The US House recently voted to stop funding for GE's alternate F-35 engine. This has been touted as an example of making the military sacrifice during these hard economic times, even though the engine is being called a redundancy (therefore not a sacrifice) at the same time. While I support the vote to stop it, I saw an ad in the Dem-Gaz which raised my curiousity.
The ad congratulated all of Arkansas's Congressmen for "protecting the American taxpayer" by voting against the alternate engine, all the Congressmen that is, except for Mike Ross. Yet Mike Ross, the lone Democrat in the delegation, voted to kill the engine too. But he wasn't thanked in the ad. Curious.
The ad was taken out in the paper by Pratt&Whitney Engines and United Technologies. Why would these companies take out an ad for this? Oh yeah, that's right because they're the ones making the F-35 engine.
Pratt & Whitney is the subsidiary of United Technologies that makes the engine. A more honest wording of the ad would probably have been, "thank you for taking care of our competition".
I'm as much for cutting waste as anyone, but I don't like companies being disingenuous.
As far as why Mike Ross wasn't mentioned, the mystery goes on. It would be interesting to see info on recent and future campaign contributions from United Technologies, and on GE for that matter, to members of the U.S. House and see if any of them correlate to yea or nay votes.
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