PHOTO/BRETT JELINEK
CHICAGO—Many years ago Marvin Gaye asked us to figure out, “What’s Going On?” Well now we know quite a bit.
The capitalists are waging endless wars killing and maiming our fine young men and women over oil. Despite unprecedented prosperity, poverty and pauperism are spreading as capitalist greed creates financial crises, eliminates public housing, cuts public assistance, closes clinics and destroys public education. Perhaps as many as 50 million people are unemployed and millions more are part of the working poor. We all know people scrambling to keep their home and pay their bills, people who have NO money. The misery index is sky-high; people can’t take much more.
No help is coming from those elected to help. The Chicago city government is snuggled up and merged with big corporations as they declare war upon the people, closing schools, cutting pensions and privatizing everything in sight. Entire cities, like Detroit, Gary and East St. Louis are being sacrificed and going bankrupt, as the greedy capitalists scour the nation and the world in search someone who will work as cheap as a robot.
Everything the criminal capitalists do is an ugly performance of self-exposure. For over a decade Chicago politicians have lied, cheated, stolen and connived while they held sham hearings for community input and closed over 100 schools anyway. Now we all know it.
Ordinary people are tired of Republicans, Democrats, and all other schemers, scammers and usurpers. Frustrated people are taking to the streets, protesting, picketing, boycotting and engaging in civil disobedience. The recent Occupy movements, union actions and protests are only the beginning. We all know a better world is possible
We must be serious and thoughtful as our very existence is at stake. Every battlefield we fight on—whether it is the fight for pension reform or school closings or class size or an elected school board– offers us a choice: bandage the cancer that is capitalism or cave in to increasing attacks against us. For every bandage they offer us with one hand, they knife us with the other, and the capitalists remain in charge. The only choice left to us is to change the system itself.
Deep down, we all hope the rulers are not as cruel as we think they are. . Despite our prayers, they continue to be guided by profit above people. They have given up on us because we are of no more use to them, and we are beginning to see it. It is time to give up on these people!!!
These vultures will not only kill us, they will pick our bones. Corporate capitalism cannot be reformed. We cannot have a kinder and gentler capitalist system. Social revolution is more thorough. It sees our society as pregnant with something new. Starting with the 50 million and more people capitalism has discarded, we are going to have to reconstruct society, re-divide wealth and make some people uncomfortable. Every struggle holds opportunities for analysis and debate about the ideas that serve opposing classes. It hinges upon which the struggle will either swing open to the next step toward greater political independence, or swing shut and lock the fighters within the corporations’ vision of the future. Every struggle opens up the question of who holds power.
