Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

Just in case you were wondering where your tax dollars went in this century, consider the American war, now 20 years old, in Iraq (and after 2014 in Syria as well). Neta Crawford of the invaluable Costs of War Project has just released her read more

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I can still remember sneaking into one of those old Broadway movie palaces (of the sort you can see in Edward Hopper’s classic painting) with two friends. It was 1959, in the midst of a global “Cold War,” and I was 15 years old, too young as I recall to be allowed in to see Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach without a grown-up.

We sat in the first row of the balcony (it was read more

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On my way home from the doctor’s office, I regularly pass the New York apartment building where I grew up. I would invariably stop, stare, and feel an overwhelming desire to visit the place I hadn’t seen in perhaps 60 years. The street door hadn’t changed a bit.

A few months ago, on a whim, I looked for the buzzer to apartment 6D, pressed it, and a woman’s voice answered. read more

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News flash! Ten thousand Marines and other U.S. troops recently invaded southern California and captured Twentynine Palms in the Mojave Desert — read more

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During the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress passed legislation that, among other things, allowed all participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), known more popularly as the food stamp program, to “receive the maximum monthly benefit, regardless of income.” That put extra food on the tables of so many poor families in this country and, as the New read more

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Twenty years ago! Unbelievable! And worth an exclamation point or two!! (Or three!!!) Think of March 20th, the day in 2003 when the U.S. began its invasion of Iraq, as the anniversary from hell. And worse yet, in this country, as TomDispatch regular Juan Cole read more

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It was almost 46 years ago, but I’ll never forget the moment I last saw my mother, quite literally white as a sheet, being rolled away from me on a hospital gurney. I would never see her again and, to this day, regret that I couldn’t have been at her side when she died. My father, who had a stroke when my mother was so desperately ill — I was endlessly at his side — read more

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Imagine this: in the 1830s, the U.S. government spent the equivalent of what today would be a trillion dollars to expel just about every last indigenous person — man, woman, and child — from their homelands in this country’s south and southeast. As historian Claudio Saunt so vividly reminds us in read more

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I must admit that, from time to time, the true madness of our world, of us, gets under my skin. Here we are, once again, doing what we humans seem best at (that is, of course, worst at!): making war. The ongoing events in Ukraine are a catastrophe for humanity and not just for all the obvious reasons: the deaths of tens of thousands, the unsettling of millions, lives ruined, read more

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From time to time in the last year, Vladimir Putin or one of his cronies has hinted that the Russians, pressed to the wall, might use a “tactical” nuclear weapon in Ukraine. And Russian military leaders have read more