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	<title>World Socialist Party (US) &#187; ROEL</title>
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	<copyright>Copyright &#xA9; World Socialist Party (US) 2010 </copyright>
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		<title>World Socialist Party (US) &#187; ROEL</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org</link>
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	<itunes:author>World Socialist Party (US)</itunes:author>
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		<itunes:name>World Socialist Party (US)</itunes:name>
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		<title>Manufacturing the News</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/11/manufacturing-the-news/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/11/manufacturing-the-news/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 26 Nov 2011 01:28:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ROEL</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Theory]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[World Socialist Perspective]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News manufacturing report media organized shapes status quo]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2299</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[[UPLOADED FOR JOE R. HOPKINS, AUTHOR] Mark Fishman, associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, investigated routine news production by examining the work practices of reporters and other news workers. His research findings were published by the University of Texas Press in 1980 in a book entitled Manufacturing the News. At the beginning of his book, Fishman touches on the practical mode of social reproduction by quoting from W. I. Thomas, The Child in America (1928): &#8220;Our picture of how the world works is integrally tied to how we work in the world. By acting in accordance with our conception of the way things are, we concertedly make them the way they are, whether we are treating pieces of paper as money, conducting a routine conversation, or electing a president&#8221; (p. 3). The research setting &#8220;At the time of the study (1973-74), the Purissima Record held a virtual monopoly over news consumption in both the city of Purissima (population 75,000) and its metropolitan environs (population 150,000). The paper&#8217;s daily circulation of 45,000 approximated the number of households in the metropolitan area&#8230; Its news department consisted of 57 full-time reporters, editors, and photographers&#8211;at least four times [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>This Just In!</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2009/03/this-just-in/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2009/03/this-just-in/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2009 05:46:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ROEL</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Labor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Work]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=991</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Dirty gossip about the capitalist mode of production Guess who’s not getting that rose garden??? You would have to search long and hard to find someone who was better at sticking it to the working class than The Economist. It has perfected one of the most truly remarkable posturing acts in the annals of propaganda. When times are good, its contempt for working-class aspirations borders on the domineering, despite the fact that the working class not only runs capitalism from top to bottom but also compliantly does its bit to legitimate the system during elections. When times are bad, however, The Economist sings a different tune. It trades its contempt in for what might be called “regrettable realism,” a syrupy pietism that sighs for the misfortunes of the poor working class while giving no quarter in the chronic warfare that goes on between labor and capital: [America’s] flexible labour market has shed 4.4m[illion] jobs since the downturn began in December 2007, including more than 600,000 in each of the past three months … An American who loses his job today has less of a chance of finding another one than at any time since records began half a century ago. [...]


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		<item>
		<title>THIS JUST IN! Word of the Day</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2009/02/this-just-in-word-of-the-day/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2009/02/this-just-in-word-of-the-day/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:49:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ROEL</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Labor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bonus]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=949</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[[Articles in this series will feast on random juicy statements about capitalism reported in the media.]  Erin McKean, a lexicographer writing in the Boston Globe, gives us a dictionary tour of today’s corporate capitalism and its private jargon that lights up a few interesting dark alleys. “The Word” of the day is “bonus” (as in “Bonus reduced”). For example:  …major financial institutions continued to pay massive bonuses to executives despite losing even more massive amounts of money. Last year Merrill Lynch essentially collapsed, but still paid almost 700 executives cash bonuses of more than $1 million each. (Boston Globe, 2/22/09)  Probably little folks like us just don’t understand how hard it is to run a complicated system like capitalism. We of course tend to weigh quantities against each other the way our parents and teachers taught us to do and draw the simplistic conclusion that someone is getting away with wasting a lot of precious money. Especially since the funds for these bonuses come from (among other sources) laying off millions and millions of workers around the world for the sake of making business more “cost-effective.” But how are we ever going to manage cracking open a nice, warm fuzzy [...]


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		<item>
		<title>Why didn’t anyone wake me up while the revolution was going on? (Why we are not Leftists)</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2009/02/why-didn%e2%80%99t-anyone-wake-me-up-while-the-revolution-was-going-on/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2009/02/why-didn%e2%80%99t-anyone-wake-me-up-while-the-revolution-was-going-on/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 06 Feb 2009 05:09:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ROEL</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Elections]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Politics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anti-capitalist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[common ownership]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[communism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=930</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[  It is not uncommon to hear leftists talk knowingly of “ongoing struggles” when they project the day after tomorrow of an anti-capitalist revolution, as if it weren’t really over yet with the expropriation of the capitalist class. The working class must evidently “smash” the capitalist state and set up a “proletarian” régime holding down the entire capitalist class, if we are to take our cue from Lenin (The State and Revolution). The truth, however, is at once simpler and more complex: an anti-capitalist revolution cannot stop with promising capitalism’s eventual replacement worldwide but must make immediate global common ownership and democratic control of wealth production its exclusive goal — or it will remain just another heavenly milkshake. The distinction is not esoteric. It makes all the difference.  Common ownership (communism/socialism) — the system that replaces capitalism — is totally unlike public ownership or state capitalism. It means direct community ownership and control based on universal free access and moneyless production. Banks are a conceptual possibility in a state-owned public industry. They are not in a communist society. Suffice it to say that more or less radicalized versions of the status quo will not do the trick. Those who posit [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>On replacing a bad system</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2008/07/on-replacing-a-bad-system/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2008/07/on-replacing-a-bad-system/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:42:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ROEL</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=473</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Advocates of reform often make the mistake of reducing capitalism to a logical structure rather than seeing it “holistically” — as a dynamic process. Even as they note its continued evolution, when they talk about changing it, their interest tends to focus on parts and wholes, on mechanical interactions. Hence, they usually assume it will be a massive job from the standpoint of some mythical observer. That it might conceivably be more of a chain reaction having “emergent properties,” where individuals and groups all begin to adopt a massively coherent response at around the same time (without warning or even having a clear picture) analogous to, say, a ﬂock of birds leaping suddenly into ﬂight — is perhaps not so intuitively obvious. Yet it was to just such a torrential outpouring of public opinion that the rigid Leninist bureaucracies of the former Soviet system fell. This suggests that it might be more useful to understand social change as a continuum of similar patterns that start with some not very sophisticated model and work their way up the scale of complexity to various all-encompassing models, with social change as a question of degree more than of kind. We might then be [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>What it is ain’t exactly clear</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2008/02/what-it-is-ain%e2%80%99t-exactly-clear/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2008/02/what-it-is-ain%e2%80%99t-exactly-clear/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 21 Feb 2008 04:36:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ROEL</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Elections]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[USA]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=352</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[If we may go by the trend emerging from the presidential primary results so far, we very likely will see the end of the CheneyBush era next November. Voters both Democratic and Republican have turned out in large, often record-breaking numbers to make preliminary choices from among the presidential candidates who have offered themselves. This is a healthy democratic trend. According to the Pew Research Center, the upsurge in voter interest is sharpest and heaviest on the Democratic side and therefore concerns a much larger constituency than on the Republican side. More interesting, younger Democratic voters “are considerably more likely than their elders to be Hispanic, and slightly more likely to be black, more apt to say they have no religious afﬁliation and more likely to say they are ‘liberal’ in their political orientation.” Not only that, but across the board regardless of race or ethnicity, “Barack Obama won a majority of the 2008 vote among this [younger] age group in every state that has held a primary or caucus thus far with the exception of California, Arkansas, and Massachusetts Obama also had a 54%-43% advantage among the next youngest age group, those ages 30-44.” Does this suggest that the [...]


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		</item>
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		<title>The Iowa caucuses: Wrong end of the crystal ball?</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2008/01/the-iowa-caucuses-wrong-end-of-the-crystal-ball/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2008/01/the-iowa-caucuses-wrong-end-of-the-crystal-ball/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Jan 2008 03:21:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ROEL</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Elections]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[USA]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=324</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[We read in the Boston Globe (Friday, January 4th) that the results of the Iowa caucuses among Democrats and Republicans are important for the unprecedentedly intense grassroots interest they reveal in the upcoming presidential election. But more to the point, to the extent voters in Iowa are still trying to make those two creaky old suits of armor work, they remain profoundly clueless. On the surface, they appear to be lining up once more to perform the symbolic ritual of Throwing the Rascals Out. This time, it is true, the Rascals are a smelly bunch of radical pro-corporates quaintly christened “neoconservatives” &#8211; but who are in fact capitalist revolutionaries in the service of the military-industrial complex, out to stack the transnational energy deck in its favor. They have teamed up with an early protg, Osama bin Laden, to give political insurgency a slick new retro cachet, privatizing terrorism, which before the era of liberation struggles had always been the prerogative of the state. Now the whole corporate sham is tottering at the hustings. The Iowa Democrats who made Barack Obama’s day have never learned that the capitalist system is not designed to deliver the goods to the Little People who [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Interview With a WSPUS Union Organizer</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2006/08/interview-with-a-wspus-union-organizer/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2006/08/interview-with-a-wspus-union-organizer/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Aug 2006 01:05:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ROEL</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Activity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Labor]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=151</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[R. What is the condition of the working class today? How do you see the status of people who work for a living? W. Speaking very generally, in the early 21st Century, it&#8217;s true that certain luxuries are more easily available: it seems that everybody has television, running water, electricity. Certain consumer goods are very available. Food is also widely accessible in the United States as well, unlike in other parts of the world. In some ways, particularly the American working class is in some respects, I think, sheltered from some of the more horrible aspects of global capitalism. At the same time, plenty of statistical and anecdotal evidence suggests that people are working harder and harder, the productivity of the working class continues to rise, measured by the number of goods produced and the value of services rendered, and yet real, monetary income &#8212; the material reward for that work &#8212; has gone down, relative to what is produced. Workers today earn less in real dollars than they did 20-30 years ago. The other thing we have seen happen, particularly in the last 50 years (not that capitalism was ever a stable system for working people anyway), is some [...]


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		<item>
		<title>Been there done that?</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2005/03/been-there-done-that/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2005/03/been-there-done-that/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 07 Mar 2005 02:18:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ROEL</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Iraq]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=99</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[While you might not be surprised to learn that it’s customary at Holocaust commemorative events for German politicians to remain silent [“Leaders mark Auschwitz liberation,” Boston Globe, 28 January 2005], you might find it interesting to know who else shows up at them. Remember the folks who brought 100,000 dead Iraqis shock and awe? Well, one of the survivors, U.S. strongman Dick Cheney (temporarily out of the loop at Halliburton), galvanized an audience in Krakow, Poland, the day before the Auschwitz event with some poignantly immortal prose. “Gathered in this place,” he pontificated, “we are reminded that such immense cruelty did not happen in a faraway, uncivilized corner of the world, but rather in the very heart of the civilized world.” Baghdad, in one of its more ancient incarnations, was once on the site of what historians assure us was the cradle of civilization (Mesopotamia); it has always been “in the very heart of the civilized world.” Is Poland more civilized than Iraq? Possibly it was six decades ago. This might depend, of course, on such things as the point of view of whoever decided the Germans must be taught a lesson and secretly ordered the firestorm-bombing of Dresden (Churchill), [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Th-Th-Th-that&#8217;s All Folks!</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2004/05/th-th-th-thats-all-folks/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2004/05/th-th-th-thats-all-folks/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 02 May 2004 01:38:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ROEL</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wspus.org/?p=160</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Now that it has become comfortable, even de rigueur, to admit capitalism can&#8217;t necessarily deliver the goods, we hear a lot less about that old standby, the standard of living. Socialists have often pointed out that capitalism is much better at providing us with poverty than with a living, and that we should more accurately speak of a standard of poverty instead. Capitalism, more than any previous form of class exploitation, runs on empty promises (See the Socialist Standard, May 2003). In &#8220;The Collapse of Globalism&#8221; (Harper&#8217;s Magazine, March 2004), John Ralston Saul points out that sometime in the 1990s, people abruptly became aware &#8220;a middle-class family required two incomes. They noticed that in a mere 25 years CEO salaries in the United States had gone from 39 times the pay of an average worker to more than 1,000 times.&#8221; So far, no one has discovered where in the United States the streets are paved with gold. They are more likely to be littered with dead packaging, old newspapers and all kinds of odd garbage. Yet the legend of the fabled per capita income of the U.S. continues to draw in the desperate. But now, ominously, someone has coined a [...]


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