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The US Bombs Kids So Palmer Luckey Can Have Nice Things
War profiteers like Luckey are all the same. For them, more war means more money.
Mar 19, 2026
Last week, we watched a US-made Tomahawk missile murder more than 160+ Iranian school children. We watched in horror, helpless to stop the incoming massacres as the US and Israel carpet-bombed Iran, then Lebanon, displacing millions of people from their homes. The pure, unrelenting terror continues to unfold. We are shocked and devastated, but we are also enraged — because for every bomb the US and Israel drop, a bunch of men in cushy offices profit off all the death.
There is an urgent need to identify and address the burgeoning war profiteers that are leading the world headfirst into planetary destruction. War does not end in Venezuela or Iran. It will continue until all avenues are exhausted, until there are no resources left to plunder because they have destroyed everything.
I call your attention to Peter Thiel, founder of military tech company Palantir, who just last week visited with Japan’s prime minister last week and was dubbed “America’s shadow president” across Japanese media. I call your attention to Ethan Thornton, founder of Mach Industries, who is attempting to create dangerous hydrogen-powered weapons (and almost killed a coworker in the process). I call your attention to Rob Slaughter, cofounder of Defense Unicorns, whose company has “built the software backbone of the War Department” (and whose surname is rather apt). And I call your attention to Palmer Luckey, self-proclaimed “radical Zionist” and founder of Anduril, a military tech company that supplies the U.S. military with AI and autonomous weapons.
There are many more corporate executives selling weapons and making a killing off of killing. But today we are going to talk about Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, the Tony Stark wannabe who so very badly wants to believe he’s the good guy. Recently, after CODEPINK launched a petition calling him out for his crimes, he claimed that he’s actually saving lives.
This is how war profiteers have always tried to sell war to people. It’s for the greater good! If we don’t kill them, they will probably try to kill us at some much later date! As much as they want us to believe that their pre-emptive wars of aggression are necessary, the truth is we don’t need to security dilemma ourselves into functioning like soulless robots; we’re actually evolved humans who can participate in dialogue, the great human superpower. It’s not a hard conclusion to draw: murder is not the solution to a disagreement with your neighbor, just as systematic murder is not the solution to a disagreement with another nation.
Besides, we all know war isn’t about saving American lives. Instead, American lives are spent carelessly to accomplish elite agendas, and then veterans are discarded like broken utensils. Tell us, Luckey, whose lives were saved by slaughtering civilians in My Lai in 1968 or in Haditha in 2005? Whose lives were saved by taking out every hospital in Gaza? Whose lives were saved by bombing 160+ school children in Iran?
No, murder is not about saving lives, just as war is not about accomplishing everlasting peace. It’s about men in safe, cushy offices far away from the battlefield amassing as much wealth as possible before they have to join the rest of us as dirt in the ground.
You can tell our petition bothered Luckey, because a few minutes later, he tweeted this:
It’s certainly an odd argument to make — that Anduril should never have had the opportunity to exist. It’s almost a direct admission of guilt, if you think about it. A shrugging of responsibility for Anduril’s existence, as if Luckey didn’t build the company himself from the ground up. It’s the world’s fault for needing Anduril, right? He’s just another cog in the machinery of fate. Helpless, unable to withstand his destiny of building murder machines. It’s funny how these war profiteers want all the recognition for what they make until they start getting recognition for the consequences of what they make. Well, we should never have existed anyway!
Luckey also wonders why the media thinks he wants tech to be more involved in the military, as if those words haven’t repeatedly come from his own mouth. He’s been rather urgent about advocating for advanced military tech to counter Russia, China, and Iran, even going so far as to actively prepare for a “simultaneous conflict” by developing advanced, rapid-production military systems. He’s an especially big fan of war on China, and instated a “China 27” strategy, which states that Anduril won’t design and produce any new weapons that won’t be ready by 2027 — the date the War Department set on war with China.
Last year, Anduril secured a $99 million US Air Force contract for autonomous software and a ten-year, $642 million Marine Corps contract for counter-drone systems. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth visited Anduril’s headquarters, where he proclaimed: “We are rebuilding the Arsenal of Freedom.”
Anduril, now valued at nearly $31 billion, was named after the Lord of the Rings sword, “Flame of the West,” a fitting title for a tool of the imperial West’s perpetual exploitation and murder of innocents abroad. The company is also responsible for the “border protection system” of lasers and identification software, inspired by Trump’s dream for a border wall, and has released new wearable headsets that Luckey claims “turn soldiers into superheroes.”
Fact of the matter is, Luckey likes to think of himself as a type of superhero or Lord of the Rings character, bumbling through an adventure, taking down bad guys, and stacking up points. But in doing so, he’s treating reality as a sort of faraway game, entirely detached from human suffering. It’s not all that different from what the White House is doing—just check out this recent White House tweet, which compared the bombing of Iran to a Wii sports game.
War profiteers like Luckey are all the same. They exist in some fantastical bubble, getting high on the idea that they’re helping save-the-world, while the government takes their fresh-baked drones and missiles and sends them to schools, hospitals, and residential buildings to take out unsuspecting families, destroy infrastructure, and wreak widespread destruction. But the truth is — even if it’s deep-deep-down in the dark voids of their souls — Luckey and friends know exactly which part they’re playing and choose not to care.
What does Luckey do with his blood money other than enthusiastically participate in a “B-boys club” group chat (B as in billionaire)... Well, he has amassed quite the collection of vehicles, including a 1969 Ford Mustang, a Tesla Model S, a 2001 Honda Insight, a 1967 Disneyland Autopia car, a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, a 1985 ex-Marine Corps Humvee, a Mark V Special Operations Craft, two submarines, and multiple motorcycles, among many others. … I wonder if we converted USD to human lives, how many people had to die for Luckey to afford each vehicle?
It’s a simple equation: more war means more money for war profiteers. So it’s really no surprise Luckey is hellbent on war with China, which would make him billions and could afford him another few submarines for his imaginary underwater adventures. The U.S. has invested trillions of dollars into preparing for war on China ($3.4 trillion to be exact, a number larger than the total amount spent on 20 years of war in Afghanistan). Every incremental increase to the War Department budget is justified with the same reason: we need to counter China, we need to counter China, we need to counter China. China has become the ultimate war budget enhancer, and all the slippery politicians and war profiteers have taken advantage of it.
Unfortunately, war is the main driver of U.S. technological advancement. So instead of developing advanced technology to improve infrastructure, build high-speed railways, and raise the standard of living, the tech industry is creating headsets for soldiers to optimize killing during battle. They are making autonomous robot drones that pick their next targets according to data sets, rather than valuing human life. They are using AI to draft battle strategies and risking escalation to unforeseen, unredeemable heights.
Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, China… These nations are not the enemies of ordinary people in the U.S. Our enemies are internal: the war profiteers, the ruling class, the “B-boys club” members, and the military tech founders. It is the ruling elites who drive war, all for profit. And it is always the people who suffer. Even now, we suffer as all our taxpayer money is funneled into new contracts with companies like Anduril instead of supporting the health and well-being of the American people. And so overseas, children are murdered, so guys like Palmer Luckey can add to their rare car collections.
Instead of pointing at manufactured enemies overseas, we must confront all the war profiteers in the United States, driving us into more war. Their power rests solely on one thing: convincing us that they are the good guys, and that innocent people in Iran, Lebanon, Venezuela, China, and elsewhere are bad and deserving of death. Let’s make sure Palmer Luckey knows that we will never let him get away with profiting off murder.
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The Weapons Makers Who Fund the Iran War Cheerleaders on Your TV
After the American public soured on the Iraq War, many groups that pushed for the invasion tried to downplay their role in the debacle. Here we go again.
Mar 17, 2026
As the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran intensifies, Americans have shown little appetite for another war in the Middle East. Far fewer Americans support the war than in previous conflicts at this stage, including Iraq, Afghanistan, or Kosovo.
