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Lockheed Martin got $35.2 billion from taxpayers last year. Thats more than many federal agencies.
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Washington Post
Posted: February 27th, 2018
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-trumps-bu...
Of Lockheed Martins $51 billion in sales last year, nearly 70 percent, or $35.2 billion, came from sales to the U.S. government. Its a colossal figure, hard to comprehend. So think of it this way: Lockheeds government sales are nearly what the Trump administration proposed for the State Department next year in its recently released spending plan. Or $15 billion more than all of NASA. Or about the gross domestic product of Bolivia. Year after year, Lockheed has received more federal money than any other corporation. Now, President Trump has opened the floodgates for defense spending, proposing $716 billion for the Pentagon, a 13 percent increase. And the defense industry is poised to profit, with Lockheed in the lead. Diplomacy is out; airstrikes are in, said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace consultant with the Teal Group. In 2013, Marine Corps Gen. Jim Mattis, now the secretary of defense, told Congress, If you dont fully fund the State Department, then I need to buy more ammunition. As journalist Fred Kaplan noted in Slate, the Trump administrations budget calls for a more than 25 percent increase in spending on missiles and munitions and a 26 percent cut to the State Departments funding. The Pentagon wants to buy more Super Hornet fighter jets, a boon for Boeing. But ... there has been nothing like the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Over its projected 60-year life span, its expected to cost more than $1 trillion, making it the most expensive weapons program in the history of the Defense Department.
Note: Lockheed Martin runs a breathtakingly big part of the United States, and was reported in 2015 to be engaged in deep and systemic corruption" including paying off a Congresswoman. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about corruption in government and in the corporate world.
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