My favorite article, however, is the one on the new openings in coal, the opening of a second union mine in Utah and the prospect of jobs and union building that now lies before us. That is a great article. It is a call to revolutionary minded youth to join the fight, work side by side with other toilers in beginning the rebuilding of the unions and workers’ consciousness and self-confidence. It is the “what” and the “why” that I signed up for 40 years ago.

Robin Maisel
Waco, Texas  
 
Co-Op coverage
I have been reading the Militant for some 45 years and have always been impressed by the honesty, objectivity, and correctness of its reporting.

However, I must now express my discomfort about the November 23 article on the Co-Op mine owners, the Kingston family. Here, the Militant has infringed, I believe, on its own high standards.

What has their flouting of bourgeois legality and morals (polygamy, child support obligations) have to do with their oppression of their workers?

I think that reports on this very important struggle should be kept on a strictly political basis.

Bea Bryant
Blenheim, Ontario

[We agree. And we’ll work with our reporters to keep the proper focus on the coverage. —Editor]  
 
U.S. elections
I am a high school student living in Canada, and I have been trusting you as my number one source of information regarding the American elections. Thank goodness that somebody is telling the truth about the pro-imperialist, pro-war warmonger, Sen. John Kerry. Kerry’s platform was in no way different from Bush; if anything, he was more like Bush than Bush himself. I sort of mean that sarcastically, but really it’s almost true. I think that America needs a political party based on the unions, but be careful. In Canada, we have a party called the New Democratic Party (NDP), based on “labour,” and it is pretty much all for business as usual (capitalism!).

For a month or two now, I have been printing off articles from the Militant, and my friends and I have been doing a small reading group at lunch hour. We may be of all different races, but we are united by the fact that our moms and dads sure aren’t rich. Up here, we understand why a lot of working people (who are like our families) in the United States voted for Bush. He didn’t try to talk like some Ivy League snob like Kerry.

Keep up the great work.

Norm P.
by e-mail  
 
Antiworker bias
Your article “Middle-class contempt for workers fuels liberal panic over U.S. elections” (November 23 issue) raised a few questions for me. The article generalized the reasons that the majority of workers voted for the incumbent. What relationship do these generalizations have to the voting habits of the Black working class and large city workers? These groups seemed to vote overwhelmingly against the incumbent.

How should we interpret the polling for many workers that indicated the impact of “moral issues” on voting motivation and candidate choice?

Kenneth Page
Brooklyn, New York  
 
Key industries
Seems to me you missed two key industries that were tiny or non-existent in Marx’s time and would also quickly bring the whole economy to a halt (Reply to Reader “Are industrial workers becoming irrelevant?” in November 16 issue).

In the electrical generation and distribution industry shut down even a small number of generation plants and the wheels of industry would come to a screeching halt. Electricity has to be generated in real time, which means the bosses can’t stock up in preparation for a strike unless they want to build in extra capacity to the power grids and more generating plants.

The communications industry—mail, telegraph, telephone, and Internet—once again functions in real time and any significant halt here would quickly cripple transportation, just-in-time manufacturing, trade, and banking.

While telegraph has been long in decline and cable TV started in the 1950s in rural areas for TV, cable TV now provides Internet, and telephone services beginning to directly competing with the major telephone companies. The phone company unions allowed the Internet portion of the industry to be classified as management positions and have had little success organizing cable TV workers.

SBC, one of the so-called “Baby Bells,” recently announced the elimination of 10,000 jobs through attrition and layoffs.

Kim O’Brien
Willimantic, Connecticut

The letters column is an open forum for all viewpoints on subjects of interest to working people.

Please keep your letters brief. Where necessary they will be abridged. Please indicate if you prefer that your initials be used rather than your full name.  
 
 
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