CAPITALIST SYSTEMIC POVERTY

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.

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. 

YOEL BITRAN—In 1989, a combination of mass protests and rising international condemnation forced the dictatorship to call for elections. But the Chilean oligarchy—which consists of the traditional land-owning aristocracy and newer generations of capitalist families—knew that though the dictator would fall, their constitution would stay intact. This meant, as Guzman predicted, that any significant changes would be rendered impossible. Thirty years later, Chile continued to have an extremely high level of economic inequality, with the highest income gap in the OECD countries.

Since the US has moved to the step of landing a military cargo plane in Taiwan island, escalating the situation to a tipping point of military action, each step they take may trigger military friction and confrontation. They must understand the mainland is much better prepared for this kind of clash, both in terms of real action and willpower.

FRANK SCOTT—The horrendous death toll inflicted by the virus is thought by many to be the work of a Chinese plot to exterminate everyone on earth but the Chinese and blame it on America, an American plot to exterminate everyone on earth but Americans and blame it on China, and assorted tales of twitness and omni-anti-social media to make those two sound relatively thoughtful. The fact that capitalism has transformed nature and made it far more easy to spread a lethal virus than to feed, clothe and shelter billions of people has escaped many, even some critics of capital who seem shocked that big pharma profits from illness. Hello? As does every and all other business entities and aspects of free market private profit pursuit which has less to do with evil individuals and far more to do with a corrupt debased system controlled by minorities at ever great cost to the majority.