UPCOMING ACTIONS
SFPJ’s LOCKHEED MURDER CAMPAIGN
In the Fall of 2008, Students for Peace & Justice launched a campaign to educate other students about the atrocities of the war profiteer Lockheed Martin and to hinder Lockheed’s recruitment of engineers on the CU campus.
The counter-recruitment campaign continues this semester, and there is even talk about expanding it to make specific demands regarding the manufacture of weapons in Colorado.
If you would like to get involved in this campaign, send an email to: Peace_and_Justice at me dot com, or attend one of our weekly meetings.
WHAT IS LOCKHEED MARTIN?
Lockheed Martin is a weapons, aerospace and advanced technology manufacturer formed in 1995 by the merger of Lockheed with Martin Marietta. It is headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. It has locations in Boulder, Denver, Aurora, Littleton, Thornton and Colorado Springs. Robert J. Stevens is the current Chairman, President, and CEO. Lockheed Martin is the world's largest defense contractor by revenue. As of 2005, 95% of Lockheed Martin's revenues came from the United States Department of Defense, other U.S. federal government agencies, and foreign military customers. Its revenue in 2007 was $41.862 billion, with a net income of over $3 billion. This is over $100 million tax dollars every day.
Lockheed Martin's slogan is "we never forget who we're working for."
Lockheed Martin spent $12,486 million in lobbying during 2008 alone. It also gave at least $2,154 million in campaign contributions to 237 federal politicians in both Democrat and Republican parties in 2008. The top three recipients of Lockheed Martin contributions were Chris Myers ($119,920) a Republican challenger to a Democrat incumbent and the current VICE PRESIDENT of Business Development and Advanced Programs of Lockheed Martin, followed by Barack Obama ($72,897) and John McCain ($66,273). According to the Arms Trade Resource Center, Lockheed Martin gets $105 from each U.S. taxpayer and $228 from each U.S. household. In 2002, the company was effectively taxed at 7.7% compared to an average tax rate for individuals of 21-33%.
The company's former vice-president Bruce Jackson chaired the Coalition for the Liberation of Iraq, a bipartisan group formed to promote Bush's plan for war in Iraq. Steven J. Hadley, Norman Mineta and Otto Reich worked for Lockheed Martin before joining the Bush administration, and E.C. Aldridge, Jr. retired from the Bush administration to serve on the board of Lockheed Martin.
· In June 2000 Lockheed Martin was fined $13 million for violations of the Arms Control Export Act in connection with the transfer of classified information to China.
· In August 2002 Lockheed Martin was fined $2.1 million on charge that it submitted fraudulent bills to the Navy for work on Trident Missiles.
· In January 2003 Lockheed Martin was fined $1.4 million on charge that it overbilled the Air Force on the F-15E Weapon System Trainer.
· In January 2005 Lockheed Martin was fined $1.4 million on charges of overbilling the U.S. Army in connection with its production and support contracts for the Multiple Launch Rocket System.
· In 2007 Lockheed Martin was fined $265 million plus interest on charge that it overbilled for work on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
· In August 2008 Lockheed Martin was fined $4 million on charge that it failed to get permission to sell missiles to the United Arab Emirates and that the company revealed classified information during negotiations with the Persian Gulf nation.
Lockheed Martin CBU-87
ONE CLUSTER BOMB WEIGHING 950 lb (430 kg) CAN CONTAIN TWO HUNDRED AND TWO 3.4 lb (1.5 kg) INDIVIDUAL BOMBS. After release, each bomb descends under a cone-shaped decelerator and is supposed to detonate on impact. Such cluster bombs have a triple charge, incorporating a fragmenting case against "soft targets" (people), an anti-armor shaped charge, and an incendiary device. They are designed to spread over large areas, sometimes as big as two football fields. Other cluster bombs can deliver 600 or more individual bombs. (Source: Directory of U.S. Military Rockets and Missiles, 2006)
Lockheed Martin's guarantees of low failure rates given are based on tests in conditions often completely different to those where the munitions are dropped in combat. Freshly plowed fields, trees, and sand often cushion the bombs' impact, preventing them from detonating immediately. Cluster bombs of all kinds continue to consistently leave behind a large number of unexploded bombs.
