Nobody said Jon isn't a great teacher. And part of a great family or clan. So, I always push him forward as "one of the good guys" even while I revile some of the positions he has been forced to take.
What he has done, apparently, is separated his supporters into sheep and goats. It's like splitting the class in a small country school by year, or in this case, by temperament. Some people think for themselves. Put them together, or mix them judiciously with the sheep - who just do and think what they are told. Get every student on a growing, exploring, learning track - finding out things that are important to them. And never forget the Big Picture - global capitalism, a rapidly collapsing environment, constant wars over oil and religion - hey, it's getting to sound a lot like Montana, isn't it?
So, he is the man for the moment. But he's got to start talking more sense. He needs better speechwriters and advisers. He needs his own "brain trust" or think tank, which I would be happy to help organize (don't pack it with a lot of hacks and expect me to work with it, though). Etc.
Montanans never understood Baucus, or what he was about. As I've said, before, he was an Oligarch, created for the part. And that was disastrous - not only for us, but for the nation and the planet. And by supporting him, Montana's best and brightest have condemned themselves to eternal infamy. We told them a thousand times and in a thousand ways - this is wrong. Corporate capitalism is not the answer. But, they didn't listen, and now we're on the verge of extinction - something we have always been since Baucus's predecessors made us into a Doomsday Machine.
It's serious, folks. Tester's greatest mistake thus far is siding with the fanatical "missiliers". The issue has never been the Base (Malmstrom), or "the local economy" and "5000 jobs", and depending on the source, anywhere from 25-46% of this "local economy". I keep telling them: that's the figure for percentages of FEDERAL SPENDING in Cascade County or whatever. And it may or may not include other military spending like pensions and Vet's benefits (which should, of course, be the same for everyone, and not depend on military service or anything else - least of all one's financial resources, or lack of them). But even if it does, you'd find that military spending for the nation as a whole is less than 8% of the national economy, and if Great Falls has 46% military economy, there are lots of other places with less than the average (and whose bases have already been closed) who will want to know why.
Face it. We've developed a cult of nuclear terrorism. We ARE the nuclear terrorists, and have been since Vietnam, which at the time was out of Minuteman range. When our mission was seen as "resisting Communist aggression" (of which there actually was none - it was all part of the same revolutionary, anti-colonialist struggle which gave birth to the USA), they could find people to support it. But now that it's clearly fighting over nothing but religion and oil, and the mechanisms of "Disaster Capitalism", leading to frequent wars and a vast increase in deaths and suffering, as well as destruction of the environment - well, we're done with it. The main focus of the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) has become anti-development, anti-intellectual, anti-intelligence, anti-culture, and like always, anti-peace and prosperity. You don't get rich off of a missile farm no matter how much fertilizer you spread on it.
Worse, in violation of all American political tradition, it has propped up imperialism and "globalization" (One World Government) at the costs of 10's of millions of lives and probably $10-20 trillion in present money. People who still defend Vietnam and the "sacrifice" our nation made to destroy another nation must be counted as Imperialists. Most of the rank and file soldier-veterans who were there understand. But their leadership so often seems to be still obsessed with blaming Jane Fonda or "Peaceniks" for our defeat. The short answer is "Our defeat was just. It was an unjust war we started, and we deserved to lose."
In WWI, the Germans lost after the British tricked and maneuvered the US (under the Southern Anglophile president, Woodrow Wilson) into joining the war against Germany (and the Ottoman Empire, which included the so-called "Jewish Homeland" which the Zionists had already planned to settle and seize by some sort of under-the-table deal). After the War, with Germany in ruins and forced to accept terms dictated, not by Wilson and his fairly sensible "14 points", but by the vindictive French and British, who were then expanding into Ottoman Territory which they then claimed as "protectorates" (still the basis for the nations and conflicts raging today). The German Veterans organized what they called "Freikorps", right-wing militias led by people who blamed the Jews and Social Democrats for "back-stabbing" in the Reichstag, and in the Jewish-owned press, and that's what gave rise to the Nazis and, arguably, WWII and the Holocaust.
NATO was supposedly organized after the Soviet Union organized the Warsaw Pact for mutual defense against attacks from the capitalist-imperialists (as well as religious anti-communist crusaders) of Western Europe, always controlled by the US, which had ended WWII unscathed, and as the totally dominant global economic superpower.
