Tuesday, May 29, 2012 Andrew Bacevich: The Golden Age of Special Operations
They have a way of slipping under the radar, whether heading into Pakistan looking for Osama bin Laden, Central Africa looking for Joseph Kony, or Yemen assumedly to direct local military action against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. I'm talking, of course, about U.S. special operations forces. These days, from Somalia to the Philippines, presidential global interventions are increasingly a dime a dozen.
Thursday, May 24, 2012 Tom Engelhardt: The Road to Amnesia
It's the saddest reading around: the little announcements that dribble out of the Pentagon every day or two -- those terse, relatively uninformative death notices: rank; name; age; small town, suburb, or second-level city of origin; means of death ("small arms fire," "improvised explosive device,"...
Tuesday, May 22, 2012 Hellman and Kramer: How Much Does Washington Spend on "Defense"? (1 comments)
As the country's big wars on the Eurasian continent wind down, American war-making and war preparations fly ever more regularly under the radar. There has, for instance, been much discussion abou There has, for instance, been much discussion about the Obama administration's policy "pivot" to Asia -- the only warlike act in the region so far has, however, been a little noted drone strike in the Philippines.
Monday, May 21, 2012 Ellen Cantarow: The New Eco-Devastation in Rural America (1 comments)
When workers drilling tunnels at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, began to die, Union Carbide had an answer. It hadn't been taking adequate precautions against the inhalation of silica dust, a known danger to workers since the days of ancient Greece. Instead, in many cases, a company doctor would simply tell the families of the workers that they had died of "tunnelitis," and a local undertaker would be paid $50 to dispose of each
Thursday, May 17, 2012 Barbara Ehrenreich: Looting the Lives of the Poor
Gordon Gekko, the infamously cutthroat capitalist and lead character in Oliver Stone's Wall Street, captured the heady years of the 1980s with a single, indelible line: Greed is good. Today, it is Edward Conard, a friend and former colleague of Mitt Romney's at the private equity firm Bain Capital, who has offered a new mantra for the 1%, a cri de coeur for the Gekkos of the twenty-first century: Inequality is good.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012 William Astore: Hail to the Cheerleader-in-Chief! (2 comments)
Let's start with this: according to the Pentagon, the production and acquisition costs of Lockheed Martin's F-35 fighter jet, the military's most expensive weapons program, have risen yet again, this time by 4.3% since 2010 to $395.6 billion. If you're talking about the total cost of the system, including maintenance and support for the nearly 2,500 planes that will some (endlessly delayed) day be produced for the military...
Monday, May 14, 2012 Predator Nation
Here's the essence of it: you can trust America's crème de la crème, the most elevated, responsible people, no matter what weapons, what powers, you put in their hands. No need to constantly look over their shoulders.
Thursday, May 10, 2012 Michael Klare: Oil Wars on the Horizon
There has been much discussion recently about the Obama administration's "pivot" from the Greater Middle East to Asia: the 250 Marines sent to Darwin, Australia, the littoral combat ships for Singapore, the support for Burmese "democracy," war games in the Philippines (and a drone strike there as well), and so on. The U.S. is definitely going offshore in Asian waters.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012 Noam Chomsky: A Rebellious World or a New Dark Age? (10 comments)
If you had followed May Day protests in New York City in the mainstream media, you might hardly have noticed that they happened at all. The stories were generally tucked away, minimalist, focused on a few arrests, and spoke of "hundreds" of protesters in the streets, or maybe, if a reporter was feeling especially generous, a vague "thousands."
Monday, May 7, 2012 Ernest Callenbach: Last Words to an America in Decline
Thirty-five years later, it was still on my bookshelf in a little section on utopias (as well it should have been, being a modern classic). A friend had written his name inside the cover and even dated it: August 1976, the month I returned to New York City from years of R&R on the West Coast.
Thursday, May 3, 2012 Bill McKibben: The Most Important Story of Our Lives (4 comments)
By now, it's already deep election season, the beginning of the culmination of a cycle that commenced the day after (or even the day before) the previous presidential election. In the meantime, the endless polls appear -- you can check Obama's approval rating or the state of the presidential horserace any time, night or day -- and the media goes ballistic handicapping the odds or discussing the presidential cat fight.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012 Rebecca Solnit: American Dystopia, Fiction or Reality?
