[Mr. Emmanuel Saez], a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has won the John Bates Clark Medal, an economic laurel considered second only to the Nobel, as well as a MacArthur Fellowship grant. [Mr. Thomas Piketty], 40, of the Paris School of Economics, has won Le Monde’s prize for best young economist, among other awards …
“The United States is getting accustomed to a completely crazy level of inequality,??? Mr. Piketty said, with a degree of wonder. “People say that reducing inequality is radical. I think that tolerating the level of inequality the United States tolerates is radical.???
Data that the two economists released in March showed that the top 1 percent of earners got nearly every dollar of the income gains eked out in the first full year of the recovery. In 2010, the top 10 percent of earners took about half of overall income.
Consequently, they argue for a much higher level of absolute taxation on the wealthy — 45 to 70 percent.
“Conservatives respond that high tax rates would stifle economic growth, at a minimum, and cause some businesses and high-income workers to flee to other countries,” it sez at another point.
Yes, of course. By all means go to Leichtenstein, Macau, Cayman, the wart on the tip of Malaya aka Singapore, or some small/US toady dictatorship on the southern side of the Persian Gulf.
With a total of 3.2 million staff members, the DOD tops the list of the world’s largest employers in a list put together by the BBC and compiled from global company and government information.
As the BBC points out, the information used to make the largest-employer list was far from standard, based on statistics provided by each entity. And in the case of the U.S. Department of Defense, the total number of employees includes civilian workers, as well as those in uniform.
All defense sector employment is protected labor, unlike its non-military domestic counterpart. Which can all go to China, or Bangalore, or wherever in Indonesia or Vietnam is the pseudo-slave labor hot spot currently.
Naturally, the soldiers employed by the Department of Defense don’t get paid nearly much as the private sector logistical and staffing labor furnished by various wings of the big arms manufacturers.
Now that’s truly protected labor — sacrosanct from any cutting. Food stamps, any social welfare programs, all the rest — all part of the rich man’s burden, the handouts that allegedly discourage and deter the blessed job creators.
“And DOD is also primed for some cuts,” continues the AOL bit. “With the goal of reducing America’s defense budget by $487 billion over 10 years …”
That’s about 49 billion a year, an almost trivial number, all things considered, probably one that won’t even move DoD back to pre-9/11 Bush war boom levels of spending achieved during the last decade.
You want entrenched immorality and root causes of national fail. It’s all wrapped up in this.
Here’s a question for readers. Do any think the US military structure is providing any significant material benefit at all — outside of the employment numbers, the salaries and wages they represent when filtered out locally — after more than ten years of war on terror and national decline?
I’m interested in sincere answers.
Is the 99 percent served by an alleged preservation of freedom, impossible to measure in dollar values because it’s an intangible, through the continued bombing of people in desperate places globally and the infrastructure required to make it happen everyday?
The GOP has repeatedly made the claim that the poorest Americans need more “skin in the game.??? Today, response to a question by ABC’s Jon Karl, Eric Cantor made it clear that Republicans are interested in raising taxes on the poor while lowering tax rates for everyone else as part of any comprehensive tax reform plan:
CANTOR: We also know that over 45 percent of the people in this country don’t pay income taxes at all, and we have to question whether that’s fair.
A piece that ran in the Guardian’s Comment is Free column is worth a quick superciliousness snort.
Covering Secrecy Blog’s recent release of a Sandia report on canceled plans for atom drones last week, the title is: US draws up plans for nuclear drones, by Nick Fielding.
The report, fairly obviously, states the drone technology which was the subject of design studies will never make it off the ground. And DD blog explained why here and at GlobalSecurity.Org.
The technology, although never directly named, is a propulsion energy source involving radio-decay, nuclear isotopes and fission products. And the reason Sandia boffins dropped it is because of an experience many years ago with the classified Timber Wind project, which involved nuclear propulsion in rocketry.
The bad publicity that resulted when Timber Wind was exposed by the Federation of American Scientists caused its cancellation. And while Sandia’s boffins of bad ideas couldn’t quite bring themselves to not take peeks at nuclear propulsion for drones, it’s also quite clear they recognized their projects were never going to be reality. For exactly the same reasons Timber Wind was scuttled.
Fielding’s piece for the Guardian makes no mention of any of this. It’s a big omission because it’s at the heart of the story. And, if ignored, it allows you to come to a conclusion that’s the opposite of reality but what’s conveyed in the Guardian, a much more sensational thing.
