[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I'm on the road for a couple of days, so the next TomDispatch post will be on Tuesday, October 8th. Tom]
It hardly matters where you look. In Italy, for instance, the authorities recently closed roads and evacuated homes near the Mont Blanc glacier, part of which is at increasing risk of collapse as it melts ever more rapidly, helped along by this summer’s brutal heat waves across Europe. In northeastern Switzerland, local hikers and environmentalists dressed in black had a “funeral” ceremony at the Pizol glacier, now 80% gone. (Scientists estimate that, by 2050, half of Switzerland’s glaciers will no longer exist.) Recently, the government of Iceland held a similar ceremony for that country’s first lost glacier.
Funerals could already be held elsewhere on this planet, too. And not just for its "lungs" like those burning forests of Indonesia, where almost 2,000 fires (largely human-set) turned the sky “blood red” over parts of the island of Sumatra and cast a smoky pall as far away as Singapore; nor just for the Amazon rainforest, where 4.6 million acres have reportedly been lost this year alone due to fires and so the ability to absorb carbon dioxide. Consider as well the recent report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the globe’s oceans and then start unpacking those mourning clothes. The 100 scientists who produced it found that “the rate at which oceans are warming has doubled since the early 1990s, and marine heat waves are becoming more frequent and intense.” Unless greenhouse gas emissions begin to be cut drastically and soon, such warmth will wreak havoc on global fisheries and coral reefs, while increasing the intensity of storms like Hurricane Dorian, which recently destroyed part of the Bahamas. Sooner or later, those heating waters will intensify the heat on land as well. And that, of course, is just to begin to tell a tale of climate-crisis woe.
No wonder another two million people walked out of schools and workplaces last week (six million over two consecutive Fridays) to protest what we fossil-fuel-burning creatures are doing to this planet. Can there be any question that the climate crisis developing now could, as I’ve written elsewhere, turn out to be the greatest crime in human history? Back in 2013, I tried to pin the label “terrarism” (and “terracide”) on the CEOs of the major oil companies. Of course, it never faintly stuck, but they and more recent figures like President Donald Trump and his crew of planetary pyromaniacs, men visibly intent on incinerating this planet for their own gain, are indeed terrarists of the first order. The term for what they’re doing that does seem to be entering the language is "ecocide" (like genocide). While news of possible impeachment has recently filled our media world to the brim (and beyond), there are far grimmer charges than those now being leveled at Donald Trump, ecocidal ones, that will never be taken up in the House of Representatives. Yet talk about true “high crimes and misdemeanors”! And worst of all, as TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan writes today, such crimes will, in the end, have been committed against small children like hers across this country and the world. Tom
Trumping the Future
Which Would Mean No Future for My Three Kids
By Frida BerriganOkay, I’ll admit it. Sometimes I can’t take the bad news. It’s too much. It’s so extra, as the kids like to say.
When I hit that wall of hopelessness and anxiety so many of us have become familiar with, I take what I think of as a “kid break.” I stare into the faces of my three children seeking solace and sanity. I remind myself that they are the why of it all.
Seamus, who is seven, and I do our special four-part kiss. I arrange five-year-old Madeline’s hair into Dutch braids or bear-ear buns. Twelve-year-old Rosena and I talk about her five-minute YouTube-inspired craft projects. I connect with those three nodes of antic energy, creativity, and goodness and I feel a little better.
Unfortunately, kid breaks don’t represent a long-term solution to my problem. They’re too brief to keep my hopes afloat, nor is it fair to continually cling to my kids’ narrow shoulders to keep my head above the surging waters. Still, sometimes it really does help to see the world, however briefly, through their eyes, because despite everything, they’re having a good time.
My life, in a sense, has been an arms race. The atomic bomb was initially tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 15, 1945, five days short of my first birthday. Less than a month later, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although the Soviet Union didn’t conduct its first nuclear test until August 1949, an arms race was essentially already underway before World War II ended. It’s never stopped and we’ve all -- to use a phrase from my childhood when we dove under our school desks during nuclear-attack drills -- been ducking and covering ever since or, in the post-Cold War world, simply ignoring the fact that an arms race that could take us to Armageddon and back never really ended with the implosion of the Soviet Union.
Consider it symptomatic and symbolic that the administration of the first “abolitionist” president, Barack Obama, who came into office talking about denuclearizing the planet and promptly got a Nobel Prize for his “vision of a world free of nuclear arms” (take that, Donald Trump!), ended up overseeing the launch of a 30-year, $1.2 trillion “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. That meant new missiles, bombers, and submarines. And now, as a new Cold War with China and Russia edges ever closer, we have a president who, in idle conversation, has threatened to essentially blow away two countries, North Korea and Afghanistan, assumedly with just such weaponry, leaving, as he recently put it, “tens of millions” dead.
Looking back on the last 75 years since my birth, arms races seem just so yesterday and yet, as TomDispatch regular Rajan Menon suggests in his latest post, so hypersonically today and tomorrow as well. How will all this end? It’s reasonable to assume, at a moment when the modest nuclear treaties of the Cold War era are being blown away by the Trump administration, while the military-industrial complex is, as ever, hot to trot, that the answer is: not well -- hypersonically not well, in fact. Tom
Hypersonic Weapons and National (In)security
Why Arms Races Never End
By Rajan MenonHypersonic weapons close in on their targets at a minimum speed of Mach 5, five times the speed of sound or 3,836.4 miles an hour. They are among the latest entrants in an arms competition that has embroiled the United States for generations, first with the Soviet Union, today with China and Russia. Pentagon officials tout the potential of such weaponry and the largest arms manufacturers are totally gung-ho on the subject. No surprise there. They stand to make staggering sums from building them, especially given the chronic “cost overruns” of such defense contracts -- $163 billion in the far-from-rare case of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
Voices within the military-industrial complex -- the Defense Department; mega-defense companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Boeing, and Raytheon; hawkish armchair strategists in Washington-based think tanks and universities; and legislators from places that depend on arms production for jobs -- insist that these are must-have weapons. Their refrain: unless we build and deploy them soon we could suffer a devastating attack from Russia and China.
The opposition to this powerful ensemble’s doomsday logic is, as always, feeble.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Signed, personalized copies of Todd Miller’s new book, Empire of Borders, are still available at the TomDispatch donation page until Tuesday evening. So check out Miller’s recent TD article and then consider donating $100 ($125 if you live outside the U.S.) for a book of his. It’s a way to support TD in this mad Trumpian world of ours. Tom]
“Mulch Trump”
“Sea Levels Are Rising and So Are We!”
By Tom Engelhardt
Look what Greta started and what she did to me! I took part in the recent climate-strike march in New York City -- one of a quarter-million people (or maybe 60,000) who turned out there, along with four million others across all seven continents. Then I came home and promptly collapsed. Which tells you one thing: I'm not 16 years old like Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teen who almost singlehandedly roused a sleeping planet and is now described as “the Joan of Arc of climate change.” Nor am I the age of just about any of the demonstrators I stopped to chat with that afternoon, however briefly, while madly scribbling down their inventive protest signs in a little notebook.
But don’t think I was out of place either. After all, the kids had called on adults to turn out that day and offer them some support. They understandably wanted to know that someone -- other than themselves (and a bunch of scientists) -- was truly paying attention to the global toilet down which their future was headed. I’m 75 and proud to say that I was walking that Friday with three friends, two of whom were older than me, amid vast crowds of enthusiastic, drum-beating, guitar-playing, chanting, shouting, climate-striking kids and their supporters of every age and hue. The streets of downtown Manhattan Island were so packed that sometimes, in the blazing sun of that September afternoon, we were barely inching along.
It was impressive, exuberant, and, yes, let me say it again, exhausting. And that sun, beautiful as it was, didn’t help at all. At one point, I was so warm that I even stripped down to my T-shirt. I have to admit, though, that I felt that orb was shining so brightly at the behest of those young school strikers to make a point about what planet we were now on. It was about 80 degrees Fahrenheit during that march, which fortunately was to a park on the tip of Manhattan, not to somewhere in Jacobabad, Pakistan, now possibly the hottest city on Earth (and growing hotter by the year) with a temperature that only recently hit 124 degrees Fahrenheit.
That night, back in my living room, I slumped on the sofa, pillows packed behind me, and turned on NBC Nightly News to watch anchor Lester Holt report on the breaking stories of that historic day in which climate strikers and their supporters had turned out in staggering numbers from distant Pacific islands to Africa, Europe, the Americas, and -- yes -- Antarctica. Even -- bless them -- a small group of young Afghans in that desperately embattled land was somehow still capable of thinking about the future of our planet and risked their lives to demonstrate! “I want to march because if I don't survive this war,” said Sarah Azizi, one of those Afghans, “at least I would have done something for the next generation that they can survive." (Where, though, were the Chinese demonstrators in a country that now releases more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other, though the U.S. remains by far the largest emitter in history?)
