This is a pretty bizarre report which shows the pernicious nature of religion in society. Evidently the potential vice-president believes not only that witches exist but they need to be hunted down and run out of communities. The reporters politics are those of the Democratic faction of the capitalist party.

A demagogue, H.L. Mencken once said, is someone “who will preach doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.” This is a pretty good description of the US presidential candidates in action at their late-summer conventions. Although, to be fair to those who listened to the convention speeches, it was more a case of preaching idiotic ideas to people who wished those ideas were true.

The contrast between the gassy rhetoric of the politicians and the weighty problems facing workers was particularly striking at this year’s conventions, highlighted further by the juxtaposition between jubilant delegates inside the convention hall and the pepper-sprayed protestors outside.

Capitalism has a nasty habit of suddenly laying a ton of grief on unsuspecting members of the working class. A typical example is when the employees of Consumers Glass in Etobicoke, Ontario, were recently told the plant was going to be shut down just two weeks after they had negotiated a union contract. But the explosion at the Sunrise Propane yard in Toronto on August 10 takes some beating. This happened at 4 am in a heavily populated residential area. 12 000 people living in a 1.6 kilometre radius were evacuated, many clad only in night clothes. A 25-year veteran of the Toronto Fire Department died fighting the blaze, and a Sunrise employee was missing presumed dead. He was reportedly last seen heading towards the fire. Considering the blast shattered windows over a wide area and flying debris damaged buildings hundreds of metres away, it was surprising casualties were not greater. Thousands forced to flee from their homes are demanding answers from the Toronto City Council as to why Sunrise Propane Industrial Gases was allowed to build a distribution plant in a long established residential area three years ago. Although the casualties were light, the residents wonder why they were not consulted when plans to move the company into this working class neighbourhood were made. “We weren’t even advised they were going to be there. They just moved in.” (resident’s response, Toronto Star, 11 August).

The area councilor, Maria Augimeri, had to cut short her holiday in Italy to return and face the anger. Augimeri organized a meeting at the same time as the local ratepayers association had theirs. When asked why she didn’t simply attend the ratepayers’ meeting she told the reporter to ‘shut up’.

[pdf Leaflet] The WSP got a an e-mail recently from some right-wing blogger for the New York Times who asked if we considered Barak Obama a socialist and if we supported his tax plans. blah, blah, blah. We won’t pass judgement on an article which may or may not see the light of day. But most likely this was another piece attempting to get someone calling themselves socialist to endorse Obama or one of his policies. Once that confession is procured, it will be widely touted as proof of Obama being a socialist, an elitist, etc.

But is Obama a socialist? OMFno-G no.

From Marx and Coca Cola: As you are probably aware of by now the government has decided to bail out the two mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. From the Land Down Under:

REPUBLICAN presidential hopeful John McCain backed a US government takeover of two mortgage giants overnight while his Democratic rival warned that taxpayers should not bail out their shareholders.

McCain said that it had to be done. I agree. If the two behemoths failed it would result in massive repercussions not just for the share holders or American homeowners, but to the entire world economy. Even so many commentators wondered why John McCain was so enthusiastic about it. I guess we’ll never know.

In a completely unrelated posting I was poking around the Center for Responsive Politics’ website, opensecrets.org, and under John McCain’s long list of assets were these two items:

• Fannie Mae Note valued at between $46,004 to $165,000
• Freddie Mac Note valued at between $45,003 to $150,000

But like I said I’m sure this has nothing to do with the above story. NOTHING AT ALL.

On the anniversary on the birth of the famous scientist Stephen Jay Gould, who sadly died in 2002 at the young age of sixty, readers might like to see what Socialists have to say about his work, evolutionary theory and related matters:

Gould v. Dawkins

The war in Georgia seems to be over.

How it began is still not clear. The first major military action was Georgia’s bombardment of Tskhinval, but some claim that this was itself a response to escalation in the low-intensity fighting in the villages of South Ossetia that has been going on for many years. In any case, the Georgian assault on South Ossetia gave Russia a golden opportunity to pursue its own goals under cover of humanitarian intervention (see last month’s Socialist Standard).

A socialist in Ireland looks at the vote there to reject the EU’s proposed Treaty of Lisbon.

On the 12th of June, voters in the Republic of Ireland rejected a constitutional proposal to ratify the Lisbon Treaty. The rejection has caused ripples across Europe and provoked a lively and continuing discussion in the letters pages of the newspapers and in radio phone-in programmes. It is a quintessential example of what passes for ‘politics’ under capitalism with heated debate amongst the protagonists and yet the result is as irrelevant to most people as the composition of government here after the next election. Closer inspection of the campaign and its aftermath reveals all the pointlessness, chicanery and opportunism of mainstream politics.