The Legacy of Leon Trotsky and U.S. Trotskyism

Attend the Conference on:
The Legacy of Leon Trotsky and U.S. Trotskyism:
Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
FRIDAY JULY 25, SATURDAY JULY 26 & SUNDAY JULY 27TH 2008.

FLYER FOR THE CONFERENCE

Attend the Conference on:
The Legacy of Leon Trotsky &
U.S. Trotskyism:
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow JULY 25, 26, 27th, 2008
Fordham University, Rose Hill Campus, Bronx, N.Y.

A diverse group of veterans of the Trotskyist movement have organized
a conference to discuss and better understand past and present
struggles, to clarify issues and to build the socialist movement today
and tomorrow. It’s shaping up to be an exciting event!

Speakers will include:
Esteban Volkov, Leon Trotsky’s grandson,
Celia Hart, Cuban Revolutionary (likely via electronic hook-up)
Bryan Palmer, author of “James P. Cannon and the Origins of the
American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928″
Ahmed Shawki, Editor of International Socialist Review
Gus Horowitz, SWP National Anti Vietnam War Director, and founding
national co-coordinator, Student Mobilization Committee

Plenary Sessions: a sampling
Permanent Revolution and the Evolution of World Realities . Social
Movements and Class Struggle in the US. What Kind of Political
Organization Do we Need? Lessons of the Socialist Worker’s Party
Experience . Venezuela & Latin America

Workshops

SWP Memory Project Students and Youth Health Care
The National Question Women’s Liberation Antiwar
Electoral Action Gay Liberation and Rights Cuba
Labor The Environment Immigration

Theoretical and political perspectives to be discussed:
What remains relevant in the Trotskyist theoretical and political
tradition? What do developments of the late 20th and early 21st
century indicate regarding the value of such concepts as permanent
revolution, workers’ states (and/or workers’ and farmers’
governments), workers’ democracy, the revolutionary potential of the
working class, the revolutionary potential of social movements, Lenin
on the vanguard party and democratic centralism, imperialism, the
national question, and the relation of democratic struggles to the
revolutionary struggle?

And what we should do now?
What is the best way to organize for change in the world today? What
is the political situation that we face, particularly from the
standpoint of those who continue to want to create a socialist
society? What is the situation in Cuba today and how does that impact
permanent revolution in Latin America in countries such as Venezuela
and Bolivia? What are the dynamics in the MiddleEast created by US
Empire building and US wars? What is happening on the Left, in the
unions, in the immigrant rights movement, the antiwar movement, among
environmentalists, and in other social movements? And what are the
lessons of the SWP experience that can help to point the way forward
today?

Dates: Friday noon – Sunday 3PM., July 25-27, 2008
Location: Fordham University, Bronx, New York

Cost: $60/day for room (dorms) and board (3 meals/day, on-site
cafeteria) + a registration fee of $40/full conference or $25/day

Donations: We would like to offer scholarships to defray registration
costs and expenses for those unable to afford them. Please send
pledges (payable before the conference) or donations to: Paul LeBlanc,
9000 Babcock Blvd. Pittsburgh, PA 15237 leblanp1@LaRoche.edu

For more information, or to help in planning and organizing the
conference (we welcome your participation!), contact the Conference
Coordinators:
Linda Thompson: 203 453-2770, lthompson321@aol.com on the East coast Robin David: 415 285-8548, robindavid@speakeasy.net on the

West coast

The Conference Planning Committee: Tom Bias, Steve Bloom,
Robin David, Alexei Folger, David Keil, Paul LeBlanc, Ahmed Shawki,
Sharon Smith, Asi Somburu, Kwame Somburu, Zakiya Somburu, Linda
Thompson, Dave Walters

SCHEDULE FOR THE CONFERENCE on
THE LEGACY OF LEON TROTSKY AND U.S. TROTSKYISM
July 25, 26, 27, 2008

FRIDAY

11:00 AM – 1:00 PM: Registration and LUNCH

1:00 – 1:15 pm: Opening/Greetings

1:15 – 3:15 PM: Permanent Revolution and the Evolution of World
Realities Since the 1960s
•Ahmed Shawki, editor, International Socialist Review
•Suzi Weisman, author, Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope
•Alan Benjamin, editor, The Organizer
•Linda Thompson, Feminist Organizer, former member of the SWP and YSA
for 22 years

