And what can the capitalist system offer to the people profiled in this article? Get sick and maybe die or starve -- "The result [of the shutdown] has been a quiet catastrophe, unfolding in the living rooms of working-class people all across the city. The crush of new claims has all but paralyzed the unemployment office, and some people are now entering their fifth week without income. Mayor Carolyn Goodman argued last week that casinos should reopen and allow people to get sick."
Nylah [special needs child of the couple profiled in this article] now a lively 8-year-old, had been thriving as a special education second-grader. But she is not getting the medicine she needs to help keep her from vomiting, because [her parents] can no longer afford the copay." It's not just Las Vegas, the whole country is in crisis. There is a solution Congress could provide tomorrow - pass Bernie Sander's bill for Medicare for All and give the struggling masses his proposed relief of $2000 a month. This is a solution that can be done within the capitalist system but won't be because the ruling class political leaders, Republicans and top Democrats alike, want to keep workers down and they know that revolutionary class consciousness is at an all time low (hence Trump as president). Besides just worrying about the future the working class family profiled here "fights back" by "In the evening, they read the Bible out loud." More than ever we have to support the CP's move to recreate the unemployment councils of the 30s and instill a sense of militant revolutionary resistance in our class.
The opinions, views, thoughts, and ramblings of editors of PoliticalAffairs.net – and other stuff worth reading or viewing.
Monday, April 27, 2020
Monday, April 20, 2020
Trump's Environmental Treason
" Every member of the bipartisan panel, the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, accused the Trump administration of putting American waters, coastlines and wildlife in harm’s way by weakening safety and environmental regulations while pushing to expand oil drilling in nearly all American waters. They also accused Congress of a near-complete failure to adopt their recommendations on drilling safety. The commissioners said the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which the Obama administration created within the Department of Interior after the Deepwater Horizon accident to focus solely on enforcement, was focusing more on increasing oil production and reducing regulations than on its safety mission." In other words, the Trump Mafioso of corrupt Congress people and industry insiders appointed to run agencies created to protect our people from criminal exploitation but now run them to increase that exploitation for their own benefit are setting the stage for another "Deepwater Horizon" catastrophe. Scientists have pointed out that the current practices of the government and the oil industry (despite some efforts towards safety constrained by cost efficiency) are furthering the present downward trend in environmental health of the Gulf of Mexico. Why are these issues not being highlighted in the Biden campaign to get rid of Trump and his gang? It's not just the Gulf Mexico; every area of environmental concern, health regulations, civil rights, education, food protection, and almost any regulation enacted to protect the health and well being of the American people is being discarded so that the business allies of Trump and his gang can make more and bigger profits. Trump is even undermining the fight against the covid-19 virus. He should be impeached again and let his confederates in Congress try to defend him while thousands are dying due to his incompetence.
Thursday, March 19, 2020
US starts new fight with Chins
It appears that all these disputes with China follow a similar pattern: the US starts up some dispute with the Chinese and the Chinese react tit for tat. Our two countries operate with different value systems based on different historical systems. We built our nation on the backs of slaves and expropriated land from the Native Americans whom we rounded up and put in Bantustans and have proceeded to try and impose our way with bombs and bullets on weaker countries around the world as part of the general European colonial and imperialist world order. The Chinese are an ancient culture that was attacked and controlled for a century or more by this European order and has freed itself from it and is now standing on its own two feet independent of US world hegemony. Our news organizations report the news filtered through a bias against the Chinese system just as theirs do with a bias against ours. As long as Trump, or any American president, starts up a fight by poking the Chinese (kicking out their news people) they are sure to poke back (the same goes for the Russians -- smaller countries just have to put up with American bullying most of the time). If we want a more peaceful world all we need is for the USA to leave off its bullying and take any real problems to the UN or the World Court which other civilized nations are wont to do instead of bombing, assassinating, or trying to starve people through sanctions.
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
Russian Constitutional reforms
"Mr. Putin emphasized that the legislation allowing him to run again would have to be approved by Russia’s Constitutional Court. The legislation would also be part of the package of constitutional amendments to be voted on in a previously scheduled nationwide plebiscite on April 22." The collapse of the Soviet Union was an absolute disaster for the ordinary citizens of that country as the economic upheavals and anarchy of the 90s and incompetent Yeltsin government attests. Putin's government did in fact bring about stability and economic betterment to the vast majority of Russians and is still the basis of his widespread popularity despite a vibrant if small opposition movement including a
Communist Party in the Duma. The attempt by the new Russian ruling class to create a parliamentary capitalist democracy based on western European models has proven to be extremely problematic given the history of the Soviet Union and Putin is correct to stress that evolutionary developments in this direction are a continued necessity and probably require a stable temporary continuity of the present mixture of a strong presidential regime restrained by a semblance of popular control through parliament and by means of the Constitutional Court. The fact that the Russian people must approve of Putin's reforms by means of a national election is proof that the ideals of bourgeois democratic government are alive and well in Russia despite whatever historical constraints they still face. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation will, hopefully, continue to play a positive role in representing the working class and laying the foundations for a revival of socialism in Russia in the coming years.
