Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 10 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants’ surprise attack. Photo by Naaman Omar apaimages. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
As Israel intensifies its bombardment of Gaza, Biden is facing extraordinary and growing resistance from his party’s left flank, especially from young voters and voters of color, over his steadfast support for Israel. They have staged demonstrations, penned open letters and even tendered resignations in protest of the Biden administration’s handling of a war they say is threatening the president’s standing at home and possibly his chances of winning re-election next year.
A Gallup poll released on Thursday found that Biden’s approval rating among Democrats plummeted 11 percentage points in one month, to a record low of 75%. According to the survey, the drop was fueled by dismay among Democratic voters over Biden’s support for Israel.
Meanwhile, a poll released last week by the progressive firm Data for Progress found that 66% of likely US voters strongly or somewhat agree that the US should call for a ceasefire.
Still, the White House has firmly rejected calls for a ceasefire, which Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, initially described as “repugnant” and “disgraceful” in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack. The administration’s rhetoric has since evolved, with White House spokesperson John Kirby arguing this week that a ceasefire at this stage “only benefits Hamas”.
Zionist president Joe Biden. 27 July 2021 image by Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz. Original public domain image from Flickr
“As the Biden administration attempts to deny the death toll of Israel’s campaign of mass murder in Gaza and sell genocide as a stimulus for the U.S. economy, these are the death merchants profiting from the war machine.”
With more than 7,300 Palestinians killed so far in Israel’s three-week bombardment of Gaza, a series of reports this week have exposed how U.S. weapon-makers and billionaire donors are enabling what legal scholars say could amount to genocide.
After Israel declared war in response to Hamas killing over 1,400 Israelis and taking around 200 hostages, the stocks of major American and European war profiteers soared. A Thursday report from Eyes on the Ties—the news site of LittleSis and Public Accountability Initiative—targets five U.S. firms with a record of providing weaponry to Israel.
The outlet stressed that while announcing a supplemental funding request that includes $14.3 billion for Israel, U.S. President Joe Biden last week “invoked ‘patriotic American workers’ who are ‘building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom,’ but it’s the defense company CEOs who rake in tens of millions a year, and Wall Street shareholders, who are the real beneficiaries of warmongering.”
As the Biden administration attempts to deny the death toll of Israel's campaign of mass murder in Gaza and sell genocide as a stimulus for the US economy, these are the death merchants profiting from the war machine.
The five targeted industry giants collectively recorded $196.5 billion in military-related revenue last year, Eyes on the Ties reported. They are Boeing ($30.8 billion), General Dynamics ($30.4 billion), Lockheed Martin ($63.3 billion), Northrop Grumman ($32.4 billion), and RTX, formerly Raytheon ($39.6 billion).
“The top shareholders in these five defense companies largely consist of big asset managers, or big banks with asset management wings, that include BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, Capital Group, Wellington, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Newport Trust Company, Longview Asset Management, Massachusetts Financial Services Company, Geode Capital, and Bank of America,” the news outlet noted.
Eyes on the Ties also highlighted how chief executives are handsomely compensated—and the CEOs’ ties to Big Pharma, the fossil fuel industry, Wall Street, and foreign policy think tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations and Center for Strategic and International Studies.
According to the report:
Boeing CEO David Calhoun took in over $64 million in total compensation from 2020-22 and as of February held 193,247 shares;
General Dynamics CEO Phebe N. Novakovic took in over $64 million in total compensation from 202-22 and as of March held 1,616,279 shares;
Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet took in over $66 million in total compensation from 2020-22 and as of February held 56,054 shares;
Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy J. Warden took in over $61 million in total compensation from 2020-22 and as of March held 161,231 shares; and
RTX CEO Gregory J. Hayes took in over $63 million in total compensation from 2020-22 and as of February held 801,339 shares.
Other reporting this week has taken aim at those CEOs for their suggestions that Israel’s assault on Gaza is good for business.
During Lockheed Martin’s latest earnings call, Taiclet correctly predicted Biden’s request last week, saying that “there continues to be the option… for supplemental requests related to support Ukraine, Israel, and potentially Taiwan.”
In addition to the request for Israel—which already gets nearly $4 billion in annual U.S. military aid—Biden asked for $4 billion to counter Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific region and $61.4 billion more for Ukraine, which is battling a Russian invasion.
