Office of Chairman TNF: Red Army takes NM, UT, ID, AZ

[windjammer]

As someone who doesn't support your foreign views at all,

Endorsed comrade, you're an active and dedicated member of the senate.

[TNF]

As someone who doesn't support your foreign views at all,

Endorsed comrade, you're an active and dedicated member of the senate.

Thank you for your support, windjammer. You've always been a good friend and comrade, and I'm glad that I can call you as such. I hope that you'll join us in elective office once again one day.

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

I wouldn't exactly put the Welsh and the Palestinians on the same boat . Otherwise, excellent address from the PPT.

[TNF]

I wouldn't exactly put the Welsh and the Palestinians on the same boat . Otherwise, excellent address from the PPT.

Perhaps not, but both are a people denied the right of self-governance. Of course the situation in Palestine is much graver, but nonetheless, I think the comparison is worth making. Thank you for your kind words, Comrade Attorney General.

[Simfan34]

What are you talking about? There are elections in Wales.

[DemPGH]

Thanks for your support, Senator! You have mine - I think you've been a model for activity, a voice for peace, and you have definitely eased life for the masses. Endorsed!

[TNF]

What are you talking about? There are elections in Wales.

There are indeed elections in Wales, Governor. But the Welsh people should be allowed to choose independence alongside the Scots and the inhabitants of occupied Ireland.

Thanks for your support, Senator! You have mine - I think you've been a model for activity, a voice for peace, and you have definitely eased life for the masses. Endorsed!

Thank you for your kind words, Comrade President. I am glad I can count you as a friend and as a supporter. Atlasia is moving forward under your enlightened leadership.

[TNF]

Schedule of events for the Week of August 31, 2014

Sunday, August 31
Foreign policy speech "Committed to Peace" in Missoula, Wonderment

Monday, September 1 - Labor Day
Domestic policy speech on labor issues  "Greater than their Hoarded Gold" in Minneapolis, Joy

Tuesday, September 2
Domestic policy speech on economic policy "Vote Yourself a Factory" in Omaha, Grit

Wednesday, September 3
Domestic policy speech on civil rights "Solidarity Forever" in Osawatomie, Harmony

Thursday, September 4
Domestic policy speech on civil liberties "The Free Development of All" in Denver, Mirth

Friday, September 5
Domestic policy speech on farm policy "Land to the Landless" in Cedar Rapids, Moxie

Saturday, September 6
Domestic policy speech on energy policy "Sustainable Socialism" in Fargo, Serenity

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

Followup question: Do you support Atlasian recognition of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I'm Welsh and what's this.

[Fmr President & Senator Polnut]

I also missed the part where Scotland is going to become a Republic...

[TNF]

Followup question: Do you support Atlasian recognition of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic?

At this juncture, I'm not entirely sure, and given that I do not know enough about the region, I would prefer not to comment until I have researched the issue further. Thank you for your question, however, Comrade Attorney General. I will respond as quickly as I can.

I also missed the part where Scotland is going to become a Republic...

I never said that Scotland would be a republic, but it would of course be disappointing to see a Scotland that recognizes Elizabeth II as its head of state. Nonetheless, should the Scots choose a republic (inherently superior in every single way to the parasitism of monarchy) or should they choose to remain a monarchy, the Scottish struggle for independence and self-governance is something that I strongly and fully support.

[TNF]

GREATER THAN THEIR HOARDED GOLD
A Labor Day message from the President Pro Tempore

The great city of Minneapolis in the state of Joy has been the site of many a labor struggle, most notably the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster Strike, which transformed the city from a bastion of the 'open shop' into a union town.

Comrades!

Today we come together to celebrate the Atlasian worker. It is with great pride that I can register my name among those friends of labor in the Labor Party and in all parties that have helped us construct a modern and humane labor code for our nation. My crowning achievement, and I will go to my grave defending said achievement, is of course, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 2013. It was a bipartisan effort, with the drafting process ultimately working out in favor of compromise, although it was (and still is) a contentious piece of legislation to this day. I will, as your Senator, continue to stand on the side of the working class in all my days in the Senate. You can count on that.

