On “JPMorgan CEO in secret meeting with Attorney General Holder over fraud probes”
I worked for M-Modal/Medquist which JP Morgan purchased. I had worked for the company 11 years and loved it until they went “global.” They just did a mass firing of people and most of our jobs went to India. I went for SNAP food benefits and I found out the credit card for food is handled by JP Morgan. Aside from the article you wrote, which was enlightening, I suggest you look at MTStars website at the comments about job loss and their comments about JPMorgan. They have ruined many lives. The company is challenging my unemployment benefits.
Delores T
Oklahoma, USA
24 October 2013
I was struck by the following observation by film producer Tony Garnett: “It’s not that you can choose your class so much as you can choose your class allegiance.”
This reminded me if of the final words in George Orwell’s 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier: “And when the widely separate classes who, necessarily, would form any real Socialist party have fought side by side, they may feel differently about one another. And then perhaps this misery of class-prejudice will fade away, and we of the sinking middle class—the private schoolmaster, the half-starved free-lance journalist, the colonel’s spinster daughter with £75 a year, the jobless Cambridge graduate, the ship’s officer without a ship, the clerks, the civil servants, the commercial travellers, and the thrice-bankrupt drapers in the country towns—may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared…”
Orwell, or course, was approaching the subject from the opposite end of the class spectrum, but reached the same conclusion as Garnett.
Another remark by Garnett left me confused: “A socialist culture is the only one that can allow us to live with each other in peace, encourage each other’s creativity, making life worth living…I don’t know how we get there. I have tried to tell the truth about the world and get the biggest platform to tell it on. How that translates into practical politics is difficult. You [the Socialist Equality Party] have an answer that I have not been able to accept…”
What, exactly, does Tony Garnett understand that “answer” to be? I’d like to know.
Randy R
Oregon, USA
24 October 2013
On “Study reports growing poverty in San Diego”
Behind these grim statistics for San Diego lie desperate people who have lost everything, soon their lives… it would be wise to color statistics with the kind of heart felt-observations that Edmund Wilson wrote as he traveled town to town and reported on the rising tide of discontent. It was revolution that his essays, collected as “American Jitters,” unmistakably signaled.
In 1932, Wilson labeled San Diego the “The Jumping-Off Place” joining the upward mobility the city promised with its leadership in the rising tide of suicides across the nation. Then the ruling class, wiser than ours, heard the rumbling and staved off revolution with the Stalinist supported Roosevelt program that much of the false left, still attached to the Democratic Party, thought possible.
AL
Toronto, Canada
25 October 2013