The USA has one of the most extensive rail networks in the world, but with diminishing safety standards. The rail-roads are almost exclusively used for freight and are owned and maintained by a handful of private transport giants, which together spend hundreds of millions of dollars on political lobbying.

Rail workers and unions have complained about mass layoffs and a declining culture of safety. Much of this has been blamed on the widespread adoption of so-called Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR), which improves efficiency, but according to its detractors, is just a blunt cost-cutting measure that sacrifices safety for profits. Since 2017, railroads have slashed their workforce by 30%. workers warned that lax safety standards would eventually lead to a catastrophic derailment.

 Overworked rail workers are given barely enough time to walk the length of the train when inspecting carriages, with trains getting longer and more haphazardly assembled, inspection points being closed, and a culture of fear instilled in the much-diminished workforce.

Ohio chemical spill draws focus on railroad dangers – DW – 02/24/2023

 Nothing demonstrates the destructive waste of the capitalist system more than the work of vast numbers of people in the arms industries and in the armed forces. On a world scale, many millions of people are involved both directly and indirectly in war machines. As well as the numbers in the armed services every branch of industry, manufacture, communications and transport has been used to mine and process every kind of material for the production of the missiles, fighter aircraft, bombers, warships, tanks, guns, bombs, shells, bullets and much more, all of which make up the military in capitalist states. 

In itself, the use of armed forces together with people in industry and manufacture for armaments production and the use of materials, represents a great waste but the purpose of war resources is to inflict death and destruction, which leads to further waste. This results in a socially insane circle of destruction which accumulates. We shall never know how many people were killed as a result of war since the beginning of the 20th Century. With each contestant inflating their enemies numbers whilst minimising their own, official figures are unreliable.

War objectives include the destruction of industrial, chemical and manufacturing installations with their machinery and equipment. Targets also include communications systems such as railways, roads, bridges, ports, power facilities and communication networks. Towns and cities have become prime targets. Creating terror, causing destruction and killing civilians have become acceptable battle tactics.

War happens in the modern world between rival capitalist states in pursuit of strategic economic objectives. These include an ability to maintain trade from a position of strength, access to and control of important materials (such as oil), access to and control of important trade routes, the retention and expansion of economic and political spheres of influence. These objectives of war are an extension of the economic objectives of capitalist production, which are to maintain a monopoly of ownership and control of the production process and an ability to trade, as a basis for the accumulation of capital. Therefore, because modern war is inherent in the national economic rivalries of the capitalist system, it can be rightly said to represent a vast waste of human and material resources, together with bringing about unimaginable misery and suffering. This waste and destruction would not happen in a system in which all humanity shared a common interest in co-operating to produce for their mutual needs. In a world socialist system,  the material assets of the entire planet would be for the benefit of all people.

 Wars are not  undertaken out of any sentimental reasons. War is the product of commercial conflicts; the aim of war – to impose upon the enemy those economic conditions one considers necessary for oneself. All possible pretexts for war are applied, but their actual causes are always questions of economics. Outward causes may seem credible to the media. One is “defending” oneself, or fighting nobly for the independence of a country, the third is defending the interests of “civilization”, purely out of idealism, against “barbarians”. 

In reality, however, all fight for the interests of a handful of magnates. In almost all the wars of recent decades, as in former times, both sides considered themselves the attacked. Whether defence or the necessity of a strategic position is alleged as the cause of war, whether treaties must be violated or similar reasons play a part – in the long run everything has its origin in business interests. For the simple but decisive reason that trade is the heart’s blood of a nation-state.

Every belligerent state contends:

1. That it is conducting a defensive war and is fighting for the just cause.

2. That it is conducting a fight for the freedom and civilization of all peoples.

3. That it is striving for a lasting peace.

4. That it is bending all efforts and will fight until the enemy has been conclusively beaten.’

5. That it will be the victor, beyond a doubt.

6. That it is forging ahead victoriously and has only slight losses to record.

7. That the bombs of its hit only the military institutions of the enemy and always with great success.

8. That its pilots and its artillery are far better than the pilots and artillery of the enemy.

9. That at this very moment, it is planning great measures which promise absolute success.

10. That the good Lord is on its side.

And every belligerent state further contends:

1. That the enemy wanted the war and was preparing for it long ago.

2. That the enemy began the war and attacked “us”.

3. That the enemy is conducting a war of conquest and wants to dominate the world.

4. That the enemy is trampling underfoot the rights of the people.

5. That the enemy has violated the neutrality of the small states and threatens the neutrality of other small states.

6. That the enemy is conducting the war with barbarous means.

7. That the enemy uses outlawed weapons

8. That the enemy is misusing the Red Cross.

9. That the enemy mistreats prisoners of war.

10. That the enemy violates women, murders and plunders.

11. That the military courts of the enemy are a mockery of the law.

12. That the enemy kills prisoners of war

13. That the enemy bombards open cities, kills women and children, but does not do “us” the slightest military damage thereby.

14. That the attack of the enemy is always nipped in the bud or else is beaten back with great losses for the enemy.

15. That the enemy is using chemical or biological bombs.

16. That the enemy is a pirate on the high seas.

17. That the enemy is needlessly preventing neutral trade.

18. That the reports of the enemy are lies through and through, and calumnies to boot.

19. That the enemy is trying to influence the neutrals by means of lies, threats and bribery.

20. That the enemy is egging the neutral states on to war – to their greatest misfortune.

21. That the enemy is suffering from a lack of money, rising living costs, industrial crises.

22. That the war loans and credits of the enemy are subscribed only by means of deception.

23. That epidemics are ravaging the enemy.

24. That strikes and domestic disturbances are the rule in the land of the enemy.

25. That the enemy’s ministers and generals are resigning.

26. That the enemy is war-weary. 

This list could on and on. What people find nn their nation’s media, is all the same thing everywhere, the same methods everywhere, the same “technique” for the deception of “its” people, everywhere.

A just war is impossible, just as impossible as a “just” struggle between thieves for the division of their loot.

 Less than 6% of plastic is recycled in the US. Much of the rest – millions of tons of it – is dumped in the oceans each year, killing marine mammals and polluting the world. Plastic does not fully decompose; instead, it eventually breaks down into tiny bits, some of which wind up inside our bodies. The idea of creating fuel from plastic offers the comforting sense that plastics are sustainable. But the release of cancer-causing pollution is just one of several significant problems that have plagued attempts to convert discarded plastic into new things. One recent study by scientists from the Department of Energy found that the economic and environmental costs of turning old plastic into new using a process called pyrolysis were 10 to 100 times higher than those of making new plastics from fossil fuels. Chevron buys oil that another company extracts from discarded plastics through pyrolysis. 

In January 2022, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced the initiative to streamline the approval of petroleum alternatives in what a press release called “part of the Biden-Harris administration’s actions to confront the climate crisis.” While the program cleared new fuels made from plants, it also signed off on fuels made from plastics even though they themselves are petroleum-based and contribute to the release of planet-warming greenhouse gases. The EPA recently gave a Chevron refinery the green light to create fuel from discarded plastics as part of a climate-friendly initiative to boost alternatives to petroleum. But, according to agency records obtained by ProPublica and the Guardian, the production of one of the fuels could emit air pollution that is so toxic, one out of four people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer. The one-in-four lifetime cancer risk from breathing the emissions from the Chevron jet fuel is higher even than the lifetime risk of lung cancer for current smokers.

“That kind of risk is obscene,” said Linda Birnbaum, former head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. 

That risk is 250,000 times greater than the level usually considered acceptable by the EPA division that approves new chemicals.  The cancer burden will disproportionately fall on people who have low incomes and are Black because of the population that lives within three miles of the refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

 Maria Doa, a scientist who worked at the EPA for 30 years, reviewed the document laying out the risk. Doa, who once ran the division that managed the risks posed by chemicals, was so alarmed by the cancer threat that she initially assumed it was a typographical error. “EPA should not allow these risks in Pascagoula or anywhere,” said Doa, who now is the senior director of chemical policy at Environmental Defense Fund. In her three decades at the EPA, Doa had never seen a chemical with that high a cancer risk that the agency allowed to be released into a community without restrictions.