Washington think tanks, however, have been far more enthusiastic. They also happen to be funded by weapons contractors that stand to profit handsomely from the war.
For instance, many fellows employed by the Hudson Institute are supportive of strikes on Iran. As the Trump administration built up its military presence, Hudson Institute fellow Rebeccah Heinrichs went on Fox News and celebrated Trump’s initiative to “push the regime over” as a “major strategic opportunity for peace and stability in the Middle East.” After a week of strikes, Heinrichs celebrated the escalation of the military campaign. “We have a lot more of those kinds of munitions, and now I would suspect that we are just going to continue to destroy the production capabilities and any other storage facilities that they have deeply buried underground, so that’s good for the United States,” Heinrichs told Fox.
The Hudson Institute has received over $4 million from the defense industry since 2019, with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Atomics CEO Neal Blue among their largest donors. Those companies’ weaponry has been used extensively in Iran. Northrop Grumman manufactures the $2 billion B-2 stealth bombers that are used to strike Iran. Lockheed Martin manufactures a variety of aircrafts used in the attacks, as well as the $300 million THAAD radar system that was recently destroyed by Iran. General Atomics, for its part, produces the MQ-9 Reaper drones used in the campaign. RTX, the manufacturer of the Tomahawk missile that killed 168 girls at their elementary school in Minab, Iran, is also a major donor.
General (Ret.) Jack Keane, Chairman of the Institute for the Study of War, took to the airwaves to claim the US should "take Iran off the map." In a segment on Fox, Keane made the case against exiting the conflict prematurely over rising oil prices; "Are we saying we can't accept several weeks of oil prices being higher than what they should be to take Iran off the map as a predator in the Middle East for decades to come?" asked Keane. "I think we're much tougher than that frankly."
ISW, Keane’s think tank, has received funding from major Pentagon contractors General Dynamics and CACI, but recently delisted the names of both donors from the website. In response to a request for comment, Alexander Mitchell, Director of External Relations at ISW, said, “ISW does not share information about our supporters or their giving histories outside standard 990 reporting.” ISW does list several other corporate sponsors on its website.
The Atlantic Council, which accepts more funding from the defense industry than any other think tank, hired an Israeli national security insider in the lead-up to the war, who used his new perch to make the case for US attacks. Michael Rozenblat, who the Atlantic Council describes as a “visiting research fellow from the Israeli security establishment,” published an article titled “Six reasons why Trump should choose the military option in Iran” less than two weeks before the strikes, framing an attack as a “moral imperative.” Rozenblat concluded that “a decisive US-led coalition effort aimed at regime change may offer a more sustainable strategic outcome” in Iran.
Last year, the Atlantic Council published a report recommending that the US procure more THAAD and SM-3 missiles to deal with threats abroad, including Iran. The manufacturers of those missiles, RTX and Lockheed Martin, have given the Atlantic Council $850,000 and $700,000 respectively since 2019. Both systems have been used extensively for missile defense against Iran.
War has been good for those donors’ pocketbooks. As stock exchanges opened the week after the US-Israeli attack on Iran, the share price of weapons manufacturers RTX, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin soared.
On March 12, the senior director of the Atlantic Council Scowcroft Center Matthew Kroenig defended the military campaign on Iran during a debate with Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute, which publishes RS. “Removing the Islamic republic from the chessboard, or significantly weakening it for years or a decade I think stands to greatly improve regional and global security, and the lives of ordinary Iranians,” said Kroenig.
Many of the most outspoken voices pushing for regime change in Iran come from dark money think tanks, which reveal nothing at all about their donors. Around 40% of the US top think tanks fall into this category, according to the Quincy Institute’s newly updated Think Tank Funding Tracker.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a prominent dark money think tank, has been advising the US to topple the Iranian regime for years. Founded with a goal to “enhance Israel’s image in North America,” FDD played a critical role in pushing Trump to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.
On the day of the US-Israeli strikes, FDD CEO Mark Dubowitz and senior analyst Ben Cohen wrote in an op-ed that “the survival of this regime – a nuclear-seeking, terror-sponsoring, protest–crushing dictatorship – is far more dangerous than the risks that come with its collapse.” Dubowitz has been cheering on the regime change effort since, recently retweeting an AI-generated video from Mossad encouraging Iranians to work with Israeli intelligence in overthrowing the Islamic Republic. FDD’s experts are invited to testify to the House Foreign Affairs Committee more than almost any other think tank, second only to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) is another dark money think tank pushing for the military campaign on Iran. JINSA’s fellows include Benjamin Netanyahu’s former National Security Advisor, the former Commander of the Israeli Air Force, and Trump’s former Iran adviser, Elliott Abrams, as well as over a dozen retired US generals and admirals. In 2020, after the US assassinated Iranian military officer Qasem Soleimani, two JINSA scholars argued in the Washington Post that the United States “must keep up the attacks against Iranian assets in the region and join Israel in rolling back Iranian aggression,” with the goal of provoking a regime collapse.
When the military operation on Iran began, JINSA published an open letter signed by 75 retired generals and admirals in support of the war. Blaise Misztal, Vice President for Policy at JINSA, argued in an article titled “Iran is not Iraq” that fears of repeating the failures of Iraq are overblown.
In a recent appearance on Fox Business, JINSA strategic advisor Vice Admiral Robert Harward described the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as a “short-term problem” and argued that ending the war on Iran now would “only exacerbate” problems in the region.
Many other think tank experts have expressed support for the US pursuing a military campaign against Iran. Analysts from the Washington Institute, which was founded as a spin-off of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, have long pushed for Congress to pre-emptively authorize the use of military force against Iran.
The Middle East Forum, meanwhile, recently published an article pushing Congress to appropriate funds not just for missile stockpiles but also nation-building efforts in Iran. Gregg Roman, the Executive Director of the Middle East Forum, suggested the US should fund “transitional governance planning” including “constitution-drafting support, judicial reform expertise,” and “lustration frameworks that remove regime loyalists” in Iran.
The Atlantic Council, the Hudson Institute, FDD, JINSA, the Washington Institute, and the Middle East Forum did not respond to a request for comment.
After the American public soured on the Iraq War, many groups that pushed for the invasion, including FDD, tried to downplay their role in the debacle.If the US-Israel bombing campaign on Iran continues on its perilous trajectory, one can’t help but wonder whether these pro-war organizations will once again attempt to memoryhole their supporting role in America’s latest military misadventure.
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Do the Democrats Have the Guts to Outflank Trump on Defense Industry Looting?
The Democrats could push Trump—or go around him to make better inroads with working people—but will they dare to take that leap? One would hope so, but don’t hold your breath.
Jan 14, 2026
Trump has decided that the government should not give money to defense contractors who then reroute our tax dollars via stock buybacks to stockholders and executives.
A stock buyback, for those unfamiliar, is when a corporation repurchases its own shares, thus boosting the share’s price, a legalized form of stock manipulation. CEOs, who are paid mostly in stock incentives, and large investors directly benefit from stock buybacks, and unlike with dividends, don’t have to pay taxes until they sell their shares.
In the weapons industry, this isn’t news. Studies show that defense contractors spent three times more on dividends and stock buybacks than on capital investments needed to fulfill their contracts over the last decade. In Europe, it was the other way around with defense companies spending twice as much on capital investments compared to dividends. (They don’t do stock buybacks.)
The New York Times cited a Department of Defense study during the Biden administration that “found that top US defense contractors spent more on returning cash to shareholders in the form of dividends and stock buybacks between 2010 and 2019 compared to the previous decades, while spending on research and new or upgraded factories had declined.”
You’ve got to wonder why the Biden administration didn’t try to stop this scam. Maybe it feared looking anti-military. Or maybe it thought such an action would be too upsetting to their Wall Street donors who feast on stock buybacks?
