Published in Socialist Worker.
Community activists and students from five area colleges came together December 8 in Amherst, Mass., to hear presentations on the "state of LGBT inequality." The meeting was organized by the Western Massachusetts chapter of Equality Across America and took up a range of issues, including LGBT bashing and hate crimes legislation; employment discrimination and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act; the "don't ask, don't tell" policy"; transgender inequality; same-sex marriage; and the need to change a section of Massachusetts law that associates homosexuality with pedophilia.
Gary Lapon, a founding member of the chapter and member of the International Socialist Organization, gave this talk titled "Why we need a movement."
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THESE ARE difficult times. It has been more than 40 years since the Stonewall Rebellion launched the modern LGBT movement, and there is still pervasive social and institutional inequality.
However, the laws on the books are out of sync with public opinion. Some 89 percent of people in the U.S. oppose employment discrimination against LGBT people; two-thirds favor allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military; and over 50 percent support same-sex partnerships with the same rights and benefits as marriage. While only 40 percent of people support same-sex marriage, this is one-third more than the 30 percent who supported it five years ago.
And that is in the absence of a mass movement unapologetically demanding LGBT equality, which would do a lot to shift public opinion.
There are over 30 million LGBT people in this country, and tens of millions more who are allies. The contradiction between the laws on the books and the actual and potential public support for LGBT equality is wide enough to drive a movement through. If just a fraction of those people devoted themselves to the struggle for equality, we could build a movement involving hundreds of thousands of people.
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ALMOST A year into the first term of President Barack Obama, with Democratic super-majorities in the House and Senate, it is clear that LGBT equality will not be handed down from on high. We must struggle for it from below. As the abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, "Without struggle, there is no progress."
This is why we organized buses to bring 150 people from Western Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., on October 11 for the National Equality March, joining a quarter of a million people to march on the Capitol building to demand full equality for LGBT people in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states--now!
Many of the leading LGBT rights organizations, such as the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), opposed the march until the last minute, only offering limited support when it became clear the march was going to be a success. Many said it would be a waste of resources. Others, like openly gay Democratic Congressman Barney Frank, said it would have no impact--that the only thing we would be putting pressure on is "the grass."
However, after years of leading a state-by-state struggle for marriage equality and spending tens of millions of dollars--such as the $40 million spent on the failed effort to defeat Proposition 8 in California (including television ads that didn't even mention the word "gay"), as well as millions in campaign contributions to Democrats who do not support full equality--what has the corporate-sponsored "Gay, Inc." gotten us?
Marriage equality has been won in seven states, but it has been taken away in two, Maine and California, where a slim majority of voters were able to strip same-sex couples of their civil rights. And even in states like Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage is legal, without over 1,000 federal benefits, it's still "separate and unequal."
We need a new strategy, one that sets as its goal full equality on the federal level, with no compromises and no more waiting and begging for crumbs. Like march organizer David Mixner said, we're equal, and we need to begin to act like it and demand our rights now!
President Obama was elected last year because his message of change, which included verbal support for LGBT rights, inspired LGBT people, youth and people of color to turn out to vote for him in record numbers. But what has he done? Of the dozens of items on the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's checklist of "low-hanging fruit"--steps towards equality that Obama could make with the stroke of a pen, including outlawing discrimination against transgender people in federal employment and recognition of homeless LGBT youth--only one has been checked off so far: more accurate accounting of same sex-couples on the census.
In the lead-up to the vote on Question 1 to repeal marriage equality in Maine this November, when asked where he stood, Attorney General Eric Holder--whose Justice Department in June, less than two weeks after Obama declared it LGBT Pride Month, defended the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act in court by effectively comparing same-sex marriage to incest--said he didn't know enough to have a position.
Obama, who has said he believes marriage should be between a man and a woman, had nothing to say about Question 1, and the day before the election, Obama's former campaign organization e-mailed Maine Democrats--asking them to call people in New Jersey to support Gov. Jon Corzine, with no mention of the marriage vote in Maine.
The Obama administration didn't step in to support marriage equality in New York, which was defeated last week after several Democrats voted against equality, and despite an international outcry over Bill 18 in Uganda, which would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment or death, the Obama administration has yet to release a statement of condemnation. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, "There comes a time when silence is betrayal."
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THIS IS nothing new. In 1960, Democrat John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected having promised African Americans that he would oppose Jim Crow discrimination. However, like Obama, Kennedy did little unless he was forced to act. Instead, he attempted to keep the civil rights movement in check, and to negotiate with and appease bigots such as Alabama Gov. George Wallace.
He only intervened to protect activists from racist Southern brutality when the movement was able to thrust the issue into the national spotlight, making inaction no longer an option. In many cases, FBI agents and federal marshals stood by and watched as local and state police violated the constitutional rights of civil rights activists.
In fact, it wasn't until 1963, when thousands of Blacks led by Martin Luther King Jr. faced Bull Connor's police dogs and fire hoses to win a victory against segregation--exposing the brutality of Jim Crow racism to the eyes of the country and the world--that JFK introduced the Civil Rights Act that was enacted the next year. And it wasn't just Birmingham; there were marches, sit-ins and other campaigns in hundreds of cities and towns across the South, a mass movement involving thousands upon thousands of people.
The African American civil rights movement teaches us lessons that are vital for the success of our struggle for LGBT civil rights today--that it is possible for a mass movement of ordinary people, through determined action and effective leadership, motivated by love and a desire for equality, to triumph over the forces of bigotry and hatred, against odds greater than those that we face now; that we cannot rely on politicians to grant us equal rights, but that we must rely on ourselves to win them.
Politicians will not act in our favor unless they see that the costs of inaction are greater than the costs of action, a calculation based on conditions it is up to us to create. The civil rights movement taught us that we cannot win unless we are clear that we cannot wait--that we must unapologetically demand full equality now. To quote Frederick Douglass again, "Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will."
And the civil rights movement taught us that we cannot win city by city, and state by state. We face federal inequality, so we must build a movement that demands equality on the federal level.
Finally, we must forge unity and solidarity. Shamefully, some, such as Barney Frank and the HRC, have argued that it is "more realistic" to win civil rights for LGB people by leaving our transgender brothers and sisters behind. This has created justifiable resentment within the trans community, and we should strive to make Equality Across America an organization that is genuinely inclusive of trans people, and uncompromising when it comes to their civil rights and demands.
We should also reject other divisive ideas--such as those that scapegoated African Americans for the passage of Proposition 8--and build a movement that is inclusive of LGBT people of color and their demands. Both of these will require more than lip service: we will only forge these alliances by standing in concrete solidarity with movements for trans rights and racial justice.
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WHILE THE civil rights movement could rely on the Black church to provide the movement with a framework, resources and a new generation of talented leaders like King, there is not an analogous institution in the LGBT community. However, as King wrote in "Why We Can't Wait," "Fortunately, history does not pose problems without eventually producing solutions. The disenchanted, the disadvantaged and the disinherited seem, at times of deep crisis, to summon up some sort of genius that enables them to perceive and capture the appropriate weapons to carve out their destiny."
Since November of 2008, when California's Proposition 8 banned gay marriage, tens of thousands took to the streets in California and across the country. This setback became a step forward: the launching of a new grassroots movement for LGBT equality. New organizations were founded by young people new to the struggle, as well as by seasoned activists reenergized by the explosion of anger following this bigoted attack on the rights of LGBT people.
Groups like One Struggle, One Fight in San Francisco have engaged in civil disobedience--for example, when hundreds shut down Van Ness Avenue, which leads to the Golden Gate Bridge, after the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8. In San Diego, the San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality staged a sit-in in a marriage license office to protest the California Supreme Court's upholding of Prop 8, where dozens of activists listened to a reading of Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail."
In Chicago, LGBT rights activists have forged alliances with immigrant rights and labor activists, standing in solidarity with Republic Windows & Doors workers who staged the first successful factory occupation in the U.S. since the 1930s. And on October 11, a quarter of a million people descended on Washington, D.D. to demand full LGBT equality, in a march organized by grassroots activists on a shoestring budget, without corporate sponsorship and without the assistance of mainstream LGBT organizations.
Now, we are taking the next step with the founding of Equality Across America. All around the country, including here in Western Massachusetts, dozens of groups of activists who built the march have founded chapters of Equality Across America (EAA), united around a single demand: full equality for all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people--now! Regional conferences are being planned for this spring to build EAA, meet with one another and figure out how we can work together to win our demands.
Millions of people are on our side, and millions more will question their homophobia and transphobia if we build a movement to challenge them, just as the civil rights movement changed millions of minds about racism.
We can draw on the rich history of struggles against oppression: the civil rights movement, LGBT struggles of the past, the women's rights movement and the labor movement, among others. And we will have to create new strategies and tactics specific to today: sit-ins at marriage license offices, protests, campaigns to win support from student governments and other organizations, putting pressure on politicians, utilizing the media and creating our own media to get our message out.
We can and have sought allies from other struggles both locally and nationally, but it is critical that we maintain our political independence--that we do not support politicians who refuse to stand up for our rights. Like one popular sign at the National Equality March said: "Attention Democrats: the gay ATM is closed," and since then, a campaign has begun to cease all contributions to Democrats until they take concrete action on LGBT equality.
We must build a mass, independent, democratic, unapologetic movement from below, and to do that, we need you, your friends, fellow students, co-workers and thousands more people we have yet to meet. Join us not as passive supporters, but as agents in the shaping of our own collective destiny. History is on our side, and it shows us that such a movement can be built--despite what our high school textbooks tell us, history is made not by a few "great men," but by ordinary people who stand up and demand their rights.
