old, but still

https://www.propublica.org/article/us-supreme-court-grants-pass-homelessness

In New Mexico, oil industry representatives met with state regulators and environmentalists to address the issue of over 70,000 unplugged wells, many leaking harmful substances. Despite initial cooperation and months of negotiations, industry opposition to the proposed bill (HB 133) led to its weakening and eventual collapse. The bill aimed to require companies to set aside more money for cleanup, block risky sales, and implement safety buffers, but faced backlash from oil trade groups, which feared the regulations could harm the industry. Similar reform efforts in other states, such as Oklahoma and West Virginia, have also faltered due to industry pressure, weakening laws intended to address the multibillion-dollar shortfall in well cleanup funding. While some states have made progress, the industry’s influence has stymied meaningful reform across the country.

https://www.propublica.org/article/oil-industry-lobbying-unplugged-wells

These entrepreneurs come from a very small number of sectors — and beyond their personal whims, they support the far right because they think it will promote their business interests.

Le Monde has revealed that Pierre-Edouard Stérin, the founder of private equity fund Otium Capital, is a staunch supporter of Marine Le Pen and has backed both her personal and political endeavors. His business partner in Otium Capital, François Durvye, recently paid €2.5 million to the Le Pen family to buy their mansion in western Paris, while allowing the elderly Jean-Marie Le Pen to live there for the rest of his life.

Another example is Charles Gave and his hedge fund Gavekal, a secretive firm based in Hong Kong.

Then comes the energy sector, particularly the fossil fuel industry. The rise of the far right in recent years has been supported by the emergence of the CNews network. Originally called iTele and the French equivalent of CNN, the news channel was bought by Vincent Bolloré, a far-right businessman worth €12 billion. He rebranded it as CNews, fired a large part of the staff, and turned it into a French equivalent of Fox News. Beyond his media holdings, Bolloré made his fortune in the fossil fuel sector, owning a majority of the oil depots in France and many others in Europe; until recently, he also owned transport infrastructure in Africa. He has constantly supported the far right.

Finally, the far right has been supported by figures from the tech sector. French newspaper Libération has reported that the Rassemblement National enjoys the backing of start-up founders like Thomas Fauré, the head of corporate social network Whaller, and Laurent Alexandre, the founder of digital healthcare platform Doctissimo, who has now become a libertarian intellectual.

Nicos Poulantzas showed how the fascist parties of the early twentieth century found fertile ground in the working class and petty bourgeoisie but only rose to power when they managed to attract support from the business elite, too.

Sociologist Félicien Faury has studied Rassemblement National voters in southern France. He has revealed how they are predominantly white owners of property (such as their homes or small businesses) who aim to safeguard their economic, social, and political position by voting for a party that wants to strengthen the current racially segregated order. The Rassemblement National is forging a coalition that includes powerful business interests alongside broader social groups, and racist policies are pivotal to this coalition due to their broad acceptance among both wealthy business owners and other constituents of the party’s base.

The coalition of business groups supporting the Rassemblement National is thus a double-edged sword. It shows that recent votes reflect more than just transient shifts in public opinion. But it is also an indication of what can make the far right fail over the long run: the interests that it defends remain heterogeneous and social movements can contribute to breaking them apart.

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/rassemblement-national-le-pen-billionaires-tech/

The book focuses on what the authors identify as the radical right, distinguishing it from the “extreme right” and fascism. The extreme right, they contend, generally refers to “revolutionary movements that reject liberal democratic institutions and tend to embrace violence,” while the radical right “accepts democracy but is anti-liberal or illiberal in its worldview and transformative ambitions.”

At the core, then, of the different national versions of the radical right is an account of what Abrahamsen and her coauthors call “global managerialism.”

"the essence of contemporary world politics is not the age-old story of realist power politics, the liberal tale of progress through institutions, or the corrosive spread of neoliberal capitalism. It is instead the rise to power of a global liberal managerial elite, the so-called New Class of experts and bureaucrats. Detached and unmoored from their national identities and cultures, the interests of this elite lie in yet further globalization and liberalization, and work against the interests of traditional national values and local communities."

A central feature of these claims is the identification of a class enemy: the New Class, which includes corporate elites, civil servants, journalists, lawyers, engineers, therapists, academics, consultants, and various bureaucrats.

Unlike left-wing commentators who might identify this group as the professional-managerial class (or PMC) or the new petty bourgeoisie, the radical right is much more likely to point to the fact that the New Class’s power derives from its position in global networks and highlight its disconnection from the local, the traditional, and above all, the nation.

Depending on the national context, other concepts — such as focus on tradition, a defense of “Western values,” and opposition to the Enlightenment — may be more prominent.

Abrahamsen et al. also examine some of the leading strategies it deploys to spread its ideas: the promotion of a radical right publishing industry and radical right educational institutions.
Abrahamsen and her coauthors go as far as to call the radical right “the Gramscian Right,” contending that just as Karl Marx looked to turn Hegelian idealism “on its head,” so the radical right has inverted Gramsci.

Central to their reading of Gramsci is the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right), particularly its main ideologue, Alain de Benoist.

Perhaps the most succinct summary of right-wing Gramscianism is Andrew Breitbart’s dictum, influential among the alt-right, that “politics is downstream of culture.”

As Abrahamsen and her coauthors note, it is now the radical right that occupies the terrain of opposition to the status quo.

It is the book’s understanding of the disruptive force of the radical right that makes the World of the Right an illuminating analysis of the historical moment of demoralization and disorientation in which the Left finds itself today. As one of the authors of the book recently framed it, the radical right recognizes that this is its historical moment.

To confront the radical right’s contemporary success requires acknowledging past failures and engaging in self-criticism — exactly the process the French New Right and others were prepared to undertake in the ’60s.

https://jacobin.com/2025/02/new-right-gramsci-managerialism-trump/

As per usual nobody is talking about this.

Bill HF 583 passed a subcommittee yesterday to remove gender identity from the civil rights act. It would make Iowa the first state in the nation go remove a class from its civil rights act. If it passes it would become legal to deny housing, loans, and jobs to trans people, would remove the right to change your gender marker on legal documents even with documentation, and makes it so your birth certificate must reflect your assigned gender at birth, among other things and wider implications.

https://eu.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/24/transgender-iowans-would-lose-civil-rights-protections-under-house-bill-advances/80008999007/

“Today our system of light-touch and risk-based regulation is regularly cited – alongside the City’s internationalism and the skills of those who work here – as one of our chief attractions. It has provided us with a huge competitive advantage and is regarded as the best in the world.” What happened next and where is Britain now?

Rachel Reeves has learnt nothing from the 2008 crash. In her first Mansion House speech as UK Chancellor last November she echoed the call for deregulation. But as Mariana Mazzucato pointed out, according to the OECD, the UK ranks second as the least regulated country in product regulation and fourth least for employment. And the World Bank continues to rate the UK one of the highest in terms of ‘ease to do business’.

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2025/03/02/trumps-maga-and-deregulation/

Anche la spesa in ricerca e sviluppo evidenzia il progressivo declino europeo. Nel 2023, gli Stati Uniti rappresentavano il 38 per cento della spesa Ocse, con un leggero calo rispetto al 1995. La Cina ha registrato un incremento straordinario, passando dal 3 al 35 per cento.

L’Europa, invece, si è ridotta dal 20 al 9 per cento, un dato allarmante che riflette non solo una riduzione degli investimenti, ma anche una specializzazione produttiva meno orientata all’innovazione. Infatti, non è tanto la volontà politica a mancare, quanto un’industria che, per caratteristiche strutturali, non richiede livelli di ricerca e sviluppo paragonabili a quelli di Cina e Stati Uniti.

Più che inseguire narrazioni ottimistiche, è necessario un approccio pragmatico che affronti i problemi alla radice: investimenti insufficienti, carenza di innovazione e difficoltà nel trasformare la ricerca in vantaggio competitivo. Solo con una visione chiara e politiche industriali adeguate sarà possibile colmare il divario con Stati Uniti e Cina e garantire un ruolo centrale all’Europa nel futuro dell’economia globale.

https://www.editorialedomani.it/economia/sfida-innovazione-brevetti-europa-battuta-da-usa-cina-ocg0uerr

According to internal memos obtained by ProPublica, the cuts are expected to lead to the deaths of up to a million children from malnutrition, 166,000 deaths from malaria, a 30% rise in tuberculosis cases, and 200,000 additional cases of polio over the next decade. Despite these warnings, senior administration officials, including State Department officials like Peter Marocco, ignored or actively hindered efforts to protect critical programs at USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development.

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-doge-rubio-usaid-musk-death-toll-malaria-polio-tuberculosis

Current CBO policy is to examine the tax cuts as a policy that is expiring and being reimplemented — which is exactly what is happening. The cuts would cost around $4.6 trillion over the next decade under this kind of examination, which is called the “current law” metric.

What Republicans are proposing instead, however, is to employ what is called the “current policy” metric, changing long-standing precedent for how the CBO does its accounting. Under this metric, the tax cuts for the wealthy wouldn’t be seen as creating new debt in the budget, but rather as a renewal of already existing policy, allowing the GOP to claim they cost $0 over the next decade, as they are not a change from the policy that’s been in place since 2017.

https://truthout.org/articles/republicans-plan-to-use-budgeting-trick-to-hide-deficit-from-trump-tax-cuts/

"As illustrated in the Lever’s investigative audio series, Master Plan, the American right has for decades constructed a vast media infrastructure outside of — and pressuring — the Republican Party to embrace conservatives’ ideological agenda.

By contrast, America’s center-left has mostly funded the Democratic Party, its politicians, and its array of Washington-based nonprofits — while relying on billionaire- and corporate-owned elite media outlets as its information conduit


Meanwhile, progressives are relegated to trumpeting crowd sizes at rallies for Bernie Sanders, who is certainly delivering a much-needed message about oligarchy but whose political apparatus has never succeeded in (or shown sustained commitment to) channeling his celebrity and fundraising power into building lasting institutions beyond the Vermont senator’s personal brand. Of course, unlike other Democratic luminaries signing Hollywood deals, feigning helplessness, and preemptively retreating, Sanders is at least trying to do something to catalyze a real opposition to the broligarchy and the Trump-Musk rampage. Like a rock star playing the hits on a last reunion tour, he’s generating some of the old energy, which is mildly encouraging — and far more than anything his sedated peers are doing.

Sanders could still end up being to center-left populism what Barry Goldwater was to conservatism — a prickly senator-turned-presidential-candidate who lacked the political and organizational skills to win a national election, but who nonetheless inspired a larger movement. But in Goldwater’s case, the movement was fueled not just by ephemeral rallies, but also by conservative institution-building outside both parties."

"The fix is something much more difficult and nonpartisan: doing the hard work of creating information conduits that provide better, more accurate reporting about what’s really happening in America; that identify who in either party is responsible for the decisions enriching the rich and harming the rest of us; that orient coverage toward a working-class audience rather than an affluent audience; and that convey news to normies rather than only to already-converted, already-dialed-in political junkies."

https://jacobin.com/2025/02/information-war-right-independent-media/