No justice, no pizza!

Published at Socialist Worker.

DOMINO'S WORKERS staged a rally on February 27 outside a Domino's franchise in Manhattan to announce an important victory in their struggle for basic rights and fairness--one that could have far-reaching implications for all fast-food workers.

Chanting "no justice, no pizza," about 50 Domino's pizza workers, other delivery and food service workers as well as supporters picketed and rallied for workers' rights and fair treatment in front of a Domino's at Third Avenue and 32nd Street.

The rally was organized by the "Justice Will Be Served" campaign sponsored by the Chinese Staff and Workers Association, National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, and 318 Restaurant Workers Union. It is part of a struggle for justice going back over two years.

According to a press release, for the first time, workers at a franchise are able to sue the parent corporation--in this case, Domino's Pizza Corp.--for alleged violations committed by franchisee Dave Melton.

The lawsuit was originally filed in 2010 by six workers alleging Melton violated state and federal labor laws. More workers joined the next year, bringing the total to over 70 plaintiffs. Workers' grievances include allegations of paying workers less than minimum wage, requiring unpaid overtime, denying workers time for breaks and lunch, unsafe working conditions (including being forced to make deliveries on bicycle in severe rain and snow), as well as retaliation against workers for standing up against these offenses.

Former Domino's worker and plaintiff Carlos Rodriguez told the crowd that Melton and Domino's "make millions of dollars by forcing the workers to work under all kinds of horrible conditions whether there are storms [or] hurricanes."

Victor, another former Melton employee, spoke at the rally, saying, "We want to end this exploitation, and we call on the corporation to also take responsibility for the abuses we suffered as workers there. Many of us worked many hours doing deliveries and we were cheated out of 20 to 25 hours per week of our pay. We call on everyone to join us to end this exploitation."

Vincent Cao, a former worker at Saigon Grill who is part of another Justice Will Be Served campaign against similar conditions at his former employer, spoke as well. "I was fired because I spoke against unfair labor practices," Cao said. "We're here today to support the Domino's Pizza workers. We say enough sweatshop conditions! All the sweatshop owners, they use asset transfers, closing down, fake bankruptcy, to try to run away and avoid lawsuit. So we will fight to get justice."

In fact, Melton himself just recently filed for bankruptcy, claiming poverty due to legal fees related to the lawsuit. Workers called on Domino's and the franchise owner to "take responsibility, pay workers what they are owed, rehire those workers fired for speaking out and end their sweatshop conditions."

After a round of speakers, Carlos Rodriguez and others went into the Domino's location to hand a copy of the judge's decision to a manager. The manager refused to meet with Carlos and other workers, but when the latter refused to leave, he sent an employee to collect it.

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THE ABILITY to include the Domino's corporation as a defendant in the lawsuit against Melton is an important victory, as major corporate chains like Domino's have in the past evaded accountability for violations of labor law committed by franchisees--who own their own restaurants, but pay a fee to the parent corporation to use the brand.

Domino's, which demands significant franchise fees and nearly 10 percent of sales after taxes, makes tens of millions from its franchises, and has seen a spike in profits in recent years. As Victor said, "The corporation, Domino's, knows what is going on in these stores, and tolerates this exploitation."

According to Forbes, Domino's corporate CEO J. Patrick Doyle took home over $6 million in total compensation in 2011. Yet the franchise system, where stores are owned by private "partners," enables chains like Domino's to plead innocence when it comes to dirty deeds done by franchisees. These workers are not only taking on a major corporation, but they are standing up to Dave Melton, a prominent Domino's franchisee.

Ironically Melton, who owns several Domino's restaurants in New York City and Connecticut, was celebrated in a 2008 New York Times story for how well he supposedly treats his employees and all of the opportunities available for them at his restaurants.

Melton even co-authored a book with a top Domino's executive entitled "Hiring the American Dream." On the promotional website, Melton claims that "my minimum-wage workers find their work fun and rewarding."

Melton said to the Times about his restaurants: "This is one of the places where so many people get their first experience in America," he said. "It is fun exposing them to the way capitalism and business in America works."

According to former Melton employees at the rally, this means subjecting them to an experience all too common for immigrant workers in the U.S.: ruthless exploitation made possible through intimidation.

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THE JUSTICE Will Be Served campaign has called for a citywide rally on April 2 at the same Dave Melton's Domino's Pizza location at 464 Third Avenue and 32nd Street to keep the pressure on Melton and Domino's. The rally will demand that Domino's take responsibility, pay workers back for stolen wages, and rehire those fired for taking a stand. They are calling on workers from across the city to join the demand for justice.

Carlos Rodriguez said, "We're calling out to all Domino's workers from different franchises to join us so we can unite against this exploitation and...we are reaching out to all other workers including those of McDonalds and Dunkin' Donuts and Wendy's to come together so we can end this exploitation."

"We're facing the same issue, and we should unite, no matter Latino, Chinese workers--we should come together," stated Vincent Cao of the Boycott Saigon Grill effort. "They use many different ways to divide the workers, documented/undocumented, Chinese versus Latino. They want workers to support the boss, not join a union."

Cao spoke about the importance of continuing with actions against Domino's and other sweatshop employers: "Picket lines are important. You have a base, an opportunity for other workers to join you, not just Domino's and Saigon Grill. Workers see there are so many workers there, and if they join there is a bigger chance to win."

The kings of corporate welfare

Published in Socialist Worker and the Indypendent.

WHO'S LIVING high on the hog off handouts and giveaways from the government?

If you're Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, the answer's obvious--it's the "takers" at the bottom of the income ladder who are raking it in from government programs. "[A]bout 60 percent of the American people get more benefits in dollar value from the federal government than they pay back in taxes," Ryan declared in 2010. "So we're going to a majority of takers versus makers in America."

If you're Barack Obama, you criticized Ryan and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign for their upside-down view of who had it good in American society. But like all top Democrats, Obama shares the view that working people and the poor are also to blame for government deficits--and therefore everyone needs to sacrifice.

When he signed the fiscal cliff agreement at the start of the year that raised taxes somewhat on the richest of the rich, but hit ordinary working people just as hard with a hike in the payroll tax, Obama made his views clear: "The deficit needs to be reduced in a way that's balanced. Everyone pays their fair share. Everyone does their part."

But you, the reader, are almost certainly neither Paul Ryan nor Barack Obama. And if you're reading SocialistWorker.org, you probably know or suspect that both of them got it wrong.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats talk about the real welfare cheats: Corporate America, which profits from a little-talked-about, but extremely lucrative array of subsidies, tax breaks and other government handouts.

Big business even managed to come out ahead in the fiscal cliff deal, when the Obama administration worked with Congress to preserve more than $200 billion in so-called "tax extenders" for businesses of all kinds. And that's on top of a system in which some of the biggest corporations in the U.S.--the real takers--pay no taxes while making record profits, thanks to ruthlessly exploiting their workers, while raking in big money in subsidies.

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THE FEDERAL government's huge subsidies to Corporate America are so commonplace that the media establishment barely notices. But the amount of money is immense, and what's more, it ends up in the pockets of the richest corporations, including those with a demonstrably negative impact on the majority of people in society.

Perhaps the most outrageous of the government subsidies is the vast amount of public money--tens of billions of dollars from the federal government alone--handed to the oil and gas industry.

This is one of the profitable industries in the world. The oil and gas industry is one of the most profitable in the world: The top five oil companies posted record profits of $137 billion in 2011, and they were raking in $341 million per day in the first half of 2012. ExxonMobil and Chevron hold the number one and two spots on the Forbesmagazine list of the 20 most profitable companies in the world.

Not only are these companies awash in cash, but the use of their product is the leading cause of the greenhouse gas emissions driving catastrophic climate change. The fossil fuel extraction process in North America alone--from deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico to the development of tar sands in Canada, with fracking everywhere in between--threatens ecosystems with dangers ranging from the BP oil spill to everyday pollution.

The costs associated with climate change aren't borne by the oil and gas industry, but by ordinary people. Hurricane Sandy and severe droughts across the Midwest--disasters made more likely and frequent by climate change--caused as much as $100 billion in damages in 2012. And those are just the major disasters.

Beyond the government subsidies, the infrastructure of the U.S. is designed to force people to rely on fossil fuel-burning automobiles for transportation, guaranteeing the industry a massive market for their product. Yet instead of using tax revenue to build reliable, affordable green public transportation systems, these systems are starved of resources by budget cuts, forcing fares to increase and service to be cut--while billions of dollars continue to flow into the pockets of the oil and gas giants.

