Reject Raytheon

  Read to the Buncombe County Commissioners right before they voted unanimously to give $5 million for the construction of a worker training facility for Pratt & Whitney.   Following the money The 27 million dollar tax rebate must have seemed an easy decision for you - had to do it, or they wouldn’t come and we need them to come because, you know, they promise jobs. Jobs mean money jobs are the currency that you bank on for approval, and for looking the other way: away from climate emergency away from war emergencies away from polluting our own water. It’s about money. Money that comes from we the people to congress to military to industrial, from the Pentagon to Raytheon to make weapons and profits galore, which kill children and other humans in Yemen and Gaza and god knows where. It’s about money Raytheon extorts from you so it won’t pay taxes, money that you offer to build an edifice for its workers with one of you at the foundation. Money that comes from we the people,...

  I cry out How can I not? On this land stolen from the Cherokee Nation, now called private property, protected by private security and county police, I cross the line. I rise up.    I cry out about the crime being committed against Mother Earth whose trees have been bulldozed over whose river is threatened whose habitat is being wiped out and contaminated.   I cry out about the crime being committed against the victims of the US Empire who will suffer more because of what is being created here - the engine parts for the F-35 jet fighters now being used to slaughter our brothers and sisters in Gaza. I cry out about the crime being committed against future generations who are inheriting a climate emergency accelerated by the rapacious fossil fuel industry represented here in our community now by this aerospace giant Pratt & Whitney.   Today we say ¡Basta! Enough!   We are not crossing a line, the line has crossed us. That line was crossed long ago when t...