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I may be not an American, not a Salon subscriber, and new around here, but I have spent decades doing this, more or less on my own, and I have plenty of practice in keeping it simple.
First, I shall take the easier issue, which is economic philosophy. Every time people make facile oppositions like 'marxist versus libertarian' they are doing the GOP's work for it. The essential 'marxist' insight, which is confirmed by Keynes, is that capitalist economies have to expand continually or they will collapse. This is NOT because of the nature of fiat money - the idea of blaming the money suppliers, i.e. the bankers, is an old capitalist dodge and one of the main ingredients of anti-Semitic politics, which we shall get to later. The expand-or-collapse dynamic is intrinsic to the process of the capitalist production and sale of commodities, because of the obvious fact that aggregate wages can never be enough to allow the producers to purchase the whole of aggregate production, some of which has to go into the production of capital goods, which are goods to make the next cycle of consumer goods. The process of resource allocation is intrinsically unstable, and the easiest way to fend off the instability is by imperialist expansion of markets. This would still be true even if there was no such thing as fiat money, and all money was gold, silver, and copper, exchanged at market value.
Now to Jews, Israel, and anti-Semitism. It is entirely misleading to identify 'Israel,' the actually existing nation-state, with AIPAC and the American Jewish lobby. In my opinion, their interests are antithetical. The lobby, in my view, prostitutes the laudable concern of Americans of all sorts for Israel's welfare, by selling it to the imperialist, militarist sector of the US economy, which has become practically the only growth sector because of the problematic nature of capitalist economies already mentioned. To some extent, politics in Israel is itself controlled by parties which are sold to these US-based imperialist-militarist interests, and certainly the Israeli economy is unpleasantly dependent upon the military sector. A further complication is the ideological submission of the secular zionist nationalism which desires Israel to be 'like unto all other nations,' and which informed most of early practical zionism, to a grandiose religious vision concocted by bourgeois American Orthodox Jews in conjunction with bourgeois American Christian imperialists. I have every reason to suppose that most Jewish Israelis, especially the younger ones, detest religious grandiosity, and would agree with me, and this is one of the reasons I am teaching myself modern (not Biblical) hebrew. If I have overshot 1000 words I apologise.
