Originally posted at TomDispatch. Honestly, if a single corporate entity controlled three-quarters of the global market in a product, you’d call it a monopoly, right? Well, in 2011, that was the situation of the United States when it came to the arms trade. This...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Congratulations to us! Talk about the art of the deal! Whether we know it or not, in the wake of those presidential Fourth of July festivities on the Washington Mall (“the biggest ever fireworks”), we’re all Saudis...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In its latest budget request, the Trump administration is asking for a near-record $750 billion for the Pentagon and related defense activities, an astonishing figure by any measure. If passed by Congress, it will, in fact, be one of...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Give Donald Trump credit. As a businessman, he’s brought into office some skills that previous presidents lacked. Take, for example, his willingness to plough staggering sums of money into five casinos destined to go bankrupt...
If the Saudi government is indeed behind the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi there should be consequences – political, military, economic, and reputational. Unfortunately, President Trump begs to differ. His reaction to questions about whether the United...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Like many in my generation, undoubtedly including Donald Trump, I went into space early (and I’m not even counting all those hours in my early teens I spent reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy or H.G. Wells’s...
Who could forget it? There were the $37 screws (no need to say who was getting screwed), the $2,043 nut (McDonnell Douglas made it specially for the U.S. Navy), the $7,622 coffee pot, the $74,165 aluminum ladder, and the $640 plastic toilet seats for the Air Force....
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Imagine that you paid a special visit to a family you hardly knew halfway around the world and they were so pleased to see you that they spent an estimated $68 million on your welcome, while mounting “festivities” like the...
Few American exports are more successful globally than things that go boom in the night: Hollywood movies – especially, of course, superhero films, which regularly garner vast international audiences – and advanced weaponry of just about every imaginable kind. As...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. What company gets the most money from the U.S. government? The answer: the weapons maker Lockheed Martin. As the Washington Post recently reported, of its $51 billion in sales in 2017, Lockheed took in $35.2 billion from the...
