World of Hurt

Trudeau, Merkel, Turnbull, Macron and Obama, along with the Clintons and the United Kingdom’s Tony Blair, represent the last desperate phase of corporate capitalism. Once their sunny faces are spurned, the face of hate rises to take their place. The con artists and thieves, no longer hiding behind the curtains, come out to pillage in the open, actively making war on the anemic democratic institutions, from the press to the courts, all of which long ago surrendered to corporate power. These protofascists rely for control on the array of undemocratic tools legalized by their “moderate” predecessors—wholesale surveillance, militarized police, the criminalizing of dissent, the primacy of “law and order” and the revoking of due process and other rights by judicial and legislative fiat.--CH

A proper essay to start your week.

Have you read any George Saunders, the American short-form satirist?  Read out of his 2006 collection, "In Persuasion Nation,"  over the weekend.  Talking puppets and vegetables, lives lived in perpetual commercials and reality TV programs, etc.  The usual stuff of American insolence and confusion rife for the plucking. Quite funny and worth a chance if you haven't gotten to him yet (or never planned to).


TS