CAPITALIST SYSTEMIC POVERTY

P. GREANVILLE—More than a year into the pandemic and I still find it hard to locate easily digestible facts for what should be a straightforward question: How much is Big Pharma charging for an average vaccine shot? The leading TV journos have pretty much ignored the topic, as if it did not matter, supposedly (I presume that’s their convenient rationale) because the government, as if by magic, is making the jabs free to the public, anyhow. But, friends, without going libertarian, we all know that when the government pays, WE pay, ultimately, because the moneys laid out are our taxes, our money —well so they say. (Contrary to common assumption, the government, which does NOT operate like a household, need not balance the books nor rely on taxes alone for its expenditures).

PG—This is a highly recommended conversation between two genuine anti-imperialist activists and communicators, Caleb Maupin, who needs little introduction to our audience, and Craig Pasta Jardulla, one of the pillars of the Convo Couch, a unique platform for authentic journalism and badly needed insightful leftist analysis. With his equally formidable co-host Fiorella Isabel —who is as brilliant as she is beautiful—and aided by their technical whiz Johnny, they produce impressive progressive and elegant content on a broad array of political topics almost every day, literally on a dime, something that dedicated people do around the globe, thereby keeping the flame of truth and the thirst for justice alive. Please support these people as much as you can, and do your part to advance revolutionary change.

GROVER FURR—In Chapter 11 of my 2011 book Khrushchev Lied, I studied the rehabilitation reports that had been published by 2003. I showed that none of them contains any evidence that the person “rehabilitated” was innocent. It was politically convenient for Gorbachev (and earlier for Khrushchev) to claim that many persons convicted of serious crimes during the “Stalin period” were falsely convicted. But Gorbachev’s men did not make public the investigative files that included the evidence against the defendants or – in the case of the Germans and Austrians – even the “rehabilitation” reports.

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.

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.