On Dec. 2, the U.S. Navy announced that it had awarded a $22.2 billion contract to war profiteer General Dynamics to build 9 Navy submarines.
With $22.2 billion, a government could guarantee 740,000 workers a year’s worth of work at $15/hr.
740,000 workers could be distributing food, running nurseries, building rural hospitals, restoring Louisiana wetlands, or caring for our elders.
The U.S. government is a government of the rich for the rich. We are sick, we go hungry in order to fatten a few shareholders at General Dynamics and ExxonMobil. But we, the workers, are millions more than the generals and CEOs. We can replace their rule with ours.
Who’s threatening who? Map shows locations of the dozens of U.S. military bases surrounding Iran.
No More Wars for Oil!
By Gregory William
Without ceasing their efforts to overthrow the legitimate government of Venezuela, the Trump administration and the U.S. military command have been revving up threats against Iran.
Trump and his gang have already demonstrated through their use of inhumane economic sanctions that they are willing to destroy the lives of thousands of people—all so that their capitalist masters can gain control of Iran and Venezuela’s oil fields.
In early May Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, announced the deployment of a carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the Persian Gulf to “send a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any attacks on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force.” Since then Trump has sent an 1,500 additional troops to the region.
Does Iran pose any threat to the U.S.? No!
Since the beginning of the last century, the United States has carried out more than 100 invasions of countries around the world. In that time, Iran hasn’t invaded a single country. Nor have they started a single war.
Bolton has had a hand in several U.S. invasions and wars—not least in Libya and Iraq, where hundreds of thousands have died as a result. During the lead-up to the Iraq war, Bolton systematically churned out lies about Iraq’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” to convince the public that war was necessary, leading to absolute devastation in that country and massive looting of U.S. taxpayers’ money. Bolton has been advocating for war with Iran for over 20 years and is now trying ratchet up tensions so that an accident or a false-flag attack might provide a pretext for war.
Here’s another claim workers might hear in the U.S. capitalist-owned media. Isn’t the Iranian government a despotic theocracy that curtails the rights of its people, and isn’t that a good reason for the U.S. to intervene?
There’s no reason to believe that this is a concern of Trump and company. One of the U.S.’ closest allies in the region, Saudi Arabia, recently beheaded 37 men and hung one of their bodies upside down on a pole in public. This hasn’t been a topic of discussion in Washington. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to support the Saudi regime’s genocidal war in Yemen and gives the Israeli government billions of our tax dollars to murder innocent Palestinian children.
The Iranian forces that Bolton and Trump are promoting as the possible “liberators” of the country hail from the now-deposed fascist monarchy or alternately, from the so-called ‘National Council of Resistance,’ an organization aligned with the Saudi monarchy and Israel.
U.S. imperialists clearly have no interest in promoting democracy or human rights in Iran or anywhere else in the world. The long history of U.S. interference in Iran proves it.
In U.S. wars for oil, playbook hasn’t changed
In 1953, U.S. and British espionage agencies orchestrated a coup in Iran, ousting the democratically-elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. In 1951, under the leadership of Mosaddegh, the Iranian parliament voted to nationalize Iran’s oil industry which had until then been under the control of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company—later known as British Petroleum (BP), the same company responsible for the horrible Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The Iranian government intended to use their oil resources to benefit the people of Iran rather than British and American shareholders.
Before the coup, the British initiated an international boycott of Iranian oil. They were trying to put an economic stranglehold on the country to make it bend to the wishes of the British and U.S. capitalist classes. In place of the popular government of Mosaddegh, the coup orchestrators installed General Fazlollah Zahedi, who shored up the rule of the Shah (the Iranian prince). The new regime relied heavily on Washington to stay in power. According to the CIA’s own declassified documents, for example, Iranian mobsters were on the U.S. payroll to stage pro-Shah riots as the coup was underway.
Under the Shah’s rule until 1979, thousands of social leaders, trade unionists, workers, students, and peasants were tortured and murdered by the SAVAK, a Gestapo-like agency set up by the CIA. Inequality soared to become almost the worst in the world, according to the International Labor Office. The people of Iran suffered all these hardships to enrich the owners of an imperialist oil cartel. This is really existing “free” market capitalism at work.
In 1979, the Iranian masses rose up to overthrow the imperialist-backed Shah. Although many of the demands of the revolution have not been met by the government of the Islamic Republic that replaced the monarchy, national independence remains a victory that the masses of Iranians are intent on defending. Any progressive Iranian knows that a U.S. war would be a terrible setback to their own struggle for political power within the country.