Another major recipient of subsidies puts our health and safety at even greater risk: nuclear power. This industry literally wouldn't exist if not for government largesse.

For one thing, the cost of the devastation caused by accidents at nuclear power plants is so great that purchasing private insurance would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, the nuclear industry is only responsible for the first $12.6 billion in damages in the case of a disaster. Taxpayers are on the hook for the rest--and the costs of a nuclear meltdown at a U.S. plant have been estimated at $720 billion in today's dollars. Of course, much of the damage to life, health and the environment from such a disaster would be irreversible.

As the Union of Concerned Scientists pointed out in 2011, subsidies protect dangerous and expensive nuclear power at the expense of safer, more environmentally friendly alternatives:

Nuclear subsidies effectively separate risk from reward, shifting the burden of possible losses onto the public and encouraging speculative investment. By masking the true cost of nuclear power, subsidies also allow the industry to exaggerate its economic competitiveness; consequently, they diminish or delay support for more economical and less risky alternatives like energy efficiency and renewable energy.

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THE DARK secrets about federal government subsidies extend beyond the energy sector.

Another major recipient is agribusiness. Each year, billions of taxpayer dollars are appropriated to help "farmers"--and they mostly end up in the bank accounts of giant corporations like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill. According to a recent study by U.S. PIRG, "Since 1995, taxpayers have spent over $277 billion on agricultural subsidies. Reflecting the political clout of the biggest producers, the lion's share of agricultural subsidies go to a very small number of large operations--75 percent of subsidies go to just 3.8 percent of U.S. farmers."

Rather than subsidizing healthy foods, a much larger share of federal handouts go to commodities that are used to produce junk food. U.S. PIRG found that "only one of the top 20 federal [agricultural] subsidy programs directly supports a fresh fruit or vegetable: apples."

Subsidies to U.S. agribusiness have a devastating impact on farmers in other countries, who can't compete with American products that are so heavily subsidized. For example,millions of Mexican farmers were pushed off their land when NAFTA removed tariffs protecting them from competition from subsidized U.S. corn and other agricultural goods. Thanks in large part to U.S. government subsidies, Mexico--the first place in history where corn was cultivated--is now a net importer of corn.

But the subsidies for agribusiness seem almost humane when contrasted to the vast sums of government money given away to the arms industry.

In 2010, world military spending was $1.63 trillion, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, with the U.S. accounting for over 40 percent of the world's total. And a lot of this spending came in the form of government money given to private companies that produce weapons, airplanes, drones, trucks, personnel (mercenaries) and military equipment and related services.

Of the top 10 recipients of federal government contracts in 2011, all were corporations in the "defense" industry. The top 10 alone received nearly $150 billion in 2011. Lockheed Martin, the top recipient of federal contracts, received over $42 billion in 2011, which accounted for more than three-fourths of its revenue.

And while politicians today, especially Democrats, talk about gun control, governments are subsidizing corporations that produce the same type of weapons being used in the mass shootings that led to demands for gun control. For example, New York state has subsidized Remington Arms to the tune of $5.5 million since 2007, supporting the production of semiautomatic rifles that are illegal in the state.

The harm of corporate subsidies is clear even in an industry that is clearly about mass entertainment: professional sports. Despite receiving millions in tax breaks and subsidies to build stadiums, ticket prices charged by pro sports teams continue to be beyond the means of most people. And while the stadiums are publicly funded, the profits end up in the owners' pockets. According to Nation sportswriter Dave Zirin:

In sports, corporate welfare is embodied in the public funding of stadiums. This is like a neoliberal Trojan Horse: wrapping organized theft of the public till in the packaging of sports. These days, the only way many working class and poor fans can attend games is if they're working in the stadiums.

Notice that the cities with the most publicly funded, gleaming stadiums--Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit--are also places that have de-industrialized. Stadiums act as ways to change the very nature of work in the so-called Rust Belt from union jobs with benefits to service, "seasonal" work at poverty wages. It's sickening because it exploits what has historically been identified with community cohesion--sports--and turned it into a blunt instrument of community destruction.

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FEDERAL GOVERNMENT subsidies are just one part of the picture. State and local governments also lavish tens of billions of dollars on corporations in an effort to attract investment.

The odds in this game favor big business. Companies can demand subsidies from states and localities in the form of tax breaks and other incentives in exchange for their promises--often hollow--to create or retain jobs in the area. A recent study by the New York Times calculated state and local corporate subsidies worth over $80 billion each year--although according to the Times, "the cost of the awards is certainly far higher." Reporters identified over 150,000 separate subsidies, but were unable to track them all.

Businesses routinely use the threat of moving to another city, state or even out of the country in order to extort more tax breaks and subsidies. According to the Times:

Over the years, corporations have increasingly exploited that fear [of corporations moving jobs overseas], creating a high-stakes bazaar where they pit local officials against one another to get the most lucrative packages. States compete with other states, cities compete with surrounding suburbs, and even small towns have entered the race with the goal of defeating their neighbors.

There's no proof that meeting the corporations' demands for advantages is beneficial to states or local communities--but there is plenty of evidence suggesting otherwise.

The Times study, for example, found that Texas offers more incentives to businesses than any other state. While the state has seen significant increases in employment, for the most part, the jobs don't pay a living wage. Texas, the Times reported, "has the third-highest proportion of hourly jobs paying at or below minimum wage. And despite its low level of unemployment, Texas has the 11th-highest poverty rate among states."

Of course, extracting subsidies or tax breaks doesn't bind companies to remain in a given area. They are typically free to take the money and run if they get a better offer somewhere else--which, in turn, is used as leverage to get even more concessions.

By playing states and localities off against one another, Corporate America is encouraging a race to the bottom. Not only are workers' wages and benefits driven down, but public funds that could be spent on public-sector jobs and providing services like education, health care, parks and public transportation are instead handed to private corporations in the interest of creating low-paying jobs.

So whether or not a given city or state "wins" the zero-sum competition of attracting jobs, workers everywhere lose. Making a region "business friendly" means making it hostile to workers and especially the unions that represent them. When workers' living standards decline in one area, it puts a downward pressure on wages and benefits everywhere else.

But the opposite is also true. When workers organize to improve wages, benefits and working conditions, they have positive impact on other workers, workplaces and communities.

Instead of competing for jobs with other regions by handing more public money to private corporations, workers have an interest in building solidarity across borders, whether local, state or national.

Stealing from seniors so the rich can get richer

Published in Socialist Worker.

CALL IT Robin Hood in reverse: The super-rich comes out of the so-called "fiscal cliff" debate with most, if not all, its tax breaks from the Bush years intact--before Washington gets down to the project of cutting benefits for the elderly and most vulnerable by "reforming" Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Translation: Take from the poor to give to the rich.

Much of the focus in the fiscal cliff deal that passed Congress focused on the income tax increase for the richest Americans--those making $400,000 or more ($450,000 for couples filing jointly). Less noticed was the giveaway to the rich, worth nearly $400 billion over 10 years, by reversing what would have been a significant increase in the estate tax.

Without action by Congress, the estate tax was set to increase substantially as of January 1, back to the levels of the Clinton years. The exemption--that is, the amount that can be passed to heirs at death, or as gifts during one's life, without paying the estate tax--would have fallen from $5.12 million per person ($10.24 million for couples) to $1 million ($2 million for couples). The tax rate on the portion of estates exceeding the exemption would have risen from 35 percent to 55 percent.

Instead, the exemption will stay where it is--and even grow with inflation. And the new tax rate amounts over the threshold will be just 40 percent. And unlike the Bush tax breaks, this massive cut in the estate tax from Clinton-era levels is permanent, with no expiration date.

Barack Obama was already willing to split the difference in the fiscal cliff negotiations. His starting-point proposal reduced the estate tax exemption to $3.5 million (double that for couples) and set the rate at 45 percent. So naturally, the "compromise" after negotiations with Republicans was even more generous to the rich.

The deal on the estate tax will cost $375 billion over the next 10 years, compared with letting it return to Clinton-era levels, according to the Atlantic. Tens of thousands of millionaires will be let off the hook each year: "Only 3,770 households will pay the estate tax next year if the exemption is set at $5 million, versus 47,170 if it's set at $1 million," the Atlantic reported.

Critics of the estate tax complain that it is a form of double taxation because it applies to assets that have already been taxed once as income. In fact, the biggest estates consist of large amounts of "unrealized" capital gains because the assets, such as stocks or investments, weren't sold before their holder died--so the estate tax is necessary to ensure this income is taxed at all.

