NATO'S 50TH ANNIVERSARY
Military corporations line up for feast
By Sarah
Sloan
While anti-war activists see NATO's 50th-anniversary
celebration in Washington as an opportunity to protest the
bombing of Yugoslavia, for many U.S. companies it is the
"ultimate marketing opportunity," wrote Washington Post
reporter Tim Smart in his April 13 article, "Count Corporate
America Among NATO's Staunchest Allies."
The April 23-25 weekend event will draw representatives of
the 19 NATO countries as well as 25 others that aspire to
belong to NATO, the international news media, and many U.S.
corporations.
The private sector is underwriting the gala to the tune of
$8 million. It is funded by corporate chief executives who pay
$250,000 to sit on a host committee that includes Ameritech,
DaimlerChrysler, Boeing, Ford Motor, General Motors, Honeywell,
Lucent Technologies, Motorola, Nextel, SBC Communications, TRW
and United Technologies.
These companies want to sell weapons--but also phone
networks, elevators, air conditioners, heaters and many other
commodities--to the Eastern European countries that recently
joined NATO. They want to sell cell phones and two-way radios
to the many guests attending the NATO functions, including the
FBI, State Department and CIA. Above all, they want to sell
military supplies and communications equipment to the leading
NATO war makers.
NATO's birthday is something of an auto show for military
contractors--an opportunity for them to "showcase their wares,"
according to the Post article. So is the war itself.
In an April 15 article in USA Today, Salina Khan wrote: "The
USA's defense equipment, such as the satellite-guided smart
bombs, has stolen the international spotlight as NATO air
forces pound Serbian forces. That could mean increased foreign
interest in U.S. military equipment, analysts say. `Other
countries are going to be dropping these in a few years,' says
John Pike, defense analyst at the Federation of American
Scientists."
Stock prices of the large military manufacturers shot up in
the first few weeks of the war. Raytheon was up 17 percent,
Boeing 12 percent and Lockheed Martin 8 percent.
Raytheon spokesperson David Shea said, "We are expecting the
Kosovo conflict to result in new orders downstream."
The Pentagon has already asked Congress for $6 billion in
emergency funds for the war effort. Raytheon will be siphoning
off approximately $420 million of that.
There are many motives behind any imperialist war. Testing
and showcasing technology is just one aspect. Besides the
political motive--to establish U.S. world dominance after the
war--the United States dropped atomic bombs on both Hiroshima
and Nagasaki to test their capabilities. Three days after the
tremendous loss of life at Hiroshima, Japan was prepared to
surrender. But Washington ordered a second bomb, with somewhat
different properties, to be dropped on Nagasaki anyway.
The United States has bombed Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and
now Yugoslavia, all within eight months. It covertly funds
terrorist organizations in many of these and other countries.
It funds the military budgets of several others.
The NATO celebration gives U.S. corporations a prime
opportunity to operate an arms bazaar while the generals exult
in their military might.
Khan continued in the USA Today article: "Corporate support
for the NATO summit is an outgrowth of the active role many
U.S. companies, particularly defense contractors such as
Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda, have played in the move to
enlarge NATO beyond its traditional U.S.-Western European axis.
U.S. defense companies lobbied hard in Congress in recent years
to admit ... Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic."
Eastern Europe is now a prime market for U.S. weapons
systems. This is the kind of "development" the imperialists are
encouraging in countries whose economies used to be centered
around providing such basic human needs as jobs for all, free
medical care and free, universal education.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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