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Tom Engelhardt

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.

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(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 4, 2011
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Uncovering the Military's Secret Military 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 28, 2023
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, A War for the Record Books Some wars acquire names that stick. The Lancaster and York clans fought the War of the Roses from 1455-1485 to claim the British throne. The Hundred Years' War pitted England against France from 1337-1453. In the Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648, many European countries clashed, while Britain and France waged the Seven Years' War, 1756-63, across significant parts of the globe[...]
(11 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Noam Chomsky: A Rebellious World or a New Dark Age? 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."
From ImagesAttr
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 6, 2011
Andy Kroll: Flat-Lining the Middle Class 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.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 26, 2012
Christian Parenti: Big Storms Require Big Government 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."
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 21, 2011
Noam Chomsky, Who Owns the World? Noam Chomsky returns to TomDispatch with a remarkable post that begins with the democracy uprising in the Arab world and events in Madison, Wisconsin, and traces, as he puts it, "what is taking place both in the decaying industrial heartland of the richest and most powerful country in human history, and in what President Dwight Eisenhower called "the most strategically important area in the world.'"
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Rebecca Solnit: Why the Media Loves the Violence of Protestors and Not of Banks 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 17, 2014
Ann Jones, Star-Spangled Baggage In today’s post, Ann Jones traces that trail, painted in blood and suffering, from the first veterans of the Afghan War to return to Fort Bragg, four of whom murdered their wives (and three of whom then committed suicide). to the present moment. It’s a stunning account of pain and carnage that puts Fort Hood in the kind of perspective you seldom see. Don’t miss it!
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 9, 2013
Peter Van Buren: If the Government Does It, It's "Legal" Indefinite detention of the innocent and guilty alike, without any hope of charges, trial, or release: this is now the American way. Most Americans, however, may not care to take that in, not even when the indefinitely detained go on a hunger strike. That act has certainly gotten Washington's and the media's collective attention.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 13, 2011
How Obama Became the Curator of the Bush Legacy 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.
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(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 2, 2010
Tomgram: Ann Jones, In Bed With the U.S. Army a unique account of being embedded with the U.S. Army in an Afghan war zone and a vivid explanation of why American-style war is bound to fail in Afghanistan -- Ann Jones, "Here Be Dragons, MRAPS, Sprained Ankles, Air Conditioning, Farting Contests, and Other Snapshots from the American War in Afghanistan"
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 1, 2014
Noam Chomsky, America's Real Foreign Policy It goes without saying that the honchos of the national security state weren't exactly happy with Edward Snowden's NSA revelations. Still, over the last year, the comments of such figures, politicians associated with them, and retirees from their world clearly channeling their feelings have had a striking quality: over-the-top vituperation.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Tomgram: William Hartung, Lockheed Martin's Shadow Government As a boy in the 1950s, I can remember my father, a World War II vet, becoming livid while insisting that our family not shop at a local grocery store. Its owners, he swore, had been "war profiteers" and he would never forgive them.
(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 16, 2012
David Vine: U.S. Empire of Bases Grows It was January 15, 2004, and TomDispatch had only been in existence for a year when Chalmers Johnson, author of the prophetic book Blowback (published in 2000 and a bestseller after the 9/11 attacks), did a piece for this site entitled "America's Empire of Bases." He wrote then: "Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 7, 2011
The War Against The Poor, By Frances Fox Piven Frances Fox Piven frames this Occupy Wall Street moment in the context of a larger, decades-long right-wing war against the poor.
(11 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, The Imperial Mentality and 9/11 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
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 23, 2012
Noam Chomsky: Destroying the Commons - How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta This week the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed suit against CIA Director David Petraeus, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and two top special operations forces commanders for "violating the Constitution and international law" in the drone assassination of three American citizens in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son Abdulrahman...
One Percent, From ImagesAttr
(24 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 19, 2015
Is a New Political System Emerging in This Country? This period doesn't represent a version, of politics as usual; nor is the 2016 campaign an election as usual; nor are we experiencing Washington as usual. Put together our 1% elections, the privatization of our govt, the de-legitimization of Congress & the presidency, as well as the empowerment of the national security state and the U.S. military, & add in the demobilization of the American public & you have a new ballgame
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Subhankar Banerjee: Arctic Nightmares Here's a Jeopardy!-style question for you: "Eight different species of whales can be seen in these two American seas." Unless you're an Iñupiaq, a marine biologist, or an Arctic enthusiast like me, it's a pretty good guess that you can't tell me what those seas are or what those whales are either.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 13, 2017
William Astore, Returning to Cheyenne Mountain Has there ever been a nation as dedicated to preparing for doomsday as the United States? If that's a thought that hasn't crossed your mind, maybe it's because you didn't spend part of your life inside Cheyenne Mountain. That's a tale I'll get to soon, but first let me mention America's "doomsday planes."
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 15, 2015
Tomgram: David Vine, "The Truth About Diego Garcia, And 50 Years of Fictions About a U.S. Military Base" While the grim saga of Diego Garcia frequently reads like fiction, it has proven all too real for the people involved. It's the story of a U.S. military base built on a series of real-life fictions told by U.S. and British officials over more than half a century.
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 12, 2015
Michael Klare: Is Big Oil Finally Entering a Climate Change World? Many reasons have been provided for the dramatic plunge in the price of oil to about $60 per barrel (nearly half of what it was a year ago): slowing demand due to global economic stagnation; overproduction at shale fields in the United States; the decision of the Saudis and other Middle Eastern OPEC producers to maintain output at current levels (presumably to punish higher-cost producers in the U.S. and elsewhere)...
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Dilip Hiro: Call it an irony, if you will, but as the Obama administration struggles to slow down or halt its scheduled withdrawal from Afghanistan, newly elected Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is performing a withdrawal operation of his own.
Child soldiers in South Sudan, From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 4, 2015
Tomgram: Nick Turse, My Very Own Veteran's Day PIBOR, South Sudan -- "I've never been a soldier," I say to the wide-eyed, lanky-limbed veteran sitting across from me. "Tell me about military life. What's it like?" He looks up as if the answer can be found in the blazing blue sky above, shoots me a sheepish grin, and then fixes his gaze on his feet. I let the silence wash over us and wait. He looks embarrassed. Perhaps it's for me.
Naomi Oreskes, From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Tomgram: Naomi Oreskes, Why Climate Deniers Are Their Own Worst Nightmares From prominent historian of science Naomi Oreskes (profiled in the New York Times science section this morning) and co-author of the already-classic book Merchants of Doubt, a truly important piece: a devastating dissection of climate denial, the deniers, and their attack on climate scientists.
The never-ending war in Afghanistan, From FlickrPhotos
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 5, 2015
Tomgram: Ann Jones, The Never-Ending War Ten months ago, on December 28, 2014, a ceremony in Kabul officially marked the conclusion of America's very long war in Afghanistan. President Obama called that day "a milestone for our country." After more than 13 years, he said, "our combat mission in Afghanistan is ending, and the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Will Our Generals Ever Shut Up? The Military's Media Megaphone and the U.S. Global Military Presence Generals and admirals now mouth off regularly on a wide range of policy issues, appealing to the American public both directly and via deferential (sometimes fawning) reporters, pundits, and commentators. They and their underlings clearly leak news repeatedly for tactical advantage in policy-making situations.
Ceremony to Honor Ms. Farkhunda, From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 12, 2015
Ann Jones: Citizen's Revolt in Afghanistan I went to Kabul, Afghanistan, in March to see old friends. By chance, I arrived the day after a woman had been beaten to death and burned by a mob of young men. The world would soon come to know her name: Farkhunda
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Noam Chomsky: Hegemony and Its Dilemmas 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Nick Turse: The U.S. Military's Battlefield of Tomorrow For three days, wearing a kaleidoscope of camouflage patterns, they huddled together on a military base in Florida. They came from U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and U.S. Army Special Operations Command, from France and Norway, from Denmark, Germany, and Canada: 13 nations in all.
Funding amid panic over ISIS .Lone Wolves. and mass shootings., From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 3, 2015
Karen J. Greenberg, The Mass Killer and the National Security State TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, explains just what it means to the future funding of the national security state amid a panic over ISIS "lone wolves" and mass shootings -- and why it's likely to result in more taxpayer money going into ever more intrusive efforts to monitor Americans instead of into caring for those in our society who are young and disturbed.
SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, February 9, 2020
Tomgram: Michael Klare, War in the Arctic? In early March, an estimated 7,500 American combat troops will travel to Norway to join thousands of soldiers from other NATO countries in a massive mock battle with imagined invading forces from Russia.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 8, 2015
Michael Klare: Perpetuating the Reign of Carbon Around the world, carbon-based fuels are under attack. Increasingly grim economic pressures, growing popular resistance, and the efforts of government regulators have all shocked the energy industry. Oil prices are falling, colleges and universities are divesting from their carbon stocks, voters are instituting curbs on hydro-fracking, and delegates at the U.N.
Richard Nixon: His legacy is very much still with us., From ImagesAttr
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Tomgram: Tim Weiner, The Nixon Legacy It turns out we never got rid of Richard Nixon. Weiner's book should convince anyone that he created the blueprint for the present national security state. What was, for instance, one president's mania for bugging and recording his world in the twentieth century has become, in the twenty-first century, the NSA's mania for bugging and recording the whole planet.
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
Michael Klare, From ImagesAttr
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 28, 2015
Michael Klare: Superpower in Distress Take a look around the world and it's hard not to conclude that the United States is a superpower in decline. Whether in Europe, Asia, or the Middle East, aspiring powers are flexing their muscles, ignoring Washington's dictates, or actively combating them.
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 13, 2015
Peter Van Buren: In the Middle East, Bet on a Winner (Iran!) The U.S. is running around in circles in the Middle East, patching together coalitions here, acquiring strange bedfellows there, and in location after location trying to figure out who the enemy of its enemy actually is. The result is just what you'd expect: chaos further undermining whatever's left of the nations whose frailty birthed the jihadism America is trying to squash.
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, Portrait of a Sagging Empire From TomDispatch this morning: Chalmers Johnson's monumental, if grim, look into America's post-imperial future on the occasion of the publication of his new book Dismantling the Empire -- Chalmers Johnson, "The Guns of August, Lowering the Flag on the American Century
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Tomgram: Bill McKibben, A Wilted Senate on a Heating Planet From TomDispatch this morning, a call to action from one of our leading environmentalists -- in what is likely to be the hottest summer on record, it's time to take the politics of global warming back from a do-nothing establishment: Bill McKibben, "We're Hot As Hell and We're Not Going to Take It Any More, Three Steps to Establish a Politics of Global Warming"
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 14, 2015
William Astore: America's Mutant Military It's 1990. I'm a young captain in the U.S. Air Force. I've just witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, something I never thought I'd see, short of a third world war. Right now I'm witnessing the slow death of the Soviet Union, without the accompanying nuclear Armageddon so many feared. Still, I'm slightly nervous as my military gears up for an unexpected new campaign, Operation Desert Shield/Storm...
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 7, 2015
Nomi Prins: Hillary, Bill, and the Big Six Banks The past, especially the political past, doesn't just provide clues to the present. In the realm of the presidency and Wall Street, it provides an ongoing pathway for political-financial relationships and policies that remain a threat to the American economy going forward.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 24, 2014
Best of TomDispatch: Noam Chomsky, "The Most Dangerous Moment" He wrote it back in 2012, catching unforgettably the time when, more than half a century ago, we all almost bit the dust. Of course, as you'll see from my introduction, even without his piece I remember well that moment in 1962 when the 18-year-old Tom Engelhardt thought he was toast.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, June 5, 2011
Tomgram: Michael Klare, How to Wreck a Planet 101 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 26, 2019
Tomgram: Hartung and Smithberger, A Trillion-Dollar Future Pentagon Budget? For the Pentagon, happy days are here again (if they ever left). With a budget totaling more than $1.4 trillion for the next two years, the department is riding high, even as it attempts to set the stage for yet more spending increases in the years to come.
We are groomed to celebrate, and be desensitized to, slaughter., From ImagesAttr
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Tomgram: Engelhardt, What It Means When You Kill People On the Other Side of the Planet and No One Notices This is the story of how the antiwar movement of one era brought what I call "the spectacle of slaughter" into American neighborhoods and backyards, and how, in the twenty-first century, the deaths of hundreds of thousands, the killing of children, the knocking off of wedding parties has barely caused a ripple in American consciousness. Think of this as memoir with a purpose.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 26, 2019
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Which Hunt? Who Knows Which Witch? French king Louis XV reputedly said, "Après moi, le de'luge." ("After me, the flood.") Whether that line was really his or not remains unclear, but not long after his death did come the French Revolution. We should be so lucky! Our all-American version of Louis XV, Donald I, is incapable, I suspect, of even imagining a world after him.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 25, 2019
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, What My Personal War Costs Me There is some incongruity between my role as an editor of a book about the costs of America's wars and my identity as a military spouse. I'm deeply disturbed at the scale of human suffering caused by those conflicts and yet I've unintentionally contributed to the war effort through the life I've chosen.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 8, 2016
"The Finest Fighting Force in the History of the World" It's a line you'll hear often enough in Washington: the U.S. military is "the finest fighting force in the history of the world." In my latest post, I take that line seriously and offer a devastating assessment of the actions of the U.S. military since 9/11, as well as a little preview of what we know about U.S. military planning for 2016 in the Greater Middle East and why it's almost certainly doomed to fail.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 16, 2016
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Minimum Wage, Minimum Chance Back in 2014, TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren described for this site how, having lost his State Department job for being a whistleblower on the Iraq War, he fell for a time into the low-wage world. As he wrote, "And soon enough, I did indeed find myself working in exactly that economy and, worse yet, trying to live on the money I made. But it wasn't just the money.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 21, 2022
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Political Hurricane Hits America Believe me, it's strange to be an old man and feel like you're living on a new planet. On November 7th, the day before the midterm elections, I took my usual afternoon walk in New York City and I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt! That was a first for me. And no wonder, since it was 76 degrees out " beautiful, but eerie. After all, that's just not November weather[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Michael Gould-Wartofsky, The New Age of Counterinsurgency Policing Last week, as Baltimore braced for renewed protests over the death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) prepared for battle. With state-of-the-art surveillance of local teenagers' Twitter feeds, law enforcement had learned that a group of high school students was planning to march on the Mondawmin Mall.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 24, 2013
Rebecca Solnit: The Longest War The Republican "war on women" helped define 2012. Its main offensives are well known, including the assertion that you can't get pregnant from rape; the obstruction of the Violence Against Women Act because it would have given Native American courts more jurisdiction over domestic violence; demonizing a woman who dared to assert that all women, rich and poor, deserve access to contraception and laws limiting access to abortion
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 2, 2023
Tomgram: Arnold Isaacs, War in a Post-Fact World This month's catastrophic violence in Israel and Gaza specifically, the contradictory statements from each side on the other's war crimes has taken me back to a revealing personal moment almost exactly 18 years ago, recalling a different war in a different part of the world[...]
There is nothing 'lone' about drone warfare., From ImagesAttr
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 13, 2015
Tomgram: Pratap Chatterjee, No Lone Rangers in Drone Warfare In reality, there's nothing 'lone' about drone warfare. Think of the structure for carrying out Washington's drone killing program as a multidimensional pyramid populated with hundreds of personnel and so complex that just about no one involved really grasps the full picture.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 18, 2015
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The Theology of American National Security Today, a brilliant piece by TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich on the repetitive madness that is Washington's Iraq policy. A full-scale look at the consensus thinking (or national security "theology") that rules the nation's capital and how it has led us repeatedly down the rabbit hole in Iraq (and elsewhere). What the Obama Administration have blinded themselves to and where this leads in an Alice-in-Wonderland world
SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, March 12, 2023
Tomgram: Beverly Gologorsky, Hunger in America My long-dead father used to say, "Every human being deserves to taste a piece of cake." Though at the time his words meant little to me, as I grew older I realized both what they meant, symbolically speaking, and the grim reality they disguised so charmingly[...]
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 3, 2011
Wallace Shawn, Are You Smarter Than Thomas Jefferson? Wally Shawn makes his first appearance at TomDispatch with an essay that couldn't be quirkier, more provocative, or more appropriate to the site. He begins with a world he knows well. "The actor's role in the community," he writes, "is quite unlike anyone else's. Businessmen, for example, don't take their clothes off or cry in front of strangers in the course of their work. Actors do."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 6, 2023
Tomgram: William Astore, An Iron Curtain Has Descended on America All around us things are falling apart. Collectively, Americans are experiencing national and imperial decline. Can America save itself? Is this country, as presently constituted, even worth saving?[...]
(9 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Barbara Ehrenreich, Homeless In America 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.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 22, 2022
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Facing Extremism, Up Close and Personal Recently, an agent of the Department of Homeland Security called me and started asking questions about a childhood acquaintance being investigated for extremism. I put him off. My feelings about this were, to say the least, complex. As a military spouse of 10 years and someone who has long written about governmental abuses of power, I wanted to cooperate with efforts to root out hate[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 3, 2023
Tomgram: Beverly Gologorsky, What Is Possible? Looking into the long reflecting pool of the past, I find myself wondering what it was that made me an activist against injustice. I was born in New York City's poor, rundown, and at times dangerous South Bronx, where blacks, whites, and Latinos (as well as recent immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe) lived side by side or, perhaps more accurately, crowded together[...]
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 19, 2012
Chase Madar: Accusing Wikileaks of Murder Wikileaks gets accused of putting lives in danger, but soldiers pissing on dead Taliban is okay, and not criminal?
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 24, 2011
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Washington's Echo Chamber In this unique post, I offer five striking recent examples of how the American echo chamber -- that place in which Washington can only hear itself talking -- actually works. Each of these comes from the largely forgotten war in Afghanistan and Pakistan where Washington and the U.S. military blunder on as if there were nothing new under the sun.
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 5, 2019
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, A Historic Crime in the Making On the Thursday of the second week of the House Intelligence Committee's impeachment hearings, former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara had a special guest on his weekly podcast, Carl Bernstein.
From ImagesAttr
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 26, 2012
Pepe Escobar: A Full Spectrum Confrontation World? 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 16, 2015
Michael Klare: Is the Age of Renewable Energy Already Upon Us? Don't hold your breath, but future historians may look back on 2015 as the year that the renewable energy ascendancy began, the moment when the world started to move decisively away from its reliance on fossil fuels. Those fuels -- oil, natural gas, and coal -- will, of course, continue to dominate the energy landscape for years to come, adding billions of tons of heat-trapping carbon to the atmosphere.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 23, 2019
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Living at War (Forever) Recently, on a beautiful Kansas Saturday, I fell asleep early, exhausted by the excitement and ultimate disappointment of the Army football team's double overtime loss to highly favored Michigan. Having turned against America's forever wars and the U.S. military as an institution while I was still in it, West Point football...
(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 23, 2015
Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, The Pivot to Eurasia n the rest of this remarkable piece, Escobar explores the latest news when it comes to China's and Russia's attempts to stitch together a new set of forces on the Eurasia continent, a plan in which Iran will be a key crossroads and node. He offers an eye-opening new way of looking at where our planet is headed and why Washington won't be the country leading it there. Make sure to give this piece your full attention!
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 24, 2023
Tomgram: Engelhardt, This Little War of Mine (and Yours and Ours and Theirs) I was born on July 20, 1944, amid a vast global conflict already known as World War II. Though it ended with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 before I could say much more than "Mama" or "Dada," in some strange fashion, I grew up at war[...]
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, June 13, 2010
Tomgram: John Feffer, Pax Ottomanica? Take population out of the equation -- an admittedly big variable -- and Turkey promptly becomes a likely candidate for future superpower. It possesses the 17th top economy in the world and, according to Goldman Sachs, has a good shot at breaking into the top 10 by 2050. Its economic muscle is also well defended: after decades of NATO assistance, the Turkish military is now a regional powerhouse.
SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, September 25, 2019
Tomgram: Todd Miller, "The American Homeland Is the Planet" The driver of the passenger van pulled onto the shoulder of the road, looked back, and said, "There's an immigration checkpoint up ahead. Does everyone have their papers?"
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Rebecca Solnit: Challenging the Divine Right of Big Energy No one would call TomDispatch a traditional website. Still, we do have our traditions. Among them, none is more "traditional" -- a full decade old at a website that just turned 13 this November -- than having Rebecca Solnit end our year.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 26, 2015
Michael Schwartz: Israel, Gaza, and Energy Wars in the Middle East Guess what? Almost all the current wars, uprisings, and other conflicts in the Middle East are connected by a single thread, which is also a threatGuess what? Almost all the current wars, uprisings, and other conflicts in the Middle East are connected by a single thread, which is also a threat: these conflicts are part of an increasingly frenzied competition to find, extract, and market fossil fuels
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 30, 2020
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, The Sudden Descent of the United States You know that feeling when you trip on the street and instantly sense that you're about to crash hard and there's no way to prevent it? As gravity has its way with you, all you can do is watch yourself going down. Yeah, that feeling.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Oil Rush to Hell Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history. Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age of Tough Oil, a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic, hard-to-reach energy sources. Make no mistake: we're entering the danger zone. And brace yourself, the fate of the planet could be at stake.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 12, 2020
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, The Global Economy Catches the Coronavirus Whether you're invested in the stock market or not, you've likely noticed that it's been on a roller coaster lately. The White House and most of the D.C. Beltway crowd tend to equate the performance of the stock market with that of the broader economy. To President Trump's extreme chagrin, $3.18 trillion in stock market value vaporized during the last week of February. Stock markets around the world also fell dramatically.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 14, 2013
Tomgram: Ann Jones, War Wounds In 2010, I arrived at Harvard University with a mess of a manuscript -- 10 years' worth of research on American war crimes in Vietnam patchworked together in such a way that it was comprehensible to only one person on the planet: me. But I was lucky. I had a year to do something about it, and by something, I mean write the book again.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 25, 2013
Ira Chernus, Political Dreaming in the Twenty-First Century: Where Has It Gone? Before plunging into TomDispatch regular Ira Chernus's piece on political dreaming, there's one historical reality worth considering in the largely dreamless night that is our present planet. As everyone knows -- but few give the slightest thought to these days -- the Soviet Union, that "evil empire," that other "superpower," gave up the ghost in 1991. In that moment, history as humanity had long known it ended.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 13, 2020
Tomgram: Engelhardt, War Addicts, Inc. My first question is simple enough: After 18-plus years of our forever wars, where are all the questions? Almost two decades of failing American wars across a startlingly large part of the planet and I'd like to know, for instance, who's been fired for them? Who's been impeached? Who's even paying attention?
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 8, 2019
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, High Crimes and Misdemeanors of the Fading American Century There is blood in the water and frenzied sharks are closing in for the kill. Or so they think. From the time of Donald Trump's election, American elites have hungered for this moment. At long last, they have the 45th president of the United States cornered. In typically ham-handed fashion, Trump has given his adversaries the very means to destroy him politically. They will not waste the opportunity.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 27, 2017
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Putting the "War" in the "War on Terror" I've long argued that just about every Bush-era policy that followed 9/11 was an unqualified disaster. Nevertheless, it remains important to ponder the weight piled upon a president in the wake of unprecedented terror attacks. What would you have done? What follows is my best crack at that thorny question, 16 years after the fact, and with the accumulated experiences of combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 6, 2023
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, A Cycle of Escalating Violence On September 19, 2001, eight days after 9/11, as the leaders of both parties were already pounding a frenzied drumbeat of war, a diverse group of concerned Americans released a warning about the long-term consequences of a military response. Among them were veteran civil rights activists, faith leaders, and public intellectuals, including Rosa Parks, Harry Belafonte, and Palestinian-American Edward Said[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 11, 2023
Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Military Dangers of AI Are Not Hallucinations A world in which machines governed by artificial intelligence (AI) systematically replace human beings in most business, industrial, and professional functions is horrifying to imagine. After all, as prominent computer scientists have been warning us, AI-governed systems are prone to critical errors and inexplicable "hallucinations," resulting in potentially catastrophic outcomes[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 6, 2019
Tomgram: Aviva Chomsky, How the Green New Deal Is Changing America When it comes to heat, extreme weather, wildfires, and melting glaciers, the planet is now in what the media increasingly refers to as "record" territory, as climate change's momentum outpaces predictions.
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Coming Era of Energy Disasters On June 15th, in their testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the chief executives of America's leading oil companies argued that BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was an aberration -- something that would not have occurred with proper corporate oversight and will not happen again once proper safeguards are put in place. This is fallacious, if not an outright lie.
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 5, 2013
Nick Turse, AFRICOM's Gigantic "Small Footprint" Here's a question for you: Can a military tiptoe onto a continent? It seems the unlikeliest of images, and yet it's a reasonable enough description of what the U.S. military has been doing ever since the Pentagon created an Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2007.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 6, 2023
Tomgram: Steve Fraser, Return of the Repressed An aged Native-American chieftain was visiting New York City for the first time in 1906. He was curious about the city and the city was curious about him. A magazine reporter asked the chief what most surprised him in his travels around town. "Little children working," the visitor replied[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 30, 2015
Subhankar Banerjee, Fire at World's End Subhankar Banerjee lives on the Olympic Peninsula in the state of Washington and has recently found himself on the front lines of the present wildfire season in a drought-gripped West. In his latest piece, he takes us into perhaps the single place least likely to be ablaze in America and oh yes, if you haven't already guessed, it's on fire.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 9, 2018
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, A New Age of Sea Power? To some it might seem curious, even quaint, that gunboats and naval bastions, once emblematic of the Victorian age, remain even remotely relevant in our own era of cyber-threats and space warfare. Yet if you examine, even briefly, the central role that naval power has played and still plays in the fate of empires, the deadly serious nature of this new naval competition makes more sense.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 9, 2019
Tomgram: Dahr Jamail, Dealing With Climate PTSD Recently, I was in Homer, Alaska, to talk about my book The End of Ice. Seconds after I had thanked those who brought me to the small University of Alaska campus there, overwhelmed with some mix of sadness, love, and grief about my adopted state -- and the planet generally -- I wept.
America: On the road to decline. Who's going to stop it?, From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Saturday, July 4, 2015
Tomgram: Engelhardt, What Happened to War? In my latest post, I start with the strange inability of Washington to translate America's staggering military power into effective and successful policy. Consider this an American decline piece with a twist. The question I ask is: What if the U.S. is indeed declining, but unlike in the past 500 years of the rise and fall of empires, no rivals are rising to challenge it?
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 6, 2019
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Of Crimes and Pardons Memorial Day has come and gone and President Trump did not issue his pardons after all. There was substantial evidence that he was planning to use the yearly moment honoring the country's war dead to grant executive clemency to several U.S. soldiers and at least one military contractor. All have been accused, and one already convicted, of crimes in the never-ending war on terror.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 31, 2023
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, The Russian Nightmare and Us Reacting to the terrorist attacks by the Palestinian militant group Hamas that killed more than 1,400 Israelis, Americans have been remarkably focused on whether we should support Israel or the residents of Gaza. In either case, we act as if Israel's only possible decision was whether or not to launch a war against Gaza[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 2, 2015
Steve Fraser: Mongrel Firebugs and Men of Property "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." So wrote British playwright Harold Pinter. How apt that seems when one compares life in our own "second Gilded Age" to the way things were done in the original Gilded Age of a century ago. True, there are some striking similarities between the two moments, including the rise to power of crony capitalism, the staggering growth of inequality...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 6, 2015
Anand Gopal: How to Create an Afghan Blackwater The sky clotted gray and the winds gusted cold as the men crowded into an old roadside gas station. It was daybreak in Band-i-Timor, early December 2001, and hundreds of turbaned farmers sat pensively, weighing the choice before them. They had once been the backbone of the Taliban's support; the movement had arisen not far from here, and many had sent their sons to fight on the front lines.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 13, 2019
Tomgram: William Astore, Military Strength Is Our National Religion When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I looked to the heavens: to God and Christianity (as arbitrated by the Catholic Church) and to the soaring warbirds of the U.S. military, which I believed kept us safe. To my mind then, they were classic manifestations of American technological superiority over the godless Communists.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 10, 2011
Tomgram: Chase Madar, The Trials of Bradley Manning, A Defense The actual trial of Private Bradley Manning, now in a Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, under the most punitive of conditions, is not expected to take place until at least this May. In the meantime, TomDispatch offers lawyer and essayist Chase Madar's full-scale defense of the young U.S. Army private in a unique form: the future opening statement of the defense in the case.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 27, 2014
Rory Fanning: Why Do We Keep Thanking the Troops? Since 9/11, those thank yous have been aimed at veterans with the regularity of the machine gun fire that may still haunt their dreams. Veterans have also been offered special consideration when it comes to applications for mostly menial jobs so that they can "utilize the skills" they learned in the military. . . .The only question that never seems to come up is: What exactly are they being thanked for?
The Confederate Flag: A War Story, From ImagesAttr
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 7, 2015
Tomgram: Greg Grandin, How Endless War Helps Old Dixie Stay New In this remarkable anatomy of how the Confederate flag went to war -- after the Civil War -- Grandin explores its uses from the late 19th century through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and into the wars of our present century.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 10, 2019
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Lives (and Names) Lost GOMA, North Kivu Province, Democratic Republic of Congo -- The boy was sitting next to his father, as he so often did. He mimicked his dad in every way. He wanted to be just like him, but Muhindo Maronga Godfroid, then a 31-year-old primary school teacher and farmer, had bigger plans for his two-and-a-half-year-old son.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 30, 2019
Tomgram: Engelhardt, "Make America Greta Again" Look what Greta started and what she did to me! I took part in the recent climate-strike march in New York City -- one of a quarter-million people (or maybe 60,000) who turned out there, along with four million others across all seven continents.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 20, 2020
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Why No Retired Generals Oppose America's Forever Wars There once lived an odd little man -- five feet nine inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet -- who rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself. For all but a few activist insiders and scholars, U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler is now lost to history.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 13, 2023
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Ending Putin's Forever War in Ukraine All wars do end, usually thanks to a negotiated peace agreement. Consider that a fundamental historical fact, even if it seems to have been forgotten in Brussels, Moscow, and above all, Washington, D.C.[...]
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(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 4, 2018
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Seeing Our Wars for the First Time Before a 40-foot American flag, addressing 500 American troops, Vice President Mike Pence praised them as "the world's greatest force for good," boasted that American air strikes had recently been "dramatically increased," swore that their country was "here to stay," and insisted that "victory is closer than ever before." As an observer noted, however, the response of his audience was "subdued."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 9, 2023
Tomgram: Todd Miller, The "Open Border" Farce On September 23rd, at about 2:30 a.m., a Border Patrol surveillance camera captured two people crossing the international boundary between Mexico and the United States on the outskirts of Nogales, Arizona. A Border Patrol vehicle arrived quickly, but not before one of them had fled back into Mexico. When an armed agent stepped out, dressed in a forest-green uniform, he found a 16-year-old girl from Mexico softly crying[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Future History From our present vantage point, it seems clear that, by 2019, the United States had passed a point of no return. In retrospect, this was the moment when indications of things gone fundamentally awry should have become unmistakable. Although at the time much remained hidden in shadows, the historic pivot now commonly referred to as the Great Reckoning had commenced.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 13, 2023
Tomgram: William Hartung, American Arms Makers, Cashing in on Conflict The New York Times headline said it all: "Middle East War Adds to Surge in International Arms Sales." The conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, and beyond may be causing immense and unconscionable human suffering, but they are also boosting the bottom lines of the world's arms manufacturers. There was a time when such weapons sales at least sparked talk of "the merchants of death" or of "war profiteers[...]"
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 12, 2023
Tomgram: Joshua Frank, The U.S. and China Face Off Over -- Yes! -- Climate Change It's an ocean of conflict and ecological decline. Despite its vast size 1.3 million square miles the South China Sea has become a microcosm of the geopolitical tensions between East and West, where territorial struggles over abundant natural resources may one day lead to environmental collapse[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 14, 2019
Tomgram: Michael Klare, A World in Which All Hell Is Breaking Loose The Situation Room, October 2039: the president and vice president, senior generals and admirals, key cabinet members, and other top national security officers huddle around computer screens as aides speak to key officials across the country.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 20, 2017
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Bombing the Rubble You remember. It was supposed to be twenty-first-century war, American-style: precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones capable of taking out a carefully identified and tracked human being just about anywhere on Earth; special operations raids so pinpoint-accurate that they would represent a triumph of modern military science. Everything "networked." It was to be a glorious dream of limited destruction combined with unlimi
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SHARE More Sharing        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"
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 1, 2015
Barbara Myers: The Unknown Whistleblower The witness reported men being hung by the feet or the thumbs, waterboarded, given electric shocks to the genitals, and suffering from extended solitary confinement in what he said were indescribably inhumane conditions. It's the sort of description that might have come right out of the executive summary of the Senate torture report released last December.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 14, 2023
Tomgram: Stan Cox, A Big Climate Win in Big Sky Country The wording in Article IX, Section 1, of Montana's constitution couldn't be clearer: "The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations." Accordingly, in April, a district court judge in Yellowstone County voided a permit for a natural-gas-fired power plant under construction there[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Michael Klare, The Coming of Cold War 2.0 In a world that, from Washington's point of view, is only getting darker, Nixon-era enemies are also returning to the fray, and so Washington's new, twenty-first century "enemies list" is the focus of TomDispatch regular Michael Klare's latest offering. As the 2016 election campaign ramps up, get ready to hear far more about the grave, even existential threats posed by two oldies but goodies: Russia and China.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 11, 2020
Tomgram: William Hartung, Are Military-Funded Jobs a Key to Election 2020? Donald Trump likes to posture as a tough guy and part of that tough-guy persona involves bragging about how much he's spent on the U.S. military. This tendency was on full display in a tweet he posted three days after an American drone killed Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad: "The United States just spent Two Trillion Dollars on Military Equipment. We are the biggest and by far the BEST in the World! ..."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 5, 2015
Pratap Chatterjee: Is Drone Warfare Fraying at the Edges? The U.S. drone war across much of the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa is in crisis and not because civilians are dying or the target list for that war or the right to wage it just about anywhere on the planet are in question in Washington. Something far more basic is at stake: drone pilots are quitting in record numbers.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 25, 2019
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, What the Child Detentions at the Border Really Tell Us Lately, I've been thinking about the Grimm's fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel. Terrified by cruel conditions at home, the brother and sister flee, winding their way, hungry and scared, through unknown woods. There, they encounter an old woman who lures them in with promises of safety. Instead, she locks one of them in a cage and turns the other into a servant, as she prepares to devour them both.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Michael Klare: Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy Becomes Everyday Reality Wherever you look, the heat, the drought, and the fires stagger the imagination. Now, it's Oklahoma at the heart of the American firestorm, with "18 straight days of 100-plus degree temperatures and persistent drought" and so many fires in neighboring states that extra help is unavailable.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 23, 2015
Rebecca Gordon: It Didn't Work in Afghanistan, So Let's Do It In Mexico If there was an official beginning to Mexico's war on drugs, it would have to be considered the election of Felipe Calderón as the country's president in 2006. The candidate of the right-wing Partido Acción Nacional, the National Action Party (PAN), Calderón was only the second Mexican president in 70 years who did not come from the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 7, 2023
Tomgram: Norman Solomon, Venture Militarism on Autopilot [Today's piece is adapted from the introduction to Norman Solomon's book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press, 2023).] The day after the U.S. government began routinely bombing faraway places, the lead editorial in the New York Times expressed some gratification[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 12, 2023
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, The Wound of the War on Terror, Up Close and Personal America's War on Terror, launched in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has had a staggering impact on our world. The Costs of War Project at Brown University, which I helped found, paints as full a picture as possible of the toll of those "forever wars" both in human lives and in dollars. The wars, we estimate, have killed nearly one million people[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 10, 2023
Tomgram: Juan Cole, Invading Ourselves It was one of the fabled rivers of history and the Marines needed to cross it[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 6, 2022
Tomgram: Adam Hochschild, The Crushing of American Socialism Donald Trump has had the urge to crush many things, including the last election. So I must admit I found it eerily amusing that, when the FBI entered his estate at Mar-a-Lago recently, they did so under a warrant authorized by the Espionage Act of 1917. History certainly has a strange way of returning in our world and also of crushing alternatives[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 4, 2015
Engelhardt: Counting Bodies, Then and Now In the twenty-first-century world of drone warfare, one question with two aspects reigns supreme: Who counts? In Washington, the answers are the same: We don't count and they don't count.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 11, 2019
Tomgram: Naomi Oreskes, Why Science Failed to Stop Climate Change It's a tale for all time. What might be the greatest scam in history or, at least, the one that threatens to take history down with it. Think of it as the climate-change scam that beat science, big time.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 16, 2020
Tomgram: William deBuys, Creating Steelhenge on the Border A new Wild West has taken root not far from Tombstone, Arizona, known to many for its faux-historical reenactments of the old West. We're talking about a long, skinny territory - a geographic gerrymander - that stretches east across New Mexico and down the Texan Rio Grande to the Gulf of Mexico. It also runs west across hundreds of miles of desert to California and the Pacific Ocean. Like the old Wild West, this one is lawless
Brother, From ImagesAttr
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 22, 2015
Armed Violence in the Homeland In the rest of the piece, I offer a kind of tabulation of the overwhelming annual carnage-by-weapon in America that, most of the time, is remarkably little attended to and that no national security state promotes as "the greatest threat" of our time. It's a piece meant to put violence in our American world in some kind of perspective. I hope you'll find it provocative!
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 31, 2019
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Why Those "Endless Wars" Must Never End Let us stipulate at the outset that Donald Trump is a vulgar and dishonest fraud without a principled bone in his corpulent frame. Yet history is nothing if not a tale overflowing with irony. Despite his massive shortcomings, President Trump appears intent on recalibrating America's role in the world.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 5, 2023
Tomgram: Maha Hilal, "Unavoidable Collateral Damage" "I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray." That's what a young Pakistani boy named Zubair told members of Congress at a hearing on drones in October 2013. That hearing was during the Obama years at a time when the government had barely even acknowledged that an American drone warfare program existed[...]
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(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 16, 2010
Bill McKibben, The Enthusiasm Gap in the White House

I got to see the now-famous enthusiasm gap up close and personal last week, and it wasn't a pretty sight.

SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 29, 2023
Tomgram: Michael Gould-Wartofsky, State Terror in the Age of Counterterrorism "There must be some kind of way out of here..." As night fell over the South River Forest, the music festival was in full swing. Young and old swayed to the sounds of Suede Cassidy. Families gathered around the grill. Little ones frolicked in an inflatable bouncy house bedecked with a banner that read: "Stop Cop City[...]"
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 16, 2015
William deBuys: A Global War on Nature Maybe baby steps will help, but the world needs a lot more than either the United States or China is offering to combat the illegal traffic in wildlife, a nearly $20-billion-a-year business that adds up to a global war against nature. As the headlines tell us, the trade has pushed various rhinoceros species to the point of extinction and motivated poachers to kill more than 100,000 elephants since 2010.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 11, 2017
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, America's Wars and the "More" Strategy I was guilty of it myself. Commanding a small cavalry troop of about 85 soldiers in southwest Kandahar Province back in 2011, I certainly wanted and requested more: more troopers, more Special Forces advisers, more Afghan police, more air support, more supplies, more money, more... everything.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 8, 2014
Ann Jones, How to Lose Friends and Influence No One (The State Department Way) Now, writes Ann Jones, TomDispatch regular and author of They Were Soldiers, ignorance is again on the march in Washington, with a helping hand from the State Department. Herself a Fulbright fellow, she offers a scathing report on how State plans to eviscerate its Fulbright international scholarly exchange program in 2015, helping make government-sponsored ignorance not just a national but a global concern.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 2, 2015
Engelhardt: The Ten Commandments for a Better American World I wish I knew your name. I've been thinking about you, about all of us actually and our country, and meaning to write for a while to explain myself. Let me start this way: you should feel free to call me an American nationalist. It may sound ugly as hell, but it's one way I do think of myself.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 21, 2019
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Making Alphabet Soup in Washington These days, witnessing the administration's never-ending cruelty at the border, the shenanigans of a White House caught red-handed in attempted bribery in Ukraine, and the disarray of this country's foreign policy, I feel like I'm seeing a much-scarier remake of a familiar old movie.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 14, 2023
Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Epicenter of International Terrorism America's Global War on Terror has seen its share of stalemates, disasters, and outright defeats. During 20-plus years of armed interventions, the United States has watched its efforts implode in spectacular fashion, from Iraq in 2014 to Afghanistan in 2021. The greatest failure of its "Forever Wars," however, may not be in the Middle East, but in Africa[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 20, 2023
Tomgram: Hartung and Gledhill, Throwing More Money at the Pentagon On June 3rd, President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that lifted the government's debt ceiling and capped some categories of government spending. The big winner was "" surprise, surprise! "" the Pentagon[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 19, 2019
Tomgram: Mattea Kramer, The Opioid Crisis in Perspective It was evening and we were in a windowless room in a Massachusetts jail. We had just finished a class -- on job interview skills -- and, with only a few minutes remaining, the women began voicing their shared fear. Upon their release, would someone really hire them? Beneath that concern lurked another one: Would they be able to avoid the seductively anesthetizing drugs that put them in jail in the first place?
(10 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 11, 2023
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Future Beyond My Imagination After almost 79 years on this beleaguered planet, let me say one thing: this can't end well. Really, it can't. And no, I'm not talking about the most obvious issues ranging from the war in Ukraine to the climate disaster. What I have in mind is that latest, greatest human invention: artificial intelligence[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 3, 2023
Tomgram: Stan Cox, Before It's Too Late The demise of Silicon Valley Bank last month triggered plenty of angst among solar energy developers. Before it collapsed, SBV claimed it had "financed or helped finance 62 percent of community solar projects in America," according to Washington Post business reporter Evan Halper. At first, it wasn't clear who might fill that gap[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 15, 2019
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, How the U.S. Created the Central American Immigration Crisis It's hard to believe that more than four years have passed since the police shot Amílcar Pe'rez-López a few blocks from my house in San Francisco's Mission District. He was an immigrant, 20 years old, and his remittances were the sole support for his mother and siblings in Guatemala.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 5, 2019
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Welcome to His World He crossed the border without permission or, as far as I could tell, documentation of any sort. I'm speaking about Donald Trump's uninvited, unasked-for invasion of my personal space.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 30, 2015
Sandy Tolan: The One-State Conundrum The SUV slows as it approaches a military kiosk at a break in a dull gray wall. Inside, Ramzi Aburedwan, a Palestinian musician, prepares his documents for the Israeli soldier standing guard. On the other side of this West Bank military checkpoint lies the young man's destination, the ancient Palestinian town of Sebastia.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 15, 2023
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes As it turns out, it's never too late. I mention that only because last week, at nearly 79, I managed to visit Mars for the first time. You know, the red planet, or rather "" so it seemed to me "" the orange planet. And take my word for it, it was eerie as hell[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 29, 2015
William Astore, "Hi, I'm Uncle Sam and I'm a War-oholic" Endless war-making, whether on countries, terror groups, or social problems, has become an American trait. We seem to regularly launch wars of every sort and then never quite make our way out of them. Retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and TomDispatch regular William Astore suggests that, were the U.S. an individual, we would immediately recognize what such behavior was -- addiction -- and act accordingly.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 6, 2020
Tomgram: Nick Turse, America's Plans to "Win" the Afghan War On February 4, 2002, a Predator drone circled over Afghanistan's Paktia province, near the city of Khost. Below was al-Qaeda's founder Osama bin Laden -- or at least someone in the CIA thought so -- and he was marked for death. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it later, both awkwardly and passively: "A decision was made to fire the Hellfire missile. It was fired."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 18, 2020
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Torture's Legacy of Impunity On February 5th, the Senate voted to acquit President Donald J. Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. In other words, Trump's pre-election boast that he "could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody" and not "lose any voters" proved something more than high-flown hyperbole.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 1, 2023
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Seduced by War -- Yet Again Allow me to come clean: I worry every time Max Boot vents enthusiastically about a prospective military action. Whenever that Washington Post columnist professes optimism about some upcoming bloodletting, misfortune tends to follow. And as it happens, he's positively bullish about the prospect of Ukraine handing Russia a decisive defeat in its upcoming, widely anticipated, sure-to-happen-any-day-now spring counteroffensive[...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 27, 2015
Christian Appy: From the Fall of Saigon to Our Fallen Empire If our wars in the Greater Middle East ever end, it's a pretty safe bet that they will end badly -- and it won't be the first time. The "fall of Saigon" in 1975 was the quintessential bitter end to a war. Oddly enough, however, we've since found ways to reimagine that denouement which miraculously transformed a failed and brutal war of American aggression into a tragic humanitarian rescue mission.
Permanent war making - it's marching on., From FlickrPhotos
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Tomgram: William Astore, America's Post-Democratic Military From William Astore, a powerful portrait of how, in the decades after the Vietnam War, a post-democratic U.S. military became a reality and of the kind of permanent war making it freed Washington to be involved in.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 29, 2022
Tomgram: William Astore, Something Is Rotten in the U.S. Military As a military professor for six years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in the 1990s, I often walked past the honor code prominently displayed for all cadets to see. Its message was simple and clear: they were not to tolerate lying, cheating, stealing, or similar dishonorable acts. Yet that's exactly what the U.S. military and many of America's senior civilian leaders have been doing from the Vietnam War era to this very day[...]
Longwall coal mining equipment, From FlickrPhotos
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 31, 2017
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Spreading the Cult of Carbon Look closely at his overseas endeavors, though, and one all-too-consistent pattern emerges: Donald Trump will do whatever it takes to prolong the reign of fossil fuels
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 19, 2023
Tomgram: John Feffer, More Butterflies, Fewer Billionaires Unrigging the Global Economy In a fit of madness or just plain desperation, you've enrolled in a get-rich-quick scheme. All you have to do is sell some products, sign up some friends, make some phone calls. Follow that simple formula and you'll soon be pulling in tens of thousands of dollars a month or so you've been promised anyway. And if you sell enough products, you'll be invited into the Golden Circle[...]
(7 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 22, 2022
Tomgram: Andy Kroll, Weapons of Mass Disinformation We all do it. Make little snap judgments about everyday strangers as we go about our lives. Without giving it a second's thought, we sketch minibiographies of the people we pass on the sidewalk, the guy seated across from us on the train, or the woman in line in front of us at the grocery store. We wonder: Who are they? Where are they from? How do they make a living?[...]
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 15, 2011
Barbara & John Ehrenreich: The Making of the American 99% A must-read account of how the depredations of the 1% made the 99% possible and killed the right-wing idea of a "liberal elite."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Andrew Cockburn: How Assassination Sold Drugs and Promoted Terrorism As the war on terror nears its 14th anniversary -- a war we seem to be losing, given jihadist advances in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen -- the U.S. sticks stolidly to its strategy of "high-value targeting," our preferred euphemism for assassination. Secretary of State John Kerry has proudly cited the elimination of "fifty percent" of the Islamic State's "top commanders" as a recent indication of progress.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 24, 2019
Tomgram: William Astore, The Militarization of Everything Here's a topic you won't find discussed anywhere: a growing American militarism at home in this era of never-ending wars and soaring national security state budgets. That's why we're lucky to have historian and retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore, a TomDispatch regular, offer a rare assessment of the damage our wars are doing not in distant parts of the Earth, but right here in this country, however unnoticed.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 27, 2023
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Whose Continent Is This Anyway? From the ashes of a world war that killed 80 million people and reduced great cities to smoking rubble, America rose like a Titan of Greek legend, unharmed and armed with extraordinary military and economic power, to govern the globe[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 29, 2019
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Could Donald Trump End the Afghan War? Could Donald Trump end the Afghan war someday? I don't know if such a possibility has been on your mind, but it's certainly been on the mind of this retired U.S. Army major who fought in that land so long ago. And here's the context in which I've been thinking about that very possibility.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 8, 2023
Tomgram: Todd Miller, Out-Trumping Trump at the Border On May 11th, I was with a group of people at the bottom of the Paso del Norte bridge in Ciudad Jua'rez, Mexico. Suddenly, I realized that I didn't have the small change needed to cross the bridge and return to El Paso, Texas, where I was attending the 16th annual Border Security Expo[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 18, 2019
Tomgram: William Hartung, Trumping the Arms Market It's no secret that Donald Trump is one of the most aggressive arms salesmen in history. How do we know? Because he tells us so at every conceivable opportunity.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 27, 2023
Tomgram: Stan Cox, Every Kind of Conflict, Everywhere, All at Once? Several times in recent weeks I've heard people suggest that Mother Nature has been speaking to us through that smoke endlessly drifting south from the still-raging Canadian wildfires. She's saying that she wants the coal, oil, and gas left in the ground, but I fear her message will have little more influence on climate policy than her previous ones did[...]
From ImagesAttr
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Immunity And Impunity In Elite America, By Glenn Greenwald 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.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 17, 2017
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Trumping the Empire The superhighway to disaster is already being paved. From Donald Trump's first days in office, news of the damage to America's international stature has come hard and fast. As if guided by some malign design, the new president seemed to identify the key pillars that have supported U.S. global power for the past 70 years and set out to topple each of them in turn.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 19, 2019
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, How War Targets the Young One day in October 2001, shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, I stood at the front of a private high school classroom. As a new social studies teacher, I had been tasked with describing violence against women in that country.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 3, 2023
Tomgram: William Hartung, The Future of Techno-War On August 28th, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks chose the occasion of a three-day conference organized by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), the arms industry's biggest trade group, to announce the "Replicator Initiative." Among other things, it would involve producing "swarms of drones" that could hit thousands of targets in China on short notice. Call it the full-scale launching of techno-war[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Tomgram: Arnold Isaacs, Trump's Ugly New Anti-Immigrant Wave Call it an irony of the grimmest sort that the most disruptive power of this century has spent these last years dreaming about walling itself in and walling the suffering and displaced out, whether via Donald Trump's "great wall" or Muslim bans and other grotesque means.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 15, 2017
Karen Greenberg, A Planet's Future Threatened by the Fate of Its Children "This is a war against normal life." So said CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward, describing the situation at this moment in Syria, as well as in other parts of the Middle East. It was one of those remarks that should wake you up to the fact that the regions the United States has, since September 2001, played such a role in destabilizing are indeed in crisis, and that this process isn't just taking place at the level of failing st
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 23, 2019
Tomgram: Engelhardt, On Hijacking History Here's the question at hand -- and I guarantee you that you'll read it here first: Is Donald Trump the second or even possibly the third 9/11? Because truly, he has to be one or the other.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Nick Turse, A Shadow War in 150 Countries From the point of view of the U.S. military and the national security state, the period from September 12, 2001, to late last night could be summed up in a single word: more.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 4, 2019
Tomgram: William Astore, The Dark Side of Air Power From Syria to Yemen in the Middle East, Libya to Somalia in Africa, Afghanistan to Pakistan in South Asia, an American aerial curtain has descended across a huge swath of the planet. Its stated purpose: combatting terrorism. Its primary method: constant surveillance and bombing -- and yet more bombing.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 21, 2019
Tomgram: John Feffer, The Far Right's War on Culture TomDispatch regular John Feffer, author of the dystopian novels, Splinterlands and Frostlands, wonders today: Isn't it time that humanity got its facts in order and its stories straight when it comes to the extremity that is increasingly at the heart of our world?
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 3, 2019
Tomgram: Arnold Isaacs, Another Kind of War Wound When an announcement of a "Moral Injury Symposium" turned up in my email, I was a bit startled to see that it came from the U.S. Special Operations Command. That was a surprise because many military professionals have strongly resisted the term "moral injury" and rejected the suggestion that soldiers fighting America's wars could experience moral conflict or feel morally damaged by their service.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 19, 2020
Tomgram: Nick Turse, America's Commandos: What Did They Do and Where Did They Do It? Last October, a group of eight Apache attack and CH-47 Chinook helicopters carrying U.S. commandos roared out of an airfield in Iraq. They raced through Turkish airspace and across the Syrian border, coming in low as they approached a village just north of Idlib Province where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, his bodyguards, and some of his children were spending the night.
SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, January 11, 2015
Ann Jones: Answering for America So wherever we expatriates settle on the planet, we find someone who wants to talk about the latest American events, large and small: another country bombed in the name of our "national security," another peaceful protest march attacked by our increasingly militarized police, another diatribe against "big government" by yet another wannabe candidate who hopes to head that very government in Washington.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 4, 2022
Tomgram: Chomsky and Barsamian, What Hope Is There? [The following is excerpted in shortened form from Chapter 9 of Notes on Resistance by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, published by Haymarket Books.] David Barsamian: What we are facing is often described as unprecedented " a pandemic, climate catastrophe and, always lurking off center stage, nuclear annihilation. Three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Noam Chomsky: I can add a fourth[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 3, 2019
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Fighting the Next War, Not the Last The recent White House decision to speed the deployment of an aircraft carrier battle group and other military assets to the Persian Gulf has led many in Washington and elsewhere to assume that the U.S. is gearing up for war with Iran. As in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, U.S. officials have cited suspect intelligence data to justify elaborate war preparations.
Convergence, From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 26, 2015
John Feffer: Why the World is Becoming Un-Sweden Imagine an alternative universe in which the two major Cold War superpowers evolved into the United Soviet Socialist States. The conjoined entity, linked perhaps by a new Bering Straits land bridge, combines the optimal features of capitalism and collectivism. From Siberia to Sioux City, we'd all be living in one giant Sweden.
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 8, 2017
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The Great Hysteria A striking assessment of the modern imperial presidency and the Trumpian moment -- Andrew J. Bacevich, "Slouching Toward Mar-a-Lago, The Post-Cold-War Consensus Collapses"
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 2, 2022
Tomgram: William Astore, A Graduation Speech to Air Force Cadets Twenty years ago, I left the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs for my next assignment. I haven't been back since, but today I travel there (if only in my imagination) to give my graduation address to the class of 2022. So, won't you take a few minutes and join me, as well as the corps of cadets, in Falcon Stadium?[...]
From ImagesAttr
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 17, 2010
Tomgram: Nick Turse, BP and the Pentagon's Dirty Little Secret Residents of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida are livid with BP in the wake of the massive, never-ending oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico -- and Barack Obama says they ought to be. But there's one aspect of the BP story that most of those angry residents of the Gulf states aren't aware of. And the president hasn't had a thing to say about it.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 5, 2023
Tomgram: Jane Braxton Little, Climate Migrants in a Hell on Earth Greenville, CA "" Pines and firs parched by a three-year drought had been burning for days on a ridge 1,000 feet above my remote mountain town. On August 4, 2021, the flames suddenly flared into a heat so intense it formed a molten cloud the color of bruised flesh. As that sinister cumulus rose above an oval-shaped reservoir, it collapsed, sending red-hot embers down the steep slopes toward Greenville[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 24, 2023
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Trump's Schedule F (for "Failed State") Sometimes the right wing in this country seems like a riddle wrapped in an enigma encased in a conundrum. Do they want to strengthen the government in line with the once-fringe doctrine of the "unitary executive," concentrating most official power in the hands of a president who would then rule more or less by fiat? That's the fascist position[...]
Defense Budget Pork, From FlickrPhotos
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 25, 2017
Tomgram: William Hartung, The Trillion-Dollar National Security Budget You wouldn't know it, based on the endless cries for more money coming from the military, politicians, and the president, but these are the best of times for the Pentagon. Spending on the Department of Defense alone is already well in excess of half a trillion dollars a year and counting.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 24, 2020
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, When Reality Sneaks Through The impeachment of the president of the United States! Surely such a mega-historic event would reverberate for weeks or months, leaving in its wake no end of consequences, large and small. Wouldn't it? Shouldn't it?
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, The (Failed) War on Terror's Precursor For a decade and a half, the U.S. Army waged war on fierce tribal Muslims in a remote land. Sound familiar? As it happens, that war unfolded half a world away from the Greater Middle East and more than a century ago in the southernmost islands of the Philippines.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 13, 2023
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Fallout from Humanity In case you hadn't noticed "" and how could you not? "" there have been more than 500 (yes, 500-plus!) wildfires burning across the vast reaches of Canada, an unheard-of number, and more than half of them completely out of (human) control in a record-shattering fire season. That's been true for seemingly endless weeks now with no end in sight[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 7, 2020
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, On Misreading Victory Thirty years ago this month, President George H.W. Bush appeared before a joint session of Congress to deliver his first State of the Union Address, the first post-Cold War observance of this annual ritual. Just weeks before, the Berlin Wall had fallen. That event, the president declared, "marks the beginning of a new era in the world's affairs."
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 18, 2023
Tomgram: Clarence Lusane, White Nationalism and Donald Trump In 2020, The Daily Show ran a segment in which statements by Republican leaders, including Donald Trump, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), and various Fox News personalities were juxtaposed with those made by Ku Klux Klan leaders like former Grand Wizard David Duke and former Imperial Wizard Bill Wilkerson[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 2, 2019
Tomgram: Engelhardt, War With...? Headlined "U.S. Seeks Other Ways to Stop Iran Shy of War," the article was tucked away on page A9 of a recent New York Times. Still, it caught my attention...
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 6, 2023
Tomgram: Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, When Lunatics Run the Asylum [The following is excerpted from David Barsamian's recent interview with Noam Chomsky at AlternativeRadio.org.[...]]
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Debacle! 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.
Atomic Bomb Test, From ImagesAttr
(5 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Tomgram: Christian Appy, America's Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 Years Later Historian Appy tells a remarkable and vivid tale of how the leaders of the only country to use atomic weapons against human beings crafted a narrative of, in essence, atomic "mercy" killings of a life-saving nature and how that narrative remained engraved in our collective consciousness (as in the wildly successfully bestseller and movie Unbroken) from August 1945 to the present moment.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 3, 2022
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Why Dobbs Is a Recipe for Disaster in the Military In significant parts of this country, the Supreme Court's June 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade returned Americans to a half-century-old situation in which hundreds of thousands of women, faced with unwanted pregnancies, were once forced to resort to costly, potentially deadly underground abortions[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 16, 2013
Tomgram: Ann Jones, Suffer the Children Another week, another revelation about spying by the National Security Agency. This time, it was the NSA's infiltration of online video games and virtual realms like World of Warcraft and Second Life. And it was hardly a shock.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Tomgram: Allegra Harpootlian, Drone Strikes and Tears Think back to the last time you cried at work. Did the tears come after your boss sent you a curt email? Or when you accidentally cc'd (instead of bcc'd) everyone? Maybe you just had a really, really long day and that one last little misstep pushed you over the edge.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 22, 2023
Tomgram: Clarence Lusane, For Trump and DeSantis, Different Paths, the Same Destination He appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices who shocked the nation with rulings that dramatically took away rights. He sided with the racists who used "states' rights" to push through undemocratic policies locally. And he's the only American president who lost a reelection bid but returned to office in the following election[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 30, 2023
Tomgram: Kelly Denton-Borhaug, Please Don't Kill the Children When humans embrace the dehumanization of others, we release our ugliest, most destructive selves. Dehumanization is a perverse force that propagates violence and justifies the lust for war and its atrocities[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 26, 2015
William Hartung: Your Money at War Everywhere President Obama and Senator John McCain, who have clashed on almost every conceivable issue, do agree on one thing: the Pentagon needs more money. Obama wants to raise the Pentagon's budget for fiscal year 2016 by $35 billion more than the caps that exist under current law allow.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 30, 2020
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Electing a Head Coach Instead of a President Attorney General William Barr's campaign to expand the powers of the presidency to unprecedented imperial levels has been misinterpreted as an attempt to raise Donald Trump to the level of his strongman heroes like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Jair Bolsonaro. Fake news! It's really been an attempt to boost him into the same league with the strongman heroes of far too many American men: the head coaches of our major sports,
From ImagesAttr
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 9, 2015
Tomgram: Gottesdiener and Garcia, How to Dismantle This Country Something is rotten in the state of Michigan. One city neglected to inform its residents that its water supply was laced with cancerous chemicals. Another dissolved its public school district and replaced it with a charter school system, only to witness the for-profit management company it hired flee the scene after determining it couldn't turn a profit.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 5, 2020
Tomgram: Bob Dreyfuss, A Giuliani-Trump Foreign Policy? Imagine, just for the sake of argument, that the president of the United States was an arrogant, information-challenged, would-be autocrat with a soft spot for authoritarian leaders from China, Russia, and North Korea to Egypt ("my favorite dictator"), Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 1, 2019
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, The Hypersonic Race to Hell Hypersonic weapons close in on their targets at a minimum speed of Mach 5, five times the speed of sound or 3,836.4 miles an hour. They are among the latest entrants in an arms competition that has embroiled the United States for generations, first with the Soviet Union, today with China and Russia.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 2, 2020
Tomgram: Mandy Smithberger, Letting the Pentagon Loose With Your Tax Dollars Hold on to your helmets! It's true the White House is reporting that its proposed new Pentagon budget is only $740.5 billion, a relatively small increase from the previous year's staggering number. In reality, however, when you also include war and security costs buried in the budgets of other agencies, the actual national security figure comes in at more than $1.2 trillion...
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 9, 2023
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, The Privatization of War, American-Style The way mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and his private army have been waging a significant part of Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine has been well covered in the American media, not least of all because his firm, the Wagner Group, draws most of its men from Russia's prison system. Wagner offers "freedom" from Putin's labor camps only to send those released convicts to the front lines of the conflict[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 18, 2023
Tomgram: Joshua Frank, Nuking Us All If you didn't know better, you'd think Lloyd Marbet was a dairy farmer or maybe a retired shop teacher. His beard is thick, soft, and gray, his hair pulled back in a small ponytail. In his mid-seventies, he still towers over nearly everyone. His handshake is firm, but there's nothing menacing about him[...]
A Syrian refugee family., From FlickrPhotos
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 27, 2017
Laura Gottesdiener, The Wrath of the U.S. Along the Euphrates River It was midday on Sunday, May 7th, when the U.S.-led coalition warplanes again began bombing the neighborhood of Wassim Abdo's family.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 23, 2017
Mattea Kramer, Hit Him Where It Hurts In normal times, Dee from New York would have ordered her copy of The Handmaid's Tale from Amazon, but these are not normal times. Amazon is on the Grab Your Wallet list, a campaign to boycott retailers that sell Trump family products, which began as a response to the video revealing our now-president's penchant for grabbing women "by the p*ssy." Dee bought her book from a smaller retailer instead.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 18, 2020
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Invasion of America Let me rant for a moment. I don't do it often, maybe ever. I'm not Donald Trump. Though I'm only two years older than him, I don't even know how to tweet and that tells you everything you really need to know about Tom Engelhardt in a world clearly passing me by.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 17, 2013
Tom Engelhardt, You Are Our Secret As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far we've come in the building of a surveillance state have swept over us 24/7 -- waves of leaks, videos, charges, claims, counterclaims, skullduggery, and government threats. When a flood sweeps you away, it's always hard to find a little dry land to survey the extent and nature of the damage.
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 18, 2015
Nick Turse: One Boy, One Rifle, and One Morning in Malakal President Obama couldn't have been more eloquent. Addressing the Clinton Global Initiative, for instance, he said: "When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed -- that's slavery."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 10, 2019
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Ending War, American-Style When the conflict that the Vietnamese refer to as the American War ended in April 1975, I was a U.S. Army captain attending a course at Fort Knox, Kentucky. In those days, the student body at any of our Army's myriad schools typically included officers from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN)...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 28, 2019
Tomgram: James Carroll, November Hopes Mislaid Here's the strange thing that TomDispatch regular and former Boston Globe columnist James Carroll brought to my mind with today's piece on what may qualify as the single most important historical event of my life: the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 30, 2023
Tomgram: Norman Solomon and David Barsamian, Living in a Warfare State [The following is excerpted and adapted from David Barsamian's recent interview with Norman Solomon at AlternativeRadio.org.]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 27, 2020
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Are We All Australians Yet? Let me betray my age for a moment. Some of you, I know, will be shocked, but I still read an actual newspaper. Words on real paper every day. I'm talking about the New York Times, and something stuck with me from the January 9th edition of that "paper" paper.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 26, 2023
Tomgram: Clarence Lusane, Creating Trumpworld? If he becomes the official nominee of the Republican Party in next year's presidential race, Donald Trump will receive tens of millions of votes in the general election. He may get less than the presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. He may get more. Regardless, tens of millions of GOP, conservative, and extremist voters will cast their ballots for him[...]
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 10, 2010
Tomgram: Juan Cole, Israel's Gift to Iran's Hardliners Iran's Green Movement is one year old this Sunday, the anniversary of its first massive demonstrations in the streets of Tehran. Greeted with great hope in much of the world, a year later it's weaker, the country is more repressive, and its hardliners are in a far stronger position -- and some of their success can be credited to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and sanctions hawks in the Obama administration.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 25, 2023
Tomgram: Stan Cox, Spreading Hate and Bullets It's not often that conservative lobbyists beat the drum for increased environmental oversight and regulation. But that's what happened this month when the far-right Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), through its legal arm, filed a brief in federal court demanding that the Department of Homeland Security conduct an extensive environmental impact study examining, of all things, immigration policy[...]
Any new republican candidate is obligated to out-militarize his opponents., From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 28, 2015
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Washington and Tehran Come in From the Cold Peter Van Buren says to stop fretting about the details. What's in the actual accord matters little; what does matter is that a kind of Cold War in the Middle East has just potentially ended, the balance of power in the region may have shifted, and the world could be a very different place -- and none of that is in the nuclear document itself.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 14, 2011
Michael Klare, Avenging Planet In his latest post, energy expert, TomDispatch regular, and author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, Michael T. Klare offers a stunning post-earthquake, post-tsunami, post-Fukushima vision of a planet -- ours -- that is not simply the victim of human depredations but a powerful actor in its own right, quite capable of defending itself.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 24, 2017
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, The CIA and Me When historian Alfred McCoy began his long journey to expose some of the darkest secrets of the U.S. national security establishment, America was embroiled in wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Almost 50 years later, the United States is, in one way or another, involved in so many more conflicts from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen to Libya, Somalia, the Lake Chad region of Africa, and the Philippines.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, How Trump Will Betray His Base Among the stranger features of the 2016 election campaign was the success of Donald Trump, a creature of globalization, as an America First savior of the white working class. A candidate who amassed billions of dollars by playing globalization for all it was worth -- he manufactured clothes and accessories bearing his name in low-wage economies and invested in corporations eager to outsource -- won over millions of voters...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 2, 2019
Tomgram: William Astore, Mutiny on Spaceship Earth Ever since 2007, when I first started writing for TomDispatch, I've been arguing against America's forever wars, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere. Unfortunately, it's no surprise that, despite my more than 60 articles, American blood is still being spilled in war after war across the Greater Middle East and Africa, even as foreign peoples pay a far higher price in lives lost and cities ruined.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 17, 2019
Tomgram: Steve Fraser, Existential Threat Versus Existential Crisis The way greenhouse gasses have poured into the atmosphere since 1965 -- more than a third of them attributable to the products of just 20 fossil-fuel companies -- should represent the crisis of any lifetime. In a fashion previously unknown to humanity, existence on this planet will change in ways that should prove grim indeed.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 17, 2023
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, A Major Empire Falls Unnoticed One of modern history's major empires is falling apart right now, right before our eyes. Yet precious few in the media have reported on this extraordinary event, much less offered any analysis of its implications for the fast-changing shape of global power[...]
