Held up at work

Published at Socialist Worker.

AN EARLY '80s Saturday Night Liveskit featured a news reporter who declared, "[S]tatistics show that in New York, a man is mugged every 11 seconds. I would now like you to meet that man. His name is Jesse Donnally, and he's mugged every 11 seconds." Jim Belushi, playing Donnally, is robbed half a dozen times during the bit that follows.

The skit is funny because of the play on the wording of the crime statistic. But for millions of workers in the U.S., the joke isn't so far from the truth. Except instead of being pickpocketed or held up at gunpoint, these workers are robbed by their employers before they even receive their paycheck.

According to Economic Policy Institute (EPI) analysis of data from the U.S. Departments of Labor and Justice:

Wage theft is a far bigger problem than bank robberies, convenience store robberies, street and highway robberies, and gas station robberies combined. Employers steal billions of dollars from their employees each year by working them off the clock, by failing to pay the minimum wage, or by cheating them of overtime pay they have a right to receive.

Yet while those convicted of these other crimes typically face years in prison--as of the end of 2010, nearly 250,000 people were serving time in state prisons in the U.S. for property crimes such as robbery and larceny--wage theft is almost never treated as a criminal offense.

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MOST EMPLOYERS guilty of wage theft are never caught, and those that are rarely face significant penalties, let alone criminal charges. According to the EPI, just $280 million in illegally withheld back pay was recovered by the Labor Department in 2012, less than 1 percent of the estimated $100 billion in wage theft each year.

Little is being done to address this massive crime wave, according to the EPI: "Few local governments have any resources or staff to combat wage theft, and several states have closed down or so severely cut back their labor departments that workers are left mostly unprotected and vulnerable to exploitation."

As of 2007, the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division (WHD) had only "approximately 730 investigative staff...responsible for enforcing employer compliance with labor laws" covering the 54 million low-wage workers who, according to the Government Accountability Office, the WHD considers "most vulnerable to [Fair Labor Standards Act] violations" such as wage theft.

According to the Progressive States Network, the number of investigators working for the Labor Department overall has gone from one per every 10,600 workers in 1941 to one per 141,000 in 2009--"a 13-fold decrease in enforcement capacity since 1941."

By contrast, there were over 460,000 officers in police departments across the U.S. in 2008. The increase in the number of police in the U.S. outpaced population growth from 1992 to 2008, and the prison population has skyrocketed over the past few decades as a consequence of the war on drugs and the rise of mass incarceration.

Similarly, the mainstream media--from local and national news programs to TV shows and films--pay far more attention to robberies and burglaries than to wage theft. In the rare occasions where corporate crime captured the media's attention, it has been because of low-wage workers' struggles against wage theft forced the issue into the spotlight.

These imbalances reflect the class bias of the justice system in the U.S., where the deck is stacked in favor of big business and the rich. As a consequence, poor people and people of color are far more likely to find themselves put behind bars than protected when they are the victim of a crime. This is particularly true when the criminals own a business, especially a big corporation.

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THE ECONOMIC Policy Foundation estimates that employers rob workers of $19 billion in unpaid overtime per year – and that is a conservative estimate from "a business-funded think tank." According to Kim Bobo, author of Wage Theft In America, the total amount stolen by bosses from workers each year may be as high as $100 billion. This is over 700 times the total amount stolen in all of the kinds of robberies listed by the EPI, which totaled $140 million in 2012.

Even looking more broadly at the different kinds of criminal theft, wage theft is a much bigger problem. In 2009, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the total amount lost in robberies, larceny-theft, burglary and motor-vehicle theft added up to less than $15 billion, less than one-sixth the amount that Bobo estimates is lost to wage theft.

Not only is the loot bigger, but wage theft is far more commonplace. According to the FBI, larceny-theft, the most common type of robbery or property crime, affected 2,061 out of 100,000 US residents--about 2 percent of the population.

While statistical on the matter is limited, a 2008 National Employment Law Project survey of over 4,300 low-income workers in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles suggests that wage theft is far mare common than most people would guess:

More than two-thirds (68 percent) of our sample experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous workweek. The average worker lost $51, out of average weekly earnings of $339. Assuming a full-time, full-year work schedule, we estimate that these workers lost an average of $2,634 annually due to workplace violations, out of total earnings of $17,616. That translates into wage theft of 15 percent of earnings.

In many industries, violations appear to be the norm. For example, 66.3 percent of child care workers surveyed reported minimum wage violations and 90.2 percent experienced overtime violations. Some 87.5 percent of home health care workers worked off-the-clock without pay before or after their shift.

Among low-wage workers, certain groups are more vulnerable, according to the NELP:

Women were significantly more likely than men to experience minimum wage violations, and foreign-born workers were nearly twice as likely as their U.S.-born counterparts to have a minimum wage violation...Foreign-born Latino workers had the highest minimum wage violation rates of any racial/ethnic group. But among U.S.-born workers, there were significant race differences: African-American workers had a violation rate triple that of their white counterparts.

Some 47.4 percent of undocumented women surveyed by the NELP reported working for less than minimum wage--nearly three times the rate for U.S. -born women, and fully 84.9 percent of undocumented workers surveyed reported overtime violations.

Other surveys have found similar results. According to a report by the North Carolina Justice Center:

Of 2,660 day laborers surveyed across 20 states and Washington, D.C., 46 percent were completely denied payment by employers in the two months prior to being surveyed, and 48 percent were underpaid during the same time period," and a U.S. Department of Labor survey found that just 26 percent of day care employers in Georgia comply with federal wage and hour law. Surveys of restaurant workers have found that nearly half face overtime violations, and a Department of Labor investigation found that of 50 poultry processing plants randomly chosen, each one "violated the law by not paying for all hours worked.

The workers most likely to face wage theft are the lowest paid and most marginalized, and therefore the least able to afford to lose their pay. Those who stand up against it often face retaliation. Employers take advantage of lax enforcement of labor laws, institutionalized racism and sexism, and the fear of deportation in order to squeeze even more money out of already overworked and underpaid workers.

The impact of wage theft extends further--not only does it hit the specific workers who were ripped off, but it reduces tax revenues. According to the Progressive States Network, in New York state, wage theft causes an estimated loss in tax revenue of over $400 million per year. By comparison, the state budget deficit for the 2012 fiscal year was just $350 million.

