February 3, 2013 was a Super Bowl Sunday and the attention
of the working class American people was focused on the big game, new
commercials, Beyonce’s halftime concert, and personal inner-circle Super Bowl
parties. The Baltimore Ravens beat the
San Francisco 49ers in a game decided in the last moments, and on Monday the
talk in the work centers of America was concentrated on that game, Beyonce, and
all the Super bowl commercials that seemed to be as humorous to five years as
they were to adults. What was not
discussed among the American workers on Monday was the transfer of four F-16s
to the nation-state government of Egypt.
The transfer was part of a 1.7 billion dollar ‘security’ agreement
between the U.S. and Egypt, an agreement made during the rule of Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak, in which the U.S. would deliver a total of twenty
F-16s and two hundred Abram tanks to Egypt. Congress, influenced by AIPAC during the
‘American bought-and-paid-for’ puppet years of Mubarak, approved this deal
prior to the 2011 Arab Spring. With
Mubarak forced out of power in Egypt and Mohamad Morsi, a member of the Muslim
Brotherhood, placed into power, a few members of Congress began to question
this agreement. After all, it is still
uncertain whether Morsi will be a bribe taking puppet like Mubarak, an
isolationist, an aggressor, or, what seems most important to our U.S. Congressional
representatives, a friend or foe of the nation-state government of Israel. There were some political attempts to halt
the transfer. One such attempt was made by
the Senator out of Kentucky, Rand Paul, but the Senate voted 79-19 against
Paul’s amendment on the passed House Resolution 325.
Why did the U.S. send F-16s to Egypt? From a political analysis view, it appears
that this is an attempt to accomplish two things at once. 1)
Support and Assist Egypt to solidify power for President Morsi in the
face of civil unrest similar to what occurred in and around Tahrir Square
during the Arab Spring during the final days of Mubarak’s regime. Protesters and police have continuously
clashed in the streets, in some cases caught on video and distributed on the
internet, and the presidential palace in Cairo was firebombed. 2)
Pull Morsi into military reliance on Western funding using economic and
military ‘carrots’. One oddity that
occurred prior to the Senate vote was that the pro-Israeli lobbies, especially
AIPAC, were pushing Congressional members to support the first transfer of this
agreement to Egypt. The reason for the
pro-Israeli lobby support is aimed at pulling the new Morsi regime into
U.S.-Israeli pockets (paid for by the U.S.) in order to ensure that the new
regime protects the Southern flank of Israel, the Negev, where there are vital
water and oil pipelines, along with the supposed Israeli nuclear reactor
facility located at Dimona (even though Israel has never signed the
international non-proliferation treaty).
We must look at U.S. foreign aid and history to understand the previous
‘hook-up’ between Egypt and Israel, paid for in full by the American tax payers
and international loans taken out by previous U.S. administrations. After the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat in
1981, Hosni Mubarak became leader of Egypt which began a new era in U.S.
foreign aid. During Mubarak’s reign,
from 1981 to the Arab uprising of 2011, Egypt received over 2 billion dollars a
year in annual U.S. foreign aid, only second on the annual recipient list behind
the three billion dollars plus a year that Israel had received from the U.S.
before and during this period, and continues to receive each year.
How do these types of foreign aid ‘carrot’ gift baskets
work? A co-worker asked me the following
question: “What would we do with those F-16s if we didn’t give them to
Egypt?” I must admit that this question
elicited a short delay of silence from me because I suddenly realized that she
honestly didn’t understand that the U.S. government didn’t just build their own
F-16s and have them sitting around in stock, but purchased them from the
private sector. In the case of the F-16s
and the tanks, the U.S. government is required to purchase them from Lockheed
Martin. Many people will argue that
these types of military foreign aid packages help to maintain jobs inside of the
U.S., but the fact remains that these purchases are paid for by the American
taxpayers, and increased national debt under international financiers, in order
to promote private sector profit.
The Foreign aid process is one of the very few times each
year that Americans actually witness pure bipartisan cooperation in Congress. Democrats and Republicans will argue to the
point of almost shutting down the government over domestic cuts, but hold hands
when it comes to dishing out billions of dollars in annual aid to nation-states
that are economically well off, such as Israel, or nation-states that could be
an enemy in the distant future. Similar
to the transfer of the four F-16s to Egypt in the shadow of the Super Bowl, the
annual federal budget proposal, which contains proposed amounts of outgoing
foreign aid, is released annually under the shadow of Valentine’s Day when most
Americans are distracted. Foreign
lobbyist groups, who are allowed to influence all members of Congress while
individual Americans are only allowed to call on their regional
representatives, are prominent in shaping (or maintaining) this annual budget
proposal concerning foreign aid. The
lobbyist presence behind the scenes can be detected by researching the top
recipients in U.S. foreign aid over the past fifty years.
On Monday morning after the Super Bowl, all throughout American
work places, garages, shipping hubs, and offices across the United States, no
one conversed about the transfer of F-16s or the overall subject of foreign
aid. The conversations were dedicated to
the Super bowl, a fourth and goal no call by the referees, Beyonce’s halftime
outfit and the power outage, the Budweiser horse who loved his original owner and
all of the other dumb ass television commercials that encouraged excess consumerism
within a nation that doesn’t seem to see poverty, unemployment, or domestic
government cuts caused by climbing international debt collecting above its own national
structure.
No comments:
Post a Comment