Now we have Trump doing what the Democrats should have done long ago, announcing he will stop buybacks and cap executive salaries at profligate defense contractors:
- His Executive Order directs the Secretary of War to take steps to ensure that future contracts prohibit stock buybacks and corporate distributions during periods of underperformance, non-compliance, insufficient prioritization or investment, or insufficient production speed.
- The Secretary shall further take steps to ensure that future contracts permit the Secretary to, upon determining that a contractor is experiencing such issues, cap executive base salaries at current levels (with inflation adjustments permitted) while scrutinizing executive incentives to ensure they are directly, fairly, and tightly tied to prioritizing the needs of the warfighter.
How about Preventing Mass Layoffs?
If the Democrats wanted to show more concern for working people they would jump all over this executive order and push legislation to expand it to include a prohibition of compulsory layoffs at all defense contractors. If a contractor wants to change staffing levels, they should offer voluntary financial buyout packages. No one should be forced to leave.
This is an easy case to make. Why should taxpayers give money to corporations that then lay off taxpayers so that they can shovel more and more of our tax dollars to the wealthy? If the problem is that these defense contractors fail to deliver products on time they need more workers, not fewer.
Instead of wallowing in the Epstein files, the Democrats should declare again and again that mass layoffs are the weapon of choice to enrich executives and Wall Street. Fight for the damn jobs!
In April, the Labor Institute, in cooperation with the Center for Working Class Politics, produced a YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In the survey, we asked voters to evaluate a state ballot initiative we invented that read:
“Corporations with more than 500 employees that receive taxpayer-funded federal contracts are prohibited from conducting involuntary layoffs of American workers. All layoffs during the life of a taxpayer-funded contract must be voluntary, based on employer financial incentives. No one shall be forced to leave.”
Overall, 42 percent supported the proposal, while 26 percent opposed it and 32 percent were not sure. The no-layoff proposal was brand new, unheard of by anyone before the survey was administered, yet it tied for fifth in popularity among 25 economic proposals. Furthermore, we reported that:
“Respondents from key demographic groups that Democrats have struggled to reach in recent electoral cycles showed robust support for the policy, which was tied for fifth among respondents without a four-year college degree and those whose family income was less than $50,000 per year, and tied for sixth among respondents who reported a declining standard of living and those who live in rural areas and small towns.”
This no-layoffs policy would be a big winner for the Democrats leading up to the mid-terms. But it would not be a winner for the financial backers of the party who cherish their stock buybacks.
So here we are again. Trump outflanking the Democrats on a populist economic proposal, like cancelling NAFTA, one that the Democrats failed to address while in power. In this case, the Democrats could push Trump even further by tying job stability to federal defense contracts, something that working people would greatly value but would be upsetting to Wall Street.
The Democrats could push Trump, but will they dare to take that leap? One would hope so, but don’t hold your breath.
The failure to rigorously defend working people over the last forty years against needless mass layoffs may be why so many voters right now are willing to consider a new political party, independent of the two billionaire parties.
Much more on that to come.
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Fashion Death: The War Machine Now Has Merch
Celebrating weapons makers, even with a nod and a wink, serves to normalize the U.S. role as the world’s premier arms producer while ignoring the consequences of that status.
Jul 17, 2025
I wrote a book about Lockheed Martin — the world’s largest arms-making conglomerate. But even I was surprised to learn that for a number of years now, they have also been involved in the fashion industry.
The revelation came in a recent New York Times piece on Kodak, which has had a minor resurgence, not by selling its own products, but by selling its name for use on a range of consumer products, produced by other firms, from luggage to eyewear to hoodies and t-shirts.
Deeper into the article it was mentioned in passing that Lockheed Martin had been doing the same. It linked to another article that noted that Lockheed Martin-branded cargo pants and hoodies have been a hit in South Korea since they were introduced a few years back. Brisk sales are continuing, with the Lockheed brand adorning streetwear with slogans like “Ensuring those we serve always stay ahead of ready.” One blue t-shirt dons the outline of an F-35 on the back, emblazoned with the motto “The F-35 strengthens national security, enhances global partnerships and powers economic growth.” It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but at least it’s free advertising.
Lockheed Martin’s efforts at reputation laundering come at a moment when many arms industry leaders are vocally supporting — even applauding — armed violence.
Not to be outdone, emerging tech firms are selling limited edition fashion lines of their own. Palantir recently dropped a line of hats and tees that quickly sold out. Eliano Younes, Head of Strategic Engagement for Palantir, has noted that when they re-launched the Palantir shop that “the site almost crashed within four minutes.” And Anduril has partnered with Reyn Spooner to launch a limited drop of Hawaiian shirts — a favorite uniform of company founder Palmer Luckey.
Not everyone welcomes the entry of weapons makers into the fashion world. A critic of Lockheed’s apparel line who goes by the name of Opal noted, “They stopped killing people for just a minute to help them kill those looks . . . The people who made these decisions are either so out of touch or like unbelievably acutely aware of what’s going on, and I can’t really tell the difference.”
As Opal fears, the marriage of fashion and weapons makers may be a sign of the times, as shoppers welcome the entrance of arms makers into the consumer sector rather than seeing their foray into fashion as an exercise in poor taste. This is probably because military firms and the weapons they produce are so deeply embedded in our culture that many people view the companies as purveyors of neat technology while ignoring the devastating consequences that occur when those weapons are actually used.
Lockheed Martin’s efforts at reputation laundering come at a moment when many arms industry leaders are vocally supporting — even applauding — armed violence. Prominent Silicon Valley military tech executives like Luckey and Palantir CEO Alex Karp, have no compunction about glorifying war while their companies are paid handsome sums to build the tools needed to carry it out. Luckey, the 32-year old head of the military tech firm Anduril, asserts that “Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited by enacting violence in pursuit of good aims.” He didn’t discuss who gets to decide what “good aims” are, or why being “excited” about killing fellow human beings could ever be a good thing.
And Karp held his company’s board meeting in Israel at the height of the Gaza war to cheer on Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter. At the time of the meeting, the company’s Executive VP Josh Harris announced that “Both parties have mutually agreed to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions. This strategic partnership aims to significantly aid the Israeli Ministry of Defense in addressing the current situation.”
These attitudes contrast with the efforts of old school arms company leaders like former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine, who was a master at burnishing the image of his company while downplaying its role as a primary producer of weapons at war.
Augustine led by personal example, working closely with the Boy Scouts and the Red Cross, championing science education, and speaking regularly of the need for corporate ethics, which he seemed to equate mostly with acts of charity by company employees, not with grappling with moral questions about how his company’s weapons were being used.
To a lesser degree, Augustine’s approach continues to this day. Company press releases describe Lockheed Martin as a firm that is “driving innovation and advancing scientific discovery.” The company’s image-building efforts include support for scholarships in STEM education, funding programs to build and upgrade facilities serving veterans, supporting food banks and disaster response programs, and more. There’s nothing wrong with helping fund a good cause, but it shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the company’s other activities.
The weapons produced by Lockheed Martin have fueled the war in Gaza, and they were integral to Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen, an effort that included bombing funerals, a school bus, hospitals, civilian markets and water treatment plants in Yemen, in a war that cost nearly 400,000 lives through the direct and indirect means, from indiscriminate bombing the the enforcement of a blockade the hindered imports of food and medical supplies.
On the rare occasions that arms industry executives are asked about the human impacts of their products, they usually say they are only doing what the government allows. They fail to mention that they spend large sums of money and effort trying to shape government policy, making it easier to rush weapons to foreign clients without adequate consideration of their possible uses in aggressive wars or systematic repression.
Given all of this, Lockheed Martin’s endorsement of a line of street clothing seems like a relatively harmless side show. But celebrating weapons makers, even with a nod and a wink, serves to normalize the U.S. role as the world’s premier arms producer while ignoring the consequences of that status.
