A blog about a criminal enterprise
Photo by Richard Grant, @richardgrant88
Here’s what should happen now, judging by what I see on social and other media.
The U.S. Military and the National Guard and other war-making outfits should clear out of the streets of the United States, get on some airplanes, and head off to properly murder lots of men, women, and children very far away. It’s simply inappropriate to kill people in this enlightened land where we’ve figured out that lives all matter.
War making should not be based on
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Okay, here’s an exact quote from my youth, a bit of homespun wisdom from another generation, and believe me, at almost 76, the number of more than half-century-old sentences I can quote from memory is small (to vanishing): “It’s the whale that spouts that gets caught.” My
By Dave Lindorff
Across the US, cities, especially fancy malls and outlets of major retail chains, are being busted into and ransacked, as police squad cars get flipped over and torched, in scenes not seen in the US since the mid to late 1960s.
Many of the perpetrators of these actions are black residents of these cities, but a surprising number compared to earlier such uprisings are white this time around.
The wave of shop looting and destruction of property
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Donald Trump May Not Be Herbert Hoover
A Graduation Speech for an Age of Collapse
By Tom Engelhardt
Class of 2020, wherever you are, I had planned to address you on this graduation day. But how can I?
Yes, I know that former President Obama, Oprah
John Perkins is an author and activist whose 10 books on global intrigue, shamanism, and transformation including Touching the Jaguar, Shapeshifting, and the classic Confessions of an Economic Hit Man have been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 70 weeks, sold over 2 million copies, and are published in 35 languages. As chief economist at a major consulting firm, he advised the World Bank, United Nations, Fortune 500 corporations, and the U.S.
The war on Vietnam plays an infinitely larger role in history in the common understanding of a typical U.S. citizen than does what the U.S. government did to Indonesia in 1965-1966. But if you read The Jakarta Method, the new book by Vincent Bevins, you will have to wonder what moral basis there can possibly be for that fact.
During the war on Vietnam a tiny fraction of the casualties were members of the U.S. military. During the overthrow of Indonesia, zero percent of the casualties were members
On Sunday afternoon, four candidates for the Democratic nomination for Congress in Virginia’s Fifth District held a debate — or really more of an amicable forum in which they didn’t much try to distinguish themselves from each other. I had blogged about them some weeks back when John Lesinski seemed the best among them to me based purely on their websites. Now, Cameron Webb seems the best
One cannot help but appreciate the speed with which it became acceptable to produce comedy about the U.S. Space Force. I don’t think any military branch or war or weapon or coup or base or boondoggle has been taken off its holy pedestal more rapidly. Recent clownish yet endearingly murderous efforts to overthrow the government of Venezuela are unlikely to be mocked in a movie for decades to come. But — as with most Hollywood productions — the new Netflix comedy about the Space Force
I’m adding Christian Sorensen’s new book, Understanding the War Industry, to the list of books I think will convince you to help abolish war and militaries. See the list below.
Wars are driven by many factors. They do not include protection, defense, benevolence, or public service. They do include inertia, political calculation, lust for power, and sadism — facilitated by xenophobia and racism. But the top driving force behind wars is the war industry, the all-consuming greed for the
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Believe me, moments like this one will haunt a generation for rest of their lives. I was born in 1944. I knew nothing of the Great Depression of the 1930s and yet, in retrospect, it haunted me indirectly. So many decades later, I can still sense how memories of that economic disaster hovered over my parents’ world. Looking back, I can still feel its presence in those years