The Real News Network has a blockbuster series of interviews starting with Understanding the Imperialist System Changed My Life – Gar Alperovitz on Reality Asserts Itself (1/5) .

Mr.[Dr.]  Alperovitz tells TRNN Senior Editor Paul Jay, that the Vietnam War made it clear there was no way to a more rational capitalism and there had to be fundamental change –   January 23, 2014

ALPEROVITZ: …And it turns out there are discontinuities in the negotiations over Europe in the spring of 1945. The U.S. gets very tough: we’re going to have to move our troops to Japan; we’d better have a showdown with the Russians now before we move. And then all of a sudden they relax and they start being very nice to the Russians. And why did that happen is what really intrigued me. Not explained.

Well, what happened is the secretary of war came into the president’s office and he says, now is not the time (in April 1945) to have a showdown. Wait for a few months and I’ll give you something better–namely, the atomic bomb

To say the least this is earth shattering information to those of us who did not know the extent to which the academic world has known this for years.

The second part in the series is Nuclear Attack on Japan was Opposed by American Military Leadership – Gar Alperovitz on Reality Asserts Itself (2/5).

ALPEROVITZ: Truman. His secretary of war says, this is the “master card” of diplomacy against the Russians, the atomic bomb. There are many, many documents that strongly suggest–particularly the secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, understood that the bomb was more a diplomatic tool than a military tool. The chief of staff of the U.S. Army and the Combined Chiefs, General Marshall, said, this is not a military decision. It has nothing to do with the military. It may be a diplomatic, political, other kind of decision, but it’s not a military decision.

So, interestingly, the military–and I mentioned this, I think, in our last discussion–virtually all the major American military leaders went public after the war saying the atomic bomb was totally unnecessary. Some called it barbaric. The president’s chief of staff went public. Can you imagine the chief of staff saying–and he was a good friend of the president–said, this is barbarism. I wasn’t taught to kill children and women. So that’s very clear.
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The thing that I think’s important to understand, because these people were ordinary human beings–the president, his secretary of state, they were not evil guys. They were caught up in an ideology that somehow, if we followed American strategy, we could save the world from another war, and the Russians are, they believe, communist devils. So they were operating out of a framework of ideology that dominated their thinking to the extent that 300,000 civilians were burned unnecessarily, killed. But it’s a mistake to see them just as bad guys. Much more important is: how does American corporate capitalism develop that ideology? And what does it really take to reach much deeper than good guys and bad guys?

There are echoes of this behavior when Nixon took over from Johnson and, of course, our entry into the war in Iraq. You really have to watch the video. They don’t even get into what Reagan did to Carter with Iran. If you know about that episode, you see how it fits with what they do talk about.

Part 3 of the series is Capitalism in Long Term Stagnation and Decay – Gar Alperovitz on Reality Asserts Itself (3/5).

ALPEROVITZ: Well, there’s lots of reasons why the economy is in trouble. I mean, the most obvious one is that when you concentrate all the income at the top, people don’t buy. They can’t buy enough. They can invest it or they can put it under the mattress or they can put it in stock speculation, but they’ve got a house, they’ve got two houses, three cars–they can’t purchase enough. The Keynesian idea is to stimulate the economy. So that’s the same–you have this in Marxist theory in another way. By and large, if you concentrate it all at the top, there’s not enough purchasing power to make the rest of the system work. So what happens is you throw people out of work and you have an economy within a large population, large numbers of whom are out of work. So I think that’s the central phenomenon that’s going on, concentration of income and wealth at the top and no way to reallocate it through purchasing power.

The discussion goes on to talk about what can we do to make a better system. This is where it gets really interesting. However, if I quoted every interesting thing in these interviews, I would have to repeat the entire transcripts. That is why I have chosen a few meager excerpts to whet your appetite.

From what I have excerpted you won’t see where the following is coming from, so you’ll really have to watch the video or read the transcripts.

All I have been writing on this blog about running Social Security like a real pension system by diversifying its investment portfolio all fits in with the picture that Alperovitz is painting.

Use the search box on my blog site here to find the articles on Social Security. I will mention just one of the recent ones, The End of the Assault on Social Security and Medicare.

The other thing that excites me about this has to do with the current Governor’s race in Massachusetts. We have a fine field of Democrats running for the nomination for that office. To varying degrees, they all espouse progressive ideas.

However, there is one candidate who has given some hints that he is the one who really understands the issues raised by Alperovitz. That candidate is Steve Grossman. The Boston Globe has raised some concerns about his possible conflicts of interest as they see it, but if he has the vision that I suspect he might have, I think those concerns might all fall by the wayside.

I have just returned from a house party in Sturbridge for Martha Coakley who is also running for Governor. I think she gets the issues that are important, too.