SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too)
“Either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; OR, the VICTORY OF SOCIALISM, that is, the conscious struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism.” Rosa Luxemburg
The second and fourth tracks, “Two Suns in the Sunset” and “The Gunner’s Dream” are from the 1983 Pink Floyd album The Final Cut, one of the most powerful antiwar rock music albums ever produced. The first of these contemplates the end of the world with a sunset in the west while another fire ball is illuminating the sky in the east, as Waters sings, “Two suns in the sunset / Could be the human race is run.”
The second of these two numbers has Waters playing piano and telling the story of the thoughts of a World War II airman gunner as he is falling to his death after having been shot down. Like Martin Luther King Jr., the gunner repeats “I had a dream, I had a dream,” and then he offers a vision of the possible future of society:
A place to stay, enough to eat Somewhere, old heroes shuffle safely down the street Where you can speak out loud about your doubts and fears And what’s more, no one ever disappears You never hear their standard issue kicking in your door You can relax on both sides of the tracks And maniacs don’t blow holes in bandsmen by remote control And everyone has recourse to the law And no one kills the children anymore No one kills the children anymore
Writing about the original recording on the 30th anniversary of The Final Cut’s release in 2013, Rachel Mann of The Quietus commented that “The Gunner’s Dream” was the “centrepiece of the album.” Mann observed that the track “tenderly imagines the lost hopes and expectations of a bomber gunner shot down and falling to his death over Berlin” and that “Waters’ voice is beautifully matched to words whose understatement adds to the power.” This “beautiful match” is even more pronounced on the new version.
The massive surge across the southern border, with more than 2.4 million immigrants detained by the US authorities over the past two years, is due to the heightened crisis of world capitalism, not to any warmer welcome from Biden compared to Trump.
Worsening poverty and oppression in Central America and Haiti, oppressed and exploited for more than a century by American imperialism, are major driving forces. An additional factor this year is a huge influx of refugees from Venezuela and now Nicaragua, under the impact of US economic sanctions which have targeted the two regimes (and which do not have repatriation agreements with Washington, a legal requirement for using Title 42 against asylum seekers).
The same factors are at work in Europe, where refugees from Africa and the Middle East, fleeing imperialist wars and the resulting collapse of entire societies, are seeking refuge. These include millions from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and other countries targeted by American bombs and missiles and US or US-proxy troops, along with similar victims of British and French imperialism.
In the United States, Republican state governors are exploiting the border crisis, seeking to whip up fear and hatred of immigrants as part of the further shift of the Republican Party in the direction of fascism. They are exploiting the border crisis both to undermine the Biden administration politically and to assert the authority of their states in a way that flagrantly challenges the US Constitution, under which border policy and its enforcement are reserved for the federal government.
"This post was unpublished because it violates Blogger Community Guidelines. To republish, please update the content to adhere to guidelines."
The post they "unpublished" was one about Gloria Steinem discussing her association with the Central Intelligence Agency. In case you weren't aware of this association, I suggest you google it and find out about it.
I do believe we should all be on the lookout for more and more of this as the U.S. government has more and more to cover up and deflect from.
Be skeptical. Read WSWS.org for evidence-based coverage of the world.
I’ve also come to the conclusion that we will not successfully mitigate science denial of the sort that has resulted in millions of potentially avoidable deaths from COVID-19 until we are able to understand conspiracy theories and develop effective strategies for countering them because, even if you do not accept the proposition that all science denial is a form of conspiracy theory, it is without a doubt true that all science denial relies at least in part on conspiracy theories to support it. As we’ve seen in the COVID-19 pandemic, the conspiracy theory of science denial can have deadly consequences, consequences that, once the pandemic finally abates, will become apparent as the earth’s climate continues to warm due to human activity.
"[A] toll many would have considered inconceivable in the modern era"
What was inconceivable is that global public health institutions, including WHO and CDC (at the behest of their capitalist overlords) would deceive the earth's population about the fact that COVID-19 was spread through aerosol emission. And that most (eventually all) global governments would adopt herd immunity as the solution, another deadly mistake. See the fatal results below.
WSWS.org has made the case for zero covid since the very beginning of the pandemic. Public health under capitalism is an oxymoron. Help build a socialist response to the pandemics abounding now: never-ending COVID, never-ending imperial wars, never-ending budding of fascism... Read WSWS.org and join the Socialist Equality Party.
The leading representatives of world capitalism—the heads of the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organization (WTO)—have assembled in China this week for their “1+6 summit,” where the CCP has officially pledged that China is reopening for business and will no longer impose lockdowns or other public health measures to stop the spread of COVID-19.
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The Western media presents the lifting of Zero-COVID in China as a response to recent anti-lockdown protests, which were centered among layers of the affluent middle class at universities. The CCP, the Western propagandists claim, frightened by the specter of mass opposition to its deeply unpopular COVID-19 policy, is at long last lifting its draconian controls. Not a word of this narrative is true.
A survey conducted in Shanghai in October and November and published by the China Data Lab at UC San Diego found that only 11.9 percent of the population favored “large-scale adjustment” of the country’s Zero-COVID policy. More than twice this number, 24.4 percent, stated that Zero-COVID “must be upheld without adjustment.” The majority of those surveyed, 58.5 percent, stated that Zero-COVID needed “adjustment on specifics” but did not call for “large-scale adjustment.” The policy of Zero-COVID retains immense popular support, and fully 83 percent of those surveyed want it to be continued.
The fact that the China Data Lab survey was conducted in Shanghai is particularly significant. A city of 25 million people, economically vital and with a mass working class population, Shanghai lived through multiple extended lockdowns over the past two and half years. If one believed the accounts in the Western media, no city would have more widespread anti-Zero-COVID sentiment than Shanghai. Yet when popular opinion is scientifically surveyed, one finds overwhelming support for the continuation of the necessary public health measures to prevent the spread of the pandemic.
