August 10, 2014

A Peace Prize for the IDF?

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/missy-comley-beattie/57512/a-peace-prize-for-the-idf

A Peace Prize for the IDF?
Israel
by Missy Comley Beattie | August 9, 2014 - 9:42am

Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, remarked that Israel’s armed forces deserve a Nobel Prize for their “unimaginable restraint” during Operation Protective Edge.

Benjamin Netanyahu said the blame lies with Hamas for the 1900 dead in Gaza.

Barack Obama condemned the killing of civilians in Gaza but just inked a bill providing an additional $225 million to Tel Aviv to improve the Iron Dome anti-missile system, bringing the total funding to $576 million for fiscal year 2015.

~snip~

Back to that Nobel Prize for Israel’s military: Consider former recipients, like Obama, the president with a kill list. There’s consistency, here.

August 10, 2014

Three Updated Charts to Email to Your Right-Wing Brother-In-Law

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/dave-johnson/57514/three-updated-charts-to-email-to-your-right-wing-brother-in-law

Three Updated Charts to Email to Your Right-Wing Brother-In-Law
by Dave Johnson | August 9, 2014 - 10:04am

Problem: Your right-wing brother-in-law is plugged into the FOX-Limbaugh lie machine, and keeps sending you emails about “Obama spending” and “Obama deficits” and how the “stimulus” just made things worse.

~snip~



Government spending increased dramatically under President Bush. It has not increased much under President Obama. This is just a fact.



Note that this chart starts with Clinton’s last budget year for comparison.

~snip~



In this chart, the RED lines on the left side – the ones that keep doing DOWN – show what happened to jobs under the policies of Bush and the Republicans. We were losing lots and lots of jobs every month, and it was getting worse and worse. The BLUE lines – the ones that just go UP – show what happened to jobs when the stimulus was in effect. We stopped losing jobs and started gaining jobs, and it was getting better and better.

August 8, 2014

NATO is desperate for war

http://atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/CEN-01-080814.html



NATO is desperate for war
By Pepe Escobar
Aug 8, '14

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is desperate; it is itching for a war in battlefield Ukraine at any cost.

Let's start with Pentagon supremo, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who has waxed lyrical over the Russian Bear's "threat": "When you see the build-up of Russian troops and the sophistication of those troops, the training of those troops, the heavy military equipment that's being put along that border, of course it's a reality, it's a threat, it's a possibility - absolutely."

NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu could not elaborate if it was "threat" or "reality", absolutely or not, but she saw it all: "We're not going to guess what's on Russia's mind, but we can see what Russia is doing on the ground - and that is of great concern. Russia has amassed around 20,000 combat-ready troops on Ukraine's eastern border."

~snip~

According to the UN itself, at least 285,000 people have become refugees in eastern Ukraine. Kiev insists the number of internal refugees is "only" 117,000; the UN doubts it. Moscow maintains that a staggering 730,000 Ukrainians have fled into Russia; the UN High Commission for Refugees agrees. Some of these refugees, fleeing Semenivka, in Sloviansk, have detailed Kiev's use of N-17, an even deadlier version of white phosphorus.

August 7, 2014

Obama Pushes Africa Investment as US Corporations 'Drool' over Resources

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/08/06/obama-pushes-africa-investment-us-corporations-drool-over-resources



"Strip away all the modern PR and prettified palaver and it’s an ugly scramble for oil, minerals, and markets for U.S. goods. Everyone wants a piece of Africa: drooling outsiders, corrupt insiders, cynical middle men."
—John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus

Obama Pushes Africa Investment as US Corporations 'Drool' over Resources
Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Wednesday, August 06, 2014
Common Dreams

At a Washington, DC gathering of African state leaders and U.S. corporations, President Obama on Tuesday unveiled a multi-billion dollar drive to promote U.S. business investments in Africa. While the President said the plan will unleash "the next era of African growth," experts warn it amounts to more of the same extractive policies that have already impoverished and dispossessed people across the continent.

