If we want to tell it like it (really) is then we will have to ask William Hartung to change the title of the next edition of his book. The cover of Hartung's book is displayed above. Here's my suggestion for a change in the title:
PROPHETS PROFITS OF WAR
As you will discover if you consult Wikipedia, Hartung is a "senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft." His work focuses on the arms industry and the U.S. military budget. Hartung also writes, regularly, for TomDispatch, published by Tom Englehardt.
TomDispatch bills itself as "a regular antidote to the mainstream media." Here's the place to click if you'd like to subscribe. Just look for the "Subscribe" button.
On November 12, 2023, Tom Dispatch published an article by Hartung, with the TomDispatch headline titled, "Cashing in on Conflict." The whole article is worth reading, but you can get a pretty good idea about the main point from reading the short introduction, authored by Englehardt:
Today, Pentagon expert and TomDispatch regular William Hartung considers just how strikingly the giant weapons-making corporations rule the roost both in Washington and in global war-making. One factor to be added to the nightmare scenario he describes might be the effort to create a weaponized future beyond compare. After all, in the coming decades, the Pentagon is already planning to upgrade its vast nuclear arsenal to the tune of perhaps $2 trillion or more — $756 billion in the next decade alone. And mind you, we’re talking about the country that already has an active stockpile of 4,500 long-range nuclear weapons, with over 1,600 of them deployed — enough weapons, that is, to do in several Planet Earths.That was before the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States even came up with the brilliant idea that such a “modernization” of U.S. nuclear forces won’t be faintly enough to take us all safely into that future. As the Federation of American Scientists recently reported, that committee is urging this country’s leaders to “prepare to increase its number of deployed warheads, as well as increasing its production of bombers, air-launched cruise missiles, ballistic missile submarines, non-strategic nuclear forces, and warhead production capacity. It also calls for the United States to deploy multiple warheads on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and consider adding road-mobile ICBMs to its arsenal.” All above and beyond the previous madly ambitious nuclear plans (aimed at ending it all in truly high style).
The world is already pushing its luck, with respect to the dangerous prospect that some nation (including our own) might plunge the world into a nuclear war that will destroy human civilization, and perhaps most life on Earth. One way we can try to avoid this outcome is to start telling it like it (really) is.
Massive corporations, dedicataed to making money, don't have the preservation and protection of human (and other) life as their highest priority. Could we do something about that?
Well, yes; we could!
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