Dennis Bernstein: We are honored to have Daniel Ellsberg here, the man who blew the whistle on the corrupt and illegal Vietnam War and has been blowing whistles and inspiring others ever since. Daniel Ellsberg gained notoriety in the early 1970s by leaking the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department's top-secret history...
Sending Ukraine a $300 million shipment of powerful M-777 howitzers is a lobbying triumph for BAE Systems, one of the many war industry corporations fattening on the death and destruction of the Ukraine war On June 15, the Biden administration announced that it was providing an additional $1 billion...
While war corporations, or so-called "defense contractors," make billions in profits, Wall Street is the ultimate beneficiary of today’s nonstop wars. The prosaic nature of war profiteering—far from the work of a shadowy cabal—is precisely why the collusion is so destructive and should be outlawed. The U.S. ruling class deploys...
In early January 2009, a thirteen-year-old girl named Almaza Samouni watched in horror as 30 members of her family were killed while her home in Gaza was shelled by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during Operation Cast Lead. Among the victims was her brother, who was struck by a...
The former Georgia governor presided over the largest peacetime increase in the military budget in U.S. history and inspired the growth of Islamic terrorism by arming the Afghan mujahadin in order to provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The media predictably sugarcoated Jimmy Carter’s record following his passing on...
This Military Paradox Could Very Well Lead to Nuclear Armageddon In 1949 the U.S. War Department changed its name. Branches of the armed forces were then administered under a new name: the Department of Defense. This newly defined mandate of defending the United States should have been a relatively easy and inexpensive task. Geography...
Ideally, Warren’s report would precipitate a much larger congressional investigation of the military-industrial complex modeled after the 1934 Nye Committee hearings. At the end of April, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Chair of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, released an investigative report: “Pentagon Alchemy: How Defense Officials Pass Through...
Arms Industry and U.S. Government Have Now Practically Merged The United States’s imperial foreign policy has been evident since day one, but especially starting with the Gilded Age and the arrogant doctrine of Manifest Destiny of the mid-19th century. The imperial “cause” continued through the decades leading up to today.  And...
The village of Endicott, New York, is where the computer age began. International Business Machines, or IBM, has roots in Endicott back to 1916 as a time clock company. It later became the acclaimed leader in the design and building of business machines and, in 1981, introduced to the...
The military’s deep penetration into all aspects of American life has hampered the development of a strong anti-war movement—at a time when it is desperately needed. Tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets across the U.S. in the last few years to decry police brutality, to oppose...