We have come a long way. There are LGBT people today who remember when homosexuality was considered by psychiatrists to be a mental illness. Today, millions live out and proud, and millions more consider homophobia and transphobia to be unacceptable. We have a long struggle ahead, but we will get there. I hope you will join us in taking the next step on the road to equality together.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Facing cuts instead of "reform"
Published in Socialist Worker.
I WORK in health care in Massachusetts, where the "reform" enacted several years ago is supposed to be the model for national proposals.
There has been a perfect storm of bad news this week that shows how twisted the government's priorities are, and exposes the lie that measures--like in Massachusetts, which requires the uninsured to purchase private health insurance--will provide health care for all.
This week, Barack Obama announced that 30,000 more troops will be sent to Afghanistan, an unjust occupation. The U.S. has no right to occupy Afghanistan or anywhere else, and more troops will mean more injury and death for Afghan civilians and U.S. soldiers.
At a cost of about $1 million per soldier per year, this will increase spending by $30 billion. Money that should be used to build is being used to destroy, and to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., the bombs that are being dropped abroad are exploding at home.
Last month, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities announced that 35 states face additional mid-fiscal year shortfalls of a total of about $32 billion.
The $30 billion that will go to escalate the war in Afghanistan could have been used to prevent the further budget cuts that will come as a result of these shortfalls--as could the over $32 billion in bonuses paid out this year by the top nine banks, as they profit from taxpayer bailouts.
Here in Massachusetts, there is a budget shortfall of $600 million. This will mean cuts in services to the most vulnerable. Here are some proposed cuts:
-- MassHealth, which is expanded Medicaid coverage for low-income people, will only provide adult dental coverage for cleanings and extractions (pulling teeth). So if you are poor and you have a cavity, if you can't afford to pay the full cost of a filling (which most poor and working people can't), your only option is to have the tooth pulled. This will have a devastating impact on quality of life, employability and self-esteem, as people will literally lose their teeth (and lack coverage for dentures).
-- MassHealth is also cutting the hours of services from personal care assistants (PCAs), who provide assistance to the elderly and the disabled that is critical in allowing them to stay in their homes and live independent lives. Many people will be forced to leave their homes and enter nursing homes and other facilities, and many of the PCAs themselves, already grossly underpaid, will lose their jobs.
-- This comes on top of cuts to other vital services for low-income people. For example, Gov. Deval Patrick is cutting $4.4 million to the Child Care Resource and Referral program, which in 2008 provided child care vouchers for 57,000 children in low-income working families so that their parents can work.
This could cripple this critical program, with devastating results. Child care is so expensive that workers facing low wages and cuts in hours will have to choose between quitting their jobs or leaving their children unattended or in other unsafe environments. And child care workers, also underpaid, will be laid off.
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WHAT KIND of a life can one have with no teeth and no dentures to replace them? Why should disabled people who are perfectly capable of living independent lives be denied the services they need to do so? What kind of future will children have after spending their early years left at home without proper supervision just so their parents can work to feed them? And what chance do laid-off child care workers and PCAs have, given that there are six people applying for each job opening and their wages are low enough to make survival, let alone saving, difficult?
It doesn't have to be this way.
A recent article in the Atlantic shows that those who will suffer from these cuts can unite and fight back. The article profiles a Massachusetts man named George Birk, who suffered brain damage after being hit by a car when he was a child. He is able to work and live on his own today, but only because of state mental health services that were on the chopping block recently.
Instead of letting the state cut the funding that allows George and people like him to live in the community, instead of in an institutional setting, George and 800 other clients and mental health workers marched on the Department of Mental Health and the State House to protest the cuts. Governor Patrick ended up not cutting that funding.
We can't let the government get away with cutting education, health care, social and human services, and the jobs of the workers who provide them. Students, professors and workers in California are standing together, as did clients and mental health workers in Massachusetts.
It's going to take a mass movement to prevent and reverse these cuts, and the way to build that movement is to protest and resist, to force the cuts and their devastating impact out of the shadowy backrooms of state bureaucracies and into the light of day, where they are visible to the majority of people in this country--people who are sick and tired of money going to line the pockets of already wealthy and to kill people overseas, while we are expected to do more with less here at home.
I WORK in health care in Massachusetts, where the "reform" enacted several years ago is supposed to be the model for national proposals.
There has been a perfect storm of bad news this week that shows how twisted the government's priorities are, and exposes the lie that measures--like in Massachusetts, which requires the uninsured to purchase private health insurance--will provide health care for all.
This week, Barack Obama announced that 30,000 more troops will be sent to Afghanistan, an unjust occupation. The U.S. has no right to occupy Afghanistan or anywhere else, and more troops will mean more injury and death for Afghan civilians and U.S. soldiers.
At a cost of about $1 million per soldier per year, this will increase spending by $30 billion. Money that should be used to build is being used to destroy, and to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., the bombs that are being dropped abroad are exploding at home.
Last month, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities announced that 35 states face additional mid-fiscal year shortfalls of a total of about $32 billion.
The $30 billion that will go to escalate the war in Afghanistan could have been used to prevent the further budget cuts that will come as a result of these shortfalls--as could the over $32 billion in bonuses paid out this year by the top nine banks, as they profit from taxpayer bailouts.
Here in Massachusetts, there is a budget shortfall of $600 million. This will mean cuts in services to the most vulnerable. Here are some proposed cuts:
-- MassHealth, which is expanded Medicaid coverage for low-income people, will only provide adult dental coverage for cleanings and extractions (pulling teeth). So if you are poor and you have a cavity, if you can't afford to pay the full cost of a filling (which most poor and working people can't), your only option is to have the tooth pulled. This will have a devastating impact on quality of life, employability and self-esteem, as people will literally lose their teeth (and lack coverage for dentures).
-- MassHealth is also cutting the hours of services from personal care assistants (PCAs), who provide assistance to the elderly and the disabled that is critical in allowing them to stay in their homes and live independent lives. Many people will be forced to leave their homes and enter nursing homes and other facilities, and many of the PCAs themselves, already grossly underpaid, will lose their jobs.
-- This comes on top of cuts to other vital services for low-income people. For example, Gov. Deval Patrick is cutting $4.4 million to the Child Care Resource and Referral program, which in 2008 provided child care vouchers for 57,000 children in low-income working families so that their parents can work.
This could cripple this critical program, with devastating results. Child care is so expensive that workers facing low wages and cuts in hours will have to choose between quitting their jobs or leaving their children unattended or in other unsafe environments. And child care workers, also underpaid, will be laid off.
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WHAT KIND of a life can one have with no teeth and no dentures to replace them? Why should disabled people who are perfectly capable of living independent lives be denied the services they need to do so? What kind of future will children have after spending their early years left at home without proper supervision just so their parents can work to feed them? And what chance do laid-off child care workers and PCAs have, given that there are six people applying for each job opening and their wages are low enough to make survival, let alone saving, difficult?
It doesn't have to be this way.
A recent article in the Atlantic shows that those who will suffer from these cuts can unite and fight back. The article profiles a Massachusetts man named George Birk, who suffered brain damage after being hit by a car when he was a child. He is able to work and live on his own today, but only because of state mental health services that were on the chopping block recently.
Instead of letting the state cut the funding that allows George and people like him to live in the community, instead of in an institutional setting, George and 800 other clients and mental health workers marched on the Department of Mental Health and the State House to protest the cuts. Governor Patrick ended up not cutting that funding.
We can't let the government get away with cutting education, health care, social and human services, and the jobs of the workers who provide them. Students, professors and workers in California are standing together, as did clients and mental health workers in Massachusetts.
It's going to take a mass movement to prevent and reverse these cuts, and the way to build that movement is to protest and resist, to force the cuts and their devastating impact out of the shadowy backrooms of state bureaucracies and into the light of day, where they are visible to the majority of people in this country--people who are sick and tired of money going to line the pockets of already wealthy and to kill people overseas, while we are expected to do more with less here at home.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Wall Street swine and the vaccine scandal
Published in Socialist Worker.
IT WAS adding insult and injury to injury.
With hospitals, doctor's offices, clinics and schools around the country waiting on scarce supplies of the swine flu vaccine, Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs and Citigroup ordered up more than 1,000 doses between them for company doctors to administer to their employees in New York City.
Distribution of the vaccine is a national scandal, but people's anger was compounded by the news that the banksters jumped to the head of the line. "Wall Street banks have already taken so much from us," John VanDeventer of the Service Employees International Union wrote on the union's Web site. "They've taken trillions of our tax dollars. They've taken away people's homes who are struggling to pay the bills. But they should not be allowed to take away our health and well-being."
But as disgusting as Wall Street's arrogant behavior is, the bigger picture is more serious and much scarier--thousands of people are dying preventable deaths, and millions are becoming seriously ill because the U.S. government's response to the swine flu pandemic relies on a for-profit pharmaceutical industry that prioritizes profits over people and a public health infrastructure that has been gutted by budget cuts.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 3,900 U.S. residents have died from swine flu--the strain of the flu virus officially known as H1N1--since April (540 of them children). That's almost four times higher than previous death toll announced by the CDC--and meanwhile, only 5 percent of Americans report having received the vaccine. Even before the Centers' dramatically higher death tolls were released, President Obama declared a national state of emergency because of the pandemic.
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HOW DID this happen? A recent USA Today/Gallup poll found [1] that "58 percent place a great deal or moderate amount of the blame for the lack of vaccine on the federal government...and 62 percent blame drug companies."
