PLUTOCRATS

MATT JJ EHRET—The patriarch of the same Bush dynasty that gave the world two disastrous American presidents (and nearly a third had Donald Trump not annihilated Jeb at the last minute in 2016) made a name for himself funding Nazism alongside his business partners Averell Harriman and Averell’s younger brother E. Roland Harriman (the latter who was to recruit Prescott to Skull and Bones while both studying at Yale).

ERIC SCHECHTER—Self-destruction was not fast enough for the plutocrats. Now they are using the pandemic as a way to speed things up. Capitalism always was a balancing act, and now I think they are losing their balance. With mass layoffs and insufficient unemployment checks, they are rapidly, greatly increasing the numbers of the poor. I think this makes inevitable EITHER A REVOLUTION OR THE COLLAPSE OF OUR CIVILIZATION, perhaps by 2022.

GARY LEUPP—Isn’t it special that Bloomberg has promised to spend a billion dollars to elect the next Democratic president, even if the nominee isn’t him? He pairs that commitment with a promise to back whatever candidate is selected at the party convention. It is an implicit demand that the other candidates (who do not have a billion dollars) to similarly promise to back him should he successfully buy the election. Fair? Bloomberg will back Bernie if he gets the nomination through mass mobilization; Bernie will back Bloomberg if he gets enough votes from saturating the media with misleading ads targeting the African-American community. That at least is the proposed deal, the gentlemanly norm in bourgeois parliamentary politics.