Military Contractors Seek More Foreign Arms Sales to Offset Budget Cuts

Military Industrial Complex will Deal with Military Cuts by Pushing Greater Arms

Sales on Foreign Countries

Scroll down to this story by Christopher Drew below and see how the military industrial complex plans to save their necks from threatened arms cuts by just upping more arms sales abroad.  Exactly what we need to frighten the people with new claims that we need even more arms here to counter all the arms we sold abroad which are threatening our national security!   What a formula for perpetual war-- one sure way to keep the arms race going.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/11/07/business/industry-reactions-to-election.html?smid=tw-share

Analysts Expect a Deal to Delay Military Spending Cuts

Whether President Obama or Mitt Romney won Tuesday, the top Pentagon contractors had already begun preparing for a new reality of shrinking resources for the military. Boeing, for one, has slashed $2.2 billion in costs, including 6,300 jobs, from its huge military business since 2010. It announced Wednesday that it planned to cut an additional $1.6 billion by the end of 2015 by consolidating office space and divisions.

Boeing’s actions underscored the biggest question of the day in the industry: How soon and how deep will bigger cuts come? For more than a year, the contractors have been pressing President Obama and the House Republicans to reach a deal to forestall $500 billion in additional military spending cuts set to start in early January. With Mr. Obama’s re-election, that issue will flare up over the next few weeks in the lame-duck Congress. Political leaders will search for ways to avert or delay the cuts while talks get under way again on a broader deficit-reduction package.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney had both promised to stop the spending cuts, and it would presumably have been easier for Mr. Romney to work that out with House Republicans than it will be for Mr. Obama. But most military analysts believe that a deal will be reached that at least delays the cuts — which would automatically lop off 10 percent of the money for nearly every weapons program — because neither party wants to see them happen.

“I do expect a sausagelike budget deal where the really tough parts get deferred and the sequester mechanism is deferred or altered,” said Gordon Adams, a professor of international relations at American University, who helped oversee military budgets in the Clinton White House. But, he and other analysts said, the overall military budget is still likely to decline significantly over the next decade, as the war in Afghanistan ends and the military is required to share in reducing the government’s $16 trillion debt.

Tom Captain, the United States aerospace and defense leader for Deloitte, the giant accounting firm, said that perhaps $250 billion in military cuts could come as part of a grand bargain to reduce the deficit, which could also include lower entitlement spending and higher taxes. Mr. Adams added that in previous military drawdowns, like the one after the cold war, the Pentagon budget declined gradually in a steplike fashion, with the cuts becoming deeper than initially expected as policy makers re-evaluated the situation in preparing each year’s budget. He said the military budget dropped by 36 percent from 1985 to 1998 in inflation-adjusted terms, and he could see the current deficit-reduction efforts leading to total cuts of at least 15 percent, and possibly as high as 30 percent, by the end of the decade.

The Pentagon’s base budget, which soared after the 2001 terrorist attacks, has already declined modestly from a peak of about $530 billion in fiscal year 2010. Mr. Obama has proposed canceling plans for $487 billion in spending increases over the next 10 years. His plan would limit the growth in military spending to about the rate of inflation over that time.Mr. Romney had argued that Mr. Obama’s plans would weaken the nation’s defense. He had promised to reverse those decisions and increase military spending at a pace that some analysts had estimated would amount to a total of $2 trillion by the early 2020s. Mr. Romney would have halted Mr. Obama’s plan to cut the size of American ground forces back to about what it was before the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Romney also called for increasing the construction of Navy ships to 15 a year rom nine, saying the Navy needs 350 ships to support a shift in the Pentagon’s focus toward the Asia-Pacific region.Mr. Obama countered at the last presidential debate that the United States still spends more on its military than several other powerful nations combined. And after Mr. Romney noted that the Navy now has fewer ships than it had in 1915, Mr. Obama shot back,“Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed.”