In other words, wage theft is a contributing factor toward the budget deficits that are being used to justify austerity--measures that impact the very communities most likely to be victims of wage theft.

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WE ALL know that justice isn't blind.

Blacks and whites use illegal drugs at about the same rates, African Americans are 10 times more likely than whites to go to jail for a drug offense. Some people have done hard time for stealing trivial items such as a slice of pizza or candy bars, while bankers guilty of multimillion-dollar fraud are let off with fines, when they are punished at all--because they are deemed "too big to jail."

The lack of enforcement of laws prohibiting wage theft--at every level of government--is another example of this unequal justice.

Fortunately, however, increasing numbers of workers have been fighting back against wage theft--and winning victories. These struggles have merged with broader demands, such as the struggle for an increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour and attempts by workers' rights advocacy organizations to pass stronger laws against wage theft in several states.

In February, Dave Melton, the owner of several Domino's Pizza franchises in New York City, agreed to pay 61 workers a total of $1.28 million to settle a lawsuit accusing him of wage theft and other violations. This victory took years of struggle to achieve, includingsolidarity from other low-wage delivery and food service workers facing similar violations of the law.

Also in February, Pennsylvania McDonald's franchisee Andrew Cheung agreed to pay over $200,000 in back wages and damages to nearly 300 workers after the Labor Department found he had violated minimum wage and overtime laws. The settlement came after a strike by guest workers and a campaign by the National Guestworker Alliance, in the context of other job actions by fast-food workers across the country.

Last year, in the midst of protests and strikes at Walmart stores and warehouses, a Walmart subcontractor that manages warehouses in California settled a lawsuit alleging wage theft and unpaid overtime for $4.7 million. Schneider Logistics had also facedstrikes by employees in Illinois alleging similar violations.

Wage theft is only an extreme example of the exploitation that is a fact of life for all workers under capitalism, a system based on extracting profits by paying workers less than the value they produce. Not content with making money from workers unpaid labor, capitalists will continue to push the limits in their quest to maximize profits--whether or not that means violating the law.

Even with stronger laws on the books in states such as New York and Illinois, workers will need to keep up the pressure to stop the business pickpockets and win back pay after the fact.

Are better schools the solution to poverty?

Published at Socialist Worker.

HARLEM CHILDREN'S Zone President and CEOGeoffrey Canada says the U.S. can finally win the war on poverty "through education." Former D.C. Public Schools Chancellor and StudentsFirst founder Michelle Rhee writes about "ending poverty through education."

Education Secretary Arne Duncan says: "What I fundamentally believe--and what the president believes...is that the only way to end poverty is through education." Teach for America insists that "all students can achieve when they are invested in their education, held to high expectations, and are supported by advocates who help them overcome the challenges of poverty."

This is the mantra of the corporate school "reform" movement, accepted across the whole spectrum of mainstream politics and in the media establishment: Fix the U.S. education system, and you fix poverty and inequality.

It seems like common sense--who, after all, would oppose better schools or helping poor children succeed?--a good-faith proposal, from those with the power to do something about it, to confront difficult problems of U.S. society.

But the mantra is false--an illusion that detracts from the real sources of, and solutions to, both poverty in the U.S. and the crisis of American public education.

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IF YOU think about it, the resources to end poverty exist in abundance, and they aren't generally found inside of school buildings.

There are plenty of empty homes to house all the homeless and people living in substandard housing. There is plenty of food, within the U.S. and around the world, to feed everyone who is hungry. The technology exists to keep people--all people--healthy and living longer. Society is rich enough to ensure a decent standard of living for everyone in it.

But accomplishing any of these things depends on a redistribution of the wealth that currently resides in the pockets of the small minority who own and control in this society--many of the very same millionaires and billionaires who, not coincidentally, fund the "reformers" who claim it is necessary to fix education before it is possible to end poverty. History teaches us that the only way the U.S. ruling class has ever parted with even a small portion of its wealth is when it was forced to by struggle from below, particularly the struggles of the union movement.

As left-wing economist Dean Baker wrote at the Jacobin website:

[T]he growth in inequality over the last three decades has not been mainly a story of the more educated pulling away from the less educated. Rather, it has been a story in which a relatively small group of people (roughly the top 1 percent) have been able to garner the bulk of economic gains for reasons that have little direct connection to education.

Everyone deserves a quality, enriching education, free and guaranteed by the government--for many more important reasons than because it could lead to higher wages.

But it is telling that the fix-education-to-fix-poverty crowd supports a school "reform" agenda aimed at the opposite: a narrower curriculum, obsessive emphasis on testing, privatization of public institutions, less power for teachers and students to explore their interests and potential. The reformers want to reshape public schools along the corporate model, with the majority of students provided with the training they will need to remain productive subordinates.

At its heart, the idea of "ending poverty through education" is a new variation on a very old ideological theme of capitalism--if given the chance, everyone can succeed, through hard work and perseverance, no matter what obstacles are thrown in their way.

That dogma has a flip side, though--those who don't succeed have only themselves to blame. Just as the tobacco industry once claimed that cigarettes were good for you and featured doctors in their ads to prove it, the 1 Percent who benefit from a system where poverty and inequality are endemic are attempting to pass off the cause as the cure.

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THE IDEA that education is the solution to poverty makes sense if you look at the experience of individuals--but not the social whole.

The highest-paying careers do generally require a college degree, whereas jobs open to high school graduates that once paid a living wage are being eliminated or turned into low-wage work. By definition, individuals in poverty lack the capital to start their own business. So for individuals, the most realistic path out of poverty seems to be getting an education to secure a job that pays well.

For a minority among the poor, obtaining a college degree does increase the chances of escaping poverty. A recent Pew study found that among people who grew up in families in the bottom 20 percent on the U.S. income ladder, college graduates were more than five times more likely to break into a higher earning group.

The problem, of course--as the Pew study acknowledges in a footnote--is that only 11 percent of the people from these circumstances got a college diploma. Their relative success compared to others who grew up in poor families is dependent on being the exception, rather than the rule.

And even for these exceptional cases, attaining a college degree gives them a better chance of making it out of poverty--but it's no guarantee, let alone a solution to poverty as a social phenomenon.

Increasing numbers of college graduates--particularly recent graduates--are working jobs that don't require a college degree. Nearly half a million people working for minimum wage have an associate's or bachelor's degree, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Meanwhile, total student loan debt in the U.S. has surpassed $1 trillion, with students graduating with average debt of nearly $30,000.