In my childhood years of the 1950s, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic landscapes were a dime a dozen. In the Arctic, the first radioactivated monster, Ray Bradbury's famed Rhedosaurus, awakened in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and began its long slouch toward New York City.
Monday, April 30, 2012 Tom Engelhardt: A Global-Profiling President
He has few constraints (except those he's internalized). No one can stop him or countermand his orders. He has a bevy of lawyers at his beck and call to explain the "legality" of his actions. And if he cares to, he can send a robot assassin to kill you, whoever you are, no matter where you may be on planet Earth.
Thursday, April 26, 2012 Pepe Escobar: A Full Spectrum Confrontation World? (1 comments)
Last December, a super-secret RQ-170 Sentinel, part of a far-reaching program of CIA drone surveillance over Iran, went down (or was shot down, or computer-jacked and hacked down) and was recovered intact by the Iranian military. This week, an Iranian general proudly announced that his country's experts had accessed the plane's computer.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012 Nick Turse: Memory Failure at the Pentagon
Call it a mantra, a litany, or a to-don't list, but the drip, drip, drip of Afghan disaster and the gross-out acts accompanying it have already resulted in one of those classic fill-you-in paragraphs that reporters hang onto for whenever the next little catastrophe rears its ugly head.
Monday, April 23, 2012 Lewis Lapham: Machine-Made News
A decade ago, I wrote a novel, The Last Days of Publishing, about the world I had worked in for a quarter-century. I already had at least some sense, then, of what was bearing down on the book. Keep in mind that this was a couple of years before Facebook was launched and years before the Kindle, the Nook, or the iPad saw the light of day.
Thursday, April 19, 2012 Fraser and Freeman: Creating a Prison-Corporate Complex (1 comments)
As cash-starved state governments scrape their way through this so-called recovery, they might as well hang signs with this message on their capitals: "Everything must go." States are hemorrhaging workers and selling off assets at a startling rate. So dire are the states' economic woes that they've begun offloading a more unusual type of property: prisons.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 Dilip Hiro: How to Trump a Superpower
Chalk it up to the genuine strangeness of our second Afghan War. Americans, according to the latest polls, are turning against the conflict in ever greater numbers, yet it's remarkable how little -- beyond a few obvious, sensational events -- they know about what's actually going on there in their name.
Monday, April 16, 2012 Chase Madar: Legal Atrocities
Of course, it wasn't Barack Obama's fault. He didn't nominate himself for the Nobel Peace Prize back in 2009 when he was already on a distinct war trajectory in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Nobel committee did it in what, even then, was visibly a vote for the idea that "peace" was anything but George W. Bush.
Thursday, April 12, 2012 Juan Cole: The Iran Conundrum
Negotiators for Iran, the U.S., Britain, China, France, Russia, and Germany are to meet in Turkey this Friday, face to face, for the first time in more than a year. There are small signs of possible future compromise on both sides when it comes to Iran's nuclear program (and a semi-public demand from Washington that could be an instant deal-breaker).
Tuesday, April 10, 2012 Tom Engelhardt: The Smog of War
Take off your hat. Taps is playing. Almost four decades late, the Vietnam War and its post-war spawn, the Vietnam Syndrome, are finally heading for their American grave. It may qualify as the longest attempted burial in history. Last words -- both eulogies and curses -- have been offered too many times to mention, and yet no American administration found the silver bullet that would put that war away for keeps.
Monday, April 9, 2012 Peter Van Buren: Joining The Whistleblowers' Club
The world can be a luckless place, but every now and then serendipity just knocks you off a cliff. In what passed for my real life before TomDispatch intervened, I was (and remain, on a part-time basis) a book editor in mainstream publishing. The "slush pile" in a publishing house is normally the equivalent of an elephant's graveyard, the place prospective books go to die. It's made up of proposals or manuscripts arriving over
Thursday, April 5, 2012 Bill McKibben: How You Subsidize the Energy Giants to Wreck the Planet (3 comments)
Just in case you're running for national office, here are a few basic stats to orient you when you hit Washington (thanks to the invaluable Open Secrets website of the Center for Responsive Politics). In 2011, the oil and gas industries ponied up more than $148 million to lobby Congress and federal agencies of various sorts.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012 Tom Engelhardt: The Intelligence Bureaucracy That Ate Our World
I was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, for another small, airless room to be added to the American national security labyrinth.
