US workers face more poverty, social crisis as capitalist offensive continues

source: CNN

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

According to the most recent US Census Bureau's report released September 17th., as US GDP has tripled, American men working full time are earning less in real terms than we were in 1973. The huge gains in this period "....have gone mostly to the people at the top" Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports in this weeks issue. I think we all agree that "real terms" are the only terms that matter don't we?

"We've had 40 years of stagnation." says Sheldon Danziger who heads the Russell Sage Foundation that funds research about living standards. The poverty rate has also jumped almost three percent since 2007 and as should be expected, the young are the hardest hit.  Close to 22% of children live in poverty in the United States compared to 15% nationally the Census report adds. The situation can only get worse as the war against workers and the poor continues.  The effects are clear, monthly food-stamp use has risen 18% over the past four years according to Bloomberg Business Week and as the Republicans in Congress are pushing to cut spending on nutrition programs by a further $40 billion things will only get worse; "If the full-time, full-year male workers aren't benefiting from economic growth, why should we expect the poor to be." says Danziger.

Robert Gordon, an economics professor at Northwestern University tells BW that the US is "in for a long period of stagnation.". Michael Feroli of JPMorgan Chase points out that the capitalists are simply not investing in what he calls the "..innovation needed to boost efficiency." We have pointed out many times that workers, the poor and the middle class must cast aside this propaganda nonsense that there is no money in US society.  The corporations are sitting on trillions of dollars that they refuse to invest in the economy or in social infrastructure.  Let's not allow the propaganda to unduly influence what we know in our gut--- that the money is there.  I will continue to remind readers again and again, that by their own estimates, sections of the capitalist class have stashed away as much as $32 trillion dollars in offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes, this is equal to the GDP of both Japan and the US combined.  Then there is the trillions wasted on predatory wars fought on behalf of the 1% and their corporations.

Furthermore, as I stated in a previous commentary, Just 20Americans made as much from their 2012 investments as the entire SNAP budget for 47 million people. SNAP is the acronym for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program that provides food and assistance to the millions of people, and soon to be millions more as the 1% forces the US working class on rations in order to make us more competitive with our brothers and sisters throughout the world and to pay for their economic crisis.  Politicians in Congress yesterday were boasting about how they will occupy the legislature floor until they could no longer stand in order to defeat Obamacare (this is not to defend Obamacare) but three trillion on the Iraq war is OK and the poor and low waged need a $40 billion trim, about half of what one human being, Bill Gates is worth.

I have felt the effects of these attacks on workers in my own neighborhood where petty theft has been on the increase, car and house break ins are occurring more frequently. The local news reported last night that in the Rockridge area of Oakland, a fairly affluent middle class (Using the US definition by income) community, a group of commuters waiting in line for car pick ups were robbed at gunpoint.  People wait in these lines for other commuters to pick them up so they can use the commuter lanes.  People stand there with computers, I phones, belongings etc. 

The robbery has shocked the community as robberies have risen over 40% in the last year.  The perpetrators were black youth from what I could gather from reports this morning. We will read all the racist laced Internet chatter about the need to get tough on crime and how we all need to be armed etc.  When I ran for Oakland City Council in 1996 I had a public debate up in Rockridge and this was a problem then, people coming up from West Oakland and breaking in to care stealing radios, CD players and such.  One of my campaign issues was for a $10 an hour minimum wage and my answer to the concerns residents had was that they are not the 1%, they are mostly middle class professional types, not walled off from the rest of society and the best best way to eliminate the crime was to openly and organizationally support the demand for jobs and a $10 an hour minimum wage. In other words, to show solidarity with other humans, victims of market forces.

I am not advocating that those less fortunate and more desperate among us are right to rob people in bus lines or each other in our communities, but people get desperate.  You can spend a lot of time in prison for robbing someone at gunpoint and if things get crazy and someone gets shot you many never see life outside of prison walls again.  The US Gulag is a notorious hellhole and hundreds of thousands of young black men occupy it. People have to eat.  The US is the worst of the advanced capitalist economies to be poor in. If you have no money here, you're "on your own baby."; Vietnam Vet---too bad, get a job, the flag waving is only for when they want our youth to go fight their wars, when they return they're a burden on profit making.

