What I’m Reading: the BS media and a history of FDR's corporate socialism
Is the capitalism vs communism dichotomy actually a false flag?
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Happy Friday! 🥳
For your inbox today, a quick roundup of nonsense from the usual suspects, plus a book I’m reading that has shaken me to my very core.
Would you like some fries with your experimental gene therapy?
The mayor of New York City is enticing people to get vaccinated by offering free burgers and fries. Hmmmm…I wonder who that could be aimed at? Maybe the Park Slope yoga moms and Park Avenue wives? They are renowned for their love of fast food. This isn’t creepy and weird at all you guys! Here’s to your health! If you have a fetish for watching politicians shoving crappy food in their mouths, watch the video below. I repeat: this is not weird at all.
And if my grandmother had balls, she’d be my grandfather…
The Washington Post headline writers really went to town on the happy talk earlier this year with these good tidings about the poors: “Biden stimulus showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty in defining move of presidency.”
But this week they outdid even that headline, with this helpful tidbit in a story about inflation. Now, I thought inflation was defined as a “sustained increase in the cost of living or the general price level leading to a fall in the purchasing power of money.” But it turns out, if you take out the rising cost of living part, inflation isn’t so bad!
Rest easy, plebs!
What are the peasants paying for their hovels these days, anyway? 🧐 A tuppence? Sounds about right.
Speaking of runaway prices, the New York Post had a hilarious story this week about two NYC Democratic mayoral candidates being asked what the median house price in Brooklyn was. They both gave answers that were wrong 20 years ago.
“McGuire, 64, an investment banker and former executive at Citigroup, responded…
“It’s got to be somewhere in the $80,000 to $90,000 range, if not higher,” he guessed.”
How does an investment banker get that question so very, very, very wrong? Aren’t they supposed to know stuff about… money?
But wait! It gets better. The other candidate — who guessed the price at $100,000 — was “housing secretary under former President Barack Obama and housing commissioner under ex-Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.” Oh wow! He must have been so good at his job!
You know what $100,000 actually buys you in Brooklyn? A parking space. Which I guess is a home for your car.
I’m not going to pretend to have the answers to how our system got so messed up, but I can say with confidence the system is not pushing the best and brightest to the top. The cream has gone fully rancid. Which is relevant to my next point.
What if everything we know about politics and economics has been a lie?
Is the capitalism vs communism dichotomy actually a false flag? It sounds a bit crazy, I know. But I feel like words and concepts that we’ve been basing our world view around for generations have no meaning any more. Suddenly, almost everything I once thought was true looks very much like a lie; officials and media figures I once trusted cover themselves in dog shit, daily; and at this point I’m just like, fuck it — I’m willing to consider any crazy possibility.
All of this madness led me to a conversation with an old family friend, who introduced me to the work of Anthony Sutton, a now obscure British-American author and researcher at the Hoover Institution, who blew up his career by writing about the connection between American big business and communism.
I’m currently reading his 1975 book, “Wall Street and FDR,” which meticulously lays out Roosevelt’s many ties to the capitalist elite of his day, and his willingness to use his political power to consolidate economic power for his cronies and himself.
Now, this may not come as a surprise to you. But FDR was a hero of my childhood. This was due to several factors: the 1982 movie Annie (which I internalised in every possible way); my anachronistic childhood obsession with World War 2; and to my grandparents and parents who spoke highly of the New Deal. FDR was a friend to the little guy! He defeated Hitler! He sang songs with feisty orphans!
Eh, no. This is what Sutton has to say about FDR:
“[f]ormer socialist editor Benito Mussolini marched on Rome and established—with liberal help from the J.P. Morgan Company—the Italian corporate state whose organizational structure is distinctly reminiscent of Roosevelt's NRA…
In brief, construction of FDR's National Recovery Administration was but one facet of a wider historical process—construction of economic systems where the few could profit at the expense of the many, the citizen-taxpayer-in-the-street—and all of course promoted under the guise of the public good, whether it was Stalin's Russia, Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, or Roosevelt's New Deal.”
What? Roosevelt in the same category as the fascists he so valiantly defeated?
And yet…With my mind already prised open by the brilliant takedown of the racist history of progressivism from Sonnie Johnston, this analysis now seems possible. If not plausible. I mean, look around. Does it seem like the little guy is getting a fair shake?
One very interesting point Sutton makes is the emphasis the pre-World War 2 capitalists put on cooperation and collectivism, over competition. This has a seductive ring to it. I’m not a competitive person by nature, I’m far more collaborative. So I can see how that idea is comforting — rich and powerful people saying: “don’t worry, regular folks, we’ll do this together! You are not alone! " Kind of like they are doing right now, come to think of it, with huge multi-nationals co-opting social justice narratives.
But what if that was just a ruse to consolidate control and never give it back?
Because the rise of the technocratic welfare state — both in the US and the UK — did not, it turns out, eliminate the evils it promised it would. Poverty still exists. Unequal access still exists. The big ticket government did not lift up the masses. It corralled them into pens, and kept them fenced in where they sit to this day, awaiting whatever comes next.
The international corporate world's ties with Communist China are a case in point.