"Fascism-lite is one reason Americans have a hard time pronouncing this particular ‘F word.’ Another is that we’ve failed to teach younger generations about the barbarism of historical fascism. In the 1950s and ‘60s my father, who served in the Army during World War II, told me war stories at bedtime. The big death camps were well known then, although today two-thirds of young Americans are unaware that Nazis slaughtered six million Jews in the Holocaust. My father’s jobs in the Army were capturing post offices, splicing communications cables and blowing up bridges. But he also told us that in addition to Auschwitz and the concentration camps, there were slave labor camps in many German towns he passed through, filled with emaciated survivors and dead bodies piled up like cordwood.

Later I learned that many veterans did not tell their families what they had witnessed. These members of the Greatest Generation didn’t want to revisit those horrors. Together with the Western allies and the USSR, they defeated Nazi Germany, along with Mussolini’s fascists, Japan’s imperialists, and all those lesser fascists like Hungary’s Arrow Cross. Some of their grandchildren became today’s Proud Boys, Patriot militias and neo-Nazis, which surely has many World War II vets turning over in their graves.

In the aftermath of World War II, almost all Americans were unequivocally anti-fascist. Now, for those in power, ‘anti-fascist’ has become a term of opprobrium. That might be because fascism applies to them too."

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/fascism-america/

"The crisis is not that the American constitutional system is broken but that the American constitutional system is working—perhaps not as the Framers intended but, as a legal and administrative matter, mostly as it was designed to."

https://newrepublic.com/article/159823/constitution-crisis-supreme-court

"And in a report released this week, the United Nations forecast that unless global warming is stopped the planet will turn into “uninhabitable hell” for millions. The UN report put it on the line: political and business leaders are being “wilfully negligent” as natural disasters nearly double this century. In the period 2000 to 2019, there were 7,348 major recorded disaster events claiming 1.23 million lives, affecting 4.2 billion people (many on more than one occasion) resulting in approximately US$2.97 trillion in global economic losses. This is a sharp increase over the previous twenty years. Between 1980 and 1999, 4,212 disasters were linked to natural hazards worldwide claiming approximately 1.19 million lives and affecting 3.25 billion people resulting in approximately US$1.63 trillion in economic losses."

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/10/18/the-imf-smokescreen/

#podcast

https://roarmag.org/2020/10/23/david-harvey-acc-s03e3/