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Thomas Fiske      Response 2

Question 2: Evaluate the performance of the press in covering the on-going presidential scandal, the private lives of politicians, and please indicate whether or not you consider yourself a role model.

There is nothing good for the working class in the current saga 
around the sex scandal promoted by the press, the politicians 
and the courts.  Only the ultraright and those pushing 
fantastic conspiracy theories benefit from it.

Workers need to remind fellow unionists and others that 
decrying the filth and degeneracy of the ruling elite became 
the stock-in-trade of Hitler's Nazis in the 1920s and 1930's.

The latest scandal is not a well-orchestrated right-wing plot. 
The pornographication of capitalist politics, set in motion as 
capitalism's world disorder grows, has unleashed a process that 
is not under the control of any of its promoters. 

The United States, as all other imperialist democracies, is run 
by a tiny aristocracy of bankers, industrialists, and landlords 
who profit from the wars and from the class exploitation and 
racism and sexism of the capitalist system. This small minority 
controls both the Democratic and Republican parties. 

The cries for Clinton to resign or be impeached for lying about 
an affair cover up the real problem - the system of class rule, 
a system that is by necessity built on corruption, on secrecy, 
and on lies. 

As working-class resistance to the bosses' offensive on working 
people's standard of living and democratic rights continues to 
spread, thinking workers will have more openings to convince 
broader layers of our class and its organizations to chart our 
own course independent of the bourgeoisie and its opinion 
makers. To develop our own values built on human solidarity out 
of collective working-class political practice. And to build 
working-class organizations that can lead the toilers to take 
power out of the hands of the ruling wealthy minority and end 
once and for all the system of class exploitation that oils its 
wheels with corruption, lechery, and deceit.