US/Israeli military supply relations - Symbiosis or parasitism?

"The biggest element of US-Israeli military-technical cooperation is military aid. Israel is the main recipient of US military aid in the form of grants and direct deliveries of equipment on advantageous terms. Since 1976, Israel has been the biggest recipient of annual US aid, and since 1987 of US military aid. In addition, by some estimates Israel receives $1 billion a year in the form of charity contributions, and a similar sum through short- and long-term funds. US provide aid to Israel in various forms: Foreign Military Sales, Direct Commercial Sales, Excess Defense Articles, and also funds to support research and development. Moreover, the Foreign Military Financing program implemented by the US Department of State has become, over the years, the largest of all such programs implemented by the US. One should note that, for example, out of $5.7 billion budgeted for this program in 2014, $3.1 went to Israel, In other words, Israel obtains more military assistance through this program than the rest of the world combined. This sum does not include the financing for Israel’s ABM programs, which are estimated at another $500 million. Unlike other programs, FMF allows Israel to spend up to 25% of US-provided funding on own military programs. All other countries receiving military aid must spend it only on US weapons and equipment."  SF

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IMO it is debatable as to which side is the donkey in the US/Israeli military relationship.  In my experience as the head DoD liaison to IDF general staff intelligence (7 years worth), "what's theirs is theirs, and what's yours is theirs as well."  I was an SES then with the spigot to intelligence largesse in my hand and I found them to be completely bloody minded about sharing information with the US.  To get anything from them was like pulling molars without anesthetic. 

I don't doubt that US government gifts to Israel benefit American defense industry, but these gifts come right out of the pocket of the American taxpayer and what do we get for it?  Is it salved conscience for FDR's unwillingness to open the floodgates to European Jewry during WW2? Perhaps that is so or is it the brute force arm twisting and virtual bribery that AIPAC works upon Congress? 

Israeli forces are in no way at the disposition of the US.  They are not assets of American policy.  Israel sees itself as an self-defining island in the world and the only real home for Jews.  As such it thinks it cannot afford to be sentimental about any predominately gentile state, in other words, all others.

And then, there is the repeated phenomenon of Israel either skirting the provisions of proprietary agreements about equipment sales or shared R&D or simply outright violations of these agreements in sales to third parties.

No, there is no doubt, we are the ass. Hee Haw!  pl 

https://southfront.org/israels-military-expenditures-and-military-industrial-complex-overview-and-dynamics/

Comments

[jpb]

Hay Mikee,

Christopher Bollyn DC 9/11/2017 " The War on Terror Among the Truth Seekers" has plenty of evidence and dares to examine capability, motive, and evidence at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuOsiMVlMBw&t=143s

[Will.2718]

it was obviously copied from the Ancient Egyptians along with monotheism.

"The earliest historical record of circumcision comes from Egypt, in the form of an image of the circumcision of an adult carved into the tomb of Ankh-Mahor at Saqqara, dating to about 2400–2300 BCE. Circumcision was done by the Egyptians possibly for hygienic reasons, but also was part of their obsession with purity and was associated with spiritual and intellectual development. No well-accepted theory explains the significance of circumcision to the Egyptians, but it appears to have been endowed with great honor and importance as a rite of passage into adulthood, performed in a public ceremony emphasizing the continuation of family generations and fertility. It may have been a mark of distinction for the elite: the Egyptian Book of the Dead describes the sun god Ra as having circumcised himself."

wikipedia

[Tony Wikrent]

I'm rather surprised to find no reactions to Howard Blum's article in Vanity Fair a few days ago.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/trump-intel-slip

[turcopolier]

Tony Wikrent

If a government passes intelligence to the head of state of a foreign state, they should expect that he will do with it what he pleases in the game of nations. pl

[Decameron]

JINSA and Shoshana Bryen are again cashing in on their investment in US military with a blueprint for re-escalating the war in Syria by means of US blood and treasure. Thanks for providing her comments.
For JINSA's plan, see http://www.jinsa.org/publications/countering-iranian-expansion-syria

[Tony Wikrent]

Well, thanks. Realpolitik I understand. What Trump's game is (or what Trump thinks the game is), I don't understand. And, to be precise, I was hoping someone would render a confirmation, condemnation, or qualification of what Blum wrote. His article struck as basically true, but I think it odd so many details were aired in public, and that the forum was Vanity Fair.

[turcopolier]

Tony Wikrent

Trump is playing the game he has always played. He plots in his mind against all except his "fam." He deprives his subordinates of information as to his intentions so as to remain more powerful than they. Then he acts instinctively with others he considers to be "players," people like Putin, the Chinese president, Duterte and MbS. MbS has proven himself a weak reed and will be downplayed in Trump's mind. Nothing could be less important to Trump than wounded Israeli feelings over their f-----g intelligence. He knows they have nowhere else to go. pl

[Tony Wikrent]

Thank you again. By describing his tactics, do you mean to imply he has no real strategy in terms of pursuing USA interests? I can understand a strategy of continuing the present status quo of financial and corporate dominance over the rest of the economy--but Trump's populist nationalism runs counter to that, particularly in the area of trade policy. My own conclusion thus far is that Trump's populist nationalism is what he clothes himself when he has to appear before the citizens (or, more precisely, the conservative and Republican base). I had hoped, before the inauguration, that Trump's experience as a real estate developer had led to his clashing with bankers and financiers, and this would leave him highly suspicious of, if not outright hostile, to Wall Street and the City of London. That hope has been drowned in the flood of appointments of Wall Streeters to various high posts.

[turcopolier]

tony wikrant

IMO he means well for the US and thinks that his instincts will lead to good things. Your talk about corporate interests is just more marxist BS. pl

[Tony Wikrent]

In classical republican theory from Machiavelli through Algernon Sidney, whose 1698 Discourses on Government has been called "the textbook of the American revolution, there were two major threats to a republic. One was a standing army. The other was concentrated wealth. Driving the Americans' 1771 revolt was their belief that Parliament had been corrupted by concentrations of wealth such as the East India Company. Corporations were seen as an institutionalized arrangement to preserve and perpetuate unfair economic power.

Hence, in early America, articles of incorporation were not easily granted, and there were very few of them. And those which were granted almost always included some statement along the lines that the corporation is being granted by the legislature because said corporation would advance the general welfare or serve the public interest in some specific way. So, you get very limited corporate charters that usually are aimed at building roads, bridges, canals, and later railroads, Charters for banks almost invariably created great controversy.

Often, the charter included a clause to the effect that the purposes had to be accomplished in very specific time frames or the charter of incorporation would lapse and the corporation would cease having a legal existence. Up until the 1860s, it was not unusual for a state to revoke a corporate charter if the corporation did not fufill the purpose for which it was incorporated. For example, the Sunbury and Erie Railroad, chartered by Pennsylvania in 1837, was never able to actually begin construction, and after the state had given it an extension of time, the company was dissolved by state government fiat and its property given to the Pennsylvania Railroad. (Sunbury is located near the confluence of the north and west branches of the Susquehanna River.) The Franklin Railroad received an unusual dual charter from Maryland and Pennsylvania in 1832, to construct a railroad from Chambersburg Pa. 27 miles south to Hagerstown Md. It failed soon after it opened, but was operated by the bankruptcy receiver until 1852, when the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania determined that the thin-flat, bar-rail on which the horse-drawn cars rode had become unsafe to operate on, and ordered that the company either disband, or rebuild the road with heavy T-rail to allow the running of steam locomotives.

Corporate charters also often included clauses intended to prevent the corporation from engaging in activities unrelated to the charter. The charter for the First Bank of the United States, February 25, 1791, included these clauses: "VIII. The lands, tenements and hereditaments which it shall be lawful for the said corporation to hold, shall be only such as shall be requisite for its immediate accommodation in relation to the convenient transacting of its business…."

It was also illegal for corporations to buy control of other corporations. But by the 1820s, there had nonetheless begun to emerge widespread public dissatisfaction over corporations. But it was not so much that corporations were straying from their charters. It was that many people felt that only a rich and privileged few were being given corporate charters, and everyone else was being deliberately excluded from having a share in this new engine of prosperity. The result was that many states began to enact laws of general incorporation. You no longer had to go to the state legislature or the Congress, and get a specific charter passed just like legislation. With general acts of incorporation, anyone can just get the papers written up, file the fee with some administrative office of the state, and start a business. The process of incorporation, supposedly, had been democratized. By the 1850s, almost every state had adopted laws of general incorporation.

What happened next, of course, was the further consolidation of wealth, with the building of the trusts after the Civil War, fueling the rise of organized opposition in the form of the populists, then the progressives. Personally, what I think happened is that after it becomes clear to the British ruling class that they are not going to be able to dispose of the American republic by breaking it up in the Civil War (see "British Preparations for War with the North, 1861-1862," by
Author(s): Kenneth Bourne Source: The English Historical Review, Vol. 76, No. 301 (Oct., 1961), pp. 600-632, available online as a pdf), the British realize they can neutralize the American republic by undermining its principles of political economy. This is why the Constitutional mandate to promote the General Welfare is crucial. The British, I believe, use the Morgan banking apparatus to being taking control of the US economy. Many people see this history and unfortunately spin CTs about the Rothschilds, or Jewish bankers, or whatever. Of course the British ruling class is not going to do anything to dispel these smokescreens. (I frankly do not know to what extent, or even if, these CTs are deliberately created as smokescreens.)

Another crippling blow is the emergence, in the 1970s and 1980s, of the shareholder theory of value, which cements corporate dominance of the economy firmly in place. The more insidious result, which very few people see, is that the shareholder theory of value directly undermines the republic by making the pursuit of corporate profit primary, and dismissing almost entirely any concern for promoting the general welfare. That burying of the concern for promoting the general welfare strikes at the very heart of what sets the American republic above all other government created before it. The creation the American republic and its Constitution must be understood in the context of the global shift from the economic and political systems of feudalism, to mercantilism and modern nationalism. The Framers were entirely familiar with mercantilist policies, and the debates in the Constitutional convention make very clear that they had no intent of creating laissez faire and unregulated market capitalism, but a careful and deliberate plan to ensure that all economic activity was channeled and directed to the promotion of the general welfare and national development.

The words “mercantilist” and “mercantilism” are generally used whenever government powers are used to promote a state’s economic powers. By specifying in the Constitution that government powers are used to promote a state’s economic powers in promotion of the general welfare, the American republic made a sharp break from European mercantilism, in which the welfare of a sole monarch or small group of oligarchs was often conflated with the general welfare of a state or nation.

It is the Constitutional commitment to promoting the general welfare that establishes the USA as the culmination of the political and scientific Enlightenment.

[Tony Wikrent]

And for what it's worth, I believe British intelligence played a significant, though certainly not exclusive, role in the creation of Marxism and Leninism.

[turcopolier]

Tony Wikrent

Is this a larouche thing? pl

[Tony Wikrent]

Regarding the British role, LaRouche is one of the few people who writes about it, and I admit to reading his stuff in the 80s and 90s. The political economy of republicanism is something I've been working out on my own. Following the 2007-2008 financial crash, I asked: Are there economic policies that should distinguish a republic from other forms of government? Turns out that in order to answer that question, you also need to ask: What is a republic? The best material I found about four years ago: Mass. Senator Charles Sumner, The Equal Rights of All: The Great Guaranty and Present Necessity, for the Sake of Security, and to Maintain a Republican Government. Speech in the Senate, on the proposed Amendment of the Constitution fixing the Basis of Representation, February 5 and 6, 1866.
Charles Sumner, Works, Volume 10, p 174ff,
https://archive.org/stream/worksofcharlessu10sumniala#page/174/mode/2up

And, just to needle you a bit: Jefferson changed his tune a bit about "the best government is that which governs least" when he became President; then a bit more when the opportunity to purchase Louisiana presented itself; then a LOT when the weakness of American industry and the atrophy of the army and navy nearly lead to defeat in the second war against Britain. And the entire history of how the U.S. developed industrially and technologically ALWAYS has featured a crucial supporting role by government. Just like Jefferson's nemesis, Hamilton, argued....

[Poul]

I have no idea where your numbers come from but if Israel spent 5,9 % of it's GDP (2016,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures )on it's military then 3.9 billion dollars is only 1%+ of GDP. Not it's no peanuts unless you argue for a one-time expenditure for the USA. As for Israel. Please they can foot the bill without problems. Like the US Israel has a bloated armed force.

So ca 1/6 of Israeli military cost. Not 25%. Would Israel notice that. Yes so send home the women or make some adjustments. But would it undermine their security,.. No.
Their armed forces would still be overwhelming and don't forget their nukes. The ultimate defensive weapon. Please present me with a plausible scenario for how Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon could successfully attack Israel.

3.9 billion dollar with interest as it's borrowed money runs up in 100's of billions of dollars in a century. Is it sensible policy for the US tax payer to donate what amounts to more than half a years expenditure on the US military to a foreign nation?

For example the US congress is considering cutting 20% of the budget for Children's Health Insurance Program (annual budget ca $15 billion). Cut the money for Israel instead and spent it on American children. Who should the US congress look after first. American children or foreigners?

[Croesus]

FDR, a complicated case.
It can't be denied (although it's never admitted) that Brandeis and Frankfurter -- and Henry Morgenthau, Jr., -- played FDR like Jack Benny's violin.