space pvt
those RW that don't deny we put a man on the moon, NASA needs to be portrayed as dinosaur just as DTT Carson big win had to be debunked;
see boy billionaire space race
subsidy military contractor?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/bezos-space/
no lnx twt
'Inappropriate giveaway of galactic proportions': Outrage over $10 billion taxpayer gift to Bezos space obsession
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos/Twitter
Brett Wilkins and Common Dreams November 18, 2021
Progressives on Wednesday slammed what they called a proposed $10 billion handout to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—the world's first multi-centibillionaire—in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act as a "giveaway of galactic proportions" in the face of growing wealth inequality and the inability of U.S. lawmakers to pass a sweeping social and climate spending package.
According to Defense News, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) plans to merge the $250 billion U.S. Innovation and Competition Act of 2021 (USICA)—aimed largely at countering the rise of China—with next year's NDAA, which would authorize up to $778 billion in military spending. That's $37 billion more than former President Donald Trump's final defense budget and $25 billion more than requested by President Joe Biden.The NDAA includes a $10 billion subsidy to Bezos' Blue Origin space exploration company.
"Providing Jeff Bezos with $10 billion of taxpayer money would be an inappropriate giveaway of galactic proportions," Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), said in a statement Wednesday.
"Jeff Bezos shouldn't receive taxpayer subsidies for his personal projects—period,"he continued. "In at least two recent years, one of the richest people on the planet paid no income tax; yet he then demands billions in taxpayer funds for a project that's already been awarded to another company. This is the height of hubris."
"Rather than waste $10 billion on a redundant space contract for Bezos, that money could be used to adequately fund Social Security Disability, Medicare and Medicaid, and the food stamps that many of his own employees at Amazon and elsewhere have to rely on to make ends meet," Appelbaum said.
"Jeff Bezos's business model includes feasting on public subsidies—and the U.S. Senate must not acquiesce to his demands," he added. "Furthermore, until Jeff Bezos changes the way his employees are mistreated and dehumanized at Amazon and elsewhere, no elected official should support the passage of subsidies for him or any of his projects."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has condemned the NDAA for containing $52 billion in "corporate welfare" for Big Tech. Explaining why he would vote against the NDAA, Sanders said Tuesday that "combining these two pieces of legislation would push the price tag of the defense bill to over $1 trillion—with very little scrutiny."
"Meanwhile," he added, "the Senate has spent month after month discussing the Build Back Better Act and whether we can afford to protect the children, the elderly, the sick, the poor, and the future of our planet. As a nation, we need to get our priorities right."
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/earths-robber-barons-are-dying-to-bring-capitalism-to-space/
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Earth’s robber-barons are dying to bring capitalism to space
Written by Keith Spencer / Salon July 29, 2019
Imagine, for a moment, that the Axis had won World War II. In this nightmare scenario, the Germans and their fascist allies would rule much of the world’s nations by proxy, relaxing into the easy chair of hegemony. It seems probable that the Third Reich would have put a satellite into orbit in fairly short order, followed, perhaps, by a man into space, and likely a man on the moon.
The Third Reich was, like much of Europe, an imperialist nation; they had their own equivalent of American Manifest Destiny, although their expansion “front” was to the east. (A book by Carroll P. Kakel III, “The American West and the Nazi East,” chronicles these unsettling parallels.) But after Earth had become fully colonized, they would likely find that space is the only remaining frontier. As Nazi scientists gained more knowledge of material science and the effects of space on human health, their citizens and top engineers would probably set their sights on the moon, and then Mars. The Nazi version of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos would celebrate what it would mean to bring the Third Reich to the stars.
If the Nazis were to follow imperialism to the next logical step, and establish human colonies on other worlds — asteroids, moons, space stations, or on planets like Mars — a social and political system rooted in oppression, hierarchy and racial superiority would spread, like an infection, to other distant bodies where they would be far more difficult to extract. Part of that is due to an intractable communication problem: even between the most distant regions of Earth, the speed of light is not a noticeable constraint on the amount of time it takes to communicate. The same is not true in space.