“We are all witnessing significant geopolitical tensions across the globe, including the ongoing war in Ukraine and the horrific attacks in Israel,” Warden said during Northrop Grumman’s Thursday earnings call, according toVICE. “As we saw last week, the [Biden] administration continues to make supplemental requests for urgent needs, including those in Ukraine and Israel, to include investments in weapons systems and defense industrial base readiness.”
“The Israel situation obviously is a terrible one, frankly, and one that’s just evolving as we speak,” said Jason Aiken, chief financial officer and executive vice president at General Dynamics, on Wednesday. “But I think if you look at the incremental demand potential coming out of that, the biggest one to highlight and that really sticks out is probably on the artillery side.”
He continued: “Obviously that’s been a big pressure point up to now with Ukraine, one that we’ve been doing everything we can to support our Army customer. We’ve gone from 14,000 rounds per month to 20,000 very quickly. We’re working ahead of schedule to accelerate that production capacity up to 85,000, even as high as 100,000 rounds per month, and I think the Israel situation is only going to put upward pressure on that demand.”
Last week, roughly 100 activists gathered outside of General Dynamics’ weapons plant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to protest the Israeli war, holding signs with slogans like, “Genocide: Brought To You By General Dynamics.”
Both The Lever and VICE also pointed out that during RTX’s Tuesday call, Hayes started by “acknowledging the tragic situation playing out in Israel” before turning to “an update on our end markets.”
If Congress approves Biden’s request for Israel, VICE explained, “some of the money would be used to restock Israel’s Iron Dome rocket defense system, which RTX manufactured.” Hayes said: “I think really across the entire Raytheon portfolio, you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking. On top of what we think is going to be an increase in [U.S. Department of Defense] top line.”
It’s not just defense executives enabling Israel’s mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza. As Eyes on the Ties reported, “Lobbying groups including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Democratic Majority for Israel have been active in Washington, calling on lawmakers to send money and weapons to Israel.”
The report names some billionaire donors to the lobbying groups, including New England Patriots and the Kraft Group CEO Robert Kraft, private equity investor Marc Rowan, venture capitalist Gary Lauder, hedge fund managers Daniel Loeb and Paul Singer, and Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, who is also the founding president of the Israel Democracy Institute.
U.S. Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) said Wednesday that Americans “know that funneling billions more dollars into arms dealers’ pockets won’t keep our children safe from weapons of war at home or across the world. It won’t keep our loved ones safe from toxins in our air and drinking water. They know that lining the pockets of weapons manufacturers won’t help families struggling to afford housing, medicine, or grocery costs. They know defense contractors won’t safeguard Medicare and Social Security or shield our communities against the climate crisis.”
Unlike the CEOs of firms like Lockheed Martin and RTX, “moms who can’t afford childcare, young folks who can’t pay off their debt, veterans who can’t keep up with housing costs, and children who go to school hungry don’t have million-dollar lobbying budgets,” added Lee, one of the few members of Congress pushing for a cease-fire in Gaza. “So it’s up to us to stand up for their needs.”
Cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Kemi Badenoch. Credit: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street, CC BY 2.0
The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, run by the owners of GB News, is hosting an event next week that it claims will be attended by 100 parliamentarians from across the world.
Michael Gove and Kemi Badenoch are due to speak at a major event next week alongside leading critics of climate action, DeSmog can report.
ARC was launched in March to address six “fundamental issues of our time”, including “energy and resources” and “environmental stewardship”. The group is fronted by psychologist Jordan Peterson and its advisory board includes senior politicians and academics from the UK and abroad.
As revealed by DeSmog, a number of ARC advisers have a history of attacking net zero policies and questioning climate science, many of whom are speaking at next week’s conference.
Levelling Up Secretary Gove and Business and Trade Secretary Badenoch will be speaking alongside these individuals at the conference, which culminates on 1 November in a public event at the 20,000-seat O2 arena.
Peterson, who is headlining the O2 event, has regularly posted about “climate apocalypse insanity” and “eco fascists” to his millions of online followers. He claimed in a Telegraph article in October that “eco-extremists are leading the world towards despair, poverty, and starvation”.
Gove and Badenoch will also be speaking alongside Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, who has called climate change a “hoax”, and former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott – a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s leading climate science denial group.
Badenoch has not always been supportive of climate action. During the 2022 Conservative leadership contest, she suggested that the UK government’s legally binding target of achieving net zero emissions by 2050 should be pushed back.