President Obama promised in July that 160 million doses of swine flu vaccine would be available by the end of October. The Department of Health and Human Services revised that estimate to 40 million and then to 28 million--enough doses for just 17.6 percent of the 159 million Americans considered to be at high risk for swine flu.
The government had plenty of time to prepare. Scientists have been predicting this crisis for years--a virulent strain of the flu virus among animals developing into a strain that affects humans, and spreading rapidly because no one has immunity to it. The specific form of H1N1 that made the jump to humans was discovered in pigs in 1998.
As Mike Davis, author of The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu [2], wrote in an article for SocialistWorker.org earlier this year [3], "[T]he central paradox of this swine flu panic is that while totally unexpected, it was accurately predicted." Researchers, Davis said, "urged the creation of an official surveillance system for swine flu. That admonition, of course, went unheeded in a Washington."
The federal government, which can find trillions of dollars for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and to bail out Wall Street, hasn't devoted enough resources to build the public health infrastructure necessary to develop and distribute vaccines to protect the population. Instead, it relies on the pharmaceutical industry.
The government awarded $2 billion in contracts for the production of 195 million doses of H1N1 vaccine to the for-profit pharmaceutical companies Norvartis, Sanofi-aventis, GlaxoSmithKline, CSL Limited and MedImmune--but these companies so far have delivered just 20 percent of the original order.
As Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out in an article on TomDispatch.com [4], the shortage is due to complications involving these companies' use of outdated technology from the 1950s, which involves growing vaccine in chicken eggs.
Rather than invest in developing more efficient, reliable and effective ways to manufacture vaccines, which "can be tricky and less than maximally profitable to manufacture...Big Pharma...[traditionally prefers] to manufacture drugs for such plagues as erectile dysfunction, social anxiety, and restless leg syndrome," Ehrenreich wrote.
Congress--which voted to cut federal funding to ACORN after a handful of its employees were caught on tape offering advice on how to evade taxes to a couple right-wingers--has so far remained silent about the federal government's contract with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), which has a long history of wrongdoing.
In 2003, GSK paid an $88 million fine for overcharging the government's Medicaid health program for low-income people, and in 2007, it paid an Internal Revenue Service fine of $3.1 billion after allegedly using "transfer pricing" to dodge paying billions in taxes, the largest tax settlement in history. And in 2008, an FDA official accused GSK of attempting to "sugar-coat" the increased risk of suicide among children taking its anti-depressant Paxil.
Exacerbating the vaccine shortage is the inability of state and local health departments to effectively distribute what has been produced. According to Reuters [5], Dr. Anne Schuchat of the CDC told a Senate health subcommittee that her agency has had difficulties reaching state and local health officials who are on furlough because of budget cuts that have come as a result of state budget shortfalls--in a system already weakened by 15,000 job cuts over the past two years.
But there's one player in all this that isn't suffering--the pharmaceutical industry. The drug giants stand to make a hefty profit off of swine flu vaccines--estimates range from $7.6 billion to $18 billion in sales worldwide, depending on severity of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, people are waiting in long lines for hours for vaccines that haven't been produced or distributed. In late October, ABC News reported on a typical scene [6]: hundreds lined up starting at 9 a.m. at a makeshift clinic in a Chicago school, scheduled to open at 3 p.m., only to be turned away 30 minutes after the clinic opened because there weren't enough doses to go around.
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SOME PEOPLE have drawn comparisons between the government's botched handling of the pandemic and its failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Another parallel to Katrina is apparent when you see who is most impacted by swine flu. According to the New York Daily News [7], "[H]alf of the H1N1 children's deaths between April and August were among African Americans and Hispanics," though these groups account for only around one-third of children in the U.S.
Like the poor and mostly African American residents of New Orleans left behind to endure the Katrina disaster, poverty and racism are the main factors behind why Blacks and Latinos are at greater risk for complications arising from swine flu. According to USA Today, these groups are "four times more likely [than whites] to be hospitalized with the virus."
Not only are African Americans at greater risk, they are less likely to seek or receive the vaccine. According to the Los Angeles Times [8], "African Americans received 2.57 percent of the initial 60,773 vaccinations [in LA County], although they make up about 9 percent of the county population."
Loretta Jones of Healthy African American Families in South LA blames the low turnout on distrust of the health care system. One stark reason for that distrust, Jones said, was the "Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which lasted from 1932 to 1972, in which federal researchers withheld treatment from Black men." But, said Jones, "it's more than the legacy of Tuskegee--it's a whole lifetime of poor access to health care."
Like the uninsured patient who goes to the dentist with a toothache, only to discover a mouth full of decay, the swine flu pandemic has revealed the consequences of decades of privatization and cuts to public health and social services--with the effects hitting working-class people, and especially people of color, hardest.
Instead of vaccinating the swine on Wall Street, the government should tax them and use the revenues to produce vaccines and other drugs that are accessible and affordable for all.
- [1] http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-11-10-swineflupoll10_ST_N.htm
- [2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FMonster-Our-Door-Global-Threat%2Fdp%2F0805081917%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1240810647%26sr%3D8-2&tag=socialistwork-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325
- [3] http://socialistworker.org/2009/04/27/capitalism-and-the-flu
- [4] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175134/barbara_ehrenreich_why_your_child_may_not_get_a_swine_flu_shot_soon
- [5] http://www.reuters.com/article/internal_ReutersNewsRoom_ExclusivesAndWins_MOLT/idUSTRE5A557920091110
- [6] http://abcnews.go.com/WN/SwineFluNews/swine-flu-vaccine-lines-hours/story?id=8930589
- [7] http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/10/07/2009-10-07_unspoken_minority_toll_swine_flus_bigger_impact_on_blacks_and_hispanics_is_not_b.html
- [8] http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-me-minority-flu-vaccine11-2009nov11,0,6574467.story
- [9] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0
Thursday, November 5, 2009
DC March for Equality: A Success
Published in the Rainbow Times
by J.M. Sorrell and Gary Lapon
JM:
Early last summer, I heard that a grassroots national march was being considered for LGBT equality in DC. My immediate internal response was to feel we should have a bus from western Massachusetts. A woman I met at a rally suggested I contact Gary Lapon, an ally and a socialist, to help with organizing.
We met regularly and began spreading the word. Before I knew it, Gary reserved TWO buses and was convinced they would be filled. He met with Five College students, and helped inspire a third bus (Hampshire College).
My two jobs precluded me from going to DC, so I was happy to support the process and be with Gary in spirit. Gary did fill those buses, and I suspect there is no stopping him as the work continues. He is one of my heroes. I asked him these questions:
JM: Describe your interest in the march. How did you come to this place?
I was excited by the response to the passage of Proposition 8, which took away same-sex marriage in California. Tens of thousands of predominately young people took to the streets in anger in California, joined by similar numbers across the country. I take a principled stand against all forms of oppression and believe that real change requires the self-activity of regular people, so I was inspired by reports of a new, youthful, diverse, largely working class LGBT movement and wanted to help it take the next step: a national march for full civil equality.
The contradiction between growing support for LGBT equality and the discrimination still on the books at the federal, state, and local level is large enough to drive a movement through, and given the hopes and confidence of a young generation that just played a leading role in electing an African American President in a country based on slavery, I became convinced that the potential exists to build a new civil rights movement for LGBT equality.
I met a wonderful group of activists who came together to make this happen; the Rainbow Times, Pride & Joy, Out For Reel film festival, and Amherst Community Television all provided us with free publicity, which is greatly appreciated.
JM: What excited you the most about your experience at the DC march/rally? Any surprises?
I was surprised by the turnout of over 200,000 people. The march was organized in large part by new activists with limited resources, only 1 paid organizer, less than $250,000, no corporate sponsorship, and very little assistance or support from mainstream LGBT rights organizations.
Given these factors, I thought that 50,000 would be a success. That so many people came out is a testament to effectiveness of independent grassroots organizing, and the demand – full civil equality for LGBT people in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states, now – resonated with people who, as lead march organizer Sherry Wolf writes, are sick of “begging for crumbs.”
I was excited to collaborate with the Graduate Employees' Organization (UAW Local 2322) at UMass Amherst, whose financial support was essential. Christopher Sweetapple, a GEO organizer who played a leading role, explained the need for labor to support LGBT equality:
“Economic justice is crucial to fighting all other forms of oppression, and thus unions like ours support the struggles of many minorities--LGBT people against homo/transphobia, but also the struggles of non-whites against persistent racial oppression, women against...misogyny and people of differing physical abilities to find accommodation and respect in society...second, there are members within our unions--gay men, trans and bisexual people, lesbians-- who suffer from legalized discrimination right now...”
Also inspiring was the talent and enthusiasm of students from UMass and Hampshire College. Madeline Burrows, Hampshire class of 2013 and a leader in bringing a bus of over 50 Hampshire students, explained:
“This generation of students [faces] a looming contradiction: we’ve grown up in a society far more open to sexuality and gender variance than ever before, but LGBT Americans lack basic civil rights. With huge budget cuts less students are able to afford college...lacking job security due to discrimination takes on a whole new meaning in this economic crisis. Students played a leading role in the sit-ins that sparked the civil rights movement that overthrew Jim Crow in the 1960s, and students today are playing a leading role in initiating building a civil rights front on college campuses across the country.”
JM: What now?
The next step is to build a local chapter of Equality Across America (over 20 of us are already involved), composed of students and others, to continue to educate, agitate, and organize for LGBT civil rights.
