Archives: Articles

European businesses and consumers face at least 20 years of electricity price rises, according to a leaked European Commission report on how the region can meet its green energy targets.

It also forecasts a huge growth in the number of wind farms, which would push up prices even higher.

In an assessment that examines a range of ways in which fossil fuels such as coal can be replaced with cleaner sources of energy, the 112-page report says all scenarios point to wind farms becoming the biggest source of electricity in the bloc by 2050, outstripping both coal and nuclear power.

Wind farms could provide as much as 49 per cent of EU electricity by that date, the report suggests, up from just 5 per cent today.

Average electricity prices for households and businesses would rise “strongly up to 2020-2030” under all scenarios, the document says, and the highest prices would occur after 2030 if renewable sources of power, such as wind and solar, make up a large share of energy production. For example, average prices for households could jump by more than 100 per cent by 2050 if this were the case but only by 43 per cent under a scenario that assumed more nuclear power and carbon capture and storage were used.

The report suggests this would be partly due to new infrastructure investments but it also appears to assume that conventional fuel plants would not run as much as they do now, meaning higher prices would have to be charged to cover initial investment costs.

The report is a draft impact assessment of the sorts of energy policies needed if European Union countries are to meet their goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 per cent from 1990 levels by 2050.

It is now circulating as officials prepare what the commission calls its “Energy Roadmap to 2050”, due to be released by the end of this year.

The assessment shows what would happen to prices, costs and energy sources under five different scenarios to make the EU less dependent on conventional fossil fuels such as coal and gas, which now account for more than half the electricity generated in the bloc.

Nuclear plants are the next biggest source, with a share of 28 per cent, while wind and hydro-electric plants, the two main sources of renewable energy, produce a combined total of 18 per cent.

 Of the five scenarios examined, the highest electricity prices are forecast in a “high renewables” scenario which envisages more supply of North Sea off-shore wind plus “significant” concentrated solar power – plants that concentrate the sun’s rays to produce steam and drive a turbine – and micro power generation from solar and wind.

The cheapest prices are predicted in a so-called “diversified supply” scenario, which assumes support for renewable energy but also acceptance of nuclear power and the commercial viability of carbon capture and storage.

A spokeswoman for the European Commission’s energy commissioner, Günther Oettinger, said she was unable to comment on leaked documents.

By Pilita Clark

16 October 2011

@ The Financial Times

It began in Tunisia and Egypt, then spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa. It spilled into Spain, Greece, and Ireland. It leapfrogged to Wall Street. And this past weekend it erupted in London, Rome, Paris, Tokyo, Taipei, and Sydney. In hundreds of towns and cities around the world the uprising’s refrain is similar: economic misery resulting from fizzling economic growth is leading protesters to question corruption both in governments and in financial institutions, and to demand an end to extreme economic inequality.

As long as economies grew, inequality was tolerable. And if the rabble demanded perks, governments could simply borrow money to fund social programs. Corruption could fester unnoticed. But now the economic tide is no longer lifting all boats. Bursting financial bubbles have led economies to contract. That has in turn led to falling tax revenues, which have made existing government debts in several key countries unrepayable. Therefore government bonds held by banks as assets suddenly have little value. Which causes the economy to teeter further. The system is broken.

The universal solution: austerity—a strategy of cutting government spending, government jobs, and government services to the poor and middle classes. Suddenly social safety nets are being withdrawn, and extreme economic inequality is no longer socially tolerable.

The only thing that could stop the uprising is a return to growth—which would generate new jobs, higher tax revenues, and solvency in the financial industry. But instead the world economy seems poised on a precipice perhaps more dangerous than the one it faced in 2008. This means the protesters likely aren’t going home anytime soon. For governments, there are only two realistic responses: repression or major reform

Brutal police and military repression of the protests could buy time for politicians, but it would solve nothing. The unrest would go underground and tear at the social fabric, leading eventually to revolution or societal breakdown.

Reform, if it is to make a difference, must be fundamental. It must start by addressing issues of economic inequality, but then must eliminate the massive debt overhang that plagues not just governments but households and the entire financial sector. In essence, policy makers must cobble together a new economic model that meets human needs in the absence of economic growth.

Politicians take note: Forces are being unleashed that cannot be tamed. So far, crisis has been dealt with by a combination of denial and delay. Those tactics no longer work. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.

By Richard Heinberg

17 October 2011

@ Post Carbon Institute

Richard Heinberg is Senior Fellow-in-Residence at Post Carbon Institute. He is the author of ten books, including The Party’s Over, Peak Everything, and the soon-to-be-released The End of Growth. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s most effective communicators of the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels.

Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has given an interview to Al Jazeera, ending his feud with a channel he once described as “vicious”.

Questioned by Sir David Frost, Bush’s former right-hand man, who many see as the architect of the second Gulf War, struck a conciliatory tone in the interview.

“Its audience has grown and it can be an important means of communication in the world,” he said of the channel.

“I am delighted you are doing what you are doing.”

The interview is to be broadcast on Al Jazeera English on Friday night.

The Al Jazeera network started in 1996 as an Arabic news channel, and was the first rolling-news media operation to be based in the Middle East.

The channel came to western attention following the 9/11 attacks, when it routinely aired broadcasts of Osama bin Laden.

It quickly gained a reputation among many in the west as a mouthpiece for Al-Qaeda, promoting Islamic militancy and a strong anti-western message.