Look at the question another way: If education was the solution to poverty on a societal level, you could expect increases in educational attainment to coincide with a decline in poverty and inequality. Yet over the past 40 years, the exact opposite has taken place in the U.S.

Educational attainment increased significantly over the last four decades. In 1970, just 16 percent of U.S. residents aged 25 to 34 had a bachelor's degree or higher. An additional 14 percent had an associate's degree or at least some time spent in college. By 2009, 32 percent of the same age group had a bachelor's degree, and an additional 28 percent had an associate's degree or some college.

In other words, the percentage of young adults with a college degree or some time spent in college doubled--and during the same period, the percentage of young people without a high school diploma declined by more than half, from 26 percent to 12 percent.

Despite this increase in educational attainment, however, some 15 percent of people in the U.S. live below the official poverty line today, compared to 12.6 percent in 1970. Over their course of their lives, the vast majority of people in the U.S.--four out of every five--will experience unemployment, near-poverty or reliance on a social welfare program at some point.

Meanwhile, inequality--the gap between rich and poor--has soared to levels not known in close to a century, all as educational attainment has been on the rise.

The situation is likely to get worse, not better--because it doesn't matter how many people manage to get a college degree if the jobs that are being created for them don't pay a living wage, much less an income once assumed for college graduates. According to Labor Department projections, a disproportionate number of new jobs created in the coming decade will pay low wages.

This doesn't mean that going to college no longer makes sense for young people, practically speaking or otherwise. Higher education should be a human right, and its expansion would benefit all of society. But the fact remains that the corporate school reformers' mantra that better schools mean less poverty is false.

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ONE OF the main points on the education "reform" agenda is weakening the power of teachers unions, one of the few strongholds of organized labor after decades of decline for the union movement.

The reformers' proposals to "fix public education"--and thereby fix the problem of poverty, according to their claims--include ending tenure protections for teachers, tying educators' evaluations to high-stakes tests, and promoting largely non-union charter schools.

Regular readers of SocialistWorker.org will have seen many articles stressing the central role teachers and their unions have to play in saving public schools from the deformers. But for the purposes of this discussion, it's worth underlining the strong evidence that unions are one of the most effective means of reducing poverty.

Not everyone can be a banker or a lawyer. Organized labor provides the means for working people in occupations with less economic or political power to organize for better wages and working conditions on the job--not to mention reforms such as universal health care, retirement security and unemployment insurance, and other initiatives that reduce poverty.

In an article for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Dean Baker wrote: "There are a variety of factors that affect poverty rates but one that stands out is the power of unions. There is a very strong inverse relationship between the percentage of workers who are covered by a union contract and the poverty rate as measured by the OECD."

Another obvious way to reduce poverty is to fund social programs that help those who can't afford them with access to food, housing and other basic needs; that provide benefits for the elderly and the disabled, that guarantee free or low-cost child care, education and health care, and so on.

Indivar Dutta-Gupta of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that countries which provide more of these services than the U.S. tend to have lower rates of poverty:

Other similarly wealthy countries [compared to the U.S.] have far lower rates of poverty after factoring in the impact of safety net programs even though, on average, they have similar rates of poverty before counting these programs...That's true largely because nearly all of these other countries do more: their programs are more generous, easier to access, and broader in scope than those in the U.S.

As Dutta-Gupta goes on to say, confronting and reducing poverty is critical to improving public schools, rather than the other way around: "[R]esearch shows that keeping young children out of poverty helps them succeed in school and earn more as adults."

The resources exist to lift all children out of poverty--as they do to guarantee a decent life to everyone, child or adult, and to guarantee a strong public education. The idea that we must wait to address any of these things until educational inequality is ended--the proposals of reformers that are guaranteed to increase that inequality--serves the interests of those who run this unequal society.

A green light to target Muslims

Published at Socialist Worker.

A FEDERAL judge dismissed a lawsuit in late February that had accused the New York Police Department (NYPD) of violating the constitutional rights of Muslims in New Jersey by spying on them based on their religious affiliation. Judge William Martini's granting of the city's motion to dismiss Hassan v. City of New York represents a blow to the Muslim community specifically and defenders of civil liberties generally.

The lawsuit, filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Muslim Advocates on behalf of several Muslim individuals, organizations and businesses, was in response to revelations that the NYPD had worked with the CIA since 9/11 to conduct extensive surveillance and infiltration of Muslim religious institutions and organizations, community groups, student groups, businesses and even a youth soccer league. Another similar case is still pending in Brooklyn.

Several reporters from the Associated Press (AP) exposed the existence of the secretive spying program, known until 2010 as the "Demographics Unit," and won a 2012 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the overreach of the city's law enforcement officials. As the AP reporters documented, the NYPD's spying program reached into nearly every aspect of Muslims' lives. Those targeted for spying were chosen on the basis of their identity.

According to the AP:

Using census information and government databases, the NYPD mapped ethnic neighborhoods in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Rakers [a term for undercover officers] then visited local businesses, chatting up store owners to determine their ethnicity and gauge their sentiment, the documents show. They played cricket and eavesdropped in the city's ethnic cafes and clubs.

Without specific evidence of wrongdoing, "rakers" focused on people from a list of 28 countries, most of which were majority Muslim, as well as "American Black Muslims." In 2011, before the story broke, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said "the NYPD does not take religion into account in its policing," and "NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said the department only follows leads and does not simply trawl communities." Browne claimed that the Demographics Unit did not exist, and that the NYPD did not use the term "rakers."

The AP obtained NYPD documents that contradicted all of these claims. It also showed the involvement of Lawrence Sanchez, a veteran CIA officer who "[o]fficials said...was instrumental in creating programs such as the Demographics Unit and met regularly with unit supervisors to guide the effort, all while on the CIA's payroll...After a two-year CIA rotation in New York, Sanchez took a leave of absence, came off the agency's payroll and became the NYPD's second-ranking intelligence official."

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MARTINI RULED that the NYPD's spying operation did not violate the constitutional rights of those targeted. He cited Ashcroft v. Iqbal, a case decided by the Supreme Court in 2009, to argue:

The plaintiffs in this case have not alleged facts from which it can be plausibly inferred that they were targeted solely because of their religion. The more likely explanation for the surveillance was a desire to locate budding terrorist conspiracies. The most obvious reason for so concluding is that surveillance of the Muslim community began just after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The police could not have monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorist activities without monitoring the Muslim community itself.