We need your talent and energy, whether you're LGBT or an ally, a student or a worker, an experienced activist or someone getting involved for the first time. Join us and let's make history by making LGBT inequality history!
Check us out online at equalitywmass.blogspot.com and get involved in our era's civil rights movement!
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Betting on our deaths
Originally published at Socialist Worker. Also published at Dissident Voice.
WITH THE home mortgage crisis dragging along, consumer borrowing still lagging, and crises looming in other sectors like commercial real estate, Wall Street is desperate for a new product to kick-start securities markets.
It appears as though the savior may be riding in on a pale horse.
According to a September 5 New York Times article, banks like Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs are exploring new investment schemes that involve buying up life insurance policies from sick and elderly people, bundling them into huge securities, and selling shares in the securities to investors.
Buying shares is essentially a bet--that the people whose insurance policies on which the securities are based will die "on time" or earlier than expected. According to the Times, "The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return--though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money."
Just when it seemed impossible for Wall Street--still counting the trillions in taxpayer dollars it received in a government bailout to save it from collapse--to sink any lower, greed came to the rescue with the development of a grim new market.
As Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere."
Now, the financial crisis has driven capitalists to the nursing and retirement homes, and to the bedsides of the sick and dying.
The credit rating agency DBRS--whose Senior Vice President Kathleen Tillwitz informed the Times that "our phones have been ringing off the hook with inquiries"--is studying how to rate pools of life insurance policies. The main challenge is figuring out how to pool people together. As the Times wrote:
The solution? A bond made up of life settlements would ideally have policies from people with a range of diseases--leukemia, lung cancer, heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's. That is because if too many people with leukemia are in the securitization portfolio, and a cure is developed, the value of the bond would plummet.
If the sub-prime mortgage market boom is any indication, an increased demand for existing life insurance policies spurred by increased securitization would lead to widespread abuse and fraud--with insurers faced with the same incentives that encouraged mortgage brokers to deceive borrowers with "teaser" interest rates that ballooned several years into repayment.
In this case, the victims would be the elderly, the sick, and those who depend on life insurance benefit payouts in the case of the death of a loved one.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
A FURTHER element of instability would be added if life insurance-backed securities take off--the likely proliferation of illegal "stranger-owned life insurance" or "STOLI" policies.
A STOLI is a policy created when a broker or investor convinces someone, usually a senior citizen, to take out a life insurance policy, with the promise to sell it quickly for a one-time payment. According to Reuters, "The death benefits are immediately transferred to investors, usually hedge funds."
The securitization of life insurance policies would likely lead to an increase in the number of illegal STOLIs, once the banks exhaust the possibilities of buying up existing, legitimate policies to package into securities. In turn, insurance companies would have an incentive to crack down on this practice to avoid paying death benefits to the investors, leaving the market prone to crisis.
Other challenges for a credit rating agency like DBRS include figuring out what "would happen if health reform passed, for example, and better care for a large number of Americans meant that people generally started living longer? Or if a magic-bullet cure for all types of cancer was developed?" These eventualities, while prolonging and improving the lives of millions, would be bad for investors' bottom line.
The "potential risk for investors," the Times continued, is that "some people could live far longer than expected. It is not just a hypothetical risk. That is what happened in the 1980s, when new treatments prolonged the life of AIDS patients. Investors who bought their policies on the expectation that the most victims would die within two years ended up losing money."
According to an ABC News story:
The industry for selling life insurance [policies to investors] first sprang up
during the AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s. "Companies loved AIDS because it was
a predictable death sentence," says Gloria Wolk, a life-settlement expert who
learned about the practice while volunteering at AIDS services clinics. "The
shorter and more certain the life expectancy, the higher the returns promised to
investors and the greater the lump sum offered to patients. It was a grim mix of
free-market capitalism and human mortality."
Wolk nevertheless said she "saw the industry make a huge difference in the lives of terminally ill patients and their families"--by providing victims with funds to pay for the exorbitant health care and other costs associated with dying from AIDS, while it was ignored a government run by Ronald Reagan.
The only conceivable defense of the practice of bundling life insurance policies into securities and selling them to investors to profit from the deaths of policyholders is that it enables those who sell their policies to get more than they would if they simply sold policies back to the insurance company.
But this option is only attractive because health care costs in the U.S. place quality care out of reach--for the nearly 50 million people without health insurance, and for tens of millions more who are insured, but can't afford the co-pays and deductibles that pile up when they get sick or injured.
Similarly, for the elderly whose retirement savings have been eroded by the current crisis, the inadequacy of Social Security, and by the long-term shift defined-benefit pension plans to 401(k)s based on the stock market, the main reason most would be tempted to sell their life insurance policies is that our government neglects to provide a decent standard of living for elderly workers who have outlived their usefulness to the exploiting class.
In other words, the market for securities backed by life insurance policies depends on the absence of universal single-payer health care for all and the lack of a sufficient social safety net for senior citizens.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ALMOST AS disturbing as first-tier financial institutions betting on death is the matter-of-fact reporting of the New York Times.
The Times article, titled "Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance," ignores completely the question of the morality of human beings gambling on the lives of others, indexing the sick based on the nature of their affliction and when it is likely to kill them, and crossing their fingers that no cure for cancer is discovered. This is a brilliant illustration of Marx's assertion that capitalism "has left no other bond between [people] than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment.""
It says a lot about capitalist society's brutality and indifference to human life that the newspaper of record could cover this story without pause, going no deeper than the pros and cons from the perspective of investors--while "Ads by Google" accompany the story, inviting readers to "sell your life insurance policy" and "find low cost life insurance."
Nor does the Times question the logic of devoting massive wealth to a market that creates no new value in the form of goods or services, and is of no use to anyone but the few who will profit from it.
According to the Times article, there are $26 trillion in life insurance policies in the U.S, and "some in the industry predict the market [for life-insurance-backed securities] could reach $500 billion." That sum is nearly three times the total of all the budget shortfalls of every state government for fiscal year 2010.
A just society based on human need would use that $500 billion to preserve and expand essential services that are on the chopping block as states balance their budgets.
A just society based on human need would devote those resources not to betting on death, but providing top quality care to the sick, researching new cures and treatments (and making them available to all), and ensuring that the elderly live the last years of their lives in dignity and security.
According to the economic "experts," the U.S. economy is beginning to "recover." But the very nature of the recovery--a return to big bonuses and salaries for Wall Street executives alongside deepening and sustained unemployment, cuts in social services and health care "reform" that amounts to a massive government handout to the health insurance industry--demolishes any idea that the U.S. is not a class society.
It is time to build the socialist alternative. Our lives and dignity depend on it.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Time to march for LGBT rights
Originally published in Socialist Worker.
MARK SNYDER of QueerToday.com asks "Why the National Equality March?" pointing to the Human Rights Campaign's (HRC) recent endorsement of the march, the lack of a day dedicated to HIV/AIDS issues, and the fact that "the resources that support the infrastructure of" the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community are incredibly drained.
I appreciate that Snyder is raising these issues, because I believe they illustrate why it is so important to go all out to mobilize people to go to Washington, D.C., for the October 11 march.
The first point to make is that, in the wake of the passage of Proposition 8, there has been a significant resurgence of activism around LGBT rights--from protests to civil disobedience to the formation of new grassroots organizations, often organized by, and including, thousands of people who have never engaged in activism before.
As socialists and leftists, we should be supportive of this and get involved, which we have done and are doing by organizing for the National Equality March (NEM). The NEM, which is being built by many of the people and organizations drawn in by this resurgence, is a fantastic opportunity to bring these new forces together to demand civil equality, get a sense of our numbers and strength, draw new people in, and make new connections to strengthen already existing and build new grassroots organizations in our local communities to continue the struggle on October 12 and beyond.
We are not simply organizing to protest, but protesting to organize, using the march to get more people involved in the struggle for LGBT civil rights and LGBT liberation.
Snyder is right to point out, if I am correct in assuming that he means funds available for political organizing and social, health and community services, that the resources that form the infrastructure of the LGBT community are drained.
That's all the more reason to put what resources we can muster into getting more people and organizations together, and building a movement that can put significant pressure on Obama and Congress to force them to pass reforms granting not just civil equality but also demanding funding for services that would benefit the LGBT community (and beyond).
And if you look at the list of endorsements on the NEM Web site, you'll notice that it has brought together a diverse array of organizations that represent a broad range of oppressed and exploited people (labor, immigrants, LGBT, African Americans, etc.). This march is a positive step in the direction of the formation of the broad left that is necessary to build the infrastructure and develop the resources we need to win the changes our communities desperately need, changes qualitatively beyond those we can make by being conservative hoarding the few resources we have now.
Third, it's important to make a statement on the national level, to put pressure on Obama for his inaction on LGBT issues and to raise awareness of the true extent of civil inequality that LGBT people face in this country.
For example, many people I've been talking with about the march were not aware, and were outraged to find out, that employment discrimination against LGBT people is still legal in most states. Eighty-nine percent of U.S. residents oppose such discrimination, so the contradiction between that and the laws on the books in states across the country represents the potential for a mass movement. If even a fraction of these people become involved in the struggle for equality, that's still millions of people--a leap forward from where we are today.
Finally, the HRC has recently endorsed the march. I think that the HRC leadership realizes that this march has real potential, because it represents the desires (for uncompromising, full civil equality now) of millions of people, including HRC supporters. HRC has said that they want the marchers to go back to their communities and become citizen lobbyists.
I think that a better strategy for winning LGBT rights is to become grassroots activists, independent of the Democratic Party, and to link this struggle to those of all the oppressed and exploited. But I will still march with HRC to demand full civil equality for LGBT people, while maintaining my political independence and expressing my views. In fact, I think it's vital that I and other socialists be there, so that our politics get a hearing, not just those advocating support for and working with the Democratic Party.
Thousands of people, many of them new to activism and open to different ideas on how to achieve equality for LGBT people and beyond, will be marching on Washington, D.C., on October 11.
It is up to us to be there, to be vocal about what we think it will take to win the change we really need and, as Harvey Milk was fond of saying, to recruit them to our movement.
I hope to see you in D.C. this October!
MARK SNYDER of QueerToday.com asks "Why the National Equality March?" pointing to the Human Rights Campaign's (HRC) recent endorsement of the march, the lack of a day dedicated to HIV/AIDS issues, and the fact that "the resources that support the infrastructure of" the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community are incredibly drained.
I appreciate that Snyder is raising these issues, because I believe they illustrate why it is so important to go all out to mobilize people to go to Washington, D.C., for the October 11 march.
The first point to make is that, in the wake of the passage of Proposition 8, there has been a significant resurgence of activism around LGBT rights--from protests to civil disobedience to the formation of new grassroots organizations, often organized by, and including, thousands of people who have never engaged in activism before.
As socialists and leftists, we should be supportive of this and get involved, which we have done and are doing by organizing for the National Equality March (NEM). The NEM, which is being built by many of the people and organizations drawn in by this resurgence, is a fantastic opportunity to bring these new forces together to demand civil equality, get a sense of our numbers and strength, draw new people in, and make new connections to strengthen already existing and build new grassroots organizations in our local communities to continue the struggle on October 12 and beyond.
We are not simply organizing to protest, but protesting to organize, using the march to get more people involved in the struggle for LGBT civil rights and LGBT liberation.
Snyder is right to point out, if I am correct in assuming that he means funds available for political organizing and social, health and community services, that the resources that form the infrastructure of the LGBT community are drained.
That's all the more reason to put what resources we can muster into getting more people and organizations together, and building a movement that can put significant pressure on Obama and Congress to force them to pass reforms granting not just civil equality but also demanding funding for services that would benefit the LGBT community (and beyond).
And if you look at the list of endorsements on the NEM Web site, you'll notice that it has brought together a diverse array of organizations that represent a broad range of oppressed and exploited people (labor, immigrants, LGBT, African Americans, etc.). This march is a positive step in the direction of the formation of the broad left that is necessary to build the infrastructure and develop the resources we need to win the changes our communities desperately need, changes qualitatively beyond those we can make by being conservative hoarding the few resources we have now.
Third, it's important to make a statement on the national level, to put pressure on Obama for his inaction on LGBT issues and to raise awareness of the true extent of civil inequality that LGBT people face in this country.
For example, many people I've been talking with about the march were not aware, and were outraged to find out, that employment discrimination against LGBT people is still legal in most states. Eighty-nine percent of U.S. residents oppose such discrimination, so the contradiction between that and the laws on the books in states across the country represents the potential for a mass movement. If even a fraction of these people become involved in the struggle for equality, that's still millions of people--a leap forward from where we are today.
Finally, the HRC has recently endorsed the march. I think that the HRC leadership realizes that this march has real potential, because it represents the desires (for uncompromising, full civil equality now) of millions of people, including HRC supporters. HRC has said that they want the marchers to go back to their communities and become citizen lobbyists.
I think that a better strategy for winning LGBT rights is to become grassroots activists, independent of the Democratic Party, and to link this struggle to those of all the oppressed and exploited. But I will still march with HRC to demand full civil equality for LGBT people, while maintaining my political independence and expressing my views. In fact, I think it's vital that I and other socialists be there, so that our politics get a hearing, not just those advocating support for and working with the Democratic Party.
Thousands of people, many of them new to activism and open to different ideas on how to achieve equality for LGBT people and beyond, will be marching on Washington, D.C., on October 11.
It is up to us to be there, to be vocal about what we think it will take to win the change we really need and, as Harvey Milk was fond of saying, to recruit them to our movement.
I hope to see you in D.C. this October!
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
When workers run the state
Originally published in Socialist Worker.
JUST BECAUSE, as Bones Hulsey argues in response to Paul D'Amato, "a state is required to create and enforce a capitalist mode of production" does not mean by extension that every state necessarily does so ("Vanguards and state power"). In fact, a kind of state is also required to abolish the capitalist mode of production.
Before going any further, I think that it's important to establish a clear definition of the state. In State and Revolution, Lenin offers this:
The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.
In other words, if you have a society that includes two classes of people whose interests are fundamentally and necessarily opposed, such as capitalist and wage worker, lord and serf, or master and slave--in general exploiter and exploited--a state is necessary to maintain this society with its relations of production, in these cases to establish and preserve the dominance of the exploiting class over the exploited.
The flip side is that if you have a society where there is a state, then that society must be split into classes with opposite interests. The state, then, is an instrument for the domination of one class over another, for the subordination of the interests of one class to those of an opposing class.
In the class societies mentioned above, the state has existed to enforce the rule of an exploiting minority over an exploited majority. So in these societies the state takes a form separate from the mass of people, as a "special body of armed men [and women]": police, intelligence agencies, the military, prison guards, etc.
But what happens in the wake of a revolution that brings the working class--the majority of people--to political power in a country when that class organizes and arms itself to protect against counterrevolution and help the revolution to spread, both to other countries and to the economic sphere?
History has shown that the world capitalist class will stop at nothing to prevent workers from taking or maintaining political power, as the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871 and the brutality of the counterrevolutionary White armies and foreign invaders from several imperialist countries following the Russian Revolution of 1917 are testament to. The working class will need to defend itself.
It doesn't make much sense to argue that a revolution could, in a flash, abolish all capitalist economic relations of production in the world. The world is a big place, with billions of people in it, and the organization that is required to meet the daily needs of all of these people, especially in its anarchic and insufficient capitalist form, is immensely complex.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
CAPITALISTS ARE not going to simply hand over their factories and stores. So how does the working class take them over? How do they enforce their class interests to liberate themselves, opposite those of the capitalists who would continue to exploit them?
As Marx wrote, "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes," but first must "smash it." So the first thing to say is that the working class can't simply take over the state as it is.
What replaces this? Lenin continues, pointing to example of the Paris Commune:
The Commune, therefore, appears to have replaced the smashed state machine "only" by fuller democracy: abolition of the standing army; all officials to be elected and subject to recall. But as a matter of fact this "only" signifies a gigantic replacement of certain institutions by other institutions of a fundamentally different type...It is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush their resistance...The organ of suppression, however, is here the majority of the population, and not a minority, as was always the case under slavery, serfdom and wage slavery. And since the majority of people itself suppresses its oppressors, a "special force" for suppression is no longer necessary!
In this sense, the state begins to wither away. Instead of the special institutions of a privileged minority (privileged officialdom, the chiefs of the standing army), the majority itself can directly fulfill all these functions, and the more the functions of state power are performed by the people as a whole, the less need there is for the existence of this power.
What Marx called "the dictatorship of the proletariat," the working class in power in a society that still has capitalists (whose interests are opposite those of the workers), requires a "state." But this is qualitatively different than any state that has come before it, so much so that Engels referred to it as a "semi-state."
Extensive measures are taken by the mass of workers to prevent the rise of a privileged, entrenched bureaucracy and to ensure that these institutions are truly accountable to the will of the majority: the replacement of the standing army and police, elected representatives subject to instant recall and paid average workers' wages, etc.
It's a tool for the dominance of one class over another, so it still fits Lenin's definition of the state, but in this case the dominant class is the majority of society. All previous states have existed primarily to preserve the rule of an exploiting minority, which relies on the labor of the majority to accumulate their wealth. These states seek to protect these social relations of exploitation, to preserve the relations of production which give rise to the need for these states.
The institutions of working class rule, the rule of the exploited majority, have a primary aim: the abolition of exploitation. This is really the opposite of the capitalist state (or that of any class society) in that rather than preserving the social relations on which it is based the working class "semi-state" seeks to overturn them, thereby doing away with its own usefulness by doing away with all classes, with the antagonism between exploiter and exploited, and with all of that the very need for a political state at all.
Once the expropriation of the capitalists is complete, there is no need for this "semi-state," so it "withers away." Political power is no longer necessary, which is what Engels was referring to as quoted by Hulsey at the end of his response.
I'm not sure exactly what Hulsey means by "revolutionary social institutions" or "societal involvement," but my guess is that he's referring to the institutions of the working class, the exploited, and their involvement in society, not that of the exploiters.
In that case, Hulsey is simply calling for a working class state by another name--the very answer to Paul D'Amato's question of how a new society can be built, which Hulsey claims Lenin was incapable of providing.
JUST BECAUSE, as Bones Hulsey argues in response to Paul D'Amato, "a state is required to create and enforce a capitalist mode of production" does not mean by extension that every state necessarily does so ("Vanguards and state power"). In fact, a kind of state is also required to abolish the capitalist mode of production.
Before going any further, I think that it's important to establish a clear definition of the state. In State and Revolution, Lenin offers this:
The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.
In other words, if you have a society that includes two classes of people whose interests are fundamentally and necessarily opposed, such as capitalist and wage worker, lord and serf, or master and slave--in general exploiter and exploited--a state is necessary to maintain this society with its relations of production, in these cases to establish and preserve the dominance of the exploiting class over the exploited.
