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).
Thursday, September 29, 2011 Sex and the Single Drone: The Latest in Guarding the Empire (6 comments)
In the world of weaponry, they are the sexiest things around. Others countries are desperate to have them. Almost anyone who writes about them becomes a groupie. Reporters exploring their onrushing future swoon at their potentially wondrous techno-talents. They are, of course, the pilotless drones, our grimly named Predators and Reapers.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, WikiLeaked at the State Department
A particularly vivid, news-breaking, first-person account by a government truth-teller of what it's like to be harried by the government he's served for 23 years -- Peter Van Buren, "Freedom Isn't Free at the State Department, The Only Employee at State Who May Be Fired Because of WikiLeaks"
Monday, September 26, 2011 Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, Will Asia Save Global Capitalism? (1 comments)
Pepe Escobar leaves his usual TomDispatch beat -- covering the global energy landscape -- to offer a far-ranging, original, and challenging look at this planet's economic health and well-being.
Thursday, September 22, 2011 Tomgram: Sandy Tolan, The Occupation That Time Forgot
It's the show that time and the world forgot. It's called the Occupation and it's now in its 45th year. Playing on a landscape about the size of Delaware, it remains largely hidden from view, while Middle Eastern headlines from elsewhere seize the day.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011 Tomgram: Engelhardt, Dearest President and Professor Barack Obama (2 comments)
Sometimes humor reaches for deeper truths. I hope that's the case for my latest post.
From TomDispatch: A dead-on satirical piece, three "Nigerian"-style scam letters from our war zones that reveal the deeper scams of Washington and the Pentagon in these war years.
Monday, September 19, 2011 Tomgram: Nick Turse, How Washington Creates Global Instability
It was built for... well, not to put too fine a point on it, victory. I'm talking, of course, about the ill-named Camp Victory, the massive military complex, a set of bases really, constructed around an old hunting lodge and nine of former dictator Saddam Hussein's opulent palaces near Baghdad International Airport.
Thursday, September 15, 2011 Tomgram: Michael Klare, Is Washington Out of Gas? (1 comments)
Way back then, the signs out on the streets read: "No Blood for Oil," "How did USA's oil get under Iraq's sand?" and "Don't trade lives for oil!" Such homemade placards, carried by deluded antiwar protesters in enormous demonstrations before the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq in March 2003, were typical -- and typically dismissible. Oil? Don't be silly!
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 How Obama Became the Curator of the Bush Legacy (1 comments)
This is, in Davis's usual quirky form, a brilliant account of how lower Manhattan became the Sarajevo of the War on Terrorism, the first shot (and what a disastrous shot it was) in a spiraling nightmare -- like the assassination that began World War I.
Sunday, September 11, 2011 Tomgram: Fraser and Freeman, Taps for the Unemployed (1 comments)
It's also a tale of how unemployment became a "natural" feature of the American landscape, how a deep American horror over the phenomenon faded, and how the unemployed themselves subsided into acquiescence.
Thursday, September 8, 2011 Tomgram: Engelhardt, Tear Down the Freedom Tower
9/11 in American culture, I conclude, has proven anything but a "hallowed" event. I end this way: "Memory is usually so important, but in this case we would have been better off with oblivion. It's time to truly inter not the dead, but the worst urges in American life since 9/11 and the ceremonies which, for a decade, have gone with them.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011 Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, The Imperial Mentality and 9/11 (11 comments)
Chomsky takes a piercing look at the American imperial mentality in action both before and since 9/11, and at what is noticed, what is ignored, and what is conveniently forgotten in this country. He also explores Osama bin Laden's crimes, how he was killed, and why the Obama administration was so unwilling to capture him and bring him into a court of law
Thursday, August 25, 2011 Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Jailed Over Big Oil's Attempt to Wreck the Planet
McKibben and his compatriots are using their jailing to throw a spotlight on Big Oil's next major attempt to despoil the planet and speed climate change. In the process, he's putting a rare spotlight on President Obama to become the climate-change president he promised to be in campaign 2008.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011 Tomgram: Andy Kroll, Political Crossroads in Wisconsin?
This is a stirring, on-the-ground account of Wisconsin in electoral turmoil. Everyone now knows that the unions and Democrats came up just one seat short in a tumultuous uphill battle to take control of the state Senate, but was what happened a victory or a defeat? And for whom exactly?
Sunday, August 21, 2011 Tomgram: Karen J. Greenberg, Taking the Justice Out of the Justice System (2 comments)
On terrorism and national security, to take an obvious (if seldom commented upon) example, the confidence of the U.S. government seems to have been severely, perhaps irreparably, shaken when it comes to that basic and essential American institution: the courts."
Thursday, August 18, 2011 Tomgram: David Bromwich, George W. Obama?
In a vivid annotated list of Barack Obama's advisors -- "the saved and the sacked" -- Bromwich shows just how the president created an airless world of conventional comforters around him and so doomed his presidency to repeating that of his predecessor.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011 Tomgram: Chris Hellman, The Pentagon's Spending Spree
The Pentagon "cuts" presently being discussed in Washington are largely in projected future growth, not in real funds (which continue to rise) -- and even then, the Pentagon and its many boosters in Washington are already crying bloody murder.
Thursday, August 11, 2011 Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Pentagon's Fake Jihadists
Put what follows in the category of paragraphs no one noticed that should have made the nation's hair stand on end. This particular paragraph should also have sent chills through the body politic, launched warning flares, and left the people's representatives in Congress shouting about something other than the debt crisis.
Thursday, August 11, 2011 Could the Pentagon Be Responsible for Your Death? The Military's Marching Orders to the Jihadist World
Even if our computer experts really were capable of turning wavering young Muslims back from the shores of jihadism -- and personally I wouldn't put my money on the Pentagon's skills in that realm -- what about young Muslims (or older ones for that matter) who weren't on that fence and took those "orders" seriously? What exactly are they being "ordered" to do?
Tuesday, August 9, 2011 Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, On Americans (Not) Getting By (Again) (1 comments)
It was at lunch with the editor of Harper's Magazine that the subject came up: How does anyone actually live "on the wages available to the unskilled"? Barbara Ehrenreich investigates!
Thursday, August 4, 2011 Tomgram: Nick Turse, Uncovering the Military's Secret Military (3 comments)
Without the knowledge of the American public, a secret force within the U.S. military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world's countries. This new Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has never been revealed, until now.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011 Tomgram: Engelhardt, Two-Faced Washington
By now, it seems as if everybody and his brother has joined the debt-ceiling imbroglio in Washington, perhaps the strangest homespun drama of our time. It's as if Washington's leading political players, aided and abetted by the media's love of the horserace, had eaten LSD-laced brownies, then gone on stage before an audience of millions to enact a psychotic spectacle of American decline.
Monday, August 1, 2011 Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Hope for the Hell of It (1 comments)
How the Arab Spring will all end is anybody's guess, but the future remains wide open. And not only in the Middle East: everywhere, along with nightmares and despair, there are victories and emerging possibilities.
Thursday, July 28, 2011 Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Playing Ball With the Pentagon
Post-9/11, doesn't it seem as though all American experience is blending into a single experience whose label is "your safety"? Which means, in practical terms, you get poked, prodded, searched, and surveilled wherever you go.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011 Tomgram: Mike Davis, The Coming Economic Disaster (1 comments)
Economically speaking, dots everywhere are almost religiously not connected, and so the thought that the global system itself might fail (as systems sometimes do) never quite manages to arise. Thank heavens, then, for Mike Davis, TomDispatch regular who has never seen a set of dots he didn't care to connect.
Thursday, July 21, 2011 Tomgram: Engelhardt, Washington's No-Friends Franchise (1 comments)
Despite everything, there's still good news when it comes to what Americans can accomplish in the face of the impossible! No, not a debt-ceiling deal in Washington. So much better than that.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011 Tomgram: Christian Parenti, Staff of Life, Bread of Death (1 comments)
Reporter Christian Parenti is just back from the global borderlands where soaring food and oil prices, climate chaos, other kinds of chaos, and resource scarcity add up to a challenging brew of trouble (as world leaders have begun to notice).
Monday, July 18, 2011 Tomgram: Stephan Salisbury, How Muslim-Bashing Loses Elections
Muslim-bashing as a campaign tactic is an absolute no-brainer, a surefire way to win over the far right, get attention, and triumph in elections -- or is it? Sometimes, common knowledge is so common that no one bothers to check it out, and sometimes it's wrong.
Thursday, July 14, 2011 Tomgram: Bill McKibben, The Great American Carbon Bomb (1 comments)
How does anyone react upon discovering that his or her way of life is the crucial problem, that fossil fuels, which keep our civilization powered up and to which our existence is tethered, are playing havoc with the planet?
Tuesday, July 12, 2011 Tomgram: Engelhardt, Making Earth a Global Free-Fire Zone
Americans do seem to have turned the page on Bush and his cronies. (President Obama called it looking forward, not backward.) Still, glance over your shoulder and, if you're being honest, you'll have to admit that one thing didn't happen: they didn't turn the page on us.
Monday, July 11, 2011 Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, The Fog of (Robot) War
Barbara Ehrenreich's latest TomDispatch post, based on an updated and adapted version of the new afterword to her book Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, is expectably brilliant and provocative. It takes us on a dazzling tour of war in our time and its possible future(s), exploring particularly what radical changes the impact of robotics and drone warfare is likely to bring to our world.
Thursday, July 7, 2011 Tomgram: Chase Madar, A Medal for Bradley Manning?
Of course, some American "warriors" just naturally deserve medals, just as some have carte blanche to leak information about secret or "clandestine" U.S. operations without fear of penalty; others get nothing but trouble for their patriotic leaking activities. Such is the case of Army Private Bradley Manning.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011 Tomgram: Andy Kroll, The 60-Year Unemployment Scandal (1 comments)
Americans care about them more than any other issue, so every poll tells us. The presidential candidates are already crafting their stump speeches and talking points around them. President Obama has seen the writing on the wall and regularly tailors his message to emphasize how many of them he has created. I'm talking, of course, about jobs.
Thursday, June 30, 2011 Tomgram: Engelhardt, The President's Military Mantra (1 comments)
It's already gone, having barely outlasted its moment -- just long enough for the media to suggest that no one thought it added up to much.
Okay, it was a little more than the military wanted, something less than Joe Biden would have liked, not enough for the growing crew of anti-war congressional types, but way too much for John McCain, Lindsey Graham, & Co.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011 Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, War Fever Subsides in Washington
The United States is looking strangely like what a past American president once called "a pitiful, helpless giant." The Democratic peace president is presiding over numerous wars and sending American planes and pilotless drones off to bomb and missile countries you didn't even know existed, and yet when he speaks to the world, when he tells other countries and other leaders what they "must" do, no one seems to be listening.
Monday, June 27, 2011 Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Energy Landscape of 2041
Let's see: today, it's a story about rising sea levels. Now, close your eyes, take a few seconds, and try to imagine what word or words could possibly go with such a story.
Thursday, June 23, 2011 Tomgram: Engelhardt, Defining an American State of War
War has a way of turning almost anything upside down, including language. But with lost jobs, foreclosed homes, crumbling infrastructure, and weird weather, who even notices? This undoubtedly means that you're using a set of antediluvian war words or definitions from your father's day. It's time to catch up.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011 Tomgram: Jonathan Schell, The War on the Word "War" (3 comments)
Nobody seems to have noticed, but in the nearly two and a half years of the Obama administration at least three commonplace phrases of the George W. Bush era have slipped into oblivion: "regime change," "shock and awe," and "imperial presidency." The war in Libya should remind us of just how appropriate they remain.
Monday, June 20, 2011 Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, How to End the War on Terror (1 comments)
From TomDispatch this evening: As Washington intensifies its war on terror in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death, an expert suggests five striking symbolic steps that could begin to that war behind us -- Karen J. Greenberg, "Business as Usual on Steroids, The Obama Administration Doubles Down on the War on Terror." A must-read.
Friday, June 17, 2011 Tomgram: Chip Ward, Fire's Manifest Destiny
From TomDispatch tonight: A stunning portrait of a West ablaze and what "the new world" now means to an America facing weather extremes --Chip Ward, "How the West Was Lost, The American West in Flames."
Tuesday, June 14, 2011 Tomgram: William Astore, American Militarism Is Not A Fairy Tale (2 comments)
In his latest TomDispatch post, retired lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore considers a phenomenon that has gotten far too little attention as America's endless wars stretch into the future -- the way classic American distinctions between the military and the civilian are blurring in Washington.
Sunday, June 12, 2011 Tomgram: Lewis Lapham, Eating Money
In his latest essay for the upcoming issue of Lapham's Quarterly, a TomDispatch online exclusive, Lewis Lapham ventures deep into the American stomach and into a long, curious American relationship with food.
Thursday, June 9, 2011 Tomgram: Engelhardt, The 100% Doctrine in Washington
"Without warning, the network -- a set of terrorist super cells -- struck in northern Germany and Germans began to fall by the hundreds, then thousands. As panic spread, hospitals were overwhelmed with the severely wounded. More than 20 of the victims died." That's how I begin my latest post: with a terrorism version of the recent E. coli outbreak and a description of just how Washington would overreact to it.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, How Not to Withdraw from Iraq
The U.S. military is supposed to leave Iraq at the end of this year. Whether it will or not remains up in the air. "To the extent that any attention is paid to Iraq here in Snooki's America, the debate over whether eight years of war entitles the U.S. military to some kind of Iraqi squatter's rights is the story that will undoubtedly get most of the press in the coming months."
Sunday, June 5, 2011 Tomgram: Michael Klare, How to Wreck a Planet 101 (3 comments)
In this stunning, tour-de-force view of global energy developments in a world in which "easy energy" is increasingly a thing of the past and "tough energy" the present reality, Klare highlights three developments that are now shaking all our energy futures and will change our lives.
