Farage and his allies have drawn up plans to establish a think tank that will help them develop their policy agenda. They are hoping to attract funding from Trump donors in the United States: “MAGA, Tech, Religious conservatives.” The Reform treasurer Nick Candy also intends to launch a major fundraising drive in tax havens like Monaco, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates, enlisting the support of wealthy British people who would rather not contribute to the public finances but nonetheless have very firm opinions about how the country should be governed.

The aim is clearly to recruit a set of rich benefactors who will be less demanding and capricious than Musk, leaving Farage to steer the ship on a day-to-day basis. A party like that, with Farage at the helm, is obviously not going to do anything that will help the working class if it gains power. Yet Reform has been trying to win over working-class voters with a sham version of economic populism, making sympathetic noises about striking garbage collectors in Birmingham, calling for the nationalization of British Steel, and railing against the greed of private water companies.

It would be much harder for Farage to pull off this stunt if the Labour Party had not worked so hard to expunge the genuine left populism that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell promoted between 2015 and 2019. Keir Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have spent their first year in office antagonizing Labour voters with cuts to disability benefits and the winter fuel allowance for pensioners.

When Labour members voted for Starmer in 2020, most of them probably thought they would be getting the British equivalent of Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez — less radical in substance and more conventional in style than Corbyn, but ready to work with the Left and take some of its ideas on board. Instead, they unwittingly handed over the reins to a destructive clique whose members have no interest in using government office to change society for the better. Farage can unquestionably be beaten, but these are not the people to do it.

The ongoing push to exclude and delegitimize those who challenge Britain’s political consensus from the Left has created a welcoming environment for right-wing mavericks like Farage. They can pose as critics of a dysfunctional economic model while assuring rich donors that they will never do anything to interfere with their core interests. Farage is entering the political mainstream on a ramp that has been constructed for him by the establishment he affects to despise.

https://jacobin.com/2025/05/england-election-starmer-farage-reform/

Los Angeles wouldn’t be the first city to turn to public housing after a tragic fire. When a catastrophic conflagration in Singapore razed an entire central neighborhood to the ground, the hyper-capitalist city-state placed a new dream of public housing for all at the heart of its rebuilding efforts.

In Chua Beng Huat’s 1997 book Political Legitimacy and Housing: Stakeholding in Singapore, the Singaporean sociologist — who lost his childhood home in the Bukit Ho Swee fire — describes how the aftermath of the tragedy revealed one of the keys to HDB’s success. As a response to the incident, the country’s Legislative Assembly quickly passed an amendment to the colonial Land Acquisition Ordinance of 1920 that allowed the government, ruled by Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party (PAP), to quickly purchase land from landowners in Bukit Ho Swee. The move would become the precursor to the 1966 Land Acquisition Act, the law that Chua and others argue is at the very core of Singapore’s public housing transformation.

[...] By 2005, the state owned 90 percent of Singapore’s entire land mass of 283.8 square miles.

Aside from laying the groundwork for further land acquisition, the Bukit Ho Swee rehousing project revealed another key to HDB’s success: the institution proved it could build swiftly and affordably to meet demand. In the nine months after the fire, HDB built five apartment blocks containing a total of 768 homes; in the following six years, it built around 12,000 apartments on the site of the former Bukit Ho Swee village. For the most part, the apartments were relatively basic, but they were built with modern plumbing and electricity — a novelty for many former traditional kampong village dwellers. From 1960 to 1963, HDB built more than thirty thousand apartments, proving it could develop and deliver housing at previously unseen speeds.

Around this time, in 1964, the PAP-led government decided to start offering HDB apartments for sale and began to view public housing no longer as rented social housing for Singapore’s poorest citizens, but rather as a means to ensure that all Singaporeans could live in well-built homes. HDB speculated that homeownership, as opposed to renting, would “stake” citizens into their homes — and by extension into a nascent Singaporean nation. Legislation introduced in the late 1960s eventually allowed citizens to tap into mandatory pension savings accounts to purchase HDB units on public land leased to apartment owners, unleashing the financial potential of its own residents to pay for a mass mixed-income public housing building drive that continues to this day.