Mr. Captain, the Deloitte partner, said that even if Mr. Romney’s campaign rhetoric had raised “glimmers of hope” among some military contractors, the reality is that the military budget will come down no matter who is president if the federal budget deficit is to be reduced.  Mr. Captain also said that the biggest military contractors — including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman — all recognized that more cuts were inevitable and had been paring back. He said those companies and their vast networks of smaller suppliers had cut 55,000 jobs over the last two years to reduce costs.

Boeing’s military unit said that it had been planning its newest cost-cutting effort for some time and that it would have made the same changes even if Mr. Romney had won. Given the reductions that started in 2010, the unit has cut nearly 30 percent of its executives and plans to reduce the number of middle managers. But the company has been able to reduce the impact of some of the cuts by transferring defense workers to its thriving commercial aircraft business, a spokesman, Todd Blecher, said.

The big companies have been looking to increase foreign sales to offset the Pentagon cuts. But with other nations facing their own budget problems, Mr. Captain said, Deloitte has found that total revenue for military contractors across the globe declined by 3.3 percent last year and another 1 percent in the first six months of 2012. So even with large weapons sales to countries like India and Brazil, he said, “all of that is not going to make up for the difference.”

— CHRISTOPHER DREW

 

 

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Mourning George McGovern

                                                           MOURNING GEORGE MCGOVERN

By Alice Slater

 It is eerily fitting that George McGovern’s passing has occurred in the final heat of a furious election campaign, precariously balanced between the Republocrats and the Democlicans, a tweedle dum/ tweedle dee choice between two corporately owned political parties. No matter how much the corporate media tries to fan the public pulse with staged debates and constant reporting on polls and money raised in this manufactured horse race, it’s apparent that on issues of corporate welfare, empowering the rich, labor rights, immigration, terrorism, the vast military-industry complex, war and peace, energy policy , poverty, and the rape of the earth, there’s merely, at best, a dime’s worth of difference between the two.  Indeed, there are third party candidates, from the Green Party, Libertarian Party, Justice Party and others who have radically different ideas from those we are hearing from Obamney/Rombama, but the corporate dominated media is having none of that and refuses to carry these other views . 

The significance of George McGovern’s failed campaign for the Presidency in 1972 is that it was born on the wings of a vast grassroots conspiracy, assiduously phoning, canvassing, going door to door, running slates of delegates to the Democratic convention, before there was an internet.  It was the last gasp of a democratic political process in the US.   The campaign to take over the Democratic Party by women, youth, gays, blacks, liberals, and other progressive Americans, started in 1968 with Eugene McCarthy’s candidacy to end the war in Vietnam.  That effort ended in the furious assault on our young people at Mayor Daley’s Chicago Democratic convention.  Here we witnessed on television the ugly police brutality against students and youth protesting the war in Vietnam and the fixed rules of the convention that favored those in power and ignored the results of that year’s grassroots primary campaign for Gene McCarthy, and later, Bobby Kennedy, cruelly assassinated while campaigning in LA, having entered the race after Johnson announced he wouldn’t run for a second term. 