Surveillance on the basis of religion or race, according to Judge Martini and the Supreme Court, is constitutional even if it has a discriminatory effect, as long as it is not conducted "with discriminatory purpose." The surveillance is legal because "the motive for the program was not solely to discriminate against Muslims, but rather to find Muslim terrorists hiding among ordinary, law-abiding Muslims."

In the words of Deepa Kumar, a Rutgers University professor and author ofIslamophobia and the Politics of Empire, this is "so deeply racist...It's a form of cultural racism that says that people who practice Islam are sort of 'programmed' to turn to terrorist activities, and this is really the mindset of the NYPD."

Judge Martini didn't deny that the Muslim community was hurt by finding out that their mosques, businesses and other community groups were infiltrated, however. In an Orwellian twist, his decision states:

None of the plaintiffs' injuries arose until after the Associated Press released unredacted, confidential NYPD documents and articles expressing its own interpretation of those documents. Nowhere in the complaint do plaintiffs allege that they suffered harm prior to the unauthorized release of the documents by the Associated Press. This confirms that plaintiffs' alleged injuries flow from the Associated Press's unauthorized disclosure of the documents. The harms are not "fairly traceable" to any act of surveillance.

In other words, the damage done by the NYPD spying is not the fault of the NYPD, which intended to keep the spying a secret from the innocent Muslims they targeted. Rather, responsibility for the harm lies with the Associated Press for exposing it.

"Here you have in one fell swoop...not only the justification for racial and religious profiling, but [also] an attack on the press...and the idea that the press should be watchdogs of the government," said Kumar.

In court testimony in June 2012, NYPD Assistant Chief Thomas Galati of the Intelligence Division said that as far as he was aware, the Demographics Unit hadn't resulted in any leads, let alone stopped a terrorist plot. However, Galati's testimony gave a chilling example of how targets of surveillance were chosen:

I'm seeing Urdu. I'm seeing them identify the individuals involved in that are Pakistani...I'm using that information for me to determine that this would be a kind of place that a terrorist would be comfortable in...Most Urdu speakers from that region would be of concern, so that's why it's important to me.

As the AP points out, "About 15 million Pakistanis and 60 million Indians speak Urdu. Along with English, it is one of the national languages of Pakistan."

In 2007, the NYPD released a report titled "Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat" that places young Muslim men living in the U.S. and Europe on a continuum that begins with "pre-radicalization" and culminates with "ATTACK."

The criteria that qualify individuals for a status of pre-radicalization include "male Muslims," "under the age of 35" and "educated." The report also states that such individuals "do not begin as radical or even devout Muslims," that they may be "unremarkable," "having 'ordinary' lives and jobs" and have "little, if any, criminal history."

The obvious conclusion is that the NYPD views all young Muslim men as potential terrorists.

In this way, it is like a secretive version of the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program, not only chronologically--the programs were established around the same time--but also in theory and practice. Stop-and-frisk swept up hundreds of thousands of predominantly young Black and Brown men, the vast majority of whom were never charged with any crime. Race, ethnicity and religion are treated as evidence enough to be targeted.

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SPYING AND infiltration efforts by the NYPD have had a chilling effect on Muslim communities. According to "Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and its Impact on American Muslims," a report issued by a number of American Muslim civil liberties organizations:

Surveillance of Muslims' quotidian activities has created a pervasive climate of fear and suspicion, encroaching upon every aspect of individual and community life. Surveillance has chilled constitutionally protected rights--curtailing religious practice, censoring speech and stunting political organizing. Every one of our interviewees noted that they were negatively affected by surveillance in some way--whether it was by reducing their political or religious expression, altering the way they exercised those rights (through clarifications, precautions, or avoiding certain interlocutors), or in experiencing social and familial pressures to reduce their activism.

As Linda Sarsour of the Arab American Association of New York told Democracy Now!:

[I]t creates psychological warfare in our community. How am I supposed to know if the NYPD was successful in that endeavor [of attempting to infiltrate the Arab American Association board]?...The community right now is in a position where, how do we even know the guy next to us that's praying at the mosque or the guy at the restaurant that's trying to open a conversation with us about something that's happening in Egypt, for example, [is not a police officer]?...And now that we know that the NYPD wants to hear what our sentiment is, people probably don't want to share their sentiment.

Sarsour explained how the revelations work to silence speech before the fact:

[T]he most disturbing of all is our Muslim student associations, who are calling us to consult about how political should their events be...The fact that our students feel like they can't do that because there are going to be NYPD informants, because they can be taken out of context, and because they think something like what happened to Fahad Hashmi is going to happen to them, I think is a valid concern for them to have.

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ACCORDING TO Muslim community activist Sammer Abulaela, the revelations about the NYPD's spying weren't really a surprise to Arab and Muslim communities used to a climate of state-sponsored Islamophobia. In an interview, Abulaela explained:

If the Associated Press stories offered any surprises to the community, it was in the details. We knew we were being watched, but we didn't know that officers were gaining entry into our homes by telling us, falsely, that they were engaged in an investigation regarding a missing child in the neighborhood.

We knew they were listening to the sermons at the mosque, but we didn't know they were counting the number of Qurans on our home bookshelves and noting the promotional wall calendars from the Halal butcher. Personally, I think I expected the language to be a bit more clinical and sanitized...Terms like "Ancestries of Interest," the title of a slide listing 28 ethnic, racial and national identities to be targeted, struck me as particularly brazen and bigoted.

The AP revelations did little but confirm what many in the community had already known. For years, shady characters were suddenly turning up--and then disappearing--inside and outside of Muslim businesses and houses of worship. Community members would speak of local businesses being stalked for weeks by men with tenuous connections to the neighborhood only to have those businesses raided a short time later.

The only thing that ever came of those invasions was a shuttering of the establishments--never as the result of a terror investigation, but due to a loss of business as customers were wary to patronize shops that were clearly compromised by infiltrators and informants wielding the power to arbitrarily smear anyone in their path with accusations against which there is no defense and from which there is no return.