3:15 – 3:30 PM: BREAK

3:30 – 5:30 PM: Workshops

5:30 – 7:00 PM: DINNER

7:00 – 8:15 PM: James P. Cannon and U.S. Trotskyism
•Bryan Palmer, author, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American
Revolutionary Left

8:15 – 8:30 PM: BREAK

8:30 – 8:45 PM: Introductory Remarks (to the film) – Esteban Volkov,
Trotsky’s grandson, Curator, Trotsky Museum, Coyoacan, Mexico

8:45 – 10:15 PM: “Trotsky in Mexico” (new documentary – U.S. Premiere)

SATURDAY

8:00 – 9:00 AM: BREAKFAST

9:00 – 9:30 AM: Registration

9:15 – 9:30 AM: Opening Remarks

9:30 – 10:00 AM: Reflection on the Legacy of Leon Trotsky – Esteban
Volkov

10:00 – 11:30 AM: Lessons of the SWP Experience: 1960 – 1980
•Robin David, 20-year veteran of the SWP and YSA, former SWP candidate
•Kipp Dawson, veteran of the SWP and YSA, former leader of the Student
Mobilization Committee to End the War In Vietnam

11:30 AM – 1:00 PM: LUNCH

1:00 – 2:30 PM: What Happened to the SWP?
•Linda Thompson, former Leader Anti-Vietnam War Movement, former SWP
candidate for office
•Paul Le Blanc, author, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, former SWP
member
•David Walters, Founder of Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-line (ETOL),
former SWP member

2:30 – 3:45 PM: Workshops

3:45 – 4:00 PM: BREAK

4:00 – 6:00 PM: Social Movements and Class Struggle in the U.S.
•Kwame Somburu, author, A Succinct Analysis of African American
History from 1776 to 1877, a Black Nationalist since 1960, former
member and candidate of the Freedom Now Party and the SWP
•Marilyn Vogt-Downey, International Coordinator, Committee for the
Study of Leon Trotsky’s Legacy & International conferences
•Dan Kaplan, Executive Director, AFT Local 1493, San Mateo, CA.,
former member SDS, YSA, SWP, SA, supporter of Socialist Organizer

6:00 – 7:30 PM: DINNER

7:30 – 9:30 PM: Revolutionary Struggles in Latin America
•Celia Hart (video) Cuban Revolutionary & Writer, Trotskyist
•Dr. Eloise Linger, Asst. Professor of Politics & LA Studies, SUNY
•Martín Sanchez, Consul General of Venezuela in Chicago
•Gerry Foley, International Editor, Socialist Action, former editor,

International Viewpoint, the English-language journal of the Fourthnternational/United Secretariat.

9:30 – 11:00 PM: July 26th Celebration

SUNDAY

8:00 – 9:00 AM: BREAKFAST

9:00 – 9:15 AM: Opening Remarks

9:15 – 10:45 AM: Building the Revolutionary Party
•Sharon Smith, National Organizer, ISO, and author, Subterranean Fire:
A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the U.S.
•Steve Bloom, National Committee of Solidarity* (id only) expelled
from the SWP 1983, managing editor of the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism
.Tom Trottier, National Committee, Workers International League

10:45 – 11:00 AM: BREAK

11:00 AM – 12:30 PM: Revolutionary Socialists and the Antiwar Struggle
•Gus Horowitz, Founding National Co-Coordinator of the Student
Mobilization Committee & former member of SWP National Committee
•Tom Bias, Co-Managing Editor, Labor Standard, President, Northwest
New Jersey Peace Fellowship, former member of the FIT
•Chris Gavreau, Former SWP member, Coordinator, CT United for Peace
Coalition
•Leia Petty, National Coordinating Committee, Campus Antiwar Network,
ISO member

12:30 – 12:45 PM: BREAK to get box lunches

12:45 – 2:15 PM: Workshops and BOX LUNCH

2:15 – 2:30 PM: Closing

Elissa Jane Karg Chacker 1951-2008

Elissa and Neil were stalwarts of the Detroit left and the Detroit Solidarity branch. As this memorial for Elissa from Solidarity makes clear they were the iron links in a long, unbroken chain of a revolutionary working class . I first met them in the beginning days of the Detroit Newspaper strike in the mid-90’s and since been in many dozens meetings of all kinds with one, the other or both of them. They were militants cut from the finest revolutionary cloth.

