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war profiteering
As Bombs Drop, Weapons Industry Stocks Take Off
One wonders how the executives of these companies feel about their products being used for mass slaughter in Gaza and dangerous escalation in Lebanon.
Oct 04, 2024
It’s a sad but familiar spectacle — as people die at the hands of U.S. weapons in a faraway war zone, the stock prices of arms makers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin soar. A piece posted yesterday at Forbes tells the tale: “Defense Stocks Hit All-Time Highs Amidst Mideast Escalation.”
One wonders how the executives of these companies feel about their products being used for mass slaughter in Gaza and dangerous escalation in Lebanon. For the most part they’re not talking, although they are glad to occasionally inform their investors that “turbulence” and “instability” means their products will be needed in significant quantities by our “allies.”
And, not unlike the Biden administration, they tend to couch their rhetoric in terms of a “right to self-defense.” They act as if Israel’s killing of 40,000 people and displacing millions more — the vast majority of whom have absolutely nothing to do with Hamas, nor any way to influence their behavior — can somehow be white washed by calling it a defensive operation.
No one who steps outside the bankrupt world of official Washington to look at the impacts on actual human beings in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon can take the notion that U.S. weapons are being used for defense in the current Middle East war seriously.
Peter Thiel and his colleagues at Palantir are an exception to the closed mouthed approach of executives at the larger weapons companies. When asked how he felt about his company’s technology to pick targets in Gaza, he said “I'm not on top of all the details of what's going on in Israel, because my bias is to defer to Israel. It's not for us to second-guess every, everything.” And Palantir CEO Alex Karp flew the entire company board to Israel earlier this year to show solidarity with Israel’s war effort in Gaza.
At least Palantir’s leaders are honest and open about where they stand. Leaders of firms like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Boeing that supply the weapons that have laid waste to Gaza and are now pounding Lebanon prefer to hide behind euphemisms about promoting defense, deterrence, and stability, and assisting allies.
But what about when those allies are engaged in widespread war crimes that prompted the International Court of Justice to say that Israel’s war on Gaza could plausibly be considered a genocide? Is it morally acceptable to just cash the checks and avert one’s eyes, or do the companies profiting from this grotesque humanitarian disaster have a moral responsibility for how their products are being used?
A few years ago, during the height of Saudi Arabia’s brutal invasion of Yemen — enabled by billions of dollars of U.S.- and European-origin weapons — Amnesty International probed this very point. In a report entitled “Outsourcing Responsibility,”the group provided the findings of a survey it had done of 22 arms companies, asking them “to explain how they meet their responsibilities to respect human rights under internationally recognized standards.”
Amnesty noted that "many of the companies investigated supply arms to countries accused of committing war crimes and serious human rights violations, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE.” None of the companies queried provided evidence that they were doing any sort of due diligence to ensure that their weapons weren’t being used to commit war crimes or human rights abuses. Fourteen companies failed to respond at all, and of the eight that did answer Amnesty’s questions gave variations on the theme of “we just do what the government allows.”
This casts influential arms makers as innocent bystanders who await government edicts before marketing their wares. In fact, weapons manufacturers spend millions year in and year out pressing for weaker human rights strictures and quicker decisionmaking on the sale of arms to foreign clients.
The weapons merchants are right about one thing. It is going to take changes in government policy to stop the obscene trafficking of weapons of war into the world’s killing zones. That will mean breaking the web of influence that ties government policy makers, corporate executives, and many members of Congress to the continued production of weapons on a mass scale. We can’t expect a profit making entity like Lockheed Martin to regulate itself when there are billions to be made fueling conflicts large and small.
Which means the responsibility for ending the killing and the war profiteering it enables falls to the rest of us, from students calling for a ban on arming Israel to union members looking to reduce their dependency on jobs in the weapons sector to anyone who wants a foreign policy driven by what makes us safe, not what makes Palantir and Lockheed Martin rich.
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Sanders Says 'Congress Must Investigate' War Profiteering by US Military Contractors
"The greed of these companies is fleecing the American taxpayer and killing Ukrainians," said the senator.
Aug 29, 2024
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday said "there's a name for" the billions of dollars in stock buybacks and dividends that major U.S. defense contractors have doled out to their shareholders while taking taxpayer money, and it's this: "war profiteering."
Sanders, the independent from Vermont who chairs the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee in the Senate, took aim at Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and RTX—formerly known as Raytheon—for taking in $255 billion in public funds since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, only to reward shareholders and executives with $52 billion via the benefits of stock buybacks and dividends.
"The greed of these companies is fleecing the American taxpayer and killing Ukrainians," said Sanders. "Congress must investigate."
Sanders reiterated his strong support for backing Ukraine as it continues to defend against Russia's incursion, but said he does not support military contractors "making huge profits on the weapons systems they produce."
With the companies increasing prices for weapons systems and equipment while showering their shareholders with payouts, he said "our taxpayers pay more than they should, and Ukraine receives less weaponry than it needs."
