By Steve Otto

Yesterday was Earth Day. I usually post something on this day. I often attend event put on for this day. But, probably because of the pandemic, I was not aware of any events. Of course, there may have been some events I didn’t know about. It really doesn’t matter, I just can’t seem to find much to celebrate on Earth Day. Some people are very conscious about the environment. But more people just don’t seem to care.

One example is paper bags. The plastic bags at the grocery store never really break down. They are filling up our trash places and will not really ever break down. I often do my shopping at Target or Dillons. In both stores I can use, and I do use paper bags. Usually I am the only shopper who does. At Target, I often have to ask for paper bags, as they are not always out in the open where I can get to them. Of all the times I shopped at Target (and that has been a lot) I have only seen one other person use a paper bag, a nine year old girl. And the girl’s mom used plastic. I guess the store is set up as if everyone uses plastic bags. They are small and don’t hold near as much stuff as the paper bags. So, it takes a whole lot of plastic bags to carry all the groceries. And a person almost has to consciously ask for paper. I can remember when it was a choice—paper or plastic? But now they just assume we want plastic. That is because plastic is way cheaper. But somewhere in the ocean there is a nearly 100 mile stretch of plastic, that is mostly powder and it will never break down. Today I read this from the Center for Biological Diversity:

It's time to get at the root of this ocean crisis. The Center (for Biological Diversity) has petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to begin regulating plastics as a pollutant and is working to stop plastic pollution at the source, before it ever has a chance to reach the ocean.

And:

The problem is growing into a crisis. The fossil fuel industry plans to increase plastic production by 40 percent over the next decade. These oil giants are rapidly building petrochemical plants across the United States to turn fracked gas into plastic. This means more toxic air pollution and plastic in our oceans.

We need urgent action to address the global plastic pollution epidemic.

They are just NOW taking action?! This is something that should have been addressed years, even decades ago. And what do I see every time I shop? Those white plastic bags. They are cheap. But they are helping destroy our oceans. And from what I can tell—NO ONE CARES!

That is just one of many environmental problems. For years I have complained about the constant expansion consisting of building new homes, which takes up natural lands as well as farmland. I have written about the need for a “no-growth”[1]economy that I posted years ago. When I talk to people around the Wichita area, concerning a no growth economy, they look at me like I’m speaking a foreign language. Constantly using growth to boost for a healthy economy means constantly using up more resources at a faster rate each time there is growth. That means we need more land, more fuels, more food, everything people need to survive gets used up. And many of our resources, such as gasoline, are non replaceable.

And that leads to population growth. Again, this is a touchy subject. Many people think it is their moral obligation (often due to religious beliefs) to have LOTS of children. If a couple has more than two children, they are adding to over population. But many people see it as their right/ and, or moral obligation to reproduce.   

Plastics, growth economy and over population all works against the environment. Much of what needs to be done should have been started by now. It is like global warming. It is already started and simply doing nothing will add to a problem that has already happened. It will take a lot to reverse global warming, but we haven’t really started on it yet. That is the way it is with most of these problems. There has been talk for a few years now of banning plastic bags—which is a no brainer. Of course, we need to stop the production of plastic trash. But it has not happened yet.

So, on this Earth Day I simply don’t think most people take it seriously. For many people it is no more than a joke. Unfortunately, I’m not laughing.

Maybe next year will be different. But this year I see little to nothing to celebrate.

Pix from No little green men—but maybe life in our Solar System

Is there more to this than that?

 By Steve Otto

Wichitahas always been a town which lacks real respect for freedom of speech. It is also a town that has always been under control of the Republican Party. I can’t help remembering that quote by Hunter S. Thompson:

"I believe the Republicans have never thought that democracy was anything but a tribal myth."

But for what ever reason, Wichita has always been hard on those who test freedom of speech. For example, just about a week ago two women were found guilty of misdemeanor charges of illegal protesting. The protest took place last summer. Gabrielle Griffie and Marissa Gonzales were charged with using the actual streets for their protests. There were actually some motorists who testified against the women who said they were “scared” by the protesters.

I have to wonder how “scared’ a motorist could really be here in this town. Here in Kansas, almost every conservative person carries a gun. Most protesters know this. In fact motorists have not been too “scared” to try and run protesters over. More likely the motorists where conservatives who just don’t like it when people protest against police violence. And they also don’t like the Black Lives Matter organization, which took part in these protests.

According to The Wichita Eagle:

" During the trials, prosecutor Maria Schrock described the women as angry and aggressive when they interacted with lawful drivers on Wichitastreets. Wheeler argued that his clients were defending themselves against drivers who went through crowds and called protesters names."

It doesn’t take long to see the same old grumblings we have heard since all of these protest began. And the protesting has largely gone one because of unjustified police killings of black people. To this day we still have more and more police killings, usually against un-armed black people.

The women will appeal their convictions.

By Steve Otto

Today on TV I heard some announcer bring up the fact that President Joe Biden has passed his first 100 days in office. His approval rating is 52 percent. The annou8ne said that one reason he doesn’t have more support is that the country is more polarized and most Republicans the Biden. That isn’t all that surprising. But for many of us on the left, we didn’t expect much from ol’ Sleepy Joe. Speaking of sleepy Joe, I called him that on a Facebook comment and some woman called me on it. She accused me of using Trump type insults. I explained that the comment was mostly meant for irony rather than an insult. Still the name seems kind of funny today, because Biden is anything other than “sleepy.”

Biden ran as a centrist in the election against Trump. So I didn’t expect much from him. But there have been a few good surprises. He announced that he will pull all the troops out of Afghanistan. That needed to be done. It should have been done years ago. There are the usual talking heads, mostly military and conservative political hacks in Congress, who wine and wail about all the terrorist that will strike us once we take the troops out of Afghanistan. The real losers are the imperialist who want to zap that country and the whole middle east of its resources, especially oil. Oil and US needs are the real reason the USgets hit by terrorist.

