Biden may not have been informed where Austin was but I bet Raytheon knew.
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Posts Tagged ‘Raytheon’
The Case of the Disappearing Defense Secretary
Posted by M. C. on January 9, 2024
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, Raytheon | Leave a Comment »
US-Saudi Arms ‘Megadeal’ Collapses Over Russia, China Links
Posted by M. C. on September 16, 2023
RTX, one of the largest weapons firms in the US, is currently being sued alongside Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics for “aiding and abetting war crimes and extrajudicial killings” by selling weapons to the Saudi-led coalition waging war in Yemen. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the victims of two coalition bombings in Yemen — one for a wedding in 2015 and another for a funeral in 2016.
According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), in October 2015, the Al-Sanabani family was readying to celebrate a relative’s wedding when a coalition jet bombed the area, killing 43 Yemenis, including 13 women and 16 children. A year later, coalition jets dropped a US-manufactured GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bomb on a crowded funeral, killing over 100.
The lawsuit alleges that western-manufactured bombs have killed over 25,000 civilians since the beginning of the NATO-backed war nearly eight years ago.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-saudi-arms-megadeal-collapses-over-russia-china-links
by Tyler Durden
Friday, Sep 15, 2023 – 07:40 PM
US weapons maker RTX, formerly known as Raytheon Technologies, scrubbed a multibillion deal with Saudi firm Scopa Defense earlier this year over “concerns” that the latter was pursuing business with sanctioned Russian and Chinese companies, according to people familiar with the deal that spoke with the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
In 2022, RTX and Scopa signed a memorandum of understanding to build a factory in the kingdom for air defense systems to protect Riyadh from airstrikes. The plan reportedly called for installing radars and multiple air defense systems with an investment of $25 billion in the kingdom and $17 worth of sales.
The owner of Scopa, Mohamed Alajlan, told the WSJ that his company has no deals with sanctioned Russian companies and that any deals with Chinese firms “are limited to securing raw materials such as copper or rubber for use in producing ammunition and armored vehicles.”
“We don’t work with any companies that have international sanctions,” Alajlan told the WSJ, adding that the decision by RTX to scrub the deal was “rushed, illogical, and even irrational.”
Alajlan, who also chairs the Saudi-Chinese Business Council, is the heir of a prominent Saudi family that for decades has imported Chinese textiles to the kingdom.
According to the WSJ, the “unease” over Scopa’s alleged ties to sanctioned Russian and Chinese companies “was a deciding factor for an advisory board of retired US military officers to resign from the Saudi company.” Furthermore, the daily claims Scopa fired its chief executive “who had raised the sanctions concerns with his company’s owner and US officials.”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Arms Megadeal, China, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, RTX, Russia, US-Saudi, Yemen | Leave a Comment »
Zelensky to Visit Washington Next Week as Congress Debates New Ukraine Spending
Posted by M. C. on September 15, 2023
The White House has asked for an additional $24 billion in spending on the proxy war
Is $24B before or after Zelenski skims his cut off the top? McDonnell Douglas and Raytheon need to know.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to visit Washington next week as Congress debates the $24 billion in additional spending on the proxy war in Ukraine that the White House has requested.
The visit hasn’t been officially announced but has been reported by several media outlets, including The Associated Press. Zelensky will stop in the American capital as part of his trip to the US during the UN General Assembly.
Sources told AP that Zelensky will meet President Biden at the White House next Thursday and will also visit Capitol Hill. When he last made the trip in December 2022, Zelensky thanked Congress for all the support but said it wasn’t “enough.”
Zelensky’s next visit comes as support for the proxy war in Ukraine falters among Republican voters. According to a recent poll from CNN, 55% of Americans oppose Congress authorizing more spending on the conflict, including 71% of Republicans who were asked.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: McDonnell Douglas, Raytheon, Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky | Leave a Comment »
The Woke Plot
Posted by M. C. on May 15, 2023
Fraser Myers points out: “‘I am intersectional… I am a cisgender millennial, who has been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder… I refuse to internalise misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be… I want you to be unapologetically you, whoever you are…’
These are not the words of some blue-haired student or tedious Instagram activist. Rather, they come from a recruitment video for the CIA. The Central Intelligence Agency – infamous for ‘enhanced interrogation’, drone warfare and trafficking drugs to pay for foreign coups – has officially gone woke.
