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Michael Klare, An All-American Path to War?
Michael Klare, An All-American Path to War? The single scariest night of my life may have been on October 22, 1962, when I thought that all the duck-and-cover moments of my childhood were coming home to roost. President John F. Kennedy appeared on national television (and radio) to warn us all to duck and cover. The Soviet Union, it seemed, […]
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Mad Policies for a Mad World
Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Mad Policies for a Mad World What’s the value of an American life in the age of Donald Trump? If you were judging by the death of Nawres Hamid, an Iraqi-American contractor killed in late December after an American base in Iraq was mortared by a Shiite militia believed to have ties to […]
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Future History
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Future History In Donald Trump’s go-back-to-where-you-didn’t-come-from America, where the fear of immigrants (as well as their grotesque mistreatment) still seems on the rise, just wait. There’s so much more to come. Climate change has barely begun to hit this planet big time and yet, while there’s much writing about the grim circumstances (including gangs, drugs, and […]
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, American Decline
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, American Decline Did Donald Trump just make his first genuine mistake in the race for reelection in 2020? As I wrote during the 2016 campaign, The Donald had one striking distinction. He was the only candidate (or essentially American politician) of that moment who didn’t feel obliged to claim that the U.S. was not […]
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, India, Pakistan, and a Planet in Peril
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, India, Pakistan, and a Planet in Peril There are a few genuinely upbeat news stories when it comes to this planet and people trying to figure out how to save us from ourselves and our fossil-fuel addiction. This at a moment of record global surface temperatures and record ocean heating when, despite the Paris climate accord […]
How Many Minutes to Midnight?
How Many Minutes to Midnight? Consider it a marriage made in hell. Start with the groom, Donald Trump, the man who once wondered why in the world we make nuclear weapons if we can’t use them; who wouldn’t rule out using nukes, even in Europe; who insisted that a president should be “unpredictable” on the subject; who suggested that […]
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Cooking the Books in the Trump Universe
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Cooking the Books in the Trump Universe There’s a clear pattern to Donald Trump’s life. Put simply: he gets away with it. Yes, sometimes (but not usually) he has to pay a penalty, but generally he has a knack for leaving others holding the bag. He’s stiffed untold numbers of people (plumbers, […]
Planet of War: Still Trapped in a Greater Middle Eastern Quagmire, the U.S. Military Prepares for Global Combat
Planet of War: Still Trapped in a Greater Middle Eastern Quagmire, the U.S. Military Prepares for Global Combat 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 […]
Tomgram: William Astore, The Pentagon Has Won the War that Matters
Tomgram: William Astore, The Pentagon Has Won the War that Matters In June, Austin “Scott” Miller, the special-ops general chosen to be the 17th U.S. commander in Afghanistan, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Like so many of the generals who had preceded him, he suggested that he saw evidence of “progress” in the […]
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Cooking the Books in the Trump Universe
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Cooking the Books in the Trump Universe There’s a clear pattern to Donald Trump’s life. Put simply: he gets away with it. Yes, sometimes (but not usually) he has to pay a penalty, but generally he has a knack for leaving others holding the bag. He’s stiffed untold numbers of people (plumbers, […]
Special Ops: 133 Countries Down, 17 to Go?
Special Ops: 133 Countries Down, 17 to Go? Give them credit. As TomDispatch’s Nick Turse has so vividly reported over the last decade, America’s previously “elite” Special Operations forces — once small, specially trained units in a large military — have now essentially become a military in their own right, all 70,000 of them (larger, […]
The Destruction of a Vast Transnational Nursery?
The Destruction of a Vast Transnational Nursery? Back in May 2013, a word came to mind that I wanted to see in all our vocabularies. It wasn’t the ever-present “terrorist” but “terrarist” and I meant it to describe people intent on destroying the planetary environment that had welcomed and nurtured so many species, including our […]
In Donald Trump’s Washington, The House Always Wins
In Donald Trump’s Washington, The House Always Wins It drove me crazy throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton (with all those high-priced consultants and aides) just kept pounding away at Donald Trump’s personality, which his many followers adored, and those unreleased tax returns of his, even though Americans have always loved hucksters capable of […]
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, In Washington, Is the Glass(-Steagall) Half Empty or Half Full?
Tomgram: 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 […]
Tomgram: Bill McKibben, The Real Zombie Apocalypse
Tomgram: Bill McKibben, The Real Zombie Apocalypse Here we are just a couple of weeks into 2016 and we already know that last year was the second-warmest on record in the continental United States (the winner so far being 2012); the month of December was a U.S. record-breaker for heat and also precipitation; and it’s assumed that, when the […]
