Seymour Hersh: CAN BIDEN REIN BIBI IN?

As Israel sets its sights on Iran, the US declares nuclear targets out of bounds

Seymour Hersh

Oct 16, 2024

∙ Paid

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during the United Nations General Assembly in New York City on September 27. / Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images.

This week, according to a report in the Washington Post, an active and fully involved President Joe Biden finally set a limit on what Israel could do with the untold numbers of American bombs that Israel has recently been dropping on Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. The Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been debating how and when to respond to an earlier Iranian missile attack on Israel and an anxious world has been watching as the military madness of the Middle East, fueled by American weapons, continues to escalate.

Biden had stepped up, the Post reported, and told the Israelis that “he would not support an Israeli strike on nuclear-related areas” in Iran. Biden and Netanyahu had had their first talk in seven weeks, and the Israeli leader got the message. He agreed to limit Israel’s retaliation to military targets in Iran and avoid any nuclear or oil installations. The Post described the Israeli turnaround “as a sign of restraint” that could avoid a wider war. The newspaper’s assessment came amid what can already only be described as a wider war. 

Why is Biden, on his way out of office, continuing to seek the limelight instead of doing all he can to promote the competence and strategic know-how of Kamala Harris, his vice president who is now struggling, amid some adverse internal polls, to defeat Donald Trump in an election three weeks away? If Harris does not win next month, Biden’s pettiness and need for attention in these last weeks will not be forgotten. Harris was on Biden’s call with Netanyahu, but she should have been taking the lead on all serious foreign policy matters in these weeks. Biden seems intent on upstaging his loyal vice president, and doing so on the front pages of the nation’s major newspapers.

The sad fact is that the president has lost the support of many young Americans through his continued backing, in the form of tens of billions of American dollars in military aid, of Ukraine’s war against Russia and Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Netanyahu has long believed that Iran is intent on becoming a nuclear power. In fact, as I reported in the New Yorker in 2011, the US intelligence community has concluded in two secret assessments, known as National Intelligence Estimates, that there is no evidence that any of the enriched nuclear materials in Iran have been diverted to a secret nuclear weapons program. There is no such program in Iran, although its nuclear industry continues to produce and store uranium that has been enriched to 60 percent. (Uranium at that level of enrichment has no medical use and is not powerful enough for a bomb, but publicly storing uranium at that level is seen not as an arbitrary choice by some nuclear arms control experts here. Rather, it can be understood as a chilling political message to enemies: “We have gone as far gone this far in response to provocation from Israel and other enemies without producing weapons-grade uranium, but we are capable of doing so.”) 

There’s something bizarre in the spectacle of a US president negotiating with Israel about what targets to hit instead of doing whatever he can to stop further bombing. Why is a president of the United States negotiating with the leader of any nation, ally or not, about which targets his air force is going to attack next? And why are he and his foreign policy aides telling the media about it?

The tragic truth is that Biden and his foreign-policy team, headed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, will depart office having left the United States mired in wars in Ukraine and the Middle East with no immediate way out. Russia is more than holding its own in its war with Ukraine, with no end in sight, and is now in the process of upgrading Iran’s sophisticated S-300 air defense missile system with the next generation of technology, capable of tracking the most advanced ballistic missile firings.

I have been reporting on Iran’s suspected bomb program for more than two decades. In 2011 one of Iran’s senior diplomats confided to me that he was appalled by his country’s official lying about its secret purchase of what are known as dual-purpose goods: machinery that could be made capable of enriching raw uranium ore to the 5 percent level needed to drive a nuclear power plant, and but also to the 90 percent enrichment level needed to develop a nuclear bomb. 

The hardline Iranian revolutionary government that came to power in 1979 after the overthrow of the pro-American Shah was convinced even a decade later that the path to nuclear arms would be blocked to Iran on the open market. The regime also believed, correctly, that any effort to buy the equipment and low-grade uranium ore needed to run a nuclear reactor for peaceful use could never take place on the open market. Its double-dealing efforts on the nuclear black market quickly became known to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a watchdog tasked with getting all nations to comply in peaceful uses of the atom. It was headed from 1997 to 2009 by Mohamed ElBaradei, an Egyptian diplomat who was skeptical that Iran was ever scrambling for weapons-grade uranium. 

I got to know ElBaradei during his directorship, after he had concluded on behalf of the IAEA that the Iranian leadership had come to terms with its wrongdoing on the black market. At that point, Iran got IAEA approval to activate their one reactor for commercial energy use. The US and Israel remained skeptical but continued their close monitoring of the Iranian nuclear program at Natanz, Iran’s main enrichment center 200 miles southeast of Tehran. The goal of the surveillance was to ensure that none of the partially enriched uranium was diverted for use, once fully enriched, in a bomb. There has yet to be evidence, then or now, of a diversion of any enriched material at Natanz and any other Iranian nuclear site for potential military use.

In October 2015, after years of intense negotiations, there was a major breakthrough in the control of the bomb. The United States, China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the European Union joined with Iran in signing a treaty putting restrictions—to be monitored by tamper- and radiation-resistant cameras—on all aspects of Iran’s nuclear operations, including enrichment and possible diversion activities. In return, the signatories agreed to ease an extreme set of sanctions that had been put in place on Iran, including those involving trade and transactions with the international financial system. One hundred billion dollars soon flowed into the Iranian treasury. The treaty, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was fiercely opposed by Donald Trump, who won the presidency the next year. Trump withdrew from the JCPOA agreement in the spring of 2018, to the dismay of most in the worldwide arms control community, after promising that he would negotiate a better deal. He did not do so before leaving office.

With the JCPOA gone, the rigid Iranian leadership surprised some by announcing it would continue the nuclear enrichment monitoring obligations that were imposed by its membership in the IAEA. Netanyahu continued his public insistence that Iran was cheating its way to a bomb. 

There turned out to be a poorly understood condition to do with monitoring in the JCPOA treaty that has enabled many of Iran’s enemies to suggest in recent years that Iran’s nuclear officials have been cheating in an effort to move quickly to the bomb. Avril Haines, director of the Office of National Intelligence, reported to Congress last July that Iran has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.” Similarly, Rafael Grossi, the director general of the IAEA, angered some on his staff early this year when he claimed Iran was “not entirely transparent” about its nuclear program at an international meeting in Dubai. Grossi further distressed IAEA technical experts by saying that he and others were “concerned about the ability of my inspectors to be able to put the jigsaw puzzle together again.” 

