{"id":163633,"date":"2020-06-29T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2020-06-29T11:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=163633"},"modified":"2020-06-26T07:59:29","modified_gmt":"2020-06-26T06:59:29","slug":"battleground-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/06\/battleground-states\/","title":{"rendered":"Battleground States"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe time for manufacturing of weapons of war has passed as a viable industry for our nation, despite the way some of our political leadership clings to economies of the past.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u00a0— <\/em>Lisa Savage, U.S. Senate candidate in Maine<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

26 Jun 2020 – <\/em>Yesterday President Trump\u2019s re-election efforts took him to the \u201cbattleground\u201d state of Wisconsin, where he toured the Fincantieri Marinette<\/em> Marine<\/em> shipyard. He railed against the Democrats as a scarier enemy than Russia or China. He also celebrated Wisconsin’s win over domestic enemies like the state of Maine in securing a key shipbuilding project. “The first-in-class FFG(X) [frigate] will not just be a win for Wisconsin workers; it will also be a major victory for our Navy,” Trump said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“\u2026 The stunning ships will deliver the overwhelming force, lethality, and power we need to engage America\u2019s enemies anywhere and at any time.” \u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On many military minds, it seems, was China.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Fincantieri Marine Group<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cIf you just look at the geography of Indo-Pacom, these ships can go a lot of places that destroyers can\u2019t go,”<\/em> said<\/a> Northeast Wisconsin’s Representative Mike Gallagher, a hawkish Republican outspokenly eager for future wars in the ‘Indo-Pacific Command’: in particular, wars against China.<\/p>\n

“\u2026 not just frigates, but unmanned ships\u2026 it will align nicely with a lot of what the Marine Corps Commandant is talking about in terms of capitalizing on the overdue death of the [Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces] Treaty, and fielding intermediate range fires.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Commandant in question, Gen. David Berger, has explained<\/a>: \u201cThe thing that has driven us to where we are right now is the paradigm shift by China moving to sea\u2026\u201d Berger wants “mobile and fast” ships to keep American marines on temporary bases as near as possible to China, since \u201cthe farther you back away from China, they will move toward you.”<\/p>\n

Fincantieri, an Italian company, acquired the Marinette shipyard in 2009, and, just last month, received a lucrative US Navy contract to build between one and ten frigates, representing a tactical shift from larger destroyers. Outfitted by Lockheed Martin with 32 vertical launch tubes and a \u201cstate of the art SPY-6 radar system,\u201d with power capacity to accommodate arriving “electronic warfare systems,\u201d the frigate will be capable of simultaneously attacking submarines, land targets and surface ships. If all ten ships are built in the shipyard, the contract will be worth $5.5 billion dollars. Rep. Gallagher and President Trump both support a Navy leadership goal of expanding the U.S. fleet well beyond its current speculative cap of 355 warships, adding multiple unmanned vessels.<\/p>\n

Marinette had been vying with several other shipyards, including Bath Iron Works in Maine, for the multi-billion-dollar contract. On March 2, a bipartisan coalition of 54 WI legislators had signed a letter<\/a> urging President Trump to direct the U.S. Navy frigate construction contract to the Marinette shipyard. \u201cWe are hopeful that the US Navy will decide to bring additional ship construction to the state of Wisconsin,\u201d the legislators wrote in their concluding paragraph, calling the opportunity vital not just for a growing Wisconsin shipyard, \u201cbut for the communities of great Americans who will benefit for years to come from valuable and meaningful work on behalf of our country.\u201d<\/p>\n

The deal could add 1,000 jobs in the area and the shipbuilder plans to invest $200 million to expand the Marinette facility because of the contract. So this was a victory lap for the shipyard, but also for Donald Trump who can deliver these jobs to a “battleground” state crucial for his hopes in this coming winter’s election. Would this rally have occurred had the contract gone to Maine’s Bath Iron Works?\u00a0 Lisa Savage<\/a> is campaigning as an Independent Green to represent Maine as a \u00a0U.S. Senator. Asked to comment on whether Maine “lost” when the contract went to Wisconsin, she offered this statement:<\/p>\n

Bath Iron Works in Maine is currently engaged in union busting contract negotiations to promote its ongoing policy of bringing in contract labor that is not unionized. This follows years of no-raise<\/p>\n

contracts with its largest union, S6, the result of BIW demanding that workers sacrifice so that its owner can pay its CEO tens of millions of dollars a year and buy back its own stock. General Dynamics can afford to pay workers fairly, given the $45 million tax break the Maine Legislature granted the massive military manufacturer, and the $900 million in cash on hand the company reported in its last SEC filing.<\/p>\n

