" $65 million every single day of the year."

http://www.counterpunch.com/stclair01222005.html


The Company That Runs the Empire
Lockheed and Loaded


Lockheed-Martin is headquartered in the Bethesda, Maryland. No, the defense titan doesn't have a bomb-making factory in this toney Beltway suburb. But as the nation's top weapons contractor, it migrated to DC from southern California because that's where the money is. And Lockheed rakes it in from the federal treasury at the rate of $65 million every single day of the year.

From nuclear missiles to fighter planes, software code to spy satellites, the Patriot missile to Star Wars, Lockheed has come to dominate the weapons market in a way that the Standard Oil Company used to hold sway over the nation's petroleum supplies. And it all happened with the help of the federal government, which steered lucrative no bid contracts Lockheed's way, enacted tax breaks that encouraged Lockheed's merger and acquisition frenzy in the 1980s and 1990s and turned a blind eye to the company's criminal rap sheet, ripe with indiscretions ranging from bribery to contract fraud.

Now Lockheed stands almost alone. It not only serves as an agent of US foreign policy, from the Pentagon to the CIA; it also helps shape it. "We are deployed entirely in developing daunting technology," Lockheed's new CEO Robert J. Stevens told the New York Times report Tim Weiner. "That requires thinking through the policy dimensions of national security as well as technological dimensions."

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When insiders don't get you everything you need, there's always political bribery. In the US, politicians who serve Lockheed's interests get annual dispensations of cooperate swill courtesy of the company's mammoth political action committee. Each year Lockheed's corporate PAC doles out more than $1 million, mainly to members of the crucial defense and appropriations committees.
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america is a crime scene - yellow crime scene tape should be on our borders - oh, I forgot, the cops are in on it.