Hiroshima and Nagasaki Never Again!  Hiroshima August 7, 1945

The detonation of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima was a deeply sobering event for all Mankind.  The fact that man was capable of building a weapon with this kind of power meant that humans now had the ability to destroy every living thing on this planet. War-Related Disaster— Nuclear Weapons.  August 7 and 9 are the  anniversaries of the destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs and the murder of hundreds of thousands of their citizens. Annual demonstrations take place at the nuclear weapons laboratories in Livermore, California and Los Alamos, New Mexico, at the nuclear weapons test site in Nevada and at the bomb factory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee to demand nuclear disarmament now.     One of the long-standing myths of U.S. history is that atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to “save lives.” The story is that the bombings, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, were necessary to bring World War II to an end.     In reality, the decision was purely political. Leading generals and admirals opposed the bombing. It was ordered to demonstrate the ruthlessness of the U.S. government.     Ronald Takaki wrote, in his article on the subject in the July 31, 2005 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, “During the days before that fateful Aug. 6, 1945, Gen. Douglas MacArthur learned that Japan had asked Russia to negotiate a surrender. ‘We expected acceptance of the Japanese surrender daily,’ one of his staff members recalled. When he was notified that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, the general was livid. MacArthur declared that the atomic attack on Hiroshima was ‘completely unnecessary from a military point of view.’”     General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of allied forces in Europe and later president of the U.S., also called it “completely unnecessary” and later told an interviewer,” It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” Fleet Admiral William Leahy, the president’s chief of staff, believed that Japan would fall without the necessity of a land invasion. Leahy later wrote that, in dropping the bomb, “we had adopted an ethical standard common to barbarians of the dark ages.” (Eisenhower and Leahy quotes found at: HIROSHIMAWHO DISAGREED WITH THE ATOMIC BOMBING?Why they did it.) Why then did the president make the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima? In fact Truman gave an order not to bomb Nagasaki. A memo published in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, (May/June 1998), states that Truman “had given orders to stop atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids.’” — Dirty Harry in San Francisco So why was the bomb dropped? Why were Truman’s orders on the second bomb not obeyed? “Secretary of War Henry Stimson, for his part, regarded the atomic bomb as what he called the ‘master card’ of diplomacy towards Russia. However, he believed that sparring with the Soviet Union in the early spring, before the weapon was demonstrated, would be counterproductive. Before a mid-May meeting of a cabinet-level committee considering Far Eastern issues, Stimson observed that “the questions cut very deep and [were] powerfully connected with our success with S-1 [the atomic bomb Gar Alperovitz, in “Hiroshima: Historians Reassess” Foreign Policy (Summer 1995) No. 99: 15-34, where it is only available to subscribers; the section quoted is available online at page 4. A web version of the article on can be found at the National Center for Economic and Security Alternatives website. These new facts from history and Eisenhower’s memoirs show that the carnage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not to make Japan surrender and save American lives, but to warn the Soviet Union that the United States had the atomic bomb and its leaders were cold-blooded enough to use such a weapon of mass destruction. It was the opening salvo of the, “Cold War” and beginning of the process of “Pax Americana.”

“The System is Working”? The Latest Trump Indictments and Continuing Existential Threats You can hear the liberal Democrats clucking and see them smiling.  The “democratic American system,” they want you to know, “is working.”  Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump has been indicted for the third time and last Tuesday brought the big one: the federal indictment for January 6, for the attempted blocking of the peaceful transfer of power during and after the 2020 presidential election.     But is it really working, for “democracy” and “the people” – the American System, that is? This is the Minority Rule system whose Electoral College, voter suppression, Huxleyan and Orwellian media, and overall many-sided corporate oligarchy/plutocracy let the demented orange fascist  into the world’s most powerful office in the first place

The US Government Once Called Hiroshima and Nagasaki ‘Nuclear Tests’ Since the bombings, presidents have routinely offered rhetorical camouflage for reckless nuclear policies, rolling the dice for global catastrophe. In 1980, when I asked the press office at the U.S. Department of Energy to send me a listing of nuclear bomb test explosions, the agency mailed me an official booklet with the title “Announced United States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 Through December 1979.” As you’d expect, the Trinity test in New Mexico was at the top of the list. Second on the list was Hiroshima. Third was Nagasaki.

The Big Myth About “Free” Markets That Justified History’s Greatest Heist A recent book details how the top 10 percent stole $47 trillion via intellectual warfare.     The bank robber John Dillinger is one of history’s most famous thieves, absconding with the equivalent today of about $7 million. You’d think that if someone had stolen $7 million on each of 7 million separate crime sprees, you would have heard about it, right? But you would be wrong.     In 2020, the RAND Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica, California, released a study with the humdrum title “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.” RAND itself resides at the center of America’s establishment. In the decades following its founding after World War II, it was largely funded by and served the needs of the military-industrial complex. Daniel Ellsberg was working at RAND when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, which he had access to because RAND possessed several copies.   Incredibly enough, this dreary-sounding paper describes what might be the largest material theft since human civilization began. It examines a simple question: If U.S. income inequality had remained at its 1975 level through 2018, how much more money would the bottom 90 percent of Americans have made during these 43 years? Put another way, how much additional wealth flowed to the top 10 percent during this time, thanks to increased income equality?

Pride Before the Fall: Crisis of the Capitalist Establishment We are witnessing a profound crisis of legitimacy and moral decomposition of the entire capitalist system. Former US President Donald Trump’s latest legal drama is just one more in a ceaseless succession of establishment scandals, blunders and internecine disputes at all levels. From parliament, to the police, to the press, to religious institutions – every pillar of bourgeois rule is rotting from the inside out. Why is this happening, why now, and what does it mean for the class struggle?

Environment:

After World War II Rosa Luxenburg Coined the Slogan: ‘S0cialism or Barbaism’! Now the Slogan Should Be: ‘Ecosocialism or Ecocide’!

One of Many Ways to Begin to End Global Warming: Expose ‘Greenwashing’ — Tax the Polluters 100%!

Fossil Fuel Companies Owe the World Massive Reparations for Climate Breakdown The World Is Now Experiencing Some Of The Hottest Temperatures ever recorded, thanks to profiteering fossil fuel corporations. They owe us hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations for the havoc they’ve unleashed. We have entered uncharted territory when it comes to climate breakdown, after climate agencies declared the first week of July as the hottest week ever recorded. The hottest week on record comes in the wake of the hottest June on record. And all of the warmest eight years ever recorded have come since 2015, with 2016 being the warmest ever, followed by 2019 and 2020.     Skeptics might argue that these records have only been kept for a small portion of human history — global temperature records only date back to the 1850s. But the UN confirmed that over the course of July, fourteen days have recorded global surface air temperatures higher than 17 degrees Celsius — an increase that has not been seen over the course of the last 125,000 years.

Polluters Rely on Old Rhetoric to Block Clean Energy Future For 60 years, corporate polluters and their political allies have sought to slow and derail anti-pollution laws, often using the exact same arguments and wording. Today’s pushback against EPA proposals to cut CO2 emissions from power plants is no exception.     The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is considering proposals aimed at reducing climate-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from existing coal and gas-fueled power plants. Power plants are the second-largest source of greenhouse gases in the United States, and the pollution standards, which are open for public comment until August 8, will mark a new milestone in climate action. But the United States’ biggest polluters and their political allies are pushing back — just as they have resisted every other landmark shift in the 60-year history of federal air pollution control.

Four Factors Driving 2023’s Extreme Heat and Climate Disasters The extremes this year are sharper than anthropogenic global warming alone would be expected to cause.     Between the record-breaking global heat and extreme downpours, it’s hard to ignore that something unusual is going on with the weather in 2023.     People have been quick to blame climate change – and they’re right, to a point: Human-caused global warming does play the biggest role. A recent study determined that the weekslong heat wave in Texas and Mexico that started in June 2023 would have been virtually impossible without it.     However, the extremes this year are sharper than anthropogenic global warming alone would be expected to cause. Human activities that release greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere have been increasing temperatures gradually, at an average of 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit (0.1 Celsius) per decade.     Three additional natural factors are also helping drive up global temperatures and fuel disasters this year: El Niño, solar fluctuations and a massive underwater volcanic eruptionUnfortunately, these factors are combining in a way that is exacerbating global warming. Still worse, we can expect unusually high temperatures to continue through at least 2025, which means even more extreme weather in the near future.

Cardiovascular ER Visits Plunged After Pittsburgh Coal Plant Shut, Study Finds “Our analysis adds to the growing body of scientific evidence that policies implemented to regulate and reduce fossil fuel-related air pollution have real public health benefit,” said a study co-author.     Emergency room visits by people suffering heart attacks and strokes significantly decreased almost immediately after one of the largest coal-processing plants in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania shut down in 2016, a study published this week revealed.     The study—published in the journal Environmental Research: Health—found “immediate and/or longer-term cumulative local cardiovascular health benefits” after the January 2016 closure of the Shenango Coke Works on Pittsburgh’s Neville Island following millions of dollars in government fines for polluting the air and water over its 54 years of operation.