A blog about a criminal enterprise
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Rebecca Gordon arrived at TomDispatch in 2014. The very first of the 98 pieces she’s produced for this site (with today’s, of course, being her 99th) was on — sigh — torture. As she grimly put it then, “In such a frightening new world, we were assured, our survival depended in part on brave men and women willing to break precedent and torture
A television writer named Annie Jacobsen recently tweeted that she’d been “prophetic” when she wrote a real CIA scheme of attacking Venezuela into a fictional program, after which the U.S. government actually attacked Venezuela. Another word would be “propagandistic” — not in the sense of the direct, immediate lie, but in the sense of the long con. While there have been societies that could not imagine murder, and
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These days, no kids in school are ducking and covering under their desks. American magazines don’t have stories about families (with the money)
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 6, 2026
We live in a world where feeding grain that could feed 10,000 people to captive animals in order to butcher those animals and eat their dead flesh, thereby feeding 1,000 people and devastating our ecosystems, is unquestionable, where grotesque levels of consumption based on climate and environmental destruction and human exploitation are just part of living, where locking huge numbers of people in cages is deemed a positive contribution to society,
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I don’t know why people (including Karen Greenberg today) get so down on Donald Trump about women when he’s such a pussycat of a guy. You remember, right? When he was discussing his failed attempt to seduce a married woman (“I did try and fuck her. She was married,” he
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What Planet Are We On? How Did I End Up Living in Donald Trump’s Suicidal America? ByAs 2026 begins, what a strange planet we find ourselves on. The two great empires of my youth, the Soviet Union (now Russia) and my own country, are clearly experiencing some version of imperial decline, even if Vladimir Putin is acting otherwise in Ukraine (as is Donald Trump in his own strange fashion in the
I discussed Venezuela with Santita Jackson:
What was defined at Nuremberg as the supreme international crime (one country attacking another one) is depicted by Trump and even the supposedly anti-Trump corporate media as some sort of law-enforcement. Bombing is liberating. Kidnapping is capturing. Murdering people on boats is “impeding the flow of drugs.”
Imagine if, say, Saudi Arabia or Norway or India were to impose deadly sanctions on the United States, attempt numerous comical coups, murder boaters off the U.S. coast, impose a no-fly-zone
Although Donald Trump’s Department of Labor announced in April 2025 that “Trump’s Golden Age puts American workers first,” that contention is contradicted by the facts.
Indeed, Trump has taken the lead in reducing workers’ incomes. One of his key actions along these lines occurred on March 14, 2025, when he issued an executive order that scrapped
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, December 26, 2025
Every single person in the United States, from those who’ve been most harmed to those who’ve been most privileged, would be better off if we had a normal government that put even a moderate effort into universally improving everyone’s lives. If we had a government that took trillions of dollars away from the war machine and the untaxed oligarchs and provided as a matter of basic rights for all
then nobody would ever be denied an education