{"id":36354,"date":"2018-08-04T08:35:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-04T13:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=36354"},"modified":"2018-08-04T08:35:00","modified_gmt":"2018-08-04T13:35:00","slug":"nato-is-a-goldmine-for-the-us-military-industrial-complex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=36354","title":{"rendered":"NATO is a Goldmine for the US\/Military Industrial Complex"},"content":{"rendered":"

NATO is a Goldmine for the US\/Military Industrial Complex<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Photo source Parker Gyokeres | CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Countries of the NATO military alliance have been ordered by President Trump to increase their spending on weapons, and the reasons for his insistence they do so are becoming clearer. It\u2019s got nothing to do with any defense rationale, because the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, has admitted that \u201cwe don\u2019t see any imminent threat against any NATO ally<\/a>\u201d and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) recorded in its\u00a02018 World Report<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cRussia\u2019s military spending in 2017 was 20 per cent lower than in 2016.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even Radio Free Europe, the\u00a0US government\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0official broadcaster,\u00a0acknowledged<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cRussia, one of the world\u2019s top military spenders, reduced its defense budget by 20 percent in 2016-2017 to $55.3 billion\u201d compared, for example, to the $56.3 billion of France.\u00a0\u00a0As SIPRI\u00a0records<\/a>, \u201ctogether, the European NATO members spent over 4 times more on the military in 2017 than Russia,\u201d and\u00a0Nato Watch<\/a>\u00a0summed it up by pointing out that the 29 US-NATO countries \u201ccollectively spent over 12 times more on the military in 2016 than Russia.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is demonstrably no threat whatever to any NATO country by Russia, but this is considered irrelevant in the context of US arms\u2019 sales, which are flourishing and being encouraged to increase and multiply as a result of Congressional and Pentagon scare-mongering.<\/p>\n

On July 12, the second and final day of the recent US-NATO pantomime gathering, Reuters reported Trump as\u00a0saying that<\/a>\u00a0\u201cthe United States makes by far the best military equipment in the world: the best jets, the best missiles, the best guns, the best everything.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0He went on \u201cto list the top US arms makers, Lockheed Martin Corp, Boeing Co and Northrop Grumman Corp by name.\u201d<\/p>\n

On July 11 the Nasdaq Stock Exchange\u00a0listed<\/a>\u00a0the stock price of Lockheed Martin at $305.68.\u00a0\u00a0The day after Trump\u2019s speech, it increased to $318.37.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NATO is a Goldmine for the US\/Military Industrial Complex Photo source Parker Gyokeres | CC BY 2.0 Countries of the NATO military alliance have been ordered by President Trump to increase their spending on weapons, and the reasons for his insistence they do so are becoming clearer. It\u2019s got nothing to do with any defense […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[12435,5493,2806,15620,528,553,620,21062,694,1796],"class_list":["post-36354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","tag-brian-cloughley","tag-counterpunch","tag-jens-stoltenberg","tag-mic","tag-military-industrial-complex","tag-nato","tag-pentagon","tag-radio-free-europe","tag-russia","tag-us-congress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36354"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36355,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36354\/revisions\/36355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}