“Red Lines” which mean anything and nothing.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah – they haven’t gone in Rafah yet – if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem,” President Biden. May 8th

On the face of it, this is a very strange statement. Israeli troops had already entered Rafah two days before Biden said they hadn’t done it yet. But, although this statement was already out of date at the point that Biden made it, on the other hand, it is “clear”, or seems to be from this statement, that “if they go into Rafah” – no caveats about that – the US would cut off “supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, with the cities…”

What happened since is that the Israelis have continued sending troops into and occupying Rafah, while shelling and bombing the parts of it that they do not occupy.

The UN puts the impact of that like this.

Ground incursions and heavy fighting also continue to be reported, particularly in Rafah. Intensified hostilities following the issuance of evacuation orders and the Israeli military operation in Rafah have so far forced the displacement of about one million people, amid a decline in the entry of humanitarian aid. Between the afternoons of 29 and 31 May, according to MoH in Gaza, 113 Palestinians were killed and 637 were injured, including 60 killed and 280 injured in the past 24 hours.

In Rafah, only three field hospitals are still operating, one of them partially. The World Food Programme (WFP) calls for the immediate opening of all access points, emphasizing that its ability to support people in need is deteriorating. Health and environmental risks are on the rise due to fuel shortages, limited access to clean water, sewage overflow, accumulation of solid waste, and infrastructural damage, UNRWA and partners warn.  

The US, in response, made a tokenistic gesture of blocking one weapons shipment. This had the same performative media feed quality as their aid air drops and the pier they built to deliver aid that has now began to sink.

The International Court of Justice ruled on May 24th that Israel “must halt” its military offensive “immediately”. That was a week ago. The Israelis have ignored the ruling. They are in breach of international law and therefore, as the saying goes, “the rules based international order”.

The film below of National Security Council spokesman and former Rear Admiral John Kirby, a man who definitely has “something of the night about him”, slipping and sliding under pressure from reporters on this question is a study in squirming self righteous evasiveness that becomes embarassingly revealing.

His line can be summarised as …“the Israelis say that they didn’t do the bombing, it “might have been” a Hamas ammo dump spontanously combusting, and anyway they used their smallest bombs, a teeny, tiny bomb, and if they did it was somewhere else, and an accident, and they are investigating it; so I really can’t comment until their investigation is complete. And of course we will not rush to judgement until they have had time to judge their own actions, and there will be nothing self serving about this because they are a “democracy”. We haven’t been able to verify any of the evidence we have seen. We will ask the Israelis about this and accept what they say. Any critical view about this is conjecture that does not fit the facts, even though I’ve just said that we won’t know what the facts are until the Israelis decide what they are. As far as red lines are concerned, there is no mathematical formula, so, trust me, trying to pin me down on this will be like trying to nail blamange to the wall. A great deal of aid has gone into Gaza but I am not going to specify how much because I know damn well how far short it falls. We have a red line against a major incursion, but no matter how major the incursions have been so far, they won’t be major enough for us to actually do anything; and we are in constant talks with the Israelis so we are on the same page on whatever this is going to be. Trust me. Anyway, all this could be avoided if Hamas came out of their tunnels and lined up with big targets on their heads so the IDF could shoot them without having to, sadly, drop 2,000 lb bombs on thousands of people trying to shelter in tents; because its very worrying that the Israelis are having to send troops back into areas that they had already flattened and thought they had “cleared”; so there needs to be a plan for the day after, though for goodness sake don’t ask me what that might be.”

Watch it for yourself. Its an education.

“You cannot make judgements in the midst of a conflict” John Kirby. Exept that the US judgement to cut funding from UNWRA after Israeli accused 7 UNWRA personel of taking part in Oct 7th was immediate, and in the midst of the conflict, even though the Israelis presented no evidence at the time; and the funding remains suspended even though the Israelis have presented no evidence since. This is complicity in using famine as a weapon.

General Election 2024: Farage Funks it…again!

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Alternative titles: Hooray Henry for the Red, White and Blue, Old Bory embraces Old Glory, Old Toadface heads West, The USA: last refuge for the scoundrel.