Following the consolidation of dozens of defense contractors into just five companies in the 1990s, the cost of weapons and supplies have risen dramatically. As CBS News reported last year, a stinger missile costs more than $400,000 at Raytheon, now the weapon's sole supplier—a seven-fold increase over its cost in 1991, even accounting for inflation.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) noted when introducing the Stop Price Gouging the Military Act in 2022 that defense contractors "regularly charge the military excessive prices, including $71 for a pin that should have cost less than a nickel and $80 for a drain pipe segment that should have cost $1."
Sanders said the companies are price gouging "all while saying they need emergency supplemental funding to ramp up production for the war effort."
"I strongly support getting the Ukrainians what they need to defend their country," said Sanders. "What I do NOT support is the war profiteering of major defense contractors."
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The Eurosatory Controversy Begs the Question: Is an Ethical Arms Show Possible?
The irony of the Israeli arms ban and reinstatement is the incursion of “moral integrity” into an event about the most up-to-date ways to kill your enemies.
Jun 22, 2024
The term is “banal militarism”—that is to say, violence and the preparation for violence so utterly commonplace that most people don’t even notice. Banal militarism is as American as apple pie. It’s also global in scope.
As Richard Rubenstein writes: “Part of the reason for the relative immunity of militarism to criticism is the extraordinary cultural power in American society of pro-military institutions and ways of thought. What some analysts call ‘banal militarism’ is omnipresent, so much so that it becomes virtually invisible, part of the air that one breathes.”
That is to say, banal militarism manifests itself in the stories we tell, the symbols we revere, the movies we watch. Even the metaphors we use! The war on drugs... the war on (my God!) cancer... on and on. Once the nation even went to war against obesity (I think we lost).
Freedom exists only for those who are well armed and, ipso facto, ready to kill.
“The term,” Rubenstein continues, “points to the ways in which the use of armed force is legitimized or encouraged by a thick network of everyday assumptions, customs, rituals, and emotions that are accepted semi-consciously as constituting part of our personalities and our collective identity.”
This is the essence of what must change about who we are. We’re at, you might say, an evolutionary stopping point. The path to peace—the path to tomorrow—is wide open and stunningly visible, if we just open our eyes and push ourselves beyond our banal certainties. I usually maintain my focus on the militarism of my own country, but because heavily guarded national borders are part of the problem, looking beyond the “sweet land of liberty” is also necessary. Thus I definitely went into wake-up mode when I read about a recent arms-show controversy in France, which was oh so laden with irony.
It involves a semiannual event called Eurosatory, which is no less than the largest weapons show in the world, involving, as The New York Times explained, more than 2,000 arm dealers from more than 60 countries. It’s an event “where military and security officials from around the world rub shoulders with manufacturers showcasing drones, missiles, and other weapons and technologies.”
Wow! The whole world is making itself safer!
What happened this year, however, is that French President Emmanuel Macron became outraged after an Israeli bombing raid on a a tent camp in Rafah killed dozens of Palestinians and, a month ago, the government of France declared that Israeli arms manufacturers would not be allowed to attend Eurosatory. (Note: Russian weapon dealers were also banned because of the war in Ukraine.)
This led to outrage by the Israelis, who challenged Macron’s decision, and just a few days ago, as Eurosatory was about to start, a Paris court ruled that the ban was discriminatory and ordered that it be lifted. That’s the essence of the controversy, which certainly put the arms show into the public spotlight—at least for me. So I got a chance to read about the show and such matters as its expanding focus on, oh... “suicide drones” and the ubiquity of cluster bombs and such.
And I found myself more or less split down the middle by the irony of the Israeli arms ban and reinstatement and the incursion of “moral integrity” into an event about the most up-to-date ways to kill your enemies. It’s a grandstand celebration of war profiteering—but the wars have to be good and just and approved by NATO. Note: U.S. weapons dealers were certainly welcome.
Speaking of which, I turn to the words of William Hartung, who reflects on the gradual normalization of war profiteering. Arms dealers have successfully uncloaked themselves from the insulting term “merchants of death,” as exemplified by a recent speech by President Joe Biden, which Hartung quotes:
You know, just as in World War Two, today, patriotic American workers are building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom.
The actual merchants of death—the corporate arms manufacturers—are suddenly invisible. In their place are ordinary men and women, patriotic Americans, creating the bullets and missiles, the MRAPs and suicide drones, maybe even the nuclear weapons, that constitute the arsenal of democracy. Freedom exists only for those who are well armed and, ipso facto, ready to kill. And the job of the president is to sell this message to the public. As I have noted previously, he’s the country’s public-relations director in chief. That may be his main job.
So there you have it. Banal militarism. Is there an alternative?
Theologian Walter Wink, in his book The Powers That Be, puts that question into an eerily large context, calling it “the myth of redemptive violence”—the belief, the lie, that violence is the foundation of freedom. “It doesn’t seem to be mythic in the least,” he writes. “Violence simply appears to be in the nature of things. It’s what works. It seems inevitable, the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts. If a god is what you turn to when all else fails, violence certainly functions as a god.”
A banal god, I would say, quietly sneaking into our consciousness, telling us we need to wage war on all our problems—you know, bang! Just make ’em go away, whether evil nations, terrorists, insulting gunmen in a Dodge City saloon, drugs, or crime, or cancer.
Think of all the evil we’ve purged in the 21st century alone. And it’s all consequence-free. Just ask the arms dealers.
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