Articles by Jon Schwarz
We found 25 results.
“The Spoils of War”: How Profits Rather Than Empire Define Success for the Pentagon
Jon Schwarz | The Intercept - TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 Nov 2021
27 Oct 2021 – Andrew Cockburn’s new book is an incredible compendium of avarice and folly. “War-fighting efficiency has a low priority,” he writes, “by comparison with considerations of personal and internal bureaucracies. … The military are generally not interested in war, save as a means to budget enhancement.”
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$10,000 Invested in Defense Stocks When Afghanistan War Began Now Worth almost $100,000
Jon Schwarz | The Intercept - TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 Aug 2021
16 Aug 2021 – Was the Afghanistan War a failure? Not for the top five defense contractors and their shareholders.
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Meet NATO, the Dangerous “Defensive” Alliance Trying to Run the World
Jon Schwarz | The Intercept - TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Jun 2021
15 Jun 2021 – Yesterday’s summit showed how the “North Atlantic” Treaty Organization has decided it has an extremely expansive global mission.
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Why Daniel Ellsberg Wants the U.S. to Prosecute Him under the Espionage Act
Jon Schwarz | The Intercept - TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Jun 2021
In an exclusive interview, Ellsberg explains why he hopes the courts take on the law used to crack down on whistleblowers.
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Wall Street’s Cooked Books Fueled the Financial Crisis in 2008–It’s Happening Again
Jon Schwarz and Ryan Grim | The Intercept - TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Apr 2021
20 Apr 2021 – This time, the issue is not a bubble in the housing market but rather apparent widespread inflation of the value of commercial businesses, on which loans are based.
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Why the Stock Market Is Healthy as Americans Die from Coronavirus
Jon Schwarz | The Intercept - TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Apr 2020
12 Apr 2020 – This past week the S&P 500 went up 301 points, or 12 percent, its best performance in 46 years. During the same week, the reported number of Americans killed by Covid-19 went up 11,499, or 161 percent, the coronavirus’s best performance ever. So this seems like a good time to reevaluate our treasured belief that a rising stock market reflects general human flourishing. Consider a few more events that happened this week around the same time as this excited tweet from Donald Trump, who somehow is the president of the United States:
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The Best Movie Ever Made about the Truth behind the Iraq War Is “Official Secrets”
Jon Schwarz – The Intercept,
9 Sep 2019
“Official Secrets,” which opened Friday [30 Aug] in New York and Los Angeles, is the best movie ever made about how the Iraq War happened. It’s startlingly accurate, and because of that, it’s equally inspiring, demoralizing, hopeful, and enraging. Please go see it.
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The World’s Leaders Are Terrible – Declaration of Independence from All of Them
Jon Schwarz and Michael Gerber – The Intercept,
8 Jul 2019
4 Jul 2019 – We, therefore, the Sane People of this Planet, who don’t think that anybody will (or should) remember any of us in 500 years, do solemnly publish and declare that all the world’s Leaders are hereby relieved of their positions; that our feeling is, enough already with the Jihads and Crusades and Glorious Struggles and Finest Hours; that we believe we will be much better off without Leaders,…
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Elliott Abrams, Trump’s Pick to Bring “Democracy” to Venezuela, Has Spent His Life Crushing Democracy
Jon Schwarz – The Intercept,
4 Feb 2019
30 Jan 2019 – The choice of Abrams sends a clear message: The Trump administration intends to brutalize Venezuela, while proclaiming our love for human rights.
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Tax Havens and Other Dirty Tricks Let U.S. Corporations Steal $180 Billion from the Rest of the World Every Year
Jon Schwarz – The Intercept,
29 Oct 2018
26 Oct 2018 – A new study shows that the corporate use of tax havens is central to how the U.S. functions and wields its power around the world.
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No One Will Be Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Oslo Accords
Jon Schwarz and Alice Speri – The Intercept,
17 Sep 2018
On September 13, 1993, Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords on the lawn of the White House. Israel’s occupation has only become more entrenched — thanks in part to the cooperation of the Palestinian leadership installed by the Oslo Accords.
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Seymour Hersh’s New Memoir Is a Fascinating, Flabbergasting Masterpiece
Jon Schwarz – The Intercept,
11 Jun 2018
2 Jun 2018 – “Reporter” is one of the most compelling, thrilling, and significant books ever written about American journalism.