Another surprise was when Biden called the Genocide against Armenians, conducted by the Turkish government during World War I, Genocide. Past US presidents wouldn’t do that because they just love having Turkey as an ally. That won’t change, of course. The change is purely symbolic. A few years ago the Recep Erdoǧan government of Turkey had stripped away democracy for the Turkish legislature. When President Nicolás Maduro did that, the US tried to use a coup to remove him from office. So what did the US do when Erdoǧan did the same thing—nothing! Absolutely nothing! This country should have done something. But it didn’t. So this is better late then never.

On the issue of climate change, Biden has set out some goals. That is a big change from Donald Trump who didn’t believe in climate change. So there is a noticeable change already. How ever we now have to wait and see if Biden can reach any of his new goals. We have the next four years to find out.

Of course there are the usual disappointments. Biden still supports Juan Guaidórather than Maduro. So much of our imperialist foreign policy remains. But as I said, I didn’t expect much from the centrist Biden. He is a centrist and most centrist sit on their buts and do nothing. So if he does anything at all, it is a refreshing change.    

Pix by Sack cartoon: Sleepy Joe | Star Tribune

 I like to support musicians when they play music with progressive themes. This song sounds interesting. I'm not sure what it really means, but sounds like a good song. -Steve Otto

[Tom Morello] (Official Lyric Video)

Wichita Democratic Socialists Of America (DSA) will have a May Day celebration this Saturday, at 4pm at the At ChisholmCreekPark.Come and join in this day of international day of support for working people. 

The Brief Origins of May Day (From IWW)

  .....Such as Angela Davis

By Steven Otto

Just recently I had a run in with some so called "friends" on my Facebook page that reminded me how much opposition goes along with the United States of America's corporate and imperialist propaganda mindset that many of our citizens have to deal with, in this country. Those of us who are  Communists know this well. For example, one woman, who I refuse to identify here, compared my views on Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. She said:

"What makes you think I'm "buying into" pro-capitalist pundits? I'm a critical theorist with a great respect for Marx's works, and I abhor authoritarianism in any shape. Even if what you believe was true, Mao oversaw political attacks on his opposition, imprisoning and murdering them. He was a mass murderer. I'm going to believe those who survived his dictatorship, not those who seem to welcome it. I'm also going to believe survivors of Castro's regime, so many of whom are not pro-Batista. And survivors of Lenin's and Stalin's regimes. Dictatorships aren't to be celebrated.

They may have liked the theory, but they never lived by it. They fomented anger, ordered mass executions, committed ethnic cleansing and genocide, and they deserve no more love than Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. Theory is hardly ever reality."

I had another gentleman who insisted, as did she, that both Mao and Staling were mass murderers. This is not uncommon. I get that from the right-wingers all the time, who like to rattle off the summation that Mao was intentionally more murderous than Hitler or Stalin. That off course, has been a common pronouncement by revisionist historians of the US right-wing. But they are not alone in this. This view is also held by many Democrats. When it comes to opposing imperialism, the Marxists left is often attacked by liberals as well as people on the right. Until the addition of Ilhan Omar to the House of Representatives, US foreign policy has never been questioned by either party, since the Ronald Reagan years.

In addition to all the accusations of human rights abuses in Cuba and Venezuela much of US imperialism tries to justification of the subjection and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is a policy supported by both Republicans and MOST of the Democratic Party as well.

Both Republicans and Democrats refuse to normalize relations with Venezuela and the US recognizes a right-wing stooge, opposition leader Juan Guaido, who has never been elected and yet this country only recognizes that person as the president of Venezuela. Omar has been just about the only congress person to question that position.

I do try to hold discussions and debate with any of my so called friends who make an honest attempt to discuss my positions on Maoism or Chinese history. But when a friend tells me that they respect the Cuban gusanos (worms is what they are called by the Cuban who have stayed behind) who have left Cuba to try and help overthrow that system, and when that person equates, not just Stalin and Mao, but VI Lenin and other leftist leaders with Hitler, Mussolini and Francisco Franco of Spain, then there is no common ground left and I unfriended that person.  

At times it is really difficult to be a Marxist, because the history of China's communist movement did make its share of mistakes. At times, certain actions have lead to people's deaths and at times there have been some excessive actions taken against those who have been critical to the communist government. Not all of the excesses are justifiable. But that does not mean that the revolution in China has no redeeming values, or that the population was "terrified by Mao." Some of these people are on the left, but they have accepted what they have read about China and they have believed those who left that part of the world in favor of a capitalist lifestyle. One of the tricks for me is to determine whether a person is seriously trying to debate a position or is so anti-communist that there is absolutely no common ground to work with. When there is no common ground, there is no point in keeping a relationship going with that person.

That said, it is difficult to be any kind of Marxist-Leninist in the US. Today I worked at the local Wichita School System today. While I was there, I was looking at the black heroes this teacher had put up on the wall, probably to celebrate black history month, which was last month, February. There was quite a contrast of various different people and leaders, and a plethora of different political ideas, from Barack Obama, to Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Judge Ruth Ginsburg and last but not least was a picture of Angela Davis along with a quote of hers: "In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist. We must be anti-racist."

The amazing thing about Angela Davis is that she is a Marxist-Leninist and her picture and quote is on the school wall. To become a famous civil rights leader as a Marxist-Leninist is no easy feat. There was a lot of prejudice against her. She had been fired from her job at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) over her political views:

"Because Davis was a member of the Communist Party, the UC Board of Regents, at the urging of then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, tried to fire her before she even taught her first class. But enraged UCLA faculty, staff and students protested in support of Davis, citing academic freedom. A lawsuit also was later filed in Davis’ defense."

At one point the government tried to include her in a murder case.

"On August 7th, 1970, seventeen year old Jonathan Jackson kidnapped Superior Court Judge Harold Haley from the Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, California. The kidnapping was meant as a tool to negotiate the freedom of the Soledad Brothers, a trio of African-American inmates (George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette) who were charged with the murder of a prison guard at Soledad Prison in California. George Jackson also happened to be the real brother of Jonathan Jackson.