3. Being woke is easier than actually paying workers.
When people complain about woke culture, they usually think about universities. They are sick of fake courses, demands for diversity, constant complaints of oppression, and the like. What we need to realize is that the situation is much worse than that. Woke culture in universities is just one part of an insidious plot to make our entire society woke.
Dr. Paul Alexander writes on May 9, ““’When other priorities, like gender or race, are introduced as a metric of assignment and advancement, the foundations of performance-based competition are sacrificed and the emphasis on safety takes a backseat,’ a current Air Force instructor pilot and former trainer for Undergraduate Pilot Training, who spoke on a condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal, told the DCNF.
‘As part of the larger military-wide effort to promote diversity in the service’s pilot ranks, the 19th Air Force command near San Antonio, Texas, ‘clustered’ racial minorities and female trainees into one class, dubbed ‘America’s Class,’ to find out if doing so would improve the pilots’ graduation rates. However, not only did the effort fail to boost minority and women candidates’ success rates, but officers involved say they were ordered to engage in potentially unlawful discrimination by excluding white males from the class, documents show.
‘When other priorities, like gender or race, are introduced as a metric of assignment and advancement, the foundations of performance-based competition are sacrificed and the emphasis on safety takes a backseat,’ a current Air Force instructor pilot and former trainer for Undergraduate Pilot Training, who spoke on a condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal, told the DCNF.
A ‘significant backlog’ of pilot candidates waiting to begin classes offered the 19th Air Force, which conducts pilot training for the entire service at Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas, a chance to build a class from scratch, a spokesperson for Air Education and Training Command (AETC) told the DCNF. So, the 19th Air Force ‘clustered’ candidates from ‘underrepresented groups” into Specialized Undergraduate Pilot Training (SUPT) class 21-15, with the initial intent of roughly mirroring the racial and gender makeup of the U.S.”
The entire defense establishment has become woke, and this has become a means of spreading the American Empire. Fraser Myers points out: “‘I am intersectional… I am a cisgender millennial, who has been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder… I refuse to internalise misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be… I want you to be unapologetically you, whoever you are…’
These are not the words of some blue-haired student or tedious Instagram activist. Rather, they come from a recruitment video for the CIA. The Central Intelligence Agency – infamous for ‘enhanced interrogation’, drone warfare and trafficking drugs to pay for foreign coups – has officially gone woke.
The recruitment video went viral. It outraged the right for portraying America as weak to its adversaries. And it outraged the left, who accused the CIA of dishonestly ‘co-opting’ progressive politics.
In truth, the CIA has been woke for some time – and no one should be surprised by its drift in this direction. The ‘Humans of CIA’ campaign, which highlights the diversity of the agency’s staff, has actually been running since 2019. A year before, Gina Haspel, despite her alleged involvement in ‘extraordinary rendition’, became the first female CIA chief – a move the Trump administration tried to spin as a victory for ‘women’s empowerment’.
It’s not just the CIA, either. The broader defence establishment is now bound up with woke politics. A watershed moment arrived in 2019 when MSNBC could proudly proclaim that the ‘military-industrial complex is now run by women’. As well as Haspel at the CIA, Andrea Thompson at the Pentagon was America’s lead weapons negotiator and in charge of the nuclear stockpile. The five largest arms contractors – Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defence arm of Boeing – were also run by women. In the same year, Raytheon, the world’s largest manufacturer of guided missiles, began its partnership with the Girl Scouts, apparently to ‘close the gender gap in STEM’.
Of course, for US militarism to be truly ‘intersectional’ it has to encompass race and sexuality as well as gender. At the weekend, the US Navy celebrated its first ever all-gay helicopter crew. Dow Chemical, which produced skin-burning napalm for the Vietnam war, has drawn media praise for its gay CEO. ‘How Dow Chemical Got Woke’, was how Bloomberg reported it. Earlier this year, ex-CIA chief John Brennan made headlines when he declared that he was ‘increasingly embarrassed’ to be a white man – perhaps not everyone can be ‘unapologetically themselves’ at Langley, after all.
