Below we post a selection of recent letters to the WSWS.
Re. “Los Angeles businesses press for expulsion of downtown homeless” these people are going through enough humiliation and don’t need to go through it over again. The people are not at fault here, the system is. It’s not the people’s fault that they have no homes or jobs and are living on the streets.
These people are not criminals, they are human beings who have been treated like criminals/animals. American society looks after the rich, which are a smaller minority of the country’s people. If we are not careful and keep the Liberal government in power, we will turn out like America.
R
Australia
1 January 2003
My father, a farm boy of Scots-Irish descent, received a commission in the US Army in the early 1960s. His first tour of duty as a Signal Corps officer was in Korea where he met and married my mother. In 1968, my father served a tour of duty as a Captain in Vietnam. I was five years old at the time. I in turn received my reserve officer’s commission while at the University of Kentucky in 1986. I had attained the rank of Captain in the combat engineering branch of the Army before being discharged from the Army Reserves.
I had heard of [Robert] Kerrey’s raid and actually saw a television interview with him discussing this raid. I saw him as dishonest and it made me very angry about what had happened during this raid and of how he could blatantly lie about it.
I have read many books written by officers who served in Vietnam but had not realized until this year how we had been responsible for the unnecessary deaths of so many noncombatants. We were supposed to be helping these people but instead we became their primary enemy. I have just recently bought several books on the My Lai massacre and now realize that American atrocities were commonplace. No wonder these people came to hate us.
The government and many military officers covered up these war crimes. No one has been made to pay for any of these crimes, not even Calley who was convicted and then pardoned by Nixon. How can we condemn others when we allow our own to get away with terrible crimes that are just as bad if not worse? There are many military officers who are truly honest and just men but I am truly disturbed by what I see as a failure by the US government and military to bring our own to answer for their crimes and to incorporate changes in our military to keep these widespread criminal acts from happening again.
BM
30 December 2002
Hi! I read your articles for first time tonight and I was stunned. About the Iraq-US conflict, what I read tonight was exactly what my personal intuition had been telling me since the beginning of this whole mess on September 11.
I thought that all this could be only in my head and that we were probably very few people thinking this way. Thank you.
MM
30 December 2002
The Bush-Harvard-Enron connections are just one more example of Bush’s direct corruption and illegal dealings. Why is he not being indicted, impeached or held accountable for his actions? I am outraged at what is happening to our country—we have an unelected “President” who got to the White House through his brother’s illegal removal of 54,000 Democrats from the Florida voters, most of whom were African-American and designated as such, which in itself is illegal, and no one has addressed this! It’s no coincidence that this occurred in Brother Jeb’s state.
The economy is collapsing, corporate corruption continues, unchecked; Bush is destroying our environment and that of the entire planet through his blatant disregard of the pollution from his campaign contributors from the oil, gas and coal industries; his and Cheney’s direct connections to oil are seemingly unimportant, and the public still doesn’t know who was in that secret meeting that Cheney called about energy policies, which impacts all of us—it is our business and right to know! Women’s rights are disappearing, as are our civil rights, and he is trying to get us into a war that is completely unnecessary, unwarranted and is a smokescreen to deflect the public’s notice of what is going on; greed is rampant in this country, and is destroying us all.
Why isn’t it being stopped, or at least challenged? There is no more security in this country than before, and Bush is whetting the appetites for future terrorist acts through his moronic “cowboy” unilateral actions.
I am deeply concerned, and angry, to feel so powerless at the extraordinary and inexplicable actions occurring in America, led by an incompetent puppet, who is a pawn in the hands of men driven by greed and power, regardless of the cost to the rest of us, and our planet.
BB
29 December 2002
I admire your web site for speaking out against the gang of cutthroats in Washington. These gangsters must be stopped! I would like to know how the bankers, corporations and the CIA keep these poor countries in poverty, not to mention these corrupt Muslim governments that are propped up by the US and England and have billions of dollars in western banks, while the people are starving!
RJ
31 December 2002
Peace be with you. I have read what you have written and I think what the US is doing is not surprising. They proclaim they want peace but instead all they are looking for is world domination. The only way to get that is through oil. Because it is known oil resources are running out, whoever has the most will ultimately have full control of the world.
Oil also produces lots of revenue as well. Ask yourself has the mission in Afghanistan been achieved, i.e., the assassination of Osama bin Laden? Ask yourself if they have built a huge pipeline across Afghanistan? At the same time they are preparing to attack Iraq, which has one-fifth of the world’s oil supply. They claim Iraq has weapons of mass destruction but do nothing about North Korea—which relies on the US for oil—and admits they have such weapons. I am only 18 years old, but already realized that the USA should not be the policeman of this world. Its history explains it: Vietnam (search and destroy missions), Iraq (sanctions) and it goes on.
M
31 December 2002
Mr. Grey,
I appreciate your article on the Al Gore and the Democrat Party. [“Al Gore and the politics of oligarchy”] I am a life-long Democrat and have become very much disappointed by the lack of vision and backbone that we have. I was very disappointed by Vice President Gore’s decision. Your column expressed a lot of my feelings.
Sincerely,
DK
21 December 2002
In a response to the article by Barry Grey, titled “How the Democrats assess their election debacle,” which is another masterfully written work by a gifted writer, I would like to make a comment.
This article highlights for the working class observer that the Democratic Party is truly an arm of the right reactionary elements and not an opposition to the latter party’s agenda.
In a time when working people as a class need vision and inspiration, the Democratic Party fails miserably. And that is assuming if the Democratic Party truly has the mission to represent working people. Here the author, clearly with class conscious precision, exposes the popular myth that the Democratic Party is the “working people’s party.”
But I believe Mr. Grey underscores the fact that the Democratic Party has had ample opportunities to refute the right. But the Democrats choose to be passive, looking cowardly, capitulating in unison to the right’s reactionary policies, stall and forfeit any notion to oppose it.
The Democrats have completely abandoned any notion to be socially responsible, hence the submissive posture to Bush’s tax cut giveaway to his cronies. The Democrats actually promote social inequality. That is characteristic not of a party that is class conscious of who it supposedly represents but a party that aides in that class’s demise.
Working people reading this article will realize they are not represented by the Democratic Party. That party only advances the same if not identical policies as the right. These policies use the coercive force of capitalism, which holds labor down, fleeces them for wealth and bars labor from true political expression. Any class conscious observer, whether capitalists or laborer, is fully aware that labor is the marrow that makes capital prosper. But it’s the Democratic Party’s mission to disguise this fact.
If the capitalists are working in class conscious cooperation, why should it not be expected from working people? Here the writer’s last point is a call that goes out to all working people as a class, everywhere. The time is ripe for a party with a disposition for the interests of all working people at heart and to liberate labor, return to labor what is rightfully theirs. The Socialist Equality Party is the party with that goal, and the class consciousness to carry it through.
Working people of the World, UNITE! Your party is already here.
20 December 2002
Dear comrade,
I regularly read the WSWS dispatches that interest me and I thank you for the same. The teachers struggle in France interests me much as I am a teacher myself and I find teachers in India in a similar predicament. Could you advise me more about ways of familiarizing myself on teachers struggle all over the world?
MC
Madras, India
20 December 2002