Olle Bengtsson

December 2024

A Rogue Reporter vs the American Empire

Bloomsbury Academic, 2024 (2015)

Amazon.com

Wikipedia

Publisher’s Description:

While working for the Financial Times, investigative journalist Matt Kennard had unbridled access to the crème de la crème of the global elite. From slanging matches with Henry Kissinger to afternoon coffees with the man who captured Che Guevara, Kennard spent four years gathering extraordinarily honest testimony from the horse’s mouth on how the global economic system works away from the convenient myths. It left him with only one conclusion: the world as we know it is run by an exclusive class of American racketeers who operate with virtually unlimited weapons and money, and a reach much too close to home. Owing to the very nature of the Financial Times, however, Kennard was not able to publish these findings as part of his day job. Enter The Racket, now in a fully updated second edition. This tell-all book, reported from all corners of the world, will transform everything you thought you knew about how the world works – and in whose interests. Kennard reports not only from across the United States, but from the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. In doing so he provides startlingly clear and concrete evidence of unchecked, high-level, interrelated systems of exploitation all over the world. At the same time, through encounters with high-profile opponents of the racket such as Thom Yorke, Damon Albarn, and Gael García Bernal, Kennard offers a glimpse of a developing resistance, which needs to win. Now more relevant than ever, this 2nd edition contains a new preface by the author and a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges.

Reviews:

“In this important book, Kennard explores the direct impacts of militarized, globalized American capitalism on some of the most battered parts of our world. With devastating precision and a formidable sense of urgency, he reports on corporate shock doctors in Haiti, imperialist drug warriors in Honduras, pillaging coal and mining giants in southern Africa and Appalachia – and so much more. Most importantly, he never loses sight of the the growing numbers of resistors holding on to their creativity and self-determination in the face of these forces.”

Naomi Klein

“Matt Kennard’s perceptive direct reporting and analysis of policy aim to expose ‘the racket’ that dominates much of global society and to ‘blow their cover.’ His in-depth studies, ranging from Haiti to Palestine to Bolivia to Honduras to the destitute in New York City and far more bring home in vivid and illuminating detail the reality of life and struggles of much of the world’s population, their defeats and victories, their suffering and vitality and hope.”

Noam Chomsky

“Timely and readable … Kennard ranges widely in his attempt to show the scope and depth of the Racket. From the ‘disaster capitalism’ imposed on an earthquake-traumatized Haiti to the undermining of democracy in Bolivia, Kennard lays bare the mechanics of the scam … This book is a valuable tool for anyone wishing to engage in the worldwide struggle for justice.”

New Internationalist

“Matt Kennard left his secure job with the Financial Times on a mission to expose the world financial system as a gigantic racket operated by the United States of America for the benefit of a tiny number of extremely rich individuals. … He has travelled the world, and has material to work on. There is no arguing with his Chomskyan analysis of the grotesque consequences of US financial imperialism in Latin America, or Washington’s refusal to confront Israel over its maltreatment of the Palestinian population.”

Peter Oborne, New Statesman

“The Racket is a powerful tool for self-education: it offers essential information about the insatiable and sordid nature of global, elitist, exploitive, profit-blinded governments and institutions that have, together, perfected the task of making billions of people miserable, poor and fatally unhappy. It also offers testimony from activists and artists who are not giving in, giving up, or lying down.”

Alice Walker

“I congratulate Matt Kennard for this brutally honest work. We need Kennard in this world (jungle) and other writers like him who have the courage and creative mind to expose the lies and deception of the Free Market, Free Elections, Free Choices, Democracy, Peace, Cooperation, Friendship, Partnership, Equality, Justice and other beautiful words hiding savage brutality, violence, terrorism, colonialism, and imperialism.”

Nawal El Saadawi

“If I was editor of an old-fashioned newspaper, the kind that published and be damned, I’d hire Matt Kennard. The Racket is a front page story.”

John Pilger

“Matt Kennard exposes the failure of US neoliberalism and a major reason why China’s star is rising while American foreign policy is imploding into a black hole.”

