Absolutely everything.

Lately I’ve been running the audio from these old film features in my bedtime playlist. Good bedtime material, halfway interesting but not noisy or dramatic. The features were written by the National Assn of Mfrs in the ’50s, and each includes a variety of industries and occupations in a sauce of capitalist propaganda.

Each item shows how something is made. For example, I knew that the lead in lead pencils was graphite, but I didn’t know that it was mostly clay, fired to make a hard ceramic. The harder lead (number 3) had more clay and less graphite. This explains why pencil strokes are shiny. Glossy paper is clay-coated paper.

One aspect of capitalist propaganda has changed drastically since then. At that time the Repooflicans were FOR taxes and the Dems were AGAINST taxes. Now it’s reversed.

This clip shows several employees of Socony Oil spending their retirements in various hobbies and part-time occupations. All have a decent PENSION from the company, along with SS and private savings.

The propaganda point: “It’s a future of ease and comfort, never being in a hurry for anyone or anything. It’s something Communist slave laborers can’t look forward to.”

Now, of course, PENSIONS are mostly extinct, along with the assured future of ease and comfort.

Was the propaganda true then?

In 2018 I summarized an article written for an insurance journal in 1959.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Most people in the United States and Canada do not realize that the Soviet Union has an effective social security system. Undoubtedly, this position is subconsciously based on the feeling that the small concern shown by the Soviet government for the rights of individuals extends to aged and disabled persons, who can no longer be productive. This would also seem to be in accordance with the Communist principle, “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.”

= = = = = END REPRINT.

AHEM! TO EACH ACCORDING TO HIS WORK, NOT NEEDS.

Here are the pension ages:

60 for most men, 55 for most women, sliding down to 55 and 50 for more demanding jobs. Putin finally pulled it up to 65, at the same time that we pulled ours up from 65 to 67.

Absolutely everything we “learned” about Russia was false.