The party platform they won't stand on

Josh On takes a look at what the Democrats promised when Barack Obama was nominated in 2008--and how those promises turned out after eight years.

July 27, 2016

"THANKS TO the millions of people across the country who got involved in the political process--many for the first time--we now have the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party." These were the triumphant words of Bernie Sanders as he prepared to endorse the candidate who beat him, Hillary Clinton, for president.

The Democrats' platform, passed early on at the party's convention in Philadelphia, has been held up as the most tangible evidence that the Sanders campaign had an impact on the party, despite the hostility of its established leadership.

But a closer look reveals that the 2016 platform is far less progressive than Sanders delegates argued for.

For example, the platform calls climate change an "urgent threat" and proposes that the U.S. should be powered by 100 percent clean energy by 2050. But every one of Sanders delegate Bill McKibben's proposals on how to get there were voted down: no carbon tax, no ban on fracking, no to keeping fossil fuels in the ground. In short, nothing tangible to back up the rhetoric.

On the Middle East, the platform declares, "We will always support Israel's right to defend itself, including by retaining its qualitative military edge, and oppose any effort to delegitimize Israel." Proposed language from Cornel West and Maya Berry calling for "an end to occupation and illegal settlements" was blocked.

Even the much heralded and certainly welcome inclusion of support for a $15-an-hour minimum wage was more vague than it needed to be about tying the minimum wage to the inflation rate.

Not exactly a smashing victory for progressive politics. But even if Sanders supporters had managed to win more concessions from the party establishment, would it matter? Would a President Hillary Clinton be bound in any way by the platform that delegates passed this week in Philadelphia?

To get a sense of how much the Democratic Party platform affects actual policy, let's take a look at some of the more progressive planks from the 2008 platform passed by the convention that nominated Barack Obama and see how they have fared under the Obama administration.

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1. Affordable, Quality Health Care Coverage for All Americans

From the platform: Families and individuals should have the option of keeping the coverage they have or choosing from a wide array of health insurance plans, including many private health insurance options and a public plan. Coverage should be made affordable for all Americans with subsidies provided through tax credits and other means...

Families should have health insurance coverage similar to what Members of Congress enjoy. They should not be forced to bear the burden of skyrocketing premiums, unaffordable deductibles or benefit limits that leave them at financial risk when they become sick.

The reality: The passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is at once the most acclaimed and most disparaged accomplishments of the Obama administration.

As Elizabeth Schulte wrote fro SocialistWorker.org, "While portions of the ACA made welcome improvements--for instance, banning the previous practice of denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and providing subsidies for low-income people--the ACA doesn't come close to covering all the millions of people who need health care. In fact, for many working-class people, the new system has made things worse."

The average deductible has tripled since 2006, seven times faster than wages, according to a September 2015 report from the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust, reported on by the Los Angeles Times.

Already high premiums are set to increase in 2017. In California, for example, premiums "will rise by an average of 13.2 percent next year--more than three times the increase of the last two years," according to the LA Times.

And some 33 million people in the U.S. still don't have health insurance, reports the FiveThirtyEight.org website.

Democrats did claim that they were fighting to have, as was promised in the platform, a so-called "public option" included in the health care legislation--a government health program to be offered as one of the choices for people required to obtain insurance through the ACA's exchanges.

The public option was included in the House proposal but got dumped from the Senate version that became the blueprint for the ACA. As Socialist Worker reported, it turned out that Democrats had made a deal with the health care industry that the public option would be dropped from the ACA. The promise was cynically dangled in the platform and during negotiations, then dumped.

Achieving the stated aims of meaningful benefits, universal coverage and affordable health care would require the Democrats to work toward a single-player system that eliminates private insurers from health care. But that was never even under consideration when the Obama administration started negotiating the ACA.

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2. Cut Poverty in Half Within 10 Years

From the platform: When Bobby Kennedy saw the shacks and poverty along the Mississippi Delta, he asked, "How can a country like this allow it?" Forty years later, we're still asking that question...One in eight Americans lives in poverty today all across our country...Nearly 13 million of the poor are children. We can't allow this kind of suffering and hopelessness to exist in our country...Working together, we can cut poverty in half within 10 years.

The reality: There are two years remaining on that commitment to cut poverty in half, but it's not looking good. Official poverty levels have grown, from 13.2 percent in 2008 to 14.8 percent in 2014, and the number of poor children jumped from 13 million to more than 15 million in the same period. Apparently, "suffering and hopelessness" has been allowed to continue.

