Socialist Party Demands 1912

I thought it would be of interest to examine the Socialist Party demands in 1912:

Collective Ownership

1. The collective ownership and democratic management of railroads, wire and wireless telegraphs and telephones, express services, steamboat lines and all other social means of transportation and communication and of all large-scale industries.

2. The immediate acquirement by the municipalities, the states or the federal government of all grain elevators, stock yards, storage warehouses, and other distributing agencies, in order to reduce the present extortionate cost of living.

3. The extension of the public domain to include mines, quarries, oil wells, forests and water power.

4. The further conservation and development of natural resources for the use and benefit of all the people . . .

5. The collective ownership of land wherever practicable, and in cases where such ownership is impracticable, the appropriation by taxation of the annual rental value of all land held for speculation or exploitation.

6. The collective ownership and democratic management of the banking and currency system. 

The conservation of human resources, particularly of the lives and well-being of the workers and their families:

1. By shortening the workday in keeping with the increased productiveness of machinery.

2. By securing to every worker a rest period of not less than a day and a half in each week.

3. By securing a more effective inspection of workshops, factories and mines.

4. By forbidding the employment of children under sixteen years of age.

5. By the co-operative organization of the industries in the federal penitentiaries for the benefit of the convicts and their dependents.

6. By forbidding the interstate transportation of the products of child labor, of convict labor and of all uninspected factories and mines.

7. By abolishing the profit system in government work, and substituting either the direct hire of labor or the awarding of contracts to co-operative groups of workers.

8. By establishing minimum wage scales.

9. By abolishing official charity and substituting a non-contributory system of old-age pensions, a general system of insurance by the state of all its members against unemployment and invalidism and a system of compulsory insurance by employers of their workers, without cost to the latter, against in diseases, accidents and death.

Political Demands

1. The absolute freedom of press, speech and assemblage.

2. The adoption of a graduated income tax, the increase of the rates of the present corporation tax and the extension of inheritance taxes, graduated in proportion to the value of the estate and to nearness of kin—the proceeds of these taxes to be employed in the socialization of industry.

3. The abolition of the monopoly ownership of patents and the substitution of collective ownership, with direct rewards to inventors by premiums or royalties.

4. Unrestricted and equal suffrage for men and women.

5. The adoption of the initiative, referendum and recall and of proportional representation, nationally as well as locally.

6. The abolition of the Senate and of the veto power of the President.

7. The election of the President and the Vice-President by direct vote of the people.

8. The abolition of the power usurped by the Supreme Court of the United States to pass upon the constitutionality of the legislation enacted by Congress. National laws to be repealed only by act of Congress or by a referendum vote of the whole people.

9. The abolition of the present restrictions upon the amendment of the constitution, so that instrument may be made amendable by a majority of the voters in the country.

10. The granting of the right of suffrage in the District of Columbia with representation in Congress and a democratic form of municipal government for purely local affairs.

11. The extension of democratic government to all United States territory.

12. The enactment of further measures for general education and particularly for vocational education in useful pursuits. The Bureau of Education to be made a department.

13. The enactment of further measures for the conservation of health. The creation of an independent bureau of health, with such restrictions as will secure full liberty to all schools of practice.

14. The separation of the present Bureau of Labor from the Department of Commerce and Labor and its elevation to the rank of a department.

15. Abolition of all federal district courts and the United States Circuit Courts of Appeals. State courts to have jurisdiction in all cases arising between citizens of the several states and foreign corporations. The election of all judges for short terms.

16. The immediate curbing of the power of the courts to issue injunctions.

17. The free administration of the law.

18. The calling of a convention for the revision of the constitution of the United States

 Just think how we would be if these were enacted. 

Catholic Pacifists

 In the early days of the Church the Christians (Catholics) were total pacifists. Martyrdom was thought to be an ultimate goal guaranteeing eternal salvation. It becam so extreme that martyrdom qua martyrdom was banned. It became a sort of suicide, facilitated by Rome.

