This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Once upon a time, the election season began with the New Hampshire primary in early March and never really gained momentum (or much attention) until the candidates were chosen and the fall campaign revved up. Now, the New Hampshire primary [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Indefinite detention of the  innocent and guilty alike, without any hope of charges, trial, or release: this is now the American way.  Most Americans, however, may not care to take that in, not even when the indefinitely detained go on a  hunger strike .  [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. And Then There Was One  Imperial Gigantism and the Decline of Planet Earth  By  Tom Engelhardt It stretched from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea, from the middle of Europe to the Kurile Islands in the Pacific, from Siberia to Central Asia.  Its [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Gary Judson had just been removed from his shackles when they slapped the handcuffs on him.  The 72-year-old Methodist minister had chained himself to the fence surrounding a compressor station — part of the critical infrastructure associated with hydraulic fracturing, better [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. As a teenager, you dreamed of being a writer and I imagine you dream of it still.  When young, you were a cartoonist and, ever since, you’ve noted the exaggeration in our world. You were the editor-in-chief of a newspaper [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Just over three years ago, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig leased by BP killed 11 people, injured 17, and — according to government estimates — polluted the Gulf of Mexico with 210 million gallons of Louisiana sweet [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. After all these decades, here’s the strange thing: what I remember are his hands, not his face.  But perhaps that’s fitting for a writer.  His name was Robert Shaplen and he was a correspondent for the New Yorker .  My parents knew him [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Filling the Empty Battlefield  Jeremy Scahill, Blowback Reporter  By  Tom Engelhardt Chalmers Johnson’s book  Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire  was published in March 2000 — and just about no one noticed.  Until then, blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. In his pathbreaking 2001 book Resource Wars , Michael Klare wrote: “Natural resources are the building blocks of civilization and an essential requirement of daily existence.  The inhabitants of planet Earth have been blessed with a vast supply of most basic materials.  [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. At a certain point in my life, I studied shotokan karate with a remarkable teacher, and then, unable to find her equivalent in the San Francisco Bay Area, took up wing chun for a while with a very amusing guy. [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. “Shell shock,” the psychological scourge of World War I, occurred after “a man has been buried, lifted, or otherwise subjected to the physical effects of a bursting shell or other similar explosive.”  So wrote Charles Myers, an officer in the [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. The Enemy-Industrial Complex How to Turn a World Lacking in Enemies into the Most Threatening Place in the Universe  By Tom Engelhardt The communist enemy, with the “ world’s fourth largest military ,” has been trundling missiles around and threatening the United States with nuclear obliteration.  Guam, Hawaii , [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Recently, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel gave a  major speech  at the National Defense University on cutting military — aka defense — spending.  Hagel is considered a “realist” and so when it comes to such cuts, this is undoubtedly the best we’re [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. They call it the “ spring swoon .” For the third straight year, the American economy bounded out of the starting blocks, adding hundreds of thousands of jobs in January and February. And for the third year in a row, that momentum melted [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. At 72, climate scientist James Hansen is retiring as head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies to work even more actively on climate-change issues. Keep in mind that, in congressional testimony in 1988, he first put climate change on [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Even if you set aside the man-made environmental disaster that is China (at a cost now estimated conservatively at $230 billion annually), ever more expensive disasters seem to be on the rise globally.  Moreover, thanks to climate change — that is, the [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. America’s post-9/11 conflicts have been wars of corruption, a point surprisingly seldom made in the mainstream media. Keep in mind that George W. Bush’s administration was a monster of privatization. It had its own set of crony corporations, including  Halliburton<span style="font-size: 13px; [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Had you searched for “Israel, nuclear weapons” at Google News in the wake of President Obama’s recent trip to the Middle East, you would have gotten a series of headlines like this: “ Obama: Iran more than a year away from developing [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. American Anniversaries from Hell  What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You By  Tom Engelhardt It’s true that, last week, few in Congress  cared to discuss , no less memorialize, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.  Nonetheless, two anniversaries of American disasters and crimes [...]

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. In the lead-up to the war in Iraq, President George W. Bush  made a promise.  “The Iraqi people can be certain of this,” he said. “The United States is committed to helping them build a better future.”  A decade later, his successor, [...]