Surviving Capitalism (Not) : US mothballs airborne laser missile defense weapon

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, March 1, 2012

US mothballs airborne laser missile defense weapon

Click here to access article from Associated Press via Fox News.

If you are distressed by the large teacher-student ratio of the classes that your children attend, the cutbacks in library hours, the huge tuition increases in universities, cutbacks in medical care for the poor, etc, well here is where more than half of your tax money is going--weapons and those that make them such as Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, etc. (see this)

This article reports on how they kept this particular boondoggle going for "defense" contractors for 15 years inspired by full spectrum dominance fantasies originating in Reagan's neoconservative administration.

I wonder how many more teachers and librarians that we could have had with this $5 billion dollars that they spent on this weapon. I guess we should be grateful that it proved to be worthless and didn't kill anybody.