Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

A couple of days ago President Trump used a Sharpie to modify a US Weather Service map to “prove” that Hurricane Dorian was, at one point in time, going to graze the NE corner of Alabama thereby making his erroneous claim about that true.

Yesterday, while news headlines focussed on the track of the same hurricane and the President’s efforts to “prove” his “forecast” was accurate, the Secretary of Defense released an itemized list outlining the cuts he needed to make to his budget to divert $3,600,000,000 to pay for the wall along the southern border…. a part of the enormous costs for the wall that “Mexico will pay for”. Here’s a portion of the list:

The planned multi-billion-dollar transfer — which has been strongly denounced by Democrats — is expected to defund more than 120 construction projects that the military was hoping to conduct over the next years.

Documents obtained by CBS News show the reprogramming request by the White House will divert funds that the Pentagon had previously designated for a diverse set of projects in the U.S. and around the world, from a missile facility in Alaska and an engineering center at the U.S. Army Academy at West Point, to a hangar at a U.S. Air Force Base in Japan and a veterinary facility for working dogs at the U.S. Navy Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Funds for the construction of schools at military bases and facilities will be transferred to finance the construction of border barriers, including a $62,634,000 grant for a middle school at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and a $56,048,000 grant for an elementary school for children of U.S. troops stationed in Wiesbaden, Germany. 

The $118,682,000 diverted from new schools is less that 2% of the $6,100,000,000 the Trump administration asked the Department of Defense to “divert” in order to fund the wall he claimed “Mexico would pay for” and an even more minuscule percentage of the $59,800,000,000 the wall would reportedly cost even after the plans were modified to substitute fencing in some stretches….

As the election season begins in 2020 I fully expect the President to wield his Sharpie to show us how “Mexico will pay” for the wall through fees collected at the border, higher tariffs, and other fiscal hocus-pocus. The shell game he will use to justify his “promise” is no different than the Sharpie he used to justify his erroneous tweet about the hurricane. In the meantime, the children of military service personnel will be denied new schools in at least two places and $3,600,000,000 that COULD have infused funds into communities near to military bases will be spent for a 12th century technology on the Southern Border.