<$BlogRSDUrl$>

Monday, May 05, 2003

Brother, Can you Spare a Dime for a Textbook? 

Multiply 3000 times 500,000. What do you get? 1.5 billion. In the first 14 days of the Iraqi war, we dropped 3000 cruise missiles on Iraq. Each cruise missile costs $500,000. That's 1.5 billion dollars worth of cruise missiles. Douglas Mattern from liberalslant.com, wants you to digest the numbers:

Just think of all the missiles, bombs, etc. that will be replaced for profit by the armament industry after the current U.S. military assault on Iraq. In the first 14 days the U.S. dropped over 8,700 bombs, including more than 3,000 cruise missiles. This includes cluster bombs, which is one of the most barbaric weapons ever created by the human mind.

Cruise missiles cost over $500,000 each. The Apache Longbow Helicopter costs about 22 million dollars each. The Bradley Fighting Vehicle costs over 1.2 million dollars. Each B-1 Stealth bomber costs over $2 billion.

Meanwhile, school districts form New York to Ohio to Illinois, to Denver, and on to California are having trouble finding the money for red-inked school budgets.

"Bleak" and "scary" are adjectives being bounced around to describe school fiscal problems:

"The economic crisis resulting in California’s General Fund shortfall for a second fiscal year will not be an easy one to manage. Elizabeth Hill, state legislative policy analyst, describes it as “an enormous challenge,” and the Sacramento Bee is calling it “bleak” and “scary.”

In the meantime, brother can you spare a dime, or how about a fraction of a percentage of the $60 billion to be spent in 2003 by the Pentagon to purchase new weapons.

"Over $60 billion was allocated to purchase new weapons for 2003. The Pentagon spends over $30 billion annually in research and development for new weapons."

Brother, can you spare a dime, maybe to buy textbooks? Certainly there is no shortage of money for cruise missiles, as there is our national, disgraceful, textbook shortage.

Apparently investing in new weapons is more important that investing in our own children. We'll save their lives from the "terrorist threat", protecting their poorly educated futures, living in a country ransacked of its safety from the hatred of other countries, as we bomb third world countries to oblivion. Egads. I think I'm going to throw-up.

# posted by scorpiorising : 5:18 PM |

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?