But of course NATO already existed, as the Allied Forces in Europe, which later evolved into the EU as well as NATO. The only mystery here is why the US continues to have a "Euro-focus" in its military and economic organization. In fact, large militaries are no longer needed. And we certainly don't need nuclear arsenals, which along with nuclear power generation, have proven to be the most catastrophic technologies ever devised.
So, why are we still in NATO? What is the purpose of a vast military alliance based on utterly destroying other nations and people, and even making them unfit for future habitation, not to mention destroying the whole global ecosystem which many want to deny even exists. NATO was directed against some alleged "threat" which the Soviet Union posed to Western Europe (even though most of Western Europe didn't feel threatened or want our "protection" - only their capitalistic elites). Finally, due to Gorbachev and Reagan having maintained some desire for peace and reconciliation, the Cold War ended. No more nukes. No more Doomsday Machine.
There's a great 60 Minutes episode from back in the 1990's (I have both tape and transcripts of this, somewhere) called "The Missiliers", in which they interview missile crews, officers, and generals in command in Russia as well as the US, basically asking the question, "Why are these still here?" Needless to say, most of the military people interviewed had the same question, with nothing but the "official answer" used by lobbyists for contractors and suppliers, as well as a few extreme "consultants" who were ex-missile officers, themselves. It's deterrence. It's our careers. It's local jobs, It's to prove we won't be bullied by "the other side", etc. The usual pattern.
To his credit, Dan Rather is suitably shocked when he finds that virtually nothing has been done beyond buying or securing a lot of the Russian arsenal, by turning it into reactor fuel, etc. So, we're down to something like 3600 lanchable warheads per side, and Start II has just been blocked in the Senate, which would have halved this number down to some 1600. Needless to say, Baucus and the other "Missile Senators" were key votes in this and every other treaty. And, the treaties themselves were deeply flawed. Old warheads weren't being destroyed. They only needed to be warehoused and defused.
The danger of an all-out nuclear war is no less, now, than it was 30 years ago - in fact, it's more likely with several new and "rogue" nuclear powers - starting with Israel. Iran has signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and is quite open about its lack of nuclear weapon ambitions. So, all the punishments, sanctions, etc. were for nothing, and they were and are serious violations of international law. Embargos (like we still maintain against Cuba, as well as Iran, North Korea, Syria, and a number of other countries designated as "terrorists states") are equivalent to an act of war - you can't stop other nations from trading, or tell them who to trade with except as acts of war.
Meanwhile, India and Pakistan now have substantial nuclear arsenals - the 200 or so thought sufficient by rational smaller countries - as a "deterrent" or whatever in hell they are supposed to do. Create jobs, I guess. Or make us feel more "secure." Yeh, right. Let me warn you - there's a lot of religion involved in it, and this can go in any direction at any time.
Any nation with a substantial (or even a small) nuclear power industry is only a few months away from building a plutonium bomb, which is what most of the warheads are. The higher-yield thermonuclear warheads we use on the Minuteman and Tridents use tritium, which decays and is hard to produce, as well as being very corrosive and toxic. The nuclear weapons production and maintenance industry is huge in the Western US - particularly Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, and to a lesser extent, Montana and its neighbors actually housing the land-based strategic nuclear missile arsenal. Malmstrom and FE Warren (Cheyenne, WY) vied for leadership in this "power bloc", and for a long time, we had 200 missiles while FE Warren had the only MX squadron of 50 missiles, each carrying up to 10 warheads, allegedly to "counter" a Russian missile of similar capacity. Such was the strategy of MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction, which guided Cold War policy. It was largely our revulsion at the idea of building an arsenal for mutual destruction that finally ended the Cold War - just to get rid of it.
So now, Sen. Tester seems to be telling us something like this:
"Sorry, guys. We still have the missiles, and we're not getting rid of them. We have a kind of direct democracy in the Military. Them that's got the guns, got's the gold. Or plutonium-tritium, in this case. Do you know what a working Minuteman missile with a 320 KT warhead is worth on the open market? We could even provide the launch service. Just tell us where to point it, and pay the money. How much? How about $20 million, the same price some of you pay to spend a few days in a Soyuz space station, or a round-trip to the International Space Station (another $100 billion boondoggle with no benefits to the taxpayers). When everything else is gone, we'll still have the Missiles of Montana, or at least the holes they came out of. You can count on it...."
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