Such are the priorities of the leaders of the Catholic Church. Abuse is fine. You can’t divorce abusive husbands. Hitler was fine. The Church collaborated with him. But birth control? That needs a “debate”. Even when 85% of Catholics support the right to birth control.

The Church is serving a very destructive role at the moment. We need comprehensive healthcare. Yet the Catholic Church, in opposition to the opinions of the overwhelming majority of of its members, is saying that one component of healthcare is “sinful” and that Catholic health services should be except from providing whatever services it chooses.

Its almost unbearable to listen to the President these days. He talks about “religious freedom”. But what “freedom” is there in denying services that the vast majority of people want access to (because they need access to it)? The media circus is meant to distract us from the need for comprehensive healthcare reform – and to distract from the insurance industry giveaway that was Obama’s healthcare program.

Thankfully, it seems, that not many people are falling for the attempts at divisions.

Nazi SS and SA troops march on the Karl Liebknecht House in Berlin on 22 January 1933. The building was the headquarters of the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands or KPD) until Hitler took power in 1933. It was named after the German Revolutionary Karl Liebknecht, who was murdered alongside Rosa Luxemburg by the Freikorps, one of the predecessors of the Nazis, in 1919.

“Listen, Agnes.
I am working-class.
And that really does make a difference. I know what’s useful,
and what isn’t.
I know the price of things,
and I know how to give things up.
I know what it is to struggle -
these tough little lessons
I dont think you people ever learned.
I hold tight, and I do my work.
I make posters for good causes.
Even if they get torn up, I make them, even though we live in a country
where theory falls silent in the face of fact,
where progress can be reversed overnight,
where the enemy has stolen everything, our own words from us,
I hold tight, and not to my painting . . . not only to that.
Pick any era in history, Agnes.
What is really beautiful about that era?
The way the rich lived?
No.
The way the poor lived?
No.
The dreams of the Left
are always beautiful.
The imagining of better world
the damnation of the present one.
This faith,
this luminescent anger,
these alone
are worthy of being called human.
These are the Beautiful
that an age produces.
As an artist I am struck to the heart
by these dreams. These visions.
We progress. But at great cost.
How can anyone stand to live
without understanding that much?”

-Gotchling, a character in Tony Kushner’s play A Bright Room Called Day, set in Weimar Republic (Germany) in the 1930s as country falls to fascism. Tony Kushner is the author of Angels in America.

Here is a picture of the charred remains of the residents of Tokyo after the U.S.’s firebombing campaign of 9-10 March 1945, which killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and left millions injured and homeless.

Last year in the United States a mere 20 Muslims and Arabs were accused of involvement in terrorist plots or association with terrorists, with few actual plots attempted, with many instances of government entrapment and frame-ups reported in recent years (which must be put in the context of a well-funded government war on Arabs and Muslims, including FBI spying and illegal CIA anti-Muslim programs run in conjunction with local police). Aside from the fact that we can’t trust the racist courts of the 1% in these matters, individual plots – - mostly done out of desperate frustration and retaliation against the most violent and racist imperial power the world has ever seen, and sometimes done at that government’s prompting – - are defined by the ruling class as “terrorism”, yet the incendiary- and atomic-bombing of Japan are praised as bringing “peace”. The interested reader can look to Glenn Greenwald’s excellent writings to better understand how meaningless the term “terrorism” is, and how hypocritical its usage.

Someone recently commented that while the attack on Pearl Harbor (a military target) is mourned and remembered, the U.S. government’s mass murder of millions of Japanese civilians, supposedly to bring about “peace”, are ignored – and when they aren’t ignored, they are praised. Mass murder, racist imperialism, and the promotion of fear through atomic and incendiary firestorms are aren’t called “terrorism”, but rather “peace”. Well, look here. This is capitalist ‘peace’!

If you’re not an Appalachian and have already been appealed to about saving Blair, that might have been your reaction. “It’s sad, but there are more pressing matters that need my attention. Best of luck, Appalachia.”

I write this appeal not as an insider, but an outsider. Hopefully I can persuade you otherwise. Perhaps I can relate to you – and you to me – and I can give you insight into why it matters to you. Why it should matter to all of us.

We’ll start with coal extraction generally and move to mountain top removal. Finally we’ll zero in on Blair. I’ll give you ten facts that I hope will change your mind.

10. Coal companies are enormous corporate entities that profit by extracting natural resources from communities, counties, and states in which they don’t live. Does this sound familiar?
9. Coal, as an energy source, is dirty and inefficient. Coal extraction is barbaric – antiquated, even. It’s the 21st Century. Time for something clean and new.
8. Most people who use electricity are – in one way or another – supporting the exploitation of the people of Appalachia. You are connected to coal in your daily life. This doesn’t mean that you should forgo use of electricity or purchase expensive solar panels. It does mean that you have a responsibility to do something though. Appalachians are statistically one of the most socio-economically oppressed groups in the country. They are kept that way by out-of-state corporations who exploit Appalachians and their land for profit. Even the political system in the region is undermined by dirty coal money.
7. Mountain top removal is exactly what it sounds like – blowing the top off of a mountain. Funny thing about mountains: their tops don’t grow back.
6. The combination of all MTR blasts that go on in a week in Appalachia is the equivalent of Hiroshima. All the dust, chemicals, debris has to go somewhere. Where do you think it goes? That’s right: down. Right on top of communities – homes, churches, schools. Into lungs, into bodies. The pollution doesn’t just hang out around extraction communities, either. It blows with the wind – miles away. Coal trains, too, are open – blowing dust from station to station, from point A to point B.
5. Sometimes after extracting the coal and washing it they inject the sludge, called coal slurry back into the mountain where it leaks out into the soil and into the ground water which people rely on for drinking and bathing.
4. If it’s not injected back into the ground, the slurry is placed in enormous compounds that hover over communities. These copounds have burst before and can burst again, unleashing hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic, hazardous materials onto communities.
3. Mountain top removal requires significantly less employees than underground mining. It kills jobs.
2. Mountain top removal usually employs private contractors so the coal companies are not liable for injury or death. It goes without saying that these are non-union operations.
1. Blair Mountain is the historic site of class struggle in the United States. In 1921, 10,000 miners descended on Blair Mountain to fight for their rights. They were gunned down by the coal company thugs and bombed by the U.S military. 16 miners died. It is a symbol of worker power.

