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US weapons makers celebrate ‘benefits’ from tensions with Russia
According to top executives, the rapidly escalating standoff could mean
big bucks for investors
military parade in Kiev. © Getty Images / Pavlo Gonchar
Rock bottom relations between Moscow and the West, along with the looming prospect of a conflict in Eastern Europe, bode well for firms cashing in on sending arms overseas, two of America’s largest weapons exporters have admitted.
As Washington spends increasingly large sums of cash on military equipment for Ukraine, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin told investors this week that escalation in the region bodes well for their bottom line, in transcripts released by investment site The Motley Fool.
On a January 25 earnings call, Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes said, “we just have to look to last week where we saw the drone attack in the UAE, which have attacked some of their other facilities. And of course, the tensions in Eastern Europe, the tensions in the South China Sea, all of those things are putting pressure on some of the defense spending over there. So I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from it.”
An admission that war benefits American economics.
The same day, Jim Taiclet, CEO of Lockheed Martin, also advised investors that the likelihood of further American involvement in Eastern Europe would be good for business. “If you look at the evolving threat level and the approach that some countries are taking, including North Korea, Iran and through some of its proxies in Yemen and elsewhere, and especially Russia today, and China, there’s renewed great power competition that does include national defense and threats to it,” he said.
Taiclet noted that “the history of the United States is, when those environments evolve, we do not sit by and just watch it happen. So I can’t talk to a number, but I do think, and I’m concerned personally that the threat is advancing, and we need to be able to meet it.”
Does this mean that American Deep State activists are pro-active as opposed to re-active?
In a January 26 earnings call, Brian West, CFO of aerospace and weapons contractor Boeing, did not reference Ukraine and Russia directly, but acknowledged that strong bipartisan support for military spending in Washington has ensured that the company sees “stable demand.”
According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, the arms industry has spent $2.5 billion on government lobbying over the past two decades, employing, on average, more than 700 lobbyists per year. Pentagon spending has exceeded $14 trillion since the start of the war in Afghanistan, and one-third to a half of that money has gone to military contractors.
In the 1990s, arms manufacturers spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying for the expansion of NATO, the US-led military bloc, into Eastern Europe, after the industry shrank following the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War.
Peace is not tolerable for the American war industry.
Tensions around Ukraine have been high for months, with Western leaders claiming they fear Russia is planning an imminent invasion of its neighbor, and pointing to reports that more than 100,000 Russian soldiers have massed near the shared border. Moscow has denied that it has any aggressive intentions, and has called for security agreements that would prohibit NATO from expanding into Ukraine or Georgia, a deal that Washington has said is off the table.
Like I said, Peace is not tolerable for the American war industry.
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Billionaire tapped for Pentagon job
Ex-NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg will head the Defense Innovation Board
Michael Bloomberg, the owner of one of the leading global business news providers, is set to chair the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board, DOD spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Wednesday. He said the multibillionaire will “leverage his experience and strategic insights on innovation, business and public service.”
The Pentagon said it wants to tap into Bloomberg’s “wealth of experience… as an innovator in business, government, and philanthropy.” The businessman, 79, said he was honored to work with the Department of Defense, “our largest government agency,” to “help bring new ideas and outside perspective that can help protect Americans and our values, interests, and allies around the world.”
The Pentagon is into philanthropy? Some militaries around the world are gearing up propaganda departments. Having seen the results from Bellincat, which I believe is the propaganda outlet for the CIA and MI6, the value of propaganda has become obvious.
The Bloomberg Data Terminal owner will be succeeding Mark Sirangelo, the former CEO of rocket and satellite company SpaceDev. Sirangelo was appointed to the position under the Trump administration.
The Defense Innovation Board was created in 2016 to advise the Pentagon on how to adopt Silicon Valley’s experience in innovation for the military. Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt served as its first chair, before being replaced by Sirangelo in 2020.
The board was scrapped in the final days of the Trump administration, along with a number of other advisory bodies. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin reinstated it and eight others on Wednesday.
In addition to running a news business that helped make him one of the richest people in the world, Bloomberg served as the mayor of New York between 2002 to 2013. He switched parties and sought the Democratic nomination for president during the 2020 election cycle, but failed to win public support in the primaries and eventually endorsed Joe Biden’s candidacy.
Declassified document accuses CIA of bulk collection of data on Americans
A heavily redacted letter claims the agency collects data without any judicial
or congressional oversight
© AP / Carolyn Kaster
Two US senators have accused the CIA of bulk collecting data on citizens following the release of documents disclosing the problems with how the agency searches and handles the information.
In their letter, sent on April 13, 2021, but partially disclosed on Thursday, Democratic Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico asked CIA Director William J. Burns and US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to declassify the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board’s (PCLOB) study into the CIA’s intelligence gathering on Americans under Executive Order 12333 – an order passed by Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1981, which expanded the power of intelligence agencies.
“During your confirmation processes, you expressed a commitment to greater transparency and an appreciation for how secret interpretations of law undermine democratic oversight and pose risks to the long-term credibility of the Intelligence Community,” the senators wrote, before adding that “the secret nature of the CIA’s activities described in the PCLOB report raise these very concerns.”
Wyden and Heinrich accused the CIA of acting “entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes with FISA collection.”
This basic fact has been kept from the public and from Congress. Until the PCLOB report was delivered last month, the nature and full extent of the CIA’s collection was withheld even from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
The two senators also observed that despite Congress and the American public’s longstanding desire to “prohibit the warrantless collection of Americans’ records,” the CIA has “secretly conducted its own bulk program.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) claimed on Thursday that the newly declassified documents “reveal that the CIA has been secretly conducting massive surveillance programs that capture Americans’ private information,” and that the surveillance was conducted “without any court approval, and with few, if any, safeguards imposed by Congress to protect our civil liberties.”
These reports raise serious questions about what information of ours the CIA is vacuuming up in bulk and how the agency exploits that information to spy on Americans. This invasion of our privacy must stop
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden called the accusations “huge,” writing, “This is the systematic construction of a surveillance state that will dominate the rest of our lives.”
“People brushing this off with ‘duh’ or ‘I’m not surprised’ should take this seriously: elections are months away. Vote out any politician who defends this in the slightest way,” Snowden added.
I would go a little further and vote out anyone who is not alarmed at this outrage.
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