America needs to be able to defend itself and its allies, but celebrating war and preparations for war is not the way to do it. We need more reflection and less celebration. And we need to call weapons makers what they are, not welcome the use of their names as marketing tools designed to sell consumer products.
The real question as we try to dig ourselves out of a period of devastating wars and increasing global tension is whether we need huge weapons firms like Lockheed Martin at all, or if there is a more efficient, humane way to provide for the common defense, less focused on profit and PR and more focused on developing the tools actually needed to carry out a more rational, restrained defense strategy.
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Missouri Puts Profits Over People's Lives With New Israeli Chemical Limited Facility
A new ICL facility would further establish St. Louis as a hub of militarization and an exporter of global death and destruction while threatening the health and well-being of residents.
May 08, 2025
Early this year, as snow froze into sheets of solid ice, covering the ground for weeks, almost 20% of St. Louis Public School students were unhoused. Meanwhile, in warm town halls, former city Mayor Tishaura Jones praised a proposed new hazardous chemical facility, displaying the city's economic priorities.
St. Louis's northside has long been subjected to the environmental effects of militarization, from the radiation secretly sprayed on residents of Pruitt Igoe and Northside communities in the 1950s, to the dumped cancer-causing Manhattan Project radioactive waste that poisoned Coldwater Creek. A proposed new Israeli Chemical Limited (ICL) facility in north St. Louis would not only be another colonial imposition, but it also poses disastrous environmental risks for the entire state.
A new ICL facility would further establish St. Louis as a hub of militarization and an exporter of global death and destruction. In St. Charles, Boeing has built more than 500,000 Joint Direct Attack Munition guidance kits, known as JDAMS. An Amnesty International report tied these to attacks on Palestinian civilian homes, families, and children, making our region complicit in war crimes. In addition to hosting the explosives weapons manufacturer Boeing, Missouri is home to Monsanto (now Bayer), which produced Agent Orange.
Why does a foreign chemical company with almost $7 billion in earnings need so much funding from our local and federal government at the expense of our residents?
What's lesser known is that Monsanto is responsible for white phosphorus production in a supply chain trifecta with ICL and Pine Bluffs Arsenal. White phosphorus is a horrific incendiary weapon that heats up to 1,400°F, and international law bans its use against civilians. From 2020 to 2023, the U.S. Department of Defense ordered and paid ICL for over 180,000 lbs of white phosphorus, shipped from their South City Carondelet location to Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas. White phosphorus artillery shells with Pine Bluff Arsenal codes were identified in Lebanon and Gaza after the Israel Defense Forces unlawfully used them over residential homes and refugee camps, according to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Another ICL facility, combined with the new National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency that analyzes drone footage to direct U.S.military attacks, would put North St. Louis squarely on the map for military retaliation from any country seeking to strike back against U.S. global interventionism.
Within a mile of the Carondelet ICL site, the Environmental Protection Agency has identified unsafe levels of cancer-risking air toxins, hazardous waste, and wastewater discharge. The new facility would be built within five miles of intake towers and open-air sedimentation ponds that provide drinking water to St. Louis. An explosion or leak could destroy the city's water supply and harm eastern Missouri towns along the Mississippi. ICL has committed multiple Environmental and Workplace Safety violations, including violating the Clean Air Act at its South City facility. In 2023, it was declared the worst environmental offender by Israel's own Environmental Protection Ministry after the 2017 Ashalim Creek disaster, and were fined $33 million.
ICL claims the new North City site is a safe and green facility for manufacturing lithium iron phosphate for electric vehicles; however, lithium manufacturing is hardly a green or safe process. Lithium and phosphorus mining require enormous amounts of freshwater—a protected resource—resulting in poisoned ecosystems and a limited water supply for residents and wildlife in the local communities where they are sourced.
In October 2024, a lithium battery plant in Fredericktown, Missouri, burst into flames, forcing residents to evacuate and killing thousands of fish in nearby rivers. The company had claimed to have one of the most sophisticated automated fire suppression systems in the world, yet it still caused a fire whose aftermath continues to affect residents today, with comparisons being drawn to East Palestine, Ohio. Meanwhile, in January, over 1,000 people in California had to evacuate due to a massive fire at a lithium facility, the fourth fire there since 2019. Despite ICL claiming that the new site will use a "safer" form of lithium processing, it's clear that lithium facilities are not as safe as profit-driven corporations claim them to be.
Missouri leaders repeatedly prioritize corporate profits over people via tax abatements. ICL is receiving $197 million from the federal government. The city is forgiving a $500,000 loan to troubled investors Green Street to sell the land to ICL and is proposing a 90% tax abatement in personal property taxes for ICL, plus 15 years of real estate tax abatements. This is a troubling regional trend, considering that in 2023, St. Louis County approved $155 million in tax breaks to expand Boeing, also giving them a 50% cut in real estate and personal property taxes over 10 years.
Corporate tax breaks in the city have cost minority students in St. Louis Public Schools $260 million in a region where 30% of children are food insecure. Over 2,000 people in St. Louis city are homeless. Enough babies die each year in St Louis to fill 15 kindergarten classrooms. Black babies are three times more likely to die than white babies before their first birthday, and Black women are 2.4 times more likely to die during pregnancy. Spending public funds on corporate tax breaks instead of directing them toward food, housing, and life-saving medical care for Black women and babies is inexcusable. Why does a foreign chemical company with almost $7 billion in earnings need so much funding from our local and federal government at the expense of our residents?
Officials cite "job creation" as a major reason to expand ICL. Still, the new facility is only expected to create 150 jobs, and there is no evidence that these jobs will be given to people in the community where it is being built. Investing in Black and minority businesses would lead to actual self-sustaining economic development.
Despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government, local tax breaks, the backing of former Gov. Mike Parson, and approval from city committees, the facility's opening is not a done deal. The St. Louis City Board of Alders could still intervene. Stopping a facility with this much federal and international backing would require massive pushback from Missourians. Residents deserve more information and input in this process, especially considering the city's resistance to hearing public comments. Notably, when locals submitted a Sunshine request for the ICL permit in March, it was so heavily redacted that it was unreadable.
This facility would turn local Black neighborhoods into environmental and military sacrifice zones, and our response to city, state, and federal leaders should be a definitive and resounding No!
CODEPINK Missouri has a petition to stop the building of the ICL facility in St. Louis.
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GOP Unveils Plan to Give $150 Billion More to Pentagon
"Any additional money pumped into this system is likely to be wasted," said one analyst. "The only beneficiaries will be weapons contractors."
Apr 28, 2025
Congressional Republicans on Sunday released legislation that would pump an additional $150 billion into the Pentagon—a morass of waste and profiteering—over the next decade as part of a sweeping reconciliation package that's also expected to include deep cuts to Medicaid and tax breaks for the wealthy.
The House Armed Services Committee, a major target of weapons industry lobbying, unveiled the plan for what it called "a historic investment of $150 billion to restore America's military capabilities and strengthen our national defense." The panel said the legislation was developed "in close conjunction" with Senate Republicans and President Donald Trump, who is separately pursuing a $1 trillion U.S. military budget for the next fiscal year.
The legislation would direct the new Pentagon funding toward a number of initiatives backed by the president, including a "Golden Dome" missile defense system that experts have called a massive boondoggle that could benefit Elon Musk.
The bill, which is scheduled for a committee markup on Tuesday, also includes $4.5 billion to speed production of the B-21 stealth bomber, a Northrop Grumman-made aircraft capable of delivering nuclear weapons.
William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said Sunday that the GOP's proposed Pentagon spending increase is "a glaring example of misplaced priorities."
"This is no time to throw more money at a weapons manufacturing base that is already maxed out," said Hartung. "Any additional money pumped into this system is likely to be wasted. The only beneficiaries will be weapons contractors, who will be glad to accept the new funds whether they can use them effectively or not."
