As millions in the world starve and workers in the US lose their shelter, their jobs and a future, Obama bombs another third world country

I was just reading about a school in North Carolina that is being closed due to a lack of funds.   There is also a piece in today's Wall Street Journal about Detroit.  Detroit is a famous US city with great history.  Today it is a shell of what it once was, a poverty stricken, urban dump.  It's population has declined significantly as both blacks and whites have fled. 

As Obama takes the US in to a series of thirds, a third predatory war in to another third world country I thought of the 199 Tomahawk missiles the US had launched on Libya as of last evening.  If my memory serves me correctly, these weapons cost about $1 million apiece. So in the past few days, the US has thrown $109 million over Libya.  Of course, this is nothing compared to the $2 billion a year the US has been paying the Egyptian dictator Mubarak up until his removal through a popular uprising.  And there's the cost of arming and supplying the Yemeni dictator, the Israeli regime that doesn't allow all of the ethnic groups within its borders citizenship as, say, Muslim Turkey does. The equally worthless thugs that run Saudi Arabia are also recipients of billions of dollars in US weaponry.  And they need it in these times especially as this regime is one of the most repressive and brutal in the third world. Given the uprisings that have taken place in the Arab world over the past few months there is not much likelihood of the $28 billion arms deal for the Saudi's agreed last November of being halted.

The US arms arms industry, and the US is the largest supplier of arms to the world, welcomes with gusto the news that 199 missiles meet their end in the way they were meant to. It means more have to be made. Arms expenditure is inflationary when there are no conflicts after all, it is money spent on a commodity that workers just don't go out and purchase.  So society has a whole section of the working class producing a commodity that no one buys---peace is definitely not profitable for this section of the capitalist class.

As schools are closed, houses taken from their owners as well as their jobs, the 400 people in the US who have more wealth than155 million of the rest of us continue to do very well indeed. Warren Buffet has just bought the chemical company Lubrizol for $9 billion. I wrote something about this company before but can't find it.  Anyways, the Wall Street Journal reports that the "deal will be a tidy windfall for shareholders" as the shares are being bought for 18% higher than they have ever traded on the open market.  Company executives are likely to collect $148.5 million cashing out their stock options, a figure that will rise to $249 million if they leave the company after the sale says the Journal.

Lubrizol's top dog, CEO James Hambrick, will most likely receive $97.3 million and if Buffet decides not to keep him on he'll get another $33.5 million severance.

In times like these the words of Marx can have such profound meaning.  I do not believe in prophecy in the religious sense, or that Marx was incapable of mistakes. But a scientific study of any phenomenon can reveal great truths, can predict future events based on analyzing them as they exist in an embryonic form in the belly of an beast not yet expired.  In 1948 Marx wrote of the capitalist system of production that one of its dominant features is the:

"Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

Capitalism, borne out of the womb of the feudal system of production, Marx adds, has, "left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”.
What we are witnessing in Japan, in Africa, in Detroit and the rural and urban poverty of the US, is global capitalism at work; it is the normal state of affairs at this stage in the game.  By understanding how it got here, and how it works, we can rid ourselves of it.  The CEO's above are simply the product of it, they benefit from it in ways that millions don't and many will defend it to the death, but their demise is equally guaranteed if it continues..