I imagine I’m not the only political and media observer sickened by the dominant (“mainstream”) corporate media’s habitual reference to xenophobic, right-wing, white-nationalist, and neo-fascist politicians like Donald Trump, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen as “populists.”  Populism properly understood is about popular and democratic opposition to the rule of the money power – to the reign of concentrated wealth. It emerged from radical farmers’ fight for social and economic justice and democracy against the plutocracy of the nation’s Robber Baron capitalists during the late 19th century.  It was a movement of the left.  As the left author and journalist Harvey Wasserman notes:

 “The Morgans, Rockefellers and their ilk had captured the industrial revolution that dominated the U.S. after the Civil War. The farmers of the South and West fought back with a grass-roots social movement…They formed the People’s Party. Its socialistic platforms demanded public ownership of the major financial institutions, including banks, railways, power utilities and other private monopolies that were crushing the public well-being.”

The Columbus Police Department has undergone “a significant loss” in dash-camera videos stored from Columbus Police Division traffic stops and call responses, Police Chief Kim Jacobs announced Tuesday. An estimated 100,000 videos recorded in 2017, the entirety of videos recorded in 2015, and an estimated 500 video files from last year were deleted. This incident was the result of an officer’s blundering attempt to reclassify thousands of video files. The deletion occurred on March 8 and officers became aware of the missing files March 13.

The 12th annual South East European Film Festival kicked off with a gala screening at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills of writer/ director Rajko Grlić’s The Constitution, a stellar must-see movie full of humor and humanity that set the tone for this filmfest. I say that because sometimes cinefiles “suffer” through specialty cinema (especially those bearing English subtitles), but The Constitution reminded me of the joy of discovering those “foreign” films by Luis Bunuel, Francois Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, et al, at an arthouse that transported us beyond Hollywood glitz and glamour to a more “sophisticated” cinematic view of the world beyond our shores.

I imagine I’m not the only political and media observer sickened by the dominant (“mainstream”) corporate media’s habitual reference to xenophobic, right-wing, white-nationalist, and neo-fascist politicians like Donald Trump, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen as “populists.”  Populism properly understood is about popular and democratic opposition to the rule of the money power – to the reign of concentrated wealth. It emerged from radical farmers’ fight for social and economic justice and democracy against the plutocracy of the nation’s Robber Baron capitalists during the late 19th century.  It was a movement of the left.  As the left author and journalist Harvey Wasserman notes: