Mutually Assured Destruction!

Perhaps it's time for a new discussion about nuclear weapons. Our President and the Israeli Prime Minister brought it up in a particularly loud and raucous way regarding Iran's nuclear ambitions recently.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the whole world decided that nuclear weapons have no place in the world? We have treaties and protocols that we hope will keep the threat of nuclear holocaust at bay. Our peoples have all decided that a weapon - any weapon - of mass destruction works against out common humanity.

After we decide to end these weapons what next? How do we guarantee they will never be used again? I have an idea that we cannot ask others to give up these weapons until we are willing to give them up ourselves. What do we think the odds are that Iran, for example, will drop a bomb on us in the foreseeable future? Much more likely that our friends the Israelis will since they actually have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Here's the list of those who actually have weapons:

     United States...      4804 nukes                        Pakistan...               120
     Russia...                 4480   "                             N. Korea... less than 10        
     United Kingdom... 225     "                             Israel...                      80
     China...                  250     "                             France... less than    300
     India...                   110      "                            NATO Nations... Belgium,Germany,Italy,
                                                                             Netherlands, Turkey... 150-200 (Part of US Total)

The total is more than 10,000, none of which belong to Iran. I wonder what the Israelis are really upset about. I wish we could uncouple the problems of Iran vs Israel from the real problem of the 10,000 plus nukes scattered around the world. Many of the holders of these weapons are proven bad actors like the current Russian State or North Korea. It makes much more sense to go after these proven bad guys than to use all our energy slowing the nuclear ambitions of Iran.

You and I need to bring all of our attention and resources to bear on the real problem of nuclear war. There are fourteen possible bad actors who all have nuclear weapons, including The United States. Let's put pressure on these fourteen countries to prove they love peace and are willing to forego the possibility of nuclear holocaust.

Who Defines the Struggle?

I've been thinking about the world of work. There has been, for example, much discussion of how to rate teachers. Many pundits proclaim that we need to test kids as a way of deciding pay and employment for teachers as if kids were a product instead of people with free will. On a broader front, the owner class says that wages should track efficiency and yet with all the recent gains in efficiency wages are still flat.

At the same time we have all seen what efficiency has done for corporate profits. Twenty years of labor efficiency has resulted in massive profits for corporations and huge wage increases for corporate bosses. What do we think is going on when there is such a disparity between what we are told to expect and what actually happens? I don't think it's hard to figure out; I'd say we have been propagandized and flat out lied to.

We were told that Labor Unions were corrupt, inefficient and outdated. Who told us? Corporate Media, Corporate Owners and CEOs, Politicians who owe Corporate America for their election and we even told this same story to ourselves. Let's face it, if you hear a lie often enough, it starts to sound like it might be the truth. Even worse, we bought the philosophy of bootstrapping and individual attainment.

Yes! Some people do pull themselves up an have great success; think about Bill Gates of Microsoft for example. Bill became a Multi billionaire after dropping out of college and starting a company in his garage, as the story goes? Not exactly true - he is the son of a well-to-do lawyer who sent him to the best private school in Seattle and to Harvard University until he quit to design the Disk Operating System which made him rich and famous. As we see, even Bill Gates needed a community to help tug up his bootstraps.

What's important here is how all of us define the way we prosper and what we call the things that get in the way of that prosperity. The things we struggle with and who defines them has been obfuscated by the Great American Story, the Horacio Alger - up by your bootstraps propaganda that ignores the infrastructure of community and culture, the work of government and family that props up every endeavor. Shouldn't we be just a little skeptical of Corporate Media and Corporate Leaders who take the money and then accuse labor of not working hard enough to get their share.

Let's you and I write our own definitions for struggle and what is considered the fruits of those struggles. People work because it's how we provide food and shelter for ourselves and our families and how we measure our worth to ourselves and others. In times of plenty (like the USA currently) excess work is used to insure a plentiful future. That's the simplest was I know to define work and it's rewards.

If you go along with that definition then when you and I work hard and don't quite make the food and shelter budget, much less our measure of worth, there might just be something systemic wrong. If you then look around and see that some have a thousand year supply of food and shelter and others are starving for food and shelter while working as much as you, what then? What I think is that you and I must redefine the struggle as being one between us and those who have somehow gotten away with that thousand year supply.