Capitalism – Page 8

Cui Boeing-o?

Published on October 17, 2007

Bush at Boeing 2004

Times and others:

‘Suicide’ casts shadow over USAF links to defence contractor

Charles Riechers, deputy head of the Air Force’s multibillion-dollar procurement budget, is believed to have committed suicide amid controversy over his links to a defence contractor. Mr Riechers, who was found dead at his home in Virginia over the weekend, joined the USAF procurement team in January after his confirmation had been held up by the US Senate for two months.

During those two months Mr Riechers, who had served in the USAF for 20 years, worked for a defence advice company, Commonwealth Research Institute (CRI). According to reports, the $13,400-a-month (£6,600- a-month) job was arranged by the USAF as a favour while the Senate considered Mr Riechers’s confirmation. Quoted last month in The Washington Post, Mr Riechers said: “I really didn’t do anything for CRI. I got a pay cheque from them.”

A USAF spokesman said that it would co-operate with county officials who were investigating the death of Mr Riechers, but that the matter was “a civilian, not a military, one”. The arrangement has come under scrutiny from politicians concerned about this relationship. The case received additional attention last week when Pemco Aviation, another defence company, amended a legal challenge to a contract won by Boeing to mention CRI and its parent Concurrent Technologies.

Pemco is challenging a $1.2 billion contract awarded by the USAF to Boeing for the maintenance of air-refuelling tankers. Reuters said yesterday that Pemco was claiming that Boeing had close ties to Concurrent, so there might have been a conflict of interest in the hiring of Mr Riechers.

The USAF’s not having a lot of luck with their procurement officials, is it? Remember Reichers’ predecessor Darleen Druyun?

By George Cahlink
gcahlink@govexec.com
October 1, 2004

Darleen Druyun, former No. 2 acquisition executive for the Air Force, was sentenced to nine months in prison on Friday for negotiating a job with Boeing at the same time she was involved in contracts with the company, the nation’s second-largest Defense contractor.

Druyun, 56, will serve nine months at a minimum security prison and another seven months at a halfway house or on home detention. She also was fined $5,000 and ordered to perform 150 hours of community service. Sentencing guidelines could have required Druyun to serve up to 16 months in prison.

Federal District Court Judge T.S. Ellis called the “stain of this offense very severe,” particularly while the nation was at war. Ellis agreed to allow Druyun to serve her sentence in South Carolina, where she plans to retire with her husband.

As part of the plea agreement, Druyun admitted that she did “favor the Boeing Company in certain negotiations as the result of her employment negotiations and other favors provided by Boeing to the defendant.” Previously, Druyun had admitted to negotiating a post-government job with Boeing, but steadfastly maintained that she had never favored them at the negotiating table.

Prosecutors said Druyun admitted to favoring the defense contractor after failing a lie detector test this summer. She also confessed to altering a personal journal to make it appear that there were no conflicts with Boeing.

Druyun’s plea agreement outlined four specific contract negotiations where she favored Boeing:

Druyun agreed to a higher price than appropriate for a proposed deal to lease 100 tanker planes from Boeing, which she called “a parting gift” to her future employer. She also shared a competitor’s proprietary data with Boeing.
In 2002, Druyun awarded $100 million to Boeing as part of a restructuring of the NATO Airborne Warning and Control System contract. She said the payment could have been lower, but she favored Boeing because her daughter and son-in-law worked there and she was considering work there as well.

In 2001, Druyun oversaw a $4 billion award to Boeing to modernize the avionics on C-130 J aircraft. She admitted she favored Boeing over four competitors because the company had given her son-in-law a job.

In 2000, Druyun agreed to pay $412 million to Boeing as a settlement over a clause in a C-17 aircraft contract. She admitted to favoring the payment because her son-in-law was seeking a job with Boeing.
Officials with the watchdog group Project for Government Oversight lauded the conviction.

“The Druyun case is offering an unusual view of just how cozy the Pentagon and defense contractors have become,” said POGO Senior Defense Investigator Eric Miller. “Her supplemental plea filed with the federal court on Friday details an even sleazier story than we could have imagined.”

“The Pentagon has been saying Ms. Druyun was a tough negotiator,” Miller continued. “Ironically, while she was working for the Air Force, as we initially suspected, she was actually negotiating on behalf of Boeing.”