So I appeal especially to working class (wage earners) readers of this blog, those of us who have had more fortunate circumstances liking keeping our homes and jobs over the past period not to fall in to the trap set for us of blaming the victims, of blaming our class brothers and sisters for circumstances they find themselves in that are overwhelmingly not of their own creation.  Poverty, racism, homelessness, petty crime, these are all market driven.   It is the same with small business, and by that I mean community mom and pops who live in a community, are part of it and contribute to it. Rather than oppose a $20 an hour minimum wage you too should support it openly.  Most workers recognize that under the present circumstances a small store owner, the local plumber or coffeehouse owner can't pay that; they can often rarely contribute to benefits as big absentee landlords jack up rents.  But by openly declaring support for such a minimum wage ($15 is gaining some momentum here at the moment) community business owners can build solidarity and links with the workers' movement and as this movement gains strength and momentum including standing it's own candidates for political office independent of the two Wall Street parties, a united movement of workers, the dispossessed, the poor and the undocumented who are among the most exploited of us, can in turn help free these small proprietors from the clutches of the corporations, insurance companies and other forces that bleed them dry. It is ridiculous for example that a community business is expected to pay for its one, two or three employees' health care.

For the workers movement it is important while we fight for the interests of workers, to appeal to this layer of community businesses between these two great classes in society and win them to our side.  If we do not, the 1% will win them to theirs.  We cannot drive back the capitalist offensive, let alone rid ourselves of it without a united working class movement and we can't build a united working class movement without fighting racism, sexism, and all forms of discrimination that they use to divide us.

The heads of organized Labor are also criminally negligent in that they have the resources and ability to turn this situation around but have completely capitulated to the capitalist offensive and regurgitate their ideological justification for it.  We will see some turmoil in these organizations as well at some point.

In my previous commentary I included a quote from the head of AIG who compared the anger Americans displayed at AIG corporate types getting bonuses after they ran the company to the ground and the taxpayer bailed them out, to white supremacists lynching blacks in the South. Give that a thought for a moment.  Yes, these people are human beings and in the new society they have the right to a job and a secure future, something they deny us. But as it stands they are not people who can be appealed to on a moral basis. The capitalist class has historically waged the most violent war against humanity and the natural world in their quest for profits, from the peasant wars of Europe, the war against women and their equal rights, the wars of conquest throughout the colonial world from Ireland to Peru.  They will not simply become nice because it's the right thing to do.  Believe me, the folks in the Pentagon would drop nuclear weapons on their own cities to save their privilege.

Like the feudal aristocracy though, some of them will break ranks but only when they see the united power of working people throughout the world and that there is no winning this war. The workers of Bangladesh, the Arab world millions of them women outside of US borders, are leading the struggle against the capitalist offensive.  It's high time we joined them.

US inequality gap hits record high

 by Richard Mellor
Afscme local 444, retired

The inequality gap in the US reached a record high in 2012 according to a recent BBC report.

According to the report, the top 1% of US earners received 19.3% of household income surpassing the previous record set in 1927.  Overall, the pre tax incomes of the top 1% rose 19.3% in 2012 compared to a 1% increase for the rest of us, with the top 10% of all households taking almost half of the national income.

USA Today reported yesterday that according to an AP study, four out of five US adults, “..struggle with joblessness, near poverty, or reliance on welfare for at least part of their lives…”  The situation among white workers is deteriorating as well as they face increased economic insecurity, and pessimism among this group is at its highest in 25 years with 63% of whites regarding the economic situation as “poor”. More than 19 million whites fall below the US poverty line of $23,021 the report claims, that’s 41% of the country’s poor.  This is double the number of blacks for obvious reasons as there are more of them. 

Percentage wise the poverty rate among blacks is much higher: “By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent.”, the report states,  “But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76% enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.”

"Poverty is no longer an issue of 'them', it's an issue of 'us'," says Mark Rank, one of the authors of the study. This is of great concern to the ruling class as we outnumber them and it is their ability to provide a significant portion of the population with higher living standards (whites) and opportunity that helps them maintain dominance of economic and political life.  Nationalism, racism, sexism (women still earn 77 cents to a man’s dollar) and other divide and rule tactics are less effective the more people fall by the wayside as capitalism sinks deeper in to crisis.

This is far from the optimistic, I’ll say Jubilant, tone after the collapse of the evil Soviet empire in 1989 when the Wall Street Journal announced that “We Won” and that finally history had come to understand how the world really works. Full Spectrum Dominance was the mantra as US capital was now free to travel the globe, to go where it wanted and when, unhindered by unions, nation states or resistance movements, protected as it is by US military might.

But 95% of all income gains in the last three years have gone to the richest 1% of Americans the BBC report states and this also contributes to the anger and hatred of the rich that exists beneath the surface of US society. The predatory wars on behalf of US corporations have to be financed and the unelected rulers of society ensure that it is workers and the middle class that pay, which is why we see the declining living standards described here.

The US bosses are well aware of the dangers that increased poverty across broader sections of the US population brings.  They are very concerned about social unrest which has led to increased domestic repression and the beefing up of state security forces as I pointed out in an earlier piece.  The situation will worsen and the years ahead will see some serious and protracted battles domestically as Americans are forced to fight back.  A cursory glance at US history and our labor history will remind us of the violent nature of the US state apparatus and the 1% will reveal just how ruthless they are as the working class offensive takes shape.

Despite the shifting of the industrial working class from the US and Europe to Asia and the huge movements against global capitalism that have arisen in Latin America, global capitalism cannot be cast in to the history books without the US working class settling accounts with the US ruling class, the most powerful and heavily armed of the global bourgeois.

The power of the US mass media is a force to be reckoned with as it penetrates every aspect of our lives.  It’s aim is to confuse, to lie to present the world not as it really is but as they would like it.  They sow division in order to weaken and prevent the unity of the working class.  The use of mindless media and sports without end is aimed to numb the mind, “I wish my co-workers could get as fired up about what’s happening at work as they do about sports.”, a young worker said to me recently.  There are a lot of sideshows, but in the last analysis, consciousness has a material base, objective reality reigns, and the traditions of the American working class will emerge with force as workers see no alternative but to fight.  Workers know it means a fight and we always seek the line of least resistance but the bosses won’t let up. 

On a final note, Peter Phillips and Brady Osborne, two Sonoma State University professors, have an interesting piece about the global capitalist class and its composition, the Transnational Capitalist Class. They point out that a “group of 161 individuals represents the financial core of the world’s transnational capitalist class. They collectively manage $23.91 trillion in funds and operate in nearly every country in the world.”

It is worth a read and is at Michel Chossudovsky’s site the Centre for Research on Globalization

Capitalism: Destroyer of beauty and love.

This beautiful photo shows the love between a mother and her child. We must use our imagination and envisage what this mother wishes for her child. But tragically we must use our imagination in another way also. That is what capitalism offers to this mother and her child. Hundreds of millions of adults and children starve to death or die of preventable disease in Africa every year. Tens of millions more dies in vicious wars where military forces representing major corporations and their stooges murder and rape their way to control. Capitalism is horror without end. Capitalism is a nightmare for the majority of the population of the world. Capitalism is destroying life on the planet as we know it. Capitalism had forfeited the right to exist.

For the international socialist revolution, for an international socialist world.

Capitalism destroys nature. Environmental catastrophe is its legacy

They say that the ocean is the biggest garbage dump in the world. That it is, is a catastrophe.  We believe that the global capitalist system, if left in place, will destroy life on this planet as we know it which means the environmental crisis is perhaps the most pressing issue we face today as our entire existence is threatened by it.  The video below is from Science Friday and reminds of the superiority of science and the natural world over mysticism.  It's as much a political question to learn from what we see here and protect it as it is for us to fight for wages and working conditions, even more so.  As the rapacious quest for profit threatens the creatures of the natural world and the natural world itself, we must remember that we are animals too. Although we have many differences, an important one is that we can consciously prevent the destruction of life and an end to the beauty we see here. The most conscious act we can perform is to end capitalism and replace it with a world federation of democratic socialist states.

Buffet and Lemann: two peas in pod

Jorge Lemann: won't eat what he produces

by Richard Mellor GED

Afscme local 444, retired

In a previous piece I commented on New York City’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, having a certain worldview.  He believes that the city’s services and no doubt the existence of the city itself, is made possible through the financial generosity and sacrifice of billionaires like him.  In response to the accusation that NYC has become two cities, one for the rich and one for the poor under his governance, Bloomberg denies it and says, “if to some extent it is, it's one group paying for services for the other."  This reflects two separate and distinct views of the world based on class.

People like Bloomberg, Warren Buffet and their colleagues, are ruthless thugs really.  You cannot accumulate $27 or $45 billion dollars without being so, excepting a lottery win. They believe they are where they are because they are special; because they are smarter than those who get up and work for a wage all of our lives.  How can they not be smarter, they’re rich and don’t work.

Every ruling class justifies its rule this way and each member of the ruling class accepts that they are where they are through their hard work and diligence.  For the rest of us, just get off your butts and be prepared to take the risks.

But like all ruling classes, they are where they are through their control of the forces of production in society, something that overwhelmingly comes to them through family ties. Functioning as owners of society’s productive forces and wealth is a set up that their state, or what most workers call government, keeps in place through violence, and coercion.  Just look at that photo of the heavily armed police at that peaceful WalMart protest.  What are the police there to protect?  They are not there to ensure that the workers demands are met, that they get a better deal than starvation wages from the owners of WalMart who do no work yet posses more wealth than 90 million Americans. The police are there to defend the Walton family’s wealth.

These people have nothing in common with workers.  They may be Americans in name like us, or British, Japanese or South African.  On days like today, remembering the victims of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, they call for national unity; we are all together they claim. But they have a different view of the world.  This difference is greater than any religious, racial or national differences workers have between each other. Despite all the weaknesses and horrific things workers can resort to as society degenerates or as non-owners, we are far more collective creatures by nature of our daily existence in capitalist society.

I was reading in Bloomberg’s magazine, Business Week, about one of the 1%’s heroes.  Not Gates or Buffet, one of their heroes from abroad, a Brazilian.  His name is Jorge, Paulo Lemann; he’s also Swiss. Lemann is a coupon clipper that runs an outfit called 3G Capital. Lemann and his partners have been on a bit of a buying spree and now own H.J Heinz , Burger King, and Anheuser-Busch.  Burger King was once owned by another bunch of coupon clippers in a club called Cerberus that had the imbecile Dan Quayle on its board; the connection to established political families is a plus in the business world.

Lemann’s 3G and Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway have equal stakes in Heinz despite Buffet putting up three times as much cash according to BW.  So Buffet trusts this guy. Not only that, Buffet refers to him as, “classy” and admits that Heinz will be, “Lemann’s show” according to BW. Buffet recognizes ruthlessness when he sees it.

Lemann has already proved to Buffet how “classy”he is firing 600 of Heinz’s office

Buffet with one of his employees

staff in the US and Canada, about 350 of them in Pittsburgh PA. And when they bought Burger King from Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital of Mitt Romney fame and a couple other coupon clipping outfits Lemann was even classier, ridding the firm of 28,000 employees, or putting it in business lexicon, shoving “…28,000 employees off Burger King’s balance sheet.”

Lemann brought in a former railroad executive to run Burger King, the man knew nothing about fast food, but that doesn’t matter as the food is not the object of this exercise. Whatever form of production the owners of capital choose to engage in, it is not the finished product as an object of consumption or use that they’re after, it is the surplus value contained in the commodity and realized in its exchange that matters. “What’s important is not knowing hamburgers, it’s knowing how to lead a company” says a former colleague; “It’s the kind of intelligence that transcends any specific business segment”. It’s about profits. 

