In America it was inflation that opened the door to Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism. Inflation is usually caused by one of two things: international devaluation or internal dilution of a country’s currency, or widespread shortages of essential commodities that drive up prices enough to echo through the entire economy. The early 1970s got both, one deliberately and the other as the result of war. Between 1971 and 1973, President Nixon pulled the US out of the Bretton Woods economic framework that had been put together after World War II to stabilize the world’s currencies and balance trade. The dollar had been pegged to gold at $35 an ounce, and the world’s other currencies were effectively pegged to the dollar.

Candidates who take on power and promise real progressive change are the ones voters are rallying behind, because anything less isn’t worth showing up for… Today is the May 1st National Day of Action; I’ll be wearing a black armband on TV and millions will be skipping school, work, and shopping to protest Trump and his fascist policies… Maine just handed Democrats a wake-up call that they’d damn well better actually listen to this time. Governor Janet Mills suspended her Senate campaign yesterday, leaving Marine veteran and oyster farmer Graham Platner as the presumptive Democratic nominee to take on Republican Senator Susan Collins in November. The message Maine voters are frankly shouting is the same one I’ve been hearing from listeners on my radio/TV show for years and the same one that pollsters across the spectrum keep picking up across the country: people are sick and tired of mealy-mouthed corporate Democrats who run on focus-grouped slogans and govern like they’re scared of their own shadow. They want fighters.

He keeps asking the same question — “What happens if I do this?” — and the answer from those who should be defending democracy is always: nothing… Donald Trump isn’t just breaking norms, he’s running a live experiment on the limits of American power. Each move is a test: How far can a president go? What laws and how much of the Constitution can be ignored? And, most importantly, will anyone actually stop him? It took the King of England to remind Congress that their job is to restrain a president, not cheer him on no matter what.

Unpacking the system that turns outrage into profit and democracy into collateral damage… The attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night shouldn’t surprise us. Not only does America have the world’s most active small-arms industry that essentially controls the GOP (the reporters got a taste of what American — and only American — schoolkids experience every few months from their “realistic” active shooter drills), but we also host the world’s largest and most profitable hate-amplification industry. Algorithms that amplify hate and division in order to “increase engagement” have made Mark Zuckerberg into one of the richest people on the planet, complete with a super-yacht and a doomsday bunker estate in Hawaii; Elon Musk’s X has turned into a sewer of Nazi-style rhetoric while Musk himself has posted, according to The Washington Post, nakedly white supremacist slogans and statements over 850 times just in the past seven months.v