Psychopathology and Arms Dealing
"War and occupation are wonderful opportunities for corporations to make billions of dollars in profits, unchecked by the laws and regulations that hamper their profitability in peacetime. Because of this, in the postmodern global era, global corporations and the government elites with whom they work have great incentive to sponsor global chaos and the violence it generates." –Nancy Ries
"Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power... All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." — Benito Mussolini
Psychopathology can be loosely defined as the lack of concern in harming others and of creating situations through which others are harmed, with the primary intent of acquiring personal gratification through profit or gain, When indulged in by large corporations, it is also indicative of schadenfreude on a mass scale.
In this regard it is vitally important for continued profit that certain large corporations support the creation of more and more armament, regardless of how many innocent lives are lost in the process. It’s all just collateral damage, after all. And if the legion of death they help create turns a tidy profit, well, why not. (Please note that in the table below I have only profits from publicly available contracts. These make up only a fraction of overall war profits.)
|
Who
|
Revenue
|
~% Revenue from war contracts
|
|
Lockheed Martin
|
$37,000,000,000
|
65%
|
|
General Dynamics
|
$23,000,000,000
|
55%
|
|
Raytheon
|
$22,000,000,000
|
45%
|
|
Northrop Grumman
|
$30,000,000,000
|
42%
|
|
Halliburton
|
$10,000,000,000
|
41%
|
|
Science Applications Int’l
|
$8,000,000,000
|
35%
|
|
Boeing
|
$54,000,000,000
|
35%
|
While none of those fine corporations supra or their confrères such as United Technologies, Veritas Capital Fund, Washington Group International, International American Products, Perini, Parsons, Environmental Chemical, L-3 Communications, Halliburton (KBR), and the like would do so of course, one cannot but wonder if there might not be a few rogue companies somewhere which create profit by building weapons of genocide and crimes against humanity.
Such as for example, producing 125 new large scale nuclear bombs per year at a cost to their country’s taxpayer of more than $25,000,000,000 per annum. This is not merely far more than any other country on the planet, and more than enough to kill every living entity on earth many times over. Or perhaps aiding in construction of Complex 2030 to augment nuclear weapons facilities throughout their country. Or participating in the the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, happily replacing old nuclear weapons with massively more lethal ones. Both actions would be a clear and obvious violation of the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, so of course none of the corporations listed supra would even consider being involved in such law breaking activity, let alone the crimes against humanity entailed.
Participating in the massive buildup of such weaponry would be also be a clear indicator of the psychopathology of the CEOs and government officials involved. But since no one who is insane could ever rise to high office, obviously neither government nor corporate leaders could be involved in such matters. Nor could they be involved in the wholesale mass production and deployment of cluster bombs, land mines, atomic weapons, biological weapons, crowd control microwave, napalm, MK77, BZ, thermobaric weapons, nanothermite, or any other such horrors clearly in violation of a plethora of international conventions to which their nation is a signatory.
Not to mention vast amounts of taxdollars flowing to for-profit corporations for production of lethal drone (unpiloted) aircraft, killer satellites, neural-blocking, microwave blankets, insect-size robots that can independently seek hiding places and wait before proceeding, insect size spy drones, bioweaponry calore, adn so on.
If protecting civilian populations from evil dictators was indeed the goal of the numerous wars fought in which
millions are slaughtered, rather than say, securing the resources desired by major oil companies, then more weaponry is not the answer. Instead, simply stop selling weapons to, and propping up, dictators.
Where have weapons from the west been sold? To Libya, to Iran, to Iraq, to Egypt, to Saudi Arabia, to Yemen, to Bahrain, to Afghanistan, to Somalia, Burma, to Syria... and so on - all repressive regimes. Some examples: European governments in recent years have sold Libya more roughly $500,000,000 worth of weapons per year; the U.S. sold the Libyan dictator an average of $140,000,000 of weapons per year. Yemen, well known for its public massacres of dissenters, was recently sold $300,000,000 of weapons. Kuwait, Oman, and Saudi Arabia were recently sold $123 billion worth of arms by the U.S. All of these lovely nations were run repressive, suppressive dictatorships at the time of these sales. Good profits for the U.S., UK , and French corporations involved in arms trade and manufacturing (although Canadian, Australian, Chinese, German, Italian, and other smaller arms purveyors have also happily participated in lesser sales for decades).
The strategy of dropping bombs on civilians in order to liberate them from oppressive regimes may not always be the best one. Perhaps ceasing to arm the dictators who suppress them might be a tad better? But I suppose that might impact the bottom line of the corporate CEOs who set foreign policy, and we cannot have that.
Still, one cannot help but idly wonder if it might it be possible that the trillions of tax dollars poured into the coffers of those who participate in creating, manufacturing, deploying, and selling this odium could be put to other use? Could such corporate profits, which derive largely from taxpayer pocketbooks, be used for improving education, housing, reducing poverty, providing fresh water, providing medical care for the poor, and the like?
Perhaps. The United Nations estimates that currently 1.5 billion people on the planet are starving for lack of food. More lack fresh water. The same UN report says that a mere $45 billion would be sufficient however, to completely eradicate world hunger. But it it clear that saving lives would be a horrible waste, where there are weapons to be built. For there is obviously
no other way to defend oneself from artificially manufactured threat and
socially engineered fear, than through armament and military build up. And if a little profit is made on the side for those in the business or their former employees now in government, well why not?
The following corporations and groups are particularly praiseworthy for their unstinting commitment over the years in helping humanity toward its current state. You may enjoy researching the contributions of these fine corporations and groups - their activities are quite interesting: Lockheed-Martin, Lucent, Halliburton, Intel, MPAA, RIAA, Tavastok Institute, Fraser Institute, Hughes/Raytheon, Monsanto, Chevron, Carlyle Group, Dow Chemical, Amsouth Bancorp, Wal-Mart, PhRMA, Bristol Myers Squibb, Alliant Techsystems, GlaxoSmithKline, Boeing, McDonald’s, DeBeers, Union Carbide, CACI International, I.G. Farben, Cantor-Fitzgerald, the 700 Club, the Devos Group, Google Corporation, United Technologies, Veritas Capital Fund, Washington Group International, International American Products, Morgan Financial Group, Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, DARPA, Microsoft, Perini, Intel, Parsons, Environmental Chemical, L-3 Communications, Halliburton, Microsoft, Oracle, Sybase, IBM, the Trilateral Commission, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Worldbank, BP, Dupont, Brookings Institute, KPMG, Roche, Raytheon (take a look at their ’active denial’ systems), Suez, W.R. Grace, Stanford University, Union Carbide, Gilead, United Technologies, Canfor, Ford, Ajinomoto, the Bilderberg group, MIT, Northrop Grumman, and last but far from least, ExxonMobil.
Again: The lack of concern in harming others and of creating situations through which others are harmed, with the primary intent of acquiring personal gratification through profit or gain, is indicative of clinical psychopathology.
"There are bound to be casualties when any nation veers from its domestic and international obligations to uphold human rights and international humanitarian law. Those casualties are etched on the minds and bodies [...] many of whom suffered infinite variations on physical and mental abuse ... [from]... war crimes, crimes against humanity and, in extreme cases, genocide." --Justice P. Wald, Judge on UN War Crimes procecutions and Chief Justice Washington Appeals Court
