Download or read book The World According to Tomdispatch written by Tom Engelhardt and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2008-05-17 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tomdispatch.com has established itself as the go-to blog for contemporary US politics, and the favored website for leading commentators; its powerful, no-holds-barred essays resonate throughout the global online media. This comprehensive volume offers readers a chance to catch up on some of the finest political analysis of our age, from Afghanistan and Iraq through Guantánamo and extraordinary rendition, Hurricane Katrina, global warming, black gold, and the misbegotten ‘clash of civilizations.’ Introduced and edited by Tomdispatch’s creator Tom Engelhardt, The World According to Tomdispatch is the essential primer for anyone seeking guidance along the highways and byways of our post-9/11 world.
Download or read book Masters of Mankind written by Noam Chomsky and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant indictment of US imperial power.
Download or read book A Nation Unmade by War written by Tom Engelhardt and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In his searing new book . . . Engelhardt has composed a requiem for a nation turned upside down by the relentless pursuit of global power” (Karen J. Greenberg, author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State). As veteran author Tom Engelhardt argues, despite having a more massive, technologically advanced, and better-funded military than any other power on the planet, in the last decade and a half of constant war across the greater Middle East and parts of Africa, the United States has won nothing. Its unending wars, in fact, have only contributed to a world growing more chaotic by the second. “The violence, destruction, and suffering resulting from the imperial arrogance of Bush, Cheney, and cohorts have proceeded on their shocking course while most Americans, Tom Engelhardt writes, were ‘only half paying attention.’ Regular readers of his incisive, lucid, and brutally informative columns could not fail to pay attention and to be appalled at what was revealed. Their impact is all the more forceful in this collection, which casts a brilliant and horrifying light on a sordid chapter of history, far from closed.” —Noam Chomsky, leading public intellectual and author of Hopes and Prospects “No one has had a keener eye for American militarism, hypocrisy, and flat-out folly than Tom Engelhardt.” —John W. Dower, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering “The mainstream media call it the ‘Age of Trump.’ Tom Engelhardt knows better: It’s the ‘Era of America Unhinged.’ This new collection of essays gives us Engelhardt at his very best: incisive, impassioned, and funny even, in a time of great darkness.” —Andrew J. Bacevich, New York Times–bestselling author “Tom Engelhardt is a tireless analyst of the miseries of American Empire . . . [an] indispensable book.” —Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan
Download or read book The United States of Fear written by Tom Engelhardt and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2008, when the U.S. National Intelligence Council issued its latest report meant for the administration of newly elected President Barack Obama, it predicted that the planet's "sole superpower" would suffer a modest decline and a soft landing fifteen years hence. In his new book The United States of Fear, Tom Engelhardt makes clear that Americans should don their crash helmets and buckle their seat belts, because the United States is on the path to a major decline at a startling speed. Engelhardt offers a savage anatomy of how successive administrations in Washington took the "Soviet path"--pouring American treasure into the military, war, and national security--and so helped drive their country off the nearest cliff. This is the startling tale of how fear was profitably shot into the national bloodstream, how the country--gripped by terror fantasies--was locked down, and how a brain-dead Washington elite fiddled (and profited) while America quietly burned. Think of it as the story of how the Cold War really ended, with the triumphalist "sole superpower" of 1991 heading slowly for the same exit through which the Soviet Union left the stage twenty years earlier.
Download or read book The World According to Tomdispatch written by Tom Engelhardt and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tomdispatch.com has established itself as the go-to blog for contemporary US politics, and the favored website for leading commentators; its powerful, no-holds-barred essays resonate throughout the global online media. This comprehensive volume offers readers a chance to catch up on some of the finest political analysis of our age, from Afghanistan and Iraq through Guantnamo and extraordinary rendition, Hurricane Katrina, global warming, black gold, and the misbegotten 'clash of civilizations.' Introduced and edited by Tomdispatch's creator Tom Engelhardt, The World According to Tomdispatch is the essential primer for anyone seeking guidance along the highways and byways of our post-9/11 world.
Download or read book The End of Victory Culture written by Tom Engelhardt and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sets out to trace the vicissitudes of America's self-image since World War ll as they showed up in popular culture: war toys, war comics, war reporting, and war films. It succeeds brilliantly ... Engelhardt's prose is smart and smooth, and his book is social and cultural history of a high order." Boston Globe, from the bookjacket.
