US’ Expanded Weapons Stockpiling in Israel

Wednesday 10 February 2010

by: Nora Barrows-Friedman, t r u t h o u t | Report

Sameh Habeeb, a young, independent, Palestinian journalist, lived in a modest house in the middle of Gaza City in December 2008. From his bedroom window, Habeeb reported to international news outlets exactly what he saw night after night during Israel’s lethal 22-day assault. On one occasion, Habeeb told Truthout, “the Apache helicopter gunship hovered less than 200 meters away from us. The children, my brothers and sisters, were hiding in the corners of the house, taking shelter. It was horrendous. The sky was dark; there was nothing but the sound and the red lights of the Apache, the screams of the children, and the sound of the bombings close by. The house shook like an earthquake every time there was a bombing. I thought I was going to be the next victim. We smelled the gun powder everywhere.”

Approximately 1,400 Palestinians were killed – including more than 300 children – and over 5,000 people were wounded in the 2008-2009 Israeli attacks, dubbed Operation Cast Lead, using advanced American-made weaponry. Now, a year later, Israel and the United States have agreed to a weapons stockpiling deal that will store $800 million worth of American-made arms and military equipment on Israeli soil.

According to a January 11 report in the weekly paper Defense News, the Obama administration previously mapped out a plan that would place $400 million worth of military arsenal in Israel, but that project was exactly doubled after a meeting in December between the Israeli military’s technology and logistics branch, and Rear Adm. Andy Brown, logistics director of the US Army European Command.

Included in this agreement is the caveat that Israel, after approval from the US government, would be able to access the American weapon and ammunition stockpile in case of a military “emergency.” The terms and definition of such an “emergency,” including against whom the weaponry could be used, remain unclear.

Barbara Opall-Rome reported, “[w]artime emergencies warranting Israeli use of such weaponry typically require Israel to reimburse Washington under Foreign Military Sales procedures,” but that, conveniently for Israel, “[r]eimbursement costs are funded through annual U.S. military grant aid to Israel.”

During the election campaign and over this last year in office, the Obama administration has repeatedly demonstrated its commitment to what it calls “Israel’s security.”

An anonymous US defense official stated that Washington believes that “[American] economics and inflation were taking their toll on the Israel-based prepositioning,” thereby limiting – in relative terms – the procurement of weapons caches by the Israeli government, up until this point.

Missiles, armored vehicles, aerial ammunition and artillery ordnance have already been stockpiled in Israel since the US Congress began expanding their “forward basing” program in 1990. South Korea remains a US ally state enjoying a similar agreement with the US government. Opall-Rome wrote that American stockpile value in Israel began with “a starting ceiling of $100 million that quickly grew to $300 million following the 1991 war in Iraq … Under the new agreement, Israel not only gains access to more US stockpiles, but enjoys greater latitude in the categories and specific types of weaponry it can request for in-country storage.”

Raytheon, a weapons manufacturer headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, is a prime contractor for US-administered arms deals with Israel. Among Raytheon’s arsenal of unconventional weapons is the 2.2-ton GBU 28 “bunker-buster,” “mini-nuke” bomb that was used against Iraq in 1991, and swiftly dispatched to Israel during the height of the 2006 attacks against Lebanon. The weapon can blast through 100 feet of earth and 20 feet of solid concrete. Raytheon’s spokesperson refused to answer Truthout’s questions regarding its expanding relationship with Israel. His response to a query about Raytheon’s possible contribution of arsenal to this $800 million stockpiling agreement was a curt “no comment,” and he told Truthout to “ask the US government” about further details.