With renewed determination, across the country we formed the New Democratic Coalition in 1968 and vowed to change the rules of the party and to capture the nomination in 1972 for a peace candidate that would finally end the war in Vietnam and address issues of civil rights, poverty, human rights, true national security---the liberal progressive agenda.  George McGovern announced as our candidate, supporting the reform of the Convention rules and all of our issues.  I went up and down my block in Massapequa, Long Island, with an army of suburban housewives, students, commuting husbands, canvassing my neighbors and making sure those who supported our platform came out to vote in the Democratic primary.   In 1970 we had primaries for local candidates and actually sent Allard Lowenstein, the brilliant progressive leader who enrolled Eugene McCarthy to challenge Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 Democratic primaries, to Congress from Long Island.  These efforts took place all over America and when I moved to Maryland in 1970, I continued my door to door work for McGovern in Potomac.  The establishment media rarely reported on our work.   They kept predicting that Edmund Muskie would be the nominee and gave virtually no press coverage to McGovern or our campaign.  What a great surprise when our elected delegates showed up at the Miami Convention in 1972—the sixties manifest in all its glory, with youth, women, blacks, Hispanics, gays, a broad swath of progressive America—and we nominated George McGovern!   The energy was electric as movie stars mingled with peace activists, civil rights workers, women’s libbers, the gay community, and every other shade and stripe of 1960s protesters.   And we proved the political process worked!   We actually captured the nomination!!   What an awful letdown to see how the establishment fought back.   They never wrote about McGovern’s forward looking platform for peace and prosperity.   They hounded him daily for having appointed Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton to run as his Vice President who was later discovered to have been hospitalized for manic-depression many years earlier.   McGovern replaced him on the ticket with Sargent Shriver, Kennedy’s brother-in-law, but the press was relentlessly opposed to his platform and instead of talking about his WWII fighter pilot record, his outstanding values and creative ideas for ending poverty in America and ending the Vietnam War, they tarred him as a “hippie” with all the rest of his supporters and he won only Massachusetts and Washington, DC in the election. 

The establishment has closed ranks ever since.    There has never been such an open, democratically conducted nomination process as we enjoyed from 1968 to 1972, and which resulted in a true people’s choice when George McGovern was nominated.   Today we have carefully staged-managed events, designed not to upset any of the corporate sponsors, filtered through the corporate media, leaving Americans in the dark.   George McGovern’s nomination was a shining moment for a democratic political process and also, sadly, a signal to the enemies of democracy to close ranks and do everything in their power to never allow it to happen again. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s an interview I did on you tube with Kevin Sanders of the World Opinion Forum, which will feature part of this talk on its Hiroshima Day program, on August 6^th.  

http://youtu.be/xK8JmmeN2FU

The Folly of Mindless Science

THE FOLLY OF MINDLESS SCIENCE

by Alice Slater 

In 2000, I traveled to India, invited to speak at the organizing meeting of the Indian Coalition for Nuclear and Disarmament and Peace.  About 600 organizations, including some 80 from Pakistan gathered in New Delhi to strategize for nuclear disarmament.   India had quietly acquired the bomb and performed one nuclear test at Pokhran in 1974 but it was in 1998 that all hell broke out, with India exploding five underground tests, swiftly followed by six in Pakistan.[i]   

The trigger for this outbreak of nuclear testing in Asia was the refusal of the US Clinton Administration, under the pressure of the US nuclear weapons scientists,  to negotiate a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that precluded laboratory testing and “sub-critical” tests, where plutonium could be blown up underground with chemicals without causing a chain reaction—hence defined as a non-nuclear test by the US and the nuclear club.  India warned the nuclear powers at the Commission on Disarmament(CD) where the CTBT was being negotiated, that it opposed the CTBT because it contained discriminatory "loopholes … exploited by some countries to continue their testing activity, using more sophisticated and advanced techniques", and it would never agree to consensus on the treaty unless the ability to continue high-tech laboratory  testing and computer-driven nuclear experiments was foreclosed.   

In an unprecedented move of colonial hubris, Australia, led by Ambassador Richard Butler, brought the treaty to the UN for approval over India’s objections, the first time in the history of that body that the UN General Assembly was asked to endorse a treaty that had not received consensus to go forward in the negotiating body at the CD.  I spoke to Ambassador Butler at a UN reception where the wine was flowing a bit liberally. I asked him what he was going to do about India’s objection.  He informed me that he had been visiting with Clinton’s National Security Advisor in Washington, Sandy Berger, and Berger said, “We’re going to screw India! We’re going to screw India!”, repeated twice by Butler, for emphasis.   Unsurprisingly, India and Pakistan soon tested overtly, not wanting to be left behind in the technology race for new improved nuclear weapons which was characterized blasphemously by the US in biblical terms, as its “stockpile stewardship” program to protect the ‘safety and reliability” of the arsenal. 