The inevitable impression left by such remarks was that Iran, no longer bound by the JCPOA strictures, was finding ways to accumulate weapons grade uranium and improve its potential to become the only other nuclear power in the Middle East besides Israel, which has yet to publicly acknowledge its nuclear capability. It is believed to have a fleet of more than one hundred warheads—likely far more than that—in storage or ready to be fired on command in underground bunkers. Inevitably Israel is concerned about any competing nuclear power in the Middle East, but nuclear parity is unlikely to occur anytime soon.

In a recent exchange, a former high-level IAEA official expressed exasperation to me at what he saw as the willingness of the senior managers in Vienna, home of the agency’s headquarters, to cast doubt publicly on the efficacy of the current IAEA camera coverage of Iran’s major nuclear facilities. The implication was that some of the vital camera coverage had been lost with the cancellation of the JCPOA. This was not so, he told me: the Iranian government is still required by the IAEA to provide round-the-clock camera coverage of the main “enrichment plant at Natanz” and other enrichment plants scattered around the nation. The office of Director General Grossi also gets reports, he said, “on the cyclonical machines”—centrifuges—“that spin at high speed to produce low-enriched fuel for commercial reactors and, at concentrations of 90 percent or more, fuel for nuclear weapons.”

The bottom line is that Iran is still producing large quantities of uranium that in some cases is being enriched to 60 percent of purity for reasons explained above, but there is no evidence of an active bomb program at any of the known Iranian nuclear research facilities. US and allied intelligence services have looked hard for evidence of an underground facility filled with scientists and technicians capable of fabricating a hotter-than-hell collection of spun-up uranium gas into a solid nuclear core that could be fitted into a bomb or a rocket. So far, I have been told, the US, even with the world’s best spotters of underground exhaust pipes, has yet to spot an Iranian underground nuclear weapons facility.

So there is no evidence of an Iranian nuclear bomb amid an awful lot of partially enriched uranium that is far from making a bomb that can go boom. Will such facts stop Netanyahu from his constant talking of the Iranian nuclear threat? Not likely. He has his own muse, and his own demons, and a lot of blood on his hands.

 

Seymour Hersh: Iran has never had a nuclear bomb—why does Israel insist that it’s an imminent threat?

Seymour Hersh

Apr 10, 2024

∙ Paid

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu points to a graphic of a bomb while discussing Iran during an address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 27, 2012. / Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images.

It remains a classic moment in United Nations history. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the dignified setting of a General Assembly speech in the fall of 2012 to raise the specter of an Iranian nuclear bomb. He displayed a cartoonish drawing of what he said was an Iranian bomb with a lighted fuse on top and asked: “How much enriched uranium do you need for a bomb? And how close is Iran to getting it?” He called his crude drawing a “diagram.”

The catcalls came immediately. Jon Stewart of The Daily Show waved a copy of the Israeli drawing that night and said, “Bibi, bubbe, what’s with the Wile E. Coyote nuclear bomb?” Stewart showed his antidote to the bomb: a cartoon drawing of a giant magnet.

Fifteen months earlier, in a report for the New Yorker, I disclosed that a highly secret National Intelligence Estimate, whose conclusions were unanimously approved by delegates from seventeen American intelligence and counterintelligence agencies, found that there was no conclusive evidence that Iran had made any effort to build the bomb before or after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. (A similar unproven allegation, that Iraq possessed an undeclared nuclear and chemical weapons arsenal, was used by the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to justify the invasion in the wake of the September 11 attacks of 2001.)

As in 2012, there is still no evidence that Iran, which does utilize low levels of enriched uranium to run its sole nuclear power plant, has the capacity to produce the needed amounts of highly enriched uranium for a bomb. Nor is there any evidence of a secure facility capable of fabricating enriched uranium into a solid nuclear core that could trigger a bomb. The American intelligence community has spent years, without success, searching for signs of an underground fabrication facility with ventilation holes that could surface many miles away—in Iran’s more than 600,000 square miles. It’s been decades of searching for air holes. 

I reported then that CIA and Special Forces teams had dropped sensors disguised as stones capable of measuring the weight of vehicles traveling on roads leading to mountain complexes in Iran to determine whether trucks in the area went in heavy and came out light. That would be a clue to possible secret weapons work going on inside.

Street signs near universities suspected of conducting nuclear research in heavily populated areas of Tehran were removed and replaced with identical signs implanted with radiation detectors. Street disturbances were triggered late at night by the gutsy American operatives in downtown Tehran to divert passersby and enable American technicians to replace a brick quickly in a suspected nuclear research building with a perfect match capable of measuring, as a Geiger counter would, nuclear emanations. No signs of nuclear emissions were found.

None of this has altered the view of the Israeli leadership that Iran, under its revolutionary Islamic government, is a soon-to-be nuclear power. At the time I wrote about the NIE, it was clear that the new estimate would be politically sensitive, in terms of the US-Israeli relationship. “If Iran is not a nuclear threat,” I was told at the time by a senior official, “the Israelis have no reason to threaten imminent military action. The guys who worked this are good analysts, and their bosses backed them up.”

That was then and this is now. The Biden administration made it plain after taking office, an informed official told me, that it has little interest in NIEs, which are prepared by CIA experts who consult with many of the best scholars in the areas being studied. For example, the final document in the 2012 study of the nuclear capability of Iran was reviewed and evaluated by an esteemed scholar teaching at a major American university who, when he and I spoke privately, vouched for the integrity of the report. 

There has been no known NIE dealing with the current war in Ukraine, the on-going Israeli war in Gaza, or the consequences of an oft-threatened Israeli assault on Iran.

Israel is now involved in an expanding exchange of missiles with Hezbollah, the Shitte militia in Lebanon that, under the religious and military leadership of Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has steadily expanded its political role within the country along with its arsenal of long-range missiles. Israel has evacuated more than 100,000 residents in the past few months whose homes near the Lebanese border have been or could be under missile attack. Israel has returned fire deep into southern Lebanon by missile and air strikes.

