COMMENT
Nationalists and loyalists riot against one another at the Peace Wall interface gates which divide the two communities on April 7, 2021 WHO knew that the “sunlit uplands” would smell of petrol and burnt tyres? Almost everyone. The fury among Northern Ireland Protestants is unimaginable but it has nowhere to go other than a regressive descent into the violence of the past. As a full week of violence stumbles on to the mainland news channels Boris’s Brexit Britain is in perilous, and much predicted decline. As the Prime Minister sits in a cafe in Cornwall for a photoshoot sipping a cappuccino and looking affable police used water cannon for the first time in six years in Belfast; armoured Land Rovers and officers with helmets and shields were deployed on Thursday on the road that separates the nationalist Springfield Road from the loyalist Shankill Road.
One of the useful functions of the latter book, in particular, is that it brings force and clarity to one’s prior knowledge of the dangers of right-wing libertarianism, or more generally anti-government and pro-“free market” thinking. In fact, this sort of thinking is an utter catastrophe that threatens to destroy everything beautiful in the world. I know that sounds like an absurd exaggeration, but it’s not. What with society and nature teetering on the brink, it’s the literal truth. I suppose the reason leftists don’t always take right-wing libertarianism as seriously as it deserves despite their deep awareness of the evils of capitalism is simply that it’s embarrassingly easy to refute. It’s a childish, simplistic, vulgar hyper-capitalist ideology that, once you examine it a little, quickly reveals itself as its opposite: authoritarianism. Or even totalitarianism, albeit privatized totalitarianism. Noam Chomsky, as usual, makes the point eloquently:
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When we first traced the rise of shamelessness as a superpower in American politics, we tried to give Mitch McConnell his due. At the time, we primarily focused on the then-Senate Majority Leader s procedural shamelessness: his abuse of arcane rules and mechanisms to block popular legislation, or indeed, to block President Barack Obama from exercising his constitutional prerogative to appoint judges to the federal bench. Through sheer brassness of balls, McConnell ground the federal government into a dramatic slowdown, which happened to be in the interests of many of the people who pay his campaign bills. If the system is already working for you, you might not want government doing much of anything. The Kentucky senator was thus a loyal servant to the most powerful corporate interests and the billionaires whose fortunes were intertwined with them.
March 15-21 is
, a national initiative celebrating open government and access to public records. Undisclosed spending by political actors undermines transparency and voters’ ability to make informed decisions.
The 2020 election saw more than $1 billion in “dark money” spending at the federal level, a massive sum driven by an explosion of secret donations boosting Democrats in a historically expensive cycle.
That’s according to an estimate from OpenSecrets. The billion-dollar sum includes a whopping $660 million in donations from opaque political nonprofits and shell companies to outside groups. In 2020, dark money groups preferred to bankroll closely-tied super PACs rather than spend the money themselves politically active nonprofits that do not disclose their donors reported roughly $88 million in direct election spending to the Federal Election Commission. The remainder of the total is made up of spending on “issue ads” targeting candidates online and on the a
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