The return of the oligarchs

Another thoughtful insight from Josh Marshall:

"A central feature of the Early Modern era was weak and underfunded states licensing private entities to exercise state-like powers and then later trying to claw back that license. All of the colonies of that would later become the fledgling United States were founded on this basis. The arc of colonial North American history saw the English and then British monarchies trying to assert direct monarchical control over these fledgling societies. A better known example is the British East India Company which conquered and administered large parts of South Asia before being brought under tighter and tighter state control until being finally extinguished in the 1850s. We live today in an age of reversal in which increasingly public disinvestment, privatization and the rise of a global billionaire class is in key ways reversing that process."

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/newsletter/vol-2-no-63-out-with-the-trumps-with-the-global-oligarchs?utm_source=brevo&utm_campaign=Backchannel%20Vol%202%20No%2063&utm_medium=email