Netanyahu has responded to increasing pressure from the usually permissive Biden administration to mitigate conditions inside stricken Gaza by escalating his rhetoric and his actions against Iran. On April 1 Israeli planes struck an annex of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, the Syrian capital, killing sixteen people, including a commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, also known to some as the Quds force. Netanyahu’s message to Biden, as the American president slowly backs away in a tough election year from all-out support for the Israeli war in Gaza, may be, in essence: “I’m going to keep doing whatever I want.”

The Israeli bombing attack in Syria was a stunning escalation of what has been for decades a low-level tit-for-tat war between Damascus, Tehran, and Tel Aviv. It immediately raised speculation in Israel and elsewhere that Netanyahu is willing to risk war with Iran to stay in office. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the 84-year-old Iranian supreme leader who has been in power since 1989, immediately vowed, as he has done before, to respond. “Israel would regret its crimes,” he said. Iran has repeatedly made clear that it does not want an all-out war with Israel and has relied on its allies in the region to respond. There has so far been no response by Syria to the April 1 bombings.

Nasrallah, who led Hezbollah to what many viewed as a stalemate in its war with Israel in 2006, told his followers last Friday in the aftermath of the killings in Syria: “Rest assured that the Iranian response to the attack on the . . . consulate will inevitably come.” A similar threat of future action came the next day from Major General Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces. Israel, he said, according to a report by Al Mayadeen in Beirut, “will regret its actions and we are the ones to determine the method of retaliation.”

There was no hint of an immediate response. The Israeli government, however, has in the days since called up reserves and halted all leaves of IDF soldiers serving with combat units in Gaza. 

Netanyahu has been increasingly criticized in Israel for the seemingly slow pace of the war against Hamas—a much quicker victory was publicly envisioned at the outset—and his failure to recover Israeli hostages. It is unclear how many hostages have survived in captivity since October 7, when Hamas staged its attack on southern Israel. Netanyahu’s promise of a full inquiry into the slow response by the Israeli Defense Forces has yet to take place and may never happen.

I asked the knowledgeable official an important question: what is going to happen now, given what seems to be Netanyahu’s obvious determination to stay in power by expanding Israel’s far-from-completed war in Gaza into the West Bank and the continued diminishment of the Palestinian Authority? 

“The Israelis never put a timeline on the war,” he said, “and its people are behind the war 100 percent.” As for Hamas, “all are going to die or escape into obscurity.” Hamas’s last gasp, he added, is the hope that “somehow the United States or the world is going to convince the Israelis to come to their senses.”

About the possible response by Iran to Netanyahu’s continued aggressiveness, the official asked rhetorically: What was a ranking officer of the Iranian Quds Force doing in the Iranian embassy in Syria? He answered his question: “The Palestinians are being targeted, and the Iranians are helping the Palestinians. And the Israelis have been blowing up Quds guys in Lebanon and Syria.” Amid the increasing tension, “the Iranians are not looking for a fight. They’ve got no bomb, and they’ve got ISIS-K”—the terrorist groups that struck last month at a rock concert in Moscow—“breathing down their necks. And Ayatollah Khamenei’s got big troubles with internal strife” throughout Iran. “The old religious leaders in Iran are dying off, and they are dealing with a population that seriously wants to be accepted throughout the world.”

He added that the long-standing economic sanctions on Iran that “we in America have imposed only impact on the people at the [economic] bottom, and not the leaders. Iran has people in uniform,” he said, “but it has no bomb and cannot win a war.”

 

Ukraine, Russia and Pelosi's Provocations

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO

It is not an exaggeration to admit that we are in extremely dangerous times. There is a real possibility that the proxy war the US is waging in Ukraine against a weaker imperialist rival, could get out of hand and that Russia, if pushed too far, could use tactical nuclear weapons. 

I would like to think it unlikely, but the situation is extremely volatile. The US is willing to weaken its Russian competitor to the last Ukrainian standing if need be in order to move more aggressively toward its main adversary in the competition for control over the world's wealth and resources, and that is China.

In the video I point out that Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan's former speechwriter and respected Republican theoretician, reminds her class in her last Wall Street Journal opinion piece of a previous time when tensions between these two great powers almost brought us to WW3. There are some great quotes from JFK and it's clear that some of them are aimed at the reckless and insane decision by Pelosi to go to Taiwan and Biden's tough guy rhetoric toward Russia and even earlier when he referred to Putin as thug and a killer.

The present crisis is not about mad men or macho posturing, or whether Putin is a killer or not. Any US president accusing any other world leader of such things has no credibility with the vast majority of people on the planet. From my point of view I believe that Noonan's comments reflect a genuine concern among the more astute and serious elements of the US ruling class and we should take note of them.

Ukraine: Pelosi and Democrats Pledge Support to the End. (Of The World?)

Russia tests first nuclear capable Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile

 

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

GES/HEO

05-03-2022

 

Nancy Pelosi, and her entourage of Democrats in Ukraine have made it clear that the US, and the Democratic Party (the party of the working people in the US apparently) stands "firmly with Ukraine" until it "secured victory against Russia". California Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff agrees, adding that the US commitment wouldn't end until "victory is won". The victory they are referring to is the victory of the US/NATO military alliance over Russia.

Tim Kaine, another Democrat is eager and work will begin this week on passing President "worker Joe" Biden's $33bn bill for more weapons. "We shouldn't wait around.” (like they do with education, health care housing, there’s no profit to made there) Senator Kaine told CBS.  Concerned as they are with democracy and the safety of the world’s people from tyranny, another Democrat Sen Robert Menendez of New Jersey stresses that passing the $30bn bill is “essential”, not just for Ukraine, but “…to preserving global security.” Rep Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican supports more weapons in order to expel Russian forces from Ukraine’s eastern provinces.

 

These remarks come on the heels of US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, announcing that as far as the US is concerned, “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the things that it has done in invading Ukraine” A White House National Security Council spokesperson said the same thing, “We have also said for months that we intend to make this invasion a strategic failure for Russia.” I’m sure these comments will save lives.

