They have the money: we just have to take it from them.

While ideas in the last analysis have a material base, this does not mean that the mass media does not have an influence.  The dominant ideas in society are the ideas or the ideology of the ruling class, and this view of the world is brought to use day in day out through the media they own and the institutions they control, the education system, the pulpit, the trade Union hierarchy.

My local paper has been on the ideological warpath this week blaming the transit (MUNI) operators in San Francisco for the crisis in public transportation, and today we read that there is a "stark outlook" for California's state parks and that the "tight budget" keeps them "on the brink".

No headline about the continued wars in Afghanistan and Iraq being on the brink or the trillions of dollars of taxpayer money being returned to us and the orchestrator's of the crises we are witnessing, economic and environmental, being thrown in to jail.  This is what is lacking in society, an alternative view of the world.  The trade Union leaders have the resources to offer an alternative but their view of the world is identical to the capitalist class.

The cost of keeping the California parks open this year is $100 million.  Schwarzenegger was going to use the tax on profits of oil drilling off the Santa Barbara coast as a source of funds but the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and more importantly, the anger that exists because of it, has forced the capitalist class to back off this idea to avoid pushing this anger in to open class warfare.

But $100 million is a mere pittance.  The 11 banks that received $175 billion in taxpayer bailout funds paid $33 billion in bonuses to their employees.  (We're not talking about the teller here).  This would have covered California's 2008/09 deficit with $9 billion left over.

Many individuals earn more than $100 million in a year.  There is no shortage of money in society, one would have to be in a coma not to see that. Unfortunately, some well intentioned groups try to solve this problem by increasing taxes in one way another on workers and the middle class, like an $18 vehicle registration fee that some are trying to get on the ballot.

We are fortunate in California to have so many rural parks, more than any other state and they are well used; some 70 million people visit them each year, today's SF Chronicle reports, compared to about 16 million who visit Disneyland.

There is plenty of money, it is merely an issue of who has it and how it is allocated.  The band aid attempts to tax ourselves to pay for their crisis is a disaster, it won't save our national parks and it won't save public education.  The horrific situation in the Gulf of Mexico is yet another example of the need for public ownership, under workers control and management of the energy industry before they destroy the environment making much of the planet uninhabitable.

The same applies to capital itself, the ownership of the wealth that we create through our labor.  We cannot allow them to own and allocate this resource.  As has been said before, the productive forces need new managers.

Today's paper also points out that bridge tolls need to go up again.  So our communities are designed and built by those whose prime concern is how much profit they make as opposed to how best to organize how we live and work.  Then they charge us more and more each year to get there.  They also ensure that the automobile rules which is a wasteful and destructive form of transport that relies on fossil fuels.  The same clique have interests in both industries.  Mass transit is not profitable enough for them but would be much better for us and the world in which we live.

We cannot limit ourselves to their solutions for their crisis, or well intentioned liberals, usually economically secure individuals, whose only answer is to join the culprits in making the working class pay. The money they have stolen from us is our money. The obscene incomes (one can't call them wages as they don't earn it through productive Labor) they earn we have to take from them.  Warren Buffet, one of the most successful unproductive members of society lost some $25 billion in 2008.

We have the skills and the ability to run society. It is important to read about events like the Seattle General Strike of 1919 and other events where working people took control of the workplace.  Bus drivers, doctors, nurses, garbage collectors, engineers, shipping clerks and dockers, we all make this society run.  If we want our children and our planet to have a future, we have to decide how its run as well.