War Is A Crime

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

Sometimes your past returns in the strangest of ways, as happened to me when today’s article from TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon first crossed my doorstep. As you’ll see, its subject would not be one on which this almost 75-year-old guy would consider read more

U.S. military spending eight years ago was at $1.2 trillion per year, when one added in the nukes in the Energy Department, the Homeland Security Department, the CIA, interest on debt, veterans’ care, etc. Now it’s at $1.3 trillion. In the years since military spending has been dramatically increased, the United States has been made less safe, less read more

Despite claims by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to have defeated its own troops using Facebook (and, really, what plot to take over a high school hasn’t done that?), the biggest challenge NATO will face this year will probably not be nefarious Russian social media posts.

Nor will it be the dreaded Russian military, now sucking down 6 percent as many dollars each year as the war machines of the NATO nations.

Nor is NATO terribly threatened by a U.S. president who demands that its read more

Roy Eidelson, PhD,is the former executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict and a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility. His work focuses on applying psychological knowledge to issues of social justice and political change. His writing has appeared in a variety of scholarly peer-reviewed journals and other outlets including the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. He read more

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

He descended that Trump Tower escalator on June 16, 2015, to announce his presidential candidacy already bragging about the “great, great wall” he was going to build on the U.S.-Mexico border (“and nobody builds walls better than me… And I will have Mexico pay for that wall”). “When Mexico read more

About four months ago, I organized over 100 scholars, intellectuals, and activists to publish an open letter to Senator Bernie Sanders, which was then signed by over 10,000 more people, several of whom volunteered to deliver it to Senator Sanders. So, we know he received it.

Before publishing the letter, I only changed the text slightly from my original draft of it. The change was that, as published, it didn’t indicate that we had all refused to support his campaign last time around, or promise read more

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

A Swiftian Modest Proposal for the President
Or How to Solve the Border and China Problems in One Swell Foop
By Tom Engelhardt

Call me crazy, if you want, but I think I see how to do it!

We have two intractable issues, one intractable president, and an intractable world, but what if it weren’t so? What if those two intractable problems could be swept off the table by a single read more

Obviously many of us are both. I have zero use for either empire or war. But I’m using those tags as shorthand for two groups that sometimes unite and sometimes do not in their advocacy efforts.

One speaks against empire and war with the emphasis on empire, tends to avoid advocating nonviolence, has little to say about alternative means of conflict resolution without war, usually likes the term “revolution,” and sometimes advocates for violent revolution or revolution by any means available read more

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

If you think of the age of Trump as a spectator sport, then perhaps the truly riveting show isn’t on the president’s Twitter feed or in his latest shout-outs to the press or at another of those “cabinet meetings” where everyone is obliged to publicly praise you-know-perfectly-well-who read more