As Abulaela pointed out, the NYPD spying program is in line with U.S. policies since 9/11. In the months following the attacks on the World Trade Center, some 1,200 immigrants, disproportionately South Asian, Arab and Muslim, were rounded up. There have been several cases of Arabs and Muslims living in the U.S. who have beenrailroaded for crimes concocted by the government, while hundreds seized abroad were held for years without trial in Guantanamo Bay.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, the FBI interviewed thousands of immigrants from countries with "a suspected al Qaeda presence."

Under...the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System special registration program, adult males from 25 predominately Muslim countries were required to register and be fingerprinted and photographed at ports of entry or present themselves at immigration offices inside the country for fingerprints and photographs. More than 80,000 individuals were interviewed under the program, and over 13,000 were placed in removal proceedings.

In addition to terrorizing Muslim communities, these government policies fed a climate of Islamophobia in the mainstream press, including providing political space for the far right to gain a hearing, leading to a rise in hate crimes against Muslims.

All of this created a climate of fear and a reality of persecution that caused real harm to Muslim communities, which was felt long before the AP released the details of the NYPD's Demographics Unit.

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MARTINI'S RULING that the harm caused by the knowledge of the surveillance and infiltration of Muslim communities in the Northeast by the NYPD is a result not of the spying but of the reporting on the spying is indicative of the increasingly brazen surveillance state that the US has become.

The U.S. government at all levels has used the threat of terrorism to construct an apparatus of surveillance and repression that is used to target not only Arabs and Muslims, but millions of others in the U.S. and around the world.

When whistleblowers have exposed wrongdoing, the government has gone after the whistleblowers themselves rather than the crimes they exposed. The Obama administration has engaged in an unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. Chelsea Manning was subject to treatment that the UN special rapporteur on torture called cruel and inhumane, yet the war criminals she exposed remain free.

Last spring, it was revealed that the Department of Justice had spied on journalists, including from AP and Fox News. The ruling that AP, not the NYPD, is responsible for the damage caused by NYPD spying sets a dangerous precedent that can only further serve to discourage investigative journalism that seeks to shed light on secret government programs.

According to Sammer Abulaela, far from causing harm, such journalism has had the opposite effect:

The revelation of the program confirmed and gave focus to what the Muslim community already understood was happening. Community members who had long remained silent now felt emboldened to speak out against a program that reflected so much of America's publicly rejected racist history. No harm was done by the revelation of this program--all of it was done by the program itself. I'm a bit embarrassed to even have to articulate that point, but if that's where we are in 2014, so be it.

Is Obamacare a step toward single-payer?

Published in Socialist Worker.

NO, NO and no: That's been the Republican Party position on health care reform since the Obama administration's first months in office. No matter how many pro-industry concessions were made in drafting what came to be called the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Republicans never wavered in their all-out opposition.

But increasingly since its disastrous rollout last fall, the ACA has had critics from the left, too--people who oppose a "reform" that falls far short of universal coverage while threatening harsh financial penalties on those who can afford them least unless they purchase the defective products of the private insurance industry.

Groups that criticized the ACA all along, such as Physicians for a National Health Program and National Nurses United, continue to stand for a "single-payer" program--where the government cuts out the insurers and guarantees health care for all under a system similar to the current Medicare program for the elderly, but much better funded and available to the whole population.

Then there are those among liberals and the left who disagree with both sides. They continue to defend the ACA--on the grounds that it is a step toward universal health care.

An editorial in the Nation magazine last month, for example, acknowledged that the ACA came about because Barack Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress "believed [single-payer] was politically unachievable, so they cobbled together a hybrid of public regulation and private insurance that has come back to haunt them."

Nevertheless, wrote the Nation's editors, the left should defend this "hybrid": "Progressives must step in not only as ardent advocates for better implementation of the ACA--a relatively easy task--but also for structural repairs to the law that will make it a better bridge to the truly universal, truly humane and truly functional health care system that America needs...Indeed, winning [the fight for the ACA's effective implementation] will make future reforms all the more possible."

The Nation is wrong. The ACA isn't a bridge to universal health care. It is a cul-de-sac, structured above all else to maintain the central role of the health care industry in general, and private insurance companies in particular.

Achieving universal health coverage and access to care will require dismantling the core of the ACA and replacing it with something else entirely. Making a defense of the ACA in the way the Nation does--as a step in the direction of a single-payer system--cedes ground to the right and is counterproductive to the goal of winning health care as a human right.

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THE CENTERPIECE of the ACA--the "individual mandate" that requires the uninsured to purchase private health insurance policies or face a penalty on their taxes--was first proposed in 1989 by the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank. In the 1990s, the Heritage plan was promoted by Republicans, led by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, as an alternative to the Clinton administration's plans for health care reform.

In contrast to the Clinton proposal--which, while far short of a single-payer system, was considerably more progressive than the ACA--Gingrich and the Heritage crowd proposed a mandate that placed the burden of obtaining coverage on individuals, rather than the government.

Like Clinton's proposal (which never made it to a vote in Congress), Obama's ACA also requires large employers to offer health insurance to employees--the so-called business mandate--although the penalty for businesses is smaller than the cost of coverage and has been delayed for at least a year.

The Heritage Foundation model was later implemented--in Massachusetts, under then-Gov. Mitt Romney, the eventual 2012 Republican Party presidential candidate. Nothing more clearly exposes the hypocrisy and crass opportunism of the Republicans, who from 2009 on have been denouncing health care "reform" from Obama that most closely resembles a model championed by one of its own only a few years before.

The ACA isn't a case of Democrats and Republicans "meeting in the middle" to find common ground between universal health care and the free market. Rather, it is a case of the political spectrum itself shifting to the right--to the point where Democrats occupy space formerly held by Republicans, and the Republicans denounce their former proposals as "socialism."

With the individual mandate at its core, the ACA is, first and foremost, about making sure health insurance remains "based on the private marketplace," as Obama described his law at the Wall Street Journal CEO Summit in November.

But the private marketplace--and the attendant prioritization of profits over care--is the root of the problems with the U.S. health care system. Money comes first in a free-market system, so those without the money to afford a given commodity go without. So it is with health care--and the 30 million people who will continue to go without coverage under the ACA, as well as millions more who will forgo needed care because they can't afford to spend thousands of dollars every year on copays and deductibles.

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IT WAS clear from the start that defending the health industry would be the priority of Barack Obama's health care law. Consider who played a leading role in drafting the legislation.

As chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus ended up with responsibility for writing the law--he happened to be one of the leading recipients of donations from the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Baucus brought in Liz Fowler, a vice president for the for-profit insurance giant WellPoint before she left to join Baucus' team. It was Fowler who, according to Baucus, wrote "the 87-page document which became the basis, the foundation, the blueprint from which almost all health care measures in all bills on both sides of the aisle came."

At the end of 2012, Fowler returned from whence she came: She left her post at the Department of Health and Human Services to take a job lobbying for Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing corporation--a perfect illustration of the revolving door between Corporate America and the Washington that ensures government policy meets the needs of the bottom line.

Baucus deliberately excluded voices for single-payer from Senate hearings on the legislation--instead, he had doctors and nurses who supported a radical alternative arrested. Not only did the Democrats exclude single-payer from the discussion, they conceded on even the half-measure of a "public option" among the choices available for the uninsured looking for coverage at the government "exchanges."

But none of that mattered anyway--despite all of the Democrats' industry-friendly concessions, the Republicans continued to oppose the ACA until the end.

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FAR FROM a step in the direction of single-payer, the ACA has made achieving universal coverage much more difficult.

The ACA entrenches the role of private health insurance--"multiple payers" instead of a "single payer"--by mandating the uninsured to purchase coverage or face a penalty. While the law requires private plans to meet minimum standards, coverage sold on the "exchanges" set up under the ACA are grouped into different tiers, and employer-based plans will continue to vary widely in quality.

Hence, health care inequality will persist--and many will go without care, whether they remain uninsured or can't access care because of high co-pays and deductibles.

Had the ACA included the "public option"--alternative coverage administered by the government available from the "exchanges"--it might have been possible to believe that the ACA would have transitioned into single-payer over time, as the public plan outcompeted private plans because of lower administrative costs and other factors.

Single-payer supporters were skeptical of this all along, but it's a moot point now. While claiming publicly to be pushing for a public option, the Obama administration made a deal with industry lobbyists, assuring them the public option wouldn't make it into the final bill. Sure enough, the public option was dropped.

The ACA makes the insurance industry stronger than ever before by handing it more customers and $1 trillion in subsidies over the course of 10 years. Greater revenues will translate into increased political power, which can be used to resist further regulations--and, obviously, any moves toward a single-payer system that would eliminate the private insurers altogether.

The ACA also includes around $500 billion in cuts to Medicare over ten years. This was initially supposed to include cuts to Medicare Advantage--where the government pays private insurance companies to administer Medicare benefits. However, the Obama administration reversed these cuts to private insurers in April 2013, sending insurance company stocks soaring.

Among the Medicare cuts that weren't reversed are a 14 percent reduction in payments to home care health agencies over the next three years, tens of billions in cuts to skilled nursing and hospice services, and some $260 billion in cuts to hospital reimbursements.

On top of all this, Obama offered to raise the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 as part of his effort to secure a "grand bargain" with Republicans to carry out unprecedented austerity.

Even without the eligibility change, these cuts place the elderly and the disabled--those who are eligible for Medicare--at a disadvantage relative to patients with private health insurance, since doctors and hospitals make more money providing the same care for the latter. This, combined with a relative shortage of primary care physicians and the actions of Medicare Advantage plans such as UnitedHealthcare, which recently cut 10-15 percent of doctors in their plan, could reduce access to care for those with Medicare.

Medicaid pays even less to doctors and hospitals than Medicare does, so health care providers serving disproportionately low-income, elderly and disabled populations could face layoffs and even closure.

And all this has been made even worse by state governments dominated by Republicans that rejected the expansion of Medicaid included in the ACA under the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2012.

If any part of the U.S. health care system could serve as a "bridge" to a single-payer system, it's Medicare. If Medicare's eligibility age limiting the program to seniors were eliminated, allowing everyone to be automatically enrolled in Medicare, this would be a tangible and completely realistic step toward truly universal coverage. Instead of expanding Medicare, however, the ACA cuts it.

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THERE IS one more question that those who believe the ACA will lead toward single-payer need to answer--the impact on a developing sentiment in favor of a pubic health care system like what exists in Canada.

Health care was a major issue in the 2008 election. Opinion polls before the election showed overwhelming majorities supporting a serious overhaul of the health care system. Nearly two-thirds supported the government guaranteeing health insurance for all, even if that meant paying higher taxes.

Michael Moore's film Sicko, released in the summer of 2007, exposed the devastating effect of for-profit health care on the lives of ordinary people. There was a growth in grassroots activism around the country, with doctors, medical students, nurses and other health care workers joining together with patients to demand universal health care for all. By the spring of 2009, with the health reform debate ramping up in Washington,a national day of action brought out single-payer supporters in all 50 states, including over 3,500 people in Seattle.

The shift in public opinion was undeniable. A New York Times/CBS News poll in June 2009 found that 72 percent of people supported "the government's offering everyone a government-administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans"--essentially, the public option.

The passage of the ACA, with the public option stripped out, took the wind out of the sails of a growing movement and ultimately reversed the trends in popular opinion. Large sections of existing and potential support for single-payer--in particular, among organized labor--were mobilized to support legislation that was antithetical to single-payer. The combination of unanswered Republican attacks on "socialistic" Obamacare and growing disillusion with what the Obama administration actually came up with has corroded support for any government role in health care.

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NOW THAT the law is finally kicking in, it is important that supporters of genuinely universal health care not allow the Republican right to be the only voice criticizing the ACA.

The failures of the ACA are becoming apparent to more and more people--those forced to buy insurance plans with thousands of dollars in co-pays and deductibles and skimpy networks, the 30 million who will remain uninsured, union workers facing cuts to their health benefits as ACA taxes on "Cadillac plans" loom.

The left must be able to recognize the positive measures in the ACA--ending insurance company discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions, the expansion of Medicaid, the requirement that insurance companies spend at least 80 percent of premiums on care and so one--while opposing the core of the legislation that forces millions of people to purchase defective policies from private insurers, thus locking in one of the central causes of the health care crisis.

There is no reason why the left should not demand a rollback of the ACA's reactionary components, like penalties for the uninsured and the tax on good health plans disproportionately held by union workers.

It is up to supporters of true health care reform to put forward an independent alternative--to demand truly universal coverage and access to care. If health care in the U.S. is ever to be made more equal, the movement for single-payer must regain the momentum lost since the passage of the ACA--and fight for health care to be the human right it must be.

