ADDED 05/30/2018
FROM | Letters and Politics - KPFA
BY Mitch Jeserich
Virtually no part of the modern United States—the economy, education, constitutional law, religious institutions, sports, literature, economics, even protest movements—can be understood without first understanding the slavery and dispossession that laid its foundation. Historian Gerald Horne digs deeply into Europe’s colonization of Africa and the New World, when, from Columbus’s arrival until the Civil War, some 13 […]
see sourceADDED 05/30/2018
FROM | Truthdig
BY Chris Hedges
In a recent episode of RT’s “On Contact,” Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges discusses Israeli war crimes committed against the people of Gaza with Max Blumenthal, director and writer of the documentary “Killing Gaza,” and Dan Cohen, the film’s cinematographer and editor. Hedges says, “Israel’s policy of demographic engineering means that it must, in order to retain […]
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ADDED 05/24/2018
FROM 05/24/2018 | Inquisitr
BY Damir Mujezinovic
Religious individuals are, on average, less humble about their intellectual prowess than non-religious individuals, and it is right-wing authoritarianism that accounts for most of the correlation between religiosity and lack of intellectual humility, according to a Pepperdine University study to be published in the August edition of the peer-reviewed journal Personality and Individual Differences. The Foundation for Critical […]
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ADDED 05/22/2018
FROM 05/22/2018 | The Guardian
BY Arwa Mahdawi
The Sunday Times profiled members of Generation Identity with a picture that made them look like members of a boyband. This dangerous trend of humanising extremists must stop. ascism is all the rage these days. Hate is haute, white nationalism is the new black and neo-nazism never looked so good. So the Sunday Times – which recently […]
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ADDED 05/19/2018
FROM 05/19/2018 | Big Think
BY Timothy Snyder
Some ideas lie dormant for decades, and such is the case with Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin, whose anti-communist stance got him—along with about 160 other intellectuals—expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922 aboard the ‘philosopher’s ship’. So who was Ilyin, and why has Russia’s President Vladimir Putin breathed new life into his writings more than 60 […]
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ADDED 05/18/2018
FROM 05/18/2018 | Truthdig
BY Elaine Margolin
“Talking to My Daughter About the Economy, Or, How Capitalism Works—And How It Fails” A book by Yanis Varoufakis. Translated from the Greek by Jacob Moe and Yanis Varoufakis Over the course of several books, Yanis Varoufakis has attempted to explain his progression from a “self-described erratic Marxist” to someone who now places his faith […]
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ADDED 05/15/2018
FROM 05/14/2018 | The Guardian
BY Ed Pilkington
Internal documents obtained by the Guardian reveal a nationwide drive to persuade union members to quit and stop paying dues. Rightwing activists are launching a nationwide drive to persuade public-sector trade union members to tear up their membership cards and stop paying dues, posing a direct threat to the progressive movement in America. Documents obtained […]
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ADDED 05/15/2018
FROM 06/26/2017 | Jacobin
BY COLIN GORDON
The malevolent incompetence of the Trump White House packs a certain entertainment value, but it is also a distraction; a bumbling misdirection in a long confidence game. At stake, as historian Nancy MacLean underscores in her new book, , is not just political power, not just the final dismantling of the New Deal order, but the […]
see sourceTwenty-eight years ago some goofball named Francis Fukuyama mistook the ever-decaying Soviet Union’s imminent demise as proof that St. Ronnie’s shining city on a hill would be the final, and finest, expression of humanity’s potential.
With all the glee they could muster, the paid propagandists at the Heritage Foundation AND Brookings Institution rallied together to move Fukuyama’s proclamation of the End of History from theory to fact.
In the intervening period, humanity did not build a liberal capitalist utopia. Instead, it immediately began devolving into a slave population in the service of a minuscule, corrupt, kleptocratic, global oligarchy. The erosion of actual self-determination is masked by the fetishization of low prices and the celebration of conspicuous wealth. The underlying theft of the 20th-century public commonwealth begun under Thatcher and Reagan has metastasized into a global race to monetize the essentials of human life itself.
Fukuyama’s back making the case that his original thesis is still valid. History is over and unfettered markets are the only way that humanity will allow humans to fulfill their potential. Timothy Snyder disagrees and explains the current historical phase as Sadopopulism – which sure sounds a lot like the preparations for a return of monarchical empires, this time with unregulated corporations wearing the warring crowns.
ADDED 05/10/2018
FROM | Youtube
BY Timothy Snyder
Sadopopulism: how America can be governed without policy and with pain. A guide to the logic of the Senate tax plan. Timothy Snyder is a historian at Yale University, specializing in eastern Europe, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. His books have received widespread acclaim. His most recent book, “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” […]
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ADDED 05/09/2018
FROM 05/09/2018 | IPS Journal
BY Francis Fukuyama
American political scientist Francis Fukuyama became an overnight star when, in a 1989 magazine article, he claimed that liberal capitalist democracy had not just triumphed over communism, but marked the last ideological stage in human history. Speaking to Nikolaos Gavalakis, Fukuyama explains why he believes his broad theory still holds despite the ascendency of populist parties […]
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ADDED 05/07/2018
FROM 05/05/2018 | Jacobin Magazine
BY James Ledbetter
Marx is often remembered as a political economist or philosopher. But he made his mark as a journalist. Political economist. Philosopher. Journalist? Two hundred years after his birth, Marx is remembered as many things — but not often as a member of the Fourth Estate.James Ledbetter sees that as a mistake. The editor of a […]
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