In 2001, a US bomb destroyed Al Jazeera’s office in Kabul; an incident the Bush Administration maintained was an “accident”.

Relations between the network and Washington were further strained when in 2003 a US plane fired upon the channel’s office in Baghdad, killing reporter Tareq Ayyoub. Again, US authorities called the incident a “mistake”.

On April 15 2004, Rumsfeld denounced the TV station at a Pentagon briefing, calling its reporting of the Iraq War “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable”.

“They are simply lying,” Rumsfeld said following an Al Jazeera report that an American assault on Fallujah was terrorizing citizens.

The nadir of the relationship came a day later when President Bush reportedly told Prime Minister Tony Blair that he wanted to bomb the channel’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar.

Reports emerged of the conversation later that year based on transcripts, though it remains unknown exactly what was said or as to whether Bush was joking.

That November, the White House referred to the reports of the conversation as “outlandish”, however Wadah Khanfar, then the director-general of Al Jazeera, sent a letter to Downing Street demanding clarification from Blair as to what was said in the meeting.

The English version of the channel launched in 2006 with veteran presenter Frost as its marquee name. Its launch, along with the end of the Bush regime, led to a thawing of relations. In April this year, President Obama hosted Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani of Qatar, the new boss of the channel, in Washington.

Suspicions remain as to the impartiality of the channel’s Dohar operation, but the Rumsfeld interview, along with a recent broadcast of Frost and David Cameron, provides some indication of Al Jazeera’s more accepted standing in the halls of Washington and London.

First Posted: 30/9/11 00:00 GMT Updated: 1/10/11 11:37 GMT Paul Vale (The Huffington Post)

 

Chomsky vividly shares his reflections on the wall street protests and warns of an impending serious poverty and real unemployment similar to the great depression, he talks about the 2012 American presidential campaign spending and how positions in both the white house and the congress are being bought, not earned and he refers to the killing of Osama Bin Laden and how this marks a shift of American policy from Bush’s abducting and torturing whoever the CIA thought posed a threat to the U.S to Obama’s “just kill `em when you spot `em” approach regardless of the legalities overlooked in the process.

He concludes that the killing of Osama Bin Laden was done, in such a way, as to infuriate, and may be implicate the Pakistani military, something he seriously regards as extremely dangerous.

In regard to the Arab spring, Chomsky acknowledges that the U.S and its western allies did not support the Tunisian or the Egyptian revolutions; rather they opposed them, and backed the dictator till the last minute and then shifted policy when they were overthrown.

Pinning its hopes on the sole support of the US, Chomsky warns “the Zionist state would risk a collapse if that support was to be withdrawn or compromised – much like apartheid-era South Africa.” He recalls how South Africans felt safe to ignore a UN embargo and corporations pulling out of their country throughout the 1980s, as long as the Reagan administration continued to support them.

As soon as the US withdrew its support, the apartheid regime collapsed. “For 35 years, the US and Israel have been rejecting a political settlement that is supported virtually by the entire world.

A couple of months ago, there was a meeting of the oligarchs — people who pretty much run the economy of Israel,” Chomsky says, “and they warned the government that it better accept something like this resolution, because otherwise, Israel will be, as they put it, South Africanized: even more isolated, with boycotts, refusal to load ships, and their economy will collapse.”

By Dr. Ashraf Ezzat

 

 

 

 

Austerity not the way to go for Europe

Most economists thought that when the euro was put together, it was an incomplete task. They’d taken out too many adjustment mechanisms and had not put anything in its place.

One of the things that makes the American common currency work across the country is we have a common fiscal authority and high migration – we’re willing to allow North Dakota to become empty.

In Europe, there’s no fiscal authority, migration is more difficult and most of the countries are not willing to let themselves become empty. So the framework for allowing for an effective common currency is not there.

Now you might be able to make up for the deficiencies in one part by strengthening another part, for instance by having a stronger fiscal authority. But they don’t have that.

What they did fiscally was tie themselves to the stability and growth pact, which was a pact for recession rather than for growth because limiting deficits when you have a shock is a recipe for recession, which is what is happening in Greece.

So the question was always: when a crisis occurred would they be able to finish the task? And I think the jury is still out.

Misguided

The agreement that they made in July was a reasonably good agreement. It recognised that Greece needed help to grow but they haven’t put in any money and the process of ratification has been very slow.

So I think it’s really a question that has not yet been resolved.

There are a number of institutional ways of going about helping to resolve it. The European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) needs to be larger or to have more ability to leverage itself. That’s a minimum.

Over the longer term they’re going to need European bonds and a number of other actions, and they have to recognise the framework of austerity is not the way to go.

Issuing bonds should be one part of the fiscal framework.

The problem with the eurozone was the one part of the framework that they thought they needed was limiting fiscal deficits and that was just a misguided analysis.

Ireland and Spain had surpluses before the crisis. But they thought that having limited fiscal deficits was necessary and sufficient for protecting the economic framework and that was just wrong.

Politics

The July agreement was a good start if they implement it quickly. But that’s not been happening.

Let me say, for democracy it’s not been that slow. Two months to get landmark legislation through is not a long time. But markets move quickly. So I don’t criticise the fact that there’s been a deliberate pace – that’s the nature of democracy.

My criticism is they didn’t do anything in the 10 years before there was a crisis.

I suspect that we’re going to see a lot of volatility. Whether at the end the eurozone will emerge intact or not, it’s hard at this point to say.

It all depends on the politics. Even though I think the commitment of the leaders to do something is there, the political process in some ways is not in tune with the economics. The problems are deep.

I think there is a reasonably good chance that a year from now you would find the eurozone smaller than what it is today.

There’s a broad consensus among economists that the best way of doing it would be for the northern European countries to leave. That would be the easiest adjustment.

But the general view is that is not what’s going to happen. The view is that some of the weaker countries will leave and that will lead to very large trauma in the global financial markets such as freezing the credit markets, a repeat of 15 September 2008 (when Lehman Brothers collapsed).

Growth potential

If Europe insists on going forward with the kind of austerity packages in Germany and without the kind of assistance they need to help those countries with severe economic problems, such as Greece, then almost surely the eurozone will break up.

But if they come forward with that money, then it can survive, at least for a while.

The European Central Bank (ECB) is the one institution that has the kind of flexibility that is necessary to deal with the crisis. It will be absolutely essential, because they will be able to step into the breach and be willing to do that.

Now the problem is that some people in Germany and elsewhere have said the ECB should not be buying Italian and Spanish bonds and that it should not be stepping into the breach. But if the ECB doesn’t do that, then the eurozone’s prospects are very, very bleak.

It’s not inevitable that Greece will default if they come forward with enough assistance for it to grow. It has enormous growth potential, so if Europe comes up with enough money, it will grow and that will enable it to manage its debts.

But so far I’ve seen nothing in the form of growth assistance as opposed to austerity assistance just to meet its budget shortfall, and I’m not very optimistic that it will avoid a default.

By  Joseph Stiglitz

3 October 2011

@ BBC News

Joseph Stiglitz is a Professor at Columbia University and also a recipient of a Nobel Prize in Economics and a former chief economist at the World Bank.

 

Attack on People who Struggle for Land and Future from POSCO

Today (26th Sept 2011), about 400 armed goons of POSCO attacked our villagers at Govindpur village with rod, sticks and hand-bombs at 8.30 AM.  In this sudden attack, more than  30 villagers have been injured including 6 women; two people are critically injured. These injured are not able to go for treatment to the nearest hospital in fear of arrest as police has already booked false cases against them in the earlier incidents.

This is a new trick made by the government and POSCO to enter into our area. The government made a plan to build a coastal road along the beach from the Indian Oil Refinery complex to the port near to our village for POSCO.  As you  know that we have prevented the entry of the police from the side of the land mass by peacefully sitting in Dharana, the government is considering this as an alternative  road to make entry from sea side.  The construction has been contracted to Paradeep Paribahan, a private company led by Bapi Circle.  On 19th of August 2011, the government has laid the foundation for road construction. On 20th of August, around 400 people including the contractor and workers were proceeding to the site during the day; our people protested the move and chased them away.

Today,  Bapi Circle who is also known as mafia leader from the ruling party Biju Janata Dal ( BJD),  brought armed goons from outside the area and lead the attack . Our villagers are chased with sticks and bombs are also being thrown on our unarmed villagers. The  leader of the Contractors’ association has admitted to have attacked the people in front of electronic media. Police did not arrive in the place. Now, our people are in high alert to face any imminent attack  by private militia. Our villagers are strongly determined not to allow the construction of the road.

We request all of you to strongly condemned this heinous attack and expose this unholy nexus between POSCO and the state government in a strong word. This is a very planned and calculated move to crush our peaceful democratic movement against the forceful displacement. The malicious plan of the government to project all this situation as a law and order problem in the media and accordingly police will enter in to our area. This is nothing but a very shameful act of POSCO to terrorize the villagers. We all are determined to continue our struggle democratically.

By Prashant Paikary

Spokesperson, POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti

1 October 2011

 

 

With anti-Wall Street protests spreading to over 100 US cities and towns, President Barack Obama at a White House press conference Thursday cynically sought to exploit the outpouring of spontaneous anger at the banks and big business as a vehicle for his reelection bid.

On Thursday, new Occupy Wall Street protests sprang up in a number of major cities, including Philadelphia, New Orleans, Washington, Tampa, Dallas, Houston and Austin. They came on the heels of the largest demonstration so far in New York City, where an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 marched through lower Manhattan Wednesday night.

The demonstrations are driven by a profound anger over unprecedented levels of social inequality as, three years after the financial meltdown on Wall Street, unemployment and declining wages persist and deepen alongside record profits and increasing wealth for the top one percent.

The first White House reporter who asked Obama about the anti-Wall Street protests stated the obvious about the demonstrators: “They clearly don’t think that you or Republicans have done enough, that you’re in fact part of the problem.”

Obama responded that he had “heard about” the protest movement and “seen it on TV.” He went on to acknowledge that “people are frustrated, and the protestors are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.”

He followed this indication that he “felt the pain” of those who are demonstrating with an immediate affirmation of his support for “a strong, effective financial sector in order for us to grow.” Referring to his unqualified support for the $750 billion TARP bailout of the banks, he added: “I used up a lot of political capital, and I’ve got the dings and bruises to prove it, in order to make sure that we prevented a financial meltdown, and that banks stayed afloat.”