Why we must say no to intervention today
Nearly four times the size of Iraq, Iran is a country of 80 million people. A war with Iran would condemn an entire region of the earth to years of death and insecurity. This terrible cost to humanity would be paid by U.S. workers too. For every dollar of our taxes that’s wasted on death machines, that’s one less dollar spent on education or healthcare or all the things necessary to give us real national security.
We— the workers of the world— must stand up and declare that we will not pay for their oil with our blood.
U.S. Hands off Iran! End U.S. sanctions against Iran! Bring the troops home! Close the U.S./NATO bases! End U.S. aid to Saudi Arabia and Israel!
The U.S. military operates 5,000 websites through its Defense Media Activity branch. Nafeez Ahmed reported in Motherboard on October 30, 2018, that “a series of research projects, patent filings, and policy changes indicate that the Pentagon wants to use social media surveillance to quell domestic insurrection and rebellion….The United States government is accelerating efforts to monitor social media to preempt major anti-government protests in the US, according to scientific research, official government documents, and patent filings reviewed by Motherboard. The social media posts of American citizens who don’t like President Donald Trump are the focus of the latest US military-funded research. The research, funded by the US Army and co-authored by a researcher based at the West Point Military Academy, is part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to consolidate the US military’s role and influence on domestic intelligence.”
The Pentagon has spent millions of dollars finding patterns in posts across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and beyond to enable the prediction of major events. Ahmed further reports that “a Pentagon-funded report titled ‘Social Network Structure as a Predictor of Social Behavior: The Case of Protest in the 2016 US Presidential Election’ was funded by the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL), which is part of the US Army’s Research Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM).”
Ahmed continues: “The tool was originally developed under the Obama administration back in 2011 by the US Army Research Laboratory and US Defense Threat Reduction Agency, in partnership with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Illinois, IBM, and Caterva (a social marketing company that in 2013 was folded into a subsidiary of giant US government IT contractor CSC). Past papers associated with the project show that the tool has been largely tested in foreign theaters like Haiti, Egypt, and Syria.
“The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is part of the ARL Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NS CTA), a consortium of three industrial research labs and 14 universities which receives multi-million-dollar support from the US Army Research Laboratory. Much of that research has been funded by the US government’s spy research organization, IARPA—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Government National Business Center.”
To show the extent of the collaboration between the Pentagon, universities and corporations, HRL, a main company involved in this domestic spying, is jointly owned by General Motors and Boeing.
The same technology being used against people in the U.S. was developed to interfere in the use of social media during the lead-up to and during elections of other countries, which the U.S. has been doing for decades.
Why did you join up? To protect America? To defeat terrorists? To serve the ideals of freedom you were taught in school?
Was it long-term benefits and pensions? Healthcare? Because no other job was available? Pressure from your family?
Or was it because there was no other way you could feel strong? Was it because there was no other way to prove that the way you feel about your gender isn’t a weakness?
Was it because someone told you you could be yourself there? Was it because you wanted to hide from yourself there?
Was it something you never before questioned?
It might not feel like it right now, but I promise you, the transgender ban is a process of liberation. Despite the fact that this is fueled by hatred and that 13,700 people have been left jobless, you are now free.
You’ve been lied to. You’ve been betrayed. Now it’s time to come home and stand up for what’s right.
You were not defending the ideals you imagined.
You were used.
The military you were tricked into joining was not the organization you thought it was. Their actions have proven this. The military serves not the people of the United States, but the rich. They serve the select few who have the money and power to command the plunder you were tricked into taking part in (even if all you did was repair trucks).
Every promise they made has been taken away from you through callous transphobia.
You were always strong. You were always better than this world has told you you were. Being trans is not a mental illness, a weakness, or a lie. It’s a way of being that was once rightfully honored, and you should have been celebrated when you came out.
Your siblings still in uniform might still support you. But there’s only so much they can do while you’re back here, so let me tell you, trans soldier, that you have a community here.
You can fight for what’s right. You can fight for freedom. The fight is here in the United States.
The fight is not for inclusion in the U.S. military. It’s for the end of the U.S. military. It’s to end the power of those who betrayed you.
Take an honest look at the lies you were told. Ask yourself who you served. Ask yourself how you brought freedom or justice anywhere. Witness Iraq and Afghanistan. Witness Libya and elsewhere. Ask yourself if that is what you signed up for.
