Will U.S., the World’s Largest Arms Manufacturer, Back Landmark U.N. Arms Trade Treaty?
Labels: Atrios, corporate military industrial government complex, Democracy Now, U.S. arms sales, U.S. interests
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posted by profmarcus at
7/03/2012
US Sets Another Record on Defense Sales, Already
The United States is set to far surpass previous records for defence sales this year, according to U.S. officials.
"Despite the global economic strain, demand for U.S. defence products and services is stronger than ever," Andrew J. Shapiro, an assistant secretary in the U.S. State Department, said on Thursday.
He confirmed that the U.S., long the world's largest weapons exporter, has already seen more than 50 billion dollars in government-to-government military sales this fiscal year.
"This represents at least a 20-billion-dollar increase over fiscal year 2011, and we still have more than a quarter of the fiscal year left," Shapiro said, speaking with reporters. The current fiscal year will end in September.
"To put this in context, fiscal year 2011 was a record-setting year at just over 30 billion. This fiscal year will be at least 70 percent greater."
Observers noted the administration's evident pride at the high numbers.
"An Obama arms bazaar is going on – this is further evidence of that," Jeff Abramson, director of Control Arms, an international civil-society alliance based in Washington, told IPS.
"This administration has made defence trade an economic rather than just a security issue – part of the agenda in terms of keeping the U.S. economy going. I think human rights issues should trump those concerns. Selling to countries such as Saudi Arabia, people need to ask whether the U.S. is living up to its promises on rights obligations."
Shapiro, who noted that the U.S. only allows a sale "after we carefully examine issues like human rights", spoke a week after the launch of the newest edition of the 655 Report, an annual compilation of defence products and services authorised for export.
Many have cautioned that the U.S. defence trade is notoriously difficult to estimate, given the numerous ways available to calculate the figure. Several point to a lower number of 30 billion dollars worth of actual transfers, rather than the larger sales number, not all of which may ultimately take place.
[...]
In a major priority for the U.S. government today, Shapiro noted that the Saudi Arabia deal alone would support more than 50,000 jobs.
[...]
According to Amnesty International, a watchdog group, today it is easier to trade in weapons than in bananas.
Labels: Amnesty International, corporate military industrial government complex, defense industry, economy, jobs, U.S. arms sales
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
6/17/2012
Friday night on Current TV’s “The Young Turks,” host Cenk Uygur charged that there’s one party in the Trayvon Martin slaying that is truly, undeniably guilty, but it isn’t a person.
[...]
Citing the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies’s Small Arms Survey, Uyger pointed out that the United States is the most heavily armed nation in the world, with 90 guns per 100 people. Yemen is in second place, but only has 60 guns per 100 people. David Hemenway, director of the Harvard University Injury Control Research Center, authored a paper in 2011 called “Risks and Benefits of Guns in the Home,” which stated that children in the U.S. are 11 times more likely to die in a gun-related accident than children in other developed nations. The Centers for Disease Control’s statistics for gun fatalities in 2009 include 11,493 homicides, 18,735 suicides and 554 accidental deaths, a combined 31,347 gun deaths for the year.