Mackinder's Concept of the World Island, From ImagesAttr
(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 8, 2015
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy. Washington's Great Game and Why It's Failing For even the greatest of empires, geography is often destiny. You wouldn't know it in Washington, though. America's political, national security, and foreign policy elites continue to ignore the basics of geopolitics that have shaped the fate of world empires for the past 500 years.
From opednews.com/populum/uploadnic/chomsky-photo-by-rob-kall-png_2_20140215-414.png: Noam Chomsky, From Images
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 13, 2016
Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, Tick... Tick... Tick... It's no small horror that, on this planet of ours, humanity continues to foster two apocalyptic forces, each of which -- one in a relative instant and the other over many decades -- could cripple or destroy human life as we know it.
Frida (at about two) and Rosemary Maguire at the River Entrance to the Pentagon in 1976. Frida's mom, Liz McAlister, and brother Jerry (in the stroller) can be seen in the background., From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Frida Berrigan: Witness to War, American-Style The Pentagon loomed so large in my childhood that it could have been another member of my family. Maybe a menacing uncle who doled out put-downs and whacks to teach us lessons or a rich, dismissive great-aunt intent on propriety and good manners.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Making Mahem (It's Spelled Correctly!) The secretive Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Project Agency or DARPA is the government's blue skies outfit par excellence. In a prodigious piece of journalistic research, Turse digs into the future that it's planning for the rest of us in his eye-opening new TomDispatch post filled with bone-rattling acronyms from hell.
From ImagesAttr
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Nick Turse, America's Empire of African Bases In the shadows of what was once called the "dark continent," a scramble has come and gone. If you heard nothing about it, that was by design.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 15, 2022
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The Unasked Questions of 2022 Britons mourned the recent passing of Queen Elizabeth II, and understandably so. The outpouring of affection for their long-serving monarch was more than commendable, it was touching. Yet count me among those mystified that so many Americans also professed to care. With all due respect to Queen Latifah, we decided way back in 1776 that we'd had our fill of royalty[...]
.Make America White Again. hat, From FlickrPhotos
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 13, 2017
Tomgram: William Astore, From Deterrence to Doomsday? What does an "America-first" foreign policy look like under President Donald Trump? As a start, forget the ancient label of "isolationism." With the end of Trump's first 100 days approaching, it looks more like a military-first policy aimed at achieving global hegemony, which means it's a potential doomsday machine.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Nick Turse: AFRICOM Behaving Badly Six people lay lifeless in the filthy brown water. It was 5:09 a.m. when their Toyota Land Cruiser plunged off a bridge in the West African country of Mali. For about two seconds, the SUV sailed through the air, pirouetting 180 degrees as it plunged 70 feet, crashing into the Niger River.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 25, 2023
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Crimes Against Humanity, American-Style In the Blindman's Buff variation of tag, a child designated as "It" is tasked with tapping another child while wearing a blindfold. The sightless child knows the other children, all able to see, are there but is left to stumble around, using sounds and knowledge of the space they're in as guides. Finally, that child does succeed, either by bumping into someone, peeking, or thanks to sheer dumb luck[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 2, 2020
Tomgram: Michael Klare, What Planet Are We On? As the coronavirus sweeps across the planet, leaving death and mayhem in its wake, many theories are being expounded to explain its ferocity.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 28, 2020
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, "We Get to Live in the Mayor's House!" "YES!" he yelled, thrusting his fist in the air. "We get to live in the mayor's house!" My son's reaction when I told his two sisters and him that I was running for mayor of our town became the laugh line of my campaign. But in real time, I had to burst his bubble. "Oh Seamus," I said, smiling, "the mayor just lives in his own house. There is no 'mayor's house.'
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 27, 2022
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Book to Write? No one listened better than Studs. For those of you old enough to remember, that's Studs Terkel, of course. The most notable thing about him in person, though, was this: the greatest interviewer of his moment, perhaps of any moment, never stopped talking, except, of course, when he was listening to produce one of his memorable bestselling oral histories[...]
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        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"
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 19, 2019
Tomgram: Stephanie Savell, The Saddest Story of All I've never been to Afghanistan, but I am the mother of two young children. So when I imagine what life must be like there after 18 years of war, my mind conjures up the children most vividly -- the ones who have been affected by the conflict -- and their parents.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Jeb! The Money! Dynasty! Based on her book, All the Presidents' Bankers, former Wall Street exec Nomi Prins is now producing a series of pieces for TomDispatch on presidential dynasties-in-the-making and their financial underpinnings.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 18, 2019
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, The Death(s) of the Working Class in the Age of Trump We hear a lot about suicide when celebrities like Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade die by their own hand. Otherwise, it seldom makes the headlines. That's odd given the magnitude of the problem. In 2017, 47,173 Americans killed themselves. In that single year, in other words, the suicide count was nearly seven times greater than the number of American soldiers killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars between 2001 and 2018.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 26, 2023
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Murderous Intentions One day when I was about six, I was walking with my dad in New York City. We noticed that someone had stuck little folded squares of paper under the windshield wipers of the cars parked on the street beside us. My father picked one up and read it. I saw his face grow dark with anger[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Gregoire Chamayou: Hunting Humans by Remote Control Initially, the English word "drone" meant both an insect and a sound. It was not until the outbreak of World War II that it began to take on another meaning. At that time, American artillery apprentices used the expression "target drones" to designate the small remotely controlled planes at which they aimed in training. The metaphor did not refer solely to the size of those machines or the brm-brm of their motors.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 23, 2020
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The All-American Way In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Americans are finally -- or is it once again? -- confronting the racism that afflicts this country and extends into just about every corner of our national life. Something fundamental just might be happening.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 23, 2023
Tomgram: Priti and Stan Cox, Two Great Powers, Too Much Violence Are you worried about the rising political power of violent white nationalists in America? Well, you've got plenty of company, including U.S. national security and counterterrorism officials. And we're worried, too "" worried enough, in fact, to feel that it's time to take a look at the experience of India, where Hindu supremacist dogma has increasingly been enforced through violent means[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 1, 2019
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, American Decline Make America Great Again? Don't count on it. Donald Trump was partly voted into office by Americans who felt that the self-proclaimed greatest power on Earth was actually in decline -- and they weren't wrong. Trump is capable of tweeting many things, but none of those tweets will stop that process of decline, nor will a trade war with a rising China or fierce oil sanctions on Iran.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 17, 2022
Tomgram: William Hartung, A Hall of Shame of U.S. Weapons Sales Here's a seldom commented-upon reality of this century and this moment: the United States remains the number-one arms-exporting nation on the planet. Between 2017 and 2021, it grabbed 39% of the total global weapons market and there's nothing new about that. It has, in fact, been the top arms dealer in every year but one for the past three decades[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 17, 2023
Tomgram: Nan Levinson, How Extreme Can You Get? In April, when Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman with a top-secret clearance, was arrested for posting a trove of classified documents about the Russia-Ukraine war online, the question most often asked was: How did such a young, inexperienced, low-level technician have access to such sensitive material?[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 26, 2012
Michelle Alexander: The Age of Obama as a Racial Nightmare 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."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Howard Zinn and Paula Giddings: "I Plead Guilty" (to Insubordination) An excerpt from a 1960 Howard Zinn piece on the young women of Superman College and a piece by Paula Giddings reflecting on Zinn and the Superman experience, from the 150th anniversary issue of The Nation magazine.
Noam Chomsky, From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 20, 2015
Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, Rogue States and Nuclear Dangers Noam Chomsky's major essay on the Iranian nuclear deal and the drumbeat of opposition to it. He makes sense of and offers a striking sense of perspective on the various over-the-top charges offered by those out to sink the deal, including that Iran is the "gravest threat" to world peace, the "greatest supporter" of terrorism on the planet, and "fueling instability" across the Greater Middle East.
Boy wishing for peace in Gaza, From ImagesAttr
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 16, 2015
Tomgram: Max Blumenthal, The Next Gaza War A gripping anatomy of the nightmarish ongoing conflict in Gaza, and why Israelis are so bent on a fourth round of hostilities in Gaza.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Michael Schwartz, The New Oil Wars in Iraq Imagine the president, speaking on Iraq from the White House Press Briefing Room last Thursday, as the proverbial deer in the headlights -- and it's not difficult to guess just what those headlights were. Think of them as Benghazi on steroids.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 30, 2023
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Former Soldiers Without a Future Here's something we seldom focus on when it comes to war, American-style, even during the just-passed 20th anniversary of our disastrous invasion of Iraq: many more soldiers survive armed conflict than die from it. This has been especially so during this country's twenty-first-century War on Terror, which is still playing out in all too many lands globally[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 22, 2023
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, RIP Jim Brown, Hero and Monster Jim Brown was a monster, not only as a wrecking-ball running back on the football field but also as a prime example of an ever more popular obsession with people (mostly men) whose admirable achievements are shaded by despicable behavior (mostly directed at women). He died last month at 87 and his obituaries, along with various appraisals of his life[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 3, 2019
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Protecting the Children on a Trumpian Planet Okay, I'll admit it. Sometimes I can't take the bad news. It's too much. It's so extra, as the kids like to say. When I hit that wall of hopelessness and anxiety so many of us have become familiar with, I take what I think of as a "kid break." I stare into the faces of my three children seeking solace and sanity. I remind myself that they are the why of it all.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 14, 2023
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Is War with China Inevitable? Is China really on the verge of invading the island of Taiwan, as so many top American officials seem to believe? If the answer is "yes" and the U.S. intervenes on Taiwan's side "" as President Biden has sworn it would "" we could find ourselves in a major-power conflict, possibly even a nuclear one, in the not-too-distant future[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 31, 2023
Tomgram: William Astore, War Racketeers Won't Reform Themselves My name is Bill Astore and I'm a card-carrying member of the military-industrial complex (MIC)[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 31, 2020
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Feminism in the Time of Coronavirus Before I found myself "sheltering in place," this article was to be about women's actions around the world to mark March 8th, International Women's Day. From Pakistan to Chile, women in their millions filled the streets, demanding that we be able to control our bodies and our lives.
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 29, 2022
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Honestly, Donald Trump? Honestly, if you had described this America to me more than half a century ago, I would have laughed in your face. Donald Trump becoming president? You must be kidding! If you want a bizarre image, just imagine him in the company of Abraham Lincoln. I mean, really, what's happened to us?[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, America First Actually Means China First Here, then, is a list of favors that Donald Trump has done for America's latest challengers and how they have reacted on what, after almost two decades of a sole superpower global order, is once again a planet with more than one world power.
SHARE More Sharing        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?"
SHARE More Sharing        Friday, October 13, 2023
Tomgram: Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox, Global Outcasts Various versions of the aphorism "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography" have been making the rounds ever since the rise of U.S. imperialism in the late 1800s. The quip (which, despite legend, appears not to be attributable to Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, or any other famous person) has proven all too accurate when the war in question directly involves American troops[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 9, 2015
Andrew Bacevich: How to Create a National Insecurity State Policy intellectuals -- eggheads presuming to instruct the mere mortals who actually run for office -- are a blight on the republic. Like some invasive species, they infest present-day Washington, where their presence strangles common sense and has brought to the verge of extinction the simple ability to perceive reality.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 23, 2015
Pepe Escobar: Inside China's "New Normal" Seen from the Chinese capital as the Year of the Sheep starts, the malaise affecting the West seems like a mirage in a galaxy far, far away. On the other hand, the China that surrounds you looks all too solid and nothing like the embattled nation you hear about in the Western media, with its falling industrial figures, its real estate bubble, and its looming environmental disasters.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 10, 2020
Tomgram: Nan Levinson, What Difference Does It Make Who Fights Our Wars? Bizarrely enough, the spate of phone calls from recruiters began a couple of years ago. The first ones came from the Army, next the Marines, and then other branches of the military. I'm decades past enlistment age. I've been publicly antiwar for most of that time and come from a family that was last involved with a military when my grandfather ran out the back door to avoid Russian army recruiters...
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 4, 2023
Tomgram: John Feffer, If You're in a Hole, Stop Digging Gustavo Petro doesn't just want to transform his own country; he wants to change the world. The new leader of Colombia, who took office last August, is targeting what he calls his nation's "economy of death." That means pivoting away from oil, natural gas, coal, and narcotics toward more sustainable economic activities. Given that oil and coal make up half his country's exports [...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 13, 2020
Tomgram: Allegra Harpootlian, Droning the World We're only a few days into the new decade and it's somehow already a bigger dumpster fire than the last. On January 2nd, President Trump decided to order what one expert called "the most important decapitation strike America has ever launched."
With no .Plan B. do we just keep soldiering on?, From ImagesAttr
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 25, 2015
Peter Van Buren, What If There Is No Plan B for Iraq? In recent White House "debates" over a disastrously deteriorating situation in Iraq, President Obama's top military officials were dragging their feet on the question of what more the U.S. should do. Clearly, they weren't ready to swallow the idea of more U.S. casualties in a spreading conflict leading nowhere fast.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Tomgram: John Feffer, How to Decide the Fate of the Planet At its best, the Earth was once likened to a spaceship that sails through the heavens with a crew working together for the common good. Thanks to climate change, this metaphor no longer works. Our planet is now more like a lifeboat that's sprung a major leak. People onboard are beginning to panic and the clock is ticking.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 27, 2020
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Contemplating an Unfounding Father In this fast-paced century, rife with technological innovation, we've grown accustomed to the impermanence of things. Whatever is here now will likely someday vanish, possibly sooner than we imagine.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 28, 2020
Tomgram: Michael Klare, A Silver Lining in the Global Pandemic Energy analysts have long assumed that, given time, growing international concern over climate change would result in a vast restructuring of the global energy enterprise. The result: a greener, less climate-degrading system. In this future, fossil fuels would be overtaken by renewables, while oil, gas, and coal would be relegated to an increasingly marginal role in the global energy equation.
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 26, 2010
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, How Washington Rules From TomDispatch this morning: A stirring excerpt from Andrew Bacevich's bestselling new book, Washington Rules, that focuses on how, as his Army career was ending, his real education, which would turn him into a leading critic of American war policy, began --Andrew Bacevich, "The Unmaking of a Company Man, An Education Begun in the Shadow of the Brandenburg Gate"
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 12, 2019
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Acclimatizing the U.S. Military It was Monday, March 1, 2032, and the top uniformed officers of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps were poised, as they are every year around this time, to deliver their annual "posture statement" on military readiness before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 12, 2019
Tomgram: Michael Klare, A Formula for Catastrophe in the Arctic Donald Trump got the headlines as usual -- but don't be fooled. It wasn't Trumpism in action this August, but what we should all now start referring to as the Pompeo Doctrine. Yes, I'm referring to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and, when it comes to the Arctic region, he has a lot more than buying Greenland on his mind.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 16, 2020
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Trump and Bouton, Two Ballplayers for this Silent Season In 1964, an 18-year-old New York Military Academy first baseman named Don Trump slammed a game-winning home run against Cornwall High School that perked the interest of scouts for the Philadelphia Phillies and the Boston Red Sox. No question about it -- the big kid was a professional prospect!
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 25, 2023
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Outlaw Superpower In 1963, the summer I turned 11, my mother had a gig evaluating Peace Corps programs in Egypt and Ethiopia. My younger brother and I spent most of that summer in France. We were first in Paris with my mother before she left for North Africa, then with my father and his girlfriend in a tiny town on the Mediterranean[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 12, 2019
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Creating a Spectacle of Slaughter at the Movies Call it a summer whim or something about this grim moment of ours, but I had an urge to post at TomDispatch my very first piece of published writing. It appeared 48 years ago in what was, at the time, one of the more obscure journals on the face of the Earth, one I helped found as a then-antiwar-China-scholar-to-be: the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 8, 2019
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, A Comic Stands Up to Racism One afternoon in New York City in the spring of 1964, I marched at the head of a small civil rights demonstration, one of the few white people in the group. I was carrying a watermelon. It was a Dick Gregory joke.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 23, 2015
Engelhardt: The Future Foreseen (and Not) Dear Grandson, Consider my address book -- and yes, the simple fact that I have one already tells you a good deal about me. All the names, street addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers that matter to me are still on paper, not in a computer or on an iPhone, and it's not complicated to know what that means: I'm an old guy getting older.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 10, 2023
Tomgram: Juan Cole, An Inflection Point in the Battle over Climate Change? The depths of depravity into which unvarnished capitalism can plunge mortal souls is incalculable. It should come as no surprise then that oil company executives and the officials of petrostates like Saudi Arabia have so assiduously lied to us about the catastrophic effects of climate change[...]
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 16, 2023
Tomgram: Juan Cole, China Hangs Washington Out to Dry in the Middle East A photo Beijing released on March 6th of Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a seismic shock in Washington. There was the Secretary-General of the Chinese Communist Party standing between Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran's National Security Council, and Saudi National Security Adviser Musaad bin Mohammed al-Aiban. They were awkwardly shaking hands on an agreement to reestablish mutual diplomatic ties[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 2, 2014
Todd Gitlin: As the Globe Warms, So Does the Climate Movement The extraordinary range, age, and diversity exhibited in the People's Climate March -- race, class, sex, you name it, and if you were there, you saw it -- changes the game. The phalanxes of unions, indigenous and religious groups, and all manner of local activists in New York formed an extraordinary melange.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 12, 2022
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, After the American Century "The American Century Is Over." So claims the July 2022 cover of Harper's Magazine, adding an all-too-pertinent question: "What's Next?"[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 5, 2014
Noam Chomsky, Why National Security Has Nothing to Do With Security Think of it as the true end of the beginning. Last week, Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, the final member of the 12-man crew of the Enola Gay, the plane (named after its pilot's supportive mother) that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died at age 93.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 4, 2023
Tomgram: Hartung and Freeman, The Twenty-First Century of (Profitable) War The military-industrial complex (MIC) that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about more than 60 years ago is still alive and well. In fact, it's consuming many more tax dollars and feeding far larger weapons producers than when Ike raised the alarm about the "unwarranted influence" it wielded in his 1961 farewell address to the nation[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Friday, May 28, 2010
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Obama's Flip-Flop Leadership Style Irrespective of their politics, flawed leaders share a common trait. They generally remain remarkably oblivious to the harm they do to the nation they lead. George W. Bush is a salient recent example, as is former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. When it comes to foreign policy, we are now witnessing a similar phenomenon at the Obama White House.
Eduardo Galeano, From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 27, 2015
Eduardo Galeano, The Previous Sole Superpower The 13 passages take you, in Galeano-esque fashion, from the Opium Wars to Darwin's finches. It's great stuff from a man to whom history regularly whispered its secrets and it's excerpted from his late-in-life masterpiece, his history of humanity in 366 episodes, Mirrors.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 6, 2016
Tomgram: Nick Turse, What the U.S. Military Doesn't Know (and Neither Do You) What the Pentagon and the U.S. military do matters greatly on this conflicted planet of ours, which is why I regularly find it amazing, even unnerving, that, in a world of monster media organizations, covering what the U.S. military does in Africa -- and it's doing more and more there -- has largely been left to Nick Turse of TomDispatch.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 26, 2013
TomDispatch: Laura Gottesdiener, Wall Street's Rental Empire "One shitty deal." "Shitty deal." "Shitty." The date was April 27, 2010, and Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) was pissed as he launched into a rant with those pungent quotes in it. As part of a Senate subcommittee investigation into the causes of the financial meltdown, Levin was grilling Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and several other current and former Goldman higher-ups about their roles...
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 13, 2017
Tomgram: Alfred W. McCoy, Washington's Drug of Choice in the War on Terror After nine months of confusion, chaos, and cascading tweets, Donald Trump's White House has finally made one thing crystal clear: the U.S. is staying in Afghanistan to fight and -- so they insist -- win.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Tomgram: Engelhardt, This Can't End Well From the historians, we know about the perils of overextended empires fighting wars they can't afford to win -- or lose. But that's patterns of history stuff. In my latest post, I try to give a sense of what it's like instead to be inside an empire heading down faster and blinder than anyone expected or is prepared to deal with.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Chip Ward: Apologies to the Next Generation for the Turmoil to Come 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 29, 2021
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Requiem for the American Century In the immediate wake of 9/11, it fell to President George W. Bush to explain to his fellow citizens what had occurred and frame the nation's response to that singular catastrophe. Bush fulfilled that duty by inaugurating the Global War on Terror, or GWOT. Both in terms of what was at stake and what the United States intended to do, the president explicitly compared that new conflict to the defining struggles of the 20th c.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Letter to a Dead Man About the Occupation of Hope, by Rebecca Solnit 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 3, 2020
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Trump Conundrum Here's the truth of it: I'd like a presidential pardon. Really, I would. And I think I deserve it more than Michael Milken or Rod Blagojevich or -- because it's obviously heading our way -- Roger Stone (not to speak of Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort).
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 7, 2023
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, Making It in a Poor World A few weeks ago, the world's power brokers "- politicians, CEOs, millionaires, billionaires "- met in Davos, the mountainous Swiss resort town, for the 2023 World Economic Forum. In an annual ritual that reads ever more like Orwellian farce, the global elite gathered "- their private jets lined up like gleaming sardines at a nearby private airport[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 20, 2019
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The Fake News of D-Day How best to describe the recently completed allied commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of France? Two words come immediately to mind: heartfelt and poignant. The aged D-Day veterans gathering for what was probably the last time richly deserved every bit of praise bestowed on them. Yet one particular refrain that has become commonplace in this age of Donald Trump was absent from the proceedings.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 11, 2023
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Global War of Terror, or the Decline and Fall of Just About Everything From the earliest kingdoms to late last night, history has been the story not just of the rise of great powers but of their decline and fall. So, normally, there would be nothing particularly out of the ordinary about the aging America of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, a classic imperial power distinctly in decline and threatening to split into pieces[...]
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 22, 2014
Is Climate Change a Crime Against Humanity? Consider this piece my attempt to reframe the climate change debate by suggesting the obvious but normally never stated: climate change is a weapon of mass destruction in the same apocalyptic vein as nuclear weapons. It is also a self-evident "crime against humanity." These are obvious categories in which to discuss the damage that is now being done, despite everything we know, to our future, but no one ever uses them.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 18, 2017
Tomgram: John Feffer, The Invisible Monster of Climate Change Once upon a time, long, long ago, I testified before the great assembly of our land. When I describe this event to children today, it really does sound to them like a fairy tale. Once upon a time -- a time before the world splintered into a million pieces and America became its current disunited states -- this old woman was a young idealist who tried to persuade our mighty Congress that a monster was stalking the land.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 12, 2017
Tomgram: William Astore, The Superpower That Fought Itself -- And Lost When it comes to the "world's greatest military," the news has been shocking. Two fast U.S. Navy ships colliding with slow-moving commercial vessels with tragic loss of life. An Air Force that has been in the air continuously for years and yet doesn't have enough pilots to fly its combat jets. Ground troops who find themselves fighting "rebels" in Syria previously armed and trained by the CIA...
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 23, 2023
Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Pentagon's Version of the World Is Not the World Given the secrecy typically accorded to the military and the inclination of government officials to skew data to satisfy the preferences of those in power, intelligence failures are anything but unusual in this country's security affairs[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 20, 2023
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Do You Really Want That Tax Deduction? We've just passed through tax time again. (Unless, like me, you live in one of several states ravaged by recent extreme weather events brought on by climate change. In that case, you can wait until October.) It's also that moment when the War Resisters League "" slogan: "If you work for peace, stop paying for war" "" publishes its invaluable annual "Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes" pie chart[...]
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 12, 2011
Tom Engelhardt: The 1% Election A new way of looking at the spectacle that is election 2012.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 9, 2019
Tomgram: William Astore, Drowning in Militarism Put up with me for just a moment while I wax literary. It turns out that, if French novelist Marcel Proust lived today, he might have had to retitle his Remembrance of Things Past as Remembrance of Things Present, or even more sadly, Things Future...
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 8, 2023
Tomgram: William Astore, An Exceptional Military for the Exceptional Nation In his message to the troops prior to the July 4th weekend, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin offered high praise indeed. "We have the greatest fighting force in human history," he tweeted, connecting that claim to the U.S. having patriots of all colors, creeds, and backgrounds "who bravely volunteer to defend our country and our values[...]"
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 1, 2019
Tomgram: Adam Hochschild, America's Real War Along rivers prone to overflowing, people sometimes talk of preparing for a 100-year flood -- a dangerous surge of muddy, debris-filled water so overwhelming it appears only once a century.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 7, 2019
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Inauspicious Futures in the U.S. Army Patches, pins, medals, and badges are the visible signs of an exclusive military culture, a silent language by which soldiers and officers judge each other's experiences, accomplishments, and general worth. In July 2001, when I first walked through the gate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point at the ripe young age of 17...
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 1, 2018
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, How to Set the Economy on Fire In Donald Trump's White House, you can hardly keep up with the ongoing brouhahas from North Korea to Robert Mueller's Russian investigation, while it already feels like ages since the celebratory mood over the vast corporate tax cuts Congress passed last year. But don't be fooled: none of that is as important as what's missing from the picture...
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 21, 2014
Patrick Cockburn, How to Ensure a Thriving Caliphate Think of the new "caliphate" of the Islamic State, formerly the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's gift to the world (with a helping hand from the Saudis and other financiers of extremism in the Persian Gulf).
The Graduates. What are we celebrating?, From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Going for Broke in Ponzi Scheme America It couldn't be a sunnier, more beautiful day to exit your lives -- or enter them -- depending on how you care to look at it. After all, here you are four years later in your graduation togs with your parents looking on, waiting to celebrate. The question is: Celebrate what exactly?
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 11, 2018
Tomgram: William D. Hartung, 2018 Looks Like an Arms Bonanza As Donald Trump might put it, major weapons contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin cashed in "bigly" in his first year in office. They raked in tens of billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts, while posting sharp stock price increases and healthy profits driven by the continuation and expansion of Washington's post-9/11 wars.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 11, 2017
Andrew Bacevich, A Country Addicted to War What makes a Harvey Weinstein moment? The now-disgraced Hollywood mogul is hardly the first powerful man to stand accused of having abused women. The Harveys who preceded Harvey himself are legion, their prominence matching or exceeding his own and the misdeeds with which they were charged at least as reprehensible.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 29, 2023
Tomgram: David Bromwich, The Everlasting Alibi A new war, a new alibi. When we think about our latest war the one that began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, just six months after our Afghan War ended so catastrophically there is a hidden benefit. As long as American minds are on Ukraine, we are not thinking about planetary climate disruption. This technique of distraction obeys the familiar mechanism that psychologists have called displacement[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 26, 2023
Tomgram: Tamar Sarai, From Education to Incarceration Not long after moving to Topeka, Kansas, in the early 1980s, community organizer Curtis Pitts learned about a hidden slice of that city's history that would come to shape his life's work over the next four decades. He was introduced to the Kansas Technical Institute, or KTI, a Black vocational college that had prospered throughout the early twentieth century, only to close in the mid-1950s[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 21, 2023
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Consider the Alternative For twelve years starting in 1982, my partner and I in San Francisco joined with two friends in Seattle to produce Lesbian Contradiction: A Journal of Irreverent Feminism, or LesCon for short. We started out typing four-inch columns of text and laying out what was to become a quarterly tabloid on a homemade light table[...]
SHARE More Sharing        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
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 20, 2018
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Global War to Infinity and Beyond American militarism has gone off the rails -- and this middling career officer should have seen it coming. Earlier in this century, the U.S. military not surprisingly focused on counterinsurgency as it faced various indecisive and seemingly unending wars across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa.
(6 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 13, 2017
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, The China Missile Crisis of 2018? Forget those "bad hombres down there" in Mexico that U.S. troops might take out. Ignore the way National Security Adviser Michael Flynn put Iran "on notice" and the new president insisted, that, when it comes to that country, "nothing is off the table." Instead, focus for a moment on something truly scary: the possibility that Donald Trump's Washington might slide into an actual war with the planet's rising superpower, China.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 18, 2023
Tomgram: Joshua Frank, The Unnoticed Atomic War It's sure to be a blood-soaked spring in Ukraine. Russia's winter offensive fell far short of Vladimir Putin's objectives, leaving little doubt that the West's conveyor belt of weaponry has aided Ukraine's defenses. Cease-fire negotiations have never truly begun, while NATO has only strengthened its forces thanks to Finland's new membership (with Sweden soon likely to follow)[...]
Eduardo Galeano recente, From FlickrPhotos
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 2, 2017
Tomgram: Eduardo Galeano, Monster Wanted Birds are the only free beings in this world inhabited by prisoners. They fly from pole to pole, powered by food alone, on the route they choose and at the hour they wish, without ever asking permission of officials who believe they own the heavens.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 22, 2018
Tomgram: Nate Terani, Being Demonized in Your Own Country Understand this: I'm an American veteran. I'm also a Muslim-American in a country in which, in these years, that hasn't exactly been the happiest category to fall into. Now, let me tell you a little story.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 27, 2022
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, The Poverty of the Political Mind Ours is an ever more unequal world, even if that subject is ever less attended to in this country. In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here?, Reverend Martin Luther King wrote tellingly, "The prescription for the cure rests with the accurate diagnosis of the disease. A people who began a national life inspired by a vision of a society of brotherhood can redeem itself[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 20, 2020
Tomgram: Greenberg and Dratel, The Gitmo Era In January 2002, the Guanta'namo Bay Detention Facility in Cuba opened its gates for the first 20 detainees of the war on terror. Within 100 days, 300 of them would arrive, often hooded and in those infamous orange jumpsuits, and that would just be the beginning. At its height, the population would rise to nearly 800 prisoners from 59 countries.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 6, 2022
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Three Conversations about Politics "Welcome back!" read my friend Allan's email. "So happy to have you back and seeing that hard work paid off. Thank you for all that you do. Please don't cook this evening. I am bringing you a Honduran dinner " tacos hondureños and baleadas, plus a bottle of wine." The tacos were tasty indeed, but even more pleasing was my friend's evident admiration for my recent political activities[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 12, 2019
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Thank Football For Donald Trump Because everything is so Trumpian these days, there's less air or space for the only other mass entertainment that promotes tribalism and toxic masculinity while keeping violence in vogue: football.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 16, 2019
Tomgram: William Hartung, Lessons From Battling the Pentagon for Four Decades I've been writing critiques of the Pentagon, the national security state, and America's never-ending military overreach since at least 1979 -- in other words, virtually my entire working life. In those decades, there were moments when positive changes did occur...
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 11, 2020
Tomgram: Bob Dreyfuss, Could Covert War With Iran Become Overt Before November 3rd? Was Donald Trump's January 3rd drone assassination of Major General Qasem Soleimani the first step in turning the simmering Cold War between the United States and Iran into a hot war in the weeks before an American presidential election? Of course, there's no way to know, but behind by double digits in most national polls and flanked by ultra-hawkish Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Trump is a notoriously impetuous and erratic
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 22, 2022
Tomgram: Stan Cox, A War on the Earth? On October 1st, the U.S. military will start spending the more than $800 billion Congress is going to provide it with in fiscal year 2023. And that whopping sum will just be the beginning[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 2, 2011
Bill McKibben, Obama Strikes Out on Global Warming President Obama came into office promising to mitigate climate change and hold back the rising waters of global oceans. More recently, his administration has been opening up new lands to coal mining and new pipeline territory to bring Canadian tar-sand "sludge" through the U.S.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 26, 2023
Tomgram: Joshua Frank, The Newest Tool of War? I awoke on December 13th to news about what could be the most significant scientific breakthrough since the Food and Drug Administration authorized the first Covid vaccine for emergency use two years ago. This time, however, the achievement had nothing to do with that ongoing public health crisis[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 22, 2023
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, The Violent American Century Blame Donald Trump and all too many of his followers, but don't just blame him or them. Yes, he was indeed responsible for the nightmare of January 6, 2021, and, in his own fashion, for the incitement of right-wing militia (terror!) groups like the Proud Boys. ("Stand back and stand by!") But in this country, in this century, violence has become as all-American as apple pie[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 1, 2022
Tomgram: Stan Cox and Priti Gulati Cox, "We Have Not Yet Been Defeated" On October 29th, 75-year-old Saifullah Paracha, Guanta'namo Bay's oldest detainee, was finally released by U.S. authorities and flown home to his family in Karachi, Pakistan. He had been incarcerated for nearly two decades without either charges or a trial. His plane touched down in a land still reeling from this year's cataclysmic monsoon floods that, in July, had covered an unparalleled one-third of that country[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 1, 2017
Ann Jones: Can the Age of Trump Spur Medicare for All? In the Trumpian moment, can we change course on a state-by-state basis? Ann Jones, "Scandinavia in Maryland?, Medicare for All in One State"
SHARE More Sharing        Saturday, June 27, 2020
Tomgram: John Feffer, The De-Trumpification of America Let's assume that Donald Trump loses the election in November. Yes, that's a mighty big assumption, despite all the polls currently favoring the Democrats. If the economy begins to recover and the first wave of Covid-19 subsides (without a second wave striking), Donald Trump's reelection prospects could improve greatly.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 11, 2022
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Back to the Future Again Recently, I told my friend Mimi that, only weeks from now, I was returning to Reno to help UNITE-HERE, the hospitality industry union, in the potentially nightmarish 2022 election. "Even though," I added, "I hate electoral politics[...]"
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 8, 2023
Tomgram: William Astore, Nuking the Promise of America I turn 60 this year. My health is generally good, though I have aches and pains from a form of arthritis. I'm not optimistic enough to believe that the best years of my life are ahead of me, nor so pessimistic as to assume that the best years are behind me. But I do know this, however sad it may be to say: the best years of my country are behind me[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Tomgram: William Astore, Time to Hold Military Boots to the Fire Air Force Academy instructor William Astore. He considers just what America's future commanders are being taught in the country's three elite military academies and wonders what a crew that has taken no responsibility for years of disaster in conflict after conflict has to offer anyone and why they are generally held in such high regard in this country.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 5, 2022
Tomgram: Helen Benedict, The Increasing Persecution of Refugees Almost anyone would agree that war is horrifying and peaceful countries should do their best to help its victims. The widespread eagerness to welcome fleeing Ukrainians after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded their country last February is a heartening example of such aid. But behind that altruism lies an ugly truth[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 13, 2022
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Will the U.S. Learn Anything from Putin's Disastrous Invasion? In Washington, wide agreement exists that the Russian army's performance in the Kremlin's ongoing Ukraine "special military operation" ranks somewhere between lousy and truly abysmal. The question is: Why? The answer in American policy circles, both civilian and military, appears all but self-evident[...]
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 16, 2014
Peter Van Buren: Seven Bad Endings to the New War in the Middle East Here are seven worst-case scenarios in a part of the world where the worst case has regularly been the best that's on offer. After all, with all that military power being brought to bear on the planet's most volatile region, what could possibly go wrong?
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 5, 2019
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Donald in Blunderland There can be no question about it. Donald Trump is Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts. "Off with his head!" was the president's essential suggestion for -- to offer just one example -- a certain whistleblower who fingered him on that now notorious Ukrainian phone call.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 30, 2015
Eduardo Galeano: Sacrilegious Women In 1919 Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary, was murdered in Berlin. Her killers bludgeoned her with rifle blows and tossed her into the waters of a canal. Along the way, she lost a shoe. Some hand picked it up, that shoe dropped in the mud. Rosa longed for a world where justice would not be sacrificed in the name of freedom, nor freedom sacrificed in the name of justice. Every day, some hand picks up that banner.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 16, 2023
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Singing the "Bourgeois Blues" In 1937, the American folklorist Alan Lomax invited Louisiana folksinger Huddie Ledbetter (better known as Lead Belly) to record some of his songs for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Lead Belly and his wife Martha searched in vain for a place to spend a few nights nearby. But they were Black and no hotel would give them shelter[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 15, 2020
Tomgram: Nick Turse, A Breathless Moment in America They were relegated to the protest equivalent of a ghetto. Their assigned route shunted them to the far fringes of the city. Their demonstration was destined for an ignominious demise far from any main thoroughfare, out of sight of most apartment buildings, out of earshot of most homes, best viewed from a dinghy bobbing in the Hudson River.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 4, 2012
Bill McKibben: Climate-Change Deniers Have Done Their Job Well Here's the thing about climate-change deniers: these days before they sit down to write their blog posts, they have to turn on the AC. After all, it might as well be July in New York (where I'm writing this), August in Chicago (where a century-old heat record was broken in late May), and hell at the Indy 500.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 13, 2019
Tomgram: John Feffer, The Rising Tide of the Populist Right In the Americas, the Trump tsunami has swept across both continents and the "pink tide" of progressivism has all but disappeared from the southern half of the hemisphere. In Europe, with the recent exception of Spain, the left has been banished to the political margins. In Africa and Asia, socialism has devolved into nationalism, authoritarianism, or just plain corruption. And forget about the Middle East.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 11, 2020
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Is There a Chinese Missile Crisis in Our Future? America's pundits and politicians have largely concluded that a new Cold War with China -- a period of intense hostility and competition falling just short of armed combat -- has started. "Rift Threatens U.S. Cold War Against China," as a New York Times headline put it on May 15th, citing recent clashes over trade, technology, and responsibility for the spread of Covid-19...
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 11, 2018
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The President as Pimple Donald Trump's tenure as the 45th U.S. president may last another few weeks, another year, or another 16 months. However unsettling the prospect, the leaky vessel that is the S.S. Trump might even manage to stay afloat for a second term. Nonetheless, recent headline-making revelations suggest that, like some derelict ship that's gone aground, the Trump presidency may already have effectively run its course.
From ImagesAttr
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 5, 2012
Bill McKibben, Buying Congress in 2012 How Congressional representatives have been turned from public servants into corporate employees and what to do about the money flooding Washington.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 17, 2019
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Trump Change Don't try to deny it! The political temperature of this country is rising fast. Call it Trump change or Trump warming, if you want, but grasp one thing: increasingly, you're in a different land and, whatever happens to Donald Trump, the results down the line are likely to be ever less pretty. Trump change isn't just an American phenomenon, it's distinctly global.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 4, 2021
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Thanks for Nothing I waited almost three months for some acknowledgement, but it never came. Not a bottle of champagne. Not a congratulatory note. Not an email of acknowledgement. Not one media request. Authors wait their whole lives for I-told-you-so moments like these. But mine passed without accolades, awards, or adulation. Being way ahead of the pack is supposed to bring honors and rewards, isn't it?[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 27, 2023
Tomgram: Cox, The War You're Not Reading About It's been devastating, even if no one's paying attention[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 17, 2023
Tomgram: Michael Klare, A World on the Edge of... Collapse? In his 2005 bestseller Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, geographer Jared Diamond focused on past civilizations that confronted severe climate shocks, either adapting and surviving or failing to adapt and disintegrating. Among those were the Puebloan culture of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, the ancient Mayan civilization of Mesoamerica, and the Viking settlers of Greenland[...]
From ImagesAttr
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Tomgram: Mike Davis, The Coming Economic Disaster 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.
(11 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Bush Era Horrors Will Haunt Us Until We Truly Face Them Given the last eight years of disaster piled on catastrophe, who in our American world would want to look backward? The urge to turn the page in this country is palpable. Perhaps the greatest fantasy of the present moment is that there is a choice here. We can look forward or backward, turn the page on history or not. Don't believe it. History matters.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 17, 2021
Tomgram: William Astore, Big Lies Have Consequences, Too Americans may already be lying themselves out of what little remains of their democracy. The big lie uniting and motivating today's Republicans is, of course, that Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, won the 2020 presidential election[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 2, 2014
Rebecca Solnit: Casino Capitalism, Nevada-Style As TomDispatch regular Rebecca Solnit explains in a haunting new piece, in the late 1990s, the bright-lit casinos of Las Vegas's strip yielded pride of place to a new, far more breathtaking national gambling scheme. The bet would be on luxury housing developments, even though, as Solnit explains, the one thing those in Las Vegas should have known was "that the house always wins."
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 5, 2024
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Against Forgetting What's in your basement? Mine is full of things I've mostly forgotten about -- tools I bought for projects I never completed, long abandoned sports equipment, furniture I planned on refinishing ages ago, and unused cans of paint I thought I wanted when someone was giving them away[...]
(6 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 29, 2011
Sex and the Single Drone: The Latest in Guarding the Empire 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.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 15, 2019
Tomgram: Dahr Jamail, "We Can't Undo This" While describing the warming, ever more acidic waters around Alaska and the harm being caused to the marine food web, he recalled a moment approximately 250 million years ago when the oceans underwent similar changes and the planet experienced mass extinction events "driven by ocean acidity. The Permian mass extinction where 90% of the species were wiped out, that is what we are looking at now."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 19, 2023
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Our Asteroid Is Us Let's admit it: We are indeed mad creatures. This should truly have been the time of our discontent. The northern hemisphere just experienced the hottest summer in recorded history, including month by month the warmest June, July, August, and (by a country mile) September ever. Staggering heat records were set in place after place globally. Fires from Canada to Hawaii to Europe broke all records[...]
(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 1, 2017
John Feffer, Trump, China, and the Unsettled Future of Asia Asia has been the future for more than a generation. When Americans try to glimpse what's to come, images of the Pacific Rim flood the imagination. For movie audiences in 1982, the rain-soaked Los Angeles of Blade Runner looked like downtown Tokyo.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 18, 2020
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, So Long to American Exceptionalism Remember the song "Over There"? [...] Maybe not, since it was popular so long ago, but it was meant to inspire American troops saying goodbye to their country on their way to a Europe embroiled in World War I. Written by George M. Cohan, the song paid homage to an American wartime urge to do good in the world, to take what was precious about this country and spread it to less fortunate, endangered peoples elsewhere.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 15, 2016
Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Rise of the Right and Climate Catastrophe Today, consider what TomDispatch's invaluable energy expert Michael Klare has to say about the rise of versions of The Donald globally and what, in climate-change terms, that means for the health of our planet.
From commons.wikimedia.org: 1984, From Images
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 25, 2017
Rebecca Gordon, Those Who Do Not Remember History... The Trump administration seems intent on tossing recent history down the memory hole. Admittedly, Americans have never been known for their strong grasp of facts about their past. Still, as we struggle to keep up with the constantly shifting explanations and pronouncements of the new administration, it becomes ever harder to remember the events of yesterday, let alone last week, or last month.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 20, 2023
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Whose War Was That Anyway? Seeking news coverage about the Adriana, the boat crowded with some 700 people migrating to Europe to seek a better life that sank in mid-June off the coast of Greece, I googled "migrant ship" and got 483,000 search results in one second. Most of the people aboard the Adriana had drowned in the Mediterranean, among them about 100 children[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 16, 2023
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Drone Warfare in the Nuclear Age A war with China may not be inevitable, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks observed recently, but it's a genuine possibility and so this country must be prepared to fight and win. But victory in such a conflict will not, she suggested, come easily[...]
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 24, 2014
Andrew Bacevich: Daydream Believers Inside the Beltway, policymakers, politicians, and pundits take Iraq's existence for granted. Many can even locate it on a map. They also take for granted the proposition that it is incumbent upon the United States to preserve that existence. To paraphrase Chris Hedges, for a certain group of Americans, Iraq is the cause that gives life meaning. For the military-industrial complex, it's the gift that keeps on giving.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 14, 2023
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Giving Whataboutism a Chance "To defend civilization, defeat Russia." Writing in the unfailingly bellicose Atlantic, an American academic of my acquaintance recently issued that dramatic call to arms. And lest there be any confusion about the stakes involved, the image accompanying his essay depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin with a Hitler mustache and haircut[...]
Sheriff, From FlickrPhotos
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 17, 2017
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Welcome to the Post-American World Let me try to get this straight: from the moment the Soviet Union imploded in 1991 until recently just about every politician and mainstream pundit in America assured us that we were the planet's indispensable nation, the only truly exceptional one on this small orb of ours.
From ImagesAttr
(5 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Washington Drunk on War Gorbachev had dubbed Afghanistan "the bleeding wound," and when the wounded Red Army finally limped home, it was to a country that would soon cease to exist. For the Soviet Union, Afghanistan had literally proven "the graveyard of empires." If, at the end, its military remained standing, the empire didn't. (And if you don't already find this description just a tad eerie, given the present moment in the U.S., you should.)
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 5, 2019
Tomgram: Harris, Stimpson, and Freeman, The Military-Industrial Jobs Scam A Marilyn has once again seduced a president. This time, though, it's not a movie star; it's Marillyn Hewson, the head of Lockheed Martin, the nation's top defense contractor and the largest weapons producer in the world.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 17, 2023
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Creating a Hypersonic Pentagon Budget On March 13th, the Biden administration unveiled its $842 billion military budget request for 2024, the largest ask (in today's dollars) since the peaks of the Afghan and Iraq wars. And mind you, that's before the hawks in Congress get their hands on it. Last year, they added $35 billion to the administration's request and, this year, their add-on is likely to prove at least that big[...]
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 14, 2011
Andrew Bacevich: The Passing of the Postwar Era The America today is not the America of 1945. Maybe it's time Washington woke up to this.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 10, 2023
Tomgram: Juan Cole, Israel's Crisis Is Not about Democracy but Occupation On July 24th, the Israeli Knesset passed a measure forbidding the country's High Court of Justice from in any way checking the power of the government, whether in making cabinet decisions or appointments, based on what's known as the "reasonability" standard. In the Israeli context, this was an extreme act[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 4, 2020
Tomgram: William Astore, The Self-Defeating Military The expression "self-licking ice cream cone" was first used in 1992 to describe a hidebound bureaucracy at NASA. Yet, as an image, it's even more apt for America's military-industrial complex, an institution far vaster than NASA and thoroughly dedicated to working for its own perpetuation and little else.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 7, 2022
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Trapped in the 1930s Timothy Snyder, Levin Professor of History at Yale University, is a scholar of surpassing brilliance. His 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin chronicles in harrowing detail the de facto collaboration of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union that resulted in the murder of millions of innocents. On any bookshelf reserved for accounts that reveal essential truths of our past, Bloodlands deserves a place [...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 2, 2016
Tomgram: Nick Turse, The U.S. Military Pivots to Africa and That Continent Goes Down the Drain Things are not exactly going well militarily 15 years after 9/11. The Obama administration will hand over at least seven wars and conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa to the next administration and from Afghanistan to Libya, Somalia, and Nigeria, things are just getting worse.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 2, 2023
Tomgram: Clarence Lusane, The Nightmare of Republican Voter Suppression The fundamental right to vote has been a core value of Black politics since the colonial era " and so has the effort to suppress that vote right up to the present moment. In fact, the history of the suppression of Black voters is a first-rate horror story that as yet shows no sign of ending[...]
From ImagesAttr
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 27, 2014
Tomgram: Nick Turse, America's Non-Stop Ops in Africa For the last several years, Nick Turse has been covering the expansion of U.S. Africa Command and the quiet, under-the-radar-screen growth of U.S. operations on that continent at TomDispatch. Today, Turse offers a revealing look at the quickening pace of U.S. military operations in Africa as the Pentagon prepares for future wars, and the destabilization and blowback it is already helping to sow on that continent.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 18, 2020
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Donald Trump Is Losing His Tech War with Xi Jinping For the Trump administration's senior officials, it's been open season on bashing China. If you need an example, think of the president's blame game about "the invisible Chinese virus" as it spreads wildly across the U.S. When it comes to China, in fact, the ever more virulent criticism never seems to stop.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 18, 2022
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Sportswashing Saudi Arabia Here's the big question in Jock Culture these days: Is the Kingdom of Golf being used to sportswash the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Or is it the other way around? After all, what other major sport could use a sandstorm of Middle Eastern murder and human-rights abuses to obscure its own history of bigotry and greed?[..]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 2, 2023
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, Whose World Is This Anyway? "In order to fully recover, we must first recover the society that has made us sick[...]"
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 9, 2014
Noam Chomsky, The Fate of the Gaza Ceasefire Is there nowhere on the face of the Earth where opinion polls aren't taken? In the wake of the 50-day Israeli assault on Gaza, parts of that tiny strip of land now look, according to photographs, like a moonscape of destruction. At least 10,000 homes were obliterated and thousands more damaged; at least 175 major factories were pummeled into the dust.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 16, 2015
Tomgram: Laura Gottesdiener, The Angel of Death When people ask me what my new job is like, I tell them that I wake up very early and count the dead. When I say "very early," I mean a few minutes after four a.m., as the sky is just softening to the color of faded purple corduroy. By "the dead," I mostly mean people across the world that my government has killed or helped another nation's government kill while I was sleeping.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 16, 2019
Tomgram: William Hartung, Eisenhower's Worst Nightmare When, in his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the "unwarranted influence" wielded by the "military-industrial complex," he could never have dreamed of an arms-making corporation of the size and political clout of Lockheed Martin. In a good year, it now receives up to $50 billion in government contracts, a sum larger than the operating budget of the State Department.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 23, 2020
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, The Perfect Military Wife I'm Not (But Who Is?) As each of my husband's Navy submarine deployments came to an end, local spouses would e-mail me about the ship's uncertain date of return. They were attempting to sell tickets to a raffle in which the winner would be the first to kiss her returning sailor.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 6, 2023
Tomgram: Clarence Lusane, Will Nikki Haley's Candidacy Flag? In 2015, according to the talking points being floated by former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley and her team, she alone heroically removed the Confederate flag that flew on the grounds of the state capitol and so healed racial wounds. She implied as much right after it happened, again at the 2020 Republican National Convention, and in subsequent interviews[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 18, 2023
Tomgram: Michael Klare, The G-3 and the Post-Ukraine World Not so long ago, political analysts were speaking of the "G-2" "" that is, of a potential working alliance between the United States and China aimed at managing global problems for their mutual benefit. Such a collaborative twosome was seen as potentially even more powerful than the G-7 group of leading Western economies[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 17, 2017
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Nixon's Children "[Petraeus] hooked his thumbs into his flak vest and adjusted the weight on his shoulders. 'Tell me how this ends,' he said. 'Eight years and eight divisions?' The allusion was to advice supposedly given the White House in the early 1950s by a senior Army strategist upon being asked what it would take to prop up French forces in South Vietnam. Petraeus's grin suggested the comment was more droll quip than historical assertion.
SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, November 18, 2018
Rajan Menon, Tweeting in the Rain By now, we're used to the president's words and deeds prompting eye-rolling and jokes. But on this occasion, as on others, Trump's behavior reflects deeper and dangerous political trends -- ones he both exemplifies and fosters...
SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, July 14, 2019
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, I Had an Abortion and Now I'm Not Ashamed I have never said this publicly before, but in December 1974 I had an abortion. I was 22 years old, living in a cold, dark house in Portland, Oregon, spending my days huddled in front of a wood stove trying to finish my undergraduate senior thesis. I did not want to have a baby. I didn't know what would come next in my life, but I knew it would not include raising a child.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 9, 2020
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Trump's Own Military Mafia Every West Point class votes on an official motto. Most are then inscribed on their class rings. Hence, the pejorative West Point label "ring knocker." (As legend has it, at military meetings a West Pointer "need only knock his large ring on the table and all Pointers present are obliged to rally to his point of view.") Last August, the class of 2023 announced theirs: "Freedom Is Not Free."
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 20, 2023
Tomgram: Joshua Frank, A Growing Middle Eastern Nightmare Israel's robust military, the fourth-strongest in the world, is ravaging Gaza and, along with armed settlers, terrorizing Palestinians in the West Bank following the brutal Hamas massacres of October 7th. Like so many other colonial projects, Israel was born of terror and has necessitated the use of violence to occupy Arab territory and segregate Palestinians ever since[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 15, 2019
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, True Crimes and Misdemeanors Think of it this way: with the refusal of the White House to cooperate in any fashion with the impeachment inquiry of the House of Representatives, which Donald Trump has already taken to calling a "totally compromised kangaroo court," the president is, in effect, attempting to impeach Congress. He's doing it through the media, on Twitter, and in the long run -- he hopes -- via the 2020 election.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 9, 2023
Tomgram: Juan Cole, When We Were Vladimir Putin Who remembers anymore that, in 2003, we were Vladimir Putin? Today, our cable and social-media news feeds are blanketed with denunciations of the president of the Russian Federation for his lawless and brutal invasion of Ukraine. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken met briefly with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in New Delhi on March 2nd, he told him in no uncertain terms, "End this war of aggression[...]"
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 28, 2020
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, A Rendezvous with Destiny? Many economists believe that a recession is already underway. So do millions of Americans struggling with bills and job losses. While the ghosts of the 2008 financial crisis that sent inequality soaring to new heights in this country are still with us, it's become abundantly clear that the economic disaster brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic has already left the initial shock of that crisis in the dust.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 2, 2020
Tomgram: Lawrence Weschler, A New Mount Rushmore for a World on the Brink? The news that President Trump is planning to stage a "massive fireworks display" before a sizeable crowd on Independence Day eve at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial (notwithstanding the prospect of both wildfires in the tinder-dry surroundings and the further spread of Covid-19) has left me mulling over once again the possible creation of another such epic-scale monument.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 19, 2021
Tomgram: William deBuys, A Long Walk into an Imperiled Future Thirteen thousand feet high on the far side of the Himalaya mountains, we have entered the past and the future at the same time. We are a medical expedition and also a pilgrimage, consisting of doctors, nurses, Buddhist clerics, supernumeraries like me, and a large staff of guides, muleteers, and camp tenders. We are bound for the isolated villages of Upper Dolpo, a remote region of northwestern Nepal[...]
As the sun sets on our time, what are we leaving for our children's sunrise?, From ImagesAttr
(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, A Mother Thinks the Unthinkable We can't say it, but we are increasingly afraid of the future, of tomorrow, afraid for our children in ways that, in themselves, are frightening to bring up. It's as diffuse as "anything can happen" and as specific as we are running out of ______ [fill in the blank: clean water, fossil fuels, space for people, arable land, cheap food stuffs, you name it].
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 5, 2019
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Bases, Bases, Everywhere, and Not a Base in Sight They called it Castle Black, an obvious homage to the famed frozen citadel from the HBO series Game of Thrones. In the fantasy world of GoT, it's the stronghold of the Night's Watch, the French Foreign Legion-esque guardians of the northern border of the Seven Kingdoms. This Castle Black, however, was all too real and occupied by U.S. Special Operations forces, America's most elite troops.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 25, 2020
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Artificial (Un)intelligence and the U.S. Military With Covid-19 incapacitating startling numbers of U.S. service members and modern weapons proving increasingly lethal, the American military is relying ever more frequently on intelligent robots to conduct hazardous combat operations. Such devices, known in the military as "autonomous weapons systems," include robotic sentries, battlefield-surveillance drones, and autonomous submarines. ..
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 2, 2023
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Whose Planet Are We On? Tell me, what planet are we actually on? All these decades later, are we really involved in a "second" or "new" Cold War? It's certainly true that, as late as the 1980s, the superpowers (or so they then liked to think of themselves), the United States and the Soviet Union, were still engaged in just such a Cold War, something that might have seemed almost positive at the time[...]
Denali Sunset, From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 21, 2015
Dahr Jamail: The Navy's Great Alaskan "War" I lived in Anchorage for 10 years and spent much of that time climbing in and on the spine of the state, the Alaska Range. Three times I stood atop the mountain the Athabaskans call Denali, "the great one." During that decade, I mountaineered for more than half a year on that magnificent state's highest peaks.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 16, 2023
Tomgram: William Astore, Humanity's Worst Pastime More than two millennia ago, in the History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides recounted a disastrous conflict Athens waged against Sparta. A masterwork on strategy and war, the book is still taught at the U.S. Army War College and many other military institutions across the world[...]
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 3, 2015
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Are Resource Wars Our Future? Officially known as the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP-21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (the 1992 treaty that designated that phenomenon a threat to planetary health and human survival), the Paris summit will be focused on the adoption of measures that would limit global warming to less than catastrophic levels.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 14, 2019
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Ultimate Brexiteer Donald Trump may prove to be the ultimate Brexiteer. Back in August 2016, in the midst of his presidential campaign, he proudly tweeted, "They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!" On the subject of the British leaving the European Union (EU) he's neither faltered nor wavered.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 14, 2020
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, One Cheer for the Deep State This seems like a strange moment to be writing about "the deep state" with the country entering a new phase of open and obvious aboveground chaos and instability.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 2, 2021
Tomgram: Michael Klare, War With China in 2027? When the Department of Defense released its annual report on Chinese military strength in early November, one claim generated headlines around the world. By 2030, it suggested, China would probably have 1,000 nuclear warheads three times more than at present and enough to pose a substantial threat to the United States[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 21, 2023
Tomgram: William Astore, America Hangs from a Cross of Iron In April 1953, newly elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a retired five-star Army general who had led the landings on D-Day in France in June 1944, gave his most powerful speech. It would become known as his "Cross of Iron" address. In it, Ike warned of the cost humanity would pay if Cold War competition led to a world dominated by wars and weaponry that couldn't be reined in[...]
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 20, 2015
Laura Gottesdiener: Another Round of Detroit Refugees? Unlike so many industrial innovations, the revolving door was not developed in Detroit. It took its first spin in Philadelphia in 1888, the brainchild of Theophilus Van Kannel, the soon-to-be founder of the Van Kannel Revolving Door Company. Its purpose was twofold: to better insulate buildings from the cold and to allow greater numbers of people easier entry at any given time.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 8, 2017
Nomi Prins, In Washington, Is the Glass(-Steagall) Half Empty or Half Full? Remember when "draining the swamp" was something the Bush administration swore it was going to do in launching its Global War on Terror? Well, as we all know, that global swamp of terror only got muckier in the ensuing years. (Think al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, think ISIS.) Then, last year, that swamp left terror behind and took up residence in Washington, D.C.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 10, 2019
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Confronting "Alternative Facts" In one of the Bible stories about the death of Jesus, local collaborators with the Roman Empire haul him before Pontius Pilate, the imperial governor of Palestine. Although the situation is dire for one of them, the two engage in a bit of epistemological banter. Jesus allows that his work is about telling the truth and Pilate responds with his show-stopping query: "What is truth?"
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 17, 2023
Tomgram: William Hartung, Going Down the Military Drain Late last month, President Biden signed a bill that clears the way for $858 billion in Pentagon spending and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy in 2023. That's far more than Washington anted up for military purposes at the height of the Korean or Vietnam wars or even during the peak years of the Cold War[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 19, 2023
Tomgram: Nan Levinson, Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream I like to sing and what I like best is to do so at the top of my lungs when I'm all alone. Last summer, taking a walk through the corn fields in New York's Hudson River Valley with no one around but the barn swallows, I found myself belting out a medley of tunes about peace from my long-ago, summer-camp years[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 13, 2023
Tomgram: Nan Levinson, Recruiting Children After more than 20 years of losing wars, recruiting for the U.S. Army is now officially a mess. Last year, that service fell short of its goal by 15,000 recruits, or a quarter of its target. Despite reports of better numbers in the first months of this year, Army officials doubt they will achieve their objective this time around either[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Friday, August 21, 2020
Tomgram: Belle Chesler, Will Public Schools Survive Covid-19? Seventeen years ago, against the advice of my parents, I decided to become a public school teacher. Once I did, both my mother and father, educators themselves, warned me that choosing to teach was to invite attacks from those who viewed the profession with derision and contempt. They advised me to stay strong and push through when budgets were cut, my intellect questioned, or my dedication to my students exploited.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 10, 2023
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Toward a More Perfect North American Union? A few recent headlines reveal the painfully inhumane, dangerously volatile state of U.S. relations with its own home region, the continent of North America. A record-breaking 2.76 million border crossings from Mexico filled homeless shelters to the bursting point in cities nationwide in 2022[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 29, 2020
Tomgram: Mandy Smithberger, Prioritizing the Pentagon in a Pandemic In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Washington has initiated its largest spending binge in history. In the process, you might assume that the unparalleled spread of the disease would have led to a little rethinking when it came to all the trillions of dollars Congress has given the Pentagon in these years that have in no way made us safer from, or prepared us better to respond to, this predictable threat...
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 31, 2016
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, America's Sinkhole Wars Fifteen years of "milestones," turning points, landmarks -- the "liberation" of Afghanistan, the capture of Saddam Hussein, the killing of Osama bin Laden, and most recently the drone-killing of the leader of the Taliban -- and still America's failing wars go on.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 28, 2020
Tomgram: William Astore, Thinking About the Unthinkable (2020-Style) The phrase "thinking about the unthinkable" has always been associated with the unthinkable cataclysm of a nuclear war, and rightly so. Lately, though, I've been pondering another kind of unthinkable scenario, nearly as nightmarish [...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 28, 2022
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Can (Green) Diplomacy Save Us? As President Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping arrived on the resort island of Bali, Indonesia, for their November 14th "summit," relations between their two countries were on a hair-raising downward spiral, with tensions over Taiwan nearing the boiling point[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 1, 2023
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Guanta'namo 21 Years Later There can be little question that the grim prison at Guanta'namo Bay, Cuba, which still shows no sign of closing anytime soon, is a key legacy in the worst sense imaginable of America's post-9/11 forever wars. I've been covering the subject for decades now and that shameful legacy has never diminished[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 15, 2015
Peter Van Buren, The Military-Industrial Complex in Iraq "You can't have victory if you have no idea where the finish line is. But there is one bright side to the situation. If you can't create Victory in Iraq for future VI Day parades, you can at least make a profit from the disintegrating situation there."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 27, 2019
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Some Notes on War Watching TRIPOLI, Libya -- Sometimes war sounds like the harsh crack of gunfire and sometimes like the whisper of the wind. This early morning -- in al-Yarmouk on the southern edge of Libya's capital, Tripoli -- it was a mix of both.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 6, 2017
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, War Making in the Age of the Imperial Presidency "It does not take any courage at all for a congressman or a senator or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 25, 2019
ToTomgram: Robert Lipsyte, How the Worst Values of Sports Are Taking Over America A half-century ago, the sporting Cassandras predicted that the worst values and sensibilities of our increasingly corrupted civic society would eventually affect our sacred games: football would become a gladiatorial meat market, basketball a model of racism, college sports a paradigm of commercialization, and Olympic sports like swimming and gymnastics a hotbed of sexual predators. Mission accomplished!
SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, August 23, 2020
Tomgram: Erin Thompson, Breaking the Bronze Ceiling On August 26, 2020, Alice in Wonderland will get some company. She will be joined in New York City's Central Park by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth, the first statues there of women who, unlike Alice, actually existed. The monument is a gift to the park from Monumental Women, a non-profit organization formed in 2014.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 8, 2015
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Tipping Points and the Question of Civilizational Survival Not so long ago, it was science fiction. Now, it's hard science -- and that should frighten us all. The latest reports from the prestigious and sober Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) make increasingly hair-raising reading, suggesting that the planet is approaching possible moments of irreversible damage in a fashion and at a speed that had not been anticipated.
SHARE More Sharing        Friday, July 19, 2019
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Living on a Demobilized Planet As I turn 75, there's no simpler way to put it than this: I'm an old man on a new planet -- and, in case it isn't instantly obvious, that's not good news on either score.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 9, 2019
Tomgram: Nick Turse, How to Read a Broken Body Do you remember July 8, 2011? Where you were? What you did? Whom you talked to? Anything at all? [...] Maybe you remember it because it was the day NASA launched the Space Shuttle on its 135th and final mission...
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 21, 2022
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Playing with Fire in Ukraine From his first days in office, Joe Biden and his national security advisers seemed determined to revive America's fading global leadership via the strategy they knew best " challenging the "revisionist powers" Russia and China with a Cold War-style aggressiveness. When it came to Beijing, the president combined the policy initiatives of his predecessors, pursuing Barack Obama's "strategic pivot" from the Middle East to Asia...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 26, 2017
Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Commandos of Everywhere The tabs on their shoulders read "Special Forces," "Ranger," "Airborne." And soon their guidon -- the "colors" of Company B, 3rd Battalion of the U.S. Army's 7th Special Forces Group -- would be adorned with the "Bandera de Guerra," a Colombian combat decoration.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 20, 2017
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Normalizing Nukes Maybe you thought America's nuclear arsenal, with its thousands of city-busting, potentially civilization-destroying thermonuclear warheads, was plenty big enough to deter any imaginable adversary from attacking the U.S. with nukes of their own. Well, it turns out you were wrong.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 4, 2018
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Victory in Our Time What would "victory" in the war on terror even look like? What, in fact, constitutes an American military victory in the world today? Would it in any way resemble the end of the Civil War, or of the war to end all wars, or of the war that made that moniker obsolete?
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 17, 2019
Tomgram: Susan Southard, Against Forgetting Landing at Nagasaki Airport last November, I joined a line of Japanese men, women, and children waiting to disembark from our plane. Most were likely returning home on this holiday weekend or arriving to visit family and friends. I wondered how many of them remembered or thought about the nuclear annihilation of this city 73 years ago -- within, that is, their own lifetimes or those of their parents or grandparents.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 9, 2020
Tomgram: John Feffer, Survivor-in-Chief? Donald Trump filed his paperwork to run for reelection only hours after his inauguration in January 2017, setting a presidential record, the first of his many dubious achievements.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Andrew Bacevich: The Eternal War? Twelve and a half years after Congress didn't declare war on an organization of hundreds or, at most, thousands of jihadis scattered mainly across the backlands of the planet, and instead let President George W. Bush and his cohort loose to do whatever they wanted.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 8, 2017
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, What Obsessing About You-Know-Who Causes Us To Miss Donald Trump's election has elicited impassioned affirmations of a renewed commitment to unvarnished truth-telling from the prestige media. The common theme: you know you can't trust him, but trust us to keep dogging him on your behalf.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 16, 2022
Tomgram: Chomsky and Barsamian, In Ukraine, Diplomacy Has Been Ruled Out David Barsamian: Let's head into the most obvious nightmare of this moment, the war in Ukraine and its effects globally. But first a little background[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 12, 2016
Tomgram: William Astore, We Have Met the Alien and He Is Us When we go to the movies, we identify with the outgunned rebels, the underdogs, the liberators, against the alien invaders, the imperial stormtroopers, the Terminators. Here, however, is one retired Air Force lieutenant colonel's hard won realization that we -- the U.S. military in particular -- may be the invading "aliens" in much of the world.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 16, 2017
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Gitmo's Living Legacy in the Trump Era Eight years ago, when I wrote a book on the first days of Guantanamo, The Least Worst Place: Guanta'namo's First 100 Days, I assumed that Gitmo would prove a grim anomaly in our history. Today, it seems as if that "detention facility" will have a far longer life than I ever imagined and that it, and everything it represents, will become a true, if grim, legacy of twenty-first-century America.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 10, 2020
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Unexpected Past, the Unknown Future Let me be blunt. This wasn't the world I imagined for my denouement. Not faintly. Of course, I can't claim I ever really imagined such a place. Who, in their youth, considers their death and the world that might accompany it, the one you might leave behind for younger generations? I'm 76 now. True, if I were lucky (or perhaps unlucky), I could live another 20 years and see yet a newer world born.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Pepe Escobar: Sinking the Petrodollar in the Persian Gulf 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:
Endless war, From FlickrPhotos
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 9, 2015
Greg Grandin, Waging Endless War From Vietnam to Syria In April 2014, ESPN published a photograph of an unlikely duo: Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and former national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger at the Yankees-Red Sox season opener.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 21, 2017
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, The Annals of Rehabilitation George W. Bush is hardly the first disgraced Republican president and war criminal to worm his way back into American esteem. Richard Nixon remains the leader in that department. He spent his later years being celebrated as an elder statesman and a master of realpolitik in international relations. In the process, he managed to shake off the dust of Watergate.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 30, 2023
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Gallows Humor in Washington and Brazil Americans tuning into the television news on January 8th eyed a disturbingly recognizable scene. In an "eerily familiar" moment of "de'jà vu," just two years and two days after the January 6th Capitol insurrection in Washington, D.C., a mob of thousands stormed government buildings in the capital city of another country " Brazil[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 2, 2023
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, The True Costs of War Over Taiwan While the world has been distracted, even amused, by the diplomatic tussle around China's recent high-altitude balloon flights across North America, there are signs that Beijing and Washington are preparing for something so much more serious: armed conflict over Taiwan[...]
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 20, 2018
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, A Memo to the Publisher of the New York Times Congratulations on assuming the reins of this nation's -- and arguably, the world's -- most influential publication. It's the family business, of course, so your appointment to succeed your father doesn't exactly qualify as a surprise. Even so, the responsibility for guiding the fortunes of a great institution must weigh heavily on you, especially when the media landscape is changing so rapidly and radically.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 14, 2018
Tomgram: William Hartung, Gunrunning USA American weapons makers have dominated the global arms trade for decades. In any given year, they've accounted for somewhere between one-third and more than one-half the value of all international weapons sales. It's hard to imagine things getting much worse -- or better, if you happen to be an arms trader -- but they could, and soon, if a new Trump rule on firearms exports goes through.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 6, 2020
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Living in a World of Trauma Last month, as hundreds of thousands of people showed up for the Women's March in Washington, D.C., a few miles from my home, I was at a karate dojo testing for my first belt. My fellow practitioners, ranging in age from five into their seventies, looked on as I hammered my fist through a two-inch piece of wood. The words of one of the black belts there echoed in my head. "Imagine the board is Trump,"
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 13, 2020
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The First Two Weeks Assume Joe Biden wins the presidency. Assume as well that he genuinely intends to repair the damage our country has sustained since we declared ourselves history's "Indispensable Nation," compounded by the traumatic events of 2020 that demolished whatever remnants of that claim survived.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 28, 2023
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Nuclear Deterrence, Really? Despite Russian hints about the use of nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine, consider it strange amid other world-endangering possibilities how little attention nuclear destruction gets anymore. And that's despite the fact that there are now nine (yes, nine!) nuclear powers on this planet, ranging from the United States, Russia, and China to Israel and North Korea[...]
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 8, 2015
Exceptional Pain Dispensed by the Indispensable Nation Fourteen years of wars, interventions, assassinations, torture, kidnappings, black sites, the growth of the American national security state to monumental proportions, and the spread of Islamic extremism across much of the Greater Middle East and Africa. Fourteen years of astronomical expense, bombing campaigns galore, and a military-first foreign policy of repeated defeats, disappointments, and disasters.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Remind Us How This Ends... Make no mistake: after 15 years of losing wars, spreading terror movements, and multiplying failed states across the Greater Middle East, America will fight the next versions of our ongoing wars. Not that we ever really stopped.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 25, 2020
Tomgram: William Astore, Stamping Out War There is no significant anti-war movement in America because there's no war to protest. Let me explain. In February 2003, millions of people took to the streets around the world to protest America's march to war against Iraq. That mass movement failed.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 13, 2022
Tomgram: Cox and Cox, The New Great Game? Much of the excitement over the Inflation Reduction Act, which became law this summer, focused on the boost it should give to the sales of electric vehicles. Sadly, though, manufacturing and driving tens of millions of individual electric passenger cars won't get us far enough down the road to ending greenhouse-gas emissions and stanching the overheating of this planet[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 9, 2023
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, The Shadow of Those Empty Apartments On the island of Manhattan, where I live, skyscrapers multiply like metal weeds, a vertical invasion of seemingly unstoppable force. For more than a century, they have risen as symbols of wealth and the promise of progress for a city and a nation. In movies and TV shows, those buildings churn with activity, offices full of important people doing work of global significance[...]
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 9, 2023
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Another Exceptional Year? Let me start with a confession: I no longer read all the way through newspaper stories about the war in Ukraine. After years of writing about war and torture, I've reached my limit. These days, I just can't pore through the details of the ongoing nightmare there. It's shameful, but I don't want to know the names of the dead or examine images caught by brave photographers of half-exploded buildings[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 12, 2020
Tomgram: Erik Edstrom, The Betrayal of the American Soldier "Every day is a copy of a copy of a copy." That meme, from the moment when Edward Norton's character in Fight Club offers a 1,000-yard stare at an office copy machine, captures this moment perfectly -- at least for those of us removed from the front lines of the Covid-19 crisis. Isolated inside a Boston apartment, I typically sought new ways to shake the snow globe, to see the same bubble -- the same stuff -- differently.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 30, 2021
Tomgram: Aviva Chomsky, Outsourcing the Border Joe Biden entered the White House with some inspiring yet contradictory positions on immigration and Central America. He promised to reverse Donald Trump's draconian anti-immigrant policies while, through his "Plan to Build Security and Prosperity in Partnership with the People of Central America," restoring "U.S. leadership in the region" that he claimed Trump had abandoned[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 24, 2023
Tomgram: Ira Chernus, Tear Down the Gender Dam What makes a good society? Is it a guaranteed right to pursue happiness, as our Declaration of Independence proclaimed? Perhaps, as Gandhi said, it's providing the poorest and most vulnerable among us with the means to control their own lives. But what happens when it's the pursuit of happiness that makes someone most vulnerable?[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 18, 2017
Tomgram: Michael Klare, The New Face of "War" at Home Deployed to the Houston area to assist in Hurricane Harvey relief efforts, U.S. military forces hadn't even completed their assignments when they were hurriedly dispatched to Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands to face Irma, the fiercest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 6, 2018
Tomgram: Engelhardt, History, Memory, and Donald Trump I know you won't believe me. Not now, not when everything Donald Trump does -- any tweet, any insult at any rally -- is the news of the day, any day. But he won't be remembered for any of the things now in our headlines.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 21, 2022
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, Making Sense of a Poor People's Pandemic The 54th anniversary of the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., just passed. Dr. King was shot down while organizing low-wage sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. At that time, he was building the Poor People's Campaign, an effort to organize America's poor into a force to be reckoned with.
Oil Spill, From FlickrPhotos
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 12, 2017
Michael Klare, "The Battle Lines of the Future" In this context, consider Klare's analysis of what a Trumpian new world order, organized around his own fossil fuel fixation, might look like and what it might mean for us all.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 7, 2022
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A World of War Excuse me if I wander a little today and if it bothers you, don't blame me, blame Vladimir Putin. After all, I didn't decide to invade Ukraine, the place my grandfather fled almost 140 years ago. I suspect, in fact, that I was an adult before I even knew such a place existed. If I could be accused of anything, maybe you could say that, for most of my life, I evaded Ukraine[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 5, 2023
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, The Last Prisoners? For 18 years, I've been writing articles for TomDispatch on the never-ending story of the Guanta'namo Bay Detention Facility. And here's my ultimate takeaway (for the moment): 21 years after that grim offshore prison of injustice was set up in Cuba in response to the 9/11 attacks and the capture of figures supposedly linked to them[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 15, 2021
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, It's Time to Touch the Third Rail These days my conversations with friends about the new administration go something like this: "Biden's doing better than I thought he would." "Yeah. Vaccinations, infrastructure, acknowledging racism in policing. A lot of pieces of the Green New Deal, without calling it that. The child subsidies. It's kind of amazing." "But on the military-" "Yeah, same old, same old[...]"
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 6, 2015
Tomgram: Susan Southard, Under the Mushroom Cloud -- Nagasaki after Nuclear War Southard follows five teenagers, who survived the second use of a nuclear weapon, from the moment a B-29 appeared over the city to the first devastating moments after the blast. It's an unforgettable account of one city's destruction and a reminder of the dangers our world, filled with nuclear weapons so much more powerful than the one that obliterated Nagasaki, still faces.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 8, 2020
Tomgram: William Astore, America's Forever Wars Have Come Home From their front porches, regular citizens watched a cordon of cops sweep down their peaceful street in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Rankled at being filmed, the cops exceeded their authority and demanded that people go inside their houses. When some of them didn't obey quickly enough, the order -- one heard so many times in the streets of Iraqi cities and in the villages of Afghanistan -- was issued: "Light 'em up."
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 25, 2022
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The All Too Thinkable on an Unthinkable Planet Face it, we're living in a world that, while anything but exceptional, is increasingly the exception to every rule. Only the other day, 93-year-old Noam Chomsky had something to say about that. Mind you, he's seen a bit of our world since, in 1939, he wrote his first article for his elementary school newspaper on the fall of the Spanish city of Barcelona amid a "grim cloud" of advancing fascism[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 23, 2017
Tomgram: Erik Edstrom, Teaching Revisionist History 101 at West Point On October 19th, George W. Bush traveled to the United States Military Academy, my alma mater, to receive the Sylvanus Thayer Award at a ceremony hosted by that school's current superintendent and presented on behalf of the West Point Association of Graduates.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, July 22, 2020
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, Time to Stop Bankrolling War and the Wealthy The word jubilee comes from the Hebrew "yovel," meaning a "trumpet blast of liberty." It was said that, on the day of liberation, the sound of a ram's horn would ring through the land. These days, I hear the sound of that horn while walking with my kids through the streets of New York City, while protests continue here, even amid a pandemic...
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 6, 2022
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Ultimate Blowback Planet Once upon a time, long, long ago " actually, it was early in the year 2000 " I was involved in publishing Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. It had been written by the eminent scholar of Asia, former CIA consultant, and cold warrior Chalmers Johnson. I was his editor at Metropolitan Books[...]
From ImagesAttr
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Tomgram: Christian Parenti, Staff of Life, Bread of Death 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).
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 23, 2014
David Bromwich: American Exceptionalism and Its Discontents American exceptionalism? Honestly, who could deny it -- other than TomDispatch regular David Bromwich, author most recently of Moral Imagination, who explores the special immorality of imagining yourself as the most exceptional of lands.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 6, 2018
Tomgram: Nick Turse, A Grim Inheritance While so much about the War on Terror turned Global War on Terrorism turned World War IV turned the Long War turned "generational struggle" turned "infinite war" seems repetitious, the troops most associated with this conflict -- the U.S. Special Operations forces -- have seen changes galore.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 31, 2023
Tomgram: William Hartung, Cashing in on a Perpetual Nuclear Arms Race Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you're undoubtedly aware that award-winning director Christopher Nolan has released a new film about Robert Oppenheimer, known as the "father of the atomic bomb" for leading the group of scientists who created that deadly weapon as part of America's World War II-era Manhattan Project[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 24, 2019
Tomgram: Allegra Harpootlian, Ending the Forever Wars? When Donald Trump entered the Oval Office in January 2017, Americans took to the streets all across the country to protest their instantly endangered rights. Conspicuously absent from the newfound civic engagement, despite more than a decade and a half of this country's fruitless, destructive wars across the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, was antiwar sentiment, much less an actual movement.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 22, 2020
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, The Boot Camp of American Life Recently, in this Black Lives Matter protest moment, my five-year-old son looked at me and asked, "Mommy, where did all the brown people go? Did the police here shoot them?"
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 3, 2017
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Hail to the Duffer in Chief From TomDispatch this morning: a devastating anatomy of the sport that's central to Donald Trump's plutocratic vision of his presidency and the promotion of the Trump brand -- Robert Lipsyte, "The Sport of Plutocrats, Golf Is Trump"
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 19, 2020
Tomgram: Juan Cole, Iran and the U.S., An Irony of Curious Affinity This spring, the novel coronavirus pandemic has raised the issue of the relationship between the blindest kind of religious faith and rational skepticism -- this time in two countries that think of themselves as polar opposites and enemies: Supreme Leader Ali Khameini's Iran and Donald Trump's America.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 14, 2022
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Seeking a Salve for Heat, Hate, and Hysteria It's hot and hazy as July rolls around. Growing up in the Baltimore swamplands, we used to say, "It's not the heat, it's the humidity." Meaning that the humidity was harder to deal with than the feverish temperatures. At some point in my family, the phrase morphed into: "It's not the heat, it's the stupidity."At the time, we meant the antics of people when it gets hot[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Pepe Escobar, Eurasian Integration vs. the Empire of Chaos On the Eurasian continent, something seems to be shifting, potentially in a big way, and Escobar is, as ever, on the scene. Consider today's essay part two (here's part 1) of his wide-ranging look at a potentially tectonic set of commercial and power shifts, centering on China, that could change the way the world works (or, of course, simply descend into Cold War 2.0).
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 9, 2015
Tomgram: Ellen Cantarow, Paradise Lost -- or Found? In the Finger Lakes, an area of New York State you may never have heard of, Cantarow offers a glimpse of the small-scale, local ways in which Americans are standing up to Big Energy corporations. She describes how they are doing their inventive best to seize the day and ensure that our children and grandchildren remain on a planet capable of supporting them. This is inspiring stuff. Don't miss it! Tom
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 23, 2023
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The End? (Not Yet!) Indulge me for a moment. This is how "The Prophecy" in my 1962 high school yearbook began. It was written by some of my classmates in the year we graduated from Friends Seminary in New York City[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 9, 2017
Tomgram: William Hartung, Ignoring the Costs of War When Donald Trump wanted to "do something" about the use of chemical weapons on civilians in Syria, he had the U.S. Navy lob 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield (cost: $89 million).
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 23, 2018
Tomgram: Ann Jones, Beware the Viking Hordes In the past couple of weeks, thanks to the president's racist comments about Haiti and African countries he can't even name -- remember "Nambia"? -- as well as the stamp of approval he awarded future immigrants from Norway, we've seen a surprising amount of commentary about that fortunate country.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 4, 2017
John Dower, Terror Is in the Eye of the Beholder Some years ago, a newspaper article credited a European visitor with the wry observation that Americans are charming because they have such short memories. When it comes to the nation's wars, however, he was not entirely on target.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, July 15, 2020
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, Homelessness in the Covid-19 Era The novel SARS-CoV-2 has roared through the American landscape leaving physical, emotional, and economic devastation in its wake. By early July, known infections in this country exceeded three million, while deaths topped 135,000. Home to just over 4% of the global population, the United States accounts for more than a quarter of all fatalities from Covid-19, the disease produced by the coronavirus.
SHARE More Sharing        Friday, September 16, 2022
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, America as a Sacrifice Zone In the American ethos, sacrifice is often hailed as the chief ingredient for overcoming hardship and seizing opportunity. To be successful, we're assured, college students must make personal sacrifices by going deep into debt for a future degree and the earnings that may come with it[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 11, 2014
James Carroll: The Pentagon as President Obama's Great White Whale President Obama had been in office only three months when, boldly claiming his place on the world stage, he unequivocally committed himself and his country to a nuclear abolition movement that, until then, had at best existed somewhere on the distant fringes of power politics.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 9, 2022
Tomgram: William Astore, Must the U.S. Be Involved in Every War? Why has the United States already become so heavily invested in the Russia-Ukraine war? And why has it so regularly gotten involved, in some fashion, in so many other wars on this planet since it invaded Afghanistan in 2001? Those with long memories might echo the conclusion reached more than a century ago by radical social critic Randolph Bourne that "war is the health of the state"[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 14, 2022
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, American Militarism, A Persistent Malady I recently participated in a commemoration of Martin Luther King's address "Beyond Vietnam A Time to Break Silence," originally delivered on April 2, 1967, at New York City's Riverside Church. King used the occasion to announce his opposition to the ongoing war in Vietnam[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 7, 2023
Tomgram: Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox, A Death in the Family So many crises "" from war to mass species die-offs to climate meltdown "" afflict our world that we often don't take time to draw insights from what generally passes for the small stuff, the things that happen all too close to home, including aging. Most of us don't relish the prospect of getting old, much less watching our parents approach their deaths, something that's even worse if you're dying poor[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 12, 2019
Tomgram: Ryan Summers and Ben Freeman, Of, By, and For Them (Not Us) Foreign influence in America is the topic du jour. From the impeachment inquiry into President Trump's request that a foreign power investigate a political opponent to the indictment of associates of his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, for illegally funneling foreign money into U.S. elections, the nation has been transfixed by news of illegal foreign influence in the political process.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 6, 2020
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, An All-American Urge to Offer Corporate Welfare To say that these are unprecedented times would be the understatement of the century. Even as the United States became the latest target of Hurricane COVID-19, in "hot spots" around the globe a continuing frenzy of health concerns represented yet another drop down the economic rabbit hole.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 11, 2022
Tomgram: Michael Klare, As Ukraine Burns, the U.S. and China Play with Fire in Asia Thanks to Vladimir Putin's recent implicit threat to employ nuclear weapons if the U.S. and its NATO allies continue to arm Ukraine " "This is not a bluff," he insisted on September 21st " the perils in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict once again hit the headlines. And it's entirely possible, as ever more powerful U.S. weapons pour into Ukraine and Russian forces suffer yet more defeats[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 14, 2011
Tomgram: Jen Marlowe, The Freedom Reading List This is a remarkable piece for our Middle Eastern moment. Unlike most of the rest of us, Jen Marlowe was not surprised to see a strong, sophisticated vision of a democratic future sweep through Tunisia and Egypt, heading for other autocratic states in the Arab world.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 27, 2021
Tomgram: John Feffer, America Hacks Itself America has a serious infrastructure problem. Maybe when I say that what comes to mind are all the potholes on your street. Or the dismal state of public transportation in your city. Or crumbling bridges all over the country. But that's so twentieth century of you[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 9, 2020
Tomgram: Palumbo and Draper, Knockout in Washington It was a bare-knuckle brawl of the first order. It took place in Washington, D.C., and it resulted in a KO. The winners? Lobbyists and the defense industry. The losers? Us. And odds on, you didn't even know that it happened. Few Americans did, which is why it's worth telling the story of how Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari money flooded the nation's capital and, in the process, American policy went down for the count.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 16, 2022
Tomgram: Kelly Denton-Borhaug, Living on a Planet of Lies Recent episodes of purposeful and accidental truth-telling brought to my mind the latest verbal lapse by George W. Bush, the president who hustled this country into war in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks. He clearly hadn't planned to make a public confession about his own warmongering in Iraq when he gave a speech in Texas this spring[...]
President Nixon with Prime Minister Chou-Enlai - TT Nixon vi Th tdegreesng Chu n Lai - 1972, From FlickrPhotos
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 22, 2017
Tomgram: John Feffer, Avoiding War with Pyongyang The United States has beaten its head against the wall of North Korea for more than 70 years, and that wall has changed little indeed as a result.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 6, 2020
Tomgram: Patrick Cockburn, My Pandemics The struggle against Covid-19 has often been compared to fighting a war. Much of this rhetoric is bombast, but the similarities between the struggle against the virus and against human enemies are real enough. War reporting and pandemic reporting likewise have much in common because, in both cases, journalists are dealing with and describing matters of life and death.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 23, 2020
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Mad Policies for a Mad World In March 1906, on the heels of the U.S. Army's massacre of some 1,000 men, women, and children in the crater of a volcano in the American-occupied Philippines, humorist Mark Twain took his criticism public. A long-time anti-imperialist, he flippantly suggested that Old Glory should be redesigned "with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 12, 2023
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, The Hunger Wars? By any standard, the money the United States government pours into its military is simply overwhelming. Take the $858-billion defense spending authorization that President Biden signed into law last month. Not only did that bill pass in an otherwise riven Senate by a bipartisan majority of 83-11, but this year's budget increase of 4.3% is the second highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 16, 2019
Tomgram: Hashem and Allen, Lobbying for War A springtime wedding in Northern Yemen's Al-Raqah village took place in April 2018, a moment of reprieve from the turmoil and devastation of that war-torn country, a moment to celebrate life, love, and the birth of a new family. From the tents constructed for the event, music flooded into the village and, as at any good wedding, exuberant dancing was a central part of the festivities.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Tomgram: James Carroll, The 12 Days of Bombing That Never End (for Me) Earlier this month, the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group -- the massive aircraft carrier itself with its dozens of warplanes and thousands of sailors and marines, a guided missile cruiser, and four destroyers -- suddenly began to make its way from the Mediterranean Sea into the Persian Gulf, heading for the waters off Iran.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 3, 2020
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, No Trump Towers for Poor Kids The plight of impoverished children anywhere should evoke sympathy, exemplifying as it does the suffering of the innocent and defenseless. Poverty among children in a wealthy country like the United States, however, should summon shame and outrage as well.
The Neoconservatives, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Republicans Game the System, From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 24, 2015
Tomgram: David Bromwich, The Neoconservative Empire Returns Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu, and a bevy of congressional Republicans as well as Republican presidential candidates, go after President Obama and play what he calls "the long game on Iran." They are, that is, not just looking toward shooting down the agreement now, but making sure that the next president will feel tremendous pressure to do so and to take on Iran militarily in 2017.
A Syrian refugee boy., From FlickrPhotos
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Tomgram: John Feffer, On the Verge of the Great Unraveling Let me start with a confession. I'm old-fashioned and I have an old-fashioned profession. I'm a geo-paleontologist. That means I dig around in archives to exhume the extinct: all the empires and federations and territorial unions that have passed into history. I practically created the profession of geo-paleontology as a young scholar in 2020. (We used to joke that we were the only historians with true 2020 hindsight).
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 15, 2017
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Is Anything the Moral Equivalent of War? Since September 11, 2001, the United States has been fighting a "war on terror." Real soldiers have been deployed to distant lands.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 1, 2020
Tomgram: Engelhardt, How the Roof Fell In Class of 2020, wherever you are, I had planned to address you on this graduation day. But how can I? Yes, I know that former President Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Tom Hanks all took part in elaborate online graduation ceremonies, offering commentary, advice, and encouragement in our now campus-less world, but I'm a hapless old guy with a flip phone from another age...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 29, 2018
Danny Sjursen, Wrong on Nam, Wrong on Terror Vietnam: it's always there. Looming in the past, informing American futures. A 50-year-old war, once labeled the longest in our history, is still alive and well and still being refought by one group of Americans: the military high command. And almost half a century later, they're still losing it and blaming others for doing so.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 11, 2019
Tomgram: Michael Klare, It's Always the Oil It's always the oil. While President Trump was hobnobbing with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the G-20 summit in Japan, brushing off a recent U.N. report about the prince's role in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Asia and the Middle East, pleading with foreign leaders to support "Sentinel."
Drought, From ImagesAttr
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 17, 2015
Tomgram: William deBuys, Entering the Mega-Drought Era in America TomDispatch regular William deBuys offers an eye-opening look at bone-dry, blazing California and ways in which that state is leading us all into a grim future. Today's droughts, bad as they are, will be put in the shade by the predicted mega-droughts of tomorrow, and the problem of water in the American West is only going to deepen -- or do I mean grow shallower?
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 6, 2017
William Astore, Back in the USSR I had long had a feeling that, of the two superpowers of the Cold War era, one had left the stage in a rush, while the other was slowly inching its way toward the exits enwreathed in self-congratulation and an overwhelming sense of triumphalism.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 22, 2019
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, The Year of the Child (in Trouble) Halfway through 2018, MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski hurled a mother-to-mother dagger at Ivanka Trump. How, during the very weeks when the headlines were filled with grim news of child separations and suffering at the U.S.-Mexico border, she asked, could the first daughter and presidential adviser be so tone-deaf as to show herself hugging her two-year-old son?
The fog of war., From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Engelhardt: Tomorrow's News Today It's commonplace to speak of "the fog of war," of what can't be known in the midst of battle, of the inability of both generals and foot soldiers to foresee developments once fighting is underway. And yet that fog is nothing compared to the murky nature of the future itself, which, you might say, is the fog of human life.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 30, 2019
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, With Friends Like These... American foreign policy can be so retro, not to mention absurd. Despite being bogged down in more military interventions than it can reasonably handle, the Trump team recently picked a new fight -- in Latin America.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 17, 2015
Nan Levinson: America's New Military Mystique Let's face it: we live in a state of pervasive national security anxiety. There are various possible responses to this low-grade fever that saps resolve, but first we have to face the basis for that anxiety -- what I've come to think of as the Big Dick School of Patriotism, or (since anything having to do with our present version of national security, even a critique of it, has to have an acronym) the BDSP.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 28, 2019
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Donald Trump Naked as a Jaybird Recently, I did something rare in my life. Over a long weekend, I took a few days away and almost uniquely -- I might even say miraculously -- never saw Donald Trump's face, since I didn't watch TV and barely checked the news.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 8, 2022
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Confronting America's Forever Prison As of December 8, 2022, Guanta'namo Bay detention facility "a prison offshore of American justice and built for those detained in this country's never-ending Global War on Terror" has been open for nearly 21 years (or, to be precise, 7,627 days). Thirteen years ago, I published a book, The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 11, 2023
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, The Wars to End All Wars? "It is time," President Biden announced in April 2021, "to end the forever war" that started with the invasion of Afghanistan soon after the tragic terror attacks on this country on September 11, 2001. Indeed, that August, amid chaos and disaster, the president did finally pull the last remaining U.S. forces out of that country[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 26, 2017
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Take Your (Tiny) Fingers Off the Button Preventing a nuclear war between the United States and North Korea may be the most pressing challenge facing the world right now. Our childish, ignorant, and incompetent president is shoving all of us -- especially the people of Asia -- ever nearer to catastrophe.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 27, 2021
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, The Athlete of the Century? In the late 1990s, I could always draw dismissive snickers at ESPN production meetings I was a commentator there at the time when I lobbied for tennis champion Billie Jean King to be named that network's number-one athlete of the twentieth century. In those days, even women sports wonks would roll their eyes and keep plugging for the likes of Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, or Muhammad Ali[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, You, Sir, Are No Alexander Hamilton Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin doesn't exactly come across as the guy you'd want in your corner in a playground tussle. In the Trump administration, he's been more like the kid trying to cop favor with the school bully. That, at least, is the role he seems to have taken in the Trump White House.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 20, 2021
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Will There Be Resource Wars in a Renewable Future? Thanks to its very name renewable energy we can picture a time in the not-too-distant future when our need for non-renewable fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal will vanish. Indeed, the Biden administration has announced a breakthrough target of 2035 for fully eliminating U.S. reliance on those non-renewable fuels for the generation of electricity[...]
Oil Barrels, From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 13, 2015
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Big Oil in Retreat In his latest fascinating dispatch, Klare takes us through the ins and outs of an oil industry that suddenly looks to be on the ropes. "Most of us are used to following the ups and downs of the Dow Jones Industrial Average as a shorthand gauge for the state of the world economy. However, following the ups and downs of the price of Brent crude may, in the end, tell us far more about world affairs on our endangered planet."
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 23, 2017
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, At the Altar of American Greatness Apart from being a police officer, firefighter, or soldier engaged in one of this nation's endless wars, writing a column for a major American newspaper has got to be one of the toughest and most unforgiving jobs there is. The pay may be decent (at least if your gig is with one of the major papers in New York or Washington), but the pressures to perform on cue are undoubtedly relentless.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 29, 2021
Tomgram: William Astore, Ten Ways to Create a People's Military As a ROTC cadet and an Air Force officer, I was a tiny part of America's vast Department of Defense (DoD) for 24 years until I retired and returned to civilian life as a history professor. My time in the military ran from the election of Ronald Reagan to the reign of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 10, 2023
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Tick, Tock, TikTok, the Nuclear Conundrum Today I'm not a TikTok person. I'm too old. But when I finally ventured onto that popular but much-maligned app, which traffics in short videos and hot takes, I was surprised to find many videos about the Doomsday Clock. It's nothing like a conventional timepiece, of course. It's meant to show how close humanity has come to nuclear Armageddon "" to the proverbial "midnight[...]"
SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, April 17, 2011
Ira Chernus, The Great Israeli Security Scam Three Sacred Commandments for Americans who shape the public conversation on Israel" ("For politicians, especially at the federal level: As soon as you say the word 'Israel,' you must also say the word 'security' and promise that the United States will always, always, always be committed to Israel's security"") These all add up to an indelible image of Israel as a deeply insecure nation.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 5, 2020
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, A Greatest Generation We Are Not The 75th anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender in May 1945 ought to prompt thoughtful reflection. For Americans, V-E Day, as it was then commonly called, marked the beginning of "our times." The Covid-19 pandemic may signal that our times are now coming to an end.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 10, 2022
Tomgram: John Feffer, Welcome to the Future (It's Not Pretty) I've just wrapped up my shift at BurgerBoy and I don't have much time before the weekly self-criticism session at town hall. This hour with my diary is precious, especially when I have to make a big decision. Writing used to be my job, but it's so much more difficult after eight straight hours on my feet. It's been more than a year since the disastrous 2024 election and I can't overestimate how much I miss my old life[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 8, 2016
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A 9/11 Retrospective: Washington's 15-Year Air War I offer what I hope is a unique 9/11 retrospective for the 15th anniversary of that nightmare: a look at what's been at the heart of events since that morning -- a set of air wars that have gone on fruitlessly and destructively for 15 years and show no signs of ever ending.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 17, 2017
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Twenty-First-Century Armageddons Within months of taking office, President Donald Trump is likely to face one or more major international crises, possibly entailing a risk of nuclear escalation.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 11, 2019
Tomgram: David Bromwich, What It Means to be "Great" on a Planet Going Down More and more, we look into our screens and gizmos. And this helps us -- almost as if they were made for that purpose -- not to think about the weather outside. Kept busy "curating" our own lives, we are regularly spared evidence of the coming catastrophe.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 15, 2022
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The American military is now having trouble recruiting enough soldiers. According to the New York Times, its ranks are short thousands of entry-level troops and it's on track to face the worst recruitment crisis since the Vietnam War ended, not long after the draft was eliminated[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 15, 2022
Tomgram: William Astore, Going Nuclear (Again) Hey, cheer up because it truly is a beauty! I'm talking about this country's latest "stealth bomber," the B-21 Raider, just revealed by Northrop Grumman, the company that makes it, in all its glory. With its striking bat-winged shape and its ability to deliver a very big bang (as in nuclear weapons), it's our very own "bomber of the future[...]"
SHARE More Sharing        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).
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 12, 2016
Tomgram: Bill Moyers, Money and Power in America Bill Moyers on how the U.S. became a 1% society -- and why democracy and plutocracy don't mix.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 12, 2017
Ann Jones, Out With Monstrous Men As I read now of women he preyed upon year after year, I feel the rage that's bubbled in the back of my brain for decades reaching the boiling point. I should be elated that Toback has been exposed again as the loathsome predator he's been for half a century. But I'm stuck on the fact of elapsed time, all these decades that male predators roamed at large, efficiently sidelining and silencing women.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 5, 2018
Tomgram: William Astore, Taking War Off Its Pedestal Whether the rationale is the need to wage a war on terror involving 76 countries or renewed preparations for a struggle against peer competitors Russia and China (as Defense Secretary James Mattis suggested recently while introducing America's new National Defense Strategy), the U.S. military is engaged globally.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 4, 2020
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, You Only Get What You're Organized to Take In the summer of 1995, when I was 18, I started visiting Tent City, a temporary encampment in an abandoned lot in northeast Philadelphia. About 40 families had taken up residence in tents, shacks, and other makeshift structures. Among them were people of various races, ages, and sexual orientations, all homeless and fighting for the right to live.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 30, 2020
Tomgram: John Feffer, The No-Trust World I don't trust you. Don't take it personally. It doesn't matter whether you're a friend or a stranger. I don't care about your identity or your politics, where you work or if you work, whether you wear a mask or carry a gun. I don't trust you because you are, for the time being, a potential carrier of a deadly virus.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 6, 2014
Shamsi and Harwood: An Electronic Archipelago of Domestic Surveillance As Hina Shamsi and Matthew Harwood of the ACLU point out, the web of watchlists on which Americans might now find their names circulating is staggeringly, redundantly vast and still expanding. It essentially adds up to a post-9/11 secret system of identification, they write, that once would have boggled the American imagination but is now just an accepted part of the American way of life.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 13, 2014
David Vine: A Permanent Infrastructure for Permanent War The sad irony is that any legitimate desire to maintain the free flow of regional oil to the global economy could be sustained through other far less expensive and deadly means. Maintaining scores of bases costing billions of dollars a year is unnecessary to protect oil supplies and ensure regional peace -- especially in an era in which the United States gets only around 10% of its net oil and natural gas from the region.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 25, 2015
Tomgram: Laura Gottesdiener, The King Is Dead! Laura Gottesdiener, who has been traveling fossil-fuel ravaged America from the fracking fields of the West to the coal industry's mountain-top removal in West Virginia, offers a powerful look at what's left behind when Big Energy is done.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 25, 2016
Tomgram: Ann Jones, "I Didn't Serve, I Was Used" At TomDispatch today, a powerful piece on how, from Big Pharma to the Koch brothers, vets coming home from America's wars have been taken to the cleaners.
SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, November 1, 2017
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Doing Bin Laden's Bidding The question was: With such limited resources, what kind of self-destructive behavior could he goad a triumphalist Washington into? The key would be what might be called apocalyptic humiliation.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Now You See It, Now You Don't The Nobel Prize-winning Czech author Milan Kundera began his 1979 novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by describing two photographs. In the first, two men are standing side by side, a Czech nationalist later executed for his views and the country's Communist ruler. In the second, the dissenter is gone, airbrushed out.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 7, 2020
Tomgram: William Hartung, What Makes Us Safer? Think of it as a war system that's been coming home for years. The murder of George Floyd has finally shone a spotlight on the need to defund local police departments and find alternatives that provide more genuine safety and security. The same sort of spotlight needs soon to be shone on the American military machine and the wildly well-funded damage it's been doing for almost 19 years across the Greater Middle East and Africa
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 30, 2020
Best of TomDispatch: John Dower, Terror Is in the Eye of the Beholder Some years ago, a newspaper article credited a European visitor with the wry observation that Americans are charming because they have such short memories.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, America to Working Class Whites: Drop Dead! The white working class, which usually inspires liberal concern only for its paradoxical, Republican-leaning voting habits, has recently become newsworthy for something else: according to economist Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the winner of the latest Nobel Prize in economics, its members in the 45- to 54-year-old age group are dying at an immoderate rate.
SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, March 25, 2020
Tomgram: Engelhardt, "The Skies Are Emptying Out" The other morning, walking at the edge of a local park, I caught sight of a beautiful red cardinal, the first bird I ever saw some 63 years ago.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 24, 2022
Tomgram: Aviva Chomsky, A Planet on Fire Three years after the end of World War II, diplomat George Kennan outlined the challenges the country faced this way: "We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity [..]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 18, 2022
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, State of Disgrace in Washington Well before the House select committee's January 6th investigation began, trust in the classic American system of checks and balances as reliable protection against executive (or, more recently, Supreme Court) abuses of power had already fallen into a state of disgrace. A domestically shackled Biden presidency, a Congress unable to act, and a Supreme Court that seems ever more like an autocratic governing body[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 9, 2022
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Where the Boys Aren't In the last week of her life, my mother extracted a promise from me. "Make sure," she said, "that Orion goes to college." I swore that I would, although I wasn't at all sure how I'd make it happen. Even in the year 2000, average tuitions were almost 10 times what my own undergraduate school had charged 30 years earlier[...]
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 20, 2017
Tomgram: William Hartung, Trump's Love Affair With the Saudis At this point, it's no great surprise when Donald Trump walks away from past statements in service to some impulse of the moment. Nowhere, however, has such a shift been more extreme or its potential consequences more dangerous than in his sudden love affair with the Saudi royal family. It could in the end destabilize the Middle East in ways not seen in our lifetimes (which, given the growing chaos in the region, is no small t
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 27, 2018
The Pentagon Budget as Corporate Welfare for Weapons Makers Imagine for a moment a scheme in which American taxpayers were taken to the cleaners to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and there was barely a hint of criticism or outrage...
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 24, 2023
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Kissinger at 100 Henry Alfred Kissinger turned 100 on May 27th of this year. Once a teenage refugee from Nazi Germany, for many decades an adviser to presidents, and an avatar of American realpolitik, he's managed to reach the century mark while still evidently retaining all his marbles. That those marbles remain hard and cold is no surprise[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 20, 2013
Pepe Escobar, The Tao of Containing China Yes, the predictions are in. By 2016 (or 2030?), China will have economically outpaced the U.S. So say the economic soothsayers.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Tweeting While Rome Burns As 2017 ended with billionaires toasting their tax cuts and energy executives cheering their unfettered access to federal lands as well as coastal waters, there was one sector of the American elite that did not share in the champagne celebration: Washington's corps of foreign policy experts.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 27, 2023
Tomgram: William Hartung, The Pentagon's Budget from Hell On March 13th, the Pentagon rolled out its proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2024. The results were "" or at least should have been "" stunning, even by the standards of a department that's used to getting what it wants when it wants it[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 24, 2019
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Amnesia in Washington As I approach 75,'m having a commonplace experience for my age[...] It's turned my mind to, and made me something of an instant expert on, one aspect of twenty-first-century America: the memory hole that's swallowed up parts of our all-too-recent history. In fact, I've been wondering whether aging imperial powers, like old men and women, have a tendency to discard what once had been oh-so-familiar.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 17, 2020
Tomgram: Adam Hochschild, Our Country Under Censorship Every month, it seems, brings a new act in the Trump administration's war on the media. In January, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo exploded at National Public Radio reporter Mary Louise Kelly when he didn't like questions she asked -- and then banned a colleague of hers from the plane on which he was leaving for a trip to Europe and Asia.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 13, 2021
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Emperor of Weaponry By the time you read this piece, it will already be out of date. The reason's simple enough. No matter what mayhem I describe, with so much all-American weaponry in this world of ours, there's no way to keep up. Often, despite the headlines that go with mass killings here, there's almost no way even to know[...]
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 14, 2017
Tomgram: Nick Turse, A Wider World of War "We don't know exactly where we're at in the world, militarily, and what we're doing," said Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in October. That was in the wake of the combat deaths of four members of the Special Operations forces in the West African nation of Niger.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 14, 2021
Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Burning Future of U.S.-China Relations This summer we witnessed, with brutal clarity, the Beginning of the End: the end of Earth as we know it a world of lush forests, bountiful croplands, livable cities, and survivable coastlines. In its place, we saw the early manifestations of a climate-damaged planet, with scorched forests, parched fields, scalding cities, and storm-wracked coastlines[...]
(7 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 9, 2016
Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, The Challenges of 2016 A half-century after Noam Chomsky wrote so memorably about the American war in Vietnam, he continues to write with the same chilling eloquence about the war-on-terror version of a similar American nightmare.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 27, 2018
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Rule Number One in Warfare: Know Your Enemy What does President Trump's recent nomination of retired Army General John Abizaid to become the next U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia signify? Next to nothing -- and arguably quite a lot.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 14, 2022
Tomgram: Nina Burleigh, Living Through the Best and (Especially) Worst of Times On New Years' Eve 2019, Americans celebrated the advent of the roaring '20s with fireworks and champagne, amid ominous news alerts from China. Surely that virus would stay on the other side of the planet. I cringe at how entitled we felt then. Covid-19 has now wiped out more than a million of us (by far the worst record on Earth when it comes to wealthy countries)[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 25, 2017
Tomgram: Aviva Chomsky, The Criminalization of Immigrants From Clinton to Trump Ever since he rode a Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race in June 2015 and swore to build his "great wall" and stop Mexican "rapists" from entering the country, undocumented immigrants have been the focus of Donald Trump's ire.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 26, 2020
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, America Terrorized Americans are facing "A Spring Unlike Any Before." So warned a front-page headline in the March 13th New York Times. That headline, however hyperbolic, was all too apt. The coming of spring has always promised relief from the discomforts of winter. Yet, far too often, it also brings its own calamities and afflictions.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 15, 2021
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, American Politics Hits the Wall In a provocative recent essay in the New York Times, the political historian Jon Grinspan places the distemper currently afflicting American politics in a broader context. In essence, he contends that we've been here before[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Noam Chomsky: "The Most Dangerous Moment," 50 Years Later Here was the oddest thing: within weeks of the United States dropping an atomic bomb on a second Japanese city on August 9, 1945, and so obliterating it, Americans were already immersed in new scenarios of nuclear destruction.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 3, 2014
Rebecca Solnit: The War Is Over (If You Want It), Feminism and Men And here's what it all means: the winds of change have reached our largest weathervanes. The highest powers in the country have begun calling on men to take responsibility not only for their own conduct, but for that of the men around them, to be agents of change.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Engelhardt: Walking Back the American Twenty-First Century? I never fail to be amazed -- and that's undoubtedly my failing. I mean, if you retain a capacity for wonder you can still be awed by a sunset, but should you really be shocked that the sun is once again sinking in the West? Maybe not. The occasion for such reflections: machine guns in my hometown.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 15, 2018
Tomgram: Stephanie Savell, The Hidden Costs of America's Wars Today, I know -- and care -- more about the devastations of Washington's post-9/11 wars than I ever imagined I would. And judging from public reactions to our work at the Costs of War Project, my prior detachment was anything but unique. Quite the opposite: it's been the essence of the post-9/11 era in this country.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 28, 2022
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Investing in the Pentagon, Not Our Children A kid spit on my husband Patrick yesterday. That sentence just keeps running through my head. The student was up on a windowsill at school and, when instructed to come down, he spit[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 16, 2017
Tomgram: David Vine, Trumping Democracy in America's Empire of Bases The critics generally ignored the far more substantial and long-standing bipartisan support U.S. presidents have offered these and dozens of other repressive regimes over the decades. After all, such autocratic countries share one striking thing in common.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 19, 2018
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Jared Kushner, You're Fired! Here we are a little more than a year into the Trump presidency and his administration's body count is already, as The Donald might put it, "unbelievable, perhaps record-setting."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 9, 2018
Tomgram: Juan Cole, How Muslims Became the Enemy These days, our global political alliances seem to shift with remarkable rapidity, as if we were actually living in George Orwell's 1984. Are we at war this month with Oceania? Or is it Eastasia?
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 22, 2021
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, A Tale of Three Reconstructions West Virginia, a state first established in defiance of slavery, has recently become ground zero in the fight for voting rights. In an early June op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin vowed to maintain the Senate filibuster, while opposing the For the People Act, a bill to expand voting rights[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 25, 2022
Tomgram:Chris Hedges, My War Never Ends As this century began, I was writing War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, my reflections on two decades as a war correspondent, 15 of them with the New York Times, in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, Bosnia, and Kosovo. I worked in a small, sparsely furnished studio apartment on First Avenue in New York City[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 6, 2023
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, I Never Thought I'd Miss the Earthquakes It was January 1983 and raining in San Francisco. The summer before, I'd moved here from Portland, Oregon, a city known for its perpetual gray drizzles and, on the 60-odd days a year when the sun deigns to shine, dazzling displays of greenery. My girlfriend had spent a year convincing me that San Francisco had much more to offer me than Portland did for her[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 26, 2022
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Oil Rules the World It may seem hard to believe, but only 15 years ago many of us were talking confidently about "peak oil" the moment of maximum global oil output after which, with world reserves dwindling, its use would begin an irreversible decline. Then along came hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and the very notion of peak oil largely vanished.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 30, 2017
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Beating the War Drums... Again You couldn't make this up, could you? Just before Trump's recent visit to Saudi Arabia, a genuinely despotic land with an extreme ideology and lacking elections, Iran's moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, was swept back into office. It was an exuberant election campaign in which he trounced a hardline fundamentalist opponent, winning 57% of the vote. Voter turnout was reportedly close to 73% which by the way beat...
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 18, 2018
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, The American War in Yemen It's the war from hell, the savage one that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, along with seven other Middle Eastern and North African states, have been waging in Yemen since March 2015, with fulsome support from the Pentagon and American weapons galore.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 25, 2023
Tomgram: William Astore, Imagining a Progressive Pentagon A progressive Pentagon? Talk about an oxymoron! The Pentagon continues to grow and surge with ever larger budgets, ever more expansive missions (for example, a Space Force to dominate the heavens and yet more bases in the Pacific to encircle China), and ever greater ambitions to dominate everywhere, including if necessary through global thermonuclear warfare[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 2, 2020
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Mind the Gaps These days, teaching graduating college seniors has me, as the Brits would say in the London Underground, "minding the gap." In my case, however, it's not the gap between the platform and the train I'm thinking of, but a couple of others: those between U.S. citizens and our government, as well as between different generations of Americans.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 19, 2022
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Give Peace a Chance? As the war in Ukraine heads for its third month amid a rising toll of death and destruction, Washington and its European allies are scrambling, so far unsuccessfully, to end that devastating, globally disruptive conflict. Spurred by troubling images of executed Ukrainian civilians scattered in the streets of Bucha and ruined cities like Mariupol, they are already trying to use many tools in their diplomatic pouches[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 20, 2023
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Duck and (Re)Cover? Bosley Crowther, chief film critic for the New York Times, didn't quite know what to make of Dr. Strangelove at the time of its release in January 1964. Stanley Kubrick's dark antiwar satire was "beyond any question the most shattering sick joke I've ever come across," he wrote. But if the film had its hilarious moments, Crowther found its overall effect distinctly unnerving. What exactly was Kubrick's point?[..]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 15, 2023
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, The Enemy Is Us Too hot. Too dry. Too many weapons. This world needs changing. But that's too vague. After all, this world is already changing, just not in ways that are good for you and me[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 17, 2017
Tomgram: Ira Chernus, Love Trumps Domination (Without the Combover) You could hear the deep sadness in the preacher's voice as he named "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government." With those words, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., launched a scathing indictmentof America's war in Vietnam. It was April 4, 1967.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 14, 2019
Tomgram: Greg Grandin, Bricks in the Wall The point was less to actually build "the wall" than to constantly announce the building of the wall. "We started building our wall. I'm so proud of it," Donald Trump tweeted. "What a thing of beauty." In fact, no wall, or certainly not the "big, fat, beautiful" one promised by Trump, is being built.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 5, 2022
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Life in Hell (Literally!) n recent weeks, a newly emboldened right-wing Supreme Court struck down a more than century-old New York law restricting the carrying of concealed weapons and a nearly 50-year-old precedent on abortion. Meanwhile, the January 6th Committee has been laying out in graphic televised detail how our last president tried to subvert the 2021 election. Inflation, of course, continues to run riot; gas prices have soared[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 19, 2017
Tomgram: Ira Chernus, The Summer of Love and the Winter of National Insecurity It's the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. What better place to celebrate than that fabled era's epicenter, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, where the DeYoung Museum has mounted a dazzling exhibition, chock full of rock music, light shows, posters, and fashions from the mind-bending summer of 1967?
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 30, 2017
Tomgram: Nick Turse, A Red Scare in the Gray Zone "They are very concerned about their adversary next door," said General Raymond Thomas, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), at a national security conference in Aspen, Colorado, in July. "They make no bones about it." The "they" in question were various Eastern European and Baltic nations. "Their adversary"? Vladimir Putin's Russia.
SHARE More Sharing        Friday, May 22, 2020
Tomgram: Bob Dreyfuss, Iraq Redux? There's a meme that appears now and then on Facebook and other social media: "Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 24, 2022
Tomgram: William Hartung, Armed Hypocrisy These are good times to be an arms maker. Not only are tens of billions of dollars in new military spending headed for the coffers of this country's largest weapons contractors, but they're being praised as defenders of freedom and democracy, thanks to their role in arming Ukraine to fight the Russians[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 13, 2022
Tomgram: Jane Braxton Little, A Global Four-Alarm Blaze Mike Savala's boots scuffed the edge of a singed patch of forest littered with skinny fingers of burnt ponderosa pine needles. Nearby, an oak seedling sizzled as a yellow-shirted firefighter hit it with a stream of water. Spurts of smoke rose from blackened ground the size of a hockey rink. A 100-foot Ponderosa pine towered overhead[...]
(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Noam Chomsky: The Eve of Destruction It didn't take long. In the immediate aftermath of the dropping of the "victory weapon," the atomic bomb, on two Japanese cities in August 1945, American fears and fantasies ran wild. Almost immediately, Americans began to reconceive themselves as potential victims of the bomb.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 19, 2019
Tomgram: William Astore, The Death of Peace "Veni, Vidi, Vici," boasted Julius Caesar, one of history's great military captains. "I came, I saw, I conquered." Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed that famed saying when summing up the Obama administration's military intervention in Libya in 2011 -- with a small alteration. "We came, we saw, he died," she said with a laugh about the killing of Muammar Gaddafi, that country's autocratic leader.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 20, 2020
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, (Un)Reality TV, 2020-Style My partner and I have been fighting about politics since we met in 1965. I was 13. She was 18 and my summer camp counselor. (It was another 14 years before we became a couple.) We spent that first summer arguing about the Vietnam War.
Refugees, From FlickrPhotos
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 5, 2017
Tomgram: Nick Turse, A Disappearance, a Body, and What It Takes to Make the News We were already roaring down the road when the young man called to me over his shoulder. There was a woman seated between us on the motorbike and with the distance, his accent, the rushing air, and the engine noise, it took a moment for me to decipher what he had just said: We might have enough gas to get to Bamurye and back.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 13, 2018
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Whistling Past the Graveyard (of Empires) If you're in the mood, would you consider taking a walk with me and, while we're at it, thinking a little about America's wars? Nothing particularly ambitious, mind you, just -- if you're up for it -- a stroll to the corner.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 9, 2014
Eduardo Galeano, The World Cup and the Corporatization of Soccer Over the next few weeks, we will see all that is beautiful and all that is damned in soccer at the FIFA World Cup in Brazil. Hundreds of millions will swoon at the sight of the gods of the global game plying their exquisite trade across the newly built or expensively refurbished stadiums on which Brazil, according to the Wall Street Journal, has spent $3.6 billion over the last few years.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 21, 2023
Tomgram: Tom Engelhardt, Where Are You, Izzy? Can there be any question that we're in a mad "" and loud "" new age of McCarthyism? Thank you, Kevin! And don't forget the wildly over-the-top members of the so-called Freedom Caucus and their Republican associates, including that charmer, lyin' George Santos, Jewish-space-laser and white-balloon-carrying Marjorie Taylor Greene, and "" once again running for president "" the man who never lost, Donald Trump-em-all[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 15, 2018
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, How Guantanamo Set the Stage for the Kavanaugh Hearings Amid the emotional hubbub over the predictable confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, there has been a largely overlooked casualty: the American judiciary.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 11, 2012
Andy Kroll: How the Wisconsin Uprising Got Hijacked The post-mortems and prognostications began just minutes after Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's recall election victory, and they're still flooding in. His win, goes one talking point, bodes well for Mitt Romney's efforts to flip Wisconsin red for the first time since 1984. Bummed-out Democrats, suggests another, spell trouble for President Obama in November.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Tomgram: John Feffer, The Real Disuniting of America The nation's motto of e pluribus unum (out of many, one) is in serious danger of being turned inside out.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 26, 2020
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, The End of War As We Know It? Covid-19, an ongoing global human tragedy, may have at least one silver lining. It has led millions of people to question America's most malignant policies at home and abroad.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 20, 2021
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Who's Rising and Falling on Planet Earth? Like his immediate predecessor, Joe Biden is committed to a distinctly anti-China global strategy and has sworn that China will not "become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world... on my watch."
SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, November 30, 2022
Tomgram: Clarence Lusane, The Decline of Democracy Just in case you didn't notice, authoritarianism was on the ballot in the 2022 midterm elections. An unprecedented majority of candidates from one of the nation's two major political parties were committed to undemocratic policies and outcomes. You would have to go back to the Democratic Party-dominated segregationist South of the 1950s to find such a sweeping array of authoritarian proclivities in an American election[...]
Wake up.
It's time to panic!, From FlickrPhotos
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 5, 2016
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Fate of Our Earth It's time to panic!
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 22, 2017
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, "There Will Be Hell to Pay" Forgive me for complaining, but recent decades have not been easy ones for my peeps. I am from birth a member of the WHAM tribe, that once proud, but now embattled conglomeration of white, heterosexual American males. We have long been -- there's no denying it -- a privileged group. When the blessings of American freedom get parceled out, WHAMs are accustomed to standing at the head of the line. Those not enjoying the trifecta
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 30, 2020
Tomgram: William Astore, Living Through Coronavirus Hard Times My dad was born in 1917. Somehow, he survived the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919, but an outbreak of whooping cough in 1923 claimed his baby sister, Clementina. One of my dad's first memories was seeing his sister's tiny white casket. Another sister was permanently marked by scarlet fever.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 29, 2021
Tomgram: Engelhardt, War Is Peace, Peace Is War Here's the strange thing in an ever-stranger world: I was born in July 1944 in the midst of a devastating world war. That war ended in August 1945 with the atomic obliteration of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the most devastating bombs in history up to that moment, given the sweet code names "Little Boy" and "Fat Man."
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 18, 2022
Tomgram: William Hartung and Julia Gledhill, Ukraine and the Profits of War The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought immense suffering to the people of that land, while sparking calls for increased military spending in both the United States and Europe. Though that war may prove to be a tragedy for the world, one group is already benefiting from it: U.S. arms contractors[...]
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 5, 2017
Rajan Menon, What Would War Mean in Korea? Here's a reasonable question to ask in our unreasonable world: Does Donald Trump even know where North Korea is? The answer matters and if you wonder why I ask, just remember his comment upon landing in Israel after his visit to Saudi Arabia. "We just got back from the Middle East," he said. In response, reported the Washington Post, "the Israeli ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, put his forehead in his palm."
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 17, 2021
Tomgram: Todd Miller, Maintaining Instability in a World of Inequality From the mountaintops of southern Arizona, you can see a world without borders. I realized this just before I met Juan Carlos. I was about 20 miles from the border but well within the militarized zone that abuts it. I was, in fact, atop the Baboquivari mountain range, a place sacred to the Tohono O'odham, the Native American people who have inhabited this land for thousands of years[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 26, 2016
Tomgram: William Hartung, How to Arm a "Volatile" Planet So here's this morning's puzzle for you: two major U.S. industries make things that go boom in the night: Hollywood and the arms business.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 6, 2022
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Nation Coming Apart at the Seams Let me start 2022 by heading back way, way back for a moment. It's easy to forget just how long this world has been a dangerous place for human beings. I thought about this recently when I stumbled upon a little memoir my Aunt Hilda scrawled, decades ago, in a small notebook. In it, she commented in passing: "I was graduated during that horrible flu epidemic of 1919 and got it[...]"
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Tomgram: Andy Kroll, The Face of An American Lost Generation One strangeness of our moment is that any U.S. Army commander going into an Afghan village can directly pay locals to, say, fix some part of that country's destroyed infrastructure. That's considered a winning-hearts-and-minds counterinsurgency strategy. On the other hand, here in the U.S., it's other hearts and minds that are targeted.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 25, 2016
Tomgram: William Hartung, The Doctrine of Armed Exceptionalism Here's the strangeness of it all: America's wars have been going badly for years in almost every way imaginable across the Greater Middle East and North Africa and yet, the Pentagon's budget is already coming up roses and no matter who enters the Oval Office, it's only going to get bigger.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 21, 2020
Tomgram: Mandy Smithberger, A Recipe for Disaster Call it a colossal victory for a Pentagon that hasn't won a war in this century, but not for the rest of us. Congress only recently passed and the president approved one of the largest Pentagon budgets ever. It will surpass spending at the peaks of both the Korean and Vietnam wars.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 16, 2021
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, On the Most Fundamental of All Human Rights: Survival When midnight strikes on New Year's Day of 2050, there will be little cause for celebration. There will, of course, be the usual toasts with fine wines in the climate-controlled compounds of the wealthy few. But for most of humanity, it'll just be another day of adversity bordering on misery a desperate struggle to find food, water, shelter, and safety[...]
U.S. Facility near Gao, Mali.  This austere compound is thought to have been overrun by Islamist forces in 2012.  Credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers., From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 14, 2014
Nick Turse, AFRICOM Becomes a "War-Fighting Combatant Command" Nick Turse follows the U.S. military ever deeper into Africa (the first of two back-to-back pieces on Africa at TD this week). Turse joined a “webinar” run for top Defense Department engineering contractors whose focus was the U.S. military on that continent. He was the only reporter and so got to hear what AFRICOM spokespeople say when they’re speaking bluntly.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 28, 2016
Social Democracy for Dummies Ann Jones offers a dazzling look at what "social democracy" -- now, thanks to Bernie Sanders, actually a topic of discussion in this country -- really means. Having spent the last four years in Norway, Jones offers a vivid comparison between how social democracy works there and how what's increasingly the democracy of the 1% works here.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 1, 2016
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Most Dangerous Country on Earth For decades, Washington had a habit of using the Central Intelligence Agency to deep-six governments of the people, by the people, and for the people that weren't to its taste and replacing them with governments of the [take your choice: military junta, shah, autocrat, dictator] across the planet.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 21, 2020
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, Circling the Ruins My mom contracted polio when she was 14. She survived and learned to walk again, but my life was deeply affected by that virus. Today, as our larger society attempts to self-distance and self-isolate, my family has texted about the polio quarantine my mom was put under: how my grandma fearfully checked my aunt's temperature every night because she shared a bedroom with my mom...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 19, 2021
Tomgram: Aviva Chomsky, Migration as Resistance Earlier this month, a Honduran court found David Castillo, a U.S.-trained former Army intelligence officer and the head of an internationally financed hydroelectric company, guilty of the 2016 murder of celebrated Indigenous activist Berta Ca'ceres. His company was building a dam that threatened the traditional lands and water sources of the Indigenous Lenca people[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Tomgram: Jeremy Scahill, The Fantasy of a Clean War The foreign leaders are dropping like flies -- to American surveillance. I'm talking about serial revelations that the National Security Agency has been spying on Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, two Mexican presidents, Felipe Calderón (whose office the NSA called "a lucrative source") and his successor Enrique Peña Nieto, at least while still a candidate, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 22, 2018
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Anniversaries That Never Will Be We're already two years past the crystal anniversary and eight years short of the silver one, or at least we would be, had it been a wedding -- and, after a fashion, perhaps it was. On October 7, 2001, George W. Bush launched the invasion -- "liberation" was the word often used then -- of Afghanistan.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 18, 2017
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, The Human Price of Trump's Wars "My guilt will never go away," former Marine Matthew Hoh explained to me. "There is a significant portion of me that doesn't believe it should be allowed to go away, that this pain is fair."
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 25, 2018
Creating an Empire of Graveyards? At the Circus with Donald Trump Who could deny that much of the attention he's received has been based on the absurdity, exaggeration, unsettling clownishness of it all, right down to the zany crew of subsidiary clowns who have helped keep him pumped up and cable newsed in the Oval Office?
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 28, 2022
Tomgram: John Feffer, The Book of Job, Updated for the 22nd Century Once upon a time, the tutelary gods of nationalism and internationalism met for a chat. They had a superb perch above the clouds. From there, they could see everything happening on the Earth below and they set to arguing, as they so often did[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 8, 2022
Tomgram: Andy Kroll, Digital Soldiers in an Online Forever War The three men and three women stood with their right arms raised. Behind them the remains of the daylight hued the sky a bluish gray. As a fire danced at their feet, they gazed straight ahead at a camera recording their words. The square-jawed man in the middle, retired Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, spoke first. The others, including members of his family, repeated after him[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 5, 2023
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Greatest Depression of All? Let me start 2023 with a glance back at a December news moment that caught my eye. To do so, however, I have to offer a bit of explanation. First, the obvious: I'm an old guy and, though I spend significant parts of any day scrolling through endless websites covering aspects of our ever-changing world, I have a subscription "yes, it's still possible!" to the New York Times. That's the paper New York Times[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 22, 2021
Tomgram: John Feffer, Avoiding the Robot Apocalypse My wife and I were recently driving in Virginia, amazed yet again that the GPS technology on our phones could guide us through a thicket of highways, around road accidents, and toward our precise destination. The artificial intelligence (AI) behind the soothing voice telling us where to turn has replaced passenger-seat navigators, maps, even traffic updates on the radio[...]
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, September 12, 2010
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Afghanistan on Life Support From TomDispatch today: A shocking report on the toll the American war has taken on ordinary Afghans, no matter what aspect of everyday life you choose to measure -- Nick Turse, "How Much 'Success' Can Afghans Stand? The American War and Afghanistan's Civilians"
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, March 31, 2019
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, On Leaving the U.S. Army I'm one of the lucky ones. Leaving the madness of Army life with a modest pension and all of my limbs intact feels like a genuine escape. Both the Army and I knew it was time for me to go.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 7, 2021
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Formula for National (In)Security Let me start with my friend and the boat. Admittedly, they might not seem to have anything to do with each other. The boat, a guided-missile destroyer named the USS Curtis Wilbur, reportedly passed through the Straits of Taiwan and into the South China Sea, skirting the Paracel Islands that China has claimed as its own. It represented yet another Biden-era challenge to the planet's rising power from its falling one[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 8, 2022
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Old Wars on a New Planet In recent days, experts have begun laying out the potential hardships the Russian invasion of Ukraine might inflict here in the United States, thousands and thousands of miles from the battle zone. As former White House national security official Richard Clarke bluntly put it, "Russia will bring the war to our homeland[...]"
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 19, 2022
Tomgram: John Feffer, The Far Right Is Crazy -- Like a Fox Arizona is ground zero for the wackiest theories and craziest political candidates[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 20, 2022
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, The Sleeping Giant of American Life Last week, I was in Washington, D.C.'s Union Station. The weather had turned cold and I couldn't help noticing what an inhospitable place it had become for the city's homeless and dispossessed. Once upon a time, anyone was allowed to be in the train station at any hour. Now, there were signs everywhere announcing that you needed a ticket to be there[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 11, 2017
Tomgram: Mattea Kramer, Road Rules, or Rediscovering My Country from Cuban Soil I'll tell you up front that my personal vehicle has crowns of rust on the rear wheel wells and an interior that smells vaguely of dog puke. It's a 2006 Mazda3 with 150,244 miles on it and it gets me around my modest world well enough, but I sure never considered it the stuff of headlines -- until I went to Cuba, an experience that tuned up my feelings about several American phenomena.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 11, 2016
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Trump Wins (Even If He Loses) Nomi Prins turns to the billionaire who has taken possession of us all. Her focus: his frenetic version of "You're fired!" this election season and how that's played out with the Republican establishment, without whom (and without whose money) she doubts he can make it to the Oval Office.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 26, 2022
Tomgram: Beverly Gologorsky, Not in Our Name To begin, an anecdote. This past summer, a pigeon walked through my open balcony door while my attention was elsewhere. I shooed it out, but when I turned around two more pigeons walked out of my bedroom. In the 20 years I've lived in my apartment, this had never happened to me, though my balcony door was often open. All I could imagine was that those poor birds had gotten as disoriented as the rest of us[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 14, 2022
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, Our Global (Dis)Order and Climate Change Washington's vaunted "rules-based international order" has undergone a stress test following Russia's invasion of Ukraine and here's the news so far: it hasn't held up well. In fact, the disparate reactions to Vladimir Putin's war have only highlighted stark global divisions, which reflect the unequal distribution of wealth and power[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 5, 2021
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, An American Spiritual Death Spiral? Fifty-four years ago, standing at the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his now-famous "Beyond Vietnam" sermon. For the first time in public, he expressed in vehement terms his opposition to the American war in Vietnam. He saw clearly that a foreign policy defined by aggression hurt the poor and dispossessed across the planet[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 24, 2021
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Living with World's End in Plain Sight Groton and New London, Connecticut, are home to about 65,000 people, three colleges, the Coast Guard Academy, 15 nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarines capable of destroying the world many times over, and General Dynamics' Electric Boat, a multi-billion-dollar private corporation that offers stock options to its shareholders and mega-salaries to its top executives as it pockets taxpayer dollars [..]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 13, 2016
Tomgram: Aviva Chomsky, Deportations "R" Us Sometimes, as today at TomDispatch, what's needed is a little history lesson to remind us that what seems unique in our moment -- in this case, Donald Trump's attitude toward immigrants (whether Mexican or Syrian) -- is anything but unique to our time.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 5, 2016
Tomgram: Pratap Chatterjee, Obama's Last Chance Think of the Oval Office that President Obama is about to leave behind as filled with the equivalent of loaded weaponry from all these years of wars, raids, assassination campaigns, surveillance, and the like.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 24, 2021
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, A Pandemic of Sexual Assault in the Military? Given the more than 60 Democratic and Republican votes lined up, the Senate is poised to move forward with a new bill that would change the way the military handles sexual assault and other felony crimes by service members[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 25, 2021
Tomgram: William Hartung, Selling Death When it comes to trade in the tools of death and destruction, no one tops the United States of America. In April of this year, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) published its annual analysis of trends in global arms sales and the winner as always was the U.S. of A[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 22, 2021
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Our Needs Versus the Pentagon's As a Navy spouse of 10 years and counting, my life offers an up-close view of our country's priorities when it comes to infrastructure and government spending[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 15, 2024
Tomgram: William Astore, Forever War in the Middle East Like many American boys of the baby-boomer generation, I played "war" with those old, olive-drab, plastic toy soldiers meant to evoke our great victory over the Nazis and "the Japs" during World War II. At age 10, I also kept a scrapbook of the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and its various Arab enemies in the Middle East[...]
