Capitalism will destroy the planet. The environment is ours, lets protect it.

They want us to forget this. But it won't forget us

It should come as no surprise that things are not going well in Japan in the aftermath of the worst nuclear disaster in human history.

Apparently, high levels of Strontium 90 have been discovered in the ground water around the Fukushima nuclear power plant after an earthquake and tsunami two years ago caused three reactor meltdowns. Strontium 90 is a by-product of the fission of uranium and plutonium in nuclear reactors as well as nuclear weapons according to experts.

Reports say that the level of strontium 90 have increased a hundredfold between December 2012 and May of this year.  This level of strontium 90 is more than 30 times the legal limit.

It is becoming apparent that the Tokyo Electric Power Company, (TEPCO) a private company, cannot adequately clean up the mess that the nuclear facility created.   The Fukushima disaster displaced 50,000 households and caused untold damage.  In fact, the level of environmental degradation will not be known for years, maybe centuries and the same applies to the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

TEPCO has received a massive infusion of taxpayer dollars (or Yen in this case) in order to help it pay claims as a result of the disaster.  Another example of public funds paying for private sector disasters much like the bail out of the banksters after the collapse of the capitalist economy in 2007.

We have blogged about this disaster many times and remind our readers that one has to wonder at why anyone would put a nuclear power plant on an earthquake fault in a region known as the “Ring of Fire” due to its seismic activity and right next to the ocean in a land that gave us the word “Tsunami”. You can check out these pieces here.

With environmental disaster like these we have to recognize that the level of destruction is hardly known.  In the case of Fukushima as well as the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, we will not know the extent of the damage for many years, perhaps decades.  The Blue Fin Tuna for example spawns in the Gulf of Mexico and we cannot possibly tell the extent of the damage to the habitat and lives of these creatures or other marine life until such damage manifests itself but it is obvious to anyone with a brain that it will be extensive. 

More on the BP spill here.

The most important thing for us to understand is that capitalism cannot prevent such disasters.  Capitalism cannot resolve the environmental crisis and, to be honest, environmental catastrophe. By its very nature capitalism is destructive to the environment and to human society.  It is a system of production that is based on the accumulation of capital (or wealth) by private individuals. It is based on continuous and never ending growth.  But the planet cannot sustain such a system.

The capitalist mode of production will always put personal gain and capital accumulation above the need of human beings or the natural world that nurtures us, that we need to survive. It is inherent in its makeup.

We do not yet know the extent of the damage that Fukushima or the BP spill or any of the other numerous environmental catastrophes have caused.  That will manifest itself in the cancers, deaths, deformities, extinctions and other anomalies that arise because of them.

What we do know is that we have to transform our global society from one that produces the necessities of life based on profit to one that produces them based on social needs.

It’s that simple.  The alternative is not a good one: the end of life as we know it.

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Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Antiques Road Show

Hiroshima

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

I was just watching Antique's Road Show. I have to admit it, I like that show.  But an item one person brought was a document from her relative who was a radar operator on the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

The appraiser was very impressed with it.  But he then went on to say that they had no idea of what this bomb would do or its effect.  This is nonsense.  They had some idea, enough of an idea to know that it would kill every living thing within a considerable radius of impact.

The appraiser then said, reading some words from the log, that said they didn't know also whether or not the guys in the plane would not be killed by the blast.  The bomb was called "little boy" (these military types give some harmless type names to their murderous machines don't they).  He said also, in a nod to the dead, that the bomb killed 100,000 people, and I refuse to believe that they didn't know that, but he added that to invade Japan it would have cost a couple million lives.

This is the line the US bourgeois put out there.  It is not true.  Japan was a defeated nation.  The dropping of these horrific bombs on a defenseless civilian population, that not only killed more than 100,000  but poisoned millions more,  was not to crush Japanese resistance and "save" lives, it was a warning to the Russians and to the Chinese. It was US imperialism stamping its mark on the rest of the world, a warning that the eagle has landed.

The US is the only nation and the Democratic Party the only political party that has committed such atrocious acts of barbarism in dropping atomic bombs on defenseless civilians.  We should not forget that.

In this instance that I describe, the owner of the document also had the medals that the fliers got for dropping the bomb and risking their lives.

Kill two hundred thousand people and you get a medal.

There were plans to drop more atomic bombs if Japan didn't surrender. Of course, the ruling class refused to surrender but by some accounts 97% of Japanese cities had been destroyed and the mass of the population was fed up with the war.  But US capitalism was triumphant.  The productive forces of its allies had been weakened and the productive forces of its rivals destroyed.  The European colonial giants had found their place in the dustbin of history after two disastrous and costly global capitalist wars for control of the world's markets and resources.  US capitalism by 1950 had more than 50% of world trade and its productive forces intact. It had made a lot of money from the war and it's allies were indebted to it.

The anti-Japanese sentiment was such that a 1944 opinion poll that asked what should be done with 13% of the U.S. public were in favor of "killing off" all Japanese: men, women, and children. Opponents of the bombing argue as I have here that Japan was a defeated nation.  We should remember also the internment of Japanese here, including those who were American citizens. This had a traumatic effect on the entire Japanese population and their families. german or Italian Americans were not incarcerated in camps.  The most militant of the Japanese resisters to this atrocity were called the No No Boys. There is a book with the title No No Boys that is a novel but describes the tragic consequences of internment on Japanese Americans and their families.

Sorry, but I wouldn't want a medal for this.

There are many who reject the official US position on the bombings.

"As the United States dropped its atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, 1.6 million Soviet troops launched a surprise attack on the Japanese forces occupying eastern Asia. "The Soviet entry into the war played a much greater role than the atomic bombs in inducing Japan to surrender because it dashed any hope that Japan could terminate the war through Moscow's mediation", said Japanese historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, whose recently published Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan is based on recently declassified Soviet archives as well as US and Japanese documents." Wikipedia.

My father was a prisoner of war in Japan captured in Hong Kong in 1939.  He worked for Mitsubishi on the docks in Yokohama.  When his camp was liberated he was taken by an American ship to Mindanao and then on to Vancouver Washington.  He thought what happened to Japan was a terrible, terrible thing.  He loved the Americans and was in prison camp with many of them. As for their war dates, he always used to say jokingly to his American buddies, "The yanks always came in late, they call the 1914-18 war the 1917-18 war."  He never forgot the kindness Americans showed him as a liberated prisoner when they took him to Mindanao.

The US capitalist class is the most crass, vulgar and violent of all of them.  Engels explained it this way.  If we take the British bourgeois, they fought a few hundred year battle against feudalism.  They fought an ideological war in which they had to defend their ideas.  For the US capitalist class on the other hand it was a matter of simply wiping out a couple of million pastoral tribes people and building some infrastructure.

With all their talk of peace and democracy we should never forget that the only group of people in the world who have dropped nuclear weapons on highly populated civilian areas is the US bourgeois and their Democratic Party.

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Don't forget the victims of Fukushima.

Facts For Working people received the message below from a group helping the victims of this market driven disaster and want to share it with our readers. The website at the bottom is in Japanese.

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Here in Japan over 2,000,000 children, women and men who live in the Fukushima Prefecture where the 3 nuclear reactors that are in meltdown cannot be forgotten.

APRICOT has Launched - APRICOT is the Allied Psychotherapy Relief Initiative for the Children of Tohoku - Please click 'Like' on this page now to show your for support and care for the:

APRICOT CHILDREN
http://www.facebook.com/apricotchildren

APRICOT is a nonprofit that supports the children of Tohoku for the mid-term and long term 'heart mind care' work of mental health carers and the development of health care projects for all children affected by the triple disasters in the East Japan (Tohoku) region ...

APRICOT is you and me, your friends and anyone else with a loving heart and good mind to care about the hearts and minds of the children of East Japan .. a way for you to help contribute and so be a part of helping the Children of Tohoku come safely through all the new years of their Childhoods yet to come.. Please help to start this ball rolling into the New Year by simply clicking the 'Like' button on APRICOT's official Facebook Page and then sharing it on to all the good friends and people you know who have the heart to care and please get them to do the same! ... Support APRICOT CHILDREN now please:

APRICOT CHILDREN
http://www.facebook.com/apricotchildren

Website and contact: http://tokyocounseling.com/jp/apricot/

With kind thanks to you from Andrew of TEAM APRICOT

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