William Hartung: Lockheed Martin's Shadow Government!

In September 1990, William Hartung wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, with the title: "Privatize the Pentagon," a distinctly tongue-in-cheek column suggesting that it was time for the US to develop a "free-enterprise-oriented military". "Looking back", he wrote at that time, isn't it odd that unlike the post office, the poor, and Eastern Europe, the military has not experienced privatizing pressures. Today, people would have no idea why my father was so worked up, and only a "neocon" could write a meaningful play with "war profiteering" as its theme, and William's sarcastic column of 1990 now reads as if it were written in "Klingon". His father was not able to imagine a future in which so many tasks, which are usually reserved for our military, in which so many tasks, from KP to mail delivery, guard duty, as well as the training of foreign forces, have been outsourced to "crony capitalist" or rent-a-gun outfits like Halliburton, KBR, Xe Services (formerly Blackwater), and Dyncorp, all of them determined to make a huge amount of money from our permanent wars. The greatest profiteer, though, is Lockheed Martin: As much as any robber baron of the nineteenth century, that corporation has long deserved its own biography.
Please click on my heading to read the full story of the fleecing of American taxpayers!