JEAN SHAOUL—Pilger’s work is a passionate appeal to working people to oppose the decades-long, covert assault on the National Health Service (NHS) by all three major parties. Even for this writer, whose professional work was bound up with exposing the secret privatisation and balkanization of the NHS, the film proved deeply shocking. Pilger introduced The Dirty War saying that he had wanted to make it for some time, even though he had already made a couple of films about the NHS. He noted that the war on the NHS had been going on a long time but was at a crucial stage now. The NHS, said Pilger, has become a major issue in the election precisely because it “represents democracy.” But what was at stake was more than “just” the dismantling by the corporate vultures of a system that was, in principle at least, a comprehensive (from the cradle to the grave) and universal service, free at the point of use. Pilger explains in the film that “Britain’s deadly disease was class. The NHS was not given from on high but won in struggle.
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GARY OLSON—Although his capitulation ultimately tore out their hearts, roughly 10 million beleaguered and bitter Millennials embraced Bernie Sanders because they realized they were being shafted by the Lords of Capital. Today, they could declare, “It’s not the pandemic, stupid! It’s the pandemic under economic inequality.” In sum, what is so exciting about this research is that an “intersectional perspective that promotes solidarity across struggles needs to be advocated” and the groundwork now exists.
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LEE CAMP—Late-stage capitalism gives us fraud & misery like when Wisconsin offered mega-corporation Foxconn billions in tax breaks to pretend they’d bring jobs to the state.
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GLEN FORD—The political weakness of the Black street movement is most evident in the behavior of the Congressional Black Caucus, which has voted overwhelmingly to continue the militarization of local police (2014) and to make cops a “protected class,” assaults against whom are now a “hate crime” (2018). The Black Lives Matter movement has not altered the anti-Black, pro-police, pro-mass Black incarceration political behavior of the men and women that represent Black America in Congress, because BLM has failed to target Black Democratic politicians, even when they act en masse against Black interests. Black lives are apparently less important than Black faces in high Democratic places, who need only wear kente cloth on occasion to ward off the young Black legions. The spear is blunted. Allegiance to the Democratic half of the duopoly – whether active or passive – is still allegiance to corporate rule, not a strategy for transformative change. Both Malcolm X and MLK rejected such a stance.
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PHILIP A. FARRUGGIO—Today we have less than 10% of private sector working stiffs in unions at all. Thanks to the public sector unions, who are also under assault, with only around 37% of their working stiffs belonging, there still may be a scant glimmer of hope. If our working stiffs do not finally realize that only strong unions can stand up to the FAT CAT empire, then feudalism will strangle us all! Forget about the Democrats as our saviors. Look what the Democrats just did in the House, where they are the majority. They joined with the other right wing party, the FAR RIGHT Repugnantins, and voted down a ‘ too small’ amendment to cut military spending by a mere 10%.