In New York, Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a similar statement on Thursday, defending Wall Street against the protests. “Wall Street is a major economic engine for the state,” he said at a press conference. “When all is said and told, 20 to 25 percent of the state’s income comes from Wall Street.”

In response to a reporter who noted that no Wall Street executives “have gone to jail despite the rampant corruption and malfeasance that did take place,” Obama defended the failure to prosecute any of those responsible for triggering the deepest crisis since the Great Depression. He said that “a lot of that stuff wasn’t necessarily illegal, it was just immoral or inappropriate or reckless,” and insisted in relation to prosecutions, “that’s not my job, that’s the Attorney General’s job.”

Obama’s feigned sympathy for the protests is part of concerted attempt to channel the movement behind the Democratic Party, which, no less than the Republicans, serves and is financed by the banks and finance houses responsible for the unemployment crisis.

This effort to hijack the protest movement has been spearheaded by the trade unions, which participated in Wednesday’s mass march in New York City. The rally featured a speakers platform packed with bureaucrats who have led no fight of their own against Wall Street and are responsible for betraying the interests of the workers they purport to represent.

The presence of a number of Democratic politicians, none of whom dared to address the rally, was announced from the platform with great enthusiasm, and some of the union bureaucrats present made no bones of the fact that they want to see the Occupy Wall Street movement exploited as a vehicle for the Obama re-election campaign.

The speed with which the anti-Wall Street protests have spread from coast to coast is all the more extraordinary given the persistent refusal of the mass media to give them significant coverage and the attempt in many of the reports that have appeared to mock and belittle them.

“Meetups” had been established in 761 cities by Thursday night, according to the web site Occupy Together [http://www.occupytogether.org], which describes itself as “an unofficial hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St.”

On Thursday, thousands of people initiated an occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington before staging a march past the US Treasury and the White House. The demonstrators chanted, “We Got Sold Out.”

The march ended in front of the US Chamber of Commerce, where marchers shouted, “We Want Jobs! We Want Jobs!” While the protesters have National Park permits allowing them to occupy the plaza only through Sunday, they have vowed to stay indefinitely.

Several hundred demonstrators marched down Tulane Avenue through the financial district of New Orleans on Thursday, rallying in Lafayette Square near the New Orleans branch of the Federal Reserve Bank. WWL radio described the crowd as “racially mixed and mostly young.”

“Most people are not getting a fair shake,” Daniel Brook, one of the marchers, told WWL. “It’s a country where the top one percent controls 90 percent of the wealth, and that’s outrageous. This is supposed to be a democracy. We’re all supposed to be in this together.”

Marches also took place across Texas. Several hundred marched on the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, which was ringed with police barricades. In Houston, hundreds more marched from the JPMorgan Chase building to City Hall chanting, “Banks Got Bailed Out! We Got Sold Out!” A demonstration was also held outside City Hall in the state capital of Austin.

David Larrick Smith, 40, from the Dallas suburb of Rowlett, told the Associated Press that he was protesting “all these billionaires who have bought our government.” He added, “I voted for Obama and he punked out. He had the opportunity to stand for the American people, and he’s become a political puppet.”

Several hundred people began an Occupy Philadelphia demonstration Thursday morning outside City Hall. May Chan, 32, a science researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Associated Press, “I’m outraged by the whole bailout. I think someone should go to jail.”

In a number of areas, anti-Wall Street protests have met with arrests, brutality and harassment from the police.

In New York City, toward the end of Wednesday’s mass march through lower Manhattan, police used truncheons and pepper spray against unresisting protesters and arrested 28 people after a section of the demonstration tried to march on Wall Street.

Mounted police were brought in to intimidate demonstrators and a number of people suffered injuries as cops threw them to the pavement. The New York City Police Department has met the protests with excessive force over the course of the last several weeks, including last Saturday, when some 700 demonstrators were arrested after they had been led onto the Brooklyn Bridge and then trapped there by police on either side.

In Seattle, more than two-dozen demonstrators were arrested Wednesday after refusing police orders to take down tents in Westlake Park. The protesters have vowed to stay in the park.

In St. Louis, 11 people were arrested shortly after midnight on Thursday morning after police attempted to enforce a ban on demonstrations in Kiener Plaza after 10 pm. Some 100 members of the occupation group were in the plaza at midnight when two dozen squad cars raided the area.

In San Francisco, police in riot gear raided the Occupy SF camp on Market Street Wednesday night.

Occupy SF issued a statement saying that police had warned them to “pack up our tents” or face arrest. While the demonstrators moved to comply by taking down the tents and beginning to move out supplies, “still, the police, wearing helmets and carrying batons, formed a perimeter around our goods and prevented us from saving anything while they supervised Public Works employees as they stole everything. The police stole food, water, shelter and other necessities of life from the 99 percent at Occupy SF.”

Similarly, in Chicago, harassment from the police has become a major concern of protesters. As part of a thoroughly anti-democratic attempt to stamp out and disperse the protest centered around the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the Chicago Board of Trade and the local headquarters of several major banks, police officials have used a local ordinance to demand that protesters’ personal possessions be kept off of sidewalks and prevent the protesters from sleeping at the site, or even sitting down or standing still.

In response, the demonstrators have become mobile, making sure to keep moving in order to avoid arrest or ticketing, and shifted their supplies to a nearby church. They have also taken to marching around different parts of the downtown area to avoid confrontation and to publicize the protest to more city residents.

