LIFE UNDER CAPITALISM

GLENN GREENWALD—In a January Wall Street Journal op-ed, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Yale Law School’s constitutional scholar Jed Rubenfeld warned that Congress is rapidly approaching this constitutional boundary if it has not already transgressed it. “Using a combination of statutory inducements and regulatory threats,” the duo wrote, “Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution.” Added: Deleted: That article compiled just a small sample of case law making clear that efforts to coerce private actors to censor speech implicate core First Amendment free speech guarantees.

According to Washington correspondent John Solomon, last night the White House confirmed the declassification of the FBI’s entire Russia Probe cache of files and documents. The documents will be released over the coming days, and will contain a number of revelations of the FBI’s shambolic investigation and the full scope of the Obama administration and Democratic Party official Russiagate hoax.

Revelations found in remaining FBI documents are said to reveal how the Hillary Clinton camp initially invented the ‘Russian collusion’ hoax to deflect from her own crippling scandals.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—We’re so far from justice that even the table scraps of “You’re too crazy to extradite” are welcomed. You want justice? Free Assange, shower him with awards and compensation, and lock up everyone who helped persecute him. That would be justice. Then you’d be getting somewhere.

PATRICE GREANVILLE—In this episode The Finnish Bolshevik provides an excellent overview of the liberal mentality, its good points and bad points; essentially its dangerous limitations grounded in bourgeois delusions, opportunism, and plain political cowardice, all of which make most liberals de facto collaborators with the imperialist status quo. He also notes Jimmy Dore’s brave struggle against the “synthetic left”, and his own evolution toward more radical positions consistent with genuine socialism.  

Personally I find his critique of liberals and their mythologies refreshing in an ideological field deliberately brimming with confusion to the point of incoherence. His dismantlement of the notion that America has devolved into the oligarchic tyranny we witness today, rather than it having been an oligarchic tyranny all along, the inevitable outcome of the natural dynamics of a capitalist order, is especially welcome.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The ability of the plutocratic class to manipulate public thought at mass scale is the single most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society. It warps the entirety of our political spectrum, all our thinking, all our discourse, and what we perceive as normal. And you just don’t see people fighting it. The ACLU isn’t protecting people’s mental sovereignty from the manipulations of sociopathic government-aligned oligarchs. People aren’t taking the media-owning class to the Supreme Court for brazen election interference. People aren’t taking to the streets protesting it. But they could.

In terms of the effect it has on society, no control tool comes remotely close to advancing as many interests of the powerful against the interests of the people as domestic plutocrat-sponsored propaganda. Nothing will change until people start noticing and resisting this.