War Is A Crime

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

Who doesn’t remember, as a child, making that Christmas wish list for Santa and his elves? As it happens, in this century — and in the post-Christmas season, no less — a Pentagon already sporting the highest budget ever is still making such wish lists, officially known as “unfunded requirements lists,” for the orange-haired Santa in the White House and especially read more

Matthew Hoh is a member of the advisory boards of Expose Facts, Veterans For Peace, and World BEYOND War. In 2009 he resigned his position with the State Department in Afghanistan in protest of the escalation of the Afghan War by the Obama Administration. He previously had been in Iraq with a State Department team and with the U.S. Marines. He is a Senior Fellow with the Center for International Policy.

Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
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Music by Duke Ellington.

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Thursday yet another mass shooting was committed by a military veteran, this one in Milwaukee. Virtually all military veterans are not mass shooters. Many peace activists are veterans. Many everything under the sun are veterans. But mass shooters are very disproportionately military veterans.

Some mass shooters who are not veterans are acting out a pretense of being in the military and/or are using military weapons. Militarism impacts a society in many ways. But one of them is through the violence read more

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

You should know that things are already not going well in your country when a majority of the Electoral College, if not of Americans, elects a con man as president, a “businessman” whose greatest success was landing on his feet, money in hand, after his five casinos went up in flames. read more

Mary-Wynne Ashford is a retired Family Physician, with a specialty in Palliative Care. She was Co-President of the International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War for four years, and President of Physicians for Global Survival (Canada) for four years. IPPNW received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. She has received many awards for her work and her book Enough Blood Shed: 101 Solutions to Violence, Terror, and War. She has been teaching thousands of high school students read more

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

Here’s a word that essentially dropped out of Washington’s dictionary in this century: peace. It used to be part of the rhetoric, at least, of politicians there, but in the era of the war on terror it’s barely made an appearance. In election year 2020, however, it’s back, not as a global phenomenon or as a general term, but very specifically connected to the more than read more

Bernie Sanders’ campaign has published a fact sheet on how everything he proposes can be paid for. On that fact sheet we find this line in a list of items that collectively will pay for a Green New Deal:

“Reducing defense spending by $1.215 trillion by scaling back military operations on protecting the global oil supply.”

Of course there is an obvious problem or mystery about this number, namely, isn’t it too damn good to be true? The full cost of military spending including numerous agencies read more

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

With our news world crashing down around us thanks to Attorney General William Barr’s actions and the president’s bizarre tweets and post-impeachment purges of “deep state” figures, not to speak of the read more