The US of A(rms)

The United States dominates the global arms trade in a historic fashion and nowhere is that domination more complete than in the Middle East | WILLIAM D. HARTUNG

Infrastructure of US bases in the Middle East | David Vine

The United States has the dubious distinction of being the world’s leading arms dealer. It dominates the global trade in a historic fashion and nowhere is that domination more complete than in the endlessly war-torn Middle East. There, believe it or not, the U.S. controls nearly half the arms market. From Yemen to Libya to Egypt, sales by this country and its allies are playing a significant role in fuelling some of the world’s most devastating conflicts. But Donald Trump, even before he was felled by Covid-19 and sent to Walter Reed Medical Center, could not have cared less, as long as he thought such trafficking in the tools of death and destruction would help his political prospects.

BlackRock – The super cartel

Canadian government hands over key advisory and decision-making power to super cartel | PETER EWART

The unfolding worldwide pandemic is bringing with it a profound financial crisis. How the crisis will be dealt with is a question on the minds of working people around the world. In Canada, working people face the additional complication that as yet, they do not set the direction of the economy, which is controlled by a financial oligarchy and governments in their service.

A financial crisis is itself nothing new; crises are inherent to the capitalist system espoused by the financial oligarchy. To prop itself up, as the financial oligarchy lurches from crisis to crisis, its instruments and forms of organization mutate and change, like creatures from the Black Lagoon.[1] For example, out of the crises and corruption of the late 19th century came the merging of banking and industrial capital and the giant trusts and monopolies of the Robber Barons. And out of a cabal of leading U.S bankers on Jekyll Island in 1910 rose the Federal Reserve. In the 1990s, came the financial de-regulation of the banking sector and the welding back together, Frankenstein-style, of investment and commercial banking which contributed in a negative way to the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the Great Recession of 2008. And most recently, there is the “warm and fuzzy” statement from the U.S. Business Roundtable that the big corporations are responsible to all stakeholders, rather than the previous Milton Friedman configuration of only being accountable to shareholders.

The defence secretary from Boeing

Merchants of Death – Lithograph by Mabel Dwight

Boeing vice-president Patrick Shanahan, who formerly led the company’s missile defence subsidiary, became Deputy Defense Secretary – the second highest position in the Pentagon – and now replaces Gen. James Mattis as Acting US Defense Secretary in the Trump administration, effective January 1st. [1]

Bombardier debacle shows what it means for Quebec to be ‘open for business’

By K.C. ADAMS

The U.S. warmongers of Boeing and the Pentagon have crushed Bombardier’s Canadian commercial jet production. While doing so, they also seized Brazil’s Embraer commercial jet production this past July. The anti-social pro-U.S. coup government of Brazil appears to have approved the Boeing takeover of Embraer. The former Brazilian governments of Presidents Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff opposed the U.S. war profiteers gaining control of Embraer. However, Rousseff was removed from office via a parliamentary coup in 2016 and Lula was unjustly imprisoned and blocked from running again for office this year. The foreign seizure of both Embraer and Bombardier’s commercial jet sectors leaves Boeing and the Pentagon in face-to-face open combat for dominance with Airbus and its European backers.

Bombardier economy in turmoil

Necessity for a new pro-social outlook and direction for the economy | K.C. ADAMS

For the second time in two years, Bombardier has announced massive cuts to its workforce. In 2016, the global oligopoly fired 7,000 workers; this time another 5,000 workers will be dismissed: 2,500 workers in Quebec, another 500 in Ontario and 2,000 elsewhere with Belfast in the north of Ireland the most probable target.