We check in now with with the website of “Workers World, workers & oppressed peoples of the world unite!”

And what “struggle” do we find?  A spiffy new attack on Al Gore and his Nobel Peace Prize.

Tough to capture and do justice to all the venom contained under their headline, “Gore and the Nobel prize: ‘Green’ polluters get a boost.”  So please forgive me if the following gems just aren’t enough:

• Will it really help save the planet from environmental ruin that former Vice President Al Gore has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?  That might seem like a strange question. So let’s ask another: Has it helped stop illegal and predatory imperialist wars that Jimmy Carter got the prize in 2002; that Yasser Arafat had to share it in 1994 with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin of Israel; that Nelson Mandela was awarded it jointly with F.W. de Klerk of apartheid South Africa in 1993; or that Le Duc Tho had to share it with Henry Kissinger in 1973?
• Yet while Gore’s film painted the picture of a looming catastrophe for the planet and all its inhabitants, it had very little to say about how to stop it. Buy low-wattage light bulbs. Ride a bike to work or school. Invest in green industries.  Nevertheless, the extreme right wing in the U.S. is frothing at the mouth about him receiving the Nobel, as can be seen in the many on-line comments on this subject.
• Gore, who happens to be an heir to a family fortune built on oil—his father was very close to Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum …
• What Gore’s Nobel prize underscores is that the biggest banks and corporations have moved, and are now up to their eyeballs in schemes to make “green” money.
• Science and technology are not to blame. It is the social system under which they have developed that has perverted technology from its original purpose: to solve humanity’s problems in the struggle to survive and flourish. Capitalism has been one headlong rush to produce more and more, create markets where none existed before, and even destroy other countries’ industries in order to profit from rebuilding them.  Gore can never oppose this system—he is an advocate for it and a son of the ruling class.

Actually, forget Gore for the moment.  It’s sorrowfully rare when Le Duc Tho gets appropriate shout-outs in the blogopshere.  So let’s take the Workers World’s lead and show Henry Kissinger shaking hands with Le Duc Tho in Paris after their agreement on the cease-fire terms of the Vietnam War, 1973.