Russia has revealed details of its ambitious plan to upgrade its army over the next ten years, planning to spend US$650 billion on the project.
The unveiled large-scale plans of the Russian defense ministry propose the spending of vast sums of money up to 2020.
First and foremost, Russian defense will focus on the development of strategic nuclear weapons, construction of over 100 military vessels for Russian Navy, including construction of four originally French-made Mistral-class amphibious assault ships, and the introduction into the Air Force of over 1,000 helicopters and 600 military planes, including fifth generation PAK-FA fighter.
Most of the military hardware will be equipped with next-generation weaponry.
http://rt.com/news/military-budget-russia-2020/
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China and Russia launched joint naval exercises Sunday in the Yellow Sea between the east coast of mainland China and the Korean peninsula.
Sixteen Chinese surface vessels and two submarines as well as four Russian warships will take part in the six days of drills. ...
China and Russia have conducted four bilateral and multilateral military exercises since 2005.
http://blogs.voanews.com/breaking-news/2012/04/22/china-and-russia-launch-military-exercises/
".................The Cold War is now over and this kind of intellectual rant, although still prevalent in “progressive” circles, is no longer consequential for America’s survival. But left-wing paranoia continues to unleash dangerous toxins into the political air., pouring .
In describing the Cold War’s denouement, [Stalinist historian Eric] Hobsbawm also fails to notice how the forces underlying the Soviet collapse and the western triumph reflected an economic reality of momentous consequence. This was the capacity of a society based on private markets to unleash the power of new technologies and transform the world. (And the inability of its state-managed rival to accommodate, let alone innovate in the new technological age). In a 400-page volume that devotes whole chapters to developments in science and industry in the pre-electronic era, Hobsbawm mentions the digital computer in only a single isolated sentence. There is not one reference to Ed Cray, Bill Gates, Jim Clark, Michael Milken or the other Rockefellers of the new industrial revolution or — except negatively — to its economic and social implications. Hobsbawm ignores, even denies, the liberating potential of the information age, as he does the Reagan boom — the greatest peacetime expansion in history — which helped to launch it. Instead, his portrait of America’s economy in the prosperous Eighties is one of unrelieved foreboding and gloom. Like a modern day Luddite, who has learned nothing from two hundred years of industrial innovation, Hobsbawm receives the news of technological progress as a social threat. In Hobsbawm’s doom-ridden scenario, technological progress means only the prospect that jobs will be eliminated — forever:
The Crisis Decades [1973 to the present] began to shed labor at a spectacular rate, even in plainly expanding industries….The number of workers diminished, relatively, absolutely and, in any case, rapidly. The rising unemployment of these decades was not merely cyclical but structural. The jobs lost in bad times would not come back when times improved: they would never come back.
As Hobsbawm, the Marxist reactionary, returns to the myths of his radical youth, he imagines the capitalist past conjured in those myths to be recurring eternally in its present: “In the 1980s and early 1990s the capitalist world found itself once again staggering under the burdens of the inter-war years, which the Golden Age appeared to have removed: mass unemployment, severe cyclical slumps, the ever-more spectacular confrontation of homeless beggars and luxurious plenty,…” To this structural dislocation Hobsbawm attributes a “growing culture of hate” and a general social breakdown (including an alleged epidemic of “mass murders”) which cloud the American future. In other words, Marx’s predictions were right.
But only in the fantasy life of an unreconstructed member of the faith. During the decades of the Cold War, the engines of capitalist progress, in fact, revolutionized the lives of ordinary working people on a scale previously inconceivable. Hobsbawm’s “landslide” in the West coincided with economic developments that ushered in the greatest social transformation in human history — the first time in five thousand years that more than a tiny percentage of the population of any society attained some degree of material well-being. It was this dazzling prospect of American progress in the era that stretched from Eisenhower to Reagan that lay at the heart of the demoralization and collapse of socialism’s empire, whose own populations had been condemned to permanent poverty by Marx’s crackpot ideas. Over the course of these allegedly somber decades, the consumption of goods and services by the average American family actually doubled. Less than 10 percent of Americans went to college in 1950, but by 1996 the figure was almost 60 percent. By that time, the poorest fifth of the population consumed more than the middle fifth had in 1955. None of this uplifting reality — a liberation of the dispossessed that no socialist ever accomplished — is allowed to enter Hobsbawm’s negative landscape.
The Age of Extremes, which has been so greedily embraced by the intellectual culture, is really an elaborate defense of the two destructive arguments in whose name the political left has caused so much suffering in the 20th Century — the alleged evil of capitalist society and the illusory promise of the socialist future. Of course, in the wake of the Soviet disaster, the hope of this socialist future is now only tenuously put forward by sophisticated radicals like Hobsbawm. It is the negative assault on capitalism that preoccupies them..................." The Left After Communism - Marxism failed because it had been inserted into a hostile environment - David Horowitz.