ASPI funding (Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan, United Kingdom, United States, Netherlands, New Zealand, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Thales Australia, American Chamber of Commerce, Center for Strategic and International Studies, German Marshall Fund, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)
Earlier, I stupidly tweeted out an article about the Jones Act and shipbuilding and Colin Grabow, from the Cato Institute, liked it (he was quoted in the article). I looked him up and decided to listen to this video on the shipbuilding competition between China and the US, where he and a lawyer for United Steelworkers were on the panel. China is eating their lunch, and it’s the ruling elites’ own fault, yet they scapegoat China for it. The double standards over China’s “unfair economic practices” AKA the subsidizing of their shipbuilding industry irritates me (liars irritate me even more). States give subsidies, grants, and tax breaks to corporations, all the time. Fincantieri Marinette Marine is just one example, but Wisconsin had done the same for Foxconn. Foxconn received tax breaks and $3B in subsidies, which was “the largest ever subsidy provided by a state to a foreign company”, despite not living up to their promises.
Colin Grabow wants to end the Jones Act. I’ve made at least three video clips regarding the Jones Act, two with Sal Mercogliano from What’s Going On With Shipping and one from the government-funded CSIS (I’ve posted them, below).Spoiler alert: Sal says that the problem isn’t the Jones Act.Meanwhile, both CSIS and the Cato Institute (part of the Atlas Network) blame the Jones Act. Deregulation is a wet dream of big corporations (which fund both the Cato Institute and CSIS).
America’s national priorities are badly misplaced. Our country spends, with almost no debate, nearly $1 trillion a year on the military while at the same time ignoring massive problems at home.
U.S. tech companies and government agencies are racing to develop defenses against potential terrorist drone attacks, a threat that has security experts increasingly concerned as they’ve watched the rise of drone warfare in Israel, Ukraine and Yemen.
US foreign policy seems to be utterly irrational. The US gets into one disastrous war after another — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. In recent days, the US stands globally isolated in its support of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians, voting against a UN General Assembly resolution for a Gaza ceasefire backed by 153 countries with 89% of the world population, and opposed by just the US and 9 small countries with less than 1% of the world population.
Faced with a dangerous shortfall in Ukraine’s air defenses and no easy resolution to the funding impasse in Congress, Washington has increasingly leaned on allies to provide urgent weapons support.
This chart is from the Government Accountability Office’s recent report on the Department of Defense’s lack of strategy around corporate mergers. Bow down before Powerpoint you peasants.
Today, as the U.S. is drawn into wars in Israel and Ukraine, as well as the defense of now-peaceful Taiwan, I’m writing about war. Not the policy choices, or whether U.S. military power is a net force for good or ill, but the actual practical machinery behind the American defense base that produces the weaponry necessary to sustain the military.
“As the Biden administration attempts to deny the death toll of Israel’s campaign of mass murder in Gaza and sell genocide as a stimulus for the U.S. economy, these are the death merchants profiting from the war machine.”
On an October 24 earnings call, RTX Corporation CEO Greg Hayes said that the defense contractor stood to “benefit” from a US Department of Defense’s budget increase which would fund the supply of weapons to Israel and the restocking of weapons in Ukraine.
CODEPINK activists were arrested for protesting Bernie’s support for the US war in Ukraine. But it’s not the first time something like this has happened
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