Ohio Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich told Truthout that there is no oversight process toward which specific weapons will be part of stockpiling deals with Israel. “There is no monitoring,” he said. He noted that these weapons stockpiling agreements send a worrisome message to the people in the region. “What’s troubling is the pullback from serious diplomatic initiatives … and the reliance on weapons to solve what are really diplomatic issues. There’s no doubt that there is some strategic consideration at work. And there is the fact that several US administrations now have failed to enforce the Arms Export Control Act. The policies are not consonant with peace,” he continued. “They’re consonant with war. ”

In the December 2009 Congressional Research Report to Congress, prepared for US representatives preceding their vote in the House to approve funding for such programs, it is pointed out that Israel was designated in 1998 as a “major non-NATO ally,” which “qualifies” the state to receive excess defense articles under Section 516 of the Foreign Assistance Act and Section 23(a) of the Arms Export Control Act.

Frida Berrigan of the US Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute in New York noted that the US State Department originally raised questions about Israel’s use of cluster bomb munitions during the 2006 Lebanon assault. Berrigan pointed out that the State Department said it was concerned about the amount of bomblets that were dropped. “But after a year of its own investigation,” Berrigan told Truthout, “the results were officially ‘inconclusive.’ A report was forwarded to the US Congress, and that’s where it ended. If Israel uses these [US-made] weapons, it is defined under ‘defense’ as far as Congress is concerned. Because under the Arms Export Controls Act, there are no set terms of activities, no definition of what ‘defense’ really means.”

Berrigan said that, although Congress routinely questions other weapons packages to allied countries, military aid to Israel is rarely, if ever, challenged. “There is a fast-track mechanism [for Israel] in place,” she added.

This move to double American weaponry and military equipment stockpiles on Israeli soil comes on the heels of Obama’s recent signing of a $30 billion, ten-year agreement for an expanded military aid package to the Israeli government. The first installment of the aid package, $2.775 billion, was signed over in December by President Obama, and was earmarked completely for Israel’s military budget instead of the prior allocation to both civilian and military infrastructure. This massive military package is over and above the annual $3.1 billion in loan guarantees to Israel that the Obama administration plans to continue.

As a part of the ten-year agreement, Israel is required to contract 75 percent of the package toward the purchase of American-made military equipment and ammunition, intended to further subsidize US weapons manufacturers. This arrangement was conceived by the Bush administration and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and was designed, Berrigan explained, to “lock in” the US-Israeli military relationship, tying the hands of the forthcoming US administration. “This benefits only the American weapons manufacturers,” she said, “and it sets the Obama administration up with a solid framework which Israel sought out and insisted on ahead of time. Once again, the United States was eager to comply.”

Meanwhile, as US-led wars in the region proliferate, this expansion of weapons stockpiles in Israel will surely be viewed as a growing threat to neighboring countries. “If we’re forward-basing [for the wars in] Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan,” former high-level CIA analyst Ray McGovern told Truthout, “the Iranians, the Russians and the Chinese will be worried. With this policy, we’re alienating so many people.”

Berrigan said that, within this context, it is important to question the strategic interest that the United States has in maintaining a close military partnership with Israel. “The relationship with Israel is not helping us win the hearts and minds of people in Iraq and Afghanistan,” she said. “People don’t believe our rhetoric. When President Obama talks about global nuclear disarmament, everyone in the Arab-Muslim world knows that Israel has nuclear weapons, and that the US has allowed Israel to have them. The Obama administration is cutting every budget but the military’s, and continuing to give billions to Israel and Egypt. That’s money that could be much better spent in Haiti, or in any neighborhood in this country. It could build real international institutions that prioritize serving the needs of the world. Even though the American public is not paying attention, the world is.”

This stockpiling agreement follows claims by Israeli military officials that Israel’s own weapons cache is nearing “dangerously low” levels – especially, they say, after the 2006 offensive against Lebanon. Reports show that, in the last 72 hours of the summer bombing campaign there, when a cease-fire was clearly imminent, Israeli Air Force pilots dropped a reported one million American-made cluster bombs over the Southern region, which continue to explode and injure Lebanese civilians in agricultural and rural village areas to this day. More recently, during the attacks on Gaza, Palestinians were subjected to wide-spread destruction of thousands of homes, apartment buildings, offices, hospitals and schools by relentless aerial bombing campaigns, utilizing conventional and unconventional weaponry from the very same distributors whose wares will be stored in Israel. Israel’s wanton use of white phosphorus during the attacks has been widely condemned by international human rights groups, as well as the use of advanced anti-personnel weaponry such as Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) bombs.

Speaking on Flashpoints Radio in June 2009, Dr. Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian physician who treated patients hit by suspected DIME weaponry in Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital during the Israeli attacks, said he witnessed the effects of this unconventional and highly-lethal technology. “We saw people who were virtually cut in two,” Dr. Gilbert reported. “We saw children torn completely apart …We saw amputations that looked like a huge ax had cut off their extremities. The DIME weapon is made from a tungsten metal alloy in a composite casting, and it’s shot by small rockets. The mechanism of the explosion is a chain reaction: it causes the metal to evaporate and dissipate. It’s made for targeted killing. We could not [categorize] them as anything else other than DIME bombs.”

Extensive research has shown that DIME bombs are also highly carcinogenic, continuing to lethally affect the victim long after the initial strike.

Israel denies its military’s use of DIME bombs against civilians in Gaza, but independent European researchers and medical eyewitnesses, such as Dr. Gilbert, insist that this weapon was indeed used indiscriminately.

At the same time as it claims a shortage of ammunition and equipment, while receiving several billions of US taxpayer dollars for its military budget, Israel is currently preparing the launch of what officials are calling the “Iron Dome” system, reportedly capable of intercepting short-range artillery shells and homemade rockets along the northern border with Lebanon and the southern borders with the occupied Gaza strip. According to Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the system will be integrated into the Israeli military by this summer. That project is reported to cost at least $215 million.

Habeeb of Gaza, however, remains extremely worried about this new era of weapons proliferation plans between Israel and the US. “Israel already has enough weapons to destroy the whole world,” he said. “As a Palestinian, I thought Obama would send us the results of his change, which was peace. Instead, we get missiles.”

Happy to read your post this morning. Thank you.

This IS the reality we are faced with, folks. Without a middle-class the leap from the ‘exploited classes’ can’t be made, and hard work will never again be rewarded. Educating our children so they can thrive in the world becomes a pipe-dream, too (we’re already seeing that with tuition hikes driving the costs beyond most people’s means).

The ‘haves’ need to wake up…

Across the rest of the world the situation is even bleaker; most of the world’s population lives in abject poverty. They have no disposable income and do not create any demand for goods. Multinational Corps routinely exploit these population to the detriment of everything. Globalization as it currently stands is a broken system because their is no overriding authority to prevent Corps from conducting the same type of colonial exploitation that was reserved for nation states. It’s no longer a colonial power subjugating developing nations; it’s Walmart and Nike and Champion. Unlike the US and Europe which adopted regulation to control how business’s treats their workers(unions and worker safety laws; fair wages and anti-disciminitory policies; also quickly eroding in the US specifically) which allowed the creation of the middle classes that drive the global economy today. With the exception of certain sectors of the population in India and China(minuscule compared to their overall population) there has not been any major increase in middle class groups anywhere in the world. Without this growth long term economic prosperity is doomed; eventually the classic marxist class war will arise again creating more economic chaos. Like the Roman’s; the haves will be toppled by the have-nots.

Ok, back to Amway, headquartered in the state which has the nation’s highest unemployment rate…..

Russia, China, India lead the way to record sales for Alticor
By Gary Schroder
February 05, 2009, 8:45AM

ADA TOWNSHIP — Amway parent company Alticor Inc. this morning made its record-breaking, downturn-bucking year official.

The direct-selling company reported 2008 sales of $8.2 billion, a 15 percent increase over 2007.

Russia, China and India represented the largest growth markets. The privately held Ada Township company reported two-thirds of the company’s 58 affiliates recorded sales increases in 2008.