Jackson, heavily armed, took over the courtroom in Marin County, arming the defendants and taking Judge Haley, the prosecutor, and three female jurors hostage. In a firefight that broke out as they attempted to leave the scene, Judge Haley, the defendants, and Jonathan Jackson were killed. In the ensuing investigation, it was discovered that the shotgun used to kill Judge Haley had been purchased by Angela Davis a few days prior to the event. Furthermore, it was discovered that Davis was in collusion with one of the Soledad Brothers."

At one point she was on the FBI's 10 most wanted list as a dangerous criminal. All of this over the fact that she had become a member of the Communist Party USA. That party used to be the pro-Soviet party—a party which many of us on the left, considered to be revisionist. But I don't think that matters today. She had to go against the same prejudices that any Marxist ends up going through, just by being here in the US. Just as I had to confront those who believe that Mao was a mass murderer, at times Davis had to go through the same kinds of accusations, mostly because she supported the Soviet Union and its so called "satellites." 

An example of the kinds of smears she was subjected to include these comments recorded by Wikipedia: 

"Davis was an honorary co-chair of the January 21, 2017, Women's March on Washington, which occurred the day after President Donald Trump's inauguration. The organizers' decision to make her a featured speaker was criticized from the right by Humberto Fontova and National Review. Libertarian journalist Cathy Young wrote that Davis's "long record of support for political violence in the United States and the worst of human rights abusers abroad" undermined the march."

So, as with myself, she had to defend a position of support for a country, along with other countries, that even US liberals had attacked. In fact some leftist Marxists and Maoists also attacked those governments.

Some of her past positions have been condemned by the established politicians, yet there are supporters for what she believes in today. For example: 

"......"Davis supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel." And that is a position that has gained a lot of ground as more and more political activist are taking up.

At the same time as all this was going on, Davis was an intellectual and a scholar"

"Education

Growing up, Angela attended black-only schools. She and her family were forced to ride in the back of buses, and were only able to enter the back door of different establishments in the community. This made her angry early on. Angela entered high school just as the civil rights movement was beginning. She left Birmingham at the age of 15 and traveled to New York City. There, she attended high school and began to learn about the Communist Party. After high school, Angela attended Brandeis University on a full scholarship, where she was one of only three African American first-year students. As a college student, Davis continued to pursue her interest in communist activities and to learn about different cultures. She came to realize that there were many barriers that needed to be overcome with regard to language and diversity.

During her junior year, Davis studied French literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. Upon returning to the states she was able to fulfill her interest in philosophy, studying with the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse. She later received a scholarship to study philosophy in Frankfurt, Germany, where she delved into the philosophies of Karl Marx, Georg Hegel and Immanuel Kant.

An Outspoken Activist

During college, Angela became interested in the Black Panther Party. She learned that this party had been formed in order to protect the African American community from experiencing brutality from the police. Angela was very interested in this movement and wanted to participate. Her work with the Black Panther party brought her further discrimination from males involved in the movement. They considered the work Angela was doing to be 'men's work'. Davis would encounter this type of discrimination in many of her future roles as well.

In 1969, Davis was hired as an assistant professor at the University of California Los Angeles. By this time, she had become a member of the Communist Party and participated in activities with them, including a trip to Cuba. Davis worked with the Cuban people and realized that there was very little discrimination there under the Socialist system. For her participation in this trip, she received much criticism and hate mail when returning to the United States and was also not rehired as a professor the next year."

She was vary smart. However, she was forced to confront both racism and prejudice of her communist beliefs. Being a communist in the US has always had its dangers. Consider the Hollywood 10 and their treatment during the 1950s, during the Joseph McCarthy (Known as McCarthyism) years:

"Hollywood Ten, in U.S. history, 10 motion-picture producers, directors, and screenwriters who appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1947, refused to answer questions regarding their possible communist affiliations, and, after spending time in prison for contempt of Congress, were mostly blacklisted by the Hollywood studios. The 10 were Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo."

So I'm not surprised to see a lot of prejudice beliefs against those of us who have chosen any type of Marxist-Leninism. At times those governments were not always fair or democratic. But they have been an alternative to the horrible governments of the US and Europe that have allowed a hand full of rich people to become wealthy beyond their wildest dreams and at the expense of the rest of us.

As I have told people here in the US, I have been to Cuba. It is a country that lacks the constant advertising and attempts to make money off of us, as here in the US. It was pleasant to get away from that. I met some prostitutes and other people, while I walked around the streets of Cuba, by myself. Yes in this foreign country I walked through working class neighborhoods, I walked into working class bars, I walked all over the various neighborhoods of Cuba and I would love to go back. 

Cuba was a wonderful place and nothing like the horror show that I have read about here in the US. Anyone who thinks they can learn more from a gusano than by a person like me, who took the time to walk around and actually meet Cubans, does not need me for a friend. If fact, I would never trust anyone like that.

So I will continue on and try and produce an important blog that brings people real and believable news of the world around us. I get nearly 800 to 1000 hits a month on that blog. I'd say we are doing something right. 

By Steve Otto

Not long ago on Facebook, I had the usual Capitalism vs. Socialism debate and there was the usual argument by right-wingers that poor people here are much better off than poor  people in other countries, especially Cuba. It is for that reason that I am reposting some stories I wrote some time ago about the years I lived in poverty. I called these stories"Journals of a Lumpen-proletariat." I basically wrotewhat it was like living as a poor Lumpen-proletariat, right here in the USA. And what is a lumpen-proletariat? It represents a sub-class of poor people who may work, full or part-time or may not work at all. They are below the actual proletariat and they often use criminal activities to survive.

So for my fist article, I am reposting this story on the strike we had at the The Stokely-Van CampStrikeof 1980

This is part of the series "Journals of a lumpen-proletariat."  The idea is to relate real working class experiences for the benefit of leftists who are studying the theories, but may not be familiar with the actual people these theories were intended to improve the lives of. Most of my 20s I spent as a member of the lumpen-proletariat class. I worked full or part-time jobs that paid only minimum wage. I tried to sell drugs to help stretch my money and to get drugs cheap or free. One year I landed a job working at the Stokely-Van Camp’s pork and bean factory in Lawrence, KS. It was one of the few times when I actually earned enough money to live comfortable. For that one half a year I was a member of the actual proletariat. (Real names are not used here and some details may be fuzzy as I am writing this from memory, mostly.)