Could Marx have been any clearer when he wrote:
“A schoolmaster is a productive laborer when, in addition to belaboring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.”

Yep, Jorge is a real hero.  He surfs, (30 foot waves says BW) plays tennis even playing in a Wimbledon event.  In fact, Jorge admits that it wasn’t the things he learned at Harvard that gave him, “…a certain confidence when it came to taking risks.” It was that 30-foot wave he surfed in Copacabana. It all comes down to be prepared to take risks, take a chance.  If you’re bold enough to take a chance you can become rich and famous like Jorge and others like him.  The more than $30 million his dad left him wasn’t what got Trump started of course, and that Lemann’s Swiss father was a dairy entrepreneur didn’t give him a certain confidence, a willingness to take a risk someone without that sort of backing might pass on. When you fail, as George W. Bush did in most of his ventures, the moneyed interests, family or friends are there to rescue you.  Who won’t take risks with that backing? They’re not risks at all.

Lemann went to the American School of Rio de Janeiro.  This school is an institution designed to develop and strengthen Brazilian capitalism and its ties to US corporate interests.  Its creation was made possible by funding from the U.S. Department of State, the Ford Foundation, private individuals, corporations, and the American Chamber of Commerce. So Jorge is not just an ordinary guy who pulled himself up by his bootstraps.  He’s not a self made man, there’s no such thing. Everyone has help and people like Lemann have the most help, the most handouts, have all the connections in the right places.

Jorge Lemann places money above all things, not in the same way as workers do, to pay the rent or mortgage or feed the family or for that little extra cash for pleasure.  People like Lemann seek to accumulate capital, live through the profit of capital as opposed to productive labor.  He places the accumulation of money above social needs. This is why Warren Buffet and Sam Walton, the retail outlet’s founder, gave him an audience.  Lemann subscribes to hatchet man Jack Welch’s business philosophy, the 20-70-10 rule on how to deal with employees, “Promote 20 percent…maintain the middle 70, and fire the rest.”  A simple thing really.

Lemann may be a capitalist involved in the production of food and beverages, an important aspect of productive life for human society.  But he doesn’t eat the stuff he produces. He ate a Burger King hamburger once and wasn’t impressed.  “What he liked about Burger King was how it generated cash.”,  He admires the Goldman Sachs model as well, “Innovations that create value are useful” is one of the favorite maxims.  We must be clear that by “value” capitalists mean surplus value, the value created above that paid out for wages, value for which the capitalist gives nothing in return and that is the source of their profits: “People say that the customer comes first and all that”, says Vincent Falconi, a management consultant hired by Lemann when he owned the Brazilian beer company AmBev that provided the seed money for the purchase of AB InBev “but actually it’s cash”

And cash flowed in to InBev which sells one in every five beers in the world according to BW.  But most of it went in to Lemann and his partner’s bank accounts.  This no doubt helped replenish the $6.4 million Lemann and his partners were fined by the Brazilian regulators for crooked dealings at AmBev.

According to Business Week, Heinz is different as there is “less fat to trim”, so “How then, to wring more value from Heinz” is the question Business Week poses. As workers we know about how bosses “squeeze”more value from a company only too well; how they “trim the fat.” We experience it in the unemployment line, longer hours for those that don’t get laid off, less pay, increased pace of work as job cuts mean fewer hands doing more.

So far production, jobs at Heinz are still intact, but “workers are nervous” says one Union official, and so they should be.  This perpetual insecurity and fear is another cause of stress and the by-products of it, poor health, family break ups, drug and alcohol abuse and domestic violence. Waiting to be fired is not freedom. But that’s the market.  The Union official has no alternative to the waiting, or the unemployment that follows “fat trimming”. Fighting back, taking the production of society’s necessities out of the hands of the Jorge Lemann’s of this world is not something they consider.

