"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

And yet, Israel has bombed not only hospitals, but also water towers, bakeries, schools, and cemeteries. The World Health Organization confirms that 95 percent of pregnant and nursing women in Gaza face starvation. Starvation became a weapon of war. Since the start of Ramadan in March, all aid convoys have been denied.

Over 80 percent of Gaza’s infrastructure lies in ruins. Thirty-seven million tons of debris have replaced what were once homes, clinics, classrooms, and kitchens. Entire neighborhoods destroyed.

Hind Rajab was 6 years old. Her family’s car was hit in Gaza City. She was the only one who survived. For hours, she hid among the corpses: “They are all dead around me,” she said. “I’m so scared.” The ambulance sent to save her was shelled. Her body was found days later, charred and lifeless.

In the West Bank, the machinery of elimination moves in different forms. Children are executed at checkpoints. Israel remains the only country in the world that systematically detains and tries minors in military courts. Human Rights Watch has documented the torture of children in Israeli prisons. In 2023 alone, Israeli forces killed at least 111 Palestinian children in the West Bank.

https://theintercept.com/2025/05/15/israel-palestine-gaza-women-children-genocide-nakba/

In 2021, Bukele upended El Salvador’s judicial system by replacing top Supreme Court judges and hundreds of lower court judges with loyalists and ousted the country’s attorney general who had opposed his policies. To the public, Bukele framed the moves as anti-corruption measures, referring to the governmental system as “Los mismos de siempre,” or, “The same as always,” reminiscent of Trump’s “Drain the swamp” slogan of his first term.

No longer with judicial constraints, Bukele responded by shepherding a new law through the country’s legislature that declared a state of emergency. The law, known as the State of Exception, suspended many civil rights, including due process, legal representation, and freedom of assembly. He then mobilized police and military into largely low-income neighborhoods controlled by gangs.

https://theintercept.com/2025/05/09/trump-bukele-kilmar-abrego-garcia-el-salvador-cecot-prison/

Employee-owned firms exist in Canada, although there are a relatively small number of them. Friesens, which operates in Manitoba, is one of Canada’s leading book printers. They are employee-owned and democratic. Shift Delivery is a worker cooperative and bike-powered delivery firm serving Vancouver. PCL Construction and Chandos Construction are 100 percent employee-owned.

And democratic employee ownership is popular across the political spectrum. A recent US survey found that a majority of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents support the concept of employee ownership and would prefer working for a firm owned by employees.

Democratic employee-owned firms are more grounded in their communities. Employee-owners who have homes, families, and friends to consider are unlikely to vote to move their businesses out of their communities in response to tariffs or other economic shocks. Nor are they going to run around the globe looking for the cheapest labor force. Democratic employee-owned firms also have a track record of weathering economic adversity and facing it with creativity. They are less likely to fail during a recession and more likely to maintain employment and wages for their workers, which also means they can help maintain macroeconomic stability for the wider economy. Research shows that democratic employee-owned firms can be just as or more competitive and profitable than conventional businesses. And they are more likely to distribute wealth more equitably, reducing inequality both within firms and across society. Wealth, of course, makes it easier for people to weather economic adversity.

Additionally, when adopting labor-saving AI technologies — another potential threat to Canada’s workers — employee-owners are positioned to share in the firm’s profits and benefit from efficiencies. When jobs and incomes are protected through employee ownership, AI systems have the potential to make work safer, easier, and more productive. When workers are not in the driver’s seat, however, there’s more danger that AI systems could put people out of jobs and deepen economic inequality.

The Canadian government should act quickly to support and incubate democratic employee-owned firms. There are many actionable policies available that have been tried and tested around the world.

In 2024, Canada’s federal government passed legislation to support EOTs. EOTs hold the shares of a firm in trust for the benefit of the firm’s employees. EOTs make it easier for business owners to sell their firms to their employees, with the purchase price paid out of the firm’s profits over several years, meaning there is no out-of-pocket cost to employees. Grantbook, a company that advises philanthropic foundations, became the first Canadian company to convert to an EOT in January 2025.

The federal government has instituted a partial tax exemption on capital gains realized through the sales of conventional firms to EOTs. This policy creates an incentive for business owners to pursue this option when planning their succession. As a next step, this exemption should be made permanent and extended to worker cooperatives. These tax breaks may be justified by the larger social and economic benefits associated with employee-ownership.

Canada could create a public investment bank with a mandate to cultivate democratic employee-owned firms and provide incentives for conventional banks to lend to these firms. Governments should also ensure that democratic employee-owned firms are eligible for — and prioritized in — existing public investment funds and business support programs. When businesses are being sold or shuttered, workers could be afforded a right of first refusal to purchase them.

Additional tax incentives for democratic employee ownership are also worth considering, e,g, setting lower corporate income tax rates for these firms and providing personal income tax deductions for workers who put their savings toward creating new worker cooperatives.

jacobin.com/2025/05/democratic-workplaces-ownership-control-stability/