Racism, capitalism and contradictions

Published at Socialist Worker.

IN AN interview at Northstar ("Is there a precariat?"), Charlie Post makes the following point:

Workers under capitalism have a dual existence: both as collective producers struggling against capital for control of the workplace, for hours and wages, but also workers compete as each other. They're sellers of labor-power, which gives rise to what the early 20th century Marxists used to call "sectional interests"; divisions along the lines of race, citizenship, nationality, gender, sexuality, etc.

These dual existences depend on one another. Under capitalism, in order to be a collective producer able to struggle, the worker must sell their labor power successfully. On the other hand, collective struggle is often about winning key demands that increase the value of labor power or improve the conditions of its sale. However, there are also contradictions within each of these.

Racism, which must be combatted if white and Black workers are to unite in struggle--and unity among collective producers is essential for victory in struggle--can also work to the benefit of white workers as sellers of labor power in competition with workers of color. Of course, there are countervailing dynamics as well, since the fact that Black workers are paid less drives down wages for white workers, too, but being white clearly has its advantages--if only relative, but isn't relative the key when it comes to individual competition?--as a seller of labor power.

Similarly, white workers gain relative advantage on the job--they're more likely to get promotions, less likely to be fired, etc. I believe that white workers have more to gain by opposing racism and engaging in collective struggle with their Black coworkers (and other people of color), but better treatment on the job is a countervailing force there, too, which encourages white workers to accept racism and even embrace it.

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WHITE WORKERS both benefit from racism, as whites who receive relative advantages or "privileges" if you will, and are harmed by it, as collective producers for whom racism is an impediment to the unity needed to win gains through struggle. The idea that we must argue that white workers do not benefit from racism in order for interracial working-class unity to be possible, and the idea that such unity is impossible because white workers benefit from racism, are both mechanical and one-sided.

Which tendencies prevail, which are dominant, depends on a number of factors. In periods of heightened class struggle, the identity of collective producers in struggle can overshadow the identity of sellers of labor power. This is where there is the greatest opportunity to combat racism, and even see things like unemployed workers rally to support strikers en masse (as in Toledo, Ohio in 1934) instead of taking their jobs.

In periods of defeat, workers are more likely to take on the identity of an individual seller of labor power, as collective struggle ceases to be seen as a realistic option. This is compounded by the pressures of day-to-day survival. Racism takes root more easily.

Of course, consciousness is always mixed, but in different ways and to different degrees: there are racist workers in times of mass interracial struggle, and there are anti-racist workers in times of defeat. There are workers who in practice unite across the lines of race while holding racist ideas, and there are those who hold anti-racist ideas yet do little or nothing to combat it.

Standing over all of this is the long-term, historic mission of the working class, which is to liberate itself. This requires doing away with all oppression and exploitation. But except in revolutionary times, this mission is only recognized by a minority of the working class.

It is up to us to promote the tendencies noted above that move us in the direction of unity in struggle and combat those that move us in the direction of embracing oppression and division.

What caused the Obamacare fiasco?

Published at Socialist Worker 

THE INTRODUCTION of the new health insurance system established by Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been a technical--and political--disaster.

But the problems aren't confined to crashing websites, and they won't be solved by Obama's promises that the enrollment process will be fixed before the end-of-year deadline for the uninsured to sign up for health plans on the ACA's "insurance exchanges."

Even if the glitches are ironed out, millions of people will face a choice that's no choice at all: Spend thousands of dollars each year on health insurance plans that, because of high deductibles and co-pays, will be even more expensive to use if they do get sick--or pay a fine with their taxes while they remain uninsured.

The fiasco of the Obamacare rollout is a direct consequence of a byzantine law that was bent and twisted to fit the needs of the health care industry, at the expense of tens of millions of people who will find themselves paying even more for even less health care than now.

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AFTER WEEKS of reports that HealthCare.gov, the federal insurance marketplace where the uninsured are supposed to sign up for coverage was plagued by problems, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced last week that fewer than 27,000 people had signed up on the federal exchange in the month of October. An additional 80,000 enrolled via the state exchanges.

As NBC News reported, "The White House had hoped half a million people would have signed up in the first month [HealthCare.gov] was active. The Congressional Budget Office had projected that 7 million people would sign up for private health insurance on the exchange and that another 9 million would get Medicaid coverage" by the end of the open enrollment period on March 31, 2014.

Adding in the 400,000 who signed up for Medicaid in October, the total number of uninsured covered in the first month of the Obamacare rollout is just 3 percent of the total predicted to gain coverage by the end of the enrollment period, and about 1 percent of the nearly 50 million people without health insurance in the U.S.

Meanwhile, millions of people--over 5 million so far, by some estimates--have received cancellation letters from their current insurers announcing that their health plans will no longer be effective as of January 1, because they don't meet the requirements of the ACA. The paltry enrollment numbers prove that only a fraction of those whose policies are going to be cancelled have been able to sign up for new plans via the exchange--meaning they face a gap in health coverage if the exchange system doesn't start working more effectively.

According to ACA supporters, many of those whose plans are being canceled will qualify for subsidies and therefore will pay less, if and when they can sign up on the exchanges.But as the investigative journalists at ProPublica showed, others face higher premiums for coverage that is inferior to their current plans.

The cancellation letters were a further embarrassment to Obama, who sold his health care proposal with the repeated promise that "if you like your insurance, you can keep it. Period." According to reports, the administration expected these cancellations--yet Obama continued to claim otherwise.

As a consequence, Obama's popularity has sank to the lowest point of his time in office--he has a 39 percent approval rating, compared to 54 percent who disapprove of the job he is doing. The same Quinnipiac poll showed a further decline in support for the ACA: "[O]nly 19 percent [say] they believe the quality of their health care will improve in the next year. Forty-three percent say it will get worse."

Facing pressure from Republicans and a revolt inside his own party, Obama held a press conference last week, in which he apologized for the HealthCare.gov problems and announced that the administration would allow insurance companies to continue to offer plans to current customers through 2014, even if they don't minimum standards under the ACA.

This announcement held down defections of House Democrats in support of a Republican-sponsored bill allowing insurers to continue to sell non-compliant plans--but nearly 40 Democrats voted in favor of the bill the day after Obama's press conference.

