The Progressive: Obama's Cynical India Visit

[Scuba]

http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/01/187977/obamas-cynical-india-visit

President Obama’s visit to India was an exercise in cynicism. To serve U.S. corporate and strategic interests, he ignored the problematic record of his host, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The roots of Modi and his party, the BJP, lie in an organization called the RSS.

“The RSS was founded in direct imitation of European fascist movements, and like its 1930s fascist models, it still makes much of daily parading in khaki drill and the giving of militaristic salutes,” wrote British journalist William Dalrymple in the New Statesman last summer. “The RSS sees this as an attempt to create a corps of dedicated paramilitary zealots who, so the theory goes, will form the basis of a revival of a golden age of national strength and racial purity. The BJP was founded as the political wing of the RSS, and most senior BJP figures have an RSS background.”

...

The visit paid off dividends on this front. The United States and India “agreed to a ten-year framework for defense ties and struck deals on cooperation that included joint production of drone aircraft and equipment for Lockheed Martin Corp's C-130 military transport plane,” Reuters reports.

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Another issue on which Obama nudged India is nuclear energy. President Bush signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with previous Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, but a major stumbling block had been India’s unwillingness to cap liability for U.S. firms in the event of a disaster. An understanding between the two sides seems to bode well for U.S. corporations (and ill for the Indian people).

“After Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. President Barack Obama issued a joint statement on Sunday, giving the broad outline of the discussions and agreement reached between the two countries, India’s foreign secretary, Sujatha Singh, said: ‘The nuclear deal is done. We have reached an understanding on liability,’ ” reports Down to Earth, an Indian environmental publication. “After the sealing of agreement by the leaders, private firms will now negotiate the modalities, say officials.”

Well, as long as Westinghouse and GE are happy, eh?

http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/01/25/india-obama-nuclear-idINKBN0KY0U520150125

Both GE and Westinghouse have already been given land in Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh to begin construction of reactors.

[merrily]

1. Why do you hate America and the job

craters creators?

[Scuba]

3. Hey, selling weapons to friendly nations is good for us, right? I mean, what could go wrong?

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0908-08.htm

How Did Iraq Get Its Weapons? We Sold Them



THE US and Britain sold Saddam Hussein the technology and materials Iraq needed to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.

Reports by the US Senate's committee on banking, housing and urban affairs -- which oversees American exports policy -- reveal that the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr, sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.

Classified US Defense Department documents also seen by the Sunday Herald show that Britain sold Iraq the drug pralidoxine, an antidote to nerve gas, in March 1992, after the end of the Gulf war. Pralidoxine can be reverse engineered to create nerve gas.

The Senate committee's reports on 'US Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual-Use Exports to Iraq', undertaken in 1992 in the wake of the Gulf war, give the date and destination of all US exports. The reports show, for example, that on May 2, 1986, two batches of bacillus anthracis -- the micro-organism that causes anthrax -- were shipped to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education, along with two batches of the bacterium clostridium botulinum, the agent that causes deadly botulism poisoning.

[whathehell]

2. Things that make you go "hmmm"

He also.supported Larry Summers to lead the Federal Reserve and currently supports the Trans Pacific Partnership "trade" deal.