The company does not release profitability figures.

“Amway enters its 50th year in a strong position,” Chairman Steve Van Andel said. “In 2008, more consumers than ever before responded positively to the appeal of the Amway business opportunity and our outstanding product brands.”
Press File PhotoTwo women shop at Amway China Co. Ltd.’s store in Nanjing, China.

Van Andel and President Doug DeVos said the company bucked economic trends in 2008, but said 2009 promises to be more difficult.

“We’re looking to grow this year but there is some rough weather out there for the business community around the world,” Van Andel said.

The official sales figure was in line with comments to The Press by company co-founder Rich DeVos during the Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital topping off ceremony.

The company, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, said it has discontinued providing breakdowns of sales by individual markets “to preserve competitive advantage.”

In 2007, Amway’s U.S. and Canadian business, previously known as Quixtar, reported sales of $1.1 billion, down slightly from 2006.

The company launched a U.S. marketing blitz last year to reacquaint people with the Amway brand and counter stereotypes. The company’s sales announcement did not disclose results of the program.

Global sales of the company’s flagship Nutrilite line of nutrition and food products topped $3 billion in 2008.

Its Artistry line of cosmetics also increased sales and market share, although the company did not provide a figure. The company said Artistry went from 12th in global cosmetics market share to ninth.

In addition to its direct sales business, Alticor operates Access Business Group, which provides contract manufacturing and packaging services; Fulton Innovations, which is developing eCoupled technology for wireless power; and Amway Hotel Corp., which owns three hotels in Grand Rapids.

http://www.mlive.com/business/west-michigan/index.ssf/2009/02/russia_china_india_lead_the_wa.html

(WOW!!! That’s a lotta money. Let’s see how they’re gonna reinvest it in their home state)

Confidential memo shows Amway could move hundreds of West Michigan jobs to Costa Rica
By Chris Knape | The Grand Rapids Press
October 15, 2009, 5:36PM

amway-letter.jpgA confidential memo obtained by The Press shows Amway Corp. is poised to move what could be hundreds of local jobs to Costa Rica.

ADA TOWNSHIp — Amway Corp. is poised to move what could be hundreds of local jobs to Costa Rica as part of a sweeping streamlining of its global operations, according to a confidential memo obtained by The Press.

The Ada-based direct seller on Oct. 5 told employees it was moving finance functions currently handled locally to a new “enterprise process center” in Costa Rica.

Other centers are planned for central Europe and Asia that will affect operations in those regions.

“This move will have a substantial impact on current finance positions in North America, Latin America and Europe, though specific impact and numbers will not be clear for six to eight weeks,” a fact sheet provided to employees said.

The idea behind the centers appears to focus on consolidating many back-of-house functions to low-cost labor markets.

The company bills the centers as a way of standardizing processes, meeting needs with greater consistency and becoming more efficient. Transition to the new center in Costa Rica will begin in the second quarter of 2010.

The exact number of jobs that will be lost among Amway’s more than 4,000-person local workforce won’t be determined for several more weeks, said Rob Zeiger, a company spokesman.

“We’ve learned from watching other companies in Michigan and elsewhere that putting off difficult analysis can really come back to hurt everyone deeply in the long run,” he said.
A letter to employees from Chairman Steve Van Andel and President Doug DeVos said Amway is “taking proactive steps to determine what operating model will fit our business today and into the future.”

“Certainly, change is difficult and many of these transitions are difficult to absorb and understand,” the letter reads.

While the moves may not be unusual for the industry, they do run counter to Amway’s efforts to polish its brand in the United States and statements by its leaders about their commitment to the local work force.

The company, privately-held by the families of co-founders Rich DeVos and the late Jay Van Andel, reported record sales of $8.2 billion in 2008 with executives proudly proclaiming the company was profitable and on solid financial footing.

