EDITORIAL
January 6^th Hearing Is One More Distraction

Jun 20, 2022

The news channels dominated by Democrats are filled with coverage of the ongoing January 6 House Committee hearings, while Fox News and others still try to defend Trump.

The Dems don’t even pretend that Trump will be prosecuted for any of his actions. They just want to prevent his return to the White House. Well, okay, but we have now had nearly two years of Biden in office, and all of our problems continue to worsen!

Where are the hearings to address the soaring gas and food prices? Where are the hearings to address the gutting of 401(k) and pension plans caused by the falling stock market? Or to address the fall in workers’ wages caused by rampaging inflation? Or to truly confront the pandemic, which still harms a public ill-served by an inadequate health care system?

The only thing elections offer us is a switch between Democrats and Republicans, while the problems confronting working people are never addressed. The only thing that the party out of power offers working people is the chance to vote them into power in the next election—and then nothing changes, and the cycle reverses, repeating over and over.

Many workers have come to understand that voting to replace one party by another does nothing at all for the working population. In fact, most workers don’t vote in the elections anymore.

But still, most workers feel that the elected politicians should represent us, should fix some damn thing, and not just the roads. But guess what. They won’t. Because all of these politicians of the Democrats and Republicans work within parties that put the profits of the capitalists first. Even those politicians who appear more concerned finally, in the end, bow to capitalism and the big bosses and banks because, “that’s the way the system works.” Regardless of how sorry they feel about it, they represent the capitalist class, and their job is to protect the system that prioritizes profits for the rich at the expense of our lives and livelihoods.

In this current economy, workers are in the process of getting really messed over. Every so-called solution the bosses and bankers have come up with for the mess they created just makes thing worse.

Inflation? Their solution is to choke back the economy by raising interest rates and knowingly throwing us into a recession. They say, “Oh well, there will be layoffs due to overproduction, there will be misery, but oh well.”

Retirement savings are being hit in the neck as billionaires maneuver the stock market and bond market and play the field for the best deal—for them! Many workers don’t have pensions today, but only 401(k)s or IRAs. But now, all of these funds are sinking, sinking with Wall Street billionaires’ plans to protect, not your future, but their profits!

The main indicators of a so-called “healthy economy” are in the tank. Housing starts are down: housing prices have skyrocketed. And cars? Forget about that new car you wanted to buy. They are pricing cars out of the range of ordinary workers, so that today, a used car costs what a new one used to.

Last but not least, the current inflation is robbing us. Forget buying a car—we can’t even fill the tank with gas. And while prices skyrocket, wages stagnate. Workers, who are already in debt, will be pushed even further in. The debt we already have will cost increasingly high monthly payments.

Wait for a politician? Wait for a November election? Trade a Democrat for a Republican? We don’t have time for that! The only way out of this mess is for workers to organize and fight.

The working class is in position to force changes to the bosses’ plans. We are at the center of production. We do the work to make everything run, and we can use our power to make everything stop.

We have the power to impose our own solutions on the bosses. We need massive hiring, so that everyone who needs and wants a job can have one. We need good wages, and for those wages to be raised every time prices rise. We need decent working conditions, and a humane retirement age AND retirement income. We need decent health care for everyone. And much, much more.

And if the bosses don’t want to go along, let them leave! Push them out! And screw the banks! If they take one more step to impoverish the majority of the population, they can be “reassigned”; put under new management by organizations of the working class.

The working class has the power to take control of this society and to build a system that serves the working population—and that workers ourselves would control. But only when we organize and fight together, rejecting not just one politician or another, but the capitalist system as a whole and its political parties.