Articles by William D. Hartung

We found 13 results.


Good Times for the Military-Industrial Complex
William D. Hartung | TomDispatch - TRANSCEND Media Service, 13 Nov 2023

But Is It Truly the Arsenal of Democracy?

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The Profiteers of Armageddon
William D. Hartung | TomDispatch - TRANSCEND Media Service, 31 Jul 2023

30 Jul 2023 – Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex

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What Price “Defense”?
William D. Hartung | TomDispatch - TRANSCEND Media Service, 23 Jan 2023

17 Jan 2023 – Going Down the Military Drain– US Costly, Dysfunctional Approach to Security Is Making Us Ever Less Safe

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Corporate Weapons Heaven Is a Hell on Earth
William D. Hartung | TomDispatch – TRANSCEND Media Service, 21 Nov 2022

17 Nov 2022 – A Hall of Shame of U.S. Weapons Sales

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USA Dominant again in Arms Sales: Selling Death
William D. Hartung | TomDispatch - TRANSCEND Media Service, 7 Jun 2021

25 May 2021 – When it comes to trade in the tools of death and destruction, no one tops the United States of America. Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and others are again profiting at the expense of so many of the rest of us. And Again… and Again… and Again

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The Stubborn Persistence of the Military-Industrial State: The Pentagon Budget Still Rising, 40 Years Later
William D. Hartung | TomDispatch – TRANSCEND Media Service, 23 Dec 2019

15 Dec 2019 – It is staggering the number of tax dollars that persistently go into what passes for national security in this country, i.e., subsidizing the U.S. military-industrial complex, year in, year out, at levels that should be (but aren’t) beyond belief. In 2019, Pentagon spending is actually higher than it was at the peak of either the Korean or Vietnam wars and may soon be twice the Cold War average.

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Bestselling Pentagon Fiction: Beware of Defense Secretaries Pledging Reform
William D. Hartung and Mandy Smithberger – TomDispatch, 14 Oct 2019

The pentagon is pledging to reform itself. Again. It Won’t. The new secretary of defense, a former Raytheon lobbyist, won’t even pledge not to go back through the revolving door. With a budget totaling more than $1.4 trillion for the next two years, the department is riding high, even as it attempts to set the stage for yet more spending increases in the years to come.

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Merger Mania: The Military-Industrial Complex on Steroids
William D. Hartung - TomDispatch, 22 Jul 2019

16 Jul 2019 – Raytheon, already one of the top five U.S. defense contractors, is planning to merge with United Technologies. That company is a major contractor in its own right, producing, among other things, the engine for the F-35 combat aircraft, the most expensive Pentagon weapons program ever.

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The Pentagon’s Cunning Plot to Militarize the Economy
William D. Hartung | Democratic World Federalists – TRANSCEND Media Service, 12 Nov 2018

8 Nov 2018 – Given his erratic behavior, from daily Twitter eruptions to upping his tally of lies by the hour, it’s hard to think of Donald Trump as a man with a plan. But in at least one area — reshaping the economy to serve the needs of the military-industrial complex — he’s (gasp!) a socialist in the making.

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War Pay: Another Good Year for Weapons Makers Is Guaranteed
William D. Hartung - TomDispatch, 29 Jan 2018

11 Jan 2018 – As Donald Trump might put it, major weapons contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin cashed in “bigly” in his first year in office. They raked in tens of billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts, while posting sharp stock price increases and healthy profits driven by the continuation and expansion of Washington’s post-9/11 wars. But last year’s bonanza is likely to be no more than a down payment on even better days to come for the military-industrial complex.

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There’s No Business like the Arms Business – Weapons “R” Us (But You’d Never Know It)
William D. Hartung - TomDispatch, 1 Aug 2016

26 Jul 2016 – When American firms dominate a global market worth more than $70 billion a year, you’d expect to hear about it. Not so with the global arms trade. It’s good for one or two stories a year in the mainstream media, usually when the annual statistics on the state of the business come out. From the president on down, significant parts of the government are intent on ensuring that American arms will flood the global market and companies like Lockheed and Boeing will live the good life.

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Obama’s Arms Sales Policy: Promotion or Restraint?
William D. Hartung – Foreign Policy In Focus, 17 Feb 2014

The United States is far and away the world’s leading arms trafficking nation, with $60 billion in arms transfer agreements last year [2013] alone. In 2011, the last year for which full global statistics are available, U.S. companies and the U.S. government controlled over three-quarters of the international weapons trade.

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Is Lockheed Martin Shadowing You?
William D. Hartung – TomDispatch, 17 Jan 2011

How a Giant Weapons Maker Became the New Big Brother: After all, it received $36 billion in government contracts in 2008 alone, more than any company in history. It now does work for more than two dozen government agencies from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s involved in surveillance and information processing for the CIA, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon, the Census Bureau, and the Postal Service.

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