The flip side is that if you have a society where there is a state, then that society must be split into classes with opposite interests. The state, then, is an instrument for the domination of one class over another, for the subordination of the interests of one class to those of an opposing class.
In the class societies mentioned above, the state has existed to enforce the rule of an exploiting minority over an exploited majority. So in these societies the state takes a form separate from the mass of people, as a "special body of armed men [and women]": police, intelligence agencies, the military, prison guards, etc.
But what happens in the wake of a revolution that brings the working class--the majority of people--to political power in a country when that class organizes and arms itself to protect against counterrevolution and help the revolution to spread, both to other countries and to the economic sphere?
History has shown that the world capitalist class will stop at nothing to prevent workers from taking or maintaining political power, as the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871 and the brutality of the counterrevolutionary White armies and foreign invaders from several imperialist countries following the Russian Revolution of 1917 are testament to. The working class will need to defend itself.
It doesn't make much sense to argue that a revolution could, in a flash, abolish all capitalist economic relations of production in the world. The world is a big place, with billions of people in it, and the organization that is required to meet the daily needs of all of these people, especially in its anarchic and insufficient capitalist form, is immensely complex.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
CAPITALISTS ARE not going to simply hand over their factories and stores. So how does the working class take them over? How do they enforce their class interests to liberate themselves, opposite those of the capitalists who would continue to exploit them?
As Marx wrote, "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes," but first must "smash it." So the first thing to say is that the working class can't simply take over the state as it is.
What replaces this? Lenin continues, pointing to example of the Paris Commune:
The Commune, therefore, appears to have replaced the smashed state machine "only" by fuller democracy: abolition of the standing army; all officials to be elected and subject to recall. But as a matter of fact this "only" signifies a gigantic replacement of certain institutions by other institutions of a fundamentally different type...It is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush their resistance...The organ of suppression, however, is here the majority of the population, and not a minority, as was always the case under slavery, serfdom and wage slavery. And since the majority of people itself suppresses its oppressors, a "special force" for suppression is no longer necessary!
In this sense, the state begins to wither away. Instead of the special institutions of a privileged minority (privileged officialdom, the chiefs of the standing army), the majority itself can directly fulfill all these functions, and the more the functions of state power are performed by the people as a whole, the less need there is for the existence of this power.
What Marx called "the dictatorship of the proletariat," the working class in power in a society that still has capitalists (whose interests are opposite those of the workers), requires a "state." But this is qualitatively different than any state that has come before it, so much so that Engels referred to it as a "semi-state."
Extensive measures are taken by the mass of workers to prevent the rise of a privileged, entrenched bureaucracy and to ensure that these institutions are truly accountable to the will of the majority: the replacement of the standing army and police, elected representatives subject to instant recall and paid average workers' wages, etc.
It's a tool for the dominance of one class over another, so it still fits Lenin's definition of the state, but in this case the dominant class is the majority of society. All previous states have existed primarily to preserve the rule of an exploiting minority, which relies on the labor of the majority to accumulate their wealth. These states seek to protect these social relations of exploitation, to preserve the relations of production which give rise to the need for these states.
The institutions of working class rule, the rule of the exploited majority, have a primary aim: the abolition of exploitation. This is really the opposite of the capitalist state (or that of any class society) in that rather than preserving the social relations on which it is based the working class "semi-state" seeks to overturn them, thereby doing away with its own usefulness by doing away with all classes, with the antagonism between exploiter and exploited, and with all of that the very need for a political state at all.
Once the expropriation of the capitalists is complete, there is no need for this "semi-state," so it "withers away." Political power is no longer necessary, which is what Engels was referring to as quoted by Hulsey at the end of his response.
I'm not sure exactly what Hulsey means by "revolutionary social institutions" or "societal involvement," but my guess is that he's referring to the institutions of the working class, the exploited, and their involvement in society, not that of the exploiters.
In that case, Hulsey is simply calling for a working class state by another name--the very answer to Paul D'Amato's question of how a new society can be built, which Hulsey claims Lenin was incapable of providing.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
October 11: March on Washington for LGBT Equality
Originally published in the Rainbow Times. Also published at Equality Across America and Socialist Worker.
October 11: many LGBT people and their allies recognize it as National Coming Out Day– a day to raise awareness and pride over ignorance and fear. The day was first observed in 1988, to commemorate the second “National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.”
In 1987, half a million people marched on Washington, DC to demand civil rights for LGBT people, and to pressure President Ronald Reagan, who remained silent while thousands died of AIDS, to take action.
We’ve come a long way since then in terms of support for LGBT equality, but this seismic shift in visibility and thinking is out of sync with the law: It’s still legal in most states to discriminate against employees on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation, same-sex marriage is still illegal in most states, and many still hold bigoted views that have violent and often deadly results.
Even in Massachusetts, transgender people are not yet explicitly protected from discrimination. And, just a few months ago, the suicide of 11-year old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, a Springfield boy who faced incessant anti-gay bullying at school, was a tragic reminder of the deadly consequences of hatred and inequality.
There is still a ways to go to reach true equality, but we can get there if we stand up together. I’d like to invite everyone to take the next step this October 11, 2009, by joining thousands of LGBT people and allies to march on Washington, DC as part of the National Equality March demanding “full equality for all LGBT people in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states. Now.”
This past November, when California’s Proposition 8 banned gay marriage, tens of thousands took to the streets in California and across the country. This setback became a step forward: the launch of a new grassroots movement for LGBT equality.
It was these protests, many of them called by regular people who’d never organized before but felt compelled by their outrage to take action, that inspired Cleve Jones to call a march on Washington. Jones, who got his start working with Harvey Milk and was the historical adviser for the recent film, had this to say in an interview with the Windy City Times: “A door has opened to us and if we push really hard we can win full, real equality. Not just marriage equality or visitation rights. Actual equality.”
It’s important to remember that equality has never been handed down from above, but won from below when regular people stand up and refuse to take “no” for an answer. Millions of people are on our side, and millions more will question their homophobia and transphobia if we build a movement to challenge them, just as the civil rights movement changed millions of minds about racism.
Now is the time for us to make history by making LGBT inequality history.
Activists from western Massachusetts have already begun organizing to bring busloads of people down to the National Equality March on October 11, 2009. To get a spot on the bus or to get involved in organizing, or to donate to ensure that low-income LGBT people and allies can attend, contact Gary Lapon at glapon@gmail.com or 617-851-5354.
October 11: many LGBT people and their allies recognize it as National Coming Out Day– a day to raise awareness and pride over ignorance and fear. The day was first observed in 1988, to commemorate the second “National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.”
In 1987, half a million people marched on Washington, DC to demand civil rights for LGBT people, and to pressure President Ronald Reagan, who remained silent while thousands died of AIDS, to take action.
We’ve come a long way since then in terms of support for LGBT equality, but this seismic shift in visibility and thinking is out of sync with the law: It’s still legal in most states to discriminate against employees on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation, same-sex marriage is still illegal in most states, and many still hold bigoted views that have violent and often deadly results.
Even in Massachusetts, transgender people are not yet explicitly protected from discrimination. And, just a few months ago, the suicide of 11-year old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, a Springfield boy who faced incessant anti-gay bullying at school, was a tragic reminder of the deadly consequences of hatred and inequality.
There is still a ways to go to reach true equality, but we can get there if we stand up together. I’d like to invite everyone to take the next step this October 11, 2009, by joining thousands of LGBT people and allies to march on Washington, DC as part of the National Equality March demanding “full equality for all LGBT people in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states. Now.”
This past November, when California’s Proposition 8 banned gay marriage, tens of thousands took to the streets in California and across the country. This setback became a step forward: the launch of a new grassroots movement for LGBT equality.
It was these protests, many of them called by regular people who’d never organized before but felt compelled by their outrage to take action, that inspired Cleve Jones to call a march on Washington. Jones, who got his start working with Harvey Milk and was the historical adviser for the recent film, had this to say in an interview with the Windy City Times: “A door has opened to us and if we push really hard we can win full, real equality. Not just marriage equality or visitation rights. Actual equality.”
It’s important to remember that equality has never been handed down from above, but won from below when regular people stand up and refuse to take “no” for an answer. Millions of people are on our side, and millions more will question their homophobia and transphobia if we build a movement to challenge them, just as the civil rights movement changed millions of minds about racism.
Now is the time for us to make history by making LGBT inequality history.
Activists from western Massachusetts have already begun organizing to bring busloads of people down to the National Equality March on October 11, 2009. To get a spot on the bus or to get involved in organizing, or to donate to ensure that low-income LGBT people and allies can attend, contact Gary Lapon at glapon@gmail.com or 617-851-5354.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Cutting budgets at our expense
analyzes the failure of Massachusetts' health care system--and what could be done about it.
July 23, 2009
THIRTY THOUSAND documented immigrants in Massachusetts have just been hit with a one-two punch that leaves them paying more taxes for fewer benefits--the latest in a series of attempts to force poor, oppressed and working-class people to pay for the economic crisis.
The new state budget drops health insurance coverage for permanent residents who have had a green card for less than five years; previously, they were covered by Commonwealth Care as part of Massachusetts' 2006 "universal" health care reform.
And, according to the New York Times, "In addition to dropping the immigrant insurance program, Commonwealth Care will save an estimated $63 million by no longer automatically enrolling low-income residents who fail to enroll themselves," which essentially means that thousands of low-income people will go without health coverage they qualify for. This comes on top of significant cuts to services for the disabled, the elderly and the poor.
Massachusetts health care reform, which includes a mandate that residents purchase insurance (enforced by tax penalties) and subsidies for low-income residents, is similar in many ways to what is shaping up as the Obama administration's national health care proposal--which aims to expand insurance coverage while maintaining the role of the for-profit health insurance industry.
With leading health care policymakers like Democratic Sen. Max Baucus stating that any legislation won't cover undocumented workers (see "Look what made it on the table" [1]) nor provide full coverage for all, the move by Massachusetts to drop a section of the documented immigrant population is an indication of what we might see on the national level if the Democrats get what they're proposing.
As these 30,000 immigrants figure out whether they should skip needed care, attempt to pay for some of it out of pocket or cut back on other expenses like food and rent, they should be careful to adjust their calculations to account for the sales tax hike (from 5 percent to 6.5 percent) that will take effect on August 1.
The argument coming from Massachusetts politicians in favor of the cuts to health care, education and human services is that because of the economic crisis and recession, there simply isn't enough money to pay for everything, and that although they care deeply about the poor, sick and disabled, sacrifices must--regrettably, of course--be made.
But is there really not enough money to pay for needed services for immigrants? And are sales taxes--which are regressive, in that the poorest pay the largest share of their income and the richest pay the smallest--the only way, or the best way, to increase tax revenues?
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ACCORDING TO the National Priorities Project, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost Massachusetts over $24 billion, more than enough to make up for budget shortfalls without cutting services (the total state budget this year is $27 billion). But even conceding that state-level politicians have no direct control over foreign policy, there is plenty of money to prevent cuts and expand funding for those who need services the most.
The only problem, at least for Massachusetts politicians, is that the money is in the pockets of the rich, the last place they look when it comes to finding revenue to pay for services for the needy and other public programs. It seems they have a case of selective amnesia, because they know all too well that the money is there when it's time to raise cash for their campaigns.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Massachusetts ranks seventh in the country, with a median household income of $62,365, and according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Massachusetts ranks third in the U.S. with a per capita Gross State Product (like GDP, but for the state level) of $48,995 in 2007, a measure of value added by state industries.
Massachusetts is one of the wealthiest and most productive states in the wealthiest nation in the world. There is also great inequality, which has been on the rise. According to "Income Inequality in Massachusetts, 1980-2006" in the MassBenchmarks journal, while income for the top 20 percent of Massachusetts households increased 16 percent during the 1990s, "for the bottom 80 percent of families in the Commonwealth, income growth was modest to minimal...by the year 2000, the top 20 percent of families received almost eight times the income of the lowest 20 percent."
If Massachusetts politicians truly cared about the most vulnerable people in the state, they'd be taxing the rich instead of cutting insurance for immigrants and raising taxes that disproportionately impact the poor and working class.
Massachusetts currently has a flat tax (enshrined in the state constitution) of 5.3 percent on income. Although in the past Massachusetts voters rejected attempts to institute a progressive tax structure where those with larger incomes are taxed at higher rates, I'm confident that today's voters--who voted "no" by a two-to-one margin in 2008 to reject a right-wing attempt to eliminate the income tax--would be open to taxing the rich at a higher rate to pay for health care and social services.
In addition, there are ways around the flat tax. Because of exemptions and deductions, the state income tax is already somewhat progressive, with the bottom 20 percent paying at about a 0.2 percent rate, the middle 20 percent at 3.5 percent, and the top 20 percent at 4.3 percent, according to the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center. So, lawmakers could raise the flat tax while simultaneously raising the threshold under which income is not subject to tax.
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ANOTHER WAY to tax the rich would be to raise taxes on income from dividends and interest, which would primarily impact the wealthy, since in Massachusetts those making over $200,000 per year averaged $23,897 in income from dividends and interest, as opposed to $375 for those making less than $50,000, and almost 10 times the average even for those making $100,000 to $200,000.
According to the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, the 1999 reduction of the tax rate on interest and dividends from 12 percent to 5.95 percent cost the state over $500 million in revenue in 2006 alone. Why not raise that rate back to 12 percent, or better yet to 30 percent or more? After all, the wealthy who collect money from this source are simply using the money they already have as leverage to get a larger share of the value produced by workers.
These investors produce nothing of value to society to "earn" their interest and dividends. Why not tax it and use the revenue to fund services for those who actually need them?
In fact, I would propose a retroactive tax on the wealthy, who in recent years profited from speculation linked to the housing bubble. Plenty of them made big money and got out of the game before the crash, leaving the bill for their reckless speculation to be picked up by the millions who lost their home, retirement savings and public services.
For example, in 2006, the 25 top-paid hedge fund managers averaged $540 million a year, a total of $14 billion for just 25 people, much of it from investing in the complicated financial instruments that triggered the current crisis. Those profits should be seized and used to prevent budget cuts, keep people in their homes and provide housing for the homeless.
And for those who protest that this would be unfair to the hedge fund managers, I say that is getting off easy after the destruction their greed has wrought for so many working people.
The story is the same across the country. The money is there--what is lacking is sufficient pressure from below to force the politicians to cut from the top.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
How the U.S. Media sees Honduras
Originally published in Socialist Worker.
AS EVENTS unfold following the coup in Honduras, some in the U.S. mainstream press are providing ideological cover for the Honduran military's illegal and undemocratic actions, which must be condemned.
Álvaro Vargas Llosa's June 30 New York Times op-ed, "The Winner in Honduras: Chavez," is one prominent example. Llosa claims that President Zelaya set a trap for the Honduran military by "pushing the limits of democracy by trying to force a constitutional change that would permit his re-election" and "the military fell for it."
This is absurd. Zelaya called for a non-binding referendum, a poll, to measure popular support for a change in the constitution, which is hardly a valid reason to kidnap and exile a head of state.
Llosa states that the referendum violates the Honduran constitution and "the legal procedure for constitutional amendments," and that Zelaya's desire to permit a vote to change the single-term limit to be able to run for re-election is the only evidence he provides of Zelaya "pushing the limits of democracy."
His argument rests on equating the violation of the constitution with the violation of democracy. To suggest that the Honduran military overthrew Zelaya, a democratically-elected president, out of respect for democracy and the constitution is ignorant at best and intentionally misleading at worst. Article 2 of the Honduran constitution identifies such violations of popular sovereignty as crimes of treason and Article 3 stipulates that nobody must recognize a government that assumes power by force of arms and gives the Honduran people the right to overthrow such a regime.
I thought, since Llosa is a fellow at the Independent Institute, which according to their Web site "adheres to the highest standards of independent scholarly inquiry" and upholds "rigorous standards without regard to any political or social biases," he must have called for the U.S. military to overthrow the Bush regime for its many violations of the U.S. Constitution, but so far my Google search has turned up 0 results on that.
The real purpose of Llosa's piece is to target Venzuelan President Hugo Chavez, whom he calls "the unlikely champion of Jeffersonian democracy in Latin America" for his "incessant exploitation of the situation," painting him as the main threat to democracy in the region.
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MARY ANASTASIA O'Grady's June 30 Wall Street Journal opinion is even worse. Titled "Honduras Defends Its Democracy: Fidel Castro and Hillary Clinton Object," O'Grady's piece applauds the coup because she sees it as a noble defense of formal "democracy" and "checks and balances," as well as standing up to "dictators" such as Chavez, who was elected with 56 percent (and re-elected with 63 percent) of the vote in Venezuela.
Reading her piece, one would think that the military soberly, and in the name of the rule of law, stepped in to arrest Zelaya, rather than kidnapping him and beating and kidnapping Foreign Minister Patricia Rodas and the ambassadors from Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Also ignored are the protests in favor of Zelaya's return; the curfew and reports of gunshots--on June 29 on Democracy Now!, Honduran human rights activist Dr. Juan Almendares stated that those on the street after 9 p.m. were being considered free game for the military to shoot; the media blackout in Honduras imposed by the military; or the fact that the leaders of the coup were trained in the United States at the School of the Americas, which trained leaders of right-wing death squads and supporters of the contras who killed tens of thousands of Nicaraguans during the 1980s, using Honduras as a staging ground.
It is clear that O'Grady left these points out to back up her incorrect assertion that "the struggle against Chavismo has never been about left-right politics. It is about defending the independence of institutions that keep presidents from becoming dictators." Apparently, military coups are an important component in the "struggle against Chavismo," given the recent events in Honduras and the failed coup against Chavez in 2002. The latter was overturned by a mass outpouring of support from ordinary Venezuelans in the streets and resistance within the military, including the inspiring example of an 18-year-old bugler in a military band who refused to play for the new "president" and handed his bugle to an enraged general telling him to play it. I'll leave it to O'Grady to explain how a military coup is an effective way of preventing the rise of a dictator, after she finishes burning her house down to protect it from future fires.
Llosa and O'Grady's attempt to sugarcoat the Honduran coup and portray leaders like Chavez and Zelaya as enemies of democracy ignores both Latin American history--which clearly shows the U.S., with its support for right-wing dictators and military coups, to be the greatest threat to democracy--and the contemporary political situation. Despite what they say, such twisting of the facts is motivated by "political and social biases" and "left-right politics."
Chavez has nationalized industries and passed social reforms and price controls to benefit the poor, and spearheaded the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) trade group that includes Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Dominica, Bolivia and Honduras. ALBA functions as a counterweight to neoliberal U.S. policy such as the Central American Free Trade Agreement.
Zelaya, at the helm of a country with a 70 percent poverty rate, has shifted to the left, passed a 60 percent increase in the minimum wage, and joined ALBA.