The tanker purchase is now up for discussion in Congress again and there are fears that the USAF is trying to slant the process unfairly in favour of Boeing, again. Boeing is the red thread here, that and its relationship with the Bush administration and the Pentagon, which has been very cosy, particularly so during the 2004 election campaign:

Bush visit raises $2.4 million for Republican Party

After landing Friday afternoon at Boeing Field in Seattle, Bush said European nations should end their subsidies of Boeing rival Airbus. He declared the United States is prepared to take action before the World Trade Organization to stop them.

Bush made the comments after meeting with Boeing executives and employees in a company hangar.

The relationship is cosy enough even for a little espionage not to disrupt it. For instance, whatever happened to this Boeing radar scientist suspected of spying for Israel?? I don’t ever recall hearing of a charge or trial:

FBI Investigating Boeing Scientist
October 19, 2006 9:00 AM

Vic Walter and Eric Longabardi Report:

Agents in the FBI’s foreign counterintelligence unit have opened a criminal investigation into the handling of classified material by a senior scientist at Boeing.

The scientist, Abraham Lesnik, of suburban Los Angeles, works in the development of anti-missile systems for aircraft and holds a Department of Defense security clearance of Secret, Special Access, according to his resume filed in court papers.

The FBI has conducted three separate searches of Lesnik’s home in Valley Village, Calif., according to Lesnik’s lawyer, Marc Harris.
Investigators in the case say Lesnik’s Boeing laptop computer has been turned over to the FBI after questions were raised as to whether classified data ended up in the hands of unauthorized individuals including foreigners.

Lesnik’s lawyer says his client “has never improperly transmitted any classified information to anyone.”

Lesnik’s neighbors say FBI agents have been conducting a 24-hour surveillance of his home for the past few weeks.

An FBI spokesperson confirmed search warrants had been served but said the affidavits filed with the court were sealed, and no other information on the case could be made public.

Boeing spokesperson Walt Rice tells ABC News, “Boeing is cooperating with U.S. Government investigators in this case, and as such, we cannot comment further.”

Odd.

While we’re on the subject of dirty tricks, at least $1500 of the money Bush raised at that Boeing visit went to fund skullduggery like the GOP’s fake ‘sex offender in your neighborhood’ cards in Washington State.

But back to those tankers and Reicher’s death.

If the Northrop Grumman team wins, most of the work would be done in Mobile, Ala. But engineering, management and some support services would be based in Melbourne.

If the Boeing team wins, most of the work would be done in Everett, Wash., and Wichita, Kan. Some of the work by Boeing and its suppliers would be in Florida, focused in cities such as Clearwater and Stuart.

There’s a lot resting on this tanker deal.

Why did Reichers kill himself, if indeed he did die by his own hand? That has yet to be proven, even though the wire services confidently asserted it was suicide within hours of the event’s announcement. If he did kill himself, was it from fear of prosecution or exposure or jail? If he didn’t, I ask again – who benefits?

Tech as Jewelry: Future Treasure or Just Plain Tacky?

Published on October 15, 2007

The Richmond and Twickenham Times:

A specialist Balham firm has created the world’s most expensive hearing aid, cast in solid 24-carat gold and encrusted with 220 diamonds.

The revolutionary aid means even aging hip hop aficionados, reeling from years of overexposure to deafening bass beats, can get help for their hearing without looking like they are signing up for the blue rinse brigade.

But the hearing aid, declared the world’s “blingiest” by maker P C Werth Ltd of Nightingale Lane, does not come cheap – retailing at £25,000.

However for that money you don’t just get gold and diamonds.

The aid comes with a handy remote that allows wearers to tweak it’s settings to maximise its performance in various situations. It also uses the latest Widex digital technology.

Specialist jeweller Barry Moule had to be called in to help create the unique device. He said: “Though I have produced exotic items such as jewel encrusted mobile phones in the past this is the most unusual project in my career.”

Whether you think that’s exceedingly cool or in gross taste is entirely a matter of political and aesthetic perspective. I’m ambivalent: on the one hand it can be seen as a symptom of wastefulness in a society drunk on conspicuous consumption; on the other a triumph of craftspersonship.

But then there’s the human cost of obtaining the precious metals and stones (there’s a reason they’re precious, it’s the expense in lives of getting them out the ground) which is being disregarded in the cause of fashion. Then again, I’ve always loved the sheer artistry and miniaturised craftsmanship of serious jewellery and precious metalwork; Amsterdam is full of antique jewellery shops and artisan jewellers and sometimes I just have to stop and stare at the sheer knockout beauty of some of it.