Monday, April 2, 2012 Michael Klare: Welcome to the New Third World of Energy, the U.S. (1 comments)
Here's a simple rule of thumb when it comes to energy disasters: if it's the nuclear industry and something begins to go wrong -- from Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 to Fukushima, Japan, after the 2011 tsunami -- whatever news is first released, always relatively reassuring, will be a lie, pure and simple. And as the disaster unrolls, it's not likely to get much better.
Thursday, March 29, 2012 John Feffer: Islamophobia, Obama, and the Art of Acting Muslim (1 comments)
When, in the last years, Marine Corps Intelligence put together a report on the practice of "cultural Islam" in Afghanistan, it noted that "Afghans are a traditionally superstitious culture," specifically referencing the weight given to dreams and symbols as well as "practices"such as the evil eye superstition."
Tuesday, March 27, 2012 Chip Ward: Apologies to the Next Generation for the Turmoil to Come (3 comments)
t our relatively advanced ages, Chip Ward and I couldn't be more modern. We've never met, only e-met (and chatted on our cell phones). We may never meet. He lives in the backcountry of Utah and while he travels extensively, it's not on trails I'm likely to be following, nor is it to the big city. I seldom leave New York and when I do, it's not for Utah.
Monday, March 26, 2012 Michelle Alexander: The Age of Obama as a Racial Nightmare (1 comments)
In March 2010, when TomDispatch first published a piece by Michelle Alexander, her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, had just been published. As I wrote then, it focused in startling ways on "a growing racial divide, one which includes the formation of a new undercaste in America that loses its normal rights at the prison gates and often never recovers them."
Thursday, March 22, 2012 Michael Gould-Wartofsky: Class of 2012 Meet the Class of 1984
Graduating from high school soon? Looking for a job in a high-growth field? Like working outdoors and traveling to exotic locales? How does $103,269 a year strike you?
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 William Hartung: Republican Math and the Pentagon Budget
Math has never been my strong suit, but even I can see that the Pentagon -- whose officials treat "weapons program" and "cost overrun" as synonyms -- has a monster math problem. Not surprisingly, it's also a place that has never successfully passed an audit. Its top officials have talked endlessly about the giant cuts they are making in future Pentagon planning to fit the changing financial mood of the country.
Monday, March 19, 2012 Karen Greenberg: A New Age of Enemies
Just a couple of days after "Sergeant Massacre" left his base in southern Afghanistan and singlehandedly perpetrated the My Lai of the Afghan War, shooting and evidently in some cases stabbing to death 16 Afghan villagers, including nine children, a district police chief in Kapisa Province reported that a NATO air strike had killed three civilians and injured two more.
Thursday, March 15, 2012 Barbara Ehrenreich: American Poverty, 50 Years Later (3 comments)
We call it "the nation's capital," but that's increasingly a misnomer. Consider Congress, where as last year ended 250 members, or 47% of our representatives, were millionaires, and the estimated median net worth of a senator was $2.56 million. Or consider the city of movers, shakers, and lobbyists they live in.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012 Michael Klare: Why High Gas Prices are Here to Stay
Think about this for a second and if it doesn't stagger you, I don't know what to say: the U.S. military consumes as much oil every day as the entire nation of Sweden.
Monday, March 12, 2012 Tom Engelhardt: War as the President's Private Preserve (1 comments)
When I was young, the Philadelphia Bulletin ran cartoon ads that usually featured a man in trouble -- dangling by his fingers, say, from an outdoor clock. There would always be people all around him, but far too engrossed in the daily paper to notice. The tagline was: "In Philadelphia, nearly everybody reads the Bulletin."
Thursday, March 8, 2012 Ann Jones: Playing the Game in Afghanistan
How primitive the Afghans are! A New York Times account of faltering negotiations over a possible "strategic partnership" agreement to leave U.S. troops on bases in that country for years to come highlights just how far the Afghans have to go to become, like their U.S. mentor, a mature democracy.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012 Eyal Press: Chilling Dissent on Wall Street (2 comments)
I scribbled the instructions in my notepad as fast as the strange man with the faint twang could give them: Ride the DC Metro red line out to the final stop. Walk to the commuter lot. Wait there. Look for a black Cadillac.
