Recently I was taking off from Rutland Airport. As you know, Vermont's taxes against the middle class force many middle class Vermonters to seek work elsewhere, or just plain leave. It had been foggy before dawn, but the day dawned clear and bright. About to take off, clearance from Air Traffic Control was abruptly revoked... they said that Rutland Airport was fogged in! So, for an hour, I just sat there with engines wasting fuel, polluting, polluting... because of some incompetent weather broadcast.
In the old days we had Flight Service Stations that collected local weather reports from local airports and local pilots, and did a damn fine job of putting the weather picture together and keeping us advised. They didn't tell us what the local weather was, WE TOLD THEM.
I soon learned that the Flight Service Stations had been disbanded --- including Burlington FSS. Slowly at first, like our school closings... then all at once. The FAA also called it 'Consolidation'... now we know where the word comes from. School closings provoke outrage; but school consolidations leave us glassy-eyed.
All aviation weather now comes from Lockheed Martin, a military contractor based in Washington DC. This is just one example of how the Military/Industrial Complex is taking over civilian life and institutions. Fortunately, in Vermont, we can stop it.
DC acts like they know better than us about our complex economy, what's good for us... Ye Gads, they can't even get the weather right!
In Montpelier, our Democrat/Republican/Progressive legislators defer to DC, in exchange for federal block grants. A mess of pottage. They must be voted out.
Here's the skinny on what's happening to Vermont.
Google Agenda 21 and you'll see a lot. What it means is massive centralization and totalitarian control over every aspect of our lives. It's Stalinist, communist... it's everything we've fought against as a free society for decades. And because the Agenda 21-ists and statists use words like sustainability to promote these unconstitutional schemes, folks get fooled and go along with it, give up their rights and our local self-government.
There's been tons of federal, corporate and Soros money flowing in to our state via bogus 'green' programs, organizations... if you follow the money, as do the Watchers, you see the pattern: Vermont is, in the corporate eye, a showcase for the rest of the world of Corporate Green. Why do they want this showcase? Because everywhere else, they get to pollute, squeeze, exploit, bomb and kill even harder, without public scrutiny. They seek to fool the public and fool the humane politicians. It's called Greenwashing. (No different than a drug trafficker laundering money.)
Behind the Smart Grid is Sandia Labs, and behind Sandia is Lockheed. Which politicians want to bring Sandia & Lockheed into Vermont? Which politicians want to sell out Vermont to Lockheed and Agenda 21? Those are the ones to vote out. Look at their voting records, look at what they do. Read about it on this site. Dirt simple.
Often, especially in Vermont, a corporation with a tainted name operates behind a subsidiary: consider the bailout queen AIG that owns Stowe. Were AIG forced to sell Stowe to repay the taxpayer? No, they transferred it to a subsidiary company that continues to draw a neat, tax-free profit and tourism subsidies from Montpelier, just as our own taxes go up and schools get closed, one by one.
Many are standing against centralization, mostly at a local level... but at a State level I with the Vermont Independents stand against the Military/Industrial Complex in Vermont.
What is the remedy that we propose?
The remedy is mentioned in Peggy Luhr's article which follows: local interdependence and resilience, decentralization. Power must be decentralised from Montpelier, back to the Towns where it belongs. We can't afford what we have today! Asking DC for more money (borrowed from our grandkids but spent today) is senseless.
The Vermont Thirty wish to take back every seat in our Vermont Senate, return power to the Towns and protect Vermont's sovereignty and our individual, constitutional rights.
What makes sense to me is local, independent ownership & control of Finance, Food, Fuel and the political will to protect those basic rights. How about you?
This article originally appeared here, in the Vermont Commons.
A Scorpion by Any Other Name:
The Military/Industrial Complex in Vermont
by Peggy Luhr
The Scorpion and the Frog
A scorpion and a frog meet on the bank of a stream and the scorpion asks the frog to carry him across on its back. The frog asks, “How do I know you won’t sting me?” The scorpion says, “Because if I do, I will die too.” The frog is satisfied, and they set out, but in midstream,the scorpion stings the frog. The frog feels the onset of paralysis and starts to sink, knowing they both will drown,but has just enough time to gasp “Why?” Replies the scorpion: “It’s my nature...”
Vermont is being invaded by the military/industrial/energy complex. Our liberal and Progressive politicians are opening the doors for them in the name of solving our energy problems and climate crisis. The Chamber of Commerce and Senator Leahy want them here to provide jobs.
