We condemn this war profiteering as we continue to campaign for immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world where Washington is pursuing its imperial interests.

During their successful two-year battle for a union, workers explained that the Point Blank bosses, in their quest for profits, were not only keeping wages at unlivable levels and refusing workers even the right to drink water in order to cut down on restroom use. The company was also disregarding quality standards and thus jeopardizing the lives of soldiers who were issued the bullet-proof vests. At the same time, and during wartime, workers rejected the company’s demand to subordinate their struggle for a union to the employer’s profit prerogatives supposedly in the interests of “American patriotism.” They took the moral high ground, setting an example for the entire labor movement.

Point Blank’s sale of defective vests is not an isolated case. Such consequences of war profiteering have marked every imperialist war. In the U.S.-led war and occupation of Iraq, some of the best-known cases of bid-rigging, fraud, and delivery of faulty parts involve companies such as Halliburton, Bechtel, and Boeing. A recent report by the Pentagon inspector general blamed Lockheed-Martin for 33 deficiencies in a C-130J transport plane, including cracked propellers.

Similarly, throughout World War II the Militant exposed the U.S. bosses’ war profiteering, which led not only to price-rigging and shortages at home, but to war supply ships breaking up at sea because of defective steel plates, faulty airplane engines, and other flagrant violations of production standards—often covered up by falsified reports—that threatened the lives of soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

The owners of capital are driven to maximize profits at all cost—in times of war as well as peace. The only difference is that in wartime they can sometimes make even bigger profits.

Just as they push to slash wages and benefits and cut corners on job safety, the capitalists, along with their government and the military brass, show callous disregard for workers and farmers in uniform, whom they throw into combat as cannon fodder for their wars of plunder, as they have in Iraq today and will continue to do in future imperialist wars. Despite pious pronouncements about their concern for the troops, they consider the lives of working people expendable.

War profiteering is inherent in capitalism. It has prevailed under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, and will not be ended through government commissions, fines, or other proposals for “corporate reform” advocated by liberal groups and the middle-class left. It will come to an end—together with imperialist wars abroad and the employers’ anti-working-class offensive at home—only when working people organize a movement that takes political power out of the hands of the ruling billionaire families and establishes a workers and farmers government, joining with fellow toilers worldwide in the fight for socialism.

The exposures about Point Blank underscore workers’ need to organize trade unions and use their potential power as the only way to defend ourselves from the bosses’ assaults.

The labor movement must follow the example set by workers at Point Blank and oppose the employers’ profit-driven efforts to sacrifice the safety of soldiers through shoddy production. At the same time, it should campaign for bringing all the troops home now from Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Korea, Haiti, Colombia, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
 
 
Related articles:
Florida garment workers denounce war profiteering
Point Blank bosses sold faulty body armor to Marines
How bosses’ war profiteering cost GIs’ lives in World War II  
 
 
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