"All you have to do is look who has a seat at the table to understand what is happening," said Emira Woods, expert on U.S. foreign policy in Africa and social impact director at ThoughtWorks, a technology firm committed to social and economic justice, in an interview with Common Dreams. "We're talking African leaders, some with bad human rights records, and American CEOs."

Obama's much-touted "Africa Summit"—which started Monday and ends Wednesday—is co-sponsored by the U.S. Commerce Department and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's foundation, and was attended by chief executives of General Electric, Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, IBM, and other multinational corporations.

Obama took the opportunity to announce $7 billion in what the White House describes as "new financing to promote U.S. exports to and investments in Africa." Obama also championed $14 billion in new investments by U.S. corporations in Africa, which includes $5 billion from Coca-Cola for manufacturing equipment. This is in addition to another $12 billion in new commitments for Obama's Power Africa initiative, which will give multinational corporations—including GE—billions of dollars in energy deals to "double the number of people with access to power in Sub-Saharan Africa." The total bill comes to $33 billion for "supporting economic growth across Africa and tens of thousands of U.S. jobs," according to the White House.

August 7, 2014

Senator Vitter Report Claims Cancer Prevention, Wildlife Nonprofits Are Part of Nefarious Cabal

http://www.republicreport.org/2014/senator-vitter-report-claims-cancer-prevention-wildlife-nonprofits-are-part-of-nefarious-cabal/



R-Douchebag

Senator Vitter Report Claims Cancer Prevention, Wildlife Nonprofits Are Part of Nefarious Cabal
by Lee Fang

Louisiana Senator David Vitter made headlines with conservative websites in the last few days by releasing a report called Chain of Environmental Command: How a Club of Billionaires and Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and Obama’s EPA.

Below the lengthy title is a report that claims breathlessly that environmental and public health foundations are part of a cabal of “a close knit network of likeminded funders, environmental activists, and government bureaucrats” responsible for spreading “bogus propaganda disguised as science and news to spread an anti-fossil energy message to the unknowing public.”

The report goes on to list groups such as the American Lung Association and the Union of Concerned Scientists as “agenda-driven far-left elites” obsessed with using “secretive backroom deals and transfers” to hide their agenda from the public. To shine a light on these organizations, the Vitter report details annual budget numbers and board membership lists scrubbed from annual tax forms that these nonprofits, like any nonprofit, are required to publish.

Though the report scolds the nonprofits as untrustworthy and elite, there’s virtually no information in the report that details anything they have done wrong. Rather, Vitter and his staff appears to disagree with the shared policy goals of these nonprofits, which include combatting global warming as well reducing cancer-causing pollutants from the air and water.

Continue Reading »

August 6, 2014

US Navy looks to Norway for answer to under-armed Littoral Combat Ship

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/us-navy-looks-to-norway-for-answer-to-under-armed-littoral-combat-ship/



If you look very carefully you can see the 57mm popgun near the pointy end.

US Navy looks to Norway for answer to under-armed Littoral Combat Ship
by Sean Gallagher - Jul 25, 2014 2:51 pm UTC

This fall, the US Navy will test a new weapon system—at least, one that’s new to the US—aboard the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) USS Coronado somewhere off the California coast. In search of some way to beef up the firepower of the oft-maligned LCS class, the Navy will test-launch a missile that can fly up to 100 miles and strike targets at sea or on land. And that missile comes not from one of the big names in the US defense industry but from Norway.

The LCS was supposed to be a modular, flexible ship that could get in close to shore and support troops with missile fire. But when the US Army cancelled the Non-Line of Site (NLOS) missile program, it took the teeth out of that idea—the modular missile system was also supposed to be the LCS’s go-to weapon for longer-range land and sea attack.

