The New York Times reported this week that 97 members of Congress “bought or sold stocks, bonds, or other financial assets that intersected with their congressional work or reported similar transactions by their spouse or a dependent child” between 2019 and 2021. With more than 3,700 such trades in those three years alone, the investigation reveals potential conflicts of interest in nearly every area of policymaking. Defense policy is no different. At least 25 members sat on committees that shape national security policy while simultaneously trading financial assets in companies that could create competing interests with their work, such as…
Defense Contracts
Google and Amazon Workers Demand End to Contract That Fuels Israeli Apartheid
Hundreds of community members and workers across four cities gathered to protest Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract between Google, Amazon, and the Israeli government and military, on Thursday. “There can be no tech for war. No tech for apartheid,” Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, expressed to a crowd of demonstrators led by Amazon and Google tech workers. While the cloud-computing project has been hailed as a “game changer” for Israel, activists have feared that it will lead to data privacy issues, especially if utilized by the Israeli military to further the surveillance and…