The unit in this table are so-called trend indicator values expressed in millions of US dollars at 1990s prices. These values do not represent real financial flows but are a crude instrument to estimate volumes of arms transfers, regardless of the contracted prices, which can be as low as zero in the case of military aid. Ordered by descending 2000–2010 values. The information is from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
| 2006–10 Rank | Supplier | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  United States |
7453 | 8003 | 6288 | 6658 | 8641 | ||||||||
| 2 |  Russia |
5095 | 5426 | 5953 | 5575 | 6039 | ||||||||
| 3 |  Germany |
2567 | 3194 | 2500 | 2432 | 2340 | ||||||||
| 4 |  France |
1643 | 2432 | 1994 | 1865 | 1834 | ||||||||
| 5 |  United Kingdom |
855 | 1018 | 982 | 1022 | 1054 | ||||||||
| 6 |  China |
597 | 430 | 586 | 1000 | 1423 | ||||||||
| 7 |  Netherlands |
1187 | 1326 | 530 | 545 | 503 | ||||||||
| 8 |  Sweden |
432 | 366 | 454 | 383 | 806 | ||||||||
| 9 |  Italy |
502 | 684 | 417 | 514 | 627 | ||||||||
| 10 |  Israel |
299 | 438 | 281 | 807 | 472 | ||||||||
| 11 |  Ukraine |
553 | 728 | 330 | 320 | 201 | ||||||||
| 12 |  Spain |
843 | 590 | 610 | 998 | 513 | ||||||||
| 13 |  Switzerland |
285 | 301 | 482 | 255 | 137 | ||||||||
| 14 |  Bulgaria |
5[13] | 9[13] | 286[14] | 198[15] | 354[16] | ||||||||
| 15 |  Canada |
226 | 334 | 227 | 169 | 258 | ||||||||
| 16 |  South Korea |
94 | 220 | 80 | 163 | 95 |
Labels: assault weapons, Cenk Uygur, guns, NRA, U.S. arms sales, Young Turks
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
5/19/2012
U.S. Strains to Stop Arms Flow
Just a week after President Bashar al-Assad of Syria assured a top State Department official that his government was not sending sophisticated weapons to Hezbollah, the Obama administration lodged a confidential protest accusing Syria of doing precisely what it had denied doing.
“In our meetings last week it was stated that Syria is not transferring any ‘new’ missiles to Lebanese Hizballah,” noted a cable sent by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in February, using an alternative spelling for the militant group. “We are aware, however, of current Syrian efforts to supply Hizballah with ballistic missiles. I must stress that this activity is of deep concern to my government, and we strongly caution you against such a serious escalation.”
A senior Syrian Foreign Ministry official, a cable from the American Embassy in Damascus reported, flatly denied the allegation. But nine months later, administration officials assert, the flow of arms had continued to Hezbollah. According to a Pentagon official, Hezbollah’s arsenal now includes up to 50,000 rockets and missiles, including some 40 to 50 Fatah-110 missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv and most of Israel, and 10 Scud-D missiles. The newly fortified Hezbollah has raised fears that any future conflict with Israel could erupt into a full-scale regional war.
[...]
The Syrian episode offers a glimpse of the United States’ efforts to prevent buildups of arms — including Scud missiles, Soviet-era tanks and antiaircraft weapons — in some of the world’s tensest regions.[emphasis added]
US Plans $60 Billion Arms Sale to S. Arabia -- Biggest Ever
Labels: defense industry, hypocrisy, NYT, Syria, U.S. arms sales
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/06/2010
US President Barack Obama's administration will soon notify Congress of plans to offer advanced military aircraft to Saudi Arabia in a deal worth up to 60 billion dollars, congressional sources said Monday.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the transaction has not yet been formally announced, confirmed a Wall Street Journal report about the deal but warned that key US lawmakers would block the move.
"You can fully expect that a hold will be placed on this deal," thought to be the largest ever arms sale of its kind, said a senior congressional source.
"There is serious concern about some sensitive material which is expected to be included in the deal," said another source, who told AFP that Obama aides would brief congressional staff on the deal on Monday.
A "hold" would come from the chair or ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee or Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which typically must sign off on arms transfers, and could change what is in the package.
The Journal, which cited unnamed officials, said the administration was also in talks with the kingdom about potential naval and missile-defense upgrades that could be worth tens of billions of dollars more.
The administration sees the sale as part of a broader policy aimed at shoring up Arab allies against Iran, the report said.
Labels: Barack Obama, corporate military industrial government complex, defense industry, Saudi Arabia, U.S. arms sales
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
9/13/2010
The United States is currently the world biggest weapons supplier — holding 30 per cent of the market — but the Obama administration has begun modifying export control regulations in hopes of enlarging the U.S. market share, according to U.S. officials.
