Why we drone, the new card played by Lockheed and the rest.

     Again in U.S history it is apparent that we are locked into an arms race. Pentagon spending currently accounts for 1.2 out of our 3 trillion dollar budget. Lockheed Martin, Boeing and BAE systems round out the top three recipients of federal subsidies. Like the previous arms race this one is multifaceted and looking at new ways to kill and spy on the citizens of earth from all angles. What should have caught your eye by now are the introduction of surveillance systems, the armament of pace and the use of drones (I will not refer to them as unmanned vehicles).

      I am going to focus on drones simply because they concern me the most today. Lobbyists from Northop Gruman, General atomics, Boeing and Lockheed Martin all lobby the "Unmanned Vehicle Caucus" (yep there is an actually caucus for drones). The contracts these criminals are after is for the development and building of Unmanned Carrier-Launched Surveillance and Strike programs. These companies have already bribed the drone caucus to well over the ten million dollar mark this year alone. What is ten million dollars when the U.S drone program is estimated to increase by 36.9 billion dollars over the next decade? Peanuts.

     Is it too far of a stretch to say there is a correlation between defense spending and a bill like H.R. 3102, which looks to cut 40 billion in benefits (this bill passed in the house on 9/19/13)? I don't give a damn if there is a correlation or not. I will not be part of any constituency that would rather bomb poor people instead of feed them. Ontologically speaking what is our nature as human beings? Is it really our role on Earth to burn the world, arguing vehemently against each other the whole way through? After reading on drones and the continual path towards destruction we witness, I almost want to say, "why yes it is".

     To me we cannot untangle these two realities. Lock Heed Martin is the single largest recipient of defense subsidies. If we divide the 36 billion dollars they receive from our federal government every taxpaying household gives Lock Heed a little under $300 annually. We cannot assume innocence here. We cannot simply claim we are just living our lives. The fact that the coffers are still open for massive increases for things like drone technologies, as social programs erode we have to look at the massive toll the last arms race took upon the parties involved.

    It's is not okay to have poor persons starving in the streets, while poor persons across the world are being blown to pieces. This is the reality we are not only heading towards, but we live in today. As of October 17th 2013 there are at least fifteen other countries who have armed drones as a part of their arsenal. When will we see them used in aggression domestically? Probably not soon, but eventually is the answer to that question.

     This reality starts to beg the ideal of living a fear based life. We cannot live if we're too afraid to die. The only answer is cut these drone programs and begin working toward peace and different methods of distributing the world's resources. The problem is peace is the biggest threat to the drones manufacturers listed above, and they will ensure peace is an impossibility.

     When someone like Chomsky argues that drone strikes actually create more combatants than they murder, the reality is companies like Lockheed Martin say "fantastic so I suppose you'll need another order of predator drones, right"? What does it say about a company when the greatest threat to their existence is peace?