ARC claims that over 1,000 people will be attending its conference, “including over 100 parliamentarians from across Europe, the UK, and Australia, as well as a delegation of congressional leaders from the USA”.
This news comes after UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last month watered down a number of flagship policies designed to achieve net zero emissions – moves that were welcomed by climate science deniers.
ARC, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and the Department for Business and Trade were approached for comment.
ARC’s Origins
ARC has extensive ties to GB News, which has prominently platformed climate science denial since its launch in June 2021.
According to Companies House, the same five individuals who own GB News’s parent company are also the people who control the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Limited: Paul Marshall, Alan McCormick, Richard Douglas, Mark Stoleson, and Christopher Chandler.
McCormick, Chandler, and Stoleson are all executives at Legatum Group, the Dubai-based investment fund that, alongside Marshall, is a principal financial backer of GB News.
ARC’s CEO, Tory peer Baroness Stroud, formerly served as chief executive of the Legatum Institute think tank, founded by the Legatum Group. The institute received $77,000 in 2018 from the Charles Koch Foundation, funded by the proceeds of Koch Industries, one of the largest privately owned companies in the United States, which trades heavily in fossil fuels.
Conservative peer Helena Morrissey, one of the directors of GB News’s parent company, is an ARC adviser, as is ex-GB News presenter Colin Brazier. Two Conservative MPs – Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates – are also ARC advisers.
Morissey, Marshall, Kruger and Cates are all set to speak at the ARC conference.
GB News has been a prominent opponent of climate action since it launched in June 2021. A DeSmog investigation in May revealed that one in three GB News hosts spread climate science denial on air in 2022, while half attacked climate policies.
Its presenters have claimed that net zero will cause “death by poverty and starvation”, that the policy “poses an existential threat to the free world”, and have called for the UK to “drill, baby, drill” for more fossil fuels.
ARC’s 44-member advisory board includes a number of climate science deniers and leading critics of climate action.
Writer Douglas Murray, who will be speaking alongside Peterson at the O2, has suggested that climate policies will “impoverish” Brits, and has argued that “terrifying our children with doom-mongering propaganda on climate change is nothing less than abuse”.
ARC adviser Tony Abbott has previously said that “climate change is probably doing good” and is a long-standing advocate for coal power, the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel.
Abbott is joined on the ARC advisory board by fellow ex-Australian prime minister John Howard, who told Sky News in March that he was “increasingly sceptic [sic]” about climate policies, adding that Australia should “continue to benefit” from coal and gas.
ARC adviser Vivek Ramaswamy, who will be speaking at the conference alongside Gove, Badenoch, Abbott and Howard, recently tweeted to his 1.3 million followers on X (formerly known as Twitter) that the “real emergency isn’t climate change, it’s the man-made disaster of climate change policies that threaten U.S. prosperity.”
Tupy and Cato
ARC also plans to publish regular research papers, which it claims will be “written by leading thinkers and researchers across the world” and “provide deep analysis and offer solutions to the problems we face”.
The first papers were published earlier this month, including one from Cato Institute researcher Marian Tupy on the topic of “superabundance” – in other words, if the world and its natural resources can sustain population growth.
In the report, Tupy suggests that critics of established climate science have been censored by the media. He claims that “Inconvenient questions about ‘sensitive’ issues, such as the extent of climate change and the long-term threats posed by global warming, are being silenced in the media, and their proponents are being condemned as ‘denialists’”.
In reality, climate science denial is given a significant platform in the press and via social media. DeSmog reported in September that otherwise fringe climate crisis deniers are being exposed to millions more people due to the promotional efforts of ARC’s Jordan Peterson.
Tupy echoes Peterson’s language in his ARC study, claiming that the “precursors” to “extreme environmentalism” include “fascism and communism”. He claims that extreme environmentalism maintains a hold “on the public imagination, thus contributing to a sense of despair and decline”.
Tupy has commented on the topics of natural resources and global warming for a number of years.
Interviewed in April 2021 about “the true risk of global warming”, Tupy said that “I’m more or less convinced that human economic activity contributes to slight increases in global warming that we are currently experiencing”.
However, he suggested that the planet was merely “lukewarming”, and that “it is not… an existential crisis”. Tupy argued that humanity would be able to “adapt and technologically innovate” its way out of the problem. He said this would happen by slowly lessening our reliance on fossil fuels and creating solutions that allow people to adapt to the consequences of climate change.
