Tomgram: Engelhardt, V for Defeat

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

Been There, Done That (Not!)
The Imperial Presidency Comes Home to Roost

By

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” read more

Why Samantha Power should not hold public office

It took a variety of approaches to market the 2003 war on Iraq. For some it was to be a defense against an imagined threat. For others it was false revenge. But for Samantha Power it was philanthropy. She said at the time, “An American intervention likely will improve the lives of the Iraqis. Their lives could not get worse, I think it’s quite safe to say.” Needless to say, it wasn’t safe to say that.

read more

Get the Nuclear Weapons Out of Germany

By David Swanson, Executive Director of World BEYOND War, and Heinrich Buecker, der World BEYOND War Landeskoordinator in Berlin

Billboards are going up in Berlin that proclaim “Nuclear Weapons Are Now Illegal. Get Them Out of Germany!”

What can this possibly mean? Nuclear weapons may be unpleasant, but what exactly is newly illegal about them, and what do they have to do with Germany?

Since 1970, under the Nuclear Nonproliferation read more

Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Rip Van Biden’s America

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

I’m 76 years old, so I have at least a modest feeling for what it must mean, at the age of 78, to enter the White House to preside over a disturbed, deeply divided, and unnerved country. Speaking personally, considering just my own energy levels and the information that my still-quite-functional brain regularly tosses out, I think it should be illegal for anyone to become read more

Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Why Congress Has to Agree on More Than Just a Defense Bill

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

Perhaps the strangest thing about America’s “forever wars” is how little obvious impact they’ve had here. A country — an imperial power, in fact, that liked to think of itself as the planet’s last or “lone” superpower — goes to war for so long (and with so little evident read more

Talk Nation Radio: Steve Ellner on Ongoing U.S. Efforts to Overthrow Venezuelan Government

Steve Ellner is a retired professor of the Universidad de Oriente in Venezuela and currently an Associate Managing Editor of Latin American Perspectives. He is the author and editor of over a dozen books on Latin American politics and history, his most recent being his edited Latin American Extractivism: Dependency, Resource Nationalism, and Resistance in Broad Perspective (2021). He has published on the op-ed page of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times and in the Nation and is a regular read more

Campaign ‘donations’ are bribes and the ‘Free’ World ain’t so free: Fixing the Language of Journalism to Reflect Reality

By Dave Lindorff

We need to eliminate a bunch of euphemisms from our political vocabulary, if we’re going to have serious debates about the future of the country. 

A new president, an ousted fascist predecessor, and an obstructionist opposition party that wants nothing to change despite losing a national election is a great time to take on this task. 

So let’s go to it. 

1.  Change Department of Defense to Department of War

The US has not played “defense” read more