On “Chicago teachers in forefront of fight against bipartisan assault on education“

 

 

I find it ironic that everything I learned in Economics 101 seems to have eluded the people in charge of getting our economy running. I was taught about supply, demand, and money flowing from the pockets of labor into stores, which creates demand. What better way to not only create demand, but to attract more qualified future teachers than to increase their pay and benefits?

Young men and women everywhere have to make hard decisions about what they will do in respect to career choices. Will the very best and brightest of them elect to teach for a corporate entity who can fire them without cause while a large percentage of their efforts go toward paying stockholders and CEOs?

Probably not.

 

Will these folks work for the Public Schools knowing that their pay is going to be stagnant and that politicians each and every day are going to devise new and dangerous ways of undermining their efforts?

Probably not.

 

What’s going to happen and what probably has been happening since I was in school is that the people who love being an educator are becoming teachers and are gritting their teeth each day and putting their love for the children and the task ahead of their own personal financial status. In cutting their pay and reducing their security, the political hacks are not creating demand, they are creating insecurity, terror, and dysfunction in order to appease those who disdain public education and do not participate in it.

 

I am 100 percent behind the teachers no matter what their demands, because when the math shows that there are 39 students in an overheated classroom, there isn’t any room for debate.

 

PK
12 September 2012

On “US ‘Fifty Wealthiest Lawmakers’ list: A Congress of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich“

 

Thank you for this revelation and very interesting data. Would like to ask you to do a piece on who actually has control over the money in political contests. That would be much more revealing to us in who controls the advertising for elections than who has their own money.

Thanks again!

 

James M
Kentucky, USA
10 September 2012

On “UAW calls off Jeep contract vote“

The UAW calling off a vote that was planned to take place on a company in which they are the majority shareholder—is this correct, are my eyes deceiving me? How was the union’s transformation possible? This protracted degeneration lies in the nationalist program of all unions, the union’s subordination to the nation-state system and the defence of capitalism and private profit.

 

The union’s rejection of internationalism is a refusal of Marxism. This raises other questions about unionism and their orientation to the defence of capitalism. Their defence of a system that continually stokes up racial hatred among workers, unending wars of aggression that is now over a decade long, endless lines of unemployment and those who can find work are forced to accept any wage, etc. This can have only one meaning, that the union bureaucracy agrees to these conditions facing millions of people.

If workers in the US are to triumph in the fight over wages and conditions then one needs to reflect on the action of the union. After agreeing to the Obama led attack on wages amounted to their brothers and sisters earning half wages for new hires, new conditions such as a no strike agreement to which they also agreed reflects the deep hostility the union has toward the working class.

After reflecting, workers needs to have a solution to the crises confronting them; if workers are to be successful in their fight for a decent wage, then we need to take an independent path collectively: the building of rank and file committees of action in all workplaces, in opposition to the unions and the Democratic Party, above all the building of the Socialist Equality Party into a mass party for its revolutionary program to transform society by nationalisation of the banks and major corporations to provide trillions of dollars for decent well-paid jobs for all.

It is the only party on the planet today taking up the fight for the working class; a few examples of the struggle to unite workers internationally are the National Health Service Fightback web site launched by the British section of the ICFI. The call for a general strike in the state of Wisconsin, when more than 100,000 people demonstrated against cutbacks only to have the unions channel it back into a recall election. And the international tour headed by US presidential candidate Jerry White to clearly explain to workers that the SEP is not out to win votes, but to build a new leadership that can take forward the coming international struggles that will inevitably arise due to the failure of capitalism.

 

Julian H
Queensland, Australia
12 September 2012

On “Anti-US protests rage across the Middle East“

 

There was a protest held in Hyde Park in Sydney, and from what I saw on SBS TV, the protesters who numbered a few hundred were peaceful, at least until they began to disperse, and that was when hordes of police officers descended on them and beat them brutally.

 

I’m convinced there’s much more behind the anti-Islamic film we won’t hear about, and that Nakoula Basseley Nakoula and the Coptic Christian community in Egypt are to be the fall guys for the blame and violence. The actors in the film had been told they were making a different film altogether. This smacks of the incident in which an Israeli film crew told a group of Palestinians to dance in the streets a week before 11 September 2001. Guess what? That film was later shown as “proof” that the Palestinians were celebrating the WTC attacks.

 

I also wondered why Chris Stevens, an IT guy and two security officers, one a US marine, had to be in Benghazi. While WSWS dealt with Chris Stevens in another article, I discovered from reading the Daily Mail online that one of those security men was in Benghazi to find rebel weapons and destroy them. Again, this smells of that incident in Fallujah in 2003 in which Blackwater employees were lynched by a mob. One of the men’s families sued Blackwater for deliberately putting their son in harm’s way by not providing enough men in the convoy and as a way of punishing him for being outspoken against his supervisor.

 

I probably sound like a rabid conspiracy theorist but I can’t help but think that Stevens, Nakoula and the other men who died were set up as were the people who initially protested outside the Benghazi consulate. Their protest was hijacked by a jihadi group who stormed the consulate and lynched the men inside.

 

Jennifer H
New South Wales, Australia
15 September 2012