Arms Sales: Obama’s Only Growth Industry? [View all]

[HiPointDem]

The dry dollar numbers in the latest Congressional Research Service annual arms sales report paint an ugly new picture. Over the last 5 years, every major arms exporting country has reduced its sales to developing countries–except for the U.S., which has sextupled its sales.

At the beginning of this period, we supplied about 20% of the developing world’s arms purchases; last year this jumped to 79%...

Table 4 shows that, from 2004 to 2006, we were signing about $6 to $9 billion dollars (in constant 2011 $) worth of arms contracts per year in the Third World. In time for the 2008 election, the Bush Administration added... an extra $3 billion in approved sales in 2007–and then unleashed a $17 billion add-on in approved arms exports for the election year itself.

Under Obama, developing country sales dropped back somewhat to $14 to $15 billion after the 2008 election, still almost double the Bush pre-election level. But in the run up to the coming election, for 2011 the Obama Administration has thoroughly outdone the Bushies by pumping in a whopping $42 billion extra of arms sales. The perhaps even larger 2012 election year results are not yet in, but it’s easy to forecast that champagne will be flowing freely in DoD contractor boardrooms by the end of the year.

Adding $42 billion dollars of export arms sales in just one year doesn’t happen by accident....

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/30/change-you-can-believe-in-comes-to-the-arms-market/