 

And Seth Cropsey, founder of the right-wing Yorktown Institute and a former deputy undersecretary of the Navy had an Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal last week on the necessity of the US showing that it can win a nuclear war. “The reality is that unless the U.S. prepares to win a nuclear war, it risks losing one.” writes Cropsey and suggests that “….arming surface ships with tactical nuclear weapons as well as attacking a nuclear missile sub and thus reducing Russian second strike ability, the US undermines Russians ability to fight a nuclear war.” The US Should Show It Can Win a Nuclear War. WSJ

 

All of this would seem to give some credence to Russia’s fear that western capitalist countries under the leadership of US imperialism has, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, had a strategy of encircling Russia and strengthening NATO, which is a military alliance of western capitalism, a competitor.  The original elation at the prospect of a Vietnamese type capitalism arising out of the collapse of Stalinism supplying cheap labor and healthy profits for western capital has suffered a dose of reality. Instead, Russia, and to a greater extent, China are rivals and threatening the dominance of US imperialism on the world stage. It is this inter-imperialist rivalry that is behind the Ukraine conflict. India and Brazil will face the same pressure and many Indian voices have reminded the US ruling class that it has to adapt to a multi-polar world and abandon its uni-polar mentality.

 

But it is China that is the real focus of US imperialism and what we are seeing in Ukraine will be repeated with China in regards to Taiwan with even more devastating consequences. The US is already training Taiwanese troops, a secret that Beijing is aware of and will respond to. It has also been waging an economic war against Chinese companies.

 

The US and western mass media of course, explains the increasing tensions with China to Chinese aggression. But aggression between capitalist states arises with battles over control of markets and global plunder, with trade wars. If democracy mattered the US wouldn’t be selling weapons of mass destruction to Israel’s Zionist regime or the Saudi thugs. When these issues remain unresolved, (consider Gatt and the WTO as attempts to do that) then armed conflict is resorted to and workers in the opposing capitalist regimes are the victims. Nuclear weapons has averted wars between major powers in the post World War Two era, but it appears that era might be on the way out the door.

 

It is not military power that is the threat as no military power would consider invading the US or China, or even Russia so the US/NATO alliance will weaken Russian influence with every last Ukrainian if need be. The winnable nuclear war that Seth Cropsey refers to in the Wall Street Journal is the stuff of Hollywood fantasy films, not real life, but that could change. There will be no winners in a nuclear conflict of any sort. I once read that even a regional nuclear war between two minor players, India and Pakistan, would cost more than 20 million lives and cover the earth with a radioactive cloud.

 

Capitalism is a system of war and the competing forces are driven to it in the last analysis. China’s economic success is what threatens the US capitalist class and its two political parties.

 

Business Week Magazine, now owned by the billionaire and world’s 12^th richest man, Michael Bloomberg, points out that “Beijing’s infrastructure spending puts Washington’s to shame”. At $2.3 trillion for this year, it’s twice what the US Congress passed last year, $1 trillion spread over five years and we’ll see that whittled down especially in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine which the US taxpayer is willingly coughing up. Selling billions of weapons to the Saudi regime for the US/Saudi assault on Yemen may heap profits on US offense contractors but if it continues there won’t be a Yemen left to bomb.

This is what threatens rival powers. It should be progress that's welcomed but for profit

 

China has 50 million construction workers. It has twice as many miles of high speed rail as the rest of the world combined. BW points out that China can produce a billion tons of steel and 1.5 billion tons of cement a year and its construction companies are among the world’s largest.

 

Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO co-wrote an Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal February 6^th reminding his class that China is a threat to the US tech industry and pleading for government assistance for tech. With 5G, the US is falling behind in speed (China average speed 299 Mbps and US 94) and its international presence.  China has 355 million 5G users, the US has about 50 million, China has 1.4 million 5G base stations, accounting for more than 60% of the world's total. The US has around 50,000. I commented on this in this video two months ago.

 

China’s global footprint is undermining US imperialism’s presence as it finances infrastructure deals, highways, rail and port rail construction throughout the world. The Financial Times wrote:“From almost nothing, Chinese banks now make up about one-fifth of all lending to Africa, concentrated in a few strategic or resource-rich countries including Angola, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Zambia.” Financial Times, 01-10-22.

 

This is an act of aggression as far as the US and western capital sees it and it is a small example of the increasing encroachment of China on US turf. We, as US workers, are drawn in to the competition between US and Chinese state capitalism (?) as allies of the very class that has waged war on our living standards at home; the same class and same political parties that can’t even provide it citizens with something as basic as dental care that won’t bankrupt them. The Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, all nation states that can, do the same of course but not all nation states have the same clout.

 

I would like to think it unlikely but the reality is that the war in Ukraine has the potential to lead to a nuclear conflict that could threaten the global population and leave millions dead, and millions more over time; that will leave hige swathes of the planet uninhabitable. Coupled with the climate crisis, the time to act was yesterday.  

The comments I include above from the heads of that other Wall Street party are not conducive to finding some sort of peaceful resolution to the conflict and certainly will do nothing but increase Russian fear and paranoia. Yes, Russia is responsible for the invasion but the US/NATO military alliance is not an innocent party here.  The continuing threats to drive Russia in to the stone age through an economic war and providing more and more weapons to Ukraine that will not drive Russia from the east and will only mean more death and destruction. The US intervention in the Korean and Vietnamese civil wars, not to mention Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere has proved a human and environmental disaster.

 

It will take millions of us globally to stop this descent in to madness as a result of late stage capitalism. There are millions of workers that are at war with capitalism here in the US and throughout the world but we are not united on a class basis in the way the ruling classes of the normally competing states within NATO are.  Class consciousness has been driven back.  Here in the US working class history has been suppressed and airbrushed. When I first came to the US, workers I mentioned May Day to thought it was a Russian or Soviet holiday. Organized labor’s hierarchy (the dogs that don’t bark) are also responsible for the present state of class consciousness or lack of it and certainly for the failure to provide an alternative political option beyond a choice of two of the world’s most powerful capitalist parties, one of them the only party in history that has dropped nuclear bombs on urban populations.