When I first met Neil at an ACOSS meeting during the News strike he said with pipe in one hand the other extended in greeting, “Great, now I move to being the second most tattooed Trotskyist in Detroit.” Elissa’s tragic passing is a great loss to her family, friends and comrades. When we get there comrades it will be because of the life and work of Elissa, Neil and those like them. Elissa Karg Chacker, Presente!

ELISSA KARG CHACKER, a longtime member of Solidarity and previously the International Socialists (IS) in Detroit, died Sunday, May 11 from injuries suffered in an accident a week earlier. Riding her bicycle home after a Solidarity meeting, she was struck by a car and never regained consciousness. Her daughters Sasha and Nina stayed with her in the hospital, where many comrades and friends maintained a vigil throughout the week.

Some members of Solidarity had known Elissa since the early 1970s. A native of Connecticut and student at Oberlin College, she came for a summer to Detroit to be an organizer for the United Farm Workers. She fell in love with the city, where she also met her life companion Neil Chacker, and never left. From the beginning, Elissa stood out in our political circle: she had a child at the age of 23, when no one else was even thinking about it.

Elissa and Neil were both dedicated socialists and rank-and-file trade unionists, as well as talented writers (Neil wrote the “Random Shots” humor column in Against the Current until his death from lymphoma in September, 2004). Elissa became an auto worker and was fired in the famous Mack Avenue Stamping sitdown strike of 1973, which was broken by a mobilization of UAW bureaucrats. She also worked for a time at Chevy Gear and Axle, the plant that later became American Axle, and spent some time on the picket line there this spring when workers were on strike.

In the 1970s and ‘80s Elissa worked on the staff of the IS newspaper, Workers’ Power, and the IS National Office. Much of her activism centered around women’s issues, particularly reproductive rights. In 1980 she authored an extremely successful pamphlet for Labor Notes called Stopping Sexual Harassment, one of the first union-oriented publications on the subject. She got a journalism degree from Wayne State University and was a gifted writer of fiction.

While working as a cartoonist on her high school paper, she was encouraged to develop her cartoons into a book, which became the short, ironic How To Be a Nonconformist. Originally published in 1967, How To Be a Nonconformist has just been reissued by Onzo Media. According to the Wikipedia entry, “With intricate pen-and-ink drawings and wry commentary, the book captures a unique period in American history, the era of flower children and anti-war demonstrations. Author Elissa Karg was 16 years old when the book was first published. A new introduction and author’s note focus on the relevance of nonconformity in today’s world.”

She wrote:

To a ‘60s idealist, today’s world seems sadder and scarier. The war in Iraq feels as unjust and as endless as Vietnam. We have a President even more bent on abusing power than Tricky Dick was. (Who could have imagined?) Cities like Detroit (where Elissa lives now) are falling apart. Good jobs are outsourced, and unions are forced to accept give backs. Poor people are isolated in dilapidated neighborhoods and their children attend crummy schools.

And yet every new generation spawns its own nonconformists.

Here is what Utne Reader had to say about How To Be a Nonconformist:

“The little barefoot, singing hippies that march across the pages of Elissa Jane Karg’s recently republished book, How to be a Nonconformist, illustrate 23 playful steps to becoming a bona fide rebel. Karg’s advice, originally published as a comic-strip for her high school newspaper in the ’60s, mischievously elbows the counterculture of that time with tips like, ‘[a]void socks. They are the fatal give-away of a phony nonconformist.’

For the past quarter century Elissa worked as a nurse for homebound patients in Detroit, Hamtramck and Highland Park, where her skills in connecting with people as well as her professionalism were highly valued. Her commitment to the patients went way past responsbilities expected of her. Through her work she discovered unsung heroes and their talents. She drew out their life stories, learned from them and shared herself with them. She took an interest in their welfare well beyond their nursing care — for example, she brought them children’s books to encourage parents to read to their children.

Her fellow nurses who came to say goodbye to Elissa at the hospital remarked on how smart she was and on how consistently she would challenge management. As one manager confirmed, “When she raised her hand to speak at a meeting, we knew we were in for something.”

