Two things I do understand...well, maybe three things if you count the
fact that I know to never disagree with Cathy when she's mad at me for
something I didn't do, but number one, most people who still bother to
read prefer fiction, and number two, many of those who believe they
are reading non fiction are actually reading fiction.
Take for example, although they were listening not reading, the mob
that gathered in Pennsylvania last Saturday, and cheered wildly every
time Donald Trump told a lie...which seemed to be every time he opened
his mouth. I swear that if Donald Trump said, "The Press lies!
Really! They say the sky is blue, can you figure that? Blue! When we
all know that the sky is Green, really, believe me!" And the crowd
goes wild. "Green, Green!" they chant.
Working Class Folks read fiction for one very good reason. Fiction
allows them to do something they can't do while reading non fiction,
or while sweating on the job, or the second job, or herding their
children to bed. Fiction allows them to escape. And most of them,
deep down in their heavy hearts, know that this is the only relief
they will ever receive...despite the web of fiction spinning from
Donald Trump's lips. Even those who cheer his fabrications have no
deep conviction that their lives will be better. Of course for now
they lay it all at the feet of the lying press, and the Democrats, and
the Socialists, and the Commie Teachers, and of course it's mostly the
doing of all those Illegal Persons of Color...including anyone Black.
After all, did any of those first Negroes come into this wonderful,
once truly Great, really White Nation legally?
And what did they do after arriving? They went out and took over the
fields, that's what they did. Massah lovingly took them into His
fine home and they took over His kitchen and won over the hearts of
His horses and the hound dogs. And Massah allowed this because He
mainly felt sorry for the "Coloreds". And how did they repay His
kindness? Right! You all know the honest to God real story. Those
ingrates turned on Massah, joined with those Yankee Doodles and bit
the kindly hands that fed and housed them. And that's the real story!
No kidding. I mean really Real.
Written by the hand of your kind and generous and good looking Supreme
President...soon to ascend to Emperor of all the Americas,
Ronald Rump
On 5/3/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
You're assuming that a majority of people read nonfiction books. They don't.
But I've been watching some really political organizing done on the web by
The Young Turks. Or, I should say, I've been listening occasionally, to
pieces of their podcasts which come from their daily on line video shows.
They are directing this organizing to young folks, people who may not have
much education. They are part of a huge sprawling movement of young people
to take over the Democratic Party. I listen to them take news items each
day, sometimes complex issues, and talk about them in very simple terms, in
an idiom that is understandable and attractive to young people who don't
read and who aren't introspective. They've been doing a whole piece on
Trump's tax plan. There needs to be someone doing precisely the same kind of
thing in terms and with a tone that older people, people in their 50's 60's
and 70's would listen to.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, May 02, 2017 8:53 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Working class must lead fight to
defend,environment, labor
Someone needs to do a bit of research and then write a book entitled, "How
to Think Independently". A copy should be given to every working class man,
woman and child.
On 5/2/17, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://themilitant.com/2017/8118/811805.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 18 May 8, 2017
(front page)
Working class must lead fight to defend environment, labor
Thousands will join the March for Climate, Jobs and Justice in
Washington, D.C., April 29, seeking to protest the increasing perils
to life and limb, pollution of the soil, water and skies.
How the destruction of the environment is a consequence of the rule of
the capitalist class and the governments that serve them — Democratic
and Republican alike — is addressed in this excerpt from “The
Stewardship of Nature Also Falls to the Working Class: In Defense of
Land and Labor.” The statement was adopted by the July 2007 convention
of the Socialist Workers Party and printed in New International no. 14.
It explains how the fight to prevent the profit-driven rulers’
destruction of the environment is bound up with the fight by working
people for political power.
An excerpt from the book is printed below. Copyright © 2008 by New
International. Reprinted by permission.
How social labor is organized to transform nature — to whose benefit,
to what social and economic ends — depends on the class relations of
production. It depends on which class rules, which class holds state
power. A 1993 talk by Jack Barnes published in Capitalism’s World
Disorder addressed this fundamental point. “Environmental pollution is
a social question, a class question,” Barnes observed.