Let me add one thing: I’m a religious viewer of Lester Holt or at least what I can take of his show (usually about 15 minutes or so). The reason? Because I feel it gives me a sense of what an aging slice of Americans take in as the “news” daily on our increasingly embattled planet. If you happen to be one of the striking school kids with a certain perspective on the adults who have gotten us into our present global fix, then you won’t be shocked to learn that those “Fridays for Future” global demonstrations proved to be the sixth story of the day on that broadcast. But hey, who can blame Lester Holt & Co? (“Tonight, several breaking headlines as we come on the air!”) After all, not far from Chicago, an SUV (“Breaking news! Shocking video!”) had busted ever so photogenically into a mall and rambled around for a while knocking things over (but hurting no one) before the driver was arrested. No comparison with millions of human beings going on strike over the heating of a planet on which life forms of every sort are in increasing jeopardy.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Just a reminder that personalized, signed copies of Todd Miller’s new book, Empire of Borders, are still available at our donation page for $100 ($125, if you live outside the U.S.). If you didn’t check out Miller’s striking recent TD piece on this country’s increasingly globalized borders, do so and then go to our donation page, where, by the way, all sorts of other signed books are available, including ones by Alfred McCoy, John Feffer, Rebecca Gordon, Nick Turse, and me. In the process, you’ll help keep this website chugging along, with my eternal gratitude, in an increasingly bizarre world. Tom]
In today’s piece, TomDispatch regulars William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger consider ways in which the Pentagon is essentially a family business (if, that is, you think of the weapons makers of the military-industrial complex as a “family”). It’s also a kind of scam (as they explain), a comfortable stop for past and future officials of that very complex. And the results of such a business model are striking, to say the least. Hey, where else could an industrial enterprise get a snazzy $2.43 billion just for spare parts? (I’m thinking about Lockheed Martin for its F-35 jet fighter, already the most expensive weapons system in history and, if Hartung and Smithberger are right, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.)
Given this, you might wonder why the media continues to make such a fuss when one relatively modest-sized family enterprise pulls in a mere $184,000 from the Pentagon -- and not even for spare parts for weapons, but merely for housing and feeding military personnel at an upscale hotel in a picturesque foreign land. (I’m thinking, of course, about the ever-increasing numbers of aircrews that have been housed at the Trump Turnberry resort in Scotland since one Donald Trump entered the Oval Office.) And yet it gets all the media attention and the “family business” that Hartung and Smithberger deal with is largely left to its own devices -- and what devices they are! Tom
Bestselling Pentagon Fiction
Beware of Defense Secretaries Pledging Reform
By William D. Hartung and Mandy SmithbergerFor the Pentagon, happy days are here again (if they ever left). With a budget totaling more than $1.4 trillion for the next two years, the department is riding high, even as it attempts to set the stage for yet more spending increases in the years to come.
With such enormous sums now locked in, Secretary of Defense (and former Raytheon lobbyist) Mark Esper is already going through a ritual that couldn’t be more familiar to Pentagon watchers. He’s pledged to “reform” the bureaucracy and the spending priorities of the Department of Defense to better address the latest proposed threats du jour, Russia and China. His main focus: paring back the Pentagon’s "Fourth Estate" -- an alphabet soup of bureaucracies not under the control of any of the military services that sucks up about 20% of the $700 billion-plus annual budget.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: A special offer today. Check out TomDispatch regular Todd Miller’s new piece and then consider that, for a donation to this site of $100 ($125 if you live outside the U.S.), you can get a signed, personalized copy of his just-published book, Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World. Of it, TomDispatch regular Greg Grandin has written, “An indispensable guide to our bunkered, barb-wired world.” TomDispatch regular Avi Chomsky adds, “Joining meticulous documentation and vivid on-the-ground research in multiple border hot spots around the planet, Todd Miller pulls the veil off the layers of borders and their policing that shape our world, revealing a stunning and terrifying reality.” Check out our donation page for the details. This offer will only be available for a week. Tom]
It was the first moment of Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency. He memorably rode a Trump Tower escalator into the race to the tune of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” and, as everyone still remembers, promptly denounced Mexican “rapists” for being “sent” across our border. No less crucially, he made a promise, one he’s now trying to steal money from the Pentagon just to begin to fulfill: “I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”
In popular memory, there was only one great wall on the planet then, hundreds of years old and (in myth, at least) viewable from outer space: the Great Wall of China. And that undoubtedly was Donald Trump’s own reference point. In truth, for most of us, his obsession in that campaign with the border, with migrants, and with that wall, like so much else about that one-of-a-kind run for the presidency, seemed uniquely his, something newly introduced to American politics.
