Editor,
For decades, Sandia and Los Alamos laboratories have prepared to commit mass murders worldwide, thousands of times larger than the atrocities on Sept. 11, 2001.
The nuclear weapons designed at Sandia and Los Alamos terrorize many whole nations. U.S. nuclear weapons threaten to incinerate many times more moms, dads and children than Hitler and the Nazis killed in gas ovens, concentration camps and World War II. U.S. nuclear weapons are prepared to slaughter far more people than all the wars in human history combined.
U.S. weapons of mass destruction are aimed to murder far more human beings than all the victims of street gangs, drug dealers, drunk drivers, rapists, deranged spouses, serial killers, the Ku Klux Klan and the mafia combined.
Even if the U.S. never again drops nuclear bombs on cities, U.S. bombs are murdering millions of poor people right now, because the billions of dollars, vast resources and brain power invested in bombs could provide clean water, decent shelter and nutritious food for millions of poor people dying worldwide.
Even if the U.S. never again drops nuclear bombs on cities, the radioactive and chemical contamination from the creation and testing of weapons can make people sick and kill millions of people for thousands of years. Multitudes of children will be born deformed or retarded. Multitudes of people will be ravaged by cancers or ruined immune systems.
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Even if the U.S. never again drops nuclear bombs on cities, these bombs are a constant threat against many nations worldwide to keep them under the bloody terrorist control of the U.S. empire and multinational corporations, robbing them of their labor and natural resources and keeping the poor in perpetual economic slavery.
How can anyone with a conscience pay one dime of federal income tax for this international nuclear terrorism by the U.S. empire? How can anyone who abhors murders on our streets and in our homes pay one dime of federal income tax for the largest mass murder in human history?
For 28 years, I have paid no federal income tax for war and nuclear weapons. I pledge never to pay the rest of my life. I have no right to pay a tax that will help do to other people what I do not want done to me.
When Gandhi was asked what worried him most, he replied, "The hardness of heart of the educated."
Albert Einstein said, "More and more, I have come to value charity and love of others above everything else - all our lauded technological progress, our very civilization is like an ax in the hand of a pathological criminal."
Don Schrader
Daily Lobo reader
