VLADIMIR GOLSTEIN—Catiline might have been corrupt, decadent, debauched and what have you. Yet, he did expose how rotten Rome was. For that, both Blok and Ibsen (another rebel against stifling bourgeois order) place Catiline in heaven. Which takes me to Trump. Whatever his critics say, he has it, and then some, but like Catiline, he fully exposes how corrupt, venal, and petty the established order is.
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PHIL ROCKSTROH—Oprah Winfrey is and has been since her entrance into the US mass media hologram one of the capitalist elite’s most effective propagandists. By intention, her New Age snake oil-peddling patter never connects capitalist exploitation as the dominant source of individual suffering. Of course not. Oprah is a US American huckster in the model of Norman Vincent Peale.
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LINDA TENENBAUM—The French comment counterposes the crime of rape, to “persistently or clumsily hitting on someone,” and correctly insists that the two are simply not the same. It attacks #MeToo for branding as “traitors” and “accomplices” those who make such a distinction, creating a climate of intimidation, where freedom of speech “is today turning into its opposite.”
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RANDY SHIELDS—Today, more than ever, the working class needs to be guardians and heroes, catchers in the rye and all, and stop the planet from going over the cliff. Do your part to unfuck the world. Go vegan and overthrow capitalism. Time’s a wastin’.
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JOE EMERSBERGER—Betrayals, however, can be deterred and their destructive impact minimized in political parties that deeply empower their ordinary members. Correa’s emphasis was heavy on macroeconomics and other policy details, not on developing that kind of political party. The example of Venezuela shows how devastating macroeconomic errors can be for a left wing government, but Ecuador is on its way to becoming another kind of cautionary tale.
