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| The job creator |
With a spluttering, and more worrisome, unstable economy (capital hates instability) there is a bright spot arising as a part of US capitalism’s efforts to spread peace and democracy throughout the world----the unmanned and heavily armed drones. The US sells drones to a number of countries but they are all unarmed. Only Britain, due to its “special relationship” receives armed drones.
The Obama administration has been pushing for selling more armed drones to NATO so this organization can ease the pressure on the US in this spreading of peace thing as well as to allies like India. Allies would include those paragons of Democracy the Saudi’s as well as other trusted friends of Wall Street throughout the world one would presume.
A package is waiting for congressional review that would sell 6 armed drones to Italy to “protect its forces” in Afghanistan, the Wall Street Journal reports. The cost to the Italian working would be almost $400 million. I need not go in to any explanation of the state of the Italian economy as I am sure every reader is aware of what has been going on there.
Then there is the NATO “alliance's air campaign in Libya this year” writes the Economic Times which sort of shatters the myth that the US and NATO under the cloak of the UN went in to Libya to maintain a “no-fly” zone that could protect Libyan civilians. Those of us that argued against the intervention in Libya by the imperialist powers were correct to do so.
The Pentagon also wants to sell armed drones to Turkey. What a mess. Iraq will continue to slide in to chaos as the various forces battle for influence. In the north, the Kurds hold aspirations of a separate nation and across the border in Turkey there is a fifteen million Kurdish minority. Turkey wants the drones to use in its campaign to smash the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
The concern among some congresspersons is that forces opposing US capitalism’s interests might get hold of the drone technology much like Bin Laden and the Taliban, former Pentagon allies, used our very own weapons supplied to them by the US government against US forces. In the Middle East, the concern in Congress is that enemies of Israel which is a “pioneer in drone development” as the Wall Street Journal puts it, might “impact on Israel’s military edge in the region.” The US has assured Israel many times that any weapons it sells to Arab allies in the region will not have the technology to offer any threat to the Zionists regime. Opposition to sales to Turkey has the same origins as Turkey’s relationship with Israel has deteriorated since the killing of Turks when Israel attacked a ship carrying supplies to the Gaza which is controlled by Israel and under siege.
The US is also concerned that selling drones to the Saudi’s for example might make it harder to persuade the Israeli’s to limit its sale of drones cutting in to the US market. Israel has drones that can stay aloft for an entire day and fly as far as Iran. Might the Iranians be a little concerned about this I wonder? The issue of selling such weapons to despotic or undemocratic regimes like the Saudi’s is not an issue obviously.
The US is the world’s largest arms dealer and is driving the arms race. In response to the US arms sales, the Chinese, Russians, Iranians and others are beginning to produce them. The US drone captured by the Iranians could help them get a hold of useful technology. Supporters in the US say that if the US doesn’t sell the drones it will encourage others to develop them and sell to would be US customers as well cutting in to the Pentagon’s market share. This would end up “depriving the US of export sales and jobs” they say.
Drones are very important here in America as wars are not very popular when our own young people get killed. The brunt of US capitalism’s wars has been borne by a small percentage of US families and their children. Another plus for drones other than they create jobs (and are inflationary if peace persists) is “their ability to conduct precise strikes even in urban areas where the risk of collateral damage is high.”
As its global influence declines and the corresponding shift occurs in the relationship between the world’s major powers the US war machine will be ramped up in this desperate attempt to maintain global supremacy and control of the world’s resources; its competitors will respond and their victims will resist in whatever way they can. This is the future that capitalism holds, there is no reforming it; it cannot be made nice. Everlasting peace and our existence on this planet in a collective society, a federation of nation states working in cooperation and friendship to maintain and improve our existence in harmony with the natural world is impossible under capitalism.
The wars, poverty, hunger and disease we see throughout the world are a product not of human failings due to human nature being inherently selfish or rotten; they are a product of how society is organized, of how we produce the necessities of life. None of these problems can be solved if those of us attempting to solve them do not recognize that it is the system of production and the political structure and human relations that flow from this arrangement that is the source and that control of the production of things, of the economic and political power in society by the working class is the solution.
The productive forces have to liberated from the clique that own and control them. Global society needs new managers.
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