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America’s war profiteers

Trump Is Bankrupting Our Nation to Enrich the War Profiteers,  March 06, 2017 By Jonathan King and Richard Krushnic, Truthout | News Analysis “………The Role of Weapons Contractors

We have previously argued that it is the guaranteed profits from nuclear weapons manufacture that leads contractors to resist nuclear disarmament and promote the concept of danger from abroad.

The profitability derives from three distinct aspects of such weapons contracts:

• First, they cannot be outsourced to lower cost suppliers, such as in China or Mexico, by congressional edict.

• Second, the contracts are cost-plus. That is, no matter what the companies spend on the manufacture, they are guaranteed a healthy profit on top. And, of course, the more they run up the costs, the more they make.

• And third, the contracts are screened from oversight, such as proper audits, by national security considerations.

The current 2017 congressional military authorization calls for spending of some $350 billion over the next decade for upgrades of our nuclear weapons ($35 billion a year) — land-based missiles in silos, long-range bombers and their bombs, new Trident submarines and upgraded Trident missiles and new nuclear-capable cruise missiles. The so-called “modernization” program that Trump supports will spend more than $1 trillion — a thousand billion — income tax dollars over the next 30 years.

Given that the Soviet Union no longer exists, that China has become a capitalist economy and that the major difficulties faced abroad are ISIS (also known as Daesh) and related groups, it is deeply questionable why the congressional budget still devotes tens of billions of dollars to Cold War-era nuclear weapons. Yet the Trump administration is proposing to spend a trillion dollars or more over the next three decades upgrading the US nuclear weapons triad.

Where does the pressure for these wasteful and provocative programs — which almost certainly decrease national security — come from? While military high command and the intelligence agencies also press for nuclear weapons upgrades, corporate profits derived from nuclear weapons contracts may be the most powerful driving force, supported by members of Congress with military research and development (R&D) and production facilities in their districts.

A closer look at Lockheed Martin, the largest weapons contractor in the world, reveals how this coupling between corporate profits and the continuation of nuclear weapons delivery programs operates……….http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39712-trump-is-bankrupting-our-nation-to-enrich-the-war-profiteers

March 8, 2017 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Reference, weapons and war