This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. How to Forget on Memorial Day Whistling Past the Graveyard of Empires By Tom Engelhardt It’s the saddest reading around: the little announcements that dribble out of the Pentagon every day or two — those terse, relatively uninformative death notices: rank; name; [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three days a week, click here . As the country’s big wars on the Eurasian continent wind down, American war-making and war preparations fly ever more regularly under the radar.  There has, for instance, been much discussion about the Obama administration’s policy “pivot” to Asia [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three days a week, click here. When workers drilling tunnels at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, began to die, Union Carbide had an answer. It hadn’t been taking adequate precautions against the inhalation of silica dust, a known danger to workers since the days of ancient [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Gordon Gekko, the infamously cutthroat capitalist and lead character in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street , captured the heady years of the 1980s with a single, indelible line : Greed is good . Today, it is Edward Conard, a friend and former colleague of Mitt Romney’s [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Let’s start with this: according to the Pentagon, the production and acquisition costs of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet, the military’s most expensive weapons program, have risen yet again, this time by 4.3% since 2010 to $395.6 billion. If you’re [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. America as a Shining Drone Upon a Hill On Staring Death in the Face and Not Noticing By Tom Engelhardt Here’s the essence of it: you can trust America’s crème de la crème , the most elevated, responsible people, no matter what weapons, what [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. There has been much discussion recently about the Obama administration’s “pivot” from the Greater Middle East to Asia: the 250 Marines sent to Darwin, Australia, the littoral combat ships for Singapore, the support for Burmese “democracy,” war games in the Philippines (and [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. If you had followed May Day protests in New York City in the mainstream media, you might hardly have noticed that they happened at all. The stories were generally tucked away, minimalist, focused on a few arrests, and spoke [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Thirty-five years later, it was still on my bookshelf in a little section on utopias (as well it should have been, being a modern classic). A friend had written his name inside the cover and even dated it: August [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. By now, it’s already deep election season , the beginning of the culmination of a cycle that commenced the day after (or even the day before) the previous presidential election. In the meantime, the endless polls appear — you can check [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. In my childhood years of the 1950s, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic landscapes were a dime a dozen. In the Arctic, the first radioactivated monster, Ray Bradbury’s famed Rhedosaurus, awakened in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and began its long slouch toward [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. The Obama Contradiction He has few constraints (except those he’s internalized). No one can stop him or countermand his orders. He has a bevy of lawyers at his beck and call to explain the “legality” of his actions. And if [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Last December, a super-secret RQ-170 Sentinel, part of a far-reaching program of CIA drone surveillance over Iran, went down (or was shot down, or computer-jacked and hacked down) and was recovered intact by the Iranian military.  This week, an Iranian general proudly [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Call it a mantra, a litany, or a to-don’t list, but the drip, drip, drip of Afghan disaster and the gross-out acts accompanying it have already resulted in one of those classic fill-you-in paragraphs that reporters hang onto for [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. A decade ago, I wrote a novel, The Last Days of Publishing , about the world I had worked in for a quarter-century. I already had at least some sense, then, of what was bearing down on the book. Keep in [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. As cash-starved state governments scrape their way through this so-called recovery, they might as well hang signs with this message on their capitals: “Everything must go.” States are hemorrhaging workers and selling off assets at a startling rate as they grapple with anemic tax [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Chalk it up to the genuine strangeness of our second Afghan War. Americans, according to the latest polls, are turning against the conflict in ever greater numbers , yet it’s remarkable how little — beyond a few obvious, sensational events — they know [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Of course, it wasn’t Barack Obama’s fault. He didn’t nominate himself for the Nobel Peace Prize back in 2009 when he was already on a distinct war trajectory in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Nobel committee did it in what, [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Negotiators for Iran, the U.S., Britain, China, France, Russia, and Germany are to meet in Turkey this Friday, face to face, for the first time in more than a year. There are small signs of possible future compromise on both sides [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.   Take off your hat. Taps is playing. Almost four decades late, the Vietnam War and its post-war spawn, the Vietnam Syndrome, are finally heading for their American grave. It may qualify as the longest attempted burial in history. [...]