At
The New York Times, Thom Shanker
reports:
Weapons sales by the United States tripled in 2011 to a record high, driven by major arms sales to Persian Gulf allies concerned about Iran’s regional ambitions, according to a new study for Congress.
Overseas weapons sales by the United States totaled $66.3 billion last year, or more than three-quarters of the global arms market, valued at $85.3 billion in 2011. Russia was a distant second, with $4.8 billion in deals.
The American weapons sales total was an “extraordinary increase” over the $21.4 billion in deals for 2010, the study found, and was the largest single-year sales total in the history of United States arms exports. The previous high was in fiscal year 2009, when American weapons sales overseas totaled nearly $31 billion.
And why have they done so well? Marketing plays a big part. Here's what one of the government's official advocates
told Andrea Shalal-Esa at Reuters in July:
The government's increased advocacy of weapons makers has helped boost foreign military sales to a record level this year, a top U.S. State Department official said, citing his hope for billions of dollars of additional arms sales to India and other countries in coming years.
"We've really upped our game in terms of advocating on behalf of U.S. companies," Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro told a defense writers group on Friday, adding with a laugh, "I've got the frequent-flyer miles to prove it." [...]
The Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which brokers government-to-government arms sales, has taken a variety of steps to improve the foreign military sales process and drive down the cost of executing foreign military sales
Doesn't that make you feel warm and fuzzy?
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2010:
This is not a good way for what had been a pretty decent, progressive career to end. Chris Dodd is continuing to press the attack on Elizabethe Warren he started a few weeks ago. When the "she's not confirmable" idea wasn't taking hold, he started in on "she's not management material." He's been keeping that drumbeat going "in interviews with Bloomberg News, Dow Jones, TPMDC, the Hartford Courant and American Banker, among others," but there's a rub here.
But it's the first time Chairman Dodd has publicly raised such an issue when it came to evaluating presidential nominees to agency positions under the banking committee's purview.
A review of transcripts from past confirmation hearings shows that Dodd has never questioned the management experience of nominees to head federal agencies his committee oversees. The heads of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Federal Housing Administration, the Export-Import Bank and the National Credit Union Administration all survived hearings under Dodd's chairmanship without him once asking a question about the experience needed to guide their respective agencies.
Tweet of the Day:
When Chris Christie sez "I gotcher war on women right-cher" I hope the podium doesn't block the sight of him grabbing his nuts #visualmedium
— @tbogg via web
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