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The recent uprising and protests in Cuba have brought me to a topic I never thought I would be discussing in the United States as a serious one. It is a fact that there has not been one successful communist or socialistic country in the history of the world that has succeeded, and yet we have Americans who are pushing that very dogma to reach some utopia.

Many who read the previous few sentences will say, of course, the Scandinavian countries succeeded at socialism.

To an extent, Scandinavian countries did have limited success at socialism, but they have since moved away from that form of government to a more capitalistic form, like ours. Even if we say, for the sake of argument, the Scandinavian countries are a success that is three countries out of more than 170 countries in the world to have found the right mix. There are many more failures than those three and the countries who have failed have failed miserably.

Countries like Venezuela, which next to the United States was the richest country in the Western Hemisphere, failed quickly and dramatically to the point where people were and are eating rats in the streets so the food isnt stolen while taking it home. Cuba happens to be the one country in the news right now with the uprising this past weekend and in todays news cycle will likely be out of the news soon.

One statement that I read in doing research for this article was one from Norway in which a single person with no dependents paid 40 percent income tax, 25 percent sales tax and other taxes and fees. So, over half of a persons income is taxed away just with those two taxes and that doesnt include other fees and other taxes. In the same article it said that you would need to have 95 percent voluntary compliance to make a system such as that work effectively and, of course, that will never happen.

What it comes down to is that socialism will always fail. It promises prosperity, equality and security and yet in Cuba, Venezuela, Soviet Union, North Korea and many others it has delivered poverty, misery and tyranny. Equality was only achieved because everyone except the ruling class was equal in their own misery. Basically, the concepts of socialism go against human nature because incentives mean little to nothing in these countries and human nature desires a need to strive for something.

Our current system of governance is capitalism, and its strength can be attributed to an incentive-based structure. By socialisms failure to promote the potential of its people through incentives a persons humanity is deprived of the need to succeed. Socialism fails because it kills and destroys the human spirit.

The drive to socialism is constantly alluring to many because by giving up a little freedom a person will gain more security through the government. The bargain is tempting but it has never paid off. Those who enter that bargain end up losing both freedom and security.

As such socialism will remain a constant temptation but will not produce the results that those who strive for it want.

Capitalism on the other hand has a proven track record of successes and plays a major role in setting people free from poverty and oppression.

Capitalism promotes an air of enterprise and nurtures the human spirit. By providing a powerful system of incentives that promote thrift, hard work and efficiency.

Capitalism creates wealth unlike any system out there.

The main difference between socialism and capitalism is that capitalism works.

Socialism causes misery and yet capitalism promotes wealth and the ability to gain individual value.

The United States, for example, has created more millionaires and billionaires than the rest of the world combined.

Of course, the argument against capitalism is that it only makes the rich richer. The fact is that even the poor get richer in a capitalistic society. Capitalism benefits all by lessening historical racial and gender disparities basically making anyone who has the drive to succeed have an equal potential for success.

In the end, there is no doubt that capitalism is the right path to follow and while socialism has an attractive allure for some, the pitfalls are such that failure is more likely than not.

State Rep. John Wills (R-Spirit Lake) may be reached at john.wills@legis.iowa.gov.

Excerpt from:
Wills: Capitalism is right path; socialism alluring but full of pitfalls - nwestiowa.com

The Bush-Cheney administration responded to 9/11, not with an internationally supported manhunt for perpetrators but by invading two Muslim countries. Their response was based on right-wing research into how the U.S. could dominate the world, detailed in their 2000 document Rebuilding Americas Defenses. Page 51 concludes the plans realization likely to be difficult absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor (or 9/11).

Told about that attack, President Bush continued reading to Florida schoolchildren. Cheney fashioned two wars that followed. Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer were in charge. The former allowed looters to sack Baghdad; the latter dismantled the Iraqi army, fueling the 2003 insurgency. The Mideast was destabilized. These invasions are regarded as the worst foreign policy decisions in U.S. history.

Afghanistans circumstances conjure images of another policy mistake helicopters rescuing persons from the embassy roof in Kabul, as they were from Saigon. Our history textbooks are patriotically designed to deceive. Wrong choices have been legion.

Historically, our governments policies have been anchored in a white supremacy mindset brought from Europe, allowing murder of native people, slavery, brutal efforts to force Indians to conform to the newcomers norms, exploitation of Chinese labor to build railroads, immigrant exclusion acts, and the imprisonment of Japanese American citizens.

Exploitation of labor has also been the basis of policy choices. Historically, farmers and workers have struggled for fair prices and wages against controllers of the markets. The powerful have resisted and dominated government. Russias Marxist revolution threatened capitalist exploitation. But it provided the label socialism, the powerful could use to defend capitalist practices. Any effort to equitably share wealth or provide for human needs was called socialism; politicians who focused on human needs were termed socialists. Worst still, any country governed by Marxist beliefs was automatically considered a grave threat to the U.S.

This survey of some foreign policy decisions is limited to our own time the past 80 years.

In contrast with his other wartime partner, Winston Churchill, President Roosevelt developed warm relations with Joseph Stalin. Roosevelt regarded Churchill as a colonist and racist.

He had no illusions about the ruthless Russian dictator and knew he would insist on political control of Eastern Europe. After all, Russia had been invaded by Napoleon and twice by Germans.

Stalin had renounced international revolution. Roosevelt was initiating a diplomacy in which the political systems of other countries are accepted as they are, that it is not our business to insist others conform to our own.

His successor, President Truman, used possession of atomic weapons as threat to the Soviet Union and directed financial aid Roosevelt intended for rebuilding devastated Russia, instead to rebuilding Germany. Truman followed historic anti-socialist policy in both Europe and Southeast Asia, in so doing, created the Cold War. He supported French efforts to restore their colonial empire, leading to the Vietnam War.

Eisenhower Administration foreign policy was largely directed by the Dulles brothers, Allen at CIA and John Foster as Secretary of State. In the Far East, Cuba, and Central America, overdue and legitimate revolutions against dictators connected with U.S. business so-called inevitable revolutions were opposed. U.S. military advisors began decades-long interventions; counterinsurgency soldiers were trained at the School of the Americas in Georgia.

When Fidel Castros revolution ended dictatorship, Mafia presence, and U.S. business exploitation in Cuba, Castro was denounced as a Marxist and driven, for survival, to seek support from the Russians.

Obliged to deal with consequences in both Cuba and Vietnam, President Kennedy refused to support the Dulles invasion of Cuba and turned the subsequent Missile Crisis into a correspondence with Khrushchev on ending the Cold War. A month before he was assassinated, he acted to withdraw troops from Vietnam.

Israels repeated success in fighting Arab-Muslim defenders in Palestine brought massive U.S. financial support. President Nixons support of Pinochets overthrow of Allendes leftist government in Chile began a horrible repression- the disappearance of 30,000 leftists in South America.

Along with opposition to socialism, white supremacy continued to prompt foreign policy choice. Our enemies were Arab, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, or Hispanic.

President Carter protected the villainous Shah of Iran, ending historic peaceful relations with that country. Before attacking Iraq, the U.S. supplied Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran. This circles us back to the beginning of this essay.

The deeper problem of wicked, undemocratic choices by both Democratic and Republican Party leaders is that outcomes are either omitted from our textbooks, or refashioned and justified as noble causes.

Charlemont resident Carl Doerner is an author and historian currently at work on a re-examination of and challenge to the American narrative.

Read more from the original source:
My Turn: With trillions spent and millions dead - The Recorder

The scene is familiar to us now. People in the streets waving U.S. flags and protesting a socialist government that promised equality and prosperity but failed to deliver either.

Cubans are standing together by the thousands chanting Libertad! in the island nations strongest ever condemnation of the 62-year-old tyrannical regime. Cubans are rejecting government censorship, they're rejecting turning off the internet to the whole island of Cuba, and they're rejecting a government who decides what rights they need.

I stand with Cuba and against socialism, the disease that infected that island so many years ago. I stand with the people of Cuba, and with all freedom-loving people that reject the idea that government gets to decide what rights we can enjoy.

Alison Putman

Kemah

Go here to see the original:
I stand with Cuba and against socialism | Letters to the Editor | The Daily News - Galveston County Daily News

Penny Kemp, who has died aged 71 after a long battle with Parkinsons Disease, was a pivotal figure in the rise of the Green Party of England and Wales; she was its co-chair when it first made an impact, in the 1989 Euro elections, a long-serving member of its executive, and the handler of its relations with the wider Left.

Witty, exuberant, committed and a gifted organiser in a movement not prone to being organised, she was to her collaborator Peter Tatchell a true trailblazer of Green socialism. She tried to persuade Jeremy Corbyn to enter a pact with the Greens, and once turned down a safe Labour seat.

Penny Kemp joined what was then the Ecology Party in 1979. Between then and 2017, when her health deteriorated, she was at crucial points the partys chair, co-chair or communications co-ordinator. She worked tirelessly to ensure Green speakers got their share of publicity, lining up panellists for Any Questions? or wangling an appearance on a daytime chat show and won a place for the Greens in one of the leaders debates during the 2015 general election.

By her death, the Greens could claim one MP, two peers, three London Assembly members and 477 local councillors. In Scotland, their sister party is in coalition talks with the SNP.

Penny Kemp believed that the three tenets of economic, social and ecological justice must be part of a whole. You cant just add on environmental policy [to a conventional partys manifesto]; it must be central.

Justice is the driving thing and if you have a just and more equal society, you have a happier and healthier society. Im not just here to save the planet I think the planet will save itself quite happily without us on it. I think we are here to save ourselves.

One of her achievements was a United Nations resolution on the environmental effects of the 1991 Gulf War, which stemmed from a symposium she organised.

Penny Kemp rang the Jordanian royal palace because the war had cost the country 37 per cent of its GDP, and King Hussein sent his chief scientific adviser to the symposiums first session, in London; the Iraqi ambassador and the chairman of Shell also attended.

She then took the event to New York, where influential figures including Paul Crutzen of the Max-Planck-Institut and the cosmologist and author Carl Sagan came on board. I went to the UN, and ended up writing a new resolution which was taken up by Canada, Sweden and Jordan.

Thereafter, whenever King Hussein was in London he would send a car round for her. The first time he asked what she would like to drink she started to say gin and tonic, but quick as a flash turned that into the juice of an orange.

Penny Kemp also played a part in advancing Green politics in Taiwan. In 1996 she was invited there for the islands general election, and helped the Taiwanese Greens win a seat. The Mayor of Taipei even wore a green suit when they met.

She was also prepared to take direct action. In the 1980s she was one of a group of activists tracking nuclear-waste trains through Kent with a view to disrupting the traffic. An undercover police officer infiltrated the group and the attempt was foiled.

The police searched my car and found a coat hanger, and tried to use that as evidence of conspiracy to commit criminal damage. I didnt get charged in the end, but I wanted to go to court I would have loved to ask how I was supposed to damage a nuclear train with a coat hanger!

She was also the tireless long-time organiser of Glastonburys Green Futures field, pulling together a set of visionary guests each year many of them personal friends for her Speakers Forum.

Personalities spanning the political and social divide came to speak under the distinctive pink canvas roof, and stayed on around the campfire backstage, talking well into the night: Sir David King, Tony Benn, Ruby Wax, Justin Rowlatt, Billy Bragg, Vince Cable, Ed Miliband, Jonathan Cainer and many more.

Penny Kemp was involved in more festivals than Glastonbury. She was marketing director of the Big Green Gathering, and during the 1990s staged events based on green and earth magic principles on her own field at Headcorn in Kent, culminating in the hugely popular Small World Festival. One happy memory was of her inaugurating the first compost toilet on her land, emerging from the canvas curtain to rapturous applause.

She also co-founded Headcorn Sustainability, encouraging the use of local produce. She explained: A typical Sunday dinner travels 49,000 miles to get on your plate, and emits 37kg of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. You can see the difference that would be made if its only travelled 12 or 20 miles.

She was born Penelope Bineham in Watford on May 10 1949, one of five children of a quantity surveyor and a post mistress. The family moved to Sussex, and she attended Fosse Bank School at Tonbridge.

Penny married at 19, had two daughters, and until joining the Green Partys staff ran her own driving school (Not very green, said her daughter Tracy.)

She was introduced to the Ecology Party by a friend who was its regional treasurer. I knew there had to be something else than just socialism combining social justice, economic justice and ecological justice. Id read books about ecology and then I came across the Ecology Party it was the missing link!

In the mid-1980s she became the partys South-East regional representative, finding herself on the interview panel when it decided to employ its first press officer. The successful candidate was Caroline Lucas, now MP for Brighton Pavilion. She recalled: Penny was a brilliant boss, immensely kind and huge fun and an utterly tireless champion for climate and nature.

Penny Kemp was instrumental in opening dialogue between the relatively young Green movement and the traditional Left, organising the first national Greens and Socialists conference with Tatchell and Robin Cook. She pursued some of these themes in a book she wrote with Derek Wall in 1990, A Green Manifesto for the 1990s.