In reality, military contractors like Lockheed Martin are progenitors of the environmental crisis. They are the creators of the Silent Spring and the possibility of nuclear winter. Today they continue to peddle pesticides and push nuclear power. Why would Vermont, which prides itself on its environment and the purity of Vermont agriculture, want to pollute itself with Lockheed Martin’s greenwash? The residue will foul Vermont’s image and reality forever. Yet Burlington Mayor Bob Kiss is proposing to work with Lockheed Martin as part of the Carbon War Room, ostensibly to ameliorate global warming, even as Lockheed lobbies against any legislation to address climate change. Kiss is going forward with this plan without public input, despite a City Council directive to keep citizens informed.
Welcomed by some, an object of concern and suspicion for others, the “smart grid” is coming, statewide in Vermont...to be developed by Sandia National Laboratories, a division of Lockheed Martin – the military/industrial complex becoming “embedded” in civilian society. -CREATIVECOMMONS ON THE WEB
Another contract is the UVM/Sandia National Laboratories contract to develop the “smart” grid. Sandia is the nuclear division of Lockheed Martin. Lockheed is creeping into Burlington’s electric department with the June election approval of “smart” meters from the Itron Corporation. At BED’s pre-election open house, Itron representatives downplayed their connection to LM. But a press release celebrates their intertwined enterprise: The offering leverages Itron’s global leadership in smart metering and enterprise utility software solutions, and Lockheed Martin’s world-class capabilities in security, command and control, and systems-of-systems integration. Both contribute technically proven, market-ready products prepared for integration.
Those meters will go in Vermont homes and emit RF radiation, implicated in causing cancer for cell phone users.
Poster by Lisa Cowan
Mr. Kiss’s explanation for bringing in Lockheed despite its record of fraudulence in contracting, is that climate change is very important, and he perversely co-opts the slogan of the healthcare movement: “everybody in, nobody out.” This pat answer suggests a lack of knowledge of climate issues and patronizes his critics who are, at least equally, concerned about global warming.
Kiss is not alone in his ignorance of the military contributions to the environmental crisis. Even some environmental groups will not talk about the military despite a fairly common knowledge that they are the greatest polluters on earth, who fight wars for fossil fuels using stratospheric amounts of those fuels. It is either love of or fear of power.
We must realize now that along with the ecological crisis we face the further danger of the U.S. military positioning itself as the most viable means to address it. The methods used by the military tend to exacerbate rather than alleviate problems. Ask those ungrateful “liberated” Iraqis.
Mayor Kiss sees LM as a funding source and deludes himself they will be “turning swords into plowshares.” But Lockheed’s immediate business interest is geo-engineering, which it is trying to sell as the answer to global warming. Here’s an assessment of that approach, from the ETC Group, an environmental and populist advocacy/watchdog organization based in Canada:
There are now several groupings, including the pragmatists, such as [Virgin Airlines owner Sir Richard] Branson [a founder of The Carbon War Room], [Bjorn] Lomborg [of the Copenhagen Consensus Center], and the American Enterprise Institute, which argue that geo-engineering is faster and cheaper than carbon taxes and emissions reductions, so just get on with it; and the theorists, such as the Royal Society and the Carnegie Institution for Science in the US which say we must have an emergency Plan B because we are heading for a certain climate catastrophe; meanwhile, businesses such as the Ocean Fertilization Company and the Biochar Initiative see dollars.
Lockheed manufactures weapons of mass destruction, enabling the oligarchy to make a financial killing. The ecological problems we face are the result of our disturbed relationship to nature. Nowhere is it more disturbed than within our military/industrial complex.
Military contractors are about conquering nature. These technological “geniuses” see themselves shaping nature for their ends. And they have shaped nature in the worst way by poisoning rivers, killing large sections of the oceans, fouling the air and soil, and ripping a hole in ozone layer. As I write, radioactive water is being poured into the Pacific at rates of seven tons per hour.
The 20th century is the story of war and industry becoming ever more connected in their extermination of humans, plant and insect pests, and the resulting dehumanization brought about by such projects. Chemicals developed for war are turned to agricultural use. DDT came out of World War II; Monsanto’s Agent Orange – used to defoliate Vietnam, altered to be less toxic – became 24D, your handy pesticide. Ecocide and genocide work hand in hand. Weapons of war become consumer products. The military wages war on nature along with the ever-changing but generally brown-skinned, enemy.
The engine of the U.S. economy now is the defense/war industry. In intervals between wars, when all the whiz-bang inventions for death might stay idle, the Masters of War reconfigure their product. Bomb technology is fused with the “peaceful atom.” Sandia’s diagram of its smart grid shows nuclear power and oil refineries linked to windmills and a solar house. Sandia wants to make sure these links stay in our grid. These folks gave us MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) and they still seem hell-bent on that in one form or another. GE brought depleted uranium (DU) to Iraq. Now it’s peddled to irradiate food for longer shelf life. DU with your potatoes, ma’am?