John Perkins

“Kennard is no conspiracy theorist. Whatever you think about his conclusions, this is a first-class piece of radical investigative journalism.”

The Journalist

“[The Racket] depicts the U.S. system of economic control and exploitation as a violent, highly oppressive nexus of government power and private wealth. Kennard’s global investigation of the effects on the ground of what is known variously as the Washington Consensus, neoliberalism, or, in Naomi Klein’s phrase, ‘disaster capitalism’-including severe poverty, loss of political autonomy, and war and terror as conditions of life-follows in the footsteps of previous critics of U.S. imperialism like Klein and Noam Chomsky. Kennard includes unusually candid interviews with members of the World Bank and other financial institutions. These and other sections from a journalistic perspective help elucidate … such tragedies as Haiti’s post-earthquake ‘reconstruction’ or aggressive mining operations in Africa and South America.”

Publishers Weekly

“Contains … vivid on-the-ground reporting from Haiti, Palestine and Egypt. [Kennard] reports on the depredations of mining companies and the baleful effects of the ‘war on drugs’ in Honduras, Bolivia and elsewhere, with many eye opening discussions of the minutiae of trade negotiations … as well as the privatised prison industry and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US. To this extent, the book is a little brother to Naomi Klein’s brilliant The Shock Doctrine, which showed in 2007 how civil wars and natural disasters in poor countries are routinely exploited by US and global business interests pushing for radical programmes of privatisation from which they intend to profit. (The same thing happened, Kennard notes, after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.)”

The Guardian

“Kennard’s new book, The Racket, is an ambitious and sweeping account of how US-backed superpowers keep the poor poor and the rich rich. It’s a kind of anti-capitalist manifesto, only without all the hipster-Marxist jargon that makes those kinds of books so inaccessible to the people who want to read them. In The Racket, Kennard speaks to everyone from earthquake victims in Haiti, to the leaders of big oil companies, to celebrities in a quest to find out how global, multilateral institutions like the World Bank and IMF create a world only conducive to the needs of private capital. He patiently explains to his readers how the US government controls banks and big businesses, enforcing their ideology on the rest of the world with the help of a brutal military and the sinister tactics employed by their intelligence agencies. Essentially, The Racket is the best noir thriller about shady mobsters you’ve ever read, and all the more terrifying because it’s a book about US history.”

VICE

“Matt Kennard has announced his presence on the scene as the next generation’s John Pilger … Kennard deftly manages the balancing act between making judgments (in favour of people over profit and the progress of society) and of getting out of the way while he lets his interview subjects tell their own stories. The book spans the globe, and is strongest in its sections on Latin America – especially on Bolivia and the US-backed terror war against the leftist government there. But Kennard does a brilliant job of tying the strands together and joining the dots between disparate struggles against corporate greed and imperial power around the world.”

Asa Winstanley, Middle East Monitor

“Kennard decided to leave his comfortable job at the Financial Times and start to do some real journalism instead. The Racket, his second book, is very much the result of this transformation and it is nothing sort of marvellous. Angry, scornful and yet optimistic about the potential for change, it’s a socially engaged and often autobiographical exploration packed with solid research and interviews with those on the class-war front line … A polemical, first-hand expose of the corporate elites who rule and ruin the world for the rest of us, ex-Financial Times journalist Matt Kennard’s The Racket is investigative journalism at its best … Covering the Turkish repression of the Kurds, the continuing US-led plunder of South America and the downtrodden of the US itself, the book makes a good case for Kennard being a true heir to John Pilger and the older generation of muckrakers.”

Morning Star

“Following Amy Goodman’s dictum that ‘the role of journalism is to go where the silences are,’ Kennard fires off incendiary dispatches from the parts of the world rarely covered by the Western mainstream media. … [T]he book focusses on Turkey’s US-backed ethnic cleaning of the Kurds and US attempts to undermine progressive change in Haiti, Honduras and Bolivia. Like the best work of John Pilger, George Monbiot and Naomi Klein, The Racket is investigative, passionate journalism with a purpose – to defend the powerless against rapacious power. A hugely important tour de force, it will inform and inspire resistance movements for years to come.”

