Right now is Congress,
is trying to nickel and
dime the average American that
suffering from the economic
instability from this pandemic.
They're also,
continuing to greenlight military
spending, on failed fighter jets
like the F 35.
In fact,
the F 35 has been such a disaster
that now Pentagon officials and
members of the military
are arguing, you know, that didn't
really work out so well.
So maybe now we need
to develop a new jet and
maybe that's what we need to do.
So first, let's focus a little bit
about the failure surrounding the F
35 this has been a 20 year project
that has been a complete and
utter utter waste of our resources.
The Airforce a generation ago
launched development of what they
referred to at the time as
an affordable lightweight
fighter to replace hundreds of
Cold War vintage F-16s.
And complement a small future fleet
of sophisticated, but costly and
unreliable stealth fighters.
So over 20 years of research and
development that lightweight
replacement fighter the F
35 got heavier and
more expensive as the Air Force and
lead contractor, Lockheed Martin.
Packed it with more and
more new technology so it has been
riddled with all sorts of bugs and
issues, delays.
I mean, it's been such a failure
that again, now the military is
pushing this idea that we need to
pay these private military
contractors, companies like Boeing
and Lockheed Martin billions and
billions of dollars.
Hundreds of billions of dollars to
develop some new jets the F-35,
the Seven.
The 25 tonne stealth war plane
has become the very problem it was
supposed to solve.
And now America needs a new fighter
to solve that F35 problem official
said and just to give you a little
more background on how terrible and
how costly the F35 is.
With the sticker price of around
$100 million per plane it is
maintenance intensive buggy and
unreliable.
The F 35 is not a low cost
lightweight fighter said Dan Ward,
a former Air Force programme
manager, and
some might be wondering, okay,
well it's been 20 years since
Congress approved the funding for
this very programme.
Why is it that it's taken so long,
literally decades for people to
realize it's been a failure and
why are we even entertaining
the notion of developed developing
another fighter jet?
Well, Vox did a pretty good job
explaining the monetary reasons
behind all of this let's take
a quick look at that video.
>> Despite deep design flaws and
constant problems, there have been
no serious efforts to cancel or
scale back the project.
In fact, through more than three
years of cuts to defense spending,
funding for the F 35,
has barely been touched.
That's because the project was
politically engineered to near
perfection.
The Pentagon started bidding for
the F 35 in the mid 90s.
It would be the largest defense
contract in history, and Boeing and
Lockheed Martin quickly emerged
as the two contenders.
Both had loyal supporters in
Congress who were very eager to
create jobs in their state.
It was an intense competition and
when Lockheed won the contract
Boeing supporters quickly mobilized
in Congress.
Immediately they drafted
legislation proposing to split
the work between the two companies.
When that failed, they push to
award Boeing contracts for
KC767 tankers, C17 cargo planes and
radar jamming growler planes.
Ensuring the Boeing factories in
their states remained open.
Today, the Lockheed Martin F 35
project supports 146,000 jobs
across 46 states.
>> Yeah, and they use those jobs as
a political shield to take
a trillion dollars of American
taxpayer money and burn it.
Of course they don't burn it they
put it in their pockets and their
executives are intensely rich.
And of course they give some
of it a small percentage,
to those greedy, corrupt,
horrific politicians who burned our
money and gave it to their corrupt
friends, so let's break this down
a little bit further.
They said it'd be lightweight
as Anna pointed out and
the F 16 is 17 tons so it's
supposed to be lighter than that is
the f 35 k minute 25 tonnes, oops,
total and utter failure.
They then said, it's okay we're
going to make thousands of these
The Air Force alone ordered 1,800.
How many do they get?
250 over two decades so
they made a fraction a fraction of
what they was the number of planes
they were supposed to make.
Making it nearly useless and a lot
of them of course were broken would
light on fire before they even took
off it was an epic disaster.
So it costs $100 million per plane
what happened to less
expensive nah, no.
Look, guys,
if you bought something and
you paid a lot of money for it and
it didn't work, what would you do?
You'd be upset and you probably
wouldn't go back to that vendor and
you wouldn't buy something else
from them right?
We all together, bought something
for over a trillion dollars and
it turns out it was junk.
And now, all those same
corrupt politicians turn around and
go, we gotta buy it again.
This time we're going to buy a new
jet, but the same companies,
I want to take another trillion
dollars out of your taxes, and
just move it over to our friends.
