Should We Fear Cruz Missiles?

by Linda Pentz Gunter

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/04/should-we-fear-cruz-missiles/

A friend recently forwarded me a “news” story about current (but not then) Republican frontrunner, Ted Cruz.  In it, Cruz was quoted as saying that gay people are “out to exterminate us,” and that the answer was for southern states to “build a nuclear bomb and use it to defend our right to believe in God as our one true Father.”

A few chuckles later I gently informed him that he had been taken for a satirical ride by the spoof news site, Newslo.

But the scary part was that the article was more than slightly believable.  With all the bellicose rhetoric — and yes, outright lies — being bandied about by Republican candidates, it wasn’t so far fetched to believe that Cruz would use nuclear weapons, against gays or whomever.

Whomever would probably be Iran, based on comments Cruz has made so far.  A strong critic of the Obama administration’s Iran deal, Cruz told an Iowa audience during the recent Caucus that: “If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, the test may not be underground measured by an earthquake, the test may be in the skies of Tel Aviv or New York or Los Angeles.  We need a president who with unmistakable clarity stands up and says under no circumstances will the nation of Iran ever be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon.”

How exactly a Cruz presidency would stand up and say no to Iran is unclear, because nuclear weapons haven’t really come up much on the presidential campaign trail.  Yes there was the infamous triad debacle when Donald Trump fumbled the question on the Republican CNN debate about which of the three legs would be his priority.  “For me, nuclear, the power, the devastation, is very important to me,” Trump said, actually making it sound like he rather relished a nuclear holocaust.

This ominous drift was further compounded by the inept burbling of Trump spokesperson, Katrina Pierson, who sounded like an extra in Cabaret during her laughable effort at damage control on The O’Reilly Factor.  “What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if you’re afraid to use it?” she blurted.

None of this is comforting.  While the absence of discussion among candidates about nuclear power is perhaps a good thing — it’s simply too irrelevant as a 21st century energy source to be worthy of mention — the silence on nuclear weapons policy is more ominous.  If next November we elect a Republican president who could, albeit not easily, decide to obliterate Tehran or Moscow or Pyongyang, shouldn’t we know how he or she feels about the “use” of nuclear weapons?

Or perhaps it doesn’t matter what the candidates say.  After all, President Obama stood in Prague on April 5, 2009 and pronounced that: “today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

That got him the Nobel Peace Prize, which some would like to see rescinded since Obama has now announced a plan to squander one trillion in taxpayer dollars over the next three decades on a new generation of nuclear warheads, bombers, submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Hillary Clinton distanced herself from this plan while campaigning in Iowa, saying: “I’m going to look into that.  It doesn’t make sense to me.”  Bernie Sanders pointed out that the entire military budget of $600 billion is “larger than the next eight countries.”  But the Republican stable have all at least alluded to their support for maintaining and upgrading the U.S. nuclear weapons cache.

According to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the U.S. is already spending $35 billion a year on its nuclear arsenal.  While it’s true that this bigger bill is largely because costs are higher today than during the Cold War, it doesn’t excuse the deliberate flouting of the commitment to disarm, binding under the terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which the five “official” nuclear weapons states have signed.

That’s why it was alarming to read that the Center for American Progress had just released a report on “how the Obama administration and Congress can modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal within its existing budget constraints — without undermining its moral boundaries in the battle against nuclear proliferation and its conventional capabilities to confront our current national security challenges.”

The report’s intent is to offer cost-saving options to reduce the projected $1 trillion price tag, and it does recommend cancellation of the new cruise missile and other cuts for a $120 billion savings.  But accepting “modernization” rather than abolition perpetuates the broadly-held Washington view that we continue to “need” nuclear weapons.  If we never drop this approach, how can we ever fully disarm?

The answer is, we won’t.  The CAP report takes for granted that the U.S. will continue to violate the NPT, writing: “Nearly every missile, submarine, aircraft, and warhead in the U.S. arsenal is nearing the end of its service life and must be replaced” [emphasis added.]  Replaced.  Not abolished.

Although he was trying to say the opposite in Prague, Obama in effect confirmed this view when he said: “if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.”

The President of the United States does not have his finger literally on the trigger that would launch nuclear weapons.  But the prospect of someone as crazy as Cruz or as megalomaniac as Trump making that decision is chilling.

Mind you, if polls are to be believed, Trump supporters would happily give him the green light to launch, as long as the target is the fictional city of Agrabah, an invention of Disney’s “Aladdin” and which Trump fans seem to believe is an actual ISIS hotbed.  Which is almost as frightening as the prospect of Trump carrying around the infamous nuclear Football.

[…]

USA: Oligarchy or Plutocracy?

https://classwarinamerica.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/so-do-we-have-an-oligarchy-or-a-plutocracy/

[…]

Plutocracy means rule by the rich, oligarchy means rule by a dominant class or clique. Either way, it all comes down to money, and most of us—those of us without the money—haven’t had much say about it.

Democracy, alas, takes a distant third place lately. Yeah, we can still vote, but for thirty years, the politicians we voted for have sold us all downriver, with more and more laws and regulations penalizing the poor and middle class and benefiting the rich. It’s supposed to “trickle down”, but so far it hasn’t. There’s a very small group of zillionaires who control everything via their pet legislators. They have systematically trashed all restraints on their activities, and now manipulate lawmaking to their own financial advantage with thousands of lobbyists and stealth activities that seek to control who votes. Social equality is not one of their goals.

If we are an oligarchy, who are the members of the oligarch, the dominant class? A dominant class could be any group of people who possess characteristics deemed important. Say, advanced degrees as evidence of ability to think critically, or demonstrated proficiency in science or some other discipline, or demonstrated ability to benefit the people. But our oligarch consists only of people with lots of money. The very wealthy literally control how laws are made. The oligarch must also include Congress, because they are the ones who actually make the laws.

