Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

Scandinavia in Maryland?
Medicare for All in One State
By Ann Jones

You may have noticed that quite a few of the formerly united states of America have been choosing to go their own way. My own state, Massachusetts, now blooms with read more

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




America’s Carbon-Pusher in Chief
Trump’s Fossil-Fueled Foreign Policy
By Michael T. Klare

Who says President Trump doesn’t have a coherent foreign policy? Pundits and critics across the political spectrum have chided him for failing to articulate and implement a clear international agenda. Look closely at his overseas endeavors, though, and one all-too-consistent read more

Burning Raqqa 
The U.S. War Against Civilians in Syria
By Laura Gottesdiener

It was midday on Sunday, May 7th, when the U.S.-led coalition warplanes again began bombing the neighborhood of Wassim Abdo’s family.

They lived in Tabqa, a small city on the banks of the Euphrates River in northern Syria. Then occupied by the Islamic State (ISIS, also known as Daesh), Tabqa was also under siege by U.S.-backed troops and being hit by daily artillery fire from U.S. Marines, as well as U.S.-led coalition read more

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

In May 2012, TomDispatch featured a piece by Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer, both then analysts at the National Priorities Project, headlined “War Pay: The Nearly $1 Trillion National Security Budget.” The two of them ran through the figures for the cumulative annual budget for what we still mysteriously read more

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

Empire of Destruction 
Precision Warfare? Don’t Make Me Laugh 
By Tom Engelhardt

You remember. It was supposed to be twenty-first-century war, American-style: precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones capable of taking out a carefully identified and tracked human being just about anywhere on Earth; special operations raids so pinpoint-accurate that they would represent read more

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

If you’re looking for fairy tales that are on the grim (not Grimm) side, things that once might only have been in dystopian fiction, look no further than our present planet at our present moment. What about, for instance, that trillion-metric-ton iceberg — read more

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

I was 12. It was 1956. I lived in New York City and was a youthful history buff. (I should have kept my collection of American Heritage magazines!) Undoubtedly, I was also some kind of classic nerd. In any case, at some point during the Suez crisis of that year, I can remember going to the U.N. by myself and sitting in the gallery of the General Assembly, where read more

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

My childhood was a nuclear one and I’m not talking about the nuclear family. I’m thinking of those duck-and-cover moments when, with air raid sirens screaming outside, we went under our school desks, hands read more

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

Dystopian, yes. Unimaginable, no. In fact, a version of our present moment was imagined more than eight decades ago by novelist Sinclair Lewis who wrote a still readable (if now fictionally clunky) novel, It Can’t Happen Here. Its focus: the election as president of a man we might read more

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

The Insult Wars in Washington 
How They Blind Us to Our Troubles 
By Tom Engelhardt

I don’t tweet, but I do have a brief message for our president: Will you please get the hell out of the way for a few minutes? You and your antics are blocking our view of the damn world and it’s a world we should be focusing on!

Maybe it was the moment, more than a week ago, when read more