So Guys aren't we don't live in
a democracy we just don't so
these guys are going to rob us to
the end of time until you take
money out of politics and yes,
it's absolute highway robbery and
they're all criminals.
And look what would accountability
look like you say so
all while the guy who would though
ordered it in the army is
that general is not no longer here.
I guarantee you he's working for
one of the defense contractors and
making millions of dollars.
They're all corrupt did I just say
some of the top
generals are corrupt?
God damn right they are they're all
working for
defense contractors getting rich
off of us as they burn our money.
All right, and then they pretend
to care about deficits, but
the accountability is this
If Lockheed Martin you screwed up
a trillion dollars, we're never
ever buying from you again.
Never go sell weapons
to Paraguay or something, but
likely we should shut you down
because you're miserable failures.
>> Well, I mean,
the way this entire system works
leads to the failure it almost
guarantees failure.
So one of the other reasons
why the F 35 fighter jets ended up
having so many flaws design flaws,
is because these members of
Congress who approved the project.
Allowed for something known as
concurrency, meaning that they
could begin production of
the fighter jets before they do
the appropriate tests.
And so that actually led to a all
sorts of design flaws and
delays because they would, they
would do the production they would
produce these fighter jets without
doing the appropriate tests.
And then when the military had them
and they ended up being all buggy
they would have to send them back
in order to get repaired.
So it leads to inefficiency
it leads to all
sorts of delays I mean,
it has been a complete disaster
from the very beginning and so on.
It's not just about
Lockheed Martin, it's also about,
the incentives, that Congress
has to do what they do.
Which is no no, we got, this is
going to look really good if
I create more jobs in my state or
in my district, so let's go ahead
and begin production right away.
Because my constituents will
love that and it just ends up being
an inefficient ridiculous mess,
and Cenk, to your point.
You're absolutely right about
some of these generals who have
some very strong thoughts about
what the money should be spent on.
For instance,
General Charles Brown Jr, who is
the Air Force Chief of Staff try
to frame this in a different way.
And I love this statement because
the, just
understand the jets are garbage but
he doesn't want to admit that.
So this is what he says the F 35 is
a Ferrari you don't drive your
Ferrari to work every day.
You only drive it on Sundays this
is our high-end fighter we want to
make sure we don't use it.
All for the low-end fight I want to
moderate how much we're
using those aircraft.
No, it's not a Ferrari, it's
garbage, don't let him get away
with framing it as the Ferrari that
you only want to use on Sundays.
Besides which,
if that were actually the case, we
shouldn't be greenlighting projects
that cost trillions of dollars,
just so the military can have
High Grade machinery that they only
use on the weekends.
No, I'm not buying it.
>> Yeah as we just told you that
was not the original intent it
was actually supposed to cost less.
It was supposed to be lighter
it was supposed to be more
efficient look,
wasting our money is not the bug.
It's the feature, the more of our
money that they waste, the more of
our money goes into their pockets
so that it's designed to spend
a waste a trillion dollars.
So I mean,
what kind of an insane excuses?
Well, I mean,
we built this thing for
over a trillion dollars, but
we don't really want to use it.
We just want to take it out on it
just have fun on Sundays wait,
what part of this is fun?
It's a killing machine well, and
what do you mean low end conflict
versus high end conflict?
Which high end conflict are we in?
I mean, all the conflicts we have
is we just launched our planes we
drop bombs,
usually on innocent people.
We kill them when we move on
where's the high end conflict?
When do we get to use f-35?
And I hope the answer is never but
the reality is,
they don't care about any of that.
It's not to protect the country,
every politician that talks about
protecting the country and
laughs behind our back is a liar
you wanted to cost us.
It costs us the education of our
kids you could get free college for
all kids that wanted at a fraction
of this price, a fraction, not even
10% not even 10% so, and let alone
healthcare, let alone our wages.
Sorry, Lockheed Martin and
all the corrupt politicians already
spent the money.
And then right now as we talk about
the minimum wage, as you'll see,
just a little bit in the rundown
in this show, another story
says all the politicians go,
we got deficits.
There's nothing we could do.
There's nothing we can do.
Did we already put $1 trillion in
our pocket?
[LAUGH] I guess there's nothing we
can do, because we already stole
all your money.
Yeah, no, there's a lot we can do,
which is fire all of you guys
they're asking for
massive trouble here.
How long can people take this?
I hope none of that trouble comes
but they're this is beyond the pale
man, but we're tired of getting
punched in the face.