Everything is couched in terms of profits and strategic resources, while the losses are shrouded in platitudes and corporate greenwash—funded and produced by the industries responsible for the destruction—peddling popsicle blue seas and coral reefs and sandy white shoals in Shell Oil, Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman advertisements.
Lockheed Martin Space Systems has been the prime contractor occupying the 832-acre NASA Michoud Assembly Facility in eastern New Orleans since 1973. Located some 24 miles from New Orleans International Airport and 15 miles from the French Quarter, the facility was designated as a “superfund” pollution site in 1995 due to illegal disposal practices and accidents that contaminated Michoud’s soil, surface water, and groundwater with deadly trichloroethylene and other contaminant byproducts of space weaponry.
The Michoud facility includes extensive deepwater canals, port facilities and privatized channels linked to the Gulf and the Mississippi waterway, and they are currently seeking a major port expansion that will further usurp and destroy wetlands.
No money to help the people of New Orleans? Concerned about wetlands and the environment? The numbers speak for themselves.
In June 2002 NASA extended the Space Shuttle External Fuel Tank contract with Lockheed Martin Space Systems to September 2008 with a $341 million addition to the original contract. On September 28, 2007, Northrup Grumman Ship Systems in New Orleans was awarded a $13 million contract for the U.S. Navy’s LPD 17 Class Amphibious Transport Dock Ship Program. On June 23, 2007, the U. S. Army Tank Automotive Armaments Command awarded $255.5 million for 369 more M1117 Armored Security vehicles ($4 million added on October 9, 2007) to New Orleans-based Textron Marine & Land. And these don’t even scratch the surface on New Orleans-based defense contracts alone.
On December 3, 2007, the U.S. Department of the Interior concluded a deepwater oil and gas lease sale of $281 million in new oil concessions in the Gulf of Mexico. [21]
Lockheed Martin has extensive research links with the University of New Orleans and others. The “core tenant” of the University’s $162 million Research and Technology Park is the 400,000-square-foot Space and Naval Warfare Information Technology Center (SPAWARITC), which is affiliated with Lockheed Martin. SPAWAR is directly linked to “black programs” that have for years funded beyond top-secret military programs through contractors like Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).
The Country Club of Privatized War
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