Tomgram: Engelhardt, Overdosing in Twenty-First-Century America

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

America’s Addictions
Opioids, Donald Trump, and War
By Tom Engelhardt

When you think of addiction in America today, one thing comes to mind: the opioid epidemic. And it should. It’s serious. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, almost 64,000 Americans died of opioid read more

They Went to Jail for Justice

C.J. Hinke has produced probably the best collection I’ve read of writings by and about conscientious objectors and war refusers behind bars. It’s called Free Radicals: War Resisters in Prison.

The book is a bit of a time capsule, somewhat along the lines of Daniel Ellsberg’s recent book revealing the substance of the other half of the Pentagon Papers decades later. In fact, Hinke actually found this manuscript, which he had begun in 1966 and lost a couple of years later in the read more

Has Democratic Socialism a Future in American Politics?

Recently, when 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an obscure, upfront democratic socialist from the Bronx, easily defeated one of the most powerful U.S. Congressmen in the Democratic primary, the story became an overnight sensation.  How, the pundits wondered, could this upset have occurred?

Actually, it shouldn’t have been a total surprise for, in recent years, democratic socialism has been making a remarkable comeback in American life.  Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist U.S. Senator read more

Silicon Valley Will Not Save You from the Surveillance State

There was something quite odd about the very welcome news that some Google employees were objecting to a military contract, namely all the other Google military contracts. My sense of the oddness of this was heightened by reading Yasha Levine’s new book, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet.

I invited Levine on my radio show (it will air in the coming weeks) and asked him what he thought was motivating the revolt over at Google. read more

Monbiot’s New Story Uncut and Unrated

I’m going to praise the heck out of yet another terrific book I’ve just read while yet again exclaiming (into a deep empty echoing canyon?) my bewilderment and outrage at the glaring omission it makes — the same one as all the other books.

George Monbiot’s Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis is part familiar; part original, creative, and inspiring; and pretty much all right-on and necessary. Its first chapter should be required reading everywhere — with the read more

The fireworks next time!: Ready for a New ‘Missile Gap’ and Arms Race?

By Dave Lindorff

            It’s July 4. Do you want fireworks?  You’re in luck, because that’s what your militarist government wants to deliver.

            You may have to wait a bit, but what’s in store is a new arms race, a new era of super instability with the chance for, or even likelihood of a catastrophic ending in the form of a global nuclear war.

read more

            It’s read more

Talk Nation Radio: William Geimer on the Case for Canada Staying Out of Other People’s Wars

William Geimer, author, peace activist, is a veteran of the U.S. 82d Airborne Division and Professor of Law Emeritus, Washington and Lee University. After resigning his commission in opposition to the war on Vietnam, he represented conscientious objectors and advised peace groups near Ft. Bragg NC. A Canadian citizen, he lives with his wife near Victoria, British Columbia where he is a member of the Vancouver Island Peace and Disarmament Network. He is the author of Canada: The Case for Staying read more

Ban Tear Gas

Tear gas is among the least of the problems facing those who care about the murder and destruction of war. But it is a major element in the militarization of local policing. In fact, it is widely deemed illegal in war, but legal in non-war (although what written law actually creates that loophole is unclear).

Like blowing people up with missiles from drones, shooting people for being Palestinian, holding people in cages for decades without charge or trial on a stolen corner of Cuba, or zapping read more

Tomgram: William Hartung, Weaponized Keynesianism in Washington

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

Who could forget it? There were the $37 screws (no need to say who was getting screwed), the $2,043 nut (McDonnell Douglas made it specially for the U.S. Navy), the $7,622 coffee pot, the $74,165 aluminum ladder, and the $640 plastic toilet seats for the Air Force. All of those examples of Pentagon waste read more

Why Ocasio-Cortez’ Platform Is So Great

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ platform is dramatically better than many may realize. It tackles the greatest evil in existence in a way that no other big-2 congressional candidate’s website does and which most do not even mention. And in doing so, it makes serious much of the rest of her socialist platform in a way that even presidential candidate Bernie Sanders did not — a way promoted by the peace movement, the Poor People’s Campaign, and Black Lives Matter.

War and war preparations eat up read more