Air show is not free
Fort Wayne for Peace invites all peace activists to attend the 2012 Fort Wayne Air Show this weekend. The show provides a rare opportunity to see how half of the federal discretionary budget is spent. It features the F-22 Raptor, the most powerful (and expensive) fighter ever created. The F-22 is not for the defense of our nation. It was made for “air dominance” and the projection of power globally. It is a first-strike weapon.
Anyone who is hungry, needs shelter, education or medical care should attend and ask why there is money for weapons but not food stamps. We would like people attending to wear a peace message on their shirt, hat, etc., and be smiling ambassadors for peace. The show is “free,” but even if you don’t attend you are paying for it.
Tim Tiernon, Veterans for Peace, Fort Wayne for Peace
Was it a bad dream?
It might have been a dream. My City Council, its members sitting as if in a corporate board room, all dressed as they imagine business executives dress, lectures a small plastic-molding firm on a tax abatement gone bad. Through the dreamy haze, they seem to be saying it failed to create enough jobs.
Council Democrats, aware that a policy of handing out other people’s money to politically defined businesses is becoming unpopular, express outrage; they vow to tighten regulations and increase penalties. The Republicans, most oddly, try to demonstrate they can run both government and a business “like a business,” suggesting operational improvements.
Could it be, though, that the council itself has failed? It abides tax rates so high they press a business at the margin, making it nightmarishly difficult to secure a market position or better utilize a physical plant operating under heavy mortgage.
And who are these councilmen to be saying anything at all? The company as it stands creates more actual wealth than the entire city government. Its employees earn paychecks as productive contributors to a free market, not as recipients of tax-funded stipend.
At that point the city’s abatement specialist begins explaining in that official pedagogic tone that state law doesn’t allow the rescension of a tax break just because of a silly recession. Rules are rules. The dream ends with a motion to amend the economic-development ordinance. It would make it illegal to not economically develop.
Craig Ladwig