Of course, with all that Labor has achieved, it's easy to say that we have done enough, or in the words of some of our fair-weather friends in the People's Party, we have done "too much," or that we have created an environment "hostile to business growth," or any of the canards the likes of a certain Governor likes to throw around when addressing the Labor program. But to say that we have done enough, or to assert that we have gone too far, is to ignore the reality of labor relations on the ground. Workers are still denied the right to organize unions in a very prominent sector of the economy (the military, that is) for example. Workers are still denied input in decisions that greatly affect them, be it the decision to close a plant or the decision to dump toxic waste in a fresh water source. New forms of organizing are being brought into being and need to be addressed and brought into the overall framework of collective bargaining, be they consumers' unions or students' unions.

Currently, there are some pieces of legislation in the queue to address these issues, but more work will be needed in the future to address the future of the ongoing class struggle between those who add value and those who do not. The Codetermination Act of 2014 is a resurrected version of the Codetermination and Cooperative Development Act of 2013, which unfortunately failed to pass the Senate in a close vote. The Codetermination Act of 2014 will give workers a say on corporate boards and will ultimately give workers more control over the workplace. The Collective Bargaining Modernization Act of 2014 is another attempt at a bill of the previous name, which, again, failed in a close vote the last time it was considered by the Senate. This act would allow for sectional unions to bargain directly with entire sectors of the economy, thus standardizing working conditions, wages, and benefits across industry and adding some degree of rationalization to the economy as a whole.

These two pieces of legislation are, I think, essential to the further development of our economy in a way that gives workers a voice at the table, rather than allows Capital to continue its domination of our economy, our lives, our nation, and our world. But these alone are not sufficient. In the next legislative session, I will introduce legislation allowing for consumers to form unions and bargain directly with distributors over prices and other concerns, students to form unions and bargain directly with universities and school districts over conditions in the classroom, funding, and tuition fees; public transit users to form unions and directly bargain with local governments over transit rider fees, etc. The development of a new and bold form of social unionism is happening all around us, and we on the side of labor would be foolhardy not to embrace these movements and make their causes our own. As I said to the good people of Missoula yesterday, I will also introduce legislation allowing soldiers to form unions and bargain collectively with the federal government concerning wages and working conditions.

We must reinvigorate our labor movement as well by putting up a strong defense of internal union democracy, as well. I am a friend of all democratic or reform movements within the labor movement and will sponsor legislation in the next legislative session that will improve the rights of rank and file union members' control over their union organizations and expand the power of the rank and file as opposed to the entrenched bureaucracies that are unfortunately the result of fighting for social justice in the capitalist jungle. I believe that union members should have control over their own pension funds and that unions should be given the same tax advantages we give corporations -- if we are going to subsidize Capital accumulation, there's no reason for us not to subsidize the development of a free working class.

The final conflict between Labor and Capital may yet be upon us, and in that case, we must be prepared to engage in that conflict by any means necessary. I shall continue to reiterate my call for a universal arming of the working class and the universal military training of the working class, as well as the development of independent workers' militia groups for the purpose of defending and policing their communities, and kicking the bourgeoisie and its scabs-in-blue out of our neighborhoods.

So long as there is a class struggle, I shall be a partisan in it. I am for the class struggle. I am for the defeat of Capital by Labor and the erection of a workers', farmers', and soldiers' government in Nyman. But I understand that we cannot live upon revolution alone, and as a Senator, I will continue to seek the reform of Atlasian capitalism so as to make the transition to socialism that much simpler, that much easier, that much quicker. I shall always and forever believe those words from the old labor hymn, Solidarity Forever:

In OUR hands is placed a power, greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand fold
WE can bring to birth a new world, from the ashes of the old

We are the ones that we have been waiting for, workingmen and workingwomen of Atlasia. We are marching forward, toward the realization of our world historical mission: the defeat of capital and the ushering in of the cooperative commonwealth of humankind. We can do this. We must do this.

