Wednesday, February 24, 2021

The day United States Senator Lyndon B. Johnson opportunistically joined the red-baiting and what the result meant for us


150 years of capitalist industrialization and rape of Mother Nature caused global warming and climate change.


I doubt a bunch of greedy profit driven capitalists have a clue about how to solve the problem.


Without considering socialist oriented solutions like public ownership and control of basic industries and the energy industry it is doubtful these problems can be solved.

The Artic freeze and loss of power and heat...


Should give us all something to ponder...


This presents the case for nationalization through public ownership and democratic control of the entire energy sector and the power grid.


Leland Olds was pushing forward this approach when his old friend Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson decided to launch into a vicious attack on his old friend from the New Deal days in return for support from the oil and gas industry.


The day LBJ launched this anti-Communist smear attack on Leland Olds in the U.S. Senate was one of the saddest days in U.S. politics... and American history... an untold and covered up story smothered by the mainstream media owned by Wall Street interests with teachers in our public schools still fearful of teaching.


And we are paying dearly for this attack today.


Something Democrats may want to ponder as two-million Texans are left without power shivering in the cold in a state with one of the biggest electric generating capacity all subsidized by state and federal tax-payers and those who are paying high priced electric bills from which the billionaires and millionaires reap huge profits.


Leland Olds was an American socialist economist interested in labor, development of public electric power, and ecology who President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed as a Federal Power Commissioner (1939 to 1947).


Like other prominent New Dealers such as Frances Perkins, most people in this country know little about these people.


Olds was supported by the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party (political alliance of the Socialist and Communist parties together with organized labor and progressive farm groups) which pushed the idea of a cooperative socialist commonwealth... an idea advanced by Leland Olds who saw cooperatives playing a leading role in developing a socialist alternative to capitalism.


Shivering in the cold is one price, among many horrendous prices, we pay for the politics of opportunism of which anti-Communism is a primary defining feature of the two-party trap... the shivering truth; figure out if the pun is intended and appropriate as you shiver beneath the blankets tonite.