CAPITALIST SYSTEMIC POVERTY

PATRICE GREANVILLE—LITERALLY MILES OF CARS WAITING FOR FOOD HAS BECOME ANOTHER SEARING IMAGE OF LIFE IN AMERICA THESE DAYS. Jimmy Dore properly calls them, “poverty traffic.” And they are popping up all over the country, including in once “proud” libertarian cultures like Texas. 

Major crises, like this “trifecta” of a pandemic, economic implosion and political bankruptcy, reveal in stark relief the shortcomings of any major social system, and so it is with America’s “Way of Life,” its beloved capitalism. While Congress and the White House have done literally NOTHING to assist the tens of millions thrown into complete destitution, it is the people who spontaneously organise themselves to help each other, and they do. Mind you, this is not charity, per se; this is people properly and promptly doing what needs to be done to solve a social problem. There is solidarity here, and a lesson that we hope will not be forgotten: the people really don’t need the capitalist structure oppressing their lives.

JEAN SHAOUL—Pilger’s work is a passionate appeal to working people to oppose the decades-long, covert assault on the National Health Service (NHS) by all three major parties. Even for this writer, whose professional work was bound up with exposing the secret privatisation and balkanization of the NHS, the film proved deeply shocking. Pilger introduced The Dirty War saying that he had wanted to make it for some time, even though he had already made a couple of films about the NHS. He noted that the war on the NHS had been going on a long time but was at a crucial stage now. The NHS, said Pilger, has become a major issue in the election precisely because it “represents democracy.” But what was at stake was more than “just” the dismantling by the corporate vultures of a system that was, in principle at least, a comprehensive (from the cradle to the grave) and universal service, free at the point of use. Pilger explains in the film that “Britain’s deadly disease was class. The NHS was not given from on high but won in struggle.

GARY OLSON—Although his capitulation ultimately tore out their hearts, roughly 10 million beleaguered and bitter Millennials embraced Bernie Sanders  because they realized they were being shafted by the Lords of Capital. Today, they could  declare, “It’s not the pandemic, stupid!  It’s the pandemic under economic inequality.”  In sum, what is so exciting about this research  is that an “intersectional perspective that promotes solidarity across struggles needs to be advocated” and the groundwork now exists.

LEE CAMP—Late-stage capitalism gives us fraud & misery like when Wisconsin offered mega-corporation Foxconn billions in tax breaks to pretend they’d bring jobs to the state.

GLEN FORD—The political weakness of the Black street movement is most evident in the behavior of the Congressional Black Caucus, which has voted overwhelmingly to continue the militarization of local police (2014) and to make cops a “protected class,” assaults against whom are now a “hate crime” (2018). The Black Lives Matter movement has not altered the anti-Black, pro-police, pro-mass Black incarceration political behavior of the men and women that represent Black America in Congress, because BLM has failed to target Black Democratic politicians, even when they act en masse against Black interests. Black lives are apparently less important than Black faces in high Democratic places, who need only wear kente cloth on occasion to ward off the young Black legions. The spear is blunted. Allegiance to the Democratic half of the duopoly – whether active or passive – is still allegiance to corporate rule, not a strategy for transformative change. Both Malcolm X and MLK rejected such a stance.