I’m also firmly in the camp of beauty and utility in everyday objects and these are everyday objects, absolutely essential daily objects in the case of the hearing aid. If you’re going to have it on your body all the time, why shouldn’t it be beautiful? At least all that bling gives as lifechanging item like a hearing aid it’s due.

I have to consider the cultural and historical component, too: it’s an antique of the future. Gold and precious stones survive death, disaster and the fall of civilisation – a golden thread, so to speak, through history. A cache of jewellery found in a remote wilderness can be the key to a whole lost people. It’s also portable money, which has got to be a consideration in such dicey economic times.

So I seem to have argued myself into approving of the bling hearing aid, if a little sick that that so much stupid money is sloshing around loose. But then there’s these:

Swarovski crystal headphones.

And these:

Swarovski crystal iPod headphone earrings>

Now that is just tacky.

If bejewelled hearing aids (IMSHO) are cool but Swarovski crrystal headphones are tacky, then where does that leave those massively expensive mobile phones? Those are starting to scale the heights, or should it be the depths, of pointless blingery. Take the Vertu, for example:

I don’t know what those say to you but to me they say “more money than sense”. There are any number of gold, platimum and jewel-bedecked mobile phones available for the well-off with no taste, but most, like the Vertu, are all fur coat and no knickers, more effort and expense having been expended on the outside than the actual phone itself. Who wants a lousy bog-standard Nokia, even if it is slathered with all the bling there is?

But now there’s a blinged-up mobile that costs a whopping – wait for it – $1.3 million dollars.

…the price is totally based on the looks of the phone. The phone, which is made by a Russian, has been embedded with diamonds on its left and right border. There are diamonds even on the keypad of the phone. There are total of 50 diamonds. Each one is a blue diamond of 0.5 – 2 carat. The phone is completely made from platinum with logo and button’s made out of gold. The phone has been introduced in the market by the company “Ancort”.

The Liberace of cellphones mine) to pop out every time the damned thing rang.

It’s all very well tech looking pretty, but if it doesn’t do what you need then it’s a pointless waste, no matter hope envious it makes your shallow fellow billionaires. But then making your shallow fellow billionaires envious and poinlessly wasting expensive resources does seem to be the entire and only point.

Life During Wartime

Published on October 15, 2007

Sir John and Lady Bourn
The Great and The Good

While Britain’s overstretched servicewomen and men swelter in the desert heat for meagre pay and their families are forced to live in officially-sanctioned squalor, everywhere you look politicians and civil servants are enriching themselves at the British public’s expense.

Here’s what Sir John Bourn, the virtually unsackable – appointed for life, much like a Supreme Court judge in the US, he or she can be removed only by a joint vote of the House of Commons and House of Lords – Auditor General of the Uk’s National Audit Office, the man who is supposed to stop government waste and fraud, helped himself to in expenses from tne taxpayers’ hard-earned cash:

175 lunches and dinners since 2004 with permanent secretaries, directors of big accounting companies and defence contractors at the Ritz, Savoy, Dorchester, Brown’s Hotel, the Goring Hotel, Cipriani, Bibendum, Wiltons, Mirabelle and The Square. The bills, nearly all for two people, vary from £80 to £301. Many of the bills came to between £150 and £220. One bill for four people – two from the NAO – at Wiltons was £500. In the past six months, he has spent £1,651.56 on meals.

Entertaining by large defence contractors and accounting firms included a visit to the British Grand Prix at Silverstone on July 8, paid for BAE Systems, the company caught in a corruption investigation over a Tanzanian defence order. Sir John has refused to release an NAO document on BAE’s biggest and most controversial defence order, the Al Yamamah defence deal with Saudi Arabia.

Sir John went for a dinner at the Savoy hosted by the Society of British Aerospace Companies on September 6; attended a polo match on July 29 funded by IT contractor EDS, which has multimillion-pound government contracts; visited the opera at Garsington on July 4 paid for by GSL, a company promoting public finance initiatives, scrutinised by the NAO; attended a reception and opera recital at Middle Temple Hall with Lady Bourn on June 6, paid for by Reliance Security Group, which has PFI contracts with local government and the police.

