Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon stocks have enjoyed the fruits of the Arab Spring. Since 2011, the shares of US defense contractors have soared by as much as 700 percent, according to RT's Keiser Report.
American global aerospace and defense technology company Northrop Grumman has appreciated sevenfold since 2011, rising from $54.82 to $357.70 per share. The company is famous for building dozens of aircraft carriers for the US Navy, including the USS ‘Harry S. Truman’ and USS ‘Ronald Reagan.’
Lockheed Martin, the maker of fighter jets including the trillion-dollar F-35, has enjoyed a five-fold increase in market cap, with company shares soaring from $69 in 2011 to the current $351. Producer of Tomahawk missiles, Raytheon, has also grown more by than 500 percent from $40.76 to $227 per share.
Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert point out that such a boom in stock prices for US defense contractors is unprecedented. It neither happened during the Cold War, nor in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, nor the subsequent US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The show notes that, in accomplishing its geopolitical goals, Washington is pretty much open to burning money, as the mainstream media can attest.
After US President Donald Trump ordered missile strikes on Syria, Bloomberg reported: “The joint US, French and UK missile barrage on Syria this week included the battlefield debut of a stealthy new Lockheed Martin Corp air-launched cruise missile produced as part of a $4.6 billion defense program.”
“Nineteen missiles fired outside Syrian airspace by two B-1B bombers targeted the Barzah Research and Development Center located in the greater Damascus area. Those Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missiles, or JASSMs, joined 57 Raytheon Co. Tomahawks that Pentagon officials also said targeted the site,” it added.
Keiser Report also pointed to a news story about the failed Space X launch earlier this year as another example of the US government wasting taxpayer dollars. The Wall Street Journal reported this month that Northrop Grumman is to blame for the failure of the controversial January launch of the US spy satellite known as Zuma, which cost taxpayers around $3.5 billion.
“The Fed prints the money and the Pentagon blows it up in various countries around the world or sends the US soldiers out there to get maimed or blown up,” said Max Keiser.
Keiser and Herbert examined the theory that the boom in the defense business can actually be linked to the launch of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. They quote a 2014 article by an American public broadcaster PBS, which brands healthcare as ‘the new oil.’
“This is a pretty exciting time to be in the federal health IT space,” said Horace Blackman, Lockheed Martin’s vice president of health and life sciences. “The biggest opportunities I would point to are efforts associated with the Affordable Care Act.”
You can watch this episode of RT's Keiser Report on Thursday at 14:30 GMT, 19:30 GMT, and 21:30 GMT.
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