Cluster bombs, such as CBU-87, are brightly colored to increase their visibility and warn off civilians. However, the color, coupled with their small and nonthreatening appearance, has caused children to interpret them as toys. This problem was exacerbated in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when US forces dropped humanitarian rations from airplanes with similar packaging. When unexploded cluster bombs are stepped on, hit or handled, they explode causing deadly injuries up to 25 yards (25 m.) away.
For example, the cluster bombs illegally dropped in Laos by the United States have killed or maimed at least 4,837 people since the Vietnam War and delayed explosions continue to this day as reported in Asia Times, May 6, 2008.
Another example, in the years between the first US-led Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Human Rights Watch documents more than 4,100 people who were killed or maimed by cluster bombs in Iraq and Kuwait.
The U.S. Air Force alone dropped more than 3 million of such Lockheed Martin bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2001 to 2006, and at that time the U.S. Air Force had already contracted Lockheed Martin for 12 million more cluster bombs.
Lockheed Martin makes the United States the world's leading producer and user of cluster bombs, and in the interest of this corporation the government has refused to join 107 other countries in the Convention on Cluster Munitions treaty banning the production, stockpiling and use of cluster bombs. Most of the 3 billion cluster bombs currently stockpiled worldwide will continue at the disposal of war criminals in countries like the United States that refuse to join the treaty.
Click here to read the Colorado Daily Article.
LOCKHEED MARTIN IN THE NEWS
Company Profile: Lockheed Martin
Crocodyl, September 14, 2008
Lockheed Martin’s slogan is “we never forget who we’re working for.” That’s not difficult, given that the company receives some 84 percent of its revenue from the U.S. government, mostly the Pentagon. It is the largest federal contractor and the largest weapons producer in the world. It trails Boeing, United Technologies and EADS in total revenues, but those companies, unlike Lockheed Martin, have substantial revenue from civilian products. Most of the 16 percent of Lockheed’s revenues that doesn’t come from Uncle Sam comes from foreign governments.
Formed by the 1995 “merger of equals” of two long-time military contractors—Lockheed Corp. and Martin Marietta Corp.—Lockheed Martin produces a wide range of combat aircraft (F-16, F-22, F-35 fighters, C-130 transports, etc.), combat ships, missiles (Hellfire, Javelin, Patriot, etc.), space systems (Hubble Space Telescope, Mars Reconaissance Orbiter, etc.), military electronics and even the new Presidential helicopter.
Lockheed has been involved in numerous controversies involving questionable foreign payments, overbilling of the federal government, race and age discrimination, and environmental racism. Yet it continues to receive a steady stream of new contracts and has made itself indispensable to the U.S. military establishment.
LOCKHEED MARTIN
Lockheed Martin is the nation’s top defense contractor, the brains behind such high-tech military hardware as the F-16 jet fighter and a variety of land and sea missiles. In 2001, the company landed the biggest defense contract in history when it was named the main contractor for the Joint Strike Fighter. Considering that access is the name of the game when securing such lucrative contracts, it’s no surprise that Lockheed splits its campaign money equally between Democrats and Republicans. All told, NASA and the Defense Department account for roughly 80 percent of the company’s annual sales.
Over the Counter Intelligence
CorpWatch, June 13, 2008
More than half the people working at the super-secret National Counterterrorism Center in Virginia are employees of companies such as Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), BAE Systems, and Lockheed Martin.
Rocketing Contaminant Levels OK’d for Lockheed Martin Discharges to Metro Denver-area Water Supply
By Adrienne Anderson, November 23, 2007
At issue is the Lockheed Martin plant southwest of Denver and its voluminous amounts of a deadly substance called n-nitrosodimethylamine, or NDMA, for short. The toxic compound was in a top-secret liquid rocket fuel mix developed for use in the Titan Missile program in the 1950’s to fuel nuclear weapons-topped ICBMs aimed at targeted cities during the Cold War.
For decades, rocket fuel from engine test stands was freely dumped on the ground, and even flushed illegally down creeks at the mountain-side facility and which regularly contaminated the drinking water supply below, records show. On site, NDMA now pollutes regional groundwater at levels many thousands of times above those considered safe to protect human health, and has also been detected at illegal levels in surface water flowing downhill, as well.