President Barack Obama already has taken the first steps by tucking new language into the Iran sanctions bill signed in early July. His aides are now compiling the "munitions list," which regulates the sale of military items.
The administration's stated reason for the changes is to simplify the sale of weapons to U.S. allies, but potential spinoffs include generating business for the U.S. defense industry, creating jobs and contributing to Obama's drive to double U.S. exports by 2015.
Critics say the reforms are being rushed and warn that the expedited procedures could allow weapons technology to fall into the wrong hands.
India, which currently is seeking 126 fighter-jets worth over $10 billion, 10 large transport aircraft worth $6 billion, and other multi-billion dollar defense sales, could be among the possible beneficiaries. Allies seeking advanced U.S. weaponry and equipment, who now often buy elsewhere due to the cumbersome U.S. approval process, would draw immediate benefit from the reforms, U.S. officials said.
Labels: defense industry, endless war, Obama administration, super-rich, U.S. arms sales
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
7/29/2010
In 2008, according to an authoritative report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), $55.2 billion in weapons deals were concluded worldwide. Of that total, the United States was responsible for $37.8 billion in weapons sales agreements, or 68.4% of the total “trade.” Some of these agreements were long-term ones and did not result in 2008 deliveries of weapons systems, but these latest figures are a good gauge of the global appetite for weapons. It doesn’t take a PhD in economics to recognize that, when one nation accounts for nearly 70% of weapons sales, the term “global arms trade” doesn’t quite cut it.
Consider the “competition” and reality comes into focus. Take a guess on which country is the number two weapons exporter on the planet: China? Russia? No, Italy, with a relatively paltry $3.7 billion in agreements with other countries or just 9% of the U.S. market share. Russia, that former Cold War superpower in the “trade,” was close behind Italy, with only $3.5 billion in arms agreements.
U.S. weapons manufacturers have come a long way, baby, since those Cold War days when the United States really did have a major competitor. For instance, the Congressional Research Service’s data for 1990, the last year of the Soviet Union’s existence, shows global weapons sales totaling $32.7 billion, with the United States accounting for $12.1 billion of that or 37% of the market. For its part, the Soviet Union was responsible for a competitive $10.7 billion in deals inked that year. France, China, and the United Kingdom accounted for most of the rest.
Since then, the global appetite for weapons has only grown more voracious, while the number of purveyors has shrunk to the point where the Pentagon could hang out a sign: “We arm the world.” No kidding, it’s true.
Cambodia ($304,000), Comoros ($895,000), Colombia ($256 million), Guinea ($200,000), Greece ($225 million), Great Britain ($1.1 billion), the Philippines ($72.9 million), Poland ($79.8 million), and Peru ($16.4 million) all buy U.S. arms, as does almost every country not in that list. U.S. weapons, and only U.S. weapons, are coveted by presidents and prime ministers, generals and strongmen.
From the Pentagon’s own data (which differs from that in the CRS report), here are the top ten nations which made Foreign Military Sales agreements with the Pentagon, and so with U.S. weapons makers, in 2008:
Saudi Arabia $6.06 billion
Iraq $2.50 billion
Morocco $2.41 billion
Egypt $2.31 billion
Israel $1.32 billion
Australia $1.13 billion
South Korea $1.12 billion
Great Britain $1.10 billion
India $1 billion
Japan $840 million
That’s more than $17 billion in weapons right there. Some of these countries are consistently eager buyers, and some are not. Morocco, for example, is only in that top-ten list because it was green-lighted to buy 24 of Lockheed Martin’s F-16 fighter planes at $360 million (or so) for each aircraft, an expensive one-shot deal. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia (which inked $14.71 billion in weapons agreements between 2001 and 2008), Egypt ($13.25 billion) and Israel ($11.27 billion) are such regular customers that they should have the equivalent of one of those “buy 10, get the 11th free” punch cards doled out by your favorite coffee shop.
