Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

Like everyone else in America, you undoubtedly know about the recent afternoon shutdown of 8,000 Starbucks stores for anti-bias training after the well-publicized handcuffing and arrest read more

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

Remember Donald Trump’s magical plan to turn $200 billion in federal money… hey, presto!… into $1.5 trillion in investment in America’s aging, underfunded infrastructure (to which the American Society of Civil Engineers gave a grade read more

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

Duck-and-Cover America
Advice to College Graduates in the Age of Trump
By Tom Engelhardt

Class of 2018, I’ve always been told that a joke’s a good way to launch any talk. It’s a matter of breaking the ice, though on your graduation day, with the temperature soaring into the upper eighties, that may not be the perfect image. Still, you know what I mean: an attempt to lighten read more

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

Six years ago, in late May 2012, I read a New York Times piece by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will.” They reported that President Obama was then overseeing a “regular Tuesday counterterrorism meeting read more

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

When I was young, I often imagined myself as an American diplomat. Back in the early 1960s, it seemed like serving my country in such a role would be an honorable, even glorious, path to take. Can you believe that I ever thought such a thing in this twenty-first-century moment when diplomats by the hundreds read more

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

Here’s a recent typical headline about the upcoming talks between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un: “Will Trump’s Ignorance (and Bolton’s Impetuousness) Doom the North Korea Summit?”

When it comes to ignorance, there can be little question that the Trump administration is in a league all its own. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for instance, recently read more

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

The forcible separation of parents and children for “months or longer” under any circumstances, even for illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexican border, would have to rank high in the annals of cruelty and heartlessness. As Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced read more

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

An Empire of Nothing at All?
The U.S. Military Takes Us Through the Gates of Hell
By Tom Engelhardt

[This essay is the introduction to Tom Engelhardt’s new book, A Nation Unmade by War, a Dispatch Book published by Haymarket Books.]

As I was putting the finishing touches on my new book, the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute published read more

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

It’s already long forgotten here, but the theocratic regime in Iran was really our baby. After all, in 1953, the CIA and British intelligence engineered a coup to replace a democratic government in Iran with the autocratic Shah and so gave Iranians just what they didn’t want (including read more

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

Imagine that you paid a special visit to a family you hardly knew halfway around the world and they were so pleased to see you that they spent an estimated $68 million on your welcome, while mounting “festivities” like the one in which you danced read more