During the 1980’s and beyond, there has been controversy over children’s deaths from cancer and birth defects in neighborhoods once receiving water impacted by these discharges. The public outcry prompted the closure of the downhill Denver Water facility in 1985 after the contamination was made public, though amidst official denials and obstruction of information that the high incidence of babies and toddlers dying from cancer and birth defects in suburban areas then receiving the tainted water was anything more than a “mystery.”
After publicity waned and frequent droughts strained existing supplies, the nearby Chatfield Reservoir - which had previously been used for only for flood control along the South Platte River and recreational use - was quietly pressed into service as a municipal water supply to ease several drought-starved systems, including Denver’s.
Meet the New Interrogators: Lockheed Martin
CorpWatch, November 4, 2005
Dozens of people converged this summer in the high desert town of El Paso, Texas, en route to spending six months in Iraqi prisons. They were going not as prisoners, but as their interrogators, walking a legalistic tightrope stretched across the Geneva Conventions. Just for signing up, they got a $2,000 check from a company that is rapidly becoming one of the key employers in the world of intelligence: Lockheed Martin, the world's biggest military company, based in Bethesda, Maryland.
Activists Occupy Office Lockheed Martin Brussels
Friends of the Earth, February 22, 2005
Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest defence contractor, and is responsible for the production of Trident nuclear missiles deployed by both the United States and Britain. Each of these missiles can carry nuclear weapons with a destructive power equivalent to 60 Hiroshima bombs. In 1996, the International Court of Justice in The Hague declared that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be illegal under the principles of international humanitarian law.
The Company That Runs the Empire:
Lockheed and Loaded
Counterpunch, January 22/24, 2005
Now Lockheed stands almost alone. It not only serves as an agent of US foreign policy, from the Pentagon to the CIA; it also helps shape it. "We are deployed entirely in developing daunting technology," Lockheed's new CEO Robert J. Stevens told the New York Times report Tim Weiner. "That requires thinking through the policy dimensions of national security as well as technological dimensions."
Contractors are Cashing in on the War on Terror
Is What's Good for Boeing and Halliburton Good For America?
World Policy Institute, February 24, 2004
As a network of citizen's groups rallies today at scores of sites in the United States and around the world to denounce what organizers characterize as "war profiteering" by major contractors like Halliburton, Bechtel, and Lockheed Martin, the New York-based World Policy Institute is releasing a new analysis that documents a rapid increase in military contracts flowing to these firms as a result of the U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"With the Pentagon budget at $400 billion per year and counting, plus a new Department of Homeland Security with a $40 billion per year budget, plus wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have cost $180 billion to date, these are lucrative times to be a military contractor," says Michelle Ciarrocca, a Senior Research Associate at the World Policy Institute and co-author of a new analysis on the Pentagon's top 10 contractors.
The Pentagon's "Big Three" contractors -- Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman -- alone split over $50 billion in prime contracts among them in FY 2003, notes Ciarrocca. "To put this in some perspective, Lockheed Martin's Pentagon awards, at $21.9 billion, are greater in value than the entire budget for the federal government's largest single welfare program - Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) - which is meant to keep several million single parents and dependent children out of poverty,"Ciarrocca comments.
US: Making Money On Terrorism
The Nation, February 5, 2004
We all know that Halliburton is raking in billions from the Bush Administration's occupation and rebuilding of Iraq. But in the long run, the biggest beneficiaries of the Administration's "war on terror" may be the "destroyers," not the rebuilders. The nation's "Big Three" weapons makers--Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman--are cashing in on the Bush policies of regime change abroad and surveillance at home. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was on target when he suggested that rather than "leave no child behind," the slogan Bush stole from the Children's Defense Fund, his Administration's true motto appears to be "leave no defense contractor behind."
US: Lockheed Martin’s Tests on Human Subjects
Aerospace contractor pays Californians $1,000 to eat thyroid toxin in first large-scale human test of water pollutant
Environmental Working Group, November 27, 2000
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. -- On behalf of military contractor Lockheed Martin, Loma Linda University is conducting the first large-scale tests of a toxic drinking water contaminant on human subjects -- a precedent medical researchers and Environmental Working Group condemned as morally unethical and scientifically invalid.
SFPJ : Students for Peace and Justice, Boulder, Colorado
