Bernie Targets Working-Class Vermonters with F-35 Jets

To a world-wide audience Senator Bernie Sanders flatly contradicted his actual support for the F-35 jets based in Vermont: In an opinion piece in The Guardian last month he used the F-35 as a specific example of fraud, waste, and abuse as he explained why he would vote against the $900 billion 2025 US military budget. Bernie showed how hundreds of billions of dollars would be handed to companies that “engage in fraud” and that paid “exorbitant compensation packages” to their CEOs while millions of Americans are struggling.

Bernie writes:

60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck, 85 million people are uninsured or underinsured and 21.5m households are paying more than 50% of their income on housing. We have one of the highest rates of childhood poverty of almost any developed country on Earth.

In particular, Bernie writes: “The F-35, the most expensive weapon system in history, has run up hundreds of billions in cost overruns.”

Hypocrisy on Steroids

Yet, right here in Vermont, Bernie provides crucial support for those very same F-35 jets. Twenty of them are based at the airport in one of the most densely populated cities in Vermont. Thousands of Vermont Air National Guard F-35 training flights a year from that runway viciously target 3,000 working-class families in the cities of Burlington, South Burlington, and Winooski with ear- and brain-damaging 115-decibel takeoffs. The impact is almost exclusively on low-income and ethnic-minority neighborhoods in those cities.

Final US Air Force F-35 Operational Basing Environmental Impact Statement Volume I p. BR4-23

Bernie has the power to stop the sadistic daily targeting of working-class families

Like all senators, Bernie has substantial influence over Pentagon action within his own state. Instead of using that power to put a stop to the torture the F-35 training flights inflict on 6,663 Vermonters, including more than 1,000 children, who live in the 5-mile long by 1-mile wide oval-shaped F-35 noise zone surrounding the runway, Bernie advocates to continue the training with them in that location.

Final US Air Force F-35 Operational Basing Environmental Impact Statement Volume I p. BR4-30

Instead of demanding a mission compatible with the Guard’s location in a city, Bernie never acknowledges the damage to the ears and brains of children that the Air Force itself described in its Environmental Impact Statement.

By contrast with Bernie, the state’s sole Congresswoman, Becca Balint, joined with town-meeting voters in Burlington and in Winooski and with the city councils in three cities that recently voted to call for end to the F-35 basing and for a different mission for the Vermont Air National Guard, as shown in their own words in this WCAX TV news report.

The F-35 training in a city is illegal

The F-35 violence directed against Vermonters that Bernie supports blatantly violates the military’s own discipline, US law, and international law. That discipline prohibits military forces from targeting civilians. The discipline requires “distinction,” or separation of military forces from populated areas. The discipline also prohibits military forces from using a weapon in a manner for which it was not designed that causes unnecessary suffering. The discipline also prohibits commanders from basing the nuclear-capable F-35 jets where thousands of city-dwellers inherently serve as human shields.

Air Force Doctrine Publication 3-60, Targeting, p. 66

Tell Bernie enough is enough

Tell Bernie to join with the voters and the three city councils in demanding an immediate end to the illegal targeting of thousands of working-class Vermonters with F-35 jets in a densely populated area.

Bernie’s Burlington office: 802-862-0697

Bernie’s DC office: 202-224-5141

Editor’s Note: An earlier draft of this article with a request for comment was sent to Bernie, his state director, his foreign policy director, and his constituent advocates on January 8. None was received.