Russia on Monday (Oct 16) suspended all Japanese seafood imports in the aftermath of Tokyo’s release of wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant.
Previously, China had suspended the imports, saying that Tokyo has not proved the authenticity and accuracy of the nuclear wastewater data, nor that the ocean discharge of the water is harmless to the marine environment and human health.
China was Japan’s biggest market for fish, accounting for more than $500 million worth of exports in 2022.
Japan recently released treated radioactive water into the sea from its defunct nuclear reactor in Fukushima after the International Atomic Energy Agency approved the plan. ………………………………………………
What did Russia say?
Ever since it released the treated water, Japan has faced the wrath of some nations and a number of environmentalists.
Japan has also criticised Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, while Tokyo’s relations with Beijing, which has deepened ties with Moscow, have worsened.
As reported by the news agency AFP, Rosselkhoznadzor, Russia’s body responsible for regulating agriculture products, said that as a “precautionary measure”, it was “joining China’s provisional restrictive measures on the import of fish and seafood products from Japan as of October 16, 2023”.
World Nuclear News, 09 October 2023 #nuclear #anti-nuclear #nucler-free #NoNukes
The in-service date for the second AP1000 plant at the site near Waynesboro, Georgia, has been revised after a motor fault was discovered in a reactor coolant pump. Meanwhile, Georgia Power has agreed to pay the plant’s co-owner Oglethorpe Power Corporation USD308 million in settlement of an ongoing dispute.
The motor fault in one of the unit’s four reactor coolant pumps – or RCPs – was discovered during start-up and pre-operational testing, Georgia Power said in a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)……………………………
Southern Nuclear believes that the motor fault on the RCP at Vogtle 4 is an isolated event, the companies said. The projected schedule for Vogtle 4 “primarily depends on the continued progression of pre-operational testing and start-up”, it added: “As testing continues, new challenges also may continue to be identified, which may result in required engineering changes or remediation related to plant systems, structures, or components (some of which are based on new technology that only within the last few years began initial operation in the global nuclear industry at this scale). These challenges may result in further schedule delays and/or cost increases.”
Dispute settled
In the same SEC filing, Georgia Power and its parent, Southern Company, announced the agreement with Oglethorpe Power to resolve a dispute regarding cost-sharing and tender provisions of the joint ownership agreements relating to Vogtle units 3 and 4. Georgia Power has agreed to make a payment of USD308 million to Oglethorpe for a portion of Oglethorpe’s previously incurred construction costs, as well as paying a portion of Oglethorpe’s further construction costs for the units – around USD105 million – based on the current capital cost forecast. It will also pay 66% of Oglethorpe’s costs of construction with respect to any amounts above the current project capital cost forecast. The parties have agreed to dismiss pending litigation on this issue, including counterclaims by Georgia Power.
Georgia Power resolved a similar dispute with another of the plant’s co-owners, the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia (MEAG Power) in September 2022. Similar litigation with the other co-owner, Dalton Utilities, is still pending.
Construction of the two Westinghouse AP1000s began in 2013. Unit 3 ………………… Plant Vogtle is jointly owned by Georgia Power (45.7%), Oglethorpe (30%), MEAG Power (22.7%) and Dalton Utilities (1.6%).
French power giant EDF’s future investments could exceed €20 billion per year, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, the country’s energy transition minister, said on Thursday (28 September), adding that the exact level was the subject of discussion.
The state-owned utility is facing a mountain of investment needs to maintain its nuclear fleet as well as build new reactors and renewable power production. EDF CEO Luc Rémont had previously put the investments at €25 billion. “What we are talking about … for EDF is investments which could reach … more than €20 billion per year,” Pannier-Runacher said at a nuclear conference organised by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
“There is a discussion about whether it is 20 (billion) or whether it is more,” she added. The French government has previously announced a plan to build at least six new model nuclear reactors, which Pannier-Runacher said would cost about €3 billion per year in investments.
BBC News By Peter Hoskins, Business reporter 2 October Britain’s biggest defence firm, BAE Systemshas won a £3.95bn ($4.82bn) contract to build a new generation of submarines as the security pact between the US, UK and Australia moves ahead.
In March, the three countries announced details of the so-called Aukus pact to provide Australia with nuclear-powered attack submarines by the late 2030s.