[SWE]

Endorsed!

[TNF]

Endorsed!

Thank you for your endorsement, comrade.

[TNF]

What has TNF ever done for me?
A comprehensive catalog of legislation introduced by the Senator from Wonderment and passed by the Senate

1. Amendment to the Labor Rights Act of 2012
2. Responsible Federal Contracting Act of 2013
3. Death With Dignity Act
4. Amendment to the Student Loan Interest Rate Fairness Act
5. Black Friday Means Black Friday Act
6. Recognition of Labor Act of 2013
7. Paid Leave Act of 2013
8. Sex Work Act of 2013
9. Fair Labor Standards Act of 2013
10. An Actual End to Imperialism Act
11. Comprehensive Drug Reform Act of 2013
12. The "You can't fire me, I quit!" Act of 2013
13. Transgender Rights Act of 2013
14. Amendment to The Productivity Equalization and Worker Employment Act of 2011
15. Freedom of Thought and Association Act of 2013
16. State Name Recognition Act of 2013
17. Employer Non-Interference Act of 2013
18. Homeschooling Act of 2014
19. Circumsicion Act of 2014
20. Freedom From Religion Act
21. Anti-Plutocracy Act of 2014
22. End Affirmative Action for the Rich Act
23. Fair Taxation Act
24. The DemPGH Fortune Fairness Act
25. Party Like It's Your Birthday Act
26. Contract Modernization and Continuity Act of 2014
27. Public Intoxication Act
28. Cheech and Chong Act
29. Cooperative Development Act of 2014
30. Rapists Shouldn't Have Custody Act of 2014
31. The Public Means Public Act
32. Demilitarization Act of 2014
33. End Sports Profiteering Act of 2014
34. Sweet Sixteen Act of 2014
35. Fair Hiring Act of 2014
36. Railway Labor Act of 2014
37. End McCarthyism Once and For All Act of 2014
38. Oil Pipeline Funding Expungement Act

[Maxwell]

Oh lordy, look at all those things you've been able to pass.

[TNF]

Oh lordy, look at all those things you've been able to pass.

Now now, I seem to remember having quite a bit of help from a certain someone on a few of those bills.

[TNF]

VOTE YOURSELF A FACTORY
Building Atlasian Socialism

The Midwest is Red! Senator TNF joins us for an early morning talk on building socialism in Atlasia from the industrial hub of Omaha in the great state of Grit

Comrades!

It's good to see everyone out this early. I know, I know, it has to be terrible going back to work after having a nice, long, four-day weekend, but unfortunately, so long as the capitalists run the show, we don't have much of a say in the matter. But changing that is what I'm actually here to talk about today. How do we build socialism in Atlasia? Will socialism come from the ballot box alone?

Before I try to address those questions, I would like to first comment upon the moves we have made in the direction of socialism since the Labor Party came into being as an explicitly socialist party committed to the fundamental reorganization of society upon a socialist basis. We have done a lot in the way of expanding the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively, and I hit upon a few of those themes yesterday in my Labor Day address, but expanded collective bargaining and higher union density alone are not socialism. We have expanded the welfare state, but again, an expansion of the welfare state alone is not socialism. We have even enacted a strong bill providing developmental aid to cooperative enterprises, but again, this is not, in and of itself, socialism. Perhaps the closest we came to establishing a socialist island in the capitalist sea was during the debate over the Public Fuel and Power Act of 2014, which would have established a democratically-governed and publicly-administered public energy monopoly, one that could have pushed us fully in the direction of renewable energy, were it not for the sniping of the so-called 'serious people' (i.e. the apologists for capitalist ownership of our energy supply) with no plan of their own other than to allow the capitalists to continue to gouge us at the pump and in our monthly electricity bills.