Ian Sinclair, Red Pepper

“Investigative journalist Matt Kennard’s The Racket is an exposé of the murky collusions between global high-finance and the militarised US state in the post-war era. Kennard traces the expansion of US corporate power across the globe, using case studies from Palestine, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico and more to illustrate the pernicious and far-reaching impact of the US ‘imperial mindset.’ A former Financial Times journalist, Kennard identifies the US as the primary actor in enforcing ‘the racket’, or the system whereby capitalist elites are buttressed through the violent suppression of labour unions, social movements and political groups in selected US satellite states. Nowhere is this more evident than in US intervention within ‘America’s backyard’ of Latin America. Kennard explores in eminently readable prose the self-evident brutality and futility of the War on Drugs in Honduras, links between US multinationals and the Colombian paramilitaries and anti-labour union governments, and the dynamic resistance presented by anti-imperialist Morales and the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in Bolivia.”

Olivia Arigho Stiles, Alborada

“This is radical journalism of the highest order. A very useful book.”

Socialist Review

“Matt Kennard threw away a cushy career with an establishment newspaper just to let you in on a secret: you don’t get the story, you get the cover-up. From Egypt to South Africa to Washington to London, Kennard lets us in on the details of buried truth.”

Greg Palast

“A brilliant atlas of what Kennard calls ‘heavy history’ – the hurricane-like path of global destruction wrought by neoliberalism and wars against the poor.”

Mike Davis

“A crucial exposé of the powerful, of injustice, and of the war against the poor. It should inspire all of us to fight back.”

Owen Jones

“This firecracker of a book, written by a former insider journalist who realised the true, exploitative agenda of corporate media, unleashes a gonzo journey across the world of US empire. From Palestine to Bolivia and America to South Africa, reporter Matt Kennard provides a roadmap of deformed economics, state violence and inspiring resistance. The Racket‘s key message is that another, more just world is possible when political and media courtiers of power recognise their own complicity in Washington’s destructive policies in the name of ‘development,’ ‘humanitarian intervention,’ and ‘liberation.’ Read this book, be startled and then take action.”

Antony Loewenstein

“The Racket is tough, angry, relentlessly researched and riveting, in the grand Chomskyan tradition but with the added value of the journalist’s mobility and on the spot coverage. Kennard’s range is wide, both geographically and topically, but with a single target-the depredations of the US superpower’s corporate and political elites on their own home turf and abroad that the lap-dog media rarely touch.”

Susan George

“Matt Kennard reveals the criminal and ruthless dynamics of global imperialism. His analysis is richly researched, keenly illustrative, and consistently on target. May this book get the wide readership it deserves.”

Michael Parenti

“Drawing on his wide-ranging in-depth investigations of exploitation and resistance from Haiti to Tunisia, Matt Kennard provides a valuable portrait of the structure and dynamics of the world’s biggest criminal enterprise. Uncovering the linkages among corporate power, free trade agreements, the International Monetary Fund, and military hegemony, he offers a clinical analysis of how the American racket operates but also inevitably triggers resistance. A masterpiece of engaged journalism.”

Walden Bello

“The Racket is a well-researched political tour through weaponised corruption and tyranny, destitution, robbery, mass murder and concluding in the censoring of the arts in the United States and Britain. Matt Kennard puts no deodorant on the reptiles waste in the imperial barnyard.”

Gavin McFayden

“This new edition of Matt Kennard’s explosive book should be obligatory reading for anyone interested or involved in politics. I cannot praise it highly enough … The Racket is a vital source of information about what is happening on a global scale to entrap us all in the empire’s web of deceit and megalomania, if only we are prepared to open our eyes.”

