Christian Sorensen
Dissident Voice
Last week two giant war corporations, Raytheon and United Technologies, announced they would merge in early 2020. The new behemoth, to be known as Raytheon Technologies, is expected to have a combined value of over $100 billion in capitalist markets. Recent history provides context to understand today's war industry and the nature of this merger.
The nineteen-nineties witnessed a lot of mergers and acquisitions in the U.S. war industry. Some of the bigger moves were Boeing merging with McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed acquiring Martin Marietta, and Raytheon gobbling up Hughes Aircraft. These moves occurred in parallel to another phenomenon: Home and abroad, the Pentagon effectively doubled down on the corporatization of military functions.
Jobs that once were carried out by the troops (e.g. mowing the lawn,
serving chow, logistics, eavesdropping on governments, transportation,
combat) were increasingly in the private domain, up for grabs to the shrewdest corporation.
The Clinton White House, a country club of neoliberal ideology,
was fully onboard. It encouraged the corporatization of the War
Department. This aligned well with President Clinton's other accomplishments in office: attacking sovereign nations
(e.g. expanding sanctions against Iran's oil sector in 1995, and
launching industry ordnance at Afghanistan, the Balkans, Iraq, and
Sudan); brutalizing the destitute, working poor, and caged
(via the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform & Immigrant Responsibility
Act, the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act, the 1996 Personal
Responsibility & Work Opportunity Act, and the 1994 Violent Crime
Control & Law Enforcement Act); and aiding corporate greed
(by passing NAFTA and the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act and
boosting spending on war). One of Clinton's most damaging achievements,
the Telecommunications Act of 1996, complemented these
activities by deregulating the telecoms and allowing cross-ownership in
corporate media, clogging the information space with info-tainment and
permitting corporate ideology to further dominate our perception of the
world around us. Support for neoliberal economic polices,
including the corporatization of war, is one of many traits that both
parties in the D.C. regime share.
When the dust settled at the end of the 1990s, three beasts hogged about two-thirds of the power in the U.S. war industry: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon.
These corporations set out to please shareholders and insatiable Wall
Street investment firms. The Pentagon had less leverage over the war
industry at this time, because, in part, these three beasts were nearly
the only game in town. War corporations soon stepped up their game, influencing Capitol Hill with greater ferocity and creativity. Campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures increased. And more titans of capital cycled from war corporations through the Pentagon's leadership ranks. The war industry also pursued more foreign military sales, including increased sales to brutal regimes like Mubarak's Egypt, the House of Saud, and the Zionist Entity known as Israel. Enter 9.11. With Muslims to bomb and Asian countries to occupy, the Department of War acceded to full corporatization.
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Zero Hedge
United Technologies has agreed to buy Raytheon in an all stock deal,
forming one of the world's largest aerospace and defense companies with
more than $74 billion in revenue and $13.5 billion in EBITDA, through
one of the industry’s biggest deals ever.
With $69 billion in pure A&D sales, the new company will be the
third largest Aerospace and Defense company in the world after Boeing
and Airbus.
Looking ahead, the combined company is expected to generate tremendous cash flow growth...
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Lucy Nichols
Stop The War Coalition
By allowing the arms trade into schools and colleges we are teaching
children that innovation for the sake of destruction is acceptable
Private arms companies and government-owned military organisations
have wormed their way into the British education system. Global arms
companies have links with many UK Universities; investing in research
programmes, poaching recent graduates and funding new buildings.
But these links stretch further than this into our education system,
as weapons manufacturers also invest their time and money into schools
across the country. Raytheon, an American weapons and cyber security
company with multiple UK sites, holds an annual ‘Quadcopter Challenge’
in which children are encouraged to design the best drone they can.
Billed as a means for the company to ‘invest in its future workforce’ by
promoting STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics)
subjects, this programme reached over 1,000 14-15 year-olds nationwide
in 2018 and has the backing of the government; last year Baroness Sugg
CBE helped judge the contest.
