CAPITALIST SICKNESS

ED CURTIN—In an old city like Rome one tends to think old thoughts: that the history of torture, human treachery, lying, and violence has a long history; that secular and religious fanatics are nothing new; and that empires rise and fall and everyone dies, even those who build monuments to their own “glorious” deeds. But if one wanders around Rome and through life with no itinerary, one also encounters beautiful people and small pockets of faith, love, and devotion. 

CHRIS MARSDEN—The Blairite think-tank, Prospect, proclaims, “Social democracy, the most influential force in European politics for decades, is dying.” They should know, because the party they dubbed “New Labour” was in the vanguard of the political shift to a nakedly pro-business, pro-privatisation, pro-austerity and pro-war agenda that has ended in electoral meltdown. The working class, particularly the younger generation, has abandoned the old parties in disgust at what they have done.

BRUCE DIXON—No fewer than 24 states have enacted bipartisan legislation to publicly identify and blacklist individuals or corporations that do business with individuals and entities publicly identified as BDS-friendly. (South Carolina already regards any criticism of Israel as a hate crime.—Ed). Similar legislation has been introduced in a dozen more states and in the US Senate. Israel trains thousands of US police each year for hundreds of local departments from big cities, universities and state cop shops to small towns and rural counties.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—It really couldn’t be more fitting that the US now has an actual, literal torturer as the head of the CIA. It also couldn’t be more fitting that it has a reality TV star billionaire President, an Iraq-raping Bush-era neoconservative psychopath as National Security Advisor, a former defense industry director as Secretary of Defense, a former Goldman Sachs executive as Secretary Treasurer, and a former Rothschild, Inc. executive as Secretary of Commerce. These positions have always facilitated torture, oppression, war profiteering and Wall Street greed; the only thing that has changed is that they now have a more honest face on them.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—This notion that the US and its allies are fighting against Russian “hybrid warfare” (by which they typically mean hackers and disinformation campaigns) has taken such deep root among think tanks, DC elites and intelligence/defense circles that it often gets unquestioningly passed on as fact by mass media establishment stenographers who are immersed in and chummy with those groups.