→ read full articleUndercover in North Korea: “All Paths Lead to Catastrophe”
Jon Schwarz – The Intercept,
11 Sep 2017
4 Sep 2017 – Suki Kim spent much of 2011 teaching English to children of North Korea’s elite at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology and had visited NK several times before. Incredibly, Kim’s North Korean minders never realized that she was there undercover to engage in some of history’s riskiest investigative journalism. Kim kept notes and documents on hidden USB sticks and her camera’s SIM card.
→ read full articleTrump Intel Chief: North Korea Learned from Libya War to “Never” Give Up Nukes
Jon Schwarz – The Intercept,
31 Jul 2017
Dan Coats did something truly shocking at the Aspen Security Forum: He told the truth about the effects of U.S. foreign policy.
→ read full articleWhy Do So Many Americans Fear Muslims? Decades of Denial about America’s Role in the World
Jon Schwarz – The Intercept,
20 Feb 2017
What surprises me about the poll results isn’t that lots of Americans like the ban — but that so many Americans don’t. Regular people have lives to lead and can’t investigate complicated issues in detail. Instead they usually take their cues from leaders they trust. And given what politicians across U.S. political spectrum say about terrorism, Trump’s executive order makes perfect sense. There are literally no national-level American politicians telling a story that would help ordinary people understand why Trump’s goals are both horrendously counterproductive and morally vile.
→ read full articleHere’s a Way to Shut Down Panama Papers-Style Tax Havens — If We Wanted To
Jon Schwarz – The Intercept,
18 Apr 2016
Tax havens serve two functions: tax evasion, which involves hiding assets and is illegal, and tax avoidance, which is done by multinational corporations in the open and is legal (since the same corporations have conveniently made sure the laws work that way.). Eliminating them requires different strategies. It is not technically difficult to crush the tax haven industry. The challenge would be mustering the political will.
→ read full articleNetanyahu Uses Same Fill-in-the-Blanks Response to Criticism as ISIS and Al Qaeda
Jon Schwarz – The Intercept,
4 Apr 2016
All perpetrators of extreme political brutality tend to react to criticism from their own side in exactly the same way, just with different nouns.
→ read full article“Where to Invade Next” Is the Most Subversive Movie Michael Moore Has Ever Made
Jon Schwarz – The Intercept,
15 Feb 2016
On its surface, Where to Invade Next seems to be a cheerful travelogue as Moore enjoys an extended vacation, “invading” a passel of European countries plus Tunisia to steal their best ideas and bring them back home to America.
→ read full articleDrones, IBM, And the Big Data of Death
Jon Schwarz – The Intercept,
26 Oct 2015
“There are no nations, there are no peoples … there is no America, there is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.” IBM received over $1.34 billion in federal contracts in fiscal year 2014, an increase of $108 million over FY 2013.
→ read full articleA Short History of U.S. Bombing of Civilian Facilities
Jon Schwarz – The Intercept,
12 Oct 2015
7 Oct 2015 – On October 3, a U.S. AC-130 gunship attacked a hospital run by Médecins Sans Frontières in Kunduz, Afghanistan, partially destroying it. Below is a sampling of such incidents since the 1991 Gulf War.
→ read full articleAn “Enormous Opportunity”: A Short, Awful 9/11 Quiz
Jon Schwarz – The Intercept,
14 Sep 2015
For regular people, terrorism and wars are tragedies. For our leaders — in every country — they’re something very different.
→ read full articleAppellate Court Judges Cite “1984” to Expand Corporate First Amendment Rights
Jon Schwarz – The Intercept,
24 Aug 2015
Telling companies they have to disclose if they are financing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is too big a step toward totalitarianism, the D.C. Circuit rules.
→ read full article‘Politico’ Gives CIA’s Worst WMD Liar a Platform to Slam Seymour Hersh
Jon Schwarz – The Intercept,
18 May 2015
What’s neither appropriate nor useful is to give former government officials the chance to attack Hersh’s story without giving readers the context of their track record of veracity.
→ read full articleAP: Americans Strongly Support Different, Imaginary Drone Program
Dan Froomkin and Jon Schwarz – The Intercept,
4 May 2015
1 May 2015 – The headline on the Associated Press story is unambiguous: “AP Poll: 60 percent of Americans approve of drone strikes on terrorists.” Strangely enough, if you get to the story’s ninth paragraph, you learn that the AP’s own reporters have a pretty good hunch that the previous eight paragraphs were bullshit.
→ read full articleSeven Things You Didn’t Know the U.S. and Its Allies Did to Iran
Jon Schwarz – The Intercept,
13 Apr 2015
A proposed nuclear deal is the first time in 35 years that U.S.-Iranian relations aren’t being driven by fear.
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