So the journalist finds someone you’ve never heard of to make a concerned noise about something that’s never going to happen:
“It’s pretty terrifying prospect,” said Chris Coles of Drone Wars UK, which campaigns against the increasing use of drones for both military and civilian purposes. “Drones are much less safe than other aircraft and tend to crash a lot. There is a major push by this industry to increase the use of drones and both the public and government are struggling to keep up with the implications …”
Using nuclear power would enable the Reaper not only to remain airborne for far longer, but to carry more missiles or surveillance equipment …
“Isn’t ‘sexed up’ the British term?” commented Steve Aftergood wryly in e-mail to DD.
Today Steve Aftergood at Secrecy Blog posts a .pdf from the national labs explaining that special secret drone propulsion systems/technology has been canceled due to “poltical conditions.”
A certain technology that could extend the mission duration and capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) was favorably assessed last year by scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation. But they concluded regretfully that “current political conditions will not allow use of the results.???
The assessment was carried out to explore the feasibility of next generation UAVs. The objective was “to increase UAV sortie duration from days to months while increasing available electrical power at least two-fold,??? according to a June 2011 Sandia project summary.
Although the the developers of this new potential drone propulsion power system do not specifically name it in the .pdf from Sandia, the technology and studies most probably stem from use of nuclear materials — radioisotopes and the power-generating processes of fission and radio-decay.
This triggers recall of the secret Timber Wind project of the Nineties, ideas and hardware for use of nuclear reactors in rocket propulsion, born of the same lab featured in today’s announcement.
Aftergood and FAS blew the lid off Timber Wind and the resulting sunlight caused it to wither and die. Global concern over potential US tests and flying of nuclear reactor run rockets did not count as good publicity.
The discovery of the hyper-classified Timber Wind program was an inspiration for the FAS Project on Government Secrecy, since we considered it a compelling instance of classification abuse … Timber Wind was canceled shortly after it became public, and other nuclear rocket initiatives likewise faded away in the 1990s, as the effort to develop nuclear rocketry for military or civilian applications surged and then collapsed, leaving behind only a bunch of good stories.
Today’s post at Secrecy blog also shows that even the boffins of bad ideas are occasionally compelled to admit the atrocious quality of some of the things they come up with preclude them ever being implemented.
Yes, news or even rumors of killer drones loaded with radioisotopes and fission products for purposes of propulsion over the impoverished regions of the world to hunt terrorists and civilians who are in the wrong place — that would really generate the good will. Even moreso than now.
“US drones bombed suspected Al-Qaeda arms caches in a hilly region in Yemen’s restive southern province of Abyan on Sunday, witnesses told AFP,” reads the news piece. “Six missiles targeted the suspected weapons hideouts in Jabal Khanfar, a hill overlooking the Abyan town of Jaar, which is controlled by Al-Qaeda militants …”
Note Djibouti, a country of less worth than the annual Rose Parade and bowl game in Pasadena, where the natural resources are some sheep, goats and oxen, to the left. We ‘own’ it, a great base for bombing the paupers. The French used to, for the training of the French Foreign Legion.
Do you feel safer because we blew up something on the above maps? Is my freedom to write what I think being preserved because something and some people were destroyed in a place called Jaar? Is the American middle class being saved?
Everyone knows the incredible danger the world would face if irrational theocrats controlled a nuclear arsenal, (except for the thirty-two percent who support Rick Santorum.) …
The candidates instead prefer the more hawkish, “All Painful Death Options Are On The Table Of Flaming Hellfire With The Fork Of Vengence For Your Eye” policy.
At Secrecy blog Steve Aftergood has posted the testimony of William McRaven, overall commander of global US Special Operations.
Appearing before the Senate Armed Services committee, McRaven emitted statements that with only a little translation, perfectly encapsulate the American strategy of Bombing Paupers.
As Al Qaeda and other extremist organizations attempt to franchise their ideology and violence globally, we will likely remain engaged against violent extremist networks for the foreseeable future.
Newspeak translation: We now operate under a mandate to attack trivial collections of people who we deem to be potentially annoying in the destitute places of the world from now until whenever.
