TomDispatch - Blog

Tomgram: Nick Turse, Hot Drone-On-Drone Action

Nick Turse — Thu, 31 May 2012 08:26:01 EDT

Washington’s post-9/11 military interventions have been a boon for drones...

Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The Golden Age of Special Operations

Andrew Bacevich — Tue, 29 May 2012 06:51:01 EDT

As he campaigns for reelection, President Obama periodically reminds audiences of his success in terminating the deeply unpopular Iraq War.

Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Road to Amnesia

Tom Engelhardt — Thu, 24 May 2012 09:10:01 EDT

It’s the saddest reading around: the little announcements that dribble out of the Pentagon every day or two -- those terse, relatively uninformative Pentagon death notices...

Tomgram: Hellman and Kramer, How Much Does Washington Spend on "Defense"?

Chris Hellman, Mattea Kramer — Tue, 22 May 2012 08:54:01 EDT

Here, then, is a simple question that, for some curious reason, no one bothers to ask, no less answer: How much are we spending on national security these days?

Tomgram: Ellen Cantarow, The New Eco-Devastation in Rural America

Ellen Cantarow — Sun, 20 May 2012 17:25:01 EDT

If the world can be seen in a grain of sand, watch out...

Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, Looting the Lives of the Poor

Barbara Ehrenreich — Thu, 17 May 2012 08:01:01 EDT

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons.

Tomgram: William Astore, Hail to the Cheerleader-in-Chief!

William Astore — Tue, 15 May 2012 09:41:01 EDT

But whether President Obama gets his second term or Romney enters the Oval Office, there’s a third candidate no one’s paying much attention to, and that candidate is guaranteed to be the one clear winner of election 2012: the U.S. military and our ever-surging national security state...

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Predator Nation

Tom Engelhardt — Sun, 13 May 2012 17:51:01 EDT

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...

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Oil Wars on the Horizon

Michael Klare — Thu, 10 May 2012 07:42:01 EDT

Conflict and intrigue over valuable energy supplies have been features of the international landscape for a long time...

Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, A Rebellious World or a New Dark Age?

Noam Chomsky — Tue, 08 May 2012 07:39:01 EDT

If the bonds and associations the Occupy movement has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead -- because victory won’t come quickly -- it could prove a significant moment in American history...

Tomgram: Ernest Callenbach, Last Words to an America in Decline

Ernest Callenbach — Sun, 06 May 2012 17:30:01 EDT

As I survey my life, which is coming near its end, I want to set down a few thoughts that might be useful to those coming after...

Tomgram: Bill McKibben, The Most Important Story of Our Lives

Bill McKibben — Thu, 03 May 2012 09:39:01 EDT

The Williams River was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011...

Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, American Dystopia, Fiction or Reality?

Rebecca Solnit — Tue, 01 May 2012 08:49:01 EDT

We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth...

Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Global-Profiling President

Tom Engelhardt — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 17:55:01 EDT

Sometimes to understand where you are, you need to ransack the past. In this case, to grasp just how this country’s first African-American-constitutional-law-professor-liberal Oval Office holder became the most imperial of all recent imperial presidents, it’s necessary to look back to the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency...

Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, A Full Spectrum Confrontation World?

Pepe Escobar — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:31:01 EDT

The multitrillion-dollar global question remains: Is the emergence of BRICS a signal that we have truly entered a new multipolar world?

Tomgram: Nick Turse, Memory Failure at the Pentagon

Nick Turse — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 08:50:01 EDT

Here’s the “lede” that should have run in every newspaper in America: More than 40 years after the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive, after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan, even after reviving counterinsurgency doctrine (only to see it crash-and-burn in short order), the U.S. military still doesn’t get it...

Tomgram: Lewis Lapham, Machine-Made News

Lewis Lapham — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 18:08:01 EDT

Why does it come to pass that the more data we collect -- from Google, YouTube, and Facebook -- the less likely we are to know what it means?

Tomgram: Fraser and Freeman, Creating a Prison-Corporate Complex

Steve Fraser, Joshua Freeman — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 09:28:01 EDT

Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance...

Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, How to Trump a Superpower

Dilip Hiro — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:03:01 EDT

The following ingredients should go a long way to produce a political thriller...

Tomgram: Chase Madar, Legal Atrocities

Chase Madar — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 18:20:01 EDT

Anyone who would like to witness a vivid example of modern warfare that adheres to the laws of war -- that corpus of regulations developed painstakingly over centuries by jurists, humanitarians, and soldiers, a body of rules that is now an essential, institutionalized part of the U.S. armed forces and indeed all modern militaries -- should simply click here and watch the video...

Tomgram: Juan Cole, The Iran Conundrum

Juan Cole — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 09:39:01 EDT

It’s a policy fierce enough to cause great suffering among Iranians -- and possibly in the long run among Americans, too...

Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Smog of War

Tom Engelhardt — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:05:01 EDT

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...

Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Joining The Whistleblowers' Club

Peter Van Buren — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 17:19:01 EDT

People ask the question in various ways, sometimes hesitantly, often via a long digression, but my answer is always the same: no regrets...

Tomgram: Bill McKibben, How You Subsidize the Energy Giants to Wreck the Planet

Bill McKibben — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 09:20:01 EDT

Along with “fivedollaragallongas,” the energy watchword for the next few months is: “subsidies.”

Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Intelligence Bureaucracy That Ate Our World

Tom Engelhardt — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 09:07:01 EDT

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...