Why do they bother? Why have the warmongers gone woke? Partly it is a question of image. Of course, just as big companies like to align their corporate missions to Black Lives Matter because it is too gauche to say they are out to make a profit, the CIA and the defence establishment cannot simply say that they are out to dominate other countries or defend US commercial interests.”
Wokeness has spread to the business world as well. Michael Rectenwald offers an outstanding analysis: “Why have the biggest and most profitable American corporations embraced leftist politics, as seen in their woke advertising and social justice activism? Hint: It’s not because they’ve become non-profits and taken up philanthropy.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: CIA, Girl Scouts, Raytheon, Woke Plot | Leave a Comment »
Foxes watching the hen house? DC insiders oversee Biden defense plans – Responsible Statecraft
Posted by M. C. on January 26, 2023
After years at the trough, these govt. contractors are now empowered to judge how billions are spent on a key national security strategy.
Written by
Eli Clifton
Earlier this month, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees named eight commissioners who will review President Joe Biden’s National Defense Strategy and provide recommendations for its implementation.
But the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, which is tasked with “examin[ing] the assumptions, objectives, defense investments, force posture and structure, operational concepts, and military risks of the NDS,” according to the Armed Services Committees, is largely comprised of individuals with financial ties to the weapons industry and U.S. government contractors, raising questions about whether the commission will take a critical eye to contractors who receive $400 billion of the $858 billion FY2023 defense budget.
The potential conflicts of interest start at the very top of the eight-person commission. The chair of the commission, former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), sits on the board of Iridium Communications, a satellite communications firm that was awarded a seven-year $738.5 million contract with the Department of Defense in 2019.
“Iridium and its Board members follow Iridium’s Code of Business Conduct and Ethics and all rules and regulations applicable to dealings with the U.S. government,” Iridium spokesman Jordan Hassin told Responsible Statecraft.
A January 11 press release announcing the commission’s roster cited Harman’s current board memberships at the Department of Homeland Security and NASA but made no mention of her Iridium board membership, which paid her $180,000 in total compensation in 2021. Harman held 50,352 shares in Iridium, now worth approximately $3 million, in March 2022, according to the company’s disclosures.
“The members of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy each hold long records of ethical public service and national security leadership,” a Senate Armed Services Committee spokesperson told Responsible Statecraft. “The commissioners have committed to adhering to all government ethics policies to prevent any potential conflicts of interest. Congress will provide responsible oversight throughout the Commission’s work.”
That oversight will be complicated, judging by the financial ties to government and defense contractors held by six of the eight commission members.
“Lets face it, the National Defense Strategy and the Commission on the National Defense Strategy are flipsides of the same coin,” Mark Thompson, national security analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, told Responsible Statecraft. “Both are heavily infected by Pentagon spending and Pentagon contractors.”
“These folks have a vested interest in spending more,” said Thompson. “In Washington’s national security community, the way you get credibility is to work at think tanks funded by defense contractors or serving on boards of defense contractors.”
Indeed, Thompson’s characterization of who has “credibility” appears to be reflected in appointments to the Commission.
Commission member John “Jack” Keane serves on the board of IronNet, a firm that describes itself as providing “Collective Defense powered with network detection and response (NDR), we empower national security agencies to gain better visibility into the threat landscape across the private sector with anonymized data, while benefiting from the insight and vigilance of a private/public community of peers.” The firm’s 2022 second quarter report made clear that IronNet is dependent on government contracts.
“Our business depends, in part, on sales to government organizations, and significant changes in the contracting or fiscal policies of such government organizations could have an adverse effect on our business and results of operations,” the report said.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: BAE Systems, General Atomics, General Dynamics, government contractors, Iridium, IronNet, L3 Technologies, Lockheed Martin, national defense strategy, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Rocketdyne, weapons industry | Leave a Comment »
Failing F-35 fighter grounded once again – Responsible Statecraft
Posted by M. C. on January 5, 2023
Operational Test & Evaluation testing report “showed that engineers are still trying to correct 845 design flaws. Their challenge is compounded by the fact that new problems are discovered almost as fast as the known flaws are fixed.”
Beyond consistent quality issues, the F-35 is also among the most expensive Pentagon programs ever.
F-35, war with China-what could go wrong?