The Morning Star

“This book is essential reading for those interested in understanding the levers used by the US to customise the world to fit its purpose, from instigating coups in countries like Bolivia, to the painful, wholesale restructuring of Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake … This is an urgent, revelatory work – a must-read for anyone who wants to better understand the times we live in.”

Middle East Eye

About the Author:

Matt Kennard is co-founder, and chief investigator, at Declassified UK, a news outlet investigating British foreign policy. He was a fellow and then director at the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) in London, UK. He has worked as a staff writer for the Financial Times in Washington, DC, New York, and London. He is the author of several acclaimed books including Irregular Army (2012), and co-author (with Claire Provost) of Silent Coup (2023).

JOB:s Comment:

The Epstein World Order.

Ordförande Haz om USA och därmed till stor del om hela väst, givet hur imperiets verklighet ser ut idag:

“All anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, and anti-hegemony voices in America must, at this critical moment, unite on a practical level.

Theoretical criticism is necessary, but practical unity is imperative.

Learn from the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance: They formed a popular front made up of factions who used to kill each other in the past.

They managed to put their differences aside and unite practically in the face of a common enemy.

If they can forgive each other despite killing each other in the past, people in the West can forgive petty personal internet grudges for a greater cause.

It shows incredible immaturity to hold meaningless personal and petty grudges in the face of a potential world war. Theoretical differences are important to accentuate – but practical solidarity is necessary.

I have talked sh*t about PSL and Deprogram crew in the past. I have profound theoretical and personal differences with them.

Yet in the midst of a uniparty crackdown on all dissident and anti-war voices, in the midst of Democrat Zionist liberals attempting to weaponize the state against more principled leftists who show solidarity with anti-imperialist resistance, it would be immature and indefensible of me to regard them as primary enemies.

I have seen how leftists have become increasingly disenchanted with the Democrat hegemony, how they have become more radicalized and principled in asserting independence from mainstream liberal voices like Ethan Klein and others.

Whether anyone likes it or not, we are all in the same boat now, in the woods and outside the mainstream.

How and when you got here is of secondary importance. I have been here for many years; yet I find it unproductive to bitterly resent those who have arrived here too late.

As MAGA undergoes division, so too do leftists. Everyone is waking up to a common truth and position – outside the system and outside the hegemony.

I commend all those leftists who have succeeded in arriving at a principled stance without any encouragement or support from the Democrat hegemony at all – who face institutional and legal persecution for it.

The genuine selfless solidarity, partisanship, commitment to social justice, and historical tradition of the Left must be united with the organic, spontaneous disillusion of MAGA masses and other disaffected (black, Mexican, indigenous, etc.) working class communities.

This is what ‘globalize the Intifada’ means in USA. The uniparty hegemony represents the forces of occupation and hegemony, represented by the Ethan Kleins, AOCs, Ben Shapiros, Lindsey Grahams, etc.

As predicted, a new political re-alignment is taking shape.

The fundamental division within the Left: Those who take a principled stance in opposition to US imperial hegemony and align themselves with forces of global resistance – and the Zionist opportunists (Liberals, Trotskyites, ‘leftcoms’, ‘anarchists’ and ‘democratic socialists’).

The fundamental division within MAGA is between anti-war voices and shills of the Republican Zionist hegemony.

The dissidents from both ranks, despite having different origins are destined to unite – for the establishment shills of both ranks are already uniting.”

En svag punkt dock: Trotskister, leftcoms och anarkister är ju inte generellt sionister, och inte heller är alla liberaler och demokratiska socialister det. Hur många som inte varit det tidigare finner det opportunt att bli det just nu?

Det kan framstå som puristisk-fanatiskt att från Haz’ utgångspunkter inte praktiskt förena sig med personer i dessa kategorier när de har rätt, eller i det de har rätt, även om kvarstående teoretiska skillnader förblir icke-negligerbara och nödvändiga att även i dessa fall betona. Samma förhållningssätt borde väl såtillvida intas till dem som till de kategorier Haz nämner som börande förenas med.

Det partiella rätthavandet, alla uttryck hos dem som kan betecknas som “anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, and anti-hegemony”, “dissident and anti-war”, borde kunna erkännas samtidigt som vederbörandes objektiva yttersta funktion som kontraproduktivt stöd för atlantetablissemanget (Demokraterna, Labour, Socialdemokraterna eller i annan form) alltfort kritiseras. Divisionen inom vänstern är verklig och viktig, men den är mindre tydlig än inom högern.

Detta är ju f.ö. mitt eget förhållningssätt till Haz själv. Även hos honom måste rätthavandet extraheras från en helhet som också rymmer problematiska och oacceptabla inslag. Ja, det är givetvis det förhållningssätt som från mina utgångspunkter måste intas till alla marxister och även all annan vänster. Detta borde vara vägen för en konservativ socialism under rådande omständigheter. Haz och även innovationisten Maupin är i alla fall bättre än den som det synes alltmer puristiske Mckay, men från en ny, konservativ-socialistisk position är det möjligt att bli ännu mycket bättre än dem.

Sedan inställer sig förstås också, ifråga om sionismen, den öppna frågan om ett möjligt försvar av Israel – ett annat Israel – idag.

Key Writings and Lectures

Independently published, 2026

Amazon.com

Publisher’s Description:

A major collection of writings and speeches from Caleb Maupin – America’s most controversial, influential, and outspoken anti-imperialist organizer in the 21st century.

Imperialism & Anti-Imperialism presents a sweeping analysis of the global struggle shaping our era: the conflict between Western financial order of globalism/imperialism and the rising new world, born in anti-colonial revolutions.

Combining almost two decades of political organizing, journalism, international activism, and ideological struggle, this comprehensive volume reveals why Caleb Maupin appears almost daily on international TV broadcasts and has so many devoted activists following his lead across the United States. These pages introduce readers to mind of a movement-builder, strategist, educator, and organizer dedicated to constructing a new political force capable of transforming the United States and bringing us closer to a peaceful and prosperous world.

This nearly 500-page collection includes speeches delivered to thousands of oil workers in Brazil, face-to-face exchanges with multiple heads of state, geopolitical lectures, interviews, and essays applying classical Marxist economic theory as well as his new spiritual and political perspective known as Innovationism.

Readers will encounter sharp analysis of:

– The war in Ukraine and NATO expansion

– The rise of China and the leadership of Xi Jinping

– Russia’s economic resurgence under Vladimir Putin

– The destruction of Libya and regime-change warfare

– The collapse of the Soviet Union

– Oil markets and the global capitalist crisis

– Artificial intelligence and the future of labor

– The Korean Peninsula and prospects for reunification

– Rosa Luxemburg, revolutionary history, and Marxist theory

– The crisis of neoliberalism and the emerging multipolar world order

Throughout the volume, Maupin argues that the old “British empire system” of endless wars and economic decay is entering a profound crisis, while a new world based on sovereignty, development, and human creativity is struggling to emerge.

More than a collection of political essays, Imperialism & Anti-Imperialism offers readers an inside look at the ideas, strategy, and worldview behind one of the fastest-growing anti-imperialist movements in the United States today.

Perfect for readers interested in:

Marxism, anti-imperialism, geopolitics, socialism, Russia, China, NATO, political economy, revolutionary movements, multipolarity, world affairs, and the future of global politics.

Av The Newsmakers, “TRT World’s flagship current affairs programme”.

Omer Bartov: Israel

What Went Wrong?

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

Amazon.com

Publisher’s Description:

A leading Israeli American scholar of the Holocaust explores and explains his native country’s intensifying turn toward violence and exclusion.

The distinguished historian Omer Bartov was born on a kibbutz, grew up in Tel Aviv, and served in the Israel Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War. He went on to become a leading scholar of the German army and the Holocaust, before turning his attention to his native country.