But that was never the case. Donald Trump's major skill -- other than his remarkable knack for getting cameras, wherever they were, to focus on him and keep “the red light on” -- was an uncanny ability to catch the mood of the moment, the vibes in the air, that other politicians seemed incapable of sensing. That certainly included his great, great wall (which, likely as not, will never actually get built) on our southern border.
What TomDispatch regular Todd Miller shows today (and in his new book, Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World) is that Trump, already our “birther-in-chief” when he entered the race in 2015, uncannily picked up not just the vibe of fast developing white nationalist sentiments in this country, but of an official American obsession with borders -- not so much with walling in this country as walling “them” out globally. As Miller makes clear, by the time he took that escalator ride, an American urge to wall out aspects of our world had moved well beyond our southern border and somehow Donald Trump got it when so many of us didn’t. Tom
Trapped in an Empire of Borders
The U.S. Border Is Much Bigger Than You Think (And Don’t Just Blame Donald Trump)
By Todd MillerThe driver of the passenger van pulled onto the shoulder of the road, looked back, and said, “There’s an immigration checkpoint up ahead. Does everyone have their papers?”
We were just north of the Guatemalan border, outside the town of Ciudad Hidalgo in the Mexican state of Chiapas. There were 10 of us in the van: a family of eight from nearby Monte Rico, Guatemala, photojournalist Jeff Abbott, and me. The driver pointed to the road blockade, already in sight. From a backseat, I could see uniformed officials questioning people inside stopped vehicles.
It was a broiling afternoon in August 2014. Dark clouds were building overhead, threatening rain. There was a murmur of hushed conversation among the family members whom I had first seen no more than half an hour before. They had only recently landed on the Mexican side of the Suchiate River on a raft made of gigantic inner tubes and wooden boards and were already aboard the van when Abbott and I crammed in.
World War II marked the apogee of industrialized “total war.” Great powers savaged one another. Hostilities engulfed the globe. Mobilization extended to virtually every sector of every nation. Air war, including the terror bombing of civilians, emerged as a central strategy of the victorious Anglo-American powers. The devastation was catastrophic almost everywhere, with the notable exception of the United States, which exited the strife unscathed and unmatched in power and influence. The death toll of fighting forces plus civilians worldwide was staggering.
The Violent American Century addresses the U.S.-led transformations in war conduct and strategizing that followed 1945—beginning with brutal localized hostilities, proxy wars, and the nuclear terror of the Cold War, and ending with the asymmetrical conflicts of the present day. The military playbook now meshes brute force with a focus on non-state terrorism, counterinsurgency, clandestine operations, a vast web of overseas American military bases, and—most touted of all—a revolutionary new era of computerized “precision” warfare. In contrast to World War II, postwar death and destruction has been comparatively small. By any other measure, it has been appalling—and shows no sign of abating.
Julian West, looking backwards from 2050, tries to understand why the world and his family have fallen apart.
Part Field Notes from a Catastrophe, part 1984, part World War Z, John Feffer's striking new dystopian novel, takes us deep into the battered, shattered world of 2050. The European Union has broken apart. Multiethnic great powers like Russia and China have shriveled. America's global military footprint has virtually disappeared and the United States remains united in name only. Nationalism has proven the century's most enduring force as ever-rising global temperatures have supercharged each-against-all competition and conflict among the now 300-plus members of an increasingly feeble United Nations.
As he navigates the world of 2050, Julian West offers a roadmap for the path we're already on, a chronicle of impending disaster, and a faint light of hope. He may be humanity's last best chance to explain how the world unraveled—if he can survive the savage beauty of the Splinterlands.
You won't see segments about it on the nightly news or read about it on the front page of America’s newspapers, but the Pentagon is fighting a new shadow war in Africa, helping to destabilize whole countries and preparing the ground for future blowback. Behind closed doors, U.S. officers now claim that "Africa is the battlefield of tomorrow, today." In Tomorrow's Battlefield, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Nick Turse exposes the shocking true story of the U.S. military’s spreading secret wars in Africa.
In 1964, a book entitled The Invisible Government shocked Americans with its revelations of a growing world of intelligence agencies playing fast and loose around the planet, a secret government lodged inside the one they knew that even the president didn't fully control. Almost half a century later, everything about that "invisible government" has grown vastly larger, more disturbing, and far more visible.
At 73, having spent years focusing on the civilian toll from Washington’s Afghan War, Ann Jones embedded on an American forward operating base to experience what that war was like for the U.S. troops in the field. The next year, she began following grievously wounded American soldiers from the moment they came off the battlefield all the way back home. Her journey proved to be nothing short of an odyssey. Despite all the talk in this country about our “wounded warriors,” no other book gives us a more powerful sense of the genuine cost of war to Americans.
