfreepress…

See more about the neighborhood demolition here: http://7d.blogs.com/stuckinvt/…

Today’s Burlington Free Press describes the home demolition as having “turned a once-thriving neighborhood into a local Detroit of empty houses and empty lots by airport buyouts.”

http://www.burlingtonfreepress…

Precedent:

The South Burlington City Council and School Board, as well as the Winooski School Board, have all formally rejected the F-35 being based at Burlington International Airport.

South Burlington School Board’s Statement:

http://sbsd.schoolfusion.us/mo…

CCTV footage of South Burlington’s City Council rejecting the F-35 can be viewed here: http://www.stopthef35.com/node/93

Lockheed’s weapons yield austerity for Vermonters:



The logic of military weapon’s systems like the F-35 can be best explained by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”

The University of New Hampshire Carsey Institute reported in 2007 that over the last 15 years Vermont ranked second among all the states for fastest growth in income inequality. http://www.bos.frb.org/commdev…

Burlington’s middle class is “shrinking faster than almost anywhere else in the country” according to US Census data reported in a BFP cover story.

http://www.feedingchittenden.o…

Meanwhile our tax dollars are being diverted away from meeting our communities fundamental needs and towards $160 million per plane weapons systems we can ill afford.

Lockheed’s “F-35 was intended to be an “affordable” fighter-bomber (at roughly $50 million per copy), a perfect complement to the much more expensive F-22 “air superiority” Raptor. But the usual delays, cost overruns, technical glitches and changes in requirements have driven the price tag of the F-35 up to $160 million per plane, assuming the US military persists in its plans to buy 2,400 of them. (If the Pentagon decides to buy fewer, the cost-per-plane will soar into the F-22 range.) By recent estimates the F-35 will now cost US taxpayers (you and me, that is) at least $382 billion for its development and production run. Such a sum for a single weapons system is vast enough to be hard to fathom. It would, for instance, easily fund all federal government spending on education for the next five years.The escalating cost of the F-35 recalls the most famous of Norman Augustine’s irreverent laws: “In the year 2054,” he wrote back in the early 1980s, “the entire defense budget will [suffice to] purchase just one aircraft.” But the deeper question is whether our military even needs the F-35, a question that’s rarely asked and never seriously entertained, at least by Congress, whose philosophy on weaponry is much like King Lear’s: “O, reason not the need.” www.thenation.com/article/165832/confessions-recovering-weapons-addict