But alas, for the time being, public ownership of energy has been shelved, in part because of a furious media campaign waged by the capitalist press and their allies and in part because of an unwillingness to take up the issue until a concrete plan with broad support in the Labor Party itself can be drawn up and once again carried forward. I have many regrets over the conclusion of the previous debate, and most of those center on the fact that, until the very last hour, almost no one bothered to offer concrete proposals of their own, waiting to snipe the proposal that I had worked out at the very end. This is unfortunate because some of the kinks in my own plan (and I'm fully aware that there were some) could have been worked out early on and the lot of us could be driving home today after filling up at an Atlasian Energy Authority-owned gas station at no charge. Public ownership of energy is not dead, it is only, at this point in time, in hibernation. You can mark my words that I will not rest until not only energy is publicly owned in the Republic of Atlasia, but until all industry in Atlasia is publicly owned and managed by the workers themselves.

Socialism is not public ownership alone, a point that Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky (to say nothing of the whole great pantheon of socialist thinkers) made clear time and time again in their own writings. Socialism is the ownership of the means of production by the working class and the democratic control and management of those means of production by the working class. It is true economic democracy. This is why I was not satisfied with simply creating another bureaucracy in the case of the public power debate and it is why I created mechanisms within the bill that provided for workers to elect representatives and the public at-large to be represented. If we are to have public ownership in the 21st century, it must not be the same kind of squalid, undemocratic, bureaucracy that characterized the public ownership of the 20th century. It must be democratic. It must be alive with activity. It must be directly controlled by the public, not by bureaucrats from this or that department.

The creation of such democratic public enterprises will provide schooling for the working class itself in how the whole of society shall be structured under socialism. It will provide a 'boot camp' for the radical democratic socialist society of the future, but even so, it will, still not be socialism by itself. For socialism to be attained, the whole of the economy must be subordinated to workers' control and workers' management. In seizing utilities and other essential sectors, we are still leaving many sectors of the economy in the hands of the capitalists, and, I am convinced, that although we may attempt to wrest these enterprises from the capitalists democratically (and I will make every attempt to do so while in the Senate), we won't be able to fully establish socialism through the ballot box. We may yet need a revolution to accomplish such a feat, as no ruling class in the history of class society has ever peacefully yielded its control of society.

I would like to outline, however, what I think should be our goals so far as building socialism in the here and now, that is, preparing for the revolution to come, should be. First and foremost, expanding the right of the working class to organize into all sectors of the economy and in new contexts, is essential to building socialism. Yesterday I noted that we need to embrace new kinds of unions, ones that bring together students, consumers, or service users to bargain collectively with school districts, distributors, or service providers. These provide a new avenue for the construction of socialism and a new means of waging the class struggle, and further, they help foster class consciousness among the workers themselves. We must also continue to expand the control of workers over their own unions and their workplaces.

[TNF]

Secondly, we must commit ourselves to increasing the control of workers over the key sectors of the economy, with the eventual goal of a fully publicly owned and managed economy. We must re-visit the debate on public power, but we must also begin a debate on public ownership of and democratic management of transportation in Atlasia. From automobile companies to airliners to cruise lines, these must be taken in to full public ownership so that we can begin a process of fully revitalizing our transportation sector, making the decisions that have to be made in lieu of climate change, and making transportation safe and affordable for all. We have to not only bring energy under public control and democratic management, but we must also bring heating, water, telecommunications, and other essential services under public ownership and democratic management. The world's foremost economic and social power should not be one in which any person freezes to death in the winter, goes without reliable water or has to boil water to use it on a regular basis, or doesn't have access to the Internet.