U.S. Army Africa briefing slide detailing U.S. efforts to aid the African-led International Support Mission in Mali (AFISMA)., From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 13, 2014
Tomgram: Nick Turse, American Proxy Wars in Africa This morning, Nick Turse, who just won a prestigious Izzy Award for his independent reporting, continues his superb journalistic work on the U.S. military’s ongoing, remarkably under-the-radar move into Africa. In his latest post on the subject, he documents (quite literally) the Pentagon’s newest tactic for that continent: refight the colonial wars there in partnership with the French.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 22, 2016
Tomgram: Engelhardt, War, Peace, and Absurdity Here's my version of why, in war and peace, bombing and politics, the stories out of this country these days should boggle our minds.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 17, 2018
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Cooking the Books in the Trump Universe Once upon a time, there was a little-known energy company called Enron. In its 16-year life, it went from being dubbed America's most innovative company by Fortune Magazine to being the poster child of American corporate deceit.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 5, 2021
Tomgam: Andrew Bacevich, The Other Big Lie "The thirty-year interregnum of U.S. global hegemony," writes David Bromwich in the journal Raritan, "has been exposed as a fraud, a decoy, a cheat, [and] a sell." Today, he continues, "the armies of the cheated are struggling to find the word for something that happened and happened wrong." In fact, the armies of the cheated know exactly what happened[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 15, 2022
Tomgram: William Astore, Is Democracy Going Down? In my lifetime of nearly 60 years, America has waged five major wars, winning one decisively, then throwing that victory away, while losing the other four disastrously. Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, as well as the Global War on Terror, were the losses, of course; the Cold War being the solitary win that must now be counted as a loss because its promise was so quickly discarded[...]
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 5, 2012
Bill McKibben: How You Subsidize the Energy Giants to Wreck the Planet 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 16, 2023
Tomgram: Steve Fraser, The Republicans Face Off Against... Yes, Communism! Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida and perhaps the next president of the United States, is waging war against something he and many others on the right identify as "woke communism[...]"
Khalid Qasim, Untitled (Fins in the Ocean), 2016., From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, December 6, 2017
Tomgram: Erin Thompson, Curating Guantanamo Of the roughly 780 people once imprisoned there, he is one of 41 prisoners who remain, living yards away from the Caribbean Sea. Captives from the Bush administration's Global War on Terror began to arrive at that offshore prison in January 2002.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 11, 2020
Tomgram: Belle Chesler, Teaching Across an Abyss of Silence Do you hear that silence? That's the absence of footsteps echoing through our nation's public school hallways. It's the silence of teaching in a virtual space populated with students on mute who lack a physical presence. It's the crushing silence of those who are now missing, who can't attend the classroom that Zoom and Google built.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 28, 2021
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, On the Downhill Slope "I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep." Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Tomgram: John Dower, Body Count for the American Century On February 17, 1941, almost 10 months before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Life magazine carried a lengthy essay by its publisher, Henry Luce, entitled "The American Century." The son of Presbyterian missionaries, born in China in 1898 and raised there until the age of 15, Luce essentially transposed the certainty of religious dogma into the certainty of a nationalistic mission couched in the name of internationalism.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Tomgram: Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, A World in Peril Noam Chomsky: There is a diversionary process under way, perhaps just a natural result of the propensities of the figure at center stage and those doing the work behind the curtains.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 8, 2018
Tomgram: Nick Turse, The U.S. Military's Drug of Choice 2017 was a year of investigations for U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM)...
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 29, 2018
Tomgram: Aviva Chomsky, Making Native Americans Strangers in Their Own Land Amid the barrage of racist, anti-immigrant, and other attacks launched by President Trump and his administration in recent months, a series of little noted steps have threatened Native American land rights and sovereignty.
From ImagesAttr
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, September 23, 2012
October Surprise? Obama and his savvy campaign staff should really be home free, having run political circles around their Republican opponent as he was running circles around himself. There's only one problem: the world. These days it's threatening to be a bizarrely uncooperative place for a president who wants to rest on his Osama-killing foreign-policy laurels.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 19, 2017
Tomgram: Ann Jones, When Will They Ever Learn? Here we go again! Years after most Americans forgot about the longest war this country ever fought, American soldiers are again being deployed to Afghanistan. For almost 16 years now, at the command of three presidents and a sadly forgettable succession of generals, they have gone round and round like so many motorists trapped on a rotary with no exit.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 16, 2017
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Beating Back the Bad Boys Slowly, I've come to a realization I probably should have had long ago. It's men like me, the bystanders, who enabled them. However righteous we may feel as they're exposed and punished, the truth is we're the problem, too.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 23, 2022
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth? The war in Ukraine has already caused massive death and destruction, with more undoubtedly to come as the fighting intensifies in the country's east and south. Many thousands of soldiers and civilians have already been killed or wounded, some 13 million Ukrainians have been forced from their homes, and an estimated one-third of the country's infrastructure has been destroyed[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 18, 2013
Rebecca Solnit, Emerging From Darkness, the Edward Snowden Story It's true that, as Glenn Greenwald and others have written, the American media has focused attention on the supposed peccadillos of Edward Snowden so as not to have to spend too much time on the sweeping system of government surveillance he revealed.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 12, 2015
Michael Klare: A Republican Neo-Imperial Vision for 2016 Keep in mind that President Obama understands well the dangers of global warming. His sideline moves -- increasing vehicle fuel efficiency, reducing coal-powered plants in the U.S., setting aside parts of Alaska's Arctic seas as no-drill areas -- reflect an often repeated "commitment" to bringing climate change under control.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 23, 2018
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Brett Kavanaugh, Raised by the Power of the Pack Brett Kavanaugh's hellish Supreme Court fraternity pledge week offered many lessons, but the most powerful, if least noted, was about the raising of boys in America -- all boys, not just the groomed Georgetown elite from which the judge emerged.
(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Tomgram: William Astore, The End of Air Power? air power alone can't be blamed for the sorry fates of the lands of the Greater Middle East, increasingly descending into chaos and terror, but let's just say -- as retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore does in his new post -- that it has proven startlingly incapable of producing any positive results.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 13, 2022
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Take My Gun, Please The gun I carried on the streets of New York City in the late 1960s was a Beretta, similar to the pistol James Bond packed in the early Ian Fleming novels. It was a small, dark beauty that filled me with bravado. I was never afraid when I had it in my pocket, which is why I'm so very afraid now[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 26, 2018
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, Normalizing Nukes, Pentagon-Style If you're having trouble sleeping thanks to, well, you know who... you're not alone. But don't despair. A breakthrough remedy has just gone on the market. It has no chemically induced side effects and, best of all, will cost you nothing, thanks to the Department of Defense. It's the new Nuclear Posture Review,or NPR, among the most soporific documents of our era.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 23, 2020
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, No Football, No Trump As controversies about the "reopening" of America loom over our lives, nothing seems as intrinsically irrelevant -- yet possibly as critically important -- as how soon major spectator sports return.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Studs Terkel on Death and Forgiveness in America Studs Terkel, who put oral history on the American map with one spectacular book after another, was a small man who had a knack for making everyone around him feel larger than life. He taught me the first significant lesson I learned as a book editor -- and he didn't even know it.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 29, 2016
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The Swamp of War Sometimes it's tough to pull lessons of any sort from our confusing world, but let me mention one obvious (if little noted) case where that couldn't be less true: the American military and its wars.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 21, 2021
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, Vaccine Nationalism Fifteen months ago, the SARS-CoV-2 virus unleashed Covid-19. Since then, it's killed more than 3.8 million people worldwide (and possibly many more). Finally, a return to normalcy seems likely for a distinct minority of the world's people, those living mainly in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and China[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 3, 2023
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Extremely Extreme Hey, who knows? It could be the Gulf Stream collapsing or the planet eternally breaking heat records. But whatever the specifics, we're living it right now, not in the next century, the next decade, or even next year. You couldn't miss it at least so you might think if you were living in the sweltering Southwest[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 4, 2020
Tomgram: Mandy Smithberger, Bailing Out the War State At this moment of unprecedented crisis, you might think that those not overcome by the economic and mortal consequences of the coronavirus would be asking, "What can we do to help?" [...] Unfortunately, when it comes to the top officials of the Pentagon and the CEOs running a large part of the arms industry, examples abound of them asking what they can do to help themselves.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 13, 2018
Tomgram: Sandy Tolan, Was Oslo Doomed From the Start? It was the era of dialogue. Many Palestinians stood witness to Israeli trauma rooted in the Holocaust. Groups of Israelis began to understand the Nakba, or Catastrophe, when 750,000 Palestinians fled or were driven out of their homes during the creation of Israel in 1948...
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 10, 2021
Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Skeletons in My Virtual Closets Recently, I wanted to show my wife a picture, so I opened the photos app on my phone and promptly panicked when I saw what was there. It's not what you think[...]
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 28, 2019
Tomgram: William Astore, Turning Victory Into Defeat America's Afghan War began in 2001 with what was essentially a punitive raid against the Taliban, part of which was mythologized last year in 12 Strong, a Hollywood film with a cavalry charge that echoed the best of John Wayne. That victory, however, quickly turned first into quagmire and then, despite various "surges" and a seemingly endless series of U.S. commanders (17 so far), into a growing sense of inevitable defeat.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 20, 2022
Best of TomDispatch: Ann Jones, War Wounds In 2010, I began to follow U.S. soldiers down a long trail of waste and sorrow that led from the battle spaces of Afghanistan to the emergency room of the trauma hospital at Bagram Air Base, where their catastrophic wounds were surgically treated and their condition stabilized[...]
SHARE More Sharing        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."
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 4, 2016
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Pseudo-Election 2016 Andrew Bacevich takes a trip back to his childhood -- to the 1956 election between Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower and Democrat Adlai Stevenson and offers a particularly clear-eyed look at how, over six decades, American politics at the national level descended into the pathological election campaign of the present moment.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 18, 2018
Tomgram: Belle Chesler, The Kavanaugh Hearings Just Won't Leave Me Alone It's been three weeks since Dr. Christine Blasey Ford gave her testimony before the nation and I'm still struggling to move on. As talk turns toward the impending midterms, I find myself mentally pushing back against the relentlessness of the news cycle as it plows on, casting a spell of cultural amnesia in its wake.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 3, 2021
Tomgram: Nina Burleigh, How to Make Money Off a Pandemic Now that we're all unmasking and the economy seems set to roar into the 2020s, what will we remember about how disastrously, how malignantly, the Trump administration behaved as the pandemic took hold? And will anyone be held to account for it?[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 1, 2022
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Last Word? Oddly enough, I've read obituaries with fascination from the time I was quite young. And yet, in all these years, I've never really reflected on that fact. I don't know whether it was out of some indirect fascination with death and the end of it all or curiosity about the wholeness (or half-ness or brokenness) of an individual life in full[...]
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, On Americans (Not) Getting By (Again) 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!
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Chip Ward, Leave It to Beaver(s) If you want to be unnerved, just pay a visit to the U.S. Drought Monitor and check out its map of the American West with almost all of California stained the deep, distressing shades of red that indicate either "extreme" or "exceptional" drought. In other words, it could hardly be worse.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 11, 2015
Tomgram: Jen Marlowe, "They Demolish and We Rebuild" Nasser Nawaj'ah held Laith's hand as, beside me, they walked down the dirt and pebble path of Old Susya. Nasser is 33 years old, his son six. Nasser's jaw was set and every few moments he glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone was approaching. Until Laith piped up with his question, the only sounds were our footsteps and the wind, against which Nasser was wearing a wool hat and a pleated brown jacket.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 27, 2021
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Failed Empire? It was all so long ago, in a world seemingly without challengers. Do you even remember when we Americans lived on a planet with a recumbent Russia, a barely rising China, and no obvious foes except what later came to be known as an "axis of evil," three countries then incapable of endangering this one?
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 28, 2013
Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Can Obama Ever Stand Up to the Oil Industry? Recently, "good" news about energy has been gushing out of North America, where a cheering crowd of pundits, energy experts, and government officials has been plugging the U.S. as the "Saudi Arabia" of the twenty-first century. You know, all that fracking and those luscious deposits of oil shale and gas shale just waiting to be pounded into shape to fill global gas tanks for an energy-rich future.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 14, 2014
William Astore: America's Hollow Foreign Legions Why do the armies that the U.S. has formed, armed, and trained in lands where we're at war and on which endless billions of dollars have been lavished always appear so ghostly and, in the end, fight so much less effectively than the forces opposing them?
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 19, 2017
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Trump Tackles the NFL One long-time national sports conscience, Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports, declared that Sunday, September 24th, was "the most important sports day since [Muhammad] Ali decided not to fight in Vietnam." From it, he foresaw the possibility of a civic conversation emerging that would create "unity in our communities."
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 14, 2017
Tomgram: William Hartung, How to Wield Influence and Sell Weaponry in Washington Until recently, few of us woke up worrying about the threat of nuclear war. Such dangers seemed like Cold War relics, associated with outmoded practices like building fallout shelters and "duck and cover" drills.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 12, 2018
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Militarizing America's Energy Policy From the onset of his presidency, Donald Trump has made it clear that cheap and abundant domestic energy derived from fossil fuels was going to be the crucial factor in his total-mobilization approach to global engagement.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 10, 2022
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, A Justice System in Peril If you watched TV in the 1960s and 1970s as I did, you would undoubtedly have come away with the idea that this country's courts, law enforcement agencies, and the laws they aimed to honor added up to a system in which justice was always served[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 7, 2022
Tomgram: William Hartung, Call It the National (In)security Budget This March, when the Biden administration presented a staggering $813 billion proposal for "national defense," it was hard to imagine a budget that could go significantly higher or be more generous to the denizens of the military-industrial complex. After all, that request represented far more than peak spending in the Korean or Vietnam War years, and well over $100 billion more than at the height of the Cold War[...]
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(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, June 6, 2010
Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Can Obama Seize the Energy Moment? How many times in recent weeks have you read a headline like this: "Oil Nears Florida as Effort to Contain Well Hits Snag"?
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 6, 2016
Tomgram: Engelhardt, This Is Not About Donald Trump I attempt to take a step back when it comes to the Trump phenomenon and look at what, despite the millions of words pouring out about him, is seldom said or thought much about: the ways in which, unique as this presidential election season may be, Trump himself couldn't be more in the American tradition -- as American, in fact, as a piece of McDonald's baked apple pie.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 5, 2017
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Last Men Standing It was bloody and brutal, a true generational struggle, but give them credit. In the end, they won when so many lost.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 9, 2018
Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Coming Year in Special Ops "During the Obama administration the use of Special Operations forces increased dramatically, as if their use was a sort of magical, all-purpose solution for fighting terrorism," William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, pointed out. "The ensuing years have proven this assumption to be false.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 25, 2018
Tomgram: William Astore, The Pentagon Has Won the War that Matters As America enters the 18th year of its war in Afghanistan and its 16th in Iraq, the war on terror continues in Yemen, Syria, and parts of Africa, including Libya, Niger, and Somalia. Meanwhile, the Trump administration threatens yet more war, this time with Iran.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 9, 2023
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Football's One to the Heart The echoes still linger from that national sigh of relief last month when Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, slammed into cardiac arrest during a game on January 2nd, was declared out of danger. It was a justified sigh. A vibrant young life had been spared[...]
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 14, 2023
Tomgram: Gledhill and Hartung, Wasting Away at the Pentagon It's early in the new Congress, but lawmakers are already hotly debating spending and debt levels. As they do so, they risk losing track of an important issue hiding in plain sight: massive Pentagon waste[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 21, 2021
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Mission Unaccomplished Professional sports is a cutthroat business. Succeed and the people running the show reap rich rewards. Fail to meet expectations and you get handed your walking papers. American-style war in the twenty-first century is quite a different matter[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 25, 2021
Tomgram: Noam Chomsky and Stan Cox, Before It's Too Late This month will mark a critical juncture in the struggle to avoid climate catastrophe. At the COP26 global climate summit kicking off next week in Glasgow, Scotland, negotiators will be faced with the urgent need to get the world economy off the business-as-usual track that will take the Earth up to and beyond 3 degrees Celsius of excess heating before this century's end,[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 4, 2014
Michael Klare, Oil Rush in America Whatever you may imagine, "peak oil" has not been discredited as a concept, a statement no less true for "peak fossil fuels." Think of them instead as postponed. We are, after all, on a finite planet that, by definition, holds a finite amount of oil, natural gas, and coal.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 5, 2018
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Age of Unintended Consequences You want to see "blowback" in action? That's easy enough. All you need is a vague sense of how Google Search works. Then type into it phrases like "warmest years," "rising sea levels," "melting ice," "lengthening wildfire season," or "future climate refugees," and you'll find yourself immersed in the grimmest of blowback universes.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 6, 2021
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, How Washington Lost the Ultimate Drug War Many of us have had a recurring nightmare. You know the one. In a fog between sleeping and waking, you're trying desperately to escape from something awful, some looming threat, but you feel paralyzed. Then, with great relief, you suddenly wake up, covered in sweat. The next night, or the next week, though, that same dream returns[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 28, 2022
Tomgram: William Astore, Pantophobia USA I have a brother with chronic schizophrenia. He had his first severe catatonic episode when he was 16 years old and I was 10. Later, he suffered from auditory hallucinations and heard voices saying nasty things to him. I remember my father reassuring him that the voices weren't real and asking him whether he could ignore them. Sadly, it's not that simple[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 19, 2015
Van Buren: Watching the Same Movie About American War for 75 Years In the age of the all-volunteer military and an endless stream of war zone losses and ties, it can be hard to keep Homeland enthusiasm up for perpetual war. After all, you don't get a 9/11 every year to refresh those images of the barbarians at the airport departure gates.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 14, 2017
Tomgram: Michael Klare, A "China First" and "Russia Second" Foreign Policy? If there's a single consistent aspect to Donald Trump's strategic vision, it's this: U.S. foreign policy should always be governed by the simple principle of "America First," with this country's vital interests placed above those of all others.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 25, 2018
Tomgram: William Hartung, To Boldly Go Nowhere? On June 18th, President Trump announced that he was directing the Pentagon to develop a new branch of the U.S. military, a "Space Force" that would give the U.S. "dominance" in that realm...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 19, 2021
Tomgram: Steiner, Riazi, and Freeman, A Message from the Saudi Lobby Princess Reema bint Bandar Al-Saud, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the U.S., was on the hot seat. In early March 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world, oil prices collapsed and a price war broke out between Saudi Arabia and Russia, leaving American oil and gas companies feeling the pain. As oil prices plummeted, Republican senators from oil-producing states turned their ire directly on Saudi Arabia[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Andrew Bacevich: Even Dumb Ideas Have Consequences It came and went in a flash and now it's long forgotten, buried in the rubble heap of history. But maybe, given recent events, a little excavation is in order. After all, as the author of Constantine's Sword, James Carroll, wrote in 2004, looking back on the 9/11 moment, "A few days after the assault... [s]peaking spontaneously, without the aid of advisers or speechwriters, [George W. Bush] put a word on the new American pur
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 22, 2018
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, America's Wars, A Generational Struggle (in the Classroom) We already sensed that, with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in the White House, the attacks would mean war. But like the rest of the world, we didn't yet have the faintest idea how long that war would last. And 16 years on, we still don't know.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 29, 2022
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, The Long War We Ignore What do a six-year-old in the United States and an 85-year-old in Russia have in common besides being on opposite sides of a war? They're both feeling the strain of a warming planet[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 3, 2022
Tomgram: Andy Kroll, Truth on Trial For about a week in the summer of 2018, I caught an early-morning train from Washington, D.C., to the Albert V. Bryan federal courthouse in the suburb of Alexandria. Located a short drive from George Washington's estate at Mount Vernon, that courthouse serves the Eastern District of Virginia[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 16, 2020
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Donald J. Trump, or Osama bin Laden's Revenge It's July 2020 and I'm about to turn 76, which, as far as I'm concerned, officially makes me an old man. So put up with my aging, wandering brain here, since (I swear) I wasn't going to start this piece with Donald J. Trump, no matter his latest wild claims or bizarre statements, increasingly white nationalist and pro-Confederate positions...
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 28, 2021
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Hellfire World What a way to end a war! Apologies all around! We're so damn sorry or actually, maybe not! I'm thinking, of course, about CENTCOM commander General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr.'s belated apology for the drone assassination of seven children as the last act, or perhaps final war crime, in this country's 20-year-long Afghan nightmare[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 18, 2021
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, The Curse of Cassandra For decades, I kept a poster on my wall that I'd saved from the year I turned 16. In its upper left-hand corner was a black-and-white photo of a white man in a grey suit. Before him spread a cobblestone plaza. All you could see were the man and the stones. Its caption read, "He stood up alone and something happened[...]"
SHARE More Sharing        Friday, July 10, 2020
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Antiwar Vets in the Belly of the Beast It was June 20th and we antiwar vets had traveled all the way to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the midst of a pandemic to protest President Trump's latest folly, an election 2020 rally where he was to parade his goods and pretend all was well with this country...
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 7, 2020
Tomgram: Ann Jones, Getting Trumped by Covid-19 Donald Trump is not a president. He can't even play one on TV. He's a corrupt and dangerous braggart with ill-concealed aspirations for a Crown and, with an election coming up, he's been monopolizing prime time every day, spouting self-congratulation and misinformation.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 6, 2021
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, The Drugging of American Politics Fifty years ago, on June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon stood before the White House press corps, staffers at his side, to announce "a new, all-out offensive" against drug abuse, which he denounced as "America's public enemy number one[...]"
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 13, 2018
Tomgram: John Feffer, Splinterlands 2.0 You've done enough escape rooms to know the drill by now. You are escorted into what seems like an ordinary room. There's a table and a chair. On the table is a book. As soon as you step across the threshold, the door closes behind you. You hear the lock click into place.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 1, 2021
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Living on a Sci-Fi Planet Yes, once upon a time I regularly absorbed science fiction and imagined futures of wonder, but mainly of horror. What else could you think, if you read H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds under the covers by flashlight while your parents thought you were asleep? Of course, that novel was a futuristic fantasy, involving as it did Martians arriving in London to take out humanity[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 13, 2021
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, "Rise Up Through the Ashes and Devastation" One hundred and fifty years ago, in the bloody wake of the Civil War, the abolitionist Julia Ward Howe issued a "Mother's Day Proclamation." The world, she wrote, could no longer bear such terrible violence and death. She called on women across the country to "rise up through the ashes and devastation" and come together in the cause of peace. Forty years later, her daughter Anna Jarvis created Mother's Day[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 3, 2022
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, War Is Hell (Even for Those Far from the Battlefield) In 1919, the renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a book that would prove controversial indeed. In it, he warned that the draconian terms imposed on defeated Germany after what was then known as the Great War which we now call World War I would have ruinous consequences not just for that country but all of Europe [...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 23, 2022
Tomgram: John Feffer, A Last Supper for Humanity? In its attempt to swallow Ukraine whole, Russia has so far managed to bite off only the eastern Donbas region and a portion of its southern coast. The rest of the country remains independent, with its capital Kyiv intact. No one knows how this meal will end. Ukraine is eager to force Russia to disgorge what it's already devoured, while the still-peckish invader clearly has no interest in leaving the table[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 26, 2019
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Turning Our Backs on Nuremberg Events just fly by in the ever-accelerating rush of Trump Time, so it's easy enough to miss important ones in the chaos. Paul Manafort is sentenced twice and indicted a third time! Whoosh! Gone!
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 6, 2015
Engelhardt: Feeling Insecure in 2015 From the point of view of the national security state, each failure, each little disaster, acts as another shot of fear in the American body politic, and the response to failure is predictable: never less of what doesn't work, but more. More money, more bodies hired, more new outfits formed, more elaborate defenses, more offensive weaponry.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 24, 2015
Alfred W. McCoy: The Unwritten American Rules of the Road "The sovereign is he who decides on the exception," said conservative thinker Carl Schmitt in 1922, meaning that a nation's leader can defy the law to serve the greater good. Though Schmitt's service as Nazi Germany's chief jurist and his unwavering support for Hitler from the night of the long knives to Kristallnacht and beyond damaged his reputation for decades, today his ideas have achieved unimagined influence.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 6, 2014
Pepe Escobar: New Silk Roads and an Alternate Eurasian Century A specter haunts the fast-aging "New American Century": the possibility of a future Beijing-Moscow-Berlin strategic trade and commercial alliance. Let's call it the BMB. Its likelihood is being seriously discussed at the highest levels in Beijing and Moscow, and viewed with interest in Berlin, New Delhi, and Tehran
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 8, 2018
Tomgram: James Carroll, An American Reckoning America may be sinking ever deeper into the moral morass of the Trump era, but if you think the malevolence of this period began with him, think again.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 5, 2021
Tomgram: John Feffer, The Potential Pitfalls of a Green New Deal It was supposed to be the greatest transition of modern times. Practically overnight, a dirty, inefficient, and unjust system that encompassed 11 time zones was to undergo an extreme makeover. Billions of dollars were available to speed the process. A new crew of transition experts came up with the blueprint and the public was overwhelmingly on board[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 17, 2022
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, How to Go from a Win-Win to a Lose-Lose World If the world is indeed entering a new Cold War, it bears little resemblance to the final years of that global conflict with its frequent summits between smiling leaders and its arms agreements aimed at de-escalating nuclear tensions. Instead, the world today seems more like the perilous first decade of that old Cold War[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Pentagon, Libya, and Tomorrow's Blowback Today Here’s the second in Nick Turse’s latest series on the U.S. military’s “Africa creep.” Today, he explores a new Pentagon scheme to train a force for the Libyan government whose recruits will be drawn from already existing and often notorious militias in that strife-torn land. It’s one of those plans that may sound sensible in Pentagon briefings but has “cockamamie” written all over it.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 2, 2014
Rebecca Solnit, #YesAllWomen Changes the Story From Rebecca Solnit this evening, a beautiful, especially strong and thoughtful post-Isla Vista piece on the power of words to challenge and remake our world and, most recently, on the power of a hashtagged phrase (#YesAllWomen) to do the same. In the process, she also explains how the word "mansplaining" came about and the power of such phrases as "rape culture" and "sexual entitlement"to reshape our thinking and our lives.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 20, 2016
Tomgram: Chip Ward, Peace Pipes, Not Oil Pipes With the return of Utah environmentalist Chip Ward to TomDispatch comes a vivid analysis of the latest dramatic oil pipeline battle in the West, the stand-off at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 30, 2017
Little Big Man Into the Whirlwind He's huge. Outsized. He fills the news hole at any moment of any day. His over-tanned face glows unceasingly in living rooms across America. Never has a president been quite so big. So absolutely monstrous. Or quite so small. He's our Little Big Man.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 13, 2020
Tomgram: Nan Levinson, The Vet Conundrum and America's Wars If you still follow the mainstream media, you're probably part of the 38% of registered voters who knew something about the op-ed Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) published in the New York Times early in June, exhorting the president to use the Insurrection Act to "restore order to our streets."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 18, 2021
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Are Imperial World Orders Heading for Extinction? When the leaders of more than 100 nations gathered in Glasgow for the U.N. climate conference last week, there was much discussion about the disastrous effect of climate change on the global environment. There was, however, little awareness of its likely political impact on the current world order that made such an international gathering possible[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 6, 2018
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Unquiet Flows The Don I certainly learned a lesson that November. During the previous months of campaigning that election season, I never wrote a piece at TomDispatch that didn't leave open the possibility of Donald Trump winning the presidency. In the couple of weeks before that fateful November day, however, I got hooked on the polling results and on Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight website and became convinced that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 2, 2012
Subhankar Banerjee: Shell Game in the Arctic Think of it as a shell game of the worst sort, and we're the ones being taken for a ride. Thanks to the burning of the fossil fuels that oil giants like Royal Dutch Shell are increasingly eager to extract from some of the most difficult environments on the planet, the vast quantities of carbon dioxide being sent into the atmosphere, and the way the oceans to absorb CO2, offshore waters are in the process of acidifying.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 22, 2018
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Who to Become in 2018? A little over a year ago at TomDispatch I wrote about the bloody nightmares rupturing my sleep and the night terrors gripping my little household in the wake of Donald Trump's election. That piece was reposted by a wide range of publications. And then, in what at first seemed like a terrible mistake, I read the comments.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 16, 2020
Tomgram: John Feffer, Trump Rex In retrospect, it's no surprise that, after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, dystopian fiction enjoyed a spike in popularity. However, novels like George Orwell's 1984 and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which soared on Amazon, would prove more horror stories than roadmaps. Like so many ominous sounds from a dark basement, they provided good scares but didn't foreshadow the actual Trumpian future.
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SHARE More Sharing        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
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 20, 2012
Rebecca Solnit: The Archipelago of Arrogance One evening over dinner, I began to joke, as I often had before, about writing an essay called "Men Explain Things to Me." Every writer has a stable of ideas that never make it to the racetrack, and I'd been trotting this pony out recreationally every once in a while.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 30, 2016
Tomgram: Thomas Frank, Worshipping Money in D.C. Thomas Frank takes us on an eye-opening tour of the lobbying industry in Washington, a dimly lit corner of "corruption-free America," a completely legal and remarkably unethical world that comes with its own guidebook: Influence, a newsletter chronicling daily dalliances involving money, alcohol, and political influence.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 22, 2016
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Making Sense of Trump and His National Security State Critics Rebecca Gordon takes a clear-eyed look at the Republican national security luminaries who recently signed a letter declaring Donald Trump unfit for the Oval Office (and yes, indeed, he is unfit for office).
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 11, 2017
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, How the Pentagon Snatched Innovation From the Jaws of Defeat Not quite a century ago, on January 7, 1929, newspaper readers across America were captivated by a brand-new comic strip, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. It offered the country its first images of space-age death rays, atomic explosions, and inter-planetary travel.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 9, 2016
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Election From Hell Consider this post my attempt to make some sense of what we're still calling an "election campaign," although it has by now become more like an all-encompassing way of life and, despite its many "debates" (that now garner National Football League-sized audiences), is also what I label "the tao of confusion."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 4, 2016
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The National Security Void You may have missed it. Perhaps you dozed off. Or wandered into the kitchen to grab a snack. Or by that point in the proceedings were checking out Seinfeld reruns. During the latter part of the much hyped but excruciating-to-watch first presidential debate, Lester Holt posed a seemingly straightforward but cunningly devised question.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 13, 2018
Tomgram: Aviva Chomsky, The Fight Over the Criminalization of Immigrants The immigration debate seems to have gone crazy. President Obama's widely popular Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which offered some 750,000 young immigrants brought to the United States as children a temporary reprieve from deportation, is ending... except it isn't... except it is...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 1, 2021
Tomgram: Ann Jones, Afghanistan (Again) I know, I know. It's the last thing you want to hear about. Twenty years of American carnage in Afghanistan was plenty for you, I'm sure, and there are so many other things to worry about in an America at the edge of" well, who knows what? But for me, it's different. I went to Afghanistan in 2002, already angry about this country's misbegotten war on that poor land, to offer what help I could to Afghan women[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 31, 2022
Tomgram: Stan Cox, Cap the Wells Before It's Too Late While the Ukrainian people bear the lethal brunt of Russia's invasion, shockwaves from that war threaten to worsen other crises across the planet. The emergency that loomed largest before Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine began the heating of the Earth's climate is now looming larger still[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 21, 2012
Ellen Cantarow: The New Eco-Devastation in Rural America 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
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 21, 2023
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Another Major War in 2024? This hasn't exactly been a year of good news when it comes to our war-torn, beleaguered planet, but on November 15th, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping took one small step back from the precipice[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 13, 2020
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, Living on a Pandemic Planet The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV-2) virus, which causes Covid-19, seemed to emerge from deepest history, from the Black Death of the 14th century and the "Spanish Flu" of 1918. In just months, it has infected more than 1.5 million people and claimed more than 88,000 lives. The virus continues to spread almost everywhere.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 18, 2022
Tomgram: William Astore, Red Storm Rising - Again In the early 1960s, at the height of America's original Cold War with the Soviet Union, my old service branch, the Air Force, sought to build 10,000 land-based nuclear missiles. These were intended to augment the hundreds of nuclear bombers it already had, like the B-52s featured so memorably in the movie Dr. Strangelove[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 19, 2022
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, Dealing with a Christian Nationalist Movement When I was the age that my daughter is now, my favorite sweatshirt had the words "Choice, Choice, Choice, Choice" in rainbow letters across its front. My mom got me that sweatshirt at a 1989 rally in response to Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. In that case, the Supreme Court upheld a Missouri law restricting the use of state funds and facilities for abortion, an early attempt to eat away at Roe v. Wade[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 13, 2016
Tomgram: John Feffer, Slouching Toward the Apocalypse This piece suggests far wilder ways in which Trump couldn't be more in that same grain, if what you have in mind is the Dr. Strangelovian current that runs through American life, involving evangelicals, apocalyptics, survivalists, and white racists; even his extremity, that is, couldn't be more us -- or, if you prefer, more U.S. This one is an original and definitely a must-read!
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 7, 2018
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Not So Great Wars, Theirs and Ours "The United States of Amnesia." That's what Gore Vidal once called us. We remember what we find it convenient to remember and forget everything else.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 30, 2020
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Assassin-in-Chief Comes Home "Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren't just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief." So I wrote back in June 2012, with a presidential election approaching.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 4, 2020
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Prioritizing Empire Over Health American military personnel are getting sick in significant numbers in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. As The New York Times reported in a piece buried in the back pages of its July 21st edition, "The infection rate in the services has tripled over the past six weeks as the United States military has emerged as a potential source of transmission both domestically and abroad."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 28, 2021
Tomgram: Mattea Kramer, All Empire Is Local Robin Rue Simmons had been very curious about the truth of American life as a young person. But it was only after she finished high school, left her native Evanston, Illinois, and returned as an adult ready to buy a house in the historically Black neighborhood in which she grew up that she delved deep into her city's history and fully understood the policies that had kept Black residents poor[...]
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 14, 2011
Tomgram: Bill McKibben, The Great American Carbon Bomb 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?
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Bill McKibben: Why the Energy-Industrial Elite Has It In for the Planet 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."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 12, 2017
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Embracing Our Inner Empire I can remember both so well. 2006: my first raid in South Baghdad. 2014: watching on YouTube as a New York police officer asphyxiated -- murdered -- Eric Garner for allegedly selling loose cigarettes on a Staten Island street corner not five miles from my old apartment. Both events shocked the conscience.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 20, 2018
Tomgram: Arnold Isaacs, Moments of Truth It's easy -- and not wrong -- to think that truth is in dire danger in the era of Donald Trump. His own record of issuing breathtaking falsehoods from the exalted platform of the White House is unprecedented in American history. So is his consistent refusal to back down when a statement is proven false. In Trump's world, those who expose his lies are the liars and facts that show he was wrong are "fake news."
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 23, 2023
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, War, American-Style, on the Homefront During a Veterans Day celebration in my small Maryland community, a teacher clicked through a slideshow of smiling men and women in military uniforms. "Girls and boys, can anyone tell me what courage is?" she asked the crowd, mostly children from local elementary schools, including my two young kids[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 16, 2018
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Rethinking National Security As a constituent, I have noted with interest your suggestion that you will "take a hard look" at running for president in 2020, even as you campaign for reelection to the Senate next month. Forgive me for saying that I interpret that comment to mean "I'm in."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 7, 2021
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Apologies All Around (Unfortunately, Not) The anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was marked by days of remembrances for the courageous rescue workers of that moment, for the thousands murdered as the Twin Towers collapsed, for those who died in the Pentagon, or in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, fighting off the hijackers of the commercial jet they were in, as well as for those who fought in the forever wars that were America's response to those al-Qaeda attacks[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 21, 2021
Tomgram: David Vine, Biden Builds Back Worse (When It Comes to China) Before it's too late, we need to ask ourselves a crucial question: Do we really I mean truly want a new Cold War with China?[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 13, 2021
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Washington Strikes Out The collapse of the American project in Afghanistan may fade fast from the news here, but don't be fooled. It couldn't be more significant in ways few in this country can even begin to grasp[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 1, 2022
Tomgram: Nina Burleigh, The Gilead Playbook Ever since the early morning hours of November 9, 2016, standing in a ballroom with red-hatted Trump election celebrants in the New York Hilton, I've been waiting for this moment. This eruption of misogyny, unlike any since perhaps the witch trials and the burnings of midwives at the stake, was only a matter of time[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 9, 2019
Tomgram: Beverly Gologorsky, Health Care That Makes Us Ill On this extremely hot summer day, the ear-splitting siren screaming through New York's streets is coming from the ambulance I'm in -- on a gurney on my way to the ER. That only makes the siren, loud as it is, all the more alarming. I fell. The pain, its location and intensity, suggests I've probably broken my hip.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 31, 2022
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, The True Costs of War Anyone who grew up in my generation of 1980s kids remembers G.I. Joe action figures those green-uniformed plastic soldiers you could use to stage battles in the sandbox in your backyard or, for that matter, your bedroom. In those days, when imagery of bombed-out homes, bloodied civilians, and police violence wasn't accessible on TV screens or in video games like Call of Duty, [...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 12, 2022
Tomgram: Hartung and Gledhill, How the Arms Industry Scams the Taxpayer Congress has spoken when it comes to next year's Pentagon budget and the results, if they weren't so in line with past practices, should astonish us all. The House of Representatives voted to add $37 billion and the Senate $45 billion to the administration's already humongous request for "national defense,"[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 8, 2018
Tomgram: Arnold Isaacs, Misremembering Vietnam Here's a paradox of the last few decades: as American military power has been less and less effective in achieving Washington's goals, the rhetoric surrounding that power has grown more and more boastful.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 23, 2020
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Work in the Time of Covid-19 In two weeks, my partner and I were supposed to leave San Francisco for Reno, Nevada, where we'd be spending the next three months focused on the 2020 presidential election. As we did in 2018, we'd be working with UNITE-HERE, the hospitality industry union, only this time on the campaign to drive Donald Trump from office.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 9, 2021
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Sunsetting the War on Terror? As August ended, American troops completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan almost 20 years after they first arrived. On the formal date of withdrawal, however, President Biden insisted that "over-the-horizon capabilities" (airpower and Special Operations forces, for example) would remain available for use anytime. "[W]e can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground, very few if needed,"[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 28, 2022
Tomram: William Astore, Up in Arms and Armor in America American schools are soft, you say? I know what you mean. I taught college for 15 years, so I've dealt with my share of still-teenagers fresh out of high school. Many of them inspired me, but some had clearly earned high marks too easily and needed remedial help in math, English, or other subjects. School discipline had been too lax perhaps and standards too slack,[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 26, 2010
The Opposites Game: All the Strangeness of Our American World in One Article Various congressional representatives are upset over the lack of a buy-American plan when it comes to the Afghan air force. The Pentagon has been planning to purchase dozens more of the Mi-17s over the next decade, and that, it seems, is what's worth being upset about when perfectly good American arms manufacturers aren't getting the contracts.
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 24, 2015
Tomgram: Nick Turse, A Secret War in 135 Countries It was an impressive effort: a front-page New York Times story about a "new way of war" with the bylines of six reporters, and two more and a team of researchers cited at the end of the piece. "They have plotted deadly missions from secret bases in the badlands of Somalia. In Afghanistan, they have engaged in combat so intimate that they have emerged soaked in blood that was not their own..."
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 19, 2017
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Three Administrations, One Standard Playbook I remember the day President Obama let me down. It was December 1, 2009, and as soon as the young president took the podium at West Point and -- calm and cool as ever -- announced a new troop surge in Afghanistan, I knew. There wasn't a doubt in my mind. In that instant, George W. Bush's wars had become Barack Obama's.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 8, 2021
Tomgram: John Feffer, Still Waiting to Exhale I went to a birthday party recently. The celebrants greeted each other with hugs on the patio. After an outdoor barbeque dinner, we stood shoulder to shoulder around the island in the kitchen, eating cake from small paper plates. We sang "Happy Birthday." Ordinarily, an event like that wouldn't be worth noting, but these aren't exactly ordinary times[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 7, 2011
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Goodbye to All That In 1991, when the Soviet Union disappeared and the United States found itself the last superpower standing, Washington mistook that for a victory most rare. In the years that followed, in a paroxysm of self-satisfaction and amid clouds of self-congratulation, its leaders would attempt nothing less than to establish a global Pax Americana.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 19, 2017
Tomgram: William deBuys, How to Hijack an Election Donald Trump was right. The election was rigged. What Trump got wrong (and, boy, does he get things wrong) is that the rigging worked in his favor.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 18, 2018
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, A Second Korean War? Most people intuitively get it. An American preventive strike to wipe out North Korea's nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles, or a commando raid launched with the same goal in mind, is likely to initiate a chain of events culminating in catastrophe. That would be true above all for the roughly 76 million Koreans living on either side of the Demilitarized Zone. Donald Trump, though, seems unperturbed.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 18, 2016
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, How Extrajudicial Executions Became "War" Policy in Washington Rebecca Gordon's new post is an eye-opening look at how two American administrations changed the nature of war, using the drone to bring extrajudicial executions -- presidentially ordered assassinations -- into the heartland of American foreign policy.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 23, 2021
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Thanks a Million for 2021! Whether the pandemic that's swept the world started from a bat or not, as 2021 ends, I think it's safe to say that we're all far battier than we were when it began[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 3, 2017
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Would-Be Strongmen Worldwide In 2016, something extraordinary happened in the politics of diverse countries around the world. With surprising speed and simultaneity, a new generation of populist leaders emerged from the margins of nominally democratic nations to win power.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 19, 2021
Tomgram: Patterson Deppen, America as a Base Nation Revisited It was the spring of 2003 during the American-led invasion of Iraq. I was in second grade, living on a U.S. military base in Germany, attending one of the Pentagon's many schools for families of servicemen stationed abroad. One Friday morning, my class was on the verge of an uproar[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 20, 2021
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Affluenza on the Holiest Holiday of the Year Confession time: this year, I don't want to buy my kids anything for Christmas. Big one, right? Okay, let me soften that just a bit. I have bought a few modest, useful things. But that's it! No new games, no new toys, no new clothes (other than socks)" nothing. They already have too much. We have too much. Our nation is drowning in stuff and, in reality, need almost none of it[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 12, 2022
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, War, Death, and Taxes Every April, as income-tax returns come due, I think about the day 30 years ago when I opened my rented mailbox and saw a business card resting inside. Its first line read, innocently enough, "United States Treasury." It was the second line - "Internal Revenue Service" - that took my breath away. That card belonged to an IRS revenue agent and scrawled across it in blue ink was the message: "Call me[...]"
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 26, 2016
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Arresting Our Way to "Justice" More than 2.3 million people are in American jails and prisons at any moment, more than 11 million cycling through them each year.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 2, 2017
Nomi Prins: All in the Family Trump President Trump, his children and their spouses, aren't just using the Oval Office to augment their political legacy or secure future riches. Okay, they certainly are doing that, but that's not the most useful way to think about what's happening at the moment. Everything will make more sense if you reimagine the White House as simply the newest branch of the Trump family business empire, its latest outpost.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 30, 2018
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, American Paths, Chosen and Not (1989-2018) The present arrives out of a past that we are too quick to forget, misremember, or enshroud in myth. Yet like it or not, the present is the product of past choices. Different decisions back then might have yielded very different outcomes in the here-and-now. Donald Trump ascended to the presidency as a consequence of myriad choices that Americans made (or had made for them) over the course of decades.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 2, 2021
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The World We Made, The Enemy We Need On February 17, 1941, less than 10 months before the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor and the U.S. found itself in a global war, Henry Luce, in an editorial in Life magazine (which he founded along with Time and Fortune), declared the years to come "the American Century." He then urged this country's leaders to "exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit[...]"
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 5, 2022
Tomgram: Todd Miller, Without Trump, the Border Is Still a Profitable Battlefield First, it was the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) vehicles speeding along on the road in front of our campsite. Then it was the Border Patrol's all-terrain vehicles moving swiftly on a ridge above us. I was about 10 miles north of the border with Mexico, near Peña Blanca Lake in southern Arizona, camping with my six-year-old son and some other families [...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 3, 2021
Tomgram: Kelly Denton-Borhaug, Why Are So Many of Our Military Brothers and Sisters Taking Their Own Lives? This summer, it seemed as if we Americans couldn't wait to return to our traditional July 4th festivities. Haven't we all been looking for something to celebrate? The church chimes in my community rang out battle hymns for about a week. The utility poles in my neighborhood were covered with "Hometown Hero" banners hanging proudly, sporting the smiling faces of uniformed local veterans from our wars[...]
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, September 11, 2011
Tomgram: Fraser and Freeman, Taps for the Unemployed 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 21, 2018
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, What's the End Game? Leaders are routinely confronted with philosophical dilemmas. Here's a classic one for our Trumptopian times: If you make enemies out of your friends and friends out of your enemies, where does that leave you?
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 18, 2021
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, War as the Enemy of Reform Is President Biden afflicted with the political equivalent of a split personality? His first several months in office suggest just that possibility. On the home front, the president's inclination is clearly to Go Big. When it comes to America's role in the world, however, Biden largely hews to pre-Trumpian precedent. So far at least, the administration's overarching foreign-policy theme is Take It Slow[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 20, 2014
Laura Poitras and Tom Engelhardt: The Snowden Reboot Call me moved. I recently went to the premiere of Citizenfour, Laura Poitras's engrossing new film on Edward Snowden, at the New York Film Festival. The breaking news at film's end: as speculation had it this summer, there is indeed at least one new, post-Snowden whistleblower who has come forward from somewhere inside the U.S. intelligence world with information about a watchlist (that includes Poitras).
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 13, 2015
Rory Fanning: Unpacking the War on Terror Make no mistake: whatever the news may say about the changing cast of characters the U.S. is fighting and the changing motivations behind the changing names of our military "operations" around the world, you and I will have fought in the same war.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 27, 2020
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, The Coronavirus Chronology From Hell Historically, in hyper-crises, local and global systems can change fundamentally. Before the coronavirus pandemic hit first China and then the rest of the globe, the question of whether the American imperial era might be faltering was already on the table, amid that country's endless wars and with the world's most capricious leader.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 21, 2022
Tomgram: Jane Braxton Little, From Drought to Deluge on a New Planet Greenville, CA Snow began falling on December 24th, big fluffy flakes that made lace on mittens before melting. Within hours it had coated the ashes, the brick chimneys that the flames had left behind, and the jagged remains of roofs strewn across my burned-out town. White mounds soon softened the look of charred cars that are everywhere [...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 25, 2017
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, In Donald Trump's Washington, The House Always Wins Now, give him credit. As president, The Donald has done just what he promised the American people he would do: run the country like he ran his businesses. At one point, he even displayed confusion about distinguishing between them when he said of the United States: "We're a very powerful company -- country."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 1, 2021
Tomgram: Michael Klare, A Game of Chicken in Asia with the World at Stake The leaders of China and the United States certainly don't seek a war with each another. Both the Biden administration and the regime of Chinese President Xi Jinping view economic renewal and growth as their principal objectives. Both are aware that any conflict arising between them, even if restricted to Asia and conducted with non-nuclear weapons no sure bet would produce catastrophic regional damage[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 2, 2022
Tomgram: Stan Cox, Angry White Guys in Big-Ass Pickups In the United States during 16 months in 2020 and 2021, vehicles rammed into groups of protesters at least 139 times, according to a Boston Globe analysis. Three victims died and at least 100 were injured. Consider that a new level of all-American barbarity, thanks to the growing toxicity of right-wing politics, empowered by its embrace of ever-larger, more menacing vehicles being cranked out by the auto industry[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 24, 2022
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Keeping an Eye on AFRICOM, Ten Years Later What's the U.S. military doing in Africa? It's an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, straight-jacketed in secrecy, and hogtied by red tape. Or at least it would be if it were up to the Pentagon[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 22, 2014
Greg Grandin: How the Iraq War Began in Panama As we end another year of endless war in Washington, it might be the perfect time to reflect on the War That Started All Wars -- or at least the war that started all of Washington's post-Cold War wars: the invasion of Panama.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 24, 2018
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Recognizing the Camel's Nose They are like the camel's nose, lifting a corner of the tent. Don't be fooled, though. It won't take long until the whole animal is sitting inside, sipping your tea and eating your sweets. In countries around the world -- in the Middle East, Asia Minor, Central Asia, Africa, even the Philippines -- the appearance of U.S. drones in the sky (and on the ground) is often Washington's equivalent of the camel's nose...
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 11, 2021
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, America Has a Drinking Problem Think of it this way: what we don't know will hurt us. And water yes, water is an example of just that. Even at a time of such angry political disputes, you might imagine that, in a wealthy country like the United States, it would still be possible to agree that clean water should be not just a right, but a given. Well, welcome to America 2021[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 6, 2022
Tomgram: Steve Fraser, The Rogue Court, Then and Now Has the Trump Supreme Court gone rogue? The evidence mounts. Certainly, its recent judicial blitzkrieg has run roughshod over a century's worth of settled law[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 14, 2022
Tomgram: Belle Chesler, Teaching in a World No Student Deserves It feels odd to admit this, but I miss the stillness of the first few disorienting and terrifying weeks of the pandemic, when the noise and hustle of my world quieted down. In March and April of 2020, spring somehow seemed more riotously colorful and gratuitously lush[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 3, 2020
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Can the Pandemic Bring Accountability Back to This Country? Whether you consider the appalling death toll or the equally unacceptable rising numbers of Covid-19 cases, the United States has one of the worst records worldwide when it comes to the pandemic. Nevertheless, the president has continued to behave just as he promised he would in March when there had been only 40 deaths from the virus here and he said, "I don't take responsibility at all."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 21, 2015
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Message in a Bottle from My Mother [This article] explores the last instance of American war mobilization and implicitly why the U.S. has failed to win another significant war without it -- and does so in the context of my memories, my life, and my mother (copiously illustrated with photos and memorabilia of mine from her life). I hope you find this one both heartfelt and out of the ordinary. Tom
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 21, 2023
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Goodbye to All That In the spring of 1957, in search of a summer job before heading west to graduate school, I answered a classified New York Times ad for an editorial assistant. The personnel clerk at the paper was condescending. Bachelor's degrees are a dime a dozen, she told me. For their newsroom, she said, they were looking for Ph.D. candidates and Rhodes scholars. Still, sighing at her own generosity, she let me fill out the paperwork[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 8, 2021
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, The Age of Unaccountability? America has an accountability problem. In fact, if the Covid-19 disaster, the January 6th Capitol attack, and the Trump years are any indication, the American lexicon has essentially dispensed with the term "accountability[...]"
Item by item, moment by moment, we are shifted and changed., From ImagesAttr
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 21, 2015
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Flying the Unfriendly Skies of America It was August 2002. My partner Jan Adams and I were just beginning our annual pilgrimage to Massachusetts to visit my father and stepmother. At the check-in line at San Francisco International Airport, we handed over our driver's licenses and waited for the airline ticket agent to find our flight and reservation. Suddenly, she got a funny look on her face. "There's something wrong with the computer," she said.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 10, 2018
Tomgram: Ariel Dorfman, The Cages of the Trump Era (That We Don't See) When Donald Trump recently accused "illegal immigrants" of wanting to "pour into and infest our country," there was an immediate outcry. After all, that verb, infest, had been used by the Nazis as a way of dehumanizing Jews and communists as rats, vermin, or insects that needed to be eradicated.
SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, December 6, 2017
Tomgram: John Feffer, Drowning Liberalism in the Bathtub By the time you read this, the latest brouhaha will undoubtedly be history -- or do I mean "fake history"? -- and largely forgotten. It will have been replaced by an explosion of media coverage about some other nightmarish set of presidential tweets or comments. After all, it's a pattern.
SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Engelhardt: The Empire as Basket Case What follows is a transcript of a therapy session between the American Empire and a psychiatrist whose name we at TomDispatch have agreed not to disclose. Normally, even in an age in which privacy means ever less to anyone, we wouldn't consider publishing such a private encounter, but the probative news value of the exchange is so obvious that we decided to make an exception.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Tomgram: Bill McKibben, The Real Zombie Apocalypse In a dramatic new piece, Bill McKibben offers a riveting vision of a world in peril, and a fossil fuel industry still proceeding in zombie-like fashion with projects which will extend the life of fossil fuels decades into the future and create the perfectly real-world equivalent of a zombie apocalypse.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 13, 2017
Engelhardt, The Making of a Pariah Nation In its own inside-out, upside-down way, it's almost wondrous to behold. As befits our president's wildest dreams, it may even prove to be a record for the ages, one for the history books. He was, after all, the candidate who sensed it first.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 4, 2018
Tomgram: William Astore, Enabling Armageddon Did you know the U.S. Air Force is working on a new stealth bomber? Don't blame yourself if you didn't, since the project is so secret that most members of Congress aren't privy to the details.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 29, 2021
Tomgram: Hartung and Smithberger, Washington's National Security Spending Follies President Biden's first Pentagon budget, released late last month, is staggering by any reasonable standard. At more than $750 billion for the Defense Department and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy, it represents one of the highest levels of spending since World War II far higher than the peaks of the Korean or Vietnam wars or President Ronald Reagan's military buildup of the 1980s[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 8, 2021
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, The Politics of the Poor in an America on Edge When President Biden first unveiled the Build Back Better agenda, it appeared that this country was on the path to a new war on poverty. In April, he told Congress that "trickle-down economics have never worked" and that it was time to build the economy "from the bottom-up[...]"
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 30, 2021
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Why Do We Need a 24/7 Economy? In mid-October, President Biden announced that the Port of Los Angeles would begin operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, joining the nearby Port of Long Beach, which had been doing so since September. The move followed weeks of White House negotiations with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, as well as shippers like UPS and FedEx, and major retailers like Walmart and Target[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 28, 2023
Tomgram: Joshua Frank, How a Nuclear Power Plant Became a Tool of War In 1946, Albert Einstein shot off a telegram to several hundred American leaders and politicians warning that the "unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." Einstein's forecast remains prescient. Nuclear calamity still knocks[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 10, 2011
Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Pentagon's Planet of Bases India, a rising power, almost had one (but the Tajiks said no). China, which last year became the world's second largest economy as well as the planet's leading energy consumer, and is expanding abroad like mad (largely via trade and the power of the purse), still has none.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 2, 2021
Tomgram: William Astore, The Power of America's Example When it comes to war, if personnel is policy, America is yet again in deep trouble. As retired Army Major Danny Sjursen recently pointed out at TomDispatch, when it comes to foreign policy, President Joe Biden's new cabinet and advisers are well stocked with retired generals, reconstituted neocons, unapologetic hawks, and similar war enthusiasts.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 23, 2021
Tomgram: Todd Miller, The Border Crisis Is Forever In late February, I drove to see the Trump wall in Sasabe, Arizona. As soon as I parked, a green-striped Border Patrol vehicle stationed a quarter of a mile away began to creep down the dirt road toward us. Just ahead, a dystopian "No Trespassing" sign was flapping in the wind. It was cold as I stepped out of the car with my five-year-old son, William. The wall ahead of us, 30-feet high with steel bollards, was indeed imposing
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 30, 2022
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, The Right-Wing's Attempt to Militarize American Politics Increasingly, it seems, Americans have an anger problem. All too many of us now have the urge to use name-calling, violent social-media posts, threats, baseball bats, and guns to do what we once did with persuasion and voting. For example, during the year after Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, threats of violence or even death against lawmakers of both parties increased more than fourfold[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 21, 2014
Knowledge Is Crime; Too Big to Jail? Why Kidnapping, Torture, Assassination, and Perjury Are No Longer Crimes in DC I’m not sure that anyone has put a genuine rundown of the crimes of the national security state and its denizens together in one place in recent years. Today, I do so, considering seven key areas of criminal activity for which we are all but guaranteed that no one will be held accountable.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 8, 2016
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, The March of the Billionaires Given his cabinet picks so far, it's reasonable to assume that The Donald finds hanging out with anyone who isn't a billionaire (or at least a multimillionaire) a drag. What would there be to talk about if you left the Machiavellian class and its exploits for the company of the sort of normal folk you can rouse at a rally?
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 7, 2017
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Whose Side Are You On? I used to command soldiers. Over the years, lots of them actually. In Iraq, Colorado, Afghanistan, and Kansas. And I'm still fixated on a few of them like this one private first class (PFC) in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2011.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 26, 2021
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, The Next Coup? As an eyewitness, I can recall the events of January 6th in Washington as if they were yesterday. The crowds of angry loyalists storming the building while overwhelmed security guards gave way. The slavishly loyal vice-president who would, the president hoped, restore him to power. The crush of media that seemed confused, almost overwhelmed, by the crowd's fury[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 11, 2022
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Is the Never-Ending Story Ending? I find nothing strange in Joe Biden, at 79 (going on 80), being the oldest president in our history and possibly planning to run again in 2024. After all, who wouldn't want to end up in the record books? Were he to be nominated and then beat the also-aging Donald Trump, or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, or even Fox News's eternally popular Tucker Carlson, he would occupy the White House until he was 86[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Swarming Our World Yes, it's already time to be worried -- very worried. As the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have shown, the earliest drone equivalents of "killer robots" have made it onto the battlefield and proved to be devastating weapons. But at least they remain largely under human control[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 21, 2019
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Retiring the Statue of Liberty It turns out that walls can't always be seen. Donald Trump may never build his "great, great wall," but that doesn't mean he isn't working to wall Americans in. It's a story that needs to be told.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 15, 2020
Tomgram: Steve Fraser, Was American History a Conspiracy? News is "faked"; elections are "rigged"; a "deep state" plots a "coup"; Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died suspiciously in bed with a pillow over his face; aides of ex-president Barack Obama conspire to undermine foreign policy from a "war room"; Obama himself was a Muslim mole; the National Park Service lied about the size of the crowd at the president's inauguration;[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 8, 2021
Tomgram: William Astore, The Cold War, Rebooted and Rebranded The future isn't what it used to be. As a teenager in the 1970s, I watched a lot of TV science fiction shows, notably Space: 1999 and UFO, that imagined a near future of major moon bases and alien attacks on Earth. Movies of that era like Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey envisioned colossal spaceships and space stations featuring international crews on mind-blowing missions to Jupiter and beyond[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 17, 2022
Tomgram: Nan Levinson, "I've Seen What Bombs Do" I've been watching this country at war for many years now and, after 9/11, began spending time with American veterans who came to disdain and actively oppose the very conflicts they were sent to fight. The paths they followed to get there and the courage it took to turn their backs on all they had once embraced intrigued and impressed me, so I wrote a book about them[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Tomorrow's Terror Today For almost 20 years, U.S. drone warfare was largely one-sided. Unlike Afghans and Yemenis, Iraqis and Somalis, Americans never had to worry about lethal robots hovering overhead and raining down missiles. Until, that is, one appeared in the skies above Florida.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 17, 2020
Beverly Gologorsky, My Neighbor, War I'm a voracious reader of American fiction and I've noticed something odd in recent years. This country has been eternally "at war" and you just wouldn't know that -- a small amount of veteran's fiction aside -- from the novels that are generally published.
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 27, 2017
Tomgram: Nick Turse, The U.S. Military Moves Deeper into Africa General Thomas Waldhauser sounded a little uneasy. "I would just say, they are on the ground. They are trying to influence the action," commented the chief of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) at a Pentagon press briefing in March, when asked about Russian military personnel operating in North Africa. "We watch what they do with great concern."
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 4, 2021
Tomgram: William Astore, Military Cancel Culture Cancel culture is a common, almost viral, term in political and social discourse these days. Basically, somebody expresses views considered to be outrageous or vile or racist or otherwise insensitive and inappropriate. In response, that person is "canceled," perhaps losing a job or otherwise sidelined and silenced...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 13, 2021
Tomgram: William Astore, Going Nuclear on Pentagon Spending Where are you going to get the money? That question haunts congressional proposals to help the poor, the unhoused, and those struggling to pay the mortgage or rent or medical bills, among so many other critical domestic matters. And yet big surprise! there's always plenty of money for the Pentagon[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 1, 2022
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Jack and Joe, The Perils of Getting Tough I send greetings from the other side and no, I don't mean the other side of the aisle. I refer to the place where old politicians go to make amends for their sins[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 31, 2017
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Donald Trump, Colin Kaepernick, and Me on Super Bowl Sunday The Super Bowl is superfluous this year. Who needs a reality show about violence, domination, and sexism, not to mention brain damage, now that we have Trumpball, actual reality that not only authenticates football's authoritarianism but transforms us from bystanders into victims? Before this game is over, the players may swarm the grandstands and beat the hell out of us.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 18, 2019
Tomgram: Michael Klare, A Long War of Attrition In his highly acclaimed 2017 book, Destined for War, Harvard professor Graham Allison assessed the likelihood that the United States and China would one day find themselves at war[...] Like much current analysis of U.S.-Chinese relations, however, he missed a crucial point: for all intents and purposes, the United States and China are already at war with one another.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 14, 2016
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Fossil Fuels Forever Based on the latest yearly report from the U.S. Department of Energy, while renewable forms of energy are growing far faster than anyone expected, so -- startlingly enough -- is the use of fossil fuels. As a result, it looks like oil, coal, and natural gas will continue to expand and dominate the global energy landscape for decades to come.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 20, 2016
Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Perpetual Killing Field Today's TomDispatch post is a monumental piece of reporting from "the worst place on Earth" and, on a planet where, from Cambodia to Rwanda, people remember the grim slaughter grounds of our recent history, the least noticed "killing fields" around.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 15, 2021
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, At War with Covid-19 Herd immunity? Don't count on it. Not if that "herd" is the U.S. military. According to news reports, at least a third of active-duty military personnel or those in the National Guard have opted out of getting the coronavirus vaccine. That figure, by the way, doesn't even include American troops stationed around the world, many of whom have yet to be offered the chance to be vaccinated[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 10, 2021
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, On Choosing Community Over Chaos My father, Athan G. Theoharis, passed away on July 3rd. A leading expert on the FBI, he was responsible for exposing the bureau's widespread abuses of power. He was a loyal husband, dedicated father, scholar, civil libertarian, and voting-rights advocate with an indefatigable commitment to defending democracy[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Pentagon Makes History the First Casualty In this piece, Turse combines his reportorial skills and his expertise in the Vietnam War to strip the Pentagon’s website commemorating the 50th anniversary of Vietnam of any claim of accuracy. Of course, the real war in Vietnam isn’t the sort of thing that countries like to commemorate when they hand out medals, pump up their populaces, or “remember” their wars.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 9, 2017
Tomgram: Subhankar Banerjee, The Destruction of a Vast Transnational Nursery? What happens in the Arctic doesn't just stay up north. It affects the world, as that region is the integrator of our planet's climate systems, atmospheric and oceanic. At the moment, the northernmost places on Earth are warming at more than twice the global average, a phenomenon whose impact is already being felt planetwide.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 21, 2022
Tomgram: William deBuys, Welcome to the Pyrocene Firefighters don't normally allude to early English epics, but in a briefing on the massive Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire in northern New Mexico, a top field chief said, "It's like Beowulf: it's not the thing you fear, it is the mother of the thing you fear." He meant that the flames you face may be terrifying, but scarier yet are the conditions that spawned them[...]
(6 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 16, 2018
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, The Wages of Poverty in America For millions of Americans, however, the greatest threat to their day-to-day security isn't terrorism or North Korea, Iran, Russia, or China. It's internal -- and economic. That's particularly true for the 12.7% of Americans (43.1 million of them) classified as poor by the government's criteria...
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Alfred McCoy, Maintaining American Supremacy in the Twenty-First Century From TomDispatch this morning: A sweeping, provocative, and original look at whether the U.S. can maintain itself as the planet's "sole superpower" in this century.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 1, 2016
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Guns for Tots Frida Berrigan uses her experiences as a mother with her three young children to explore, in a freewheeling and fascinating way, toy culture, toy guns, the NRA, the weapons industry, and kids (and what we adults can take from such subjects).
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 21, 2019
Tomgram: Engelhardt, American Election Exceptionalism In this country, reactions to the Mueller report have been all-American beyond belief. Let's face it, when it comes to election meddling, it's been me, me, me, 24/7 here. Yes, in some fashion some set of Russians meddled in the last election campaign...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 12, 2018
Tomgram: Rory Fanning, Will the War Stories Ever End? I'm here in Chicago, 7,000 miles and 15 years away from Jalalabad, a desolate town in southwestern Afghanistan. Yet sometimes it seems to me as if it were yesterday, or even tomorrow, and anything but thousands of miles distant.
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(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 8, 2011
William Astore, The Remoteness of 1% Wars 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 2, 2017
Tomgram: Mattea Kramer, When a Voice Tells You You'll Never Be Enough Living in such a backward, misogynistic, and violent country as the United States can make strange things happen inside women's heads, as TomDispatch regular Mattea Kramer explains. That's what gender discrimination is meant to do. But at long last it made Hillary Clinton rightfully angry. It makes me angry, too. How about you?
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 11, 2017
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Resistance is Fertile (Not Futile) In the wake of Donald Trump's inauguration, George Orwell's 1984 soared onto bestseller lists, as did Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which also hit TV screens in a storm of publicity. Zombies, fascists, and predators of every sort are now stalking the American imagination in ever-greater numbers and no wonder, given that guy in the Oval Office. Certainly, 2017 is already offeri
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 7, 2021
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Post-Afghanistan, Nation (Un)Building Comes Home They weren't kidding when they called Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires." Indeed, that cemetery has just taken another imperial body. And it wasn't pretty, was it? Not that anyone should be surprised. Even after 20 years of preparation, a burial never is[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 9, 2017
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, How We Got Here The fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989 abruptly ended one historical era and inaugurated another. So, too, did the outcome of last year's U.S. presidential election. What are we to make of the interval between those two watershed moments?
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 12, 2021
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Teetering on the Existential Edge In San Francisco, we're finally starting to put away our masks. With 74% of the city's residents over 12 fully vaccinated, for the first time in more than a year we're enjoying walking, shopping, and eating out, our faces naked. So I was startled when my partner reminded me that we need to buy masks again very soon N95 masks, that is. The California wildfire season has already begun, earlier than ever[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 23, 2021
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Trumptopia? Who knew that Martians, inside monstrous tripodal machines taller than many buildings, actually ululated, that they made eerily haunting "ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla" sounds? Well, let me tell you that they do or rather did when they were devastating London[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 20, 2011
Tomgram: Ira Chernus, Obama Trapped by Myth Why are we still at war in Afghanistan? In part, because of a very American mythology -- an "us versus them" myth of American national insecurity, writes TomDispatch regular and professor of religious studies Ira Chernus. It's such a powerful myth largely because, he adds, "it always tells us who and what to fear."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 2, 2017
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, The Forever Prisoners of Guantanamo In the spring of 2016, I asked a student of mine to do me a favor and figure out which day would be the 100th before Barack Obama's presidency ended. October 12th, he reported back, and then asked me the obvious question: Why in the world did I want to know?