To avoid his eight succesive defeat in a Parliamentary election, Reform Party majority share proprietor, and backseat leader emeritus from half way across the water Nigel Farage, has announced that the US election is more important than the UK election; so that’s what he’ll be concentrating on; though “believe you me”, he will be shooting his mouth off throughout; secure in the knowledge that the press here will magnify whatever he has to say well beyond its significance.

As willfully discarded masks go, this is quite something. Brexit, for the fraction of the UK ruling class that pushed for it, was always about aligning the UK with US regulatory standards, but was always covered by a grandiose assertion of deluded nationalist vainglory that, shorn of EU regulation, the UK would once more bestride the world like a collosus. But Farage, in one careless swoop, has exposed the real power relations in this process. If Tony Blair was George Bush’s poodle, Nigel Farage is Donald Trump’s Shitzu.

Reform is a Party of the old. In this, it mirrors the Conservatives. In the Economist’s election tracker poll, Reform support by age group is like a shrunken, even more bitter and twisted, version of that of the Tories.

The contrast with Labour and the Greens is stark, because the young don’t dance to the same tunes, and don’t particularly want to be “toughened up” by being conscripted into the Army for a year, are excluded from whats left of the “property owning democracy” and, in fact, are finding it hard even to find a substandard place to rent, can’t afford to have children and are nervous of doing so because they can see the climate crisis deepening around them and have little truck with fools who deny that its happening.

Among the under thirties in fact, according to the most recent YouGov MRP poll, the Greens are the second Party, ahead of the Lib Dems, Conservatives and Reform.

The danger in this situation is that an incoming Labour government is so stolid and defensive that the sheer relief that they are not the Tories, anyone but the Tories, gives way to a similar reaction against them (bearing in mind that public trust in Starmer’s team is lower than that enjoyed by Ed Miliband in 2015 and their strong polling is based primarily on the Tories being loathed even more). In this context, “stability” is not “change”.

After the election, which Farage has left to jaw jutting, golf club Man of Destiny Richard Tice to lead Reform’s Kamikazi attack on whats left of the Conservative Party; the aim appears to be to gather up the burning wreckage of both into a Reformed Conservatism; with a politics straight off the Republican Right’s peg and infusions of US dark money turbocharging its Zombie rise from electoral oblivion.

In the event of a Trump victory, they will be his direct agents in UK politics. Attempts by David Lammy and others to ingratiate themselves by suggesting that Trump has been “misunderstood” will cut little ice in a scenario determined by a war drive and climate denial, bend over backwards as far as they like.

A Wet Tuesday in Grays

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As the steady drizzle descends there is a cultural clash outside the precinct.

On the corner of George Street one of the increasingly classy breed of buskers they have here now is playing some limpidly amplified acoustic guitar, staring quietly and camly towards the trees, the war memorial and the old Courthouse. He is playing a slow, gentle, rather yearning tune, with an emotional underpunch that sounds a bit like the B Side of Mark Knopfler playing Local Hero.

Directly opposite, outside the pawnbrokers, a short black woman in an enormous hoody declaims from an equally enormous Bible held in front of her – a burden and a shield – calling for people to “repent” and “follow the Lord Jesus”. No one is paying her any mind. In the bag she carries at her side there is a magnificent brass trumpet, which she must use at some point with a divine blast to rally the faithfull and startle the faithless.

In the market on George Street, the same bloke who was selling four perfumes for a tenner before Xmas, now has piles of those ugly high crowned half baseball hats emblazoned with “Prada”, Gucci”, “YSL”. Producing bootlegs with the inverted commas might be the next stage in cool.

At the top of Cromwell Road an armada of several dozen snails sails bravely across the pavement towards the promised land of the allotments over the far horizon.

Doing the exercises for my arthritic knee in the absence of weights, I use fat, heavy books instead. James Holland’s Normandy ’44 in one hand and Vasily Grossman’s extraordinary novel Stalingrad in the other. Possibly misguided even handedness. In reality, the Ostfront was much heavier in all respects.

“There is no moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel” Michael Gove.

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I can think of many words to describe what the IDF is doing in Gaza. “Moral” would not be one of them.

Perhaps Michael Gove looks at things differently; rather like Frederick Lindeman, Churchill’s right hand man and an advocate of mass area bombing in World War 2, who, when asked for a definition of morality replied: “I define a moral action action as one that brings advantage my friends”.

Only such a skewed perspective could allow him to see systematic algorithms that target air strikes and shelling using a 50:1 ratio of collateral damage (making it ok to kill 50 civilians if a strike manages to kill one fighter), smashed hospitals, schools and water treatment plants, the destruction or damage of over 250,000 homes, the displacement of nearly 2 million people, and the use of famine as a weapon as evidence of a superior morality on the part of the Israeli government.

Perhaps he hasn’t seen the people with white flags being shot in the street, didn’t listen to 6 year old Hind Rajab’s pleading phone call from a car trapped by the IDF, nor hear the IDF bullets that killed her family, nor note the way that the IDF waited for paramedics to get to her before they killed both her and them.

Perhaps he hasn’t seen any of the gloating videos made by IDF soldiers, and some civilians, or the Israeli civilians trying to blockade aid trucks.

Or perhaps he thinks all of this is ok; as his presumption of moral superiority for the IDF is not based on objective criteria, but because they are allied with the UK in the US centred Global North Bloc and therefore “the good guys”; on the side of “democracy” and “human rights” no matter what they actually do.

In a way this is almost Nietzchian. The ubermensch of US allies by definition “beyond good and evil”; and certainly not subject to the International Criminal Court.

Gove’s indignation at the ICC prosector arguing for arrest warrants for Israeli PM Netanyahu and Defence Minister Gallant as well as 3 Hamas leaders, echoes that of Netanhayu himself, who has spluttered his “disgust” that “democratic Israel” (i.e. him) has been put in the dock with what he described as “mass murderers” and threats from the United States to impose sanctions on the ICC.

In the interests of objectivity, it makes sense to look at who has been carrying out murder en masse; and how Hamas matches up to Israel in that respect.

This graph compares the numbers of people killed in Israel on Oct 7th with those killed in Gaza by the IDF since.

1200 Israelis killed on Oct 7th.

35,709 Palestinians killed in Gaza since.

So, almost 30 eyes for an eye… so far.

If Hamas are mass murderers, what does that make the IDF?

If Hamas leaders are culpable for deaths at their hands, how much more culpable is Netanyahu for the deaths at his?

Nearly 30 times… so far.

This is even higher than the ratio of 20 Palestinians for every Israeli killed in the period from 2000 up to Oct 7th 2023, which, once you’re aware of it, goes some way to explaining why it happened.

In quantitative terms, there is indeed, no equivalence. What the IDF have done since Oct 7th, and what they did before Oct 7th, is far, far worse.

And they are doing it in a now futile attempt to reassert by terror and massacre the status quo for a state that occupies and represses another people; against whom it commits continuous and casual violence, systematically discriminates, and has been inexorably dispossessing since 1948.

There is, indeed, no moral equivalence.

The Face of “Order” 2024

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“Order must prevail” President Biden.

There are times when the veil of delusion, the web of weasel words that weaves our brains into complacent compliance, tears of its own accord and we can see them for what they are.

When the peaceful encampment at UCLA calling for the University to divest its investments in Israel was attacked overnight by masked far right Israeli supporters spraying mace, throwing fireworks and wielding iron bars, aerial footage showed a large concentration of police vans just a few blocks away. It was apparent from the film that the violence and aggression was coming from the pro Israeli side. Resistance from the occupation came in the form of holding up the barricades that the attackers were trying to tear down. The Police did not intervene. Analogies with the West Bank, where far right settlers attack Palestinian villages while the IDF stands by, and sometimes joined in, were hard to avoid.

The attack failed.

So, the following day, the Police themselves in full riot gear, steamed in to smash the occupation and arrest the students taking part. The state having far greater resources than a bunch of vigilantes. Film of students – who had been protesting peacefully – being brutally dragged off, their wrists fastened behind their backs with plastic ties were all over the news.

The similarity in the style of attack juxtaposed together coming so soon after each other was obvious. You could see it.

But the news framed this violent Police action as an attempt to stop violence on campus. You couldn’t make it up. But, in a way, they did just that. And in so doing they reveal what they are. The longer this goes on, the more the masks will slip.

Personal Note: The demand for disinvestment is a crucial one. When I was a student in the 1970s, our Anti-Apartheid society had a campaign for the University I was at to disinvest from investments in South Africa. As the Secretary of the group I had to take in a petition to the University Bursar and try to negotiate with him. Brushing aside my arguments about the sheer immorality and inhumanity of Apartheid and the University’s complicity in it, he commented “Essentially, you want us to opt out of the capitalist system”, before phoning his PA to ask for roast beef, “left a little pink in the middle”, for lunch. I drew the conclusion that if breaking with Apartheid required breaking with capitalism, thats what we’d have to do.

This cartoon is based on a design by the Atelieres Populaires for workers at the Renault Flins factory, who were occupying their plant as part of the General Strike in May – June 1968 and were coming under attack from the CRS riot police as a result.

Mythbuster 1. Over heating is good for you?

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As we move into a period in which the powers that be will be retreating and retrenching on climate policy, we can expect discredited arguments and factoids to be churned out with dreary regularity; so that anyone who does not want to confront the realities we face has a set of one liners to trot out to deflect thought and effort.

This series of blogs is aimed at giving workers and activists the information we need to debunk these claims if a workmate, friend or relative comes out with one of them.

A recently distributed leaflet, very glossy but with no publisher acknowledged, makes the claim that Humans thrive in warm climates straight after arguing that the world is not heating up; stating Humans have always thrived in warm climates. Even if the world were warming, warmth is by no means a threat, ice ages ARE. Every year many more people die in the colder winter months, even in the UK, see ONS data”.

The key word here is “warm”. We are already getting well beyond that. Here’s some examples, with thanks to Simon Erskine for compiling them. These arguments will be useful in the context of “Phew! What a scorcher!” and “Hotter than Morroco!” headlines in the tabloids. For those who can absorb anecdotes more easily than statitsics, a useful question is, “Have you noticed how, until a few years ago, every time we had a heatwave people used to go out and sunbathe, but now, have you noticed how people go out and sit in the shade under the tres because the heat is becoming uncomfortable?”

  • Zimbabwe’s president Emmerson Mnangagwa has declared a national disaster amid a prolonged drought that has destroyed about half the country’s maize crop, BBC News reports. He joins neighbouring nations in southern Africa, Zambia and Malawi, both of which have recently declared similar states of emergency, the article adds.
  • “Unprecedented” temperatures are being reached across south-east Asia, including in parts of Vietnam, Thailand and Myanmar, according to the Guardian. It points to lengthy spells of dry weather in Indonesia driving up rice prices and fears that coral is under threat in Thailand due to high water temperatures. The newspaper says the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has “attributed the scorching weather to human-induced climate change, as well as the El Niño event, which brings hotter, drier conditions to the region”.
  • In Santiago, Chile, an 11-day heatwave has ended, becoming “the longest in history,” according to Raúl Cordero, a climatologist at the University of Santiago, La Tercera reports.
  • The UK may face water shortages and hosepipe bans this summer, despite recording record-breaking rainfall over the past 18 months, the Times reports. The i newspaper notes that the UK population has increased by 10 million over the past three decades, while “climate change has put pressure on existing reserves”. The Guardian reports that the Environment Agency released a report last week, which “predicts a growing shortfall of water in coming years, leading to a deficit of almost 5bn litres of water a day by 2050”. The National Farmers Union has warned that flooding and other extreme weather linked to climate change will undermine UK food production, BBC News reports. The article says this comes after “record-breaking rain over the past few months”, which “has left fields of crops under water and livestock’s health at risk”.
  • Russia and Kazakhstan have ordered more than 100,000 people to evacuate after melting snow swelled rivers beyond bursting point, leading to the worst flooding in the area for at least 70 years, reports Reuters.
  • The United Arab Emirates has been hit by an intense storm, with the country experiencing its heaviest rains in 75 years, according to meteorological authorities, reports the Financial Times. Almost 6 inches (152mm) of rain fell on the capital Dubai on Tuesday, a year and a half’s worth of rain in a single day, causing travel disruptions, reports the Independent. In related news, the death toll from flooding in Pakistan has risen to 63, the Associated Press reports.
  • The deadly heatwave that hit West Africa and the Sahel over recent weeks would have been “impossible” without human-induced climate change, scientists have said, reports BBC News. Temperatures in Mali soared to above 48C, with one hospital linking hundreds of deaths to the extreme heat, it continues. Researchers found that human activities such as burning fossil fuels made temperatures up to 1.4C hotter than normal, the article adds. On 3 April, temperatures hit 48.5C in the south-western city of Kayes in Mali, with intense heat continuing for more than five days and nights, giving no time for vulnerable people to recover, reports the Guardian.
  • The “unprecedented” warming of the oceans over the past year has had widespread repercussions on marine life, an EU environment chief has warned, reports the Financial Times. This includes impacting already dwindling native fish species such as Baltic Sea Cod, the European commissioner for the environment, oceans and fisheries Virginijus Sinkevičius said, citing the migration of the cod towards colder waters near Russia and Norway as an example of the impact on biodiversity of rising temperatures, it adds.
  • The past 10 months have all set new all-time monthly global temperature records, with April 2024 on track to extend this streak to 11, wrote Dr Zeke Hausfather in his latest quarterly “state of the climate” report for Carbon Brief. The graph at the end of this email shows monthly temperatures over 1940-2024, plotted with respect to a 1850-1900 baseline. Based on the year so far and the current El Niño forecast, Carbon Brief estimates that global temperatures in 2024 are likely to average out at around 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
  • The Independent reports that a “punishing heatwave” has forced the government in Bangladesh to shut schools for 33 million children “as the country battles the hottest April in three decades”. The Guardian has an article with the headline, “Wave of exceptionally hot weather scorches south and south-east Asia”. It says millions of people across the Philippines, Thailand, Bangladesh and India are facing dangerous temperatures as the hottest months of the year are made worse by El Niño.
  • Mexico: Drought spreads to almost 80% of the country; there are 10 states with 100% of municipalities affected.
  • As India heads to polls amid 45C heat, fears mount over voters’ safety. Bloomberg columnist David Fickling asks: “How can India hold elections when it’s too hot to vote?”
  • The Washington Post carries a feature headlined: “Earth’s record hot streak might be a sign of a new climate era.” It says Nasa’s Dr Gavin Schmidt indicates that what happens in the next few months…could indicate whether Earth’s climate has undergone a fundamental shift – a quantum leap in warming that is confounding climate models and stoking ever more dangerous weather extremes”.

Now that this is the trend, unions are developing stronger guidelines for working in extreme heat. This is a serious matter as some right wing

TUC guidelines are here. Individual unions will also have their own polices. Joint guidelines for the education sector are here.

On the Beach – 1938

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Back Row: Cecil (Tom) Atkin (with parasol), Henry Cunningham. Middle Row: Fred Pond, Win Pond, Ruth Atkin, Daisy Cunningham (all three sisters, formerly Ellis). Front Row: Len Cunningham (with ball) Ron Atkin (with life belt).

A week of collective freedom

This picture captures some of the excitement and happiness unleashed by the legislation that set up a weeks paid holiday for workers introduced in 1938, after “a tough battle, one that pitted campaigners against government intransigence and resistance from employers”.

Plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose.

The French here is deliberate; as one of the pressures on the government here came from legislation introduced by the Popular Front government in France for the 40 hour week and paid holidays for all two years earlier, after a massive wave of strikes and factory occupations, as well as similar developments in Belgium, Norway and the USA (with FDR’s New Deal).

So, to some extent, my family owe the good time they had and their carefree smiles to Leon Blum.

Daan to Margit...a long time before Chas n Dave

My Dad’s family, like so many others, took off for Margate for the week. The back of the photo shows it to be a post card. So photographers would set up a bespoke postcard from holidaymakers that they could have taken and copied to send off home, as a personal and more taseful alternative to the “cheeky” sort.

My Mum’s family, not pictured here, did the same. “We went to Margate. It was so COLD”. Miles of lovely beach, but the wind was so cold.” Both families stayed in B&Bs. “When you went back to where we were staying all you could smell all through the house was greens being cooked” (Mum).

Sunday School outings

Margate came at the end of a train journey, and gave a more exciting view of a seaside more expansive and a seaside town grander by far than those provided by the Sunday School charabang trips to Maldon, travel sickness included, that both my parents had been on for the preceding couple of years to see the sea; complete with refreshments from a tent that served up mugs of very brown tea from enormous enamel pots.

Woolly Cozzies

My Dad is wearing quite a classy boys swimsuit here. Not the one his Mum had knitted for him, as a lot of Mums did at that time; because it was much cheaper than buying one. These had the advantage of being warm before you went in the water, but had the downside of becoming incredibly heavy (and hard to keep up) as soon as you did.

Not Lobby Lud

As workers on holiday were much less likely to buy a daily paper – getting away from it all meaning getting away from it all – so, with all the factories closing pretty much at once, and facing a disastrous, if temporary, slump in circulation, the Daily Mirror and a few others like the News Chronicle used to publish a photo of a repesentative who would be present at the seaside during the holiday, so people who recognised him could approach and say “You are Lobby Lud and I claim my £5”; but with a variation printed only in that morning’s paper without which it wouldn’t work.

With average worker’s wages at 1 shilling and 2 pence an hour in 1938, this was equivalent to two weeks wages; so, worth buying a paper for.

At one point on this holiday, my grandfather was convinced he’d seen him, walked over and staked his claim. To no avail. The man said he wasn’t the mark. So, he bought a Daily Mirror to get the right form of words and tried again and, once again, and slightly more irritated, the man said he wasn’t. So, perhaps he was, but was off duty for a bit and was therefore irritated to be approached. Or he was a Lobby Lud lookalike and got approached all the time; in which case its a wonder he wasn’t more irritated than he was.

Darkness at noon?

Fred, sitting at the end of the line with the parasol, had a dark skin. After the outbreak of World War 2, just over a year later, he was in the RAF and, like a lot of other RAF personnel, was sent to Southern Africa for training; where he found that his uniform was no guarantee of being allowed into “Whites Only” bars or cafes, applying the strict colour bar that was the precursor to the fully fledged Apartheid entrenched there after 1948.

This photo was taken 20 years after the end of the First World War, and just over a year before the start of the Second. No cloud seems to dim the happiness. The sun is shining. The wind is fresh. The sand is soft and gritty. The ice creams are cold and sweet. A little bit of heaven outside the daily grind and in between two horrors.

MI5 tells Universities to cut off their nose to spite their face.

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The news that MI5 has told Universities to restrict cooperation with Chinese Universities on “national security” grounds looks like self harm when you consider that China leads the “West” in 37 out of 44 key and emerging technologies.

According to a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute funded by the US State Department, Over the past five years, China

  • hosts seven of the world’s top 10 research institutions.
  • generated 48.49% of the world’s high-impact research papers into advanced aircraft engines, including hypersonics
  • is likely to emerge with a monopoly in 10 fields including synthetic biology, where it produces one-third of all research, as well as electric batteries, 5G, and nano manufacturing
  • is strong enough in the fields of photonic sensors and quantum communication, to “go dark” to the surveillance of western intelligence.

Overall, the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranked first or second in most of the 44 technologies tracked, which included defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and quantum technology.

The Report attributes this to government support and funding but, instead of supporting greater collaboration and sharing, or emulating the model of state led investment in technological development – which clearly works – or recognising that science and technology in the “West” can benefit from learning from the cutting edge work being done in China, we have proposals based on Cold War paranoia that are as much an act of self harm as cutting Huewai out of the 5G Network to use slower, more expensive Western alternatives.

The UK already spends much more per capita on its military than Russia or China do.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Taking 2023 figures from Sipri,

  • the UK spends $74.9 billion for a population of 68 million.
  • Russia spends $109 billion for a population of 144 million.
  • China spends $296 billion for a population of 1,400 million.

So, the UK spends $1101 per person, almost one and a half times as much as Russia’s spend of $757 per person and more than 5 times as much as China’s $211 per person.

That looks like this.

So, perhaps the UK is on more than enough of a war footing as it is; as its participation in so many wars, overtly and covertly, demonstrates.

If the UK were to go for parity with Russia’s per capita spend, it could save about $20 billion a year (£16 billion). If it were to go for parity with China, it would save $60 billion a year ($48 billion). We could do a lot with that. An additional dividend from these savings might actually be peace.

The United States, of course, is in a league of its own, with a per capita spend of $3,210. If they were to spend what the Russians do, that would free up $687 billion every year. Think what could be done with that.