The different forms of fascism

The specter of fascism in the US has been raised with the presidency of Donald Trump. While he has openly flirted with neo-Nazis and white supremacists, his defenders have said that his behavior does not imply fascist sympathies.

The problem is that fascism does not take a single form. In an article in the April/May 2020 issue of The Progressive, John Nichols looks back at the warnings that Henry Wallace, a progressive who in 1944 was vice-president to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, gave about the danger of fascism emerging in the US then and what were some of its signs
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The fascinating life of mussels

This short video looks at the life cycle of the California floater mussel and how in its infancy it hitches rides on fish to get around.

Growing up in Sri Lanka, I had never encountered these creatures. My only knowledge of them was that sweet Molly Malone would sing out “cockles and mussels, alive, a live–o” as she wheeled a barrow of them through the streets of Dublin, home of pretty girls. Now I know what mussels are, I looked up what ‘cockles’ are too and they seem very similar to mussels.

The elites are always first in line to get government handouts

This one single graphic about the representation of wealth in government tells us a lot about how decisions about public money is disbursed get made as to who gets what.


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Modern forms of wage slavery

American businesses keep looking for ways to keep wages low. One way they have been able to do that is because since most people’s health insurance is obtained through their employment, that makes it difficult for people to leave since that would require them to find new health care providers, assuming the new employer does provide health insurance. And during the period between jobs, you would not have insurance. For many people, the least troublesome option is to stay with the same employer until it becomes intolerable.
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Trump is really losing it

Trump lies shamelessly during his press conferences and also make racist allusions. Reporters have mostly left it to commentators to later deconstruct these statements but by then the damage has been done. But increasingly it looks like reporters at the press conferences are challenging him in real time to explain and back up his statements and he clearly does not like it. A week or so ago Jonathan Karl of ABC News kept asking for examples when Trump made one of his baseless, fact-free, sweeping assertions and Trump of course could offer none and just got peevish. Yesterday, Trump abruptly ended the conference and left when two such pushbacks occurred. Watch.


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The mysterious video of the jogger’s murder

The killing of the Ahmaud Arbery, 26, who was shot while jogging in a residential upscale neighborhood outside Atlanta, Georgia on February 23 is revealing layers of racism and cronyism by the police and prosecutors in Glynn county that is unfortunately all too common in the US. Arbery is black and the two men who had blocked the street with their truck and confronted Arbery before killing him are white. The event was captured in this video.


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Testing for me but not for thee

We learn that people in the White House are very frequently tested for covid-19 and as a result more and more people working there have been found to have it. It was because of such infected people that Dr. Anthony Fauci (head of the NIH’s infectious disease program and a member of the coronavirus task force), Dr. Stephen Hahn, (commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration), and Dr. Robert Redfield (director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) were quarantined because they were found to have been in contact with some of them.
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How the bizarre Venezuelan ‘Bay of Piglets’ plot fell apart

As more details emerge of the foiled attempt on Tuesday, May 5th at overthrowing the Venezuelan government of president Nicolas Maduro, the sheer ineptitude and hubris and arrogance of the plotters becomes ever more incredible to behold. Take this report about the ringleader, a former member of the US Special Forces Green Berets named Jordan Goudreau and how he worked with representatives of Juan Guaidó, the person the US treats as the president of that country even though, you know, he is not, to plan and implement the foiled attempt.
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This is not good

Three of the US’s top health officials, Dr. Anthony Fauci (head of the NIH’s infectious disease program and a member of the coronavirus task force), Dr. Stephen Hahn, (commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration), and Dr. Robert Redfield (director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) have gone into two weeks quarantine after having come into contact with people who have tested positive for covid-19.
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