“We don’t need to do it immediately; we don’t need to do it in the scope of 10 or 20 years, but it would be nice if say in 40 years time most of the world’s energy was provided by energy sources that do not spew CO2 into the atmosphere,” he said.
For 21 years, Tupy has worked at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C.. He currently holds the position of senior fellow at the group’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.
The Cato Institute was founded in 1977 by Charles Koch of Koch Industries. Charles Koch and his late brother David have channelled millions into right-wing organisations over recent decades, donating almost $9 million to the Cato Institute between 1997 and 2015.
The institute has downplayed the need to take urgent action on climate change and has in the past suggested that lawmakers shouldn’t pass any legislation to restrict the emissions of carbon dioxide.
Tupy’s arguments around “lukewarming” and technological innovation reflect the statements of the Cato Institute towards global warming.
“Fortunately, and contrary to much of the rhetoric surrounding climate change, there is ample time to develop such technologies, which will require substantial capital investment by individuals,” claims the institute’s public statement on global warming.
In December 2015, Patrick J. Michaels and Chip Knappenberger wrote a Cato Institute “working paper” making the “case for lukewarming”.
“[W]e conclude that future global warming will occur at a pace substantially lower than that upon which US federal and international actions to restrict greenhouse gas emissions are founded. It is high time to rethink those efforts,” they wrote.
In 2009, Cato’s “Handbook for Policymakers” on global warming began with the suggestions that Congress should “pass no legislation restricting emissions of carbon dioxide”. In the same year, more than 100 scientists signed a statement, circulated by the institute, disputing the climate change “consensus”.
A number of climate consensus studies conducted between 2004 and 2015 found that between 90 percent and 100 percent of experts agree that humans are responsible for climate change. A study published in 2021, which reviewed over 3,000 scientific papers, found that over 99 percent of climate science literature says that global warming is caused by human activity.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s foremost climate science body, has stated it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”.
The IPCC also states that global warming will cause “increases in the frequency and intensity of hot extremes, marine heatwaves, heavy precipitation, and, in some regions, agricultural and ecological droughts; an increase in the proportion of intense tropical cyclones; and reductions in Arctic sea ice, snow cover and permafrost.”
The IPCC’s chair, Jim Skea, has said that “Without immediate action to reduce emissions and adapt to continued warming, threats to planetary health and human systems are inevitable.”
The Cato Institute and Marian Tupy were approached for comment.
Campaigners take part in a Stop Rosebank emergency protest outside the U.K. Government building in Edinburgh, after the controversial Equinor Rosebank North Sea oil field was given the go-ahead Wednesday, September 27, 2023. (Photo: Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images)
ROSEBANK owner Equinor have once again posted billions in profits – to the fury of climate campaigners.
The Norwegian fossil giant – which has the controlling stake in the huge oil field development in the North Sea – posted profits of £6.6 billion for the past three months.
Environmental campaigners said the firm was adding “insult to injury” with its huge profits as parts of Scotland continue to suffer from extreme weather caused by climate breakdown.
Last week, Storm Babet caused flooding that hit towns across north-east Scotland, with some evacuated residents in Angus told they would not be back in their homes by Christmas.
In September, the UK Government gave the green light for the Rosebank development to go ahead, despite fury from campaigners and across the political spectrum.
The field, which lies north-west of Shetland, contains up to 350 million barrels of oil and is expected to be in operation for decades.
Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 10 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants’ surprise attack. Photo by Naaman Omar apaimages. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer call for ‘humanitarian pauses’ … but not a ceasefire
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that temporary breaks or “specific pauses” in the violence could allow British nationals and hostages to be freed and aid to be supplied to the Gaza Strip.
But the government has continued to back Israel’s “right to defend itself,” and resist calls for a ceasefire.
…
[Zionist] Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who has also resisted calls to support a ceasefire, said on Wednesday evening that the amount of aid and essential utilities going into Gaza was “completely insufficient.”
In a statement, he called for supplies to be “urgently ramped up” and added that “we support humanitarian pauses.”
However, Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Ben Jamal hit out at Sir Keir, telling him to “stop playing games with people’s lives.”
He wrote on social media platform X: “Aid cannot be safely delivered without a ceasefire. Nor can infrastructure be repaired which is necessary for life.
“If you care about the lives of innocent Palestinians, then call for a ceasefire now or you remain complicit.”