 

In the conflict in Ukraine as with all capitalist wars, there is no side that workers can support. None of them are acting in our interests. Not the Russian oligarchs, the Ukranian ones, or the western ones that we refer to as entrepreneurs and job creators. It is not the time to bury one’s head in the sand, to refuse to take the bull by the horns and learn the history of our own movements that brought us this far. It is not the time to abstain from politics or to seek answers in the world of feel good movements, metaphysics or identity politics. The stakes are too high and our grandchildren and the planet demands better.  

 

The youth of the world are not the problem, they are the solution.

 

The world demands new managers.

US Military, the world's Top Polluter Not on the Table at COP26.

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

GED/HEO

 

“The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch.F Engels, Socialism Utopian and Scientific.

 

The issue of the US military Industrial Complex, was not even on the table at COP26 in Glasgow and that is because it is a sham. “Since we are so far from what actually we needed, I think what would be considered a success would be if people realize what a failure this COP is,”, Greta Thunberg, the 18 years old climate activist said about the event. She accurately described the event as, “sort of turning into a greenwash campaign, a P.R. campaign,”

 

We cannot expect a meeting of the representatives of global capitalism to seriously take the steps that are necessary to avert climate catastrophe, a crisis so acute, it threatens life as we know it.  

 

Never ending wars, conflict and violence are an integral aspect of the capitalist mode of production. The arms industry is a very lucrative source of profits for those that invest in it and those who profit from this planet destroying industry cannot avert disaster; the fox cannot be left to guard the henhouse.

 

The panic and constant reference in the mass media to Chinese, and to a lesser extent, Russian aggression will increase the likelihood of environmental disaster and the possibility of nuclear annihilation. What we are not told is Chinese aggression is driven as much by US imperialism and it rapacious question for domination of the world’s resources.

 

Chinese aggression is used to convince the US workers and middle class to support our bloated offense industry. I do believe the defense department was called the department of war at one time which is a much more accurate description.

 

Bloomberg BusinessWeek is concerned that China is developing new weapons and missiles. They are developing “…more exotic weapons including a hypersonic system…”, “…that may one day evade the US missile defense system.” The Pentagon, one of the greatest polluters on the planet, “…predicts that China’s stockpile of operational warheads will more than double by 2030” according to Bloomberg.

Source

The Pentagon, and indeed the US capitalist class as a whole is concerned, after all, the US sells more weapons of mass destruction than the rest of the world combined and the mass media reminds us constantly that the US relationship with China is deteriorating; we need more guns. A major ally like the oil rich Saudi regime would not survive without US weaponry and it is not the only ruthless regime kept afloat by the US taxpayer and the more scared we are, the less likely we are to oppose the cost. What good is Medicare For All if we’re overrun by the “Yellow Peril” bringing communism in to our midst and the Iranians forcing us to be Muslims?

 

So Michael Bloomberg’s Business Week (Bloomberg is worth $49 billion according to Forbes) stresses that “Worker Joe” Biden’s Administration is right to “upgrade” the Navy’s fleet and the air force should “work on developing unmanned means of delivering nuclear weapons……in addition to buying B21 bombers.”

 

BloombergBW admits that even if China quadruples its stockpile it will still, “Lag far behind the 3750 warheads in the US arsenal.” What madness is this?

 

In this struggle for control of the world’s resources and markets, neither the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy nor the US capitalist class can be trusted. Workers have nothing to gain and certainly have no interest in defending Taiwan. The US sending warships through the South China Sea simply to make a point does not encourage the Chinese government to stop playing catch up with the US on weapons of mass destruction. It has become very clear, that without nuclear weaponry, any country in the world that opposes US imperialist policy is subject to US bombs.

 

As informative as the video above is, it too offers no solutions. It leaves us with no way forward. So the presenter above suggests that as “citizens we have a responsibility to hold our leaders and military accountable.” But we can’t. We are to see ourselves as “one humanity”. But in all honesty, this is pure nonsense, it is utopian. We are all just people; you the reader, me, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. We just need to change our thinking and that will set it strait. I recommend Engels’ Pamphlet Socialism Utopian and Scientific to get some idea of the basis for the ideas expressed by the narrator and why they are a dead end.  

 

What is absent from the commentary in the video is that we live in a system of production, a society composed of classes with irreconcilable economic interests. And a world with nation states that are also in competition with each other, to the death in the final analysis. The presenter may be a genuine, honest person who wants the best for all of us; most of us want that. But it is this exploitative system and its laws of operation that is the root cause of the crisis and if we refuse to recognize that and its historical origins, we cannot prevent the likelihood of global catastrophe. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.  When we are taught history, we are told of feudalism and how that was a system of exploitation and that there was a ruling class, of slavery both in antiquity and in the colonial US. These social systems did not leave the world stage by people suddenly thinking in a different way, by suddenly waking up one day and calling on the ruling classes to change their ways.

 

These systems of production and the political superstructure that arose from them were put to rest through huge social upheavals that were a product of their irreconcilable internal contradictions.

 

There are links being built between unions in different countries but without an independent political voice, workers in the US or China or throughout the world, have no dialogue with each other; we are the mercy of the billionaires. We also have no real say on international trade or relations. The COP26 conference is an example as is the UN which is nothing but a capitalist club.

Radio Bikini: Show It To Your kids

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

GED/HEO

Reading up on Nigerian history of late I find that in 1963, three years after independence from British colonial rule, the young Nigerian government broke diplomatic relations with France over its nuclear tests in the Sahara and southern Algeria. These were met with many protests and Nigerians too were concerned about the fallout.  Reading this made me think of the arrogance of colonial regimes. Why didn’t the French government test their nuclear bombs in The Camargue? That’s a rhetorical question of course as we know why; the French population wouldn’t have put up with it and it would have undermined the power of the French ruling class in their own back yard. Some estimates put the Algerian death toll during the French colonial rule at over 10 million so risking Algerian lives was clearly a better opti

 

I thought more about this after I read a piece this weekend by Timothy Noël Peacock on the Legacies of the post war nuclear tests that is published at The Conversation.com and it spurred me to look a little further in to the issue. That’s how I came across the documentary above and I urge folks to watch it. It’s called Radio Bikini after the Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands, a beautiful coral reef and lagoon where the US exploded nuclear bombs. In all, the US conducted 23   nuclear tests there up till 1958. Overall the US has conducted 1,054 atomic tests up to 2020.

