Pursuit of Corporate Profits Driving Israel-Hamas War and World Conflict

I took heat after writ­ing my Sub­stack, Israel War With Hamas, Not About Hatred-Win­ners and losers, not who you think. One read­er called me an anti­semite because I did not auto­mat­i­cal­ly fall into the trap of accept­ing the offi­cial nar­ra­tive con­cern­ing the events of Octo­ber 7, 2023, as report­ed by known liars. That was the day the “Iron Dome,” air defense sys­tem, designed and imple­ment­ed by US defense con­trac­tors, paid for by Amer­i­can tax­pay­ers to the tune of $2.6 bil­lion, osten­si­bly to pro­tect the peo­ple of Israel from air attacks, hap­pened not to work in any capac­i­ty while hun­dreds of short-range mis­siles rained death and destruc­tion in and around South­ern Israel. Where do the Amer­i­can peo­ple apply for a refund? 

To many Amer­i­cans, thoughts of the nation of Israel elic­it pro­found emo­tions, cer­tain­ly much more so than emo­tions asso­ci­at­ed with most oth­er nation states. I get that and I under­stand why. Just to be clear though, the kinds of attacks of Octo­ber 7 hap­pen around the world all the time. Soma­lia, for exam­ple, with the help of west­ern weapon­ry fund­ed by Amer­i­ca, aid­ed by the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary, has been in con­stant war for decades. Two more Amer­i­cans, par­tic­i­pat­ing in that war, died in Soma­lia this week.

Why do Amer­i­cans con­tin­ue to die in Soma­lia? Why is the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary even present in Soma­lia? What is the nation­al inter­est for the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary to be in Soma­lia? That’s just it, there is no Amer­i­can nation­al inter­est in Soma­lia. There are only CORPORATE inter­ests in Soma­lia. Those inter­ests involve the extrac­tion of some of the world’s most acces­si­ble nat­ur­al resources by west­ern cor­po­ra­tions who lob­by con­gress for the US mil­i­tary to pro­vide them pro­tec­tion. Soma­lia is low fruit for resource extrac­tion because it has a 3000km coast­line and numer­ous ports to sup­port the operation. 

To pro­vide pro­tec­tion for the sake of gen­er­at­ing cor­po­rate prof­its, under the pre­tense of fight­ing ter­ror­ism, is the rea­son mem­bers of the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary keep fight­ing and dying in Somalia. 

I bring Soma­lia into this dis­cus­sion sim­ply to illus­trate that, regard­less when or where vio­lence such as we saw on Octo­ber 7 occurs, there are gen­er­al­ly pri­vate inter­ests at work pulling strings and ben­e­fit­ting. And the Israel-Hamas war is no different. 

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In my pre­vi­ous arti­cle con­cern­ing the Israel-Hamas war, writ­ten mere­ly one week after the Octo­ber 7 attacks, I point­ed out that dur­ing the pre­vi­ous 6 months four major US defense con­trac­tors lost an aver­age of 23% on their stock val­u­a­tions. That is because our con­gress had not vot­ed to send Ukraine any more mon­ey to sup­port its war­ring effort against Rus­sia. The day before the Hamas attacks, the New York Times report­ed that the pre­vi­ous $113 bil­lion US aid pack­age would soon run out. 

But strict­ly speak­ing, the new mon­ey would not go to Ukraine any­way. Instead, the funds would go direct­ly to lucra­tive con­tracts with giant, west­ern defense indus­try cor­po­ra­tions. Below you will find the same graph­ic I used in the Octo­ber 13 arti­cle. Notice the tick upward of stock prices coin­cid­ing with the Octo­ber 7 attacks. The tick upward actu­al­ly began on Octo­ber 5, as if knowl­edge of an immi­nent, game-chang­ing event were about to occur. 

I took a sub­stan­tial risk when I pub­lished the Octo­ber 13 arti­cle. Had I been wrong, had US defense indus­try stock val­u­a­tions con­tin­ued down­ward, or lan­guished at the lev­el they were at the time, I would look pret­ty foolish. 

But that did not hap­pen. Instead, as I pre­dict­ed one week after the Hamas attacks, less than three months lat­er the US Defense Indus­try Index hit an all-time high, an index that present­ly sits just below that high, await­ing con­gress to approve anoth­er $62 bil­lion pack­age for Ukraine to con­tin­ue fight­ing a war that is long-since lost. When that mon­ey is appro­pri­at­ed, stock prices will vault upward again. 

Con­gress has been throw­ing mon­ey at US Defense con­trac­tors for Ukraine hand over fist. There has been no account­abil­i­ty regard­ing where the mon­ey has gone, what it has pur­chased or how those pur­chas­es have been used. When I say, “no account­abil­i­ty,” I mean, lit­er­al­ly, no account­abil­i­ty. Last April, Geor­gia 6th Dis­trict Con­gress­man Rich McCormick boast­ed of his “piv­otal role in shap­ing the con­flict” in Ukraine. On the ground in Kiev, McCormick claimed he “wit­nessed first­hand the account­abil­i­ty of equip­ment,” not­ing that, “Account­abil­i­ty and clar­i­ty of pur­pose are Key.”

Yet, as recent­ly as two weeks ago, the Pen­ta­gon report­ed no account­abil­i­ty what­so­ev­er for vir­tu­al­ly ANY of over $1 bil­lion in weapons pur­chased and sent to Ukraine.

Now, why would a con­gress­man like Rich McCormick claim to “wit­ness first hand the account­abil­i­ty of Tax­pay­er-fund­ed equip­ment” in Ukraine, when nine months lat­er the Pen­ta­gon admits that vir­tu­al­ly none of the tax-pay­er fund­ed weapons are unac­count­ed for? 

Why would a con­gress­man like Rich McCormick decide against sup­port­ing the over­whelm­ing favorite to become the Repub­li­can nom­i­nee for pres­i­dent, Don­ald Trump, and instead choose to sup­port a can­di­date he knows has no chance of win­ning, Gov­er­nor Ron DeSan­tis? Do you think it might be that Trump declared that the war in Ukraine would be over with­in 24 hours of his tak­ing office? 

Con­gress­man McCormick’s largest donor is a cam­paign con­tri­bu­tion aggre­ga­tor, “WinRed.” The way WinRed works is that a donor, could be a soc­cer mom, could be Ratheon Indus­tries or Boe­ing, logs onto WinRed and places a bet on a can­di­date. WinRed takes a 3.94% fee for its ser­vices and trans­fers the remain­ing funds to the can­di­date of choice. That way, no one needs to know who made the dona­tion to the can­di­date, the soc­cer mom, Ratheon or Boe­ing. It almost looks like legal mon­ey laun­der­ing, doesn’t it? Just asking. 

I only use Con­gress­man McCormick as an exam­ple of how the sys­tem enables mega-cor­po­ra­tions to place large bets on polit­i­cal can­di­dates, and in so doing remain anony­mous from the pub­lic. But of course, there is no law against inform­ing a can­di­date of a con­tri­bu­tion made, or to be made, to his or her cam­paign through an oper­a­tion such as WinRed. The result of this kind of sys­tem is an entire class of politi­cians, regard­less of par­ty, whether local, state or fed­er­al, devot­ed to doing the bid­ding of major cor­po­ra­tions, rather than vot­ers, thus sub­vert­ing the prin­ci­ples of America’s found­ing, and turn­ing the Amer­i­can Gov­ern­ment into a cor­po­rate fas­cist state.