Representative Arthur Robertson, MN wrote:
Representatives, representatives, listen to me.
There's a certain air of...cronyism, and old-fashioned thinking, about this bill. For starters, it bases all of our national security and sovereignty on the continued development and profits of the military-industrial complex that has, inexplicably, retained its influence in politics over the years regardless of its abject failure to bring us victory in the World War, somehow still claiming that its size and federal funding has managed to keep us safe, instead of chalking it up to a cold calculation by the Superpowers to avoid nuclear war with each other, which is probably the actual case.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Socialist Party stands before this House with a simple idea: that the strength and safety of a nation lies not with the profits of limited shareholders but with the preparation and capabilities of its patriotic peoples. If the Superpowers decided they could afford to wage war on the MSA, the expensive toys of McDonnell and others won't keep us safe. If Europe and Asia attack this land, then our country would only be safe and free to the extent that ordinary people decide to take up the mantle of Liberty and Democracy and stand up for what's right. In other words, it's the free folk of our nation who will, through their decided actions of determined resistance, push back the invaders and keep this great land strong and safe.
Now, this road will not be easy to travel (it's certainly harder than handing some big company a lot of money and calling it a day), and it will require not only the draft but the institution of a nationwide military service. It will require the formation of civilian defense corps all across the nation. Training, certification, weapon allocation... I know it's not what we're used to when we think about the American armed forces, but I also know that a possible tragedy could have been averted had our Minnesotan sailors been equipped with weapons and trained to use them. At the very least, the US Navy would think twice before intruding in our national waters.
This is the general outline for the Socialist defense policy. Let the House, and the public, now debate its merits.
Alright, so what do we do about the Republicans airplane proposal? Well, at least its spirit has a lot of merit, and the Socialist caucus believes it knows a way in which we can work with this spirit. See, what bothers us the most is that the Right-Wing, which claims to support austerity and fiscal responsibility, would propose a bill that heavily subsidizes a private corporation (and that with no less than 10% of the nation's Treasury, to borrow one of their own debating tactics) to produce a whole new plane, one that that we would later, presumably, buy from said corporation, thus performing a double operation in which a simply
unconscionable amount of money would be spent.
What the Socialists say is this: why spend so much money on these sort of things when we already receive, though admittedly largely not out of our own free will, so many working-yet-outdated vehicles from our two lovely neighbors? We're not saying we should keep them as our ultimate standard for warfare, but merely: what if we take all that great technology they were going to put into the new plane, and retrofit it into the clunkers we're already stuck with? That way we're still buying these machines from our neighbors and thus so many of our colleagues will be dissuaded from voting against the interests of their own State.
We can also do this at a significantly lower expense to the taxpayer. The reformed bill would look like this:
- Contracting the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation to immediately and without delay begin development of a line of advanced air defence fighters that meets the needs of the MSAAF. This line of jet fighters is to be developed as adaptations and improvements on similar fighters bought from the PSA and the USA by our country, which will be provided by the Department of Defense for McDonnell to carry out this contract.
- Specifying the aircraft to be adaptable, twin-engined tactical fighter with supersonic capabilities and specialising in air-to-air combat, to be built in-mass by McDonnell as soon as the prototype models are working and approved by the overseeing entities.
- Contributing the sum of 10 credits to the venture.
- Stressing that the aforementioned amount already covers the cost of buying the developed results from the McDonnel Aircraft Corporation.
- Confirming oversight of the process to be undertaken by the Federal government and Department of Defence, with secondary oversight by the House Committee on the Armed Services.
Of course, this is just based on preliminary research carried out by our Congressional offices, it remains to be seen if the appropriate committees can find reasons to cut the cost of this venture even more. Naturally, this is also only a first step towards a useful compromise which will hopefully reflect the merits of the Republican proposal as well as the general direction of the Socialist model for defense. Just think: if all the money we've spent on these defense contracts over the years had instead been spent on building a veritable network of bunkers and well-regulated militias across the land, then maybe we would be safe in the knowledge of our assured sovereignty, and not frantically trying to outpace the Superpowers in the global never-ending arms race.
