Why would anybody want to go to the Social Forum?

Look all around us. We're in the middle of a foreclosure meltdown, and haven't even started to feel the beginning of the commercial foreclosure crisis that's on the way. Unemployment way up, with no strong job creation. Two major wars with illegal bombing of another country, perhaps two more on the way. Dwindling civil liberties, with government officials claiming they have the right to assassinate American citizens if they want to, or even to strip them of their rights and imprison them without trial. A million Americans in prison. No real future for most young people, no security for most of the elderly. A system that punishes you when you're poor and funnels trillions of dollars into the pockets of the wealthy.

By any stretch of the imagination, this system is a failure. Go to Washington, and you'll get the same-old answers from the same-old political hacks who've been running this same-old country into the ground for a generation. No fresh ideas there.

So, I'm not surprised that tens of thousands of people want to come to town to talk to many different people with many, many different ideas. And you shouldn't be either.

If the U.S. government didn't want communists, why has it spent the last 30 years trying to prove Karl Marx right?