PHILIP A. FARRUGGIO—Today is the 17th anniversary of the 9/11 Twin Towers and Bldg. 7 false flag scenario. What transpired soon after that horrific event was the marriage between the sports media and the Pentagon. Case in point: before 2009 Pro Football teams stayed in their locker rooms while the National Anthem was played. After the Pentagon threw mega millions at the NFL, we had the weekly honor guards and pomp and circumstance, replete with a giant flag draped over the 100 X 55 yard playing field.
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Three Cheers for the Decline of the Middle Class
CHRIS WRIGHT—How can society ever get to this point? Evidently only through upheavals so painful that it becomes clear there is no other option. Revolutionary change on such a scale happens only by means of unprecedented crisis, which is to say social discontent so extreme that half-measures are cast aside as pitifully inadequate. As long as a large middle class exists to serve as a bulwark of social stability and relatively conservative politics, the requisite crisis will not happen. Society has to polarize between a tiny minority of ultra-rich and a huge majority of unprotected, insecure, ecologically vulnerable, politically desperate people whose violent discontent propels the “revolution” forward.
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When Bernie Sold Out His Hero, Anti-Authoritarians Paid
BRUCE LEVINE—Wilson’s venom for Debs was such that even after the end of the war, Wilson announced, “This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration.” Wilson even denied a pardon for Debs when it was recommended because of Debs’s poor health by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer (notorious for his “Palmer Raids,” incarcerating and deporting dissenters). It was the Republican president Warren Harding, following Wilson, who commuted Debs’s sentence in 1921.
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What’s Wrong with Sigmund Freud?
SUSAN ROSENTHAL—In the 1970s, the capitalist class launched an offensive to retake lost ground. The economic assault on workers’ organizations, wages, benefits, and conditions was accompanied by virulent victim-blaming. Sick people were blamed for making bad choices. Injured workers were blamed for not working safely. Welfare recipients were portrayed as lazy cheats. Affirmative action and the right to abortion came under attack.
As the balance of forces shifted in favour of the capitalist class, the deniers of child abuse grew more confident. In 1992, Pamela and Peter Freyd founded the False Memory Syndrome Foundation after their daughter (with the support of her grandmother and uncle) accused her father of childhood sexual assault.
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