The pact aims to counter China’s ambitions in the Indo-Pacific region.
Beijing has strongly criticised the three countries over the deal.
……………………..”This multi-billion-pound investment in the Aukus submarine programme will help deliver the long-term hunter-killer submarine capabilities the UK needs to maintain our strategic advantage and secure our leading place in a contested global order,” UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said as the Conservative party conference got under way in Manchester.
………………….Other major UK defence contractors are also getting a boost from the Aukus deal.
End of the American Dream. Life As You Have Known It Will Never Be The Same Again… by Michael
It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the Military Industrial Complex to our society. It employs millions of people, and it brings in hundreds of billions of dollars each year. The Military Industrial Complex has always been one of the central pillars of our economy, and these days business is booming thanks to the war in Ukraine and the possibility of a war with China. Needless to say, those that run the Military Industrial Complex want the gravy train to continue, and so politicians that are pro-war are showered with campaign contributions. In both major parties, politicians that are pro-war greatly outnumber those that are anti-war, and that is not likely to change any time soon.
Smedley D. Butler fought in four major conflicts, and in 1935 he astutely observed that “war is a racket”…
“WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
If the Military Industrial Complex suddenly disappeared, it would leave a giant, gaping hole in our economy that would be extremely difficult to fill. In an excellent piece that he posted earlier this week, Richard C. Cook shared some numbers about the Military Industrial Complex that are absolutely astounding…
Today about 2.1 million people are employed by the defense industry. According to Acara Solutions, a major MIC recruiting firm, their average annual salary is $106,700, 40 percent higher than the national average. The companies they work for produced revenues in 2022 of $741 billion. How much of their production is high-priced junk, no one knows. The performance of U.S.-produced armaments in the Ukraine conflict does not seem impressive. No modern U.S. weapons have ever been tested in an industrial-type war against an equal adversary.
The MIC also includes active-duty uniformed personnel of 1.37 million and reserves of 849,000. There are 750 U.S. military bases in more than 80 countries outside of the U.S. More than 100,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed in Europe. Annual salary and benefits of the military are currently $146 billion per year, escalating with COLAs compounded at two to three percent annually, sometimes more. Some former U.S. military personnel are assumed to be fighting in Ukraine as mercenaries or helping direct the fighting from safe locations like Kiev or Lvov.
Then there are the civilian employees. According to the DoD, it employs more than 700,000 civilians “in an array of critical positions worldwide,” with compensation totaling about $70 billion. According to the Government Accountability Office, we may also add 560,000 contractor employees, whose compensation is typically higher than the career workforce.
We can also add hundreds of thousands of executives, managers, employees and contractors of the three-letter Deep State agencies, such as the CIA, NSA, DEA, FBI, and now DHS, etc., who interface with the MIC day in and day out and are part of the same fabric of state-sanctioned force and enemy identification and interdiction.
In the entire history of the world, we have never seen anything quite like this.
And the Military Industrial Complex absolutely loves Joe Biden, because he has promised to keep the war in Ukraine going “for as long as it takes”…
It is likely that billions of people around the world view the conflict in Ukraine as a proxy war being waged by the U.S. against Russia. US President Joe Biden has pledged to aid Ukraine’s pursuit of victory “for as long as it takes,” without defining what the end state might be. Russian President Vladimir Putin has interpreted U.S. intentions to mean a fight “to the last Ukrainian.”
Unfortunately, there is a problem.
The Ukrainians are running out of warm bodies.
They have literally been grabbing men off the streets and throwing them into vans, but we didn’t care because it wasn’t our sons that were being forced to go to war.
Many Americans cheered when the Ukrainians began their ill-fated “counter-offensive”, but it turned out to be a disaster.
A senior U.S. intel official recently admitted to journalist Seymour Hersh that Ukraine has suffered approximately 75,000 casualties during this counter-offensive…
“There is no discussion in his headquarters or in the Biden White House of a ceasefire and no interest in talks that could lead to an end to the slaughter,” Hersh said.
Speaking of the Ukrainian claims of slow progress in an offensive that has lost an estimated 75,000 casualties, the official told Hersh: “It’s all lies.”
On many battlefields in Ukraine, there are unburied dead bodies just laying around all over the place.