Obama's concession, however, doesn't guarantee that insurers won't rescind the cancellations. According to the Atlantic, Obama's measure allows, but doesn't require, companies to continue to offer existing plans. It does require insurers "to tell their customers 1) what the new plans cover that their old plans don't, and 2) that these new plans might actually be cheaper for them. In other words, the administration is trying to get the insurance companies to tell people what they would find on HealthCare.gov if it worked."

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ACCORDING TO Sebelius, HealthCare.gov should be working well by the end of this month--at which point one-third of the time available for people to sign up will have elapsed. But it's unclear whether the technical issues will be resolved by then. An analysis sponsored by CNN found that the site is "getting better, but it looks like there's still a lot to do," said Media Temple President Russ Reeder.

So far, the administration has spent $175 million on federal contracts to develop HealthCare.gov. Incredibly, the companies contracted to create the HealthCare.gov marketplace testified before Congress that "end-to-end testing was conducted only in the final weeks before the site went live, and no senior executive at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services was designated as the point person for integrating the various components of the system."

Still, as incompetent as it has made them look, it may be better for Obama if the problems with the ACA rollout are chalked up to technical issues. That's better than admitting the deeper problems with the health care law itself.

The Obama administration and congressional Democrats began developing health care legislation determined to bring the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance complex "to the table"--and then made one concession after another to keep them there. The ACA contains some long-awaited regulations on the insurance industry, such as a ban on using "pre-existing conditions" to deny coverage and requirements that plans cover preventative health care.

But the law leaves the main problems of the current system intact because it preserves the place of private profit in a corrupted and wasteful system--instead of making quality, universal care the priority.

Thus, the technical issues are directly connected to the complexity of the system created by the ACA. Different types, levels and costs of coverage are available, and they vary depending on income and what state the customer lives in.

Residents of 36 states must rely on the federal HealthCare.gov site, while the rest have state-level exchanges. Once enrolled, people can choose between different levels of coverage--from Bronze plans, with the lowest premiums, but highest out-of-pocket costs, through Silver and Gold, to Platinum plans, with the highest premiums, but lowest costs if and when policy holders use their insurance. Not only that, but many exchanges include multiple insurance companies, selling multiple versions of plans at each of the four coverage levels.

This creates the illusion of choice, with a bewildering multiplicity of options--but all within a relatively narrow framework that shifts the burden of health care costs more and more onto individuals.

In the future, the "Cadillac tax" on expensive health insurance plans offered through employers will place downward pressure on the quality of existing coverage, particularly for union workers who have bargained for the best coverage over the years. The tax will create incentives for employers to shift more costs onto workers.

For right now, though, another complicating factor is the subsidies for purchasing coverage, which the government offers to individuals earning between 100 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty line, with amounts varying again by state. These subsidies, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will total over $1 trillion in the next 10 years, will help make plans on the insurance exchange more affordable--but the money will go straight into the pockets of private insurance companies, which is probably while the stock prices for these companies are up.

Last year's U.S. Supreme Court decision on the ACA allows states to opt out of one important aspect of the law--an expansion of the government-run Medicaid health care program to cover individuals and families just over the poverty line. Fully one-half of U.S. states, led by Republicans, are refusing to accept additional Medicaid funds for the expanded coverage. This will leave even more people--those with fewer means to start with--to negotiate the complicated exchange process.

Managing all of the different options requires the online marketplace to interface with the computer systems of multiple health insurance companies, as well as several government agencies. The system must validate users' information by cross-referencing data entered on the site with records at government agencies, determine the eligibility for Medicaid and/or subsidies, and transmit that information to insurance companies to ensure that enrollment is completed successfully.

Some insurance companies, ever on the lookout for a way to make even more money, have allegedly attempted to take advantage of the confusion caused by the ACA to trick customers into paying more for plans when they might qualify for better, cheaper plans in the federal exchange. According to CNN, the state of Kentucky has fined leading insurer Humana for sending illegal letters saying that "customers had to choose one of two options within 30 days: Either legally extend their current policy through next year or choose a new, more expensive policy that complies with Obamacare. The letter never mentioned buying insurance through the new exchange."

Still, the $60,000 fine won't make a dent in Humana's profits, which totaled some $1.4 billion in 2012. Humana has been sanctioned in other states as well, but without penalties that make it costlier to break the law than comply with it, it should be expected that insurers will continue to make the logical business decision to maximize profits by skirting the law.

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Compare the complexity, confusion and opportunities for insurance company scamming under the ACA to a single-payer system, such as Canada's, where everyone in each province qualifies for government-provided health insurance. Instead of multiple tiers of insurance plans with varying levels of costs, coverage is the same for residents within each province--though those who aren't citizens or legal residents are unjustly excluded.

While universal coverage is available for medical care, the system is not pure "single-payer"--a majority of Canadians buy supplemental insurance for dental, vision, pharmaceuticals and other elements of coverage.

Still, the relative simplicity of this system means that not only is the proportion of the uninsured reduced far lower than the best estimates under the ACA, but there are immense savings on administrative costs. More of health care workers' time can be spent caring for patients instead of dealing with the paperwork associated with determining insurance status and billing multiple insurers.

According to a survey published in Health Affairs two years ago:

[T]he administrative costs of and time spent interacting with multiple payers in the United States far exceeded time spent and costs in Canada with its single-payer system. Physician practices in the United States spent $82,975 per physician per year while Canadian practices spent $22,205 (financials were adjusted for purchasing power). Nursing staff at physician practices in the United States spent 20.6 hours per physician interacting with health plans while their Canadian counterparts spent 2.5. Clerical staff in the United States spent 53.1 hours compared to Canadian clerical staff's 15.9.

A pure single-payer system would save even more time and money. Medicare, which is essentially federal single-payer health insurance system for seniors and the disabled, spends less than 1 percent on administrative costs compared to the major health insurer Aetna, which spends 29 percent, as Time magazine explained in a report earlier this year.

The U.S. continues to spend more than any other country in the world on health care, yet lacks universal health coverage and has poorer outcomes than most advanced industrialized nations.

Despite all its problems, the ACA will, in fact, reduce the numbers of uninsured in the U.S. But it doesn't address the many other aspects of the system that lead to these higher health care costs and poorer outcomes. Instead, Obamacare preserves the role of for-profit insurance companies whose existence is the source of many of these problems.

Fixing the bugs in the ACA won't fix the need for a movement for truly universal health care.