“The direct approach is characterized by technologically-enabled small-unit precision lethality, focused intelligence, and interagency cooperation integrated on a digitally-networked battlefield…. Extreme in risk, precise in execution and able to deliver a high payoff, the impacts of the direct approach are immediate, visible to the public and have had tremendous effects on our enemies’ networks throughout the decade,” reads another bit from the testimony at Secrecy blog.
Put another way, it’s the focused application of killing technology and wealth against those who have none, a bottom global class with different skin color and religion which cannot threaten the country’s existence but inclusive of some miscellaneous bad people. None of whom we can abide. And all because of one very bad day a decade ago.
A couple quotes from a Guardian piece, in which a historian/pundit explains the evolution of our search for primary enemies. It evolved on the necessity of replacing the Soviet Union with someone allegedly scary enough to keep the war machine funded.
So the new enemies, mostly Islam, are anyone somewhere else as long as they’re desperate, poor and look troubling.
Likewise, five of the original six Republican candidates for US president recently called for war with Iran for “posing a threat to the American people”. What threat?
It led Washington lobbyists to protect defence spending, as Truman was advised, by “scaring the hell out of the American people”. Today, a similar self-delusion leads Washington and London to claim the right to drop bombs on anyone they find “unacceptable”.
To this there is only one answer. Let no day pass without headbutting an ignorant politician, and kissing a sceptical historian.
One part the writer, Simon Jenkins, left out: “Cyberwar” and Anonymous.
The news agency story is that civilian casualties are much less than thought by the Pakistani populace at large. Nevertheless, the perception that drone strikes kill more prevails, fueling hatred of the US.
Both premises are understandable.
It’s reasonable for a civilian population to be aggravated by attacks which cannot be fought, which come by surprise by a more wealthy and powerful country that is hated and envied.
It’s also not surprising that drone strikes, yes, do kill more militants than civilians. They’re not a strategic air campaign by B-52s over North Vietnam.
Nevertheless, the AP’s argument that drone strikes kill less civilians is drawn a little too finely, particularly since the agency goes to some length to account for all the civilians killed. It’s a significant number.
American drone strikes inside Pakistan are killing far fewer civilians than many in the country are led to believe, according to a rare on-the-ground investigation by The Associated Press of 10 of the deadliest attacks in the past 18 months.
Indeed, the AP was told by the villagers that of at least 194 people killed in the attacks, about 70 percent — at least 138 — were militants. The remaining 56 were either civilians or tribal police, and 38 of them were killed in a single attack on March 17, 2011.
Excluding that strike, which inflicted one of the worst civilian death tolls since the drone program started in Pakistan, nearly 90 percent of the people killed were militants, villagers said.
[In 2011] a drone fired missiles at the guest room of a large compound in Hasan Khel, a village in the mountains dominated by Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a Pakistani militant commander fighting foreign troops in Afghanistan.
The strike killed 25 people, including 20 militants, three children and two women, said Mamrez Gul, who owns a shop near the site of the attack. The militants were staying in the guest room, and the civilians were sleeping in a nearby room that was also destroyed by the blasts. A funeral was held for the women and children, but the bodies of the militants were taken away, said Mamrez Gul.
One London-based group, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, has published drone casualty figures based on media reports, witness testimony and other information. It said strikes have killed between 2,383 and 3,109 people, of whom 464 to 815 were civilians. That implies the percentage of militants killed was roughly 70 to 80 percent.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s breakdown aligns reasonably with the percentages offered today by the Associated Press.
Most of it focuses on all the allegedy wonderful uses of the machines.
Some of the instances are absurd pieces of prototype robotics, loved by the tech press, but which will probably wind up as nothing by apocrypha.
There’s the alleged hummingbird drone by a local SoCal company, a thing which performs nothing like a hummingbird. I’ve dumped on previously here.
“Drones come in all sizes, from the high-flying Global Hawk with its 116-foot wingspan to a hummingbird-like drone that weighs less than an AA battery and can perch on a window ledge to record sound and video. Lockheed Martin has developed a fake maple leaf seed, or ‘whirly bird,’ ” reads the AP report.
Indeed, small remote controlled fliers pop up in the news from time to time.
Last week it was reported anti-pigeon shoot activist Steve Hindi was in the news for an incident in South Carolina.
Hindi has been after pigeon shoots since at least the late Eighties. He’s been successful at it and his crew of protesters also dispersed the South Carolina shoot. In retaliation, the South Carolina pigeon shooters downed his remote-controlled observer, demonstrating you can fight back — or shoot skeet — against the smaller, unarmed and much cheaper models.
