did i ever explain the relationship between the ‘world wars’ and the falling rate of profit? (yes, you did)

NATO allies vassals act to strengthen Turkey’s air defenses
Robin Emmott, Sabine Siebold, Arshad Mohammed, Reuters, Dec 1 2015

BRUSSELS – NATO allies vassals plan to send patrol aircraft and missiles to strengthen Ankara’s air defenses on its border with Syria, officials said on Tuesday, following Turkey’s shooting-down of a Russian bomber. As the allies vassals seek to reassure Ankara over the fallout of Russia’s incursions into its airspace, a decision by Germany and Pindostan to remove their PAC-3 missile batteries from Turkey left other allies vassals to fill the gap. While the German and Pindosi steps were announced weeks ago, Russia’s surprise intervention in Syria’s civil war in September has galvanized NATO allies vassals to offer additional help to Turkey’s air force. Spain is now the only NATO nation with PAC-3s in Turkey. Offers of ships and aircraft began to trickle in from allies vassals during meetings in Brussels of NATO foreign ministers. Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius told Reuters:

We must support our ally fellow vassal Turkey. We must make full use of the capabilities we have to counter threats on NATO’s southern flank.

Diplomats said measures are likely to include more ships from NATO allies vassals in the eastern Mediterranean, more NATO planes at Incirlik, and more missile defense batteries in addition to that of Spain. Foreign ministers said in a statement that the situation on Turkey’s border with Syria and Iraq was “highly unstable,” and just to make it worse, they committed to increase Turkey’s air defenses, which they described as “assurance measures.” They said:

We remain determined … to continue developing additional NATO assurance measures and allies vassals are working to prepare other possible contributions.

NATO Sec-Gen Stoltenberg said he expected a decision on a package “within weeks,” but he sought to portray the reinforcements as separate from Russia’s air incursions, and called for Russia and Turkey to seek a solution to the tensions. NATO deployed its PAC-3 missiles along the border in Jan 2013. Ankara had appealed to the alliance to maintain the defenses even before the flare-up of tensions with Russia over airspace violations. While the Turkish air force has shown it is capable of intercepting Russian jets on bombing raids in Syria that stray into Turkish airspace, ministers say sending military support to Turkey is also designed to reassure Ankara and calm tensions. Some, including Germany and the Netherlands, want Turkey and NATO headquarters to discuss the air incursions with Russia. Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders told reporters:

There is a necessity to talk military-to-military between NATO and the Russian Federation to avoid these kinds of incidents, conflicts, because they are very risky.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called for NATO envoys to hold a special meeting with Russia. Such meetings were suspended by NATO foreign ministers in April last year after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula. So far, Pindostan has moved a squadron of fighter interceptors to Incirlik, while Britain has said it will also send jets to the region once NATO’s decision is formalized. Germany and Denmark are sending ships to the NATO fleet in the eastern Mediterranean. NATO could also send its AWACS planes.

2 Comments

  1. Cu Chulainn
    Posted March 3, 2016 at 11:41 am | Permalink

    surprise from the Saker

    http://thesaker.is/capitalism-requires-world-war/

  2. niqnaq
    Posted March 3, 2016 at 12:41 pm | Permalink

    He omits the fundamental point, which is that (of all the factors of production) only labour power returns more than its replacement cost. This is the conceptual stumbling-block for people brought up on the usual west hyena pseudo-economics. They cannot accept that a piece of production machinery (shall we say, a machine for making CDs) is incapable, over the course of its entire productive life, of doing more than exactly providing for its own replacement at the end of its life. But the reason is that the competitive market, which applies as much to producer goods as to consumer ones, forces the sale price of the machine down to the level at which the profit to its producer falls to the average level. At this level (given the ideal-type competitive market, without which no general theory will work), the profit of the machine manufacturer (like that of all other manufacturers, whether of producer goods & consumer goods equally), comes entirely from the surplus labour he had not paid for in his wage bill. If in fact the rate of profit is higher in some sectors than in others, in one and the same national economy, that is because surplus value and hence profit is being transferred from the low-tech immigrant sweatshops (which are intrinsically low-wage and thus high-profit) by means of very high taxes to the MIC, which pays no taxes and is protected by ‘national security’ militarily-enforced monopolies of very high-tech critical goods such as microprocessors.

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