Amazon union organizer Christian Smalls appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program to discuss his recent success winning a pro-union vote at the online retailer’s Staten Island warehouse. Not everyone was happy about the interview, with noted liberals insisting that Carlson is such a repulsive figure that no amount of publicity to the unionizing efforts is worth making an appearance on his program. Jimmy and American comedian Kurt Metzger discuss why Smalls is right to ignore the wailing from the liberal commentariat.
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KARL NORTH—What the pandemic caper revealed when its lies were fully exposed was a gamut of corruption that showed just how powerful big pharma actually is. The corruption encompassed a range of agencies from the World Health organization, to the Food and Drug Administration, the Center for Disease Control, the Health and Human Services Agency including its research arm, and the National Institute of Health. It showed that the corruption reached into the Patent Office, university departments and scientific journals. All in all, it is astonishing that the US public has been persuaded to live with what can only be described as a political economy of legalized racketeering.
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John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science and Co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, assesses the causes of the present Ukraine crisis, the best way to end it, and its consequences for all of the main actors. A key assumption is that in order to come up with the optimum plan for ending the crisis, it is essential to know what caused the crisis. Regarding the all-important question of causes, the key issue is whether Russia or the West bears primary responsibility.
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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.
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PATRICE GREANVILLE—The term socialism has been abused to the point of meaninglessness. Bernie Sanders (!) calls himself a socialist. AOC calls herself a socialist. There are many other examples equally ludicrous. As well, legions of liberals satisfied with welfare capitalism like to call themselves “socialists”, but this obviously does not make them so. The label can stick only in political spheres severely confused and deprived of a politically sophisticated audience.
Attaching [capitalist]-appeasing labels to this ideology, such as “democratic socialism” or social(ist) democracy, is in reality a backhanded, cowardly insult to genuine socialists: it bows to the capitalist propaganda slander that socialism is or can be inherently “undemocratic”, while denying that genuine socialism, by its nature, is several magnitudes more democratic than any bourgeois “democracy”.