While the Green Party won 14.5 per cent of the vote if no seats in the 1989 Euro elections, she felt it had done so on a false premise. Her fellow co-chairs took references to animal rights and opposing Nato out of its manifesto yet the Telegraph still condemned the partys programme as dangerous.

After this ground was lost at the 1992 election she was elected to manage the partys election campaigns, then took charge of its media operations.

Penny Kemp did not bother with diplomacy when Germanys Greens agreed to troops being sent to Afghanistan to support Americas war on terror. She wrote: Greens who are propping up the German government have put power before principle. Their claim that they must participate in the war effort in order to make it more humane is obscene.

However, she did make concessions to the art of spin. After the Greens first took control of Brighton & Hove council in 2011 on an anti-austerity programme, then pushed through a package of cuts, she blamed Labour councillors for having joined with the Conservatives to block the Greens proposed budget increase.

Before the 2015 election, the broadcasters proposed three party leaders debates without the Greens, with David Cameron and Ed Miliband, plus Nick Clegg in two and Nigel Farage in one.

Penny Kemp got them to change their minds, firing off a letter of protest. She wrote: The Green Party received 150,000 more votes than the Liberal Democrats in the 2014 European elections and won three times as many seats. In general election opinion polls the Greens are neck-and-neck with the junior coalition partners.

Despite our comparative lack of airtime, our policies are consistently popular with the public. Political commentators have declared the decision to be unfair and even the prime minister has called for the Greens to be included in the debates on the grounds of fairness.

She succeeded in setting up a fourth debate in which the Greens Natalie Bennett took part.

Penny Kemps illness forced her to give up full-time work for the party in 2017, but she kept up her involvement at Glastonbury for two more years. The gradual onset of the disease was both debilitating and frustrating for Penny as her speech was affected, a colleague said. For a woman of many opinions it was difficult for her to be understood, but understood she was. She insisted on being there, and had the support of dedicated and wonderful friends.

Penny Kemps marriage to John Kemp was dissolved in the early 1980s. She is survived by her partner Johann Sikora, her two daughters from the marriage, and five grandchildren.

Penelope Kemp, born May 10 1949, died June 12 2021

Read the original:
Penny Kemp, campaigner and activist described as the trailblazer of Green socialism obituary - Telegraph.co.uk

David Moore will be running as the Socialist Equality Party candidate in the September 14 California gubernatorial recall election. Moore will advance a socialist program to fight against the pandemic, inequality, war and dictatorship through the independent political mobilization of the working class against both the Democrats and Republicans.

Moore is a special education teacher in the Oakland Unified School District and has seen firsthand the impact of the pandemic on chronically underfunded schools. He grew up in a farming family in Ventura County and has firsthand knowledge of the harsh conditions facing workers in fields and packing houses across the state forced to work in dangerous conditions confronting mass infections and heat waves.

As a member of the SEP and writer for the World Socialist Web Site, Moore has written on and directly fought in the strikes of teachers, BART workers, nurses, and oil refinery workers. He previously ran as the SEP candidate for Senate in California in 2018.

The recall campaign has been overwhelmingly funded and driven by far-right forces seeking to overturn all public health measures that have not yet been scrapped by the Democratic administration of Governor Gavin Newsom.

For this reason, the SEP calls on Californias voters to vote no on the recall.

At the same time, Newsom and the Democratic Party bear direct responsibility for the catastrophic impact of the pandemic in California and throughout the US. The Democrats are a party of the ruling class, military and intelligence agencies. To fight against the far right and the growth of fascism, workers must organize independently of both big-business parties on the basis of a revolutionary, internationalist and socialist program.

Central components of Moores campaign will include:

1. For an internationalist and socialist strategy to eradicate COVID-19!

The election is being held as COVID-19 infections are once again surging in California and across the globe due to the disastrous policies of local, state, and federal governments. The official global death toll is over four million, but a recent report estimates that at least four million people have died in India alone. The real global death toll is likely well over 10 million.

This is a monumental catastrophe for which the ruling classes of all the major countries are responsible, but particularly the United States, long the epicenter of the pandemic. As COVID-19 spread in the first months of 2020, Democrats and Republicans rapidly passed $2.5 trillion in bank bailouts to boost stock prices and support the rich through the CARES Act, while leaving workers and small businesses to suffer under a patchwork of haphazard, local, and utterly insufficient public health and social support measures.

Newsoms decision to end state requirements to contain the pandemic on June 15 and tie school funding to reopening in person was a reckless effort to try to appease the far-right forces seeking his recall.

