A blog about a criminal enterprise
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The report was devastating — or would have been, if anyone here had noticed it. “Between 2001 and 2017,” it concluded, “U.S. government efforts to stabilize insecure and contested areas in Afghanistan mostly failed.” I’m thinking of “Stabilization: Lessons From the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan” put
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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: A small reminder that, for a donation of $100 ($125 if you live outside the U.S.) to this website, signed, personalized copies of former New York Times sports columnist (and TD jock culture correspondent) Robert Lipsyte’s SportsWorld:
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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I suggest that, in conjunction with Rajan Menon’s powerful piece on American poverty today, any of you who missed Beverly Gologorsky’s vivid TD post, “What Does Poverty Feel Like?,”
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Never forget it: Donald Trump rode birtherism like a surfboard into the White House. He first played the birther card back in 2011 (“I’m starting to think that [Obama] was not born here”), and the next year cited “an extremely credible source” that Obama’s birth certificate
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A recent study of insect life in protected nature reserves in Germany got the most modest attention in our busy Trumpian world. In the last 27 years, however, researchers found that flying insect populations there had dropped 76% seasonally and 82% in mid-summer (when insect numbers are
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America’s Addictions
Opioids, Donald Trump, and War
By Tom Engelhardt
When you think of addiction in America today, one thing comes to mind: the opioid epidemic. And it should. It’s serious. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, almost 64,000 Americans died of opioid
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Who could forget it? There were the $37 screws (no need to say who was getting screwed), the $2,043 nut (McDonnell Douglas made it specially for the U.S. Navy), the $7,622 coffee pot, the $74,165 aluminum ladder, and the $640 plastic toilet seats for the Air Force. All of those examples of Pentagon waste
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On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump wasn’t shy when it came to the issue of debt. As he told Norah O’Donnell of CBS This Morning at the time, “I’m the king of debt. I’m great with debt. Nobody knows debt better than me. I’ve made a fortune by using debt and
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In the days before Donad Trump “caved” and issued an executive order (which he previously
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Two decades ago, when I was working as an editor at a publishing house, Chalmers Johnson, then an eminent scholar of Asia and a former CIA consultant, sent in a proposal for a book he was already calling Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. I still remember the passage from his prologue that convinced me it was indeed one that simply had to be done:
“One