In Los Angeles Thursday, eleven protesters were arrested for the “crime” of entering a downtown Bank of America branch carrying a giant check for $673 billion made out to the “People of California.” They were seeking to present the check to the bank when they were detained by security guards and turned over to the Los Angeles police.

The police arrested the six men and five women, part of a crowd of 500 who marched through the downtown area Thursday, and led them to prison in handcuffs. Bail was set at $5,000 per person.

By Bill Van Auken

7 October 2011

WSWS.org

When the think-tank chappies ponder “decline,” they tend to see it in geopolitical terms.

Great powers gradually being shunted off the world stage have increasing difficulties getting their way: Itsy-bitsy colonial policing operations in dusty ramshackle outposts drag on for years and putter out to no obvious conclusion.

If that sounds vaguely familiar, well, the State Department reported that the last Christian church in Afghanistan was razed in 2010. This intriguing factoid came deep within their “International Religious Freedom Report.”

It is not, in any meaningful sense of that word, “international.” For the last decade, Afghanistan has been a U.S. client state; its repulsive and corrupt leader is kept alive only by NATO arms; according to the World Bank, the Western military/aid presence accounts for 97% of the country’s economy.

American taxpayers have spent nearly half a trillion dollars and lost many brave warriors in that benighted land, and all we have to show for it is a regime openly contemptuous of the global sugar daddy that created and sustained it.

In another American client state, the Iraqi government is publicly supporting the murderous goon in Syria and supplying him with essential aid as he attempts to maintain his dictatorship. Your tax dollars at work.

As America sinks into a multitrillion-dollar debt pit, it is fascinating to listen to so many of my friends on the right fret about potential cuts to the Pentagon budget. The problem in Iraq and Afghanistan is not that we are spending insufficient money, but that so much of that money has been utterly wasted.

Dominant powers often wind up with thankless tasks, but the trick is to keep it within budget. London administered the sprawling, fractious tribal dump of Sudan with about 200 British civil servants for what, with hindsight, was the least worst two-thirds of a century in that country’s existence.

These days I doubt 200 civil servants would be enough for the average branch office of the Federal Department of Community Organizer Grant Applications. Abroad as at home, the U.S. urgently needs to learn to do more with less.

As I said, these are common symptoms of geopolitical decline: Great powers still go through the motions, but increasingly ineffectually.

What the Council of Foreign Relations types often miss is that, for the man in the street, decline can be very pleasant.

In Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands, the average citizen lives better than he ever did at the height of Empire. Today’s Europeans enjoy more comfortable lives, better health and take more vacations than their grandparents did. The state went into decline, but its subjects enjoyed immense upward mobility.

Americans might say if this is decline, bring it on. But it won’t be like that for the U.S.; unlike Europe, geopolitical decline and mass downward mobility will go hand in hand.

Indeed, they’re already under way. Whenever the economy goes south, experts talk of the housing bubble, the tech bubble, the credit bubble. But the real bubble is the 1950 American moment, followed by our failure to understand that moments are not permanent.

The U.S. emerged from the Second World War as the only industrial power with its factories intact and its cities not reduced to rubble, and assumed that that unprecedented pre-eminence would last forever: We would always be so far ahead and so flush with cash that we could do anything and spend anything and we would still be No. 1. That was the thinking that Detroit’s automakers made when they figured they could afford to buy off the unions.

The industrial powerhouse of 1950 is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket cases. And yes, Detroit is an outlier, but look at the assumptions its rulers made, and then wonder whether it will seem an outlier in the future.

Take the complaints of the young Americans “occupying” Wall Street who’ve said “it’s our Arab Spring.”

Put aside the differences between brutal totalitarian dictatorships and a republic of biennial elections, and simply consider it in economic terms: At the Wall Street demonstrations, not-so-young college students are demanding that their tuition debt be forgiven. In Egypt, half live in poverty; the country imports more wheat than any other nation, and the funds to do that will dry up in a couple of months. They’re worrying about starvation, not how to fund half a decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U.

One sympathizes. When college tuition is $50,000 a year, you can’t “work your way through college” — because, after all, an 18-yearold who can earn 50 grand a year wouldn’t need to go to college, would he?

Nevertheless, it’s not the same as some guy halfway up the Nile living on $2 a day. One is a crisis of the economy, the other a crisis of decadence. Generally, the former are easier to solve.

My colleague Rich Lowry correctly notes that many of the beleaguered families on the “We are the 99%” websites have real problems.

However, the “occupy” movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable, lethargic pseudo university with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole.

Indeed, for all their youthful mien, the protestors are as mired in America’s postwar moment as their grandparents. One of their demands is for a trillion dollars in “environmental restoration.” Hey, why not? It’s only a trillion.

Beneath the allegedly young idealism are very cobwebbed assumptions about societal permanence. The agitators for “American Autumn” think that such demands are reasonable for no other reason than that they happen to have been born in America, and expectations that no other society in human history has ever expected are just part of their birthright.

But a society can live on the accumulated capital of a glorious inheritance for only so long. In that sense this bloodless, insipid revolution is just a somewhat smellier front for the sclerotic status quo.

Middle-class America is dying before our eyes. The job market is flat-lined, college fees soar, the property market is underwater, and ObamaCare is already making medical provision more expensive and more restrictive.

That doesn’t leave much else — although no doubt, as soon as they find something else, the statists will fix that, too.

As more and more middle Americans are beginning to notice, they lead more precarious and vulnerable lives than did their blue-collar parents and grandparents without the benefit of college “education” and health “benefits.”

For poorer Americans, the prospects are even glummer, augmented by grim statistics on obesity, childhood diabetes and much else. Potentially, this is not decline, but a swift, devastating downward slide, far beyond what postwar Britain and Europe saw and closer to Peronist Argentina on a Roman scale. It would be heartening if more presidential candidates understood the urgency. But there is a strange lack of boldness in most of their proposals. They, too, seem victims of that 1950 moment and assumptions of its permanence.

By MARK STEYN

14 October 2011

@ Investors.com

 

Its full extent revealed for the first time

They increasingly dot the planet. There’s a facility outside Las Vegas where “pilots” work in climate-controlled trailers, another at a dusty camp in Africa formerly used by the French Foreign Legion, a third at a big air base in Afghanistan where Air Force personnel sit in front of multiple computer screens, and a fourth at an air base in the United Arab Emirates that almost no one talks about.

And that leaves at least 56 more such facilities to mention in an expanding American empire of unmanned drone bases being set up worldwide. Despite frequent news reports on the drone assassination campaign launched in support of America’s ever-widening undeclared wars and a spate of stories on drone bases in Africa and the Middle East, most of these facilities have remained unnoted, uncounted, and remarkably anonymous — until now.

Run by the military, the Central Intelligence Agency, and their proxies, these bases — some little more than desolate airstrips, others sophisticated command and control centers filled with computer screens and high-tech electronic equipment — are the backbone of a new American robotic way of war. They are also the latest development in a long-evolving saga of American power projection abroad — in this case, remote-controlled strikes anywhere on the planet with a minimal foreign “footprint” and little accountability.

Using military documents, press accounts, and other open source information, an in-depth analysis by TomDispatch has identified at least 60 bases integral to U.S. military and CIA drone operations. There may, however, be more, since a cloak of secrecy about drone warfare leaves the full size and scope of these bases distinctly in the shadows.

A Galaxy of Bases

Over the last decade, the American use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned aerial systems (UAS) has expanded exponentially, as has media coverage of their use. On September 21st, the Wall Street Journal reported that the military has deployed missile-armed MQ-9 Reaper drones on the “island nation of Seychelles to intensify attacks on al Qaeda affiliates, particularly in Somalia.” A day earlier, a Washington Post piece also mentioned the same base on the tiny Indian Ocean archipelago, as well as one in the African nation of Djibouti, another under construction in Ethiopia, and a secret CIA airstrip being built for drones in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. (Some suspect it’s Saudi Arabia.)

Post journalists Greg Miller and Craig Whitlock reported that the “Obama administration is assembling a constellation of secret drone bases for counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of a newly aggressive campaign to attack al-Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen.” Within days, the Post also reported that a drone from the new CIA base in that unidentified Middle Eastern country had carried out the assassination of radical al-Qaeda preacher and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.

With the killing of al-Awlaki, the Obama Administration has expanded its armed drone campaign to no fewer than six countries, though the CIA, which killed al-Awlaki, refuses to officially acknowledge its drone assassination program. The Air Force is less coy about its drone operations, yet there are many aspects of those, too, that remain in the shadows. Air Force spokesman Lieutenant Colonel John Haynes recently told TomDispatch that, “for operational security reasons, we do not discuss worldwide operating locations of Remotely Piloted Aircraft, to include numbers of locations around the world.”

Still, those 60 military and CIA bases worldwide, directly connected to the drone program, tell us much about America’s war-making future. From command and control and piloting to maintenance and arming, these facilities perform key functions that allow drone campaigns to continue expanding, as they have for more than a decade. Other bases are already under construction or in the planning stages. When presented with our list of Air Force sites within America’s galaxy of drone bases, Lieutenant Colonel Haynes responded, “I have nothing further to add to what I’ve already said.”

Even in the face of government secrecy, however, much can be discovered. Here, then, for the record is a TomDispatch accounting of America’s drone bases in the United States and around the world.

The Near Abroad

News reports have frequently focused on Creech Air Force Base outside Las Vegas as ground zero in America’s military drone campaign. Sitting in darkened, air-conditioned rooms 7,500 miles from Afghanistan, drone pilots dressed in flight suits remotely control MQ-9 Reapers and their progenitors, the less heavily-armed MQ-1 Predators. Beside them, sensor operators manipulate the TV camera, infrared camera, and other high-tech sensors on board the plane. Their faces are lit up by digital displays showing video feeds from the battle zone. By squeezing a trigger on a joystick, one of those Air Force “pilots” can loose a Hellfire missile on a person half a world away.

While Creech gets the lion’s share of media attention — it even has its own drones on site — numerous other bases on U.S. soil have played critical roles in America’s drone wars. The same video-game-style warfare is carried out by U.S and British pilots not far away at Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base, the home of the Air Force’s 2nd Special Operations Squadron (SOS). According to a factsheet provided to TomDispatch by the Air Force, the 2nd SOS and its drone operators are scheduled to be relocated to the Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field in Florida in the coming months.

