As Trump appoints bigots, war-hawks and oligarchs to his cabinet, he has been advised to invest a good portion of federal spending in the nuclear weapons program in New Mexico. This, of course, is to promote U.S. imperialist aggression and its threat of nuclear annihilation to those who will not kowtow to the ruling class’s neoliberal demands.
New Mexico has an extensive and very important history in the nuclear weapons program. It was the birthplace of the nuclear bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. New Mexico has since been the seat of nuclear research, weapon construction, storage, and nuclear waste disposal. Kirtland Air Force Base, stationed right next to some of the poorest neighborhoods in Albuquerque, is estimated to house around 2,500 nuclear warheads, more than any other military base in the nation. In fact, were New Mexico to secede from the United States tomorrow, it would be the second largest nuclear power in the world.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory, the leading institution of the nuclear weapons program in the United States, had a Congressional Budget Request of $2.5 billion dollars in 2016, and has requested another $2.4 billion for 2017. Even though the United States is already the strongest military power in the world and has thousands more nuclear weapons than any of the countries it deems as nuclear threats, allocates billions of the federal budget towards maintaining and expanding its nuclear arsenal.
New Mexico is also the poorest state in the nation. An estimated one fifth of its population lives beneath the state poverty line, and as many as 17,000 individuals experience homelessness at any given time in a year. Minimum wage is a pitiful $8.50/hour, most of the available work being low-wage service jobs. The unemployment rate in New Mexico in 2015 was 6.2 percent; out of a population of 2,086,000, that makes 129,332 people with no means of providing for themselves.
This state also claims the highest per capita rate of police violence in the nation, with Native Americans, Latinos, and the mentally ill being disproportionately targeted.
Aside from the rampant poverty and police brutality that plague New Mexico’s working people, nuclear research has severe ecological repercussions that only worsen the living conditions for the poor, while the wealthy elite remain unaffected as they secure further wealth.
New Mexico has been the site of one nuclear disaster after another, including one of the costliest in U.S. history in February of 2014. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the largest nuclear waste dump in the nation located in the Carlsbad Desert, saw the explosion of one of its barrels containing plutonium and americium. The white radioactive foam that flew around in the air and left whoever breathed it in to their own devices, also contaminated about 35 percent of the surrounding underground area.
The long-term clean up and repair is estimated to exceed $2 billion, almost as much as the 1979 disaster involving the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.
Nuclear waste spills and explosions contaminate the air, soil and water supply of New Mexico, forcing its working people to live in hazardous conditions. This most negatively affects the Native peoples living on reservations all over the state, who often must travel and purchase drinkable water (assuming they even have enough money to afford it).
Rather than allocate to the nuclear arms race the billions the LANL has requested and the $2 billion that will be used in nuclear waste cleanup, not to mention the $200 million that go toward operating the nuclear waste dump annually, the funding could be used for:
• Providing every New Mexican, including the unemployed, with a living wage job
• Housing for everyone, eradicating homelessness in the state
• Universal healthcare and free 4-year tuition for every individual
• Funding public education, drug rehabilitation facilities and mental healthcare, which are consistently attacked and defunded
Capitalism, imperialism, and their love child, colonialism, only serve to make the rich richer while the workers and the poor continually suffer and bear the burdens they impose. The expansion of the nuclear program in New Mexico will only further pollute the natural resources essential for survival, as well as suck funding away from the people and hoard it for nuclear arms.
Despite the “pro-worker” rhetoric and promise of jobs that the Trump administration is sure to pander in an attempt to justify such spending, the contradictions are clear. As with the Dakota Access Pipeline which is estimated to only provide 50 jobs, this program expansion will provide work for a select few while the masses remain unemployed and in abject poverty.
The United States government has well over enough funding to provide the universal healthcare, free college tuition and living wage jobs that so many people in the U.S. desired this election season. Rather than care for the people that do all the work and produce the wealth, the wealthy elite instead choose to expand their own wealth at the cost of the environment and the health and living conditions for the 99 percent.
The wealthiest nation on Earth should not have 1 in 2 people living in poverty, 1 in 8 suffering from hunger and the highest incarceration rate in the world. The wealth must be redistributed to those who produce it, and state power must lie the hands of the majority, not the wealthy elite. The people are in need of a planned economy and a state system designed to meet their needs, not a free-market economy and club of wealthy elites only interested in securing billions for themselves.