Pushing STEM subjects is common amongst private arms manufacturers
and government-funded military organisations; QinetiQ and BAE Systems
each boast various outreach programmes. In 2017, BAE partnered up with
the Royal Navy and the RAF to visit 420 schools
with a workshop designed to encourage the uptake of science and maths
amongst 10-13 year olds. That year, BAE Systems also joined forces with
the Royal Navy, QinetiQ and the University of Portsmouth to open a
college.
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More than half a billion pounds of council workers’ pension money has been directly invested by local authorities in arms companies implicated in Saudi Arabia’s military campaign in Yemen, in which thousands of civilians have been killed.
Council pension funds have sizeable shareholdings in BAE Systems, Airbus, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, according to nearly 100 freedom of information requests.
Between them, 43 pension funds directly hold shares worth £566m in the five companies and earned more than £18.5m in dividends in 2018, a period in which civilian deaths reportedly surged and a punishing famine took hold.
The councils also hold hundreds of millions of pounds in shares in the five companies via pooled investments, which they do not control directly.
The holdings mean thousands of local authority staff will have their retirement payouts part-funded by the companies, some of which manufacture arms linked to incidents in which civilians and children were killed.
The Guardian gathered the data through the freedom of information website
WhatDoTheyKnow.com.
Last month, warplanes belonging to the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen repeatedly bombed a wedding party in the northern part of the country, killing more than 20 people, including the bride, and injuring dozens of others. In the days that followed, local media published a photograph of a bomb fragment with a serial number tying it to the U.S.-based weapons manufacturer Raytheon.
Now the State Department is taking preliminary steps toward a massive, multibillion-dollar sale of similar weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, three congressional aides, a State Department official, and two other people familiar with the sales told The Intercept.
The State Department has yet to announce the exact details and dollar value of the package, but it is said to include tens of thousands of precision-guided munitions from Raytheon, the same company that was involved in producing the weapons used in last month’s strike.
Reuters reported in November that Saudi Arabia had agreed to buy $7 billion in precision-guided weapons from U.S.-based companies Raytheon and Boeing. Raytheon was “courting lawmakers and the State Department to allow it to sell 60,000 precision-guided munitions to both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates,” according to the New York Times.
The State Department has briefed staff on the House and Senate Foreign Relations committees about the sale, but has yet to release details of the package to members of the committees, according to three aides who were not authorized to speak on the record. Once the chair and ranking member of the committees give the nod, the State Department can formally notify Congress about the sale, which could happen as early as next week.
Under the Arms Export Control Act, the State Department reviews potential arms sales to make sure they align with U.S. foreign policy goals and decides whether to issue export licenses. It then notifies Congress about sufficiently large sales, giving Congress a 30-day window to review and potentially block them.
The sale in question is a direct commercial transaction between Raytheon and the Gulf countries, which does not require the government to publicly announce the sale at the time of congressional notification. That means it will be up to senators to decide how many of the details to make public.
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Blacklisted News
‘Maybe we’ll help the Saudis send some troops of their own to offset the influence of Iran and Russia’, speculated Jim Cramer on his CNBC show Mad Money. ‘That’s good news for these arms dealers, plus defense is the one place that Congress is going to spend lots and lots of money.’
It seemed as though Cramer had accidentally stumbled upon a foul cornerstone of the US economy whilst presenting another episode of his light-hearted investing tips program that has been running since 2005: that certain corporations make an absolute killing on US foreign interventions and the stock market reflects this.
He noted the missile manufacturer Raytheon as the most bullish in the group of US defense giants. ‘Raytheon could have a lot more room to run because it just broke out above a rising triangle pattern’, he claimed.
In fact, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company saw its market capitalisation rise by roughly $2.5 billion in response to President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Syria. This caps a few years of impressively solid growth for Raytheon, whose stock price has risen roughly 30% since the start of Saudi Arabia’s carpet-bombing of Yemen using their American-made smart missiles.
Ultimately, Cramer’s assertion that ‘political worries can boost top defense stocks’ is a well-evidenced paradigm that consistently demonstrates its own validity whenever a US-led intervention occurs. However, to chalk it off as some kind of coincidence rather than a creature of political design is incredibly naive.
