Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

It remains the most famous line of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” — and yes, of course, you know what it is:

“Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”

In a sense, that sums up America’s water problems described so vividly, if painfully, by read more

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

Today, TomDispatch regulars and Pentagon experts William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger consider the way the funding of the U.S. military and the industrial complex that goes with it has headed for what used to be called “the wild blue yonder.” After all, it’s just about the only thing a Congress that can’t otherwise seem to reach an accord agrees about.

In a strange read more

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

Consider it strange indeed that Congress won’t even blink when asked to fund the military — anything military whatsoever. In fact, when the Biden administration suggested a Pentagon budget of a staggering $715 billion for fiscal year 2022, both parties in the House of Representatives responded by insisting on read more

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

In 2006, Newsweek dubbed him “a rising star” and one of the “Jedi knights who are fighting in what [Vice President] Cheney calls ‘the shadows.’” The particular Jedi knight being touted to the skies was Army General Stanley McChrystal, then running the Pentagon’s super-secret Joint Special Operations Command. And such language only multiplied, when, read more

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

Ann Jones began her remarkable book Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan this way: “I went to Afghanistan after the bombing stopped. Somehow, I felt obliged to help pick up the pieces. I read more

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

The request arrived by email, but read as if it were from another age. Would I be open, an executive assistant asked, to having tea with the president of an Ivy League university? A longtime éminence grise, the president, still new to the job, was interested in discussing with a select group of young scholars how to guide this renowned educational institution into read more

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

Don’t imagine that anything truly began at the Capitol on January 6th. Admittedly, as TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, author of the upcoming imperial history read more

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

To the best of my memory, I first met Noam Chomsky in 1970. No, admittedly not in person, not then. But I “met” him through his remarkable essay “After Pinkville,” his look, in the midst of the Vietnam War, at a world of My Lai massacres. read more

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

Let me make my own position on China all too clear. I’m distinctly “soft” on that country. I always have been. After all, it represents a remarkable civilization, one I studied in graduate school. Among my greatest regrets is never having visited there, never having made it to the Great Wall or any of its other memorable historical landmarks. China has indeed “risen” read more

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

Yes, unbelievably enough, her vote seems to control the direction that American politics is going to take in this era. I’m thinking about Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona Democratic senator who, like that king read more