Boeing Chief: War spending has "been a great ride for the last 5 years"

Manufactured war drawing down. What to do, what to do?



Not to worry, we're already in the process of stirring up another conflict in another country. We'll not only continue subsidizing your corporations with taxpayer's money for more deployments and more weapons, we'll give your industry free reign to develop more costly weaponry that we may or may not need in the future.



We're just cowboys at heart, fighting back the Indians.



Hey, a frown is, after all, just a smile turned upside down.


full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/business/27weapons.html?adxnnl=0&adxnnlx=1135696124-ZJTM+1FvocR8iSmLTzjcUA&pagewanted=print

In ecstasy over war profits, sleep like babies too.

The military industry is the main motivator behind the Bush era imperialistic expansionism. They hold the puppet strings.


In order to replace weapons used in Afghanistan, and in concert with the military conflict in Iraq, most U.S. weapons makers have increased production. Bombs are big business again and the Bush administration has opened the candy store, exporting death, conquest, and perpetual war.

With a share of 24% of U.S. arms exports, Lockheed-Martin is the world's largest arms exporting company. Lockheed leads the pack of defense contractors who do business with the U.S. with valuable Pentagon contracts worth a total of nearly $30 billion and an advertised $70 billion backlog. Lockheed Martin now has over $77 billion in federal contracts, primarily (but not exclusively) with the Defense Dept.

Lockheed has 125,000 employees in the United States and overseas with 939 facilities in 457 cities and 45 states throughout the U.S.; internationally, with business locations in 56 nations and territories.

Lockheed leads the defense industry in lobbying expenditures. Lockheed Martin made over $10.6 million in campaign contributions to candidates and party committees from 1990 to 2000, including $3.4 million in donations in the run-up to the year 2000 elections.

The company actively lobbies for the need to retain substantial numbers of existing nuclear weapons while developing new ones. Lockheed Martin receives more than $1 billion per year from the Department of Energy - to operate the Sandia National Laboratories (involved in the design and production of nuclear warheads) and help run the Nevada Test Site for "sub-critical testing" of new nuclear weapons designs

-Peter B. Teets, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, is a former president and chief operating officer of Lockheed Martin who retired from the company in late 1999. Teets now serves as the director of the National Reconnaissance Office and chief procurement officer for all of military space, controlling a budget in excess of $65 billion.

-James G. Roche, Secretary of the Air Force is a former president of Northrop-Grumman, a subsidiary of Lockheed.

-Stephen Hadley, Condi Rice's former deputy and our new national security advisor, was a partner in Shea & Gardner, the Washington law firm representing Lockheed Martin.

- Gordon England, Secretary of the Navy, was a General Dynamics contractor and a former president of Lockheed.

-Michael Jackson, Deputy Secretary of Transportation is the former Vice President, Former CEO of Lockheed Information and Management Services and a shareholder.

-Dov Zakheim - Under Secretary for Comptroller of Defense was a paid advisory board member of Northrup-Grumman.

-Nelson F. Gibbs, Air Force; Assistant Secretary for Installations, Environment and Logistics is a former corporate comptroller for Northrop-Grumman.

-I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff and Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs was a Northrup-Grumman consultant.

Boeing had the upper hand in influencing the purchase of Air Force goodies during the first quarter of the Bush I presidency. Boeing was probably best known in the past for making commercial jet airplanes. These days 40% its annual revenue is generated from the sale of military aircraft, missiles, lasers, guidance systems, and the like.

-Karl Rove, Senior Advisor to the President is a Boeing shareholder.

The biggest threat to the World community is the proliferation of WMDs here in the U.S., facilitated by a nest of former military-industrial executives (military-industrial warriors) and shareholders in the Defense department and throughout the Bush administration.

The CDI reports that the United States military budget exceeds that of the next 25 nations combined; $400 billion a year, and that's just the public accounting. Russia follows the U.S. with a $60 billion defense budget. U.K. spends only about $35 billion a year.
Since 1992, the United States has exported more than $142 billion worth of weaponry around the world. North America accounts for more than 65% of the world's arms exports. Of the 43 countries with over $500 million in arms imports, 23 obtained 2/3 or more from the U.S. http://www.cdi.org/document/search/displaydoc.cfm?DocumentID=216&StartRow=1&ListRows=10

With the new money appropriated for homeland defense ($38 billion for FY 2003), virtually all of the big defense contractors — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon have started hawking their products for use in domestic security. In order to replace weapons used in Afghanistan, and in concert with the military conflict in Iraq, most U.S. weapons makers have increased production. Bombs are big business again and the Bush administration has opened the candy store, exporting death, conquest, and perpetual war.