Committed for the Long Haul

Politically, in the last decade or so Elissa could be counted on to take on internal tasks for Solidarity — no matter how discouraged she became about the state of the world. She turned her artistic gifts to working on the re-design of Against the Current’s format, a project that remains in progress, and created many beautiful leaflets for Detroit Solidarity events. Her commitment was also expressed in working on Solidarity’s Midwest socialist-feminist retreats. Elissa’s house was the site of innumerable meetings and forums and she was always willing to house out-of-town guests for various Solidarity events. She volunteered to help with registration at Labor Notes conferences and at this year’s conference donated $1,000, anonymously.

As the widow of a Chrysler worker, she was overjoyed last fall when Chrysler assembly workers were turning down a concessionary contract, and saddened when the rebellion was contained.

Elissa did not use unnecessary words, but when she spoke she usually had an interesting take on events. There was just a little twist to what she had to say. This was as true in Solidarity meetings as in the mothers’ group she belonged to.

In addition to her daughters, Elissa is survived by her eight-year old granddaughter, Alisha Pitts, and her recent companion Tim Janssen. Contributions in her memory can be made to the Karmanos Cancer Center, 4100 E. John R, Detroit, MI 48201 or Center for Changes, 7012 Michigan Avenue, Detroit MI 48210.

It’s above all as a rock-solid friend that we will remember Elissa. She could absolutely be counted on to be there, generously, for her comrades and for her friends. Her death leaves a big hole in many people’s lives.

A memorial service will be held
for Elissa Jane Karg Chacker
January 5, 1951-May 11, 2008
on June 28, 2008 at 1PM
at the Roeper School’s upper campus
1051 Oakland Avenue
Birmingham, MI 48009

Waking up to…

…Good news! No, not the Gospels.

The Lisbon Treaty got trounced in Ireland. This is the only country in the EU to have a vote of the population on the treaty. I’ve lost count of where we’re at with trying to get an EU constitution through. It keeps losing (the French and Dutch dealt the blows in the last round). Instead of scrapping the project the Maastricht Masters thought that Ireland, a country which has done pretty well by the EU, would be a shoe in to close the deal. Well they were wrong. What next for the EU project? They’ll keep going until they get it. I doubt they’ll let the pesky public have a say again though.  Joe Craig from Ireland’s Socialist Democracy has excellent analysis here.

The Tigers have had a totally miserable season confounding my hopes and expectations. I’ve been to three games this year so far and two of them were rained out (one of the rain outs was against the Yankees and the best seats I will ever hope to have). Leyland is making major changes, pulling guys up from the AAA’s and sending stars all the way down to the A’s. It worked this last series with a sweep of the division leading White Sox.

Good news from Ireland and Detroit all in one day?! I’d better watch my back the rest of this Friday. Something is amiss.

Attention Span: The Philippines

I know that the modern attention span can be short. I seem to need a constant stream of new and unrelated trivialities to satisfy my synapses. A disease of modernity? Blame it on TV or MTV in particular? I don’t know, probably. I doubt that my peasant ancestors had the same problem watching the root vegetables grow and preparing for the seasonal changes.

Still, it is remarkable that Iraq has fallen off the pages and screens of the major news outlets as quickly and determined as it has. Conspiracy? The immediacy of the recent election reality show? The creeping “oh shit” realization of many on the economy has finally hit home?

Patrick Cockburn reports that the US is holding a $50 billion dollar extortion brief over the heads of the Iraqi “government” and they still won’t bite on the deal to allow 50 permanent military bases, no control over their own borders or air space, etc. The deal would codify a colonial relationship with Iraq as real in its own way as the one the US had with the Philippines.

Stretching our attention span all the way back to 1898 and the Philippines may be asking a lot, but it’s a pretty good place to start for the story of US imperialism. Back then even the Philippine bank notes had an American stamped on them. These days tact requires a little more subtlety although I have a feeling the American dollar goes further than the new dinar in Iraq (which is not even exchanged by Iraqi banks). The US only paid about $20 million (payable to Spain) for those unfortunate islands. A big mark up on property in the last century, who knows what the total cost of the attempted Iraq colony will be but with the cost of oil these days….

