Letters to the Editors
Dear Editors,
President Biden in 2020 said: "All student loan borrowers will be forgiven (at least) $10,000"-so, where is it? There are 45 million such borrowers! Meaning, they still have debt, some after five years, some after ten, some after 15, some after 20, some after 30 YEARS.
Those 45 million Americans, and their families, are tired of it.
It is crippling. They can't even pay for food for their families, some of them, and also pay the loan payment-its either one or the other. Not both.
That's why it's important to those Americans and their families. Because they are still poor. After trying to go to college or other postsecondary training courses
Many finished their complete course and degree, but then couldn't find work, so had no money to start making loan payments. Or maybe they had to stop and drop out for family crisis or childcare reasons. Or got one D or F and must repeat that early class with a higher-grade result, or they can't go forward to the next prerequisite classes. Or some other reason.
But they still owe this staggering, large debt. That will never go away, as of now.
And Joe Biden is-guess who? The U.S. Senator who fought hardest (2010, during the economic downturn) to change the Bankruptcy laws, in order to restrict bankruptcy filing so that (the poorest) Americans could not discharge student-loan debt in bankruptcy -ever.
Thus, we see that they are still poor.
He is so out of touch and rich that he just doesn't get it.
Why can't his staff tell him? "It's important!" "Don't go back on your word on this one."
I mean, It's not 45 people.
Not 450 people.
Not 4,500 people.
Not 45,000 people (that's about how many he has provided at least some little bit of debt relief, and only about $10,000 each)
Not 450,000 people.
Not 4,500,000 people. No, it's ten times that many!
In fact, it's about one-third of all those Americans who file a tax return-heads of households, or married couples, all wage-earners, or drawing unemployment, etc.
45,000,000-that's 45 million-Americans need help! and he promised. Since then, he has welshed on his campaign promise.1
Yours truly,
Marlene Met
1 https://www.yahoo.com/news/biden-hasn-t-forgiven-student-080016180.html
Dear Editors,
As of March 13, 2022, the Ukrainians are putting up an unexpected stiff resistance against the Russian invasion. In the wake of this invasion, conscientious Russians, braving police repression and imprisonment, are courageously organizing a nascent antiwar movement. According to the BBC's website on March 14th, an estimated 13,000 Russian Citizens have been jailed for antiwar activity.
Waiting like vultures to pray upon a decimated, prostrate Ukraine is the United States and NATO and their capitalist ruling class opponents in Russia.
United States is looking to blockade Russian oil and what better way for the United States and NATO to expand into the largest land mass in Europe, second to Russia, than with a military base making sure that armed force is brought to bear on their Russian capitalist competitors. What is needed is a rebirth in working class revolutionary activity to take back the socialized property stolen by the Ukrainian capitalist class.
Camp Bondsteel is a U.S. military base located in the former Yugoslavia. The United States gained entrance into what was once Yugoslavia under the pretext of helping the Kosovar Albanians by bombing Serbia followed by an occupation by U.S. soldiers. The U.S. and NATO are military expansionists who arrive in these crises-torn lands where socialized property once existed to guarantee that these lands remain in their spheres of influence when the crisis subsides.
The unwarranted slaughter of the Ukrainian people and the leveling of their homes and infra-structure is very depressing for us in the U.S. antiwar movements. Yet there is a strong force that can checkmate the machinations of the Russian capitalist ruling class and their chief executive, Vladimir Putin and the United States/NATO imperial-capitalist military coalition. A winning force that can lay down the trump card against the capitalist's hand is the working classes of Ukraine and Russia.
Wars can often bring socialist leaders to the foreground who can win influence among combat troops because of their willingness to fight and die beside them. The Ukrainian working class can only gain a confidence and self-assuredness, fighting the Russian Army and winning. It is an active and combative working class that can bring sanity and stabilization to a war-torn society. The working class is the vast numerical majority in Ukraine. Yet once independence is achieved, as it was in Romania and Poland, there is no guarantee that the working class will seize power. Yet the independence achieved by the working classes of Poland and the anti-Stalinist anti-Ceausescu revolution in Romania provided breathing space for these nations to exist without an oppressive military force hounding them with occupational and police violence. Independence provides ground where the socialist movement can have a rebirth unattached to the bloody Stalinist past.
Fighting for independence and winning brings many political forces selling their programs to the working class from all political spectrums encompassing right and left. Unfortunately, the left side is not often guaranteed a win as we saw in the Spanish Civil War.
Fascist thugs are menacing parasites on the body politic. Yet they win because first and foremost they can best protect the assets of the ruling class while fighting and presenting themselves as a vanguard for middle classes, farmers and even appealing to backward workers. Huffington Post claims that under one percent of the Ukrainian population are members of fascist organizations.
As revolutionary socialists, we have to deal with the objective reality as it presents itself. Our program is based on convincing a majority to act in its own class interests. Revolutionaries have to demonstrate that their leadership can navigate the working class through the perilous path of revolution with as few casualties as possible. The capitalist ruling classes of the world are crafty and ruthless. How could we get a hearing with the Ukrainian working class if we took the side of the Russian capitalist invaders who blasted their civilization to smithereens?
The working classes of the world need to separate themselves from their national ruling classes. Deception, violence, and trickery are tools not used by the working-class parties as they face the capitalists in both peace and revolution. Debates for clarification, actions that unite disparate interests of the middle class, to bind their fortunes with the working class. These are our tools to advance the interest of the working class and their allies. Of course, the working class and their parties defend themselves from capitalist class violence.
The working class have the poor and those they can win over from the grounded forward thinking middle classes. We do not have huge donors like the capitalist parties and fascists. Our majority in numbers makes us strong provided there is leadership and a program that can change to suit conditions of the day.
What will things look like when this letter comes out in May when that issue of Socialist Viewpoint comes to print? Hopefully the violence against the Ukrainian People will be over and that Russia gets their military forces out of there. It would be fantastic to have an international antiwar movement calling for Russia and U.S./NATO to keep their hands off the Ukraine.
A most chilling outcome would be a nuclear exchange. All the experts say, "Oh no, we wouldn't use nukes, it would be suicide. We can keep this all conventional." The United States incinerated thousands of Japanese people, the young, the old, women and small children because they argued, it would "save American soldier's lives."
Years ago, a group of us young socialists gathered around leaders of Socialist Action, where we held a discussion about nuclear weapons and whether the ruling classes would ever use them. Emphatically they said yes, they will use them. "That is their terrifying conclusive logic-that is why they were built. That is why the capitalist classes worldwide have to be disarmed by their revolutionary working classes."
Victory to the Ukrainian Working Class. Support for the Russian antiwar movement. Russian and U.S./NATO hands off the Ukraine.