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 […]
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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 […]
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ADDED 03/16/2018
FROM 03/14/2018 | Medium
BY Robert Greenfield IV
Maduro’s new Petro token is consolidating power and crowdfunding oppression. “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” ― Simone Weil Last year, token sales raised approximately $5.6 billion. The crypto-method of crowdfunding has opened the floodgates to decentralized funding, which […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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ADDED 03/06/2018
FROM | Ha'aretz
BY Uri Misgav
The Netanyahu regime is a populist, Peronist right. It’s doubtful it can even be called fascist; fascism is an ideology with core values that can be challenged. How do they look at themselves in the mirror, the new right-wingers? The prime minister is suspected of receiving a million shekels’ worth of “gifts” and of bribery […]
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ADDED 03/05/2018
FROM | NPR
BY Shankar Vedantam
Several years ago, sociologist Brooke Harrington decided to explore the secret lives of billionaires. As she told us in this favorite episode from 2016, what she found shocked her.
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ADDED 03/05/2018
FROM 02/28/2018 | Jacobin
BY MIYA TOKUMITSU
A hundred years ago, the United States adopted daylight savings time in order to extract more profit from labor. How would we organize time differently if we were free from the demands of capitalism? Forget Karl Marx’s old saw about hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, and criticizing after dinner — for many, […]
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ADDED 03/05/2018
FROM | The Guardian
BY Gavin Evans
Its defenders claim to be standing up for uncomfortable truths, but race science is still as bogus as ever. One of the strangest ironies of our time is that a body of thoroughly debunked “science” is being revived by people who claim to be defending truth against a rising tide of ignorance. The idea that […]
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