The fuels that Chevron plans to make at its Pascagoula refinery present serious health risks, including developmental problems in children and cancer and harm to the nervous system, reproductive system, liver, kidney, blood and spleen. Aside from the chemical that carries a 25% lifetime risk of cancer from smoke-stack emissions, another of the Chevron fuels ushered in through the program is expected to cause 1.2 cancers in 10,000 people – also far higher than the agency allows for the general population. The EPA division that screens new chemicals typically limits cancer risk from a single air pollutant to one case of cancer in a million people. The agency also calculated that air pollution from one of the fuels is expected to cause 7.1 cancers in every 1,000 workers – more than 70 times the level EPA’s new chemicals division usually considers acceptable for workers.

In addition to the chemicals released through the creation of fuels from plastics, the people living near the Chevron refinery are exposed to an array of other cancer-causing pollutants.

Scott Throwe, an air pollution specialist who worked at the EPA for 30 years,was asked  how existing regulations could protect people in this instance. Now an independent environmental consultant, Throwe said the existing testing and monitoring requirements for refineries couldn’t capture the pollution from these new plastic-based fuels because the rules were written before these chemicals existed. There is a chance that equipment designed to limit the release of other pollutants may incidentally capture some of the emissions from the new fuels, he said. But there’s no way to know whether that is happening.

Chevron said that “plastics are an essential part of modern life and plastic waste should not end up in unintended places in the environment. We are taking steps to address plastic waste and support a circular economy in which post-use plastic is recycled, reused or repurposed.”

But environmentalists say such claims are just greenwashing. The creation of fuel from plastic is in some ways worse for the climate than simply making it directly from fossil fuels. Over 99% of all plastic is derived from fossil fuels, including coal, oil and gas. To produce fuel from plastics, additional fossil fuels are used to generate the heat that converts them into petrochemicals that can be used as fuel.

“It adds an extra step,” said Veena Singla, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “They have to burn a lot of stuff to power the process that transforms the plastic.”

This ‘climate-friendly’ fuel comes with an astronomical cancer risk | Pollution | The Guardian

  Pharmaceutical giant Moderna announced Thursday that it brought in over $19 billion in revenue and $8.4 billion in profits in 2022 thanks primarily to its Covid-19 vaccine.

“Moderna’s revenue in 2022 alone is equivalent to the combined health budgets of 68 countries,” Maaza Seyoum, Global South convenor of the People’s Vaccine Alliance, said in response to Moderna’s earnings report. “Already, the company expects to make more from the vaccine in 2023 than the combined health budgets of 42 countries.” 

Moderna sold $18.4 billion worth of its coronavirus vaccine—the company’s only product on the market—last year while rejecting calls to share critical technology with the rest of the world, denying low-income countries the ability to quickly produce lifesaving shots for their populations.

Tim Bierley, a pharma campaigner at Global Justice Now, said, “History will not be kind to Moderna, whose scandalous profits are a direct result of the company’s refusal to share vaccine technology with the Global South, even when it was clear that global shortages would be deadly.” He added, “Millions of people around the world are now grieving the loss of family members, many of whom were unable to get a Covid-19 vaccine.” Bierley continued, “Moderna’s pandemic profiteering is even more shocking given that the U.S. public-funded 100% of this vaccine’s development. Now the company is brazenly threatening to hike prices on its vaccine…”

Moderna’s 2022 Windfall a ‘Scandalous’ Result of Pandemic Profiteering, Campaigners Say (commondreams.org)

 When it comes to nationalistic zeal, there is nothing at all with which socialists can identify, for both are abstractions that have imbued the workers of the region with a false consciousness that prevents them identifying their real interests.

The label Ukrainian or Russian camouflage the bigger and more permanent label of ‘working class’, a label most caught up in the present crisis could, if challenged, identify with.

 And as the warring camps continue to vent their hatreds we can only maintain that there is more that unites them as members of that exploited majority, with the same basic needs and desires than can ever divide them along religious or national lines. For the real conflict is yet to be waged – that between ourselves, the exploited, and the master class – though with ideas, not rifles and cannon.

As socialists, we side with no leaders or any  faction, taking no sides in their wars over territory; for we have the insight to see where disagreements over resources, such as oil and water, and artificial borders lead and in whose interests such conflicts are waged. Our thoughts lie with the exploited majority – the common folk – who continue to pay the price of power politics, and eagerly await the day when they have the chance, along with their counterparts the world over, to at last vote for themselves and, more, in their own interests, a world devoid of Putins, Bidens, and Zelenkys and the misery their games bring.

