Medea
Benjamin en Nicholas J.S. Davies hebben een opiniestuk geplaatst op
Information Clearing House waarin ze stellen dat een regering
als de Trump administratie niet alleen zwaar tekortschiet in het
bestrijden van het Coronavirus, waardoor de VS nu verreweg het
grootste aantal Coronaslachtoffers heeft, maar ook op 2 andere
gebieden een beleid voert dat miljoenen mensen het leven zal kosten…… 

Het voorgaande als die administratie niet terugkeert naar de werkelijkheid
(wat niet zal gebeuren…) en juist zal proberen de wereldbevolking te
helpen en daarbij illegale oorlogsvoering zal afzweren…….. Dit terwijl deze
wereldbevolking het slachtoffer was, is en zal zijn van VS blunders, corruptie*, het
niet handelen op de klimaatverandering en van haar ongebreidelde
agressie getoond in de illegale oorlogen die dit land telkens weer start, agressie die gelijkstaat aan grootschalige terreur in de vorm van enorme oorlogsmisdaden……

Sinds
1947 wordt de ‘Doomsday Clock’ gehanteerd door een aantal
wetenschappers die bijhouden hoe dicht de wereld bij een
nucleaire vernietiging staat en afhankelijk van internationale
spanningen gaat die klok vooruit dan wel terug. Januari dit
jaar ging deze klok voor het eerst voorbij de 2 minuten die wordt
aangehouden tot de vernietiging van de aarde door een nucleair
conflict, ofwel voorbij 2 minuten voor 12…….. Helaas weinig
aandacht voor dit feit door de Coronacrisis, waarover de hysterie
juist toen losbrak…..

Het
hoeft geen betoog te zeggen dat de houding van de Trump administratie
t.a.v. de klimaatverandering desastreus is, i.p.v. te handelen met de
bedoeling deze verandering te lijf te gaan en nog enigszins af te remmen, doet de Trump
administratie het tegenovergestelde, sterker nog: de Coronacrisis
wordt misbruikt door deze administratie om bedrijven een carte
blanche te geven voor onbelemmerde vervuiling en het boren naar olie
en gas op plekken waar bijvoorbeeld een olieramp niet is te
bestrijden, denk daarbij o.a. aan het arctisch gebied……. Ook wat dat betreft is het een ‘zegen’ dat de olieprijs zwaar is gekelderd, waardoor dat soort winningen, als die van schaliegas en -olie, niet langer lucratief zijn. (vergeet verder niet dat ook oorlogsvoering een enorme aanjager is van de klimaatverandering….)

Vergeet
verder niet dat de VS als Australië, al vele jaren steenkool tegen
afbraakprijzen dumpt op de wereldmarkt, iets waardoor onze
gascentrales al vele jaren geleden werden uitgeschakeld, immers ‘steenkool was veel voordeliger’** (dat werd ons niet verteld toen het besluit werd genomen om 4 nieuwe kolencentrales te bouwen….)……. Kortom
de Trump administratie is doende de aarde te vernietigen, of dit nu
gebeurt middels nucleaire wapens dan wel met enorme vervuiling, of zelfs een combinatie van die 2…..

Will
America’s Corruption End on a Ventilator or in a Mushroom Cloud?

By
Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies

A
political system that is structurally incapable of acting for the
common good, even when millions of lives are at stake, is not just
failing to solve our problems. It is the problem.

April
22, 2020 “Information
Clearing House”
–  Little
by little, Americans are understanding just how badly our
government has let us down by its belated and disastrous response
to the Covid-19 pandemic, and how thousands more people are dying as
a result. But there are two other crises we face that our government
is totally unprepared for and incapable of dealing with: the climate
crisis and the danger of nuclear war. 

Since
1947, a group of scientists with the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists (‘the Bulletin’) have warned us about the danger of
nuclear war—using their Doomsday
Clock to symbolize just how close we are to destroying human
civilization on Earth. Over the years, the minute hand on the clock
has gone back and forth, measuring the rising and falling risks. 

Unbeknownst
to most Americans, in January 2020, just before the Covid-19 crisis
broke, the Atomic Scientists, who include 13 Nobel Prize winners and
dozens of scientists and other experts, sounded the alarm that the
double risks of nuclear war and climate change have now brought us
closer to self-destruction than at the most dangerous moments of the
Cold War. For the first time ever, they moved the hands of the
Doomsday Clock beyond the 2-minute mark to 100
seconds to midnight.