 

The documentary begins with celebrations as WW2 ended after the US dropped an atomic bomb on Japan as a warning to the Chinese, the Soviets and the entire world, that the US had the big stick and would use it. In 1946, the US was the only country in the world with the atomic bomb and needed to test it further. The Special Committee on Atomic Energy developed Operation Crossbow and chose the Bikini atoll and the testing ground after the inhabitants were removed of course.

 

The Bikinians had no say in the matter. The Bikinian Chief who is interviewed in the documentary describes how they were told that the US needed to do this to see what would happen “in case there was another war.”, and that they would “have to leave”. Their beautiful lagoon would be the testing ground for this awesome power the chief was told by an American who said he was “the most powerful man in the world”. The purpose of this test, the inhabitants were told, was to turn this, “great destructive power in to something for the benefit of mankind.” That the lagoon and its coral reef was a more suitable place to drop nuclear bombs rather than Lake Michigan was no doubt to offer the Bikinians a place in history as the source of mankind’s salvation due to the generosity of US imperialism.

 

Atomb bombs had not been dropped over water or exploded under water and the first two tests were the most important and well known. There were many old ships and sea vessels loaded with animals placed in the lagoon to study the affect the blasts would have on life and military equipment. There were hundreds of navy personnel involved and there is some powerful testimony from one of them, John Smitherman.

 

Smitherman points out that he didn’t recall the word radioactivity being mentioned at all and the general message was that they were all protected and it was very safe. “Don’t worry about it, it won’t harm us” he was told. But Smitherman and others were showered with debris after the blast that covered the ship, their clothes, their hair and so on. After the experiment, Smitherman got sick and was given a medical discharge and sent home. Up until the interview in the film, he was not told what was wrong with him.  Make it to the end and see what it did to him. How many thousands of enlisted men suffered a similar fate? For Smitherman, and no doubt thousands of other US workers who were in the navy, it was a “slow death from that time to this day” he says.

 

It’s not an easy video to watch. But it is important for us to draw some conclusions from it. One is relevant to today when the mass media and the right wing forces are attacking people for publicly protesting injustice. Colin Kaepernick was savaged and harassed for his mild protests against police violence and the murder of black people in particular. We still have the right to protest on paper but the illusion or limits of bourgeois democracy are laid bare when protests begin to turn in to a conscious movement and action for real change.

 

In the documentary we see protestors opposing the tests carrying signs that say the tests are not scientific but military and they were right. The mass media will always call protests riots and the ruling class will always use provocateurs to discredit them Any strike that successfully gives power to labor over capital is terrorism as far as the capitalist class is concerned.

The US dragged the UN along but we have to look at the objective situation.  The US was the only atomic power and had shown what it can do in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; a crime against humanity. The UN, still a capitalist club, was in no situation to stop the US from doing whatever it wanted. The productive forces of both US allies and enemies were destroyed and there was no country on earth that could stop the US at that point. By 1950, the US had over 50% of world trade and most importantly, atomic bombs.

 

It is important as well that we see the sheer barbaric nature of capitalism and its proponents. The US ruling class, like all ruling classes, had no respect at all for the people or the environment that it would pollute with radioactivity for generations to come. “There’s nothing in my life I want more than to go home to Bikini……” the chief says, “……The reason I can’t go back is because the Americans tell me there is poison there, I don’t understand this, but that is what the Americans say. This is not my island. I want to go back to my paradise, where God intended us to be.”

 

As far as I know, Bikinians are still scattered throughout the region unable to return home. A very familiar scene in the history of capitalist development. Peackock describes the event:

 

“But the cost which can never be calculated is the power of those images upon the human imagination and fear, as well as their effect on the nuclear arms race. Many target ships, while damaged, survived Crossroads Baker, but were enveloped in so much radioactive seawater that decontamination became almost impossible, except for a few vessels. Plans to sail the remaining ships back to the US triumphantly gave way to sinking most of them.”

 

Capitalism is a violent, competitive and destructive system of production. By its very nature it is hostile to the environment, and to all life, human included. While the existence of nuclear weapons has prevented a global war between the big powers, it has led to regional forever wars but we need to recognize that they do not make all those nuclear weapons never to use them. In Radio Bikini, US president Truman thanks God for giving the atomic bomb to the US rather than “our enemies” and offers prayers that God will guide the US to use the bomb in his ways and “for his purposes”. Didn’t Pompeo say something similar fairly recently? Religious fanatics of varying types, and there's plenty of them in the US body politic, see global conflagration as prophecy, as divine words written in 5000 year old tracts.

 

All working class people should watch this video and come away from it with one powerful conclusion. The political and military representatives of the capitalist class see no difference between some native on an island in the pacific and the US workers who were on those ships at Bikini atoll when their class interests are at stake. It’s pretty certain that more American workers died from that experiment than Bikinians although never being able to return to your home and witnessing the destruction of a coral reef that provided your sustenance is a death of sorts.

 

Then inescapable truth is that the US sailors have more in common with the Bikinian people than their own officers, their own president, their own government. Without the worker, society cannot function, wars cannot be fought, the environment poisoned. In that sense, “we” have no country of our own. Wow! I just had a great idea. What if workers of the world united as workers. Might that be a first step in changing course and building a sane, civilized global society?

 

I can’t believe no one’s thought of that?

