Opinion

Let us start with the punchline: “Mass media in the United States, Europe, Canada, and Australia is depicting the People’s Republic of China as ‘capitalist’ because ‘capitalist’ is now a dirty word. Even people in the West see ‘market economy’ as some sort of filth.”

The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant. — Maximilien Robespierre

It is many years ago that Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an essay, which was, in fact, the preface to his magnum opus, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, the title of which was “The Search for Method”.
A significant transformation from his critique of Heidegger, Being and Nothingness, Sartre attempted to liberate European Marxism from its captivity in Russian party ideology and restore its historicity.1

We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection.
— The New England Journal of Medicine, May 21, 2020

(T)hey told us exactly what was coming, and advised us to shut up and follow orders. Tragically, most people have done just that.
— CJ Hopkins, 2020

Somewhere along the way I became an associate. Before that I was a waiter who became a server. Hell, I’ve even been periodically transformed from a barkeep into a mixologist.

Observed from outer space, the United States is in a revolutionary turmoil. Fires are burning, thousands of people are confronting police and other security forces. There are barricades, banners, posters, and there is rage.

George Orwell (Eric Blair) was not the first or only person to write that empire needs euphemism as well as control over language and not just the people who use it.1 Mark Twain and even Ernest Hemingway also captured this quality although they were usually less explicit in their illustrations. In contemporary memory George Carlin gave what was probably the best classic rendition of the pathology.

On June 2, 2020, Jan Dehn of Ashmore Investment Management Limited remarked:

If central banks were to allow asset prices to reflect the actual underlying fundamentals – record levels of debt, record low productivity growth, record unemployment, record populism – the resulting crashes in financial markets would be so large that most Western economies would be plunged into deep and lasting depressions.1

Loud acts of racism, like the atrocious killing of George Floyd by a US police officer; the disproportionate number of black men incarcerated in American prisons or the high percentage of young black or minority ethnic (BAME) men subjected to ‘stop and search’ by police in Britain are blatant and ugly. But an individuals ‘unconscious bias’ and the institutionalized racism festering deep within organizations is subtler, perhaps harder to recognize.

A widespread view among observers is that Pres. Donald J. Trump is all about himself.  His main interest, during his presidency, has been his re-election.  For Trump, that is, re-election “trumps” the national interest!