“Seconds after [the drone] hit the air, numerous shots rang out,” Hindi said in the release. “As an act of revenge for us shutting down the pigeon slaughter, they had shot down our copter.”
He claimed the shooters were “in tree cover” and “fled the scene on small motorized vehicles.”
Coincidentally, many years ago I covered the Labor Day pigeon shoot in Hegins, PA, and it is mentioned here and here.
The locals beat Steve Hindi and his followers at that event but he had the last laugh. The Hegins shoot was eventually halted.
But back to the so-called wonderfulness of domestic drones.
I’m betting the price breakdown is simple. If the drone is tiny and innocuous, a small remote-controlled model plane or helicopter with a camera, it will remain cheap and small businesses will (and do) buy them for various tasks. The big arms manufacturers really won’t be interested in that end of the market because, well, it’s not rich enough.
However, those drones developed using taxpayer money filtered through defense spending will never be cheap. They will be sold/leased to police forces and local governments through grants/subsidies handed out by homeland security.
An their contribution to employment and the middle class economy will be negligible:
In a Monday post at the Secrecy Blog, entitled “DoD Envisions ‘Routine’ UAS Access to US Airspace,” Steve Aftergood includes a claim by a member of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International drone industry lobbying group:
“Over the next 15 years more than 23,000 … jobs could be created in the U.S. as the result of UAS integration into the [National Air Space.]”
When industry trade groups are boosting something they always include job creation claims as enticements.
Using simple arithmetic it is easy to put such claims in perspective.
Using the drone industry’s own figure on job creation,. that’s 1,533 and one third jobs/year. Spread over a country the size of the United States at 311.5 million.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the employment/population ratio is 58 percent, which means 180.7 million people in the labor force this year.
Here’s the calculation:
1,533.33 divided by 180,700,000 = 8.48550083 × 10-6
That is, drone work is projected to contribute 8.48 x 10 to the MINUS SIXTH POWER, in terms of relative percentage to the current labor force.
And the inimitable and very singable official Dick Destiny drone song is here. You should post it on your website. It’s more pleasant and humorous than watching any tech nerd idiot video of little flying machines.
Published in the Asia Times, this piece by Andrew Bacevich, goes into the evolution of the US military strategy, or lack of it, during the war on terror.
There’s no catchy description for it, just a handful of idiot’s acronyms and jargon, and Bacevich, a history prof at Boston University allowed to occasionally be one of the academy’s pro critics of the US military, seems loathe to call it out language that could be far more blunt.
In fact, the piece is notable for how it dances around the immorality of the global war strategy, which I’ve called Bombing Paupers.
The United States is now in the business of using missile-armed drones and special operations forces to eliminate anyone (not excluding US citizens) the president of the United States decides has become an intolerable annoyance. Under President Obama, such attacks have proliferated …
The role allotted to the American people is to applaud, if and when notified that a successful assassination has occurred.
I guess you could say the trivial destitute pests in the really broken places of the world, and the people mistakenly offed in the effort to get them, could be seen as “intolerable annoyances.”
However, that overlooks the whole other side of the coin, the one where an entire national and globe-spanning industry of national security men and arms manufacturers, work to designate the paupers of the world as “intolerable annoyances.”
Their chosen because they’re easy to paint in this manner. They look and sound alien, desperate and — best of all — poor. And they really can’t fight back to well against the instruments and special forces operations deployed against them.
If and when the US gets into a war with Iran, after that country’s conventional military is destroyed, its skies laid bare, the strategy will evolve to the same. It will be easy to cynically justify because Iran is a really big country where a lot of people will be really angry. But they won’t have an air force that can defend airspace and territory against drones once the defense infrastructure is torn away.
Bacevich mentions some of the celebrity names from the forever war. Rumsfeld, Petraeus, the latter once cited as a possible presidential candidate, now at the CIA where half or more of Bombing Paupers can be quietly administered.
Bacevich mentions an undersecretary of intelligence whose name is unknown to 99 percent of Americans — Michael Vickers — who is now the government CEO, so to speak, of Bombing Paupers, Inc.
The Boston U. man calls Vickers a “gangster,” only because someone who admires the guy already delivered the description as a compliment.
You don’t have to be a scholar to know any of this because it’s obvious.
