CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM

RICHARD SANDERS—For centuries, self-righteous state myths have depicted the imperial Canadian project as a victory for democracy and human rights. Despite Canada’s long record of genocide, land plunder, and war profiteering, official narratives about noble “Canadian values” still reign in this imagined “peaceable kingdom.” Canada’s ethnonationalist propaganda demonized First Nations as hostile sub-humans to be enslaved, imprisoned on reservations and made Christian in residential schools. This White-Power racism served imperialist containment policies designed to turn “Red Indian” enemies into captive nations. By the early 1950s, then-external affairs minister Lester Pearson was pioneering a new containment policy. During the transition to the new world order of the Cold War, he rallied his powerful allies in Canada’s racist old-boys’ clubs.

JEFF J. BROWN—An interview with the capable principals at the Rising Tide Foundation, Cynthia Chung and Matt Ehret on my recent book, “BIG RED BOOK ON CHINA”. As usual we do not expect such materials or truths to be given any space on the corporate media, except perhaps to denigrate them. So be sure to pass this on.

ALASTAIR CROOKE—The alternative way simply is to privatise these ‘public goods’ (as in the West), where they are provided at a financialized maximum cost – including interest rates, dividends, management fees, and corporate manipulations for financial gain.

‘It’ is then a truly different economic approach. To give one example: New York’s Second Avenue Subway extension cost $6 billion, or $2 billion per mile – the most expensive urban mass transit ever built. The average cost of underground subway lines outside the U.S. is $350 million a mile, or a sixth of New York’s cost.

How does this ‘it’ change everything? Well, just imagine for a moment: the biggest element in anyone’s budget today is housing at 40%, which simply reflects high house prices, based on a debt-fuelled market. Instead, imagine that proportion at 10% (as in China). Suppose too, you have low-cost public education. Well then, you are rid of education-led debt, and its interest cost. Suppose you have public healthcare, and low priced transport infrastructure. Then you would have the capacity to spend – It becomes a low-cost economy, and consequently it would grow.

EDWARD CURTIN—On March 30, 2018, The Washington Post’s crime reporter, Tom Jackman, published a four-column front-page article, “Who killed Martin Luther King Jr.?  His family believes James Earl Ray was framed.”  While not close to an endorsement of the trial’s conclusions, it is a far cry from past nasty dismissals of those who agreed with the jury’s verdict as conspiracy nuts or Hitler supporters.  After decades of clouding over the truth of MLK’s assassination, some rays of truth have come peeping through, and on the front page of the WP at that. Jackman makes it very clear that all the surviving King family members – Bernice, Dexter, and Martin III – are in full agreement that James Earl Ray, the accused assassin, did not kill their father, and that there was and continues to be a conspiracy to cover up the truth.

P. GREANVILLE—As longstanding supporters of The Grayzone, just about one  of the few consistently reliable antiwar/anti-imperialist outfits in what remains of the Western left, we are delighted to see their work making headway and headlines, especially among our common enemies. Contrary to all the noise, there is absolutely zero reason for the constant hysterical hostility, and even less for the talk of war, against Russia, China, Iran and other nations singled out by the empire for imaginary crimes fully manufactured by the West’s engines of disinformation. The world and especially Washington and Britain face no threat whatsoever from the currently designated  “rogue nations”, except the threats they themselves create.  Meanwhile, via a transparent regimen of suffocating mendacity, Washington, London and their imperialist accomplices seek to demonise their opponents by any means necessary. This is serious. We all know from painful experience with the Big Hegemon’s playbook that character assassination usually precedes actual execution.