Since then, the only missile that has even been fired from an LCS-class ship is the RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missile, an anti-air point defense missile system tested aboard the USS Freedom in 2009 and 2010. And concerns about the ship’s underpowered armament and inherent lack of flexibility without a missile capability made it an expensive sitting duck in “contested” waters—in other words, against any adversary that could put even a patrol boat armed with anti-ship missiles to sea. As a result, the Navy cut the number of LCS ships to be built in half and froze the purchase of ships not already under construction while it looks at alternatives.



The Kongsberg Naval Strike Missile—that missile from Norway—might be part of the answer to the LCS’s woes. The turbojet-powered cruise missile is already in service aboard Royal Norwegian Navy patrol boats and in a truck-mounted version with the Polish Navy’s coastal defense forces and has been chosen as the basis for the air-launched Joint Strike Missile—a standoff attack missile for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

August 5, 2014

A Second Chance on Nuclear Modernization

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/08/a-second-chance-on-nuclear-modernization/



The DC debate on the Navy’s new nuclear missile submarines has been about how we can possibly pay for them. In this op-ed, however, frequent Breaking Defense contributor Bob Butterworth takes a step back to look at a much bigger picture. The Navy’s recent admission that it can’t afford the Ohio Replacement Program (ORP) is an opportunity, he argues, a moment of clarity that should force the administration to rethink its plan for the future of the entire nuclear enterprise. In an increasingly dangerous world, he says, he still need nukes, but the world is dangerous in a different way than the Cold War and requires a different kind of thinking about nuclear weapons. — Sydney Freedberg, deputy editor.

A Second Chance on Nuclear Modernization
By Bob Butterworth on August 04, 2014 at 1:41 PM

Thanks to the Navy, we now have a chance to build a force posture better suited to meeting our future nuclear challenges.

To recap: In 2009 the then-new Obama Administration prepared a Nuclear Posture Review that set out to conclude the country would be safe with fewer deployed nuclear forces. The following year the Administration presented the New START agreement for Senate advice and consent, soon coupling it with a plan to modernize the classic triad by building new ICBMs, new submarines to launch SLBMs, and new nuclear-capable bombers, all to be fielded during the early 2030s and 2040s. New SLBMs for the new “boomers” would then follow. The next year brought a reduced version of this plan, delaying the start of the submarine program by two years and indefinitely deferring the work to make the new bombers capable of delivering nuclear bombs. This year brought a three-year delay in beginning work on a new air-launched cruise missile.

All this was expected to be very costly, as the delays and deferrals suggest. The Navy’s effort alone was likely to run almost to $100 billion and to take up nearly half the shipbuilding program for several years. And, sure enough, the Navy told Congress in July that the plan to build new subs is “not supportable” without giving the service a lot more money.

And so there may now be a chance to reconsider the whole modernization scheme. With or without delays, the Administration’s plan would simply recapitalize the force posture that had emerged from inter-service competition half a century ago. Is that the best achievable posture for meeting the threats and challenges of the next fifty years? Maybe, but there was not much strategic analysis offered to justify it, and the arguments offered to support it have a distinct superpower-vs.-superpower Cold War flavor. It is hard to see the plan as more than a replay of bureaucratic politics, in which the Air Force and the Navy each surrendered some deployed missiles and outside “blue ribbon” panels reported they could not agree on a better alternative.

August 5, 2014

Wars and Conflicts in the World’s Reconfiguration

http://watchingamerica.com/News/243602/wars-and-conflicts-in-the-worlds-reconfiguration/

Wars and Conflicts in the World’s Reconfiguration
La Jornada, Mexico
By José Blanco
Translated By Jessica Fernandez Rhodes
29 July 2014
Edited by Gillian Palmer

The world is heading toward a political and economic reconfiguration, with no arrival station or set deadline. It is a process full of serious threats, which, apparently, will keep growing more and more. We only know that some forces are marching toward a multipolar world, and the United States will try with all of its resources to remain the one and only tyrant and irrefutable center of the planet. Perhaps the biggest train wreck in human history is taking shape, and its consequences could erase an unimaginable portion of the human race from the planet. For now, the U.S. has its political and economic forces concentrated mainly against Russia, with a reluctant European Union tagging along.

