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/

The ultra conservatives wanting to make the Vatican great again – POLITICO
https://www.politico.eu/article/vaticans-church-catholic-pope-francis-hard-right

MAGA Tries to Sway Pope Vote With $100 Bottles of Wine and Billion-Dollar Promises
https://www.thedailybeast.com/maga-tries-to-sway-pope-vote-with-100-bottles-of-wine-and-billion-dollar-promises/

Among those amendments, buried on page 380 of the draft, is a section that would enable Trump’s secretary of the Treasury to denounce any nonprofit as a “terrorist-supporting organization” and strip it of its tax-exempt status.

“This seems to just give the president a tool to go after his political enemies and fulfill some of the darker elements of the Project 2025 agenda,” said Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council.

A previous version of the clause — dubbed the “nonprofit killer bill” — was introduced in 2023. Critics viewed that legislation as a bipartisan expression of pro-Israel policy and opposition to pro-Palestinian speech.

The first version of the bill passed the House easily, before languishing in the Senate. But when it reappeared in November — following Trump’s reelection — many Democrats who had backed the bill dropped their support in the face of reporting from The Intercept and a flurry of anger from the party’s base.

https://theintercept.com/2025/05/12/trump-nonprofit-killer-tax-cuts/

This unequal exchange leads to truly massive net transfers from South to North. In the final year of data, we see the following:

A net South-North flow of 12 billion tons of embodied materials, and 21 Exajoules of embodied energy. According to recent research, this quantity of materials and energy would be enough to provide infrastructure and supplies to provision decent living standards – universal healthcare, education, modern housing, sanitation, electricity, heating/cooling, induction stoves, refrigerators, freezers, washing machines, public transit, computers, and mobile phones – for the entire population of the global South, but instead it is siphoned away for consumption and accumulation in the core.

A net flow of 820 million hectares of embodied land. This is twice the size of India. This land could be used to provide nutritious food for up to 6 billion people, but instead it is used to produce things like sugar for Coca-Cola and beef for McDonald's, consumed in the North.

A net flow of 826 billion hours of embodied labour. That’s more than the total annual labour rendered by the entire workforce of the US and European Union combined. That labour could be used to staff hospitals and schools in the global South, and produce food and goods for local needs, but instead it is used to churn out tech gadgets and fast fashion for Northern corporations.

These results reveal that the high levels of consumption and growth in the core rely heavily on net appropriation from the South, today just as much as during the colonial era. In the case of materials and labour, around half of the total consumption in the core is net-appropriated from the South.

https://progressive.international/wire/2025-04-18-china-unequal-exchange-and-the-present-world-historic-juncture/en