National Security State

Can the Military-Industrial Complex Be Tamed? Cutting the Pentagon Budget in Half Would Finally Force the Generals to Think

By William J. Astore | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – My name is Bill Astore and I’m a card-carrying member of the military-industrial complex (MIC). Sure, I hung up my military uniform for the last time in 2005. Since 2007, I’ve been writing articles for TomDispatch focused largely on critiquing that same MIC and America’s […]

Classified into Paralysis

Michael G. Roskin

Nashville (Special to Informed Comment) – It looks like Donald Trump gets off the hook for his defiant mishandling of classified documents. If former vice presidents kept documents, how can you single out Trump for prosecution? True, Trump committed far more and more serious breaches, but now others share his sins. How many classified materials […]

Corporations

Congress Has No Business Shoveling Another $847 Billion Into the Military Industrial Complex

OtherWords

By Lindsay Koshgarian | – ( Otherwords.org ) – Can you imagine the audacity to fail a multi-trillion dollar audit of public funds, and then ask for even more of those taxpayer dollars? Pentagon leaders just did exactly that. This month news broke that the agency once again failed to pass a basic audit showing […]

Afghanistan

How the Bush “War on Terror” Fed US White Nationalism and brought the Terror Home

Andrea Mazzarino

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Recently, an agent of the Department of Homeland Security called me and started asking questions about a childhood acquaintance being investigated for extremism. I put him off. My feelings about this were, to say the least, complex. As a military spouse of 10 years and someone who has long written about […]

Arms Sales

Corporate Weapons Heaven Is a Hell on Earth: Joe Biden, the National Security State, and Arms Sales

William D. Hartung

( Tomdispatch.com) – Here’s a seldom commented-upon reality of this century and this moment: the United States remains the number-one arms-exporting nation on the planet. Between 2017 and 2021, it grabbed 39% of the total global weapons market and there’s nothing new about that. It has, in fact, been the top arms dealer in every […]

Climate Crisis

The “Rules-Based International Order” Has a Priorities problem, stressing War over Food Security and Climate

Rajan Menon

( Todmispatch.com ) – Washington’s vaunted “rules-based international order” has undergone a stress test following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and here’s the news so far: it hasn’t held up well. In fact, the disparate reactions to Vladimir Putin’s war have only highlighted stark global divisions, which reflect the unequal distribution of wealth and power. Such […]

Authoritarianism

Invasion of the Mind Snatchers: How to Combat the GOP Election Denialists’ Plot to Subvert Democracy

Dan Dinello

Chicago (Special to Informed Comment) – In the 1978 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, an alien fungal spore infection takes over the minds of susceptible people, growing into pods that duplicate their bodies and transforming them into pod people — mindless authoritarian monsters that want to control America. A remake of the 1956 movie […]

Government surveillance

America’s Digital Soldiers in an Online Forever War

Tomdispatch

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 […]

Far Right

Faced with Extremism within its Ranks, US Military has clamped down on racist Speech, including Retweets and Likes

The Conversation

By Dwight Stirling, University of Southern California | – Less than a month after the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin took the extraordinary step of pausing all operations for 24 hours to “address extremism in the ranks.” Pentagon officials had been shaken by service members’ prominent […]