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/01/04/failing-f-35-grounded-once-again/
Defense News reported on Wednesday that defense contractor Pratt & Whitney is suspending its deliveries of new F-35 engines, following a setback on a Texas runway last month. Video from the December 15 incident shows a Lockheed F-35B Lightning II crashing during a quality check and the pilot ejecting.
Last Friday, in the aftermath of the incident, Defense News first reported that Lockheed Martin had “announced it halted acceptance flights and deliveries of new F-35 Joint Strike Fighters” due to the ongoing investigation. As a result, Lockheed Martin delivered seven fewer aircraft than the 148 that they were contracted to deliver in 2022. According to that report, “A source familiar with the program told Defense News the investigation into the Dec. 15 mishap found that a tube used to transfer high-pressure fuel in the fighter’s F135 engine, made by Pratt & Whitney, had failed.”
Pratt & Whitney, which is a subsidiary of Raytheon, and earlier in December received a $115 million contract from the Department of Defense for an F135 engine enhancement program, told Defense News that they would not comment since an investigation into the crash was ongoing.
Problems relating to the F-35’s engines are nothing new. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report from April 2022 revealed that Pratt & Whitney delivered only six of 152 F-35 engines on time in 2021, “primarily due to quality issues that required resolution before engines could be accepted by the government.” And yet, through last year, Congress continued to fund the F-35 beyond the Pentagon’s requests. As Nick Cleveland-Stout noted in RS last year, the FY 2020 Defense Appropriations Act allocated funds for 22 more F-35s than DoD had asked for.
The F-35 aircraft additionally has been mired in other major problems. Dan Grazier wrote for RS in March that a non-public 2021 Pentagon’s Director, Operational Test & Evaluation testing report “showed that engineers are still trying to correct 845 design flaws. Their challenge is compounded by the fact that new problems are discovered almost as fast as the known flaws are fixed.”
Beyond consistent quality issues, the F-35 is also among the most expensive Pentagon programs ever. As a letter signed by a transpartisan group of organizations — including the Quincy Institute — last summer exclaimed, “Over the service life of the fleet, the F-35 program is projected to cost the American people $1.7 trillion. This is roughly $5,000 for every man, woman, and child in the nation.”
In the more than 20 years since Lockheed Martin won the competition to develop the F-35, more than $62.5 billion has been spent on the program’s research and development, according to Grazier. “Despite all that time and resources, the F-35 remains an underdeveloped aircraft,” he writes, “it will still take years to complete the design during a process program officials have dubbed ‘modernization’ but is really a second chance to finish work that should have been completed during the initial development effort.”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: F-35 fighter, Lockheed Martin, Pratt & Whitney, Raytheon | Leave a Comment »
Forever War at the End of the World
Posted by M. C. on November 19, 2022
The Raytheon board member (Lloyd Austin https://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/rev_summary.php?id=82688) turned Pentagon chief has vowed Americans will support and arm Kiev “as long as it takes” to “take back all of the territories” within its “sovereign borders.” This includes the Crimean Peninsula, the Russian controlled areas in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, as well as the Donbas Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/forever-war-at-the-end-of-the-world/
Uncle Sam now has nuclear weapons held to humanity’s head. Washington’s recently released Nuclear Posture Review clarified that launching nuclear weapons in a first strike is indeed on the table, to “achieve U.S. objectives if deterrence fails.” This came after President Joe Biden acknowledged that his administration’s proxy war in Ukraine has brought humanity closer to nuclear “Armageddon” than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This month, the Pentagon announced it is setting up a new command, based in Germany, overseeing the training and equipping of Ukraine’s military during its fight with Russia. The command is named Security Assistance Group-Ukraine, or SAG-U. The New York Times reported the command will give the proxy war a “formal structure…roughly modeled on U.S. train-and-assist efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past two decades.” The American people may have largely rejected the “forever wars” of the last twenty years, but the American Empire is eager to launch “long term” conflicts with Russia and China.
A possible reason for the decision to establish this new command may be to obscure the level of funding going to the proxy war, making it more difficult for American civilians and journalists to discern where the money comes from and just how much is being spent.