The U.S. made a timid effort to restore its supremacy during Jimmy Carter’s administration, convinced as he was that the world would march toward multipolarity; however, the cowboy Ronald Reagan arrived, claiming that Carter was a lunatic. The vast majority of the right wing, which populates the empire, was on Reagan’s side, whom they elected in 1980, and he immediately launched a brutal display of what the empire is supposed to do with the economy and weapons.

He implemented Reaganomics (or “supply-side economics”), according to which growth is achieved through methods that increase aggregate supply by reducing barriers for people who produce goods and services (supply), such as tax reduction and a high “flexibility” through deregulation. He defined the USSR as the “evil empire,” and thus boosted the arms race. As the vandal that he was, he gave the first vicious slap against a terrible force: Grenada, a small island off the coast of Venezuela. Then came the supply of weapons to Iran when it was at war against Iraq, the supply of weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua and the brutal bombing of Libya. From that moment, the U.S. established an international domination with guns blazing.

Obama arrived and started talking timidly about a kind of international New Deal, but the right wing crushed him immediately. The powerful U.S. right wing of today has a realistic view of the threat to its interests. It has seen how, amid the shrapnel fired by the U.S. here and there, new countries have advanced and become medium international powers; it sees that, should the trend continue like this – amidst the financial crisis that gestated with Reagan and in which the U.S. and the EU are trapped – it will inevitably lose positions of power to make way for this international reconfiguration, which remains hazy for now.

August 5, 2014

Proposition 1: How to Swindle the Middle Class

http://www.juancole.com/2014/08/proposition-swindle-middle.html

Proposition 1: How to Swindle the Middle Class
By Juan Cole | Aug. 4, 2014
By Cathy Stripe Lester

On August 5, Michigan taxpayers will be asked to vote on Proposition 1, which is being presented in commercials as a way to “help small businesses and create 15,000 new jobs … without raising taxes!”

If that sounds like a conjuring trick, it is – smoke’n’mirrors, my friends. And if you try to look behind the curtain, it becomes very, very confusing, as if the proponents of Prop 1 don’t want anyone to notice what it actually does.

Firstly it takes control of one segment of local tax bases. Takes it away from local cities and townships, and gives it to the state. Secondly, it is going to be a huge tax break for big companies in the long run, and shift even more tax burden onto working families.

But, you say, that isn’t what the ballot says it does! Of course not. You have to look at how it’s going to work.

August 5, 2014

F-35 purchase price will average $178 million per plane in FY2015

http://www.autoblog.com/2014/08/04/f-35-purchase-price-average-178-million-per-plane-fy2015/



F-35 purchase price will average $178 million per plane in FY2015
By Brandon Turkus
Posted Aug 4th 2014 9:02AM

With all the problems and delays facing the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, critics of the program have had plenty of ammunition at their disposal. Now, they're about to get one more figure to lob at proponents of the plagued fighter – its cost. Now, we know the F-35 program itself is very pricey – the latest reports claim the jet has already cost an eye-watering $400 billion over the course of its development so far. The latest forecast for the unit cost, though, isn't a much more encouraging sign.

According to Winslow Wheeler, a staffer at the Project On Government Oversight, each individual jet should cost between $148 million and $337 million in fiscal year 2015, with an average per-unit price of $178 million, DoDBuzz reports.

"This data is the empirical, real-world costs to buy, but not to test or develop, an F-35 in 2015," Wheeler wrote on blogging site Medium.com. "They should be understood to be the actual purchase price for 2015 – what the Pentagon will have to pay to have an operative F-35."

Wheeler, who counts stints working on security issues with the Senate and the Government Accountability Office among his accolades, unsurprisingly expects the conventional takeoff and landing variant employed by the Air Force – the F-35A – to be the cheapest of the plane's three variants, at $148 million.


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F-22s cost $418 million per copy; $337 million puts this POS into the same territory.