Production itself must be brought under public ownership and democratic management, for use rather than for private profit. There are many factories that lay idle and there are even more workers without jobs - let us bring them together in publicly-owned, democratically-managed industries where they can produce to the limit those things that we all need, be they smart meters for our homes to help check energy usage or electric cars. And of course, we cannot even begin to discuss these without bringing that sector which has the ability to crash our entire economy under heel - the financial sector. At present, democratic management of the economy is ultimately undermined from within by the unaccountable, undemocratic Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve, and, for that matter, the entire banking sector, must be brought under public ownership and democratic management. Private banking and private control of our money supply have proven themselves untenable even under the present capitalist epoch, and must be abolished with all due haste.

In addition to expanding the publicly-owned, democratically-managed sectors of the economy, we must also continue to expand our welfare state. Lifelong education and retraining for the unemployed or underemployed must be heavily subsidized by the federal government. We must move in the direction of offering more public services to communities without regard to cost, as well. At present, we have a national system of public libraries that serve our communities and provide them with free access to knowledge. I would propose that we enact legislation creating public gymnasiums along the same line, providing equal access to fitness for all who seek to use them. We must provide free eye tests in every school, not unlike the free meals currently provided as of the latest piece of federal legislation concerning education, to help identify problems with eyesight early on and get children the help they need.

Universal access to education must also be enacted on a broad scale, with full federal financing of education from pre-school to graduate school. Students should be provided with state of the art technology, classroom sizes should be strictly limited, and students above a certain age should be provided with a weekly stipend, so as to discourage them from holding a job and instead encourage them to focus on their studies. We must subsidize the arts and bring art from the masses to the masses. The great programs of the New Deal period for artists must be revived and put under control of the artists themselves; we must fund a lot of experimentation and new ways of thinking, so far as the arts are concerned. We must provide grants for young people to organize themselves, to form clubs and debating societies and so on; such grants would allow the young to develop the skills that under a socialist society, they would need in order to participate in a radically democratic, egalitarian society.

We must also, of course, finish Fritzcare. And by that, I mean, we must build a democratic National Health Service covering all aspects of medical care at no charge to those who utilize those services. The democratic National Health Service should be managed by doctors, nurses, and patients, and should provide dental and mental health services in addition to standard coverage. For prospective parents, we should provide free parenting classes.

At present, I have introduced a bill providing for work for all who are unemployed and seek to work. The Job Guarantee Act would be a cornerstone of our welfare state if passed, for it would ensure that no person is unemployed unless they consciously choose unemployment, a choice that, in light of the oppressive, authoritarian conditions of modern capitalism, I greatly sympathize with, at this juncture. In that vein, I of course support the expansion of Nixcome and redesigning it into a truly universal basic income program for all who create value.

We must have universal child care programs to help liberate women from the drudgery of housework. We must have rent controls to prevent gouging of the tenant by the landlord. We must ensure that every person that is now homeless has a place to stay, and we must do so by prying open vacant hotel rooms, seizing the unused mansions of the bourgeoisie, and constructing new, communal public housing.

[TNF]

Above all, and, fundamentally, it does not matter which way our welfare state grows so long as it provides us with a means to de-commodify that which is essential to our wellbeing. We must embrace the logic of de-commification and take it yet a step further by taking the fight itself to the capitalists, that is, by making the first steps toward expropriating the expropriators.

Controls on the export of capital must be enacted swiftly to prevent capital flight in light of the enactment of any or all of the above policies. If the capitalists will not hire the unemployed, if they will not produce, they forfeit their right to own the means of production to the working class. We should thus seize those industries where the capitalists have proposed relocating capital overseas and transform them into democratic enterprises. We must also be aware of, and must clamp down upon, bourgeois attempts to undermine the democratic process. Racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, and other bigoted ideas and the groups that organize around them are the battering ram of the bourgeoisie against working class unity. So long as these ideas may be freely proclaimed in public, on television or on the radio, working class unity is in danger. We must not shirk away from use of coercive force to bar these poisonous ideas from being injected into our national debate, and we must not shirk away from prosecuting those individuals who deliberately use them as a means of dividing and conquering the working class.