As the anniversary of the purported Biden Regime sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline approaches Sept. 26, veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh blamed a ”secret disinformation operation“ by CIA and MI-6 for misleading the public about the disastrous state of the US-led war effort.
“The war is over. Russia has won. There is no Ukrainian offensive anymore, but the White House and the American media have to keep the lie going,“ a senior US intel official told Hersh. “The truth is if the Ukrainian army is ordered to continue the offensive, the army would mutiny. The soldiers aren’t willing to die any more, but this doesn’t fit the B.S. that is being authored by the Biden White House.”
Where do we go from here?
The Military Industrial Complex certainly does not want this conflict to end, and Joe Biden has no intention of backing down.
So more warm bodies will be needed.
That is one of the reasons why there has been so much chatter about bringing back the draft here in the United States.
Recruitment has been way down in recent years, but our leaders desperately want to win this war with Russia and they also want to be ready to fight a war with China over Taiwan.
And so the stage is being set to draft young American boys and young American girls into military service…
The most recent edition of the US Army War College’s academic journal includes a highly disturbing essay on what lessons the US military should take away from the continuing war in Ukraine. By far the most concerning and most relevant section for the average American citizen is a subsection entitled “Casualties, Replacements, and Reconstitutions” which, to cut right to the chase, directly states, “Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.”
The context for this supposed need to reinstate conscription is the estimate that were the US to enter into a large-scale conflict, every day it would likely suffer thirty-six hundred casualties and require eight hundred replacements, again per day. The report notes that over the course of twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US suffered fifty thousand casualties, a number which would likely be reached in merely two weeks of large-scale intensive combat.
The military is already facing an enormous recruiting shortfall. Last year the army alone fell short of its goal by fifteen thousand soldiers and is on track to be short an additional twenty thousand this year. On top of that, the report notes that the Individual Ready Reserve, which is composed of former service personnel who do not actively train and drill but may be called back into active service in the event they are needed, has dropped from seven hundred thousand in 1973 to seventy-six thousand now.
Do you want your children to be fed into a meat grinder on the other side of the globe?
If not, it is time to stand up and say something………………………………………………………………………………………
We need to pull back from the brink before it is too late.
But our leaders won’t do that.
They don’t want to upset the Military Industrial Complex.
Unfortunately, we could also soon find ourselves in a war with China……………………………………………
The Military Industrial Complex wants to make even more money, and our politicians want to keep the campaign contributions rolling in.
So we will continue to speed toward a date with the unthinkable as the fate of our society hangs in the balance.
The U.S. government has embarked upon the first comprehensive modernization of its strategic nuclear arsenal since the Cold War ended three decades ago. The Department of Defense is simultaneously developing a new generation of ballistic-missile submarines, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers.
Collectively, these three systems are referred to as the strategic “triad.” Every nuclear posture review conducted by the government since the Soviet Union collapsed—there have been five counting Biden’s—has endorsed the triad as the best approach to assuring nuclear deterrence.
During the Cold War, each leg of the triad was periodically modernized. However, with the waning of the Soviet threat, improvement slowed. As a result, the nuclear arsenal has aged markedly. With great-power competition now restored to prominence in the nation’s defense strategy, the deterrent is overdue for revitalization.
The most recent authoritative estimate of nuclear-weapons costs, produced by the Congressional Budget Office in July, projects that the Department of Defense and Department of Energy will spend $247 billion during the ten years ending in 2032 to modernize the nuclear force.
An even larger amount will be allocated in subsequent years, delivering revenues to hundreds of companies. For instance, industrial conglomerate TextronTXT-1.1% will provide reentry-vehicle technology for carrying nuclear warheads, and BoeingBA-2% hopes to build a successor to the E-4B flying command post (popularly known as the Doomsday plane).
However, four companies are poised to dominate modernization of the nuclear arsenal, each of them ultimately realizing tens of billions of dollars in sales.
Northrop Grumman NOC+0.5%is the big winner in this generation’s round of competitions to rebuild the nuclear force. ……………… The company thus finds itself firmly ensconced as a key contractor on all three legs of the triad for decades to come—an unprecedented achievement in the history of the nuclear program.
General Dynamics, a Virginia-based defense and aerospace conglomerate, will build the 12 Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines destined to carry two-thirds of U.S. strategic warheads, just as it built the existing Ohio class of strategic subs……….. Today it is the world’s leading producer of undersea warships, supporting modernization of both the U.S. and United Kingdom nuclear deterrents.
Lockheed Martin LMT-0.3%is the world’s biggest military contractor, and will play a number of roles in nuclear modernization. The Maryland-based company has built every generation of submarine-launched ballistic missile from the early Polaris weapons to today’s Trident II D5……………………………………………………………………………………..
Like General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin contributes to my think tank.
Global energy ministers met in Paris this week to discuss how to kick-start a new age of atomic power. Installed capacity must triple to 1,160 gigawatts by 2050, the Nuclear Energy Agency says. In the west, many countries’ goals will hinge on attracting private capital to a sector with a tarnished record.
Recent large projects in the US and Europehave run over budget and into delays. New, small reactors that can be built in factories by companies such as NuScale and Rolls-Royce to reduce risks are an exciting prospect. For larger projects in particular, governments will have to offer incentives and guarantees that will not always sit comfortably with taxpayers. ………..
France and the UK have ambitious targets. The UK is a test case for investor appetite to fund new plants. It wants to secure funding for the 3.2GW Sizewell C project, using a regulated asset base financing model. RAB …. offers investors returns during construction. That avoids the accumulation of interest on debt that would normally be paid off when projects open.
Households contribute to the financing via a surcharge on their energy bills. For that reason, it is not popular with consumer groups. Opposition will grow especially as investors will want the risk of any budget blow-ups to be shared with bill-payers, at least 50-50. Governments have unpopular decisions to make to achieve their nuclear aims.
The dominant player in France’s energy sector, Electricité de France (EDF), must leave room for smaller energy providers who offer an innovative alternative to the national nuclear energy champion model, writes Philippe Girard.
Philippe Girard is CEO of E-Pango and an expert in energy and electricity markets.
As the International Energy Agency has recently warned, Europe could face a very difficult winter this year despite coping impressively with the challenges of sky-high natural gas prices that followed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Surprisingly, France needs to prepare to face another energy crisis this winter.
France’s nuclear energy sector has been hailed as the best in Europe, if not the world, for decades. France’s once robust nuclear sector, responsible for 70% of its energy production, should have positioned the country as a dominant force in Europe’s energy landscape.
However, in 2022, France was forced to import electricity from Germany, Spain and the UK when a significant proportion of France’s nuclear reactors had to close for unscheduled maintenance. How did this happen?
Many analysts attribute France’s current energy crisis to a combination of external factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, inconsistent government policies and plain bad luck. Yet, pinning this crisis on these factors alone would be a mistake.
The story behind France’s energy sector turmoil is intimately linked to the machine behind it all, Electricité de France (EDF), the state-controlled energy company. Years of poor decision-making and mismanagement have eroded the country’s nuclear advantage, resulting in France importing energy rather than exporting it……………………………………………………………………….
In a landscape dominated by EDF, its responsibility must be questioned. By the end of 2022, EDF’s debts had reached a staggering €64.5 billion, making it one of the most heavily indebted companies globally. The full acquisition of EDF by the French State in 2023 was crucial for the company’s survival. Presently, the French government needs to boost EDF’s revenues without imposing higher electricity expenses on consumers. At the same time, it must navigate the delicate path of avoiding prosecution by the European Commission for potential infringements related to illegal state aid and distortion of competition.
The importance of preventing one dominant player from having a quasi-monopoly on non-intermittent capacity cannot be understated. In the case of EDF, it has negatively impacted the European and UK electricity markets.
Considering the turmoil caused by EDF and its place within the French energy ecosystem, ending EDF’s monopoly on the energy sector by diversifying energy providers and embracing innovation should be the way forward. Smaller energy providers offer an innovative alternative to the national champion model.
China’s imports of seafood from Japan slumped last month as Tokyo started to release treated waste water from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant. Imports of Japanese seafood fell 67.6% in August from the same month last year, China’s customs authority said.
Japan’s ministry of agriculture and fisheries says China was the world’s top importer of the country’s seafood. Last year, Asia’s largest economy imported 84.4 billion yen ($571m; £461m) of seafood from its neighbour. The sharp fall came as Japan prepared to start releasing the waste water and in the aftermath of the release.
So reads a quote from an arms industry executive in a recent Reuters article titled “At London arms fair, global war fears are good for business” about Europe’s biggest arms show, the biennial Defence and Security Equipment International. You will probably be unsurprised to learn that Reuters does not name the war profiteer whose quote inspired their headline.
War is good for business, and it’s expected to get even better. The world’s largest military contractor Lockheed Martin saw its stock rise by a whopping 37 percent last year — helped along by taxpayer-sponsored stock buybacks — and in a report titled “Lockheed Martin: Huge Growth Ahead”, an investment analyst for AlmaStreet Capital predicted last month that Lockheed’s massive profits will only continue to climb. Calling the escalated geopolitical tensions in the current political atmosphere “the most favorable condition that Lockheed Martin could possibly operate under,” the article’s author writes the following:
“Governments worldwide are increasing their budget for defense and security under this heightened geopolitical tensions worldwide. The US government is not an exception. As the largest contractor to the US government, Lockheed Martin is bound to be the biggest beneficiary of the increased defense budget. Given that the company already reached approximately 8% of YoY net sales growth in 2Q23, I believe escalating geopolitical tensions along with easing macroeconomic conditions would allow Lockheed Martin to soon achieve double-digit growth in net sales by the end of the year.”
So it’s no wonder that Lockheed CEO James Taiclet called the most recent hike in the US military budget “as good an outcome as our industry or our company could ask for.” There are vast fortunes riding on governments equipping themselves to kill large numbers of human beings.
There’s a popular quote, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” commonly attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti but most likely coined by Kurt Vonnegut’s son Mark. Whenever I read reports like this about corporations raking in billions from death, suffering, and extremely dangerous acts of brinkmanship between military powers, I always find that phrase “a profoundly sick society” rattling around in my head.
It’s hard to imagine a society sicker than one in which corporations are not only allowed to profit from war and militarism, but to actually push for more of it using campaign donations, lobbying, and the funding of influential warmongering think tanks. It’s no less evil than if corporations were allowed to slaughter foreigners like livestock and sell their body parts for profit at industrial scale; the only thing that’s different is the payment plan. And yet the people who do this are celebrated as respected job creators instead of thrown into cages like the monsters they are.
This is not the sort of civilization we should strive to be well-adjusted to. It is no sign of health to be well-adjusted to a society in which someone can become a billionaire selling weapons of mass murder after lobbying the government to perpetrate those murders. It is no sign of health to be well-adjusted to a society in which the military industrial complex launders information through the media to promote its deadly products and agendas. It is no sign of health to be well-adjusted to a society in which war profiteering corporations can reap massive quarterly profits in a proxy war that was provoked by the west while pouring fortunes into think tanks which helped manufacture consent for those provocations and which spin the west’s actions in a positive light for the media.
If this society could give rise to something so depraved as the military industrial complex, then it is not the sort of society we should seek to blend in with. This is the sort of society we should want to stick out like a sore thumb in. The sort of society in which we should be swimming against the current when everyone else is swimming with it. The sort of society in which we say a resounding NO to things that everyone else is saying yes to.
This society has failed as spectacularly as anything can possibly fail. We live in a mind-controlled dystopia where war profiteers get to steer public policy, where the entire biosphere is being fed into the wood chipper of global capitalism while we rapidly accelerate toward nuclear armageddon. This is the most insane civilization anyone could possibly design. We should seek dissent and divergence from it to the fullest extent possible.
1\Investors in the UK’s next nuclear power plant, Sizewell C, will face “strict national security checks” by the government, after the state last year bought out a Chinese company’s stake in the project.
Britain opened the private investment process on Monday for the 3.2 gigawatt nuclear power plant that’s being built by Electricite de France SA. Companies will have to demonstrate that they meet key criteria before starting negotiations on Sizewell C, including experience in delivering major infrastructure projects, according to a statement.
The UK is particularly sensitive about which countries it allows into its nuclear infrastructure. The administration last year took over China General Nuclear Power Corp.’s stake in EDF’s Sizewell project following concerns over national security.
Still, being too picky may make it difficult to get investors for the projects that need billions of dollars of spending, and also brings the risk of cost overruns and delays.
