[Note for TomDispatch readers:We live in a media world with a remarkably short memory, which means that stories with a past go missing in action all the time. Witness the one that follows. To the extent my aging brain is able, TomDispatch tries to keep the past in...
It's been on the minds of antiwar activists and war critics since 2003. And little wonder. If you don't remember the pre-invasion of Iraq neocon quip, "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran..." – then take notice. Even before American...
And speaking of oil, just when we were barely getting used to Big Oil and Iraq hitting the front pages of American newspapers in tandem, here comes Afghanistan! Who now remembers that delegation of Taliban officials, shepherded by Unocal ("We're an oil and gas...
[Note for TomDispatch readers: The following piece offers a picture of the Bush administration's 18-month "surge" in Iraq that, I believe, you'll find nowhere else. Something similar could be said of all the pieces collected in the new book, The World According to...
At $34 billion, you're already counting pretty high. After all, that's Harvard's endowment; it's the amount of damage the triple hurricanes – Charley, Ivan, and Jeanne – inflicted in 2004; it's what car crashes involving 15-to-17-year-old teenage drivers...
[Note for TomDispatch readers: It's worth mentioning that the missing Iraqi oil story – see below – wasn't missing online, and certainly not at TomDispatch. This site's newest book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire, has a...
It's just a $5,812,353 contract – chump change for the Pentagon – and not even one of those notorious "no-bid" contracts either. Ninety-eight bids were solicited by the Army Corps of Engineers and 12 were received before the contract was awarded this May 28...
If you thought things were bad, with a barrel of crude oil at $136 and the oil heartlands of our planet verging on chaos, don't be surprised, but you may still have something to look forward to. Alexei Miller, chairman of Russia's vast state-owned energy monopoly,...
The Internet teaches its own lessons, often painfully quickly. In April 2005, I followed an urge, as I often did in those days. Our president, who would soon claim to be spending his spare time absorbing meaty books like King Leopold's Ghost, Lincoln: A Life of...
Be depressed. Be very depressed. You thought that cyberspace – a term conjured up long ago by that neuromancer, sci-fi author William Gibson – was the last frontier of freedom. Well, think again. If the U.S. Air Force has anything to say about it,...
