Article: Growth Industries

Wanna make a million bucks? Build a better bomb.

If there's any recession-proof industry, it's the designers of death and destruction. Educators, factory workers, the national park service, environmental protection, medical and scientific researchers, and many other public and private sector industries continue to suffer from budget cuts.

The Rapture Righties in Congress continue to clamp the federal wallet for social programs and infrastructure repair, they throw thousand-dollar bills at defense contractors to build bigger, boomier, better weapons of war.

In the US, we spend enough taxpayer dollars on a single day of missile strikes to run a local school system for a year. As Robert Fisk, writing for The Independent reported yesterday, "last month American warships fired $65.8m worth of Tomahawk missiles within just 24 hours of each other."

Think about that -- $66 million in 24 hours. And that was just bombing in Syria, against ISIS. ISIS, the new al Qaeda. ISIS is the perfect terrorist hybrid of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The US-made (and armed) dictator and the religiously-insane Bush Crime Family cohort. Thanks to our years of bombing the bejeezus out of Afghanistan and Iraq, we have successfully created the Perfect Enemy in ISIS.

Let's face it -- we are not seen as smiling liberators by most of the Muslim world. The US is a 3-D recruiting poster for ISIS terrorists, despite the propaganda the Bushies tried to force-feed the public about the oppressed Afghanis and Iraqis yearning to breathe free ... at least Saddam and al Qaeda left them free to breathe. Hellfire missiles -- not so much.

The only winners in the never-ending terror wars are defense contractors, Blackwater-style private "peacekeepers," and companies like Lockeed Martin and Raytheon who make the machines that make people dead.

Fisk continues:

"Shares in Lockheed Martin -- maker of the 'All for One and One for All' Hellfire missiles -- are up 9.3 percent in the past three months. Raytheon -- which has a big Israeli arm -- has gone up 3.8 percent. Northrop Grumman shares swooped up the same 3.8 percent. And General Dynamics shares have risen 4.3 percent. Lockheed Martin -- which really does steal Alexandre Dumas' Three Musketeers quotation on its publicity material -- makes the rockets carried by the Reaper drones, famous for destroying wedding parties over Afghanistan and Pakistan, and by Iraqi aircraft.

"When the Americans decided to extend their bombing into Syria in September -- to attack President Assad's enemies scarcely a year after they first proposed to bomb President Assad himself -- Raytheon was awarded a $251m contract to supply the US navy with more Tomahawk cruise missiles. Agence France-Presse, which does the job that Reuters used to do when it was a real news agency, informed us that on 23 September, American warships fired 47 Tomahawk missiles. Each one costs about $1.4m. And if we spent as promiscuously on Ebola cures, believe me, there would be no more Ebola."

Ebola shmebola. Let the West Africans fret over that. Our government won't spend the people's money on a cure that would probably benefit people elsewhere in the world. Or on any other program that would benefit the world in general.

Think what scientists combating climate change could do with $67 million a day to develop alternatives to fossil fuels. Y'know, the petroleum that provides the grease for the gears of war. The real reason the US gives a whit about these distant desert lands.