New Stealth Bomber To Carry Payload Of Jobs (Demo)

By Gary Reber Uncategorized February 8, 2015

Lancaster, Palmdale eye new stealth bomber contract

A B-2 stealth bomber is parked at a Northrop Grumman facility in the Antelope Valley. Northrop could build parts of the company’s proposed Long-Range Strike Bomber in Palmdale. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

On February 8, 2015, Melody Petersen writes in the Los Angeles Times:

The Pentagon is poised to spend billions to build a new stealth bomber, a top secret project that could bring hundreds of jobs to the wind-swept desert communities in Los Angeles County’s northern reaches.

Two teams of defense contractors are now battling to win what would be one of the most expensive contracts in Pentagon history. As the lobbying intensifies, the coming decision to pick a winner as soon as this spring has set off a debate over whether the new warplane is crucial to national security or a colossal budget-busting waste.

“You’re talking about a $2-billion airplane by the time they build it,” said Thomas Christie, who worked as a top analyst inside the Pentagon for more than three decades before retiring. “It’s a disaster waiting to happen.”

But Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said last month, “I think the Long-Range Strike Bomber is absolutely essential to keep our deterrent edge.”

Republican control of Congress could mean more military spending

For elected officials across the country, however, the bomber contract means one thing: jobs. And as the teams led by weapons giants Northrop Grumman and Boeing Co. privately lobby lawmakers for their support, the legislators want to know what their state will get out of the deal.

In an effort to snag jobs for California, Sacramento lawmakers passed bills last summer giving companies hundreds of millions of dollars in potential tax breaks.

In few places can the lure of a new bomber be felt more profoundly than in Palmdale, where the competing teams of contractors have each told local officials that they would perform significant work at their leased facilities at the sprawling expanse of scrub brush known as Air Force Plant 42.

The new jobs would help revive the Antelope Valley’s communities, which have long played an outsized role in military aerospace history and are still struggling to recover from the Great Recession.

“They’ve indicated that they can’t talk about this,” Palmdale Mayor James Ledford said of the defense companies bidding on the contract. “But we can.” And the prospects look good.

Northrop executives have said they would build substantial parts of the company’s proposed bomber in Palmdale, he said, creating an estimated 1,500 jobs.

Rival Lockheed Martin Corp. — the primary subcontractor to Boeing Co. — said it also planned to work on the new warplane in Palmdale, Ledford said. That plan could mean adding 700 jobs, he said.

“It would be the answer to all our prayers,” said R. Rex Parris, mayor of neighboring Lancaster, which has a 10.7% unemployment rate, far higher than the state average.

The decision is in the hands of the Air Force, which says it needs a heavy-payload-carrying bomber that is so stealthy it can evade the most sophisticated enemy radar.

Air Force officials have said the warplane would eventually be outfitted to carry nuclear weapons. They also want it to one day be capable of flying as a drone.

Other details are a closely guarded secret.

To stem criticism of the program’s cost, military officials have vowed to limit the bomber’s price to $550 million each. The Pentagon included $1.2 billion for the bomber in the public portion of this year’s budget. The Air Force plans to award the contract for as many as 100 of the new planes as soon as late spring.

An Air Force spokesman and executives from the companies said they could say little because the bomber is part of the Pentagon’s classified “black budget.”

Located about 70 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, the Antelope Valley’s blue skies and open desert spaces make it a prime location for building and testing experimental military planes. For decades, Northrop, Lockheed and Boeing have leased hangars at the Plant 42 complex, where they share a runway with the Air Force and other contractors.

It was here that Northrop developed and built the first stealth bomber, the B-2, during the Cold War, and it continues to perform their maintenance here. The black boomerang-shaped aircraft was designed to penetrate the heart of the Soviet Union.

Over the decades, Lockheed’s engineers have developed a long line of stealthy military flying inventions inside its Palmdale facility known as Skunk Works, including the U-2 spy plane and the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter.

The postwar peak in aerospace employment in Southern California came near the end of the Cold War.

In 1987, about 10% of the nation’s aerospace jobs, nearly 200,000 workers, were in Palmdale and the rest of Los Angeles County, according to a county economic development study. Soon thereafter, defense companies began laying off workers by the hundreds.

The county’s aerospace employment fell by nearly 70% — from 189,000 in 1990 to 59,200 in 2011, with most of that decline happening before 2000.

“We’re an aerospace community,” said Ledford, the Palmdale mayor. “We’re not looking to get less. We want more.”

The stakes are high not just for the communities but for the three defense contractors. The industry is coping with the automatic federal budget cuts, known as sequestration, imposed by a 2011 law.

The bomber contract has set off a fierce lobbying battle between Northrop and the Boeing-Lockheed team.

In a rare move for a defense company, Northrop paid for an ad touting its stealthy aircraft during this month’s Super Bowl. The ad, which ended with a shot of a plane veiled in a sheet, appeared only in Washington, D.C., and Dayton, Ohio, the home of top Air Force acquisition officials.