Download or read book To Govern the Globe written by Alfred W. McCoy and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a tempestuous narrative that sweeps across five continents and seven centuries, this book explains how a succession of catastrophes—from the devastating Black Death of 1350 through the coming climate crisis of 2050—has produced a relentless succession of rising empires and fading world orders. During the long centuries of Iberian and British imperial rule, the quest for new forms of energy led to the development of the colonial sugar plantation as a uniquely profitable kind of commerce. In a time when issues of race and social justice have arisen with pressing urgency, the book explains how the plantation’s extraordinary profitability relied on a production system that literally worked the slaves to death, creating an insatiable appetite for new captives that made the African slave trade a central feature of modern capitalism for over four centuries. After surveying past centuries roiled by imperial wars, national revolutions, and the struggle for human rights, the closing chapters use those hard-won insights to peer through the present and into the future. By rendering often-opaque environmental science in lucid prose, the book explains how climate change and changing world orders will shape the life opportunities for younger generations, born at the start of this century, during the coming decades that will serve as the signposts of their lives—2030, 2050, 2070, and beyond.
Download or read book The New American Militarism written by Andrew J. Bacevich and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative book, Andrew Bacevich warns of a dangerous dual obsession that has taken hold of Americans, conservatives, and liberals alike. It is a marriage of militarism and utopian ideology--of unprecedented military might wed to a blind faith in the universality of American values. This mindset, the author warns, invites endless war and the ever-deepening militarization of U.S. policy. It promises not to perfect but to pervert American ideals and to accelerate the hollowing out of American democracy. As it alienates others, it will leave the United States increasingly isolated. It will end in bankruptcy, moral as well as economic, and in abject failure. With The New American Militarism, which has been updated with a new Afterword, Bacevich examines the origins and implications of this misguided enterprise. He shows how American militarism emerged as a reaction to the Vietnam War. Various groups in American society--soldiers, politicians on the make, intellectuals, strategists, Christian evangelicals, even purveyors of pop culture--came to see the revival of military power and the celebration of military values as the antidote to all the ills besetting the country as a consequence of Vietnam and the 1960s. The upshot, acutely evident in the aftermath of 9/11, has been a revival of vast ambitions and certainty, this time married to a pronounced affinity for the sword. Bacevich urges us to restore a sense of realism and a sense of proportion to U.S. policy. He proposes, in short, to bring American purposes and American methods--especially with regard to the role of the military--back into harmony with the nation's founding ideals.
Download or read book In the Shadows of the American Century written by Alfred W. McCoy and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning historian delivers a “brilliant and deeply informed” analysis of American power from the Spanish-American War to the Trump Administration (New York Journal of Books). In this sweeping and incisive history of US foreign relations, historian Alfred McCoy explores America’s rise as a world power from the 1890s through the Cold War, and its bid to extend its hegemony deep into the twenty-first century. Since American dominance reached its apex at the close of the Cold War, the nation has met new challenges that it is increasingly unequipped to handle. From the disastrous invasion of Iraq to the failure of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, fracturing military alliances, and the blundering nationalism of Donald Trump, McCoy traces US decline in the face of rising powers such as China. He also offers a critique of America’s attempt to maintain its position through cyberwar, covert intervention, client elites, psychological torture, and worldwide surveillance.
Download or read book Terminator Planet written by Nick Turse and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first history of drone warfare, written as it happened. From the opening missile salvo in the skies over Afghanistan in 2001 to a secret strike in the Philippines early this year, or a future in which drones dogfight off the coast of Africa, Terminator Planet takes you to the front lines of combat, Washington war rooms, and beyond. Drawing on several years of research -- including official documents, open-source intelligence, and interviews with military officers -- two of the foremost analysts specializing in drone war offer a sobering, factual account of robot warfare combined with critical analyses found nowhere else. Packed with rarely seen Pentagon photos, Terminator Planet provides a rich history of the last decade of drone warfare, a clear-eyed look at its present, and a far-reaching guide to its future. You used to have to watch science fiction movies to imagine where that future was headed, now you can read Terminator Planet -- and know.
Download or read book Who Rules the World written by Noam Chomsky and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Bestseller The world’s leading intellectual offers a probing examination of the waning American Century, the nature of U.S. policies post-9/11, and the perils of valuing power above democracy and human rights In an incisive, thorough analysis of the current international situation, Noam Chomsky argues that the United States, through its military-first policies and its unstinting devotion to maintaining a world-spanning empire, is both risking catastrophe and wrecking the global commons. Drawing on a wide range of examples, from the expanding drone assassination program to the threat of nuclear warfare, as well as the flashpoints of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Israel/Palestine, he offers unexpected and nuanced insights into the workings of imperial power on our increasingly chaotic planet. In the process, Chomsky provides a brilliant anatomy of just how U.S. elites have grown ever more insulated from any democratic constraints on their power. While the broader population is lulled into apathy—diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable—the corporations and the rich have increasingly been allowed to do as they please. Fierce, unsparing, and meticulously documented, Who Rules the World? delivers the indispensable understanding of the central conflicts and dangers of our time that we have come to expect from Chomsky.