 

Hiroshima: US Didn't Need to Drop the Bomb

Reposting this from four years ago as it's the 75th anniversary of the US nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
 
Reprinted from Salon.com

We didn’t need to drop the bomb — and even our WW II military icons knew it

President Obama will finally visit Hiroshima. Moral leadership suggests both sides apologize for unspeakable acts 

Gar Alperovitz

A huge expanse of ruins left by the explosion of the atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945 in Hiroshima.(Credit: AP)

When President Obama visits Hiroshima later this month, he might do well to reflect on the views of another President who was also the five-star general who oversaw America’s military victory in World War II. In a 1963 interview on the use of the atomic bomb against Hiroshima, President Dwight D. Eisenhower bluntly declared that “…it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

Eisenhower was even more specific in his memoirs, writing that when he was informed by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson the bomb was about to be used against Japan “…I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives…”

Eisenhower was not alone. Many of the top military leaders, mostly conservatives, went public after World War II with similar judgments. The President’s chief of staff, William D. Leahy–the five-star admiral who presided over meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff–noted in his diary seven weeks before the bombing of Hiroshima: “It is my opinion that at the present time a surrender of Japan can be arranged with terms that can be accepted by Japan and that will make fully satisfactory provision for America’s defense against future trans-Pacific aggression.”

After the war Leahy declared in his 1950 memoir: “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender….My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children…”

Just a few weeks after the bombing, the famous “hawk” who led the Twenty-First Bomber Command, Major General Curtis E. LeMay, stated publicly that “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb…the atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

It is possible to go down the line and find similar views among most of the top World War II military figures. Many of those who had access to secret intelligence showing Japan’s desperate attempts to end the war were deeply disturbed by the bombing. Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet stated publicly two months after Hiroshima: “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war.” “The atomic bomb,” he stated “played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan….”

A contemporaneous May 29, 1945 memorandum by Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy also shows that America’s top military leader, General George C. Marshall, “thought these weapons might first be used against straight military objectives such as a large naval installation and then if no complete result was derived from the effect of that, he thought we ought to designate a number of large manufacturing areas from which the people would be warned to leave—telling the Japanese that we intend to destroy such centers…”

As the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima approached in 1985, former President Richard Nixon reported that “[General Douglas] MacArthur once spoke to me very eloquently about it, pacing the floor of his apartment in the Waldorf. He thought it a tragedy that the bomb was ever exploded. MacArthur believed that the same restrictions ought to apply to atomic weapons as to conventional weapons, that the military objective should always be limited damage to noncombatants.....MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off…”

Modern debates over the decision to use the atomic bomb without warning against a predominantly civilian target would also do well to include reminders that President Truman was advised well before Hiroshima that a Red Army declaration of War against Japan, planned at U.S. request for the first week of August, together with assurances for the Japanese Emperor, would bring an end to the war long before even the first stage landing of an invasion might occur three months later on the Island of Kyushu (and long before any possible general invasion in the spring of 1946.) There was plenty of time to use the bombs if the recommended strategy failed (and it had already been decided in any case to keep the Emperor to help control Japan after the war.)

A poll taken in 1991 at the time of the 50^th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor reported that roughly half of Americans surveyed felt that both sides should apologize for the respective acts which marked the beginning and the end of World War II—a morally important suggestion worthy of deep consideration, and one that President Obama might put forward as he prepares for his visit Hiroshima.

Even a nuclear spat between Pakistan and India would mean billions dead.

Hiroshima. What one small nuclear bomb can do.

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

What f%#ked up world am I living in? I just read a headline that reads: "Latest News: If a Nuke Hit, US Wouldn't Be Ready"

Ready? All the readiness in the world cannot prepare us for the devastating affects of a nuclear confrontation between two major world powers. The "ready" means the few thousand unelected people who actually rule society. It is they that want to be ready.  A recent study pointed out that a nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan, two "minor" players when it comes to nuclear capabilities, would “trigger a global famine that would immediately kill 2 billion people around the world and spell the ‘end of human civilization’”

“With a large war between the United States and Russia, we are talking about the possible, not certain, but possible, extinction of the human race,” the International Business Times reported in 2013.   I accept this as real. There is no winner in a nuclear conflict, we all die and the possibility of the end of human life on this planet becomes a reality.

The reformists, no matter how honest and decent their motives, hope that capitalism will eliminate this threat, will place a ban or some sort of moratorium on the production of nuclear weapons but this is pure fantasy, utopian musings.

Ira Helfand, the author of the study is optimistic and thinks that a movement to ban nuclear weapons will gain traction. “This is a disaster so massive in scale that really no preparation is possible. We must prevent this,” he says.

But Helfand is wrong. He is wrong not because he is dishonest or stupid. He assumes that the global capitalist class led by the US and possibly China and Russia, will see the light and end this madness. But the opposite is the case. Capitalism is not a system of production that can change its spots no more than a tiger hunting game can.

Capitalism is a state of war. It is a competitive system that forces workers, sellers of labor power, to compete with each other in order to maximize profits for the purchasers of that labor power. It is the unpaid labor power of the worker that is the source of surplus value and the capitalist’s profit.

Helmand has a flaw, a flaw that people with great minds from Hawking to Assange all have. They do not see the working class as the force that can change society and they do not see an alternative to capitalism. They do not see that a democratic socialist society, a world federation of democratic socialist states and the end of capitalism as an economic system of production is the only way we will eliminate this threat.

The US capitalist class in particular is a most ruthless bunch. As Engels pointed out, one source of the violent, brutal nature of the US capitalist class is that when European capitalism invaded this landmass there was no existing organized ruling class. Unlike their English/European counterparts, the new US bourgeois did not have to wage a centuries old battle of ideas against a feudal aristocracy as their ancestors did; it didn't have to defend its ideas. For these transplants it was a matter of wiping out the tens of millions of native peoples and importing labor power, the poor of Europe and forcibly importing millions of African people as slaves forcing them to work for no pay for three hundred years or more. Asians labor also came in droves. Then it was a matter of building the infrastructure.
 The US capitalist class are a crude and ruthless ruling class.

I am confident that the working class can govern. I am confident that a democratic socialist society is not a utopian dream but can become a reality that offers humanity a future.

I am confident that the US and global capitalist class does not make all these nuclear weapons never to use them.

US Infrastructure a Catastrophe Waiting to Happen

Profits and US War Economy Takes Precedence Over Social Welfare and Safety of US Population.

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

I was wondering should I write about this today as it seems so banal when we consider the situation in the world with the US and Russia squaring off in the Middle East. The US might bomb Syria to save civilians from the gangster capitalist Putin as it supplies Saudi’s with information and weapons to bomb the hell out of Yemen where perhaps the world’s worst humanitarian crisis is taking place, er wait, maybe it is Gaza that holds this prestigious claim. It’s hard to tell what US capitalism will do as at home it’s facing a huge crisis on all front, political, economic, social.