Maybe I’m being a bit selfish here because writing about this is a sort of catharsis for me. It keeps me on my political toes, reminding me (and hopefully some who read it) of how the world really works and how absurd it is that the production of a social necessity like food is in the hands of private individuals and that production is set in to motion only if profit accrues to the owners of capital like Lemann, the moneylenders and other coupon clippers. It reminds me of who my enemies really are.

Lemann could have, as the quote from Marx stated above, invested his capital in condom production or a mining concern, it matters not to these people.  What matters is the end result, more money coming out of the process than went in.

A friend I talk to about these things worried that to take these important social functions out of the hands of private individuals would mean a bloodbath, that we will deny them life itself.  That is not necessarily so. It has not been workers that initiated violence in the historical struggle for some control over our lives at work and the respect and dignity that comes with it.  It has been the bosses and their government that resorted to violence, who hired gun thugs and entire armies to keep working people down.  The violence against strikers; the black folks who fought to eliminate Jim Crow and the apartheid south, and all Americans who fought for equality was always initiated by the state and its agents.

The Jorge Lemann’s , Warren Buffets and Donald Trumps of this word are all welcome as productive contributors in the society so many activists are fighting to build.  They just aren’t going to continue to live off the labor, poverty and misery of the vast majority of humanity.

Starvation, poverty and disease are market driven.

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

What a tragedy. A beautiful little boy who should be experiencing all the pleasures that a healthy and well fed young life can offer. I can barely look at it without wanting to take him in my arms and caress the little man; hold him like I have my own little ones, or the way we hold our pets.  A mother or father whose kisses and hugs bring such joy to the recipient and the giver is waiting for that moment when starvation and lack of water, ensures he breathes his last breath. It's not a nice death is it?  Look at the body and the physical pain it brings to the child and the emotional pain to the adult, herself, not far from death's door. 

The scene in the picture is indeed horrific. It is heart wrenching, sad, makes us angry and makes us want to cry at the same time.  But let's get something clear in our heads. What we see in the picture, a starving boy being given water by his equally deprived mother, or female guardian, is not something that occurs because of a lack of resources or money.  The condition prevails not because people in that particular part of the world are lazy or stupid or can't govern themselves.  It is not as some might argue, god's wrath, or the devil's work or the work of any supernatural beings or ghostly demons. It is not because of overpopulation or that there's too many people on the planet.

This young boy will die of starvation amid plenty.   He will die of diseases that were cured long ago.  The cause of these events is political and economic.  Society has infrastructure and that infrastructure is put in place by directing capital and labor power to do so.  The trillion or two the US has spent in Iraq would solve world hunger, would eliminate what we see here forever.

The infant mortality, disease and starvation that engulf millions of people in this world is a product of the market, of capitalism.  The communities in which these people live have little public infrastructure, no water system, no sewage system and instead unsafe water and sewage flows openly in the streets if at all. There is no medical and health care system in place. Diet is poor and shelter is inadequate. The money is there to remedy this.  But the owners of capital, capitalists as the Wall Street Journal calls them as opposed to many anti-capitalists who choose words like corpocracy, plutocracy, meritocracy, oligarchy and other terms to avoid calling them what they are, will not allocate capital to buy labor power and the necessary materials necessary to end this savagery.

According to Global Issues:
10.6 million children died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (same as children population in France, Germany, Greece and Italy

1.4 million die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation

The money is there to change this:
A conservative estimate for 2010 finds that at least a third of all private financial wealth, and nearly half of all offshore wealth, is now owned by world’s richest 91,000 people – just 0.001% of the world’s population.

The world’s billionaires — just 497 people (approximately 0.000008% of the world’s population) — were worth $3.5 trillion (over 7% of world GDP).

The world spent close to $2 trillion on military hardware in 2012 with the bulk of that coming from the US, the worlds largest arms dealer by far. Corporations are hoarding trillions, private capitalists have stashed away some $26 trillion or more in offshore tax havens. Poverty and most disease can be eliminated, but capitalism cannot do it; it is the cause of it.