Last summer, lobbyists for Lockheed persuaded Sacramento legislators to pass a bill giving the company hundreds of millions of dollars in potential tax credits if it did extensive work on the new stealth bomber in California.

After Northrop complained, state lawmakers passed a bill giving it a similar potential tax break.

All three companies have previously won Pentagon contracts that blasted through their initial budgets.

During Northrop’s development of the B-2 stealth bomber, the secrecy surrounding the project helped allow costs to soar. The contract was so far over budget that the Pentagon eventually decided to build just 21 of the 132 aircraft it had originally planned. The average cost of each: more than $2 billion.

Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, estimated in September that the stealth bomber program would ultimately cost $90 billion — or about $900 million for each plane.

“We have to have a replacement bomber,” Harrison said at a Washington briefing. But it will take money away from other defense projects, he said.

“If you want to put something in,” he said, “something else has to come out.”

The Air Force is already spending billions of dollars to modernize its current fleet of 150 bombers, readying them for the next 25 to 50 years.

The Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly pointed to the new bomber as a program that could be cut. In 2013, its staff said that delaying the new bomber program for 10 years would allow engineers to use more advanced technology to improve its design.

New weapons developed in the next decade may even make the new bomber unnecessary, the office’s staff said.

But the Pentagon says it needs to begin work now on the new bomber. In fact, for years, defense officials may have been secretly funding its development under classified contracts, analysts say.

Last year, Jeremiah Gertler, a Congressional Research Service analyst, said that based on budget figures it appeared the Pentagon was planning to soon put the new bomber into production — suggesting that models had already been built and were being tested.

Lancaster Mayor Parris said the relatively high-paying aerospace jobs had the potential to create many times that number in new positions throughout the Antelope Valley, including at restaurants, stores and manufacturing suppliers.

“It would be so great,” he said, “to see it all come back.”

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-stealth-bomber-20150208-story.html#page=2

More military-industrial complex spending funded by tax extraction and incurred national debt, but sold to the America public as a Job Creation project that will create hundreds of jobs. But NO ONE, and I mean NO ONE is talking about the billions of dollars that will be spent and which will further enrich those few who really own the defense contract businesses. Thus, taxpayers, as usual, are funding the enrichment and further concentration of wealth-creating, income-producing capital asset creation––because it will result in more jobs being created.

Underlying this story, is the undeniable fact that extracted taxpayer income is being used to SUBSIDIZED business corporations in various developing fields, particularly related to the military-industrial complex of corporations. What is most disturbing is that, in addition to instances of political favoritism, is that the result of taxpayer infused investment furthers the narrow ownership interests of the founders of any particular business corporation on the receiving end.

Subsidies are ALWAYS justified on the basis of how much new jobs will be created. But when will our leaders and the people of this nation wake up and realize that job creation is not enough justification for taxpayer subsidies that further the monopoly ownership interests of corporations that are narrowly owned and controlled and that are non-inclusive in ways that would create employee ownership?

Taxpayer subsidies continue to be justified on the basis of economic benefit measured in terms of job creation, not in terms of ownership creation, which is where the real wealth-creation occurs. Until this economic inequality issue is addressed and countermeasures enacted to expand and broaden corporate wealth-creating, income-producing capital asset formation, the decline of our economy will continue as fewer and fewer citizens will benefit from the ownership of technological innovations that replace the need for labor workers, but further perpetuate monopoly capitalism for the already wealthy ownership class.

Taxpayer supported government welfare continues to be extended to the private sector without the stipulation of broadening private, individual ownership of NEW productive capital investment related to technological innovation and invention. This is in the form of government loan guarantees and tax incentives that are issued in the name of JOB CREATION, while oblivious to the CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP CREATION resulting from bolstering the financial ownership interests of the awarded companies’ ownership class.

What is needed is a massive loan guarantee economic growth plan with aims to balance production and consumption by empowering EVERY American to acquire private, individual ownership in FUTURE wealth-creating, income-producing productive capital asset investments and pay for their loans out of the earnings of the investments.

The REAL issue regarding the structural problem with the economy, which is rigged to further the CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP interests of the wealthiest Americans at the expense of the American majority who are exponentially facing job losses and devaluation as tectonic shifts in the technologies of production require less and less labor workers to produce the products and services needed and wanted by our society, is ignored. This issue is NEVER addressed, which is the crux of the problem causing our declining economy.

