CAPITALIST SYSTEMIC POVERTY

John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science and Co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, assesses the causes of the present Ukraine crisis, the best way to end it, and its consequences for all of the main actors. A key assumption is that in order to come up with the optimum plan for ending the crisis, it is essential to know what caused the crisis. Regarding the all-important question of causes, the key issue is whether Russia or the West bears primary responsibility.

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.

PATRICE GREANVILLE—The term socialism has been abused to the point of meaninglessness. Bernie Sanders (!) calls himself a socialist. AOC calls herself a socialist. There are many other examples equally ludicrous. As well, legions of liberals satisfied with welfare capitalism like to call themselves “socialists”, but this obviously does not make them so. The label can stick only in political spheres severely confused and deprived of a politically sophisticated audience.

Attaching [capitalist]-appeasing labels to this ideology, such as “democratic socialism” or social(ist) democracy, is in reality a backhanded, cowardly insult to genuine socialists: it bows to the capitalist propaganda slander that socialism is or can be inherently “undemocratic”, while denying that genuine socialism, by its nature, is several magnitudes more democratic than any bourgeois “democracy”.

Intro: I need to begin with a MAJOR caveat and tell you how/why this “interview” happened.  I did not plan to interview Michael Hudson.  I was listening to a well-known Russian economist, Mikhail Khazin, and I was fascinated by what he was saying.  I also understood only some of the points he was making.  To put it mildly, I am not an economist, and while listening to Khazin did not take any notes.  What I did do is email Michael and ask him a few questions by email, just to clarify my own thoughts and marginally better my (rather dismal) “understanding” of economics and its role in the current standoff.  With his typical kindness and generosity, Michael gave me some very interesting answers, and he agreed to allow me to turn this into an interview. 

Well before COVID-19, back in 2018 hospitals across the United States were facing bed shortages, ICU overcrowding and staff pushed to the brink – all because of the flu. So if you think the problems with hospital beds and the healthcare system pushed past capacity is the fault of the unvaccinated, you’re wrong. Jimmy and comedian Kurt Metzger discuss the greed driving overcrowded hospitals.