A blog about a criminal enterprise
By Dave Lindorff
Let me start out with full disclosure: I’m 69 and next April I will start collecting $30.000 a year in Social Security benefits — the amount I qualify for on the basis of both my highest 35 years of earnings as an employed and later self-employed journalist, and because I’ve waited until I hit 70, the maximum age for starting to collect benefits, before starting to receive my checks.
So it particularly galls me to read news articles about
Murder Incorporated is a three-book series by Mumia Abu Jamal and Stephen Vittoria, which I can highly recommend based on the first book. The other two are not out yet.
Book One, “Dreaming of Empire,” is a critique of U.S. imperialism, a debunking of U.S. nationalist myths, a corrective or alternative history of the U.S. nation. Politically, a book like this would never be permitted in U.S. schools, and it’s clearly not aimed at clearing that hurdle. It uses curse words, which would provide
We should be very grateful to Francesco Duina for his new book, Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country. He begins with the following dilemma. The poor in the United States are in many ways worse off than in other wealthy countries, but they are more patriotic than are the poor in those other countries and even more patriotic than are wealthier people in their own country. Their country is (among wealthy countries) tops in inequality, and bottoms in social support,
By Doug Rawlings
June 15, 2018
Note:
• Emmy nominations are ongoing.
• Veterans For Peace recently announced it will place this full-page ad in ‘Variety’ urging an Emmy not be awarded to the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary, “The Vietnam War.”
• The “Hollywood Reporter” has refused to run the ad.
• Here, Vietnam veteran, Doug Rawlings, adds his voice to why the filmmakers should not get a Best Documentary award.
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By the time I reached
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
How the Last Superpower Was Unchained
American Wars and Self-Decline
By Tom Engelhardt
Think of it as the all-American version of the human comedy: a great power that eternally knows what the world needs and offers copious advice with a tone deafness that would be humorous, if it weren’t so grim. If you look, you can find examples of this just about anywhere. Here, for instance,
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War
Six-years after the British landing at Jamestown, with the settlers struggling to survive and hardly managing to get their own local genocide underway, these new Virginians hired mercenaries to attack Acadia and (fail to) drive the French out of what they considered their continent.
The colonies that would become the United States decided to take over Canada in 1690 (and failed, again).
They got the British to help them in 1711 (and failed, yet again).
General Braddock
The government of Sweden has reinstated the military draft and sent a war propaganda brochure to all Swedes promoting fear, Russophobia, and warlike thinking.
While my last name comes from Sweden, I’m writing this in the United States and will no doubt be obliged to acknowledge that the militarist threat from tiny Sweden hardly compares with that of the Pentagon. While Sweden is fifth in dealing weaponry to poor countries and ninth in dealing
Dave Lindorff
The summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un was pretty much all symbols and no solid content — basically it’s an agreement to talk further with plenty of wiggle room for either side to back out later. But that said it was a striking departure from the gutless and arrogant refusal of 11 prior presidents to make any move towards ending the state of war between the US and
Thomas Linzey is an attorney and the Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) – a nonprofit law firm that has provided free legal services to over five hundred local governments and nonprofit organizations since 1995. He is a cum laude graduate of Widener Law School and a three-time recipient of the law school’s public interest law award. He has been a finalist for the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World Award, and is a recipient of the Pennsylvania
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
We know her name but not, as the courageous Israeli journalist Amira Hass has pointed out, the name of the Israeli sniper who shot her down in cold blood during an unarmed demonstration at the blockaded Gazan border as she ran to aid a man struck in the head by a tear gas shell.