What we need is for the Federal Reserve to stop monetizing unproductive debt, including bailouts of banks “too big to fail” and Wall Street derivatives speculators, and begin creating an asset-backed currency that could enable every child, woman and man to establish a Capital Homestead Account or “CHA” (a super-IRA or asset tax-shelter for citizens) at their local bank to acquire a growing dividend-bearing stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income. The CHA would process an equal allocation of productive credit to every citizen exclusively for purchasing full-dividend payout shares in companies needing funds for growing the economy and private sector jobs for local, national and global markets. The shares would be purchased on credit wholly backed by projected “future savings” in the form of new productive capital assets as well as the future marketable goods and services produced by the newly added technology, renewable energy systems, plant, rentable space and infrastructure added to the economy. Risk of default on each stock acquisition loan would be covered by private sector capital credit risk insurance and reinsurance back by the government, but would not require citizens to reduce their funds for consumption to purchase shares. ALL subsidized loan guarantees would have the stipulation that the companies benefiting from the loan infusion demonstrate NEW owners be created among their employees and others in which ownership shares are purchased on credit wholly backed by projected “future savings” in the form of new productive capital assets.

We need to lift ownership-concentrating Federal Reserve System credit barriers and other institutional barriers that have historically separated owners from non-owners and link tax and monetary reforms to the goal of expanded capital ownership. This can be done under the existing legal powers of each of the 12 Federal Reserve regional banks, and will not add to the already unsustainable debt of the Federal Government or raise taxes on ordinary taxpayers. We need to free the system of dependency on Wall Street or the accumulated savings and money power of the rich and super-rich who control Wall Street. The Federal Reserve System has stifled the growth of America’s productive capacity through its monetary policy by monetizing public-sector growth and mounting Federal deficits and “Wall Street” bailouts; by favoring speculation over investment; by shortchanging the capital credit needs of entrepreneurs, inventors, farmers, and workers; by increasing the dependency of with usurious consumer credit; and by perpetuating unjust capital credit and ownership barriers between rich Americans and those without savings. The Federal Reserve Bank should be used to provide interest-free capital credit (including only transaction and risk premiums) and monetize each capital formation transaction, determined by the same expertise that determines it today––management and banks––that each transaction is viably feasible so that there is virtually no risk in the Federal Reserve. The first layer of risk would be taken by the commercial credit insurers, backed by a new government corporation, the Capital Diffusion Reinsurance Corporation, through which the loans could be guaranteed. This entity would serve to seed the new policy direction and would fulfill the government’s responsibility for the health and prosperity of the American economy.

Our political leaders, academia, and the media fail to understand that our financial system has resulted in a fundamental imbalance between production and consumption. We have ignored the systematic income inequalities that persist and grow exponentially due to the steady progress of tectonic shifts in the technologies of production, shifting productive input from labor to the non-human factor of production––productive capital, as generally defined as land, structures, human-intelligent machines, superautomation, robotics, digital computerized automation, etc. Productive capital assets are OWNED by individuals and, respecting private property principles, those individuals are entitled to the earnings generated by such assets.

The significant problem has been the systematic denial of participation as capital owners on the part of the majority of consumers. While the wealthy ownership class has essentially rigged the financial system to their benefit, and by that is meant to continually concentrate ownership of productive capital among the richest Americans, the majority of Americans have been and are dependent on JOB CREATION. Yet, none of our political leaders, academia or the media addresses this inbalance with the richest Americans entitled to income growth associated with productive capital ownership and the majority facing further job losses and degradation due to technological advancement.

Ordinary Americans of so-called “middle-class position” have used consumer debt financing as a means of bettering their life with an abundance of consumer products and services. The government has used income redistribution via taxation and national debt to prop up the economy with monies spent on supporting a massive military-industrial complex comprised of a small group of owners and millions of “employed” and various social programs to uplift the American majority’s life and prevent their decline into poverty––supported by government dependency.

The ONLY way out of this mess, if we are to not become a complete socialist or communist communal state governed by an elite class, is to embrace growth managed in such a way that EVERY American is empowered to acquire over time a viable wealth-creating, income-producing capital estate and pay for their acquisition out of the FUTURE earnings of the investment. Such is the precise means that the richest Americans continually advance their wealth and thus, income.

We need leaders who will put this issue before the national debate stage, and we need the media to put forth the questions whose answers will provide the financial mechanism specifics to reverse the ever dominant OWNERSHIP CONCENTRATION. Such concentration and the economic power that result is taking control of our representative government, with productive capital ownership channeled through plutocratic finance into fewer and fewer hands, as we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels.

We are absent a national discussion of where consumers earn the money to buy products and services and the nature of capital ownership, and instead argue about policies to redistribute income or not to redistribute income. If Americans do not demand that the holders of the office of the presidency of the United States, the Senate, and the Congress address these issues, we will have wasted the opportunity to steer the American economy in a direction that will broaden affluence. We have adequate resources, adequate knowhow, and adequate manpower to produce general affluence, but we need as a society to properly and efficiently manage these resources while protecting and enhancing the environment so that our productive capital capability is sustainable and renewable. Such issues are the proper concern of government because of the human damage inflicted on our social fabric as well as to economic growth in which every citizen is fairly included in the American dream.

New Stealth Bomber To Carry Payload Of Jobs (Demo)

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