U.S. Pays For Corporate Profit At the Expense of Human Lives

Kansas City, Thursday March 1, 2011 a group of concerned citizens gathered at the Cherith Brook Community House (A Catholic Worker House) to educate and plan protest against the building of nuclear warheads in Kansas City.  Dorothy Day was the matriarch of an anarchist movement in the earlier part of the twentieth century. She began what is known as the catholic worker movement. The goal was to gather people of faith in opposition to this issue. It was refreshing to see spiritual people whose religion was not telling them to murder their neighbor and submit. Civil disobedience was renamed Gospel Obedience by Nick Pickrell one of the community members who was present. Members of Catholic Worker houses as well as PeaceWorks and Ann Suellentrop who is associated with NukeWatch.org.

The night started off with a presentation from Maurice Copeland a former employee of the Kansas City Honeywell facility in question. He worked at the Bannister complex for over 30 years and has spent the last decade or more as an outspoken whistle-blower against what has and is going on in Kansas City. He told a tale of what some would call pure capitalism or the right libertarian might refer to as corporatism. Workers mistreated and placed in unsafe unhealthy conditions and exploited. The bill for the whole racket seems to be footed directly by the United States Empire in its effort to spend more and more money in its monopolized multi-billion dollar murder industry. The Kansas City Plant (KCP) is the most productive of the eight sites in the research and production complex of the Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). KCP produces and/or procures 85% of all nuclear weapons components both by type and quantity.

Maurice focused on the health and environmental issues and dangers impacting the workers their families and the surrounding community. He brought to light the exploitation of Native Americans in digging for uranium as well as the secrecy of the dangerous nature of such materials people unknowingly are paid to work with.  New cancers and sicknesses have emerged and impact not only the workers but also families and those who they interact with unknowingly. He told how Honeywell is protected by ‘national security’ and how they claimed they will “not be responsible for the legacy issues of the plant”. One person present made the claim that more people have died in the making of the bomb due to health issues than have died in the U.S.’s dropping of the bombs.

Maurice told of how Native Americans were hired to work digging toxic uranium out of the ground the very land they live by.  American Indians of the Navajo Indian Nation mined uranium ore from the hills around Cove for the atomic weapons program of the United States. Now the area is the location of a cluster of lung cancer and other respiratory diseases related to uranium. The General Service Administration (GSA) and the NNSA have both acknowledged illness problems they continue to sweep under the rug. Maurice told of how often the families of the workers suffered more from health consequences. Workers did not change clothes when working with hazardous materials or scrub down after. Often the one in the household doing the laundry would have a greater exposure to the toxins. An on-site daycare facility was built where Trichloroethylene (TCE) and other harmful and toxic chemicals have been found.  Despite denials and minimization of the issues they do handle uranium and nuclear weapons grade material at the complex. Often it is shipped back from disassembled warheads.

Ann Suellentrop came up next to speak of the NNSA and the Nuclear industrial complex. The powerpoint she presented can be found as a PDF here.

Honeywell is in bed with National Security, funded by the federal government. U.S. citizens foot the bill for this operation through taxes. The new complex that is being built was purchased with ‘urban blight funds’ in a rural soy field south of Kansas City.  The use of ‘urban blight funds’ has been called into question, but the powers that be seem to have little problem with due to the large sums of money passing hand in this deal. Sadam may not have been building WMD’s but the U.S. sure is. Kansas City government sought $815 million in municipal bonds from the NNSA’s to foot the bill. The Planned Industrial Expansion Facility (PIEA) in Kansas City offered the land up with a lease-to-purchase. This will amount to a $1.2 billion dollar total cost to the tax payer over the period.

Spending on nuclear weapons programs has increased since the cold war from around five billion a year to it’s current 9 billion a year after the U.N.’s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and under the Obama administration after the president came out in favor of nuclear disarmament. The Nuclear weapons industry is busier than it was in the cold war.  The amount of nuclear bombs increases despite our being told they are going down. Around 4,000 bombs are scheduled for disarmament are just sitting in Texas at a facility that can only handle disassembling or reassembling about 200 bombs a year. As the U.S. continues to order more bombs and build these weapons of mass destruction they have failed to eliminate many they claim they will eliminate.

The meetings were held at the Cherith Brook community house to gather people of faith and raise awareness. They are planning a weekend retreat for the last weekend of April. They will start Friday night and prepare through the weekend for protests on that monday morning where they will have breakfast at 7 am and head to the site at 8 am ready for action. The Cherith Brook Catholic Worker House will be hosting this. They can be reached at 816-241-8047 or at cherithbrookkcmo at gmail dot com. They are doing this with the Holy Family House Catholic Worker who can be reached at 816-753-2677 or holyfamilycw at gmail dot com. They are asking people to please consider civil disobedience on March 2nd 2011, and to talk to family and friends about this.  They are also asking people to come early and help with preparations the week of April 22nd.

Maurice Copeland on the Bannister Bombplex from Rebecca Riley on Vimeo.

There are many other shady dealings going on in these facilities and I will be putting up a few more articles soon to expose some of those. I would like to state that my initial interest in this has been simply the mass murder the U.S. pays for has committed and is in preparation to commit with these weapons of mass destruction. One person at the first meeting I went to said that these weapons were for ‘our defense’. The reality is that a nuclear warhead is not a defensive weapon at all. It is only offensive. It can only be used to take many lives. It can not be used to defend against an attack by nuclear weapons. Perhaps a defensive shield of sorts could be called a ‘defense’ but the reality remains these weapons are simply for the mass annihilation of humanity.