CAPITALIST FRONTS

MICHAEL HUDSON—Why is it okay for the Fed to create $1.5 trillion to buy stocks to prevent rich people from losing on their stocks, and it’s not okay to print only $1 trillion to pay for free Medicare for the entire population? This is crazy!

The idea that only the rich should be allowed to print money for themselves, but the government should not be allowed to print money for any public purpose, any social purpose — not for medicine, not for schools, not for personal budgets, not for full employment — but only to give to the 1 percent. People hesitate to think that.

P. GREANVILLE—Inhabiting a clusterfuck of ignorance and disinformation, Americans are woefully ill-equipped to distinguish truth from falsehood. Granted, the desire to expunge the lies from the national debate is valid and healthy, but that train left the station a long time ago. It left the station when Americans —mostly in the immediate postwar period—the “Eisenhower years”—dropped their guard to concentrate on living the American Dream, brushing aside the need to understand real politics. They did not see that the postwar affluence was the product not so much of capitalism’s wonderful design—long enshrined by hucksters as “the American Way of Life”—but of a historically brief and exceptional moment in which the United States had found itself as the sole global industrial superpower, with all rivals in ruins.

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ED CURTIN—Now we have endless digital propaganda that is the “remedy” for loneliness.  Ah, all the lonely people, keeping their masks in a jar by the side of the door together with Eleanor Rigby.  They think they know what their masks are for but don’t know why they are lonely or that they have been played with. Masks upon masks are donned to ward off the fear that is pumped out through the electronic airwaves.  It is doubtful that many ever heard of William Casey or can imagine the breadth and depth of the propaganda that he and his current protégés in the intelligence agencies and corporate media dispense daily.

“When everything the American people believes is false.”  Casey must be smiling in hell.

CALEB MAUPIN—In old Rome we could already see the contours of a proletariat, argues Caleb Maupin, with all attendant ills of surviving only on the sale of their labor. Christ, e notes, was a proletarian: a carpenter, a free man, who neither a slave nor a landlord. His doctrines were seen as dangerous to the status quo, hence his persecution, and the rise of a “mild version” of radical Christianity, a form of early social democracy.