CRIMINAL RULING CLASS

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).

RICHARD SANDERS—BRD was first spawned in 1985 by pro-NATO, anti-Soviet East European émigré groups in Toronto whose founding leaders were riddled with fascist collaborators, SS veterans, Holocaust perpetrators, and top officials of Nazi puppet regimes. In 2009, Liberal MP (Ontario’s former NDP premier) Bob Rae’s pro-BRD motion received all-party support in Parliament. Cda’s fascist-rooted groups have never been closer to power! The most egregious of them represent the far-right Ukrainian diaspora with which Freeland was worked for 30+ years.

MAITREYA BHAKAL—The reason why the My Lai massacre was allowed to enter the popular US imagination was to hide America’s much larger war crimes. As Nick Turse points out in his award-winning book Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam: “Today, histories of the Vietnam War regularly discuss war crimes or civilian suffering only in the context of a single incident: the My Lai massacre… Even as that one event has become the subject of numerous books and articles, all the other atrocities perpetrated by US soldiers have essentially vanished from popular memory.”

Up until the end of his life, Gehlen enjoyed the protection of German and American leaders. They were willing to overlook his Nazi past in order to use his skills. As the German newspaper, Der Spiegel, noted decades after Gehlen’s death: “If there was ignorance on the matter, it was only because no one wanted to know.” 

The 79-year-old Zuma is a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle that he joined when he was 17, serving a 10-year prison sentence on Robben Island in the 1960s alongside Nelson Mandela. Zuma was also a member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) until 1990. He has played a major role in the ANC ever since. This, his professed support for the poor farmers and workers, and a significant degree of patronage, has enabled him to retain a measure of popular support, despite being mired for years in scandals and facing a long-postponed trial for fraud, corruption and racketeering.