In Israel: What Went Wrong?, Bartov sketches the tragic transformation of Zionism, a movement that sought to emancipate European Jewry from oppression, into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism. How is it possible, he asks, that a state founded in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, an event that gave legitimacy to a national home for the Jews, stands credibly accused of perpetrating large-scale war crimes? How do we come to terms with the fact that Israel’s war of destruction is being conducted with the support, laced with denial and indifference, of so many of its Jewish citizens?

Tracing the roots of the violent events currently unfolding in Israel and the occupied territories, Bartov tracks his country’s moral tribulations and considers the origins of Zionism, the intertwining of Israel’s independence with Palestinian displacement, the politics of the Holocaust, controversies over the term “genocide,” and the uncertain future. The result is a searing and urgent critique that addresses today’s debates over Zionism and the future of Israel with rigor and depth.

Reviews:

“Remarkable . . . Anyone seeking an explanation of Israel’s ‘fall from grace’ will find no better guide than this perceptive, sophisticated, erudite, elegantly written and strikingly fair-minded book.”

Avi Shalim, The Guardian

“Timely . . . a must-read . . . [Bartov’s] explicit tone, factual multi-sectoral analysis, and historically grounded and honest discussion of the most sensitive, but urgently relevant, dimensions of modern Zionism, Judaism, and Israel . . . revolves around how we should understand – and end – Israel’s US-enabled, slow-motion genocide in Palestine. The book’s message is clear from the very beginning.”

Rami G. Khouri, Arab Center Washington DC

“[Bartov’s] understanding of his subject is both historical and intimate . . . Clear, sober, and deliberate. Israel is his attempt to chart what has happened to the country where he was born . . . Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism . . . One of Bartov’s points in this mournful book is that too many possibilities have been kept off the table.”

Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review

“A clear-eyed work of moral reckoning.”

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Omer Bartov brings his formidable scholarly skills to offer a deep history of October 7. But Israel: What Went Wrong? is far more than that. It is a fascinating and rich biography, in the first instance, of Zionism, which went from an ideology of salvation to a project of oppression, including to the point of committing what Bartov calls genocide in Gaza. At the same time, this book is so affecting because it is a biography in another sense, of Bartov himself. The author chronicles his own transformation from an Israeli youth and soldier into one of America’s leading scholars of the Shoah. His personal journey affords him a distinctive perch for observing the way in which trauma transformed Jews in Israel from the victimized into the victimizer. Bartov traces this process with poignancy, judiciousness, and moral clarity – modeling the very ‘opening of minds’ that he deems so urgent in our times.”

David N. Myers, Sady and Ludwig Kahn Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at UCLA

“A brilliant, unique, timely, and thought-provoking treatment of how, in being ‘committed to saving the Jews from future existential threats, Zionism created a state that roots its very sense of identity in its assertion of living under precisely this type of threat, resulting in large part from the very policy that was intended to remove it.’ A must-read.”

Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland and nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution

“Gripping in its moral clarity and sweeping knowledge, this new work by Omer Bartov painfully offers harsh insights into the State of Israel without ignoring nuances and complexities.”

Michael Sfard, Israeli human rights lawyer and author of The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine, and the Legal Battle for Human Rights

“The descent of Israel, once a refuge for the Holocaust’s surviving victims, into genocidal madness has revealed how little we know about the ‘slaughter-bench’ of modern history. In Israel: What Went Wrong?, Omer Bartov explores the most horrifying and vexing calamity of our time with a rare combination of painful personal intimacy and impeccable scholarship. Anyone disturbed and frightened by our current moral and intellectual morass should read it.”