I also joined the Teamsters Union while I was at the plant and it gave me an opportunity to experience actual class struggle through union activities.  By December of 1979, the Unionand its members were tired of their contract coming up for approval right before Christmas. There was an issue of pay, but every union member agreed that the main reason talks broke down between the union and the company was a union demand for changing the negotiation date.

“No one wants to go on strike before Christmas,” a tall elderly man said at a union meeting I attended. “The company knows we can’t afford to go on strike before then and they use it as leverage to keep us from pushing our demands on them.”

There was real anger among the union members of the plant. The local newspaper, the Lawrence Journal World said the strike was divisive to the town. At one point a woman in the union complained that company official’s referred to us as monkeys. For people as myself it was a real eye opener to see these corporate rulers exposed as the creeps they are.

One thing that is probably not the usual for such a strike was the Marxist workers in the factory who came there because Lawrence is college town and the new communistmovement was moving into the University of Kansas, as it did universities across the country. The Progressive Labor Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party occasionally made their appearance at KU. Also the Socialist Workers Party showed up a few times a month. There were local groups that dealt with a lot of foreign policy issues such as the North American Club, which I belong to. It was an umbrella group for Latin American issues. Many of those in the group were pro-Castro. There were also the Friends of the Iranian People, of which I was also a member. The last group was aligned with the Iranian Student Association, which was made up mostly of Maoist Iranians.

Most of these groups took part in the various university activities related to the Stokely Strike. Movies were shown and panel discussions were held. Some people involved in the strike attended these activities and one was a labor organizer called Sam.  

Sam was involved with the new communist groups and activities. He was a tall blond man who wore a red earring. I heard him arguing against the draft and US actions against the USSRfor its involvement in Afghanistan.

“I don’t have anything against the Afghanistanpeople and their government,” I once heard him say.

The strike was a good opportunity for the both of us to get involved in class struggle right here in the USA. Sam used the opportunity to take a leadership role in the strike. One day I was discussing politics with Sam and he realized I had a lot of political experience.

As we talked, we both realized we were getting a unique experience that some Marxists never get. And later I would realize I might never get such a chance again.

Some of the tactics being used my certain union members and leaders involved vandalism. A thin red haired girl name Betty said she needed the money too bad and crossed the picket line. Her and some other scabs were parking their cars at a cab company and using cabs to get to work. Some union people found out and slashed their tires at the cab parking lot. Betty went as far as walking down railroad tracks, though a wooded area, to go to the plant in the back way so no one would see here. It didn’t help. When she returned to her car, her tires were slashed.

This one foreman was an old nasty redneck who tried to run the picketers over when he crossed in to work each day. He drove a big red pickup truck. It was brand new. One night some union people put grease and oil all over the inside of his pickup cab, making it impossible for him to drive to work the next morning. I thought that was funny at the time, especially since he was such a right-wing ass hole—Hell!—I still think it was funny. There were some people who didn’t approve of such tactics. Both Sam and I had no problem with them.

“Should we really use tactics like that?” asked a 20 something union man.

“If someone broke in and raped you mom, would you fight them?” he asked. “We are fighting to save our jobs. It is the same things.”

As the strike ground on, the union decided to spread the strike to two other plants. The plan would really hit the company in their bankrolls. Sam invited me to go with him to another plant in another state to help spreading the strike. Since I was taking a class at KU at the time I couldn’t go.

Stokely had been relying on union busting layers to try and break the union. When we spread the strike they flipped out. Sam told me their representatives were clearly pissed. They finally made an offer for a very tiny raise and they moved the negotiation date. The raise was a tiny fraction of what we asked for.

I had learned a lot from the experience. As the strike drug on, I went to a dog food company and told the guy I needed the money and would quit at the other place if he would hire me at his plant. I was wearing down and living on the strike benefits of $40 a week. It was getting hard for me to get by all this time.

“I can’t do that,” the balding old bastard told me. “If you’re lying then I would be helping another company to break a strike and I can’t have that. What if we had a strike here? We all have to work together to prevent strikes.”

So there it was. The guy had taught me that businesses know how to stick together and crush working people, while we had a hard time convincing some workers that sticking together was the only way to defend our rights as workers.

Right before the end of the strike I got a call from someone at Stokely’s asking me to come back to work. I told them I would not go back until the strike was over. They were polite, but when the strike ended, they didn’t hire me back.

I had a friend named Boz who worked with me at Stokely. I had known him before the strike. He lived as a lumpen-proletariat, just as I had been. He was biker and a vet and was a fanatic about bicker wear and customs as some bikers are. He was short and dressed kind of plain and was proud of his long-black scraggly hair.

Boz was on the grave yard shift cleaning tanks. He liked working on the grave yard shift so he could sit in bars all night and go to work about the time the bars began to close. He had it timed just right.

No one ever complained about his drinking until after the strike. He had been a solid union member and spent time on the picket line. So they fired him for drinking right after he went back to work.

Sam also got fired after another employee started a fight with him.

Another union member I knew was Barb, a young woman about my age who had long dark hair. She was the one who got me on at Stokely’s. We dated briefly but stayed friends. One day Boz and I were at her home visiting. Another friend of hers, a young man, came over and he said;

“I heard that Stokely has been firing all the people who were hard core supporters of the union.”

“You’re in a room full of them,” Boz said.

Today the plant is closed down. I moved to Wichita shortly after that. But I haven’t forgotten the days of that strike. It was a great learning experience. 

Some time ago I published this article: Journals of a lumpen-Proletariat—Homelessness here on this site.

 By Steve Otto

Today members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) had a barbeque and get together to honor the First of May, International Workers Day (for more information on May 1 and its significance, see The Brief Origins of May Day—From IWW), here in Wichita Kansas.

The event was held at ChisholmCreekPark. While most May Day celebrations include parades or protests, it is perfectly acceptable to have some kind of memorial event to celebrate this important day. There was plenty of political discussions about the future of socialism in the US.

