US capitalism finances slaughter in Gaza and wages war at home.

By Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

I was talking to a friend today, another worker, and he was saying about people in the US not being interested or willing to talk about the genocidal assault on Gaza and Apartheid Israel with him.  He is not a leftist, socialist, or radical or at least has never given himself any of these labels. But people don't resist talking about this slaughter by the Zionists because they support them.  Most people just don't see any way out. It's like the alcoholic, if they walk through that door they have to do something but they can't see a solution and there is no significant social force in the US offering one. Best stay within the secure walls of denial or call for a curse on both their houses. What the eyes don't see the heart won't grieve over as they say.

The Christian Zionists will talk about it and so will their preachers but they are not much different than the Taliban really, like the Zionist settlers. They just know the turmoil is the precursor to Jesus landing back here.  Jews that won’t convert will rot in hell.  Who can argue with someone whose life path is guided by this nonsense. The Muslims believe Abraham is one of their forbearers as the Jews do. But apparently only Jews were promised the land by Jesus’ dad although this wasn’t registered at the city hall at the time. It’s caused quite a problem for the religiously motivated. For the US capitalist class that has profits as their motive for siding with and arming the Zionists, they’ll play the religious card but do you honestly think Dick Cheney has a relationship with anything linked to the teachings of this Jesus that most honest Christian workers might? I think not.

The US ruling class, their president and politicians support the Zionists for economic reasons, Jesus be damned. They are mass murderers like Netenyahu and his ilk.

The US ruling class is the driving force behind a new arms race, world savagery and a fast track on the road to a real “end of the world” as opposed to the one familiar in Christian mythology. As John Pilger pointed out in a previous article we published on this blog  “Every year the American historian William Blum publishes his "updated summary of the record of US foreign policy" which shows that, since 1945, the US has tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and biological weapons; and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders”.

I am not an alarmist, but capitalism will destroy life as we know it on this rotating ball of ours unless the working class puts a stop to it.  While I wish my American compadres, the American workers and middle class would step up to the plate, ignoring reality is not assent. The greatest obstacle in American society is not that people don’t care, not that they aren’t hurt by the thought of what their government is doing, it’s that people simply think change cannot be made, nothing can be done.  So nose to the grindstone and keep working, after all, I could be in the streets very easily, that’s what freedom is all about.

But history teaches us that there will be a savage explosion in this country at some point; it cannot go on. There are now 48 million low waged Americans. Fewer than half of US adults are working full time and as the BLS reported full time jobs fell by 523,000 in June. And a staggering 91 million people over 16 are not working. Low paying jobs now account for 44% of all employment growth since February 2010.  The vibrant market at work! What a waste of labor power. 

America the free, is down there with Liberia, Papua new Guinea, and Suriname as the only countries that don’t provide paid maternity leave and the only industrial country that doesn’t. Pregnancy is a sickness you see. “The usual argument against granting paid leave, intoned by elected officials and the private sector, is simply that it’s bad for business.” Says a recent article in Business Week.  The millionaire mum Hilary Clinton’s great contribution to paid maternity leave is “eventually” says BW. Pity she can’t say that to the Zionists.

I remember when the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was passed; I was still very active in my union at the time. We were delighted, but even being pretty well paid workers by US standards, who could afford to take 12 weeks off without pay? According to the Community Service Society quoted in Business Week “The average minimum wage worker in New York can afford to take only about eight days off without pay before his or her life savings are wiped out.”

Trillions have been wasted in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan etc. and the human suffering-----what a tragedy.  And overnight the 1%’s representatives in the two Wall Street parties hand over more money to the Zionists. 

The huge water main break at UCLA that has done millions of dollars of damage was no anomaly.  That main, according to reports I heard on TV, was put in in 1921. I am not a metallurgist or engineer but I worked around water mains for most of my life and, you know what, that is a very old main.  As the war criminals in the US Congress hand the Zionists another half million or so for more bullets and bombs to slaughter Palestinian children, our infrastructure crumbles.  Business Week a long time ago referred to the crumbling infrastructure as the “Third Deficit”. There is no such thing as guns and butter. They will make the guns and feed us lard.

I started this session simply to put up an article from MondoWeiss about the biased propaganda surrounding the racist Zionist assault on children. But I couldn’t stop myself. I say we have to enter the stage of history the US working class. There is no future if we don’t because although the industrial working class has shifted mainly from the west to the east, from Europe and the US to Asia, we will not be successful in building a new global society without settling accounts with the US bourgeois, without transforming the way society is managed and governed. And we can’t settle accounts with this class if workers are divided along racial religious, gender or national lines.

We must own and control globally the means of producing our needs. Protectionism is not the answer, free trade is not the answer, these are all capitalist solutions that will not work. Competition between workers of nations is not the answer, class unity is. We must take the productive forces and the management of them out of the hands of the minority of unelected individuals that presently control them and all aspects of social life. We must plan what we produce based on what we need and what our natural world can accommodate.  Naturally, the first step is to actively resist their attempts to impoverish us and fight the smaller direct battles and savor these victories as we build the movement.

A world federation of democratic socialist states must be our goal and it is the only solution. It is not a utopian idea; it is necessity. You owe it to your children

In order to not go on any longer, here is the link to the article that got me worked up about writing this afternoon. The article is reprinted from MondoWeiss.

Slaughter is not self-defense: The assault on Gaza and the corruption of language

David Lloyd on July 30, 2014

A Palestinian man stands amid debris following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City on July 11. (Photo: Mohammed Abed / AFP / Getty Images)

We are witnessing the unspeakable, again. Are there any words left adequate to the abomination of Israel’s ongoing onslaught on Gaza, an assault that is proceeding with dismal predictability, and that is, in fact, a repetition and an escalation rather than a recommencement of violence? It is 2009 all over again; it is 2012 all over again.

1400 Palestinians were killed in Operation Cast Lead, fitting prelude to Barack Obama’s inauguration; 161 were killed in 2012, a minor tribute to his re-election. Already, more than a thousand Palestinians have died in what is the most savage yet of these assaults, and President Obama continues to call it self-defense, though he dutifully regrets the loss of innocent civilian lives.

Let us not descend to this game of differentiating Palestinian civilians, or even Palestinian children, from Palestinian “combatants.” Israel targets Palestinians because Palestinians’ very existence is resistance, not because Hamas uses them as human shields. It is this diverse, differentiated, creative, vital, persistent existence of Palestinians that frustrates Israel, not the existence of Hamas or its rockets, which Israel has never really sought to eradicate, so handy an excuse are they for its periodic incursions and slaughters. And since it is the Palestinians’ right, as it is that of any occupied people, to resist, Israel’s resort is to deny them the right to exist. Continue reading