Viewing Oligarchy

ADDED 02/09/2019

Selfishness Is Killing Liberalism

FROM 02/19/2018 | The Atlantic

BY JAMES TRAUB

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky […]

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ADDED 02/09/2019

Meet Fellow Worker Gritty, the Anti-Fascist Mascot

FROM 02/08/2019 | Truthout

BY Drew Hallowell

By now you have probably heard about Gritty, the mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team who has become nothing less than a phenomenon since debuting last September. Gritty has quickly become an NHL all-star and symbol of everything Philly, but there is much more to the orange, wide-eyed monster. Look no further than a resolution introduced by members […]

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ADDED 02/04/2019

Nativist Nationalism and the Specter of Fascism in Italy

FROM 02/04/2019 | EuropeNow

BY EuropeNow

Lombard League, Northern League, League: in recent years the regionalist formation, which had emerged in Lombardy in the 1980s as the vocal representative of autonomist and anti-southern sentiment in the rich northern region, has converted into a nativist Italian nationalist party and solidified an alliance with Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France (recently renamed […]

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ADDED 01/31/2019

The World to Come

FROM 01/28/2019 | Truthdig

BY Chris Hedges

The ruling elites are painfully aware that the foundations of American power are rotting. The outsourcing of manufacturing in the United States and the plunging of over half the population into poverty will, they know, not be reversed. The self-destructive government shutdown has been only one of numerous assaults on the efficiency of the administrative […]

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ADDED 01/31/2019

U.S. Far Right Figures Flew to Russia to Party with Oligarchs and Fascists

FROM 01/30/2019 | Hill Reporter

BY Ollie Ward

A cache of hacked emails revealed that a senior figure in the Bradley Foundation, a prominent financier of right-wing groups in the US, attended a gala alongside Russian oligarchs and officials shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. The Daily Beast reported that a new leak site called Distributed Denial of Secrets hacked the […]

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ADDED 01/31/2019

Global alt-right exploiting SA’s divisions and history

FROM 01/28/2019 | Daily Maverick

BY Marianne Thamm

A steady stream of transnational right-wing populists and nationalists has trekked to South Africa in recent years hoping to leverage the country’s fraught racial history for their own global aims. They have found local friends who appear willing to allow these grifters to exploit South Africa’s past and its current high rate of crime and […]

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ADDED 01/28/2019

Netanyahu Forms Alliances with Far-Right Authoritarian Leaders

FROM 01/26/2019 | Real News Network

BY Marc Steiner

Shir Hever says Netanyahu is abusing his image as a protector of the Jewish people, and cuts deals with far-right and anti-Semitic heads of state, absolving them of their racism towards Jews in exchange for their superficial support for the State of Israel. All this, to win the upcoming Israeli elections. MARC STEINER: Welcome to The […]

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ADDED 01/24/2019

Americans Have Lost Faith In Their Ability To Move From Poverty To Riches

FROM 01/21/2019 | HuffPost

BY Jo Confino

People in the United States and other developed countries are losing faith in the capitalist system to improve their lives, according to a new global poll commissioned by the World Economic Forum, published on the eve of its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Almost two-thirds of U.S. respondents said it was no longer commonplace for […]

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ADDED 01/23/2019

Confronting the Culture of Death

FROM 01/21/2019 | Truthdig

BY Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges, an ordained Presbyterian minister, gave this sermon Jan. 20 at Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria, British Columbia, in Canada. The issue before us is death. Not only our individual death, which is more imminent for some of us this morning than others, but our collective death. We have begun the sixth great mass extinction, […]

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ADDED 01/17/2019

The self is capital: Seeing life within, and beyond, the neoliberal frame.

FROM 03/10/2018 | This is Hell!

BY Julie Wilson

People acquiesce to neoliberalism, but they’re completely disaffected from it. They don’t like it, they’re disciplined into it by debt, and by the norms of competition and the kind of social Darwinism that it promotes – but at the same time, that disaffective consent is a tenuous thing to build a society on. So the […]

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ADDED 01/16/2019

When the Nazis were beaten, ‘never again’ was the cry. But here we are again

FROM 01/15/2019 | iNews

BY Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Among the agitating gilets jaunes in Paris were known anti-Semites. One banner described President Emmanuel Macron as a “whore of the Jews”. Others abused the Jewish billionaires, the Rothschilds. Ukip now has official links with those with similar views. Among them is Paul Joseph Watson, an editor of Infowars, a website that promulgates Jewish conspiracy theories. […]

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ADDED 01/14/2019

Liberal laws, illiberal uses

FROM 01/13/2019 | The Shift

BY Ranier Fsadni

A lot has been said about the judge, Giovanni Grixti, who has ruled that information obtained from the Panama Papers is inadmissable in court. The commentary has focused on the implications for cases of money laundering. But there is a broader political aspect. The principle that evidence illegally obtained cannot be used in courts has a liberal […]

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