As for the “safety and reliability” of the nuclear arsenal, in the late 1980s, during the heady days of perestroika and glasnost, when there was talk of a nuclear testing moratorium, initially instituted in the Soviet Union after coal miners and other activists marched and protested the enormous health threats from Russian testing in Kazakhstan,  a debate in Congress resulted in an annotated Congressional record indicating that since 1950 there were 32 airplane crashes carrying nuclear weapons and not one of them ever went off!  Two spewed some plutonium around Palomares, Spain and Thule, Greenland that had to be “cleaned up”, but there was no catastrophic nuclear explosion.  There are still some bombs unaccounted for including an airplane still missing which crashed off the coast of Georgia [ii] How much more “safer and reliable” would the weapons have to be?  Fortunately, General Lee Butler, taking command of the nuclear arsenal stopped the insanity in 1992 and ruled that the planes carrying nuclear weapons would be grounded instead of being in the air 24/7 keeping us “safe” and “deterring” the Soviet Union.  What could they have been thinking?   Sadly, there has been no corresponding move to ratchet down the lunacy that endangers our planet at every moment from some 1500 deployed nuclear weapons mounted on missiles poised to fire against Russian missiles, similarly cocked, in minutes.    

Even before “stockpile stewardship”, I remember attending a meeting with the mad scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, home of Dr. Strangelove, and sitting in a circle to discuss the aftermath of nuclear policy in the shadow of the crumbled wall in Berlin.  The scientists were earnestly discussing the need for AGEX (Above Ground Experiments), to keep their nuclear mind-muscles alive and limber, which eventually morphed into the diabolically named “stockpile stewardship” program.  Today, that misbegotten program is funded to the tune of $84 billion over the next ten years, with another $100 billion budgeted for new “delivery” systems—missiles, submarine, airplanes—as if the Cold War had never ended! 

At the Delhi conference, Dr. Amulya Reddy, a nuclear physicist gave an electrifying talk on the responsibility of science and its moral failures, explaining how shocked he was to find documents describing how the German scientists carefully calculated, with extraordinary accuracy and scientific precision, the amount of poison gas required per person to kill the Jews who were routinely marched to the Nazi “showers” in the concentration camps.  And at a workshop on the role of science, there was an extraordinary conversation with Indian and Pakistani scientists who pondered whether scientists have lost their moral compass because the system of higher education produced the growth of the scientific institute, isolating scientists from the arts and humanities.  They examined whether these separated tracks of learning, denying scientists the opportunity to intermingle with colleagues engaged in those issues, while narrowly concentrating on their scientific disciplines, had stunted their intellectual and moral growth and led them to forget their humanity. 

Now scientists are pushing whatever boundaries might have existed to open a whole new avenue of terror and danger for the world.  In a profound disregard for the consequences of their actions, US scientists are enabling a new arms race with Russia and China as the military-industrial-academic-Congressional complex plants US missiles in Eastern Europe and beefs up military bases in the Pacific.  This despite efforts by Russia and China to forestall this new arms race by calling for a treaty to ban weapons in space, supported by every nation in the world except the US which blocks any forward progress for negotiations.    

