PATRICK MARTIN—The destruction of jobs, living standards and social benefits for working people is constantly and invariably justified by Corporate America and the capitalist politicians of the Democratic and Republican parties with the declaration that “there is no money.” This mantra is repeated even as the fortunes of the super-rich swell to previously unthinkable dimensions. What it really means is “there is no money for you, because we want it all.” The plutocrats bear the same relationship to modern society as a cancerous tumor does to the human body.
Category:
PLUTOCRATS
PAUL STREET—The openly plutocratic and even now oligarchic domination of U.S. politics by the upper class (explicitly validated in the Supreme Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeoand 2010 Citizens United decisions) is no small part of why the Democrats function as a dismal, dollar-drenched corporate-centrist Inauthentic Opposition in the face of the Republicans’ horrifying drift down the white-nationalist road to a chilling Amerikaner fascism. Meanwhile, the Republican Party’s control of all three branches of the federal government (related to their domination of state governments) makes an abject mockery of the Founders’ claim to have pre-empted tyrannical government with a system of institutional “checks and balances.”
ABDRE VLTCHEK—I am writing this essay in the city of Puebla, in Mexico. You know, the people of Mexico just recently voted, and overwhelmingly, they elected the left-wing Presidential candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. For three weeks I travelled all around the country. I spoke to hundreds of people. Most of them were hopeful; most of them were instinctively longing for socialism. Usually, they do not call it ‘socialism’, because for decades they were told not to use this word in any positive context, but what they describe when they dream, is clearly a form of socialism, nevertheless. But how can they define the position of their country in the world, or even their own position inside their country? You turn on the television set, and all you see is CNN in Spanish (‘Mexican edition’), or the extreme right-wing FOX, or some corporate-owned local TV station. Almost all international news in Mexican newspapers is taken from the Western press agencies. Can socialism be built like this, based on the Western indoctrination, disinformation system?
P. GREANVILLE—Stephen Colbert and the recently dethroned Les Moonves typify the hypocrisy of hardcore centrist liberals. These are the folks that talk incessantly of morality, doing the right thing, are wedded to identity politics and racialism, but when push comes to shove, money and power always talk louder. Colbert made his reputation as a smirking, insolent subsidiary of Jon Stewart, cultivating the image of a rebel, speaking truth to power, yada yada. Later, as inheritor to the uber profitable Late Night Show franchise once presided by Johnny Carson, the man instantly became an apologetic CIA-asskissing, Democrat Russiagater and fervent neoliberal.
America’s new aristocracy lives in an accountability-free zone
20 minutes read
DAVID SIROTA—Since Skilling’s conviction 12 years ago, our society has been fundamentally altered by a powerful political movement whose goal is not merely another court seat, tax cut or election victory. This movement’s objective is far more revolutionary: the creation of an accountability-free zone for an ennobled aristocracy, even as the rest of the population is treated to law-and-order rhetoric and painfully punitive policy.
