A blog about a criminal enterprise
When Neera Tanden emailed her colleagues in support of forcing Libya to pay for the privilege of having been bombed, many misunderstood, including one of her colleagues who emailed back objecting to creating what he supposed was an obvious financial incentive for bombing more countries.
Now that Tanden has been nominated for high office and will face confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, we have an obligation to get this right. The top ways in which Tanden has been misunderstood are:
You may have heard that the U.S. House of Representatives just passed a bill to spend $741 billion renaming military bases that have been heretofore named for Confederates. You may think that’s a grand idea but still wonder at the price tag.
Of course, the secret is that — even though most of the media coverage is about the renaming of bases — the bill itself is almost entirely about funding (part of) the world’s most expensive military machine: more nukes, more “conventional” weapons,
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
TomDispatch is essentially a no-submissions site. The only exception I’ve made over the years has been for those in the U.S. military or retired from it who, miraculously enough, became critical of it and the forever wars that it so relentlessly pursued. I’ve always felt that they had something of importance to offer the rest of us. The first such out-of-the-blue
Alison Cole is a former researcher and activist living in Portland, Oregon. She is working with a coalition of community organizations to demilitarize their local law enforcement agencies.
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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
You may have noticed those U.S. aircraft carrier task forces repeatedly entering the South China Sea to challenge Beijing or the increased arms
By Dave Lindorff
The US War in —or on—Afghanistan has rightly been called the “Forever War.”
Launched on October 7, 2001, while the ruins of the World Trade Center were still smoldering from the 9/11 attacks five weeks earlier, the war is now in its 19th year, making it almost nine years longer than the Vietnam War.
And yet, over the years, almost any time a president has attempted to ratchet down the war, or to talk about ending it — while that may have been
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Nineteen years ago, the administration of George W. Bush responded to the 9/11 attacks by invading Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. And, yes, you won’t be shocked to learn that the Taliban is stronger now than at any time since that moment. Though U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan has
Take a gander, if you can stomach it, at buildbackbetter.gov.
Now, be honest, if this were the work of a Republican would you be ready to protest?
Not only did you not vote for anything new, as the vast majority of the nominees and the policy proposals are long-established moss-gathering Washingtonians, but the new additions here and there are the worst of the bunch.
Biden, who had no foreign policy platform on his campaign website, and no foreign policy task force, has suddenly, post-election, prioritized
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire
Or What It Means to Fall on a Failing Planet
By Tom Engelhardt
We’re now living in an age of opacity, as Rudy Giuliani pointed out in a courtroom recently. Here was the exchange:
“‘In the plaintiffs’ counties, they were denied the opportunity to have an unobstructed observation and ensure opacity,’ Giuliani
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Consider the second paragraph of the lead story in the November 20th New York Times:
“The leaders of Western Europe have called Mr. Biden, as has the president of the world’s rising superpower, Xi Jinping of China. PayPal’s chief executive extended his ‘warmest congratulations to President-Elect Joe Biden, who will become the 46th president of the U.S.A.’ The Boeing