The costs of America’s wars, still spreading in the Trump era, are incalculable and go far beyond the trillions spent on perpetuating America’s wars.
As I was putting the finishing touches on my new book, the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute published an estimate of the taxpayer dollars that will have gone into America’s war on terror from September 12, 2001, through fiscal year 2018. That figure: a cool
Donald Trump might be considered the superpower version of an Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and this particular cult did not come from nowhere, but from a land of growing extremity, a country that now, it seems, may be willing to preside over not just cities in ruin but a planet in ruin, too. Doesn’t that seem just a little extreme to you?
They are the extremists. If you need proof, look no further than the Afghan capital, Kabul, where the latest wave of suicide bombings has proven devastating. Recently, for instance, a fanatic
Yes, he’s the Dumbfounding Father of twenty-first-century America and that’s distracting, but he’s also the ultimate symptom of the unfounding of this nation, of the moment when — to slightly adapt a Cole Porter line — Plymouth Rock finally landed on us.
Opinion -- Don’t look away. I mean it! Keep on staring just like you’ve been doing, just like we’ve all been doing since he rode down that escalator into the presidential race in June 2015 and, while you have your eyes on him, I’ll tell you exactly why you shouldn’t
1% Elections, The Privatization of the State, a Fourth Branch of Government, and the Demobilization of “We the People”
James Cartmill holds an American flag while protesting in Oakland, Calif., on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, after the announcement that a grand jury decided not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old. Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew
A letter to an unknown American patriot.
Retired U.S. Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Jackie Powell of Canton, Ga., gives some instruction on saluting to Boy Scout Logan Schell, 12, of Cumming, Ga., as they place flags at the graves of military service members ahead of the Memorial Day holiday at Georgia National Cemetery, Saturday, May 25, 2013, in Canton, Ga. Dear American
“While taxpayer dollars flowed into your coffers, no one considered it a problem that the country lacked 17 overlapping outfits bent on preventing approximately 400,000 deaths by firearms in the same years; nor 17 interlocked agencies dedicated to safety on our roads, where more than 450,000 Americans have died since 9/11”
What are the odds? You put about $68 billion annually into a maze of 17 major intelligence outfits. You build them
Your Newspaper, Your Choice
It was 1949. My mother -- known in the gossip columns of that era as “New York’s girl caricaturist” -- was freelancing theatrical sketches to a number of New York’s newspapers and magazines, including the Brooklyn Eagle. That paper, then more than a century old,
