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An “Inconvenient Truth” that Al Gore
Missed
Posted By Michael Eisenscher On April 5, 2019 @ 1:37
am
In a recent interview
with The Real News, actor and activist John Cusack made a
simple but profoundly important point: “[Y]ou can’t separate climate justice
and militarism’, he said,”… because the drones are going to follow the fresh
water, and the soldiers are going to protect the oil, and then if things go on
as they are, game over for the planet.”
There is ‘an inconvenient truth’ that
didn’t make it into the 2006 documentary by that name featuring Al Gore.
It is something rarely mentioned by most environmental and social justice
activists and their organizations. Most labor leaders who seek a just
transition to a sustainable energy system that does not make workers with
fossil fuel-dependent jobs bare the social cost also remain silent.
The truth is that
preventing climate change from inflicting cataclysmic damage to our ecosystem
and threatening much of life on earth and civilization as we know it cannot be
accomplished unless we also demilitarize our foreign policy, end
interventionist wars and break the grip that both Big Carbon and the
military-industrial complex have on our federal budget, foreign policy, economy
and government.
Peace is a climate goal because it is a
climate necessity
War is an environmental nightmare that
pollutes and contaminates every place it is fought, while contributing
substantially to the carbon load of the planet. The US military is the
single largest consumer of fossil fuels on
the planet and its single largest greenhouse gas polluter. War and climate
change-caused disasters are the principal drivers of global migration and the
refugee crisis.
The physical, social and financial
impacts of war are felt for generations. War, preparation for war and its
aftermath drain resources from investment in renewable energy. It limits our
ability to protect our most vulnerable frontline communities and mitigate the
worst effects of climate change. Military spending consumes funds needed to
meet other critical economic and social needs — healthcare, education,
infrastructure, energy efficiency and more. The costs of war continue long
after the fighting ends in the ongoing care required by veterans, the social
costs of addiction, depression and other manifestations of PTSD, and interest
paid to service the debt that accrues when wars are fought on the government’s
credit card.
Our
military’s primary function is to defend whatever the president as
commander-in-chief determines is in America’s ‘national security’ or ‘vital US
interests’. George Bush sent tens of thousands of troops to invade Iraq in 2003
without provocation and in contravention of international law, in the name of
‘national security’. But in reality, the concepts of ‘national security’ and
‘vital interests’ are more often than not euphemisms for protecting and
defending corporate and investor interests, preeminent among which are the
interests of fossil fuel energy conglomerates and the military-industrial
complex — or more simply to make the world safe for the exploitation of and
trade in fossil fuel and other natural resources while boosting profits of
military contractors. To do that it has to assert military superiority and
global hegemony to discourage, and discourage or defeat, any competitor or
adversary, whether real, potential, contrived or imagined. The US military
serves as global enforcer for fossil fuel interests. It’s collaborator in that
effort is the military-industrial complex, which maintains a codependent and
inextricably interwoven relationship with Big Carbon. Neither can survive
without the other.
The US military has been continuously at
war for more than 17 years at a cost of over five trillion dollars, and has been engaged in
some form of armed conflict or military intervention on average every six months since
World War II. Its global reach is provided by more than 1.3 million men and women under arms stationed
on 800 foreign bases in
80 nations, reinforced by 20 aircraft carriers; 66 submarines; 329 other naval
craft; 3,700 fighter jets, bombers and attack aircraft; 44,700 tanks and
armored fighting vehicles; 6,550 nuclear warheads, and
800 inter-continental ballistic missiles — a military might unmatched by any
other country in the world . The US has deployed Special Forces to 150 countries —
more than three-quarters of all the nations in the world* — in
service to what the AFL-CIO General Executive Council in
2011 aptly described as a “militarized foreign policy.” The US fits the classic
definition of a ‘garrison state’.
In order to fulfill this
role, the US military and military contractors consume nearly two-thirds of the entire US
discretionary budget, costing taxpayers $1.25 trillion a year when
the Pentagon base budget, war spending, nuclear arms, veterans benefits and
future care, interest paid on funds borrowed to finance past wars, and other
national security-related expenses of government are added up. The US military
budget is greater than the next seven nations combined —
roughly double what China, Russia, Iran and North Korea together spend — far
more than is required to defend our country’s borders and its people.
As we
abandon fossil fuels, a just transition to a sustainable energy society
requires that we defend immigrant families, protect and meet the needs of
frontline communities, assure the welfare of displaced workers in both fossil
fuel-dependent and military-industrial jobs, and support military personnel
impacted by an end to our aggressive foreign policy.
Just as fossil fuel and military-industrial
interests are interwoven and interdependent, so too are environmental, social
justice and labor causes, The labor, environmental justice and peace movements
must abandon issue and organizational silos to begin operating as a single multi-faceted
progressive movement that understands their interdependence and consciously
develops collaboration, mutual support and solidarity between them. What
compels these different strands of progressive struggle to weave a new
progressive tapestry is recognition that none of these movements can
achieve their objectives without achieving the objectives of the others. We
will not be able to successfully decarbonize our economy if we do not also
demilitarize US foreign policy.
Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood
this when he declared one year prior to his death: “We as a nation must undergo
a radical revolution of values. . . . When machines and
computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important
than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism
are incapable of being conquered.” His admonition has been echoed more recently
by the Poor People’s Campaign.
We need a new definition of national
security
We need a new definition of national
security based on what the American people, not multinational corporations and
the investor class need to be secure — not based on the size of our
military, the number of our foreign military bases, the power of our weapons or
the advanced state of our military technology but on the strength of our shared
values and the needs and aspirations of the American people. Real national
security should protect our people, not the profits of multinational
corporations.
· Real national
security exists when people have jobs with incomes sufficient to provide a
decent standard of living, affordable housing and healthcare, education without
a lifetime of student debt, and safe, affordable child and elder care.
· Real national
security provides efficient affordable mass transit, modern safe public
infrastructure, a proper social safety net, sustainable carbon-free energy,
protection of our environment, and wholesome food.
· Real national
security can only be achieved if all countries dramatically reduce their
consumption of fossil fuels, lower the threat posed by runaway global warming,
and eliminate all nuclear weapons.
· Real national
security requires our country operate in the world as a member of a global
community of nations so as to earn respect rather than to instill fear.
· Real national security
requires respect for international law, human rights, the rights of refugees,
the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution, and work to end xenophobia,
nativism, racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia.
· Real national
security can be achieved only if the conditions of poverty, unemployment,
alienation and despair which provide the fertile field in which terrorism grows
are alleviated throughout the world — when the fate of the least of us is tied
to the fate of the rest of us as members of a single global human community.
That is why we must rise together for
climate, jobs, justice and peace.
Article printed from CounterPunch.org: https://www.counterpunch.org
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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