Tomgram: Janet Abou-Elias and William D. Hartung, Planet Palantir

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Yes, he used the American war machine to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, with a naval armada off that country’s coast and special operations forces flown into its capital to capture its leader. And once Maduro was in a prison in Brooklyn, New York, he turned his attention read more

International Law Needs International Enforcement

Donald Trump’s war of choice in the Middle East is but the latest indication that the system of international law―which provides guidelines for the behavior of nations in world affairs―is crumbling.

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after thousands of years of violent international conflict, efforts to establish global norms for nations in connection with war, diplomacy, economic relations, and human rights accelerated.  These efforts resulted in the founding of the United read more

Tomgram: Maha Hilal, The “Legality” of Shooting Ships Out of the Water

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Count on this: a hospital ship isn’t the only thing Donald Trump wants to send to Greenland. In fact, from the Caribbean to Nigeria to Iran, he seems ever more intent on (dis)organizing the world into a Trumpian nightmare. And by the time he’s done (whatever “done” might even mean on this planet of ours at this moment), it’s not going to be pretty.

Count on this as read more

Tomgram: Beverly Gologorsky, Power, What Is It?

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I’ve only shot a gun once in my life. When I went to camp as a kid, there was a rifle range and, at age 12 or 13, I shot 22s at a target. And I’ve only had a gun in an apartment I lived in once. When my father, a World War II veteran, died in 1983, I spent time in the New York apartment my parents had moved to after I went off to college. I began cleaning out his closet read more

Tomgram: Engelhardt, The President from Hell on One Hell of a Planet

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Trumped!
The President of No Return on a Hothouse Planet

By

I grew up with a vision of a possible instant apocalypse, inspired (if, under the circumstances, such a word can even be used) by the nuclear obliteration of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. It could happen at any moment, even if you were “ read more

Stop Trump’s New Mass-Murder Spree

The latest location where Trump has given the orders to murder people is Iran.

Remember a couple of months back when establishment U.S. lawyers and human rights groups were admitting that Trump’s attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific were nothing other than murder?

Murder doesn’t cease being murder because it’s further away or grander or provokes a more dramatic response or targets victims who speak a different language.

By all means hunt in the Epstein files for evidence of Trump raping read more

Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Accelerating American (and Planetary) Decline

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Yes, in our world, MAGA (Make America Great Again) and Donald Trump are distinctly one and the same. They fused so long ago that no one ever really thinks much about that “again” anymore. And yet, it might be Donald Trump’s greatest confession (as well as an explanation for how he came to power). read more

Tomgram: Nick Turse, Donald Trump’s Death Cards

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Yes, I can remember playing Canasta with my grandma. That was “cards” in my childhood. And when I was an editor in publishing, I actually had a little card with my name, position, and address on it that I could give out to potential authors (or, I guess, whomever). But in those years, if you had ever told me about the “cards” that read more