"Given that the Pentagon and its contractor network are having a hard time spending existing funds well," Hartung added, "Congress should think twice before sending more taxpayer money their way."
The Republican push for additional Pentagon funding comes as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is facing calls to resign for sharing plans for a U.S. military attack on Yemen in at least two private group chats.
Earlier this month, as Common Dreams reported, Hegseth endorsed Trump's push for a $1 trillion U.S. military budget, which would mark the highest level of spending since the Second World War.
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L3Harris: Convert to Peace Work or We Will Shut You Down
From our position in the imperial core, with war profiteers as our neighbors, it is our duty to do everything in our power to end the genocide and occupation.
Mar 26, 2025
On March 19, 2025, five members of Demilitarize Western Massachusetts were arrested for occupying the public lobby of the L3Harris plant in Northampton, Massachusetts, and serving a “people’s warrant” against CEO Chris Kubasik for perpetrating, and profiting from, the genocide in Gaza. As they read a statement noting that L3Harris weapons shipments violate the U.S. Leahy Law and related laws, they threw fake money splotched with red paint on the floor of the L3 lobby.
Their--and our--demand is simple: L3Harris, convert to peace work or shut down!
Like all weapons manufacturers, L3Harris profits from militarism, genocide, and occupation. Incongruously nestled in the luscious green ecology of the Connecticut River Valley, the L3Harris Northampton plant makes submarine periscopes and optical targeting sights for naval vessels. The plant is merely one node in L3Harris’ global weapons empire reaping $19.4 billion in profits in 2023 alone, making it the world’s 12th largest weapons manufacturer.
By allowing L3Harris to operate in our communities, we are all complicit in genocide, occupation, and militarism.
For decades, L3Harris has supplied weapons systems and components used by the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF, commonly known as the IDF) in Palestine. For example, L3 Combat Propulsion Systems, L3Harris’ former subsidiary, manufactured the engine of the Merkava IV, used by the IOF in its 2006 invasion of Lebanon and the 2012, 2014, and 2021 assaults on Gaza. L3Harris also manufactures components for multiple weapons systems used by the IOF in Gaza, including Boeing’s JDAM (guided bomb) kits, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 warplane, Northrop Grumman’s Sa’ar 5 warships, and ThyssenKrupp’s Sa’ar 6 warships. L3Harris’ webs of violence extend worldwide. In addition to supplying surveillance technology used at the Qalandia, Bethlehem, and Sha’ar Efraim checkpoints in the occupied West Bank, L3Harris manufactures surveillance equipment used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security against immigrants in occupied Turtle Island.
The Demilitarize Western Massachusetts action on March 19, 2025 came 17 months into the Zionist entity’s genocidal assault on Gaza, 75 years after the mass dispossession of Palestinians known as the Nakba, and after nearly a century of the settler-colonial occupation of Palestine. The action came two days after the Zionist entity’s resumption of airstrikes on March 17, which killed over 400 Gazans in a single night, two weeks after the Zionist entity cut off all humanitarian aid to Gaza, and during the largest forced displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967.
The occupation’s relentless pursuit of annihilation, trauma and maiming, ecocide and scholasticide is unquantifiable. The numbers we recite to tally this genocide--186,000 direct and indirect deaths, 110,000 injured, 1.9 million displaced, 217 journalists and over 1,000 doctors murdered, 85% of schools bombed, healthcare infrastructure obliterated, and over 85,000 tons of bombs dropped—fail to adequately describe the existential and ongoing horrors of occupation and settler-colonial violence in Gaza. As Palestinian poet and organizer Mohammed El-Kurd writes, “Not a corner of our geography is spared, not a generation.”
Yet, occupation and violence have been immensely profitable for L3Harris, revealing capitalism’s grotesque and parasitic capacity to reap value from death and destruction. Like other weapons manufacturers, L3Harris has been the target of an ongoing global campaign for demilitarization and an end to war profiteering. In the past year and a half, Demilitarize Western Mass blockaded the entrance to L3 in October, 2023 and again in June, 2024, demanding that L3 stop arming the genocide. In Brighton, England, Stop L3Harris successfully organized to prevent the weapons manufacturer from expanding; The struggle to permanently shutter the factory is ongoing. Over the past two years, L3Harris factories across Canada have been repeatedly blockaded. These and similar actions follow the 2023 call from Workers in Palestine to “intervene and disrupt the flow of arms that sustain genocide.”
For more than a decade, members of Demilitarize Western Mass have held weekly vigils and street protests and blockades of the Northampton plant’s entrances, imploring L3Harris to convert to life-affirming, rather than life-destroying, work.
By allowing L3Harris to operate in our communities, we are all complicit in genocide, occupation, and militarism. From our position in the imperial core, with war profiteers as our neighbors, it is our duty to do everything in our power to end the genocide and occupation. We hope that this direct action at L3Harris inspires others. As the Secretariat of Student Frameworks in Gaza urged in their March 21 statement, “This must not be a moment of resignation—it must be one of escalation!”
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What the Movement for Divestment Misses
Yes, schools and other institutions should divest from companies involved in war crimes or fueling the climate crisis. But individuals can also divest. Here's how.
Jul 08, 2024
On Sunday, May 26—as graduating students at my school, Wesleyan University, tossed their caps into the air—bombs rained down on a tent camp for displaced Palestinians in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, killing 45 people, including a number of women and children. The weapons that killed them, GBU-39 bombs, were made by Boeing and supplied by the U.S.
"Many of the dead bodies were severely burned, had amputated limbs, and were torn to pieces," according to a local physician. In addition, the bomb blasts and ensuing fires wounded another 249 people.
The next day, Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the bombing a "tragic accident," but by Tuesday, Israeli shelling and airstrikes killed another 37 Palestinians in the area, most of them sheltering in tents. "We will enter Rafah because we have no other choice," Mr. Netanyahu had warned earlier, in his campaign to defeat Hamas after last year's heinous October 7 attack on Israel.
In American terms, this concentration of explosive force would be like dropping five Hiroshima-size bombs over a land mass one quarter the area of Oklahoma City, with triple its population.
It is this mounting civilian death toll—carried out with U.S. weapons—that spurred students to protest and set up encampments in the spring on nearly 140 college campuses, including Wesleyan. Although each encampment was different, student protesters were largely united in calling on their school to divest any holdings in companies supporting the war. The divestment they were calling for was strictly institutional, but as I will explain later, it's also possible for individuals to carry out acts of divestment on their own.
In the first three months of the war alone, Israel dropped 45,000 bombs on Gaza, the majority of which were designed or manufactured by the United States. Perhaps the most controversial of these weapons is the 2,000-pound "bunker busting" Mark-84 bomb, which has a lethality area equivalent to 58 soccer fields. In the first month of the war, Israel dropped more than 500 Mark-84 bombs, often in densely populated areas, according to a CNN analysis (and these 500 bombs, made by General Dynamics, are only a small fraction of at least 5,000 that the U.S. sent to Israel after the Hamas attack).
As described in a United Nations Human Rights Council report, the explosive blast from a Mark-84 bomb "can rupture lungs, burst sinus cavities, and tear off limbs hundreds of feet from the blast site, according to trauma physicians. When it hits, the [bomb] generates an 8,500-degree fireball, gouges a 20-foot crater as it displaces 10,000 pounds of dirt and rock and generates enough wind to knock down walls blocks away and hurl metal fragments a mile or more."
All told, the explosive force of munitions Israel has used on Gaza since October 7 is estimated to be 75 kilotons—five times larger than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In the case of Gaza, though, its 141 square-mile territory is less than half the size of Hiroshima. In American terms, this concentration of explosive force would be like dropping five Hiroshima-size bombs over a land mass one quarter the area of Oklahoma City, with triple its population.
One of the most catastrophic results of this bombing is that roughly 1 out of every 133 Palestinian children in Gaza has now been killed—a number which, when scaled to match the U.S. population, would translate into the deaths of more than half a million American children.
It is hard to imagine the bitterness and hatred that such a death toll would generate in the United States, yet only three days into the war, Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Daniel Hagari publicly acknowledged that Israel's bombing campaign was "focused on what causes maximum damage"—not on the accuracy of where bombs land or the need to minimize collateral damage.
In keeping with that focus, nearly half of all bombs Israel used in Gaza during the first two months of war were unguided, and even U.S. President Joe Biden warned that Israel risked losing international support due to its "indiscriminate bombing."
Calls for Divestment
Wesleyan student protesters began sleeping in tents on April 28, and their encampment ultimately grew to more than 100 tents by the time it disbanded on May 20. The tent community was peaceful and advanced a set of demands, the foremost of which was that the university administration disclose its financial investments and then divest from companies and institutions which are supporting or profiting from the war and occupation of Palestinian territory.
As someone with Israeli family members, it pains me to say that I agree with the call for divestment. My agreement is not only because of the profound loss of life on both sides of the war, but for three additional reasons.
(1) Israeli leaders are violating international humanitarian law. Put simply, it's illegal to starve civilians or willfully impede relief supplies as a method of war. Nonetheless, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu announced on October 18 that "we will not allow humanitarian assistance in the form of food and medicines from our territory to the Gaza Strip." As a result of that policy, "full-blown famine" hit Northern Gaza by May, according to the executive director of the U.N. World Food Program. Even worse, the program predicts that if the war continues, more than 1 million people (half the population of Gaza) will face life-threatening levels of starvation by mid-July.
Here is what Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court says about starving civilians and impeding relief efforts:
For the purpose of this Statute, "war crimes"... [includes] Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies.
To be sure, one could argue that Mr. Netanyahu's statement doesn't accurately represent the Israeli government's official position, but several other top leaders have also publicly called for withholding food and humanitarian relief. For instance, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on October 9: "I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed... We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly."
Likewise, on October 12 Energy Minister Israel Katz posted this statement on social media: "No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened, and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home."
And National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has gone on record as saying that it would be a "grave mistake" for the Israeli government to allow "the transfer of humanitarian aid" into Gaza unless Hamas frees Israeli hostages.
There's a relatively quick and simple step that individual citizens can take, not as a substitute for institutional divestment, but as a complement to it. They can make sure their own financial holdings are divested.
In other words, the starvation of civilians and suspension of humanitarian aid is explicit, sustained, and willful. Even Israel's closest military ally and defender, the United States, issued a report on May 10 concluding that Israel has "contributed significantly to a lack of sustained and predictable delivery of needed assistance" and likely violated international humanitarian law (for more on that report, and claims by a former U.S. State Department official that it understated violations of international law, see coverage in The Guardian and PBS NewsHour).
Along similar lines, many Americans believe that laws have been broken. A national poll of Americans by The Economist/YouGov in May asked the following question: "Do you think Israel has violated any international laws in Gaza?" Only 28% of respondents answered, "No."
Indeed, on May 20, the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor requested arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, charging them with war crimes and crimes against humanity, and citing violations of Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Rome Statute. (The prosecutor also sought to arrest three Hamas leaders for a list of crimes that included rape, torture, and kidnapping.)
In addition, the ICC appointed an independent Panel of Experts in International Law to render an opinion on whether there were "reasonable grounds" to believe that crimes had been committed. In its report, the panel unanimously concluded:
[T]here are reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant formed a common plan, together with others, to jointly perpetrate the crime of using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. The Panel has concluded that the acts through which this war crime was committed include... cutting off supplies of electricity and water, and severely restricting food, medicine, and fuel supplies.
Although President Biden called the ICC prosecutor's charges "outrageous," the next day a report documented that Israeli soldiers and police officers were tipping off far-right activists about the location of aid trucks delivering vital supplies to Gaza, colluding with vigilantes to block the trucks from reaching their destination. Then, on June 12, a commission established by the U.N. Human Rights Council released a finding that "Israel has committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, and violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law."
(2) U.S. taxpayers are funding Israel's activities in Gaza. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has been the world's largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, totaling more than $300 billion in American taxpayer money, adjusted for inflation. Moreover, military aid to Israel shows no sign of slowing down. Between 2019 and 2023, nearly 70% of Israeli arms imports came from the U.S., and since the Israel-Hamas war began last year, the U.S. has supplied Israel with weapons via more than 100 arms transfers.
Even after the U.S. State Department released its May 10 report concluding that Israel was likely committing crimes, the U.S. has continued to underwrite Israel's actions in Gaza with $12.5 billion in military aid during fiscal year 2024—the second-highest level of U.S. military aid ever provided to Israel.
In a very real sense, then, Israel's war in the Middle East has become America's war—a joint project, as reflected in the results of a national poll conducted in April. When Americans were asked whether they thought the U.S. was at war in the Middle East, 56% said either yes or they weren't sure.
By supplying most of the bombs dropped in Gaza while knowing that humanitarian assistance is being withheld, the U.S. is not only morally culpable—it is breaking federal law. Providing military aid to Israel under such circumstances violates Section 620I of the 1961 U.S. Foreign Assistance Act, which bans foreign aid to any country that "prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance."
On March 11, eight U.S. senators sent a letter to President Biden raising precisely this concern, and on March 27, six additional members of Congress sent a similar letter reiterating the point:
It is apparent that the Netanyahu government is repeatedly interfering in U.S. humanitarian operations in direct violation of the Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act—Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961... We [are] imploring you to enforce U.S. law with the Netanyahu government.
Providing Israel with weapons used in the commission of war crimes also violates Article Seven of the Arms Trade Treaty, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly, ratified by 113 states, signed by 28 others (including the U.S. and Israel), and supported by several Nobel Peace Prize recipients, notable among them Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.
Nor is the problem limited to the 2,000-pound bombs made by the United States. On June 6, Israel killed at least 40 people—including women and children—with American-made GBU-39 small diameter bombs in an attack on a school where Palestinians were sheltering. One day later, the U.N. publicly announced that it was adding the Israel Defense Forces (as well as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad) to a global list of offenders that violate the rights of children. Because the United States is still supplying Israel with lethal weapons while being aware of how the weapons are being used, many people around the world regard the U.S. as complicit.
(3) Divestment can promote political change and moral alignment. Divestment movements have been around since at least 1783, when Quakers urged members of their community to divest their holdings from the slave trade. As explained by sociology professor David S. Meyer:
[T]he idea wasn't to financially cripple the slave trade. The idea was to get their [own] conduct in line with their beliefs so they could advocate more effectively, sort of a strike against hypocrisy.
Consistent with this explanation, modern-day divestment campaigns rarely have a major financial effect on the targeted countries or businesses, but they can raise public awareness about an issue, signal its urgency, and generate political action. One such political campaign was the global movement to divest from South Africa, which is widely credited as having hastened the end of apartheid in that country and provided a model for the movement to divest from Israel.
When I asked Wesleyan student protesters why they were calling for divestment, some said that they hoped it would help publicize the plight of Palestinians and contribute to political change. Others spoke of moral alignment, saying that they didn't want Wesleyan to fund or support war crimes. And still others felt that schools should not profit from war, arms sales, or the death of civilians. As climate activist Bill McKibben famously said when explaining the logic behind divesting from fossil fuel companies, "If it is wrong to wreck the climate, then it is wrong to profit from the wreckage."
Joining the call for divestment also offers a way for student voices to be heard, for protesters to network within and across campuses, and for students to exert more collective leverage than if they act alone. In the case of Wesleyan, for example, students were able to secure a promise from the administration to have the Board of Trustees consider a proposal later this year to divest Wesleyan's $1.5 billion endowment, $25-30 million of which is currently invested in aerospace and defense businesses.
The Missing Element: Personal Divestment
One of the most powerful aspects of university divestment is that it makes a statement from a respected institution known for its erudition and scholarly expertise. At the same time, a promise to consider divestment is not the same as a promise to divest, and even if a school were to opt for divestment—as Wesleyan has with respect to fossil fuels, and as it may in the future with respect to defense contractors—the process could take months or years to complete, by which time the war in Gaza would presumably have ended.
In the meanwhile, there's a relatively quick and simple step that individual citizens can take, not as a substitute for institutional divestment, but as a complement to it. They can make sure their own financial holdings are divested.
This is no small thing. American college and university endowments total an estimated $839 billion—an astronomical amount that would have far-reaching political effects if it were divested—but the divestment campaigns on college campuses miss a source of funds 45 times larger: $38.4 trillion in U.S. retirement accounts held by individual employees.
Even after the current war is over, we will be better off in a world that divests from companies selling weapons of mass destruction, fossil fuels, and tobacco products than in a world that financially invests in their growth.
In a matter of minutes, many employees with retirement accounts can divest by moving their assets into environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds that exclude defense contractors. ESG funds also typically exclude fossil fuel companies, the tobacco industry, and corporations known for worker abuses.
In days gone by, these "socially responsible" or "sustainable" investment funds tended to perform more poorly than broad mutual funds set up to mirror market indexes such as the S&P 500. Not anymore. In fact, according to a New York University meta-analysis of more than 1,000 research papers, today's ESG funds often outperform other funds.
To take just one example, the Statista Research Department compared the classic S&P 500 index and an ESG S&P 500 index between 2021 and 2024, and it found that by the fourth quarter of 2021, "the S&P 500 ESG index began to steadily outperform the S&P 500 by four points on average."
A Morgan Stanley study of more than 10,000 mutual funds from 2004 to 2018 also found that ESG funds tend to be less risky than other mutual funds, especially when markets are turbulent. The conclusion, according to the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing, is that "incorporating ESG criteria into investment decisions makes good sense financially."
Of course, not everyone has a retirement fund, but for those who do, these results are reassuring. What they suggest is that individual employees can divest from defense contractors like Boeing and General Dynamics—makers of the GBU-39 and Mark-84 bombs discussed earlier—without compromising retirement savings.
This divestment option applies to a broad range of retirement accounts, including traditional and Roth IRAs, 401(k) plans, 403(b) plans, and 457(b) plans. For further details on how to divest, see these tips on how to divest retirement accounts.
All well and good, you might say, but what about after a cease-fire or the war ends—would it still be worth the effort to divest? Without question, my answer is yes. First, cease-fires are often fragile. In the 2014, for example, Israel and Hamas had nine truces, during which more than 2,000 people were killed, before there was a relatively lasting agreement to stop the fighting. And even after the current war is over, we will be better off in a world that divests from companies selling weapons of mass destruction, fossil fuels, and tobacco products than in a world that financially invests in their growth.
Admittedly, personal and institutional divestment are both blunt instruments, and ESG investing has its critics. Nevertheless, ESG investments are growing worldwide and estimated to reach $53 trillion by next year (one third of all global assets under management). The reason for this meteoric growth is not just that ESG investment strategies exclude certain industries. They also embrace prosocial values and goals that are aligned with emergent global regulations, priorities, and needs.
In short, ESG investing is here to stay, and personal divestment can serve as a refusal to support or profit from the use of American-made weapons in Gaza—a small but significant statement. As Mahatma Gandhi reportedly said with respect to the impact of individual actions, "Almost anything you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."
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No, We’re Not Stuck With Nuclear Weapons
To say an technology will always be with us because it can’t be disinvented is like saying you will always be alive because you can’t be disborn.
Apr 09, 2024
After seeing the movie Oppenheimer, a friend glumly commented, “I certainly don’t like them [nuclear weapons], but what can we do? We can’t put that genie back in its bottle.”
Those of us eager to get rid of nukes hear this a lot and at first glance it seems true; common sense suggests that we’re stuck with J. Robert Oppenheimer’s genie because after all, it can’t be disinvented. But this “common sense” is uncommonly wrong. Technologies have appeared throughout human history, and just as the great majority of plant and animal species have eventually gone extinct, ditto for the great majority of technological genies. Only rarely have they been actively erased. Nearly always they’ve simply been abandoned once people recognized they were inefficient, unsafe, outmoded, or sometimes just plain silly.
Don’t be bamboozled, therefore, by the oft-repeated claim by defense intellectuals that we can’t put the nuclear genie back in its bottle. We don’t have to. Plenty of lousy technologies have simply been forsaken. It’s their usual fate. (Dear readers, please don’t misunderstand. Our argument is NOT that nuclear weapons shouldn’t be actively restricted and eventually abolished. They should. Indeed, doing so is a major goal for basic planetary hygiene. Our point is that we, as a society and as antinuclear activists, shouldn’t be buffaloed by the widespread, influential claim that we are stuck with nukes simply because “that genie is out of the bottle.” Our argument isn’t, in itself, a profound case against nuclear weapons; we have made that point in other contexts, and we intend to keep doing so. Rather, we write to dispute one of the troublesome arguments that, for some people, has inhibited discussion about the necessity of nuclear abolition.)
Why isn’t it possible to imagine that they will be abandoned—just as other technologies that are dangerous and essentially useless?
Now, back to our thesis: that we’re not necessarily stuck with bad genies simply because they have somehow gotten out of their bottles. There are many instructive examples. The earliest high-wheel bicycles, called penny-farthings in England because their huge front wheel and tiny rear one resembled a penny alongside a farthing, were very popular in the 1870s and 1880s. They were not only difficult to ride, but dangerous to fall off.
Between 1897 and 1927, the Stanley Motor Carriage Company sold more than ten thousand Stanley Steamers, automobiles powered by steam engines. Both technologies are now comical curiosities, reserved for museums. Perhaps transportation intellectuals warned at the time that you couldn’t put the Stanley Steamer or penny-farthing genies back in their bottles.
Technological determinism—the idea that some objective technological reality decides what technologies exist—seems persuasive. After all, we can’t disinvent anything, nuclear weapons no less than penny-farthings and Stanley Steamers. There are no disinvention laboratories that undo things that shouldn’t have been done in the first place. To say that nuclear weapons will always be with us because they can’t be disinvented is like saying you will always be alive because you can’t be disborn.
Pessimists clinging to the myth of disinvention also argue that nuclear weapons can never be done away with because the knowledge of how to build them will always exist. Inventing something is conceived as a one-way process in which the crucial step is the moment of invention. Once that line has been crossed, there is no going back.
Again, this is superficially plausible. After all, it’s almost always the case that once knowledge is created or ideas are promulgated, they rarely go away. But there is a crucial difference between knowledge and ideas on the one hand, and technology on the other. Human beings don’t keep technology around (except sometimes in museums) the way they keep knowledge around in libraries, textbooks, and cultural traditions.
Bad ideas may persist in libraries, but not in the real world. The physicist Edward Teller, “father of the hydrogen bomb,” had some bad ideas. He urged, for instance, that H-bombs be used to melt arctic ice in order to dig seaports and also to free up the Northwest Passage, while other physicists, including Freeman Dyson, spent years on Project Orion, hoping to design a rocket that would be powered by a successive series of nuclear explosions. Crappy ideas don’t have to be forgotten in order to be abandoned.
Useless, dangerous, or outmoded technology needn’t be forced out of existence. Once a thing is no longer useful, it unceremoniously and deservedly gets ignored.
To understand how nuclear weapons might fit this mold, and be eliminated, look at technologies more generally, and how they go away. Venture capitalists, for example, are aware that new things don’t become permanent the moment they’re invented, nor do they disappear because they’ve been disinvented. Technologies have a life cycle whose two end points aren’t birth and death, but invention, then (sometimes) adoption, followed by either modification and continuation, or abandonment.
A new device can be utterly brilliant, but if it isn’t widely used, it won’t persist; certainly, it won’t live on forever just because it has been invented. Technologies go away when enough people decide to give up on them. This applies to weapons, too. Stone axes didn’t disappear because people couldn’t make them anymore, or because our ancestors ran out of stone. Iron replaced bronze, steel replaced iron. Spears, blowguns, bows and arrows, matchlock rifles, blunderbusses, the gatling gun: Each went extinct because they were simply abandoned, and for good reasons.
Consider the hand mortar. Developed in the 1600s, these guns (sort of like a sawed off, wide-barreled shotgun) were supposed to fire an exploding grenade at an adversary. At the time, however, triggers that could ignite on impact had not yet been developed, so the hand mortar relied on a somewhat complicated process: You primed the gun, set it down, grabbed the grenade (carefully!), lit its fuse, stuffed it in the gun’s muzzle, and shoved it all the way down the barrel, picked up the gun, aimed, and fired.
In theory, hand mortars ought to have been effective weapons. But there were lots of things that could go wrong, and did. The fuse could touch the grenade and detonate it in the barrel. Or the fuse could get doubled on itself as it was stuffed down the barrel, shortening the burn time, again detonating it in the barrel. The gun could misfire, leaving the grenade in the barrel, where it would eventually detonate. (None of these events were healthy for the soldier firing it.) The shock of shooting it could separate the fuse from the grenade, making it no more deadly than a thrown rock. If you mis-estimated the amount of powder needed to fire the grenade out of the gun incorrectly, it could either deposit the grenade at your feet or just a few yards away among your own troops, or it could send it sailing far over the heads of your adversaries.
As a practical matter, there were too many things that could go dangerously wrong with hand mortars, such that ultimately killing a knot of enemy soldiers if everything went right wasn’t worth the many risks involved. Even though hand mortars had been invented, and even though any madman who wanted to could have armed his forces with them, they had a negligible impact on war fighting. They were never outlawed or disinvented. Being a technology that was both dangerous and not very useful, they were simply abandoned.
And nuclear weapons? They are certainly dangerous, given that deterrence cannot persist indefinitely without someday failing. Bertrand Russell noted that one can imagine watching a tightrope walker balance aloft for five minutes, or even 15, but for a whole year? Or a hundred? At the same time, nuclear weapons have never been very useful, if indeed they have been useful at all, except to benefit those relatively few individuals, civilian and military, whose careers have profited from designing, developing, and deploying them.
So why isn’t it possible to imagine that they will be abandoned—just as other technologies that are dangerous and essentially useless? They could readily go extinct even though the memory of how to make them persists.
Yes, nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented. Oppenheimer and his colleagues bequeathed us something that was remarkable, not very useful, and very dangerous. The way to eliminate the danger is to understand that they were never a very good technology to begin with. And to recognize that insofar as they are bad genies they needn’t be stuffed back into their bottles. They can be left to fall of their own weight, or, alternatively, to suffer the fate suggested by Brent Scowcroft—no peacenik—when, in retirement, he was asked what should best be done with them: “Let ‘em rot.”
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Under the Rubble of Gaza
Living as we do in a world where countries like the United States maintain a permanent warfare state, we must reckon with the horrific cost of war—and the obscene profits. Our bombs don't drop on tunnels, but people.
Nov 24, 2023
It’s one thing to burrow beneath the ground, digging to construct a tunnel for refuge, a passage of goods, or to store weapons during a time of war. It’s quite another to use one hand, as a small child, to try and dig your way out of the rubble that has collapsed upon you.
Professor Mustafa Abu Sway, a professor based in Jerusalem, spoke sadly of the reality in Gaza where, he said, “one child dies every ten minutes.”
“It was not the death of a child,” he said, ”but the survival of one, that made me really very, very sad.” He was speaking of a video which had emerged showing a child buried alive under rubble attempting to free herself with one hand.
When we think of how to rescue suffering children from the unbridled carnage of numerous wars that have forced people to go underground, the vast network of tunnels built by the Vietnamese come to mind. To this day, tourists in Viet Nam visit a network of tunnels created by the North Vietnamese, extending from the outskirts of Saigon to the borders of Cambodia. Construction of these tunnels, used both for shelter and by soldiers, began during the French occupation of Viet Nam. Eventually, the complex system gave the North Vietnamese a form of leverage in their effort to fight against the United States military.
Following the U.S. defeat in Viet Nam, weapon makers in the United States focused on developing ordnance that could destroy underground tunnels and bases. Bombs like the Paveway (GBU-27) were used against Iraq in Operation Desert Storm where they were deployed on February 13, 1991 to attack the Amiriyah shelter in Baghdad. At that time, families in the Amiriyah neighborhood had huddled overnight in the basement shelter for a relatively safe night’s sleep. The smart bombs penetrated the “Achilles’ heel” of the building, the spot where ventilation shafts had been installed.
The first bomb exploded and expelled 17 bodies out of the building. The second bomb followed immediately after the first, and its explosion sealed the exits. The temperature inside the shelter rose to 500 degrees Celsius and the pipes overhead burst, resulting in boiling water that cascaded down on the innocents who slept. Hundreds of people were burned alive.
In Afghanistan, on April 13th, 2017, The United States used a Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb nicknamed MOAB, the Mother of All Bombs, to destroy a network of tunnels in the Hindu Kush mountains. The United States had helped the Mujahideen construct these tunnels during their war against the Soviet Union in the late 1970s.
The 21,000 pound MOAB, designed to destroy tunnel complexes and hardened bunkers, still affects the area where it was used.
Locals say this harsh terrain has been haunted by a deadly, hidden hazard: chemical contamination. According to one local resident, Qudrat Wali, “All the people living in Asad Khel village became ill after that bomb was dropped.” The 27-year old farmer showed a journalist red bumps stretched across his calves and said, “I have it all over my body.” He said he got the skin disease from contamination left by the MOAB.
When Wali and his neighbors returned to their village, they found their land did not produce crops like it had before “We would get 150 kilograms of wheat from my land before, but now we cannot get half of that,” he says. “We came back because our homes and livelihoods are here, but this land is not safe. The plants are sick and so are we.”
One of the most alarming underground concentrations for massive destruction is located 53 miles from Gaza, where a complex now called the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center has developed at least 80 thermonuclear weapons. First built in 1958, the facility underwent a major renovation just two years ago.
“To this day,” writes Joshua Frank, “Israel has never openly admitted possessing such weaponry and yet has consistently refused to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the secretive site.”
A classic 1956 film depicting the horror of a Nazi concentration camp, Alain Resnais’s “Night and Fog,” contains narration that at one point addresses how the terrible sites will be seen in the future. “Nine million dead haunt this countryside… We pretend that it could only happen once, in this place at that time… The icy water fills the hollows of the mass graves, while war goes to sleep, but with one eye always open.”
Living as we do in a world where countries like the United States maintain a permanent warfare state, we must reckon with the horrific cost of war—and the obscene profits. The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal notes that weapons makers’ stocks on Wall Street have risen 7% since the war started. Recognizing war never sleeps, we must keep our eyes wide open and acknowledge the horrendous toll as well as our responsibility to build a world beyond war.
As much as we might long to grasp the hand of the child trying to free herself from underneath a collapsed building’s rubble, we need to imagine and long for the chance to grasp the hand of someone outside our own community, someone we’ve been taught to regard as an enemy or an invisible “other.”
Writing these words from a safe, secure spot feels hollow, but in my memory I return to the pediatric ward of an Iraqi hospital when Iraq was under a siege imposed by U.S. and U.N. economic sanctions. Agonized and grieving, a young mother, her world crashing in on her, wept over the dying child she cradled. I came from the country that forbade medicine and food desperately needed by each of the dying children in this ward. “Believe me, I pray,” she whispered, “I pray that this will never happen to a mother who is from your country.”
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