To look at the movement of executives between the Pentagon and military-industrial giants like Raytheon enabled by lax to non-existent conflict of interest regulations paints an incredibly clear picture – the US is governed by ‘experts’ who have made a career out of military profiteering.
Take William H. Swanson for example, the CEO of Raytheon from 2004 to 2014. He holds a keycard to the Pentagon as a member of the Secretary of the Air Force Advisory Board, who were naturally intimately involved in the recent Syria strikes. No regulations prohibit Swanson from also serving on various military advocacy groups such as the Association of the United States Army, the Navy League, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the National Defense Industrial Association and the Aerospace Industries Association.
In 2014 Swanson held 0.23% of Raytheon’s stock – well over the 0.10% industry average for CEOs – that at the time was worth about $41.9 million. There are no regulations in place that would force Swanson to part with his stake in the company or recuse himself in order to sit on the Air Force Advisory Board, and there is no indication that he did this.
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As part of the mammoth $110-billion deal brokered by Donald Trump, Saudi Arabia is purchasing precision arms worth $7 billion from US manufacturers Raytheon and Boeing, a media report says. This is in spite of concerns over the toll on Yemen’s civilians.
Raytheon and Boeing are the two defense contractors selected to produce precision-guided munitions for the Saudi Arabian military, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing sources familiar with the matter. The deal is part of the giant $110-billion weapons agreement inked by Trump and the Saudi king Salman bin Abdulaziz in May.
Neither the corporations nor Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to the US, Prince Khalid bin Salman, chose to comment on the precision weapons sale. The Saudi diplomat said, however, that his country will follow the agreement signed by Trump and King Salman.
Shir Hever
Stop the War Coalition
Israeli arms companies have the advantage in marketing their
products around the world, because they can claim that their products
have been tested in actual combat.
Israel may be a relatively small state, but it is the largest
per-capita weapons exporter in the world. The Israeli arms companies
have the advantage in marketing their products around the world, because
they can claim that their products have been tested in actual combat.
Senior officers of the Israeli army often pursue a second career in
the arms industry after retiring from service, and as soldiers they
already have the opportunity to perform valuable services to their
future employers, by testing weapon systems developed by the arms
companies, by convincing the Israeli government and public of the
necessity of such technologies for military victory, and by offering praise to the companies producing these weapons.
Trade fairs for military technology and for homeland security
equipment are commonplace in Israel, especially after each round of
bombardment and/or invasion of Gaza. The advertising line repeated by
the companies in these trading fairs to promote their wares is that “the
IDF already uses that technology.”
The Israeli arms industry operates in close cooperation with its
bigger sister in the US. The military aid the US gives to Israel ensures
this cooperation, and every conflict in the Middle East contributes more
to the profits of US arms giants (such as Boeing, General Dynamics,
Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon) than to the Israeli arms companies.
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Gizmodo
It's not the first crowd control tool to use sound waves, but Raytheon's patent
for a new type of riot shield that produces low frequency sound waves
to disrupt the respiratory tract and hinder breathing, sounds a little
scary.
Crowd control tools like the LRAD Sound Cannon
emit bursts of loud and annoying sounds that can induce headaches and
nausea. But Raytheon's non-lethal pressure shield creates a pulsed
pressure wave that resonates the upper respiratory tract of a human,
hindering breathing and eventually incapacitating the target. The patent
points out that the sound waves being generated are actually not that
powerful, so while protestors might collapse from a lack of oxygen
reaching their brains, their eardrums won't be damaged in the process.
Phew!
And like Roman soldiers joining their shields to form a large
impenetrable wall, these new riot shields can actually be networked
together to form a larger acoustical horn, vastly improving their range,
power, and effectiveness. There's no word on what the long-term
medical implications might be if you find yourself on the wrong side of
one of these shields. But I imagine the unpleasant experience is not
unlike being force choked from afar by Darth Vader. [Google Patents via New Scientist]
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