Most realize that I am antiwar and that I think most wars are fought more for profit than ideology.

I feel I need the let my readers know why I feel this way…..I have written many posts on the war for profit thing…..and I found a short history written by Brad Wolf that explains it much better than I do because I get too emotional at times.

The senseless slaughter of World War I began with the murder of a single man, a Crown Prince of a European empire whose name no one was particularly familiar with at the time. Archduke Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria was the presumptive heir to the Austrian-Hungarian empire in June of 1914.

His assassin was a young Bosnian Serb student and the murder of the Crown Prince set off a cataclysmic series of events resulting in the deaths of over 20 million people, half of whom were civilians. An additional 20 million people were wounded.

Entire generations of young men from England, France, Russia, Austria, and Germany were lost. National economies were ruined. In economic terms, World War I caused the greatest global depression of the 20th century. Debts by all the major countries (except the USA) haunted the postwar economic world. Unemployment soared. Inflation increased, most dramatically in Germany where hyperinflation meant that a loaf of bread costs 200 million marks.

World War I ended a period of economic success. Twenty years of fiscal insecurity and suffering followed. It is thought that veterans returning home from World War I brought with them the Spanish Flu, which killed almost one million Americans. The war also laid the groundwork for World War II.

Was it simply the murder of the Crown Prince that caused a world war or were other factors at work? Why did the United States get involved in a European conflict, particularly when an overwhelming number of Americans were against the United States being involved?

Despite major public opposition to the war, Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of it: 373 to 50 in the House of Representatives, 82 to six in the Senate. The politicians defied the wishes of the people they were supposed to represent. What happened? Was something else driving their votes?

Yhttps://www.antiwar.com/blog/2023/05/07/war-for-profit-a-short-history/

Hopefully the reader did in fact read the whole historic perspective before flying off into some diatribe….

There is more on how the taxpayer will be ripped off…..

On Sunday night, CBS 60 Minutes aired an episode on price gouging by weapons contractors. Chronic overcharging by arms companies not only wastes money, but it also puts our security at risk by increasing the chances that weapons systems funded by the Pentagon will be overpriced, underperforming, and never fully ready for combat.

As the 60 Minutes episode notes, a major contributor to price gouging is the fact that the arms industry is far more concentrated than it has ever been, due to a merger boom that started in the 1990s and has stepped up again in recent years, most notably with blockbuster deals like the 2020 Raytheon-United Technologies merger.

In the 1990s there were 51 major defense contractors. Now there are five. Those top five weapons contractors – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — split over $118 billion in Pentagon contracts in Fiscal Year 2022, or nearly one-third of all contracts issued by the Pentagon that year. These companies make most of the bombs, missiles, combat aircraft, helicopters, tanks, and other major weapons systems purchased by the U.S. government, which gives the Pentagon limited leverage when it tries to negotiate reasonable prices or hold contractors to account for shoddy work.

In addition to the problems posed by the industry’s near monopoly on weapons production, the Pentagon has made matters worse through lax oversight practices, including failing to gather adequate background information for price negotiations; using too many sole-source and cost-plus contracts; and failing to hold contractors accountable for cost overruns and poor performance.

Arms industry’s price gouging shows how greed trumps national interest

The greed is starting to show….even the M-IC is into price gouging…..

American military-industrial complex firms are guilty of “price gouging,” former Pentagon insiders told Newsweek. These accusations come amidst Washington’s exponentially rising demand for weapons systems to both bolster Taiwan – in an effort to destabilize China – and support NATO’s proxy Kiev during its war with Russia.

The Ukraine policy of providing massive quantities of arms “no matter the expense,” in particular, is weakening America’s national security and combat readiness by depleting stocks which cannot be easily replenished due to the weapons firms’ skyrocketing prices, according to the former officials.

For four decades, Shay Assad worked as a contract negotiator at the Defense Department. He recently sounded off about these “astronomical price increases” and the resultant detrimental effect on the military, during a recent report on 60 Minutes, the CBS news program.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/news/former-dod-insiders-accuse-us-arms-manufacturers-of-price-gouging-amid-ukraine-proxy-war/

A few see the gouging….and are calling for an investigation….

A bipartisan group of senators sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Wednesday urging him to open an investigation into reports of systematic price gouging by defense contractors.

The letter, which included the signatures of Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), cites a CBS News “60 Minutes” report on major defense contractors overcharging the Pentagon on a wide range of equipment and weapons.

The senators expressed concern that defense contractors were securing profits of 40 percent, and sometimes as high as 4,000 percent.

“Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and TransDigm are among the offenders,” the senators wrote, “dramatically overcharging the Department and U.S. taxpayers while reaping enormous profits, seeing their stock prices soar, and handing out massive executive compensation packages.”

(thehill.com)

I know that this portion of the post is redundant but that is by design….maybe the repartitions will help readers grasp what is actually happening within the M-IC…l..how their money is basically being stolen.

In a move to give the arms industry more clout…..

Members of the Council on Foreign Relations are currently voting on a slate of ten board candidates put forth by the “Nominating and Governance Committee.” That slate includes what is arguably the world’s largest arms dealer, the chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, James Taiclet, according to a document circulated to CFR members and obtained by Responsible Statecraft.

The board of directors of CFR, a New York-based think tank that focuses on U.S. foreign policy and international relations, isn’t a stranger to embracing the weapons industry. CFR’s chairman is David Rubenstein, a co-founder and co-chairman of the private equity firm and defense-industry-focused Carlyle Group, and the board currently includes Raytheon board member Meghan L. O’Sullivan, and Frances Townsend, a director at Lenoardo Systems, a Virginia based weapons systems company. (CFR’s biography of Townsend omits any mention of her role at the weapons firm but Leonardo Systems lists her CFR board membership in her biography on their website.)

Arms industry titan poised to sit on Council on Foreign Relations board

This should assist in the arms industry getting an expanded influence in our forever wars.

One could plug in any war since WW1 into the matrix…..especially Vietnam, Iraq and now Ukraine…..the results are mostly the same.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”