JAMES MARTIN—White effectively captures the hypocrisy of upper middle-class politics as well in a number of interactions, including between Olivia and her mother Nicole. The latter declares that “Hillary Clinton was one of the most influential women of the last 30 years.” Olivia scoffs, “She was a neolib and a neocon.” Nicole responds to the taunts, pointing out that “most of these activists” and armchair critics like her daughter, “don’t really want to dismantle the systems of economic exploitation, not the ones that benefit them, which are all global by the way. They just want a better seat at the table…. What’s your system of belief, Olivia? Not capitalism? Not socialism? So just cynicism?”
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GUSTAVO MARANGES—The political situation in Peru appears to be spinning out of control with no end in sight as violent repression on an angry population, who feel their democracy has been pulled out from under them, escalates. A jailed president now imprisoned, the military and the police swarming on the streets, road blockades, increasing protests against Dina Boluarte and the Congress, and 25 deaths have been the balance of a parliamentary coup d’état, whose gestation began even before Pedro Castillo won the elections just 17 months ago.
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MICHAEL HUDSON—America’s number one enemy of course, is always – has been its number one competitor which is Europe, especially Germany. And so, you can think of the war, the new cold war is waged first and foremost against Germany to deindustrialise it, to end German and European competition with America for the next 50 years.
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JEFF BROWN—One of the great fabrications of Western mainstream media, among academics and on Wall Street is that China, starting in 1978 with Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, became a capitalist country. The favorite Western shibboleth bandied about is that, China’s authoritarian regime (it’s almost never called a government) runs a system of state capitalism.
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STEPHEN GOWANS—The Stone and Kuznick view is, really, rather quite silly. They believe that Mao and Kim decided to become guerrillas, and Stalin, a Bolshevik, because these were routes to the acquisition of personal power, self-aggrandizement, and iron-fisted control. Yet, at the time, guerrilla and underground revolutionary were hardly the most promising career paths for people who lusted for power and self-aggrandizement. If Stalin really lusted after these things, why didn’t he link up with Tsarist forces, rather than the Bolsheviks, which until mid-1917 were a minor political force that no one (including many Bolsheviks) expected to take power?
