{"id":389131,"date":"2018-12-14T14:46:30","date_gmt":"2018-12-14T13:46:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/a-tale-of-two-cities-2\/"},"modified":"2018-12-14T14:46:30","modified_gmt":"2018-12-14T13:46:30","slug":"a-tale-of-two-cities-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/a-tale-of-two-cities-2\/","title":{"rendered":"A Tale of Two Cities"},"content":{"rendered":"<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<div id=\"attachment_107924\" style=\"width: 520px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-107924\" src=\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/12\/46277346411_0e8a3cdc19_z.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"383\" srcset=\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/12\/46277346411_0e8a3cdc19_z.jpg 510w, https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/12\/46277346411_0e8a3cdc19_z-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 510px) 100vw, 510px\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo Source Laurent Bourrelly | <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/\">CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Here follows a tale of two cities \u2014 not, as in Dickens\u2019 novel, Paris and London, but Paris and Madison, Wisconsin.<\/p>\n<p>Besides the obvious differences between he City of Light and a modestly sized Midwestern state capital and college town, there is also this: that while Dickens could justly write of the world he described, the world of the French Revolution, that \u201cit was the best of times, it was the worst of times,\u201d no sane person could say at least half of that about the world today. The best of times it certainly is not \u2013 not with Donald Trump on the loose.<\/p>\n<p>There are probably more than a few comparatively clear-headed beneficiaries of the Trump administration\u2019s tax cuts for corporations and the rich and of its efforts \u201cto deconstruct the administrative state,\u201d as Steve Bannon infelicitously calls it, who would agree.<\/p>\n<p>Included among them are fossil fuel and \u201cdefense\u201d industry magnates and other high-flying capitalists, along with top military brass and their counterparts in the various institutions of America\u2019s overblown national security state.<\/p>\n<p>To be sure, some well-off Trump supporters are committed free market ideologues, and some are fools who believe their own propaganda. But there is little doubt that many of them maintain a comparatively sound purchase on reality, and therefore support Trump only because they are greedy and because their time horizons are short.<\/p>\n<p>May their wickedness cause them anguish&#8230;.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/12\/14\/a-tale-of-two-cities-3\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Photo Source Laurent Bourrelly | CC BY 2.0 Here follows a tale of two cities \u2014 not, as in Dickens\u2019 novel, Paris and London, but Paris and Madison, Wisconsin. Besides the obvious differences between he City of Light and a modestly sized Midwestern state capital and college town, there is also this: that while Dickens [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-389131","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}