Monday, March 5, 2012 Stephan Salisbury: Weaponizing the Body Politic
When I covered the Occupy Wall Street protests last fall, I just couldn't stay focused, despite the fact that people from across the country and around the world were traveling to that block-long half-acre park of granite walls and honey-locust trees in lower Manhattan to build a new mini-society. It boasted free housing, free food, free medical care, free education, and free music.
Thursday, March 1, 2012 Andy Kroll: The Unlikely Oracle of Occupy Wall Street
n a recent TomDispatch introduction, I pointed out that, when it comes to America's wars, you can't afford to be right. I suggested that those who had foreseen disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan should logically be celebrated in this country and "should be in the Rolodexes of every journalist reporting on American foreign policy, the Iran crisis, or our wars." But, I asked, "When was the last time you heard from one of them?"
Tuesday, February 28, 2012 Engelhardt and Turse: The End in Afghanistan?
Is it all over but the (anti-American) shouting -- and the killing? Are the exits finally coming into view?
Sunday, February 26, 2012 Adam Hochschild: Antiwar Critics Forgotten on Oscar Night
Here's how, in his classic Vietnam War history, The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam summed up Washington life via the career of Dean Rusk, the hawkish Secretary of State under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson: "If you are wrong on the hawkish side of an event you are all right; if you are accurate on the dovish side you are in trouble."
Thursday, February 23, 2012 The Arrival of the Warrior Corporation (1 comments)
In the American mind, if Apple made weapons, they would undoubtedly be drones, those remotely piloted planes getting such great press here. They have generally been greeted as if they were the sleekest of iPhones armed with missiles.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Rebecca Solnit: Why the Media Loves the Violence of Protestors and Not of Banks (1 comments)
In December 2001, 110 of 112 revelers at a wedding died, thanks to a B-52 and two B-1B bombers using precision-guided weapons to essentially wipe out a village in Eastern Afghanistan (and then, in a second strike, to take out Afghans digging in the rubble). The incident got next to no attention here.
Monday, February 20, 2012 Andrew Bacevich: Uncle Sam, Global Gangster
If all goes as planned, it will be the happiest of wartimes in the U.S.A. Only the best of news, the killing of the baddest of the evildoers, will ever filter back to our world.
Thursday, February 16, 2012 Ari Berman: The Politics of the Super Rich
America has a serious air pollution problem. Kathleen Hall Jamieson is hell-bent on fixing it.
"Air pollution," in this case, doesn't mean CO2, methane, or anything else in the poisonous cocktail of gases helping warm our planet. Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania communications professor and long-time media critic, is talking about the error-riddled attack ads flooding the TV airwaves this campaign season.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 Noam Chomsky: The Imperial Way; American Decline in Perspective, Part 2
On Tuesday, Part 1 of Noam Chomsky's piece on American decline, ""Losing' the World" was posted at this site. It can be read by clicking here. Now, Part 2 begins. When you're done, you might check out Chomsky's earlier TomDispatch piece, "Who Owns the World?" which could be considered a companion to this one.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012 Noam Chomsky: Hegemony and Its Dilemmas (1 comments)
Back in May 2007, I stumbled across online sketches at the website of a Kansas architectural firm hired to build a monster U.S. embassy-cum-citadel-cum- Greater-Middle-Eastern command center on 104 acres in the middle of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. They offered an artist's impressions of what the place would look like -- a giant self-sufficient compound both prosaic (think malls or housing projects) and opulent.
Thursday, February 9, 2012 Peter Van Buren: In Washington, Fear the Silence, Not the Noise
No one ever joins the government in order to be a whistleblower. Whistleblowers are created, not born. As Peter Van Buren is happy to admit, before he spent a year on two forward operating bases in Iraq running a State Department provincial reconstruction team, he was "a more or less content Foreign Service Officer." It is perhaps typical of leakers that something they are privy to simply pushes them over the edge.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012 Bill McKibben: Why the Energy-Industrial Elite Has It In for the Planet (2 comments)
Two Saturdays ago, I was walking with a friend in a park here in New York City. It was late January, but I was dressed in a light sweater and a thin fall jacket, which I had just taken off and tied around my waist. We were passing a strip of bare ground when suddenly we both did a double-take. He looked at me and said, "Crocuses!" Dumbfounded, I replied, "Yes, I see them."
Sunday, February 5, 2012 Kicking Down the World's Door (2 comments)
Onshore, American power in the twenty-first century proved a disaster. Offshore, with Washington in control of the global seas and skies, with its ability to kick down the world's doors and strike just about anywhere without a by-your-leave or thank-you-ma'am, it hopes for better.
Thursday, February 2, 2012 Robert Lipsyte: On Super Sunday, Occupy Your Mind
Are you on tenterhooks? Will Mitt make it out of the Cayman Islands and into the White House? Will Newt take the full "wild and woolly" ride on the primary roller coaster to the Republican convention? Will the two of them and their PACs eat each other alive by next week? Will Rick and his single Wyoming funder hang in there until his "man on dog" sex comment finally fades from Google?
Tuesday, January 31, 2012 Michael Klare: No Exit in the Persian Gulf?
When it comes to U.S. policy toward Iran, irony is the name of the game. Where to begin? The increasingly fierce sanctions that the Obama administration is seeking to impose on that country's oil business will undoubtedly cause further problems for its economy and further pain to ordinary Iranians. But they are likely to be splendid news for a few other countries that Washington might not be quite so eager to favor.
Monday, January 30, 2012 Tom Engelhardt: Iran Through the Looking Glass
(Tehran, FNA) The Fars News Agency has confirmed with the Republican Guard's North American Operations Command that a new elite Iranian commando team is operating in the U.S.-Mexican border region. The primary day-to-day mission of the team, known as the Joint Special Operations Gulf of Mexico Task Force, or JSOG-MTF, is to mentor Mexican military units in the border areas in their war with the deadly drug cartels.
Thursday, January 26, 2012 Christian Parenti: Big Storms Require Big Government (3 comments)
At some basic level, climate change shouldn't be hard to grasp. Fossil-fuel burning -- the essence of our civilization since the industrial revolution -- dumps prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. As it happens, 2010 was another banner year for carbon dioxide production; the 5.9% rise in CO2 emissions was the "biggest jump ever recorded."
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 William Astore: Confessions of a Recovering Weapons Addict
The twenty-first century hasn't exactly been America's greatest moment. Still, there remain winners, along with all the losers you might care to mention. If, in fact, you were to sum up the first decade-plus of the next "American Century" in manufacturing terms, you might say that -- Steve Jobs aside -- this country has mainly been successful at making things that go boom in the night.
Monday, January 23, 2012 Ellen Cantarow: An Environmental Occupy Fracks Corporate America
They say you can't keep a good man down, but the "good" part of that equation is often negotiable. If you thought you had seen the last of the then-disgraced Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, you know what I mean. The same goes for corporations. Even scandals, swindles, and sanctions don't seem to matter -- at least when the company is valued in the tens of billions of dollars.
Thursday, January 19, 2012 Chase Madar: Accusing Wikileaks of Murder (2 comments)
Wikileaks gets accused of putting lives in danger, but soldiers pissing on dead Taliban is okay, and not criminal?
Tuesday, January 17, 2012 Pepe Escobar: Sinking the Petrodollar in the Persian Gulf (1 comments)
These days, with a crisis atmosphere growing in the Persian Gulf, a little history lesson about the U.S. and Iran might be just what the doctor ordered. Here, then, are a few high- (or low-) lights from their relationship over the last half-century-plus:
Sunday, January 15, 2012 Nick Turse: Drone Disasters (2 comments)
After almost two months in abeyance and the (possibly temporary) loss of Shamsi Air Base for its air war, the CIA is again cranking up its drone operations in the Pakistani tribal borderlands. The first two attacks of 2012 were launched within 48 hours of each other, reportedly killing 10 ___s, and wounding at least four ___s. Yes, that's right, the U.S. is killing ___s in Pakistan.
