Author: Tom Engelhardt

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Somehow, when it comes to Congress and the mainstream media, the true strangeness of the Pentagon budget always is missing in action. Despite arguments about the small things, just about everyone accepts that the United States must have a monstrous, all-powerful military and a military budget beyond compare (beyond, in fact, all comprehension). And nothing seems to truly dent read more

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Prophesies, Then and Now My Life at World’s End By Tom Engelhardt

Indulge me for a moment. This is how “The Prophecy” in my 1962 high school yearbook began. It was written by some of my classmates in the year we graduated from Friends Seminary in New York City.

“Being an historian, I am jotting down these notes out of habit, but what I saw and experienced two days ago I am sure no one else as civilized as I am will ever see. I am writing read more

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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