Once we recognise that as a class we have shared basic needs and desires, suffering the same privations because of our less privileged position in the relations of production, and unite in defiance of that minority intent on maintaining the status quo and its bellicose insanity, we need never fear the horror of war again.

As socialists we certainly do not need to re-define our war. The war we must fight to end the insanity and horror capitalism would bring us into is the class war. And this can not be fought with missiles, but something more powerful – our minds, our imagination, our solidarity and preparedness to unite as the majority exploited class and to wrest control of the planet from the madmen before it is to late.

As socialists, as observers of international affairs and commentators on the way they impinge upon the lives of our fellow workers, we are well attuned to the machinations of the elites of powerful countries as they seek to promote the interests of their corporate backers. Though it is no easy task for the uninitiated, we urge our fellow workers to be as vigilant as ever. To believe the arguments of the likes of Biden and Putin is to disarm yourself intellectually – for it is at times like the present, when the media is dancing to the tunes of governments, when the trumpets of jingoism, patriotism and reaction are sounding, that we need to be fighting the war of ideas with a little more gusto.

Nationalist conflict has raged for many long years around the globe. What, in all honesty, have any of the victors gained? What is the ‘independence’ they yearn after, if it means being trapped within borders – artificial constructs, no, prisons – inside of the bigger prison of capitalism?

The solution to the ongoing insanity, we insist, remains the same. There is one world and we exist as one people in need of each other and with the same basic needs. There is far more that unites us than can ever divide us along cultural, nationalistic or religious lines. Together we can create a civilisation worth living in, but before that happens we need the conscious cooperation of ordinary people across the world, united in one common cause – to create a world in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation, a world without borders or frontiers, social classes or leaders and a world in which production is at last freed from the artificial constraints of profit and used for the good of humanity – socialism.

Are you with us? Don’t take too long to think of a reply – the doomsday clock really is ticking.

 A former US ambassador, Daniel Kurtzer, who served in Tel Aviv during the George W Bush administration,  accused Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government of breaking a written agreement with Washington by legalising a group of hardline nationalist and religious settlements in the West Bank.

 He warned that some ministers in Netanyahu’s new coalition are not interested in a peace agreement with the Palestinians.

 He called on the Biden administration to be more proactive in stopping Israel’s “creeping annexation” of the West Bank.

Kurtzer said he is also concerned about Israel’s plans to press ahead with building settlements in an area just outside Jerusalem known as E1.

“If Israel builds there as they want to build, it would effectively cut the West Bank in two,” he said.

The retroactive authorisation of the nine so-called outposts earlier this month, alongside plans to build thousands of new homes in larger West Bank settlements, is a further blow to a deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

“It’s also a significant violation of a commitment that the Israeli government made in writing to the American government back in 2004 when, in a letter to the then Bush administration, Israel undertook to dismantle illegal outposts, illegal settlements,” he said. “Now you’ve come full circle. Not only are they not dismantling these illegal outposts, but they’re trying to legalise them ex post facto. And there have been many that have been built since that time so that the number is really quite significant.”

“If Israel is still interested in a peace process, it’s going to have to stop a number of the actions that it’s it’s taking. It’s going to have to start doing some things that it’s not doing,” he said.

Former US ambassador accuses Israel of ‘creeping annexation’ of the West Bank | Israel | The Guardian

“Corresponding disasters every night on the TV

Sickening reality keep gripping me in its guts

All my friends talk and joke and laugh about Armageddon

But like a nightmare it’s still waiting there

At the end of each and every day”

War Baby, Tom Robinson.

It becomes more dire every day. How do you cope? Immersion in sports and soap operas?

Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”

Edward L. Bernays. Propaganda 1928

Karl Marx had an explanation: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”

 Education or indoctrination into becoming a wage slave?

‘I learned our Government must be strong;

It’s always right and never wrong;

Our leaders are the finest men

And we elect them again and again’

Pete Seeger

 Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

‘Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori’ – It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.

From a Latin Ode by the Roman, Horace.

First World War poet, Wilfred Owen knocked that one out of the park:

“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.”