Monday, March 9, 2020
Krugman & Piketty versus Marx
A good review for activists which will save us from having to go through a slough of 1000 pages of undigested speculation. As far as Marx versus Piketty is concerned Piketty admitted re his first book that he never read Marx! Krugman's review also indicates problems with understanding Marx: “In Marxian dogma, a society’s class structure is determined by underlying, impersonal forces, technology and the modes of production that technology dictates. Piketty, however, sees inequality as a social phenomenon, driven by human institutions.”— Sorry Dr Krugman, but Marx says that class structure is conditioned by human social institutions and is a product of historical development not determined by impersonal forces but by a dialectical interaction between material forces and human responses the most important of which is, with regard to the modes (means) of production the historically constituted social relations of production i.e., class relations involving who owns and controls the means of production. Piketty’s view “Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological and political.”- is only half right and represents the idealistic non materialistic flaws of bourgeois economics. The truth is Marx’s view that the inequality intrinsic to capitalism is a product of the interaction between economic and technological forces and the ideological and political forces engendered by this interaction.
Wednesday, March 4, 2020
We are all one (and hungry)
What makes a person a person is a sense of self (self-consciousness) i.e., a feeling of identity and having memories and an internal narrative and all this is conditioned by, or a function of, the hippocampus, when we find that the proteins and chemicals associated with self-consciousness show up in other forms of life we cannot rule out the possibility these life forms are similar to us —i.e., they are self-consciousness personalities in their own right. These chemicals show up in the brains of crabs, shrimp, lobsters, insects and “other arthropods, including centipedes, millipedes and some arachnids. Even vertebrates, including humans, have them in a brain structure called the hippocampus, a known center for memory and learning.” According to the lead scientist in this study: "Corresponding brain centers -- the mushroom body in arthropods, marine worms, flatworms and, possibly, the hippocampus of vertebrates -- appear to have a very ancient origin in the evolution of animal life.” We are all living unique personal selves, and we eat each other.
"All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all."
Bon appétit !
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all."
Bon appétit !
Wednesday, February 26, 2020
The Last Debate (2-25-20) Sanders versus the Hacks
The attacks on Sanders were all ridiculous and show how completely the other Democratic contenders are simply hacks for the monopoly capitalist ruling class that currently controls the Democratic Party (but hopefully will begin to be dislodged this November). The main attacks were:1) Sanders was pro-Castro, etc. All he said was the literacy campaign was a good idea, the other candidates obviously think eliminating illiteracy is some sort of Communist plot. 2.) He can’t beat Trump: but all the recent polls say he can. 3.) His ideas are so extreme they are practically crazy: in reality they are just mainstream ideas found in all the other advanced industrial countries and had we already had them here we wouldn’t have a president that is practically crazy. 4. He has a bad foreign policy because he criticizes the over throwing of democratically elected governments (Iran, Chile) in favor of fascist replacements. The American people, basically the multiracial working class, youth, retired people and others on limited incomes (the majority) and genuine progressives want a candidate who offers a real changing revamping of our current system that favors a wealthy minority over the majority. None of the other candidates, including the saccharine watered down progressivism of Elizabeth (capitalism in my bones) Warren), offer the radically democratic people before profits change that Sanders is offering —his program is the one now on the agenda of history and can win in November.
Monday, February 17, 2020
Nevada Culinary Union versus Sanders on Medical Care
Some points about this article: 1. Medicare for all provides not only the working class but all citizens with complete medical coverage. The leaders of the Culinary union seem to be sacrificing medical care for all just to preserve the medical care for their members without regard for the rest of the working class -- this is not a good example of "Solidarity Forever." 2. Nothing in this article indicates why the present union plan is better than medicare for all or what benefits would be missing from the union plan under Sanders' bill. 3. "The vile language prompted Mr. Sanders to issue a statement, in which he said “harassment of all forms is unacceptable to me” and urged “supporters of all campaigns not to engage in bullying or ugly personal attacks.”'-- this is in reference to Sanders "supporters" emailing politically incorrect attacks on the union leaders and others who don't support Sanders. It is more than likely that these so-called Sanders "supporters" are actually Trump trolls as no real supporters of Sanders would engage in activity he has expressly condemned and they know hurts his campaign. 4. The position of the union supports Lenin's view that unions on their own can achieve working class union consciousness but socialist consciousness comes from the outside and is the reason a strong Communist Party is necessary which would have educated the union to the need for medicare for all and greater inter-union solidarity with the Sanders campaign -- a task the CPUSA is uniquely equipped to carry out, and perhaps could have been doing a better job at during this primary season.
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