Sir John and Lady Bourn took foreign trips with first class air travel to San Francisco, Venice, Lisbon, Brazil, South Africa, the Bahamas and Budapest. Their air fares and taxi fares ranged from £15,997 to Brazil and £14,518 to South Africa, to £2,238 to Budapest and £1,718 to Venice.

Lady Bourn did not accompany him on his latest trips, to Moldova on September 28 and to Khazakstan. The air fares were £1,117.50 and £2,107.20 respectively. Over the past six months, Sir John has spent £16,998 of taxpayers’ money on mainly first class travel for himself and his wife.

But.. but Sir John and Lady Bourn had had a social position to maintain!

So why has Sir John had such a blind spot? The reason, according to those who know him well, is pride and a determination not to be beholden to anyone, however grand.

“If he was taken to lunch at the Ritz by someone from a big company, he would insist on reciprocating at the same level. If he met a permanent secretary for lunch, he would take them in turn to suitable restaurant, say the Goring or Wiltons.”

Whether Sir John was entertaining a business director, fellow Whitehall mandarin or journalist – including from the Guardian – he would always insist that the NAO made a reciprocal arrangement.

When Sir John is abroad and representing Britain at conferences or signing agreements, earning the NAO £4m a year to advise foreign governments, he insists on a similar style.

Oh, heaven forbid a mandarin should ever lose face.

Since London’s become the world capital of dirty money, corrupt oligarchs. dodgy arms dealers and blinged-up billionaires, who’ve now joined the exiled dictators and corrupt corporate CEOs as perfectly acceptable additions to the most rarefied circles of top civil servants and government ministers, it’s been getting harder and harder for the socially ambitious public servant to keep up. The bar keeps getting raised ever higher – you have a car and driver, he has a Maibach and a driver and a bodyguard . You have a chichi London pied a terre in Chelsea – but he has a mansion in Bishops’s Avenue. It never ends.

Just ask Tony Blair,

Blair's new country house?

Blair is said to be buying himself and Cherie a Christopher Wren-designed country pile in Wiltshire (see above) that’s finally big enough and posh enough as to befit their massively inflated egos.

Buying it with what, one asks? A relatively modest new-build Barratt home in Dulwich was good enough for Thatcher on her retirement and she was no slouch in the personal enrichment stakes. Where’s the money for this new Blair landed estate coming from? For someone who’s never had a job that wasn’t in some way taxpayer-subsidised, the newly-retired Blair, so recently worried about he’d pay his mortgage, suddenly seems to be doing quite well.

No doubt the taxpayers, as they do with the Blair’s house in Connaught Square, will be picking up the bill for police security on his new country estate. I suspect that bill will make Sir John and Lady Bourn’s expenses look a mere bagatelle in comparison. The fact that he is in potential physical danger only as a result of his own actions is not a factor. We must pay to protect his and Cheries’ sense of entitlement and grandeur.

Our elected and appointed public servants see themselves not as public servants, but as an elite social group set apart from the rest of us poor schmucks. This arms race in greed and corruption will only accelerate while we allow them to think that and act as trhough that’s so.

I’m No Economist…

Published on September 19, 20071 Comment

…and I don’t even play one on teevee.

But.

Northern Rock may have been essentially nationalised and made safe for now and Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown may think they’ve dodged a bullet. (Huh. They’d better take a look at the hail of bullets headed their way. Merkel is not going to be happy.)

Ditto the US economy and the Federal Reserve: after lowering interest rates as a spur to lending, for now they’re breathing a sigh of relief.

But it seems obvious to me, the non-economist, that if you have an unsustainable economic bubble, that pumping the bubble up bigger by putting more imaginary money into it to enable even more excessive consumption and dodgy lending might not be a good idea.

Surely it’s just blowing the bubble up bigger, which means that when it does burst, and it will because it has to (something Marx identified long ago but call it a positive feedback loop and economics bloggers discover it like it’s a new thing), then the debris will be spread over a bigger area.

Personally I reckon that this temporary boost of confidence is causing a glut of trading because investors are getting out of the market and there’s money to be made in the interstices of crisis trading, particularly in short-term currency speculation. But what do i know. I’m not an economist.

Global Research, basing its opinion on a WaPo article predicting a global market crash, alleges that because of it a crash is a done deal already.

Among those poised to profit from the crash is the Carlyle Group, the equity fund that includes the Bush family and other high-profile investors with insider government connections. A January 2007 memorandum to company managers from founding partner William E. Conway, Jr., recently appeared which stated that, when the current “liquidity environment”—i.e., cheap credit—ends, “the buying opportunity will be a once in a lifetime chance.”