As Kelley Vlahos, Editorial Director at Responsible Statecraft, has written,
[Dan Caldwell, senior advisor to Concerned Veterans of America] suggests this could allow the Pentagon to carve out a protected fund for the war. “Establishing a formal, named-mission or military task-force specifically for Ukraine could further open the door to moving funding for the war in Ukraine to the Overseas Contingency Operations budget, which is essentially the Pentagon’s slush fund. That could be one of the primary motivations here—the Pentagon wants a steady stream of funding from a source that Congress has shown a lack of willingness to properly oversee.”
This news was paired with the Pentagon’s announcement of yet another $400 million arms package to Ukraine, including tanks and drones. Sabrina Singh, the deputy Pentagon press secretary, told reporters this new command ensures “we are postured to continue supporting Ukraine over the long term.” She added the U.S. remains “committed to Ukraine for as long as it takes.”
Since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February, Washington has funded Ukraine with over $67 billion, mostly in weapons, a figure greater than Moscow’s entire 2021 military budget. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has said the current policy aims to see Russia “weakened.”
Members of both parties in Congress are reportedly planning another massive aid package for Ukraine that is said to cost as much as $60 billion which would bring total spending on the war to more than $125 billion. This week, the White House requested $37.7 billion in additional funding for Ukraine. Again, this is mostly military aid, and Congress will likely compete amongst themselves to add billions more.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Forever War, Lloyd Austin, Raytheon | Leave a Comment »
Representatives are Too Invested in Defense Contractors
Posted by M. C. on August 12, 2022
After Raytheon and L3Harris, the rest of the top ten defense companies donating campaign cash were Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, BAE Systems, General Atomics, Huntington Ingalls Industries, Boeing, and Leidos. These companies lined members’ campaign coffers with millions of dollars in PAC funding.
https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2022/08/representatives-are-too-invested-in-defense-contractors
BY DYLAN HEDTLER-GAUDETTE & NATHAN SIEGEL
As Congress considers two monumentally important pieces of legislative business — the annual defense policy bill and a historic reform to congressional ethics rules — it is worth taking some time to consider just how deep the potential for corruption goes in both these areas and how they intersect with one another. In other words, congressional corruption and ethical failings are inextricably linked to the military-industrial-congressional complex — the unhealthy intersection between Congress and the defense sector. This situation calls for serious reforms, and Congress is the only stakeholder that can make that happen.
A Cozy Relationship
There are few examples that better highlight the ethical dysfunction in Congress than the excessively cozy relationship between policymakers and the defense industry. Each year, including this one, members of the House and Senate armed services committees and the House and Senate appropriations committees craft the policy and allocate the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that fund the Pentagon. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the primary vehicle for defense policy. The accompanying appropriations bill allocates the money to operationalize the policy laid out in the NDAA. To put this in perspective, consider that the defense budget now clocks in at more than $800 billion and the Pentagon allocated $420 billion in contracts in fiscal year 2020 — over half the total defense budget and a contract dollar amount larger than every other federal agency combined.
In light of the scale and scope of defense spending, reasonable observers could be forgiven for assuming there might be some prudential rules in place to prevent corruption when it comes to Congress’s work regarding the defense industry. Unfortunately, there are virtually no such rules. In fact, the current framework around congressional conflicts of interest and campaign finance regarding industry relationships is so permissive as to all but guarantee the perversion of the policymaking process in this area.
There are few, if any, rules in place that restrict or prohibit members of Congress who sit on committees that oversee and legislate defense policy from holding direct personal financial stakes in defense companies, including through the ownership of stock. This means there is nothing stopping members of the House and Senate armed services committees (as well as each chamber’s respective defense subcommittee of the appropriations committee) from directly tying their own personal financial interests to the financial interests of defense contractors, all while passing laws that would steer billions of tax dollars to those very same companies. Again, these contracts total hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: BAE Systems, Boeing, defense contractors, General Atomics, General Dynamics, Huntington Ingalls Industries, L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, NDAA, Northrop Grumman, PAC, Raytheon | Leave a Comment »
Pentagon diverted small business fund to defense industry giants
Posted by M. C. on July 15, 2022
A new report finds that in a single year, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, L3Harris, and others got more than $300 million meant for smaller firms.
The pentagram is protecting…but it’s not you.
Written by
Tevah Gevelber and Connor Echols
In just one year, more than $300 million earmarked for small businesses ended up going to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, L3Harris, and other top defense contractors, according to a recent report from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO).
The funds come from a pool of $33 billion that the Pentagon set aside to support small businesses in the defense industry, which have rapidly disappeared as the military sector has consolidated in recent years.
Experts say this misuse of funds threatens to force more small companies out of business, eliminating competition and empowering defense giants to drive up prices.
And since the program uses middlemen, taxpayers end up paying extra for gear from companies that have no problem selling directly to the Pentagon.
The sheer size of the program also allows officials to make big claims about supporting small businesses while pumping money toward traditional defense giants, according to Robert Burton, a lawyer who previously served as a high-level federal procurement official.
“We don’t generally have $33 billion contracts over 10 years,” said Burton. “This one is special because the DoD is getting credit for all $33 billion going to small business.”
David Goodreau, the president of the Small Business Aerospace Industry Coalition, said small businesses that contract with the Pentagon are tired of big promises with little payoff.
“There’s all kinds of reasons to exercise supply chain contraction, but not at the expense of telling everybody in your marketing materials and at your conferences […] about how you’re doing more for small business,” Goodreau said. “It’s a lie.”
Not your mother’s small business
The Tailored Logistics Support (TLS) program is administered by the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which conducts acquisitions for military services. The program manages the $33 billion small business contract, which it subcontracts to four intermediaries. The resellers are in turn supposed to fulfill their orders by purchasing from small business manufacturers. But not all of that money is getting where it’s meant to go.
To understand how this is happening, let’s look at one of these four intermediaries: Atlantic Diving Supply (ADS), which gets the vast majority of its revenue through the TLS program. At first glance, it might be hard to consider ADS — a corporation with more than $1 billion in annual revenue — a “small business.” But it plays a key role in the program, according to Nick Schwellenbach, the POGO report’s author.
“The idea of the program is that all sorts of federal agencies […] can go to DLA and say, ‘We have some special ops guys, we have some troops who need knives or rifle scopes or new boots, and we don’t want to go through the traditional contracting process. We want to do this quickly,’” Schwellenbach said.
Intermediaries like ADS, which have the know-how to work smoothly with the Pentagon, can in turn seek out small businesses to produce the gear and then sell it to the government. As Schwellenbach argues (and the Pentagon implies in its marketing), contracting to small businesses speeds up procurement, generates new ideas, and keeps prices low by encouraging competition.
But there’s a loophole in the system: ADS can contract out to businesses of any size if it gets a waiver approved by the Small Business Administration.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, Pentagon, POGO, Raytheon, Small Businesses | Leave a Comment »
The Bizarre, Unanimous Dem Support for the $40b War Package to Raytheon and CIA: “For Ukraine”
Posted by M. C. on May 14, 2022
AOC, needless to say, has not bothered to reconcile this vote with the drastically divergent body of statements she has uttered her entire adult life because her blind followers do not demand anything of her, let alone explanations for why she does what she does
Glenn Greenwald
After Joe Biden announced his extraordinary request for $33 billion more for the war in Ukraine — on top of the $14 billion the U.S. has already spent just ten weeks into this war — congressional leaders of both parties immediately decided the amount was insufficient. They arbitrarily increased the amount by $7 billion to a total of $40 billion, then fast-tracked the bill for immediate approval. As we reported on Tuesday night, the House overwhelmingly voted to approve the bill by a vote of 388-57. All fifty-seven NO votes came from Republican House members. Except for two missing members, all House Democrats — every last one, including all six members of the revolutionary, subversive Squad — voted for this gigantic war package, one of the largest the U.S. has spent at once in decades.
While a small portion of these funds will go to humanitarian aid for Ukraine, the vast majority will go into the coffers of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and the usual suspects. Some of it will go to the CIA for unspecified reasons. The extreme speed with which this was all approved means there is little to no oversight over how the funds will be spent, who will profit and how much, and what the effects will be for Ukraine and the world.
To put this $54 billion amount in perspective, it is (a) larger than the average annual amount that the U.S. spent on its own war in Afghanistan ($46 billion), (b) close to the overall amount Russia spends on its entire military for the year ($69 billion),
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: CIA, Raytheon, Ukraine, War Package | Leave a Comment »
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