the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jul 16, 2012
Former FBI Director Louis Freeh’s report on the Penn State scandal stated clearly what everyone knew had to be true: University officials knew about Jerry Sandusky’s crimes from at least 1998; and at every level from the very top on down, they did nothing to put a stop to his abuse of young boys.
The list includes his boss, long-time football coach Joe Paterno, as well as athletic directors and top administrators at the college itself. Every one of them knew that crimes against young children were being perpetrated–and every one of them chose to allow them to keep happening for at least fourteen more years.
No one should be surprised that this could happen. In this society, sports are a big business–and college football is one of the biggest. Penn State’s football program has pulled in millions upon millions of dollars for the university, Paterno and everyone around him. Next to that, the lives of any number of helpless, young boys were expendable–the cost of doing business, or of making sure that the bucks kept rolling in. In this class society, these young victims were easy to ignore–they were poor; they and their families were all the more powerless, and their lives were all the more worthless to all of these moneyed men.
If anyone has any doubt just how little all these administrators cared about the lives of the victims, they need only take a look at the latest news: In early 2011, just as Joe Paterno and other administrators at Penn State were learning that prosecutors were finally investigating Sandusky–that the secrets they all knew about and had helped to hide for years were soon going to come out–Paterno renegotiated his contract, a year early. And as the investigation went on, the university’s president reached an agreement with Paterno–to give him a RAISE!
It’s the disgusting logic of the capitalist system: where profits are involved, even the most vulnerable human lives will be damned, despised and destroyed.
Such a system deserves to die.