To sum up, the U.S. has a virtual global monopoly on exporting tools of force and destruction. Call it market saturation. Call it anything you like, just not the “global arms trade.”
Labels: defense industry, U.S. arms sales
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
2/18/2010
U.S. steps up arms sales to Persian Gulf allies
The Obama administration is quietly working with Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf allies to speed up arms sales and rapidly upgrade defenses for oil terminals and other key infrastructure in a bid to thwart future military attacks by Iran, according to former and current U.S. and Middle Eastern government officials.
The initiatives, including a U.S.-backed plan to triple the size of a 10,000-man protection force in Saudi Arabia, are part of a broader push that includes unprecedented coordination of air defenses and expanded joint exercises between the U.S. and Arab militaries, the officials said. All appear to be aimed at increasing pressure on Tehran.
The efforts build on commitments by the George W. Bush administration to sell warplanes and antimissile systems to friendly Arab states to counter Iran's growing conventional arsenal. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are leading a regionwide military buildup that has resulted in more than $25 billion in U.S. arms purchases in the past two years alone.
No sanctions for Bush lawyers who approved waterboarding, report will say
Bush administration lawyers who paved the way for sleep deprivation and waterboarding of terrorism suspects exercised poor judgment but will not be referred to authorities for possible sanctions, according to a forthcoming ethics report, a legal source confirmed.
The work of John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, officials in the Bush Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, provided the basis for controversial interrogation strategies that critics likened to torture in the years after al-Qaeda's 2001 terrorist strikes on American soil. The men and their OLC colleague, Steven G. Bradbury, became focal points of anger from Senate Democrats and civil liberties groups because their memos essentially insulated CIA interrogators and contractors from legal consequences for their roles in harsh questioning.
The reasoning, set out in a series of secret memos only months after Sept. 11, 2001, prompted a multi-year investigation by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility, which reviews the ethics of Justice lawyers. The legal source was not authorized to discuss the report's conclusions and described them on the condition of anonymity.
Labels: defense industry, Department of Justice, Eric Holder, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Office of Professional Responsbility, Saudi Arabia, U.S. arms sales, United Arab Emirates
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
1/31/2010
With that stunning graphic out of the way, please consider some interesting factoids from Why a Recovery May Still Feel Like a Recession.Given the amount of durable goods that go into homes (washers, dryers, microwaves, stoves, refrigerators, etc), and given the enormous boom in housing from 2003-2007 that chart is a stunning description of the state of our economy.
- Durable goods shipments fell by more than 20 percent during this recession, and would have declined further were it not for increased production of weapons.
- In no previous downturn since 1958, when the figures began being recorded, had the decline been as much as 14 percent.
- The drop is all the more remarkable because such shipments rose at a relatively restrained rate in the preceding period of economic growth, particularly when military sales were excluded.
- In June, seasonally adjusted shipments for civilian purposes were 19 percent below the average monthly figure for 2000. Shipments of military items were running 123 percent above the 2000 average.
- Those figures are in nominal dollars, not adjusted for inflation. That fact may exaggerate the trend, since prices of some durable goods, like computers, have fallen over the years.
REPORT TO CONGRESS
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE SALES OF SIGNIFICANT MILITARY
EQUIPMENT TO FOREIGN ENTITIES
FISCAL YEAR 2008
[...]
Fifty-seven countries procured significant military equipment (SME) that exceeded $2,000,000 through the FMS system in FY 2008. The total value of these purchases was $10,178,102,944. These purchases were made through the Air Force, Army, and Navy and Marine Corps.
Labels: corporate military industrial government complex, U.S. arms sales
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
8/02/2009
We are a nation at war. We have to confront that reality every day. And while it's important to learn the lessons of the past, we must not do it in a way that sacrifices our capability to stay focused on the present, stay focused on the future, and stay focused on those who threaten the United States of America.
