War Is A Crime

Enhanced Medicare for All — that wild scheme that Michael Bloomberg calls “untried” because it’s only been tested for decades in virtually every wealthy nation on earth — would cost $450 billion a year less than the current U.S. system. In the usual propaganda terms (in which you multiply by ten and then — if asked — admit that you’re talking about ten years) that’s a savings of $4.5 trillion! Let’s be honest and call it $450 billion a year.

The health coverage debate has gone read more

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In early 2017, U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen, who first stumbled upon TomDispatch while on duty in Afghanistan in 2011, wrote to the site wondering if he might do a piece for it. He got in touch, in part, because a former Army colonel, Andrew Bacevich, whom he admired, was already regularly read more

It’s often hard to report on U.S. politics and government with a straight face. It’s even harder to report on the usual reporting on U.S. politics and government with a straight face. So much of it is beyond the reach of parody. Yet it also opens up opportunities to shock people with basic facts.

The stock market going up is not a good thing. Wars don’t expand human rights. Loony newfangled schemes to give everyone healthcare and education have been tried for many decades in many countries, read more

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

He was the candidate who, in a 2016 election campaign debate, swore that, as president, he’d “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” At another read more

Richard Sanders is a researcher/writer/activist who has engaged full-time in the peace movement since 1984 when he escaped academia with an MA in cultural anthropology. His efforts to debunk Canada’s peace mythology began when coordinating Ottawa’s Peace Resource Centre, producing a community anti-war radio program for almost 20 years, and being a local organizer with the Alliance for Nonviolent Action. In late 1988, he founded the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT.ncf.ca). read more

By David Swanson, Executive Director of World BEYOND War

Indigenous people in Canada are giving the world a demonstration of the power of nonviolent action. The justness of their cause — defending the land from those who would destroy it for short term profit and the elimination of a habitable climate on earth — combined with their courage and the absence on their part of cruelty or hatred, has the potential to create a much larger movement, which is of course the key to success.

This is a demonstration read more

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

The War in Questions
Making Sense of the Age of Carnage
By Tom Engelhardt

My first question is simple enough: After 18-plus years of our forever wars, where are all the questions?

Almost two decades of failing American wars across a startlingly large part of the planet and I’d like to know, for instance, who’s been fired for them? Who’s been impeached? Who’s even read more

Elections, I think most of us can agree, usually bring out the idiocy, superficiality, and illogic in everyone who can muster any. Imagine supporting, as many did, Sanders and then Trump because they were both “outsiders.” On Tuesday, I heard somebody on CNN announce that Sanders and Klobuchar were both “change candidates” (because you’d have to change every bit of the platform of one of them to match that of the other?). Tokenism no longer embarrasses voters or even the candidates who read more