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Michael Klare: The New Congress and Planetary Disaster Pop the champagne corks in Washington! It's party time for Big Energy. In the wake of the midterm elections, Republican energy hawks are ascendant, having taken the Senate and House by storm. They are preparing to put pressure on a president already presiding over a largely drill-baby-drill administration to take the last constraints off the development of North American fossil fuel reserves.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 2, 2017
Tomgram: William Hartung, Investing in the Military (and Little Else) At over $600 billion a year and counting, the Pentagon already receives significantly more than its fair share of federal funds. If President Donald Trump has his way, though, that will prove a sum for pikers and misers.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 20, 2017
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Do African Famines Presage Global Climate-Change Catastrophe? Not since World War II have more human beings been at risk from disease and starvation than at this very moment.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 18, 2017
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Trump the Flamethrower Once again the country watches in horror as firefighters struggle to contain blazes of historic voracity -- as we watched only a couple of months ago when at least 250 wildfires spread across the counties north of San Francisco. Even after long-awaited rains brought by an El Niño winter earlier in 2017, years of drought have left my state ready to explode in flames on an increasingly warming planet. All it takes is a spark.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Lewis Lapham: Going the Way of the Great Auk If you walk through the painting collection of a great museum like the Metropolitan in New York City, heading from the twentieth century into the past, one thing may strike you sooner or later: animals and birds, domestic and wild, appear ever more frequently on canvas. This, no doubt, reflects how much closer to nature and a wilder world we all once were.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 23, 2019
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, What Illinois Bikers Know That Washington Doesn't Earlier this month, I spent a day visiting Marseilles to videotape a documentary about recent American military history, specifically the ongoing wars that most of us prefer not to think about. Lest there be any confusion, let me be more specific. I am not referring to Marseilles (mar-SAY), France, [...] No, my destination was Marseilles (mar-SAYLZ), Illinois, a small prairie town with a population hovering around 5,000.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 27, 2021
Tomgram: Nick Turse, A Forever Wall for Our Forever Wars As a parting shot, on its way out of Afghanistan, the United States military launched a drone attack that the Pentagon called a "righteous strike." The final missile fired during 20 years of occupation, that August 29th airstrike averted an Islamic State car-bomb attack on the last American troops at Kabul's airport. At least, that's what the Pentagon told the world[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 5, 2022
Tomgram: William Astore, Will the Pentagon Budget Ever Shrink? I have a question for you: What would it take in today's world for America's military spending to go down? Here's one admittedly farfetched scenario: Vladimir Putin loses his grip on power and Russia retrenches militarily while reaching out to normalize relations with the West[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Engelhardt: Inside the American Terrordome When I left [Iraq] in 2010, the year before the American military finally departed, the truth on the ground should have been clear enough to anyone with the vision to take it in. Iraq had already been tacitly divided into feuding state-lets controlled by Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds. The Baghdad government had turned into a typical, gleeful third-world kleptocracy fueled by American money, but with a particularly nasty twist...
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 6, 2017
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Two Impulsive Leaders Fan the Global Flames The Middle East. Could there be a more perilous place on Earth, including North Korea? Not likely. The planet's two leading nuclear armed powers backing battling proxies amply supplied with conventional weapons; terror groups splitting and spreading; religious-sectarian wars threatening amid a plethora of ongoing armed hostilities stretching from Syria to Iraq to Yemen. And that was before Donald Trump and his team arrived on
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 28, 2022
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, Poverty is the Sin, Not Poor People As if killing the Child Tax Credit, blocking voting rights, gutting key climate legislation, and refusing living wages wasn't enough, West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin is now promoting legislation that further punishes the poor and marginalized. Along with Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio, he's introduced the PIPES Act, which undercuts key harm-reduction funding from the Department of Health and Human Services
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 5, 2018
Tomgram: James Carroll, Entering the Second Nuclear Age? It was only an announcement, but think of it as the beginning of a journey into hell. Last week, President Donald Trump made public his decision to abrogate the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), a 1987 agreement with the Soviet Union.
SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, December 2, 2018
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Grandmasters of the Universe As Washington's leadership fades more quickly than anyone could have imagined and a new global order struggles to take shape, a generation of leaders has crowded onto the world stage with their own bold geopolitical visions for winning international influence.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 11, 2021
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Can America's Soul Be Saved? When Martin Luther King preached his famous sermon "Beyond Vietnam" at Riverside Church in New York City in April 1967, I don't recall giving his words a second thought. Although at the time I was just up the Hudson River attending West Point, his call for a "radical revolution in values" did not resonate with me.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 4, 2021
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, The Guanta'namo Conundrum The Guanta'namo conundrum never seems to end. Twelve years ago, I had other expectations. I envisioned a writing project that I had no doubt would be part of my future: an account of Guanta'namo's last 100 days. I expected to narrate in reverse, the episodes in a book I had just published, The Least Worst Place: Guanta'namo's First 100 Days, about well, the title makes it all too obvious[...]
SHARE More Sharing        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.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 19, 2013
Bill McKibben: A Movement for a New Planet In his stunningly insightful book The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, Jonathan Schell suggested that there were two world-changing inventions for the twentieth century, nuclear weapons and nonviolence, and described the way their histories and powers were intertwined.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 8, 2018
Extremists "R" Us Now, for a moment, let's consider the possible extremism of Washington in a more organized way. Here, then, is my six-category rundown of what I would call American extremity on a global scale...
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SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 2, 2022
Best of TomDispatch: Engelhardt, A Message in a Bottle from My Mother Almost three quarters of a century ago, my mother placed a message in a bottle and tossed it out beyond the waves. It bobbed along through tides, storms, and squalls until just recently, almost four decades after her death, it washed ashore at my feet. I'm speaking metaphorically, of course. Still, what happened, even stripped of the metaphors, does astonish me [...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 27, 2016
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Too Big to Fail, Hillary-Style Of a Hillary Clinton presidency, so much less has been written and yet she's the woman who never saw a bank CEO she couldn't get a couple of hundred thousand dollars from for giving thoroughly unsurprising speeches.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 22, 2022
Tomgram: Hartung, Cleveland-Stout, and Giorno, Cold Wars, Then and Now A growing chorus of pundits and policymakers has suggested that Russia's invasion of Ukraine marks the beginning of a new Cold War. If so, that means trillions of additional dollars for the Pentagon in the years to come coupled with a more aggressive military posture in every corner of the world[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Alien Visitations Tucson and Kabul are on opposite sides of an American planet in more ways than the obvious. In my latest post, I explore various aspects of this strange reality of our moment, asking why Americans don't care about the Afghan innocents they kill and why they care so much about the American innocents who died.
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 29, 2017
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Fighting the War You Know (Even If It Won't Work) We walked in a single file. Not because it was tactically sound. It wasn't -- at least according to standard infantry doctrine. Patrolling southern Afghanistan in column formation limited maneuverability, made it difficult to mass fire, and exposed us to enfilading machine-gun bursts. Still, in 2011, in the Pashmul District of Kandahar Province, single file was our best bet.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 7, 2017
Todd Miller, The Market in Walls Is Growing in a Warming World When I first talked to the three Honduran men in the train yard in the southern Mexican town of Tenosique, I had no idea that they were climate-change refugees. We were 20 miles from the border with Guatemala at a rail yard where Central American refugees often congregated to try to board La Bestia ("the Beast"), the nickname given to the infamous train that has proven so deadly for those traveling north...
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 22, 2018
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, The Hidden Meaning of American Decline Month by month, tweet by tweet, the events of the past two years have made it clearer than ever that Washington's once-formidable global might is indeed fading. As the American empire unravels with previously unimagined speed, there are many across this country's political spectrum who will not mourn its passing.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 16, 2019
Tomgram: William Astore, A Wasteful Weapon for America's Forever Wars How are you with numbers? I can deal with $1.5 million. I think I can even imagine $1.5 billion, a sum a thousand times greater. But how about a million times greater: $1.5 trillion? That happens to be the estimated cost of the Pentagon's program to build, deploy, and maintain the no-longer-so-new F-35 jet fighter over its lifetime.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 9, 2020
Tomgram: William Astore, On Being Black and Blue in America As I lived through the nightmare of the election campaign just past, I often found myself dreaming of another American world entirely. Anything but this one.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 3, 2022
Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Forgotten People of a Fictional Country We live on a planet in motion, a world of collision and drift. This was once an Earth of super-continents Gondwana, Rodinia, Pangea. The eastern seaboard of the United States sidled up against West Africa, while Antarctica cozied up to the opposite side of the African continent. But nothing in this world lasts and the tectonic plates covering the planet are always in motion[...]
(5 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 6, 2018
Tomgram: Belle Chesler, Will an AR-15 Succeed Where the American Dream Failed? So what was it about the Parkland killings that tipped the scale? Why hadn't this happened after Columbine or Newtown? These are among the questions we teachers have been asking one another at my school recently. Perhaps what's driving this moment is fear of the seeming inevitability, the not-if-but-when of it all. As teachers, we are forced to wonder: When will it be our turn?
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 13, 2014
Tomgram: Michael Klare, In the Carbon Wars, Big Oil Is Winning Michael Klare offers a powerful and original look at why we’re losing the “carbon wars.” Given that we’ve built our global civilization on the continuing hit of energy that fossil fuels provide and given the interests arrayed around exploiting that hit, the gravitational pull of what Klare calls "Planet Carbon" is staggering. In his latest piece, he shows just why, in three vivid instances, we're losing ground.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 16, 2021
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, Making Sense of the Eviction Crisis Over the past weeks, multiple crises have merged: a crisis of democracy with the most significant attack on voting rights since Reconstruction; a climate crisis with lives and livelihoods upended in the Gulf Coast and the Northeast by extreme weather events and in the West by a stunning fire season; and an economic crisis in which millions are being cut off from Pandemic Unemployment Insurance[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 10, 2014
Astra Taylor, Misogyny and the Cult of Internet Openness The Internet has been hailed for its “openness” and its democratic spirit even as it’s taken real world disparities and inequalities online and often amplified them. TomDispatch gets at this issue in a powerful way via a Rebecca Solnit-introduced piece by documentary filmmaker Astra Taylor, adapted from her new book, The People’s Platform. Today, Taylor explores what’s happened to women online.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 14, 2020
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Might the Coronavirus Be a Peacemaker? Let me quote a Trumpian figure from long ago, Henry Ford. That's right, the bigot who created the Ford Motor Company (and once even ran for president). Back in 1916, in an interview with a Chicago Tribune reporter, he offered this bit of wisdom on the subject of history...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 7, 2022
Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Geopolitics of Hell Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been widely described as the beginning of a new cold war, much like the old one in both its cast of characters and ideological nature. "In the contest between democracy and autocracy, between sovereignty and subjugation, make no mistake freedom will prevail," President Biden asserted in a televised address to the nation the day Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 23, 2018
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Trumping Trump? One thing already seems clear in the Trump era: the world will not turn out to be the American president's playground. His ultra-unilateralist, rejectionist policies on trade, the Iran denuclearization agreement, the costs of defense, and climate change are already creating an incipient anti-Trump movement globally (and in the United States as well).
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 14, 2017
Tomgram: Ariel Dorfman, A Tale of Two Donalds The organizers of the white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville last month knew just what they were doing when they decided to carry torches on their nocturnal march to protest the dethroning of a statue of Robert E. Lee. That brandishing of fire in the night was meant to evoke memories of terror, of past parades of hate and aggression by the Ku Klux Klan in the United States and Adolf Hitler's Freikorps in Germany.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 17, 2018
Tomgram: John Feffer, The New World Order Is Here You know the story: the globalists want your guns. They want your democracy. They're hovering just beyond the horizon in those black helicopters. They control the media and Wall Street. They've burrowed into a deep state that stretches like a vast tectonic plate beneath America's fragile government institutions...
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 6, 2014
Engelhardt: What, Me Worry? Today, a personal piece of mine about how the young react to the exterminatory dreams and plans of their elders. It's based on an elaborate map I made in perhaps 1959 at age 15 in the back of my American history classroom depicting the Chinese conquest of the world. Jumping more than half a century, I then wonder what sorts of "maps" kids in 2014, facing another kind of exterminatory threat (climate change), are making.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 19, 2022
Tomgram: John Feffer, The Future of Autocracy Here's a nightmare scenario: Unable to recruit enough soldiers from the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin takes North Korean leader Kim Jong-un up on his recent offer to send 100,000 North Koreans to join the Russian president's ill-fated attempt to seize Ukraine[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 20, 2010
Tomgram: Michael Klare, China Shakes the World The year 2009 was a bad one for the United States. And no, I'm not talking about unemployment, or poverty, or home foreclosures, or banks too-big-to-fail, or any of the other normal bad news. I'm talking about something serious. As the world's leading maker of things that go bang in the night (and I don't mean Hollywood films), we took a hit last year. A big one.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 9, 2012
Nick Turse: Tomorrow's Blowback Today? Only in America: It turns out that we're the sole country on the planet where a majority of people (62%) are sunnily in favor of sending drones across the globe (and across the borders of other countries) to take out terrorists. According to Pew Research's latest polling, that includes 74% of Republicans, 60% of independents, and 58% of Democrats. Nowhere else is such sentiment to be found.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Karen Greenberg: Will the U.S. Go to "War" Against Ebola? As TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg points out today, given an administration already on the ropes over its new war in the Middle East, it would be all too easy for U.S. officials, amid the usual panic, to fall back on that comfortable template of the post-9/11 years, the war on terror, when it comes to Ebola.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 24, 2017
Tomgram: John Feffer, A Globalism of the 1% Donald Trump is a worldly fellow. He travels the globe on his private jet. He's married to a Slovene and divorced from a Czech. He doesn't speak any other languages, but hey, he's an American, so monolingualism is his birthright.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Buttering Up the Pentagon Think of it as the chicken-or-the-egg question for the ages: Do very real threats to the United States inadvertently benefit the military-industrial complex or does the national security state, by its very nature, conjure up inflated threats to feed that defense machine?
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 28, 2019
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Climate Change as the End Game for U.S. Global Power Once upon a time in America, we could all argue about whether or not U.S. global power was declining. Now, most observers have little doubt that the end is just a matter of timing and circumstance. Ten years ago, I predicted that, by 2025, it would be all over for American power, a then-controversial comment that's commonplace today.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Rebecca Solnit, The New Feminist Road Map Rebecca Solnit's new book on the gender wars, from which today's post is taken, offers a fresh look at feminism a half-century later. Solnit suggests that, whatever has yet to be won, by changing our assumptions feminists have already insured that the biggest battle of all is in the past. That women are equal to men and deserve equal rights as well is no longer an earth-shattering idea, and that in itself is a great victory.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 17, 2022
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, An Epochal Decline in American Global Power Throughout 2021, Americans were absorbed in arguments over mask mandates, school closings, and the meaning of the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Meanwhile, geopolitical hot spots were erupting across Eurasia, forming a veritable ring of fire around that vast land mass[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 24, 2010
Tomgram: Stephan Salisbury, Being Muslim Is No Crime Alioune Niass, the Sengalese Muslim vendor who first spotted the now infamous smoking SUV in Times Square and alerted police, is no hero...
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Tomgram: Michael Schwartz, Weapons of Mass Disruption Memo to President Obama" -- so begins sociologist, author of War Without End, and TomDispatch regular Michael Schwartz in a highly original new TomDispatch post -- "Given the absence of intelligent intelligence and the inadequacy of your advisers' advice, it's not surprising that your handling of the Egyptian uprising has set new standards for foreign policy incoherence and incompetence.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 25, 2019
Tomgram: William deBuys, 12 Ways to Make Sense of the Border Mess Borders are cruel. I know this because I've been studying the U.S.-Mexico border for more than 40 years. It features prominently in two of my books, written in different decades. It keeps pulling me back.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 17, 2021
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Is Higher Education a Pyramid Scheme? For the last decade and a half, I've been teaching ethics to undergraduates. Now admittedly, a little late to the party I've started seriously questioning my own ethics. I've begun to wonder just what it means to be a participant, however minor, in the pyramid scheme that higher education has become in the years since I went to college[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 12, 2022
Tomgram: Nina Burleigh, Pandemic Anti-Rights Syndrome Last month, not long after Florida federal judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle ruled that the transportation mask mandate was illegal, I flew from New York City to Miami. Videos of airplane passengers in midflight ripping off their masks and cheering with joy had already gone viral following the judge's ruling[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Obama Still Hammering Away In his latest TomDispatch post, as the paperback of his bestselling book Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War is published, Andrew Bacevich brilliantly explains why it's time to stop spending so much time on official Washington's motives and look instead to its repetitious methods when it comes to American policy in the Greater Middle East.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 5, 2017
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Special Ops, Shadow Wars, and the Golden Age of the Gray Zone Don't think the fad for "draining the swamp" began on the campaign trail with Donald Trump. It didn't, although the "swamp" to be drained in the days after the 9/11 attacks wasn't in Washington; it was a global one.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 26, 2020
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, The Nightmare That Joe Could Inherit Donald Trump isn't just inside the heads of his Trumpster base; he's long been a consuming obsession among those yearning for his defeat in November. With barely more than a week to go before the election of our lifetime, those given to nail biting as a response to anxiety have by now gnawed ourselves down to the quick.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 24, 2022
Tomgram: Alfred W. McCoy, A Planet on the Brink Consider us at the edge of the sort of epochal change not seen for centuries, even millennia. By the middle of this century, we will be living under such radically altered circumstances that the present decade, the 2020s, will undoubtedly seem like another era entirely, akin perhaps to the Middle Ages[...]
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Tomgram: Ira Chernus, Is Palestine America's Next Vietnam? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hasn't been alone in playing for time when it comes to American policy, that's for sure. (Think, for instance, of our Afghan War commander General David Petraeus.) But Netanyahu played out the pre-election months with some skill and much shuffling of feet, as he officially pondered Obama administration proposals to reinstitute a settlements freeze in return for copious concessions.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 20, 2010
Tomgram: Max Blumenthal, The Great Fear Moments of imperial and economic decline -- according to a recent poll, 65% of Americans now believe this country to be "in a state of decline" -- can also be periods of cultishness, even of madness incarnate. Such a mood now seems to be spreading through the United States.
Zombie, From FlickrPhotos
SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, December 6, 2017
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A President Made for a Zombie Apocalypse Media World Don't look away. I mean it! Keep on staring just like you've been doing, just like we've all been doing since he rode down that escalator into the presidential race in June 2015 and, while you have your eyes on him, I'll tell you exactly why you shouldn't stop.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 10, 2017
Tomgram: Dahr Jamail, Alaska in the Crosshairs It's war in the Gulf and the U.S. Navy is on hand to protect us. No, not that Gulf! I'm talking about the Gulf of Alaska and it's actually mock war -- if, that is, you don't happen to be a fin whale or a wild salmon.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 17, 2018
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Dismantling Democracy, One Word at a Time Consider us officially in an Orwellian world, though we only half realize it. While we were barely looking, significant parts of an American language long familiar to us quite literally, and in a remarkably coherent way, went down the equivalent of George Orwell's infamous Memory Hole.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 4, 2022
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Not-So-Great Powers on a Dangerous Planet In Western military circles, it's common to refer to the "balance of forces" the lineup of tanks, planes, ships, missiles, and battle formations on the opposing sides of any conflict. If one has twice as many combat assets as its opponent and the leadership abilities on each side are approximately equal, it should win[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 8, 2018
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, A Mother Confronts a World on Fire As a mother and an activist, here's what I've concluded as 2018 begins: it's getting harder and harder to think about the future -- at least in that soaring Whitney Houston fashion. You know the song: "I believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way..." These days, doesn't it sound quaint and of another age?
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 8, 2021
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Will the Four Horsemen of the Media Continue to Trample Us? The Four Horsemen of our media apocalypse Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and Donald Trump have ridden roughshod over us this past half-century leaving their hoofprints on our politics, our culture, and our lives. Two of them are gone now, but their legacies, including the News Corporation, the Fox News empire, and a gang of broadcast barbarians will ensure that a lasting plague of misinformation, propaganda [...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 4, 2021
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Will Sports Get Over Trumpism? Overwhelmed by the intertwined plagues of Covid-19 and Trumpism, sports didn't stand a chance in 2020. No wonder I'm weirded out by the strange, metaphorical moments of that last disastrous year and the first days of this one. To mention just three among so many: Dr. Anthony Fauci's errant pitch on opening day of the Major League Baseball season; Ben and Jerry's announcement of its newest ice cream flavor,[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 16, 2021
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, The Lessons of Suffering in a Covid-19 World In June 1990, future South African President Nelson Mandela addressed a joint session of Congress only months after being released from 27 years in a South African apartheid prison. He reminded the political leadership of the United States that "to deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity. To impose on them a wretched life of hunger and deprivation is to dehumanise them."
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 2, 2015
William Astore: Groundhog Day in the War on Terror Back in July 2010, I wrote an article for TomDispatch on the seven reasons why America can't stop making war. More than four years later, with the war on terror still ongoing, with the mission eternally unaccomplished, here's a fresh take on the top seven reasons why never-ending war is the new normal in America.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 27, 2022
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, One War Too Many on Planet Earth When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, I was easing my way into a new job and in the throes of the teaching year. But that war quickly hijacked my life. I spend most of my day poring over multiple newspapers, magazines, blogs, and the Twitter feeds of various military mavens, a few of whom have been catapulted by the war from obscurity to a modicum of fame[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 5, 2018
Tomgram: Arnold Isaacs, The False Case Against "Foreign-Born Terrorists" When you see an immigrant or a foreign visitor, especially from a Muslim country, should your first thought be that you might be looking at a possible terrorist? Clearly, that's how the Trump administration wants Americans to react.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 3, 2014
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Bermuda Triangle of National Security Here’s a conundrum for you. Since 2001, the U.S. national security state has rarely played a card that hasn’t been trumped. (You can do the list yourself: Iraq, Afghanistan, the Global War on Terror, etc., etc.) Yet every disastrous step they’ve taken has only tightened their grip on state power here. It’s given them more money, more areas to control, and so on.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 21, 2018
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Will China Be the Next Global Hegemon? As the second year of Donald Trump's presidency and sixth of Xi Jinping's draws to a close, the world seems to be witnessing one of those epochal clashes that can change the contours of global power.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 13, 2019
Tomgram: Laura Gottesdiener, An American Saddam Hussein? There's a dark joke going around Baghdad these days. Noof Assi, a 30-year-old Iraqi peace activist and humanitarian worker, told it to me by phone. Our conversation takes place in late May just after the Trump administration has announced that it would add 1,500 additional U.S. troops to its Middle Eastern garrisons.
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 4, 2011
The End of America's Pacific Century, by John Feffer 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 27, 2018
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The White Ford Bronco Presidency Call it mega-historic, if you wish. Never from Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar to Soviet despot Joseph Stalin, from the Sun King Louis the XIV to President Ronald Reagan, from George Washington to Barack Obama, has anyone -- star, icon, personality, president, autocrat, emperor -- been covered in anything like this fashion.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 11, 2021
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The History of the Present You may have noticed: the Blob is back. Beneath a veneer of gender and racial diversity, the Biden national security team consists of seasoned operatives who earned their spurs in Washington long before Donald Trump showed up to spoil the party. So, if you're looking for fresh faces at the departments of state or defense, the National Security Council or the various intelligence agencies, you'll have to search pretty hard[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 15, 2012
Nick Turse: The Secret Building Boom of the Obama Years Part of a slogan from my hometown past sticks in my mind. "Build we must," it went. Such an American phrase, really. Evidence of a can-do spirit from another country in another age. Now, in can't-do America with its disintegrating infrastructure, "build we mustn't" seems more in the spirit of the times -- with one obvious exception.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 22, 2021
Tomgram: Nina Burleigh, The Pandemic Memory Hole The second Moderna shot made me sick as predicted. A 24-hour touch of what an alarmed immune system feels like left me all the more grateful for my good fortune in avoiding the real thing and for being alive at a time when science had devised a 95% effective vaccine in record time[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 23, 2016
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics... and U.S. Africa Command Turse explores the way U.S. Africa Command has seemingly massaged its numbers in testimony to Congress and so evidently managed to disappear piles of its missions on that continent, obscuring the expansion of U.S. military operations there.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 14, 2021
Tomgram: Jane Braxton Little, Living Through the Dixie Fire Half a mile south of what's left of the old Gold Rush-era town of Greenville, California, Highway 89 climbs steeply in a series of S-turns as familiar to me as my own backyard. From the top of that grade, I've sometimes seen bald eagles soaring over the valley that stretches to the base of Keddie Peak, the northernmost mountain in California's Sierra Nevada range[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 9, 2014
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Have the Obits for Peak Oil Come Too Soon? So here we are in a record-breaking “polar vortex” with Florida’s Everglades going on a freeze watch and Minnesota registering wind chills of -60 degrees Fahrenheit. This most extreme of weather systems, which should warm the hearts of climate deniers, may in fact turn out to be climate-change related (thanks to a melting Arctic warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet).
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Todd Miller, The Creation of a Border Security State TomDispatch has once again sent its regular border correspondent, Todd Miller, out to cover the latest in the militarization and up-armoring of those border zones and, in the process, the creation of a border security state. This stuff couldn’t be more important -- and not just to immigration mavens, either. His latest report takes you from Border Security Expo 2014 to the broiling backlands of Arizona.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 10, 2012
Jeremiah Goulka: Confessions of a Former Republican Here, to my mind, was one strange aspect of the political convention season just past: since the great meltdown of 2008, brilliantly engineered by various giant financial institutions gone wild, we've seen a collapse in the wealth of middle-class African Americans and Hispanics, and a significant drop in the wealth of middle-class whites. Only the rich have benefitted.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 15, 2016
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Donald Trump's Energy Nostalgia and the Path to Hell Scroll through Donald Trump's campaign promises or listen to his speeches and you could easily conclude that his energy policy consists of little more than a wish list drawn up by the major fossil fuel companies
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 26, 2021
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, The Fantasy War from Hell On May 1st, the date Donald Trump signed onto for the withdrawal of the remaining 3,500 American troops from Afghanistan, the war there, already 19 years old, was still officially a teenager. Think of September 11, 2021 the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the date Joe Biden has chosen for the same as, in essence, the very moment when its teenage years will be over[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Living in the 51st State (of Denial) Graduates of the class of 2010, I'm honored to have been asked to address you today, but I would not want to be you...
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 9, 2013
Andrew Bacevich, Drama from Obama Here is the strangeness of our moment: the U.S. has no rival on the planet. Its global military stance is historically unparalleled and largely uncontested. And yet somehow, in crucial areas of the world, Washington's power to do anything is significantly, visibly lessening.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 15, 2021
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, To Build or Not to Build? That Is the Question During the Trump years, the phrase "Infrastructure Week" rang out as a sort of Groundhog Day-style punchline. What began in June 2017 as a failed effort by The Donald's White House and a Republican Senate to focus on the desperately needed rebuilding of American infrastructure morphed into a meme and a running joke in Washington[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 18, 2021
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Ultimate Ghost Story? Here's one of the things I now do every morning. I go to the online Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center and check out the figures there global coronavirus cases and deaths, U.S. coronavirus cases and deaths. And I do so the way that, not so long ago, I would have opened the sports pages and checked out the latest scores of whatever New York team I was rooting for[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 10, 2014
Peter Van Buren: Iraq and the Battle of the Potomac Karl von Clausewitz, the famed Prussian military thinker, is best known for his aphorism "War is the continuation of state policy by other means." But what happens to a war in the absence of coherent state policy?
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SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 25, 2010
Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Invasion of the Democracy Crushers This country is being run for the benefit of alien life forms. They've invaded; they've infiltrated; they've conquered; and a lot of the most powerful people on Earth do their bidding, including five out of our nine Supreme Court justices earlier this year and a whole lot of senators and other elected officials all the time.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 22, 2015
Washington's Walking Dead When it comes to the national security state, our capital has become a thought-free zone.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 15, 2018
Tomgram: William Astore, The Fog of War in America Overseas, the United States is engaged in real wars in which bombs are dropped, missiles are launched, and people (generally not Americans) are killed, wounded, uprooted, and displaced. Yet here at home, there's nothing real about those wars. Here, it's phony war all the way. In the last 17 years of "forever war," this nation hasn't for one second been mobilized.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 17, 2022
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Cold War II or World War III? He's our very own emperor from hell, an updated version of Nero who, in legend, burned down Rome on a whim, though ours prefers drowning Washington. Why, just the other day, Donald Trump and you knew perfectly well who I meant bent the ears of 250 top Republican donors for 84 minutes[...]
Donald Trump, From ArchivedPhotos
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 30, 2015
Nomi Prins; Welcome to Panem 2016 (Starring Donald Trump But Not Katniss Everdeen) Fact: too many Republican candidates are clogging the political scene. Perhaps what's needed is an American Hunger Games to cut the field to size. Each candidate could enter the wilderness with one weapon and one undocumented worker and see who wins.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Pyromaniacs, Inc. Worlds end. Every day. We all die sooner or later. When you get to my age, it's a subject that can't help but be on your mind.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 18, 2013
Tomgram: Michael Klare, A Climate Change-Fueled Revolution? There's a crossroads moment in our recent history that comes back to me whenever I think of our warming planet. (2013 is shaping up to be the seventh warmest year since records began to be kept in 1850. The 10 warmest years have all occured since 1998.)
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 27, 2017
Tomgram: Jon Else, Eyes on the Prize 2017 Today, with the three branches of government controlled by men intolerant of dissent and hounded by their own dark vision of pluralism, few human rights advocates of any stripe can reasonably expect a hearing in Washington.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 6, 2017
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Believe the Autocrat When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney launched their forever wars -- under the banner of a "Global War on Terror" -- they unleashed an unholy trinity of tactics. Torture, rendition, and indefinite detention became the order of the day. After a partial suspension of these policies in the Obama years, they now appear poised for resurrection.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 15, 2017
The Globalization of Misery Consider what I never learned about Mosul my loss, a sign of my ignorance. Yet, in recent months, little as I know about the place, it's been on my mind -- in part because what's now happening to that city will be the world's loss as well as mine.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Tomgram: Michael Klare, On the Road to World War III? When it comes to relations between Donald Trump's America, Vladimir Putin's Russia, and Xi Jinping's China, observers everywhere are starting to talk about a return to an all-too-familiar past.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 1, 2021
Tomgram: Belle Chesler, Living in Pandemic Purgatory, Up Close and Personal It seems appropriate that the 2020-2021 school year in Portland, Oregon, began amid toxic smoke from the catastrophic wildfires that blanketed many parts of the state for almost two weeks. The night before the first day of school, the smoke alarm in my bedroom went off. Looking back, I see it as a clarion call, a shrieking, beeping warning of all the threats, real and existential, we'd face in the year to come[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The United States of Fear It's finally coming into focus, and it's not even a difficult equation to grasp. It goes like this: take a country in the grips of an expanding national security state and sooner or later your "safety" will mean your humiliation, your degradation. And by the way, it will mean the degradation of your country, too.
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Bill McKibben: Puncturing the Pipeline "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."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 4, 2014
Engelhardt: War to the Horizon 2016 is already shaping up as a War Party election all the way. It goes without saying that whichever Republican candidate emerges from the pack will be a war-firster, while the leading Democratic candidate of the moment, Hillary Clinton, is another war-fightin' liberal of the first order.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 29, 2016
Tomgram: Arlie Hochschild, Trumping Environmentalism TomDispatch takes you on a remarkable journey into the bayous of Louisiana, a world of Tea Party supporters, of an environmental disaster, and of the confounding contradictions of American political life in the midst of Election 2016.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 10, 2021
Tomgram: William Astore, War Is Strictly Business in Twenty-First Century America Why don't America's wars ever end? I know, I know: President Joe Biden has announced that our combat troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan by 9/11 of this year, marking the 20th anniversary of the colossal failure of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to defend America[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 4, 2022
Tomgram: Nick Turse, A Blank Check for Endless War It began more than two decades ago. On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a "war on terror" and told a joint session of Congress (and the American people) that "the course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain[...]"
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 17, 2022
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Unbanning Maus! Sometimes life has a way of making you realize things about yourself. Recently, I discovered that an urge of mine, almost four decades old, had been the very opposite of that of a rural Tennessee school board this January. In another life, I played a role in what could be thought of as the unbanning of the graphic novel Maus[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 7, 2022
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Living in a Tipping-Point World When I was growing up, there was a parody of an old-fashioned public announcement tacked to the wall of our kitchen that I vividly remember. It had step-by-step instructions for what to do "in case of a nuclear bomb attack." Step 6 was "bend over and place your head firmly between your legs"; step 7, "kiss your ass goodbye[...]"
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 15, 2011
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Is Washington Out of Gas? 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!
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 19, 2016
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Class of 2017 -- So Sorry! Fifteen years after 9/11, war and possible war are embedded in our American way of life and the public is consumed with safety and security-related fears, of terrorism in particular, that have little basis in reality but have helped immensely to expand our national security state.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 20, 2018
William Astore, Make Sports, Not War As long as I can remember, I've been a sports fan. As long as I can remember, I've been interested in the military. Until recently, I experienced those as two separate and distinct worlds...
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 9, 2021
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, What Makes a "Good Job" Good? A year ago, just a few weeks before San Francisco locked itself down for the pandemic, I fell deeply in love with a 50-year-old. The object of my desire was a wooden floor loom in the window of my local thrift shop[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 9, 2021
Tomgram: Hartung and Smithberger, The Pentagon's Yearly Blank Check Even as Congress moves to increase the Pentagon budget well beyond the astronomical levels proposed by the Biden administration, a new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has outlined three different ways to cut $1 trillion in Department of Defense spending over the next decade[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 11, 2022
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, The Rise of White Christian Nationalism "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality." Archbishop Desmond Tutu [...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 6, 2021
Tomgram: John Feffer, Anti-Globalists Unite to Take Over the World What alt-right guru Steve Bannon failed to create, German taxpayers have just stepped in to revive: a Nationalist International. Thanks to the German government, the far right is about to get its own well-heeled global think tank, complete with the sort of political academy that was so dear to Bannon's plan for world domination[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 10, 2022
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, War on an Endangered Planet Just as the relentless grinding of the earth's tectonic plates produces earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, so the endless superpower struggle for dominance over Eurasia is fraught with tensions and armed conflict. Beneath the visible outbreak of war in Ukraine and the U.S.-Chinese naval standoff in the South China Sea, there is now an underlying shift in geopolitical power in process[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 21, 2011
Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Hope and Turmoil in 2011 "Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be." So begins Rebecca Solnit in her latest, moving exploration of the nature of the revolutionary moment from the French Revolution to the Egyptian one
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(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 23, 2013
Engelhardt: The Biggest Criminal Enterprise in History We have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide. And one for the conscious destruction of aspects of the environment: ecocide. But we don't have a word for the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on, the world as humanity had known it until, historically speaking, late last night. A possibility might be "terracide" from the Latin word for earth.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 26, 2018
Turning 74 in a Failing World Sooner or later, there comes a moment in the history of the experiment when those muscles start to falter, those brain cells begin jumping ship, and in some fashion, spectacular or not, it all comes tumbling down. And that, as they say (or should say), is history. Human history, at least.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 22, 2021
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Whose Planet Are We On? Empires live and die by their illusions. Visions of empowerment can inspire nations to scale the heights of global hegemony. Similarly, however, illusions of omnipotence can send fading empires crashing into oblivion. So it was with Great Britain in the 1950s and so it may be with the United States today.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 24, 2021
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Is a Cold War Still Possible in an Overheating World? In recent months, Washington has had a lot to say about China's ever-expanding air, naval, and missile power. But when Pentagon officials address the topic, they generally speak less about that country's current capabilities, which remain vastly inferior to those of the U.S., than the world they foresee in the 2030s and 2040s, when Beijing is expected to have acquired far more sophisticated weaponry[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 26, 2022
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Bodies Beyond Bucha Madogaz Musa Abdullah still remembers the phone call. But what came next was a blur. He drove for hours, deep into the Libyan desert, speeding toward the border with Algeria. His mind buckled, his thoughts reeled, and more than three years later, he's still not certain how he made that six-hour journey[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 5, 2016
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Revolving Doors, Robust Rolodexes, and Runaway Generals Nick Turse offers a riveting look at what "retirement" means for top commanders in the U.S. military and believe me, if you don't think public service pays big time, think again.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 29, 2016
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Trump's Future Piggy Bank, Our Country? As Nomi Prins, author of All the Presidents' Bankers points out in her latest TomDispatch piece on election 2016, there's one thing Donald Trump is not prepared to do, whatever the political positions he may espouse: give up what's best for Donald Trump.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 15, 2021
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, War Is a Cancer on Our Democracy Sometimes, as I consider America's never-ending wars of this century, I can't help thinking of those lyrics from the Edwin Starr song, "(War, huh) Yeah! (What is it good for?) Absolutely nothing!" I mean, remind me, what good have those disastrous, failed, still largely ongoing conflicts done for this country? Or for you? Or for me?
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 14, 2013
William deBuys: Exodus from Phoenix We're not the first people on the planet ever to experience climate stress. In the overheating, increasingly parched American Southwest, which has been experiencing rising temperatures, spreading drought conditions, and record wildfires, there is an ancient history of staggering mega-droughts, events far worse than the infamous "dust bowl" of the 1930s, the seven-year drought that devastated America's prairie lands.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 26, 2021
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Rip Van Biden's America After four years of Donald Trump's fitful tenure, America is awakening from a long, troubled sleep to discover, like the fictional character Rip Van Winkle, that the world it once knew has changed beyond all recognition...
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 5, 2016
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Going Offshore in the 2016 Election Campaign Nomi Prins, author of All the President's Bankers, uses the Panama Papers moment to take the whole present election campaign offshore. She analyzes just what the leading candidates are likely to do (or more likely not do) about all of the "missing" money flowing out of our lives and into those tax havens in Panama and elsewhere, increasing inequality and destabilizing the planet.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 16, 2016
Tomgram: Judith Coburn, On the Mean Streets of America Step aside, Sam Spade. Move over, Philip Marlowe. You want noir? Skip the famed private eye novels and films of the 1930s and 1940s and turn to our present American world and to neighborhoods where the postman doesn't ring even once, but the police are ready to shoot more than once, often on the slightest excuse.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 10, 2018
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Creating a Perpetual War Machine The purpose of all wars, is peace. So observed St. Augustine early in the first millennium A.D. Far be it from me to disagree with the esteemed Bishop of Hippo, but his crisply formulated aphorism just might require a bit of updating.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 20, 2021
Tomgram: William Astore, A Bright Future for Weapons and War Yoda, the Jedi Master in the Star Wars films, once pointed out that the future is all too difficult to see and it's hard to deny his insight. Yet I'd argue that, when it comes to the U.S. military and its wars, Yoda was just plain wrong. That part of the future is all too easy to imagine[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 4, 2017
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Teflon Wars On successive days recently, I saw two museum shows that caught something of a lost American world and seemed eerily relevant in the Age of Trump. The first, "Hippie Modernism," an exploration of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s (heavy on psychedelic posters), was appropriately enough at the Berkeley Art Museum.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 8, 2019
Tomgram: Nick Turse, One Down, Who Knows How Many to Go? And just like that, arguably the most important American garrison in Syria was (maybe) being struck from the Pentagon's books -- except, as it happens, al-Tanf was never actually on the Pentagon's books...
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Tomgram: Patrick Cockburn, An Endless Cycle of Indecisive Wars As Patrick Cockburn points out in his TomDispatch post today, we have entered "an age of disintegration." And he should know. There may be no Western reporter who has covered the grim dawn of that age in the Greater Middle East and North Africa.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 10, 2017
Aiding and Abetting the Tweeter-in-Chief I don't tweet, but I do have a brief message for our president: Will you please get the hell out of the way for a few minutes? You and your antics are blocking our view of the damn world and it's a world we should be focusing on!
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 21, 2018
Tomgram: John Feffer, Korea's Two "Impossibles" Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump have posted some of the highest negatives since Attila the Hun. The notion that two such wrongs could make a right certainly tests the credulity of the most dispassionate observer. You wouldn't normally want to buy a used car, much less a complex diplomatic deal, from either of them.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 2, 2018
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, The Disrupter-in-Chief According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, entropy is "a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder." With that in mind, perhaps the best way to predict President Trump's next action is just to focus on the path of greatest entropy and take it from there.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 5, 2019
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, What Matters and What Doesn't The news, however defined, always contains a fair amount of pap. Since Donald Trump's ascent to the presidency, however, the trivia quotient in the average American's daily newsfeed has grown like so many toadstools in a compost heap, overshadowing or crowding out matters of real substance. We're living in TrumpWorld, folks.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 12, 2021
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Our Not-So-Slow-Motion Apocalypse Admittedly, I hadn't been there for 46 years, but old friends of mine still live (or at least lived) in the town of Greenville, California, and now" well, it's more or less gone, though they survived. The Dixie Fire, one of those devastating West Coast blazes, had already "blackened" 504 square miles of Northern California in what was still essentially the (old) pre-fire season.
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Tomgram: Stephan Salisbury, Politics in the Terrordome, 2011 Here in the United States of Fear, official voices are again rising in a remarkable crescendo of hysteria. My advice: don't even try getting on the subway car filled with American politicians and their acolytes accusing WikiLeaks and Julian Assange of terrorist activity. It's already standing room only.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 14, 2019
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Hail, Caesar! What dreamers they were! They imagined a kind of global power that would leave even Rome at its Augustan height in the shade. They imagined a world made for one, a planet that could be swallowed by a single great power. No, not just great, but beyond anything ever seen before -- one that would build (as its National Security Strategy put it in 2002) a military "beyond challenge."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Tomgram: Stephanie Savell, U.S. Counterterror Missions Across the Planet When I first set out to map all the places in the world where the United States is still fighting terrorism so many years later, I didn't think it would be that hard to do. This was before the 2017 incident in Niger in which four American soldiers were killed on a counterterror mission and Americans were given an inkling of how far-reaching the war on terrorism might really be.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 26, 2019
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Building a Great Wall of Wealth Like a gilded coating that makes the dullest things glitter, today's thin veneer of political populism covers a grotesque underbelly of growing inequality that's hiding in plain sight. And this phenomenon of ever more concentrated wealth and power has both Newtonian and Darwinian components to it.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 8, 2020
Tomgram: William Astore and Danny Sjursen, Pen Pals of War If you have a moment, how about joining two retired officers, Bill Astore and me, Danny Sjursen, as we think about this country's catastrophic forever wars that, regardless of their deadly costs and lack of progress, never seem quite to end?
SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, April 15, 2018
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Growing Up With the Threat of Pervasive Violence One in four Americans now owns a gun or lives in a household with guns. So how strange that, on that day in the late 1980s, I saw a real gun for the first and last time.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 6, 2012
Pepe Escobar: Obama in Tehran? Imagine, for a moment, a world in which the United States is a regional power, not a superpower. A world in which the globe's mightiest nation, China, invades Mexico and Canada, deposing the leaders of both countries. A world in which China has also ringed the Americas, from Canada to Central America, with military bases.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 12, 2016
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Yet Another Undeclared U.S. War What is it about America and its twenty-first-century wars? They spread continually -- there are now seven of them; they never end; and yet, if you happen to live in the United States, most of the time it would be easy enough to believe that, except for the struggle against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, there were no conflicts underway. Take the Afghan War, for an example.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 10, 2011
Tomgram: David Bromwich, Superpower Bypassed by History "From Egypt to Pakistan," begins David Bromwich, regular essayist for the New York Review of Books and the Huffington Post, in his latest TomDispatch piece, "February 2011 will be remembered as a month unusually full of the embarrassments of empire."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 18, 2022
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Bombs Away! The time has come to ban The Bomb. Of course, all those nuclear ones in the arsenals of the "great" powers, but " since I'm a sportswriter by trade " let's start with the home run. Call it a four-bagger, a dinger, a moon shot, or (in my childhood) a Ballantine blast for the beer that sponsored so much baseball[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 27, 2023
Tomgram: Michael Gould-Wartofsky, "No Hunting Like the Hunting of Man" To residents of Memphis's resource-poor, predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods, the Scorpions were easy to spot. The plainclothes patrols were known for driving their unmarked Dodge Chargers through the streets, often all too recklessly, sowing fear as they went, spitting venom from their windows, jumping out with guns drawn at the slightest sign of an infraction[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 18, 2010
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, How at Risk Is the Justice System? The presumption of innocence may be slowly dying in the courtrooms where our terror trials are being held, as Karen Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at NYU Law School and author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days, points out in today's post.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 24, 2022
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Why Washington Can't Learn In the long and storied history of the United States Army, many young officers have served in many war zones. Few, I suspect, were as sublimely ignorant as I was in the summer of 1970 upon my arrival at Cam Ranh Bay in the Republic of Vietnam[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 22, 2022
Tomgram: Kelly Denton-Borhaug, Planting a Million Seeds of Violence Lately, random verses from the Bible have been popping into my mind unbidden, like St. Paul's famous line from Galatians, "A person reaps what they sow." The words sprang into my consciousness when I learned of the death of the 95-year-old Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, who helped encourage Martin Luther King to declare his opposition to the Vietnam War so long ago[...]
The .prime directive. designed to govern Captain Kirk and crew, required non-interference in the workings of alien civilizations., From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 17, 2015
Tomgram: John Feffer, The Star Trek Fallacy The "prime directive," designed to govern the conduct of Kirk and his crew on their episodic journey, required non-interference in the workings of alien civilizations. The Vietnam War, which raged through the years of its initial run, was then demonstrating to more and more Americans the folly of trying to re-engineer a society distant both geographically and culturally.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 19, 2016
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Washington's America-First Commandos in Africa Al-Qaeda doesn't care about borders. Neither does the Islamic State or Boko Haram. Brigadier General Donald Bolduc thinks the same way.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 10, 2017
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, The Best Defense Many of the folks I know are getting ready to play serious defense in 2017, and they're not wrong. Before we take up our three-point stance on the national line of scrimmage, however, maybe we should ask ourselves not only what we're fighting against, but what we're fighting for. What kind of United States of America do we actually want?
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 16, 2017
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Donald Trump, a One-Man 9/11? So reality has inexorably, inescapably penetrated my life. It didn't take long. Yes, Donald Trump is actually the president of the United States. In that guise, in just his first weeks in office, he's already declared war on language, on loving, on people who are different from him -- on the kind of world, in short, that I want to live in.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 22, 2019
Tomgram: Nick Turse, No Need to Whisper, AFRICOM Isn't Listening In If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Or to bring this thought experiment into the modern age -- if it happens in the forest, does it stay in the forest? I ask this question because it has a bearing on the article to come. Specifically, what if an article of mine on the U.S. military appears somewhere in our media world and that military refuses to notice?
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Tomgram: Andy Kroll, The 60-Year Unemployment Scandal 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 25, 2012
Nick Turse: Big Maps, Big Dreams, and the Failure of the Obama Doctrine It wasn't an everyday event, the arrival in TomDispatch's email inbox of a letter of complaint from Colonel Tom Davis, director of public affairs at USAFRICOM. It began, "Greetings from U.S. Africa Command, we read the recent [Nick Turse] article "Secret Wars, Secret Bases, and the Pentagon's "New Spice Route' in Africa' with great interest."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 30, 2021
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, So Long, CENTCOM, and Good Riddance! The bad news stemming from the ill-planned and ill-managed U.S. evacuation of the Afghan capital just kept coming in. The Washington Post put it this way in blowing the whistle on the culminating disaster: "U.S. military admits 'horrible mistake' in Kabul drone strike that killed 10 Afghans[...]"
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 24, 2018
Tomgram: Todd Miller, An Unsustainable World Managed With an Iron Fist At first, I thought I had inadvertently entered an active war zone. I was on a lonely two-lane road in southern New Mexico heading for El Paso, Texas. Off to the side of the road, hardly concealed behind some desert shrubs, I suddenly noticed what seemed to be a tank. For a second, I thought I might be seeing an apparition.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 1, 2021
Tomgram: Engelhardt, V for Defeat Joe Biden's got a problem and so do I. And so, in fact, do we. At 76 years old, you'd think I'd experienced it all when it comes to this country and its presidencies. Or most of it, anyway. I've been around since Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. Born on July 20, 1944, I'm a little "young" to remember him, though I was a war baby in an era when Congress still sometimes declared war before America made it.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 20, 2022
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, America's Prison from Hell It's now more than 20 years later and that American offshore symbol of mistreatment and injustice, the prison at Guanta'namo Bay, Cuba, is still open. In fact, as 2021 ended, New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg, who has covered that notorious prison complex since its first day, reported on the Pentagon's plans to build a brand-new prefab courthouse at that naval base[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 30, 2017
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, Making America Insecure Again Donald Trump's supporters believe that his election will end business as usual in Washington. The self-glorifying Trump agrees and indeed his has, so far, been the most unorthodox presidency of our era, if not any era.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Engelhardt, A Record of Unparalleled Failure The United States has been at war -- major boots-on-the-ground conflicts and minor interventions, firefights, air strikes, drone assassination campaigns, occupations, special ops raids, proxy conflicts, and covert actions -- nearly nonstop since the Vietnam War began. That's more than half a century of experience with war, American-style, and yet few in our world bother to draw the obvious conclusions.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 30, 2014
Juan Cole, Waiting for the Arab Summer When it comes to pure ineptness, it's been quite a performance -- and I'm sure you've already guessed that I'm referring to our secretary of state's recent jaunt to the Middle East. You remember the old quip about jokes and timing. (It's all in the...) In this case, John Kerry turned the first stop on his Middle Eastern tour into a farce, thanks to impeccably poor timing.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 4, 2014
Engelhardt: Bulding an Escalation Machine You already know the tune: more planes, more drones, more bombs, more special ops forces, more advisers, and more boots on the ground. After 13 years of testing, the recipe is tried and true, and its predictably disastrous results will only ensure far more hysteria in our future.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 8, 2020
Best of TomDispatch: Engelhardt, The Biggest Criminal Enterprise in History We have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide. And one for the conscious destruction of aspects of the environment: ecocide. But we don't have a word for the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on, the world as humanity had known it until, historically speaking, late last night. A possibility might be "terracide" from the Latin word for earth.
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 8, 2011
An All-American Nightmare, By Tom Engelhardt Tom Engelhardt's obituary for a slumping nation in armed denial.
They're highly skilled, smart, and well equipped. They also consider themselves quite successful., From FlickrPhotos
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 26, 2015
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Success, Failure, and the "Finest Warriors Who Ever Went Into Combat" "They're smart, skillful, wear some very iconic headgear, and their 12-member teams are "capable of conducting the full spectrum of special operations, from building indigenous security forces to identifying and targeting threats to U.S. national interests."
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 26, 2018
Tomgram: John Feffer, Springtime for Despots Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has encouraged a spree of extrajudicial police executions aimed at the drug trade that, according to Human Rights Watch, has left more than 12,000 Filipinos dead. Although the International Criminal Court has launched an inquiry into Duterte's "crimes against humanity," Trump has praised him for doing an "incredible job" with his anti-drug program.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 26, 2017
Tomgram: William Astore, A Violent Cesspool of Our Own Making Today, when it comes to building and exporting murderous weaponry, no other country, not even that evil-empire-substitute, Vladimir Putin's Russia, comes faintly close. The U.S. doth bestride the world of arms production and dealing like a colossus.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 11, 2018
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, All Eyes on Nevada It's what campaigners say every November, I know, but this year's election really is as important as it gets. Will U.S. voters choose to halt the progress of Donald J. Trump's slow-motion coup? Or will the tide just continue rolling over us? So much depends on what happens in Nevada -- a state that once elected a senator by a mere 401 votes.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 19, 2012
Fraser and Freeman: Creating a Prison-Corporate Complex 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.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Friday, June 28, 2013
Agents Provacateurs and Informants are Everywhere From personal experience, Todd Gitlin and Tom Engelhardt describe a few of the tentacles of the Federal agencies that sow seeds of violence and hatred in our movements for peace and justice, just to justify prosecution and police brutality against peaceful protests.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 3, 2014
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A New World Order? I hope my latest post will startle you. If you survey our planet, the situation is remarkably unsettled, confusing, and often violent, yet at least two things stand out. First, the imperial principle and the great power competition to which it has been wedded are visibly on the wane. Second, war of the traditional sort (global, intrastate, anti-insurgent), which convulsed the twentieth century, seems to be waning as well.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 5, 2017
Tomgram: Engelhardt, It Can Happen Here (In Fact, It Did!) Know thyself. It was what came to mind in the wake of Donald Trump's victory and my own puzzling reaction to it.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 6, 2021
Tomgram: Nan Levinson, The Military as an Extremist Culture? It was around noon and I was texting a friend about who-knows-what when I added, almost as an afterthought: "tho they seem to be invading the Capitol at the mo." I wasn't faintly as blase' as that may sound on January 6th, especially when it became ever clearer who "they" were and what they were doing[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 15, 2018
Tomgram: Engelhardt, An "Earned Media" Presidency Face it: it's been an abusive time, to use a word he likes to wield. In his telling, of course, it's he or his people who are always the abused ones and they -- the "fake news media" -- are the abusers. But let's be honest. You've been abused, too, and so have I. All of us have and by that same fake news media.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 15, 2022
Tomgram: William Astore, Making Sense of the New Cold War Dreamscape In certain quarters in this country, Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine has generated enthusiasm for a new cold war. At the New York Times, Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin have been described as "children of the [old] Cold War" now involved in a "face off," an "eyeball to eyeball" confrontation harkening back to John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev contesting Berlin and Cuba in "dramatic fashion" 60 years ago[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Anand Gopal, How to Lose a War That Wasn't There Here's the mind-blowing news in Anand Gopal's new TomDispatch post and in his just-published book No Good Men Among the Living: the U.S. fought its "war on terror" for almost a year in Afghanistan against - quite literally - ghosts. In the process, it resuscitated a Taliban movement that had ceased to exist and brought back the Harqqqani network as well, only to find itself in a conflict it couldn't win.
What if the U.S. had not invaded Iraq in 2003?, From FlickrPhotos
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 22, 2015
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, The Great War in the Middle East What if the U.S. had not invaded Iraq in 2003? How would things be different in the Middle East today? Was Iraq, in the words of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the "worst foreign policy blunder" in American history?
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Nick Turse: The Life and Death of American Drones Why America's "wonder weapon," the drone, will not be a game changer in our wars in 2012 or after.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, December 9, 2018
In the Shadow of Donald Trump Breaking News! -- as NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt often puts it when beginning his evening broadcast. Here, in summary, is my view of the news that's breaking in the United States on just about any day of the week: Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 5, 2018
Tomgram: Erin Thompson, In Debt to the Law (at $100,000 a Pop) Law school applications are up this year in what some are calling a "Trump Bump," since around a third of applicants were inspired to apply by Trump's election. Nearly half of them identify themselves as members of a minority group.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 24, 2018
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Ringing in a New Year of War As Donald Trump wraps up his second year in the Oval Office, despite sudden moves in Syria and Afghanistan, the United States remains entrenched in a set of military interventions across significant parts of the world.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 28, 2011
Rebecca Solnit, The Earthquake Kit This is another classic Rebecca Solnit piece that uses the triple disasters in Japan (earthquake, tsunami, nuclear) to explore how surprisingly we humans react to catastrophe. Think of her latest TomDispatch post as her way of preparing us for disasters to come.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 4, 2012
Michael Klare: Extreme Energy Means an Extreme Planet If you want a particularly hard-headed assessment of how successfully Barack Obama, the most vulnerable president in memory, is pursuing his reelection campaign, don't bother to check the polls; just read "Bibi" Netanyahu's U.N. speech of last week. The Israeli Prime Minister had, until then, all but campaigned for Mitt Romney, his old Boston Consulting Group pal, who claims Obama has thrown Israel "under the bus."
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 4, 2013
Noam Chomsky: Why It's "Legal" When the U.S. Does It Credit the Arab Spring and what's followed in the Greater Middle East to many things, but don't overlook American "unilateralism." After all, if you want to see destabilization at work, there's nothing like having a heavily armed crew dreaming about eternal global empires stomp through your neighborhood, and it's clear enough now that whatever was let loose early in the twenty-first century won't end soon.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 12, 2018
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Trump's War on Black Jocks Last September, when the commander-in-chief of toxic masculinity dubbed any football player who didn't stand during the playing of the national anthem a "son of a b*tch," the war on black men took a spectacular pop-cultural surge. And unlike white cops who shoot unarmed black men, President Trump didn't even have to claim that he had been afraid.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 7, 2021
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Cheering Through the Moral Drift If you think that the true focus of the recent World Series was what the Houston Astros and Atlanta Braves were doing on the field, you were either living in Texas, Georgia, or on some billionaire's space station[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 19, 2022
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Abortion -- Not for Women Only For 50 years now, people have told desperate, heart-breaking stories about what it was like to search for an abortion in the days before Roe v. Wade. These were invariably narratives of women in crisis. They sometimes involved brief discussions about economic inequality, police-state intrigue, and unwanted children, but for the most part men were invisible in them, missing in action. Where were they?[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 18, 2018
Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Coming of Hyperwar There could be no more consequential decision than launching atomic weapons and possibly triggering a nuclear holocaust. President John F. Kennedy faced just such a moment during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and, after envisioning the catastrophic outcome of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange, he came to the conclusion that the atomic powers should impose tough barriers on the precipitous use of such weaponry...
SHARE More Sharing        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?
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 7, 2020
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, A Victory Parade in the Coronavirus Moment Last month, Donald Trump retweeted a doctored photo of himself playing the fiddle that was labeled "My next piece is called: nothing can stop what's coming." It was clearly an homage to the Emperor Nero who so infamously made music while Rome burned. To it, the president added this comment: "Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me!"
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Tomgram: Arnold Isaacs, The Con Game of America's Anti-Muslims Anti-Muslim activists in the United States were operating in a "post-truth era" and putting out "alternative facts" long before those phrases entered the language. For the last decade they have been spreading provable falsehoods through their well-organized network of publications and websites.
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Tomgram: Lewis Lapham, The Playing Field as Battlefield Rosenstock-Huessy was a German army officer in World War I, afterward a professor of medieval law in Breslau until the Nazis acquired the franchise in 1933. Signed for the next year's season by Harvard University to teach undergraduates the rudiments of Western civilization, he soon noticed that few of them grasped what he was trying to say, couldn't square the lines of thought with the circle of their emotions.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 11, 2019
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, One Weekend a Month, My A** A young friend is seriously considering joining her state's National Guard. She's a world-class athlete, but also a working-class woman from a rural background competing in a rich person's sport[...] Each season, raising the necessary money to compete is a touch-and-go proposition, so she's now talking to the National Guard[...] What could possibly go wrong?
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 9, 2021
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, 100 Seconds to Midnight? If you live in California, you're likely to be consumed on occasion by thoughts of fire. That's not surprising, given that, in last year alone, actual fires consumed over four and a quarter million acres of the state, taking with them 10,488 structures, 33 human lives, and who knows how many animals.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 25, 2021
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Holding Our Breaths on AUMFs, Drones, and Guanta'namo In the first two months of Joe Biden's presidency, you could feel the country holding its breath. Sheltered in place, hidden behind masks, unsure about whether to trust in a safe-from-pandemic future, we are nonetheless beginning to open our eyes collectively. As part of this reemergence, a wider array of issues those beyond Covid-19 are once again starting to enter public consciousness[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Tom Engelhardt: Lessons from Lost Wars in 2012 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.
Three exceptional facts about America., From ImagesAttr
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Superpower as Victim Given the cluttered landscape of the last 14 years, can you even faintly remember the moment when the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War ended in a stunned silence of shock and triumph in Washington, Eastern Europe was freed, Germany unified, and the Soviet Union vanished from the face of the Earth? At that epochal moment, six centuries of imperial rivalries ended. Only one mighty power was left.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 18, 2016
Best of TomDispatch: Andrew Bacevich, Pentagon, Inc. A writer who dares to revisit a snarky article dashed off five-plus years earlier will necessarily approach the task with some trepidation. Pieces such as the one republished below are not drafted with the expectation that they will enjoy a protracted shelf life. Yet in this instance, I'm with Edith Piaf: Non, je ne regrette rien.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 10, 2014
Tomgram: David Bromwich, The Leader Obama Wanted to Become and What Became of Him Tonight, a truly magisterial portrait of a failing presidency from David Bromwich, perhaps the canniest portrait painter of the presidential character around. This sweeping character portrait of Barack Obama, the man we’ve never quite come to know, explains why the president’s words can still soar, but the actions he proposes show a remarkably consistent inability to leave the ground.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 27, 2017
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, All War All the Time, or War American-Style The headlines arrive in my inbox day after day: "U.S.-led airstrikes in Syria killed hundreds of civilians, U.N. panel says." "Pentagon wants to declare more parts of world as temporary battlefields." "The U.S. was supposed to leave Afghanistan by 2017. Now it might take decades." There are so many wars and rumors of war involving our country these days that it starts to feel a little unreal, even for the most devoted of news
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 14, 2018
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Twenty-First-Century History of Greed Think of it as the all-American version of the human comedy: a great power that eternally knows what the world needs and offers copious advice with a tone deafness that would be humorous, if it weren't so grim.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 1, 2018
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Backfire, a Generation of American Folly He was shot in the back, the ultimate act of treachery. On September 3rd, a U.S Army sergeant major was killed by two Afghan police officers -- the very people his unit, the new Security Force Assistance Brigade, was there to train.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 18, 2014
Rebecca Solnit: What to Do When You're Running Out of Time Consider this a propitious moment for a major climate-change demonstration, possibly the largest in history, in New York City this Sunday. As the WMO's Secretary-General Michel Jarraud pointed out, there is still time to make a difference.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 21, 2021
Tomgram: William Hartung, How Corporations Won the War on Terror The costs and consequences of America's twenty-first-century wars have by now been well-documented a staggering $8 trillion in expenditures and more than 380,000 civilian deaths, as calculated by Brown University's Costs of War project. The question of who has benefited most from such an orgy of military spending has, unfortunately, received far less attention[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 26, 2015
Miller and Schivone, Bringing the Battlefield to the Border Predator drones, tested out in this country's distant war zones, have played an increasingly prominent role in the up-armoring of the U.S.-Mexican border.
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 17, 2014
Laura Gottesdiener: A Tale of Two Cities, Post-Bankruptcy In late October, a few days after local news cameras swarmed Detroit's courthouse to hear closing arguments in the city's historic bankruptcy trial, "Commander" Dale Brown cruised through the stately Detroit neighborhood of Palmer Woods in a Hummer emblazoned with the silver, interlocking-crescent-moon logo of his private security company.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 23, 2012
Greg Muttitt: Whatever Happened to Iraqi Oil? It was never exactly rocket science. You didn't have to be Einstein to figure it out. In early 2003, the Bush administration was visibly preparing to invade Iraq, a nation with a nasty ruler who himself hadn't hesitated to invade another country, Iran, in the early 1980s for no purpose except self-aggrandizement.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Engelhardt: Iraq War 4.0? For a moment, do your best to suspend disbelief and imagine that there's another superpower, great power, or even regional power somewhere that, between 2001 and 2003, launched two major wars in the Greater Middle East. We're talking about full-scale invasions, long-term occupations, and nation-building programs, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 31, 2011
Occupy Wall Street At Valley Forge, By Tom Engelhardt 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Laura Gottesdiener: Adrift in Oil Country According to residents and oilfield workers, including Fred, there are only two things to do in Williston: work and drink. The reasons are simple enough. Unlike in significant parts of the country, well-paying jobs are easy to acquire in the oil fields. As a result, North Dakota boasts the lowest unemployment rate in the nation, an eye-popping 2.8%.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 24, 2018
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Trump's Grand Strategy While that reaction may be typical, it's a mistake to assume that Trump lacks a coherent foreign-policy blueprint. In fact, an examination of his campaign speeches and his actions since entering the Oval Office -- including his appearance with Putin -- reflect his adherence to a core strategic concept: the urge to establish a tripolar world order...
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 14, 2019
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, A Mother Swept Away by Climate Change Young people across the world are striking to draw attention to the ravages of climate change. They are demanding -- with their bodies and their voices -- that the catastrophe each of them will inherit be a priority for the grown-ups around them. They are insisting that we adults make some sacrifices to keep their planet from becoming uninhabitable.
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SHARE More Sharing        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."
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 24, 2020
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Yes, It's Time to Come Home Within establishment circles, Donald Trump's failure to win re-election has prompted merry singing and bell-ringing galore. If you read the New York Times or watch MSNBC, the song featured in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz nicely captures the mood of the moment[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 11, 2021
Tomgram: Mandy Smithberger, Joe Biden's Pentagon Honeymoon The first 100 days of President Joe Biden's administration have come and gone. While somewhat exaggerated, that milestone is normally considered the honeymoon period for any new president. Buoyed by a recent election triumph and inauguration, he's expected to be at the peak of his power when it comes to advancing the biggest, boldest items on his agenda[...]
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Tomgram: Ann Jones, Americans Can't Remember, Afghans Will Never Forget The Afghan War is officially winding down. American casualties, generally from towns and suburbs you've never heard of unless you were born there, are still coming in. Though far fewer American troops are in the field with Afghan forces, devastating "insider attacks" in which a soldier or policeman turns his gun on his American allies, trainers, or mentors still periodically occur.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 11, 2019
Tomgram: Ann Jones, Our Veblen Moment Distracted daily by the bloviating POTUS? Here, then, is a small suggestion. Focus your mind for a moment on one simple (yet deeply complex) truth: we are living in a Veblen Moment.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Tomgram: Beverly Gologorsky, My Neighbor, War In the years when I was growing up more or less middle class, American war on the childhood front couldn't have been sunnier. True, American soldiers were fighting a grim new stalemate of a conflict in Korea and we kids often enough found ourselves crouched under our school desks practicing for the nuclear destruction of our neighborhoods, but the culture was still focused on World War II.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 19, 2018
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Is a War With China on the Horizon? On May 30th, Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced a momentous shift in American global strategic policy. From now on, he decreed, the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), which oversees all U.S. military forces in Asia, will be called the Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM)[...]Think of it as a signal that the U.S. military is already setting the stage for an eventual confrontation with China.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 4, 2018
Tomgram: Ben Freeman, The Saudi Lobby Juggernaut It was May 2017. The Saudis were growing increasingly nervous. For more than two years they had been relying heavily on U.S. military support and bombs to defeat Houthi rebels in Yemen. Now, the Senate was considering a bipartisan resolution to cut off military aid and halt a big sale of American-made bombs to Saudi Arabia...
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 23, 2019
Tomgram: Jen Marlowe, Running for the Right to Thrive I never intended to run a marathon, but when I realized that I would be on hand for the 2019 Palestine Marathon, I registered. I did so in solidarity with the goals of the aptly named Right to Movement, the global running community founded in 2013 to organize the first annual marathon there.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Hellman and Kramer: How Much Does Washington Spend on "Defense"? 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Peter Van Buren: The Ultimate No-Fly List Last week, touching down in India on his way to Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta described reality as you seldom hear it in the confines of Washington and, while he was at it, put his stamp of approval on a new global doctrine for the United States. Panetta is, of course, the man who, as director of the CIA, once called its drone air campaign in the Pakistani borderlands "the only game in town."