The protests cited by the Western media were small, numbering in the hundreds in a nation of 1.4 billion people, and based almost exclusively among upper middle class students at the country’s elite universities. The protests were staged not with an eye not to rousing the sentiment of the broad Chinese population but to providing photo ops for Western journalists. The protesters issued invitations to all the major international news outlets, who photographed the blank pieces of paper held up in the rallies and wrote ecstatic editorials on the birth of “freedom” in China.
As the WSWS has documented, the moves by the CCP to scrap Zero-COVID predate the protests. In the final analysis, the protests served the social function of legitimizing the policies adopted by the CCP, presenting the opening to the pandemic as an outgrowth of popular demand, as if the Chinese people were clamoring to be infected.
The demand for mass infection in China comes not from the Chinese people but from world capitalism. The Wall Street Journal wrote today that “disruptions to businesses [are] threatening the country’s status as the world’s factory floor.” Terry Guo, the founder of Foxconn Technology Group, the company responsible for the mass production of Apple’s iPhone in China and is now facing a shortage of workers in the Foxconn assembly plants, wrote a letter at the beginning of November to the CCP government warning that “strict COVID controls would threaten China’s central position in global supply chains.” Apple signaled that it was thinking of moving production elsewhere. There were similar rumblings from Samsung, Nike, Volkswagen and other major international firms.
China’s Zero-COVID policy saved millions of lives and prevented the virus from ravaging the country. It was not a top-down imposition on society, but the planned and coordinated mobilization of vast collective efforts. The Chinese people sacrificed and worked together to ensure the nation’s public health.
Indeed, some UAW locals with thousands of members saw turnout of 1 percent or less, while numerous other locals saw turnout of less than 10 percent.
According to the UAW Monitor, UAW Local 4123, with over 11,000 members at the California State University System, returned just 29 ballots—a turnout of just 0.26 percent. Lehman won 24 percent of the votes in this local.
UAW Local 4121, with approximately 9,000 members at the University of Washington, submitted just 72 ballots, a turnout of 0.8 percent. Lehman won 23 percent of the votes cast in this local.
UAW Local 5810 was sent 6,000 ballots to post-docs and academic researchers at the University of California system, where workers are currently on strike. The local reportedly returned just 328 ballots, a turnout of 5.5 percent. Lehman won 13 percent of votes cast in this local.
UAW Local 2865—also on strike—was sent 30,138 ballots but only 921 votes were cast. Lehman won 15 percent of this vote. There is no explanation for why only 36,000 ballots were sent to the 48,000 striking UC workers.
The number of ballots tallied by the Monitor fell by nearly 30 percent, by approximately 40,000 votes, compared to the national referendum last year, in which workers voted to implement direct elections. Roughly 143,000 members voted in the referendum.
On Tuesday, the Detroit News published a letter by United Auto Workers presidential candidate Will Lehman exposing the undemocratic character of the UAW’s first-ever membership vote for top union officers.
Published under the headline,“‘Democratic’ UAW election is really anything but,” the letter states that the UAW apparatus did as little as possible to inform workers about the election, leading to a turnout of only 10 percent of the eligible voters.
The full letter is reprinted below.
Will Lehman with Warren Stamping workers in August 2022 [Photo: WSWS]
The United Auto Workers (UAW) election ended this week, with a Monday deadline for ballots to be received by mail. This is the first direct leadership election in the history of the UAW, which up to now has had all its top officials appointed by the bureaucracy at its annual conventions.
A direct election is the result of corruption in the apparatus, with the union’s recent leadership thrown in jail and charged with accepting bribes.
Despite its unprecedented character, the way the election is being carried out is a travesty. Out of 1 million UAW members (workers and retirees), 900,000 (90 percent) have not voted. This is not because workers are apathetic, but because most workers don’t even know that there is an election. UAW leadership has done as little as possible to inform workers of their rights and ensure that they can vote.
This is why I filed a lawsuit last month in Detroit, at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, asking for a 30-day extension to voting deadlines and for the court-appointed monitor to take measures to ensure that all UAW members are properly informed. As part of the lawsuit, I submitted affidavits from workers who said that they had not been notified about the election or did not receive a ballot.
In response, the UAW, the monitor and the Biden administration all lined up against extending the deadline. They all said they are not concerned about what the court itself called an “anemic” turnout. As far as they were concerned, the election was proceeding just as they intended.
Regrettably, the court evaded the central democratic issues and chose to dismiss my lawsuit on the narrowest technical grounds, claiming that since I personally had received a ballot, I did not have standing to file a complaint. This creates an impossible Catch-22 situation: Only workers who do not know about the election can file a lawsuit, but these workers would not file a lawsuit because they did not know about the election.
This rationale ignored my right, as well as the right of all workers in the UAW, to an election that is conducted in a democratic manner to ensure a leadership that represents the views of the entire membership.
One of the main arguments given by the UAW’s attorneys for opposing a delay is that it would undermine the Bargaining Convention in March, that the union needs “stability.” As a matter of fact, the blatantly undemocratic character of the election will leave union leadership without any credibility in the rank and file.
My campaign has been about workers on the shop floor. Workers all agree on is that current conditions of life are impossible. Prices are rising far beyond the minuscule wage increases negotiated by the UAW. Many of our coworkers have died from the pandemic. Meanwhile, corporate profits are skyrocketing and inequality gets worse and worse.
My campaign has won powerful support from rank-and-file workers who are looking for a way to advocate for themselves. And we will continue to do so.
Will Lehman, UAW 2022 presidential candidate, works at Mack Trucks in Macungie, Pennsylvania
