Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Trump’s War on Black Jocks

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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 read more

Tomgram: Ariel Dorfman, The Cages of the Trump Era (That We Don’t See)

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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 read more

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Overdosing in Twenty-First-Century America

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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 read more

Tomgram: William Hartung, Weaponized Keynesianism in Washington

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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 read more

Tomgram: Stephanie Savell, How America’s Wars Fund Inequality at Home

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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 read more

Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, “We Will Always Be Confronted by U.S. Power”

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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 read more

Tomgram: Nomi Prins, What’s the End Game?

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In the rush of Trumped-up events, history — of the last month, week, hour — repeatedly gets plowed (or tweeted) under. Who can remember what happened so long ago? Perhaps it’s not surprising then that, in the wave of abuse from the president and his men (including economic adviser Larry read more

Tomgram: Beverly Gologorsky, What Does Poverty Feel Like?

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When you come from the South Bronx, you have the option of writing about different kinds of characters than those who so often inhabit the universe of fiction we’re used to. That was true of Beverly Gologorsky’s first novel, The Things We Do to Make It Home, which focused on the lost vets of the Vietnam era, their wives, and their children, all desperately trying read more