But when you look at Congress, you find that about half are millionaires, and only 6% have incomes representative of the bottom 80% of the population. In fact, House wealth has increased 25% in the past two years alone, while everyone else’s  fell. It all fits well with the conservative belief that money is virtue, but not very well with virtue itself. Granted, being a millionaire these days doesn’t mean the same thing it meant a few decades ago. As the saying goes, “Inflation will make millionaires of us all”. Even so, even though there are ten million millionaires in the world, a net worth of a million dollars is still quite substantial when average income is $42K in the US (Note that this figure is sharply skewed by the enormous income at the upper end of the scale.) and $7K worldwide, and millionaires are greatly over-represented in Congress.

Speaking of, doesn’t that 1% qualify as plutocratic? Or do we need the top 0.1% for that? Even those guys speak of themselves as plutocrats, according to some intercepted communications not long ago.

[…]

largest glacier calving ever filmed

We Simply Don’t Understand What Climate Change Means

https://classwarinamerica.wordpress.com/2016/01/23/we-simply-dont-understand-what-climate-change-means/

Here’s what it means: It means that our entire world will be upset. We will have to change everything. Everything. It will all be radically different from what we in the US, as the wealthiest economy, are used to. The very land we live on will be transformed, as will the way we live. Here are a few items for thought.

Let’s start with cars, since we in the US place a higher value on cars than we do on almost anything.

The idea of the privately owned automobile will vanish. Completely. We’ll get around some other way, and get around not quite so much. It won’t be necessary to get around as much, because important things will be closer together. As for cars, at least in cities, there are other possibilities. Here are some:

Those cute little self-driving cars, which will be electric, charged from the sun. Summon a car with your phone when you need it, and again when you want to go home. We will benefit from less traffic congestion. Solar cells will be installed on every available rooftop space. We’re already seeing this. The generated electricity, charged into the grid, will offset the cost of electric transportation and other needs.

Bicycles. There is already a well established urban movement toward using bicycles for getting to work, as well as for exercise, and for shopping and other tasks. Today’s bicycles are considerably safer and easier to use than bikes of the past. Mass transit. Hybrid busses and advanced light rail are well established in many cities. In some cities they are nearly as pleasant as those in Europe. How about a self-driving commuter “train” for the highway?

Airplanes will either become far more efficient, or they will become very expensive to use.

Jets allow us to traverse in hours what in the past took months. But the tradeoff has been in planes’ outsized contribution to global warming. It is possible that efficient planes will be developed, but they are unlikely to travel as fast as current planes do. Many experiments are underway, for example to develop lighter-than-air craft that would make use of natural air currents and solar electricity. Here too, “driverless”, that is, pilotless craft, will arrive at some future time. The technology already exists. Much of flying at present is handled by computers.

Some air travel should be taken over by high-speed vacuum tube travel, as Elon Musk and others are developing. Passengers would be comfortably ensconced in tubular vehicles that are moved by compressed air behind the vehicle. Speeds would be comparable to jet flight or faster, and would begin and end in the centers of cities. The air for propulsion would be compressed by solar electricity.

Here’s an idea I like: The return of sailing ships, that are also powered by solar panels on deck. Flexible solar panels might become sails. Timeliness is not important for some freight, which could rely entirely on wind and solar-powered motors. Lighter passenger ships might move slower than today’s cruise ships, but this is not necessarily a disadvantage. Going on a classic sailing ship, capturing the wind, is a thrilling experience for most of us land lubbers.

Coal and petroleum have become deadly dangers that will simply have to be dropped. The greatest dangers are from their gross contribution to global warming, but, as anyone who has seen the photos of cities so choked with pollution that vision is sharply limited knows, the dangers to health from other kinds of pollution are also extreme in some places.

Energy industry collapse is already happening. The value of both coal and oil on the world’s stock exchanges has been falling for a long time. As oil and coal use continue to drop, many of their corporations will cease production and become extinct.

Raising cattle will become a much smaller business, say 10% of what we have today. The average American eats far too much beef anyway, which has created widespread serious health problems, including cardiovascular disease and diabetes from obesity. Cattle generate serious quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas some 25 times worse than carbon dioxide. Cutting the herd to 10% of its present size would be greatly beneficial in several ways. However, we are unlikely to simply do away with beef cattle because the US economy utilizes literally hundreds of byproducts of beef cattle in ways we rarely are aware of.

In general terms, pollution and excessive energy use have been a secondary or tertiary consideration with industry, and often ignored at that. Because of global warming, we no longer have that option.

Although this news is at least two decades late in arrival, we at long last seem to understand the seriousness, and are beginning to do things about it. The time for avoiding climate change is some three decades past. Now, at last, there is an increased understanding that this is not something that can be ignored.

The only exception to understanding the clear and present danger on the entire planet is the Republican party, which has been in thrall to those who got rich from taking oil and coal from the ground, usually ignoring the responsibilities that come with it and with no concern for the future. These interests have employed every unsavory method available to extend their wealth-gathering, including the purchase of Congressional and academic pawns, who have wasted decades arguing against their own responsibility.

Even though they have finally been forced to acknowledge the reality that was obvious to the rest of the world decades ago, it seems certain that the GOP has by itself created dangers that will cause major problems for the entire world. Their denial has created dangerous conditions that will not end once we actually begin to do something about it, but will continue to intensify for decades, or centuries. It is even possible that the planet will turn into something that will not support human life in another century or two. To me it is more than astonishing that anyone could put personal profit before the very survival of humanity.

The present difficulty is that we don’t really understand that everything will change. Radically.

Like it or not, we can’t do as we’ve always done.

What is Fascism?