That’s probably a conspiracy too far. But rapacious as some investment funds are, there are others that must be taking huge hits and as it becomes clear just how many banks and institutions in the US, Europe and worldwide are overexposed to almost worthless junk loan investments, it’ll become clear just how temporary the confidence boost is.

Already the big money appears to be cutting its losses and moving out of mortgages and other financial instruments and into commodities like metals and oil, where prices are rocketing and not dependent on untrustworthy rating companies. Big money wants certainty and solidity in its investments right now and to get it that means liquidity: calling in many of those junk loans and mortgages and converting the resulting cash, such as it is, into valuable commodities.

The word may have gone out to the media from the Fed and the Bank of England that confidence is up and must be maintained at all costs, but the market is saying otherwise as global nvestors rush to put their money somwhere safe.

In that you could argue that they’re doing no more than the customers of Northern Rock did – withdrawing their savings and stashing it under the mattress.

Arms and The Man

Published on August 8, 2007

When it comes to the arms trade the British government are the deranged offspring of a Ferengi and Franz Kafka, insatiable greed and bureacratic ineptitude combined in one nightmare package.

Here’s a nice encapsulation of the sick situation by activist/comedian Mark Thomas at the 2007 Birmingham Police and Security Fair :

[…]

In the middle of the hall was Mr Xia, a Chinese man with three electro-shock weapons on display for all to see. He demonstrated them for me while I filmed him. A bargain at £3.25 each. At least, I thought, it shouldn’t be hard to find a cop at the police and security fair. How foolishly naive. The Association of Chief of Police Officers had a stall around the corner from Mr Xia, but with no one there. The nearest Customs officer, I was told, was at the airport. The closest thing I found to an on-duty officer were two life-size cardboard cutout cops, on sale as a deterrent to thieves. Eventually, I found the fair organiser’s office.

Mr Xia was arrested, and two weeks later I got a phone call from Solihull CID. “Mr Xia has pleaded guilty to the possession of prohibited firearms,” said the voice, “but I think it is illegal to try and sell these weapons.”

“You would be right.”

“And I think Mr Xia was trying to sell them.”

“He was at a trade fair.”

“Would you give us a statement and let us see the film you shot at the fair?”

“Yes, I would be happy to.”

“And one more thing – if you wouldn’t mind, could you bring up copies of the relevant legislation?”

More…

While it’s long been an open secret in Britain that our national earnings are underpinned by international arms sales – we make 46 billion a year out of it – what’s not often mentioned is that we’re also one of the biggest enablers of the worldwide and domestic trade in illegal small arms and torture equipment.

The British government’s attitude to arms sales is hypocritical to the nth degree. On one hand it subscribes to the “Guns bad, mmmkay?” school of thought for domestic consumption; on the other it allows illegal arms and torture weapons to be sold under its nose to pretty much anyone from at home and abroad, so long as they have the money.

You’d be surprised at who has a financial interest in the arms and repression industry:

45 UK UNIVERSITIES own over £15m worth of shares in the arms trade. Three institutions – University College London (UCL), Trinity Hall Cambridge and the University of Liverpool – each own shares worth over £1million.

British academics, MPs, police and media alike bemoan the growing gun culture that leads to the murders of so many young men and shed crocodile tears even as they condemn: “Tsk tsk”, they say. “Oh dear, black drugs and gun culture, tragic isn’t it? Oh well, at least it’s not our children.”

Yet while all that international money is sloshing around London they’ll happily turn a blind eye either by passivity or ineptitude,to the international gun culture that is the Daddy of the gun culture in our cities.

As a spokesperson for the University of Liverpool explains; “The university has a legal obligation to maximise returns on its investments as it is accountable to its beneficiaries. We would not choose to invest in arms if other opportunities to fulfil our financial obligations were equally available.”

Oh well, then, that’s fine. Profit trumps morals, my duh.

It’s a sad fact that in our post-imperial and industrial days of decline we are a fading, insignificant offshore island in a big scary world. Our only remaining diplomatic bargaining chips are a] guns and b] money. These days we can only wield power in the world by

a] enabling, supporting and protecting the international trade in arms and weapons of repression, come what may and

b] by having a whole city full of handy banks for managing the subsequent profits and lots of accountants and lawyers to evade any inconvenient legislation (that’s when they’re not actually orchestrating it on a massive scale).

and

c] By knowing where the bodies are buried. *Cough* Banco Ambrosiano.*Cough*

that last’s influence probably outweights the first two.

Mind you, the relevant laws are such an absolute dogs breakfast as to be almost totally ineffectual anyway and of course lets not forget that we in our turn are mere passive instruments of US foreign policy, just another tool to be used by Washington to do politics by the back door.

The voters have expressed their justified disgust with this hypocrisy by demonstrating peacefully yet forcefully, only to find themselves subjected to the most draconian of the post-911 terror laws. A state of terrorist emergency was first declared in metropolitan London in Feb 2001, but no-one knew until the law was used not against terrorists but against legitimate arms trade prorestors.

The Metropolitan Police are using anti-terrorist legislation against protesters demonstrating at Europe’s biggest annual arms fair which was opened today by Geoff Hoon, UK defence minister, in London’s Docklands. The police have invoked Section 44 of Terrorism Act 2000 which allows assistant chief constables (or the commander in the case of the Metropolitan police) to authorise extended stop and search where they

“consider it expedient for the prevention of acts of terrorism”

Section 44 was also used extensively during the protests and peace camp at Fairford RAF airbase in the build-up to the Iraq War (1). This is contrary to clear undertakings from the Home Secretary to the House of Commons that Section 44 notices would only be used where there is good reason to suspect terrorist activity. Protestors have already won a judicial review of police mass detention tactics during the Fairford protests (2), while Liberty has said it will seek a judicial review of the Met Police’s use of Section 44 in the Docklands.

There has been much made in the press of how the police have “braced themselves for violent protests” (e.g. The Guardian, 6 September 2003) and the £1 million pound cost of the policing operation. Sixteen arrests were reported on the evening news, while inside, cluster bombs, which the exhibition organisers had last week said should not be included, were among the exhibits.

They lost their case.

That that state of emergency hasn’t been lifted since and it was what eventually resulted in the effective ‘shoot to kill’ policy that then allowed the extra-judicial murder of Jean-Charles Menezes by trigger happy police.

Which makes the persistence of anti arms-trade protestors all the more admirable.

A nondescript large industrial unit in Lenton, Nottingham had its anonymity taken away by local Disarm DSEI / anti-arms trade protesters on Tuesday when they descended on Heckler and Koch’s UK headquarters.

H&K are the world’s second largest maker of pistols and machine-guns for soldiers and death squads across the world, including Turkey, Iran, Mexico, Thailand, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Burma/Myanmar. Their weapons are in use in over 90 countries, including by British police, and the company has evaded EU arms controls to sell weapons to war-zones in Sudan, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone. Over half a million people are killed worldwide by small-arms annually.

A productive bit of research led a couple of intrepid investigators to buzz the company and ask “Excuse me, is this the Nottingham Small Arms Factory?” Although they didn’t get a response as such, their suspicions were confirmed when armed police turned up minutes later and detained them for 45 minutes under the Terrorism Act.

The subsequent demo made it clear that gun merchants are not welcome in the city (which, by the way, has the highest gun crime rate in the UK). The peaceful protest obviously hit a raw nerve as the forty or so people in attendance attracted an almost equal number of cops, including members of the (London-based political squad) Forward Intelligence Team.

Local rag, the Nottingham Evening Post, showed just how weak its commitment to reporting is when they pulled the story from page 2 after being told by a police press officer that it would be ‘irresponsible’ for the media to publish the arms company’s address (…yes, so obviously it’s: NSAF Ltd, Unit 3, Easter Park, Lenton Lane, Nottingham NG7 2PX). See http://disarmdsei.evey.org

It’s easy to see a grand establishment conspiracy in all this but I’m inclined to think it’s more a typical mixture of jaw-dropping venality, sheer ineptitude and passive complicity.

Or am I?

When you think of a world in the grip of accelerating climate change, potential social disorder and subject to an increasing scramble, even to the death, for temperate land and resources and you consider how few natural resources we actually have, then controlling the weapons of repression and the gold begins to look less like conspiracy and more like an actual strategy.

Looked at in that light the arms traders’re doing our young a favour by training them in weapons skills for the the apocalyptic future. You could even say it’s a public service.

See what I mean about Kafka and the Ferengi…..