But this is sort of connected.

I was on an elevator yesterday in Oakland and as I generally do I look at the expiration date since the last inspection. As you can see from the picture, this elevator’s was last inspected in February 2016 and that permit expired February 2017 so it has been operating for a year without an official permit.

I always check this as I spent three weeks on a jury trial in which a janitor sued the makers of an elevator and the makers of the software that ran it claiming injury during a malfunction.

I spoke to one of the security guards about the expired permit, a woman who told me she has raised this but no response; “They don’t care about us” she said. I should add that this is common, most elevators are operating beyond their inspection date. 

A failure to inspect elevators and US imperialism’s military ventures to defend US corporations abroad, including the cost of some 280 military installations, are connected. Elevators in a way are part of the social infrastructure of US society just as roads and bridges are and the Predator in Chief has pledged to fix things but the money is not forthcoming like it is for the missiles, MOABS, nuclear submarines and so on.

There is a huge crisis when it comes to infrastructure in the US. The Federal Highway Administration reckons that at the end of 2017, 54,560 of the nations 615, 002 bridges are “structurally deficient” while the American Society of Civil Engineers adds that it would cost $123 billion to repair all of them.

Oroville dam CA. 100,000 evacuated

 A couple decades ago Business Week referred to the mounting costs of repairing the crumbling US infrastructure as the “Third Deficit”. We have seen the consequences of this calamity with collapsing structures, the levees that protected New Orleans for example were known to be weak.  We have had numerous close calls with dams, the most recent for us here in California being the Oroville Dam, the tallest dam in the US when the spillway collapsed last year forcing an evacuation of 100,000 residents.Ten years before there had been warnings.

Mississippi, one of the poorest US states suffering from a legacy of apartheid and Jim Crow has been warned by the Federal Transportation Administration to close more than 100 bridges or the FTA will withhold federal funding. This week Mississippi governor Phil Bryant authorized the closing of 102 of these “dilapidated” bridges. They are to be closed within 24 hours or the state will intervene according to the Wall Street Journal.

The bridges “Create extreme peril to the safety of persons and property” the governor explained in the order to close them.

Both the elevator issue and the bridges as well as dams roads and social infrastructure in general, are matters of public services, are expenditures that amount to the wealth that workers create being returned to us in the form of social services. Capitalism’s ability to function also depends on roads, railways and other social services that assist the production, distribution and exchange of commodities. They don’t trust their beloved market forces to do this. The public water utility I worked for arose out of a situation where competing private companies could not produce such a valuable resource; you can’t trust a shark with the seals.

Naturally, there is plenty of money in society. Not simply the obscene wealth of individuals like Stephen Schwarzman but in all aspects of capitalist society and its wasteful, inefficient economic model.

We have said many times on this blog, including in a previous post,  that US capitalism can no longer afford to maintain anywhere near the living standards it did in the post World War 2 era, a period that was linked to the particular conditions that arose after the war and that were the material basis for the term The American Dream.

US imperialism is compelled to defend its interests in competition with its global rivals, particularly with the rise of China, as well as Russia and to en extent India. Capitalism is a war economy. They are driven by the laws of the system to do what they do. The cost of a predatory US foreign policy to the taxpayer and of keeping billionaires like Schwarzman, Gates, Buffet, Zuckerberg, wasters that own sports franchises and others happy, is placed squarely on the shoulders of the US workers and middle class (another term that is used for workers here). 

What catastrophes exist on our own doorstep! In Flint and other urban centers people can’t drink the water. In some rural areas native people are being poisoned by uranium in their water. Oil is leaking in to our farmland and parklands. Hog and poultry production waste is polluting our rivers and some 200 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi Delta, is known as the “Dead Zone” as no life can survive there due to the runoff from America’s industrial farming and all the chemicals, fertilizers and pollutants it carries.

The reason millions of people are relying on elevators that are not regularly inspected, roads that are crumbling, bridges collapsing, dams bursting and so on, is that US capitalism is in decline, threatened with growing competition from China and Russia and globalization in general, it is forced to drive down the living standards of its own working class.

Nevertheless, the US is still the guy with the big stick, spending more money on weapons of mass destruction than its two greatest rivals combined. This is good for missile producing companies and the war industries especially as US capitalism has been known to sell weapons of death to both sides in conflicts itself has provoked. Our infrastructure is crumbling, our elevators, bridges and dams unsafe because Halliburton, Bechtel, Northrop, Raytheon and the investors that own them have to have their profits protected so the taxpayer will fork over close to $800 billion this year for that.

There is available labor power especially if the workweek is reduced which is entirely possible. People want good jobs, there is the technology, there is all we need to make sure elevators, roads, bridges, dams, in short social infrastructure efficient and safe. There is money and labor power and the technology to fix environmental problems and pick up that 2000 sq miles of floating plastic in the Pacific, but capitalism cannot do that. There are priorities, and capitalism will not put resources in this area, even more, it cannot do so and survive from their point of view.

So this has to be paid for by an ongoing assault on living standards, social spending and other important social issues like education, health care, decent and environmentally sound policies. Another aspect of this is that at some point as we have stated many times, despite nuclear weapons being a deterrent in preventing a war between major powers, at some point they will be used by some force. There is no such thing as a limited nuclear engagement. Even a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan, two minor players when compared to Russia the US or Israel, would kill millions and cover the planet in a huge radioactive cloud. This is inclusive of environmental catastrophes increasing through global warming and environmental degradation if the working class does not enter the stage and carry out the task history has set for it---------the building of a democratic and rationally planned socialist economy through a global federation of democratic socialist states.

I remember being in Morecombe England one time and looking at the beachfront. It felt like I was in the Victorian era. And so I was in a way as this was a popular resort for the English middle classes in the Victorian era. The end of British colonialism as world power froze this place in time.

We are seeing a similar situation here in the US except US capitalism has the ability to blow up the entire world and a nuclear war between the big powers would do just that. Meanwhile, watch out for those bridges and elevators.

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