A huge swath of US public opinion and discourse can’t remember last week let alone the last century but we have been here before, in different ways for sure, but with certain economic truths remaining constant in the story. Just about the first time was in the Philippines and we are lucky that Mark Twain was alive to see it and comment on it. Twain’s anti-imperialist writings continue to be some of the most powerful written. A certain, modern hypocrisy is necessary for the imperial projects of “democracies”. Read Twain and turn on NPR; he would have nailed them.  Oh, and the US is, of course, still in the Philippines.

“We have bought some islands from a party who did not own them; with real smartness and a good counterfeit of disinterested friendliness we coaxed a confiding weak nation into a trap and closed it upon them; we went back on an honored guest of the Stars and Stripes when we had no further use for him and chased him to the mountains; we are as indisputably in possession of a wide-spreading archipelago as if it were our property; we have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag

“And so, by these Providences of God—the phrase is the government’s, not mine—we are a World Power; and are glad and proud, and have a back seat in the family. With tacks in it. At least we are letting on to be glad and proud; it is the best way. Indeed, it is the only way. We must maintain our dignity, for people are looking. We are a World Power; we cannot get out of it now, and we must make the best of it.”

Mandel, Wheen, Lenin, Marx

Crisis, over production and credit

I am currently reading Francis Wheen’s Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography. It has strengths and weaknesses.  It is rich in character and sense of time and place.  Some of the books’ weaknesses are pretty profound. There are plenty of good Marxist reviews out there. Google them.

I would like to propose, for future reference, that you cannot write about Lenin unless you have actually read Lenin…and in context.  Lenin’s politics were the opposite of haughty elitism; one can not say that of most of his detractors.  I have a feeling that people will turn once again to Lenin as they seem to have started towards Marx as the workers’ movement finds its feet and reorients itself to power and its consequences.  The vistas opened up by State and Revolution, for example, are as emancipatory as any in Marx and Engels.  We will come to need our Lenin again; the experience of him and his generation is too rich in lessons, both negative and positive, for us to ignore.   Why would we wish too?

Still, this thin, welcome, volume is a nice introduction to the character and formation of Marx’s masterpiece. For an introduction into what Das Kapital actually says I recommend Mandel’s Introduction to Volume I in the Penguin Edition.

One of the finest Marxist economists of the 20th Century was Ernest Mandel. His studies and work rightly gained him enormous influence in the New Left and beyond. He never lost sight of certain central propositions of Marx that others, including accomplished Marxists, did. This anchor allowed him to go further than many in developing new ideas in the materialist approach to economy. He is miles ahead of Wheen in getting this stuff because, unlike Wheen, Mandel was a revolutionary. As such he understood the dialectic of learning includes action.

Here Mandel comments on the origins of capitalism’s routine and violent crises. It is entirely relevant, even necessary, for us to absorb and educate ourselves anew on these issues. I have been trying over the last years to make a determined study of Marx’s economic writings. It’s my conviction that the revolutionary left ought to spend a good deal more time than it does explaining just how capitalism works. To paraphrase the increasingly whacked, formerly Maoist now strictly cult of Avakian: “Marx Now, More than Ever”

So a little Ernest on this rainy Tuesday morning….

“The ups and downs of the rate of profit during the business cycle do not reflect only the gyrations of the output/disposable income relation; or of the ‘organic composition of capital’. They also express the varying correlation of forces between the major contending classes of bourgeois society, in the first place the short-term fluctuations of the rate of surplus-value reflecting major victories or defeats of the working class in trying to uplift or defend its standard of living and its working conditions. Technological progress and labour organisation ‘rationalisations’ are capital’s weapons for neutralizing the effects of these fluctuations on the average rate of profit and on the rate of capital accumulation.

“In general, Marx rejected any idea that the working class (or the unions) ‘cause’ the crisis by ‘excessive wage demands’. He would recognise that under conditions of overheating and ‘full employment’, real wages generally increase, but the rate of surplus-value can simultaneously increase too. It can, however, not increase in the same proportion as the organic composition of capital. Hence the decline of the average rate of profit. Hence the crisis.

“But if real wages do not increase in times of boom, and as they unavoidably decrease in times of depression, the average level of wages during the cycle in its totality would be such as to cause even larger overproduction of wage goods, which would induce an even stronger collapse of investment at the height of the cycle, and in no way help to avoid the crisis.