NUCLEOMITUPHOBIA  is anxiety or a phobia in the face of a potential future nuclear holocaust.

Up until January 24th 2023, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists doomsday clock stood at 100 seconds to midnight.

On that date it was changed to ninety seconds to midnight.

On a Saturday in January, 2018, anyone with a Hawaiian telephone number received this message:

‘Ballistic Missile threat inbound to Hawaii

Seek Immediate Shelter. This is not a drill.’

 It was. The text had been sent as “accidentality”

 Donovan’s 1965 anti-Vietnam song, The War Drags On still resonates today.

Last night, poor Dan had a nightmare it seems

One kept occurrin’ and reoccurrin’ in his dreams

Cities full of people burnin’, screamin’, shoutin’ loud

And right there overhead, a great orange mushroom cloud

And there’s no more war

For there’s no, no more world.

Heavy Metal bands were on the ball too.

Black Sabbath’s War Pigs. 1970

“Politicians hide themselves away

They only started the war

Why should they go out to fight?

They leave that role to the poor, yeah’

Iron Maiden said, hold my beer:  Two Minutes to Midnight.  1984

‘As the mad men play on words

And make us all dance to their song

To the tune of starving millions

To make a better kind of gun ‘

The  Edwin Starr timeless classic, War, What is it good for? poses a question:

‘They say we must fight to keep our freedom but there’s got to be a better way,

War, What is it good for? You tell me (nothing)

Stand up and shout it  (nothing)’

Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s,  When Two Tribes Go To War official video had it right, Let the “leaders” fight it out amongst themselves. Reagan and Chernenko were featured in the video. Better still, let’s abolish leaders along with capitalism.

 In August 1914, the Socialist Party of Great Britain Executive Committee said:

  Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our good will and Socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of Socialism

THE WORLD FOR THE WORKERS!

 Clifford Slapper wrote in the Socialist Standard, July 1984 of the Greenham Common Peace Camp:

 ‘Perhaps they don’t know, or don’t care, that socialists alone have opposed every single war this century, not just before they began, but during and after them too, even where this meant incarceration in prison for many of our members during both World Wars. We do not sneer at the opposition to war of millions of our fellow workers. But how is this opposition to be turned into a practical movement, which will be effective in ending all war?’

‘Your old road is rapidly agin’

Please get out of the new one

If you can’t lend your hand

For the times they are a-changin’

Bob Dylan. The Times They Are A-Changin

Capitalism is on notice that the revolution will happen. Socialists work toward a peaceful transition from capitalism to a global sane society which is dependent upon us all  ‘getting together.’ Capitalist, the choice is yours…

‘Hand out the arms and ammo

We’re going to blast our way through here

We’ve got to get together sooner or later

Because the revolution’s here and you know it’s right.’

Thunder Clap Newman. Something In The Air.

Dave C.

 “Ukraine is certainly not seen here as something with a clear moral tale to tell. When brown or black people get bombed or shocked-and-awed, it does not matter, but with white people it is supposed to be different.” Arundhati Roy 

  Russia is selling its military products to more than 50 countries. 

“We have a stable portfolio of export orders, which amounted to $50-$55 billion of US dollars (over 3 trillion rubles). The tendency remains approximately the same at present,” the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation (FSVTS) has told TASS.

Russia sells its military products to over 50 states, demand stable — federal service – Military & Defense – TASS

 Sales of U.S. military equipment to foreign governments rose 49% to $205.6 billion. Sales approved included $13.9 billion worth of F-15ID fighter jets to Indonesia, $6.9 billion worth of Multi-Mission Surface Combatant ships to Greece, and $6 billion worth of M1A2 Abrams tanks to Poland.

There are two major ways foreign governments purchase arms from U.S. companies: direct commercial sales negotiated between a government and a company, and foreign military sales in which a foreign government typically contacts a Defense Department official at the U.S. embassy in its capital. 

The direct military sales by U.S. companies rose 48.6% to $153.7 billion in fiscal 2022 from $103 billion in fiscal 2021, while sales arranged through the U.S. government rose 49.1% to $51.9 billion in 2022 from $34.8 billion the prior year. 

U.S. arms exports up 49% in fiscal 2022 | Reuters