“The
world is sleepwalking its way through a newly unstable nuclear
landscape,” they wrote, highlighting the New Cold War between the
U.S. and Russia, plans to “modernize” their nuclear arsenals and
“lowered barriers to nuclear war” as a result of new “low-yield”
nuclear weapons. Arms control treaties between the U.S. and Russia
that took decades to negotiate are being abandoned, removing
restraints that were carefully calibrated to prevent either side from
upsetting the balance of terror that made it suicidal to use nuclear
weapons. What is now to prevent a conventional war from escalating to
the use of “low-yield” nuclear weapons, or a low yield nuclear
war in turn escalating to Armageddon?

On
the climate crisis, the annual UN Conference of Parties (COP) in
Madrid in December 2019 failed
to agree on any new steps to cut carbon emissions, despite record
heat, unprecedented wildfires, faster melting of glacial ice, and a
scientific consensus that the commitments countries made in Paris in
2015 are not sufficient to avert catastrophe. Most countries are
falling short of even those insufficient pledges, while U.S. CO2
emissions actually rose
by 2.6% in 2018, after falling by only 11% under the Obama
administration. Obama’s policy of using natural gas as a “bridge
fuel” for U.S. power plants fueled a huge expansion in the
fracking industry, and the U.S. is now producing more
oil and more
gas than ever before in our history. 

Now
the next COP in Glasgow has been postponed from 2020 to 2021 due to
the pandemic, further delaying any chance of decisive action.
Covid-19 is temporarily restraining our destruction of our own life
support system. But this will be only a temporary respite unless we
pivot from lockdowns to a COP in Glasgow that launches a global
program to very quickly convert our energy systems from fossil fuels
to green energy.

The
Atomic
Scientists wrote that both these existential dangers are severely
compounded by political leaders who “denigrate and discard the most
effective methods for addressing complex threats – international
agreements with strong verification regimes – in favor of their own
narrow interest and domestic political gain… these leaders have
helped to create a situation that will, if unaddressed, lead to
catastrophe sooner rather than later.”

It
is the political leaders of the United States, not Russia or China,
who have withdrawn from nuclear arms agreements, undermined the Kyoto
Protocol (the only binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gases),
rejected the jurisdiction of international
courts, failed to ratify 46
multilateral treaties and systematically violated the UN
Charter‘s prohibition against the threat or use of force.

The
Republicans have been more aggressive in many of these policies, but
Democratic leaders have also gone along with them, consolidating U.S.
imperialism and disdain for international law as bipartisan U.S.
policy. When UN Secretary General Kofi Annan told the BBC that the
U.S. invasion of Iraq was illegal
under the UN Charter, Senator Joe Biden, then Chairman of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, dismissed that out of hand.
“Nobody in the Senate agrees with that,” Biden
sneered. “There is nothing to debate. He is dead, flat,
unequivocally wrong.” 

The Democratic Party
has now closed ranks behind Joe Biden as its presidential candidate,
presenting Americans with a choice between two leaders from the two
administrations that have governed the U.S. since 2009 and therefore
bear the greatest responsibility for the current state of the nation.
Biden has based his candidacy on the premise that everything was just
fine in America until Trump came along, just as Trump based his 2016
candidacy on the idea that everything was great until Obama came on
the scene. 

Most
Americans understand that our problems are more entrenched and
systemic than that, but we remain trapped in a closed political
system that presents us with limited choices between leaders who have
already proved unable to solve our problems, even when the solutions
are well-known or obvious and have broad
public support, like Medicare For All.

When
it comes to war and peace, the American public wants to keep the U.S.
out of wars, but leaders of both parties keep fueling the war machine
and stoking dangerous tensions with other countries. The Russiagate
fiasco failed to bring down Trump, but it succeeded in unleashing a
propaganda
blitz to convince millions of Americans, from MSNBC viewers to
Members of Congress, that Russia is once again an irreconcilable
enemy of the United States and a threat to everything Americans
believe in. In the hall of mirrors that is American politics,
Democrats now hate
Russia more than China, while Republicans hate
China more than Russia—although the Biden
campaign is now vying with Trump to see who can be more hostile
to China. 