And then look at what is going on here at home.
You’ve been betrayed, and so have all of your trans siblings who no longer have any legal protections or recognition. Reproductive rights are being taken away state by state. People of color live in fear of unjust incarceration and worse. People are forced from their homelands only to endure torment at our borders.
If you want to fight, if you want to stand up for something, if you want to live your truth, you have to fight back against them.
And that’s what we’re doing. Agitate, educate, and organize with us. Take all that pain and use it in the struggle with us.
Our planet is being sacrificed to corporate greed. As the rich get richer, the rest of us must deal with poisoned air, water, soil, and food. But one major actor in the current environmental crisis gets to walk away blameless time after time: militarism. In order to continue to make a profit in a system where most of us struggle to make ends meet, the super rich have expanded the military so they can go steal resources and workers from foreign countries and maintain business as usual at home. Whether in France, the United States, Germany, or Norway, all capitalist countries have built up military forces geared towards invasions of other countries, costing tons of money and countless lives.
The U.S. military admits to using 395,000 barrels of oil every day and produces about 38,700,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO²) every year (a typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of CO² per year)—which doesn’t even take into account all the emissions they won’t admit to. The military’s fossil fuel consumption drains our landscapes and drives coastal erosion. If you’re asking yourself why Louisiana loses a football field of land every hour, why our city risks going underwater in the next 100 years, you need look no further than the military.
The U.S. military admits to using 395,000 barrels of oil every day.
The Paris Agreement, and other international accords made by politicians have time and time again EXEMPTED military operations from even trying to reduce their carbon footprint. While poor people get told to recycle, become vegan, stop using straws, reduce our plastic bag use, the crooks in Washington continue to expand the military. Individual actions are not enough! We need to oppose rich men’s wars and unite with working-class people across the world. If we don’t oppose militarism, climate change will continue to devastate the lives of working people across the world.
In spite their supposedly “progressive” stance on environmental issues, Democrats are unwilling to challenge the U.S. military, which not only drains resources from the budget each year, but also causes significant environmental harm. Multi-millionaires like Nancy Pelosi don’t oppose the bloated military budget because they profit from the arms industry and the drive to war.
Our politicians, the monsters who vote to bomb children in Iraq, destroy forests, pollute landscapes, and build more and more nuclear weapons, will not be swayed with words of encouragement, votes, or polite calls and emails. The working-class is under attack—our communities are being destroyed by climate change, our families are sick from the poison in our food, air, and water, our children are sent off to fight in unjust wars, and our future is at stake. United, as one band, one sound, we have the power to take back what is already ours and build a better world.
Banks are the biggest profiteers from the drug trade. But bank owners are never jailed. HSBC, Western Union, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase & Co, Citigroup, Wachovia among many others have allegedly failed to comply with American anti-money laundering (AML) laws.
While some poor youth has to spend 20 years of their life in Angola for possession, Wachovia Bank only has to pay a fine for laundering $378 billion in drug money over three years.
Charles A. Intriago, president of the Association of Certified Financial Crime Specialists, observed, “If you’re an individual, and get caught, you get hammered. But if you’re a big bank, and you’re caught moving money for a drug dealer, you don’t have to worry. You just fork over a monetary penalty, and then raise your fees to make up for it.”
“Until we see bankers walking off in handcuffs to face charges in these cases, nothing is going to change,” Intriago adds. “These monetary penalties are just a cost of doing business to them, like paying for a new corporate jet.”
U.S. Military Protects Drug Profits
Afghanistan—while occupied by the U.S. military—increased poppy production by 50% according to the 2013 Afghanistan Opium Survey by the United Nations. The U.S.’s only friends there are the opium producers, so the U.S protects them.
The head of the NRA, Oliver North, used military planes to bring in drugs to fund right-wing death squads in Nicaragua. The U.S. military and CIA were well known as a source of drugs during the Vietnam War era. Now they hide it better.
Pharmaceutical Companies Make a Killing from Addiction
The super wealthy Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma. Purdue Pharma plead guilty to federal criminal charges for misleading doctors, regulators, and patients about the addictiveness of Oxycontin yet the company continues to rake in billions every year. Opioids like Oxy kill an average of 200 people every day across the U.S. More than 400,000 people have died from overdoses in the last 20 years.
PUT THE BANKERS, MILITARY AND DRUG COMPANY OWNERS IN JAIL AND SEIZE THEIR MONEY!
