On “Two-thirds of US mining disaster victims had black lung”
This is horrifying. Black lung was supposed to be prevented back in the 1960s. How horrible that such young people were in the beginning stages of black lung. My Dad was the first in his family to get out of the mines. His first job was loading coal cars with a shovel all day long, for a dollar. From there he went to the railroad. This is so very sad.
Patricia G
31 May 2011
On “US Supreme Court protects abuse of material witness warrants”
“Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen G. Breyer concurred separately, agreeing only that the constitutional principles that apply to material witness warrants are too unclear for the United States Attorney General to understand, and therefore Ashcroft is entitled to ‘qualified immunity’ from suit.”
I’d like to see any of us try to say “well, it’s just too unclear to understand” if we’re ever charged with something. How many times have we heard that “ignorance of the law is not a defense”? And pardon me, but is it not the Attorney General’s job to understand the Constitution in all its complexity?
Christie S
Washington, USA
2 June 2011
On “HBO’s Too Big to Fail: Propaganda aimed at the US population”
“We deserve a good deal more than this piece of shallow propaganda.” Yes, and it is up to us to write. Art that denotes reality will have to be made by artists from the working class. It will have to be made despite harrowing circumstances and seemingly impossible odds. And I believe it will.
Thushara
1 June 2011
* * *
Charles Bogle, let me thank you for this article. I’m glad to know that I was not the only one feeling a sense of disgust over the fairy tale called Too Big To Fail. It is humiliating enough to see innocent working people paying dearly for the gambling adventures of the financial elite, but to have HBO, a premium channel, produce filth that turns the criminals into heroes is quite disconcerting.
P.S. Please find out what HBO’s love affair with Andrew Ross Sorkin is. He appears regularly on “Real Time With Bill Maher” and spews his apologetics. While his book and movie are heavily promoted, they are distortions and misrepresentations of historical fact. Our useless media refuses to take a closer look. Please continue to expose these frauds.
Paul
1 June 2011
On “The jobs crisis in America”
The lack of jobs confronting working class families and youth is a political problem that cannot or, should I say, will not be solved by any leading government today, otherwise this financial crisis which threw millions of workers onto the scrap heap wouldn’t have happened at all.
The facts are mounting up, billions of dollars handed over to the banks and the financial elite who pillaged the public coffers, and who continuously wreck millions of lives by sitting on a massive amount of cash, and who refuse to hire you unless you’re prepared to earn half the wages of your parents. The answer by every single government that upholds the capitalist system is to make the population pay through a counterrevolution in which the gains won by the working class are to be taken from us, the very people who produce the wealth in society.
This counterrevolution is the beginning for the financial elite of extorting the working class in each of their respective countries to offer the biggest tax cut to the oligarchy and if all else fails, as happened twice before in the last century, they can use their ill-gotten wealth to prepare by arming themselves militarily to annihilate their international competition.
The fight thus far has produced mass protest on a scale not seen since the 1960s and two revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. This is a beginning of a political awakening; the problem has been the leadership, or the lack of it, in the working class. Without a political program through which the working class can seek political power our cries of our destitution to capitalist governments will fall on deaf ears.
The only party that calls not for the reform of capitalism but for its overthrow is the Socialist Equality Party. Their calls for international socialism puts their party above all others.
Only the social force of the working class can solve mass unemployment through the taking of political power in which the vast majority control the wealth it produces, thus providing full employment at a wage it deems necessary not only to survive but to flourish in a era where modern technology, medicine and space exploration should take mankind into a future of prosperity.
Julian H
Queensland, Australia
31 May 2011