Thursday, January 12, 2012 Tom Engelhardt: Superpower Adrift in an Alien World
Here's the ad for this moment in Washington (as I imagine it): Militarized superpower adrift and anxious in alien world. Needs advice. Will pay. Pls respond qkly. PO Box 1776-2012, Washington, DC.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012 Michael Klare, Energy Wars 2012
Michael Klare offers a remarkable, if chilling, look at the energy supply chokepoints on the high seas that are going to become ever more contested places of conflict in the years to come.
Sunday, January 8, 2012 Thomas Frank: Why the Tea Party Needs Mitt
A stylish and brilliant anatomy of Mitt Romney and the Tea Party movement, and just why they deserve each other.
Thursday, January 5, 2012 Bill McKibben, Buying Congress in 2012 (1 comments)
How Congressional representatives have been turned from public servants into corporate employees and what to do about the money flooding Washington.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 Tom Engelhardt: Lessons from Lost Wars in 2012 (1 comments)
A devastating, full-frontal assessment of a decade of disastrous American war-making on the Eurasian continent and what lies ahead this year and beyond.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 Debacle! (3 comments)
Simply to fight its war, Washington has made itself dependent on the kindness of strangers -- in this case, Pakistan and Russia. It's one thing when a superpower or great power on the rise casts its lot with countries that may not be natural allies; it's quite a different story when a declining power does so.
Thursday, December 22, 2011 Rebecca Solnit: Occupy Your Heart
As she explores our passionate year of global protest -- from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street and beyond -- she takes as her text a message photographed scrawled on the lid of a pizza box at Zuccotti Park: "Compassion is our new currency."
Monday, December 19, 2011 Tom Engelhardt: The Four Occupations of Planet Earth
An end of the year look back at the four "occupations" that made our world what it is, in misery, chaos and hope, over the last two decades
Tuesday, December 13, 2011 Nick Turse: Did the Pentagon Help Strangle the Arab Spring?
As the Arab Spring blossomed and President Obama hesitated about whether to speak out in favor of protesters seeking democratic change in the Greater Middle East, the Pentagon acted decisively. It forged ever deeper ties with some of the most repressive regimes in the region, building up military bases and brokering weapons sales and transfers to despots from Bahrain to Yemen.
Thursday, December 8, 2011 William Astore, The Remoteness of 1% Wars (2 comments)
In his latest post, TomDispatch regular and retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore takes on our "remote wars," those 1% wars of choice, and just what our remoteness from them means. In our present wars of choice, he points out, "99% of Americans have no stake. The 1% who do are largely ID-card-carrying members of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower so memorably called the "military-industrial complex' in 1961.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 Michael Klare, A New Cold War in Asia?
The Obama administration's new campaign to "contain China" based on a fresh analysis of the global energy equation, and why it will fail.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 Take Our Children! A Modest Proposal for OWS, by Steve Fraser
Our preeminent historian of Wall Street offers a proposal for turning the tables on Wall Street with a Jonathan Swift-style "modest proposal": Restore Debtors' Prisons! Take Our Children!
Monday, November 28, 2011 Peter Van Buren: Thought Crime in Washington
A stunning warning from a State Department official that free speech is in imperiled in Washington as "thought crimes" become the order of the day. Peter Van Buren on the Orwellian firing of Morris Davis.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011 Rebecca Solnit: Civil Society at Ground Zero
Rebecca Solnit on how OWS is a revival of the civil society that rose up to take care of the community in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
Thursday, November 17, 2011 Tom Engelhardt: How the Movies Saved My Life
A plunge into 1950s cinema as an explanation for how Tom of TomDispatch became a critic of American wars.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011 Bill McKibben: Puncturing the Pipeline (1 comments)
"Conventional wisdom has it that the next election will be fought exclusively on the topic of jobs. But President Obama's announcement last week" makes it clear that other issues will weigh in -- and that, oddly enough, one of them might even be climate change."
Monday, November 7, 2011 The War Against The Poor, By Frances Fox Piven (3 comments)
Frances Fox Piven frames this Occupy Wall Street moment in the context of a larger, decades-long right-wing war against the poor.
Thursday, November 3, 2011 Me And Ofac And Ahmed The Egyptian, By Ann Jones
Ann Jones on finding herself on the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control's watch-list of sanctioned groups.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011 The Art Of The Shakedown, From The Nile To The Potomac, By Lawrence Weschler
In a wonderful story, which launches a brilliant cross-continental and cross-cultural comparison, Weschler delves into the nature of corruption here and in Africa. He concludes: "In Uganda, corruption often arises out of desperation. In America, more typically, its wellsprings are greed, pure and simple."