Here are some photos:

 It was May 4, 1970, that then President Richard Nixon sent troops into Cambodia to stop Viet Cong from using the Eastern part of that country for a trail to go from the North to the South. Student where outraged. There were Demonstrations at Kent State in Ohio. The Governor called out the National Guard to deal with the protests. The guards opened fire and four students where shot dead. -Steve Otto

By Steve Otto

Every now and then I write about commercials I see on my TV. I have noticed there seems to be an effort to put more black folks on TV commercials. A lot of people would say “Wow! We are seeing more black folks on TV now. That must be progress.” But for me, it just means the corporations all know that black folks have money and they want to get their grubby paws on it.

What is trendy right now, are black women with frizzy hair. Nearly all commercials I see try to stick at least one black woman with frizzy hair in them. Often there is a white woman with straight hair with the black women, with the frizzy hair. At times they use white, or nearly white women with frizzy hair. And lately, with the last few commercials I noticed, the frizzy haired black women are perky—very perky!

The latest example is an outfit that calls itself DriveTime.com. There is this extremely perky black woman, with frizzy hair, who tries to sound like she is revealing some perky secret. There is the white guy, who needs a car and in just seconds he is approved to borrow money from DriveTime. Now he can drive off in that all important new car. In commercial land, nothing is more important than driving a brand-new car. We see lots of cars and all kinds of ways to finance these new cars.

Another trend I have noticed are people trying to sell us assets that are not tangible. For example, everyone needs car insurance. Everyone needs an extended warranty (car protection against repairs). All these things are intangible. Only the car is an asset we can hold onto. Insurance, extended warranties and loans are all intangible assets. They are all things that help us get our hands on a car and help us keep the car. But all those things must be paid for—paying for thin air, for various car privileges, that these commercials are out to get from us.

The guy in the DriveTime add is incredibly happy to get his loan approved. The perky woman assures him that he has earned this wonderful privilege. Loans seem to be extremely popular items to sell on TV. They give us the allusion we OWN fancy cars and houses. But we are really a nation of home and car BUYERS, not really owners. Owning a home is a badge of honor for middle class people who want to prove that they are serious about their place in society. They are quick to point out that they are “HOMEOWNERS” whenever there are arguments over laws that affect those who live in or near the all-important homes. These people are quick to yell out: “I’m a homeowner,” which is supposed to make them seem more important than the “hippie like people” who don’t own homes. And even when a person can afford to buy a home without a loan, there are those advisors trying to convince them that there are tax advantages and other advantages that make that all important loan look like a real bargain. But most so-called homeowners actually pay nearly twice as much as their home is worth, thanks to that 30-year mortgage. Most people are home or car buyers and not really owners.

Years ago, my wife and I bought our home with a 15-year mortgage. The payments were a little higher and we did not get any tax breaks. But after 15 years we owned our home. After it was paid off, we didn’t have to pay those huge house payments. We pay taxes and that is it. It was one of the smartest things we ever did. But that is not what most people do. Most Americans get loans, as with DriveTime.com. They pay a lot of money for that priviledge. In the long run it is a racket pure and simple. White folks have been taken to the cleaners for years. Now the corporations are taking the black folks to the cleaners. Maybe that is why we now see so many black folks on TV commercials.

Let’s not forget all the people who think they can keep up loan commitments, but they don’t. That is especially true of people who get a 30-year mortgage. A job lay-off or an emergency no one was expecting can cause a loss of more than 10 years of paying off on a house loan. Then all that money, time and effort can go down the drain as people are not able to keep up their 30-year commitment.

So now after all this time, black folks can be scammed by the same kind of sharks that have gone after white folks for all these years. Black folks can now experience the pain and suffering of home and car buying that goes wrong. Equality is here at last.

 DriveTime.com commercial—It’s easy—super easy!

DriveTime.com commercial—It’s easy—super easy!

 By Steve Otto

“Now reigns pride in price [wealth]
And covetousness is deemed wise
And lechery without shame
And gluttony without blame.
Envy rules with treason,
And sloth is in great season [is popular]
God help us, for now is the time.”—John Ball (1338-1381)[1]

Most of us have heard the expression “trailer trash.” Anyone who has watched the Jerry Springer Show has heard that label almost every time they watch the show. But that brings to mind an interesting question. Why would poor people from the “trailer trash” class come on a show where they know they will be surprised by a wife/girl friend/ best friend or a family member who is stabbing them in the back? Outside of any money to be made—why would anyone go on a show were they know they will be ridiculed by millions of people watching television and waiting for someone to make a fool of him or herself?[2]

The theme of this lumpen-proletariatjournal entry is: ‘Life among the trailer parks.’ The first thing to point out is that the stereo type promoted by Springer and others is obviously false. There are some trashy people living in trailers—prostitutes, drug users and dealers and welfare queens—but there are also regular working class people who work a 40 hour week and live relatively normal lives.

Trailers are cheaper than other buildings that people commonly rent or buy, so a lot of poor people do live in them. Some trailers are quite large and those who live in them are not that poor. I once had a friend who worked as a full-time cook, making good money, and he lived in a large well furnished trailer. He did not fit the stereo type of a poor “white trash” trailer park person. He was a regular skilled proletariat.

I have lived in trailer parks twice in my lifetime. In the mid 1980s, I had just earned a BA in Journalism and I moved to Osceola, MO, in order to begin working at my first newspaper job for the St. Clair County Courier. I found a trailer to rent for a reasonable amount of money. I moved in and shortly after that, my wife moved in with me—about six months later. I was working full time, earning a professional salary. I was a law abiding citizen, even though I drank a lot, at that time. But drinking is legal. At that time I did not consider myself a lumpen-proletariat. By that time I had risen up to become a regular proletariat.

I was a lumpen-proletariat the first time I lived in a trailer park in Lawrence, KS, during the 1970s, when I was still married to my first wife, I will call Diane (not her real name). It was September and Diane thought she had a new apartment lined up for us to move in. I was going to school, part-time, at Kansas University and I was working at a minimum-wage, part-time job washing dishes at a restaurant in the Kansas Union, a building at Kansas University. Diane was still getting some unemployment. She found an apartment she wanted to move into, but the land lord, a middle aged woman, kept stringing her along, telling her “I might be able to rent this to you, but I haven’t decided yet.”

