Author: Tom Engelhardt

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Imperial powers — and so empires — have always been with us. They’ve been part and parcel of history forever and a day. However, in this country, though it should be difficult to deny that the United States is just such a power, most Americans remain remarkably oblivious not just to the phenomenon, but to the very idea of it. No matter that, in this century, their country read more

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When it comes to war, increasingly autonomous drones are now, it seems, the name of the game. Only the other day, in its stunning surprise attack on Israel, Hamas claimed read more

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Let me offer you a little summary of NBC Nightly News on October 4th. The top story that evening, you won’t be surprised to learn, was who would be the next House read more

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If you want to be convinced that we now live on a different planet, just focus for a moment on those Canadian wildfires. Yep, them! You remember, right? Back in early June, more than 400 of them were burning out of control across that country and their smoke had drifted over read more

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As you think about the ongoing United Auto Workers (UAW) strike, consider this: of the CEOs of the three companies being struck, Ford’s Jim Farley got nearly $21 read more

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In September 2007, Karen Greenberg ominously titled her third report for TomDispatch “Guantanamo Forever.” Give her credit. So many years ago, she grasped all too clearly the nightmarish nature of that bastion of injustice. Sixteen years and three presidencies later, read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Uh… gulp… you thought it was bad when that experienced pilot ejected from one of the Air Force’s hottest “new” planes, the F-35 combat fighter, near — no, not China or somewhere in the Middle East — but Charleston, South Carolina. The plane then flew on its own for another 60 miles before crashing into an empty field. And that was without an enemy in sight.

Perhaps read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

The Slow-Motion Equivalent of a Nuclear War?
A “New Cold War” on an Ever-Hotter Planet

By Tom Engelhardt

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, read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Here’s something strange about our all-too-nuclearized planet: in my youth during the 1950s and early 1960s, the possibility of an obliterating nuclear war played a significant role in our everyday nightmares. We schoolkids then regularly engaged in “ read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

What a criminal enterprise our country truly is. And I do mean enterprise. After all, according to the latest figures, there are… honestly, you’re not going to believe this… but, according to PrisonPolicy.org, read more