Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 11, 2024
by Tony Wikrent
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Israel’s Relentless Bombing Erases Gaza’s Heritage Sites
[Wide Walls, via Naked Capitalism 02-09-2024]
The war in Gaza is wiping out Palestine’s education and knowledge systems
[The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism 02-09-2024]
In the past four months, all or parts of Gaza’s 12 universities have been bombed and mostly destroyed.
Approximately 378 schools have been destroyed or damaged. The Palestinian Ministry of Education has reported the deaths of over 4,327 students, 231 teachers and 94 professors.
Numerous cultural heritage sites, including libraries, archives and museums, have also been destroyed, damaged and plundered.
Oligarchs’ war on the experiment of republican self-government
The Republican Party and Their Billionaire Backers’ Plot Against America
Thom Hartmann, February 8, 2024 [Common Dreams]
…The most appealing thing about a dictator is that he can “get things done.”
Dictators don’t have to worry about bureaucracies hindering them, or pesky laws and regulations. They don’t care about local opposition to their projects, or their impact on the environment.
From making the trains run on time to building an autobahn and a car company to go with it, dictators famously “get things done.”
The corollary to that old nostrum is that when things are going well, when things are working smoothly, when the people are getting what they want from their government, there is little interest in putting a dictator into office.
You have to break government pretty badly before people are willing to trade in a normal democracy for a dictatorship, but it’s sure happened before.
Germany wouldn’t have embraced Hitler if it weren’t for the depression the country had slid into because they lost World War I and were hit with fierce sanctions in the Treaty of Versailles.…
One of the most successful ways the forces of autocracy and authoritarianism have risen to power throughout history is by creating or stepping into a crisis and promising to be the “strongman” who will fix things and fix them now.
Which, of course, is why right-wing billionaires and the Republicans they own have been working so hard in the decades since the Reagan Revolution to break our government.
They want a series of terrible crises. And if they don’t happen organically, right wingers are more than happy to create them, as we saw this week when Republicans in the House of Representatives refused to do anything about our southern border or to fund aid to Ukraine and the Palestinians….
Warn Voters About the Radicalism Beyond Trump
Nancy MacLean, February 8, 2024 [The New Republic]
…Promoters have been methodically lining up authorizations from the states since the 2012 election showed them that most Americans reject the kind of society they seek, even Mitt Romney’s mild version. So strategists concluded that the only way to permanently entrench minority rule by plutocrats and theocrats is to encase it in a dramatically altered Constitution….