LIFE UNDER CAPITALISM

P. GREANVILLE—Inhabiting a clusterfuck of ignorance and disinformation, Americans are woefully ill-equipped to distinguish truth from falsehood. Granted, the desire to expunge the lies from the national debate is valid and healthy, but that train left the station a long time ago. It left the station when Americans —mostly in the immediate postwar period—the “Eisenhower years”—dropped their guard to concentrate on living the American Dream, brushing aside the need to understand real politics. They did not see that the postwar affluence was the product not so much of capitalism’s wonderful design—long enshrined by hucksters as “the American Way of Life”—but of a historically brief and exceptional moment in which the United States had found itself as the sole global industrial superpower, with all rivals in ruins.

Journalist Eva Bartlett speaks candidly on her experiences in North Korea and Syria at the Waterside Theatre in Derry, Northern Ireland on January 30, 2018.

On Foreign Agents, Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton expose the biggest frauds recruited as defectors and dissidents to lie about Official Enemies by the US regime. For well over a century now, London and Washington have excelled at disinformation using phony witnesses and false flags, the latest campaigns including the Skripal and Navalny “poisonings”, the downing of MH17 “by Russia”, Russiagate itself, and the myriad accusation against China, Venezuela, etc. The list is long.

ED CURTIN—But let us also ask where the writers and presenters of the mainstream and alternative media get their money.  Although “to follow the money” is a truism, few do.  If we do, we will learn that money talks and those who take it toe the line, nor do they live in shacks by the side of the road or rent like so many others.  They invest with Black Rock and their ilk and have money managers who can increase their wealth while shielding them from the ways that money is made on the backs of the poor and working people.  And they lie about people like Assange, Daniel Hale, Reality Winner, Craig Murray, et al., all imprisoned for daring to reveal the depredations of the power elites, the violence at the heart of predatory capitalism.

There are now almost 100,000 members of the Democratic Socialists of America. Because of this, the author of a critical biography of its founder is timely. The criticisms of Harrington are overwhelmingly true of the DSA today. Its anti-communism drives it to still support the Democratic Party in spite of the fact the party today is far more right-wing than it was in Harrington’s day. In Harrington’s day supporting Palestine was considered antisemitic. DSA’s support of Palestine today is more the effect of the brutal Israeli policy for decades than an internal change of heart on the part of DSA. —Bruce Lerro, Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism