On “Billionaire Oracle CEO buys Hawaiian island”
Evidently a moat & drawbridge around the castle of the king will no longer do. Now the king needs an entire ocean to protect his fortune from the rabble.
Kim H
22 June 2012
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Concerning your article about Larry Ellison, the billionaire CEO of Oracle Company buying an island, I can attest to Ellison’s arrogance, feeling of entitlement and lack of concern for the public.
I live near the San Jose area and ten years or so ago there was a controversy going on that was reported in the local paper, the San Jose Mercury, about Ellison flying his personal jet in and out of the SJ airport at hours that were prohibited because the approach and departure of his plane took him over (at very low altitude) residential areas and the noise disturbed people while they were trying to sleep.
He kept doing it even though aware of the situation, that it was against the rules and was a public nuisance.
The editorials in the Mercury by the top people at the paper were very fawning and servile, saying that the airport officials, etc. should leave him alone and let him violate the protocols or rules (or laws?), whichever it was.
He’s a rich jerk as far as I’m concerned and a symbol of what’s been happening to our state and country in the last 30-40 years.
The government should tax people like Ellison at 90 percent like they did during the 1950s.
Bob R
23 June 2012
On “A modest proposal for indentured servitude”
First off, college education in America should be free—financed at public expense, as an investment into the talent and intellect of our youth—like it was in California in the ‘60s, remember? Like it is in Georgia if the students maintain a B average? A no-brainer as to the future of our country ... this putative democracy, which requires the Jeffersonian educated populace ...
What’s my second point: I can’t believe what I just read ... that human beings—and all the potentialities they represent—are merely another sanguinary neckfeed for these capitalist podsuckers ... disgusting.
Personal: my daughter—who’s had trouble repaying her loans, but tries in this draconian/dystopic economy—now wants to go to nursing school—but she tells me, because she is currently in default (Is she alone? ... rhetorical)—they won’t even send her transcripts.
Of course, the ironic/satirical Swiftian solution is to eat our young ... which is exactly what is happening.
Only a rational system based upon human need—to include the development and care of our young—and not subject to the heinous and obscene, such as this “venture capitalist” absurdity (not to be dismissed in the current environment—they’re serious)—only a revolutionary change, through direct action outside the two-party system, has any hope of success.
Reading Trotsky’s “History of the Russian Revolution,” as he made clear, the vectors of any significant change may not be clearly lined, and a revolution has its own dynamics—tectonic forces cannot be denied.
It will happen here, as well, although the timeline may not be obvious, but the groundwork must be laid by educating and rallying the working class—who are already prepared—for a thoroughgoing change.
The SEP and WSWS has been constant in this.
It matters—I’m older and may not live to see it—immaterial: it’s coming.
Rob M
Alabama, USA
22 June 2012
On “UK government seeks to justify child poverty and welfare cuts”
The attacks on the working class carried out by this ConDem government as described by Julie’s piece has been ratcheted up with today’s announcement by Cameron that Housing Benefit for under-25s is now under threat. Among other attacks being considered is a time limit for people able to claim benefits.
This unremitting series of attacks by the ConDems on the working class are also being helped by the bankruptcy of all the reformist organizations, from the Labour Party to the TUC, who seems to think that it is sufficient to call for purely symbolic demos once a year if we’re lucky. We need more than this; we need an alternative that will not only highlight the reason for the austerity, the systemic crisis of capitalism globally, but also build within the working class an alternative to all shades of reformism both right as well as left.
Without this alternative leadership the future will be a gradual and not so gradual dismantling of the totally inadequate safety net so to intensify the exploitation of the working class. We in the UK need to learn from the weaknesses of the struggles in Greece and elsewhere, which is to stop tailing the reformists and begging the task of building the revolutionary alternative.
I know I’ve gone on comrades, but today’s critical situation makes me angry as well as concerned. Keep up the good reporting WSWS.
Dave T
Durham, UK
25 June 2012
On “WikiLeaks’ editor Julian Assange threatened with arrest”
The baldness of the moves by the British government shone brightly in Wednesday’s (6/21/12) Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A headline on page one reads, “Britain balks at extradition in sex case—State sex offender program seen as rights violation”.
Why is it, that in this case, the British government staunchly defends the rights of a man charged in the state of Minnesota with groping two 11-year-old relatives in 1993, and raping a 14-year-old girl in 1994? He was convicted in Ireland in 1997 of “indecent assaults on two 12-year-old girls”. It states that one of Britain’s highest courts found that Minnesota’s controversial sex offender program, “violates European human rights law.”
The program is controversial because the state uses civil commitment as a way to keep dangerous sex offenders imprisoned indefinitely. Britain is asking the US for a guarantee that this man not be subjected to the program if he were extradited. The Lord Justice Alan Moses found a “real risk” he could be committed to the program, and “that amounts to a risk that he would suffer a flagrant denial of his rights.”
He was arrested in 2010 in London. He has not been held in prison, and is subject to a curfew. He wears an electronic tag.
The contrast of the treatment accorded this convicted sex offender, facing current charges in Minnesota, to that of Julian Assange, who has not been charged or convicted of anything, is blinding.
The working class of the world must defend Julian Assange! — these bourgeois governments want to make an example of him to terrify us all. Assange stepped forward to expose war crimes, and, in doing so, also defends freedom of the press, freedom of information via Internet, and freedom of speech for rank and file people around the world. His actions have indeed been that important for anybody who has to work for a living, and the 1 percent seeks to end these freedoms.
Kit
Minnesota, USA
22 June 2012