Plundering ANWR is the President's retirement policy to assure that his Texas oil buddies have unlimited income after he gets out of office...it won't do much good for the nation now anyway--and should be saved for future use as the final large U.S. oil field able to supply domestic manufacturing needs should a serious international crisis ever arise. Reasonable alternative fuel planning synergetically combining fuel cells in homes and cars, power lines in many regional highways, a variety of solar and wind products could replace a substantive portion of oil requirements for the nation and free-up capital for domestic investment.
One hopes that the time will never arrive when economic responsibility for public debt is required of the Republican congress, whom will probably be offshore working for global corporations if it does, because the apparent lack of imagination and ingentuity in defense appropriations, willingness to just borrow from the Chinese and Indians, Japanese and Saudi's (which makes even al jezera's headlines occassionally) and the requirement for the public to pay a half trillion annual interest payments will interfere with reasonable alternative public allocations of their resources for vital urban infrastructure and economic and ecological management.
India and China together graduate more engineers than the U.S.A. by a factor of nearly 20 to 1 and in time that numerical superiority will lgically move ownership of corporate startups abroad. Even though a majority of women graduates flood through U.S. colleges and universities to happily work for foreign and transnational corporations they will not be able to insinuate an independent national energy infrastructure not requiring oil for personal and mass transport into the U.S.A.
The administration in seeking to hog-tie the nations infrastructure to a dumbed down and dependent oil infrastructure, support global warming, pollution of the high arctic, and globally invested profits for it's favorites oil execs has done the nation a serious disservice by allowing ANWR development to be placed into the defense appropriations bill along with other pork.
The Defense Bill's Actual Military Content Has Pork Too
Should a defense bill be full of funding for obsolete technologies that are state of the art only in providing jobs for local resident's? The answer is assuredly not. Even so within the usual political structure of federal largesse with other people's money whenever possible jobs lost in a community should be directly replaced with jobs gained when equal upgrade value of weapons procurement are legislated.
Consider the five Naval Aircraft carriers with their vast cold war era maint. budgets each with a flotilla of defense ships in this era of global satellites, electronics, communications, cell phones with g.p.s.'s, terrorists with lethal inflatable boats with semtex explosives, improvised explosive device delivery vehicles made of personal watercraft with guidance systems, cruse missiles, thousand mile per hour torpedo's deliverable from fishing boats or latent mine locations when the Russian developers sell the plans on the black market, silent electric submarines running deep lying in wait for a shot at one of the globally stalkable behemouths at a likely approach locations or a plethora of other post-cold war era sinking technologies.
The Kennedy, a carrier homeported in Norfolk, VA should be allowed to retire to the boneyard and be replaced with some of the smaller, faster, cheaper stealth ships designed for a trecherous modern combat environment that implicitly interfaces onshore and offshore weapons interaction. A battleship could be kept activated an homeported in the interim while the new ships are being constructed to provide jobs and cheap delivery of ordinance in quantity onshore when needed asd additionally given an electro-magnetic cannon or two.
Aircraft carriers with their very high radar profile are fairly easy to stalk around the modern world or even sabotage in port. The ships might be converted into some sort of alternative mobile command or housing posts for the marines or army, but modern vtol aircraft like the F-22 and perhaps the joint strike fighter haven't the need of a conventional aircraft transporter. The forces resisting a defense budget with modernizing tech infrastructure, like the Bush administration's resistance to a post-fossil fuel era national transport infrastructure, should be resisted vigorously in congress.
The President's plundering of ANWR provisions reminds me somewhat humourously of a request by a former Commander of the Pacific Fleet Sanchez's request of a Governor of Alaska for 50,000 free barrels of oil and was turned town a bit before the Exxon Valdez oil spill. If the President's wish to plunder the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is denied I hope he won't add environmentalists to his probably illegal wiretaps list...are their many or any democrats or libertarians on it?
Without congresssional ovcersight of his illegal wiretaps the President must himself designate who or what the enemy is that has no meaninful constitutional rights in the United States...that same dillema may be encounter by future computer programmers working with robotic attack vehicles that will shoot the enemy in accord with programming...watch out style imitators!
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