Authoritarians, of both the Nazi and the corporate variety, are not necessarily fond of free speech nor free communication; they are powerful tools for upsetting the social and political order.Even here in the United States, supposed bastion of liberal democracy, we’ve seen this play out before. In 2011, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) public transit system suppressed communications networks in order to stifle dissent. As protests over the BART police shooting of Charles Blair Hill spread around the Bay Area, the regional transit system literally turned off the underground cell phone towers that would allow cell and data transmission while underground. The agency, unwisely, openly admitted it:
“Organizers planning to disrupt BART service stated they would use mobile devices to coordinate their disruptive activities and communicate about the location and number of BART Police,” the transit agency said. “A civil disturbance during commute times at busy downtown San Francisco stations could lead to platform overcrowding and unsafe conditions for BART customers, employees and demonstrators.”
The American Civil Liberties Union issued a harsh rebuke, and questioned whether the move was even legal for a government agency to do this.
“All over the world, people are using mobile devices to protest oppressive regimes, and governments are shutting down cell phone towers and the Internet to stop them,” said Michael Risher, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. “It’s outrageous that in San Francisco, BART is doing the same thing.”
If this is how an American governmental agency behaves when confronted with the prospect of a legitimate peaceful protest, imagine how pro-Martian colonizer Elon Musk — who notoriously detests labor — will behave when his Martian dishwashers strike for higher wages.
My point is, if you think that social and political struggles are difficult on Earth, where oxygen is free and the outside is traversable without an airtight suit, just wait until you see what happens when you bring humans to Mars — a planet where round-trip communication with Earth takes forty minutes at a minimum, and nighttime surface temperatures vary between -100 and -195° Fahrenheit. On our capitalist planet, there are no workers whose employers can threaten to leave them stranded, 80 million miles from home, if they don’t do their bidding. On Mars, a disgruntled worker’s employer could compel them to work by threatening to ever let them go home to Earth again. The potential for slavery on the red planet cannot be underestimated.
Historically, the worst capitalist labor abuses on Earth happen to the most powerless workers in situations where no one is looking. Horrific tales of sexual harassment in Antarctica made sense inasmuch as its barrenness makes it an ideal place to be manipulative without anyone noticing. Mines, given their remote nature, are often rife with exploitation — and the history of miner treatment should give us pause as to how workers on Mars or on one of Jeff Bezos’s space stations might be treated.
This warning is prescient currently because of the intense focus of both government and private actors on the potential to privatize space travel. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wants to create a “robust commercial marketplace” for space travel, has proposed a public-private partnership for the moon, and has spoken of privatizing the international space station. Elon Musk, one of NASA’s suppliers in the brave new privatized world, is perfervid about building a Mars colony. Jeff Bezos, the richest human in the world, plans to build giant space stations; his rationale for space colonization is that “we are in the process of destroying this planet,” something he actually stated with no palpable sense of irony.
There are many who adulate Musk and Bezos, and view them as our generation’s heroes. Yet the fact that these men honestly believe they are the ones to lead humans to space has nothing to do with any of their unique qualifications; it is due to a series of historical accidents that randomly thrusts sociopaths to the top of the capitalist food chain.Five decades of deregulation, neoliberal economic policy, and reduced taxation on the highest tax bracket have led us to a unique point in human history, where a few individuals are so wealthy that they have the ability to fund space travel. Again, this is not because these individuals are uniquely competent, nor qualified, to jumpstart colonization; it is an accident of history and economics that makes this situation possible. Nothing more.
My fear with space colonization is that humans tend to think of it as inherently different than other political struggles, merely because humans haven’t gone to space yet. The idea of space colonization as a cool, fun, exciting, sci-fi thing inhibits our ability to think critically about what it would actually mean to let a bunch of tech CEOs unilaterally colonize the solar system.