The bourgeoisie should be explicitly denied the right to purchase for their children a better education or better medical care. Private medical care and private education should be totally banned upon the creation of a fully fledged, democratic and public alternative. Homeschooling, already restricted under our laws, must be completely and totally banned.

The tax structure should be altered so as to make war against the bourgeoisie, rather than to divide up the working class and tax it to pay for the bourgeois state. We should reject any and all taxation that is regressive in nature or that levies a tax upon income, rather than one which levies a tax upon how income is derived. The income tax has long been hailed as a progressive advance, but it is undeniably bourgeois in character in that it assumes all income should equally be subject to taxation; it ignores the crucial question of how an income is made. Capital gains taxation or inheritance taxation, on the other hand, do not. Nor does a Land Value Tax, another option that we must strongly consider enacting as a replacement for the kind of individualized, bourgeois taxation that now exists.

However, some individual taxation, at least so far as individual spending on the part of the bourgeoisie is concerned, is worth maintaining and expanding. Thus I recently introduced the Tax the Bastards Act of 2014, which would enact a mansion tax and a tax upon luxury goods, two key components in our war against the bourgeoisie. I continue to support the capping of incomes of the bourgeoisie. No person should earn more annually than five (5) times the annual yearly income of a minimum wage worker. But none of this can even begin to be enforceable unless we fundamentally strengthen our tax code. We need to start sending tax cheats to prison and we need to start throwing up sanctions and restrictions upon travel and trade with known tax havens. We must make the tax returns of the bourgeoisie publicly accessible, so that everyone may view how these parasites get their money and what they do with it. Home ownership should be strictly regulated. No person should be allowed to own a second home, and all excess homes should be seized and converted into communal living spaces for the working class.

We must also not forget, in our war against the bourgeoisie, that the working class must likewise be built up to combat this class of parasites. A public educational campaign on the real division of society, between producers and parasites, must be the official policy of the Labor Party and the state itself. Education must be reorganized and actually taught from a material, i.e. from a scientific, basis, rather than being used as a means of bourgeois propaganda. Public service broadcasting should be democratized and expanded; the state should fund the growth of publicly-owned, democratic newspapers and deliver those newspapers for free, as well as promote more community television timeslots and the like.

As I noted yesterday, the working class must fundamentally begin to learn how to push the struggle forward in its own terms, on a military basis. The events in Ferguson, Missouri show us that the police cannot be trusted to police our communities. The police are the scabs-in-blue of the bourgeoisie, not friends of the workers or of their communities. We must disarm the police, regulate the hiring and firing of police officers, and ideally substitute for the police a system whereby concerned citizens can apply for licenses to patrol their own communities as special public safety patrols. We must familiarize the working class with the workings of the gun and we must arm every proletarian household.

Fundamentally, we shall not build socialism through the ballot box. I wish it were not so, but it is undeniable that the bourgeoisie will defend its privileges and its power at all costs, and so it is prudent and makes sense for us to organize and to defend ourselves, and, eventually, to make the revolution that will free us from toil. In the interim, I will continue to seek reform within the capitalist system, but never lose sight of the ultimate goal, of worldwide socialist revolution. I am first and foremost a revolutionist, a dialectical materialist, a proletarian internationalist, and a Marxist. You may not agree with where I stand, but you will never have any doubts as to it, and that I can guarantee you.

Onward to socialism, comrades! Onward to the cooperative commonwealth of all humankind!

[TNF]

SOLIDARITY FOREVER
Completing the Civil Rights Revolution

The city of Osawatomie in the state of Harmony was the site of a major battle for civil rights led by abolitionist militant John Brown in the 1850s. Senator TNF, an admirer of John Brown, joins us today from this small Midwestern town.

Comrades!

