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Mass Education and the Climate Crisis: Lessons from the Pandemic (Part 2)
Mass Education and the Climate Crisis: Lessons from the Pandemic (Part 2) This is part two of a five-part essay that highlights lessons from the coronavirus pandemic which could advance the fight for a Green New Deal. Part one (published on Resilience.org here) argues that money is not scarce. Part two argues that control of […]
“Toto, I Don’t Think We’re in Kansas Anymore”
“Toto, I Don’t Think We’re in Kansas Anymore” Recently, an American colleague commented to me, “We no longer live in a democracy but a dictatorship disguised as a democracy.” Is he correct? Well, a dictatorship may be defined as “a form of government in which absolute authority is exercised by a dictator.” The US today […]
Plutocracy Now!
Plutocracy Now! The United States today qualifies as a plutocracy – on a number of grounds, and it is having a profound impact on the media, education and think tanks–indeed on the whole of society, says Michael Brenner. Plutocracy literally means rule by the rich. “Rule” can have various shades of meaning: those who exercise […]
How To Beat A Manipulator
How To Beat A Manipulator I’ve been busy working through some of my own stuff lately, while marveling at how closely my personal journey has been mirrored in the larger world. I wrote out the following as a personal exercise while meditating on all the similarities between abusive personal relationships with manipulators and our relationship as […]
OMG This This This This!
OMG This This This This! That’s right, I’m writing an entire goddamn article about a single tweet made by another political commentator. It probably won’t even be a long article, because the excellent Tim Black said it all. Call me lazy, I don’t care, this is the most interesting thing I’ve seen all day: “Last night, […]
Do U.S. Oligarchs Exist? Not in Mainstream Media
Do U.S. Oligarchs Exist? Not in Mainstream Media We hear incessantly about Russian oligarchs. But do they also exist in the United States? You wouldn’t know it by watching cable news, says Jeff Cohen. TV news shows are good at getting viewers riled up. Day and night, I hear the anchors on CNN and MSNBC […]
The U.S. is Not a Democracy, It Never Was
The U.S. is Not a Democracy, It Never Was Photo by Daniel Huizinga | CC BY 2.0 One of the most steadfast beliefs regarding the United States is that it is a democracy. Whenever this conviction waivers slightly, it is almost always to point out detrimental exceptions to core American values or foundational principles. For […]
How Big Corporations Game Our Democracy Into Their Plutocracy
How Big Corporations Game Our Democracy Into Their Plutocracy Photo by Todd Blaisdell | CC BY 2.0 A major chapter in American history – rarely taught in our schools – is how ever larger corporations have moved to game, neutralize and undermine the people’s continual efforts to protect our touted democratic society. It is a […]
A Scam Too Far
A Scam Too Far One of the more politically frustrating aspects of the last decade in the West is the unwillingness of the powers-that-be to address the radical dysfunction that underlies Western political economy. As fact, microcosm and metaphor, the ‘scandal’ of Wells Fargo bank creating millions of fake accounts, charging its customers for the […]
Deep State: Inside Washington’s Shadowy Power Elite
Deep State: Inside Washington’s Shadowy Power Elite This “state within a state” hides “mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day,” says Lofgren, and yet the “Deep State does not consist of the entire government.” “Our plutocracy, whether the hedge fund managers in Greenwich, Connecticut, or the Internet moguls in […]
Limits of Liberal War Opposition
Limits of Liberal War Opposition Robert Reich’s website is full of proposals for how to oppose plutocracy, raise the minimum wage, reverse the trend toward greater inequality of wealth, etc. His focus on domestic economic policy is done in the traditional bizarre manner of U.S. liberals in which virtually no mention is ever made of the 54% […]
Verging on Plutocracy? Getting Real About the Unelected Dictatorship
Verging on Plutocracy? Getting Real About the Unelected Dictatorship In politics as in medicine, excessively mild remedies are typically based on overly placid diagnoses. Look, for example, at the highly esteemed Columbia University historian Eric Foner’s recent letter of congratulations and advice to Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in The Nation. As I have argued […]
Greece and Global Class War
Greece and Global Class War Then By 2008 the neoliberal project that had been propelled by bullshit, wishful thinking and copious quantities of bank money freed from any pretense that it could ever be repaid was coming unwound. The same ‘favor’ that American mortgage lenders had done communities of color and exurbs in the U.S. […]
Debt, War and Empire By Other Means
Debt, War and Empire By Other Means This video below may help one to understand some of the seemingly obtuse demands from the Troika with regard to Greece. The video is a bit dated, but the debt scheme it describes remains largely unchanged. The primary development has been the creation of an experiment called the European Union […]
Letter to a Plutocrat: Your Pipeline Made Me a Criminal
Letter to a Plutocrat: Your Pipeline Made Me a Criminal Dear Sir/Madam: I’m writing to you who control our government now — that is, the big corporations of the world. Let’s not pretend it is otherwise. Thanks to a system in which money buys elections, nearly all of our politicians are in your employ. Thanks for […]
