Penn State, "Its all about money."

There was a guy on MSNBC last night about the criminal abuse at Penn State and he kept insisting that it was all about money. He was hitting the nail on the head though he would have been more accurate if he had said it was all about capitalism, and in particular the brand of US capitalism.

The football program at Penn State brought in close to a billion dollars over the years. Paterno the head coach at the center of this bread and circuses activity ran the university. The President went to him some years ago and asked him to quit and he threw the President out of his house. Paterno was in reality the real boss of the university. Think about it. An old reactionary ignorant man, who knew a few things about football running a university through which tens and tens of thousands of students were supposed to get an education. Only US capitalism could countenance this.

Paterno's money making machine could not be stopped because of a few boys wrecked lives. The criminal abusers would have to be let get on with their crimes so the money making machine's wheels would keep turning. And the right wing macho culture, the Republican Paterno, the local cops, the Penn State officials all had to be left alone so the money would keep rolling in. Capitalism in its most brutal and disgusting form.

Now the university has appointed Kenneth Frazier, the chief executive officer, (and yes a man,) of the corrupt capitalist company, the pharmaceutical Merch to head up an investigation. Merch is one of the top drug pushers in the country. Just because it is legal because it has the money to bribe the politicians does not make this any less of a fact. Yes some investigation this will be. It will be all about capitalism, trying to disassociate the crimes from the system and to preserve the capitalist way of doing things in the universities and education system in the country. Another cover up can be guaranteed. This time it may not be of a few individuals but it will be a cover up of the system.

But there is a lesson for the left in this criminal enterprise of Penn State also. Paterno is 84 years old. He has been head coach for decades. He grew to think that he was the university and he had to be preserved if the university was to be preserved, he grew to think he was irreplaceable, he also grew to think his cabal of close staff had to be preserved. So when confronted with the criminal abuse he and they huddled up and defended their outfit. It is not correct for any organization, and this includes organizations on the left, to have the same one or two persons at the top for decades. Inevitably mistakes are made which would need to be corrected. But with the same one or two leaders mistaken and fossilized methods become routine. And this makes impossible the correction of the mistaken ideas and methods. What is needed is a leadership which is genuinely collective, which sees itself as being genuinely up for recall on a regular basis and which sees that the test of a real and effective and successful leadership is can it replace itself.

A fact or two on another subject. Torture. There is an article in the New York Times on November 6th by Sarah Shourd one of the three Americans who was shamefully held captive in Iran from July 2009 to September 2010. For much of that time she was held in solitary confinement. She rightly describes this as torture, describing how her mental state collapsed and the terrible times she went through. She then describes her shock at coming home and finding that the country with the largest number of prisoners in solitary confinement in the world is the US, what she sees as her own country. There is an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 prisoners in the US in solitary confinement. Last summer prisoners in California went on hunger strike to stop being confined to their cells for 22 hours a day. Imagine this. i cannot even stay in my house all day and it has lots of rooms, three floors, TV's books etc etc. And two dogs. Solitary confinement is torture. The US capitalist press kept attention on the three Prisoners in Iran but you do not hear much about the 20,000 to 25,000 in solitary confinement here. And on top of this the US has 5% of the world's population but 25% of the world's prisoners. the land of the free alright. But not only that the land of tens and thousands of prisoners being tortured.

When reading this remember Bradley Manning. He is being held in solitary confinement for allegedly leaking information to wikileaks. If he did he did the world a favor. there should be no secret agreements between ruling classes. In our struggles always keep the demand for the release of Bradley Manning to the fore.

Sean.