Pankaj Mishra, author of The World After Gaza

“Born in an Israeli kibbutz, historian Bartov grew up believing in the promise of the Jewish state. More than two years on from the horrific Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, his latest book tries to understand how a nation founded in response to an epoch-defining genocide became a perpetrator of the same terrible crime against Palestinians in Gaza. It considers the rhetorical uses of antisemitism and Holocaust remembrance to explore how Israel defines and understands itself, particularly how it navigates (or declines to acknowledge) the tension between being a Jewish state and a democratic one. Bartov argues that the country’s refusal to adopt a formal constitution may be the defining failure that has enabled Israel to maintain decades of inequality and violence against Palestinians. He explores various possible futures for Israel and Palestine while recognizing that Israel is unlikely to change course without pressure from the international community. Israel is bracing in its moral clarity. Its author is well aware of humanitarian law, and he refuses to obfuscate the reality of crimes against humanity, regardless of who perpetrates them. For anyone seeking to understand the tragedies of the last two years, Israel is an essential read.”

Jenny Hamilton, Booklist (starred review)

About the Author:

Omer Bartov is the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University and the author of many books, including Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, which won the National Jewish Book Award; Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past; and Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis.

How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home

Bold Type Books, 2025

Amazon.com

Publisher’s Description:

A hard-hitting investigation into how the Pentagon’s runaway spending embroils America in foreign wars, squanders its wealth, and enriches a privileged elite

“A damning indictment of the conflicts of interest running rampant in the defense establishment.”

Publishers Weekly

America spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on its military. This extraordinary spending not only detracts from our ability to address pressing social problems but compels us into foreign wars to justify our vast arsenal. Sold to us in the name of “security,” our military industrial complex actually makes us far less safe.

Top policy experts William D. Hartung and Ben Freeman follow the profits of militarism from traditional Pentagon contractors, which receive more than half of the Pentagon’s budget, to the upstart high-tech firms that shamelessly promote unproven and destabilizing technologies. They unmask the enablers of the war machine – politicians, lobbyists, the media, Hollywood, think tanks, and so many more – whose work enriches a wealthy elite at the expense of everybody else, spreading conflict around the world and embroiling America in endless wars.

A damning tour de force, The Trillion Dollar War Machine shows who is pulling the strings and pushing for war, and offers a blueprint for how we can shut down the war machine and restore American security and prosperity.  

Reviews:

“Extremely timely and necessary . . . [Hartung’s and Freeman’s] diagnosis offers a map of the structural forces that continuously push America toward war. However, do not despair; the authors, as they should, propose a successful path forward.”

Common Dreams

“A corrupt military-industrial complex peddles shoddy weapons that can’t win wars but still wreak havoc around the world, according to this coruscating exposé . . . It’s a damning indictment of the conflicts of interest running rampant in the defense establishment.”

Publishers Weekly

​“A resounding denunciation of a military-industrial complex gone metastatic.”

Kirkus

“This is it: the definitive account of America’s wasteful, corrupt, and astonishingly ineffective military industrial complex. William Hartung and Ben Freeman have done their fellow citizens a great service. Taking their message to heart is a job for the rest of us.”

Andrew Bacevich, cofounder of the Quincy Institute and coeditor of Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars

“Hartung and Freeman tell a tragic story of how the military industrial complex successfully survived President Eisenhower’s dark warning and now shapes the military budget and our escalating rivalry with China. But even more ominous, Silicon Valley has joined the game with promises of AI miracles and lethal systems and gadgets galore. Sobering – and well worth reading.”

Jerry Brown, former governor of California

“Because the book is so well researched and easily readable, I presume many will be moved to want to do something, and Hartung and Freeman offer a foundation for action.”

John Tierney, former member of Congress and the current executive director of the Council for a Livable World

“Hartung and Freeman show that the ecosystem of state-privileged, corporate militarists has become a beast. The result is a war machine that can’t protect us, a foreign policy that flirts with Armageddon, a broken domestic society, and a people who cannot see that the very fabric of our reality is a militarist matrix crafted by lies and sustained by our blood and our souls.”

Scott Horton, director of the Libertarian Institute

About the Authors:

William D. Hartung is a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute, focusing on the arms industry and military spending. He is the author of Prophets of War and resides in New York City. 

Ben Freeman, director of democratizing foreign policy at the Quincy Institute, holds a PhD from Texas A&M. He focuses on investigating money in politics, military spending, and foreign influence. He lives in central Florida.