 |
| NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR |
“War against a foreign country only happens
when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.” – George Orwell
Robert Epstein, a Bank of America analyst commented that all
of the regional conflicts around the world spelled good news for defense
industry investors.
“Let’s paint a picture of the world right now. You’ve got the Europeans worried about what the Russians are doing in
their backyard; we’ve got our hands full right now in Iraq; you’ve got the
Israelis with their hands full in their region; and then you have the Chinese
and Japanese in the South China Sea. As an investor, with this much regional
conflict in the world, at least from a sentiment point of view, that can’t be
bad.”
Arms manufacturers spend $128 million a year lobbying the US
Congress for the development of lethal new weapons systems. The top three US
defense contractors alone raked in $8.5 billion in profits in 2012. For all the
talk of Pentagon budget cuts, the USA still spend more than $61 million every hour
of every day on the military.
“It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable,
surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the
only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A
racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to
the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it
is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of
the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.” Major-General
Smedley Butler
No comments:
Post a Comment