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Bill Alstrom (MA/Maine/MA)'s avatar

TC, I have admired your encyclopedic sense of history...the key details you share...with awe. Your assessments of "how we got here" are spot on. And I especially appreciate your wordsmithing.

I clipped these three piece from your letter today. I think it encapsulates my understanding and political perspective.

"...capitalism has been historically the economic engine that spread progress most widely among people..."

""...unregulated capitalism would create its own destruction..."

"...governments whose policies exacerbated the problem of inequality..."

And there you have it. "I speak not as a Marxist." But as one who can see the value of a regulated free enterprise based economy built on a foundation of social equality and opportunity. It's not as complicated as people want to make it. It's just a decision. Is the US of A to be a "me" place or a "we" place?

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FERN MCBRIDE (NYC)'s avatar

TC, as usual you are ahead of the pack. There is little in the press about European democracies falling backward. I read one piece recently, 'Right-Wing Parties Are Selling Out Across Europe, Too' in Today's World View, a newsletter in WAPO. To quote, 'Meloni’s rise matters not only because Italy has been since the early 20th century a bellwether for far-right movements in Europe. More critically, Manfred Weber, president of the European People’s Party (EPP) — a family of mainstream, center-right parties across the continent — has publicly endorsed Berlusconi’s coalition with Merloni.'

'The EPP kept a fastidious distance from Germany’s xenophobic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), for instance....'Weber’s embrace of a far-right-dominated alliance seems especially sinister. It weakens the European Union’s own criticism of illiberal regimes in Hungary and Poland, and it enables further legitimization of neo-fascist movements such as Vox in Spain, which has already entered the Spanish political mainstream through its partnership with the center-right People’s Party.'

THE RETURN OF MUSSOLINI? What's going on is a SHOUT not a whisper.

TC summarized our fall backward and far-right in the clearest terms:

'It is the result of 50 years of increasing social inequality as neo-liberalism took control of national social and economic policy, led by U.S. policies that began with the Nixon administration and saw their spread through the policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund during the period of inflation in the 1970s and 80s, then supported by the accession to power of center-right governments whose policies exacerbated the problem of inequality.'

There it is, that's our story, in brief. Could anyone be more succinct and direct about it than TC? One of my deepest concerns is whether the captured MAGA and the more extreme groups have boiled over -- ready and eager to fight.

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