Some may object that Obama inherited a recession and an increase in poverty was inevitable.

But the Great Recession, while severe, is long in the past, and those at the top of U.S. society have recovered quite well. According to University of California-Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez, the top 1 percent richest households captured an estimated 95 percent of income growth during the 2009-12 recovery period, with their pre-tax incomes growing 31.4 percent after adjusting for inflation. The pre-tax incomes of the bottom 99 percent grew 0.4 percent during the same period.

By 2012, the top 10 percent of households had a 50.4 percent share of the pre-tax income, the highest level since 1917.

What would it have taken to actually cut poverty in half? A good start might have been the "green jobs" program proposed by Van Jones, who was appointed as the Obama administration's "green jobs czar." But even leaving aside whether Jones' proposals would have achieved what he claimed, he came under fire from the right-wing press, and the Obama administration did nothing to defend him as he was hounded to resign. And that was the end of "green jobs."

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3. A World Without Nuclear Weapons

From the platform: America will seek a world with no nuclear weapons and take concrete actions to move in this direction...We will maintain a strong and reliable deterrent as long as nuclear weapons exist, but America will be safer in a world that is reducing reliance on nuclear weapons and ultimately eliminates all of them. We will make the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons worldwide a central element of U.S. nuclear weapons policy.

The (terrifying) reality: After Democrat Al Gore proclaimed in 2000, "If you're not careful, you could have a reduction of missiles and a more dangerous world," this 2008 Democratic Party platform point was a welcome shift in direction.

Unfortunately, the reduction of nuclear weapons has slowed under Barack Obama. In fact, Pentagon figures show "that the current administration has reduced the nuclear stockpile less than any other post-Cold War presidency," according to a report in New York Times.

Rather than work toward the eradication of nuclear weapons, the Obama administration has launched an "atomic revitalization" plan to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which will cost up to $1 trillion over the next three decades.

This is horrific in terms of the cost in the face of increased poverty. But perhaps worst of all, part of the Obama plan is to make nuclear weapons more precise, with smaller yields--which would make the unthinkable more likely: the actual use of these weapons of mass destruction.

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4. Open, Accountable and Ethical Government & Reclaiming Our Constitution and Our Liberties

From the platform: In Barack Obama's administration, we will open up the doors of democracy. We will use technology to make government more transparent, accountable and inclusive. Rather than obstruct people's use of the Freedom of Information Act, we will require that agencies conduct significant business in public and release all relevant information unless an agency reasonably foresees harm to a protected interest...

We support constitutional protections and judicial oversight on any surveillance program involving Americans. We will review the current administration's warrantless wiretapping program. We reject illegal wiretapping of American citizens, wherever they live.

The reality: ProPublica writes that according to NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, "the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance of Americans' international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking."

After getting caught red-handed expanding the "illegal wiretapping of American citizens" that the Democratic platform denounced when George Bush was the culprit, the Obama White House went after the whistle-blowers.

Edward Snowden remains in exile, with his passport provoked. The NSA surveillance apparatus that he unmasked continues to gather data generated by the communications not just of Americans but people around the globe.

Chelsea Manning languishes in a military prison with a 35-year sentence for the "crime" of providing government transparency"--by releasing what came to be known as the "Iraq War Logs" and the "Afghanistan War Logs," including the "Collateral Murder" video showing civilians and journalists being indiscriminately slaughtered in a Baghdad air assault.

The Obama administration hasn't been held accountable to its promise to "open the doors of democracy." Instead, it has slammed them shut on anyone who tried to open them.

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5. Umm...

Alright, finding five inspiring promises from the 2008 platform proved to be something of a trial. It was surprising how meager many of the platform pledges were on closer reading. And even then, the results of the half-promises after nearly two terms under Obama included a few progressive moves--but they were almost always accompanied by setbacks, major compromises or less-than-stellar outcomes.

On women's rights, the Democrats promised and delivered the Lilly Ledbetter Act to make it more possible for women to sue against workplace discrimination. But they failed to get the Paycheck Fairness Act passed, even while both houses of Congress were controlled by Democrats.

Women today earn on average 79 cents for every dollar a man makes, an increase of a few pennies from when the 2008 platform was written--but pretty much the trajectory it has been on since the late 1960s .

On immigration, the promises were notably vague considering the huge mega-marches of the past two years before the 2008 convention against Republican legislation to criminalize all 12 million undocumented people in the U.S. The platform offered nothing more specific than this: "We are committed to pursuing tough, practical, and humane immigration reform in the first year of the next administration."

Nothing of the sort was introduced in 2009, even though--to repeat--Democrats controlled Congress in the first two years of Obama's presidency. Instead, under Obama, federal immigration policy has been merely tough and practical--practical in expelling as many immigrants as possible, that is.

Proposals from Democrats and a handful of Republicans for "comprehensive immigration reform" combined stepped-up border patrol and enforcement with proposals for a highly complicated "path to citizenship," or at least legalized status for a minority of the undocumented. But the Democrats allowed the "reform" side of the combination, as compromised as it was, to be stripped away, leaving only the enforcement.

That's why Barack Obama, seen by supporters of immigrant rights as the obvious "lesser evil" in 2008, instead presided over more deportations than his "greater evil" Republican predecessor, George Bush.

Notably absent from the 2008 platform was any major promise to people of color or African Americans. Beyond a few platitudes--and noting that "Hispanics" and African Americans were hard hit by the housing crisis--the main civil rights promise was to "work to fully protect and enforce the fundamental Constitutional right of every American vote."

Ironically, and tragically, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act during Obama's time in the White House. While Obama wasn't responsible for that decision--his administration was on the other side of that court case--as Tavis Smiley observed, "Black folk, in the era of Obama, have lost ground in every major economic category.'

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WE COULD be accused of picking and choosing for this article--and that's exactly what we've done: We picked the platform statements that most reflected the spirit of "hope and change" that people felt as Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, and examined them to see how they held up in practice.

We could also look through that 2008 document and focus on some of the points where the Democrats delivered: They promised to escalate the war on Afghanistan, and they did. They promised to aggressively negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program, sanctions and the threat of force as the carrot and the stick. They provided U.S. police with more deadly "technology" to deploy in U.S. cities, and they defended Israel and kept of the steady flow of U.S. aid.

The 2008 platform was less progressive than the 2016 platform in many ways, but not all. For example, the 2016 platform no longer promises to halve poverty in 10 years, and it added the clarifying term "eventually" to the Democrats' supposed vision for a nuclear free world.

The usual Democratic explanation for the failure to achieve the worthy reform proposals in their 2008 platform is that they were prevented from doing so by the obstructionist Republicans. Yet Obama was elected in 2008 with what even ruling class commentators typically hostile to the Democratic Party recognized was a mandate. Neither the mandate nor control of both houses of Congress produced the kind of progress Obama supporters expected.

Yet now, the Democrats, led by Bernie Sanders, are asking us to vote for Hillary Clinton because she'll make a "wonderful president," in Sanders' words--and if you have any doubts, just look at "the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party" she agreed to.

We've heard that one before.

So much more is needed urgently to combat racism, climate change, poverty, inequality and war. It clearly won't come from any Democratic president or officeholder, or from the platform they pass at the party's convention--but from organizing in our workplaces, on our campuses and in our communities to put our demands first, not fake platitudes.

William Hartung, How to Arm a "Volatile" Planet

Posted by William Hartung at 7:45am, July 26, 2016

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176169/tomgram%3A_william_hartung%2C_how_to_arm_a_%22volatile%22_planet/#more

As is often the case, I opened the Monday newspaper curious to find out how the weekend had gone at the movies.  The headline read, “‘Ghostbusters’ Is No. 2 Behind ‘Secret Life of Pets.’”  That meant Universal Studios’ animated film had again been the big winner, taking in an estimated $50.6 million for a two-week domestic total of $203.2 million.  In the industry, it was feared that China, the world’s number two market and gaining fast, might not let another hit, Ghostbusters, be shown, given its paranormal themes.  Still, all in all, it had been an upbeat week for one of the two dominant American product lines that go boom in the night and also have a remarkable grip on their respective global markets.  The first of those -- think action films, superhero movies, and space operas -- comes out of Hollywood and, in multiplexes globally, one thing is guaranteed: you’re not going to get the next Avengers sequel or Fast and Furious 23 from Russia, France, or China. Not surprisingly, since Hollywood rakes in billions of dollars annually from the rest of the planet for entertaining us all, weekly news about its business successes and failures is a regular feature of our world.

And, oh yes, then there’s that other business, the one that actually makes things that go boom in the night.  I’m talking, of course, about the weapons trade.  As TomDispatch regular Bill Hartung, author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex, points out today, it has an almost monopolistic grip on its global market and, like Hollywood, regularly has cheery news to offer about the billions of dollars it pulls in from countries at war or fearing future conflicts.  In fact, for a business that -- bottom line -- kills people rather than simply thrilling them with bloody mayhem, it, too, has a remarkably upbeat sense of itself.

Take Thomas Kennedy, CEO of Raytheon, a major arms maker, presently cleaning up when, as Defense News reports, it comes to the "missile defense interceptor, as well as air-to-ground missiles and air-to-air combat missiles fired by fighter jets” that it’s selling across the Middle East (and in some cases in Asia, too).  The company is projecting a revenue rise of 3%-5% this year and, according to Defense One, “When investors visiting Raytheon’s factories ask ‘How’s business?’ Kennedy tends to respond like this: ‘Did you notice you couldn’t get a parking space?... ‘Where else can you find a factory in America that you can’t get a parking space?’”

So here’s the puzzle: two major industries with certain similarities grip their global markets in similarly overwhelming ways.  One is the focus of almost constant reportage and attention, the other largely avoids notice in our world.  Why is that?  Fortunately, TomDispatch can call on Hartung’s expertise when it comes to the remarkably little known “success” story of America’s weapons makers to offer the sort of picture of one of this country’s stellar industries that you won’t find anywhere else. Tom

There’s No Business Like the Arms Business

Weapons “R” Us (But You’d Never Know It)

By William D. Hartung

When American firms dominate a global market worth more than $70 billion a year, you’d expect to hear about it.  Not so with the global arms trade.  It’s good for one or two stories a year in the mainstream media, usually when the annual statistics on the state of the business come out.

It’s not that no one writes about aspects of the arms trade. There are occasional pieces that, for example, take note of the impact of U.S. weapons transfers, including cluster bombs, to Saudi Arabia, or of the disastrous dispensation of weaponry to U.S. allies in Syria, or of foreign sales of the costly, controversial F-35 combat aircraft.  And once in a while, if a foreign leader meets with the president, U.S. arms sales to his or her country might generate an article or two. But the sheer size of the American arms trade, the politics that drive it, the companies that profit from it, and its devastating global impacts are rarely discussed, much less analyzed in any depth.

So here’s a question that’s puzzled me for years (and I’m something of an arms wonk): Why do other major U.S. exports -- from Hollywood movies to Midwestern grain shipments to Boeing airliners -- garner regular coverage while trends in weapons exports remain in relative obscurity?  Are we ashamed of standing essentially alone as the world’s number one arms dealer, or is our Weapons “R” Us role such a commonplace that we take it for granted, like death or taxes?

The numbers should stagger anyone.  According to the latest figures available from the Congressional Research Service, the United States was credited with more than half the value of all global arms transfer agreements in 2014, the most recent year for which full statistics are available. At 14%, the world’s second largest supplier, Russia, lagged far behind.  Washington’s “leadership” in this field has never truly been challenged.  The U.S. share has fluctuated between one-third and one-half of the global market for the past two decades, peaking at an almost monopolistic 70% of all weapons sold in 2011.  And the gold rush continues. Vice Admiral Joe Rixey, who heads the Pentagon’s arms sales agency, euphemistically known as the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, estimates that arms deals facilitated by the Pentagon topped $46 billion in 2015, and are on track to hit $40 billion in 2016.

To be completely accurate, there is one group of people who pay remarkably close attention to these trends -- executives of the defense contractors that are cashing in on this growth market.  With the Pentagon and related agencies taking in “only” about $600 billion a year -- high by historical standards but tens of billions of dollars less than hoped for by the defense industry -- companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics have been looking to global markets as their major source of new revenue.

In a January 2015 investor call, for example, Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson was asked whether the Iran nuclear deal brokered by the Obama administration and five other powers might reduce tensions in the Middle East, undermining the company’s strategy of increasing its arms exports to the region.  She responded that continuing “volatility” in both the Middle East and Asia would make them “growth areas” for the foreseeable future.  In other words, no worries.  As long as the world stays at war or on the verge of it, Lockheed Martin’s profits won’t suffer -- and, of course, its products will help ensure that any such “volatility” will prove lethal indeed.

Under Hewson, Lockheed has set a goal of getting at least 25% of its revenues from weapons exports, and Boeing has done that company one better.  It’s seeking to make overseas arms sales 30% of its business.

Good News From the Middle East (If You’re an Arms Maker)

Arms deals are a way of life in Washington.  From the president on down, significant parts of the government are intent on ensuring that American arms will flood the global market and companies like Lockheed and Boeing will live the good life.  From the president on his trips abroad to visit allied world leaders to the secretaries of state and defense to the staffs of U.S. embassies, American officials regularly act as salespeople for the arms firms.  And the Pentagon is their enabler.  From brokering, facilitating, and literally banking the money from arms deals to transferring weapons to favored allies on the taxpayers' dime, it is in essence the world’s largest arms dealer. 

In a typical sale, the U.S. government is involved every step of the way.  The Pentagon often does assessments of an allied nation’s armed forces in order to tell them what they “need” -- and of course what they always need is billions of dollars in new U.S.-supplied equipment.  Then the Pentagon helps negotiate the terms of the deal, notifies Congress of its details, and collects the funds from the foreign buyer, which it then gives to the U.S. supplier in the form of a defense contract.  In most deals, the Pentagon is also the point of contact for maintenance and spare parts for any U.S.-supplied system. The bureaucracy that helps make all of this happen, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, is funded from a 3.5% surcharge on the deals it negotiates. This gives it all the more incentive to sell, sell, sell.

And the pressure for yet more of the same is always intense, in part because the weapons makers are careful to spread their production facilities to as many states and localities as possible.  In this way, they ensure that endless support for government promotion of major arms sales becomes part and parcel of domestic politics.

General Dynamics, for instance, has managed to keep its tank plants in Ohio and Michigan running through a combination of add-ons to the Army budget -- funds inserted into that budget by Congress even though the Pentagon didn’t request them -- and exports to Saudi Arabia.  Boeing is banking on a proposed deal to sell 40 F-18s to Kuwait to keep its St. Louis production line open, and is currently jousting with the Obama administration to get it to move more quickly on the deal.  Not surprisingly, members of Congress and local business leaders in such states become strong supporters of weapons exports.

Though seldom thought of this way, the U.S. political system is also a global arms distribution system of the first order.  In this context, the Obama administration has proven itself a good friend to arms exporting firms.  During President Obama’s first six years in office, Washington entered into agreements to sell more than $190 billion in weaponry worldwide -- more, that is, than any U.S. administration since World War II.  In addition, Team Obama has loosened restrictions on arms exports, making it possible to send abroad a whole new range of weapons and weapons components -- including Black Hawk and Huey helicopters and engines for C-17 transport planes -- with far less scrutiny than was previously required.

This has been good news for the industry, which had been pressing for such changes for decades with little success. But the weaker regulations also make it potentially easier for arms smugglers and human rights abusers to get their hands on U.S. arms. For example, 36 U.S. allies -- from Argentina and Bulgaria to Romania and Turkey -- will no longer need licenses from the State Department to import weapons and weapons parts from the United States.  This will make it far easier for smuggling networks to set up front companies in such countries and get U.S. arms and arms components that they can then pass on to third parties like Iran or China.  Already a common practice, it will only increase under the new regulations.

The degree to which the Obama administration has been willing to bend over backward to help weapons exporters was underscored at a 2013 hearing on those administration export “reforms.”  Tom Kelly, then the deputy assistant secretary of the State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, caught the spirit of the era when asked whether the administration was doing enough to promote American arms exports.  He responded:

“[We are] advocating on behalf of our companies and doing everything we can to make sure that these sales go through... and that is something we are doing every day, basically [on] every continent in the world... and we’re constantly thinking of how we can do better.”

One place where, with a helping hand from the Obama administration and the Pentagon, the arms industry has been doing a lot better of late is the Middle East.  Washington has brokered deals for more than $50 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia alone for everything from F-15 fighter aircraft and Apache attack helicopters to combat ships and missile defense systems.

The most damaging deals, if not the most lucrative, have been the sales of bombs and missiles to the Saudis for their brutal war in Yemen, where thousands of civilians have been killed and millions of people are going hungry.  Members of Congress like Michigan Representative John Conyers and Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy have pressed for legislation that would at least stem the flow of the most deadly of the weaponry being sent for use there, but they have yet to overcome the considerable clout of the Saudis in Washington (and, of course, that of the arms industry as well).

When it comes to the arms business, however, there’s no end to the good news from the Middle East.  Take the administration’s proposed new 10-year aid deal with Israel.  If enacted as currently planned, it would boost U.S. military assistance to that country by up to 25% -- to roughly $4 billion per year. At the same time, it would phase out a provision that had allowed Israel to spend one-quarter of Washington’s aid developing its own defense industry.  In other words, all that money, the full $4 billion in taxpayer dollars, will now flow directly into the coffers of companies like Lockheed Martin, which is in the midst of completing a multi-billion-dollar deal to sell the Israelis F-35s.

“Volatility” in Asia and Europe 

As Lockheed Martin’s Marillyn Hewson noted, however, the Middle East is hardly the only growth area for that firm or others like it.  The dispute between China and its neighbors over the control of the South China Sea (which is in many ways an incipient conflict over whether that country or the United States will control that part of the Pacific Ocean) has opened up new vistas when it comes to the sale of American warships and other military equipment to Washington’s East Asian allies.  The recent Hague court decision rejecting Chinese claims to those waters (and the Chinese rejection of it) is only likely to increase the pace of arms buying in the region.

At the same time, in the good-news-never-ends department, growing fears of North Korea’s nuclear program have stoked a demand for U.S.-supplied missile defense systems.  The South Koreans have, in fact, just agreed to deploy Lockheed Martin’s THAAD anti-missile system.  In addition, the Obama administration’s decision to end the longstanding embargo on U.S. arms sales to Vietnam is likely to open yet another significant market for U.S. firms. In the past two years alone, the U.S. has offered more than $15 billion worth of weaponry to allies in East Asia, with Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea accounting for the bulk of the sales.

In addition, the Obama administration has gone to great lengths to build a defense relationship with India, a development guaranteed to benefit U.S. arms exporters.  Last year, Washington and New Delhi signed a 10-year defense agreement that included pledges of future joint work on aircraft engines and aircraft carrier designs.  In these years, the U.S. has made significant inroads into the Indian arms market, which had traditionally been dominated by the Soviet Union and then Russia.  Recent deals include a $5.8 billion sale of Boeing C-17 transport aircraft and a $1.4 billion agreement to provide support services related to a planned purchase of Apache attack helicopters.

And don’t forget “volatile” Europe.  Great Britain’s recent Brexit vote introduced an uncertainty factor into American arms exports to that country. The United Kingdom has been by far the biggest purchaser of U.S. weapons in Europe of late, with more than $6 billion in deals struck over the past two years alone -- more, that is, than the U.S. has sold to all other European countries combined.

The British defense behemoth BAE is Lockheed Martin’s principal foreign partner on the F-35 combat aircraft, which at a projected cost of $1.4 trillion over its lifetime already qualifies as the most expensive weapons program in history.  If Brexit-driven austerity were to lead to a delay in, or the cancellation of, the F-35 deal (or any other major weapons shipments), it would be a blow to American arms makers.  But count on one thing: were there to be even a hint that this might happen to the F-35, lobbyists for BAE will mobilize to get the deal privileged status, whatever other budget cuts may be in the works.

On the bright side (if you happen to be a weapons maker), any British reductions will certainly be more than offset by opportunities in Eastern and Central Europe, where a new Cold War seems to be gaining traction.  Between 2014 and 2015, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, military spending increased by 13% in the region in response to the Russian intervention in Ukraine. The rise in Poland’s outlays, at 22%, was particularly steep.

Under the circumstances, it should be obvious that trends in the global arms trade are a major news story and should be dealt with as such in the country most responsible for putting more weapons of a more powerful nature into the hands of those living in “volatile” regions.  It’s a monster business (in every sense of the word) and certainly has far more dangerous consequences than licensing a Hollywood blockbuster or selling another Boeing airliner.

Historically, there have been rare occasions of public protest against unbridled arms trafficking, as with the backlash against “the merchants of death” after World War I, or the controversy over who armed Saddam Hussein that followed the 1991 Persian Gulf War.  Even now, small numbers of congressional representatives, including John Conyers, Chris Murphy, and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, continue to try to halt the sale of cluster munitions, bombs, and missiles to Saudi Arabia.

There is, however, unlikely to be a genuine public debate about the value of the arms business and Washington’s place in it if it isn’t even considered a subject worthy of more than an occasional media story.  In the meantime, the United States continues to hold onto the number one role in the global arms trade, the White House does its part, the Pentagon greases the wheels, and the dollars roll in to profit-hungry U.S. weapons contractors.

William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and a senior advisor to the Security Assistance Monitor. He is the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.