ERIC ARNOW—Seems like Blinken has a selective or defective memory. Blinken told his stepfather’s story as a tale of one-sided U.S. beneficence, but Samuel Pisar remembers it differently: “I was saved by the Battle of Stalingrad, which was the turning point of the war, and the Red Army offensive,” he said in a 2010 interview with Russian media outlet RIA Novosti. “For me, during the Second World War, Russia was a savior. I consider my saviors to be the Russian and American armies. You can criticize Stalin, the Gulag, and other things that happened in Russia from 1920 to 1930, but the heroism, sacrifice, and victory of Russia in the war against Fascism cannot be questioned. It’s sacred.”
ENVIRONMENTAL STRUGGLES
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EDITOR—A high point of the episode is a discussion about climate change. Chris Black is extremely pessimistic, believing that the assertion that climate change is a hoax needs to be reexamined carefully. The idea this is a hoax has become popular, of all places, notes Black, among the world’s left, and progressive statesmen, which may be a huge miscalculation. Leaders around the world keep talking about this issue but do little, with Russia and China doing the most, but still not enough, and the West doing the least, or next to nothing. We are at a point where a few more degrees may spell the death of all life on this planet due to the collapse of agriculture and plant life in general, says Black.
Ben Toth replies that a Russian scientist recently advised Putin that humanity had a “Window” of about 10,000 years to solve this problem. This may be wildly optimistic. In Siberia the problem may be extreme, as permafrost (thought to be “eternal”) is now melting away at ever faster rates, in the process releasing methane.
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GODFREE ROBERTS—Mao, a passionate developmentalist, had offered to travel to Washington in 1944 to talk with President Roosevelt, “China must develop. This can only be done by free enterprise. Chinese and American interests fit together, economically and politically. America need not fear that we will not be co-operative. We cannot risk any conflict”. Mao’s message never reached the President so, in 1949, he wrote Truman, then Eisenhower. Both ignored him.
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The Pervasive Lies on Both Sides of the Global Warming Debate
15 minutes readERIC ZUESSE—What, then, about the other 35% of electical power that isn’t coming from fossil fuels? Electricity entails transmission-line losses of around 3%, plus there are the additional costs of the battery, which will wear down and then be recharged and then ultimately trashed, and nobody has calculated a final all-in carbon footprint for electrical vehicles versus internal-combustion ones; so, that’s a secret (or else it’s unknown, if the liberal billionaires are that unconcerned about reality so as not even to know what the all-in carbon-footprint is for electrical versus traditional cars).
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THE BROADER VIEW: How Finance Capitalism Ruined the World
7 minutes readEDITOR—Dr. Michael Hudson is an American economist, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator and journalist. Dr. Steve Keen is an Australian economist and author. A post-Keynesian, he criticizes neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. Our conversation examines the false dichotomy of capitalism v. socialism and considers the true dichotomy, which is industrial capitalism v. finance capitalism. Hudson and Keen argue that the transition to finance capitalism, where unearned income is considered economic growth, has truly sown the seeds to ruin the world. Tell us what you think in the comments!