Source: In These Times
by Naomi Klein, Astra Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor & Chenjerai Kumanyika
“About a month after Donald Trump was inaugurated to a second term, and as it became overwhelmingly clear that Elon Musk’s role alongside him is to gut the administrative state and pave the way for widespread privatization, Haymarket Books held ‘An Emergency Town Hall’ to help situate this ‘Corporate Coup in Global Context.’ The roundtable discussion included bestselling journalist and author Naomi Klein …; writer, author and organizer Astra Taylor …; author, journalist and professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor …; and professor Chenjerai Kumanyika, who helped guide the discussion, cohosts the Uncivil podcast and also created and hosts the widely popular Empire City podcast.” (03/26/25)
“Women in more than 100 countries can get birth control pills over the counter. Yet the U.S. government requires women to ask other adults for permission slips, in the form of a prescription, before getting access to hormonal contraceptives.” (03/25/25)
“Trump and friends are all-in on the ‘unitary executive’ theory, under which the president can do pretty much anything he wants because, per Article II of the US Constitution. “the executive Power shall be vested” in his office. … There’s another side to the ‘unitary executive’ coin, though. If the president’s ‘executive power’ extends so far, so does the president’s responsibility for both the details and the consequences. The Constitution, after all, also charges the president to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’ … Apart from Goldberg, the participants in the alleged Signal chat all seem to have been chosen by Trump — vice-president JD Vance as his running mate, the cabinet secretaries as his nominees. If they messed up, Trump messed up.” (03/25/25)
“In response to tariffs imposed by Trump in February, China slapped new tariffs on a wide range of American farm exports, including beef, chicken, corn, cotton, dairy, fruits, pork, soybeans, and various vegetables. Both Canada and Mexico have indicated that they plan to retaliate against American tariffs with new levies targeting American agricultural goods. It’s impossible to know how bad the losses for American farmers could be, but the potential is high. The U.S. exported $176 billion of agricultural goods in 2024, and the three largest destinations for those exports were Mexico, Canada, and China, according to the Farm Bureau. That gravy train of federal subsidies to farmers is already rolling again, even before the majority of Trump’s promised tariffs hit. The Department of Agriculture announced earlier this month that it will distribute $10 billion in ’emergency’ income subsidies funded by the spending bill Congress approved in December.” (03/25/25)
“Brussels and Washington are once again at odds over Europe’s sweeping social-media restrictions, contained within the 2022 Digital Services Act (DSA). In a letter sent earlier this month, the EU’s vice-president for tech sovereignty, Henna Virkkunen, rejected claims made by Donald Trump’s team that the DSA is a tool for censorship. She insisted that the law ‘does not regulate speech’ and that the EU remains ‘deeply committed to protecting and promoting free speech.’ … The ‘Brussels Effect,’ where the EU’s strict standards end up being adopted by firms and other regulators around the world, is nothing new. History shows that platforms frequently adopt the strictest regulatory standards across all markets to minimise compliance risks.” (03/25/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“When I read about the capitulation to President Trump by the big law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, I couldn’t help thinking about the capitulation of lawyers in countries like Germany and Chile. … Paul Weiss could have chosen to fight. It certainly had the financial resources to do so. It had the right to file suit in federal court to seek a judicial declaration that Trump’s actions were illegal, malicious, vicious, retaliatory, and unconstitutional. Paul Weiss instead reached out to Trump and struck a deal, one in which the firm agreed to provide Trump with $40 million — yes, $40 million! — in free legal services in the future for causes that are near and dear to Trump’s heart.” (03/25/25)
“In the history of countries that offer models of reconciliation after long conflicts, Syria is now trying to make its mark. A good example is a grassroots rescue organization known as the White Helmets. During a severe but short flare-up of sectarian violence in early March, the group’s volunteers quickly entered the killing zone in a minority area to help any and all, conducting around 30 responses a day. ‘When we go to rescue someone in need, we don’t ask them about their religion or political opinion,’ said Abdulkafi Kayal, head of the group’s operations in the coastal region where the killings took place. ‘Our mandate is to help those in need,’ he told the BBC. A reporter from the BBC was able to join the Syrian Civil Defence, as the White Helmets are formally known, as it went about its humanitarian missions.” (03/24/25)
“No matter how successfully Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) identify the waste in federal spending, their achievements will not be secure without a closer look at how Washington became so profligate in the first place. True success requires looking beyond the obvious causes — self-interested lobbying by public unions and the reluctance of politicians to terminate any program with a vocal constituency — but also the false, academically generated worldviews designed to persuade voters that their government is competent to do so many things it cannot.” (03/25/25)
Source: Center for a Stateless Society
by Kevin Carson
“The right-wing talking point that Black poverty is the result, not of historic injustice, but of ‘Black culture’ — and particularly the effect of Great Society welfare programs on Black culture — dates almost as far back as the Great Society itself. … In fact, as Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward showed in their radical history of the welfare state, Regulating the Poor, while the rise in urban Black crime and poverty in the postwar period was associated with family disintegration, the causality was entirely different from what Sowell and Stossel imply. The rise in fatherless households was ultimately an outgrowth of powerlessness and economic exploitation. The primary driver of family disintegration and unemployment was actually Black sharecroppers mass-migrating to northern cities after they were tractored off their land by white landowners.” (03/25/25)
