ADDED 04/03/2018
FROM 03/15/2018 | Al Jazeera
BY Jonathan Cook
Nazareth, Israel – After seven years of delays, the Israeli governing parties have agreed the final terms of controversial new legislation that would define Israel exclusively as “the nation-state of the Jewish people”. The bill is now expected to be fast-tracked through the Israeli parliament and on to the statute books in the coming weeks. Approval by […]
see source
ADDED 03/29/2018
FROM 03/28/2018 | Letters and Politics - KPFA
BY
Today we are in conversation with professor Christian Fuchs to examine the right-wing authoritarian use of social media and the capitalist models that allow growing such issues as the one concerning Cambridge Analitica. Christian Fuchs is a professor of social media at the University of Westminster, Director of the Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies & Communication and Media Research Institute, United Kingdom. […]
see source
ADDED 03/28/2018
FROM 03/26/2018 | Pacific Standard
BY Tom Jacobs
Can It Happen Here?, a new collection of essays that ask whether America is susceptible to creeping authoritarianism, includes a startling assertion by psychologists Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt. “Western liberal democracies,” they write, “have now exceeded many people’s capacity to tolerate them.” Their analysis of a survey conducted at the end of 2016 found “about a third of white responders across […]
see source
ADDED 03/28/2018
FROM 03/28/2018 | Slate
BY Slate
Anand Giridharadas on why many rich people do harm—even when they think they’re doing good. Yascha Mounk discusses the limits of philanthropy, how the hopey-changey narrative of the affluent cloaks the power they exercise, and how they can do better with author of the forthcoming book Winners Take All and former New York Times and current NBC […]
see source
ADDED 03/23/2018
FROM 03/22/2018 | American Prospect
BY Paul Starr
This article will appear in the Spring 2018 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here. “It is now clear that the most frightening threats to ordinary politics in the United States are empty or easily contained. … The sky is not falling and no lights are flashing red.” So wrote two distinguished historians, Samuel Moyn and David Priestland, in […]
see source
ADDED 03/22/2018
FROM 03/20/2018 | AlterNet
BY Mehreen Kasana
The practice of governments and security firms conducting wide-scale exploitation of major disasters, natural and otherwise, is nothing new. Last week, the Intercept reported on TigerSwan, a mercenary security firm that follows a similar disaster-capitalist model and has attacked the No Dakota Access Pipeline (NoDAPL) movement since 2016, at least. But that’s not all: TigerSwan has also been preying […]
see source
ADDED 03/22/2018
FROM 03/20/2018 | Foreign Policy in Focus
BY Conn Hallinan
More than a quarter of a century ago, much of the European center-left made a course change, edging away from its working class base, accommodating itself to the globalization of capital, and handing over the post-World War II social contract to private industry. Whether it was the “New Labor” of Tony Blair in Britain or Gerhard […]
see source
ADDED 03/08/2018
FROM 03/08/2018 | Slate
BY YASCHA MOUNK
He is following the same playbook as other authoritarian populists around the world. He’s just bad at it—so far. A week after the horrific shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead and 14 injured, Donald Trump publicly scolded members of his own party: “They have great power over you […]
see sourceADDED 03/08/2018
FROM 03/08/2018 | Budapest Beacon
BY Staff
“If you don’t have a free and pluralistic press that is conveying messages on different sides of issues and which is actively critical of the government and its policies, then democracy starts to be meaningless. If people are just fed a steady diet of pro-government propaganda by media sources either controlled by the government or […]
see source
ADDED 03/08/2018
FROM | ABC News
BY Jim Gomez, Associated Press
The Philippines‘ embattled Supreme Court chief justice urged Filipinos on Wednesday to stand up against authoritarianism and threats to human rights, in an indirect criticism of the country’s volatile leader, who has long called for her removal. Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno is facing two ouster attempts, including by President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration, whose legal counsel asked […]
see source
ADDED 03/08/2018
FROM | The Economist
BY Bagehot
British institutions may not withstand the authoritarian-populist wave. IN HIS dystopian novel of 1935, “It Can’t Happen Here”, Sinclair Lewis described the rise of an American Caesar, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip. Buzz easily defeats Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency by promising to make America great again. He then sets about destroying the country’s system of checks […]
see source
ADDED 03/08/2018
FROM 03/08/2018 | Open Democracy
BY Bilge Yabanci
Not a single International Women’s Day or Mother’s Day can pass by without reasserting women’s main duty as child-bearers and men’s responsibility to ‘protect’ and ‘rekindle’ fragile mothers. Last January, shortly after Turkey’s military operation started in Afrin, I was at a women’s event held by a pro-government civil society organisation in a working-class suburban […]
see source