OK: McAlester Ammo Plant Inspires Confidence Despite Base Closing Review

[rainbow4321]

http://www.kotv.com/main/home/stories.asp?whichpage=3&id=78249


If she hadn't built bombs for a living, Carol Kelley doubts she could have afforded her daughters' softball camp or swimming lessons.

``We would've probably ate a lot of taters and beans,'' said the 56-year-old, who raised two girls alone on her salary from the McAlester Army Ammunition Plant. ``We wouldn't have had a comfortable living. It was nothing high class, but they got to do the things they wanted to do.''

Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., said the remoteness provides an argument for keeping the depot intact. ``I still see McAlester as very secure,'' Cole said. ``We not only have to stockpile, but maintaining the production line there is important.'' The McAlester site, which resembles a wooded college campus, was chosen during World War II for its isolation from German threats on the East Coast and Japanese foes on the West Coast.

Since the war in Iraq began, the plant has been operating 20 hours a day, something it hasn't done since running round-the-clock during the Vietnam War.

[hangemhigh]

1. Here's an interesting version of this story:

Excerpted from Axis of Logic:

Americans are not deceiving anybody in the world but themselves. Okies (Oklahomans) are especially oblivious to the utterly simple fact that Oklahoma is the major shipping point for millions of pounds of genocidal and illegal weapons to Iraq. Up to 3.2 million pounds a day. That is up to 96 million pounds of radioactive uranium a month!



Okies are more interested in an annual series of football games played by an ADHD group of adolescent boys at the University of Oklahoma. It is so much easier to bravely scream out "Go, Big Red Sooners, Kill 'em all!" than to tell the government their uranium munitions are wrong, banned, and illegal.



Okies are moral cowards. Okie politicians and preachers, bankers, doctors, lawyers, managers and workers are deathly afraid of merely even hinting that they would do anything other than totally support the illegal War on Iraq. Why, what would people say at the Country Club or at the Church? Conformism is enforced by what is socially acceptable.

http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_15479.shtml

[rainbow4321]

2. WOW....thank you for that link...

I have always cringed whenever I drive by the "Ammo Plant" sign on Highway 69/75 in OK...look below at the bennies these people get...shrub sure knows how to buy votes in the red states..

From the article in the initial post:


Most of the jobs at the plant do not require a college degree _ good news in a community where only about 13 percent of residents have completed college.

A starting annual salary of about $24,800, benefits and a four-day work week also make the jobs attractive in southeastern Oklahoma, where the per capita income is about $20,636, according to a 2002 Bureau of Economics study of Pittsburg County.

Most residents know somebody who works at the plant or who has worked there in the past. Many have hunted deer or wild turkey on the vast wooded acreage. And they're well aware of the $168.4 million the base provides to the local economy. ``McAlester,'' said downtown barber Chris Lenardo, ``would blow away if they closed the plant.''

[hangemhigh]

3. Yeah, as a former Okie, "We're Number One!!!"

Disgusting isn't it?