A robot was on fire. Again. It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire with startling regularity, according to four former workers there. This wasn’t ideal, as the plant was supposed to be churning out urgently needed artillery shells for Ukraine. The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands…
… The fiasco has cost American taxpayers $533 million, according to the Army. But the Army has not held General Dynamics or a key Turkish subcontractor — which provided the factory’s much-hyped but little-proven equipment — publicly accountable for the failures. Nor has it made General Dynamics pay a penny back.
Just the opposite: General Dynamics, one of the world’s largest defense companies, has been showered with new contracts, continuing its track record as one of the greatest beneficiaries of Pentagon spending. The company is still in charge of the factory. It recently announced that it will fix things there by bringing in another much-hyped but little-proven technology.
meanwhile, as all this chaos and destruction is happening, who is getting wildly rich?
around 3,000 families control wealth equal to 15-17% of global GDP.
add to that, billionaires are increasingly influencing global politics as governmental advisors or by tipping scales in elections… when they’re not getting rich directly off military contracts and reconstruction/real estate deals on the land they just got paid to help “liberate”.
the planet is being steered into apocalypse by a handful of madmen.
and with climate perma-crises on the horizon, “disaster capitalism” is going into overdrive.