Japanese Catastrophe: The sea walls and capitalism.

Some of our readers may think that we are going a bit far in linking the catastrophe in Japan to capitalism. But we would ask you to think of one simple thing. Somebody made the decisions to build these nuclear plants, somebody made the decision to build them on the sea front and somebody made the decision to build utterly inadequate sea walls and claim these would stop tsunamis. So brothers and sisters. Who made these decisions?

It was not the working class. Nor were these decisions made in the context of a socialist society. No these decisions were made by the capitalist class in the context of their capitalist system. The capitalist class and their capitalist system are responsible. This is the harsh reality. Capitalism and the capitalist system must be held to account.

In my previous blog I dealt with the inevitability of catastrophic accidents with nuclear power. Here I would like to deal with the impossibility of guarding against natural forces sweeping away nuclear plants and sea walls to supposedly guard the nuclear plants. Look what the New York Times says about the sea walls that existed. "Even in the two cities with seawalls built specifically to withstand tsunamis, Ofunato and Kamaishi, the tsunami crashed over before moving a few miles inland, carrying houses and cars with it."

There are massive seawalls in Japan located in up to a dozen locations. Smaller seawalls up to as high as forty feet extend along forty per cent of the nation's coastline. Yet in spite of this we have had this catastrophe. The answer is to stop and phase out nuclear power, to move to energy from sustainable natural sources, to locate cities and towns and homes away from coasts and off fault lines. Of course all this means that we will have to stand up to and defy capitalism and its addiction to profit. As we say capitalism does not work. the solution to the problems we face is a democratic socialist society world wide.

By the way if anybody still has any illusions in the Democrats and Obama they must be blind altogether. He is now openly supporting the torture of Bradley Manning. But also in his state of the union address he came forward with the proposal to build twenty new nuclear power stations.

Sean