War is good business

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

 From here