Focus: Raqqa – July 21, 2017

At Every Door

At Every Door
by Kathy Kelly

July 21, 2017

“I come and stand at every door
But none shall hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen”
                            -Nazim Hikmet
On July 18, 2017, at a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing focused on “The Four Famines: Root Causes and a Multilateral Action Plan,” Republican Senator Todd Young, a former Marine, asked read more

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Bombing the Rubble

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

Empire of Destruction 
Precision Warfare? Don’t Make Me Laugh 
By Tom Engelhardt

You remember. It was supposed to be twenty-first-century war, American-style: precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones capable of taking out a carefully identified and tracked human being just about anywhere on Earth; special operations raids so pinpoint-accurate that they would represent read more

Focus: Turkey and Syria – July 19, 2017

Ethics of Not Ruining Everything

Today I listened to the audio book of Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationship With Animals by Lori Gruen while reading the hardcopy of From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel Dennett. As a result I have been better able to empathize with Dennett’s obsession with the uniqueness of human consciousness, and I have been better able to marvel at the complex precision of Gruen’s theorizing. But I don’t seem to be any better off than read more

Reflections on Rivers of Blood Action: We All Must Come Together to Stop War

We are in some difficult times right now. There are too many people living in poverty and too many suffering from racism. We don’t have a system of health care or education that supports the citizens of this country. We are polluting the earth and this could lead to the end of us all.

We have a madman in the White House, but as S. Brian Willson posts to Facebook, “focusing on Trump is a distraction…. Trump is an avatar (or caricature), an undisguised buffoon serving as a mirror revealing read more

Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Trumping the Empire

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

I was 12. It was 1956. I lived in New York City and was a youthful history buff. (I should have kept my collection of American Heritage magazines!) Undoubtedly, I was also some kind of classic nerd. In any case, at some point during the Suez crisis of that year, I can remember going to the U.N. by myself and sitting in the gallery of the General Assembly, where read more

How Much is a Boss Worth?

An awful lot of Americans are skeptical about the value of their nation’s corporate executives.

As a 2016 nationwide survey reveals, 74 percent of Americans believe that top corporate executives are overpaid.   This public dismay with CEO compensation exists despite the fact that Americans drastically underestimate what top corporate executives are paid every read more

Pentagon Recruiting Playbook Revealed

Ominous developments in three states this summer – Oregon, Texas, New Jersey, and one city – Chicago, provide a glimpse into the Pentagon’s new playbook to recruit soldiers from high schools across the country. In brief, the military has been engaged in a robust lobbying campaign to lower academic standards to make it easier to recruit youth.

New recruits have long been required to hold a high school diploma or a GED certificate. This requirement is a major impediment to finding enough read more