6/19/20 Jeff Abramson on America’s Bloody Arms Industry - a podcast by Scott Horton

Scott interviews Jeff Abramson about America’s convoluted process for selling weapons to foreign governments. The arms trade is a multi-billion dollar industry for private firms like Raytheon—but it’s also a process that is highly controlled by the U.S. government, muddying the incentives and leading to a public-private partnership with very little accountability and unfailingly terrible results. Abramson describes the circular way in which weapons companies and various branches of government push both their own selfish interests and what they believe to be in the country’s interest, to create a self-perpetuating system that no one can quite take the blame for. The result, tragically, is nothing but money in the pockets of the arms manufacturers and more dead civilians abroad.

Discussed on the show:



“Leahy Law Fact Sheet” (United States Department of State)

“U.S. to Allow Expanded Landmine Use” (Arms Control Association)



Jeff Abramson is a senior fellow for conventional arms control and transfers at the Arms Control Association. Follow him on Twitter @jeffabramson.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; Listen and Think Audio; TheBumperSticker.com; and LibertyStickers.com.

Donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal, or Bitcoin: 1KGye7S3pk7XXJT6TzrbFephGDbdhYznTa.







The following is an automatically generated transcript.

Show TranscriptScott Horton 0:10

All right, y'all welcome it's Scott Horton Show. I am the director of the Libertarian Institute editorial director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. And I've recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at ScottHorton.org. You can also sign up to the podcast feed. The full archive is also available at youtube.com/ScottHortonShow. Okay guys, introducing Jeff Abramson. He is Senior Fellow for conventional arms control and transfers at the Arms Control Association. That's arms control.org. Welcome to the show. How's it going?



Jeff Abramson 0:54

Going? Well, thanks for having me on.



Scott Horton 0:56

Great. Really happy to have you here. And typically We're not talking about banning small arms in, you know, Second Amendment stuff. We're talking about International Military arms transfers here. And in fact, unlike usual, we're not basing this interview off a specific article that you've written so much as a question that came up in the Reddit room, which was, hey, Scott, could you get a good expert on to explain really the nuts and bolts so I can imagine how it works about how these massive military arms transfers are arranged. It's clearly nothing free market about it. It's all state licenses and different agencies and politics and congressional leaders involved and who knows what kind of lobbying and favoritism and all kinds of mechanics. So, hey, Scott, find somebody who can really teach us the mechanics. And so I asked bill Hartung because he's about the best on this stuff. And he says, You should talk Dr. Jeff Abramson. So that's why I'm talking to you. What if, say I was a Raytheon salesman, and I was trying to help commit genocide in Yemen for the bucks? How would I go about doing that?



Jeff Abramson 2:18

That's an interesting way to frame it. But yeah, thanks for bringing me on. The US does have a really complicated system on how it sells weapons. And it's true that there are all sorts of actors, including the government, including companies. And I'm happy to sort of piece that through. There's lots of bits to it. So I'm not quite sure where to start. But this administration in particular, definitely is involved. They want to be and have talked about selling arms as a ...

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