Jimmy is not just running to halt the F-35 training

Jimmy Leas also fights climate change, seeks to expand child care, and calls for a healthy environment, free & frequent public transit, tenant rights, union organizing, and racial & class justice

To be sure, canceling the F-35 is central to Jimmy Leas’ campaign for city council in South Burlington. The F-35 touches so many areas of life in the city, from health and safety to housing to pristine open fields, and from jobs to climate catastrophe.

Jimmy is also using the election campaign to take on weatherizing every home in the city and implementing full-day child care at the city’s three elementary schools. He is also calling for a healthy and safe environment, free & frequent public transit, tenant rights, union organizing, and racial and class justice.

1. Cancel the F-35

The election offered the chance to take the demand for canceling the F-35 from this substack news report to the city as a whole.

Public health and safety

The F-35 training in a city tortures and brutalizes public health and safety and degrades the learning and cognitive development of children, as admitted by the US Air Force itself.

Affordable housing

∙ Military jet noise caused the demolition of hundreds of affordable homes on an area the size of 44 football fields in the Chamberlin neighborhood of South Burlington in 2015.

∙ The intolerable F-35 training noise is solely responsible for that 44-acres remaining vacant of housing.

∙ The airport is required by the FAA to sell the 44 acres for rebuilding housing once the 115-decibel F-35 training stops.

∙ 3,000 existing affordable homes in the Air Force-designated extreme noise zone in Burlington, South Burlington, Winooski, and Williston are “generally considered not suitable for residential use” because the 115-decibel F-35 makes life in them unbearable.

Pristine open fields

The loss of the 44 acres for housing and the degradation of the 3,000 existing homes foists development in pristine open fields further away.

Jobs

The loss of the 44 acres and the degradation of the existing 3,000 housing units hurts the economy because employers are unable to bring in new workers for lack of affordable housing.

Climate Catastrophe

Each F-35 burns 22 gallons a minute, adding to rapidly approaching climate catastrophe with each minute of flight.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned

All of these losses impose immense health, safety, environmental, climate, and dollar costs on the city, its economy, and its people. Consider the huge expense of operating each F-35 for hundreds of training flights each month–at a rate of $30,000 per flight-hour. Every level of government, federal, state, and local, is stripped of a vast amount of money by this expenditure.

As former President and 4-star General Dwight D. Eisenhower said in a speech on April 16, 1953:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

At a time of rampant inflation, the vast amount of money used for the F-35 and its training flights is handed to Lockheed-Martin, which then uses some of that money to fund and to corrupt politicians and to lobby for even more such wasteful and counterproductive expenditures.

In his farewell address in 1961, President Eisenhower warned of a “military industrial complex.” He said:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.

We need city councilors who will assert the city’s authority to promote the public health, safety, and welfare of the people in the Chamberlin school neighborhood–instead of pretending powerlessness in obsequious subservience to the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against.

We in South Burlington have been given the chance to put a stop to the F-35 training in a location it does not belong—in a city.

An article coming out here on Tuesday will lay out the federal and state laws that provide each city, town, and village in Vermont with the authority to put a stop to the F-35 in the most densely populated part of Vermont. Let’s use that power.

2. Weatherize homes on a mass-scale

To save the planet, to preserve the climate, I am calling for a city-run mass-weatherizing-homes program. Conservation by insulating and weatherizing is one of the most effective steps the city can take to preserve the climate. 41% of South Burlington families rent their homes. Renters cannot be expected to fund weatherization for the land owners on top of rent.

Here is the plan: City workers going house-to-house down each street in the city to insulate and plug the leaks in all homes at no cost to renters or homeowners. $2.5 million can be raised each year with a 10% tax surcharge on properties valued at more than $1 million to pay for the considerable portion left for renters and homeowners to pay by the state’s inadequate home-weatherization program.

3. Full-day childcare

Working families desperately need quality child care. I am calling for adding full-day child care to the existing pre-kindergarten and after-school programs at our three elementary schools.

Here is the plan: Use $1 million of left-over federal COVID funds for adding the space at each school. Tax the city’s large employers—those who benefit from child care—for the salaries of additional teachers and care-givers to further reduce cost for working-class parents (in addition to the state subsidy that is available at our three elementary schools).

The campaign

This election campaign goes further than CancelF35.substack.com can by itself. It is reaching out to the whole city. It is broadening public awareness that we, as a city have the power under federal and state law to put a stop to the F-35 training in the Chamberlin School neighborhood.

The election campaign is also expanding the scope of discussion to include the needs of working people regarding weatherization and child care, and to ensure that the costs are not transferred to the people least able to pay.

While CancelF-35.substack.com is part of a growing independent news media that challenges established politicians and military commanders in ways that established news media stopped providing, this election campaign goes further in one other way. It does not just seek to empower one candidate. It seeks to empower the people to organize, push for, and implement the desperately needed changes.

Write or call your public servants and demand an immediate halt to F-35 training in cities.

Governor Phil Scott 802-828-3333 Chief of Staff <Jason.Gibbs@vermont.gov>

Vermont National Guard's Complaint Line: 802-660-5379 (Note: the Vermont Guard told a reporter that it received over 1400 noise complaints. But the Guard won’t release what people said).

Submit your report & complaint to the still active Fall 2021-Continuing Now online F-35 Report & Complaint Form: https://tinyurl.com/5d89ckj9

See all the graphs and in-your-own words statements on the F-35 Spring-Summer 2021 Report & Complaint Form (513 responses): https://tinyurl.com/3svacfvx.

See links to the graphs and in-your-own words statements on all four versions of the F-35 Report & Complaint Form since Spring 2020, with a total of 1670 responses from 658 different people plus 77 more so far on the form that remains active now.

Senator Bernie Sanders 800-339-9834 <Senator@sanders.senate.gov>

Senator Peter Welch 888-605-7270 Chief of Staff <patrick.satalin@mail.house.gov>

Congressman Becca Balint

Burlington City Council <citycouncil@burlingtonvt.gov>

Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger <mayor@burlingtonvt.gov>

Winooski Mayor Kristine Lott <klott@winooskivt.org>

S. Burlington City Council Chair Helen Riehle <hriehle@sburl.com>

Williston Selectboard Chair Terry Macaig <macaig@msn.com>

VT Senate President Philip Baruth <Philip.Baruth@uvm.edu>

VT House Speaker Jill Krowinski <jkrowinski@leg.state.vt.us>

Attorney General Charity Clark <Charity.Clark@vermont.gov>

States Attorney Sarah George <Sarah.fair.george@gmail.com>

Vermont’s Federal Prosecutor <usavt.contactus1@usdoj.gov>

Adjutant General Brig Gen Gregory C Knight <gregory.c.knight.mil@mail.mil>

Major J Scott Detweiler <john.s.detweiler.mil@mail.mil>

Wing Commander Col Dan Finnegan <daniel.finnegan@mail.mil>

Vermont National Guard Inspector General Lt. Col. Edward J Soychak <edward.soychak@us.af.mil>

US Air Force Inspector General Lt. Col. Pamela D. Koppelmann <pamela.d.koppelmann.mil@mail.mil>

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall <Frank.Kendall@us.af.mil>