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SHARE 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.
(10 comments) SHARE 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 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?
SHARE 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 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 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 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 AmÃlcar 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
SHARE 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[...]
SHARE 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 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[...]
(2 comments) SHARE 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
(7 comments) SHARE 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?[...]
SHARE 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.