We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, August 6, 2020

Posts that I especially recommend today: Thursday, Aug. 6, 2020

Franklin barely skims the surface of this phenomenon: the avoidance of Allied bombing in WWII to targets that had ties to Western capitalist corporations. I recommend that you read Trading with the Enemy by Charles Higham, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler by Anthony Sutton, Nazi Nexus by Edwin Black, and Big Business and Hitler by Jacques Pauwels (the latest, and in my opinion, the best). Obviously, the same applies to plants owned by purely US corporations: Opel owned by General Motors and Ford-Werke. My clarification about WWII--see commentary.
  • Black Labor from Chattel Slavery to Wage Slavery by Sam Marcy from Internationalist 360°. (My reaction: Nothing proves Marx's emphasis on labor than capitalists' use of slave labor to exploit the value they found in the Americas. Capitalists could conquer these territories but they could not exploit them. Early on, they couldn't get enough Europeans workers to come to the Americas so they had to engage in slave labor to exploit their new conquered territories.
As Marx was to write, “It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.”
  • Ben Swann Interview – Decades Of Mask Science Came To One Conclusion, So Why Can’t We Talk About It? Ryan Cristián posts the Ben Swann interview on his weblog The Last American Vagabond. (Note: The interview lasts for 33:08m. I admit I have a bias against Cristián because of his excessively long comments (up to three hours) on his Daily Wrap-Up show. Why he thinks that anyone has time to listen to his show is beyond my understanding. Anyway, listen to Ben Swann and be sure to notice the studies about masks below the video.)