Will America’s Corruption End on
a Ventilator or in a Mushroom Cloud?
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.
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.
By Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies
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
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.
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“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.