As Nikolas Kozloff points out in his CounterPunch article "The Coup in Honduras," Zelaya wrote a letter to Obama after the latter's election warning against U.S. intervention in Honduras and criticizing Washington policy, likely referring to Plan Columbia, where the drug war is used as a pretext to heavily arm the right wing Uribe regime. As Kozloff noted, "Zelaya then moved on to drug trafficking: 'The legitimate struggle against drug trafficking...should not be used as an excuse to carry out interventionist policies in other countries.'"
The coup should be seen for what it is: an attempt by a right-wing section of the Honduran ruling class to turn back what it sees as a threat to total corporate and U.S. dominance in Latin America, a region the latter is used to treating as its "backyard."
Just as millions of supporters of democracy and human rights have stood behind the people of Iran in their recent struggle, so should we condemn the coup in Honduras and call for the return of Zelaya to office.Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Bombs can't bring liberation
Originally published in Socialist Worker.
THANK YOU for republishing Jeremy Scahill's "The not-so-antiwar Democrats," a vital analysis of the June 16 passage of the $106 billion war funding supplemental for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Scahill rightly calls out the shameful hypocrisy of Democrats who, to win the votes of the antiwar majority, claimed to be antiwar when their votes didn't matter, but voted for empire when they could have had some impact. And he exposes Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi's bullying of their antiwar colleagues and double-speak regarding the release of photographic evidence of torture under Bush II.
His article is an indispensable tool for antiwar activists.
Democrats in Congress and the White House weren't the only ones who showed themselves, when the cards are down, to side with the occupiers against the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Also exposed were various groups on the left with ties to the Democratic Party--those who "acted as if empire began," and I would add ended, "with George W. Bush," as Anthony Arnove put it in a recent interview with SocialistWorker.org.
In a June 22 article, "MoveOn Resumes Antiwar Stance" in the Nation, Tom Hayden points out that "antiwar sentiment at the grassroots is smothered by the unwillingness of several organizations to openly oppose the war escalation," calling out MoveOn, True Majority, and others for their silence on the supplemental war funding.
Although Hayden points out that MoveOn has resumed its "antiwar stance" by calling for a timetable of withdrawal from Afghanistan, a visit to MoveOn's Web site on June 26--a group that gained millions of supporters because of its opposition to the Iraq War during the Bush years (and turned that support into millions of dollars in contributions to Democrats' campaigns)--yields no mention on the main page of the word "Afghanistan" and only one reference (in a tiny font near the bottom) to ending the war in Iraq.
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IN HIS famous speech declaring his opposition to the war in Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Jr. said "there comes a time when silence is betrayal." By refusing to stand against the supplemental war funding bill, MoveOn, True Majority and others have betrayed not only the people of Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, but also their own supporters who want the U.S. out of the Middle East and Central Asia.
The Feminist Majority, a major feminist non-profit, even went so far as to support the war funding supplemental bill because it included an amendment, later dropped, for aid for women in Afghanistan.
The Feminist Majority is right to be outraged by the horrible atrocities, such as rape and the throwing of acid in the faces of school girls, being committed against Afghan women.
However, their press releases distort reality by largely leaving the U.S. and NATO off the hook for supporting warlords whose policies towards women are just as deplorable as the Taliban, not to mention the inherent difficulties involved in "liberating" the Afghan women who are among the hundreds of civilians killed in U.S. airstrikes in the past few months, and those who will be killed by bombs purchased with the newly-approved funding.
The occupation of Afghanistan has always been about U.S. control of Central Asian energy resources. Women's liberation from the Taliban, a justification for the war in Afghanistan held up by anti-abortion/anti-woman crusader George W. Bush, was simply an excuse that deserves to be given as much weight as the claim, coming from a man who took office in 2000 in a stolen election, to seek to spread "democracy" in Iraq.
Furthermore, the U.S., a country with a $10 billion pornography industry and access to abortion in fewer than 15 percent of its counties is in no position to lead others on the path to women's liberation.
Shazia (an alias), a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), who struggles for women's rights from her home in Kabul, had this to say to Green Left Weekly:
Those organizations and people who are antiwar, that support the democratic groups, they must support...democratic groups and organizations like RAWA because they will be the future of Afghanistan and they will bring change for the Afghan people.
[Antiwar] demonstrations and such gatherings will have a big impact on the situation in Afghanistan...We think the first step is that [foreign troops] should leave Afghanistan because we do not need war.
They should leave Afghanistan because we have three enemies now, not only two or one.
We, ourselves will bring peace and security for our people because no other country can grant us...peace, democracy and security.
Florence Reece's song "Which Side Are You On?," written in the 1930s in the midst of class struggle in "Bloody" Harlan County, Kentucky, comes to mind:
They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there.
You'll either be a union man
Or a thug for J. H. Blair.
Which side are you on?
We must answer RAWA's call by rebuilding the antiwar movement. This will be impossible unless we have a clear and principled answer to Florence Reece's question.
We must never compromise: Not another nickel, not another dime--no more money for the U.S. and NATO's crimes!Monday, June 15, 2009
Look what made it on the table
Originally published in Socialist Worker.
Analysis: Gary Lapon
analyzes some of the disappointing proposals that have crept onto the health care reform table.
SINGLE-PAYER health reform may be "off the table" for the Obama administration's pending overhaul of the U.S. health care system, but apparently taxing workers' employer-provided health insurance benefits is not.
According to a June 2 WashingtonPost.com video report, after meeting with Obama and other Democrats, Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus said that taxing health benefits is "something [Obama] might consider" and is "on the table."
This, the Post points out, is in sharp contrast with Obama's campaign rhetoric that criticized John McCain for the same proposal. "For the first time in American history, he wants to tax your health benefits," Obama said in September. "Apparently, Senator McCain doesn't think it's enough that your health premiums have doubled. He thinks you should have to pay taxes on them, too."
Since then, the Obama administration released a statement that while "the president made it clear during the campaign that he has serious concerns about taxing health care benefits," nevertheless, "all options should be considered." Conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel suggested that Obama "may well be attracted to the dollars of a benefit tax, but he's waiting to see if he can blame Congress for dragging him into it."
Currently, workers pay no income tax on compensation they receive in the form of health care benefits. Removing this exclusion is equivalent to raising taxes for a majority of the working class during an economic crisis where many are failing or barely able to make ends meet. It would come on top of skyrocketing out-of-pocket health care costs--for workers who get insurance through an employer, these costs increased by 34 percent from 2004 to 2007, according to a recent study in Health Affairs.
The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that taxing benefits would raise up to $246 billion a year toward coverage for the uninsured, as part of Obama's health reform plan, which supposedly aims at providing health insurance for all.
However, according to the Congressional Quarterly's HealthBeat Web site, Baucus, whose committee is leading efforts to come up with a reform plan, said last month that "we're not going to get 100 percent coverage" and that a more likely figure would be 94-96 percent. Baucus added, "We're not going to cover undocumented workers. That's too politically explosive."
In other words, a possible "solution" to the failure of the for-profit U.S. health insurance system could raise taxes on the working class toward helping people purchase health insurance (and fill the already-bulging pockets of the insurance companies)--and would leave millions uninsured, including undocumented immigrants, one of the most oppressed and exploited sections of the working class.
There is plenty of money in the federal budget to pay for Obama's proposed health care reform, not to mention a much more effective single-payer system.
Estimates of the cost of Obama's proposals range from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion over 10 years. The total U.S. military budget (including the Pentagon budget, spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for nuclear weapons, and payments to service military debt) is nearly $1 trillion per year, more than the rest of the world combined.
Obama could easily cover the costs of health care reform by ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing troops home from the over 700 U.S. military bases scattered across the globe and ceasing the development of nuclear weapons (after all, the U.S. already has enough nukes to destroy the world many times over). But such steps would be "too politically explosive" given the near absolute consensus among Democrats and Republicans on the rehabilitation and promotion of U.S. empire.
Baucus' comment about not providing health care to undocumented workers--predominately Latino immigrants, but also including people from Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe, among other places--because it's "too politically explosive" is revealing as well.
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FORTUNATELY, WHAT is seen by politicians as possible and what is seen as "too explosive" changes, depending on who is or isn't taking to the streets or exerting power in the workplace.
It would have been "too politically explosive" for Baucus to suggest today that health care reform not cover African Americans. However, that would have been an acceptable view for a mainstream politician before the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s overturned Jim Crow and shifted the political spectrum and mainstream consciousness in the direction of equality for African Americans.
History, unfortunately, does not move steadily forward in terms of issues of social and economic justice and equality. Just a few decades ago, the idea of a Democratic (or Republican) President overseeing the dismantling of health and retirement benefits for United Autoworkers (UAW) would have "too politically explosive." But not today, after decades of attacks on unions and workers' living standards.
What reforms fall within the range of acceptability depends on the relative strength of the capitalist class on the one hand and the working class and social movements on the other. Our task today is to make it "too politically explosive" to pay for reforms by increasing taxes on the working class, to deny undocumented immigrants basic human needs like health care, or to suggest as an option any health care reform that does not ensure universal access to care.
Struggles like the victorious sit-in at Republic Windows & Doors, which saw a largely Latino and immigrant work force occupying their factory for demands that included health care benefits for themselves and their families, are an example of how different demands can be combined.
As the saying goes, "if you're not at the table, you're on the menu." The labor movement and the left are weak today and have been for some time, which is why our wages and benefits are being consumed by a ruling class hungry for profit. We need to organize and rebuild--and demand that the only options "on the table" are human needs, justice, dignity and equality.
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