One of my favorite voices these days is British: George Monbiot writes for the Guardian, when he doesn’t write books. (Regarding the latter I recommend his thrilling read for anyone who loves nature: Feral. 

http://www.monbiot.com/2013/05/24/feral-searching-for-enchantment-on-the-frontiers-of-rewilding/

For today’s topic, though, I’ll attach 2 of his columns. One is a scathing take-down of neoliberalism, providing an analysis that helped me understand more about where we are now and why. Here is an excerpt:

“It was inevitable that the blazing, insurrectionary confidence of neoliberalism would exert a stronger gravitational pull than the dying star of social democracy……. the result is first disempowerment then disenfranchisement. If the dominant ideology stops governments from changing social outcomes, they can no longer respond to the needs of the electorate. Politics becomes irrelevant to people’s lives; debate is reduced to the jabber of a remote elite. The disenfranchised turn instead to a virulent anti-politics in which facts and arguments are replaced by slogans, symbols and sensation. The man who sank Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency was not Donald Trump. It was her husband.”

Here is the whole essay: http://evonomics.com/ruthless-network-super-rich-ideologues-killed-choice-destroyed-peoples-faith-politics/

The other is one of his occasional musings on how effective resistance can happen, a helpful guide for the passive perplexed. http://www.monbiot.com/2017/02/09/all-together-now/

An opera that fits with the theme of money in politics is, of course, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Weill, who wrote the music, and Brecht, who wrote the libretto, parted ways after this collaboration. As someone once said, Weill wanted success while Brecht wanted revolution. Brecht urgently called for resistance to a social order that descended from some kind of feudal capitalism that rots the soul into Nazism. Weill, a plain liberal, wanted to reach a broader spectrum of people with his music; after Mahagonny he never wrote opera again, but rather succumbed to showbiz music. Second act is fun, but the best known song from this opera, which Hitler hated and regularly had interrupted by the brown shirt youth, is Alabama.

Here are some versions:

Lotte Lenya, Weill’s wife, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6orDcL0zt34  1930

David Bowie, in his Peter Pan outfit, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cz1ypTjChcA, 1978

Marianne Faithful, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T59ej_TlXE

And yes, I did not care for the Doors version…..