Whole – not wholly owned
Why are so-called Progressives opening Vermont to these predators? In lieu of minds that think ecologically about whole systems, we would get experts in separation and specialization. Around the world people are trying to rid themselves of U.S. bases and the contamination they leave behind. F-16s in South Burlington are responsible for ground water contamination there. This is the Lockheed legacy.
Climate chaos is a result of ignorance about our impact on nature, and an economics that externalizes the costs of pollution and has a cancer-like ethic of growth. Our insane energy policies exist because those who profit from them buy our government so they can stay in business no matter the cost to people or planet.
We need people who understand whole systems – ecologists and ecological economists, biologists who know how to remediate damaged ecosystems. There are Vermonters who have done this work, these studies, who have taught others, and they have acolytes who will be the lights of the next generation.
Lockheed is antithetical to the mindset needed to resolve our predicament. Working with Branson, rich playboy, whose other project is consumer space travel, LM developed the Carbon War Room. The name encapsulates its conflict-driven paradigm. These corporations sell us their lethal services at exorbitant prices by pushing fear, a paralytic of critical thinking. Gwynne Dyer and others argue for a techno-fix to correct things. Summed up, the argument is: The earth is so loused up we can’t rely on solutions based on working with nature; we’ve cocked it up so bad we must use cocked-up and coked-up solutions to fix it.
Clearly, calling the whole thing off won’t be easy. Far better to avoid this unhealthy relationship before the battering begins. The claim that these industries bring more jobs never seems to pan out. Local contractors and decentralized solutions create more decent work.
We are in change-or-die territory now. We don’t have time for Carbon War Room fantasies. We need to get real about human survival. The earth is being despoiled, the soil is being destroyed with these military byproducts.
LockMar is also in the security/ surveillance industry, with a new billion-dollar contract with the FBI for biometric implants. Haven’t those industries brought good things to life? Don‘t you bet our D.C. Masters of the Universe are dying to know why Vermont is so stubbornly progressive despite much of the rest of the country getting with the program of subduing nature to death. Lockheed’s slogan says, “We never forget who we’re working for.” You can be damn sure it isn’t the people of Vermont.
Lockheed wants more than mere greenwashing, which it can pay its ad and PR firms to do. It wants more lucrative contracts in geo-engineering, and to pose as Superman saving the planet, too.
First we had a failed “Green Revolution,” which was going to feed the world. Instead, Rachel Carson showed us how it was poisoning us. Then the biotech revolution would save us. Monsanto – which brags that it has conquered the world food supply and patents life – claims it will feed the world with its bioengineered food. Yet its GMOs cause birth defects, and there is new concern that they cause a kind of plant “AIDS” that could also impact animals.
Now comes geo-engineering to save us from global warming and keep the Lockheed racket going even if, by some terrible chance, there aren’t enough wars happening.
Our real treasures
What we really need is a new way of living, a science without the arrogance and irrational exuberance that seems to be in the genes of these guys and their financiers on Wall Street. We desperately need a world where the participation of women in the public sphere is deemed as important as that of men, since the abuse of nature and women often runs parallel.
Many Vermonters are trying to actualize a different life – not a world of deprivation, but of connection and creativity and ingenuity. Instead of Masters of the Universe on Wall Street and Dr Strangeloves in the labs, we need the science Barbara McClintock advocated when she spoke of a “feeling for the organism,” rather than Bacon’s idea of torturing nature for her secrets.
The Lockheed scorpion can unleash destructive power; it’s what they do. But as poet Judy Grahn says, “Power is the apple tree producing an apple; the farmer only has control.” We need biophillic power. Vermonters would do well to remember the fable of the scorpion and the frog when the mayor of our largest city wants to hand the keys to the scorpion. Why should we be the first state to display Sandia’s smart grid? Doesn’t one big grid under a military corporation sound like the sort of scale and profit margin that have brought civilization to the brink?
Our problems are systemic. We need ecological economics that value our real treasures – good soil, clean water, clean air, human connection and well-being. We have an institute devoted to that at UVM. We have the highest rate of people eating local produce in the country. We have passionate environmental activists, inventive companies devoted to renewable energy, and the beginnings of the social climate we need to tackle our challenges.
Part of the needed change is local interdependence. Behemoths like Lockheed bring all the worst of the system we must leave behind. We need people with an ecological vision. Mayor Kiss, Sen. Sanders, BED, UVM, and other Lockheed supporters are wearing blinders with dollar signs on them, and that is how we got into this fix in the first place.
Peggy Luhr is a member of FED UP VERMONT, a coalition formed last summer to fight for women's equality, and WILPF (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom). Peggy is a longtime community activist, campaigning for legal abortion in Vermont in the 1970s.
Peggy Luhr is a member of FED UP VERMONT, a coalition formed last summer to fight for women's equality, and WILPF (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom). Peggy is a longtime community activist, campaigning for legal abortion in Vermont in the 1970s.