Workers must not fall into accepting the common view—that is, the
bourgeois view — that the environment …is a “scientific” question, a
“natural” question, that somehow hovers above classes and outside the
class struggle. That is how many middle-class opponents of nuclear
energy, and of nuclear weapons, for example, often present those
questions. Many who call themselves environmentalists say the problem
is “consumerism,” or industrial development per se. But the workers
movement has to explain the source of ecological destruction and why
the answer lies along the revolutionary line of march of the working
class….
The working class must also reject all forms of fake science,
exaggerations, catastrophism, and crankism. There is a decades-long
record of such frenzied prophecies — the impending exhaustion of
fossil fuels and other natural resources, the “limits to growth,” and so
on.
These originate in sections of the bourgeoisie and are then picked up
and propagated by petty-bourgeois reformers. They feed into the
conspiracy nostrums that are floated in the working class and labor
movement, taking workers’ eyes off the true source of such social ills:
the capitalists and their profit system….
[I]f we translate everything commonly thought of as an environmental
issue into how to advance the protection of the working class, and how
the working class can extend that protection to all, then we can
hardly ever go wrong. With that approach, we will increase the
possibilities for concrete solidarity in fighting against ecological
abuses and outrages.
The labor movement should expose the differential effects of pollution
on the working class, including the even more devastating consequences
for sections of the working class that are the poorest and most
vulnerable, as well as those that are Black, Latino, or foreign born….
The workers movement must take the lead in actively exposing the
destruction and dangers produced by capitalism and in organizing
opposition to them.
This communist course, Barnes concludes, enables us to explain how
“the sources of all wealth — land and labor — are increasingly the
victims of the domination of capital. And, most importantly, why the
working-class-led struggle for a socialist revolution opens a way
forward on this front as well.”
As Cuban Gen. Armando Choy concludes in Our History Is Still Being
Written, “Yes, a better world is possible. But only with a socialist
revolution.”
In the mid-nineteenth century some 85 percent of energy for human use
was produced by burning wood, charcoal, and crop residue. Today some
85 percent of energy supplies comes from fossil fuels — primarily
coal, oil, and natural gas. The production and use of these resources
in pursuit of profits has always been detrimental not only to the
health of the workers involved but simultaneously to the natural
environment in which we live and labor.
A transition to other energy sources can and will be neither smooth
nor rapid. The dog-eat-dog laws of rival capitals ensure that every
“energy policy” implemented by corporations and bourgeois governments
will serve the interests of maintaining capitalist rule — not the
economic, social, and cultural needs of the earth’s population, nor
the health and safety of the workers involved. Communists oppose
anti-working-class “solutions” promoted by big business and various
bourgeois and petty-bourgeois reformers. We expose and counter their
reactionary notion, for instance, that “too large” a population of
toilers — as well as too much consumption and too high living
standards for many of them — is a threat to a “livable” world.
The capitalist rulers warn workers and farmers throughout the
semicolonial world that they must forego the level of economic
development and living standards existing in the imperialist countries
— development achieved in no small part by superexploiting the toilers
and plundering the resources of these very same oppressed peoples.
“The ecological consequences are unsustainable!” impatient toilers are
scolded. This is another of finance capital’s smokescreens masking the
reasons for the widening gap in economic, social, and cultural
conditions between earth’s great toiling majority, on the one hand,
and, on the other, the bourgeoisie and professional middle classes in
the imperialist centers and in the more economically advanced
semicolonial countries.
In the United States and other imperialist countries, politicians and
other bourgeois voices tell working people “we” must tighten “our”
belts in order to stem environmental destruction. They tell us “we”
must accept higher prices for fuel and other necessities, including
regressive “carbon taxes” on gasoline, home heating oil, and
commercial travel. “We” must recycle, turn off the lights, lower the
thermostat, go without air conditioning, ride a bike, change our
showerhead, join a carpool, flush the toilet less, plant a tree.
But there is no “we” that embraces both working people and those who
grow wealthy off the exploitation of our labor: the ruling families
and their rentier tagalongs among the middle class and professionals.
Such “solutions” not only inaccurately place the blame on individuals
and families and promote the sale of “green” and “organic” products
and services at premium prices. Above all, they are part of the drive
by the capitalist rulers to boost their profit rates at the expense of
the working conditions, wages, living conditions, trade union
solidarity, and genuine social security of workers and farmers, all of
which have been under relentless assault since the mid-1970s.
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