Saturday marked the tragic anniversary of the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., but also the anniversary of his “Beyond Vietnam” speech one year earlier.
WASHINGTON - Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates will announce "a fundamental shift" in the military's weapons budget on Monday, unveiling a series of cuts to big-ticket programs that he deems ill-suited to meeting current national security threats, the Pentagon said yesterday.
"These are not changes to the margins. This is a fundamental shift," Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters yesterday, though he declined to provide specifics of the plan, which Gates will unveil after briefing key members of Congress over the weekend.
In decaying societies, politics become
theater. The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to
serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation. They
express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working class
they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make
promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled.
Once the spotlights go on they read their lines with appropriate
emotion.
The
new arms race in space is shaping up to be the largest industrial
project in Earth's history. To pay for this project, the aerospace
industry has been lobbying Washington for a dedicated funding source.
Budget allocations for missile defense - Star Wars - are only part of
the huge sums of money redirected toward preparations for war in space.
WASHINGTON - As the Bush administration was drawing to a close, Robert M. Gates, whose two years as defense secretary had been devoted to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, felt compelled to warn his successor of a crisis closer to home.
The United States "cannot expect to eliminate national security risks through higher defense budgets, to do everything and buy everything," Gates said. The next defense secretary, he warned, would have to eliminate some costly hardware and invest in new tools for fighting insurgents.
More than a decade ago, long before President Barack Obama signed the $787 billion economic stimulus package into law, taxpayer money began flowing to another stimulus program in Groton, Conn.
Since then, the project has created tens of thousands of high-paying jobs around the nation and helped keep a U.S. industry afloat. But despite its vast economic impact, the end product is often hard to spot as it's usually more than 800 feet under water.
In 2003
and 2004, President George W. Bush announced his intention to initiate
a major realignment and shrinkage of what his administration described
as an economically wasteful and outdated U.S. overseas basing
structure. The plan was to close more than a third of the nation's Cold
War-era bases in Europe, South Korea, and Japan. Troops were to be
shifted east and south, to be closer to current and predicted conflict
zones from the Andes to North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast
Asia. Over a planned six to eight years, as many as 70,000 U.S.
In the
wake of Israel's massive assault on heavily populated civilian areas of
the Gaza Strip earlier this year, Amnesty International called for the
United States to suspend military aid to Israel on human rights
grounds. Amnesty has also called for the United Nations to impose a
mandatory arms embargo on both Hamas and the Israeli government.
Unfortunately, it appears that President Barack Obama won't be heeding
Amnesty's call.
The company formerly known as Blackwater continues its mission to
bury its tarnished reputation and soldier on. Early this morning,
Blackwater founder Erik Prince released a brief statement announcing he
is stepping down as CEO of the infamous mercenary firm he started in
1997. A press release from the company -- which last month renamed
itself "Xe" -- said Prince "will now focus his efforts on a private
equity venture unrelated to the company."
In December,
The New York Times reported that Obama's Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and Defense Secretary had all "embraced a sweeping shift of priorities and resources in the national security arena…a rebalancing of America's security portfolio after a huge investment in new combat capabilities during the Bush years."
The budget released today does show signs of a modest course correction. A "sweeping shift" will have to wait.