Think about it.

An attack on Blair Mountain isn’t just an attack on a pretty landscape. It’s an attack on the environment. It’s an attack on Appalachian communities. It’s an attack on the working class. It’s an attack on labor and labor history.

We can break this down piece by piece, but there’s really no need. It would be repetitive. Obama’s plan is simply a bolder, more aggressive version of his first term. The name of the game is public funding of private entities. Just as he did with the massacre in Iraq and healthcare, the President is poised to hand over public entities to the whims of private ownership. On top of that, he’s willing to shell out taxpayer money.

This doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Public/private partnerships sound like a cute combination of capitalism and socialism. How American. How reasonable. How bat-shit insane.

The problem with public/private partnerships is that they operate according to the rules of the private sector and therefore to the advantage of the private sector. What you have, in effect, is a private corporation that is incentivized and propped up by public funding. It cuts out the average citizen (who theoretically “votes” for “good” corporations with their dollar) and funnels the money directly to whoever holds the contract. This is done with a sort of blanket consent offered by the masses that doesn’t come anywhere near being actually democratic. It’s not just “bad”, it’s atrocious and horrifying.

Many liberals will read this with their jaws hitting the floor, but not for the reason I would hope. They’re aghast that I could openly criticize what they see – and what was presented to them as – reasonable solutions to real problems. They’re not solutions, though. These are issues that were created by the private sector. Using the private sector to fix these problems is not reasonable, it’s downright nutty.

Why?

Private corporations have shown themselves to have:
No regard for the environment.
No regard for workers’ rights.
No regard for creating an anti-oppressive work environment.
No regard for the impacts of their decisions and practices on communities, the country or the world.

These are the people and entities we think should be solving the education crisis in this country? The people who chop down workers should be tasked with lifting them up? The people who unfairly pay women should be liberating them? The people who exploit the poor and sick should be the ones to ameliorate their ills? The fox should guard the hen house. Criminals should judge and punish themselves.

This is not sound policy. This is corporatism. This is not progressive, nor revolutionary.

As a side note, Obama also continued with his jingoistic militarism, open and flagrant support for his vicious deportation scheme (more deportations than under Bush), disgusting support for Israel in the genocide against Palestinians etc.

If you’re a liberal and can still support this murdering fat cat, be my guest. But stop pretending that you (or he) are progressive or anywhere remotely left of center.

“Gasoline with lead additives was invented in the United States, and from the United States a barrage of advertising imposed it on the world. In 1986, when the U.S. government finally decided to outlaw it, the number of victims of lead poisoning was incalculable. It was known all along that leaded gasoline was killing adults in the United States at a rate of five thousand a year, and causing irreparable damage to the nervous systems and mental development of millions of children.

“The principle authors of this crime were two executives from General Motors, Charles Kettering and Alfred Sloan. They have gone down in history as generous benefactors of humanity. They founded a hospital.” – Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone

Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone is a wonderful book of poetic short stories, telling stories from history, always from the prospective of the downtrodden and oppressed. Almost all of the stories are between a few paragraphs and 2 pages. Great subway, bathroom, before bed reading. You can literally open the book up randomly whenever you have a few spare moments. No matter what page you find yourself on, you won’t be disappointed. Check it out today.

“Darwinism, which explained the evolution of species through quantitative transformations passing into qualitative, was the highest triumph of the dialectic in the whole field of organic matter. Another great triumph was the discovery of the table of atomic weights of chemical elements and further the transformation of one element into another.

“With these transformations (species, elements, etc.) is closely linked the question of classification, equally important in the natural as in the social sciences. Linnaeus’ system (18th century), utilising as its starting point the immutability of species, was limited to the description and classification of plants according to their external characteristics. The infantile period of botany is analogous to the infantile period of logic, since the forms of our thought develop like everything that lives. Only decisive repudiation of the idea of fixed species, only the study of the history of the evolution of plants and their anatomy prepared the basis for a really scientific classification.

“Marx, who in distinction from Darwin was a conscious dialectician, discovered a basis for the scientific classification of human societies in the development of their productive forces and the structure of the relations of ownership which constitute the anatomy of society. Marxism substituted for the vulgar descriptive classification of societies and states, which even up to now still flourishes in the universities, a materialistic dialectical classification. Only through using the method of Marx is it possible correctly to determine both the concept of a workers’ state and the moment of its downfall.

“All this, as we see, contains nothing “metaphysical” or “scholastic”, as conceited ignorance affirms. Dialectic logic expresses the laws of motion in contemporary scientific thought. The struggle against materialist dialectics on the contrary expresses a distant past, conservatism of the petit-bourgeoisie, the self-conceit of university routinists and … a spark of hope for an after-life.” – Leon Trotsky, “The ABC of Materialist Dialectics“, December 1939

Longer version: