CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM

CALEB MAUPIN–Despite describing his upbringing as attending wholesome Catholic schools, it’s not a secret Pete Buttigieg’s father was associated with Marxism and left-wing activism. The father of Pete Buttigieg was Joseph Anthony Buttigieg, a Notre Dame professor who has achieved notoriety for translating the writings of Antonio Gramsci. The project of translating the Italian Marxist’s prison notebooks was paid for with a grant from the US Governments Endowment for the Humanities. Joseph Anthony Buttigieg established the International Gramsci Society, an institution that seems to have cooperated with the CIA’s efforts to push the Frankfurt School, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and other “anti-Stalinist” voices among Marxist academia, most especially in western Europe.

CALEB MAUPIN—Dispatch dateline October 2019 • Topics included:
The fake (synthetic) left destruction of real leftism in the developed world • Criticism of identity politics, LGBTQ, transgenderist idealism, etc.  • Deliberate “de-industrialisation in the developed world heartland • Dismantlement of the postwar “welfare state” in Europe, and rollback of worker gains in the US (the “Great American Middle Class”) • The imposition of austerity and unending war • Why bourgeois feminism leads nowhere •The century long campaign to defame the Soviet Union and J. Stalin • The accomplishments of socialism • Art & music under the Bolsheviks: it wasn’t the way the film Ninotchka presented it —and much more.

MoA—The U.S. wants to counter China’s growing economic and political standing in the world. The Obama administration had attempted a ‘pivot to Asia’ by building a low tariff economic zone via the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). It would have excluded China. The Trump administration rejected the TPP and withdrew from it. It launched an economic war against China by increasing tariffs on Chinese products, prohibiting high tech supplies to Chinese manufacturers, and by denying Chinese companies access to its market. 
It has also tried to build a military coalition that would help it to threaten China.

ERIC SCHECHTER—But exponential growth and tipping points are just descriptions of how fast. How are humans causing global warming? Materially, the three biggest ways are fossil fuels, deforestation, and cow farts.

Yes, cow farts. We humans, especially in the wealthier countries, are eating a lot of beef, mostly from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. CAFO cattle don’t get to graze on grass; instead they are fed cheap grains. This unnatural diet produces a great deal of methane as a side effect. (Pig shit too, to a lesser degree.)

JIM KAVANAGH—For whatever opportunistic reasons and however fragmentarily, they have opened the door for questioning the “payroll tax/trust fund” structure, which is actually a weak and failing line of defense for SS&M that must be abandoned. The better response of the left is not to reflexively reject what they are saying, but to say “You’re right. The tax isn’t necessary,” and take the discussion in a much more productive direction.