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#oligarchy – @protoslacker on Tumblr
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@protoslacker / protoslacker.tumblr.com

I read posts online that interest, infuriate, stimulate, inspire, or otherwise move me. I'll share short snippets. Mastodon Shuffle
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I believe very strongly that, should Trump be elected, we’re going to see a vast change and our democracy will not be what it looks like today.

Christine Todd Whitman quoted in an article by Ed Pilkington and Kira Lerner in The Guardian. Washington insiders simulated a second Trump presidency. Can a role-play save democracy?

I'm sure that I am not alone in knowing people who are nice and really rather dear to me who are strong supporters of Trumpism. It's hard to talk becasue in some ways I'm in one bubble and they're in a different one. But from what I can gather they do not imagine such a "vast change" that even a dyed in the wool Republican like Whitman can see.

#politics#trump#international authoritarianism#oligarchy
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I, quite frankly, am tired. I find myself yet again in a conversation dominated by beneficiaries of a dirty system while the conscience, critique and force of collective action for alternatives are provided by women, and women of colour, predominantly.

Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber. Silicon Valley’s worldview is not just an ideology; it’s a personality disorder.

#neofeudalism#data#oligarchy#biting wit#maria farrell
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Singer, however, is not a typical partisan billionaire looking to lower tax rates and beat back the creep of socialism: Singer’s business model depends in part on lucrative fees accrued from public funds — funds that are often controlled by trustees appointed by Republican governors.

Matthew Cunningham-Cook in The Intercept. AS Paul Singer Donnated Millions to Repbulican Governors Association, Public Funds Flowed into His Hedge Funds

#republican party politics#fascism#pay to play#oligarchy
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Cash matters, but O’Keefe’s personal connections are where the depth and seamlessness of this coordination with the Republican Party become truly apparent. They also offer a glimpse into the vast network that has formed to suppress the vote this fall—a network years in the making, of which Project Veritas is but a humble node. Matthew Phelan and Jesse Hicks in The New Republic. Inside the Project Veritas Plan to Steal the Election    James O’Keefe’s group is part of a sprawling campaign to delegitimize mail-in balloting in the fall—a campaign being led by the White House.
Source: newrepublic.com
#donald trump#republican party#elections#oligarchy#democracy
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My friends, catastrophic climate change is not a problem for fascists — it is a solution. History’s most perfect, lethal, and efficient one means of genocide, ever, period. Who needs to build a camp or a gas chamber when the flood and hurricane will do the dirty work for free? Please don’t mistake this for conspiracism: climate change accords perfectly with the foundational fascist belief that only the strong should survive, and the weak — the dirty, the impure, the foul — should perish. That is why neo-fascists do not lift a finger to stop climate change — but do everything they can to in fact accelerate it, and prevent every effort to reverse or mitigate it.

Umair Haque in Eudaimonia at Medium. How Capitalism Torched the Planet by Imploding Into Fascism

Catastrophic Climate Change is not a Problem for Fascists — It is a Solution

#politics#fascism#mass extinction#global climate change#oligarchy
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A combination of Brexit, decades of neglect and political alienation in Labour’s heartlands, the new digital media ecology, and hints of frightening illiberalism could conspire to produce a form of democracy that looks more like Hungary or even Russia than the checks-and-balances system of liberal ideals. It’s not that democracy will end, but that it will be reduced to a set of spectacles that the government is ultimately in command of, which everyone realises are “fake” but that are sufficiently funny or soothing as to be tolerated.

William Davies in The Guardian. For Johnson’s Tories, the collapse of public trust isn’t a problem – it’s an opportunity

‘Get Brexit done’ isn’t a policy – it’s a mantra for anyone who believes the establishment is a stitch-up

#billionares#boris johnson#democracy#oligarchy
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Instead, we are being told something much more frightening: that Russiagate doesn’t end with Trump and his inner circle, that some members of Congress may be implicated, and that the Republican leadership therefore has a personal stake in preventing anyone beyond Manafort and a few other flunkies from being held accountable. Mueller and the FBI are giving everyone a glimpse at the scale of official corruption in Washington, and they’re warning us that they aren’t going to be able to rein it in all by themselves.

David Klion at The Nation. Russiagate Is Far Wider Than Trump and His Inner Circle

It isn’t just the story of a few corrupt officials, or even a corrupt president. It’s the story of a corrupt Republican Party.

#politics#oligarchy#donald trump#republicans
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Between them, the three billionaires account for over $40 million in pro-Trump political money. In the 2016 cycle, the three were also the source of 44% of individual contributions to the CLF and 47% of those received by the SLF, the biggest spending campaign finance vehicles for House and Senate Republicans. Trump and the GOP are deeply indebted to anti-Iran deal billionaires who aren’t afraid to advocate for policies that push the country closer to another war in the Middle East.

Eli Clifton at Lobelog, Follow The Money: Three Billionaires Paved Way For Trump’s Iran Deal Withdrawal

#donald trump#iran#american foreign policy#oligarchy#ban nuclear weapons#republicans
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Most importantly, the NYT sees the opinion page as a contest of ideas. And fundamentally, what Trumpist conservatives are advocating for are not ideas, but a demographic, a tribe.

David Roberts at Vox. The real problem with the New York Times op-ed page: it’s not honest about US conservatism It wants to challenge its readers, but not with the ugly truth.

#journalism#The New York Times#oligarchy#politics
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I don’t have the resources to bring a libel suit – I cannot out-lawyer a newspaper that has an ally in its founder and major contributor to the university, Peter Thiel. The troubling question is: who does?

David Palumbo-Liu in The Guardian. I'm a Stanford professor accused of being a terrorist. McCarthyism is back

I am used to receiving abusive messages and being publicly maligned. Now, however, attacks on me have reached troubling new heights

#oligarchy#higher education#facism#neoliberalism
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So let’s call the crisis what it is: the rise of privately held government. It’s happened in part because for decades Americans have been told, and too many got swept up in the fairy tale, that we have to turn over our fate to a force that works on its own without us: the market. It’s “magic,” Ronald Reagan assured us, is all we need. Once we buy that notion, we’re done for, for wealth accrues to wealth to wealth until we end up with a society that a 2005 Citigroup report famously dubbed a “Plutonomy,” in which the top 1 percent control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. And an America where inequality is now greater than in Pakistan or Egypt, according to the World Bank.

Frances Moore Lappé, Anthony Lappé in Huffington Post. Don’t Think of a Pig: Why ‘Corporate Greed’ Is the Wrong Frame

#oligarchy#democracy
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In November 1934, famed double Medal of Honor winner Marine Gen. Smedley Butler gave secret testimony before the McCormack-Dickstein committee – a precursor to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In it, Butler told of a plot headed by a group of wealthy businessmen (The American Liberty League) to establish a fascist dictatorship in the United States, complete with concentration camps for “Jews and other undesirables.”

Michael Donnelly in Counterpunch. Wall Street’s Failed 1934 Coup

#oligarchy#military#history#council on foreign relations
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If this man is elected president, we will be done with elections as we know them. We will enter a new age of winner-take-all politics, where ruthlessly ambitious tacticians assemble billionaire donors, cultivate an echo-chamber media, shove aside idealists, reimagine parties as reflections of themselves, and remake government as a vessel to be filled by the highest bidder. Perhaps we’ve already passed the tipping point, and Scott Walker’s candidacy simply confirms the crisis he exemplifies. Or perhaps it’s the fight against Walkerism that will finally awaken us.

John Nichols in The Nation. Get Ready for Scott Walker… and the Ruthless Politics of Walkerism For the presidential candidate from Wisconsin, politics is a win-at-any-cost competition for power.

#oligarchy#assholocracy#US politics#elections
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Now, let's suppose a financial oligarchy has seized control of the country, and, since it can't control its own appetites, is running it into the ground. Then it would make sense for it to have some sort of back-up plan for when the whole financial house of cards falls apart. Ideally, this plan would effectively put down any chance of revolt of the downtrodden masses, and allow the oligarchy to maintain security and hold onto its wealth. Peacetime is fine for as long as it can placate the populace with bread and circuses, but when a financial calamity causes the economy to crater and bread and circuses turn scarce, a handy fallback is war.

Dimitry Orlov at CLUBORLOV. Financial collapse leads to war

#corporations#oligarchy#war#militarism
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