The US has recently admitted to cyber warfare, targeting uranium enrichment equipment in Iran with a killer virus to set back the Iranian program to build their own bomb in the basement, while at home, we are talking of massive subsidies to the uranium enrichment factory in Paducah Kentucky.  It is hard to believe how screwy this new venture into cyber warfare is in terms of providing security to the “homeland”.   After all, cyber terror is not nuclear warfare.   Any country, or even scores of various groups of individuals, can master the technology undetected, and wreak catastrophic havoc on the myriads of civilian computer-dependent systems, local, national, and global.  Similarly, the recent expansion of drone warfare, assassinating innocent civilians together with suspected “terrorists” in eight countries, at last count, with the President of the US acting as judge, jury and executioner, is the application of misbegotten science in a recipe for endless illegal war.   Just as the US was the first to use the atomic bomb, opening the door to the disturbing and uncontrollable nuclear proliferation we witness today, it is again opening the door, taking the lead in a new global arms race in cyber warfare and drone technology.   Despite Russia’s suggestion that there be a treaty against cyber war, the US is resisting negotiations, indicating their continued arrogance and disregard of what must be manifestly apparent to any rational thinking person.[iii]  There can be no reasonable expectation that scientists can keep the dark fruits of their lethal discoveries from proliferating around the world.   It is just so 20^th century, hierarchical and left-brained to imagine that there will not be others to follow their evil example, or that they can somehow control an outbreak of the same destructive technology to others who may not wish them well. 

Can there be any doubt that scientists driving US policy are out of touch with reality?  Officials talk about “risk assessment” ­as though the dreadful disastrous events at Chernobyl and Fukushima are capable of being weighed on a scale of risks and benefits. Scientists are constantly refining their nuclear weapons and designing new threats to the fate of the Earth.  After the horrendous devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely everyone with half a brain knows these catastrophic bombs are completely unusable and yet we’re pouring all these billions of dollars into perpetuating the weapons labs, as hunger and homelessness increase in the US and our infrastructure is crumbling. The high priests of Science are not including the Earth in their calculations and the enormous havoc they are wreaking on our air, water, soil, our biosphere. They’re thinking with the wrong half of their brains—without integrating the intuitive part of thinking that would curb their aggressive tendencies which engender such deadly, irreversible possibilities.   They are engaged in creating  the worst possible inventions with a Pandora’s box of lethal consequences that may plague the earth for eternity. Still, they continue on. Scientists are holding our planet hostage while they tinker in their laboratories without regard to the risks they are creating for the very future of life on Earth.”  

Alice Slater is the NY Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and serves on the Advisory Council of the Global Network Against Nuclear Weapons and Power in Space

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[i] http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/pakistan/nuke98.html  

[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accidents

[iii] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/25/germany-cyber-idUSL6E8FP40M20120425

Tone Deaf US Foreign Policy Announcements Create New Provocations in Asia

On UN Day, at a panel on Nuclear Disarmament, Secretary General Ban-ki Moon spoke about his 2008 five point proposal for nuclear disarmament, including the requirement for negotiations to ban the bomb.  It was dismaying  when the next speaker, a retired US Air Force General, Michal Mosley,  breezily assured  the audience and his fellow panelists that it certainly was now possible to rid the world of nuclear weapons, since atomic bomb technology is thoroughly out of date.  He boasted that today “we” have long range attack weapons of such “unbelievable precision and lethality” that we no longer need nuclear weapons in the US arsenal.  Our conventional weapons are ever so superior to those of any other nation.   He said this as his fellow co-panelists, the Russian and Chinese ambassadors, took in the full import of his braggadocio, to my extreme embarrassment as a US citizen.   Did the General consider for a moment the effect his words were having on the Ambassadors and the other non-US participants in the meeting?  His astonishing disregard for the effect of such provocative war talk on our fellow earth mates seems to be a major failure of our “tin ear” foreign policy.

 Hillary Clinton proclaimed a similarly tone-deaf policy in an article in November’s Foreign Affairs, “America’s Pacific Century”, [i]  remarking that now that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were winding down, we were at a “pivot point”   and that “one of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will be to lock in a substantially increased investment—diplomatic economic, strategic and otherwise—in the Asia-Pacific region.”  Calling for “forward-deployed” diplomacy, she defined it to include “forging a broad-based military presence” in Asia…that would be “as durable and as consistent with American interests and values as the web we have built across the Atlantic…capable of deterring provocation from the full spectrum of state and non-state actors.” She added that just as our NATO alliance “has paid off many times over…the time has come to make similar investments as a Pacific power.”

Citing our Treaty alliances with Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines and Thailand as the “fulcrum for our strategic turn to the Asian-Pacific”, she also spoke of the need to expand our relationships to include India, Indonesia Singapore, New Zealand, Malaysia, Mongolia, Vietnam, and the Pacific Island countries.  While acknowledging that “fears and misperceptions linger on both sides of the Pacific", and that “some in our country see China’s progress as a threat to the United States; some in China worry that America seeks to constrain China’s growth,” she blithely asserted, “we reject both those views …a thriving America is good for China and a thriving China is good for America”.  This said as the United States aggressively lines up a host of new nations in an expanded Pacific military alliance, providing them with missile defenses, ships, and warplanes, encircling China.   What is she thinking?

Shortly after Clinton’s article appeared, Obama went to Australia to open up a new military base there with a token 250 US soldiers, and a promise of 2500 to come with plans for joint military training, promising that “we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.” He also adopted the “Manila Declaration”, pledging closer military ties with the Philippines and announced the sale of 24 F-16 fighter jets to Indonesia. Clinton just paid a visit to Myanmar, long allied with China, to re-establish relations there.

In her article’s conclusion Clinton bragged, “Our military is by far the strongest and our economy is by far the largest in the world.   Our workers are the most productive.   Our universities are renowned the world over.   So there should be no doubt that America has the capacity to secure and sustain our global leadership in this century as we did in the last.”  Didn’t anyone tell her that the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest in the 52 years the census bureau has been publishing those figures?[ii]  Or that the United States deteriorating transportation infrastructure will cost the economy more than 870,000 jobs and would suppress US economic growth by $3.1 trillion by 2020, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers? [iii]

The tone-deaf quality of US foreign policy pronouncements is like an infant who pulls the covers over his head to play peek-a-boo, thinking he can’t be seen so long as he can’t see out.   China has responded as would be expected.  A Pentagon report warned Congress that China was increasing its naval power and investing in high-tech weaponry to extend its reach in the Pacific and beyond. It ramped up efforts to produce anti-ship missiles to knock out aircraft carriers, improved targeting radar, expanding its fleet of nuclear-powered submarines and warships and  making advances in satellite technology and cyber warfare. [iv] What did we expect?  And now, having provoked China to beef up its military assets, the warmongers in the US can frighten the public into supporting the next wild burgeoning arms race in the Pacific and what appears to be endless war.

This month, Mikhail Gorbachev , in The Nation [v], observed the US elite’s “winner’s complex”  after the end of the Cold War, and the references to the US as a “hyperpower”, capable of creating “a new kind of empire.”   He said, “[t]hinking in such terms in our time is a delusion.  No wonder that the imperial project failed and that it soon became clear that it was a mission impossible even for the United States.”  The opportunity to build a “truly new world order was lost.”  The US decision to expand NATO eastward “usurped the functions of the United Nations and thus weakened it. We are engulfed in global turmoil, “drifting in uncharted waters.   The global economic crisis of 2008 made that abundantly clear. “ 

Sadly, the powers in control of US public policy and their far-flung global allies appear to have learned nothing from the extraordinary opportunity we lost for a more peaceful world at the Cold War’s end.  We are now repeating those expansionary designs in Asia, and “thus we continue to drift towards unparalleled catastrophe” as Albert Einstein observed when we split the atom which “changed everything save man’s mode of thinking.” 

[i] Foreign Policy, America’s Pacific Century, Hillary Clinton, November 2011

[ii] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/us/14census.html?pagewanted=all

[iii]http://dcnonl.com/article/id46259

[iv]http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics/nation/navy-driving-chinas-military-expansion/articleshow/10112639.cms

[v]Mikhail Gorbachev, “Is the World Really Safer Without the Soviet Union”, The Nation, January 9/16, 2012