Tomgram: Mandy Smithberger, Letting the Pentagon Loose With Your Tax Dollars

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

Who doesn’t remember, as a child, making that Christmas wish list for Santa and his elves? As it happens, in this century — and in the post-Christmas season, no less — a Pentagon already sporting the highest budget ever is still making such wish lists, officially known as “unfunded requirements lists,” for the orange-haired Santa in the White House and especially read more

Talk Nation Radio: Matt Hoh on Afghanistan and U.S. Foreign Policy

Matthew Hoh is a member of the advisory boards of Expose Facts, Veterans For Peace, and World BEYOND War. In 2009 he resigned his position with the State Department in Afghanistan in protest of the escalation of the Afghan War by the Obama Administration. He previously had been in Iraq with a State Department team and with the U.S. Marines. He is a Senior Fellow with the Center for International Policy.

Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.

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Yet Another Mass Shooter Was a Military Veteran

Thursday yet another mass shooting was committed by a military veteran, this one in Milwaukee. Virtually all military veterans are not mass shooters. Many peace activists are veterans. Many everything under the sun are veterans. But mass shooters are very disproportionately military veterans.

Some mass shooters who are not veterans are acting out a pretense of being in the military and/or are using military weapons. Militarism impacts a society in many ways. But one of them is through the violence read more

Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Contemplating an Unfounding Father

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

You should know that things are already not going well in your country when a majority of the Electoral College, if not of Americans, elects a con man as president, a “businessman” whose greatest success was landing on his feet, money in hand, after his five casinos went up in flames. read more

Talk Nation Radio: Enough Blood Shed, End the Arms Trade

Mary-Wynne Ashford is a retired Family Physician, with a specialty in Palliative Care. She was Co-President of the International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War for four years, and President of Physicians for Global Survival (Canada) for four years. IPPNW received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. She has received many awards for her work and her book Enough Blood Shed: 101 Solutions to Violence, Terror, and War. She has been teaching thousands of high school students read more

Tomgram: William Astore, Stamping Out War

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

Here’s a word that essentially dropped out of Washington’s dictionary in this century: peace. It used to be part of the rhetoric, at least, of politicians there, but in the era of the war on terror it’s barely made an appearance. In election year 2020, however, it’s back, not as a global phenomenon or as a general term, but very specifically connected to the more than read more

Bernie Finally Puts a Number on Cutting Military Spending

Bernie Sanders’ campaign has published a fact sheet on how everything he proposes can be paid for. On that fact sheet we find this line in a list of items that collectively will pay for a Green New Deal:

“Reducing defense spending by $1.215 trillion by scaling back military operations on protecting the global oil supply.”

Of course there is an obvious problem or mystery about this number, namely, isn’t it too damn good to be true? The full cost of military spending including numerous agencies read more

The attack on Medicare for All is on: Saying Government-Funded Healthcare’s Too Costly is Nuts…Unless You Think the US Uniquely Can’t Do It

y Dave Lindorff

The new corporate media and conservative Democratic argument against front-runner Bernie Sanders’ eminently logical proposal for creating a single-payer government health insurance program that he calls “Medicare for All” is that it would destroy the huge health insurance industry and put 1.8 million insurance industry employees out on the street.

That is about the stupidest argument for not making an urgent reform of an outrageous pirate-capitalist system I can read more

Trump Betrays His Promise to Protect and Fight for American Workers

Campaigning for the presidency in 2016, Donald Trump promised that, if he was elected, “American worker[s] will finally have a president who will protect them and fight for them.”

Has he kept this promise?

When it comes to protecting workers’ health and safety, his administration has been a disaster.  Once in office, Trump packed the leadership of U.S. regulatory agencies with pro-corporate zealots, read more