The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open society, become impotent.
[...]
The military-industrial establishment is a very lucrative business. It is gilded corporate welfare. Defense systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are always guaranteed.
Foreign aid is given to countries such as Egypt, which receives some $3 billion in assistance and is required to buy American weapons with $1.3 billion of the money. The taxpayers fund the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buy them on behalf of foreign governments. It is a bizarre circular system. It defies the concept of a free-market economy. These weapons systems are soon in need of being updated or replaced. They are hauled, years later, into junkyards where they are left to rust. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy.
Those who profit from permanent war are not restricted by the economic rules of producing goods, selling them for a profit, then using the profit for further investment and production. They operate, rather, outside of competitive markets. They erase the line between the state and the corporation. They leech away the ability of the nation to manufacture useful products and produce sustainable jobs.
Our permanent war economy has not been challenged by Obama and the Democratic Party. They support its destructive fury because it funds them. They validate its evil assumptions because to take them on is political suicide. They repeat the narrative of fear because it keeps us dormant. They do this because they have become weaker than the corporate forces that profit from permanent war.
[...]
We have been drawn into the world of permanent war by these fools. We allow fools to destroy the continuity of life, to tear apart all systems—economic, social, environmental and political—that sustain us.
Labels: Chris Hedges, CIA, corporate military industrial government complex, endless war, greed, Leon Panetta, Obama administration, U.S. arms sales
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
5/19/2009
If a country develops an economic system that is based on how to pay for the war, and if the amounts of fixed capital investment that are apparent are tied up in armaments, and if that country is a major exporter of arms, and its industrial fabric is dependent on them, then it would be in that country's interests to ensure that it always had a market. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is clearly in the interests of the world's leading arms exporters to make sure that there is always a war going on somewhere."
Marilyn Waring - Source: Documentary 'Who's Counting', based on her book 'Counting for Nothing'
Labels: corporate military industrial government complex, economy, U.S. arms sales
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/17/2008
my response...
- Americans, who enjoy constitutional liberties of long standing, should support the lawyers in their protest against the suspension of the Pakistani constitution.
- The US should be earmarking aid to Pakistan not for military use but for funding and building schools for the millions of poor Pakistani children (some of them still from refugee Afghan families displaced by the US struggle with the Soviet Union in the Cold War). Such schools should stress east-west understanding.
- Washington should keep pressure on the present government to hold free and fair elections for parliament on schedule. US aid for election observers and voter education would be well spent.
a noble sentiment but completely at cross-purposes with the reasons the aid is offered in the first place... the u.s. is spending money to make more money, channeling vast sums of taxpayer-generated funds to pakistan in a quid pro quo, namely that pakistan will turn around and send that money right back to the u.s. in the form of massive defense purchases, purchases that only serve to maintain the rivers of cash flowing into the coffers of the already super-rich elites that call the shots in the u.s... offering principled advice to the criminals that run the united states is, as has been abundantly apparent for the past six and one half years, an exercise in complete futility... the u.s. will not engage in principled foreign policy unless and until there are principled people placed in office... in the meantime, your energy would be better utilized in helping to find a way to get those people removed...
Labels: Bush Administration, elites, Juan Cole, military-industrial complex, Pakistan, U.S. arms sales, U.S. foreign policy
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
11/08/2007
Attack on Iran Said To Be Imminent
UNITED NATIONS — In a sign that U.N. Security Council-based diplomacy is losing steam, a number of sources are reporting that a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities may be imminent. France and America also are pushing for tighter economic sanctions against Tehran, without U.N. approval.
