By Stan Cox | – ( Tomdispatch.com) – On October 1st, the U.S. military will start spending the more than $800 billion Congress is going to provide it with in fiscal year 2023. And that whopping sum will just be the beginning. According to the calculations of Pentagon expert William Hartung, funding for various intelligence […]
Spending Unlimited: Contractors Cash in as Congress Adds Billions to the Pentagon Budget
By Julia Gledhill and William D. Hartung | – ( Tomdispatch.com) – Congress has spoken when it comes to next year’s Pentagon budget and the results, if they weren’t so in line with past practices, should astonish us all. The House of Representatives voted to add $37 billion and the Senate $45 billion to the […]
America’s Digital Soldiers in an Online Forever War
By Andy Kroll | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – The three men and three women stood with their right arms raised. Behind them the remains of the daylight hued the sky a bluish gray. As a fire danced at their feet, they gazed straight ahead at a camera recording their words. The square-jawed man in […]
The Trump Supreme Court Is Nothing New: A History of the Tyranny of the Supremes
By Steve Fraser | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Has the Trump Supreme Court gone rogue? The evidence mounts. Certainly, its recent judicial blitzkrieg has run roughshod over a century’s worth of settled law. A woman’s right to get an abortion? Gone (at least as a constitutionally protected civil right). Meanwhile, voting rights are barely […]
How Trump helped Sportswash Saudi Arabia
By Robert Lipsyte | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Here’s the big question in Jock Culture these days: Is the Kingdom of Golf being used to sportswash the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Or is it the other way around? After all, what other major sport could use a sandstorm of Middle Eastern murder and human-rights […]
Is Moral Clarity even Possible anymore in Donald Trump’s America?
By Kelly Denton-Borhaug | – (Tomdispatch.com) – Recent episodes of purposeful and accidental truth-telling brought to my mind the latest verbal lapse by George W. Bush, the president who hustled this country into war in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks. He clearly hadn’t planned to make a public confession about his own warmongering […]
Angry White Guys in Big-Ass Pickups: Climate Change and Fragile Masculinity
By Stan Cox | – ( Tomdispatch.com) – In the United States during 16 months in 2020 and 2021, vehicles rammed into groups of protesters at least 139 times, according to a Boston Globe analysis. Three victims died and at least 100 were injured. Consider that a new level of all-American barbarity, thanks to the […]
Season of Sadism: With right wing Republicans running on the New Misogyny, can Dems Riposte Effectively?
By Nina Burleigh | – ( Tomdispatch.com) – Ever since the early morning hours of November 9, 2016, standing in a ballroom with red-hatted Trump election celebrants in the New York Hilton, I’ve been waiting for this moment. This eruption of misogyny, unlike any since perhaps the witch trials and the burnings of midwives at […]
The Right-Wing’s Attempt to Militarize American Politics
( Tomdispatch.com) – Increasingly, it seems, Americans have an anger problem. All too many of us now have the urge to use name-calling, violent social-media posts, threats, baseball bats, and guns to do what we once did with persuasion and voting. For example, during the year after Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, threats of […]