Bipartisan
hostility to Russia and China is only helping to justify the
Pentagon’s pivot from “counterterrorism” to its New Cold War
with our nuclear-armed neighbors and trillions of dollars in spending
on new weapons that make the world more dangerous for all of us. 

With
almost no public debate, Members of Congress from both parties
quietly rubber-stamp every record military budget placed in front of
them. Only 8
Senators (4D, 4R) and 48
House Members (41D, 6R, 1I) dared to vote against final passage
of the outrageous $712
billion 2020 Pentagon budget. The Trump administration is fully
committed to Obama’s plan to spend at least a
trillion dollars to “modernize” the U.S. nuclear arsenal,
which the Atomic Scientists warn is taking us closer to nuclear
catastrophe than ever. Of this year’s Democratic presidential
candidates, Bernie Sanders is the only
one who routinely votes against record military budgets,
approving only 16% of military spending bills since 2013.

On
this and many other issues, Sanders has dared to say what Americans
know but no major party candidate would say before: that our
neoliberal emperors sit stark naked on their thrones, tossing sacks
of money to their friends as they rule over an obscene empire of
corruption, inequality, war, poverty and racism. 

In
dogged defiance of American conventional wisdom, Sanders built a
political movement based on real solutions to the structural problems
of American society, directly challenging the powerful interests who
control and profit from the corrupt status quo: the
military-industrial complex; the prison-industrial complex; the
medical-industrial complex; and the Wall Street financial complex at
the heart of it all.

Sanders
may have lost the Democratic nomination, but he successfully
demonstrated that Americans don’t have to be passive in the face of
a corrupt political system that is leading us down a path to
self-destruction. We do not have to accept a dysfunctional for-profit
healthcare system; ever-worsening inequality and poverty; structural
racism and mass incarceration; an overheated, dying natural world; or
a military-industrial complex that fears peace more than a nuclear
apocalypse.

A
political system that is structurally incapable of acting for the
common good, even when millions of lives are at stake, is not just
failing to solve our problems. It is the problem. Hopefully, as we
struggle to emerge from today’s tragic pandemic, more and more
Americans are understanding that healing our sick, corrupt political
system is the vital key to a healthy and peaceful future.

Medea
Benjamin,
co-founder of Global
Exchange and CODEPINK:
Women for Peace, is the author of the new book, Inside
Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Her previous books include: Kingdom
of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection;
Drone
Warfare: Killing by Remote Control;
Don’t
Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart,
and (with Jodie Evans) Stop
the Next War Now (Inner Ocean Action Guide).
Follow her on Twitter: @medeabenjamin

Nicolas
J.S. Daviesis the
author of Blood
On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
He also wrote the chapters on “Obama at War” in Grading
the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as
a Progressive Leader.

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==================================

* 
Corruptie: neem alleen al alle baantjes die Trump aan zijn familie
gaf, dat zou in een echte democratie niet kunnen…… En dat heel
openlijk alsof het de normaalste zaak van de wereld is, dit in een
land dat keer op keer liegt dat het de wereld wil bevrijden van
corruptie en democratie wil brengen….. Waar de VS intussen de
smerigste dictators steunt, neem Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), de
psychopathische massamoordenaar en kroonprins van de
reli-fascistische dictatuur Saoedi-Arabië…… Deze MBS is zelfs
bezig met het uitvoeren van een genocide in Jemen, waarin de VS, Groot-Brittannië en
Frankrijk hem als westerse staten steunen en zelfs militair
helpen……

**
Uiteraard is steenkool in het geheel niet voordeliger, immers de
kosten van de klimaatverandering door steenkoolverbranding zijn vele
malen hoger dan die door gasverbruik, terwijl gasverbranding t.o.v.
van steenkoolverbranding welhaast duurzaam kan worden genoemd……
Daarom ook onbegrijpelijk dat Nederland gas uit de huizen wil weren,
immers nieuwe huizen zijn goed geïsoleerd en het gasverbruik is
vergeleken met niet geïsoleerde huizen bijna nihil……

Zie ook:

‘Trump promoot anti-malariamiddel voor 2de keer als remedie tegen het Coronavirus‘ (en zie de links in dat bericht)