It is great to be in small town Atlasia today, and even greater that that small town is one with such a rich and important history. One of my personal heroes is and will always be John Brown, that fiery abolitionist who Frederick Douglass said, and I'm paraphrasing here, was the only man he knew that could "die for the slave," that would of course sacrifice his life for the greater good of bringing an end to the horror of slavery. John Brown may have been hanged for the crime of doing the right thing by opposing slavery in 1859, but his spirit lives on. It lives on within the Labor Party, it lives on within the labor movement, among those that seek to smash the chains of our modern equivalent of slavery, that is, wage slavery, and free all workers from their daily toil. It lives on in social movements that seek the equality of men and women and those of us who do not identify with a gender or those of us that have a different term for our specific gender expression. It lives on in the anti-racist movement. It lives on in the movement for LGBTQ liberation. It lives on in each and everyone one of us that embrace that dictum that freedom must be grasped "by any means necessary," in the words of the great revolutionary Malcolm X.

In the spirit of John Brown, my address today is concerned primarily with the liberation of oppressed peoples. From Belfast to Edinburgh, from Barcelona to the Gaza Strip, from Kurdistan to Montreal, we must stand with those who seek to bee free from the shackles of oppression. And, likewise, in our own country, we must recognize the right of all oppressed people to govern themselves. The native people of Hawaii, of Puerto Rico, and of all colonized areas, must be allowed the option to chart a course all their own, or be allowed to request autonomy from the federal and regional governments. So should it be in the deep South, where black Atlasians compose the numerical majority and yet lack control over the major institutions that dominate their lives. The Civil Rights Act of 2014, which I have proposed and which is currently in the queue, outlines a process by which autonomy or independence is a possibility for oppressed people in the Republic of Atlasia.

The Civil Rights Act of 2014 also outlines a process by which the rights of the oppressed in society at large can be better protected than at present. We must not only act to protect the rights of the oppressed, but to extend those rights and guard them -- by any means necessary. We must first seek to root out racism, sexism, xenophobia, and all other bigoted belief systems which seek to divide the working class. The public prohibition of advocating for these bigoted worldviews is a necessity if we are to actually do much of anything about them. We cannot allow open racists, misogynists, or homophobes to march down our streets and attack large segments of our population.

We should make it so that those who seek to spew this vile hatred in public spend time behind bars, pay fines, and have to pay back their debt to society by taking classes that educate these persons on the wrongness behind the bigoted things that they advocate. If these forces organize and attempt to block the implementation of such a law, these elements should have their heads acquainted with the pavement. We should provide no quarter for bigotry in this country.

Much of what I advocate here has been detailed in long form in the Civil Rights Act of 2014, and as such, I will not repeat it here. Interested parties may look in the queue thread and read the bill for themselves. What I want to make an overall note of today is that racism and other forms of oppression cannot simply be eliminated by promoting certain numbers of an oppressed group or changing the way oppressed persons are represented in the media. Make no mistake -- I believe that both of the above are goals worth fighting for. But I want to underline the fact that bigotry under capitalism is systemic and serves a certain purpose, that is, to block the unity of and the organization of the working masses to demand their own liberation as a class and smash the bourgeois oppressors.

We must tackle systemic bigotry and everyday bigotry at the same time. These are not either or goals, they are the pre-eminent mission of the modern progressive movement. We cannot even begin to talk about working class unity and working class unity until we start breaking down the bigoted attitudes that prevail in society at-large. We must thus build a rainbow coalition to tear down bigotry and liberate the working class. We must smash not only capitalism, not only the state, but also the concept of 'race', the concept of 'gender', the concept of 'sexual orientation', etc. We must smash all hierarchies that we have not ourselves chosen democratically. Then, and only then, will we be able to say that John Brown can rest in peace, that liberation of the oppressed is a full and complete project.

[Sopranos Republican]

I shouldn't have to say this, but ENDORSED for reelection, comrade!

[TNF]

I shouldn't have to say this, but ENDORSED for reelection, comrade!

Thank you for your support, Mr. Vice President.

[Gass3268]

Obviously endorsed!