By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
The last time capitalism faced a crisis this deep, it was 1929.
People minded the Great Depression. All those people Joe McCarthy
persecuted in the 1950s for having joined the Communist Party when they
were young and angry had been angry because of the Great Depression.
Specifically, they were angry at capitalists, especially bankers, whom
they blamed for kicking millions out of their homes or off their land.
Bank robbers even became celebrities. Semi-socialist policies like
social security were implemented by FDR in part out of fear of popular
anger.
It wasn’t Donald Trump or alt-NeoNazi Steve Bannon who was mainly
responsible for taking the US back out of the Paris climate accord.
It was the Koch Brothers and the rest of Big Oil, and Big Gas, and Big Coal.
It was “energy” corporations who have vast inventories of worthless
fossil fuels that they want to unload on the marks quick before
everybody realizes they have all the usefulness for human beings of
eating arsenic.
