Micah White at The Guardian writes—Why aren't the streets full of protest about the Paradise Papers?
The street-level response to the Paradise Papers, the mighty follow-up punch to last year’s Panama Papers, has been curiously tepid. This is probably not what many activists, and the 100 media organizations involved in the leak, expected to happen.
In striking contrast to the bombshell release of the Panama Papers in mid-2016 that immediately triggered a 10,000-person-strong protest in Iceland leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, the Paradise Papers have thus far made many headlines but no uprisings.
The world was different – arguably better – 18 months ago when commentators widely believed, as Rana Foroohar put it at the time in Time magazine: “the Panama Papers could lead to capitalism’s greatest crisis.”
Many activists justifiably, and optimistically, anticipated that the largest leak in human history would provide the evidence necessary to spark an ongoing series of protests worldwide that would yield concrete, lasting change.
Then Brexit happened, alt-right nationalism surged and Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. In other words, the Panama Papers protests, and leftist activism more generally, were quickly overshadowed by a dramatic string of victories for the criminally rich who now figure prominently in the Paradise Papers.
That is why I want you to entertain the possibility that this time around the absence of predictably reactive street protests that dissipate as spontaneously as they erupt – and quite frankly, have not yielded systemic change in recent years – is a positive sign.
Rather than being an encouragement to succumb to defeatism, or a retreat into an equally false triumphalism that unconvincingly claims our movements are winning, the eerily quiet response to the Paradise Papers is a long-overdue indication that activists everywhere are either open to, or actively involved in, reimagining revolutionary activism in the 21st century. [...]
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“The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
~Garry Kasparov, 2016
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On this date at Daily Kos in 2010—Republicans don’t do bipartisanship:
While the Broders of the world continue their partisan game of calling for Democrats to be bipartisan, it's obvious to anyone paying attention that they really only intend for a unilateral Democratic capitulation. It was obvious from the moment President Obama took office that his sincere desire to work across the aisle would only be taken advantage of, and that it would be seen as a sign of weakness. After a year of Democrats negotiating down their health insurance plan until it most resembled Romneycare or the 1993 Republican plan, for which the Republicans gave it not a single vote and now call for its repeal, nobody any longer should be buying into the myth of bipartisanship.
While the president continually calls for bipartisan cooperation, the Republicans continually make clear that they will not compromise, will continually try to move the goalposts, and that despite the Democrats having not investigated any of the many horrendous crimes of the Bush-Cheney administration, there now is nothing about the Obama administration the Republicans won't obsessively investigate. As I've been saying for some time, it shouldn't surprise anyone if they send a fact-finding team to Kenya to search for the "real" birth certificate.
The Democrats need to stop buying into a myth that means but their own destruction.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Sorry, but we’re gonna have to talk about Roy Moore today. And his defenders. Because this is just f#@%*ng ridiculous, now. For your weekend reading: Icahn haz subpoena? Is anyone not at war with Saudish Arabia? What did Trump do in Moscow?
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