COVID-19 can only be eradicated as part of a global strategy, but Californias workers can play a major role by forcing the closure of nonessential businesses and in-person schooling, with compensation to workers and small business owners until the pandemic is contained.

2. For social equality and a massive redistribution of wealth!

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the stock market has reached new record highs despite the massive growth in unemployment and dire conditions facing the working class. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 16 percent from before the pandemic began and is nearly three times higher than before the 2008 economic crisis.

Californias billionaires have made out like bandits, primarily through government handouts and bleeding their workers dry. To name just a few of the states richest:

The wealth of the ruling elite must be seized and utilized to meet the urgent social needs of the working class, including a massive investment in education, health care and social services.

3. Oppose fascism and dictatorship!

The recall campaign in California is part of a broader strategy of the far right to oppose all necessary restrictions on the pandemic. This has been accompanied by the ever more open transformation of the Republican Party into a fascistic organization under the leadership of Donald Trump.

The fascistic insurrection on January 6 was part of a broader conspiracy led by Trump to overturn the results of the election and establish a dictatorship. The operation was carried out with the complicity of top Republicans, including the current House minority leader and representative from California, Kevin McCarthy.

While Trump did not succeed with his immediate aims, the threat continues. In response to the growth of social anger and opposition in the working class, a faction of the corporate and financial elite is turning toward fascism. The Democrats, a party of Wall Street and the military, have worked throughout to cover up the extreme danger and block any popular mobilization against the far right.

4. Defend the rights of immigrants!

Perhaps the cruelest aspect of the policies of the Trump administration, which aroused mass hostility in California, was its persecution and abuse of immigrants. Trump took the internment camps already built under Obamawho deported more immigrants than any previous presidentand added the wall, deliberately separated children from their parents, and encouraged brutality on the part of ICE and the Border Patrol.

Rather than reverse these policies, Biden has built on them, summarily expelling all arriving adult immigrants and many children, using the pretext of the health risk due to the coronavirus. Administration representatives, with Vice President Kamala Harris, the daughter of immigrants, at the forefront, have warned refugees against coming to America. The administrations anti-China campaign has helped fuel anti-Asian attacks.

The SEP fights to unify the working class. We oppose all efforts to divide workers along the lines of gender, ethnicity, skin color or national origin. The multinational, multiracial protests against the police murder of George Floyd showed the instinctive striving of working people to wage a common struggle, across all such lines of division. We uphold the right of working people to live and work in the country of their choice.

5. No to imperialist war!

The Biden administration seeks to outdo Trump in its militaristic threats war against Russia and China. Bidens military budget is even larger than Trumps, and he embraces the strategy of preparing for great power conflict, which threatens nuclear war.

The Biden administration has rehabilitated the racist conspiracy theory pushed by Trump that China is responsible for COVID-19. Both presidents have tried to deflect blame for their own disastrous handling of the pandemic by blaming a foreign enemy.

There is no difference between the Democrats and Republicans when it comes to waging war in the Middle East, including drone missile assassinations; targeting governments in Latin America and the Caribbean for subversion and overthrow; and upholding the right of American imperialism to dictate to every country in the world.

The SEP calls for the trillions squandered on war and militarism to be redirected to addressing basic social needs.

6. For the political independence of the working class! Fight for socialism!

None of the problems confronting workers in California, across the US and throughout the world can be resolved within the framework of capitalism. Whether it is the pandemic, the spread of wildfires, climate change, poverty, homelessness, and unemploymenta rational and scientific response based on the interests of the working class requires an end to the capitalist system.

The gigantic corporations and banks must be turned into public utilities, run on the basis of social need, not private profit.

The objective basis for a socialist movement is the growth of working-class struggle. The pandemic has enormously intensified class conflict in the US and internationally. Workers are beginning to fight back, from Volvo autoworkers in Virginia, Frito-Lay workers in Kansas, mine workers in Alabama, and teachers and health care workers throughout the country. These struggles are part of a growing movement of workers throughout the world.

The SEP campaign of David Moore will fight to unify these struggles through the development of a coordinated network of rank-and-file committees, independent of the corporatist unions, which have collaborated at every point with the corporations and the state in enforcing the demands of the ruling class.

Above all, this movement must be armed with a socialist program, perspective and leadership. We call on all our supporters and readers in California to sign up to support the campaign of David Moore for governor. If you are a US citizen or permanent legal resident, you can donate to the campaign, even if you dont live in California.

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David Moore to run as the Socialist Equality Party candidate in the California gubernatorial recall election - WSWS