Add Your Photos and Video to This Story

Someone Had to Win in Iraq

by green | January 18, 2007 at 06:45 pm | 573 views | add comment

This was on the front of crooksandliars.com today, the article published in Playboy magazine is really a good read. We knew large corporations were making off with billions of American tax dollars, while Veterans lose benefits, children lose their arms, and more people keep dying. These companies thrive off the production of endless lines of killing machines for the White House, Congress, and the military complex, as well as direct our policy in the USA.

But this article gives you a lengthy peak into Washington DC and its hot lobbyist on Capitol Hill orgy.

If Lockhead loves America so much, wouldn't it be supporting the war at any cost in-order to fight the endless war on terror, like build planes for free, add armor to tanks so that soldiers would not be wounded, or perhaps take a loss every once in a while. Oh, sorry wrong world, wrong war, wrong America.

Of course, all the frothing at the mouth about lobbyists, money and special interests can seem from outside the Beltway as much ado about nothing. The government hands out contracts. The beneficiaries or those who want to be beneficiaries buy steak dinners for the officials who hold the purse strings. Big deal. The problem, though, is that, upon closer scrutiny, this is not how the system works. It's actually much more sinister than that, allowing the interests of America to be subverted by the interests of corporate America. As you'll see here, your elected officials did not deliberate on how best to protect their constituents, decide bombing Iraq was the best way and then order some provisions and weapons. On the contrary, this is the story of how Lockheed's interests, as opposed to those of the American citizenry, set the course of U.S. policy after 9/11.

For the war companies, things have worked out perfectly. Whatever the rationale for the invasion of Iraq, business is booming. Not long after Bush took office, Lockheed Martin's revenues soared by more than 30 percent, as it was awarded $17 billion in contracts from the Department of Defense, a far cry from the lean years of the Clinton administration. (Under Clinton, it did win $2 billion in contracts with the Department of Energy for nuclear weapons activity; recently Bush called for 125 new nukes a year, opening up new contract horizons in that area, as well.) Its stock went from 16.375 in October of 1999 to 71.52 in June of 2002. As professor of finance at the State University at Buffalo Michael Rozeff observes, "the stock market anticipates many events."