Download or read book Splinterlands written by John Feffer and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2016-11-28 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dystopian trilogy opener, an elderly scientist reminisces, wondering why both the planet and his family fell apart. Part Field Notes from a Catastrophe, part 1984, part World War Z, this striking 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 three hundred-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. Praise for Splinterlands “In a chilling, thoughtful, and intuitive warning, foreign policy analyst Feffer . . . takes today’s woes of a politically fragmented, warming Earth and amplifies them into future catastrophe . . . . This novel is not for the emotionally squeamish or optimistic; Feffer’s confident recitation of world collapse is terrifyingly plausible, a short but encompassing look at world tragedy.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review “Feffer’s book is a wild ride through a bleak future, casting a harsh, thought-provoking light on that future’s modern-day roots.” —Foreword Reviews “A startling portrait of a post-apocalyptic tomorrow that is fast becoming a reality today. Fast-paced, yet strangely haunting, Feffer’s latest novel looks back from 2050 on the disintegration of world order told through the story of one broken family—and offers a disturbing vision of what might await us all if we don’t act quickly.” —Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times–bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed and Had I Known, and founder of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project
Download or read book Shadow Government written by Tom Engelhardt and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful survey of a militarized America building a surveillance structure unparalleled in history.
Download or read book Tomas Young s War written by Mark Wilkerson and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2016-05-14 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tomas Young’s War is the tragic yet life affirming story of a paralyzed Iraq War veteran who spent his last ten years battling heroically with his injuries, while courageously speaking against America's wars. Based on hours of interviews with Young and those close to him, the book puts the reader alongside Young as he struggles with life as a paralyzed veteran, suffering frustration and humiliation as he attempts to reenter society and resume as normal an existence as possible. It shows his fight to balance his precarious health with his drive to speak out for veterans care and against the war, and the impact his catastrophic injuries had on his family and his relationships. This emotional and powerful book sheds light on many crucial but often overlooked issues such as veterans’ care, public attitudes toward the disabled, medical marijuana, and the terminally ill. Tomas Young’s War shares everything, as unflinchingly honest as Tomas himself: the depression, the pain, the love, and laughter . . . the life of this man whose world was turned upside down by an Iraqi bullet more than ten years ago. Throughout, it serves as a powerful testament to the true cost of war.
Download or read book Washington Rules written by Andrew J. Bacevich and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of The Limits of Power critically examines the Washington consensus on national security and why it must change For the last half century, as administrations have come and gone, the fundamental assumptions about America's military policy have remained unchanged: American security requires the United States (and us alone) to maintain a permanent armed presence around the globe, to prepare our forces for military operations in far-flung regions, and to be ready to intervene anywhere at any time. In the Obama era, just as in the Bush years, these beliefs remain unquestioned gospel. In Washington Rules, a vivid, incisive analysis, Andrew J. Bacevich succinctly presents the origins of this consensus, forged at a moment when American power was at its height. He exposes the preconceptions, biases, and habits that underlie our pervasive faith in military might, especially the notion that overwhelming superiority will oblige others to accommodate America's needs and desires—whether for cheap oil, cheap credit, or cheap consumer goods. And he challenges the usefulness of our militarism as it has become both unaffordable and increasingly dangerous. Though our politicians deny it, American global might is faltering. This is the moment, Bacevich argues, to reconsider the principles which shape American policy in the world—to acknowledge that fixing Afghanistan should not take precedence over fixing Detroit. Replacing this Washington consensus is crucial to America's future, and may yet offer the key to the country's salvation.
Download or read book Breach of Trust written by Andrew J. Bacevich and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A blistering critique of the gulf between America's soldiers and the society that sends them off to war. As war has become normalized, armed conflict has become an "abstraction" and military service "something for other people to do." Bacevich takes stock of a nation with an abiding appetite for war waged at enormous expense by a standing army demonstrably unable to achieve victory.
Download or read book With Liberty and Justice for Some written by Glenn Greenwald and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-11-11 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From "the most important voice to have entered the political discourse in years" (Bill Moyers), a scathing critique of the two-tiered system of justice that has emerged in America From the nation's beginnings, the law was to be the great equalizer in American life, the guarantor of a common set of rules for all. But over the past four decades, the principle of equality before the law has been effectively abolished. Instead, a two-tiered system of justice ensures that the country's political and financial class is virtually immune from prosecution, licensed to act without restraint, while the politically powerless are imprisoned with greater ease and in greater numbers than in any other country in the world. Starting with Watergate, continuing on through the Iran-Contra scandal, and culminating with Obama's shielding of Bush-era officials from prosecution, Glenn Greenwald lays bare the mechanisms that have come to shield the elite from accountability. He shows how the media, both political parties, and the courts have abetted a process that has produced torture, war crimes, domestic spying, and financial fraud. Cogent, sharp, and urgent, this is a no-holds-barred indictment of a profoundly un-American system that sanctions immunity at the top and mercilessness for everyone else.