In West Michigan the company seemed a rare success — growing internationally at a time when Michigan’s auto industry was on the rocks and the state was suffering from the nation’s highest unemployment rate.

During Dick DeVos’ unsuccessful 2006 gubernatorial bid, the company repeatedly refuted critics accusing him of sending Amway jobs overseas during his stint as the firm’s chief executive officer.

“I think you have to separate there were a lot of accusations that were made that year that were factually wrong, and we had to address them,” Zeiger said.

“Where we are today is understanding what we need to do here in Michigan to stay competitive for the long runs.”

Zeiger said the company did not purposely wait to convey the news until after it wrapped up its 50th anniversary celebration.

The memo said consolidation will result in a reduction of up to 10 percent of the European region’s employees over the next three to five years.

The memo refers to other departments undertaking assessments similar to those leading to the decision to establish the Costa Rican operations.

Zeiger said the finance and European changes are the only ones Amway expects to announce this year.

The memo goes on to explain that a majority of its competitors already have “centers similar to the ones we plant to implement.”

It also says employees who lose their jobs will have several months notice and will receive severance pay, outplacement assistance, career transition assistance and company-sponsored training courses.

In recent interviews, company leaders Doug DeVos and Steve Van Andel said they were reviewing all operations, but remained committed to a substantial presence in Ada.

“The fact that we are in relatively good shape means that we should be able to do a lot of things to minimize negative impacts,” Zeiger said.

http://www.mlive.com/business/west-michigan/index.ssf/2009/10/confidential_memo_shows_amway.html

(Hmmmm….so the jobs in Michigan have to be moved elsewhere. Interesting. This must be some sort of ‘New” business model. Maybe the next story will shed some light on the why’s, heretofores, and wherewith-alls of big business.)

Are Van Andels making move to acquire Macatawa Bank Corp.?
By Chris Knape | The Grand Rapids Press
November 16, 2009, 12:50PM

MACATAWA BANK, HOLLAND.jpgMark Copier | The Grand Rapids PressThe Macatawa Bank branch in downtown Holland. Amway heirs David and Stephen Van Andel may be making a bid to take over the beleaguered bank.Are Amway heirs David and Stephen Van Andel making a bid to take over beleaguered Macatawa Bank?

A notification published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago would seem to indicate so, though no announcement has been made by the bank or the Van Andels.

Shares of the stock are trading at twice their normal volume as of 12:45 p.m., but the share price is up only 5 cents to $1.92.

White Bay Capital, an entity controlled by David Van Andel, CEO of the Van Andel Institute and owner of nutrition company Ideasphere Inc., and Amway Chairman Stephen Van Andel are mentioned in the brief notice saying they “plan to acquire 100 percent of the voting shares of Macatawa Bank … and thereby indirectly acquire Macatawa Bank.”

Neither of the Van Andels could be reached for comment. Bank officials were not available for comment.

David Van Andel’s White Bay last year spent $20 million to buy a 9.9 percent stake in Macatawa.

Since then the bank has ousted founding Chairman Ben Smith and demoted founding CEO Philip Koning.

Shares in Macatawa have dropped below $2 in recent weeks as the bank saw its regulatory status downgraded and installed a new chairman, Grand Rapids businessman Rich Postma.

http://www.mlive.com/business/west-michigan/index.ssf/2009/11/are_van_andels_making_move_to.html

(OH!!!!!! Well, sure they can buy a bank because they have shipped so many jobs overseas and saved money at the cost of American/local jobs…Good Christian Morals)

Don’t let the door hit ya’ in the backside on the way out, Mr. soon-to-be-ex-congressman.

MOVE YOUR MONEY!!

This is another way we can support the President in the effort to re-regulate the “Too Big To Fail” banks, and encourage thoughtful finance reforms through Congress.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/4/move_your_money_project_urges_people

Thanks to Arianna Huffington and friends for this timely initiative of empowerment.

peace

Not in the mood to play with you today, but I will have a good day