There are precedents for the political aftereffects of space colonization: we have seen situations where a controlling institution tries to stifle communication on their property to prevent protest; we have seen how workers are exploited in cordoned spaces where their employers think no one is paying attention; we have seen how corporations entrap workers in hostile environments by giving them housing and food, and using that as a wedge to prevent dissent; and we have seen how corporations harvest the labor of the poor and vulnerable in order to avoid paying first-world wages to people who expect benefits.
All of these scenarios seem likely to play out in our future if we don’t fight back against the space imperialists. If you thought capitalism on Earth was horrific, wait till you see what it looks like in a vacuum.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/why-are-billionaires-like-jeff-bezos-so-interested-in-going-to-space/
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Why are billionaires like Jeff Bezos so interested in going to space?
Written by Marshall Auerback / Independent Media Institute July 17, 2019
The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing is this year, and it’s worth recalling the memo that then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson wrote to President John F. Kennedy: “If we do not make the strong effort now, the time will soon be reached when the margin of control over space and over men’s minds through space accomplishments will have swung so far on the Russian side that we will not be able to catch up, let alone assume leadership.”
That sense of urgency has shifted over the decades from government to the private sector, where billionaires like Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, among others, are displaying profound enthusiasm in regard to the notion of exploiting space. Their interest appears to go well beyond space tourism for the thrill-seeking one-percenters, even though that’s what gets most of the media attention. As Cathal O’Connell reports for Cosmos Magazine, “Already companies are sending up 3D printers to produce replacement tools in space.Next we could see orbiting factories making products for sale on Earth or automated robots constructing satellites the size of a football field.”
If this all seems as exotic as those old 1930s “Flash Gordon” films did to the audiences of the day, recall that the experience of the Apollo 11 moon landing showed that reality has a way of catching up quickly to Hollywood fantasy (it also shows that when sufficient government resources are harnessed to a higher common purpose, good results can happen surprisingly quickly and efficiently). Once the likes of Bezos, Branson, Musk, and others find a way to economically hoist heavy machinery into space (and it is becoming more economic), permanent “off-Earth” manufacturing could become a reality. But this raises an interesting issue: who chooses the technological alternatives that set out our future? Should this decision solely be left in the domain of the private sector? Should space be privatized in this matter? What about NASA? Consider the future: Forget about the threat of moving a Midwestern plant from, say, Ohio, to Mexico or China. Next time, it could be a robot-filled factory in space that takes your job.
To be clear, nobody is suggesting a return to medieval-style craft guilds. At the same time, it is worth noting certain salient aspects about technology: rather than acting in the service of mankind, technology has often been used in a way that creates a momentum of its ownthat establishes limits or controls what becomes socially possible. It is wrapped in an aura of linear progress and scientific inevitability, conveniently ignoring that its benefits are often skewed most heavily to the power brokers who initiate and champion its use. This is a principle danger of subcontracting space to billionaire plutocrats, whose ambitions and interests might be inconsistent with society’s broader public purpose. This is to say nothing of the increasing de-skilling of labor that could follow, if they are not integrated into this process somehow.
As the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip notes, the government-sponsored race to the moon spurred considerable “advances in computers, miniaturization and software, and found its way into scratch-resistant lenses, heat-reflective emergency blankets and cordless appliances,” all of which had tremendous benefits for society as a whole. But today, the government has largely lost its “moonshot mindset” and space, in turn, has increasingly become the focus of the oligarch class, seeking to enhance profit opportunities as well as exploiting theincreasing trend of displacing human labor with machines. This is despite the fact that Professor Seymour Melman’s own research illustrated that if you give workers decision-making power on the shop floor, productivity tends to increase substantially.
Without a doubt, there are many benefits to be derived from the work being done in the cosmos. For example, the microgravity conditions pertaining in space are considered ideal for developing materials, such as protein and virus crystals, observes Sarah Lewin, in a piece discussing the incipient development of “off-Earth manufacturing.” The insights developed by these crystals could enhance drug research and provide useful new therapies and medical treatments for infections and diseases (such as heart disease and organ transplants). Space also enhances the scope for producing high-tech materials, whose production is otherwise adversely affected by the Earth’s gravity, one example being a “fiber-optic cable called ZBLAN, … [which, w]hen manufactured in microgravity… is less likely to develop tiny crystals that increase signal loss. When built without those flaws, the cable can beorders of magnitude better at transmitting light over long distances,such as for telecommunications, lasers and high-speed internet,” according to Lewin.
We shouldn’t be oblivious to the considerable human costs associated with work in the government’s space program—“Microgravity sets our fluids wandering and weakens muscles, radiation tears through DNA and the harsh vacuum outside is an ever-present threat” (to quote Lewin), to say nothing of the risk of death itself—which are mitigated considerably when you can do things with machines alone. At the same time, left unchallenged or unmonitored, these billionaires could use space to quietly initiate further radical changes to our social structures.
It starts with ownership models. There’s an interesting paradox of futuristic 24th-century economic visions in space being built on the 12-to-13th–century ownership models that make up Silicon Valley. Wealth sharing ownership models should be conceived as part of the futuristic vision if we don’t want to be saddled with human wealth disparities reaching factors of 12 or 15 zeros. Ideally, NASA (or some other space agency) should take a leading national developmental role in the production of goods in space, and then subcontract to manufacturers to do the actual production processes, rather than the other way around.
Of course, if the government does ultimately decide that space privatization is not a great thing, no doubt Silicon Valley and its market fundamentalist champions will trot out the line about the inefficient government fighting “technological inevitability”—a typical playbook from the Silicon Valley oligarchs (i.e., you can’t fight technological progress, so let’s just set up something like a Universal Basic Income—UBI—that acts like a painkiller, but masks the symptoms of economic injustice and fails to address the underlying causes of exploitation and inequality). That’s one major risk of “off-Earth” production when it becomes a plaything of the rich alone. That’s to say nothing of the fact that thebillionaire class is already benefiting from a long series of government-funded innovations undertaken in the past, as Professor Marianna Mazzucato has illustrated in her work, “The Entrepreneurial State.”
One of which was the government-led (and funded) space program: at its funding peak, the lunar space program employed over 400,000 Americans. The management, national commitment and personal motivation of the participants were just as important as the technology itself in terms of ensuring the program’s success. It’s hard to see that sort of coalescing of interests in the absence of an overriding government stake when it comes to the production of manufactured goods in an environment outside a planetary atmosphere.
There is another unhealthy aspect to uncritically acceding to a paradigm in which supposedly superhuman entrepreneurs are selflessly taking up the baton from a tapped-out public sector. It becomes self-serving for the billionaires, and implicitly justifies and entrenches the economic status quo. As journalist Amanda Schaffer has argued: “If tech leaders are seen primarily as singular, lone achievers, it is easier for them to extract disproportionate wealth. It is also harder to get their companies to accept that they should return some of their profits to agencies like NASA and the National Science Foundation through higher taxes or simply less tax dodging.” That self-entitlement also manifests itself in other ways. Just look at the way that Elon Musk treats his own employees to get a better sense of this. Or Jeff Bezos’s labor practices at Amazon.com.
It’s undoubted that orbital manufacturing will yield innovations in technology, medicine and material science in the next few decades. But we should recall that technology doesn’t simply have an autonomous momentum and direction that inexorably leads to social progress. Likewise, it bears recalling (as Professor Seymour Melman once observed) that technology “is applied in accordance with specific social criteria wielded by those with economic decision power in the society.” Melman’s implicit argument is that technology can be used to enhance worker control or to create more yet alienation.
The government, therefore, shouldn’t be reduced to the role of passive minority shareholder collecting dividends or royalties from a privately run space enterprise. That’s the old market fundamentalist model that has failed pretty badly on this planet, let alone replicating it in space. So before we get too wrapped up in all of the exciting new goodies that Jeff Bezos and his fellow space enthusiasts can create for us, let’s also ensure that this move to “the final frontier” doesn’t simply become a new form of technological control and enslavement, in which the benefits continue to be distributed in a profoundly illiberal direction as they are here on planet Earth.
Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.