Monday, October 31, 2011 Occupy Wall Street At Valley Forge, By Tom Engelhardt (1 comments)
My latest post offers a personal view of what the Occupy Wall Street movement means (and specifically what it means to me) as the winter of all our discontents bears down on us.
Thursday, October 27, 2011 Occupy Earth, By Chip Ward
Chip Ward then makes a case for why Mother Nature should be included in the 99% that the OWS movement talks about. As he puts it, "It's not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip. In all my years as a grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same: someone got rich and someone got sick.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011 Immunity And Impunity In Elite America, By Glenn Greenwald (1 comments)
A brilliant exploration of how immunity and impunity became a way of life for Washington and Wall Street and why that is being challenged now by Occupy Wall Street.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011 Barbara Ehrenreich, Homeless In America (9 comments)
From TomDispatch regular Barbara Ehrenreich, a powerful look at the draconian response to homelessness in America, and the way Occupy Wall Street has shined a spotlight on the homeless. Her latest post is both an eye-opening look at what the homeless endure in this country and a striking explanation for how extremes of wealth and homelessness are linked.
Thursday, October 20, 2011 TARPing War, by Tom Engelhardt
Right now, at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and elsewhere, when you say "too big to fail" you're talking about the financial institutions that almost took us down in 2008 and that Washington bailed out (with no return for the American taxpayer). In today's post, I suggest another nominee for the category: the Pentagon and the National Security Complex whose dimensions now beggar the imagination.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 Letter to a Dead Man About the Occupation of Hope, by Rebecca Solnit (1 comments)
Rebecca Solnit writes a letter to Mohammed Bouazizi, the young Tunisian vegetable seller who lit himself on fire and sparked the Arab Spring and a growing global movement that now includes, Occupy Wall Street, or the American Fall.
Monday, October 17, 2011 America's Secret Empire of Drone Bases: Its Full Extent Revealed for the First Time, by Nick Turse
America's secret empire of drones is on the rise and, as he did recently with this country's special operations forces, in his latest post TomDispatch Associate Editor Nick Turse lays out just what that constellation of secret bases for the pursuit of robotic war looks like. This is a first for TomDispatch -- and in fact a first more generally.
Thursday, October 13, 2011 The All-American Occupation: A Century of Our Streets Vs. Wall Street , by Steve Fraser
In this groundbreaking piece, Fraser puts the Occupy Wall Street movement in the powerful light of history and helps explain just why the response to a few hundred young demonstrators is shaking the nation. "After an absence of well over half a century," he writes, "Wall Street is back, center stage, as the preferred American icon of revulsion, a status it held for a fair share of our history.
Monday, October 10, 2011 Ariel Dorfman, Salvador Allende Has Words for Barack Obama from the Other Side of Death
A moving warning for President Obama from a Chilean-American writer who has experienced the best and worst of a democratic revolution, a perfect piece for our Occupy Wall Street moment -- Ariel Dorfman, "Salvador Allende Has Words for Barack Obama From the Other Side of Death"
Thursday, October 6, 2011 Andy Kroll: Flat-Lining the Middle Class (2 comments)
A stunning portrait of the economic collapse of the American middle class in the lost decade of 2000-2010, using the hardest of hard numbers, and what it means for our future.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011 The End of America's Pacific Century, by John Feffer (1 comments)
The world is changing in ways Washington, wrapped up in itself and election 2012, hardly notices. But Asia expert John Feffer has a way of seeing the previously unnoticed. In his latest post, he turns our ideas of just what's on America's Pacific horizon upside down. This country, he writes, has already reached the high-water mark of its Pacific presence and influence and we're going to know that remarkably quickly.
Monday, October 3, 2011 Peter Van Buren, How the American Taxpayer Got Plucked in Iraq
Today, TomDispatch provides a hilarious (yet painful) account of what the "reconstruction" of Iraq actually meant at ground level. It's a tale of the funding of the building of a modern plant for killing, plucking, and producing chicken for the Iraqi diet (and jobs for Iraqis) - and it couldn't be wilder (or funnier).
