Hartung's 'Prophets of War' a tell-all on Lockheed Martin

[Jefferson23]

By Steve Weinberg Special for USA TODAY

"Prophets of War," William D. Hartung's exposé of the world's most pervasive private corporation that benefits from military weaponry, could have carried an alternate title that sounds the same when spoken but carries a different spelling: "Profits of War."
Lockheed Martin has received an incomprehensible amount of money from U.S. taxpayers by building massive warplanes and other hardware. Much of the product has cost much more than estimated, has failed to operate as advertised, and has yielded fewer jobs than claimed. Yet corrupt or naïve or ill-informed members of Congress, Defense Department bureaucrats and lobbyists continue to reward Lockheed Martin while the federal budget fails to provide adequate food, education and insurance for many of the taxpayers underwriting the multinational corporation, Hartung writes.

Hartung calculates that every taxpaying household in the United States contributed $260 to the company during 2008 to support its federal contracts totaling $36 billion. That amount can fairly be termed "the Lockheed Martin tax," Hartung says.

Although civilian researcher Hartung, employed at the New America Foundation, delineates outrage after outrage, his book's message is somewhat blunted by his ho-hum prose, his unfortunate penchant to bury major points with a barrage of details, and his lack of a sustained narrative. Put bluntly, Hartung's writing does not adequately showcase his investigative findings.

Depending on the perspective of the reader, Lockheed Martin is a savior of democracy under attack by shadowy enemies outside U.S. borders, or is a sycophantic corporation whose sub rosa tactics subvert the very democracy it purports to serve.

in full: http://www.usatoday.com/money/books/reviews/2011-01-24-warprophets24_ST_N.htm

[ensho]

1. Lockheed is:

"a sycophantic corporation whose sub rosa tactics subvert the very democracy it purports to serve"

[Jefferson23]

4. No doubt, the author has done an excellent job pointing that out.

The amount of money is staggering..36 billion.

More here from another review:

•Lockheed Martin: From Arms to Surveillance to Promoting Democracy
According to William Hartung, author of a new study of the corporation, "Lockheed Martin doesn't actually run the U.S. government, but sometimes it seems as if it might as well. 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.

Oh, and Lockheed Martin has even helped train those friendly Transportation Security Administration agents who pat you down at the airport. Naturally, the company produces cluster bombs, designs nuclear weapons, and makes theF-35 Lightning (an overpriced, behind-schedule, underperforming combat aircraft that is slated to be bought by customers in more than a dozen countries) -- and when it comes to weaponry, that's just the start of a long list. In recent times, though, it's moved beyond anything usually associated with a weapons corporation and has been virtually running its own foreign policy, doing everything from hiring interrogators for U.S. overseas prisons (including at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq) to managing a private intelligence network in Pakistan and helping write the Afghan constitution.

in full: http://www.cesran.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1154%3Aeisenhower-lockheed-martin-and-the-military-industrial-complex-today-&catid=61%3Amakale-ve-raporlar&Itemid=79&lang=en

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2. And yet Lockheed Martin's web site states:

Our Values:

* Do What's Right
* Respect Others
* Perform With Excellence

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/aboutus/index.html

[Jefferson23]

3. Yep, they push a fun PR narrative. The " respect others" one is rich. n/t

[The Roux Comes First]

5. I.e., Actual Bullying of Co-workers of "Another Persuasion" is Discouraged (nm)