Posts that I especially recommend today:Thursday, July 9, 2020
- As Long As Mass Media Propaganda Exists, Democracy Is A Sham by Caitlin Johnstone from her weblog. (My reaction: Propaganda is an
indispensable element added to fascism to create the neofascism of the
US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. It is a crucial weapon along with the re-writing of history added to the traditional weapons of fascism (example: the militarization of police) in order to control their populations.
"Democracy" has nothing to do with fascism of either type.)
Prof. Wolff is what we are left
with to expose the weaknesses of capitalism after the great ideological
purge of the late 1940s and '50s (see this and this).
This period that saw the careers of Hollywood producers, directors, and
actors destroyed along with true leftist intellectuals was very well described by Bruce Lerr.
As a result, we now we see a very few tamed leftists who pose as true socialists like Wolff attacking the weaknesses of capitalism regarding the provision of health services of our country. (Or we see intellectuals like Wilkinson avoiding the topic of capitalism as a class-based system
in preference to the highly abstract and meaningless "Business".) Wolff
has been playing to the crowd, and "dissident" websites like CounterPunch, as a safe "Marxist" by promoting worker cooperatives within
a capitalist system. He knows, or should know, that worker cooperatives
cannot compete with private enterprises because the former serve the
welfare of workers, whereas the private enterprises regard workers as
expensive commondities that they must reduce in order to compete in the
marketplace vis-a-vis other companies.
By
attacking capitalist health services he stays on very safe ground
because the capitalist system cannot serve the whole population with
health services--it was never designed for this purpose. Capitalism is
inherently a class based system. It was designed to serve a tiny class
which has over the centuries accumulated capital in ever concentrated
amounts and in ever smaller hands. Today major capitalists hold more
money than entire countries along with their enormous power to subvert
entire countries (and even the UN),
including our own, and today's events reflect that fact. It is obvious
that capitalists could never prepare for a pandemic. It's simply not
"efficient" use of resources that were designed only to serve the needs
of a tiny minority--capitalists.