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 27, 2015
John Feffer: Europe's End? Remember the glory days of the 1990s, when our interconnectedness -- the ever-tighter embrace of Disney characters, the Swoosh, and the Golden Arches -- was endlessly hailed? It was the era of "globalization," of Washington-style capitalism triumphant, and the planet, we were told, would be growing ever "flatter" until we all ended up in the same mall, no matter where we lived.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 31, 2018
Tomgram: Engelhardt, What Can't Be Walled Out -- or In It's true that when I went to school back in the Neolithic Age, we had our own version of being blown away -- and of active-shooter drills and of the fear of dying that went with them.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 25, 2021
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Why Congress Has to Agree on More Than Just a Defense Bill "I got out of the Marines and within a few years, 15 of my buddies had killed themselves," one veteran rifleman who served two tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq between 2003 and 2011 said to me recently. "One minute they belonged and the next, they were out, and they couldn't fit in. They had nowhere to work, no one who related to them. And they had these PTSD symptoms that made them react in ways other Americans didn't."
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 7, 2013
Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, The Age of Inhuman Scale It was the stuff of fantasy, of repeated failed expeditions and dreams that wouldn't die. I'm talking about the Northwest Passage, that fabled route through Arctic waters around North America. Now, it's reality.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 14, 2021
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, Wars of Unintended Consequences Disagreements over how to assess the American exodus from Afghanistan have kept the pundits busy these last weeks, even though there wasn't much to say that hadn't been said before. For some of them, however, that was irrelevant. Having overseen or promoted the failed Afghan War themselves, all the while brandishing various "metrics" of success, they were engaged in transparent reputation-salvaging[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 1, 2011
Lessons From the Dead in a No-Learning-Curve World, by Tom Engelhardt Tom Engelhardt on Washington's military-first policy and how little has been learned since 9/11.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 7, 2016
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Justice for Torturers? Gordon turns to recent prosecutions of Latin American war criminals, 40 years later, for their crimes in the Cold War-era Operation Condor, and then to the unpunished crimes of the U.S. war on terror and, in a deeply thoughtful and provocative piece, considers what "justice" for such figures might look like in a different and better world.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 23, 2021
Tomgram: Kelly Denton-Borhaug, War's End? As a religious studies professor, I know a parable when I see one. Consider the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the final events in this country's war in Afghanistan as just such a parable taken directly from the history of our moment[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Pentagon and Murder in Bahrain This is a startling and timely tale of an underplayed aspect of American relations in the region -- the way Pentagon arms and bases shore up anti-democratic rulers there and help fund and support an "Arab lobby" whose influence in Washington can even overcome presidential desires.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 18, 2016
Tomgram: Sandy Tolan, The Death of the Two-State Solution The Obama administration just agreed to a 10-year military aid deal that will give Israel $38 billion dollars in, among other things, America's most advanced weapons systems. The White House terms it "the largest single pledge of military assistance in U.S. history."
SHARE More Sharing        Friday, April 27, 2018
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, The Return of the Great Meltdown? Warning: What you are about to read is not about Russia, the 2016 election, or the latest person to depart from the White House in a storm of tweets. It's the Beltway story hiding in plain sight with trillions of dollars in play and an economy to commandeer.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 9, 2018
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Overdosing in Twenty-First-Century America When you think of addiction in America today, one thing comes to mind: the opioid epidemic. And it should. It's serious.[...]The United States, however, has two other crises that, in the long run, will cost Americans far more. Yet they get remarkably little attention as addiction phenomena.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 20, 2022
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Privatizing Secrecy Thanks to Donald Trump, secrecy is big news these days. However, as political pundits and legal experts race to expose the layers of document-related misdeeds previously buried at his Mar-a-Lago estate, one overlooked reality looms large[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 24, 2018
Tomgram: John Feffer, Say Goodbye to the Guardrails of Governance Plenty of oddballs had run for president, from Jello Biafra to Roseanne Barr, and gotten nowhere. The guardrails of American democracy were set up to prevent just such outsiders from making it anywhere near the Oval Office. Donald Trump's three presidential qualifications -- money, name recognition, and unbounded arrogance -- were obviously not enough to overcome his lack of sway with party bosses...
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 1, 2018
Tomgram: William Hartung, The Pentagon's Plan to Dominate the Economy His plan is now visibly taking shape -- one we can see and assess thanks to a Pentagon-led study with a distinctly tongue-twisting title: "Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States."
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 13, 2011
Tomgram: Ann Jones, Can Women Make Peace? Last week, Pentagon budget "cuts" were in the headlines, often almost luridly so -- "Pentagon Faces the Knife," "Pentagon to Cut Spending by $78 Billion, Reduce Troop Strength," "U.S. Aims to Cut Defense Budget and Slash Troops." Today, just to shake things up a tad, TomDispatch offers some actual new thinking of a sort you won't find in Washington. It's from Ann Jones, a hands-on aid worker and remarkable writer.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 29, 2019
Tomgram: Smithberger and Hartung, The Pentagon's Revolving Door Spins Faster The way personnel spin through Washington's infamous revolving door between the Pentagon and the arms industry is nothing new. That door, however, is moving ever faster with the appointment of Patrick Shanahan, who spent 30 years at Boeing, the Pentagon's second largest contractor, as the Trump administration's acting secretary of defense.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 4, 2024
Tomgram: Juan Cole, How Washington's Anti-Iranian Campaign Failed, Big Time In the midst of Israel's ongoing devastation of Gaza, one major piece of Middle Eastern news has yet to hit the headlines. In a face-off that, in a sense, has lasted since the pro-American Shah of Iran was overthrown by theocratic clerics in 1979, Iran finally seems to be besting the United States in a significant fashion across the region. It's a story that needs to be told[...]
SHARE More Sharing        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.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 7, 2016
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Whose Finger on the Nuclear Button? Once upon a time, when choosing a new president, a factor for many voters was the perennial question: "Whose finger do you want on the nuclear button?"
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 21, 2011
Tomgram: William Astore, Six Vows to Support Our Troops ""Support our troops' is an unconditional American mantra. We're told to celebrate them as warrior-liberators, as heroes, as the finest fighters the world has ever known. They're to be put on a pedestal or plinth, holding a rifle and a flag, icons to American toughness and goodness. What we're not told to do is listen to them."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 8, 2022
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, War with Russia? Understandably enough, commentaries on the crisis between Russia and the West tend to dwell on Ukraine. After all, more than 100,000 Russian soldiers and a fearsome array of weaponry have now been emplaced around the Ukrainian border. Still, such a narrow perspective deflects attention from an American strategic blunder that dates to the 1990s and is still reverberating[...]
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Peter Van Buren: Our 9/11 Torturers I hope you know that, on the 11th anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, you live in a country so exceptional it's blessed by God; that, in fact, it's -- no point in pulling punches -- "the greatest nation on earth." If you don't believe me, just listen to President Obama, who used the last words of his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention to say exactly that.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 9, 2021
Tomgram: Jane Braxton Little, Becoming a Climate Refugee GREENVILLE, CA At 10 a.m. on July 22nd, I interviewed a New York University professor about using autonomous robots, drones, and other unmanned devices to suppress structural and wildland fires. I sent the interview to an online transcription service, walked down the steps of my second-floor office and a block to the Greenville post office, where I mailed a check to California Fair Plan for homeowners' fire insurance[...]
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 11, 2010
Tomgram: Juan Cole, The Asian Century? For Barack Obama, midterm 2010 has already been written off as a crushing Republican triumph, but that's hardly the full story. After all, approximately 29 million Americans who voted for him in 2008 didn't bother to stir for him or the Democrats in 2010. Think of it this way: he's less a man who lost to the opposition than a man who lost his own dispirited base, much of which is by now thoroughly disappointed.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Corruption U.S.A. A top government official with energy industry holdings huddles in secret with oil company executives to work out the details of a potentially lucrative "national energy policy." Later, that same official steers billions of government dollars to his former oil-field services company. Well-paid elected representatives act with impunity, routinely trading government contracts and other favors for millions of dollars.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 7, 2016
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Where Did the American Century Go? Is this actually the American Century? And concludes that perhaps it's not, despite the fact that we remain the globe's "sole superpower."
SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Winning World War II in the Twenty-First Century If you are an American male of a certain age -- Donald Trump's age, to be exact -- you are likely to have vivid memories of Victory at Sea, the Emmy award-winning NBC documentary series about the U.S. Navy in World War II that aired from October 1952 to May 1953.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 16, 2022
Best of TomDispatch: Rebecca Gordon, I Had an Abortion and Now I'm Not Ashamed I have never said this publicly before, but in December 1974 I had an abortion. I was 22 years old, living in a cold, dark house in Portland, Oregon, spending my days huddled in front of a wood stove trying to finish my undergraduate senior thesis. I did not want to have a baby. I didn't know what would come next in my life, but I knew it would not include raising a child[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Tomgram: Stephan Salisbury, Plotting Terrorism Informers have by now become our first line of defense in our battles with the evildoers, the go-to guys in the never-ending domestic war against... what? Al-Qaeda? Terror? Muslims? The inept? The poor?
SHARE More Sharing        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!
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 10, 2015
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Nothing Succeeds Like Failure Since 9/11, in fact, the continent has increasingly been viewed by the Pentagon as a place of problems to be remedied by military means. And year after year, as terror groups have multiplied, proxies have foundered, and allies have disappointed, the U.S. has doubled down again and again, with America's most elite troops -- U.S. Special Operations forces -- leading the way.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 12, 2017
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, The Iranian Connection in the Age of Trump Stack up the op-eds and essays on the disasters that await the world once Donald Trump moves into the White House and you'll have a long list of dismaying scenarios.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 16, 2021
Tomgram: Kevin Tillman, Capitol Blowback Just about everyone was shocked by what happened at the Capitol building on January 6th. But as a former soldier in America's forever wars, horrifying as the scenes were, I also found what happened strangely familiar, almost inevitable. I thought that, if only we had taken our country's imperial history seriously, none of us would have found that day either shocking or unprecedented[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 16, 2021
Tomgram: William Astore, Prefabricated War Who is America's god? The Christian god of the beatitudes, the one who healed the sick, helped the poor, and preached love of neighbor? Not in these (dis)United States. In the Pledge of Allegiance, we speak proudly of One Nation under God, but in the aggregate, this country doesn't serve or worship Jesus Christ, or Allah, or any other god of justice and mercy[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 5, 2024
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Big-Time War of Terror On this planet of ours, it almost doesn't matter who's right and who's wrong when it comes to our wars[...]
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Tomgram: Jonathan Schell, The War on the Word "War" 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 13, 2012
Jeremiah Goulka: Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Republican Titanic It's barely a month since Election 2012 put Barack Obama back in the White House and Mitt Romney in the Republican doghouse (or even perhaps on the roof of the GOP's family car). Still, TomDispatch is already behind the eight ball in its election coverage. After all, we're still thinking about the past election while the rest of the media didn't take a breath before launching campaign 2016.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 21, 2013
Ann Jones: The War Against Women Recently, American newscasts have uncharacteristically devoted lots of time to African stories. Okay, one African story anyway. No, not French intervention in Mali. Nor the election in Kenya. Nor even the food crisis in Lesotho. (Yes, there is a food crisis in Lesotho.) Instead, the focus has been on the tragic death of a white South African model at the hands of her white Paralympic sprinter boyfriend.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 15, 2012
Barbara Ehrenreich: American Poverty, 50 Years Later 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 13, 2018
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, A World That Is the Property of the 1% As we head into 2019, leaving the chaos of this year behind, a major question remains unanswered when it comes to the state of Main Street, not just here but across the planet. If the global economy really is booming, as many politicians claim, why are leaders and their parties around the world continuing to get booted out of office in such a sweeping fashion?
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 28, 2020
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, Fixing Our Eyes on American Poverty On August 26th, during the Republican National Convention, Vice President Mike Pence closed out his acceptance speech with a biblical sleight of hand. Speaking before a crowd at the Fort McHenry National Monument in Baltimore, he exclaimed, "Let's fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents. Let's fix our eyes on this land of heroes and let their courage inspire."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 18, 2019
Tomgram: Belle Chesler, Defunding Children, A National Crisis of the Soul Three weeks ago, I sat in a cramped conference room in the large public high school where I teach in Beaverton, Oregon. I was listening to the principal deliver a scripted PowerPoint presentation on the $35-million-dollar budget deficit our district faces in the upcoming school year.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 11, 2021
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, An Invasion From Mars Sometimes things only make sense when seen through a magnifying lens. As it happens, I'm thinking about reality, the very American and global reality clearly repeating itself as 2021 begins.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 2, 2021
Tomgram: Mandy Smithberger, More Money for the Pentagon in the Pandemic Moment? This country is in a crisis of the first order. More than half a million of us have died thanks to Covid-19. Food insecurity is on the rise, with nearly 24 million Americans going hungry, including 12 million children. Unemployment claims filed since the pandemic began have now reached 93 million. ..
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 23, 2010
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, The Waning of America "Make poverty history!" A catchy slogan, and an admirable aim, it was adopted by world leaders at the United Nations summit in New York on the eve of the New Millennium. A decade later, it is America which has made history -- even if in the opposite direction. The latest U.S. Census Bureau statistics show that, in 2009, one in seven Americans was living below the poverty line, the highest figure in half a century.
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 27, 2011
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Pentagon, Inc. In his latest TomDispatch post, Andrew Bacevich offers a sweeping look at what keeps defense spending locked in place, exploring four factors crucial to making such spending "impregnable" to attack by budget cutters.
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 20, 2011
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, How to End the War on Terror 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.
Negotiations and democracy are needed to deal with the Syrian quagmire., From ImagesAttr
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 19, 2015
Tomgram: Jo Comerford and Mattea Kramer, Dealing With the Syrian Quagmire As war between President Bashar al-Assad and various rebel forces raged across Syria, as the Obama administration and the CIA armed rebel factions of their liking while continuing an air campaign against the militants of the Islamic State (ISIS), as Russia entered the quagmire with its own airstrikes, and as millions of Syrians fled for their lives amid untold violence, a Connecticut congressman decided to do something.
(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Saturday, May 9, 2009
Washington's Imperial Attitude: We Talk About Countries Like We Own Them If President Obama temporarily suspended the Bush-era drone war, which his administration has recently escalated, it would represent a start down a different path, one not already strewn with the skeletons of failed policies.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Engelhardt, Welcome to Post-Legal America Is the Libyan war legal? Was Bin Laden's killing legal? Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen for assassination? Were those "enhanced interrogation techniques" legal? These questions have come up regularly in recent weeks and all of them, I suggest in my most recent post, are irrelevant.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 1, 2018
Tomgram: Arnold Isaacs, In Present American Wars, Repeating Past Mistakes "This time, they think they have it right." So declared an Associated Press story reporting an upbeat assessment by this country's top military officer at the end of a five-day visit to Afghanistan earlier this spring...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 7, 2022
Tomgram: Nan Levinson, How (Not) to Stop America's Wars When I urge my writing students to juice up their stories, I tell them about "disruptive technologies," inventions and concepts that end up irrevocably changing industries. Think: iPhones, personal computers, or to reach deep into history, steamships. It's the tech version of what we used to call a paradigm shift. (President Biden likes to refer to it as an inflection point[...])
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SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 27, 2010
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The Washington Gossip Machine Once a serious journalist, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward now makes a very fine living as chief gossip-monger of the governing class. Early on in his career, along with Carl Bernstein, his partner at the time, Woodward confronted power. Today, by relentlessly exalting Washington trivia, he flatters power. His reporting does not inform. It titillates.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 20, 2012
Lewis Lapham: The Rule of Money Here's what the latest census data tell us: in 2011, the middle class shrank to "an all-time low" (as the Washington Post headline had it), while the income of the wealthiest Americans continued to climb. The poverty rate leveled off at a still shuddering 15%, with more than one of every five Americans under eighteen living in poverty.
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 22, 2010
Tomgram: William Astore, Wars Don't Make Heroes From TomDispatch this morning: A powerful explanation of why we make American troops en masse into "our heroes" at our own peril -- William J. Astore, "'Our American Heroes,' Why It's Wrong to Equate Military Service With Heroism"
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 11, 2014
Nick Turse, Christmas in July and the Collapse of America's Great African Experiment On return from his recent reporting trip to Africa, Nick Turse told me the following tale, which catches something of the nature of our battered world. At a hotel bar in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, he attended an informal briefing with a representative of a major nongovernmental organization (NGO). At one point, the briefer commented that just one more crisis might sink the whole aid operation.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 23, 2018
Tomgram: John Feffer, The Jaws Presidency Conjuring up the current president's foreign-policy doctrine is like arguing that the Teletubbies have a theology. After all, this president approaches global affairs the way a teenager with attention-deficit disorder might tackle War and Peace. To call Trump scattershot in his approach would be generous. He doesn't even have sufficient command of the relevant vocabulary to formulate a doctrine.
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 15, 2013
Alfred W. McCoy, Obama's Expanding Surveillance Universe On the website of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services there is a list of rights belonging to all Americans. Chief among them: Freedom to express yourself. Abdiwali Warsame must have taken them literally. Two days after he became a U.S. citizen, he created a rollicking news and opinion website covering his native Somalia.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 5, 2010
The War Addicts: the Pentagon and Military Would Do Almost Anything to Continue Neverending War The present Pentagon and military cast of characters can't stop themselves. They really can't. The thought that in Afghanistan or anywhere else they might have to go on a diet, as sooner or later they will, is deeply unnerving. Forever war is in their blood.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 23, 2012
The Arrival of the Warrior Corporation 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.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 28, 2017
Tomgram: William Astore, In Afghanistan, America's Biggest Foe Is Self-Deception America's war in Afghanistan is now in its 16th year, the longest foreign war in our history. The phrase "no end in sight" barely covers the situation. Prospects of victory -- if victory is defined as eliminating that country as a haven for Islamist terrorists while creating a representative government in Kabul -- are arguably more tenuous today than at any point since the U.S. military invaded in 2001 and routed the Taliban.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 28, 2021
Tomgram: Mandy Smithberger and William Hartung, The Pentagonization of America This month's insurrection at the Capitol revealed the dismal failure of the Capitol Police and the Department of Defense to use their expertise and resources to thwart a clear and present danger to our democracy. As the government reform group Public Citizen tweeted, "If you're spending $740 billion annually on 'defense' but fascists dressed for the renaissance fair can still storm the Capitol as they please...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 16, 2016
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, The Snapchat Version of American Victory Former State Department official Peter Van Buren returns to the subject of Iraq, the place where he was once stationed and where, in his book We Meant Well, he blew the whistle on the American war.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 7, 2021
Tomgram: Nick Turse, How Not to End Terror Wars "This is a different kind of war, which we will wage aggressively and methodically to disrupt and destroy terrorist activity," President George W. Bush announced a little more than two weeks after the 9/11 attacks. "Some victories will be won outside of public view, in tragedies avoided and threats eliminated. Other victories will be clear to all."
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 8, 2021
Tomgram: John Feffer, The Unreliable Superpower The nightmare is over. The vanquished beast has crawled back to Mar-a-Lago to lick his wounds. The heroes are hard at work repairing the damage. As America returns to the international stage, the world heaves a collective sigh of relief.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 24, 2014
Peter Van Buren, I'm a Whistleblower: Want Fries with That? Today, a personal odyssey in minimum-wage America. After State Department whistleblower and TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren found himself out of a job and, for months without a pension while his former government employer went after him, he entered the big-box-store minimum-wage economy. From that world he brings us back a vivid picture of life with no way out and no way out.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 20, 2016
Tomgram: William Astore, All the President's Generals America has always had a love affair with its generals. It started at the founding of the republic with George Washington and continued with (among others) Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 29, 2018
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Making Atrocities Great Again These days, there's a significant consensus here that the Iraq invasion was a "terrible mistake," a "tragic error," or even the "single worst foreign policy decision in American history." Fewer voices are saying what it really was: a war crime.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 12, 2018
Tomgram: Engelhardt, America Last? The lessons of history? Who needs them? Certainly not Washington's present cast of characters, a crew in flight from history, the past, or knowledge of more or less any sort. Still, just for the hell of it, let's take a few moments to think about what some of the lessons of the last years of the previous century and the first years of this one might be...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 25, 2019
Tomgram: Rory Fanning, The Courage to Say No Hilel Garmi's phone is going straight to voicemail and all I'm hoping is that he's not back in prison. I'll soon learn that he is. Prison 6 is a military prison. It's situated in the Israeli coastal town of Atlit, a short walk from the Mediterranean Sea and less than an hour's drive from Hilel's home. It was constructed in 1957 following the Sinai War between Israel and Egypt to house disciplinary cases from the IDF.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Worst That Could Happen In one of my most personal pieces, I begin my latest TomDispatch by invoking the post-apocalyptic fiction of my childhood, those "irradiated zones" filled with mutants that were such a part of my growing up years (in the 1950s and 1960s) -- and the nuclear apocalyptic imagination that went with them.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 10, 2018
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Psychologists Say No to Torture Sometimes the good guys do win. That's what happened on August 8th in San Francisco when the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association (APA) decided to extend a policy keeping its members out of the U.S. detention center at Guanta'namo Bay, Cuba.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 19, 2021
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, The Fall of the American Empire? How can you tell when your empire is crumbling? Some signs are actually visible from my own front window here in San Francisco. Directly across the street, I can see a collection of tarps and poles (along with one of my own garbage cans) that were used to construct a makeshift home on the sidewalk...
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 21, 2013
Tomgram: Todd Gitlin, Climate Change as a Business Model This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. When a crossroads doesn't lie in the woods or the fields but in our minds, we seldom know it's there or that we've made the choice to take one path and not the other until it's long past. Sometimes, the best you can do is look for the tiniest clues as to where we're really heading.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 21, 2017
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Mission Unaccomplished, 15 Years Later he United States has already lost -- its war for the Middle East, that is. Having taken my own crack at combat soldiering in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that couldn't be clearer to me.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Tomgram: William Astore, American Militarism Is Not A Fairy Tale 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Nick Turse, Blowback Central The other day, Hamid Karzai, the U.S.-supported Afghan president who was once sardonically nicknamed "the mayor of Kabul," had a few curious things to say about American policy in the Muslim world. Karzai, of course, is a man whose opinions -- whether on U.S. special operations forces and their (out of control) militias, U.S. night raids on Afghan homes, or U.S. air strikes on Afghan villages -- Washington loves to ignore.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 18, 2018
Tomgram: Beverly Gologorsky, What Does Poverty Feel Like? Imagine this: every year during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 there were nearly four million home foreclosures. In that period, with job losses mounting, nearly 15% of American households were categorized as "food insecure."
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 30, 2013
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, The Mystery of Washington's Waning Global Power Among the curious spectacles of our moment, the strangeness of the Obama presidency hasn't gotten its full due. After decades in which "the imperial presidency" was increasingly in the spotlight, after two terms of George W. Bush in which a literal cult of executive power -- or to use the term of that moment, "the unitary executive" -- took hold in the White House...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 19, 2014
Pepe Escobar, Who's Pivoting Where in Eurasia? What's rising and what's falling in the world? In this case, TomDispatch regular Pepe Escobar focuses on something hardly even attended to here in the U.S.: on Tuesday, Vladimir Putin arrives in Beijing where he's going to ink an enormous energy deal between Russia and China, part of a growing strategic alliance which, he suggests, may help give birth to a new Eurasian Century.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 7, 2019
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Living on a Quagmire Planet It took approximately 66 million years for humanity to evolve from lowly surviving mammals and, over the course of a recent century or two, teach itself how to replicate the remarkable destructive power of that long-gone asteroid in two different ways: via nuclear power and the burning of fossil fuels...
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 23, 2017
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Living Nightmare of Intelligence Groupthink Let me lay my own cards on the table here. Based on the relatively little we can know about the information the Intelligence Community has been delivering to the president and his people in these years, I've never been particularly impressed with its work.
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(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 8, 2010
Tomgram: William Astore, Operation Enduring War From TomDispatch this morning: How war has become the new American norm and seven ways to cap the wellsprings of American war -- William J. Astore, "Hope and Change Fade, But War Endures, Seven Reasons Why We Can't Stop Making War"
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 16, 2010
Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Why Obama and Cancún Miss the Point At the moment, if you live in the American Midwest, where part of the roof of a football stadium just collapsed under the weight of a massive snowfall, or in Europe in the grips of a frigid cold spell, it may seem strange to be talking about warming, global or otherwise, no less vanishing ice.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 26, 2011
Tomgram: Ira Chernus, Ass-Backwards in the Middle East 'Let's cut the BS and talk about honest truth.' It seems like a particularly apt expression after a week watching the shadow-boxing between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that brought no tangible progress toward an Israeli-Palestinian peace."
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 1, 2016
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Donald Trump and the Remaking of America In a stunning piece of analysis themed to Super Tuesday and beyond, TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author of the upcoming book America's War for the Greater Middle East, suggests what this country might be like, should Donald Trump actually ride a populist wave of fear and loathing to the White House.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Unipolar No More As Dilip Hiro points out in his TomDispatch post today, if you've noticed the growing assertiveness of China and Russia, you'll know that we're on an increasingly multipolar planet.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 17, 2018
Tomgram: Steve Fraser, Teaching America a Lesson Teachers in red-state America are hard at work teaching us all a lesson. The American mythos has always rested on a belief that this country was born out of a kind of immaculate conception, that the New World came into being and has forever after been preserved as a land without the class hierarchies and conflicts that so disfigured Europe.
SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, October 11, 2020
Tomgram: Michael Klare, A Game of Nuclear Chicken with Russia and China On August 21st, six nuclear-capable B-52H Stratofortress bombers, representing approximately one-seventh of the war-ready U.S. B-52H bomber fleet, flew from their home base in North Dakota to Fairford Air Base in England for several weeks of intensive operations over Europe.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 12, 2021
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, My War on Terror, Up Close and Personal I know what it means to be watched all too carefully, a phenomenon that's only grown worse in the war-on-terror years. I'm a strange combination, I suspect, being both a military spouse and an anti-war-on-terror activist. As I've discovered, the two sit uncomfortably in what still passes for one life. In this country in these years, having eyes on you has, sadly enough, become a common and widespread phenomenon[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Tomgram: Chris Hellman, $1.2 Trillion for National Security "What if you went to a restaurant and found it rather pricey? Still, you ordered your meal and, when done, picked up the check only to discover that it was almost twice the menu price. Welcome to the world of the real U.S. national security budget." So begins Christopher Hellman of the National Priorities Project, and an expert on military spending, in a piece that should be eye-opening for any American.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 19, 2016
Tomgram: Adam Hochschild, Letting Tarzan Swing Through History Adam Hochschild recently discovered that the latest reboot of the Tarzan movies, The Legend of Tarzan, was, bizarrely enough, in part based on his classic book King Leopold's Ghost -- on, that is, the colonial nightmare of the Belgian Congo.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 24, 2013
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Bashing "Isolationists" While at War in the World Hey, Private First Class Dorothy: when that next tornado hits Kansas, it's slated to transport you not to Oz, but to somewhere in Africa, maybe Chad or Niger or Mauritania. And that's war, American-style, for you, or so reports the New York Times's Eric Schmitt from Fort Riley, Kansas, where an Army brigade is gearing up for a series of complex future deployments to Africa.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 15, 2014
Rebecca Gordon: The Torture Wars But here's one important thing to keep in mind: this report addresses only the past practices of a single agency. Its narrow focus encourages us to believe that, whatever the CIA may have once done, that whole sorry torture chapter is now behind u
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, What Principles Rule the World? The devastating way in which Washington has played by the "al-Qaeda game plan," moving drone-first into "the quagmire" of the Greater Middle East, while helping create conditions for "even more violent jihadism with broader appeal" to thrive.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 12, 2016
Washington's Military Addiction And The Ruins Still to Come I take a new look at what I call Washington's "military addiction" in action. We've been watching it for almost 15 years, of course, without drawing any of the obvious conclusions.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 23, 2016
Tomgram: Todd Miller, The Great Mexican Wall Deception Todd Miller reminds us, Trump supporters shouldn't feel complete despair if, in the course of this election campaign, The Donald goes down in flames.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 17, 2016
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Finding Hope in Dismal Times Luckily, not everyone has been glued to the screen, eternally watching The Donald. From Black Lives Matter to the climate change movement, activists have, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon points out in a powerful (and powerfully upbeat) new post, never stopped working to make this a better world.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 1, 2014
Peter Van Buren, Regime Change in America Recently, Peter Van Buren wrote a dramatic, one-of-a-kind TomDispatch account of his descent into the minimum-wage, box-store economy that got a lot of attention online. Now, he widens his lens, taking us on a road trip into an American world of gaping inequalities, towns and cities where the economy is in flight and what's left looks like an industrial apocalypse or the dark side of the moon.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 23, 2016
Aviva Chomsky, Will the Millennial Movement Rebuild the Ivory Tower or Be Crushed by It? Almost out of the blue, a movement, inspired in part by Black Lives Matter, has swept across college campuses nationwide, challenging the racial climate of American higher education and raising other issues of substance, including promoting a living wage for campus workers, fighting soaring tuitions and the inequality that goes with them, and so on.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 5, 2011
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Osama Dead and Alive We've had days of 24/7 coverage of the killing of Osama bin Laden and, by now, a number of analysts and reporters have made the point that, at the time of his death, he was already a "footnote" to history in a Middle East convulsed by the Arab Spring. What's not being said is this: The world bin Laden really changed forever wasn't in the Greater Middle East, it was here in the United States.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 25, 2016
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Crimes Against the Future In this one, as befits my age, I imagine the world I will, sooner or later, be leaving behind: a destabilizing country and a planet filling with refugees, especially millions of children uprooted from their worlds and lives, deprived often of parents, education, and a childhood.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 29, 2020
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Don't Just Blame It on the Pandemic These past few months, it's grown ever harder to recognize life in America. Thanks to Covid-19, basic day-to-day existence has changed in complicated, often confusing ways. Just putting food on the table has become a challenge for many. Getting doctors' appointments and medical care can take months.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 11, 2013
Michael Klare, Will the Keystone XL Pipeline Go Down? Congress seems desperate to see the Keystone XL pipeline built. More than half the Senate -- 44 Republicans, including key Rice opponent John McCain, and nine Democrats -- signed a letter to that effect, but it matters little. Because of the international border Keystone XL crosses, only two people stand between us and its construction, the secretary of state and President Obama, who alone will make the final decision.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 10, 2018
Tomgram: Ben Freeman and William Hartung, A Saudi Love Affair in Washington Think of it as the great love affair of the age of Trump, the one between The Donald and the Saudi royals. And if there's any place to start laying out the story, it's naturally at a wedding, in this case in a tragic ceremony that happened to take place in Yemen, not Washington.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 8, 2014
Jen Marlowe: One Family, Two Doors, Nowhere to Run Suddenly, the ceiling began to crumble. Wafaa, Kamal, and their six children fled, as an Israeli military bulldozer razed their home. No sooner had they made it outside than the roof collapsed. As tank after tank rolled by, the family huddled under an olive tree next to the house. When dawn finally broke, they could examine the ruins of their house.
500px-Wikipedia-logo, From FlickrPhotos
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 3, 2018
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Hail, (Donald) Caesar! It may be too late. The president of the United States is now a veritable autocrat in the realm of foreign policy. He has been since at least 1945, when the last congressionally declared war finally ended. Wars in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen (among other places) were all waged via executive fiat or feeble, open-ended congressional authorizations...
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 26, 2011
Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, Will Asia Save Global Capitalism? 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.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 17, 2020
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, Grappling With a Divided Nation In the two weeks since Election 2020, the country has oscillated between joy and anger, hope and dread in an era of polarization sharpened by the forces of racism, nativism, and hate. Still, truth be told, though the divisive tone of this moment may only be sharpening, division in the United States of America is not a new phenomenon[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 7, 2020
Tomgram: Michael Klare, How to Make War, Twenty-First-Century-Style, and Lose a World In the military realm, Donald Trump will most likely be remembered for his insistence on ending America's involvement in its twenty-first-century "forever wars" -- the fruitless, relentless, mind-crushing military campaigns undertaken by Presidents Bush and Obama in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 13, 2021
Tomgram: Michael Klare, An All-American Path to War? It's the summer of 2026, five years after the Biden administration identified the People's Republic of China as the principal threat to U.S. security and Congress passed a raft of laws mandating a society-wide mobilization to ensure permanent U.S. domination of the Asia-Pacific region[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 20, 2018
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, On Board the USS Detention We still want populations around the world to admire, appreciate, and respect this country as a democracy and a powerful protector. Some ships are used to make exactly that point. And yet, in the twenty-first-century version of war American-style, other ships have become the very image and essence of hardship and harm in ways that violate the most basic tenets of democracy and justice.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 19, 2015
Maya Schenwar, Prison By Any Other Name On January 27th, domestic violence survivor Marissa Alexander will walk out of Florida's Duval County jail -- but she won't be free. Alexander, whose case has gained some notoriety, endured three years of jail time and a year of house arrest while fighting off a prison sentence that would have seen her incarcerated for the rest of her life -- all for firing a warning shot that injured no one to fend off her abusive husband.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 11, 2016
Tomgram: William Astore, Why It's So Hard for Members of the Military to Speak Out These days, who writes about how little public dissent or criticism of U.S. foreign policy and its disastrous wars comes from those who are at the heart of the process, who should know so much better than the rest of us? In all these years, I've seen next to nothing on the subject military dissent in particular.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 8, 2012
Alfred McCoy: Super Weapons and Global Dominion n the 1950s and early 1960s, the Cold War was commonly said to have partially plunged "into the shadows" as a secret, off-the-grid, spy-versus-spy conflict fought between the planet's two superpowers.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 10, 2014
Tomgram: Chase Madar, The Folly of Arming Israel With his latest post, Chase Madar provides a welcome remedy for that collective media and political silence, taking us on a deep dive into what that aid has meant and continues to mean in Israel, Palestine, and Washington. Under the circumstances -- the blackout of just about all attention to the subject -- this is a controversial piece and it’s about time Washington’s military aid to Israel was given an airing.
SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, October 14, 2020
Tomgram: William Hartung, How to Stuff the Middle East With Weaponry The United States has the dubious distinction of being the world's leading arms dealer. It dominates the global trade in a historic fashion and nowhere is that domination more complete than in the endlessly war-torn Middle East.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 13, 2012
Nick Turse: Prisons, Drones, and Black Ops in Afghanistan In Afghanistan, "victory" came early -- with the U.S. invasion of 2001. Only then did the trouble begin.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Nick Turse: A War Victim's Question Only You Can Answer In late December 2001, not long after Washington's second Afghan War began, there was that wedding celebration in eastern Afghanistan in which 110 of 112 villagers were reportedly killed by American B-52 and B-1B bombers using precision guided weapons.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Steve Fraser, Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt Over the past five years, I've spent more hours than I wish to count talking to homeowners within the blast zone of the great housing meltdown of the late 2000s. I'm thinking about the ones who lost their homes to foreclosure, or offloaded them quick and dirty in a short sale, or battled a lender or loan servicer or crooked attorney in court.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 5, 2013
Peter Van Buren, Bizarro World and The Manning Trial, Which Began on 9/11 Close your eyes for a moment, think about recent events, and you could easily believe yourself in a Seinfeldian Bizarro World. Now, open them and, for a second, everything looks almost familiar... and then you notice that a dissident is fleeing a harsh and draconian power, known for its global surveillance practices, use of torture, assassination campaigns, and secret prisons, and has found a haven in a heartless world in...
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Special Ops Goes Global It’s said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. So consider the actions of the U.S. Special Operations Command flattering indeed to the larger U.S. military. After all, over recent decades the Pentagon has done something that once would have been inconceivable.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 13, 2014
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, We Have to Destroy Our Constitution to Save It A new book, as well as the first account written by a participant, remind us that, in the world of the national security state, when it comes to pure and simple illegality in the monitoring of, spying on, and surveillance of American citizens, there really is nothing new under the sun.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 18, 2021
Tomgram: Engelhardt, On Being a Roach Superpower Like Gregor Samsa, the never-to-be-forgotten character in Franz Kafka's story "The Metamorphosis," we awoke on January 7th to discover that we, too, were "a giant insect" with "a domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments" and numerous "pitifully thin" legs that "waved helplessly" before our eyes. If you prefer, though, you can just say it: we opened our eyes and found that, somehow, we had become a giant roach...
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 27, 2022
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, The Glory of the Greatest Shines On At least once a week, a stranger writing a book, magazine article, newspaper feature, or blog; representing a documentary film, radio serial, or podcast; researching a paper for middle school, high school, or college asks me for an interview about Muhammad Ali[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 26, 2016
Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Oil World in Chaos Michael Klare is ahead of the curve with a vivid portrait of petro-states on the downhill slope. From Venezuela to Nigeria to Saudi Arabia, the "climate" is changing for the major oil producing states and not for the better either.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 4, 2019
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, India, Pakistan, and a Planet in Peril It's still the most dangerous border on Earth. Yet compared to the recent tweets of President Donald Trump, it remains a marginal news story. That doesn't for a moment diminish the chance that the globe's first (and possibly ultimate) nuclear conflagration could break out along that 480-mile border known as the Line of Control (and, given the history that surrounds it, that phrase should indeed be capitalized).
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 24, 2020
Tomgram: Nick Turse, One Hundred Seconds Till the Apocalypse Whether you're reading this with your morning coffee, just after lunch, or on the late shift in the wee small hours of the morning, it's 100 seconds to midnight. That's just over a minute and a half. And that should be completely unnerving. It's the closest to that witching hour we've ever been.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 25, 2022
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Secure What? Against Whom? A relative of mine, who works for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) compiling data on foreigners entering the United States, recently posted a curious logo on his Facebook profile: a white Roman numeral three on a black background surrounded by 13 white stars. For those who don't know what this symbol stands for, it represents the "Three Percenters,"[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 31, 2022
Tomgram: Juan Cole, The Muslim-American Conundrum in America Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson excused one of the leaders of the extremist Oath Keepers organization implicated in the January 6th insurrection by describing him as "a devout Christian." It's safe to surmise that he wouldn't have offered a similar defense for a Muslim American[...]
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 29, 2020
Tomgram: John Feffer, Donald Trump's Real Mob Connections The white mobs didn't care whom they killed as long as the victims were Black. They murdered people in public with guns and rocks. They set fire to houses and slaughtered families trying to escape the flames. In East St. Louis in July 1917, white vigilantes lynched Blacks with impunity.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 13, 2013
Nick Turse: Israel, Iran, and the Nuclear Freight Train Has a weapon ever been invented, no matter how terrible, and not used? The crossbow, the dreadnought, poison gas, the tank, the landmine, chemical weapons, napalm, the B-29, the drone: all had their day and for some that day remains now. Even the most terrible weapon of all, the atomic bomb, that city-buster, that potential civilization-destroyer, was used as soon as it was available.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Tomgram: Krushnic and King, The Corporate Nuclear Complex Imagine for a moment a genuine absurdity: somewhere in the United States, the highly profitable operations of a set of corporations were based on the possibility that sooner or later your neighborhood would be destroyed and you and all your neighbors annihilated. And not just you and your neighbors, but others and their neighbors across the planet.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Killing People, Breaking Things, and America's Winless Wars America's post-9/11 wars have been going on for years and it seems as if, in conflict after conflict, the U.S. military can't get out of them and can't win any of them either.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 6, 2016
Tomgram: John Feffer, The Deconstruction of America, 2016-2050 I didn't vote in the pivotal American election of 2016. Thirty-five years ago, in that unseasonably warm month of November, I was in Antarctica's Allan Hills taking ice core samples with a hand augur.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 14, 2018
Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Road to Hell in the Middle East With Donald Trump's decision to shred the Iran nuclear agreement, announced last Tuesday, it's time for the rest of us to start thinking about what a Third Gulf War would mean. The answer, based on the last 16 years of American experience in the Greater Middle East, is that it won't be pretty.
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, 1984 Was an Instruction Manual Once upon a time, you might have said that someone "disappeared." But in the 1970s in Argentina, Chile, and elsewhere, that verb grew eerily more active in its passive form. He or she no longer "disappeared," but "was disappeared" -- up to 30,000 Argentineans by their own military in the course of an internal struggle that came to be known as "the dirty war."
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SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, August 15, 2010
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The War Mentality From TomDispatch tonight: a unique exploration of why Washington can't imagine alternatives to its global war policy -- Tom Engelhardt, "What If Washington...? Five Absurd Things That Simply Can't Happen in Wartime Washington"
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 7, 2014
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, No-Fly-List America It’s rare that we ever get a glimpse of how our expanding secret state really works. But every now and then, a single case can suddenly illuminate an otherwise dark landscape. Such is Rahinah Ibrahim's case, vividly laid out by former State Department whistleblower Peter Van Buren today at TomDispatch, and it should chill you to the bone.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 17, 2016
Tomgram: Mattea Kramer, You Don't Leave Home Without It Not long before Election Day, but thousands of miles away in the Afghan village of Bouz Kandahari, 30 to 36 civilians died (including a significant number of children and infants).
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 1, 2022
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Cult of No Imagine that you were experiencing all of this (and by this, I mean our lives right now) as if it were a novel, à la Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. The famed author of Robinson Crusoe Defoe claimed it had been written by the fictional Crusoe himself was five years old in 1665. That was when a year-long visitation of the bubonic plague decimated London[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, January 30, 2011
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, The Empire Bowl is Super! A TomDispatch guarantee: You won't find another Super Bowl article like this one -- by TD's Jock Culture correspondent and former New York Times columnist Robert Lipsyte. It's provocative, political, and canny. In short, it's super. It'll bowl you over.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 20, 2022
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Is There an Off-Ramp from the Latest Forever War? Ukraine is obviously a powder keg. With each passing day, in fact, the war there poses new threats to the world order. Only recently, Vladimir Putin's Russia intensified its attacks on civilian targets in that beleaguered land, while threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons and adding Ukraine's neighbor Belarus to its side on the battlefield[...]
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 2, 2018
Tomgram: William Hartung, Weaponized Keynesianism in Washington Other than shouting about building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, one of Donald Trump's most frequently proclaimed promises on the 2016 campaign trail was the launching of a half-trillion-dollar plan to repair America's crumbling infrastructure (employing large numbers of workers in the process). Eighteen months into his administration, no credible proposal for anything near that scale has been made.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 21, 2020
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Partyland 2020 It's party time in the nation's capital and the Christmas spirit reigns supreme, even if the Texas Republican Party does want to secede from the Union. I mean, who doesn't?
SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, A Shadow Government of Kindness On December 7th, the State Department announced its brave decision to host UNESCO's World Press Freedom Day in 2011. ("[W]e are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information"") Less than two weeks later, I learned that if you try to go to TomDispatch.com from a State Department computer, you can't get there. The following message appears:
SHARE More Sharing        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).
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 24, 2014
Tomgram: Greg Grandin, The Reparations of History, Paid and Unpaid Greg Grandin begins with right-wing fever dreams about reparations for slavery (including the Drudge Report’s claim that President Obama is handing out free cell phones to African Americans). Then, in a highly original essay, he considers what we really owe the slave system -- and the answer is, in every sense, from medicine to insurance, our world. It’s a stunning and painful look at the foundations of our way of life.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 22, 2016
Tomgram: William Hartung, Trump for the Defense As with so much of what Donald Trump has said in recent months, his positions on Pentagon spending are, to be polite, a bundle of contradictions.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 14, 2020
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, Making Sense of Mass Abandonment Amid Abundance Martin Luther King, Jr., offered this all-too-relevant comment on his moment in his 1967 speech "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?": "The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the upper classes until they gag with superfluity.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 22, 2024
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, What Kind of Jew Am I? Long ago, I came to believe that being a Jew, even a secular one like me, entailed certain responsibilities. A people who had suffered so much yet survived were obligated, if not honored, to serve as witnesses and supporters of other oppressed people and to live in the public interest, to model ethical lives[...]
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 15, 2016
Tomgram: Nick Turse, America, the Election, and the Dismal Tide It wasn't to be, but had it been, Hillary Clinton would have become not only the first woman president, but the first president to enter the Oval Office as a lame duck.
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SHARE More Sharing        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?
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 18, 2014
Engelhardt: The National Security State "Works," Even If Nothing It Does Works It was December 6, 2019, three years into a sagging Clinton presidency and a bitterly divided Congress. That day, the 500-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee's long fought-over, much-delayed, heavily redacted report on the secret CIA drone wars and other American air campaigns in the 18-year-long war on terror was finally released.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 19, 2020
Tomgram: Cassandra Stimpson and Holly Zhang, A World Being Made for War War: what is it good for? Apparently, in Washington's world of think tanks, the answer is: the bottom line[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Tom Engelhardt: The Meaning of a Do-Nothing Election In the fall of 1948, Harry Truman barnstormed the country by train, repeatedly bashing a "do-nothing Congress," and so snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in that year's presidential campaign.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 10, 2022
Tomgram: Kelly Denton-Borhaug, What an American Addiction to War Means to Veterans I'm a civilian who, like many Americans, has strong ties to the U.S. Armed Forces. I never considered enlisting, but my father, uncles, cousins, and nephews did. As a child I baked cookies to send with letters to my cousin Steven who was serving in Vietnam. My family tree includes soldiers on both sides of the Civil War[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 1, 2021
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Living Up Close and Personal with Our Endless Wars "Are you okay?" asked a friend and military spouse in the voicemail she left me on the afternoon the mob of Trump supporters breached the Capitol so violently. At home with a new baby, her Navy reservist husband stationed in Germany, the thoughts running through her head that day would prove remarkably similar to mine. As she said when we spoke, "It's as if the U.S. has become a war zone."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 7, 2017
Tomgram: Engelhardt, It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's The Donald in the News! It started in June 2015 with that Trump Tower escalator ride into the presidential race to the tune of Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World." ("But there's a warnin' sign on the road ahead, there's a lot of people sayin' we'd be better off dead, don't feel like Satan, but I am to them...")
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 25, 2019
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Collusion, Hell, Yeah! As Notre Dame burned, as the flames leapt from its roof of ancient timbers, many of us watched in grim horror. Hour after hour, on screen after screen, channel after channel, you could see that 850-year-old cathedral, a visiting spot for 13 million people annually, being gutted, its roof timbers flaring into the evening sky, its steeple collapsing in a ball of fire.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 8, 2020
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Great, Great Fall The year was 1991 and the United States was suddenly the globe's lone superpower, its ultimate hyperpower, the last and greatest of its kind, the soon-to-be-indispensable nation. The only one left -- alone, utterly alone and triumphant atop the world.
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SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 6, 2010
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Taking Down America Trying to play down the significance of an ongoing Wikileaks dump of more than 250,000 State Department documents, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently offered the following bit of Washington wisdom: "The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it's in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets...
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 9, 2014
Michael Klare: Washington Wields the Oil Weapon The Obama administration is also wielding the oil weapon against two of the world's leading producers, Iran and Russia. These efforts, which include embargoes and trade sanctions, are likely to have a far greater impact on world output, reflecting White House confidence that, in the pursuit of U.S. strategic interests, anything goes.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 9, 2017
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, The Enemies of Our Enemy Are Not Our Friends You know you're living in a looking-glass world when former Vice President Dick Cheney speaks out against one of Donald Trump's executive orders. He's a good example of how past adversaries of movements for peace and justice are lining up against our current adversary, the new president.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 3, 2022
Tomgram: William Hartung, Mission (Im)possible -- and You're Paying for It 2021 was another banner year for the military-industrial complex, as Congress signed off on a near-record $778 billion in spending for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy. That was $25 billion more than the Pentagon had even asked for[...]
(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 3, 2012
Bill McKibben: The Most Important Story of Our Lives 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.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 20, 2014
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, It's About Blackmail, Not National Security Spying has a history almost as ancient as humanity itself, but every now and then the rules of the game change. This post-9/11 moment of surveillance is one of those game-changers and the National Security Agency (NSA) has been the deal-breaker and rule-maker.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 17, 2014
Tomgram: Lewis Lapham, How "Revolution" Became an Adjective Today, we have another wild ride with the superb Lewis Lapham. It’s the introductory essay to the new issue of his magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly, as always exclusively at TomDispatch online.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 12, 2018
Tomgram: Shammalah and Marlowe, The Return of the Women of Gaza Abu Mosa's left arm was wrapped in a sling fashioned from a black-and-white-checkered kuffiyeh, or scarf, and a Palestinian flag. Israeli soldiers had shot her in the shoulder with live ammunition on March 30th as she approached the barrier to plant a Palestinian flag in a mound of earth. The bullet is still lodged in her collarbone. Three weeks later, however, she's back at the Great Return March...
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Michael Klare, Fighting for Oil Call it a double whammy for the planet or simply irony with a capital "I." As the invaluable Michael Klare, TomDispatch regular and author of The Race for What's Left, points out today, if you scan the planet for conflict, what you'll find from Syria and Iraq to the South China Sea are a series of energy wars -- fossil-fuel conflicts to be exact.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Tomgram: Michael Klare, The New "Long War" "Great power competition, not terrorism, has emerged as the central challenge to U.S. security and prosperity," claimed Pentagon Comptroller David Norquist while releasing the Pentagon's $686 billion budget request in January.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Engelhardt: Field of Nightmares Chalmers Johnson's book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published in March 2000 -- and just about no one noticed. Until then, blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, which Johnson defined as "the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people."
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 1, 2015
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, How Trump Became Trump and What That Means for the Rest of Us The 2016 election campaign is certainly a billionaire's playground when it comes to "establishment candidates" like Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush who cater to mega-donors and use their money to try to rally party bases.
Perpetual War, From FlickrPhotos
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 24, 2017
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Chameleon Presidency MOAB sounds more like an incestuous, war-torn biblical kingdom than the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, aka "the mother of all bombs." Still, give Donald Trump credit. Only the really, really big bombs, whether North Korean nukes or those 21,600 pounds of MOAB, truly get his attention.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 2, 2018
Tomgram: William Hartung, Selling Arms as if There Were No Tomorrow For an astounding 25 of the past 26 years, the United States has been the leading arms dealer on the planet, at some moments in near monopolistic fashion.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 25, 2014
Aviva Chomsky, What's at Stake in the Border Debate The militarization of the police has been underway since 9/11, but only in the aftermath of the six-shot killing of an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, with photos of streets in a St. Louis suburb that looked like occupied Iraq or Afghanistan, has the fact of it, the shock of it, seemed to hit home widely.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 5, 2016
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Presidential Wars Andrew Bacevich, author of the just-published book, America's War for the Greater Middle East, explores the way Congress has, in the twenty-first century, signed a blank check on war powers for the president and what this means for the American system of governance. As it happens, Washington's never-ending wars in distant battle zones have helped alter the most basic workings of our government and our Constitution.
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(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, February 5, 2012
Kicking Down the World's Door 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, How the U.S. Created Middle East Mayhem This year's Nobel Peace Prize went to Tunisia's National Dialogue Quartet "for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy... in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011." The Quartet is a group of four organizations -- two national labor unions, a business group, and a lawyers' association -- whose work helped prevent Tunisia from sliding into civil war in the years following that "revolution."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 21, 2017
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Words Not to Die For By way of explaining his eight failed marriages, the American bandleader Artie Shaw once remarked, "I am an incurable optimist." In reality, Artie was an incurable narcissist. Utterly devoid of self-awareness, he never looked back, only forward. So, too, with the incurable optimists who manage present-day American wars.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 12, 2019
Tomgram: James Carroll, How Many Minutes to Midnight? Last month, the National Nuclear Security Administration (formerly the Atomic Energy Commission) announced that the first of a new generation of strategic nuclear weapons had rolled off the assembly line at its Pantex nuclear weapons plant in the panhandle of Texas. That warhead, the W76-2, is designed to be fitted to a submarine-launched Trident missile, a weapon with a range of more than 7,500 miles...
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 25, 2021
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Heating the Planet Through a New Cold War Slowing the pace of climate change and getting "tough" on China, especially over its human-rights abuses and unfair trade practices, are among the top priorities President Biden has announced for his new administration. Evidently, he believes that he can tame a rising China with harsh pressure tactics, while still gaining its cooperation in areas of concern to Washington.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Pox Americana: Driving Through the Gates of Hell and Other American Pastimes in the Greater Middle East Facing genuine shock and awe (the people's version), the Obama administration has been shaken. It has shown itself to be weak, visibly fearful, at a loss for what to do, and always several steps behind developing events. Their oh-so-solemn, carefully calibrated statements, still in command mode, couched in imperial-speak, and focused on what client states in the Middle East must do, might as well be spoken to the wind.
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SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 13, 2010
Tomgram: Lewis Lapham, Sweet Celebrity Label celebrity a consumer society's most precious consumer product, and eventually it becomes the hero with a thousand faces, the packaging of the society's art and politics, the framework of its commerce, and the stuff of its religion.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 7, 2013
Tomgram: Ann Jones, Silent Soldiers, The Losers From Our Lost Wars When Barack Obama took office, the sky was the limit in the Greater Middle East. After all, it seemed the U.S. had hit rock bottom. President Bush had set the region aflame with a raging debacle in Iraq, a sputtering conflict in Afghanistan, and a low-level drone war in Pakistan.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 10, 2022
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, A World of Killer Robots? Here's a scenario to consider: a military force has purchased a million cheap, disposable flying drones each the size of a deck of cards, each capable of carrying three grams of explosives enough to kill a single person or, in a "shaped charge," pierce a steel wall. They've been programmed to seek out and "engage" (kill) certain human beings, based on specific "signature" characteristics[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Tomgram: Subhankar Banerjee, Oil Follies in the Arctic Bear with me. I'll get to the oil. But first you have to understand where I've been and where you undoubtedly won't go, but Shell's drilling rigs surely will -- unless someone stops them.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 17, 2011
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Top Guns No More When air war first began, it was imagined as the equivalent of knightly jousts in the sky and that image remained long embedded in our world, whether as Snoopy fighting the Red Baron or as American "Top Guns" taking down enemy aircraft in dogfights. Well, Top Guns no more.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 29, 2015
Bacevich: A Hug for the Muddlers En route back to Washington at the tail end of his most recent overseas trip, John Kerry, America's peripatetic secretary of state, stopped off in France "to share a hug with all of Paris." Whether Paris reciprocated the secretary's embrace went unrecorded.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 19, 2018
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Making Sense of U.S. Moves in the Middle East My father and I always had a tacit agreement: "We will never speak of That Part of the World." He'd grown up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Norfolk, Virginia. His own father, a refugee from early-twentieth-century pogroms in what is now Ukraine, had been the president of his local Zionist organization.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 8, 2013
Michael Klare, How to Fry a Planet Look at it any way you want, and if you're not a booster of fossil fuels on this overheating planet of ours, it doesn't look good. Hardly a month passes, it seems, without news about the development of some previously unimaginable way to extract fossil fuels from some thoroughly unexpected place.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 24, 2016
Tomgram: Gary Younge, America's Deserving and Undeserving Dead Children On average, seven children a day, about 2,500 a year, are shot to death in this country. Given the availability of guns of every sort here, this should surprise no one.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 14, 2016
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Through the Gates of Hell The one thing you could say about empires is that, at or near their height, they have always represented a principle of order as well as domination.
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SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 5, 2011
William deBuys: The Age of Thirst in the American West A riveting account of American water politics and why the civilization of the Southwest will not survive the present century.
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 5, 2010
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Out, Damned Spot! From TomDispatch today: A startling account of how the Obama administration has taken control of the Wikileaks Afghan War archive story and how, in the process, it has "bloodied" Wikileaks founder Julian Assange; it's a remarkable tale of the impunity of those who oversee the American way of war -- Tom Engelhardt, "Whose Hands? Whose Blood? Killing Civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq"
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 4, 2014
Who Rules Washington? The Fourth Branch-- The Rise to Power of the National Security State As every schoolchild knows, there are three check-and-balance branches of the U.S. government: the executive, Congress, and the judiciary. That's bedrock Americanism and the most basic high school civics material. Only one problem: it's just not so.
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Why the Troops Are Coming Home This story originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. One and a Half Cheers for American Decline. The Future's Not Ours -- and That's Good News
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Dilip Hiro, Pakistan's Other Partner In a highly original analysis of the growing Pakistan-U.S. imbroiglio, Hiro reveals that the Pakistanis have two powerful "cards" in their hand: The first is America's supply lines for the Afghan War, most of which run through Pakistan.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 29, 2013
Rosner and Markowitz: Your Body Is a Corporate Test Tube Just over three years ago, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig leased by BP killed 11 people, injured 17, and -- according to government estimates -- polluted the Gulf of Mexico with 210 million gallons of Louisiana sweet crude. It turns out, however, that the casualty toll didn't end with those 28 workers. The real number may reach into the thousands.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 15, 2021
Tomgram: Ariel Dorfman, Liberty and Justice for All? "Una nación bajo Diós, indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos." When Jennifer López shouted out that last line of the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish during Joe Biden's inauguration ceremony, like so many Spanish-speaking Latinos in the United States I felt a sense of pride, a sense of arrival.
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SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, January 16, 2011
Tomgram: Stephan Salisbury, The Right Wing of Killing Tomgram: Stephan Salisbury, The Right Wing of Killing | TomDispatch
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 20, 2010
Tomgram: Christopher Hellman, Is the Pentagon Finally Overmatched? Is that the wake-up smell of coffee wafting through the halls of the Pentagon? After a decade and a half of unparalleled budget growth, top Defense Department officials are finally talking about the possible end of their spending spree. And they're not alone.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, January 15, 2012
Nick Turse: Drone Disasters 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 12, 2019
Tomgram: Allegra Harpootlian, The School Shooters of the Planet In the wake of the February 14, 2018, mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 students and staff members, a teacher said the school looked "like a war zone." And to many young Americans, that's exactly what it felt like. But this shooting was different.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Tomgram: Pratap Chatterjee, Big Bro Wants You Sometimes, the world sends you back to school. These last months have offered us a crash course -- call it Surveillance 101 -- in how Washington, enveloped in a penumbra of extreme secrecy, went to work creating a global surveillance state on a scale almost beyond the imagination.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 16, 2017
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Walled In If you want to know where President Donald Trump came from, if you want to trace the long winding road (or escalator) that brought him to the Oval Office, don't look to reality TV or Twitter or even the rise of the alt-right. Look someplace far more improbable: Iraq.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 7, 2019
Tomgram: Arnold Isaacs, A Catalog of Heartlessness "Make America Cruel Again." That's how journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Shipler has reformulated Donald Trump's trademark slogan. Shipler's version is particularly apt when you think about the president's record over the last two years on refugee resettlement and other humanitarian-related immigration issues.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 9, 2017
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Surging to Failure The other day, I found myself flipping through old photos from my time in Iraq. One in particular from October 2006 stood out. I see my 23-year-old self, along with my platoon. We're still at Camp Buerhing in Kuwait, posing in front of our squadron logo splashed across a huge concrete barrier.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 17, 2018
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Special Ops: 133 Countries Down, 17 to Go? Early last month, at a tiny military post near the tumbledown town of Jamaame in Somalia, small arms fire began to ring out as mortar shells crashed down. When the attack was over, one Somali soldier had been wounded -- and had that been the extent of the casualties, you undoubtedly would never have heard about it.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 1, 2013
Peter Van Buren, Obama's War on Whistleblowers Finds Another Target Sometimes, it's hard to grasp just how our world has been transformed since September 11, 2001. But here's a little exchange at NBC Nightly News a few days back -- just part of the humdrum flow of TV news-chat -- that somehow caught my attention.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 4, 2018
Tomgram: Ben Fountain, "Very Close to a Complete Victory" The midterms were bearing down on us like a runaway train with Donald Trump in the driver's seat and the throttle wide open, the Presidential Special hell-bent for the bottom. "Go Trump Go!" tweeted David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, as if the president needed anyone's encouragement.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 21, 2021
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Peering Into a Forever-War Crystal Ball Hard as it is to believe in this time of record pandemic deaths, insurrection, and an unprecedented encore impeachment, Joe Biden is now officially at the helm of the U.S. war machine. He is, in other words, the fourth president to oversee America's unending and unsuccessful post-9/11 military campaigns. In terms of active U.S. combat, that's only happened once before...
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 26, 2012
Oded Na'aman: "It's Mostly Punishment"" Testimonies by Veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces From Gaza and the Occupied On returning from his first trip to the Gaza Strip, Noam Chomsky told Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, "It's kind of amazing and inspiring to see people somehow managing to survive as caged animals subject to constant, random, sadistic punishment only to humiliate them, no pretext. Israel and the United States keep them alive basically.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 14, 2013
David Vine: Baseworld Profiteering Every now and then, news about U.S. military bases abroad actually gets a little attention. The most recent example: Afghan President Hamid Karzai's announcement that the U.S. will be able to keep nine bases after the 2014 withdrawal of its combat troops.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 15, 2018
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Staggeringly Well-Funded Blowback Machine In reality, the costs of America's wars, still spreading in the Trump era, are incalculable. Just look at photos of the cities of Ramadi or Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa or Aleppo in Syria, Sirte in Libya, or Marawi in the southern Philippines, all in ruins in the wake of the conflicts Washington set off in the post--9/11 years, and try to put a price on them.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 27, 2018
Tomgram: Judith Coburn, Can We Be Forgotten Anymore? Now that we know we are surveilled 24/7 by the National Security Agency, the FBI, local police, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, hackers, the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, data brokers, private spyware groups like Black Cube, and companies from which we've ordered swag on the Internet, is there still any "right to be forgotten," as the Europeans call it? Is there any privacy left, let alone a right to privacy?
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 22, 2020
Tomgram: Ariel Dorfman, Trump's Divine Fate For some time now, I've wanted to send Donald Trump to Hell. I mean this literally, not as a figure of speech. I want him to inhabit the palpable, sensory Hell that religions have long conjured up with scenes of sulfur, damnation, and screams of perpetual pain from those who once caused grievous harm to their fellow humans.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 27, 2012
Rebecca Solnit: We Could Be Heroes Think of them as Rebecca Solnit's "explaining" trilogy, three incisive and provocative commentaries on how we (mis)understand our mad world. The first of them, "Men Explain Things to Me," was actually four years old and already a minor classic when, on August 19th, I reposted it as a "best of TomDispatch" summer piece.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 19, 2023
Tomgram: Juan Cole, Greenwashing the Planet A recent opinion poll rocked the world of the Big Oil lobbyists in their proverbial thousand-dollar suits and alligator shoes. The Pew Research Center found that 37% of Americans now feel that fighting the climate crisis should be the number one priority of President Joe Biden and Congress, and another 34% put it among their highest priorities, even if they didn't rank it first[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 16, 2012
Peter Van Buren: Imperial Reconstruction and Its Discontents A war and occupation thousands of miles away that lasted seven years and involved more than 1.5 million Americans, military and civilian, has passed into the history books and yet we still know remarkably little about so much of it. Take American military bases in Iraq.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 31, 2016
Tomgram: Nate Terani, One Veteran's War on Islamophobia Recently, I was asked a question about Kill Anything That Moves, my history of civilian suffering during the Vietnam War. An interviewer wanted to know how I responded to veterans who took offense at the (supposed) implication that every American who served in Vietnam committed atrocities.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 10, 2020
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Gloom and Doom 2020 In 2016 as now, he was the candidate of chaos. Yes, he was a billionaire (or wanna-be billionaire or in-hock billionaire, not to mention a liar, a cheat, and a scoundrel), but from the beginning he appealed to the forces of order in America that were also, as it happened, the forces of chaos.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 13, 2022
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Welcome to the New Cold War in Asia The word "encirclement" does not appear in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act(NDAA), signed into law by President Joe Biden on December 27th, or in other recent administration statements about its foreign and military policies. Nor does that classic Cold War era term "containment" ever come up. Still, America's top leaders have reached a consensus on a strategy to encircle and contain the latest great power, China[..]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 12, 2014
William Astore, Drafted by the National Security State On the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings, Brian Williams led off NBC Nightly News this way: "On our broadcast tonight, the salute to the warriors who stormed the beaches here in Normandy..." It's such a commonplace of our American world, that word "warriors" for those in the U.S. military or, as is said time and again, our "wounded warriors" for those hurt in one of our many wars.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 30, 2014
Ann Jones: Genuine, Handcrafted, Man-Made Government This disconnect between Washington's much-advertised support for women's rights and its actual disdain for women was not lost upon canny Afghans. From early on, they recognized that the Americans were hypocrites at heart.
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Pentagon Lovers and Welfare Queens By the time you read this, I'll already have voted -- the single most reflexive political act of my life -- in the single most dispiriting election I can remember. As I haven't missed a midterm or presidential election since my first vote in 1968, that says something. Or maybe by the time you've gotten to this, the results of the 2010 midterm elections will be in. In either case, I'll try to explain just why you don't reall
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 13, 2013
Rebecca Solnit, The Art of Not Knowing Where You Are Here are my three fleeting personal experiences of the far North. In 1982, on my only trip to Japan, I flew over the Aleutian Islands. Out the plane window was a spectacular sight, jagged, snowy mountaintops tearing through clouds -- spectacular, that is, until a stewardess came over and asked me to pull down the shade. The movie Fame was onscreen and the Aleutian light was bothering the passengers around me.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 3, 2016
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Resurrecting My Parents From the Dead for Election 2016 To say that this is the election from hell is to insult hell.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 26, 2018
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Requiem for a Tragedy By the time Donald J. Trump threw in the towel, who among us hadn't seen or heard the chilling videos in which U.S. border officials shamelessly grabbed uncomprehending children and toddlers from their pleading mothers and fathers? Some were told they were being taken to bathe or shower by people with little sense of the resonances of history...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 14, 2015
Tomgram: David Vine, Our Base Nation Early in this century, former CIA consultant and scholar Chalmers Johnson broke the silence around America's "empire of bases." And yet, in an era in which such bases, still being built, have played a crucial role in our various wars, conflicts, bombing and drone assassination campaigns, and other interventions in the Greater Middle East and elsewhere, they remain a barely acknowledged aspect of American life.
SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, October 28, 2020
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, A Well-Armed and Unpatriotic Far Right It was July 2017, a few weeks before the "Unite the Right" Charlottesville riots, when white men marched through the streets of that Virginia city protesting the planned takedown of a confederate statue and chanting, "Jews will not replace us."
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 12, 2010
Tomgram: Mark Engler, Paying Oil's True Cost From TomDispatch this morning: A remarkable and original exploration of the real damage and real cost to society of Big Oil's depredations in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere -- Mark Engler, "The Gulf at the Gas Station, Can We Calculate the True Cost of Our Dependence on Oil?"
