It's a bull market for the death industry:
Helped greatly by the Bush Administration, U.S. weapons manufacturers amassed a grand total of $21 billion from September 2005 to September 2006 in sales to other countries, twice the amount of the previous 12 months...
Policy changes made by the Bush folks assisted in enriching the coffers of Lockheed Martin and the rest of the gang. The Bush people opened up enormous new markets for arms peddling by lifting bans or restrictions in recent years on previously proscribed countries, most notably India and Pakistan. Pakistan responded by buying $5 billion worth of F-16 jets from Lockheed Martin. India, for its part, is aiming to place an order of 126 jets, with American corporations salivating at the prospect of being chosen for the largesse.
The lone discordant voice in a recent New York Times piece [1] on the weapons industry’s bloated coffers was William Hartung of the World Policy Institute, a group that has done invaluable research on the subject. In June 2005, the organization issued a report on U.S. weapons sales.
“U.S. arms transfers end up fueling conflict, arming human rights abusers, or falling into the hands of U.S. adversaries,” the report stated [2]. “As in the case of recent decisions to provide new F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan, while pledging comparable high-tech military hardware to its rival India, U.S. arms sometimes go to both sides in long-brewing conflicts, ratcheting up tensions and giving both sides better firepower with which to threaten each other. Far from serving as a force for security and stability, U.S. weapons sales frequently serve to empower unstable, undemocratic regimes to the detriment of U.S. and global security.”
Why should industry types worry about all this? All they are looking at is the bottom line, and they are ecstatic.
More here and here. h/t Cursor.
No comments:
Post a Comment