The time for manufacturing of weapons of war has passed as a viable industry for our nation, despite the way some of our political leadership clings to economies of the past. The global pandemic emphasizes for us all the interconnectivity of our global society and the folly, wastefulness, and moral failure of war in all forms. We must transform facilities like BIW and Marinette into hubs of manufacturing for solutions to the climate crisis, including public transportation, resources for the creation of renewable energy, and disaster-response vessels.<\/p>\n

Building clean energy systems would generate up to 50% more jobs than making arms systems according to research<\/a> by leading economists. The two biggest security threats to the United States are currently the climate crisis and COVID-19. The Pentagon’s contractors have long contributed to the climate crisis, and the time for conversion is now.<\/p>\n

Before the pandemic hit, and before this U.S. Navy contract was awarded to Marinette, my fellow activists at Voices for Creative Nonviolence were planning a protest walk to the Marinette shipyard. As Trump noted in his speech at Marinette, they are currently building four Littoral Combat Ships for sale to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Defense industry analysts noted, in late 2019, with the U.S. Navy no longer interested in purchasing Littoral Combat Ships from the yard, the Marinette shipyard had been \u201csaved by the Saudis<\/a>\u201d and by Lockheed Martin, which had helped arrange the contract.<\/p>\n

The Saudi military has been using U.S.-supplied Littoral (near-coast) Combat Ships to blockade the coastal ports of Yemen, which is undergoing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis due to a famine exacerbated by the Saudi-led blockade and an invasion involving relentless aerial bombardment. Actual cholera epidemics, reminiscent of centuries past, were another result of the war’s creation of lethal delays and shortages for Yemeni people in desperate need of fuel, food, medicine and clean water. Yemen\u2019s humanitarian situation, worsened by the spread of COVID-19, is now so desperate that the United Nations humanitarian chief, Mark Lowcock, warned\u00a0Yemen will\u00a0“fall off the cliff<\/a>”\u00a0without massive financial support. President Trump took full credit for the Saudi contract at today’s rally.<\/p>\n

The world that our global empire is swiftly creating, through our devastating oil wars in the Middle East and our arriving cold wars with Russia and China, is a world without winners. Maine could find ample reason to celebrate losing its battle for this contract if it considered the precious gained opportunity of which Savage eloquently reminds us: of conversion, with a net gain in jobs, to industries that prepare us against the real threats we face: devastating climate change, a global pandemic, and the corrosive shame of endless war. We must resist signing contracts with weapon makers profiting from endless immiseration of the Middle East and needless superpower rivalries inviting full nuclear war. Such contracts, inked in blood, doom every corner of our world to perish as a battleground state.<\/p>\n

_________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Kathy Kelly is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>,<\/em> an American peace activist, pacifist and author, one of the founding members of <\/em>Voices in the Wilderness, and currently a co-coordinator <\/em>Voices for Creative Nonviolence. <\/em>Three times since 2000, she has been nominated for the <\/em>Nobel Peace Prize. As part of peace teamwork in several countries, she has traveled to Iraq twenty-six times, notably remaining in combat zones during the early days of both US-Iraq wars. Her recent travel has focused on Afghanistan and Gaza, along with domestic protests against U.S. drone policy. She has been arrested more than sixty times at home and abroad, and written of her experiences among targets of U.S. military bombardment and inmates of U.S. prisons. She lives in Chicago.<\/em> Kathy@vcnv.org<\/em><\/a> – info@vcnv.org<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

26 Jun 2020 – The world that our global empire is swiftly creating, through our devastating oil wars in the Middle East and our arriving cold wars with Russia and China, is a world without winners. We must resist signing contracts with weapon makers profiting from endless immiseration of the Middle East and needless superpower rivalries inviting full nuclear war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":123231,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[867,1817,1161,1188,1104,101,725,1253,100,1126,1050,1105,769,450,99,95,70,481],"class_list":["post-163633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-anglo-america","tag-anti-militarism","tag-arms-industry","tag-arms-race","tag-arms-trade","tag-cultural-violence","tag-culture-of-violence","tag-demilitarization","tag-direct-violence","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-military-industrial-complex","tag-military-supremacy","tag-nuclear-weapons","tag-structural-violence","tag-us-military","tag-usa","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163633\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}