Labels: egypt, France, Iran, Iran war planning, Middle East, military-industrial complex, Tehran, U.N. Security Council, U.S. arms sales, war on terror
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
9/29/2007
The Pentagon confirmed that this fiscal year, the United States has finalized $1.6 billion in arms sales to Iraq, placing the country in an elite club of weapons buyers. For example, in recent one-year periods Saudi Arabia bought $800 million and Egypt bought $1 billion in arms from the U.S., while Pakistan spent $3.5 billion, including the purchase of jet fighters. "This would put [Iraq] right up there with the top handful of arms buyers," said William Hartung, a weapons proliferation expert at the New America Foundation.
In fact, the numbers Petraeus presented on Iraq were the tip of the iceberg. According to data obtained by Salon from the Defense Security Cooperation Agency at the Pentagon, which manages the arms sales, the military has alerted Congress to up to $4.3 billion in arms sales that have been under discussion since at least 2006 between the U.S. and Iraqi governments.
Labels: Congress, David Petraeus, defense industry, egypt, India, Iraq, military-industrial complex, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, U.S. arms sales
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
9/18/2007
The Bush administration will announce next week a series of arms deals worth at least $20 billion to Saudi Arabia and five other oil-rich Persian Gulf states as well as new 10-year military aid packages to Israel and Egypt, a move to shore up allies in the Middle East and counter Iran's rising influence, U.S. officials said yesterday.
The arms deals, which include the sales of a variety of sophisticated weaponry, would be the largest negotiated by this administration. The military assistance agreements would provide $30 billion in new U.S. aid to Israel and $13 billion to Egypt over 10 years, the officials said. Both figures represent significant increases in military support.
The United States last year provided nearly half of the weapons sold to militaries in the developing world, as major arms sales to the most unstable regions -- many already engaged in conflict -- grew to the highest level in eight years, new US government figures show.
According to the annual assessment, the United States supplied $8.1 billion worth of weapons to developing countries in 2005 -- 45.8 percent of the total and far more than second-ranked Russia with 15 percent and Britain with a little more than 13 percent.
[...]
The United States, for instance, also signed an estimated $6.2 billion worth of new deals last year [2005] to sell attack helicopters, missiles, and other armaments to developing nations such as the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, India, Israel, Egypt, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Developing nations are designated as all those except in North America, Western Europe, Russia, Australia, and New Zealand.
In addition to weapons already delivered, new contracts for future weapons deliveries topped $44 billion last year -- the highest overall since 1998, according to the report. Nearly 70 percent of them were designated for developing nations.
Labels: Bush Administration, Defense Department, defense industry, egypt, Middle East, military-industrial complex, Saudi Arabia, U.S. arms sales
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
7/28/2007
[B]y the end of March 2007, at least 280,000 American citizens had already contributed some $113.6 million to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, or John McCain.
If these people actually believe a presidential election a year-and-a-half from now will significantly alter how the country is run, they have almost surely wasted their money. As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, puts it: "None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of check and balances.... The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them."
What the country desperately needs is a popular movement to rebuild the Constitutional system and subject the government once again to the discipline of checks and balances. Neither the replacement of one political party by the other, nor protectionist economic policies aimed at rescuing what's left of our manufacturing economy will correct what has gone wrong. Both of these solutions fail to address the root cause of our national decline.
I believe that there is only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge (still growing) military establishment that undergirds it.
[...]
To succeed, such an endeavor might virtually require a revolutionary mobilization of the American citizenry, one at least comparable to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Even to contemplate a drawing back from empire -- something so inconceivable to our pundits and newspaper editorial writers that it is simply never considered -- we must specify as clearly as possible precisely what the elected leaders and citizens of the United States would have to do.
- First, in Iraq, we would have to initiate a firm timetable for withdrawing all our military forces and turning over the permanent military bases we have built to the Iraqis.