“It’s humiliating,” Diane said. “She obviously looks down on us and wants to find someone she thinks is better than us. She is looking for a better renter, possibly someone who makes more money. I take offense to the fact that she is stringing us along and will only rent to us if she can’t find the renter she wants. This is an insult to us. I’m tired of her stringing us along as chumps.”

I agreed with her. The woman was being an elitist snob. So, we didn’t take the apartment and we stopped asking her about it.

We spent day after day racing to the newspaper office and then running to see the rooms, apartments and homes the town’s people had for rent. At the same time we were trying to beat the other students, in town, trying to compete with us for the same spaces to rent. We finally got an offer to rent a very small trailer.

Once we signed the papers and money changed hands we were living in a trailer park court. It was a long driveway shaped like an oxbow lake. There were probably 30 trailers in all. Ours was one of the smallest.  It was a small metallic trailer and very cramped. It had air conditioning and yet on a hot August day, it just didn’t get very cool. There were no trees in the park—nothing to break the sunshine and the heat it caused in the little metal capsule.

When we first moved in it was a rainy and cloudy day. It was a cool day, so it was a few days later when we had a good dose of what the rest of the summer would be like. Even if we had known, it would not have mattered. We couldn’t afford to wait around anymore. We needed a place to live. So, we would have moved in regardless of how hot it was inside.

It was also cramped. We barely had room to invite people over and since I was in my mid 20s and we had just moved to Lawrence a few years before, having guest over was important to us.

In just a few days we met our closest neighbors. They were Rob and Molly with their 9 year old daughter Amy. They were Native American Indians. They were at least 99 percent assimilated to life in the trailer park and the ways us white folks live. There was nothing wrong with that. They never discussed what tribes they were from or anything to do with their Indian heritage. One thing we all had in common was our fondness for drinking alcohol (except the 9 year old).

 I remember one afternoon, I thought back to a documentary by some Disney outfit were a young boy went to visit some Indians on a reservation and he got to observe their many traditions. I thought about what it would look like if I made a documentary about Indians I knew living as every other American—what they ate for food, what they did for a living, their living quarters—all the same as any other American people only they are assimilated Indians. It seemed kind of funny—not hilariously—but good for a chuckle just the same.

“I should be able to get unemployment in a week or two,” Rob said. “I don’t see any point in looking for a job when I can just collect unemployment for a few months.”

As with any proud lumpen-Proletariat Rob was willing to take free money from the government for as long as he could and felt no obligation to get a job and contribute to society. That was especially true for those of us who were under 30. When we are younger, six months sounds like a real long time. As we get older, it seems as if that time seems to get shorter and shorter. By the time we are in our 40s, six months seem very short and being laid off creates a sense of panic in us. We worry that we will not get a job before the six months ends. It is a purely practical reason for us to look for a job.

However, avoiding work is more than simple laziness. Rob probably learned as I did that we rarely get a decent vacation unless we keep the same job for at least five years. With all the lay-offs and the instability of the working world, it is best to take at least a few weeks off before seriously looking for a job. It is also a way of getting back at the establishment for treating us as if we are just expendable machine parts rather than working people who have value for what they contribute to the various corporations we work for.

By the time I got divorced from my fist wife, I had developed a bitter streak in me that is still there today. My brother and I noticed that going to work for the first time is when we learn that the companies we work for want to get as much out of us as they can for as cheap as they can. They constantly run a scam off of us to take as much from us for as little money as they can get away with. They don’t trust us and for those of us who wise up to them, we never trust them. Part-time, full-time, minimum wage, higher pay—it all boils down to a relationship that is never fair and we never actually trust each other. That was the one constant of everyone in the trailer court and it never changed as I went from being a lumpen-proletariat to a full-blown proletariat.

We got to know the other people in the trailer park. There was a mother and daughter two trailers down. The mother is on welfare and going to school. She told me she would rather work, but she needed health care for her seven-year-old daughter and welfare was the only way to afford it. If she got a job she could not get or afford health insurance.

At the other end of the trailer park were Vicky and James. They had a little girl about three-years-old. Vicky was dark haired, part Indian. James had blond hair and was tall and stocky. He dressed as a bicker with a vest and a wallet with a chain on it. He would come over from time to time when I bought a friend’s Talwin[3] scripts. We both had a taste for that drug, which resembled the affects of morphine, and we all liked beer. They two were married and they ran with a rather Rough crowd. James was working at the pork and bean factory I had once worked at. But James hurt his back and was on disabilities.

The trailer structures are not suited to withstanding tornado and hurricane attacks, which has led to the stereo type label “tornado food.” So, some of the people fit the stereo types of “trailer trash” and many did not. I remember an old man in the town of Clinton, MO, who I interviewed  for a newspaper I worked for after a drug raid staged in that town by the police, during the mid 1980s:

“They don’t have decent jobs here, many people are on welfare, they have nothing to do—what they (local authorities) expect them to do?” he said loudly. “Of course people are going to use drugs.”   

[1]John Ball's letter to an unidentified community, 1381, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Letter_to_an_unidentified_community

[2]“Better to be king for a night, than schmuck for a lifetime."—Rupert Pupkin, character from The King of Comedy, 1982.

This quote above says it all. Desperate and poor people with little to show for their lives can become instant celebrities for just one afternoon, as on the Jerry Springer Show. As the above quote suggests, it is better to be the center of attention and a celebrity for one after-noon—than to be a poor person who will live their whole life unnoticed by anyone. Even being the butt of jokes and playing the fool is better than being unnoticed. So Springer took advantage of that desperation by poor people to make his fortune and ratings.

[3] Pentazocine is a synthetically prepared prototypical mixed agonist–antagonist narcotic(opioid analgesic) drug of the benzomorphan class of opioids used to treat moderate to moderately severe pain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentazocine

UK: Israeli and Palestinian demonstrations separated by Police in London

 By Steve Otto

Once again, we have a prominent Republican representative, Matt Gaetz of Florida, who has is said to be under investigation over possible sex trafficking of a minor. From The Guardian:

“The scandal engulfing Matt Gaetz, one of Donald Trump’s brashest supporters in Congress, deepened on Friday after an associate admitted sex trafficking involving a minor and agreed to cooperate with investigators.

Joel Greenberg, a former tax collector in Florida, said he and unidentified others paid a 17-year-old girl for sex and he provided the girl with drugs, according to court papers cited by multiple media outlets.

Greenberg, 37, is expected to plead guilty to six federal charges, including financial crimes, in court in Orlando on Monday. He could be a pivotal witness if prosecutors charge Gaetz, 39, over an alleged sexual relationship with the 17-year-old girl.”

This is not all that surprising. The Republicans seem very attached to corruption. There have been many sex scandals attached to Republicans.And Donald Trump was caught before his first election victory, bragging about abusing women. That did not stop his followers from supporting and voting for him. Gaetz is not the first conservative caught in a sex scandal. But conservative US voters just don’t seem to care. They didn’t care about Trump’s treatment of women.

So now we have another conservative Republican from Florida, caught doing what conservatives do best, violate the very morality they claim to be supporting. They are all very moral as long as the rules they believe in don’t apply to them. People like this guy are all strong supporters of Christianity, the family and moral fiber for our society. And of course, it is all a lot of hot air.

So when will people learn not to vote for such vial corruption. Their hatred of both Democrats and anything on the left, means they will continue to support Christian corruption at its worst. All we can do is try to remind people—the Republican Party is the party of corruption. Don’t trust them.   

By Steve Otto

A few years ago, the Republican Party decided to do a favor for their favorite low level flunky Ron Estes. Since he was getting old, they decided to give him the fourth district and he could be a real congress person. So, they figured the fourth district was so heavily Republican that he didn't even half to campaign there. To his surprise he had to campaign in the next election. With the parties backing and big money they were able to dump that loser on us as if the fourth district is now his own. He is a real do nothing loser, whose only credentials were that he is a loyal, but not too bright, Republican. The fact that he would have lost any election that took intelligence or debating skills means nothing to the dolts who keep electing him. To the rest of us, he is a major insult.

By Steven Otto

I call this site the idiot factor because a lot of the politics and politicians I deal with just seem to be complete idiots. I could easily call this coming holiday a holiday for idiots. Its not that I want to taunt those who actually served their country. But I wish we didn’t have so many people enamored by our imperialist army.

No mistaking it, we are the bad guys. We go around the world and kill people. We steal their sovereignty and their resources. The due process that protects us here, does not exist in many parts of the world, especially the Middle-east. Our military kills those who get in our way. We label them terrorists and that justifies assassination. And more interesting is that almost no US politicians oppose what we do over-seas, not even Bernie Sanders.

This year I planned a really neat vacation, except it includes this holiday for idiots. I will look for a place, that day, to go that does not have a lot of idiots in it.

Meanwhile:

Another look at Memorial Day- "Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?"

From Zin Education Project:

By Howard Zinn

Published on June 2, 1976 in the Boston Globe and republished in The Zinn Reader with the brief introduction below.

Memorial Day will be celebrated … by the usual betrayal of the dead, by the hypocritical patriotism of the politicians and contractors preparing for more wars, more graves to receive more flowers on future Memorial Days. The memory of the dead deserves a different dedication. To peace, to defiance of governments.

In 1974, I was invited by Tom Winship, the editor of the Boston Globe, who had been bold enough in 1971 to print part of the top secret Pentagon Papers on the history of the Vietnam War, to write a bi-weekly column for the op-ed page of the newspaper. I did that for about a year and a half. The column below appeared June 2, 1976, in connection with that year’s Memorial Day. After it appeared, my column was cancelled.

* * * * *

Memorial Day will be celebrated as usual, by high-speed collisions of automobiles and bodies strewn on highways and the sound of ambulance sirens throughout the land.

It will also be celebrated by the display of flags, the sound of bugles and drums, by parades and speeches and unthinking applause.

It will be celebrated by giant corporations, which make guns, bombs, fighter planes, aircraft carriers and an endless assortment of military junk and which await the $100 billion in contracts to be approved soon by Congress and the President.

There was a young woman in New Hampshire who refused to allow her husband, killed in Vietnam, to be given a military burial. She rejected the hollow ceremony ordered by those who sent him and 50,000 others to their deaths. Her courage should be cherished on Memorial Day. There were the B52 pilots who refused to fly those last vicious raids of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s war. Have any of the great universities, so quick to give honorary degrees to God-knows-whom, thought to honor those men at this Commencement time, on this Memorial Day?

No politician who voted funds for war, no business contractor for the military, no general who ordered young men into battle, no FBI man who spied on anti-war activities, should be invited to public ceremonies on this sacred day. Let the dead of past wars be honored. Let those who live pledge themselves never to embark on mass slaughter again.

“The shell had his number on it. The blood ran into the ground…Where his chest ought to have been they pinned the Congressional Medal, the DSC, the Medaille Militaire, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the Italian gold medal, The Vitutea Militara sent by Queen Marie of Rumania. All the Washingtonians brought flowers .. Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies.”

 By Steve Otto

It was great to hear of a Texan Valedictorian who put a highly charged political message in her speech. Many students across the country get a chance to give a speech on behalf of their student body, in celebration of their achievement. But this one was special.

According toCNN news:

“A high school valedictorian exhaled as she pulled a piece of paper from underneath her graduation gown.

Gathering her courage, Paxton Smith started the speech she had worked so hard on for her graduation on Sunday.

But the speech the 18-year-old gave ended up being an entirely different speech than she had planned, and that her school had already approved.

She said she initially was going to talk about TV media and content. Instead, the Dallas teenager decided to use her platform to take a stand against a controversial Texas abortion law that had recently passed.”

She went on to blast the new state law designed to eliminate any chance for a woman to have an abortion. Again, according to CNN:

"I cannot give up this platform to promote complacency and peace, when there is a war on my body and a war on my rights," Smith said during her Lake Highlands High School graduation speech, which came two weeks after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the so-called "heartbeat ban" abortion bill into law.”

We need more young people to step forward and use their valedictorian speech to speak out against injustice perpetrated by Republicans and others in our society.. This law is part of a nation-wide attempt to cut back on women’s rights and Smith was very brave to speak out against it.

By Steve Otto

 Once again Facebook has decided to close me down for a comment I made. It supposedly violated their precious community standards, which is just another way of closing down speech they doesn't want on their precious site. I originally said I would like to round up the rich people who get all the great tax breaks and, like the Khmer Rouge, I  would love to take them into the street and shoot them.

I said, I probably would not do that, I was fantasizing, But they took my comment down and deleted it.

Then I complained that they did that and they deleted the complain and they suspended me for 24 hours. Sucks once again, Facebook can do what they want and their is nothing I can do.

More and more I really hate Facebook. And anyone who works on their censorship board is no more than a punk for the system. They are cheats and liars for the bourgeois system. I hate them passionately. I am going to look for another place to post things. Facebook is nothing more than a piece of shit and lackeys for the bourgeoisie.

Pix from Reason Magazine.

 By Steve Otto

Most weeks I look in The (Sunday) Wichita Eagle for article ideas. Many weeks I find nothing. But there are weeks when I find plenty to write about. Today I discovered a whole page of ideas. They were all written from a conservative point of view.

To start with we had Mike Pompeo,[1]who is now...uh...well, nothing. He wrote an entire article and the best part of it is when he admitted that The New York Times called him "worst Secretary of State in history." And they were right. His article is called Don't back down in our fight for American values. In this, he intends to fight against the progressive left and he never plans to wear down. That's not surprising. This country is full of really bad ideas and he is a major proponent of such bad ideas. What he refers to as American values are actually bullying other nations (AKA imperialism) and the worshiping of really rich people, mostly $millionaires and $billionaires here in this country (AKA capitalism).

In this fight, which he is determined to carry out, he wrote:

"Our resistance to the Left's socialism and the woke cancel culture is a worthy fight, especially as they try to cancel us."

What he is telling us is nothing new. From Republicans Richard Nixon, to Ronald Reagan and now to the gone but not forgotten Donald Trump, I have had a full life-time of struggling against these ass holes and I'm sure they will never stop trying to poison the minds of the young.

I'm also sure that Pompeo does not just include democratic socialists and real Marxist when he uses the word "socialism." He uses a lot of terms that I hear being used by members of the right all the time, such as cancel culture. Most right-wingers make no distinction between President Joe Biden, Former President Barack Obama and the actual socialists of this country. Most of us on the left do not consider centrists such as Biden, to be leftist and definitely not socialist. He is also write that we on the left want to cancel him and his achievements. Again from his own writing:

"Americathe  most exceptional nation the world has ever known, and we can never give an inch. Especially now that the Biden Administration is actively undoing the good work we did."

At times he is right. Many Democrats and others in office, are trying to cancel the damage he and his former boss, Trump, have made. I also know that Biden will not cancel some of the worst actions of former president Trump. For example he does not plan to cancel the crippling sanctions on Venezuela(the topic of another of The Wichita Eagle article, "Maduro has only himself to blame in Venezuela").

Those sanctions are crippling his economy and that hurts EVERYONE living there. Those kind of sanctions are cruel, unnecessary and this country uses them to try and bully foreign leaders into submission. These sanctions are used all over the world and are the most damaging to poor third world, underdeveloped countries. Not all of this countries enemies are socialist, but our leaders and pro-imperialist and pro-capitalist legislators (which is most of them today and until a few years ago was nearly ALL of them over the past 30 years). For example Trump put almost complete sanctions on Iran, which is Islamic, but not really socialist.

One advantage our pro-capitalist leaders love about sanctioning Venezuela is that they can say to the socialists of this country; "see what happens when you chose socialism. The economy is a mess and we can all blames socialism." They like to say that about Cuba. But I have been to Cuba[2]and my experience has taught me to know better. The country functions well and the main problems they have, economically, is that the US has sanctioned them to death. They even ban US citizens from traveling there. The  Pastors for Peace (IFCO) group that I went with got around that ban by flying out of Mexico.

And that brings me to a letter to the editor someone wrote about Vice President Kamala Harris's visit to Guatemala. It wasn't the opinion of the letter writer that got my attention. I used to follow the Revolutionary movements in Guatemala, the guerrillas known as URNG. That was an umbrella group that included four basic armies, The Guatemalan Army of the Poor, The Guatemalan Party of Labour, The Organization of People in Arms and The Rebel Armed Forces. As with guerillas in other Latin American countries, they excepted a cease fire in 1996 and a program that allow them to function as a political party. The fighting from some of these groups began in 1960. But little has been gained since the end of the war. Guatemala today is a very poor basket case of a nation. As is the situation in El Salvador, the poverty in these nations is extreme and with no real way to struggle politically, many people take part in violent gangs.

For the people living in these countries there is a sense of hopelessness. And so many come to the UShoping to have some kind of a future. The real solution to the poverty in those countries is to develop some kind of industry and the development of a living wage. Trump simply tried to build a wall and focused on keeping these poor people out. Conservatives like to call these people illegal and blame them for breaking the law. They also like to blame Democrats for their lack of enthusiasm in keep illegals out. But in reality the Democrats do little more than just ignore those people.

For the last century the US has developed a kind of Apartheid like system. People living above the Mexican border (US and Canada) live as first world people. People below that border live as third world people and most live in extreme poverty. The UShas never made any real effort to change that, in fact they have worked to keep those people as poor and underdeveloped as possible.

To my knowledge there are no USelected politicians who have spoken in favor of serious development to get those people out of the desperate poverty they live in. That has to be part of the solution and at present it is not even being discussed.

So we on the left must continue to fight for a better tomorrow. I don't see that as anti-American values. Anti-capitalism—YES! Anti-imperialism—YES! We don't need to be arrogant. We can value living in harmony with each other.