Question: In a society grown dictatorial and oppressive would your good friend X collaborate or resist? If you were to resist, would X support your rights or side with the apparent source of power? If asked by authorities to scrutinize neighbors, would X do so? Would X yield naturally to arbitrary requests or invasive questioning, or would a strong sense of personal identity tend to question authoritarian entitlement?
My columns haven’t been very funny recently. This one isn’t going to be any funnier. Sorry. Fascism makes me cranky.
I don’t mean the kind of fascism the corporate media and the fake Resistance have been desperately hyping for the last four years. God help me, but I’m not terribly worried about a few hundred white-supremacist morons marching around with tiki torches hollering Nazi slogans at each other, or Jewish-Mexican-American law clerks flashing “OK” signs on TV, or smirking schoolkids in MAGA hats.
The aversion of the rich and their political and media representatives to science in general and economic science in particular is legendary. When it comes to making sense of the economy, they rely mainly on irrationalism and discredited ideas. It is no accident that mainstream economics has long been called “the dismal science.” It lacks any robust explanation of economic realities. It is not useful to the public.
‘We’ll cut off the whole relationship’ –Trump threatened China in a recent Fox-Business interview, suggesting he may cut diplomatic relations with China and thereby saving US$ 500 billion. He didn’t say how, though.
Sunflower field in Hudson — Photo by Larry Goodwin
Suffering in numbers
According to Mark Twain (supposedly), history doesn’t repeat itself, but it frequently rhymes. He was right. Donald Trump, for example, rhymes with Mussolini. The decline of organized labor in recent decades rhymes with its decline in the 1920s. And the coming depression will rhyme, in many respects, with the Great Depression.
How many times a day, and in how many different presentations, has President Donald Trump suddenly departed from script to exclaim, “This was the greatest economy we ever had, the greatest in the world, the greatest ever, and it all went down because of a pandemic?” A large part of the United States electorate has accepted this political statement, which Trump uses to boost his election chance. Time to burst the bubble he has created around himself and let him know his ego- building statement is entirely false.
China’s worldwide assistance and medical aid to other countries to combat the coronavirus is barely covered in the corporate press. Instead, the US has ramped up its anti-China campaign to cover up its own incompetence in combating the virus. As John Pilger shows in his Obama era film The Coming War on China, this is no new campaign.
US and Chinese Fists and Weapons face-off (from the Financial Times)
The Trump administration, in seeking to divert attention from its bungled response to the COVID-19 pandemic and mishandling of the economic collapse, is escalating the bipartisan anti-China policy, which has a long history. This increases the potential of military conflict and economic war between our countries.