Eve Ottenberg / CounterPunch SCHEERPOST, September 18, 2023
Last month, President Joe “No Comment on Hawaii” Biden’s Twitter boosters hurried to claim that the measly $700 he initially boasted of for Maui fire victims was but the first installment of more generous help to come. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and even with Biden’s added ingredients, the pudding’s comparatively pretty thin and watery. On August 30, Biden pledged $95 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to aid Mauli’s rebuilding. It remains to see how far that goes – thousands of homes burnt to the ground. With an average home price in the most affected area, Lahaina, coming in at a cool million dollars, Biden’s promised bonanza, made after his disastrous hegira to Hawaii, may not stretch far.
Meanwhile, the Biden bunch showers billions on the most corrupt government in Europe and possibly in the world, namely Ukraine, whose American-gifted weapons flame into action all over the Middle East and in the hands of Mexican drug cartels (whose dangers are small potatoes compared to this past week’s massive, reckless and wildly provocative clinker of NATO wargames in the Black Sea), but when it comes to actual needy Americans – well, they aren’t worth as much as Washington’s imperial clients……………………………………………………………..
We do NOT need billions for Kiev kleptocrats. We do not need trillions for that ravenous monster python called the military industrial complex, busy devouring the last bloody scraps of the heart of the American economy. Washington should begin planning – yesterday……………………………………………………………………………… more https://scheerpost.com/2023/09/18/bidenomics-millions-to-rebuild-maui-billions-for-ukraine/.
“Deals done at DSEI will cause misery across the world, causing global instability, and devastate people’s lives,” one peace activist lamented.
Military-industrial complex players big and small gathered in London this week, hawking everything from long-range missiles to gold-plated pistols to arms fair attendees—including representatives of horrific human rights violators—as weapon-makers and other merchants of the machinery of death reap record profits.
“War is good for business,” one defense executive attending the biennial Defense and Security Equipment International (DSEI) conference at ExCel London flat-out told Reuters. “We are extremely busy,” Michael Elmore, head of sales at the U.K.-based armored steelmaker MTL Advanced, told the media agency.
Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and the West’s scramble to arm Ukrainian homeland defenders have been a bonanza for arms-makers.
“Ukraine is a very interesting combination of First and Second World War technologies and very modern technology,” Kuldar Vaarsi, CEO of the Estonian unmanned ground vehicle firm MILREM, told Reuters.
Saber-rattling and fearmongering by government, media, and business figures amid rising tensions between the U.S. and its allies on one side, and a fast-rising China on the other, have also spurred military spending, including Japan’s $320 billion buildup announced last December.
“We think this is a longer-term essentially ‘sea change’ in national defense strategy for the U.S. and for our Western allies,” Jim Taiclet, CEO of U.S. arms giant Lockheed Martin, told investors during a call earlier this summer announcing higher-than-expected sales and profit outlooks.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States, Russia, France, China, and Germany were the world’s top arms exporters from 2018-22, with the five nations accounting for 76% of all weapons exports during that period. The U.S. accounted for nearly 40% of such exports during those five years, while increasing its dominance in the arms trade. The U.S. also remains by far the world’s biggest military spender.
In addition to major corporations, middlemen like Marc Morales have also been profiting handsomely from wars in countries including Ukraine. Morales happened to have a warehouse full of ammunition in Bulgaria that the Pentagon originally intended for Afghanistan when Russia invaded its neighbor, and he has been richly rewarded as the U.S. spends tens of billions of dollars arming Ukrainian forces. He named his new $10 million yacht Trigger Happy.
Outside the sprawling ExCel convention center in London’s Docklands, anti-war protesters rallied against the global arms trade and the death and destruction it fuels. The Guardianreported that at least a dozen demonstrators were arrested during the course of the conference, including nine on Thursday for blocking a road outside the venue.
Sam Perlo-Freeman, a researcher at the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), told The Guardian that “a lot of countries that are being talked about as new arms export markets are ones we would be concerned about.”…………………………………
“Deals done at DSEI will cause misery across the world, causing global instability, and devastate people’s lives,” Apple added.
Inside ExCel, it was business as usual. Pressed by Declassified U.K. chief reporter Phil Miller on why Britain’s right-wing government supports “selling arms to the Saudi dictatorship that sentences someone to death for tweeting,” Minister of State for the Armed Forces James Heappey deflected.
The American public is hurting. The bare necessities—clean water, nutritious food, and affordable housing—are hard to come by.
Tap water is contaminated with lead, PFAS, and other pollutants. The water systems that serve cities and towns suffer additional stressors, including drought, overuse, and a failure to incorporate greywater systems. And, like many necessities, you have to pay for it in the United States: Water utility prices continue to go up and up.
What is U.S. Congress doing as the public suffers?
Water Is Not a Priority
Every year, U.S. Congress appropriates money for two federal water funds. The Environmental Protection Agency gives this money to states in the form of grants. The Washington Post recently reported, “Since 2022, the federal allocation has totaled roughly $5.5 billion, amounting to a literal and figurative drop in the bucket for a nation with an estimated $625 billion backlog in projects just to provide cleaner, reliable drinking water.”
In other words, Congress has allocated 0.88 percent of the funding needed to establish infrastructure that dependably provides potable water.
It gets worse. Members of Congress skim funds off the top……………………………………
Food is Not a Priority
Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, recently showed that annual U.S. military spending increased during the Trump administration by 20 percent in nominal terms and then increased during the first two years of the Biden administration by 15 percent in real terms. The military budget is now a record $858 billion for fiscal 2023, a bipartisan feat.
Food insecurity “climbed 18 percent during the same stretch,” Semler explained. “Something’s wrong when either military spending or food insecurity spikes over a two-year period. When they soar in tandem, it’s an abomination…”
There is plenty of money available to make sure people don’t go hungry. For example, the amount of money to be spent over several years on new land-based nuclear weapons ($263.9 billion) could instead build 52.5 million community gardens ($2,750 each) across the country, with more than enough money left over ($119.52 billion) to cover a year of food stamps. Tax dollars, we see, could be used to nourish instead of accidentally or deliberately eliminating human life on Earth.
The Housing Crisis……………………………………
Support the Troops
Evidence suggests that the federal government doesn’t even prioritize the troops’ water, food, and housing…………………………………………………………………………………
A State of Permanent Warfare
Military and intelligence personnel don’t deploy themselves. The U.S. ruling class deploys them.
When “successful,” military or intelligence operations open up an economy to multinational corporations, enriching the ruling class. Examples spanning the three main eras of the military-industrial complex (the first Cold War, the “global war on terror”, and today’s “strategic competition”) illustrate this success:……………………………………………………………………………………….
Moreover, U.S. military activity itself is extremely profitable for Wall Street and top corporate executives, as the U.S. military doesn’t shoot, move, or communicate—let alone eat, refuel, fly, or spy—without corporate goods and services. Corporations absorb more than half of the U.S. military budget. Many regularly price gouge the military.
The ruling class is organized and relentless in its pursuit of profit. The three branches of government (legislative, judicial, executive) largely respond to the needs of this class. Some of the richest and/or most influential members of U.S. government, such as a coal baron or a person who has profited from the provision of healthcare, even come from that class.
The Front Burner
A military aircraft, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, embodies the priorities of the ruling class. With a lifetime cost expected to top $1.7 trillion, the F-35 is on track to becoming the most expensive weapon of all time………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
The European Investment Bank is ‘for everybody,’ Dane says in an effort to win wider support for job bid.
SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, Spain — The European Investment Bank should not become a “political fighting arena” for investments in nuclear energy or defense, said Margrethe Vestager, who’s trying to convince European Union finance ministers to pick her to head the powerful government-backed lender.
Vestager, currently on leave as EU digital and antitrust chief, is one of the top candidates to take over from President Werner Hoyer next year and lead the bank that finances EU policies, from fighting climate change to rebuilding Ukraine.
She stressed that a successful candidate needed broad support, including smaller countries, because “the bank is for everybody, big shareholders as well as small shareholders,” she told POLITICO on the sidelines of a finance ministers’ gathering in Santiago de Compostela.
France and Germany, who together with Italy, account for nearly half of the bank’s capital, haven’t said who they will back. France has been pushing for a candidate sympathetic to steering the EIB funds to nuclear projects and defense investments. It also wants someone willing for the cautious lender to take on more risks.
Germany has emphasized that“sound banking is essential” and that “the mission of the EIB mustn’t be overstretched,” Finance Minister Christian Lindner said ahead of the meeting.
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