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ADDED 05/18/2018

The Economy Is Too Important to Leave to the Economists

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

Exclusive: how rightwing groups wield secret ‘toolkit’ to plot against US unions

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

Democracy’s Critics

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 […]

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The surprising continuation of history. Gasp!

Twenty-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

Sadopopulism: Timothy Snyder Speaks

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

History’s protracted end

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

Marx the Journalist

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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ADDED 05/05/2018

China’s social credit system fuels authoritarian regime

FROM 05/05/2018 | Asia Times

BY Sonika Gupta

China implemented its social credit system on a nationwide scale starting May 1. Social Credit, a harmless sounding phrase is the unholy marriage of big data with the proverbial ‘Big Brother’ under which, the state grades citizens as ‘trustworthy’ or not. Ostensibly the system is intended to address the trust deficit in the Chinese business […]

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ADDED 05/04/2018

The Comrade In Punjab – Lost, Irrelevant, Asleep, Even Bored!

FROM 03/05/2018 | Punjab Today

BY Kamjaat Singh

AT A TIME when Punjab is in the throes of a massive social upheaval and there is a complete disconnect between its farmers, farm labourers and those dependent on rural economy and others in towns and cities who are more cued into structures of political power, one would have thought that vast swathes of political […]

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ADDED 05/03/2018

New Eugene Debs Film Does the Socialist Proud

FROM 04/26/2018 | The Indypendent

BY Michael Hirsch

A charismatic and militant labor leader, five-time Socialist Party presidential candidate, class-war prisoner jailed by the ostensibly liberal Woodrow Wilson administration for opposing U.S entry into World War 1 and a fiery, moral force in a corrupted era — Eugene Victor Debs was among the greatest orators this nation ever produced, yet no recording of his […]

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ADDED 05/03/2018

Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World

FROM 05/03/2018 | Letters and Politics - KPFA

BY Mitch Jeserich

In this searing exposé, former Wall Street insider Nomi Prins shows how the 2007-2008 financial crisis turbo-boosted the influence of central bankers and triggered a massive shift in the world order. Central banks and international institutions like the IMF have overstepped their traditional mandates by directing the flow of epic sums of fabricated money without […]

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ADDED 05/02/2018

Man Picks Fight With Protest Sign and Loses

FROM 05/02/2018 | SPIN

BY Andy Cush

Yesterday was May Day, which meant that groups of left-leaning demonstrators took to the streets across the world in support of workers’ rights. In Seattle, according to local media, the May Day march attracted hundreds of people, including a faction of “Proud Boys,” the far-right men’s group that Gavin McInnes founded after he was triggered by a […]

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