“Marx energetically rejected any idea that capitalist production, while it appears as ‘production for production’s sake’, can really emancipate itself from dependence on ‘final consumption’ …. While capitalist technology implies indeed a more and more ‘roundabout-way-of-production’, and a relative shift of resources from department II to department I (that is what the ‘growing organic composition of capital’ really means, after all), it can never develop the productive capacity of department I without developing in the medium and long-term the productive capacity of department II too, admittedly at a slower pace and in a lesser proportion. So any medium or long-term contraction of final consumption, or final consumers’ purchasing power, increases instead of eliminates the causes of the crisis….

“Marx visualised the business cycle as intimately intertwined with a credit cycle, which can acquire a relative autonomy in relation to what occurs in production properly speaking. An (over) expansion of credit can enable the capitalist system to sell temporarily more goods that the sum of real incomes created in current production plus past savings could buy. Likewise, credit (over) expansion can enable them to invest temporarily more capital than really accumulated surplus-value … would have enabled them to invest (the first part of the formula refers to net investments; the second to gross investment).

“But all this is only true temporarily. In the longer run, debts must be paid; and they are not automatically paid through the results of expanded output and income made possible by credit expansion. Hence the risk of a Krach, of a credit or banking crisis, adding fuel to the mass of explosives which cause the crisis of overproduction.”

A relatively recent DVD has been released of and about the late Mandel. I recommend it highly. It can be ordered from the States and our colder (and warmer) neighbors to the North at:

Ernest Mandel DVD

P.O. Box 85, Station E,

Toronto, Ontario M6H 4E1 Canada

e-mail: mandeldvd@gmail.com

phone: (416) 537-8925

It’s Obama and it’s all bullshit

Having to think and talk and work around bourgeois elections is the least appetizing job of a leftist. The institutionalized Party duopoly in the US makes it down-right sickening. I already pay way too close attention to the vagaries of US politics. I even watch C-SPAN to make sure that I am right. Here’s the secret to the US political system; it’s all bullshit. Piles of it. So here goes only a thought or two.

The primaries are finally over. Now we have to endure 5 months of the Presidential elections. I haven’t even wrapped my head around what the possibility of a black President means for the US. It sure means something. While the election is the Democrat’s to lose they might just do it. Obama hasn’t won many States lately and that’s IN the Democrat Party.

He doesn’t seem nearly as strong a candidate as he did to me some months ago. His performance at the AIPAC conference right after his victory was nauseating. His new flag lapel pin, etc. And as unpolitical as US politicians are Barak is still surprisingly light on any discernible platform or ideology. It’s all bullshit.

Hillary will try to save her legacy and position in spite of the considerable damage Club Clinton did to themselves. I, for one, am all for Hillary as Veep. It would put Bill back in Washington with nothing to do and load the administration with the heaviest egos in America. For laughs sake I hope he picks Hillary. It will not happen. He’ll probably pick Larry the Cable Guy to prove his redneck bona fides.

I promised myself I would say something about the morbid McCain. His recent trip to Louisiana to open the campaign wasn’t an accident. He may well pick the new Governor there Bobby Jindal; a pretty hard right Indian American. He’s young, almost half as young as McCain (37) and though he was born into a Hindu family converted to Catholicism. That may be a strike against him with the crazy evangelical set, but he has navigated Biblical waters before in the Louisiana race and did just fine with the local snake handlers. The First Person of Color award on a major party ticket could then be split for posterity’s sake between the two parties.

McCain will play the Iran card as often as he can. Bush and the feeble Olmert are going to assist by upping the rhetoric as well. I wouldn’t count the old buzzard out. He would be just about the most unhinged President we’ve had in a while. John McCain in some sort of rage as Commander in Chief isn’t pleasant to think about. What strange psychological things await a McCain Presidency is any body’s guess.

What a bleak picture for the next 4 years. Obama would be like having Bono for President. Which is more than I can take. McCain’s mad, mad, mad and, at 71, he might survive a whole term though probably not two. Plenty of time to heap more bodies on Bush’s pile.

The crises facing us all are so severe they cannot be solved within the capitalist framework; their origins lie in capitalism’s dynamic.  These candidates don’t propose to treat the symptoms, reforms, of the disease, that is killing us and our planet of residence let alone the disease.  “Change” is not even reform when Obama says it. He lives in a post-reform world. It’s all bullshit.