With a share of 24% of U.S. arms exports, Lockheed-Martin is the world's largest arms exporting company. Lockheed leads the pack of defense contractors who do business with the U.S. with valuable Pentagon contracts worth a total of nearly $30 billion and an advertised $76 billion backlog. (http://www.cdi.org/issues/wme/spendersFY03.html)

Lockheed leads the defense industry in lobbying expenditures. Lockheed Martin made over $10.6 million in campaign contributions to candidates and party committees from 1990 to 2000, including $3.4 million in donations in the run-up to the year 2000 elections. http://worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/updates/051603.html

The company actively lobbies for the need to retain substantial numbers of existing nuclear weapons while developing new ones. Lockheed Martin receives more than $1 billion per year from the Department of Energy - to operate the Sandia National Laboratories (involved in the design and production of nuclear warheads) and help run the Nevada Test Site for "sub-critical testing" of new nuclear weapons designs. http://actagainstwar.org/downloads/LMflyer2page.pdf

The ex-Lockheed Martin employees with the most direct connections to defense dollars are:

Former chief operating officer Peter B. Teets, who is now Under Secretary of the Air Force and Director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), a post that includes making decisions on the acquisition of everything from reconnaissance satellites to space-based elements of missile defense.

And, Everet Beckner, who served as the chief executive of Lockheed Martin's division that helped run the United Kingdom's Atomic Weapons Establishment. http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/uk/uk-usa.htm

Beckner is now Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs at the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration http://www.dp.doe.gov/about_nn.asp , charged with oversight of maintenance, development, and production of nuclear warheads.

In their new positions, both Teets and Beckner are well-positioned to make decisions on procurement and research programs that will directly or indirectly benefit their former employer (Lockheed),which has major portfolios in nuclear weapons, missile defense, and military space systems.

The Arms Trade Resource Center, reported that 80% of Lockheed's business is with the Department of Defense and other federal government agencies. It is also the largest provider of information technology services, systems integration, and training to the U.S. government. Such business has grown substantially during the Bush tenure, especially in fiscal year 2002 as plans for war were formulated. http://worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/links.html

The ATRC report calculates that Lockheed was awarded $17 billion in defense contracts in 2002, up from $14.7 billion in 2001. First quarter sales for 2003 were $7.1 billion, an 18% increase from the corresponding quarter in 2002.

These corporations simply cannot be trusted to keep their word or their commitments over the length of these multibillion, multi-year contracts which are awarded and maintained with responsibility for oversight falling into the hands of several successive administrations and legislatures. Ronald Sugar, the new head of Northrup-Grumman, at a recent conservative policy forum on the defense industry remarked that he expects the government to be responsible for a financially stable military industry.

"Time is risk, . . . the defense industry needs steady, predictable growth," he said.

Pentagon senior defense consultant Richard Perle, who also spoke at the conference, opined that, "A profitable defense industry keeps America strong." Profits have been pretty darn good; CEO pay, however, has been even better.

According to the study by United for a Fair Economy, More Bucks for the Bang: ", the median CEO salary at the 37 largest publicly traded defense contractors rose 79% between 2001 and 2002 whereas overall CEO salary increased only 6%. In 2002, defense industry CEOs earned an average of $5.4 million - or 577 times as much as a private in Iraq - while other U.S. CEOs, on average, earned "only" $3.7 million." http://www.ufenet.org/press/2003/BucksforBang.pdf

At the military industry conference hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, defense policy advisor Richard Perle mused that, "It would be better if we simply handed the money to the defense industry and let them invest it themselves, . . . but Congress likes to control that . . . , but it gives the impression that the merchants of death are unduly licenced." http://www.c-span.org/Search/basic.asp?ResultStart=1&ResultCount=10&BasicQueryText=American+Institute+of+Aeronautics

You can hear the regret in his statement. If we would only just give the industry the money they want, no strings attached, they would provide for the nation's defense needs.

The industry wants us to believe that they are the best judges of what the next generation's needs are in terms of weaponry. But, the existence of these corporations and their new hi-tech boondoggles will not make us anymore secure than the existence of these same executives in our government have kept our sons and daughters from dying in senseless wars.