Comment by tokai
1 day ago
I don't understand why US weapons manufactures are not lobbying harder. They are losing the European market just as the largest rearmament since ww2 happens.
Maybe they are and its just a lost cause with the US administration.
> I don't understand why US weapons manufactures are not lobbying harder
It doesn’t really matter if your product is better or cheaper, if the customer thinks that service and spare parts might possibly be withdrawn in the future for political (or whatever) reasons they won’t buy your product.
That is what they need the political lobbying for. Obviously not to help their pricing.
If you mean they need to lobby the US government to be less schizophrenic, I agree. Though I suspect the government would just decide to start more wars.
If you mean they need to lobby the other governments, I don't think that'll work, the decreasing trust is associated with the US government's actions, not as related to the arms dealers' actions.
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There are other rich people lobbying harder to protect other businesses not impacted by the ally double-crossing.
So they need lobbying to lie to customers? Why would that help people choose Boeing when it ultimately is up the whims of one single individual that can drastically change moods every four years?
There is a reason why imperialism ultimately always fails.
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A major issue is that the US manufacturers cannot keep up with demand even as they scale up production capacity. The current order backlog of approved foreign military sales of US weapons systems is approaching $1T and growing faster than they can fill the orders.
This is creating secondary fallout as the orders from various countries get re-prioritized. It is not strictly first-come, first-served order fulfillment; you can find your order pushed back in the queue for reasons.
Don’t think of them as companies in the normal sense. There’s no meaningful competition anymore and they have rolled everything up. They are essentially national industries now.
itll be hard for US weapons manufacturers to win when a big part of the rearmament is going to be around deterring the US just as much as deterring Russia
The rearmament is mostly happening because the US has shown itself a bad unreliable partner that abuses interdependence.
No lobbying can change the risk assessment where America is the risk factor.
They're very scared of their boss and the CEOs are short sighted by virtue of their compensation packages.
You have to understand that the smartest people in the US didn’t vote for this administration and are just as horrified as everyone else with how inept and pathetic this administration is. Unfortunately we’re a minority, the senate’s design (Wyoming has the same number of senators as California even though a small city in CA may have more people than the whole state) and the US is so ridiculously gerrymandered.
Sorry everybody but we just have to wait this stupidity out.
This stupidity is not going to simply be waited out. It is becoming even further entrenched.
There are a lot of issues in the American political system but the structure of the Senate is not one of those.
It was explicitly created as a way to balance sovereignty of the states against populism, such as that enacted by MAGA or leftists.
If you are a small state like Vermont, you don’t want to just have California, New York, and Texas dictating all rules and laws for the country by sheer weight of their population sizes. That is expressed in the House, but the Senate serves to balance that and ensure that populists don’t run roughshod over the country.
Without such a structure states with less population would either band together and create their own super states - and you can see where this leads, or they wouldn’t have agreed to join the US in the first place.
> That is expressed in the House, but the Senate serves to balance that and ensure that populists don’t run roughshod over the country.
Yet that is exactly what has been happening twice now.
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> It was explicitly created as a way to balance sovereignty of the states against populism, such as that enacted by MAGA or leftists.
that only works if the smaller states are not representative of the larger majority of the population.
instead, nowadays the smaller states are actually over-representative of the populist mass - e.g Wyoming is 80% white.
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Yes, if anything the issue is that the House was capped in seats in 1929 and the population has tripled. Smaller states have an outsized representation in Congress currently.
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Vermonters might not want that because they hold outsized influence on the direction of the country, but then they shouldn't pretend to believe in Democracy.
So, yes, 50 million people should have more say over the country's direction than 1 million. We should stop pretending we have 55 mini countries, because the Supreme Court has stopped pretending we have a 10th Amendment.
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This might have made sense for the original 13 colonies but after westward expansion, it clearly does not. Most of the western state borders were formed for administrative reasons
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Waiting it out was the first strategy in Europe but it's clearly moving into something else.
> Sorry everybody but we just have to wait this stupidity out.
And the rest of the world has to suffer the consequences. It has been incredible watching americans shrugging off any responsibility.
Insufferable hypocrites.
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> the smartest people in the US didn’t vote for this administration
Trump has support from SV and Wall Street leaders, and the whole Republican Party.
> gerrymandered
Trump won the popular vote, and iirc the GOP got more total votes for the House of Representatives. What about for the Senate? Sure NY and CA are big, but so are FL and TX.
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You can’t lobby the Trump or “America First” crowd to not be themselves.