Then in the second century as Christians multiplied, Rome needed troops, they had not yet convinced those they conquered to join in and thus Christians became Roman soldiers, and the view of total pacifism disappeared. The ultimate test was with Constantine, who made Christianity the religion of the land. It would be honorable for Christians to join in with Constantine and his defense of the Empire.

As tribes descended upon the Empire, defense and war was pandemic. As Rome collapsed, Christianity spread to the invaders. The Merovingians became Christian and from then until the French Revolution France was both Christian and war like. 

The construct of Just War was formalized by Aquinas, and even supported by Augustine. 

In today's world  where the United States has been attacked, threatened and overtly called out for total annihilation by nuclear weapons, defense of its population is a sine qua non.

Yet along come quasi first century Christians as in the NY Times. They note:

It isn’t every day that a pope calls for an overhaul of a more than 1,000-year-old teaching of the Catholic Church, but that’s exactly what Pope Leo XIV did last month. In his inaugural encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” which was mainly an exploration of how to protect human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence, Leo devoted a brief but critical passage to just war theory. In a break with a foundational principle of Catholic thought on conflict, Leo called the theory “outdated” and made it clear that the teaching has been twisted to justify wars for decades, most recently the war in Iran. It is about time for the change. Just war theory holds that wars must meet strict conditions: They should be in self-defense, and only if alternatives have been exhausted; the use of force should be proportional; there should be a likelihood of success and the threat should be imminent. Since World War II at least, several popes have criticized world leaders for using the theory as a fig leaf. While Leo did not cite any specific war in the encyclical, he clearly had President Trump’s war on Iran in mind. On June 6, in remarks en route to Madrid for a visit, he was asked if a “just war” was being waged in Iran. The pontiff replied: “I believe this has already been made very clear: In Iran, the criteria for a just war are not present.” Leo wasn’t done. “The theory of the just war dates back to centuries when it was impossible to imagine the weapons and the destructive capacity available to humanity today,” he added.

 As I have noted earlier, Leo appears to have a massive dislike of the current President. He also, in my opinion, has a gross lack of understanding of Church policy in this area. Perhaps martyrdom in an arena, readily done in the threatening nation discussed, would be his moral solution. 

D Day

 

D Day, September 13th 2001. Two days after 9-11 I was staying in Normandy, out of Paris until the flights to North America resumed. I visited the Normandy beaches. Each year we remember Normandy, and we should equally remember Saipan, where my father and thousands of others attacked and stormed the beaches, allowing the annexing of Tinian, the airfield for B-29s and Hiroshima. 

Ave Imperator, morituri te salutant

The gladiators fought with their gladius, the mid sized sword used in the Roman legions. The gladius was often chipped from battle, made of a Roman steel blend, iron with a charcoal mix of carbon, then heated and sharpened.

I gather the White House has installed a Roman like gathering with brutal fighters. Gold fixtures, all we are missing is golden leaf crowns! 

Never Thought of This One

 Going to the moon and staying there has its hazards. But NASA presents a new one.

A mobile wastewater treatment system built at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida that can help prepare for long-duration missions on the Moon and Mars departed the spaceport and arrived at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. Graduate students at the university will test the technology under conditions designed to closely mimic the challenges of operating on another planetary surface. The Divergent Deployable Wastewater Treatment Facility is designed to turn crew wastewater into useful resources, which future explorers will need every day. At the University of North Dakota, teams will integrate this new wastewater system with the university’s Integrated Lunar/Martian Analog Habitat. Student operators and NASA researchers will study how the facility performs when connected to a habitat-like environment and exposed to the kinds of operational limits crews could face on another planet.

 Imagine human waste, with both human and other DNA, floating around the universe, landing on different planets, finding new homes, creating new aliens! 

Never thought of this in old days, just brought it back with you! 

 

An Interesting Geography Problem

 DHS has proposed removing ICE from airports in regions where sanctuary cities/states are. That would be Newark here in NJ.

Now the geography of Newark is below:

 Note Terminal A is NOT in Newark, Terminal C and Terminal B is kind of. So all international flights could be shuttled to Terminal A, recently upgraded and the rest would be domestic. 

Guess that would work. Not any good for New York however.