We funnel tax payer dollars and public debt into the hands of defense contractors for resource grabs and then sell those rights back to the same contractors related entities. So, no you and I are not war profiteers, but the small group of elite who own our government, yes, they are.
In the scale of things, $27B sold isn't much at all. Apple, for example, has revenue of $27B every 2-3 weeks.
So many people throw around fake numbers here. That would be $27B every 2-3 months for the biggest company in the world (now 2nd behind ExxonMobil), that sells a product everyone has. $27B only involves weapons sales. So much more goes into it and is based on murder, violence and destruction. I really think public consciousness has not stressed this issue enough and it's something that we easily turn a blind eye to.
I wonder if Bill Gates decided he wanted a War ship . . .would anyone oppose it Rocket River SECOND AMENDMENT!!!
In general I agree about the dollar amount. Especially when each boat is 2bil and each plane is 350mil. If they had some sku breakdown or something it would give more meaning to the total sales. I bet it's mostly artillery and airplanes (in dollars, not units sold). The number of customers though, I thought, would be more applicable to the OP.
Not if it's built by the US government Larry Ellison, Oracle's CEO, has a few military jets. Flew one over San Jose and got in some trouble for it. The MiG was not allowed to be imported though.
Save some cows from the slaughter house. Also, Azerbajan must have a pimpin' military. They get the state of the art crap from us and the Mexican fire cracker type crap from Russia.
Much of America's economic engine in the last few decades is built on DARPA research. The tech sector has been injecting productivity and jobs without an excessive reliance on limited magic fossil fuels, or you know, private market practices that involve preying on financial ignorance (whether individual or national). People always laud Silicon Valley's pantheon as Randian heroes---but in truth, Google's initial version of PageRank was based on public research on eiganvalues, Apple's IPod is based on a number of public research advances in physics, and beyond, Uber and much of the new real-time location based mobile services are servile to GPS, a DoD invention---the list goes on. In that sense we are all profiteers of "war", or rather more candidly, the human drive to innovate and to fund cutting-edge innovation is perhaps best directed when you think said funding is going towards killing people you fear, or just plainly don't like.
When we look back at history, we will appreciate what war did for the human innovative spirit in terms of sheer engineering marvels from which technologies have trickled down into civilians' hands. However, we won't miss funding and policy conspiring to create new conflicts (which is the heart of the military-industrial complex). When war on earth becomes a relic, human productivity and innovative drive will take turns we haven't imagined fully. So we will appreciate war for what its given and taught us, knowing that perhaps at the time it was required for whatever circumstance due to humanity being less evolved as a whole collective - no pointing fingers, we are just dumb right now as a species. maybe it will be star wars by then though. but I do have to think that if a race is intelligently evolved enough to be flying interplanetary lightyears, they most certainly know war is not progressive nor worth it.
The problem with this line of thought being that you presume that those innovations couldn't have been made without the state. Its not as though the demands that those innovations satisfied didn't exist before DARPA spent the time to research them. That isn't to say that I disagree with funding for defense research, but I thought I'd point that out. The premise of the thread is war profiteering. Defense research, while relevant to the discussion, is a different matter than war profiteering.
Who’s Paying the Pro-War Pundits? Talking heads like former General Jack Keane are all over the news media fanning fears of ISIS. Shouldn’t the public know about their links to Pentagon contractors? http://www.thenation.com/article/181601/whos-paying-pro-war-pundits
I like the post, but I think the word "charity" is misused here. Even with Israel when we give them $3 billion per year to buy weapons to kill Palestinians we get back about 70% of it as it is spent on American weapons so it is a subsidy to our corporations.. It is true that with the conservative/libertarian mind set war i.e "defense: is only one of the two or three valid uses of government spending so it is the only sort of Keynesian spending allowed. You might call it Warfare. I don't know but maybe another maybe the reason why we don't want to give them bulldozers instead of weapons is that it would develop their country and then they would not be so dependent on us? If we give them advanced weapons, it produces nothing internally and they will not develop and they are heavily dependent on us for replacement parts.
What Israel Does. Virtually everything is censored. Below is an interesting Democracy segment by an ex Israeli soldier from a prominent military family who has come to the US when he recently had his life threatened by Israeli intelligence for documenting through interviews with Israeli soldiers what they are up to day to day in the West Bank and in the recent Gaza Attack. He let out the information on facebook without going through the military censors which he had been doing for years ad which he claims virtually all Israeli media must report to Amazingly through interviews they pretty much catch the IDF executing an unarmed Gazan civilian in real time as the soldiers shoot once and keep then keep seeking higher up orders before they finish the guy off. The executed guy's parents first learned of their son's death when footage of Israeli actions were uploaded to youtube. The soldiers were essentially told to take revenge for the unexpected deaths of their fellow soldiers in the first day or so of combat. Previously they virtually never lost anyone in their invasion.s http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/9/12/part_2_former_israeli_soldier_eran