Reapers or Predators are also being flown from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, March Air Reserve Base in California, Springfield Air National Guard Base in Ohio, Cannon Air Force Base and Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, Ellington Airport in Houston, Texas, the Air National Guard base in Fargo, North Dakota, Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, and Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in Syracuse, New York. Recently, it was announced that Reapers flown by Hancock’s pilots would begin taking off on training missions from the Army’s Fort Drum, also in New York State.

Meanwhile, at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, according to a report by the New York Times, teams of camouflage-clad Air Force analysts sit in a secret intelligence and surveillance installation monitoring cell-phone intercepts, high-altitude photographs, and most notably, multiple screens of streaming live video from drones in Afghanistan. They call it “Death TV” and are constantly instant-messaging with and talking to commanders on the ground in order to supply them with real-time intelligence on enemy troop movements. Air Force analysts also closely monitor the battlefield from Air Force Special Operations Command in Florida and a facility in Terre Haute, Indiana.

CIA drone operators also reportedly pilot their aircraft from the Agency’s nearby Langley, Virginia headquarters. It was from here that analysts apparently watched footage of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, for example, thanks to video sent back by the RQ-170 Sentinel, an advanced drone nicknamed the “Beast of Kandahar.” According to Air Force documents, the Sentinel is flown from both Creech Air Force Base and Tonopah Test Range in Nevada.

Predators, Reapers, and Sentinels are just part of the story. At Beale Air Force Base in California, Air Force personnel pilot the RQ-4 Global Hawk, an unmanned drone used for long-range, high-altitude surveillance missions, some of them originating from Anderson Air Force Base in Guam (a staging ground for drone flights over Asia). Other Global Hawks are stationed at Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, while the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio manages the Global Hawk as well as the Predator and Reaper programs for the Air Force.

Other bases have been intimately involved in training drone operators, including Randolph Air Force Base in Texas and New Mexico’s Kirtland Air Force Base, as is the Army’s Fort Huachuca in Arizona, which is home to “the world’s largest UAV training center,” according to a report by National Defense magazine. There, hundreds of employees of defense giant General Dynamics train military personnel to fly smaller tactical drones like the Hunter and the Shadow. The physical testing of drones goes on at adjoining Libby Army Airfield and “two UAV runways located approximately four miles west of Libby,” according to Global Security, an on-line clearinghouse for military information.

Additionally, small drone training for the Army is carried out at Fort Benning in Georgia while at Fort Rucker, Alabama — “the home of Army aviation” — the Unmanned Aircraft Systems program coordinates doctrine, strategy, and concepts pertaining to UAVs. Recently, Fort Benning also saw the early testing of true robotic drones — which fly without human guidance or a hand on any joystick. This, wrote the Washington Post, is considered the next step toward a future in which drones will “hunt, identify, and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans.”

The Army has also carried out UAV training exercises at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah and, earlier this year, the Navy launched its X-47B, a next-generation semi-autonomous stealth drone, on its first flight at Edwards Air Force Base in California. That flying robot — designed to operate from the decks of aircraft carriers — has since been sent on to Maryland’s Naval Air Station Patuxent River for further testing. At nearby Webster Field, the Navy worked out kinks in its Fire Scout pilotless helicopter, which has also been tested at Fort Rucker and Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, as well as Florida’s Mayport Naval Station and Jacksonville Naval Air Station. The latter base was also where the Navy’s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) unmanned aerial system was developed. It is now based there and at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington State.

Foreign Jewels in the Crown

The Navy is actively looking for a suitable site in the Western Pacific for a BAMS base, and is currently in talks with several Persian Gulf states about a site in the Middle East. It already has Global Hawks perched at its base in Sigonella, Italy.

The Air Force is now negotiating with Turkey to relocate some of the Predator drones still operating in Iraq to the giant air base at Incirlik next year. Many different UAVs have been based in Iraq since the American invasion of that country, including small tactical models like the Raven-B that troops launched by hand from Kirkuk Regional Air Base, Shadow UAVs that flew from Forward Operating Base Normandy in Baqubah Province, Predators operating out of Balad Airbase, miniature Desert Hawk drones launched from Tallil Air Base, and Scan Eagles based at Al Asad Air Base.

Elsewhere in the Greater Middle East, according to Aviation Week, the military is launching Global Hawks from Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, piloted by personnel stationed at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland, to track “shipping traffic in the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Arabian Sea.” There are unconfirmed reports that the CIA may be operating drones from the Emirates as well. In the past, other UAVs have apparently been flown from Kuwait’s Ali Al Salem Air Base and Al Jaber Air Base, as well as Seeb Air Base in Oman.

At Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the Air Force runs an air operations command and control facility, critical to the drone wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The new secret CIA base on the Arabian peninsula, used to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki, may or may not be the airstrip in Saudi Arabia whose existence a senior U.S. military official recently confirmed to Fox News. In the past, the CIA has also operated UAVs out of Tuzel, Uzbekistan.

In neighboring Afghanistan, drones fly from many bases including Jalalabad Air Base, Kandahar Air Field, the air base at Bagram, Camp Leatherneck, Camp Dwyer, Combat Outpost Payne, Forward Operating Base (FOB) Edinburgh and FOB Delaram II, to name a few. Afghan bases are, however, more than just locations where drones take off and land.

It is a common misconception that U.S.-based operators are the only ones who “fly” America’s armed drones. In fact, in and around America’s war zones, UAVs begin and end their flights under the control of local “pilots.” Take Afghanistan’s massive Bagram Air Base. After performing preflight checks alongside a technician who focuses on the drone’s sensors, a local airman sits in front of a Dell computer tower and multiple monitors, two keyboards, a joystick, a throttle, a rollerball, a mouse, and various switches, overseeing the plane’s takeoff before handing it over to a stateside counterpart with a similar electronics set-up. After the mission is complete, the controls are transferred back to the local operators for the landing. Additionally, crews in Afghanistan perform general maintenance and repairs on the drones.

In the wake of a devastating suicide attack by an al-Qaeda double agent that killed CIA officers and contractors at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Khost in 2009, it came to light that the facility was heavily involved in target selection for drone strikes across the border in Pakistan. The drones themselves, as the Washington Post noted at the time, were “flown from separate bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Both the Air Force and the CIA have conducted operations in Pakistani air space, with some missions originating in Afghanistan and others from inside Pakistan. In 2006, images of what appear to be Predator drones stationed at Shamsi Air Base in Pakistan’s Balochistan province were found on Google Earth and later published. In 2009, the New York Times reported that operatives from Xe Services, the company formerly known as Blackwater, had taken over the task of arming Predator drones at the CIA’s “hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

Following the May Navy SEAL raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, that country’s leaders reportedly ordered the United States to leave Shamsi. The Obama administration evidently refused and word leaked out, according to the Washington Post, that the base was actually owned and sublet to the U.S. by the United Arab Emirates, which had built the airfield “as an arrival point for falconry and other hunting expeditions in Pakistan.”

The U.S. and Pakistani governments have since claimed that Shamsi is no longer being used for drone strikes. True or not, the U.S. evidently also uses other Pakistani bases for its drones, including possibly PAF Base Shahbaz, located near the city of Jacocobad, and another base located near Ghazi.

 

The New Scramble for Africa

Recently, the headline story, when it comes to the expansion of the empire of drone bases, has been Africa. For the last decade, the U.S. military has been operating out of Camp Lemonier, a former French Foreign Legion base in the tiny African nation of Djibouti. Not long after the attacks of September 11, 2001, it became a base for Predator drones and has since been used to conduct missions over neighboring Somalia.

For some time, rumors have also been circulating about a secret American base in Ethiopia. Recently, a U.S. official revealed to the Washington Post that discussions about a drone base there had been underway for up to four years, “but that plan was delayed because ‘the Ethiopians were not all that jazzed.’” Now construction is evidently underway, if not complete.

Then, of course, there is that base on the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. A small fleet of Navy and Air Force drones began operating openly there in 2009 to track pirates in the region’s waters. Classified diplomatic cables obtained by Wikileaks, however, reveal that those drones have also secretly been used to carry out missions in Somalia. “Based in a hangar located about a quarter-mile from the main passenger terminal at the airport,” the Post reports, the base consists of three or four “Reapers and about 100 U.S. military personnel and contractors, according to the cables.”

The U.S. has also recently sent four smaller tactical drones to the African nations of Uganda and Burundi for use by those countries’ militaries.

New and Old Empires

Even if the Pentagon budget were to begin to shrink, expansion of America’s empire of drone bases is a sure thing in the years to come. Drones are now the bedrock of Washington’s future military planning and — with counterinsurgency out of favor — the preferred way of carrying out wars abroad.

During the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, as the U.S. was building up its drone fleets, the country launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and carried out limited strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, using drones in at least four of those countries. In less than three years under President Obama, the U.S. has launched drone strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. It maintains that it has carte blanche to kill suspected enemies in any nation (or at least any nation in the global south).

According to a report by the Congressional Budget Office published earlier this year, “the Department of Defense plans to purchase about 730 new medium-sized and large unmanned aircraft systems” over the next decade. In practical terms, this means more drones like the Reaper.

Military officials told the Wall Street Journal that the Reaper “can fly 1,150 miles from base, conduct missions, and return home… [T]he time a drone can stay aloft depends on how heavily armed it is.” According to a drone operator training document obtained by TomDispatch, at maximum payload, meaning with 3,750 pounds worth of Hellfire missiles and GBU-12 or GBU-30 bombs on board, the Reaper can remain aloft for 16 to 20 hours.

Even a glance at a world map tells you that, if the U.S. is to carry out ever more drone strikes across the developing world, it will need more bases for its future UAVs. As an unnamed senior military official pointed out to a Washington Post reporter, speaking of all those new drone bases clustered around the Somali and Yemeni war zones, “If you look at it geographically, it makes sense — you get out a ruler and draw the distances [drones] can fly and where they take off from.”

Earlier this year, an analysis by TomDispatch determined that there are more than 1,000 U.S. military bases scattered across the globe — a shadowy base-world providing plenty of existing sites that can, and no doubt will, host drones. But facilities selected for a pre-drone world may not always prove optimal locations for America’s current and future undeclared wars and assassination campaigns. So further expansion in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia is a likelihood.

What are the Air Force’s plans in this regard? Lieutenant Colonel John Haynes was typically circumspect, saying, “We are constantly evaluating potential operating locations based on evolving mission needs.” If the last decade is any indication, those “needs” will only continue to grow.

By Nick Turse

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and a senior editor at Alternet.org. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives and The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan. Turse is currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute.