EDITOR—Dr. Michael Hudson is an American economist, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator and journalist. Dr. Steve Keen is an Australian economist and author. A post-Keynesian, he criticizes neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. Our conversation examines the false dichotomy of capitalism v. socialism and considers the true dichotomy, which is industrial capitalism v. finance capitalism. Hudson and Keen argue that the transition to finance capitalism, where unearned income is considered economic growth, has truly sown the seeds to ruin the world. Tell us what you think in the comments!
CULTURE & HISTORY
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The New York Intellectuals and the invention of Neoconservatism
41 minutes readDENIS BONEAU—Since 1945, American and British propaganda services have been recruiting intellectuals, usually from Trotskyite media, to invent and promote an “ideology capable of competing with communism”. The “New York Intellectuals”, headed by Sidney Hook, efficiently and zealously complied with several missions entrusted to them by the CIA, thus becoming first-class agents of the cultural Cold War. Key theoreticians of this movement, like James Burnham and Irving Kristol, devised the neoconservative rhetoric used nowadays by Washington “hawks” as their foundation.
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BRUCE LERRO—People’s identity can be made sense of as existing in the cross-fire between our biological, psychological and social lives. This helps us to understand the differences between someone’s temperament, personality and self. Among social psychologists such as George Herbert Mead, the species homo sapiens is not fully human until we have been socialized. What are the skills necessary to build this social identity? Why is it that some skills have to be built before others? As adults we assume that our inner psychology and the objective world are separate. But research shows that it probably takes the child seven or eight years to develop both a subjective and objective self.
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The Gwangju Uprising and American Hypocrisy: One Reporter’s Quest for Truth and Justice in Korea
41 minutes readTIM SHORROCK—My award was doubly significant because my stories had grown directly out of events that took place on the very square where I stood. There, in the shadow of Gwangju’s old Provincial Capital, the last voices of the city’s rebels had been stilled on May 27, 1980, by a Korean Army division dispatched from the DMZ marking the border with North Korea. They were sent with the approval of the US commander of the US-Korea Joint Command, Gen. John Wickham. That decision, made at the highest levels of the US government, forever stained the relationship between the United States and the South. For the people of Gwangju, many of whom believed that the US military would side with the forces of democracy, it was a deep betrayal that they’ve never forgotten.
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PAUL EDWARDS—The idiotic bind that The Empire is in is one they chose by their long, duplicitous, two-faced vaudeville act in the Middle East. This Gaza slaughter has drawn the curtain exposing The Great Oz, and made starkly obvious the payoff for playing both ends against the middle. If it backs the murderous Zionist Reich, it must see its cringing romancing of previously wholly-owned tyrannies such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey end forever. There is no clean, or even dirty way—as in Afghanistan—out of this political iron maiden in which it has sealed itself. Official America backs wholesale murder of children and no spin can hide that.