- Where spending is rising, as in military supplemental bills to conduct the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would sharply decline. *
- Where spending is steady or declining (health, education, job training, the promotion of energy conservation and renewable energy sources, veterans benefits, funding for the UN and UN peacekeeping operations, and so on), it would sharply increase. *
- Bush's tax cuts for people with incomes over $200,000 a year would be immediately rescinded. *
- [W]e would have to launch an orderly closing-up process for at least 700 of the 737 military bases we maintain (by official Pentagon count) in over 130 foreign countries on every continent except Antarctica.
- [W]e should rewrite all our Status of Forces Agreements -- those American-dictated "agreements" that exempt our troops based in foreign countries from local criminal laws, taxes, immigration controls, anti-pollution legislation, and anything else the American military can think of.
- We would have to end our belligerent unilateralism toward other countries as well as our scofflaw behavior regarding international law.
- The United States needs to cease being the world's largest supplier of arms and munitions -- a lethal trade whose management should be placed under UN supervision.
- [W]e should take some obvious steps like recognizing Cuba and ending our blockade of that island and, in the Middle East, working to equalize aid to Israel and Palestine, while attempting to broker a real solution to that disastrous situation.
- [W]e need to rewrite the National Security Act of 1947, taking away from the CIA all functions that involve sabotage, torture, subversion, overseas election rigging, rendition, and other forms of clandestine activity. The president should be deprived of his power to order these types of operations except with the explicit advice and consent of the Senate.
* quoted from Noam Chomsky
- [T]he U.S. must cap its trade deficits through the perfectly legal use of tariffs in accordance with World Trade Organization rules, and it must begin to guide its domestic market in accordance with a national industrial policy.
I also believe that unless we follow this path, we will lose our democracy and then it will not matter much what else we lose.
Labels: 2008 candidates, 2008 Election, Afghanistan, Chalmers Johnson, CIA, defense industry, democracy, Democrats, free trade, George Bush, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Republicans, U.S. arms sales
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
5/17/2007
Three months after the United States successfully pressed the United Nations to impose strict sanctions on North Korea because of the country’s nuclear test, Bush administration officials allowed Ethiopia to complete a secret arms purchase from the North, in what appears to be a violation of the restrictions, according to senior American officials.
The United States allowed the arms delivery to go through in January in part because Ethiopia was in the midst of a military offensive against Islamic militias inside Somalia, a campaign that aided the American policy of combating religious extremists in the Horn of Africa.
Labels: axis of evil, Bush Administration, Ethiopia, Iran, Islam, North Korea, Somalia, U.S. arms sales
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
4/08/2007
In the three years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, U.S. military aid to Pakistan soared to $4.2 billion, compared to $9.1 million in the three years before the attacks — a 45,000 percent increase — boosting Pakistan to the top tier of countries receiving this type of funding.
More than half of the new money was provided through a post-9/11 Defense Department program — Coalition Support Funds — not closely tracked by Congress.
This is a key finding of an investigative study by the Center for Public Integrity, using data assembled through Freedom of Information Act requests. Pakistan received $2.3 billion of post-9/11 aid from CSF money in fiscal years 2002 through 2004, a total that surpassed $3 billion in 2005. Not only did this earn it the No. 1 rank among nations receiving CSF money, but Pakistan's take was nearly four times as much as all other countries combined received by 2005.
"With the possible exception of Iraq reconstruction funds, I've never seen a larger blank check for any country than for the Pakistan CSF program," Tim Rieser, the majority clerk on the Senate Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs, told the Center.
The Bush administration's nuclear accord with India seems on track to easy passage in Congress, as the White House also proceeds with plans to equip Pakistan with F-16 fighter jets.
33.5% of all weapons contracts worldwide and 31.6% of contracts to the developing world are inked by our peace-loving nation... our hypocrisy is evidently limitless... oh, and by the way, $1.5B of that went to Pakistan and almost $5B to India...
the $1.3B u.s. weapons sale to pakistan, paid for by the u.s. department of defense, no less...
Labels: Bush Administration, FOIA, India, Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, Senate Appropriations Committee, U.S. arms sales, White House
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
3/28/2007
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