A blog about a criminal enterprise
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Honestly, the inequality gap in America should stagger the imagination or, on second thought, maybe it shouldn’t, not with the first billionaire in the White House and at least two more threatening to join him in a run for the presidency in
I’ve written before about the pseudo-science of genetics, which is almost as crazy as the popular understanding of it. Our culture has long proposed that Oliver Twist could grow up middle-class in the slums because of his inherited traits. But in the age when the scientific gurus in popular films are geneticists, things have gotten nuttier.
A book and movie called The Time Traveler’s Wife presents a handy depiction of roughly the way that many people think of genes. A character has
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
She began cutting school on Fridays and simply sitting on the steps of the Swedish parliament. Her name was Greta Thunberg. She was 15 years old, with a mind of her own and a sign demanding a school strike against climate change. Her parents wanted her to go back to school, but Friday after
By David Swanson, Director of World BEYOND War
When I was a kid there was a local basketball team called the Washington Bullets. The team changed its name when “bullets” became offensive due to the high rate of gun murders in Washington, D.C. This is the same city that to this day has a football team called the Washington Redskins. What offends is not, perhaps, violence, but violence directed at people who matter. (Compare: tens of thousands of Yemenis vs. one Washington Post reporter.)
The
By David Swanson, Director of World BEYOND War
The U.S. State Department uses public funds and public employees to market private products designed for mass killing to foreign governments. Few corporations have benefitted more from this socialism for the oligarchs than Boeing. In one recent example, the U.S. government has persuaded the New Zealand government to buy four “Poseidon” planes from Boeing that are designed for working with submarines, of which New Zealand possesses zero.
The purchase
By Dave Lindorff
The organization Roots Action has delivered a petition signed by 6700 people from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, across the country and around the world, to Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, demanding that Mumia Abu-Jamal be allowed to re-argue his original appeal of his conviction to the state’s highest court.
The petition, which can still have names added, states:
Dear District Attorney Krasner:
As you know, respected
By David Swanson, Director of World BEYOND War
The New York Times and the people it gives voice to are very worried that Donald Trump may be too much in favor of peace in Korea, more in favor of peace than of disarming North Korea prior to peace — a sure recipe, of course, for never arriving at peace.
North Korea has disarmed in the past when there were real steps toward peace from both sides.
North Korea is no threat to the United States — the actual United States, not its mission of global
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Former Obama speechwriter, confidant, and deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes had an all-encompassing label for the wonks, experts, think tankers, cable news talking heads, and former or future officials, always ready to spin through Washington’s infamous revolving
The Trump administration’s campaign to topple the government of Venezuela raises the issue of whether the U.S. government is willing to adhere to the same rules of behavior it expects other nations to follow.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, U.S. foreign policy was characterized by repeated acts of U.S.
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
“Training.” It sounds so innocuous. It also sounds like something expected of a military. All professional soldiers undergo some sort of basic training. Think: calisthenics, negotiating obstacle courses, and marksmanship. Soldiers require instruction, otherwise they’re little more than rabble.
Sometimes soldiers from one country even train the troops of another, imparting