Category

US Politics

Trump exploited low and middle-income white people's anger over their deteriorating life prospects to mobilise racial animus and xenophobia and enlist their support for policies that benefit high-income people and corporations and threaten health. His signature legislative achievement, a trillion-dollar tax cut for corporations and high-income individuals, opened a budget hole that he used to justify cutting food subsidies and health care. His appeals to racism, nativism, and religious bigotry have emboldened white nationalists and vigilantes, and encouraged police violence and, at the end of his term in office, insurrection. [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32545-9/abstract]

S. Woolhandler et al.

The idea that the poor should have leisure and a holiday from work has always been shocking to the rich. In the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: 'What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.' People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion.

Bertrand Russell

[Libertarians are like] house cats. They are convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.

John Spaulding

If there's any lesson to be learned from the unfolding climate disaster and 28 COP failures, it's that as long as governments cede power to corporations and billionaires, and as long as those corporations and billionaires make money from ecological destruction, then ecological destruction is what we get.

Peter Gleick

A pathology of conservativism is that 'things used to be simple.' No, you used to be a kid. Your parents shielded you from life's complexity. Things are complex because you're an adult now. Conservativism is the desire to be a child.

Cory Doctorow