ABOMINATIONS

It is a myth that the pandemic devastated America. Other rich countries faced the same virus without mass unemployment, mile-long breadlines, and a soaring death toll. Those governments gave their citizens a basic income or subsidized payroll at the companies that employ them, on top of the universal single-payer health care they already provided. Our government passed a multi-trillion dollar Wall Street bailout and left working people to fend for themselves. Both parties were in on it, and the vote was nearly unanimous. The Democrats and Republicans exploited the greatest national crisis in generations to enrich their corporate donors.

A defining pattern has emerged in Biden’s governance. He promises popular progressive policies to much media fanfare, then quietly reneges while the corporate press turns a blind eye and falls silent. The result is an avalanche of revisionist propaganda and confusion that shields a reactionary administration and party.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The US actively works to bribe, bully and manipulate international governments into protecting and advancing its interests. When the US was seeking UN authorization for the Gulf War in 1991, Yemen dared to vote against it, after which a member of the US delegation told Yemen’s ambassador, “That’s the most expensive vote you ever cast.” Yemen lost not just 70 million dollars in US foreign aid but also a valuable labor contract with Saudi Arabia, and a million Yemeni immigrants were sent home by America’s Gulf state allies.

Or take the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which began in 1997 as an independent international body working toward the elimination of chemical weapons from the world with great success. That all changed in 2002 when the OPCW Director General, José Bustani, became viewed by the Bush administration as an obstacle to the agenda to manufacture international support for the Iraq invasion. The US threatened to cut off funding for the organization, Undersecretary of State John Bolton threatened Bustani’s kids, and Bustani was sent packing. Now the OPCW is a lackey of the US war machine whose leaders actively manipulate chemical weapons investigations to produce results which align with US imperialist interests.

Contrary to the Black capitalist myth, most Greenwood residents were low wage working people employed by whites and living in substandard housing. It was the super-exploitation of poor Black labor that facilitated both the function of Tulsa as a whole and the Black Wall Street District.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Worn out and disgusted by crushing neoliberal policies at home and murderous neoconservative policies abroad, Americans elected a political neophyte who ran on a populist platform which criticized both Bush and Obama. Trump promised to “drain the swamp”, end the wars, and fight the establishment in the interests of ordinary people. This time for sure there would be change.

But the wars kept going, and the swamp got even fuller, and the US empire kept chugging along on the same trajectory it had been on throughout the Bush administration and the Obama administration. Despite all this, the Democratic Party and its allied media institutions acted as though some drastic deviation from the norm had taken place, insisting that the United States had been plunged from a free democracy respected around the world into an isolationist fascist dystopia.

CALEB MAUPIN—Forerunners of the “color revolutions”, Caleb discusses the CIA-supported Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Czech “Prague Spring” of 1968, the latter term symbolising the coming in from the frozen cold of communist tyranny. Every nation that heeded the capitalist siren song of the West became a corrupt neoliberal regime, warns Caleb. And each of these regimes were at the time of their birth hailed as great improvements over communism by many people who still define themselves as being anti-imperialist and “on the left”.