US politics.

It is common place to hear talk about the low level of political involvement in the US. There are many reasons for this. One is the strong feeling of filth and corruption and hypocrisy that pervades politics. Look at the 29 coal miners who were killed recently. Obama and Biden stood stern faced and sorrowful looking at their memorial. "How can we fail them?" Obama declared and talked about improving mine safety. But anybody who knows anything about mines and the way things work knew long before now that the mine owners controlled the mine safety committee and Obama and Biden and their pals did nothing about this. They are responsible along with the mine owners for the deaths of these miners. US politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, are capitalist politicians who work for the rich and powerful and have to lie and cover up for this every day. This is the basis for their corruption and hypocrisy. Decent people want nothing to do with them. We are repulsed by them. And rightly so. They are filth on the soles of our shoes.

But this does not mean we should avoid politics. There are different kinds of politics. What exists in the US is capitalist politics. We cannot avoid politics. As the saying goes you may avoid politics but politics will not avoid us. What we need is a different kind of politics. Working class politics. We, the working class need a political party of our own, that is of working class people. And one that is dedicated to confront and oppose the capitalist class and its corrupt capitalist criminal system. And one in which all elected representatives are accountable to the membership and earn no more than the average industrial wage and are able to be recalled at any time. This is what we need. Such a party to have a chance would have to commit itself to end capitalism, to break from the way it works now.

Almost weekly we have new corruption and swindles and crimes on Wall Street. But it is not only that. Every day we have the economic crisis which is based on the fact that capitalism does not pay the working class enough to buy what it produces and so there is a surplus product and over production, over capacity. This leads to the tendency towards recession and slump and to try and avoid this capitalism hands out credit like there is no tomorrow and tries to keep the market, the demand going. But of course the credit will have to paid back sometime. Capitalism cannot solve its problems. It is inevitably headed for new massive convulsions in the period ahead. The 2008/9 crisis was a sign of things to come.

Our head can spin when we hear or read about Wall Street and the financial system, the derivatives, the credit swaps, the rating agencies. That is partly deliberate. Capitalism does not want to help working class people to understand what it is up to. But it is not that complicated.

Capitalism has extorted trillions of dollars from its ownership of wealth and its exploitation of working people. Because there is insufficient demand, that is over capacity of industry, there is insufficient demand for new factories and machines into which this capital could be invested. So they have these trillions of dollars of capital floating around looking for somewhere it can make more. They buy and sell this to each other, to working people, to pension plans, that is they swindle and speculate it back and forward. They create no new wealth with it. And of course every deal that is made the companies that make the deals get huge fees. This is what Wall Street is, a bunch of swindles and criminals who control vast sums of capital which has been derived from our, that is the working class peoples' labor.

What should be our alternative? We are all familiar by now with the phrase "too big to fail." This means that banks and financial institutions and companies can get so big that if they fail they will bring down the economic system. This is the blackmail these companies and their capitalist politicians hit us with. But this is completely false. The solution is obvious as long as you do not see things only within confines of capitalism. The solution is to take all the financial institutions and big corporations out of private hands. If they say they are going to fail then a working peoples party which is what we stand for says okay, you are failing, this proves you cannot run your company, you have forfeited the right to own it and run it, so rather than giving you billions of tax payers money to throw after the billions you have already lost we are taking you over. You are taken into public ownership under workers control and management.

Even they do not say they are going to fail. Wall Street and the stock exchanges and commodity exchanges and banks and financial institutions are a cancer on society. They corrupt the economy and politics, they act like a giant tumor which grows and grows and dominates our whole system. If we take over this wealth under workers control and management then we can have this vast sum of capital to build roads, schools, hospitals, bridges, homes, whatever is needed by people. At the same time we can end the obscene squandering of wealth on the production of scrap metal which is what arms production is. And we can have the hundreds of thousands of young people who are trained to go and kill and themselves be killed trained instead to help those who need help. This is the way to run the world.

This alternative would bring millions of people into active involvement in politics. For a working peoples party. For democratic socialism. The trade union leaders could set this process in motion right away. They sit in the leadership of working class organizations of millions. But they are terrified by capitalism and that they might have to build an alternative and just about as afraid of their own members. But that is a story for another day.

Sean.