Category: Power & Corruption
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The Distraction Machine and the Coming Silence
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR We are living inside a distraction machine. Every day it delivers a fresh surge of outrage: Trump’s thuggery, ICE shootings, the Epstein files, the war in Ukraine, genocide in Palestine. These are not fabricated crises. They involve real violence, real victims, real injustice. They demand moral attention.And yet—taken together, and presented the…
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THUGPOWER: The Architecture of Misleadership
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR and PHILIP KOTLER THUGPOWER names the pattern of behavior we see across the world today: when leadership stops protecting the Common Good and starts behaving like a protection racket. In the diagram, it’s drawn as a cycle because it isn’t one isolated tactic-it’s an architecture. Each move makes the next move easier,…
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Moral Superiority, Political Ambiguity, and the Belgian Compromise On Gaza
BY JEF TEUGELS When Prime Minister Bart De Wever said, “Don’t act as if your position is morally superior to someone else’s,” it sounded like a plea for humility. [Bart De Wever, Goeiemorgen morgen!, Radio 2, August 30, 2025.] But humility in politics is never neutral. In this case, it is an alibi — a…
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The Blind Pursuit of Power: How Billionaires Undermine Their Own Future
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR and PHILIP KOTLER Billionaires, for all their wealth and power, exhibit a striking short-sightedness when it comes to governance and the political systems that sustain their “wealthbeing” (where they confuse money with wellbeing). While democracy provides the stability, legal frameworks, and educated workforce necessary for long-term wealth creation, many billionaires either undermine it…
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Wicked Problems: The Book
ANNOUNCEMENT: After almost five years, we’re happy to announce the availability of “WickedProblems: What can we do in a Time of Collapse?“ We are grateful to the Wicked7 advisers and working group. Thank you for your patience. We are also thankful to Daniel Erasmus who introduced us to his brilliant ClimateGPT – the world’s first…
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‘He’s Building a Concentration Camp’: Fears Grow as Images Emerge of Offshore Prison at Gitmo
BY JON QUEALLY Fears are growing that the offshore U.S. detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are an ominous sign of what President Donald Trump has in store as he further disregards the rule of law and normalizes actions that previously would have been unthinkable or faces immediate, bipartisan opposition in Congress. After the first pictures emerged…
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The Death of Democracy
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR and PHILIP KOTLER Trump 2.0 is going to be a nightmare for ethical leaders – they will be harassed and persecuted, even jailed or worse. When asked “What in your view is Trump trying to turn America into?” respondents were quite clear: In our forthcoming book Wicked Problems: What can we do…