If politics and policy were synonymous, the voters who loyally backed the Bush administration over eight years might as well support Barack Obama in the upcoming presidential election. His first four years in office have demonstrated that he can deliver the same basic policies as the Bush years (the military adventures overseas, the bailouts for investment banks, the cuts in social programs, the chipping away at constitutional rights, and so on), with the added benefit of no protesting peeps from liberals. But politics is about more than policy, of course. For individual politicians, it all comes down to getting...
Read more »
CBS News reports that although the basic pay for members of Congress is $174,000, nearly half — 261, to be exact — are millionaires (there are 535 total members of the House and Senate). Just 1 percent of Americans overall can say the same. 55 members had an average calculated wealth of $10 million or more in 2009. While the economy has generally faltered over the past two years, congressional members actually saw their collective personal wealth increase by more than 16 percent between 2008 and 2009. The wealthiest member of Congress is Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), whose holdings...
Read more »
It is well known that the word ‘democracy’ originates from Ancient Greece and means ‘power of the people’. Such an idea, in its literal sense, encompassing economic, political and social democracy does not exist anywhere in the world. This is primarily because the planet’s resources, many of which human beings need in order to live, do not belong to the people as a whole. Instead, they are in the hands of a small, privileged, rich minority. Such extremely limited political ‘democracy’ as does exist in parts of the modern world, is scarcely even a shadow of what genuine democracy...
Read more »
Socialists often meet with the argument that while capitalism may have been a terrible system in the past, with the awful gap between rich and poor, today we are gradually improving things and such inequalities no longer exists. So what do the anti-socialists make of these recent statistics? “The rich-poor gap also widened with the nation’s top one percent now collecting 23 percent of total income, the biggest disparity since 1928, according to the Economic Policy Institute. One side statistic supplied by the IRS: there are now 47,000 Americans worth $20 million or more, an all-time high.” (San Francisco...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
Judging by the ubiquitous media-generated euphoria that greeted the Barak Obama victory in the US presidential election, you could be forgiven for thinking that the class struggle had ended in the USA. Across the globe, the world’s media intimated that this was the dawn of a new age and hundreds of millions of workers breathed a sigh of relief, convinced President Obama will now undo all the wrongdoing carried out by President Bush and generally improve the quality of their lives and the safety of the planet. The first thing to note, however, is that this had been the...
Read more »
Bianca Jagger participating in a demonstration during the United Nations climate change conference in Poznan, Poland “The politicians just don’t seem to get the seriousness of the global warming crisis. Scientists attending the recent UN climate conference in Poznan, Poland, complained that the gap between political rhetoric and scientific reality on climate change is growing.”It doesn’t matter what the politicians promise,” said French climate scientist Phillipe Ciasis. “Even if we stop emissions growing today, the world will still warm by 2 °C – a lot more in some places. It is too late to prevent that.” Ciais was at...
Read more »
The Ozymandian candidate (with apologies to P.B. Shelley and Horace Smith)
Humans, alone among the mammals and other life-forms on the planet Earth, invented “no.” The power of negation lies at the root of conceptual thought, and hence of abstract thinking. And with it comes the power of deception. Deception applied to oneself is basically illusion. Error and deception make very good allies. Politicians are considered notorious liars. But are they deceiving themselves as well? Apart from questions of moral turpitude, what most politicians have to lie about is economics. They are forever making promises that they either know cannot be kept or that amount to so much pie in...
Read more »