Viewing State Currency

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 05/09/2018

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 05/06/2018

Why the fearful, the vulnerable and the confused are attracted to ‘illiberal’ politics?

FROM 05/06/2018 | The Arab Weekly

BY Oussama Romdhani

Jihadist terrorism, in particular, can lower citizens’ expectations in Western democracies and make all kinds of concessions palatable. While hopeful voters headed to the ballot boxes in a number of Arab countries, politicians and pundits around the world, especially in the West, voiced concern that liberal democratic ideals are under assault. Alluding to the growing […]

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ADDED 05/05/2018

Top Republican Plans to Use Fossil Fuels to Make Puerto Rico “the Energy Hub of the Entire Caribbean”

FROM 05/05/2018 | The Intercept

BY Kate Aronoff

PUERTO RICO COULD become “the energy hub of the entire Caribbean area” under a vision laid out by Rob Bishop, the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, who visited the island. Bishop is not thinking of wind or solar. In a press conference held in San Juan on Friday, with Puerto Rican Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González-Colón […]

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ADDED 05/04/2018

Chile: A Return to ‘Guardian Democracy’?

FROM 04/17/2018 | NACLA.org

BY J. Patrice McSherry

How Sebastián Piñera’s right-wing government is undermining democratic institutions  Sebastián Piñera, a conservative billionaire, assumed the presidency of Chile for the second time on March 11 after an election in which abstention was the biggest winner. In only a few weeks he and right-wing allies engineered changes to key reforms enacted by previous socialist president […]

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ADDED 05/03/2018

Media Silent On Brasil’s Growing Public Debt Under Temer

FROM 05/03/2018 | Brasil Wire

BY Marcio Pochmann

During the lead up to the 2016 Coup, a series of alarmist articles in the Brazilian and international media warned of Brazil’s spiraling public debt. In January, 2016, for example, the Economist wrote, “public debt is worryingly large for a middle-income country and rising fast. Because of high interest rates, the cost of servicing it is a […]

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ADDED 04/06/2018

Have Christian nationalists staged a “soft coup,” with Trump as their figurehead?

FROM 04/05/2018 | Salon

BY Chauncey Devega

Scholar Andrew Whitehead: Right-wing evangelicals think Trump can make “their vision of a Christian nation” real y the standards of any of the world’s major religions Donald Trump is an ungodly person, an enthusiastic and unrepentant sinner who revels in his misdeeds. Trump is a serial liar and apparent narcissist. He is a greedy, crude […]

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ADDED 04/04/2018

The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism

FROM 04/01/2018 | Monthly Review

BY Gerald Horne

The years between 1603 and 1714 were perhaps the most decisive in English history. At the onset of the seventeenth century, the sceptered isle was a second-class power, but the Great Britain that emerged by the beginning of the eighteenth century was, in many ways, the planet’s reigning superpower.1 It then passed the baton to its […]

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