Once a collection of shophouses, kampongs, and informal settlements with no running water or electricity, Singapore has transformed into a metropolis with over a million HDB units housing a population that’s more than tripled since the Bukit Ho Swee fire. Today 80 percent of the approximately 4.1 million Singaporean citizens and permanent residents live in high-quality HDB high-rises. Families from all income brackets and a variety of cultural backgrounds thrive in vibrant neighborhoods offering numerous public and commercial services designed with communities’ needs in mind. With less than 0.2 percent of the population unhoused, homelessness has essentially been eradicated, and housing has become an unwritten right. What’s more, HDB housing is actually extremely popular in Singapore, where the unfortunate stigma attached to public housing has been entirely lifted.

https://jacobin.com/2025/05/la-fires-singapore-public-housing/

Già il rapporto Draghi (settembre 2024) suggeriva la creazione di un’Autorità e di un commissario per l’industria della difesa, incaricati di coordinare acquisti centralizzati a livello europeo. Vanno in questa direzione la nomina del commissario alla Difesa (oggi il lituano Andrius Kubilius), l’istituzione del Safe (Security Action for Europe) e il Libro bianco per la difesa europea (White Paper for European Defence – Readiness 2030).

Un ulteriore passo potrebbe essere il Me (Meccanismo europeo della difesa) proposto da Guntram Wolff, Armin Steinbach and Jeromin Zettelmeyer, modellato sull’Esm (Meccanismo europeo di stabilità). Sarebbe del tutto autonomo dai singoli governi e avrebbe la capacità di finanziare progetti comuni ricorrendo al mercato dei capitali. Ha però due i limiti: il Med sarebbe concentrato sul mercato interno, senza competenze sul commercio estero di armamenti, fondamentale per l’Europa, secondo esportatore mondiale dopo Usa e Russia, mentre la governance basata sulle quote sottoscritte rischierebbe di accentuare le disuguaglianze tra paesi ricchi e poveri.

https://lavoce.info/archives/107725/se-la-difesa-europea-non-e-uguale-per-tutti/

""For blue- and pink-collar working people, their jobs don’t offer social honor, less so with each generation. So they seek alternative avenues to social honor through religion and morality.""

"To use Thomas Piketty’s terminology, the “merchant right” has long understood that they needed to forge a coalition with middle-status people against the “Brahmin left.” They had to give them something, so they offered cultural issues that matter less to them than perpetuating their wealth.

Trump innovates on this tradition. He’s brilliant at it. He genuinely feels condescended to and rejected by elites — the high New York elites, not the Brahmin left — and people sense his authentic anger against elites. He performs a certain strain of masculine toughness that conveys dignity among blue-collar men, saying, “I’m going to tell it like it is. I’m not mealymouthed like those white-collar professionals who suck up to each other. I’m a straight shooter.”

Compare that to Hillary Clinton’s recent op-ed titled “How Much Dumber Will This Get?,” the first line of which is “It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity.” This type of condescension appeals to elites but not to middle-status people, who often feel they’re on the receiving end of this attitude from elites."

"Look at Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Fighting Oligarchy Tour — people in red states flocked to hear them rail against the rich. Republican donors learned long ago they needed to tolerate anti-elitist rhetoric. Democrats need to learn the same lesson."

"If we want to really help poor people, we need to break the elite feeling rules that mandate empathy for certain groups and scorn for others — empathy for poor people, immigrants, and LGBTQ people, but scorn for people who go to church, respect the military, and embody the basic culture of middle-status America. That’s a losing strategy that ironically puts a target on the backs of the aforementioned marginalized communities, as we are seeing.

It’s a matter of framing. We don’t need to become “Republicans lite.” Life’s too short. None of us would do that, because if we did, we wouldn’t be ourselves, and we wouldn’t be on the Left. But we need to understand the people we’re trying to persuade: middle-status people who value traditional institutions and obsess over economic stability. Unless we rebuild relationships with them, our progressive values won’t materialize.

We won’t abandon climate initiatives, because the world is about to fry. But we can discuss climate action in ways that connect with rural and blue-collar values, and stop talking down to people as “climate deniers” who don’t understand science. The class condescension is driving them to the far right."

"Gay marriage is the only social justice battle we’ve definitively won in forty years. There’s a key message for the Left in here. Your values are your own — don’t compromise them — but politics is about building coalitions that win. The gay marriage movement built a winning coalition and changed what it meant to be gay in this country. We think of it as inevitable, but it wasn’t."

on immigration: "More effective arguments include protecting American workers — you’ll never protect American workers while immigrants remain infinitely exploitable, so it’s important to make sure they have a path to being documented. Another approach: many immigrants are working-class people with working-class values themselves. Rather than focusing on the poverty and violence they’re fleeing, emphasize that they’re religious people with traditional family values — just like you. [...] I saw this with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the sheet metal apprentice deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador. Instead of saying, “A marginalized person of color was targeted and further marginalized,” the leadership of his union said, “A Maryland father and fellow union worker was kidnapped and sent illegally to El Salvador. He was one of us.” That seemed like a different message."

https://jacobin.com/2025/05/trump-middle-class-values-left/

"As in German writing (in which Hitler’s influence was remarkably muted), Italian writing shows only a slight uptick in fascist jargon during Mussolini’s reign. The message is that despite the devastation imposed by European fascists, it seems that their ideology was never particularly popular. Or as Steven Pinker puts it, “the totalitarian governments of the 20th century did not emerge from democratic welfare states sliding down a slippery slope, but were imposed by fanatical ideologues and gangs of thugs.”

Now to the present. Worryingly, the linguistic evidence suggests that fascist thought is more popular today than during Mussolini’s time. And yet there has been no sign of fascist revolution. Although we shouldn’t be smug, we can plausibly conclude that the success of 1930s fascism had more to do with post-WWI circumstances than with the dominance of fascist ideas."

"It’s against this theocratic backdrop that we should understand the historical decline in fascist rhetoric. Think of ‘fascism’ as a slightly secularized repackaging of medieval theocracy. Its opposite, then, is not communism or socialism. No, the opposite of fascist thought is the ideology of the Enlightenment — the belief that reason and evidence should be applied to all areas of human behavior.

It’s this belief in reason and evidence that neo-fascists like Donald Trump have successfully hijacked. When Trump burst on the scene, the dominant norm was that political debate should play out at the level of facts and reasoned arguments. So if a politician had a ghoulish policy, the expectation was that they’d at least try to find evidence for why the policy was good. Accustomed to this norm, the mainstream media found it impossible to admit that Trump had a different playbook — one which consisted entirely of lies and appeals to authority. A decade ago, we called this approach ‘post-truth politics’. Today, it looks increasingly like ‘fascism’. And if these ideas were to become entrenched, they’d likely transform into old-fashioned ‘theocracy’."

rench fascist jargon declined continuously throughout the 18th and 19th century, with a particularly large drop towards the end of the French Revolution. Like in English writing, French neo-fascist ideas rose after 1980. But unlike in the anglophone world, French neo-fascism peaked in 2008 and then collapsed. The timing of this decline coincides with the introduction of the RSA, a form of universal minimum income.

Considering that he’s also running a mayoral campaign premised on New York City being a dangerous, chaotic, broken place, Cuomo is taking a Trumpian approach to winning the primary, leaning on distrust and fear to motivate voters. Cuomo is refusing to respond to demands for transparency. Between his resignation as governor in August 2021 and his declaration of mayoral candidacy, Cuomo ran a legal consultancy called Innovation Strategies and reported $500,000 of income to the city’s Conflict of Interest Board (the highest income of all the mayoral candidates) for 2024 alone. While Cuomo recently “pledged” that he would recuse himself from all potential conflicts of interest, he refused to disclose his clients, as the board does not require this. In contrast, mayoral candidate Scott Stringer released his consulting clients.

While Cuomo tried to strengthen ethics reporting rules for elected officials and state employees during his time as governor, he often backtracked to avoid any scrutiny of his own behavior. For example, Cuomo created the Moreland Commission in July 2013, tasked with investigating potential corruption and making recommendations on new ethics rules. During its one-year tenure, the commission issued around three hundred subpoenas (which many legislators simply ignored) and found the Cuomo administration interfering with its duties. Cuomo then abruptly shut down the Commission in March 2014, over the protests of state legislators. As a result, US attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara started an investigation of Cuomo’s potential obstruction of justice, which ended in 2016 “prematurely” but without sufficient evidence for federal charges.

This is a pattern with Cuomo. Bloomberg recently reported on Cuomo’s relationship with a Seychelles-based cryptocurrency company that faced federal investigations for operating illegally in the United States. Cuomo allegedly advised this company on how to deal with the criminal investigation, even getting the company to hire one of his longtime allies to its board of directors, who later became the company’s chief legal officer. Cuomo’s consulting company also advises a nuclear energy company, NANO, with zero employees, zero products, and no patents.

Seeking private gain and shielding himself from public scrutiny has long been Cuomo’s MO.

https://jacobin.com/2025/05/andrew-cuomo-nyc-mayor-mamdani/