Poverty? Really?
Let's use this graph for discussion:
We all know that the military eats up 57% of all discretionary funding. Food stamps, unemployment insurance, Veterans Benefits, Labor, Education, Science all come from the same pot of money.
The US Navy's shipbuilding program is out of control.
Example 1: $5+ billion dollars for a destroyer? Really? That's more than Nimitz-class aircraft carriers usta cost.
Example 2: Our newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford, is currently being built will cost somewhere between $16 ~ $40 billion dollars. ka-fucking-ching
Example 3: Cheap ships (think Littoral Ccombat Ships) defined in the Navy's Bluewater Project were supposed to cost $200 million a pop. The first two LCS came in at over $1.2 billion. Our Congress, in it's infinite wisdom, ordered 52 more to bring the cost down. I hear they are planning to replace the 57mm popgun these things come with. 
As you will read below, the Navy isn't the only service with very expensive hardware.
We really need to rethink that 57%.
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http://isnblog.ethz.ch/government/aircraft-stories-the-f-35-joint-strike-fighter-part-i
Aircraft Stories: The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (Part I)
By Srdjan Vucetic
28 May 2014
How big is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter? By one set of measures, it is three times bigger than the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, ten times bigger than either the Apollo Project or the International Space Station or Hurricane Katrina, or one hundred times bigger than the Panama Canal. These comparisons are only moderately outlandish. US$1.45 trillion is the Pentagon’s own December 2010 estimate of lifetime operating and supporting costs for the 2,443 copies of the F-35 currently on order by the United States government, which we can then compare to the known price tags, in 2007 dollars, of these five projects.[1] Costs—also variously prefaced as procurement, actual, sunk, fly-away, upgrade, true and so on—and their contestations are central to a discourse of accountancy that surrounds all projects that require large-scale mobilization of public power. But enormous as they are, these numbers still cannot capture the size of this particular weapons program. To understand just how big the F-35 is, I wish to suggest in this two-part post, we ought to conceive it as a proper assemblage—a heterogeneous association of human and nonhuman elements that is at once split, processual, emergent, and, most importantly, constitutive of the modern international.
To explore this proposition, I follow the tenets of early actor–network theory (ANT), and in particular the work of one of its founding fathers, John Law.[2] It was through a series of case studies of the TSR-2, early Cold War-era nuclear-capable multi-role aircraft commissioned and eventually cancelled by the United Kingdom government that Law advanced an argument that human actors hold no a priori primacy over things in constituting the social or, if you prefer, the socio-technical.[3] Here is one revealing passage:
An aircraft, yes, is an object. But it also reveals multiplicity—for instance in wing shape, speed, military roles, and political attributes. I am saying, then, that an object such as an aircraft—an “individual” and “specific” aircraft—comes in different versions. It has no single center. It is multiple. And yet these various versions also interfere with one another and shuffle themselves together to make a single aircraft.
So instead of thinking about aircraft as objects with concrete essences and purposes, Law is inviting us to see them as “decentered” and “fractionally coherent”—as assemblages or networks that become objects only in interactions with other assemblages. He is further suggesting that assemblages are made up of both material and social elements that come together in contingent ways. And what is more, Law accepts that objects are also actors that can exert force—hence the term actor-network. In this ontology, aircraft are at once networks of multiple components, organic and inorganic, that have become connected in a particular way and heterogeneous actors capable of producing, inter alia, salaries and sound pollution, fear and loathing as well as theories and policies.
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Some Aussies are having second thoughts:
https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/latest/a/23905774/mp-blasts-f-35-jet-deal/
MP blasts F-35 jet deal
Nick Butterly Canberra The West Australian May 28, 2014, 5:24 am
WA Liberal backbencher Dennis Jensen has suggested senior Defence Department officials backed the Joint Strike Fighter program after receiving "largesse" from military contractors.
And Dr Jensen has blasted the coalition's Budget cuts to the CSIRO, while questioning the merits of Prime Minister Tony Abbott's $20 billion medical research fund. In an extraordinary speech to Parliament last night, Dr Jensen said he was aware of "influence peddling" by defence contractors with both Defence personnel and some journalists.
Dr Jensen, a long-time critic of the F-35 program, said senior military officers who provided advice to the Government on big defence contracts should be forced to publish a personal interests register.
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Even the Canuks are being pressured by Lockheed Martin:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-urged-to-bypass-competition-for-fighter-jet-program/article18851234/
Ottawa urged to bypass competition for purchase of fighter jets
Daniel Leblanc
OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail
Published Monday, May. 26 2014, 3:29 PM EDT
Last updated Monday, May. 26 2014, 3:33 PM EDT
The Canadian companies that are participating in the F-35 fighter jet program are urging the federal government to bypass a competition and return to its original plan to sole-source the purchase of the U.S.-based Lockheed-Martin aircraft.
“Using a competition to simply delay making a decision is costly, unnecessary and not in the interests of Canadian taxpayers or Canadian industry. That is bad management, bad policy and bad for business,” the industry group made up of 35 Canadian firms said in an open letter.
But other voices are rising, arguing that the best way to find the aircraft that suits Canada’s needs is to launch a competition that would pit the single-engine F-35 against its rivals, including the twin-engine Boeing SuperHornet.
The debate is at the heart of the choice facing the Conservative government as its seeks a replacement for its aging fleet of CF-18s. Armed with detailed technological information on four fighter jets, the cabinet will have to decide in the coming weeks whether to launch a competition, or to proceed with the untendered purchase of F-35s.
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From the we'll-take-care-of-it deparment:
http://digital.vpr.net/post/no-specifics-yet-vermont-guard-promises-mitigate-f-35-noise
No Specifics Yet, But Vermont Guard Promises To Mitigate F-35 Noise
By Mitch Wertlieb & Melody Bodette
Tuesday, May 27th, 2014 | Posted by WorldTribune.com
After much debate from opponents who fear an increase in noise pollution along with other concerns, and supporters who argued jobs were at stake, the Air Force recently announced that the Vermont Air National Guard would be awarded F-35 fighter jets in 2020.
But a mitigation and management plan for the site says the arrival of the jets will increase the area impacted by jet noise, a circumstance that had jet opponents concerned that their objections were warranted, and ignored by the Guard.
VPR’s Mitch Wertlieb spoke with Colonel Thomas Jackman, Commander of the Vermont Guard's 158th Fighter Wing and Adam Wright, environmental manager of the 158th Fighter Wing.
Wertlieb: Let’s start out with a question that has been asked before but bears asking again, how loud will these F-35s be, and how will the noise affect houses surrounding the airport?
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Just in case Lockheed wasn't getting enough business, the DoD kicks in another $102 million into Lockheed's coffers :
http://www.worldtribune.com/2014/05/27/israel-years-refusals-gets-concessions-obama-f-35-modifications/
Israeli F-35 green-lighted: Obama administration ends lengthy delay
Tuesday, May 27th, 2014 | Posted by WorldTribune.com
WASHINGTON — Israel has received U.S. approval for its planned Joint Strike Fighter fleet.
The Defense Department has awarded a $101.9 million contract for JSF logistics for Israel. Under the contract, Lockheed Martin would provide engineering and software development for Israel’s order of 19 F-35A fighter-jets.
~snip~
“This modification provides for non-recurring engineering and sustainment tasks for mission systems software and autonomic logistics development of the F-35A Conventional Take Off and Landing Air System for the government of Israel under the Foreign Military Sales Program,” the Pentagon said.
In a statement on May 13, the Pentagon said the latest contract would also procure autonomic logistics hardware to support Israel pilot training. No details were given.