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 31, 2019
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, Addicts, Addicts, Everywhere... Fabricating national emergencies is unconscionable, especially when there are real ones requiring urgent attention. Here's an example: since 1999, 400,000 Americans have died from overdoses of opioids, including pain medications obtained legally through prescriptions or illegally, as well as from heroin, an illicit opioid.
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 15, 2010
Tomgram: John Barry, The Pandemic Next Time From TomDispatch this evening: A prescient analysis from a leading expert of how the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009, while not the lethal public-health crisis many expected, exposed unsettling weaknesses in the world's preparedness for the next pandemic which is bound to come -- John M. Barry, "How Prepared Are We for the Next Great Flu Breakout?: Why We're Losing the Way Against Influenza"
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 22, 2010
Tomgram: David Swanson, All War All the Time These last years of blissful peace have left Republican Congressman Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, soon to be the new chair of the House Armed Services Committee, in a true panic. How, he wonders, will a starved military ever get the necessary money for the weapons it needs to keep us safe, and where exactly is that military heading, anyway?
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 14, 2020
Tomgram: Mandy Smithberger, Ending the Pentagon's Pandemic of Spending The inadequate response of both the federal and state governments to the Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the United States, creating what could only be called a national security crisis. More than 190,000 Americans are dead, approximately half of them people of color.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Tomgram: Jeremiah Goulka, Republicans and the Redskins Allow me to introduce you to Dan Snyder. He owns the Washington Redskins football team. Before Snyder bought the team in 1999, the Redskins were one of the most hallowed franchises in the National Football League, with a history as rich as any.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 9, 2011
Andy Kroll, Welcome to the McJobs Recovery This is a stunning report from the front lines of job disaster that raises this question: Will this warped recovery of ours pave the way for an even more warped McEconomy, with the have-nots at one end, the have-it-alls at the other end, and increasingly less of us in between?
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 30, 2017
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Goldmanizing Donald Trump Irony isn't a concept with which President Donald J. Trump is familiar. In his Inaugural Address, having nominated the wealthiest cabinet in American history, he proclaimed, "For too long, a small group in our nation's capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished -- but the people did not share in its wealth."
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 11, 2019
Tomgram: Bob Dreyfuss, The Rise of the Hardliners Here's the foreign policy question of questions in 2019: Are President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, all severely weakened at home and with few allies abroad, reckless enough to set off a war with Iran?
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 24, 2013
Chip Ward, Rewilding the West Here's a nifty trick that's been on my mind lately. In case you hadn't noticed, the weather news this season has been pretty grim. Tornados so large and destructive that they would have given Dorothy pause, 500-year European floods, massive rainstorms rolling across the land, record heat in California and Alaska, late snowfalls that boggle the imagination, wildfires that dwarf past ones in the American West.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 28, 2018
Tomgram: Stephanie Savell, How America's Wars Fund Inequality at Home Never before has this country relied so heavily on deficit spending to pay for its conflicts. The consequences are expected to be ruinous for the long-term fiscal health of the U.S., but they go far beyond the economic. Massive levels of war-related debt will have lasting repercussions of all sorts. One potentially devastating effect, a new study finds, will be more societal inequality.
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 9, 2010
Tomgram: Fatima Bhutto, The War Against Pakistan Honestly, it's perfectly sensible. Secrecy being such an all-encompassing value for our government, why shouldn't its employees work in the dark, even when the rest of us, the rest of the world, knows what's going on.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Tomgram: Subhankar Banerjee, The Vanishing Whether the sixth mass species extinction of Earth's history is already (or not quite yet) underway may still be debatable, but it's clear enough that something's going on, something that may prove even more devastating than a mass of species extinctions: the full-scale winnowing of vast populations of the planet's invertebrates, vertebrates, and plants.
SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, April 10, 2019
Tomgram: Alfred W. McCoy, America's Self-Inflicted Wound We live in a time of change, when people are questioning old assumptions and seeking new directions. In the ongoing debate over health care, social justice, and border security, there is, however, one overlooked issue that should be at the top of everyone's agenda, from Democratic Socialists to libertarian Republicans: America's longest war. No, not the one in Afghanistan. I mean the drug war.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 18, 2012
Dilip Hiro: Washington's Pakistan Meltdown In 1948, George Orwell published his classic dystopian novel 1984, flipping the numbers in the publication year to speed us into a future that is now, of course, 18 years in our past. In that book, he imagined a three-superpower world of regularly shifting alliances in which war was a constant but its specific nature eternally forgotten.
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 17, 2015
Tomgram: Nick Turse, A Shadow War and an American Drone Unit Under Wraps On October 7th, at an "undisclosed location" somewhere in "Southwest Asia," men wearing different types of camouflage and dun-colored boots gathered before a black backdrop adorned with Arabic script. They were attending a ceremony that mixed solemnity with celebration, the commemoration of a year of combat that left scores of their enemies slain.
SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, October 7, 2020
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Pandemic Living After all these months and 210,000 deaths, you'd think I'd be used to it all, but I'm not. It doesn't seem even a little normal yet. I'm still full of absences, missing so much I used to take for granted: hugs and handshakes, rooms crowded for funerals and weddings, potluck dinners and house parties.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, No Pro Football? No Problem. In his patented fashion, Lipsyte then takes us on a Mr. Toad's wild ride through the larger American issues that the NFL labor dispute reflects (even if in sports-cartoonish fashion), including: "the current attacks on unions across the country... racism, classism, sexism, recreational violence, and the health-care gap. No wonder football seems to have replaced baseball as the national pastime."
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 14, 2014
Matthew Harwood, One Nation Under SWAT Think of it as a different kind of blowback. Even when you fight wars in countries thousands of miles distant, they still have an eerie way of making the long trip home. Take the latest news from Bergen County, New Jersey, one of the richest counties in the country. Its sheriff's department is getting two mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPs -- 15 tons of protective equipment -- for a song from the Pentagon.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 8, 2024
Tomgram: Norman Solomon, Everything at Risk Yes, the Doomsday Clock keeps ticking -- it's now at 90 seconds to midnight, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists -- but the ultimate time bomb never gets the attention that it deserves. Even as the possibility of nuclear annihilation looms, this century's many warning signs retain the status of Cassandras[...]
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, January 6, 2013
Bill McKibben: Time Is Not on Our Side When it came to climate change in 2012, the operative word was "hot" (with "record" a close second). The continental U.S. broiled. Drought struck with a passion and, as the year ended, showed no sign of going away any time soon. Water levels on the Mississippi River fell so perilously low as to threaten traffic and business on one of the nation's busier arteries.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 2, 2018
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, The Cheetah in Us All My six-year-old boy can't imagine a future without his favorite animal, but we live in the small city of New London, Connecticut. Unlike coyotes, cheetahs are, to say the least, rare here.
(37 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 29, 2012
Rebecca Solnit: Climate and Clarity All summer, there were screaming weather headlines and stories, in part because of the worst drought the U.S. has seen in more than half a century -- a continuing drought that is now threatening the winter wheat crop.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 17, 2014
Dahr Jamail, Incinerating Iraq Who even knows what to call it? The Iraq War or the Iraq-Syrian War would be far too orderly for what's happening, so it remains a no-name conflict that couldn't be deadlier or more destabilizing -- and it's in the process of internationalizing in unsettling ways. Think of it as the strangest disaster on the planet right now. After all, when was the last time that the U.S. and Russia ended up on the same side in a conflict?
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Tomgram: Juan Cole, American Policy on the Brink Cole explores the explosion of popular outrage in Tunisia, and smaller-scale versions of it in Algeria and elsewhere in the Greater Middle East -- and how from Tunisia to Central Asia and Afghanistan, the U.S. government ended up on the wrong side, backing crony, nepotistic regimes, deeply unpopular with their people, which nonetheless offered one thing: a willingness to join Washington in its "war on terror."
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(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Tomgram: Stephen Kinzer, BP's First "Spill" To frustrated Americans who have begun boycotting BP: Welcome to the club. It's great not to be the only member any more!
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 11, 2011
Tomgram: Sheila Johnson, "Chal" Now, as the latest TD post, I'm pleased to offer a special kind of goodbye to him, a wonderful memory piece ("We were married in May 1957 in Reno, Nevada, having left the car in a 15-minute parking zone"") by Sheila Johnson, his wife, partner in so many endeavors, and an impressive figure in her own right.
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(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Dearest President and Professor Barack Obama 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 30, 2012
Stephan Salisbury: Life in the American Slaughterhouse Is America an increasingly violent society? Statistics seemingly tell us no. From 2001 to 2010, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, violent crime victimizations actually dropped 34%.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 19, 2024
Tomgram: Joshua Frank, Waters of Conflict We live in a world of dangerous, deadly extremes. Record-breaking heat waves, intense drought, stronger hurricanes, unprecedented flash flooding. No corner of the planet will be spared the wrath of human-caused climate change and the earth's fresh water is already feeling the heat of this new reality[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Tomgram: Tony Karon, The Bomb-Iran Debate From Hell From TomDispatch this morning: An incisive exploration of just why the American "debate" about whether to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities (or whether to let the Israelis do so) is so fraudulent and the three crucial questions the media debaters avoid asking as they potentially set us on the road to war -- Tony Karon, "Two Minutes to Midnight? Cutting Through the Media's Bogus Bomb-Iran Debate"
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Vietnamization 2.0 First came Fallujah, then Mosul, and later Ramadi in Iraq. Now, there is Kunduz, a provincial capital in northern Afghanistan. In all four places, the same story has played out: in cities that newspaper reporters like to call "strategically important," security forces trained and equipped by the U.S. military at great expense simply folded...
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 22, 2020
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The Madness of War, American-Style In choosing a title for his final, posthumously published book, the prominent public intellectual Tony Judt turned to a poem by Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, published in 1770. Judt found his book's title in the first words of this couplet: Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey Where wealth accumulates, and men decay...
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Tomgram: Stephan Salisbury, Extremism at Ground Zero (Again) From TomDispatch today: A remarkable look at anti-Muslim hysteria in America from 2001 to the mosque "controversies" of today and the growing role of the far right in fanning them by a reporter who has long covered the subject -- Stephan Salisbury, "Mosque Mania, Anti-Muslim Fears and the Far Right"
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Tomgram: Lewis Lapham, Selling Death If you think about it, since 9/11, death has been the great topic of conversation in this country and the crucial building block for the national security and global surveillance state whose shadow has fallen across Washington. It has been the selling point for the loss of American liberties, the assault on American privacy, and the transformation of that city into a war capital overseeing a permanent global conflict.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 21, 2016
Tomgram: Adam Hochschild, A Corporation Goes to War In researching the book, Hochschild came across a crucial figure working in those shadows -- an unforgettable oilman with a Trumpian personality whose acts in support of Spanish general Francisco Franco and then Adolf Hitler helped ensure that fascism would come to power in Spain and, in the end, that the globe would be bathed in blood.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 24, 2016
Tomgram: William Hartung, How to Disappear Money, Pentagon-Style William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, shines a bright light into the darkest corners of the Pentagon's shady spending and accounting practices.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 15, 2020
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, On the Frontlines of Covid-19 Suffering As autumn fades and winter looms, the dire predictions public-health experts made about Covid-19 have, unfortunately, proven all-too-accurate. On October 27th, 74,379 people were infected in the United States; less than a month and a half later, on December 9th, that number had soared to 218,677, while the 2020 total has just surpassed 15 million[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 27, 2017
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Trumpian Snapshot of America It's been epic! A cast of thousands! (Hundreds? Tens?) A spectacular production that, five weeks after opening on every screen of any sort in America (and possibly the world), shows no sign of ending. What a hit it's been! It's driving people back to newspapers (online, if not in print) and ensuring that our everyday companions, the 24/7 cable news shows, never lack for "breaking news" or audiences.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 15, 2020
Tomgram: Mattea Kramer, Isolation and Opioids During the Pandemic In our new era of nearly unparalleled upheaval, as a pandemic ravages the bodies of some and the minds of nearly everyone, as the associated economic damage disposes of the livelihoods of many, and as even the promise of democracy fades, the people whose lives were already on a razor's edge -- who were vulnerable and isolated before the advent of Covid-19 -- are in far greater danger than ever before.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 21, 2013
Ruth Rosen: Feminism's Long March On February 12th, the Senate passed a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) with broad bipartisan support. But House Republicans (who killed the legislation in the last Congress) have yet to introduce their version of the bill.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Tomgram: Bob Dreyfuss, American Death Spiral in the Middle East When Barack Obama took office, the sky was the limit in the Greater Middle East. After all, it seemed the U.S. had hit rock bottom. President Bush had set the region aflame with a raging debacle in Iraq, a sputtering conflict in Afghanistan, and a low-level drone war in Pakistan.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 27, 2016
Tomgram: John Feffer, Donald Trump and America B John Feffer focuses on the post-Cold War global economy and who it left behind, a group that has no name here but is known in Poland as "Poland B" and is now triumphantly represented in power by a rabid right-wing political party there.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 3, 2016
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, What Actually Keeps Americans Safe We have a vast national security state that remains remarkably helpless when it comes to finding the terrorists in our American world. It is simply incapable of picking those unexpected needles out of the vast haystack of us.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 5, 2012
Jeremiah Goulka: The Urge to Bomb Iran The Obama administration has engaged in a staggering military build-up in the Persian Gulf and at U.S. and allied bases around Iran (not to speak of in the air over that country and in cyberspace). Massive as it is, however, it hasn't gotten much coverage lately.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 15, 2013
Tom Engelhardt, Putting War Back in Children's Culture Now that Darth Vader's breathy techno-voice is a staple of our culture, it's hard to remember how empty was the particular sector of space Star Wars blasted into. The very day the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973, Richard Nixon also signed a decree ending the draft. It was an admission of the obvious: war, American-style, had lost its hold on young minds.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 12, 2013
Tomgram: Bill Moyers, Covering Class War If you've heard the phrase "class war" in twenty-first-century America, the odds are that it's been a curse spat from the mouths of Republican warriors castigating Democrats for engaging in high crimes and misdemeanors like trying to tax the rich.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 12, 2014
Pratap Chatterjee, The True Costs of Remote Control War In his latest post, Pratap Chatterjee puts a new face on that seemingly most "detached" form of conflict. Because for the first time American drone pilots are actually stepping out into the public to talk about what drone war really means and how deeply it affects them -- including surprising PTSD diagnoses -- we're getting a new picture of Washington's post-9/11 assassination campaigns in the backlands of the planet.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 21, 2014
The Future Is Not Ours (and Neither Is the Past) Seventy-three years ago, on February 17, 1941, as a second devastating global war approached, Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines, called on his countrymen to "create the first great American Century." Luce died in 1967 at age 69. Life, the pictorial magazine no home would have been without in my 1950s childhood, ceased to exist as a weekly in 1972 and as a monthly in 2000.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 19, 2018
Tomgram: Belle Chesler, A Teacher Listens to Her Students During the first week of May 1963, more than 800 African-American students walked out of their classrooms and into the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, to call for an end to segregation. Despite frequent arrests and having dogs and high-pressure firehoses turned on them, they kept marching.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 14, 2021
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Can the U.S. and China Cooperate on a Failing Planet? Soon-to-be President Joe Biden will instantly face a set of extraordinary domestic crises a runaway pandemic, a stalled economy, and raw political wounds, especially from the recent Trumpian assault on the Capitol but few challenges are likely to prove more severe than managing U.S. relations with China. While generally viewed as a distant foreign-policy concern, that relationship actually looms over nearly everything...
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 23, 2021
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, A Covid-19 Hell on Earth Economic crises shine a spotlight on a society's inequities and hierarchies, as well as its commitment to support those who are most vulnerable in such grievous moments. The calamity created by Covid-19 is no exception. The economic fallout from that pandemic has tested the nation's social safety net as never before.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 9, 2016
Tomgram: Mark Wilkerson, Batman in a Hospital Bed Mark Wilkerson, who was himself deployed to Somalia in 1993 (the Black Hawk down year) and, had never come fully to grips with his own experience in an American conflict, finally did so by writing Tomas Young's War, a book about Young's bravery -- heroism, actually -- on the home front of a kind normally not associated with antiwar activity.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 18, 2016
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, How to Resolve the ISIS Crisis Van Buren then offers a full-scale reassessment of the situation to date and a realistic look at what kind of a threat the Islamic State is to the U.S. At that point, he suggests a plan of action that is radical indeed from the point of view of present-day Washington where an "antiwar" stance involves more bombs and more special operatives.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 3, 2013
Lewis Lapham: The Ocean as Desert As a boy, I was forbidden what were then called "horror comics." So, of course, with the first purloined dime I could get my hands on, during a vacation when I was eight or nine, I snuck into the local store and bought the grisliest looking one I could find. Predictably, it scared the hell out of me.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 14, 2013
Tomgram: Max Blumenthal, Expulsion and Revulsion in Israel In case you hadn't noticed, Israel has been in the news a lot lately. After all, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at the U.N. in the midst of an Iranian "charm offensive," just as presidents Obama and Rouhani were having the first conversation between Iranian and American heads of state since Jimmy Carter's day, and gave the usual hellfire sermon.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 6, 2018
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Speed Kills I took my first hit of speed in 1970 during my freshman year in college. That little white pill -- Dexedrine -- was a revelation. It made whatever I was doing absolutely fascinating. Amphetamine sharpened my focus and banished all appetites except a hunger for knowledge.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 30, 2019
Tomgram: William Astore, Ending the Pentagon's Long Con Donald Trump is a con man. Think of Trump University or a juicy Trump steak or can't-lose casinos (that never won). But as president, one crew he hasn't conned is the Pentagon. Quite the opposite, they've conned him because they've been at the game a lot longer and lie (in Trump-speak) in far biglier ways.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 30, 2020
Tomgram: Hartung and Smithberger, The Pandemic of Pentagon Spending Now that Joe Biden is slated to take office as the 46th president of the United States, advice on how he should address a wide range of daunting problems is flooding in. Nowhere is there more at stake than when it comes to how he handles this country's highly militarized foreign policy in general and Pentagon spending in particular.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 23, 2011
Rebecca Solnit, When Institutions Rape Nations This is the story of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the formerly powerful head of the International Monetary Fund and possible future French president, in a hotel suite in New York City -- but as only TomDispatch regular Rebecca Solnit could tell it.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 23, 2013
Tomgram: Calabrese and Harwood, Privacy Down the Drain In the U.S. these days, privacy is so been-there-done-that. Just this week, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret outfit that hears only the government side of any argument and has generally been a rubberstamp for surveillance requests, declassified an opinion backing the full-scale collection and retention of the phone records ("metadata") of American citizens.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 5, 2015
Matthew Harwood: The Fear of Lone-Wolf Terrorism Rises The shadow of a new threat seems to be darkening the national security landscape: the lone-wolf terrorist. "The lone wolf is the new nightmare," wrote Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer recently, and the conservative pundit wasn't alone in thinking so.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 1, 2016
Tomgram: Ann Jones, Donald Trump's Open Carry Donald Trump grabbed a new lifeline. Speaking at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on October 15th, he raised a hand as if to take an oath and declared: "I am a victim!"
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 15, 2015
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Creating an Un-Intelligence Machine 1,500. That figure stunned me. I found it in the 12th paragraph of a front-page New York Times story about "senior commanders" at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) playing fast and loose with intelligence reports to give their air war against ISIS an unjustified sheen of success: "CENTCOM's mammoth intelligence operation, with some 1,500 civilian, military, and contract analysts, is housed at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa...
SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, December 2, 2020
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Age of Opacity We're now living in an age of opacity, as Rudy Giuliani pointed out in a courtroom recently. Here was the exchange: "'In the plaintiffs' counties, they were denied the opportunity to have an unobstructed observation and ensure opacity,' Giuliani said. 'I'm not quite sure I know what opacity means. It probably means you can see, right?' 'It means you can't,' said U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann. 'Big words, your honor.'"
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 15, 2012
Jeremiah Goulka: Playing the ID Card It's an election year for the record books -- or maybe Ripley's Believe It or Not. The Obama campaign has now raised close to $1 billion; "dark money" is pouring into the Republican camp and onto the airwaves; and it's clear that earlier predictions of the first $2 billion presidential campaign are likely to fall short of the real figure.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Tomgram: Dahr Jamail, The Climate Change Scorecard Since a nuclear weapon went off over Hiroshima, we have been living with visions of global catastrophe, apocalyptic end times, and extinction that were once the sole property of religion. Since August 6, 1945, it has been possible for us to imagine how human beings, not God, could put an end to our lives on this planet.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 3, 2016
Tomgram: Nick Turse, It Can't Happen Here, Can It? In 2015, on a trip to South Sudan, a country the U.S. helped bring into existence, he found himself in a place where the same kinds of war crimes were being committed right here and now in a commonplace way, where violence was the coin of the realm, and horrors of various sorts were almost guaranteed to be around the next corner.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 6, 2017
Tomgram: Ira Chernus, Now Who's The Enemy? What kind of national security policy will the Trump administration pursue globally? On this issue, as on so many others, the incoming president has offered enough contradictory clues, tweets, and comments that the only definitive answer right now is: Who knows?
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Pentagon Triumphant on the Media Battlefield From TomDispatch this morning: Have you noticed that, for the first time in our history, our commanding generals can narrate their own wars in real time? Consider this part of the Pentagon's ongoing media triumph -- Tom Engelhardt, "Will Our Generals Ever Shut Up? The Military's Media Megaphone and the U.S. Global Military Presence"
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 25, 2011
Tomgram: McCoy and Reilly, An Empire of Failed States McCoy, a canny observer of empire and TomDispatch regular, and Reilly then take us on a dizzying tour of those "subordinate elites" and how, for half a century, the U.S. ran its imperial domains through local leadership; how Washington built up militaries around the world, and how, when the going got rough, U.S. administration after administration changed that leadership.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 4, 2013
Engelhardt: Climate Change as History's Deal-Breaker Two Sundays ago, I traveled to the nation's capital to attend what was billed as "the largest climate rally in history" and I haven't been able to get the experience -- or a question that haunted me -- out of my mind. Where was everybody?
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 11, 2018
Tomgram: Arnold Isaacs, Promoting Islamophobia in America Imagine that a nominee for secretary of state had shared platforms with white nationalist Richard B. Spencer and been given a major award by his National Policy Institute, which describes itself as "an independent organization dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States and around the world."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 20, 2020
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Campaigning on Planet A "Look, folks, the air quality is in the red zone today. The EPA says that means people with lung or heart issues should avoid prolonged activity outdoors." That was J.R. de Vera, one of two directors of UNITE-HERE!'s independent expenditure campaign to elect Biden and Harris in Reno, Nevada. UNITE-HERE! is a union representing 300,000 workers in the hospitality industry ...
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 9, 2016
Rosner and Markowitz, Welcome to the United States of Flint David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, authors of Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America's Children, offer the definitive account of how this country was poisoned by lead thanks to industries that were profiting from its use and left the public to face the music.
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 17, 2011
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Waist Deep in the Washington Quagmire "Neither $553 billion [the 2012 Pentagon budget request] nor $80.1 billion [the intelligence budget] can buy Washington a brain. Right now, by all evidence, our leaders are still convinced that it's their job to run the world and fight distant wars until hell freezes over. They can't bear to think a new thought, or take a chance, or experiment on anything, or look at our planet in a new way.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Tom Engelhardt: The Supersizing of American Politics Obesity is an American plague -- and no, I'm not talking about overweight Americans. I'm talking about our overweight, supersized presidential campaign. I'm talking about Big Election, the thing that's moved into our homes and, especially if you live in a "swing state," is now hogging your television almost 24/7.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 16, 2014
Peter Van Buren: RIP, The Bill of Rights Here's what passes for good news when it comes to a free press these days: two weeks ago, the Supreme Court refused without comment to hear a case involving New York Times reporter James Risen. It concerned his unwillingness to testify before a grand jury under subpoena and reveal a confidential source of information in his book State of War on the secret U.S. campaign against the Iranian nuclear program.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 22, 2016
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Washington's Twenty-First-Century Opium Wars It might be said that Washington "liberated" only one thing in Afghanistan over the last 14-plus years and that was, as TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy points out, the opium poppy.
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Tomgram: Mark Danner, Still Living in Cheney's World ark Danner has launched a remarkable new series at the New York Review of Books on the Bush administration and the grim world they created for the rest of us. In doing so, he offers us a way to look forward out of the darkness they generated by looking back. Danner starts at the moment in 2007 when Cheney was determined to bomb a Syrian nuclear plant secretly being built – as he was determined to bomb just about everything.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 12, 2015
Roads to Nowhere, Ghost Soldiers, and a $43 Million Gas Station in Afghanistan Let's begin with the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills, Iraqi oil money held in the U.S.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 1, 2020
Tomgram: William Astore, America's Dark Side in the Age of Trump What pops into your head when you hear the number 1,000 in a political-military context? Having studied German military history, I immediately think of Adolf Hitler's confident boast that his Third Reich would last a thousand years. In reality, of course, a devastating world war brought that Reich down in a mere 12 years. Only recently, however, such boasts popped up again in the dark dreams of Donald Trump.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 5, 2014
Dilip Hiro, Behind the Coup in Egypt Dilip Hiro's latest TomDispatch post is a Middle Eastern expert's magisterial look at what's really been happening in Egypt over the last year, as that country's generals ended the Arab Spring there (at least for now) via a coup performed in slow motion in the open air. It's a remarkable story that puts disparate events, disparately covered, in one place and explains just how it all happened.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 11, 2014
Steve Fraser: The Return of the Titans Today, a striking anatomy of America as a tycoon's playground, including the urge of this country's newest crop of billionaires to "play god" at our expense and with our lives.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 24, 2011
Tomgram: Chip Ward, The Nuclear Myth Melts Down Ward offers an anatomy of the "peaceful atom" and the industry that goes with it from its 1950s beginning to late tomorrow night. He takes you on a whirlwind tour of how the industry tries to limit the discussion of risk, of the real costs of nuclear power and its massive government subsidies.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 8, 2016
Tomgram: Michael Klare, A Take-No-Prisoners World of Oil Michael Klare offers a hair-raising look at this planet's new world of oil, involving a glut of the stuff, plunging prices, and an energy "war of attrition" set off by the Saudis that could have unknown but dangerous ramifications planet-wide.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 21, 2016
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, No "New Normal" The night after the election, this long-time pacifist dreamed she shot a big white man carrying an arsenal of guns. He was wandering around a room full of people, waving a pistol and threatening to fire.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 10, 2013
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Advice from the Colonel Dear Col. Manners, I'm an embattled newspaper editor. Recently, I read a New Yorker piece by Ken Auletta that included this disturbing passage about the New York Times: "In early August, the Times was working on a story about an intercepted terror threat when James R. Clapper, the administration's director of intelligence, asked the paper's Washington bureau to withhold certain details.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 13, 2017
Tomgram: John Feffer, Next Stop: The Deconstruction Zone Dystopias have recently achieved full-spectrum dominance. Kids are drawn to such stories -- The Giver, Hunger Games -- like Goths to piercings.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 7, 2011
Tomgram: Ellen Cantarow, Dirty Energy's Dirty Deeds From a pristine homestead in East Texas to the Kellogg's Corn Flake factory in Battle Creek, Michigan, Cantarow takes us to the front lines of America's energy wars and examines tar sands oil -- what it is, what it does and why every one of us should be more than a little worried about it.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 23, 2015
Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, The New Great Game Between China and the U.S. The U.S. is transfixed by its multibillion-dollar electoral circus. The European Union is paralyzed by austerity, fear of refugees, and now all-out jihad in the streets of Paris. So the West might be excused if it's barely caught the echoes of a Chinese version of Roy Orbison's "All I Have to Do Is Dream." And that new Chinese dream even comes with a road map.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 23, 2020
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, What If They Called an Election and Nothing Changed in the War State? In this mystifying moment, the post-electoral sentiments of most Americans can be summed up either as "Ding dong! The witch is dead!" or "We got robbed!" Both are problematic, not because the two candidates were intellectually indistinguishable or ethically equivalent, but because each jingle is laden with a dubious assumption[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 12, 2021
Tomgram: William Astore, We're All Prisoners of War Now "POWs Never Have A Nice Day." That sentiment was captured on a button a friend of mine wore for our fourth grade class photo in 1972. That prisoners of war could never have such a day was reinforced by the sad face on that button. Soon after, American POWs would indeed be released by their North Vietnamese captors as the American war in Vietnam ended...
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 9, 2010
Tomgram: Juan Cole, The Media as a Security Threat to America From TomDispatch this morning: A searing look at just why the Haitian earthquake was a wall-to-wall, months-long media event and the Pakistani floods, which have inundated 20% of that country in a modern weather disaster unparalleled in memory, have gotten next to no attention here -- Juan Cole, "The Great Pakistani Deluge Never Happened, Don't Tune In, It's Not Important"
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Tomgram: Engelhardt and Turse, The Wacky World of American War From TomDispatch this morning: 11 pop-quiz questions on the wacky world of American war -- depending on how many answers you get correct you can be a four-star general, a gun totin' mercenary, or a mere private -- Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse, "The American Way of War Quiz, This Was the War Month That Was (Believe It or Not)
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 8, 2013
Nick Turse, The Snags, Snares, and Snafus of Covering the U.S. Military The 30-year-old history of U.S. foreign policy: now, there's a dynamite issue! Explosive, in fact. Far too dangerous, it turns out, for Americans to be informed about or have access to basic documents about -- so you might conclude from a recent report at Steven Aftergood's website Secrecy News.
Repercussions: Rhythm and Resistance Across the Atlantic. Map concept and research: Rebecca Solnit. Cartography: Shizue Seigel. Design: Lia Tjandra. c Univ. of CA Press, 2013., From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 23, 2013
Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, The Future Needs Us 'Tis the season of tradition and, as it turns out, TomDispatch has one seasonal tradition of its own. For the last nine -- count 'em: nine! -- years, Rebecca Solnit has stepped into the breach ("dear friends!") and ended the TomDispatch year for us with her usual panache.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 20, 2014
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Thug State U.S.A. The revelations of Edward Snowden, significant as they have been, have left us with the feeling that a curtain has been finally been pulled back on that secret state. That, I suggest, is a delusion. In order to grasp the fullness of its acts and boundlessness, you would need 5, 10, 20 Snowdens at its many different outfits.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 9, 2013
Tomgram: Chase Madar, The Criminalization of Everyday Life Sometimes a single story has a way of standing in for everything you need to know. In the case of the up-arming, up-armoring, and militarization of police forces across the country, there is such a story.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 12, 2020
Tomgram: Nick Turse, You Can't Go Home Again I saw them for only a few seconds. One glimpse and they were gone. The young woman wore a brown headwrap, a yellow short-sleeved shirt, and a long pink, red, and blue floral-patterned skirt. She held the reins of the donkey pulling her rust-pink cart. Across her lap lay an infant. Perched beside her at the edge of the metal wagon was a young girl who couldn't have been more than eight[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 29, 2012
John Feffer: Islamophobia, Obama, and the Art of Acting Muslim 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."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 26, 2014
Peter Van Buren, What We've Lost Since 9/11 (Part 2) When it comes to spying, surveillance, and privacy, a simple rule applies to our world: however bad you think it is, it's worse. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we've learned an enormous amount about the global surveillance regime that one of America's 17 intelligence outfits has created to suck into its maw (and its storage facilities) all communications on the planet, no matter their form.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 4, 2016
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Flashpoint for the Planet Fears are rising over Pakistan's new generation of tactical nuclear weapons and what any clash between that country and its neighbor India might lead to, especially in a world in which a nuclear nightmare in South Asia would be likely to throw the whole planet into a version of nuclear winter.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 25, 2013
Nick Turse: The Hidden History of Water Torture Imagine for a moment that the Iranians kidnap an American citizen from a third country. (If you prefer, feel free to substitute al-Qaeda or the North Koreans or the Chinese for the Iranians.) They accuse him of being a terrorist. They throw him in jail without charges or a trial or a sentence and claim they suspect he might have crucial information.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 5, 2020
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, "In Short, There Is Still Much to Do" In the chaos of this moment, it seems likely that Joe Biden will just squeeze into the presidency and that he'll certainly win the popular vote, Donald Trump's Mussolini-like behavior and election night false claim of victory notwithstanding. Somehow, it all brings another moment in my life to mind.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Ariel Dorfman, Martin Luther King and the Two 9/11s As we approach the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, the words pour out. Ten years ago on the 40th anniversary, TomDispatch asked the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman to consider what Martin Luther King had meant to him in the struggle that followed the first 9/11, the brutal U.S.-backed military coup of September 11, 1973, against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 16, 2015
Jane Lazarre: On the Problems of Breathing in America It was 1969 and 1973, both times in early fall, when I first saw your small bodies, rose and tan, and fell in love for the second and third time with a black body, as it is named, for my first love was for your father. Always a word lover, I loved his words, trustworthy, often not expansive, sometimes even sparse, but always reliable and clear.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 2, 2012
Michael Klare: Welcome to the New Third World of Energy, the U.S. 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Anya Schiffrin, Who Knew We Were Living in the Golden Age of Investigative Journalism? Almost a decade ago, I spent more than a year freelancing for a major metropolitan newspaper -- one of the biggest in the country. I would, on an intermittent basis, work out of a newsroom that appeared to be in a state of constant churn. Whoever wasn't being downsized seemed to be jumping ship or madly searching for a life raft.
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 7, 2010
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The U.S. Military as Quagmire Specialists Consider this: the number three book at Amazon.com at the moment is entitled Obama's Wars, and yet the war that may most truly turn out to be the president's seems only now to be gaining steam. Is it a case of premature titling?
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 27, 2024
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, War's Cost Is Unfathomable We Americans have been at war now since October 7th, 2001. That was when our military first launched air strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan in response to al-Qaeda's September 11th terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. That's 22 years and counting. The "war on terror" that began then would forever change what it meant to be an Arab-American here at home[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Tomgram: Nick Turse, American War Versus Real War From TomDispatch this morning: A brilliant dissection of why Sebastian Junger's widely praised film Restrepo does not catch the essence of either the Afghan War or modern war in general, as well as a remarkable statement on the nature of war -- Nick Turse, "Death on Your Doorstep, What Sebastian Junger and Restrepo Won't Tell You About War"
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 4, 2011
Tomgram: Lewis Lapham, Consuming Labor Lapham traces the meaning and importance of work from medieval times through the deregulating years of Reagan to our present moment, with more than 10 million Americans officially out of work and many more unofficially so.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 28, 2014
Karen Greenberg, Abu Ghraib Never Left Us ere, on the 10th anniversary of the moment when the infamous photos from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq became public, is the story -- in six chapters without an ending -- of an American journey into hell that's still not over. No one has followed this endlessly grim tale more assiduously than TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg, the chronicler of the creation of the prison at Guantanamo Bay and the editor of The Torture Papers.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 13, 2016
Tomgram: Tim Shorrock, American Military Power in Asia and the Trump Factor Despite the attention being given to America's roiling wars and conflicts in the Greater Middle East, crucial decisions about the global role of U.S. military power may be made in a region where, as yet, there are no hot wars: Asia.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 29, 2024
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, On Trial (Never?) In 1868, British Prime Minister William Gladstone famously said, "Justice delayed is justice denied." The phrase has often been repeated here in the United States, most famously by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who echoed it in his 1963 "Letter from a Birmingham Jail": "Justice too long delayed is justice denied[...]"
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 27, 2012
Tom Engelhardt: Losing It in Washington In the wake of several deaths among its contingent of troops in a previously peaceful province in Afghanistan, New Zealand (like France and South Korea) is now expediting the departure of its 140 soldiers. That's not exactly headline-making news here in the U.S. If you're an American, you probably didn't even know that New Zealand was playing a small part in our Afghan War.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Engelhardt: I.F. Stone and the Urge to Serve They say you can't go home again, but recently, almost 44 years after I saw my last issue of the Weekly -- Stone was 64 when he closed up shop; I was 27 -- I found the full archive of them, all 19 years, online, and began reading him all over again. It brought back a dizzying time in which we felt "liberated" from so much that we had been brought up to believe...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 26, 2024
Tomgram: William Hartung, False Job Claims Fuel Massive Pentagon Budgets Joe Biden wants you to believe that spending money on weapons is good for the economy. That tired old myth -- regularly repeated by the political leaders of both parties -- could help create an even more militarized economy that could threaten our peace and prosperity for decades to come[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 19, 2014
William Astore, The Bomber Will Always Get Funded -- and Used Bombing Iraq, as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and TomDispatch regular William Astore indicates today, has become an American pastime. (These days, you can't be president without sending in the bombers and drones.) So let's try to get our heads around the latest U.S. air strikes in northern Iraq against the forces of the new "caliphate."
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 28, 2015
Tomgram: Greg Grandin, Henry of Arabia The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran.
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SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 4, 2010
Tomgram: Stephan Salisbury, Keeping an Eye on Everyone Let H. David Kotz put American surveillance activities in context by focusing our attention on what this government hasn't spent much time looking at while it was putting its 24/7 efforts into watching the rest of us.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Tomgram: James Carroll, Where Did All the Fatwas Go? This is a new look -- as only Carroll could offer it -- at the way our vision of Arabs, the Arab world, and Islam has been turned upside down. In these last two months, he asks, where were the fatwas? Where were the violent jihadists ready to slaughter innocents?
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 25, 2018
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, "We Will Always Be Confronted by U.S. Power" On April 19th, university students in Nicaragua's capital, Managua, exploded onto the streets. Their initial demand? A more effective government response to wildfires burning out of control in the country's most precious repository of biodiversity.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 2, 2019
Tomgram: Rajan Menon, Whose Money? Not Yours Despair about the state of our politics pervades the political spectrum, from left to right. One source of it, the narrative of fairness offered in basic civics textbooks -- we all have an equal opportunity to succeed if we work hard and play by the rules; citizens can truly shape our politics -- no longer rings true to most Americans.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 3, 2020
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Stop Thanking the Troops and Lend a Hand By the end of this year, the White House will reportedly have finally brought home a third of the 7,500 troops still stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq (against the advice of President Trump's own military leaders).
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 2, 2009
Too Big to Fail? Afghanistan as a Bailout State In the worst of times, my father used to say, "A good gambler cuts his losses." It's a formulation imprinted on my brain forever. That no-nonsense piece of advice still seems reasonable to me, but it doesn't apply to American war policy. Our leaders evidently never saw a war to which the word "more" didn't apply. Hence the Afghan War, where impending disaster is just an invitation to fuel the flames of an already roaring fire.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Tomgram: Engelhardt, What Planet Are We On? In terms of pure projectable power, there's never been anything like it. Its military has divided the world -- the whole planet -- into six "commands." Its fleet, with 11 aircraft carrier battle groups, rules the seas and has done so largely unchallenged for almost seven decades.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Rebecca Gordon: Six Americans Who Prove Bush and Cheney Didn't Have to Do It Why was it again that, as President Obama said, "we tortured some folks" after the 9/11 attacks? Oh, right, because we were terrified. Because everyone knows that being afraid gives you moral license to do whatever you need to do to keep yourself safe.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 7, 2017
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, War Without End In his inaugural address, President Trump described a dark and dismal United States, a country overrun by criminal gangs and drugs, a nation stained with the blood seeping from bullet-ridden corpses left at scenes of "American carnage." It was more than a little jarring.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Tomgram: Todd Miller, The Border-Industrial Complex Goes Abroad As with the rest of our homeland security state, when it comes to border security, reality checks aren't often in the cards. The money just pours into a world of remarkable secrecy and unaccountability. Last week, however, the Government Accountability Office released a report about a Transportation Security Administration decision to spend $200 million a year on a "behavioral screening program."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 25, 2014
Nick Turse: American "Success" and the Rise of West African Piracy "The Gulf of Guinea is the most insecure waterway, globally," says Loic Moudouma. And he should know. Trained at the U.S. Naval War College, the lead maritime security expert of the Economic Community of Central African States, and a Gabonese Navy commander, his focus has been piracy and maritime crime in the region for the better part of a decade.
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 24, 2010
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Perfect American Weapon Admittedly, before George W. Bush had his fever dream, the U.S. had already put its first unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drone surveillance planes in the skies over Kosovo in the late 1990s. By November 2001, it had armed them with missiles and was flying them over Afghanistan.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 16, 2013
Andy Kroll: A Democracy of the Wealthy Once upon a time, the election season began with the New Hampshire primary in early March and never really gained momentum (or much attention) until the candidates were chosen and the fall campaign revved up. Now, the New Hampshire primary is in early January, and by then, the campaign season has already been underway for a couple of years.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 5, 2013
Tomgram: Pratap Chatterjee, The Jason Bourne Strategy This won't mean much to most of you, but Andre, publisher of Pantheon Books and my boss for 15 years, the person who, in 1976, hired me when there was really no obvious reason to do so and, more than anyone else, let me become what I am today, died last weekend.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Michael Klare, What's Big Energy Smoking? Michael Clare offers us genuine news about the Big Energy companies: they're taking a leaf from the playbook of Big Tobacco and, with their sales declining in the First World, they're ramping up their operations in the developing world. They're planning to sell ever more of their product there, and so ensure the perpetuation of the age of fossil fuels and the associated disasters that we know will go with it.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 6, 2017
Tomgram: William Hartung, The Generals vs. the Ideologues or the Generals and the Ideologues? In the splurge of "news," media-bashing, and Bannonism that's been Donald Trump's domestic version of a shock-and-awe campaign, it's easy to forget just how much of what the new president and his administration have done so far is simply an intensification of trends long underway.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 7, 2024
Tomgram: Nan Levinson, The Enticements of War (and Peace) War, what is it good for? Well, the media for starters. Shortly after the Biden administration responded to the killing of three American soldiers in a drone attack on a base in Jordan by bombing 85 Iran-connected targets in Iraq and Syria, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) asked in a headline: "Is the press dragging America to war again?" Again? I thought. Shouldn't that be "still"?[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 29, 2010
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Giving Up On Victory, Not War From TomDispatch this morning: a bestselling author's brilliant and provocative exploration of why big victory and war as a viable instrument of statecraft are headed for the dustbin of history -- Andrew Bacevich, "The End of (Military?) History, The United States, Israel, and the Failure of the Western Way of War"
SHARE More Sharing        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.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Next War? Once upon a time, former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping suggested that Asia's Pacific powers and wannabes should "put aside differences and jointly develop resources." Now, China is the rising power on planet Earth. The idea of regional cooperation turns out to have been a dream and now, it seems, everyone in the Pacific basin has woken up.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Rebecca Solnit, How to Act Like a Billionaire National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, now charged with violating the Espionage Act, has opened a Pandora's box of American global surveillance for the rest of us to be stunned by. Every day a new revelation, a new set of secrets or information, seems to pour out from somewhere -- without Hope, that last denizen of Pandora's famous container, yet in sight.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 31, 2014
Tomgram: In Memoriam: Jonathan Schell (1943-2014) Jonathan Schell died last week and today, at TomDispatch, I pay tribute to him with a piece of my own, “The Widening Lens,” and a never-before-online interview with him from historian Chris Appy’s book on the Vietnam War from all sides, Patriots, that takes us back to his formative moments as a young reporter.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 28, 2016
Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Coming World of "Peak Oil Demand," Not "Peak Oil" Michael Klare is once again ahead of the curve, this time in explaining why, even under the pressure of falling oil prices, the major oil producers couldn't agree on a price freeze in a recent meeting at Doha in Qatar.
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Michael T. Klare, 2040 or Bust If you're an oil exec, the world is a rosy place -- and I'm not talking about the pink haze of heat that's been rising from the burning American West all summer. I'm talking about energy consumption where the news just couldn't be cheerier.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 12, 2011
William Astore, A New Age of "Enlightened" War Historian and retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William J. Astore in his latest TomDispatch post takes up permanent-war, American-style, and its eerie similarity to "enlightened" wars fought by European monarchs centuries ago.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 27, 2013
Todd Gitlin, Are "Intelligence" and Instigation Running Riot? Back in the early 1970s, I worked for Pacific News Service (PNS), a small antiwar media outfit that operated out of the Bay Area Institute (BAI), a progressive think tank in San Francisco. The first story I ever wrote for PNS came about because an upset U.S. Air Force medic wanted someone to know about the American war wounded then pouring in from the invasion of Laos.
SHARE More Sharing        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.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, "Are They Going to Kill Me?" "What did you do at school today, Seamus?" It's a question I ask him everyday. "Well," my proud preschooler begins, "we did not have a lockdown drill today." And that's about as far as he gets in the art of storytelling.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 18, 2021
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, Why Martin Luther King Day Should Matter 2020 will go down as the deadliest year in American history, significantly due to the devastation delivered by the coronavirus pandemic. In addition, count in nearly two trillion dollars in damage from climate events (many caused by, or heightened by, intensifying global warming), a surge of incidents of police violence inflicted on Black and Native peoples, and millions more Americans joining the ranks of the poor...
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 26, 2013
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The American Exceptionalism Sweepstakes Let's be Americans, which means being exceptional, which also means being honest in ways inconceivable to the rest of humanity. So here's the truth of it: the American exceptionalism sweepstakes really do matter. Here. A lot.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 2, 2014
Engelhardt, The Escalation Follies Whatever your politics, you're not likely to feel great about America right now. After all, there's Ferguson (the whole world was watching!), an increasingly unpopular president, a Congress whose approval ratings make the president look like a rock star, rising poverty, weakening wages, and a growing inequality gap just to start what could be a long list.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 16, 2020
Tomgram: John Feffer, There's No Returning to Normal After Trump Imagine for a moment that Hillary Clinton had won the presidential election in 2016 [...]
SHARE More Sharing        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.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Eyal Press: Chilling Dissent on Wall Street 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.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Tomgram: Engelhardt, How to Build a National Security Blowback Machine Dear Whistleblower, I don't know who you are or what you do or how old you may be. I just know that you exist somewhere in our future as surely as does tomorrow or next year. You may be young and computer-savvy or a career federal employee well along in years. You might be someone who entered government service filled with idealism or who signed on to "the bureaucracy" just to make a living.
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 15, 2014
Nick Turse, How "Benghazi" Birthed the New Normal in Africa In his latest piece of remarkable reportage on the U.S. military's under-the-radar-screen "pivot" to Africa, TomDispatch Managing Editor Nick Turse goes in search of "Operation New Normal." He found the operation name in one of the many documents he's uncovered on military developments on that continent and he sets out in search of someone at U.S. Africa Command who can tell him what it is.
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Off-Base America Last year, it was Kuwait, Qatar, and Iraq. This year, it's Germany, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Next year, it could easily be Afghanistan, Pakistan, Diego Garcia, Bahrain, and Turkey.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Engelhardt, The OED of the National Security State In the months after September 11, 2001, it was regularly said that "everything" had changed. It's a claim long forgotten, buried in everyday American life. Still, if you think about it, in the decade-plus that followed much did change in ways that should still stun us.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 2, 2016
Tomgram: Ira Chernus, The Peace Movement's War Story Ira Chernus brings up a question that should be on all our minds. What ever happened to the pre-Iraq-invasion massive peace movement? At a time when Americans should have been in the streets saying hell no, we better not go, the Bush administration and then the Obama administration were repeating the same militarized mistakes endlessly, while turning the Greater Middle East into a charnel house of failure.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 21, 2019
Tomgram: Ben Freeman, How to Buy Foreign-Policy Expertise The 2016 elections awakened Americans to a startling reality: the country's political system is ripe for foreign interference[...]one area has remained largely off the congressional and media radar screens. Yet it remains a vital part of the way other governments try to influence policy in this country: the foreign funding of think tanks.
John Bolton without his mask., From FlickrPhotos
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 5, 2018
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Cleaning House, Enabling War Sometimes I get sick of saying it, but just when you thought it couldn't get any worse"
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, How to Avert Real Change in Election 2016 Andrew Bacevich suggests six crucial national security areas where you can count on one thing this election season: everyone, including media questioners in those "debates," will be ducking.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Eduardo Galeano, Robots, Drugs, and Collateral Damage It could be any week on that great U.S. military base we know as Planet Earth and here's the remarkable thing: there's always news. Something's always happening somewhere, usually on more than one continent, as befits the largest, most destructive, most technologically advanced (and in many ways least successful) military on the planet.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 29, 2015
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Campaign 2016 as a Demobilizing Spectacle You may not know it, but you're living in a futuristic science fiction novel. And that's a fact. If you were to read about our American world in such a novel, you would be amazed by its strangeness. Since you exist right smack in the middle of it, it seems like normal life (Donald Trump and Ben Carson aside). But make no bones about it, so far this has been a bizarre American century.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 5, 2021
Tomgram: Engelhardt, An Overheated, Underwhelming World 2021 has indeed begun and god knows what it has in store for us. But unless, somehow, we're surprised beyond imagining, The Donald is indeed going to leave the White House soon and, much as I hate to admit it, in some strange fashion we're going to miss him.
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 12, 2010
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Petraeus Syndrome From TomDispatch this evening, a bold thought experiment: What if, against all odds, General David Petraeus succeeds in Afghanistan and returns to a hero's welcome? Would that actually be good news? The latest TomDispatch post suggests the opposite -- Tom Engelhardt, "Why Are We in Afghanistan? As Petraeus Takes Over, Could Success Be Worse Than Failure"
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Andy Kroll: The Death of the Golden Dream of Higher Education These days, it seems like going to college increasingly means heading for the nearest pawn shop or loan shark to hock your valuables. Based on a recent spate of figures, it looks as if we'll soon need to find a replacement term for the "public" in public higher education. After all, the cost of a public college education is rising at a startling clip. Tuitions at four-year universities have gone up by 15% between 2008 and 2010
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(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, August 21, 2011
Tomgram: Karen J. Greenberg, Taking the Justice Out of the Justice System 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."
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 2, 2016
Tomgram: Steve Fraser, How the Age of Acquiescence Came to an End Steve Fraser, who has been covering the rise of a new Gilded Age in America (and the fall of just about everything else) from The Street to the streets, considers the fate of liberalism in a potentially new era of right- and left-wing populism.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 22, 2014
Taylor and Appel: The Subprime Education Scandal Astra Taylor and Hannah Appel explain, when it comes to a new crew of "for-profit" colleges, higher education has gone hyena and is tearing at the financial flesh of the poor.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Adam Hochschild: Thank You for Making War! We need to be reminded that war is not the only imaginable state for humanity. Fortunately, TomDispatch regular Adam Hochschild, author most recently of To End All Wars, an eloquent and original history of World War I and those who resisted it, does just that.
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Jen Marlowe: The "Secret" Revolution That Could Set the Middle East Aflame Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was unequivocal in her condemnation. "We have confronted the Russians about stopping their continued arms shipments to Syria," she said in remarks earlier this year. "They have, from time to time, said that we shouldn't worry; everything they're shipping is unrelated to their actions internally. That's patently untrue."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 3, 2015
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, An Invitation to Collective Suicide Assume that the hawks get their way -- that the United States does whatever it takes militarily to confront and destroy ISIS. Then what?
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 30, 2018
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Can Bean Counters Save the World from Trump? They call people like us "bean counters" -- the soulless ones beavering away in some windowless accounting department, the living calculators who don't care about desperation or aspirations, who just want you to turn in your expense report on time and explain those perfectly legitimate charges on the company credit card.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 6, 2014
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Ripley's Believe It or Not National Security State In a 1950s civics textbook of mine, I can remember a Martian landing on Main Street, U.S.A., to be instructed in the glories of our political system. You know, our tripartite government, checks and balances, miraculous set of rights, and vibrant democracy.
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 1, 2011
Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Hope for the Hell of It 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.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Dumb and Dumber: A Secret CIA Drone Base, a Blowback World, and Why Washington Has No Learning Curve You could, of course, sit there, slack-jawed, thinking about how mindlessly repetitive American foreign and military policy is these days. Or you could wield all sorts of fancy analytic words to explain it. Or you could just settle for a few simple, all-American ones. Like dumb. Stupid. Dimwitted. Thick-headed.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 19, 2013
Tomgram: Kramer and Pemberton, Downsizing the Military Mission, Upsizing the Peacetime One In the preface to his 1974 classic, The Permanent War Economy, Seymour Melman decried America's choice of guns over butter. He wrote: "Traditional economic competence of every sort is being eroded by the state capitalist directorate that elevates inefficiency to a national purpose, that disables the market system, that destroys the value of the currency..."
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Nick Turse: The Pentagon's Bases of Confusion One of the jokes of our era is the Republican Party's claim that it favors "small government." An accurate description might go more like this: the present-day Republican Party (libertarians excepted) has never seen an oppressive power of the national security state it didn't want to bolster or grow. And it loves big government -- the bigger the better -- as long as we're talking about the military-industrial complex.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 31, 2016
Tomgram: Cantarow and Levy, Could Nuclear Disaster Come to America? In the first of two TomDispatch posts this week from the front lines of potential future nuclear disaster, Alison Rose Levy and Ellen Cantarow, who has in recent years covered citizen resistance to the desires of Big Energy for TD, travel up the Hudson River only 30 miles from Manhattan Island to consider what might prove to be this country's future Fukushima or Chernobyl.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 8, 2014
Nick Turse, American Monuments to Failure in Africa? In light of recent history, perhaps it's time to update that classic U.S. Army recruitment campaign slogan from "be all that you can be" to "build all that you can build." Consider it an irony that, in an era when Congress struggles to raise enough money to give America's potholed, overcrowded highways a helping hand, building new roads in Afghanistan proved no problem at all (even when they led nowhere).
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 11, 2016
Tomgram: Rick Shenkman, How We Learned to Stop Worrying About People and Love the Bombing Making sense of why Americans seem so unbothered by the killing being done in their names in distant lands. Rick Shenkman, who runs the History News Network website and is the author of the just-published book Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics, takes on American air power, its results, and why those results bother us so little.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 7, 2016
Tomgram: Rory Fanning, Talking to the Young in a World That Will Never Truly Be "Postwar" The young, especially in America's poorest high schools, are being recruited into the country's failing wars of the twenty-first century, even if they don't know it, via JROTC.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 17, 2016
Tomgram: William deBuys, No More Wide Open Spaces? Environmental writer and TomDispatch regular William deBuys offers a striking look at developments in the American West, from the occupation of Oregon's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to a possible future privatization of many of America's public lands.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Barbara Garson, How to Become a Part-Time Worker Without Really Trying Bad news out of Bentonville. On Thursday, Walmart, the American retail behemoth, announced that it had slumped through another quarter. Sales were sluggish, and a Walmart executive said the company was downgrading expectations for the rest of 2013. The reason? "The customer doesn't quite have the discretionary income, or they're hesitant to spend what they do have," said Charles Holley, Walmart's chief financial officer.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 14, 2016
Tomgram: David Vine, Enduring Bases, Enduring War in the Middle East Today, Vine, author of Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, analyzes what our increasingly secretive military is going to do with the latest set of bases the Pentagon is building or building up in the Greater Middle East and now Africa. It's quite a story and you can only find it laid out in this authoritative and sweeping way at TomDispatch. Don't miss it!
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 24, 2014
Peter Van Buren: Undue Process in Washington What a world we're in. Thanks to smartphones, iPads, and the like, everyone is now a photographer, but it turns out that, in the public landscape, there's ever less to photograph. So here are a few tips for living more comfortably in a photographically redacted version of our post-9/11 world.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 17, 2016
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Candidates, Is America Exceptional, or Only Great? As State Department whistleblower and TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren explains in devastating detail today, one "debate" area where the present crew of media interrogators and presidential candidates are almost startling out of touch is foreign policy and the national security state.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 19, 2016
Tomgram: Harwood and Stanley, Policing the Dystopia Perhaps nowhere in these years have America's wars come home more fiercely or embedded themselves more deeply than in the country's police forces.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 22, 2020
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, (Un)Civil War? When it rains, pieces of glass, pottery, and metal rise through the mud in the hills surrounding my Maryland home. The other day, I walked outside barefoot to fetch one of my kid's shoes and a pottery shard stabbed me in the heel. Nursing a minor infection, I wondered how long that fragment dated back.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Tom Engelhardt, Can Edward Snowden Be Deterred? It's hard even to know how to take it in. I mean, what's really happening? An employee of a private contractor working for the National Security Agency makes off with unknown numbers of files about America's developing global security state on a thumb drive and four laptop computers, and jumps the nearest plane to Hong Kong.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 2, 2019
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Autocrats R Us "Al-Shebab," said my student Jerry early in the fall 2010 semester. "We're calling our small group al-Shebab. It means 'The Youth.'" From his name alone, I wouldn't have guessed his background, but he was proud of his family's Egyptian roots and had convinced his classmates to give their group an Arabic name.
SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, March 6, 2011
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Locking the Gates In my latest TomDispatch post, I focus on the single most difficult thing for Washington to get through its collective skull: that the Age of Intervention is actually over.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 15, 2016
Tomgram: Gregory Foster, A Case for Demilitarizing the Military Almost 15 years after America's global war on terror was launched, we face a deeply embedded (and remarkably unsuccessful) American version of militarism and, as Gregory Foster writes in a monumental, must-read post for TD today, a massive crisis in civil-military relations that is seldom recognized, no less discussed or debated.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 24, 2016
Tomgram: Tanya Golash-Boza, How Many Presidents Does It Take to Deport 11 Million People? For today's post, TomDispatch asked Tanya Golash-Boza, author of Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism, to take a clear-eyed look at the anti-immigrant policies and plans of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz -- both the expansive claims of future deportations and wall-building and make some sense (or, in reality, nonsense) of them.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 16, 2019
Tomgram: Arnold Isaacs, The 100-Year-Old Echoes of 2019 Reading about immigration policy, religious and racial bigotry, and terrorism fears in America in 1919 offers an eerie sense of decades melting away and past and present blurring together.
Oil Pump, From FlickrPhotos
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Look of a Badly Oiled Planet Saudi Arabia may be in trouble and the reason for that has little to do with Iran or Syria or Yemen or Iraq or the Islamic State. The problem is far more basic, as TomDispatch's resident energy expert Michael Klare points out in his latest post. It's the price of oil, which in the last 18 months has dropped through the floor.
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Shooting Up on Big Energy Michael Klare asks whether there’s only one way to explain our present world and the continuing commitment to ratcheting up the burning fossil fuels as if (if you’ll excuse the phrase) there were no tomorrow -- what he calls “carbon delirium.” His piece is about our planetary leaders, Big Energy, and addiction to fossil fuels -- and the sort of 12-step program we’ll need to bring all this to heel
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Hedges and Sacco: A Twenty-First Century American Sacrifice Zone During the two years Joe Sacco and I reported from the poorest pockets of the United States, areas that have been sacrificed before the altar of unfettered and unregulated capitalism, we found not only decayed and impoverished communities but shattered lives. There comes a moment when the pain and despair of constantly running into a huge wall, of realizing that there is no way out of poverty, crush human beings.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Michael Klare: A Thermonuclear Energy Bomb in Christmas Wrappings Let's face it: climate change is getting scarier by the week. In this all-American year, record wildfires, record temperatures in the continental U.S., an endless summer, a fierce drought that still won't go away, and Frankenstorm Sandy all descended on us.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 17, 2013
Tomgram: Jonathan Schell, Seeing the Reality of the Vietnam War, 50 Years Late In January 1966, Jonathan Schell, a 23-year-old not-quite-journalist found himself at the farming village of Ben Suc, 30 miles from the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon. It had long been supportive of the Vietcong. Now, in what was dubbed Operation Cedar Falls, the U.S. military (with Schell in tow) launched an operation to solve that problem. The "solution" was typical of how Americans fought the Vietnam War.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 1, 2024
Tomgram: Kramer and Fogler, "Solving" a Mental Health Crisis in America Amid ongoing emergencies, including a would-be autocrat on his way to possibly regaining the American presidency and Israel's war on Gaza (not to mention the flare-ups of global climate change), the U.S. has slipped quietly toward an assault on civil liberties as an answer to plummeting mental health. From coast to coast, state lawmakers of both parties are reaching for coercive treatment and involuntary commitment[...]
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 8, 2010
Tomgram: John Feffer, Crusade 2.0 Right now, all the news chatter is about domestic policy (health care, tax cuts, etc.), but count on the Republicans -- Rand Paul aside -- to light out after the president sooner or later at least as hawkishly on foreign policy as they have domestically.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 6, 2014
Tomgram: Mattea Kramer, Is the Pentagon Doomed -- To Be Flush Forever TomDispatch doesn’t usually have what is essentially breaking news. Today, however, it does. Mattea Kramer of the invaluable National Priorities Project has carefully gone over the Pentagon budget numbers and shows to devastating effect just how its sequestration “cuts” -- and all the gloom and doom about the future strength of the U.S. military that went with them -- have really been a con job.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 19, 2014
Engelhardt, The Guns of Folly As Iraq was unraveling last week and the possible outlines of the first jihadist state in modern history were coming into view, I remembered this nugget from the summer of 2002. At the time, journalist Ron Suskind had a meeting with "a senior advisor" to President George W. Bush (later identified as Karl Rove).
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 28, 2010
Tomgram: Robert Dreyfuss, The President Chooses the Guru Petraeus's defiant declaration that he wasn't putting much stock in the president's intending to hold the military command accountable for its failure in Afghanistan next December earned him an instant rebuke from the White House. Now, that same Petraeus is in charge.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Chamber of Carbon In his latest TomDispatch post, McKibben takes on one giant money polluter: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spent a staggering $33 million on the mid-term 2010 elections and plans to spend far more in the future supporting the kinds of giant corporate entities which exist so profitably on climate-change denial.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 1, 2013
Laura Gottesdiener, The Backyard Shock Doctrine African Americans had every reason to celebrate Barack Obama's election in 2008. History was made. Then reality set in. Economically speaking, the Obama era has been a five-year nightmare for Black America. The unemployment rate for blacks now stands at 13.7%, almost twice the rate for all eligible workers.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, The Next Battleground in the War on Whistleblowers TomDispatch remains dedicated to documenting the Obama administration’s ongoing war against those who have the urge to bring the secret workings of the national security state to our attention. So today, we’re publishing a new piece about Robert MacLean by Peter Van Buren. A former State Department whistleblower, Van Buren takes another deep dive into the dark territory he has dubbed post-Constitutional America.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 4, 2019
The Greatest Wall of All Call me crazy, if you want, but I think I see how to do it! We have two intractable issues, one intractable president, and an intractable world, but what if it weren't so? What if those two intractable problems could be swept off the table by a single gesture from that same intractable man?
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Tomgram: William Astore, Taking Selfies in Iraq and Afghanistan The United States is a peculiar sort of empire. As a start, Americans have been in what might be called imperial denial since the Spanish-American War of 1898, if not before.
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, August 19, 2010
Tomgram: Pratap Chatterjee, Manhunters, Inc. From TomDispatch tonight: How the U.S. military got into the "manhunting" business in Afghanistan in a big way -- Pratap Chatterjee, "The Secret Killers, Assassination in Afghanistan and Task Force 373"
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 22, 2013
Michael Klare: The Coming Global Explosion In his pathbreaking 2001 book Resource Wars, Michael Klare wrote: "Natural resources are the building blocks of civilization and an essential requirement of daily existence. The inhabitants of planet Earth have been blessed with a vast supply of most basic materials.
DSC03177, From FlickrPhotos
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 4, 2016
Aviva Chomsky, A Newspaper's Crisis Reveals Unreported Worlds From Aviva Chomsky, author of Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal, a genuinely eye-opening look at how intimate our relationship is with undocumented immigrants, how carefully that relationship is kept from us, and how that helps Donald Trump and others blast away at them while the rest of us feel as if it has nothing to do with us.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 25, 2016
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Exhibit One in Any Future American War Crimes Trial When Donald Trump or Ted Cruz speak of torture and other war crimes, these are future nightmares to be called by their rightful names and denounced by major figures, as well as rejected and resisted by military and intelligence officials.
From ImagesAttr
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 30, 2011
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The President's Military Mantra 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.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 3, 2014
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The End of History? Whatever you do, don’t think of my latest post as counter-programming to the Super Bowl. Consider it instead a piece for your post-game Monday morning recaps; this being a look back at why climate change and before it the nuclear issue fit so poorly with our idea of “the news” and why, raising as they do, the possibility of the end of history, they are so difficult for us to respond to as we should.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 9, 2015
Christian Appy: "Honor" the Vietnam Veteran, Forget the War The 1960s -- that extraordinary decade -- is celebrating its 50th birthday one year at a time. Happy birthday, 1965! How, though, do you commemorate the Vietnam War, the era's signature catastrophe?
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 10, 2020
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, What Have They (and We) Learned? It's only mid-afternoon and Army Lieutenant General Victor Constant has already had a bad day.1 Soon after he arrived at the office at 0700, the Chief2 had called. "Come see me. We need to talk."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 3, 2013
Tomgram: David Vine, The Pentagon's Italian Spending Spree This may be a propitious moment to offer an up-to-date version of a classic riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the terrorist? For many in this country, the Kenyan mall horror arrived out of the blue, out of nowhere, out of a place and a time without context. Next thing you know, it's all 24/7-ing on your TV set. You can't avoid it.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Victoria Brittain: Fighting a Global War of Terror The Global War on Terror has had many victims since it was launched by President George W. Bush soon after September 11, 2001. In his "crusade," a word he used publicly before he thought better of it ("This crusade," he said, "this war on terrorism"), the history of kidnappings and renditions, torture and abuse, imprisonment without charges or trial, drone assassinations and the killing of civilians is by now well known.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 19, 2013
Tomgram: Lewis Lapham, Laughing into Darkness Not being Navajo, there were no "first laugh" ceremonies in my household. But who could forget their child's first laugh? It's like having one of the mysteries of life presented to you out of nowhere, right in your own house.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 26, 2016
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Has The American Age of Decline Begun? Donald Trump has stepped across many lines in these last months, and they've been endlessly analyzed, but there's one that hasn't and that's too bad, because it matters.
SHARE More Sharing        Friday, December 20, 2013
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Washington's Wedding Album From Hell The headline -- "Bride and Boom!" -- was spectacular, if you think killing people in distant lands is a blast and a half. Of course, you have to imagine that smirk line in giant black letters with a monstrous exclamation point covering most of the bottom third of the front page of the Murdoch-owned New York Post.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 7, 2019
Tomgram: Hartung and Smithberger, A Dollar-by-Dollar Tour of the National Security State In its latest budget request, the Trump administration is asking for a near-record $750 billion for the Pentagon and related defense activities, an astonishing figure by any measure. If passed by Congress, it will, in fact, be one of the largest military budgets in American history, topping peak levels reached during the Korean and Vietnam Wars.
SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, March 13, 2011
Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, Mummies and Models in the New Middle East This is a tour de force exploration of Egypt's situation -- and of possible models for a transition from military rule to future Egyptian democracy, models that range from Turkey's conservative Islamic and democratic government to prominently Muslim Indonesia's functioning democracy -- "the world's third largest" and the freest in Southeast Asia, with a secular government, a booming economy, and the military out of politics."
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Tomgram: Adam Hochschild, War Redux rize-winning author Adam Hochschild is intimately knowledgeable when it comes to war's folly in the twentieth century, having spent years working on his latest book, To End All Wars. As a historian, he's had the strange experience not of looking back, but of looking forward into our own unnerving, unending world of war.
From flickr.com/photos/60513726@N03/7751205588/: slimsaks_DSC_0487, From Images
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 1, 2016
Nomi Prins, The Big Money and What It Means in Election 2016 Here's the perfect piece for the day of the first official primary of the year -- a rundown not on the vote in Iowa but on a far more important matter: the money. This is the latest in the coverage that Nomi Prins, author of All the Presidents' Bankers, is offering at TomDispatch this election season on the money behind the spectacle.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 16, 2014
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Secret Wars and Black Ops Blowback These days, when I check out the latest news on Washington's global war-making, I regularly find at least one story that fits a new category in my mind that I call: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Mattea Kramer: Spinning Ourselves Into a Deficit Panic You couldn't make this stuff up: thanks to Harold Rogers, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and the power of "earmarks," the Army has bought $6.5 million worth of "leakproof" drip pans "to catch transmission fluid on Black Hawk helicopters," reports the New York Times.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 29, 2013
Tom Engelhardt, Luck Was a Lady Last Week He came and he went: that was the joke that circulated in 1979 when 70-year-old former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller had a heart attack and died in his Manhattan townhouse in the presence of his evening-gown-clad 25-year-old assistant. In a sense, the same might be said of retired CIA operative Robert Seldon Lady. Recently, Lady proved a one-day wonder.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Rebecca Solnit: The Name of the Hurricane Is Climate Change Consider me lucky. Yes, Sandy made a modest mess of my life. I had to cancel a trip to Chicago (or swim down the LaGuardia Airport runway to get there). The wind roared past our window like a speeding truck. The Hudson River was a white-capped torrent. Trees in our neighborhood came down. A piece of construction scaffolding on a building across the street fell.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 6, 2024
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Trumpian Bacchanalia in 2024? I was born on July 20, 1944, almost two years after Joe Biden arrived on this planet and almost a year before You Know Who, like me, landed in New York City. The United States was then nearing the end of the second global war of that century and things were about to look up. My dad had been the operations officer for the 1st Air Commandos fighting the Japanese in Burma and, by that July, the tide had distinctly turned[...]
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Handicapping the Global Midterms Winners and Losers You can't turn on the TV news or pick up a paper these days without stumbling across the latest political poll and the pros explaining how to parse it, or some set of commentators, pundits, and reporters placing their bets on the midterm elections. The media, of course, loves a political horse race and, as those 2010 midterms grow ever closer, you can easily feel like you're not catching the news but visiting an Off-Track Bet
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 6, 2011
Tomgram: William Astore, We're Number One (in Self-Promotion) Can you believe that, in certain circles, support for obesity is becoming an American birthright (as in "the freedom to be"") and a political position? Like various radio and TV shock jocks, Sarah Palin has been attacking Michelle Obama's anti-obesity initiative as yet another example of "the nanny state run amok."
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Karen Greenberg, Intolerance "R" Us Greenberg focuses in particular on the way in which violation of the rights of non-citizens is, as in the case of Bradley Manning, entering the world of citizens in a form of "enemy creep" that threatens to Guantanamo-ize America. All of this is happening now. It points toward a far grimmer future. Attention must be paid -- and soon.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 11, 2016
Tomgram: William Hartung, What a Waste, the U.S. Military Wasting vast sums of taxpayer dollars as a way of life is the defining trait of the modern U.S. military.
From ImagesAttr
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 3, 2010
Tomgram: William Astore, Washington's Compulsive Gambling As Congress moves toward rubber-stamping yet another "emergency" supplemental bill that includes more than $33 billion for military operations, mainly to fund the latest surge in Afghanistan, maybe we should take a page from the new British government. Facing debilitating deficits, the conservative Tories and their Liberal Democrat partners are proposing painful cuts to governmental budgets, including military operations in A
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Engelhardt: An Obit for the General History, it is said, arrives first as tragedy, then as farce. First as Karl Marx, then as the Marx Brothers.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 31, 2014
Nick Turse, An East-West Showdown in the Heart of Africa? For the last two years, TomDispatch Managing Editor Nick Turse has been following the Pentagon and the latest U.S. global command, AFRICOM, as they oversaw the expanding operations of the American military across that continent: drones, a special ops surge, interventions, training missions, bases (even if not called bases), proxy wars. Short of a major conflict, you name it and it's probably happening.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Tom Engelhardt: Death-By-Ally Imagine for a moment that almost once a week for the last six months somebody somewhere in this country had burst, well-armed, into a movie theater showing a superhero film and fired into the audience. That would get your attention, wouldn't it? James Holmes times 21? It would dominate the news. We would certainly be consulting experts, trying to make sense of the pattern, groping for explanations.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 13, 2012
Tom Engelhardt: Washington Invested in War It's pop-quiz time when it comes to the American way of war: three questions, torn from the latest news, just for you.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Chase Madar: Bradley Manning vs. SEAL Team 6 Okay, give them this much: their bloodlust stops just short of the execution chamber door. The military prosecutors of the case against Bradley Manning, assumedly with the support of the Obama administration, have brought the virulent charge of "aiding the enemy" against the Army private who leaked state secrets. Yet they claim to have magnanimously taken the death penalty off the table.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Obama's Failing Emails Where Did the President's Mojo Go? by Bill McKibben Bill McKibben's powerful personal tale of how disillusionment with Barack Obama led one activist to new forms of action and our Occupy moment.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 30, 2014
Tomgram: Ellen Cantarow, The Frontlines of Fracking Ellen Cantarow has been on the fracking beat for TomDispatch for the last year. Today, she turns from the kind of devastation that the drilling involved in fracking can bring to local communities to the vast expansion of pipelines that will bring fracked energy from often distant locales to your neighborhood, wherever you may live.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Sandy Tolan, Going Wild in the Gaza War The carnage in the Gaza Strip has been horrendous: more than 1,900 dead, mainly civilians; its sole power plant destroyed (and so electricity and water denied and a sewage disaster looming); 30,000 to 40,000 homes and buildings damaged or destroyed; hundreds of thousands of residents put to flight with nowhere to go; and numerous U.N. schools or facilities housing some of those refugees hit by Israeli firepower.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 6, 2016
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Renaming Our World In my latest for the graduates of 2016, I review the strangeness of our American world (from what we still call an "election" to the candidate that confounds everyone -- and you know who I'm talking about!).
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 24, 2012
William deBuys: The West in Flames The water supply was available only an hour a day and falling. People -- those who hadn't moved north to cooler climes -- were dying from the heat. Food was growing ever scarcer and the temperature soaring so that, as one reporter put it, you could "cook eggs on your sidewalk and cook soup in the oceans."
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 21, 2012
Michael Klare: The Cheney Effect (in the Obama Administration) Back in September 2001, Dick Cheney was, according to Jane Mayer in The Dark Side, being chauffeured around Washington "in an armored motorcade that varied its route to foil possible attackers." In the backseat of his car (just in case), adds Mayer, "rested a duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit." And lest danger rear its head, "rarely did he travel without a medical doctor in tow."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 14, 2016
Tomgram: William Astore, Words About War Matter Retired Air Force Lt. Col. William Astore writes today about the war of words launched by two administrations, the Pentagon, and the U.S. military. It's a devastating account of how to fight -- or rather take the sting out of -- war, American-style, via an endless array of euphemisms and acronyms, of attempts to win the wars at home by dulling their impact and their realities.
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 11, 2013
Todd Miller, Surveillance Surge on the Border I mean, come on. You knew it had to happen, didn't you? In a 2010 Department of Homeland Security report, wrested from the bowels of the secrecy/surveillance state (thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation), the Customs and Border Protection agency suggests arming their small fleet of surveillance drones.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 5, 2019
Tomgram: Greg Grandin, Donald Trump, Pornographer-in-Chief On February 15th, Donald Trump declared a state of national emergency in order to fund his "great, great" border wall without having to go through Congress. There is, of course, no emergency, despite the rape fantasy that the president has regularly tried to pass off as public policy.
From ImagesAttr
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, Pipelineistan's New Silk Road Future historians may well agree that the twenty-first century Silk Road first opened for business on December 14, 2009. That was the day a crucial stretch of pipeline officially went into operation linking the fabulously energy-rich state of Turkmenistan (via Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) to Xinjiang Province in China's far west.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 21, 2016
Tomgram: Pratap Chatterjee, Inside the Devastation of America's Drone Wars Any sense of sadness or regret for Washington's actions, when it comes to the many killed, wounded, or traumatized in its never-ending, implacable, and remarkably unsuccessful war on terror, is notable mainly for its absence from our world.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 7, 2015
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Apocalypse When? For six centuries or more, history was, above all, the story of the great game of empires. From the time the first wooden ships mounted with cannons left Europe's shores, they began to compete for global power and control. Three, four, even five empires, rising and falling, on an increasingly commandeered and colonized planet.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 25, 2016
Failed States and States of Failure "We Destroyed the Cities to Save Them" and Other Future Headlines In my latest post, I focus on the strangely repetitive policy decisions Washington continues to make in Iraq, Syria, and the rest of the Greater Middle East, and why they allow us to predict the future in a reasonably accurate way.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 30, 2024
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Sorry, But Not Sorry in Somalia In war, people die for absurd reasons or often no reason at all. They die due to accidents of birth, the misfortune of being born in the wrong place -- Cambodia or Gaza, Afghanistan or Ukraine -- at the wrong time. They die due to happenstance, choosing to shelter indoors when they should have taken cover outside or because they ventured out into a hell-storm of destruction when they should have stayed put[...]
SHARE More Sharing        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."
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 18, 2013
Greg Grandin, Why Latin America Didn't Join Washington's Counterterrorism Posse There was a scarcely noted but classic moment in the Senate hearings on the nomination of John Brennan, the president's counterterrorism "tsar," to become CIA director. When Senator Carl Levin pressed him on whether waterboarding was torture, he ended his reply: "I have a personal opinion that waterboarding is reprehensible and should not be done. And again, I am not a lawyer, senator, and I can't address that question."
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 27, 2014
Tomgram: Greg Grandin, The Terror of Our Age In a tour-de-force, must-read essay, based on his new book The Empire of Necessity (which Toni Morrison calls “compelling, brilliant, and necessary”), historian Greg Grandin lays out the anatomy of a world driven to ecological destruction of the first order by the need for profits in the eighteenth century -- and today. Then it was seal-hunting, today it’s fossil-fuel hunting.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 12, 2024
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Protecting the Most Benign Institution When my mother died in 2000, I inherited all her books. Sadly, after several moves and downsizings over the decades, her collection had shrunk. Still, it remains considerable and impressive in its own way. Her legacy to me included some special volumes like a first edition of Frederick W. Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management, a famed codification of time-management practices[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 25, 2012
Lewis Lapham: Will Wonders Never Cease? It is said, Lewis Lapham tells us, that Abbot John Trithemius of Sponheim, a fifteenth-century scholar and mage, devised a set of incantations to carry "messages instantaneously... through the agency of the stars and planets who rule time."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Tom Engelhardt: A Subprime Education in a Subprime World Class of 2012, greetings! It's a deceptively glorious day, even under this tent in the broiling heat of an August-style afternoon in mid-June on this northeastern campus. Another local temperature record is being set: 98 degrees.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 28, 2012
Nan Levinson: Moral Injury and American War "It's a day of picnics and patriotic parades, a night of concerts and fireworks, and a reason to fly the American flag." That, at least, is how the federal government describes July 4th on its official website, USA.gov. "Independence Day," it tells us, "honors the birthday of the United States of America and the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776."
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Chase Madar: Handcuffing Seven-Year-Olds Won't Make Schools Safer It was, in a sense, so expectable, so leave-no-child-behind. I'm talking about the arming of American schools. Think of it as the next step in the militarization of this country, which follows all-too-logically from developments since September 11, 2001.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 7, 2013
Peter Van Buren: One Day Even the Drones Will Have to Land We don't get it. We really don't. We may not, in military terms, know how to win any more, but as a society we don't get losing either. We don't recognize it, even when it's staring us in the face, when nothing -- and I mean nothing -- works out as planned. Take the upcoming 10th anniversary of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq as Exhibit A.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Engelhardt: Entering the Intelligence Labyrinth Think of the world of the "U.S. Intelligence Community," or IC, as a near-perfect closed system and rare success story in twenty-first-century Washington. In a capital riven by fierce political disagreements, just about everyone agrees on the absolute, total, and ultimate importance of that "community" and whatever its top officials might decide in order to keep this country safe and secure.
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        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?
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Dilip Hiro: How the Pentagon Corrupted Afghanistan America's post-9/11 conflicts have been wars of corruption, a point surprisingly seldom made in the mainstream media. Keep in mind that George W. Bush's administration was a monster of privatization.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Tomgram: Matthew Harwood, Welcome to Cop Land If you've been listening to various police agencies and their supporters, then you know what the future holds: anarchy is coming -- and it's all the fault of activists.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Tom Engelhardt, War Games It was 1964, and in Vietnam thousands of American "advisers" were already offering up their know-how from helicopter seats or gun sights. The United States was just a year short of sending its first large contingent of ground troops there, adolescents who would enter the battle zone dreaming of John Wayne and thinking of enemy-controlled territory as "Indian country."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 10, 2014
Rebecca Gordon, A Nation of Cowards? t sounded like the beginning of a bad joke: a CIA agent and a U.S. Special Operations commando walked into a barbershop in Sana... That's the capital of Yemen in case you didn't remember and not the sort of place where armed Americans usually wander out alone just to get a haircut.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 28, 2014
Naomi Oreskes, A "Green" Bridge to Hell Call it the energy or global warming news of recent weeks. No, I'm not referring to the fact this was globally the hottest June on record ever (as May had been before it), or that NASA launched the first space vehicle "dedicated to studying atmospheric carbon dioxide."
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Nick Turse, Obama and the Mideast Arms Trade This is the week when President Obama is to give a major speech to "reset" his administration's policies in the new Middle East of the Arab Spring. Only problem, as Turse writes: "All signs indicate that the Pentagon will quietly maintain antithetical policies, just as it has throughout the Obama years."
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Jeremiah Goulka: Shell Shock Lite "Shell shock," the psychological scourge of World War I, occurred after "a man has been buried, lifted, or otherwise subjected to the physical effects of a bursting shell or other similar explosive." So wrote Charles Myers, an officer in the British army's medical corps, in his 1940 book, Shell Shock in France, 1914-18.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 13, 2024
Tomgram: Clarence Lusane, Neither Law, Nor Order for You Know Who When the Civil War ended in 1865, the 76-year-old Constitution needed an upgrading and those leading the country did indeed dramatically transform it with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, known collectively as the Reconstruction Era amendments. The 13th (1865) abolished slavery, while the 15th (1870) gave voting rights to newly freed Black men[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Latest News in Fossil Fuel Addiction The news couldn't be better -- and it couldn't be worse. Or ask yourself this: What do these two headlines have in common: "U.S. expected to be largest producer of petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons in 2013," "Shift to a new climate likely by middle of the century, study finds"?
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Tomgram: John Feffer, The Empire's New Asian Clothes The Obama administration’s policy “pivot” or “rebalancing” in Asia has gotten a lot of press, but nothing - until now - like Asian expert John Feffer’s cold-eyed assessment of its actual import. Once you make it through all the rhetoric about Washington’s new focus on Asia, Feffer points out, you discover that the reality isn’t a new level of power projection in the Pacific, but a further retreat.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 14, 2016
Tomgram: Ann Jones, Donald Trump Has the Traits of a Wife Abuser and Women Know It Ann Jones makes sense of Donald Trump's stunningly unfavorable polling numbers among women and why, thanks to what lies behind them, the only billionaire in the running may not, in fact, make it to the White House.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 17, 2014
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, The Divine Right of President Obama? Today, TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren, in his usual tart and incisive manner, explores the deep derangement of the transformation of the White House into a (drone) killing machine and just what it means in the building of a “post-Constitutional America.”
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SHARE More Sharing        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,"...
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Eight Things I Miss About the Cold War It's hard, so many decades later, to make my way back to my Cold War youth, that time when the history of humanity was, as LIFE magazine so classically put it, "The Epic of Man."
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 4, 2013
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, America's Top Diplomat is Lost in Space If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium -- the title of a 1969 romantic comedy -- could now fit two intertwined phenomena: the madcap global travels of Secretary of State John Kerry and the nonstop journey of the latest revelations from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 19, 2015
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The National Security State's Incestuous Relationship with the Islamic State Honestly, I don't know whether to rant or weep, neither of which are usual impulses for me. In the wake of the slaughter in Paris, I have the urge to write one of two sentences here: Paris changed everything; Paris changes nothing. Each is, in its own way, undoubtedly true. And here's a third sentence I know to be true: This can't end well.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 3, 2014
Peter Van Buren, A Rising Tide Lifts All Yachts Former State Department whistleblower Peter Van Buren, who has been covering the fate of the 99% for TomDispatch, takes a fascinating look at nine questions typically asked about the problems of the unemployed and those in the minimum-wage economy, including why they can't find better jobs, why they can't be retrained into new jobs, and whether raising the minimum wage really would make a difference.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 11, 2014
By the Way, Your Home Is on Fire, The Climate of Change and the Dangers of Stasis Another spectacular piece from Rebecca Solnit, based on her recent experiences in the climate change divestment movement. In this post, she explains -- in the vivid way only she can -- just why the usual, the normal, the prudent in everyday life isn’t the way to go once your house is on fire or the ocean liner you’re on is sinking.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 16, 2013
Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Victories Come in All Sizes I was electrified, and my own trajectory in life changed, by the antiwar movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. That experience, those years, mobilized me. They shocked me -- quite literally -- about what my country was capable of. They destroyed my rather idealistic urge to be a part of the government.
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SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Tomgram: Engelhardt, General Petraeus's Two Campaigns Going, going, gone! You can almost hear the announcer's voice throbbing with excitement, only we're not talking about home runs here, but about the disappearing date on which, for the United States and its military, the Afghan War will officially end.
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 10, 2011
Protest Planet, by Juan Cole Juan Cole on how the neoliberal shell game created a global age of activism.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 12, 2012
Kramer and Hellman: It's the Politics, Stupid fter the first $6 billion election, $3 billion in (mostly attack) ads, billions paid out to political consultants, presidential campaigns that raised more than $1 billion each, piles of "dark money," and a year of debates, punditry, robocalls, ground games, polls by the trillions, and just about anything else you might want to name, Election 2012 is officially over...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 7, 2016
Tomgram: Engler, The Transformative Power of Democratic Uprisings Mark and Paul Engler offer a powerful argument for why we shouldn't listen to the voices of everyday practicality and incremental change, and why today's activists fighting for immigrant rights or battling the forces of climate change can, in fact, make a major difference -- even against long odds, great doubts, and business-as-usual Beltway intransigence.
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SHARE More Sharing        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."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Tomgram: Crump and Harwood, The Net Closes Around Us Today’s stunning TomDispatch report by the ACLU’s Catherine Crump and Matthew Harwood on surveillance and the corporate world should chill you to the bone. They offer a wide ranging survey of how your home and your world are going to be turned into an “Internet of Things”; how from your icebox to the street lighting, you are going to be constantly surveilled and others will know essentially everything about you.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, August 18, 2014
Eduardo Galeano, A Lost and Found History of Lives and Dreams (Some Broken) Who isn't a fan of something -- or someone? So consider this my fan's note. To my mind, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano is among the greats of our time. His writing has "it" -- that indefinable quality you can't describe but know as soon as you read it.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 10, 2016
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Done In by the American Way of War I begin by noting that Washington's war effort in Afghanistan just got its 17th commander in less than 15 years, which reminded me of just how repetitive the American way of war has been in that near decade and a half (and how repetitively unsuccessful as well).
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 29, 2024
Tomgram: Stan Cox, Solving Climate Change -- Or Else! In December, the New York Times reported that "Earth is finishing up its warmest year in the past 174 years and very likely the past 125,000[...]"
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 31, 2013
Nick Turse: Chuck Hagel and Murder in Vietnam Think of it as the Great Obama Shuffle. When U.N. ambassador Susan Rice went down in flames as the president's nominee for secretary of state, he turned to ally, former presidential candidate, and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry (who had essentially been traveling the world as a second secretary of state during Obama's first term).
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 28, 2023
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, The Hamster Wheel of War When I was in my early twenties, I seriously considered murdering someone. He had given my best friend genital herpes, which many health practitioners then believed was the agent responsible for causing cervical cancer in women. (It wasn't.)[...]
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 5, 2012
Tom Engelhardt: Washington's Militarized Mindset Americans may feel more distant from war than at any time since World War II began. Certainly, a smaller percentage of us -- less than 1% -- serves in the military in this all-volunteer era of ours and, on the face of it, Washington's constant warring in distant lands seems barely to touch the lives of most Americans.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 23, 2014
Laura Gottesdiener, Security vs. Securities I live in Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill neighborhood. I can more or less roll out of bed into the House of Representatives or the Senate; the majestic Library of Congress doubles as my local branch. (If you visit, spend a sunset on the steps of the library's Jefferson Building. Trust me.) You can't miss my place, three stories of brick painted Big Bird yellow. It's a charming little corner of the city.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 8, 2019
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Behind Fronds of Fakery, Here's Some Real News Irony, paradox, contradiction, consternation -- these define the times in which we live. On the one hand, the 45th president of the United States is a shameless liar. On the other hand, his presidency offers an open invitation to Americans to confront myths about the way their country actually works.
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SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, June 20, 2010
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Fathers Playing Tough with Sons As a kid, I only wished that my Dad was less bookish, more ballish. We never had a catch. When I was thirteen, I managed to drag him to one Yankee game where he made a valiant effort not to show his boredom. That was it when it came to sports. Of course, we went to libraries almost every week and we talked all the time -- just never about sports.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 7, 2012
Todd Miller: Fortress USA Drones are nothing new. The first of them took to America's skies before the Wright Brothers plane lifted off at Kitty Hawk in 1903. In the years since, "unmanned air systems" (UAS) have played a relatively minor role in domestic aviation. All that, however, is about to change in a major way.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 12, 2012
Nick Turse: America's Shadow Wars in Africa Here's an odd question: Is it possible that the U.S. military is present in more countries and more places now than at the height of the Cold War? It's true that the U.S. is reducing its forces and giant bases in Europe and that its troops are out of Iraq (except for that huge, militarized embassy in Baghdad).
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 21, 2013
Tomgram: William Astore, War! What Is It Good For? Profit and Power It's no news (and in fact rarely makes it off the inside pages of our newspapers) that the U.S. dominates -- one might almost say monopolizes -- the global arms market. In 2011, the last year for which figures are available, U.S. weapons makers tripled their sales to $66.3 billion and were expected to remain in that range for 2012 as well.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Jonathan Schell, A Niagara Falls of Post-9/11 Violence In December 2002, finishing the introduction to his as-yet-unpublished book The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, Jonathan Schell wrote that the twentieth century was the era in which violence outgrew the war system that had once housed it and became "dysfunctional as a political instrument. Increasingly, it destroys the ends for which it is employed, killing the user as well as his victim.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 29, 2012
William Astore: Generals Behaving Badly He was "an ascetic who... usually eats just one meal a day, in the evening, to avoid sluggishness. He is known for operating on a few hours' sleep and for running to and from work while listening to audio books on an iPod... [He has] an encyclopedic, even obsessive, knowledge about the lives of terrorists... [He is] a warrior-scholar, comfortable with diplomats, politicians..."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 15, 2014
Todd Miller, Bill of Rights Rollback in the U.S. Borderlands You're not in the United States. Oh sure, look around at the fog lifting over the New England countryside or the diamond deserts of Arizona, but this land isn't your land, not anymore. It's a place controlled by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and your constitutional rights do not apply on their territory.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 19, 2012
Ellen Cantarow: "Little Revolution," Big Fracking Consequences To say the Central Intelligence Agency has had an uneven record over its 65 years would be kind. It found early "success" in plotting to overthrow the legitimate governments of Iran and Guatemala (even if it did fail to foresee the Soviet Union going nuclear in 1949). Then, it had a troubled adolescence. The Bay of Pigs. Vietnam. Laos. Spying on Americans.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 2, 2013
Ellen Cantarow: Big Energy Means Big Pollution Gary Judson had just been removed from his shackles when they slapped the handcuffs on him. The 72-year-old Methodist minister had chained himself to the fence surrounding a compressor station -- part of the critical infrastructure associated with hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking -- a stone's throw from Seneca Lake in upstate New York. The sheriff and his deputies freed him only to arrest him for trespassing.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, A Mother Confronts the Wounded Ego of the Century If you believe that we can make it through this "election" season without recourse to the experts (and by that I naturally mean expert satirists, humorists, and cartoonists), then you truly are a -- in the Trumpian tradition of insult -- mad person!
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 8, 2024
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Gimme Shelter Back in 1968, my father announced that, if Richard Nixon were elected president that November, he was going to move us all to Canada. I'm not sure who "us all" actually was, since my younger brother and I were then living with my mother and my parents had been divorced for years. Still, he was determined to protect us, should someone he considered a dangerous anti-Semite make it into the Oval Office[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 16, 2024
Tomgram: William Hartung, Disarming You 2023 was a year marked by devastating conflicts from Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine to Hamas's horrific terror attacks on Israel, from that country's indiscriminate mass slaughter in Gaza to a devastating civil war in Sudan. And there's a distinct risk of even worse to come this year. Still, there was one clear winner in this avalanche of violence, suffering, and war: the U.S. military-industrial complex[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, February 28, 2011
Tomgram: Andy Kroll, The Spirit of Egypt in Madison Kroll has been covering the Madison protests for Mother Jones. Now, he writes one of the truly stirring pieces on the new American awakening -- and what it owes to the uprising in Egypt. He traces the links between Cairo and Madison (from pizzas ordered from Cairo for Wisconsin protestors to signs held, photos taken, and even statements from Egyptian labor leaders in support of the American protests).
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Tom Engelhardt: Disaster on Autpilot Americans lived in a "victory culture" for much of the twentieth century. You could say that we experienced an almost 75-year stretch of triumphalism -- think of it as the real "American Century" -- from World War I to the end of the Cold War, with time off for a destructive stalemate in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam too shocking to absorb or shake off.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 16, 2016
Tomgram: Andrew Cockburn, Victory Assured on the Military's Main Battlefield -- Washington Today, Andrew Cockburn, whose recent book, Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (just out in paperback), is a devastating account of how U.S. drone warfare really works, suggests that such results are anything but. Quite the opposite, it represents strategic thinking and maneuvering of the first order and results in the Pentagon regularly taking the budgetary high ground in Washington.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 18, 2013
Erika Eichelberger: Your Home Is Your Abattoir At a certain point in my life, I studied shotokan karate with a remarkable teacher, and then, unable to find her equivalent in the San Francisco Bay Area, took up wing chun for a while with a very amusing guy. At that point, I realized that the main threat to my health and well-being was my own stress level and -- well, you can see where this is going: yoga.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Alfred McCoy: Perfecting Illegality Her white hair peeked out from under a brilliant cerulean blue headscarf. Her lips and teeth were stained red from chewing areca nut and betel leaf, a mild stimulant favored by older Vietnamese women. She was missing her right eye. She also appeared to be in danger of floating away had a stiff breeze swept along the roadside where we were talking. Le Thi Xuan couldn't have weighed more than 90 pounds.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 6, 2014
Tomgram: Pratap Chatterjee, The Wild West of Surveillance Who can keep up with all the NSA and other revelations about how our sphere of online privacy is shrinking and just how the government (and corporations) are compromising our Internet lives? The answer: CorpWatch’s Pratap Chatterjee, who offers us a tour de force survey of the ways that the world that connects all of us also connects all of us to “them.”
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 19, 2016
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, No Justice at Gitmo Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School and author of a striking new book, Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State, offers a vivid look at the prison from hell, Guantánamo, and just why the president who swore he would close it on day one of his new administration, is struggling to do so in the last months of his second term.
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 14, 2015
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Go Green Young Woman, Young Man It will undoubtedly be many years before renewable forms of energy -- wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and others still in development -- replace fossil fuels as the world's leading energy providers. Nonetheless, 2015 can be viewed as the year in which the epochal transition from one set of fuels to another took off, with renewables making such significant strides that, for the first time in centuries...
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 23, 2014
Tomgram: Laura Gottesdiener, Visiting a Revolution That Won't Go Away Some people would tell you that a modest-sized group of mostly indigenous people in a poor Mexican state on the Guatemalan border doesn't matter, but that would be the voice of those who don't understand how a revolution can work and what victory can mean. The Zapatistas have been a great inspiration to movements globally since they first appeared on the world stage on New Year's Day 1994.
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Tomgram: Chip Ward, A West Raised by Wolves At long last, good news. Fifteen years have passed since wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and the results are in. The controversial experiment has been a stellar success. The Big Bad Wolf is back and in this modern version of the old story, all that huffing and puffing has been good for the land and the creatures that live on it. Biggie, it turns out, got a bum rap.
The grief of others., From FlickrPhotos
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 3, 2016
Tomgram: Mattea Kramer, The Grief of Others and the Boasts of Candidates In today's moving post, Mattea Kramer takes up a subject TomDispatch always finds of special importance -- what might be called this country's empathy deficit when it comes to the "collateral damage" inflicted in our distant wars, and she does so in the context of the particularly bloodthirsty nature of campaign 2016.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 29, 2016
Tomgram: Thomas Frank, The Inequality Sweepstakes Thomas Frank does a typically brainy thing. Since we've all heard for years about how the Democrats have been stopped from truly pursuing their political program by Republican experts in political paralysis, he turns to a rare set of places where, in fact, the Republicans were incapable of getting in the way.
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 10, 2015
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Who Will Fight the Islamic State? In the many strategies proposed to defeat the Islamic State (IS) by presidential candidates, policymakers, and media pundits alike across the American political spectrum, one common element stands out: someone else should really do it.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Engelhardt, The Last Empire? It stretched from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea, from the middle of Europe to the Kurile Islands in the Pacific, from Siberia to Central Asia. Its nuclear arsenal held 45,000 warheads, and its military had five million troops under arms. There had been nothing like it in Eurasia since the Mongols conquered China, took parts of Central Asia and the Iranian plateau, and rode into the Middle East, looting Baghdad.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 18, 2024
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, Can the Kids Change Our World? "All Americans owe them a debt for -- if nothing else -- releasing the idealism locked so long inside a nation that has not recently tasted the drama of a social upheaval. And for making us look on the young people of the country with a new respect." That's how Howard Zinn opened his book The New Abolitionists about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the 1960s[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 15, 2009
Obama Looses the Manhunters: Charisma and the Imperial Presidency Had the November election results been reversed, Obama's top team of today could just as easily have been appointed by Senator John McCain. As a group, Obama's key foreign policy figures and advisors are traditional players in the national security state and pre-Bush-style Washington guardians of American power, thinking globally in familiar ways.
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 21, 2011
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Washington's No-Friends Franchise 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.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 1, 2012
Mattea Kramer: A Recipe for American Decline That No One Will Be Debating With that jutting jaw of steel, think of him as the next Clark Kent, hence also Superman, promising to save our world (don't worry about just how). Opposite him, imagine Chris Pine as James T. Kirk, commander of the rebooted USS Enterprise, promising (repeatedly) to boldly go where no man has gone before.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 16, 2014
The Great Concentration or the Great Fragmentation? For most of the last several hundred years, the story in view might be called the Great Concentration and it focused on an imperial struggle for power on planet Earth. That rivalry took place among a kaleidoscopic succession of European "great powers," one global empire (Great Britain), Russia, a single Asian state (Japan), and the United States.
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SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 19, 2010
Tomgram: Ellen Cantarow, Blowback Crude From TomDispatch today: a powerful, connect-the-dots piece on how Big Oil has, for decades, created Gulf-of-Mexico situations elsewhere on this planet -- Ellen Cantarow, "Big Oil Makes War on the Earth, The Gulf Coast Joins an Oil-Soaked Planet"
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 19, 2020
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Dominance in the Name of Internationalism The so-called Age of Trump is also an age of instantly forgotten bestselling books, especially ones purporting to provide the inside scoop on what goes on within Donald Trump's haphazard and continuously shifting orbit. With metronomic regularity, such gossipy volumes appear, make a splash, and almost as quickly vanish, leaving a mark no more lasting than a trout breaking the surface in a pond.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 4, 2013
Steve Fraser: A Disaster for All Seasons Even if you set aside the man-made environmental disaster that is China (at a cost now estimated conservatively at $230 billion annually), ever more expensive disasters seem to be on the rise globally. Moreover, thanks to climate change -- that is, the greenhouse gases we've been pumping into the atmosphere at record levels -- the distinction between man-made catastrophes and natural ones is rapidly blurring.
Another American war against evil., From FlickrPhotos
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 8, 2015
Tomgram: Ira Chernus, Six Mistakes on the Road to Permanent War Oh, no! Not another American war against evil! This time, it's the Islamic State (IS). After the attacks in Paris, Barack Obama, spokesman-in-chief for the United States of America, called that crew "the face of evil." Shades of George W. Bush. The "evildoers" are back. And from every mountaintop, it seems, America now rings with calls to ramp up its war machine.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 7, 2019
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, A 1970s Feminist Looks Back at a Joyous Time I'll never forget the first time I saw my own menstrual period start. I was seated on the floor in a circle of women, legs bent in front of me, soles facing each other, a mirror resting on my feet.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 11, 2024
Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, This Can't Be as "Good" as It Gets The slang definition of "unwinding" means "to chill." Other definitions include: to relax, disentangle, undo -- all words that, on the surface, appear both passive and peaceful. And yet in Google searches involving such seemingly harmless definitions of decompressing and resting, news articles abound about the end of pandemic-era Medicaid expansion programs[...]
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 17, 2013
Tomgram: Kramer and Comerford, Shutting Down Americans While this country's creditor nations twitched, the global bankers were worried, too, and in campaign mode. In Washington for the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund, a number of them were predicting that a congressional unwillingness to raise the debt ceiling could take down what global "recovery" there had been since the Great Recession.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 29, 2019
Tomgram: Allegra Harpootlian and Emily Manna, The AI Wars Here's a question worth asking about America's seemingly endless global conflicts: if you kill somebody and there's no one there (on our side anyway), is the United States still at war?
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Tomgram: Ira Chernus, What Ever Happened to Plain Old Apocalypse? Religious scholar Ira Chernus offers a fresh look at a very necessary topic today -- the spread of a sense of doom in our world, linked first to nuclear war, more recently to environmental catastrophe, and above all to the idea of apocalypse. These days as a term, apocalypse is everywhere -- from the weather (air or snowpocalypse) to corporate upsizing (mergerpocalypse) to the Zombie apocalypses of pop culture.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 23, 2024
Tomgram: John Feffer, The End of Europe? It would be funny if it weren't so potentially tragic -- and consequential. No, I'm not thinking about Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign but a related development: the latest decisions from the European Union (EU) about Ukraine[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 12, 2013
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, What If Congress Says No on Syria? Looked at one way at least, the president's Syrian war proposal -- itself an ever shifting target -- couldn't be more brain-dead. The idea that one country, on its own, has the right to missile and bomb another to resolve the question of a chemical attack and war crime should, on the face of it, seem strange to us, like the most random death-dealing response to an already horrific act.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 2, 2013
Tomgram: Engelhardt, 2024 or Bust! Many publications have advice columnists, but none has our old friend Colonel Manners (ret.), whose experience in military and surveillance matters is evident from his impressive CV (unfortunately, a classified document). His assignment: to answer questions from Americans puzzled by the abstruse intricacies of the American way of war and by the etiquette, manners, and language of the arcane national security world.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Ariel Dorfman, A Tale of Torture and Forgiveness I'll bet you didn't know that June is "torture awareness month" thanks to the fact that, on June 26, 1987, the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment went into effect internationally.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Barbara Garson: Going Underwater in the Long Recession They call it the "spring swoon." For the third straight year, the American economy bounded out of the starting blocks, adding hundreds of thousands of jobs in January and February. And for the third year in a row, that momentum melted away in the spring like the last traces of winter snow.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 25, 2024
Tomgram: Maha Hilal, Cheerleading the War on Terror In a New Yorker piece published five days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, American critic and public intellectual Susan Sontag wrote, "Let's by all means grieve together. But let's not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen[...]"
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 11, 2012
Peter Van Buren: What They Won't Talk About (Dept. of Foreign Policy) As expected, the deficit and debt were both discussed in the first presidential debate on domestic policy. However, despite this year's endless American summer and a devastating drought that won't leave town, climate change wasn't. What would you bet that it won't be a significant topic in the final debate on foreign policy either? Only one conclusion seems reasonable: climate change has no place on this American planet.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 10, 2013
Karen Greenberg: How Zero Dark Thirty Brought Back the Bush Administration We got Osama bin Laden -- and now, for millions of Americans, we'll get him again onscreen as Zero Dark Thirty hits your neighborhood multiplex. Lauded and criticized, the film's the talk of the town. But it's hardly the only real-life CIA film that needed to be made.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 11, 2013
Jeremiah Goulka: C-130 Math and a Cargo of Pork Bipartisanship in Washington is a rare thing these days. However, no beltway battle in recent memory has been quite as partisan as the one over sequestration and its $85 billion in across-the-board government spending cuts.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Matthew Harwood, Counterterrorism in the Twilight Zone They went without saying a word. In the dead of night, the last U.S. troops slipped out of Iraq and across the Kuwaiti border. There was no victory parade. No departure ceremony. They never said goodbye. They didn't even cancel scheduled meetings with their Iraqi counterparts. They just up and left, weeks before their departure deadline in December 2010. The Americans took home their weapons and vehicles, of course.
SHARE More Sharing        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?
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 27, 2014
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Obama's Commandments When it comes to the Obama record on national security matters, today’s piece by Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and TomDispatch regular, offers a stunning scorecard of failure (stunningly organized for greatest impact).
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Murderous Police in the City of Love No city is immune from the American epidemic of police killings that has recently gained wide attention -- not even a liberal bastion like San Francisco.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 15, 2024
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Ending the American Century? With recent polls giving Donald Trump a reasonable chance of defeating President Biden in the November elections, commentators have begun predicting what his second presidency might mean for domestic politics. In a dismally detailed Washington Post analysis, historian Robert Kagan argued that a second Trump term would feature his "deep thirst for vengeance"[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 30, 2013
William deBuys, Goodbye to All That (Water) Martha and the Vandellas would have loved it. Metaphorically speaking, the New York Times practically swooned over it. ("An unforgiving heat wave held much of the West in a sweltering embrace over the weekend, tying or breaking temperature records in several cities, grounding flights, sparking forest fires, and contributing to deaths.")
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 21, 2011
Andy Kroll, Occupy Wall Street's Political Victory in Ohio Andy Kroll on how the language of OWS helped progressives win in the recent Ohio elections.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 29, 2014
William deBuys: Love Affair in the Back Country Like the Civil Rights Act, the Wilderness Act legislated justice. I don't mean to equate the two laws -- no one went to jail or was attacked by police dogs or shot or killed to get the Wilderness Act passed, but it did embody a revolutionary act of justice, nevertheless. It legislated compassion toward the planet by insisting that we humans must stop and leave certain lands alone and not take anything more from them.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 12, 2024
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Living in a Quagmire World Empires don't just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French, and Soviet empires; so it now is with imperial America[...]
SHARE More Sharing        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.
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 18, 2010
Tomgram: Engelhardt, American Warscapes The other day, at the invitation of economics professor Marty Melkonian, I took a rare jaunt out of my hometown to Hofstra University on Long Island and gave a talk in that college's lecture series, The International Scene, to a group of lively young students. It was filmed and will soon appear on CSPAN's Book TV. In the meantime, here it is in print.
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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 30, 2010
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Forever War On Monday, the Washington Post ran the first of three pieces adapted from Bob Woodward's new book Obama's Wars, a vivid account of the way the U.S. high command boxed the Commander-in-Chief into the smallest of Afghan corners. As an illustration, the Post included a graphic the military offered President Obama at a key November 2009 meeting to review war policy. It caught in a nutshell the favored "solution" to the Afghan War
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SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 24, 2011
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Resource Revolts Here's how energy expert Michael Klare, who first explored the idea of "resource wars" back in the 1990s, begins his latest dramatic TomDispatch post on the "resource revolts" in our future: "Get ready for a rocky year. From now on, rising prices, powerful storms, severe droughts and floods, and other unexpected events are likely to play havoc with the fabric of global society, producing chaos and political unrest.
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 25, 2016
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Disappointments of War in a World of Unintended Consequences Unless you consider an expanding series of failed states, spreading terror movements, wrecked cities, countries hemorrhaging refugees, and the like as accomplishments, war has been a genuine bust for Washington in the twenty-first century.
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 28, 2016
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Don't Blame It All on Donald Trump In this "election" season, many remain shocked that a leading candidate for the presidency is a demagogue with a visible authoritarian side and what looks like an autocratic bent. All such labels are pinned on Donald Trump, but the new American system that's been emerging from its chrysalis in Washington in these years already has just those tendencies. So don't blame it all on Donald Trump.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Peter Van Buren: Torture Superpower On New Year's Eve 2003, Khaled el-Masri, an unemployed car salesman from Germany on vacation in Macedonia, was removed from a bus and kidnapped by the CIA due to a confusion of names. His evidently bore some similarity to an al-Qaeda suspect the Agency wanted to get its hands on.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Rebecca Solnit: One Big Continent of Pain It shouldn't surprise you that Illegal Drugs R' Us. In fact, nearly 9% of this country's population above the age of 12 uses them -- more than 22 million people, according to the government's 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Epitaph from the Imperial Graveyard America's heroes? Not so much. Not anymore. Not when they're dead, anyway. Remember as the invasion of Iraq was about to begin, when the Bush administration decided to seriously enforce a Pentagon ban, in existence since the first Gulf War, on media coverage and images of the American dead arriving home at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware?
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Surveillance State Scorecard Given how similar they sound and how easy it is to imagine one leading to the other, confusing omniscience (having total knowledge) with omnipotence (having total power) is easy enough. It's a reasonable supposition that, before the Snowden revelations hit, America's spymasters had made just that mistake.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 18, 2012
Tom Engelhardt: Till Death Do Us Part It was almost closing time when the siege began at a small Wells Fargo Bank branch in a suburb of San Diego, and it was a nightmare. The three gunmen entered with the intent to rob, but as they herded the 18 customers and bank employees toward a back room, they were spotted by a pedestrian outside who promptly called 911.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 28, 2013
Ann Jones, The Afghan End Game? The euphemisms will come fast and furious. Our soldiers will be greeted as "heroes" who, as in Iraq, left with their "heads held high," and if in 2014 or 2015 or even 2019, the last of them, as also in Iraq, slip away in the dark of night after lying to their Afghan "allies" about their plans, few here will notice.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, May 20, 2013
Rebecca Solnit, What Comes After Hope I worked for years as an editor at Pantheon Books. Its publisher, maybe the most adventurous in the business, was André Schiffrin. Among his many accomplishments, he "discovered" Studs Terkel (already a well-known Chicago radio personality), published his first oral history (Division Street: America), and made him a bestseller.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 10, 2012
Lewis Lapham: Drugs and the National Security State It started out as a metaphor: "the war on drugs." But it became ever more dismayingly real as time passed, initially as a fierce assault on young black men who ended up in jail in outrageous numbers. More recently, it's coming to seem ever more like a grim description of onrushing reality, an actual war, which shouldn't surprise anyone living in a country that now has the habit of militarizing just about everything from hurri
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 11, 2012
David Vine: The True Costs of Empire Mars? Venus? Earth-like bodies elsewhere in the galaxy? Who knows? But here, at least, no great power, no superpower, no hyperpower, not the Romans, nor imperial China, nor the British, nor the Soviet Union has ever garrisoned the globe quite the way we have: Asia to Latin America, Europe to the Greater Middle East, and increasingly Africa as well.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 12, 2023
Tomgram: Nan Levinson, Peace When? What a world! For eight weeks now, events in Israel and Gaza have been the story of the hour, day, week. And what exactly are we to make of that?[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Tomgram: Barbara Garson, All the President's Middlemen Today, Barbara Garson uses her knowledge of how the Obama administration teamed up with banks in the foreclosure crisis to offer an anatomy of the way public-private partnerships can go disastrously wrong. Consider it a prime warning on the potential fate of Obamacare. Offering the banks incentives to “modify” the mortgages of people whose houses were “underwater,” the administration created a mortgage farce.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Peter Van Buren: Back to the Future in Iraq Former State Department whistleblower and TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren spent his own time in Iraq and wrote We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People about it. Now, he considers the mind-boggling strangeness of Washington doing it all over again, this time as the grimmest of farces.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Tom Engelhardt, Alone and Delusional on Planet Earth In an increasingly phantasmagorical world, here's my present fantasy of choice: someone from General Keith Alexander's outfit, the National Security Agency, tracks down H.G. Wells's time machine in the attic of an old house in London. Britain's subservient Government Communications Headquarters, its version of the NSA, is paid off and the contraption is flown to Fort Meade, Maryland, where it's put back in working order.
SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Inimitable Colonel Manners Sometimes the real world is indeed stranger than fiction. I made up the character of Col. Manners -- a Dear Abby of the national security state -- last October to offer a satiric view of the language and thinking of our secret world. Today, I bring Col. Manners back to answer in his inimitable fashion questions from ordinary Americans (who have also sprung from my mind full-grown).
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 30, 2023
Tomgram: Ariel Dorfman, The Donald (Duck, Not Trump) Chronicle This year marks the anniversaries of two drastically different events that loomed all too large in my life. The first occurred a century ago in Hollywood: on October 16, 1923, Walt Disney signed into being the corporation that bears his name. The second took place in Santiago, Chile, on September 11, 1973, when socialist President Salvador Allende died in a military coup that overthrew his democratically elected government[...
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 14, 2023
Tomgram: Norman Solomon, What Daniel Ellsberg Knew About Doomsday Top American officials in the "national security" establishment are notably good at smooth rhetoric and convenient silences. Their scant regard for truth or human life has changed remarkably little since 1971 when Daniel Ellsberg risked decades in prison to leak the Pentagon Papers to the world. During the years between then and his death six months ago, he was a tireless writer, speaker, and activist[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 3, 2012
Steve Fraser: The National Museum of Industrial Homicide A week after the election, I folded myself into the front seat of a small rental car and left Washington, D.C., for the highlands of southwestern Virginia. The destination on my GPS device read Radford University, a small public college located an hour's drive from the West Virginia border.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, June 10, 2013
Victoria Brittain: Miscarriages of Justice Sometimes, when you watch the strange, repetitive political dance that swirls around the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- the president announcing yet again that he plans to "close" it and the Republicans in Congress swearing that they won't let him -- it's hard not to wonder what alternative universe we live in.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 14, 2014
Engelhardt, The Age of Impunity For America's national security state, this is the age of impunity. Nothing it does -- torture, kidnapping, assassination, illegal surveillance, you name it -- will ever be brought to court. For none of its beyond-the-boundaries acts will anyone be held accountable.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Tomgram: Engelhardt, War Is a Drug If, as 2011 begins, you want to peer into the future, enter my time machine, strap yourself in, and head for the past, that laboratory for all developments of our moment and beyond.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 11, 2016
Tomgram: William Astore, Spoiling The Pentagon As for today, retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and TomDispatch regular William J. Astore has come up with a perfect "medical" diagnosis for the Pentagon in the twenty-first century. It suffers, he writes, from Ethan-Couch-style "affluenza."
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 14, 2016
Tomgram: Bob Dreyfuss, Will The Donald Rally the Militias and the Right-to-Carry Movement? Bob Dreyfuss points out that, though Donald Trump is now regularly being compared to Hitler, from the beginning the Nazis always had the support of a brutal, thuggish armed paramilitary wing, the notorious Sturmabteilung (or storm troopers), also known as the Brown Shirts.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 28, 2013
Engelhardt: The 12th Anniversary of American Cowardice It's true that, last week, few in Congress cared to discuss, no less memorialize, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Nonetheless, two anniversaries of American disasters and crimes abroad -- the "mission accomplished" debacle of 2003 and the 45th anniversary of the My Lai massacre -- were at least noted in passing in our world.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 7, 2023
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, When Wars Converge One way of understanding the ongoing bloodbath pitting Israel against Hamas is to see it as just the latest chapter in an existential struggle dating back to the founding of the Jewish state in 1948. While the appalling scope, destructiveness, and duration of the fighting in Gaza may outstrip previous episodes[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        Monday, July 26, 2010
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Clueless in Afghanistan -- and Washington From TomDispatch this morning: a tour de force account of the strangeness of American war-making arrangements in distant lands and how completely blasé we are about them (and, though obviously written before the recent Wikileaks release of classified U.S. military documents, very relevant to them) -- Tom Engelhardt, "The Opposites Game, All the Strangeness of Our American World in One Article"
Bill McKibben, From FlickrPhotos
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 18, 2016
Tomgram: Bill McKibben, It's Not Just What Exxon Did, It's What It's Doing Bill McKibben explores what it meant for one giant energy company, ExxonMobile, to know the truth about climate change decades ago, use that information to improve its future profitability while keeping it from the public, and so continue the never-ending search for more fossil fuels and the never-ending big dig that goes with it.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Tomgram: Laura Gottesdiener, Fantasy, Greed, and Housing, the Prequel As Laura Gottesdiener has been reporting for TomDispatch, predatory investment firms are building "rental empires" nationally by buying up foreclosed properties by the thousands, renting them back to working people, and bundling up those properties to sell to Wall Street. Today, Gottesidener turns her sights to New York City, where the rental racket has been underway for years and the results have been instructively grim.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, September 6, 2012
John Feffer: The Dumbing Down of American Foreign Policy Think back to the election of 2008. Do you remember how one candidate had it easy? He had eight years of abject failure to run against.
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Tom Engelhardt: Assassin-in-Chief Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren't just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Rise of the Reader Normally, you wouldn’t call me the most upbeat of writers, but today, amid all the keening and mourning over the collapse of the newspaper, journalism, and investigative reporting, I suggest that, from the point of view of the reader, we have actually entered the golden age of journalism.
SHARE More Sharing        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."
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 24, 2012
Rebecca Solnit: 2013 as Year Zero for Us -- and Our Planet In weather terms, 2012 in New York City began for me with crocuses. On an early February day in a week in which the temperature hit 60 degrees, I spotted their green shoots pushing up through the bare ground of a local park on a morning walk -- just as if it were spring.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 9, 2024
Tomgram: Karen J. Greenberg, Whose Power? Not Ours This week marks the 22nd anniversary of the opening of the Guanta'namo Bay detention facility, the infamous prison on the island of Cuba designed to hold detainees from this country's Global War on Terror. It's an anniversary that's likely to go unnoticed, since these days you rarely hear about the war on terror -- and for good reason[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Engelhardt: The Washington Straitjacket Nothing you don't know, but let me just say it: the world's a weird place. In my younger years, I might have said "crazy," but that was back when I thought being crazy was a cool thing and only regretted I wasn't.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 3, 2013
Tom Engelhardt: Apocalypse When? Think of it as a simple formula: if you've been hired (and paid handsomely) to protect what is, you're going to be congenitally ill-equipped to imagine what might be. And yet the urge not just to know the contours of the future, but to plant the Stars and Stripes in that future has had the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) in its grip since the mid-1990s.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Engelhardt, Paying the Bin Laden Tax Inauguration Day. More than two weeks gone and already part of our distant past. In its wake, President Obama was hailed (or reviled) for his "liberal" second inaugural address. On that day everything from his invocation of women's rights ("Seneca Falls"), the civil rights movement ("Selma"), and the gay rights movement ("Stonewall") to his wife's new bangs and Beyoncé's lip-syncing was fodder for the media extravaganza.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 5, 2023
Tomgram: Clarence Lusane, Don't Say You Weren't Warned On February 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. It initiated a Department of Defense program that resulted in the rounding up and incarceration of about 122,000 individuals of Japanese descent. They were to be placed in federal "relocation centers" that would popularly become known as "internment camps." As it happened, they were neither[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, November 8, 2006
Outlaw Empire Meets the Wave 5 Questions for Our Future The wave -- and make no mistake, it's a global one -- has just crashed on our shores, soaking our imperial masters. It's a sight for sore eyes.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, October 22, 2012
Karen Greenberg: Preparing for a Digital 9/11 Traditionally, war powers have resided with Congress -- or so the Constitutional story goes. It's been a long time, of course, since that's been a reality, but over the last few decades American wars have become ever more purely and starkly presidential in nature.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 1, 2013
Ira Chernus: Obama's Risky Middle East Fantasy Had you searched for "Israel, nuclear weapons" at Google News in the wake of President Obama's recent trip to the Middle East, you would have gotten a series of headlines like this: "Obama: Iran more than a year away from developing nuclear weapon" (CNN), "Obama vows to thwart Tehran's nuclear driverdquo; (the Times of Israel), Obama: No nuclear weapons for Iran (the San Angelo Times).
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Spying for Us Hey, let's talk spying! In Surveillance America, this land of spookery we all now inhabit, what else is there to talk about? Was there anyone growing up like me in the 1950s who didn't know Revolutionary War hero and spy Nathan Hale's last words before the British hanged him: "I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country"? I doubt it.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 29, 2014
Engelhardt, The Big Brotherness of It All As from time to time in the past, today I offer "the last commencement address" of the season from what I like to call "the campus of my mind." To be specific, I address "the Internet class of 2014" on their "world of shadows," the online world they inhabit that often dazzles me, but most of the time leaves me feeling as if I were a creature from another planet and another time.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 27, 2023
Tomgram: Engelhardt, World War III? Imagine this: humanity in its time on Earth has already come up with two distinct ways of destroying this planet and everything on it. The first is, of course, nuclear weapons, which once again surfaced in the ongoing nightmare in the Middle East[...]
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 25, 2013
William Astore: Predatory Dreams Just who is doing the killing? That was the question that came up when the U.S. and sometime ally Pakistan got into a war of words over who was responsible for air strikes that killed up to nine people -- including two purported al-Qaeda senior commanders -- in Pakistan's restive tribal belt early last month.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 17, 2012
Engelhardt: Supersizing Secrecy Weren't those the greatest of days if you were in the American spy game? Governments went down in Guatemala and Iran thanks to you. In distant Indonesia, Laos, and Vietnam, what a role you played! And even that botch-up of an invasion in Cuba was nothing to sneeze at. In those days, unfortunately, you -- particularly those of you in the CIA -- didn't get the credit you deserved.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 30, 2013
Michael Klare: A Future in Arms Imagine for a moment that in 2010, China's leaders had announced a long-term, up to $60 billion arms deal with an extreme Islamic fundamentalist regime in the Middle East, one that was notoriously repressive to women and a well-known supporter of the Taliban.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 4, 2024
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Whose World Is This Anyway? Honestly, what strange creatures we are. Nothing stops us when it comes to destruction, does it? (And I'm not even thinking about the utter, ongoing devastation of Gaza.)[...]
SHARE More Sharing        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?
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 15, 2014
Bautista, Crisp-Sauray, and McKibben: A Future to March For Next Sunday's event in New York City is already being pre-billed as "the largest climate change demonstration in history." (It doesn't actually have that much competition.) My hope is that anyone who can get here will help make it impressively so, if for no other reason -- and there are plenty -- than because it feels good once in a while to know that you're not alone.
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(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 14, 2013
The Pentagon as a Global NRA The Pentagon is the largest federally licensed weapons dealer on the planet and its goal -- one that the NRA might envy -- is to create a world in which the rights of those deemed our allies to bear our (most advanced) armaments "shall not be infringed." The Pentagon, it seems, is intent on pursuing its own global version of the Second Amendment. A well regulated militia indeed.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Eduardo Galeano: Not So Elementary, My Dear Watson As a teenager, you dreamed of being a writer and I imagine you dream of it still. When young, you were a cartoonist and, ever since, you've noted the exaggeration in our world. You were the editor-in-chief of a newspaper and, with the skills you honed, you've never stopped editing our history -- from our first myths to late last night.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 11, 2024
Tomgram: Joshua Frank, Making Gaza Unlivable On a picturesque beach in central Gaza, a mile north of the now-flattened Al-Shati refugee camp, long black pipes snake through hills of white sand before disappearing underground. An image released by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shows dozens of soldiers laying pipelines and what appear to be mobile pumping stations that are to take water from the Mediterranean Sea and hose it into underground tunnels[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 28, 2013
Kramer and Hellman: The Washington Creation That Ate Your Lunch Once upon a time, "homeland" was a word of little significance in the American context. What American before 9/11 would have called the United States his or her "homeland" rather than "country"? Who sang "My homeland, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty"? Between my birth in 1944, as World War II was drawing to a close, and September 11, 2001, I doubt I ever heard the word in reference to the U.S.
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SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 22, 2024
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Trump Atop Us (Again)? Count on one thing: Donald Trump, who seems to gain Republican support with every new indictment, is not going away. He's managed to capitalize on his 2020 election loss, using his failed insurrection, a stream of violent threats and verbal attacks against political opponents and journalists, and the disinformation machine of Fox News and similar outlets to peddle his stories of white American victimhood[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 28, 2011
Nick Turse, How to Arm a Dictator This piece is a riveting part of Turse's ongoing coverage of the U.S. military's impact on the Arab Spring -- and it reveals with just what extreme and remarkably self-interested selectivity Washington has "supported" democracy movements in the Middle East.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 14, 2012
Nick Turse: The Changing Face of Empire The frustration has long been growing. Now, it's been put into words. On his recent trip to Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who has earned a reputation for saying whatever comes into his head, insisted that Washington had just about had it with Pakistan. "Reaching the limits of our patience" was the way he put it (not once but twice).
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, September 17, 2012
Rebecca Solnit: Success is for the Stubborn Rebecca Solnit arrived at TomDispatch as a ray of light in a moment of darkness. It was May 2003. The largest anti-war demonstrations in history -- organized across the planet before an expected war had even broken out -- were so over.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Glenn Greenwald, How I Met Edward Snowden This is publication day for Glenn Greenwald's new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. National Security State, and TomDispatch is especially proud to have an exclusive 3,000-word adaptation of its first chapter on how Snowden initially got in touch with Greenwald, how he almost missed the biggest story of his (and possibly our) lifetimes, and how he became convinced that this was the real thing.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 15, 2019
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A "Ridiculous" War Here's a statement it might be hard to disagree with: American war is off the charts. Still, I'd like to explain -- but I'm nervous about doing so...
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 4, 2023
Tomgram: Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox, Three Nations Under God(s) In 1981, India's post office issued a stamp showing the flags of India and occupied Palestine flying side by side above the phrase "Solidarity with the Palestinian people." That now seems like ancient history. Today, Hindu nationalists are flying the flags of India and Israel side by side as a demonstration of their support for that country's catastrophic war on Gaza[...]
SHARE More Sharing        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.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 8, 2013
Bill McKibben: How Do You Solve a Problem Like the Democrats? At 72, climate scientist James Hansen is retiring as head of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies to work even more actively on climate-change issues. Keep in mind that, in congressional testimony in 1988, he first put climate change on the national map. "It is time to stop waffling so much," he told the congressional committee members, "and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Tomgram: Engelhardt, World Without Context Sometimes what matters most takes up every inch of space in the room and somehow we still don't see it. That's how I feel about our present media moment.
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Mattea Kramer and Jo Comerford: Congress Tweeted While America Burned Three days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress passed a joint resolution called an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). You might remember it. In layman's terms, it was a carte blanche for the Bush administration to go to war wherever it wanted, whenever it wanted, however it wanted, under the guise of fighting anyone who "planned, authorized, committed, or aided" the September 11th attackers
SHARE More Sharing        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.
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, May 15, 2012
William Astore: Hail to the Cheerleader-in-Chief! 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...
SHARE More Sharing        Friday, September 25, 2009
How to Trap a President in a Losing War This last week General Petraeus was, in fact, in England, giving a speech and writing an article for the (London) Times laying out his basic "protect the population" version of counterinsurgency. Only at mid-week, with Washington aboil, did he arrive in the capital for a counterinsurgency conference at the National Press Club and quietly "endorse" "General McChrystal's assessment."
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Nick Turse, A Rape in Wartime Here's how I met Nick Turse. I have a friend who's a professor of public health and one day in 2003 he asked me if I'd be willing to spend a little time with one of his graduate students who was doing some curious work on the Vietnam War. This student had read my book The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War era that had a significant Vietnam component, and was eager to get together with me.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 18, 2016
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Obsession, Addiction, and the News In my latest post, I try to make some new sense of what we still call "the news" -- that strange onscreen thing, at present obsessed (sometimes 24/7) with election 2016 (and of course The Donald), sometimes obsessively focused on the latest terror attack in the U.S. or Europe.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 11, 2023
Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Upending America? Recently, on a commuter train, I ran into an acquaintance who works for a government agency here in Washington, D.C. Soon after we started chatting, he indicated a desire to switch jobs in case Donald Trump was reelected president in 2024. "I'd like to be somewhere that Trump wouldn't be able to politicize," my buddy said[...]
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SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett: Playing for Time on Iran Recently, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta finally said it. The U.S. is "fighting a war" in the Pakistani tribal belt. Similarly, observers are starting to suggest that "war" is the right word for the American air and special operations campaign against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in southern Yemen. (There have already been 23 U.S. air strikes there this year.)
SHARE More Sharing        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.
SHARE More Sharing        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.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, November 25, 2013
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Boo! From the time I was little, I went to the movies. They were my escape, with one exception from which I invariably had to escape. I couldn't sit through any movie where something or someone threatened to jump out at me with the intent to harm. In such situations, I was incapable of enjoying being scared and there seemed to be no remedy for it.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, March 14, 2024
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, My "Children" Say They Won't Vote for Biden Recently my partner and I had brunch with some old comrades, folks I first met in the 1996 fight to stop the state of California from outlawing affirmative action. Sadly, we lost that one and, almost three decades later, we continue to lose affirmative action programs thanks to a Supreme Court rearranged or, more accurately, deranged by one Donald J. Trump[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 25, 2013
Todd Gitlin: The Tinsel Age of Journalism After all these decades, here's the strange thing: what I remember are his hands, not his face. But perhaps that's fitting for a writer. His name was Robert Shaplen and he was a correspondent for the New Yorker. My parents knew him and, as a boy, I idolized him. From World War II on, he covered Asia. He seemed to me the most adventurous man on the planet.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, December 18, 2023
Tomgram: Mattea Kramer and Sean Fogler, This Holiday Season, We're Lonely Consider two phenomena that might seem unrelated. This fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data showing a marked increase in overdose fatalities nationally. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told CNN that she had expected overdose deaths to decline after a sharp spike during the pandemic. Instead, such fatalities have only gone up[...]
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Dahr Jamail, "My Children Have No Future" In the lead-up to the war in Iraq, President George W. Bush made a promise. "The Iraqi people can be certain of this," he said. "The United States is committed to helping them build a better future." A decade later, his successor, Barack Obama, seemed to suggest the U.S. had kept its end of the bargain.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 19, 2012
Tom Engelhardt: The National Security Complex and You When my daughter was little and I read to her regularly, one illustrated book was a favorite of ours. In a series of scenes, it described frustrating incidents in the life of a young girl, each ending with the line -- which my tiny daughter would boom out with remarkable force -- "that makes me mad!" It was the book's title and a repetitively cathartic moment in our reading lives.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, June 6, 2013
Engelhardt: At World's End and Back Again Here may be the most commonplace sentence anyone could write about graduation day in any year: when I think back to my own graduation in 1966, an eon, a lifetime, a world ago, I have no memory of who addressed us. None. I have a little packet of photos of the event: shots of my parents and me, my grandmother and me, my aunt and me, my former roommates and me, my friends and me.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 20, 2012
Ira Chernus: The Mideast Surprise of 2013? The future has its surprises. Even the most farseeing among us, even the seers of the U.S. Intelligence Community, are -- for better or worse -- regularly caught off-guard by what tomorrow has to offer. Take the murderous acts of two disturbed young men.
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, January 14, 2013
The Pentagon as a Global NRA: For Washington, There Is No Arms Control Abroad Given these last weeks, who doesn't know what an AR-15 is? Who hasn't seen the mind-boggling stats on the way assault rifles have flooded this country, or tabulations of accumulating Newtown-style mass killings, or noted that there are barely more gas stations nationwide than federally licensed firearms dealers, or heard the renewed debates over the Second Amendment?
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, April 15, 2013
Engelhardt: The Cathedral of the Enemy The communist enemy, with the "world's fourth largest military," has been trundling missiles around and threatening the United States with nuclear obliteration. Guam, Hawaii, Washington: all, it claims, are targetable. The coverage in the media has been hair-raising.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 26, 2012
U.S. Africa Command Debates TomDispatch On July 12th, TomDispatch posted the latest piece in Nick Turse's "changing face of empire" series: "Obama's Scramble for Africa." It laid out in some detail the way in which the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has, in recent years, spread its influence across that continent, establishing bases and outposts, sending in special operations forces and drones, funding proxy forces on the continent, and so on.
SHARE More Sharing        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.
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 12, 2012
Tom Engelhardt: War as the President's Private Preserve 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."
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, April 11, 2013
Mattea Kramer: A People's Budget for Tax Day Recently, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel gave a major speech at the National Defense University on cutting military -- aka defense -- spending. Hagel is considered a "realist" and so when it comes to such cuts, this is undoubtedly the best we're likely to get out of Washington for a long time to come. Unfortunately, it turns out that the best is pretty poor stuff.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 31, 2012
Nick Turse: Hot Drone-On-Drone Action It's now commonly estimated that more than 50 nations have drones, are making plans to develop them, or are at least planning to buy them from those who do produce them. In other words, the future global skies are going to be a busy -- and increasingly dangerous -- place.
SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, February 7, 2013
Todd Miller: Locking Down the Borders Today, Todd Miller, who has previously written for this site on the militarization of the Mexican border, focuses on a part of that American lockdown which I've seldom seen discussed anywhere: the way our northern border, once possibly the most open on the planet, is being transformed into a "Constitution-free zone."
SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 18, 2024
Tomgram: William Astore, Cutting the Pentagon Down to Size In an age when American presidents routinely boast of having the world's finest military, where nearly trillion-dollar war budgets are now a new version of routine, let me bring up one vitally important but seldom mentioned fact: making major cuts to military spending would increase U.S. national security[...]

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