The US president Obama, Hilary Clinton and all the other representatives of wall Street and the system that perpetuates the misery we see in the graphic, are prepared to bomb Syria because of the deaths of less than 2000 people.  But the policies that these people institute and defend to the teeth kill millions of children and adults yearly; their deaths are not accidents, they are the product of conscious decisions by human beings.

These conditions and the endless wars that we currently see begun by primarily by the US government  cannot be eradicated under the present economic system we know as capitalism.  It is not simply that they cannot be eradicated in what is often called the developing world, they are on the increase in the advanced capitalist countries also. As an earlier blog pointed out, the cost of making the world safe for US corporations is not only causing untold environmental damage and misery for the world's populations, it is also driving US workers further in to poverty and debt.  Even the US troops are facing cuts to necessary services.  This will hasten the crisis in the US military much like the crisis that occurred during the imperialist war against Vietnam.

It is pointless feeling guilty about having a better life than the woman and her child in the picture.  We are not individually responsible for it and guilt is a pointless emotion that accomplishes little.  We can collectively end it though.   I was talking to a group of young men the other night, they were all well educated and relatively financially secure. They had good jobs but when it came to understanding the forces at play in society and what was going on in the world around them, especially US capitalism's role in it, they were clueless and actually accepted that they were oblivious to much of what is going on.  This is nothing to be proud of even though, the forces against us in the US are considerable as we are faced day in day out with an ideological  offensive from the 1% about the merits of their system and how there's opportunity for all if we take the bull by the horns.

Throughout the world,  workers are fighting back against the capitalist offensive.  Working class women that fill the factories of Bangladesh have waged street battles against factory owners and their hired thugs.  Chinese workers have struck foreign multinationals for higher wages and better conditions and won raises of as much as $20% and this is without independent unions.
Indigenous people throughout Latin America, India, Indonesia and the entire world are leading the struggle against the environmental devastation caused by the energy giants and mining companies.

Greek workers, Portuguese workers, women and gays in Russia, are all refusing to be cowed by the worshipers of the market. And we saw the rise of the Occupy Movement in the US that challenged the repressive laws of the 1% and battled the new beefed up security apparatus built in anticipation of the resistance that will occur to the increased offensive of capital.

And here in the US, we should not underestimate the developments that have occurred around Obama's eagerness to bomb Syria.  The outpouring of opposition has been intense and this has caused the 1%'s representatives in Congress to push back against Obama's war drive.  In a twist of irony, it looks like old Putin might have thrown Obama a lifeline brokering a deal with Syria's Assad to have the UN take charge of that country's chemical weapons stash.

This development is very positive and when we consider the ongoing global resistance to the capitalist offensive we should be inspired and optimistic about it.  But we must take the bull by the horns, we must accept firstly in our own consciousness that the present state of affairs will eventually lead to the end of life as we know it, market driven wars and environmental catastrophe all in the pursuit of profits will ensure it. We must recognize that the most destabilizing force in society today and the reason for much of world poverty is US capitalism.  American's cannot find a solution to our problems within the borders of our own nation state.  The solution to the starvation we see in the graphic, the endless wars and driving back our own 1%'s austerity agenda lies in the building of a global movement.  Capitalism is global and the fight against it's destructive effects must be global.

Replacing an economic system of production where a tiny minority of individuals own the means by which we produce the necessities of life and who set these forces in motion only for personal gain, is our goal.  Capitalism is an anarchistic unplanned system of production, it cannot advance humanity.  It is, as we say here, past its expiration date.  Only a democratic socialist economy and political system can solve the crises that capitalism creates.

A couple of things to remember:
The Soviet union was not a socialist or communist society.
Socialism is not a utopian idea it's just a different way of constructing human society
Sweden, Finland or a national health service is not socialism or communism
Obama is not a socialist (for my American brothers and sisters only)
Capitalism overthrew feudalism and socialized production
Socialism will take it one step further and socialize ownership of the process of production, distribution and exchange. It brings economic democracy.