Michael Parenti was a great scholar and orator. He connected the dots like no one else. He was far more than a collection of sharp quotes.
But here's a great quote from him anyway.
I think it slaps.
"It is the heart of Western policy, ladies and gentlemen, to use fascism to preserve capitalism, while claiming to be saving democracy from communism." -Michael Parenti
Mark Carney's speech at Davos was very well written.
It shows both sides of that quote from Parenti. How someone calls out the problem and then gets a standing ovation for telling us to embrace it is peak.
I guess you score points just for criticizing Trump these days.
Carney gestures toward the truth when he talks about fortresses, coercion, weaponized interdependence, and the collapse of even the pretense of rules. He acknowledges that the old narrative relied on consent and that it no longer holds. But he never follows the logic to its conclusion.
He never says plainly that when consent fails, power does not retreat. It escalates, and violence becomes a governing strategy.
But in the moment, he didn't have to say it - we were all thinking it. These are not abstractions.
We are watching this happen in real time.
Attempts to treat Greenland as a negotiable asset.
Regime change pursued through abduction and intimidation.
Sanctions that quietly kill thousands of people every year by denying food, medicine, and infrastructure.
Unwavering political, military, and financial support for the mass killing of Palestinians.
We see it. We know this is violence. We know it is wrong. And yet we tolerate it. We sigh, roll our eyes, call it complicated, and move on. That tolerance is not neutral.
That is "keeping the sign in the window."
This is where the speech becomes illogical, and dishonest. If the problem is that power rests on consent, then the solution cannot be elite coordination and strategic autonomy alone.
The logical response would be to empower the people whose consent has been exploited the most, workers, the dispossessed, those bearing the cost of inequality and injustice. Withdrawal of consent at that level would actually confront the system producing the violence.
Carney proposes the opposite. His solution is to reorganize power among middle states, diversify away from one hegemon, harden alliances, expand military capacity, and stabilize capital.
He presents this as acting in the face of wrongdoing, but it is not action for the greater good. It is action in our own interest. The injustice is not confronted. It is selectively rerouted.
The deception lies there. The speech alludes to moral clarity and truth telling, but the outcome is not justice. It is insulation.
One major perpetrator is cut out, not because domination is wrong, but because it has become unreliable for us. The system that produces coercion, violence, and inequality remains intact, merely redistributed.
Fuck Trump!
But don't change anything.
That is not taking the sign down. It is replacing it with one that feels better to display.
That is exactly the pattern Parenti named. When consent erodes and democratic outcomes threaten economic power, elites do not abandon capitalism.
Values are repeatedly invoked. But none of them are allowed to constrain capital accumulation, military escalation, or coercive leverage.
They abandon democratic constraint while insisting they are defending it. They are not working for you.
When democracy threatens capital, democracy is managed, narrowed, and hollowed out while its language is intensified.
Carney names the WTO, COP and the UN as under threat.
The WTO’s central function is to protect the rights of capital across borders, not the rights of people.
The COP process acknowledges climate crisis while protecting the economic structures that cause it.
Power within the UN is explicitly unequal. Economic strangulation is treated as diplomacy even though it is violence.
Fuck Trump! But fuck the UN, the WTO and COP too! And fuck Carney as well, for reducing my values into opportunity for the wealthy.