anti-militarism

Adopted by UA Local 393 in San Jose - US Labor Against the War, March 9, 2016

Whereas;  On March 3, 2016 the temperature across the northern hemisphere,  crossed a line.  For a short time it was more than two degrees Celsius above “normal” for the first time in recorded history.  Governments are supposedly working to avoid crossing that so called “red line.” Arctic sea ice is at record low levels for the date.  Last month a tropical cyclone hit Fiji with the highest wind speeds ever measured, causing substantial regional destruction. Storms on Mexico’s West Coast have carried the highest wind speeds in history for months and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere unexpectedly surpassed 400 parts per million,  drastically changing the historical natural balance. This February we’ve seen record high temperatures. This is a glimpse into our climate changed future if we do nothing and,

Whereas; the Zika virus, spreading on the wings of mosquitos in the newly warmed climate, is attacking the brains of our babies, and we can expect a multitude of health effects to come out of climate changes in the environment, and

Whereas; the future is clearly coming much faster than science predicted. Global warming is no longer just a threat. It is increasingly a reality and a menace to our children, our loved ones and civilization as a whole, and

Whereas; almost all scientists agree that human use of fossil fuels propels climate change and that a rational approach to defend against the catastrophic effects of climate change is to leave most carbon fuels, coal, oil, and gas in the ground and develop new energy sources to serve our industries, homes, and economy - solar energy, wind energy and perhaps tidal energy, and

Whereas; the necessary changes the global community will need to make to prevent  catastrophic climate change in a positive way will have a powerful impact on the men and women who work in the pipe trades, and

Whereas; as our world and our industry evolves to prevent global catastrophe, many traditional UA and Building Trades jobs may no longer be needed, but with that change will come a tremendous upsurge in other technologies, such as solar power, wind power, tidal power, water reclamation, desalinization plants, and others that will offer monumental job opportunities to expand work for our members while ensuring a future for our children, so

Therefore Be It Resolved; that we call upon the United Association to form a Climate Change Commission of officers, members and scientific experts to study and develop plans that will respond to the new climate issues in a manner to best protect the needs of our members, our families, our people, our planet, and our Union.

By Noam Chomsky - Alternet, October 21, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

A previous article I wrote explored how security is a high priority for government planners: security, that is, for state power and its primary constituency, concentrated private power - all of which entails that official policy must be protected from public scrutiny.

In these terms, government actions fall in place as quite rational, including the rationality of collective suicide. Even instant destruction by nuclear weapons has never ranked high among the concerns of state authorities.

To cite an example from the late Cold War: In November 1983 the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization launched a military exercise designed to probe Russian air defenses, simulating air and naval attacks and even a nuclear alert.

These actions were undertaken at a very tense moment. Pershing II strategic missiles were being deployed in Europe. President Reagan, fresh from the "Evil Empire" speech, had announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed "Star Wars," which the Russians understood to be effectively a first-strike weapon - a standard interpretation of missile defense on all sides.

Naturally these actions caused great alarm in Russia, which, unlike the U.S., was quite vulnerable and had repeatedly been invaded.

Newly released archives reveal that the danger was even more severe than historians had previously assumed. The NATO exercise "almost became a prelude to a preventative (Russian) nuclear strike," according to an account last year by Dmitry Adamsky in the Journal of Strategic Studies .

Nor was this the only close call. In September 1983, Russia's early-warning systems registered an incoming missile strike from the United States and sent the highest-level alert. The Soviet military protocol was to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own.

The Soviet officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, intuiting a false alarm, decided not to report the warnings to his superiors. Thanks to his dereliction of duty, we're alive to talk about the incident.

Security of the population was no more a high priority for Reagan planners than for their predecessors. Such heedlessness continues to the present, even putting aside the numerous near-catastrophic accidents, reviewed in a chilling new book, "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety," by Eric Schlosser.

It's hard to contest the conclusion of the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, Gen . Lee Butler, that humanity has so far survived the nuclear age "by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion."

The government's regular, easy acceptance of threats to survival is almost too extraordinary to capture in words.

In 1995, well after the Soviet Union had collapsed, the U.S. Strategic Command, or Stratcom, which is in charge of nuclear weapons, published a study, "Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence."

A central conclusion is that the U.S. must maintain the right of a nuclear first strike, even against non-nuclear states. Furthermore, nuclear weapons must always be available, because they "cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict."

Thus nuclear weapons are always used, just as you use a gun if you aim it but don't fire when robbing a store - a point that Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, has repeatedly stressed.

Read the entire article here.

By Burkely Hermann - Z Blogs, June 13, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Aggressive militarism continues to emanate from the office of the presidency and the US government itself. With drone strikes in foreign countries, an “empire of drone bases” in Africa as the Washington Post once called it, and a continuing war in Afghanistan, you would think that there would be mass protests on the streets against these injustices. Instead, there have been noble and honorable protests against drones, the war in Afghanistan, Bush era war criminals, and so on, but they have been too limited. At the same time, protests calling for the coming climate catastrophe to be adequately addressed have been growing among indigenous people and concerned citizens in both the Global North and the Global South. This is despite a laser focus of the big environmental organizations, Gang Green, on stopping Keystone XL but not a focus on many other issues. This article outlines why the peace movement[1] and the environmental movement within the United States should join together as a united front against corporate power and global neoliberal capitalism.