From the perspective of reducing record levels of inequality, raising taxes on wealth, such as the estate tax, is arguably more effective than raising income taxes on the rich. This is because wealth inequality is even greater than income inequality. And wealth inequality is a driver of income inequality, since the rich use their wealth to invest and accumulate an even greater share of the value produced by workers.

While the top 1 percent collects just under one-fourth of all income in the U.S.--a huge gap to begin with--they hold more than a third of the wealth, amounting to over three times what the bottom 80 percent holds.

The amount of wealth in the hands of the super-rich is astounding. The richest 400 Americans alone were worth $1.7 trillion in 2012, an increase of 13 percent from the year before. And the wealth gap continues to grow: The top 1 percent has average wealth of over $16 million, 288 times that of the median household, more than double what it was half a century ago.

President Obama claimed the fiscal cliff deal as a victory--a compromise where everyone would pay their "fair share." Instead, the deal preserved important aspects of the Bush-era tax breaks for the super-rich, ensuring that inequality will go on.

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IT'S NOT surprising that Congress--half of whom are millionaires, and all of whom rely on donations from millionaires and billionaires to run their campaigns--would cut a deal that protects cuts in the estate tax.

But what's particularly galling is that it comes at the same time as Washington gears up to make historic cuts in Social Security and Medicare, using the excuse that there just isn't enough money to fund these programs that are essential to keeping millions of elderly people above the poverty line.

From Paul Ryan's Medicare voucher scheme to George W. Bush's failed attempt to privatize Social Security, Republicans have long sought to cut these so-called "entitlement" programs. Until recently, they've failed due to overwhelming public support for these programs, which led Democrats to challenge the cuts.

But this time around, Obama and the Democrats are responsible for putting cuts to Social Security and Medicare on the table.

"Entitlement reform" has been a goal for Obama since he took office. In 2010, he appointed Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles to chair the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, whose mission was to come up with a program for reducing the deficit. When he offered cuts to Social Security and Medicare as part of a "grand bargain" during the 2011 debt ceiling debate, Obama used the Simpson-Bowles commission as a framework.

Alan Simpson is a right-wing former Republican senator from Wyoming who has made it his mission to "stabilize"--read: cut--Social Security, a program he has referred to as "a milk cow with 310 million tits" whose beneficiaries "milk it to the last degree."

Bowles, for his part, is a Democrat who thinks Paul Ryan is "amazing" and who supports Ryan's budget-slashing proposals.

The recommendation of the Simpson-Bowles commission won support from Obama and leading members of Congress of both parties, as well as business leaders like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. They include raising the retirement age to collect full Social Security benefits to 68 and later to 69, and indexing cost-of-living adjustments to the "chained Consumer Price Index (CPI)." The commission also proposed harsh cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and other social safety net spending.

The chained CPI understates inflation by accounting for substitutions people tend to make when prices rise. While it sounds like a technical matter, the result is that Social Security benefits will increase more slowly, leading to an overall cut in benefits of about $300 billion over 10 years.

In reality, the erosion in the standard of living for elderly Social Security beneficiaries is already happening. Seniors spend more on health care and housing, which have increased in cost in recent decades much faster than overall inflation. A recent study found that participants spent an average of "$38,688 [on health care] in the last five years of life. Even more shocking was the fact that a quarter of participants made an average contribution of $101,791, and the same number spent more than their total household assets on healthcare."

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has an experimental CPI-E index that more accurately measures the spending habits of those age 62 and over. According to the BLS, "From December 1982 through December 2011, the all-items CPI-E rose at an annual average rate of 3.1 percent, compared with increases of 2.9 percent for both the CPI-U and CPI-W."

As David Rosnick wrote at MRZine, this adds up: "Compared with current law, a retiree who received $878 per month in 2001 would, in 2012, see his/her annual benefit decrease by $462 (3.3 percent) under the chained CPI...The same retiree seeing $462 lower annual benefits under the chained CPI would see instead $230 higher benefits under the CPI-E."

In other words, just to maintain retirees' current--and far from extravagant--standard of living, Social Security benefits should be increased, not cut.

Outrageously, the savings from switching to the chained CPI would amount to about $220 billion over the next 10 years, some $150 billion less than the cost of the estate tax giveaways to multimillionaires in the fiscal cliff deal.

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WHILE THE mainstream media focus on stories of palace intrigue and the standoff between Democrats and Republicans in negotiations to resolve the latest manufactured crisis, the real impact of cuts to Social Security and Medicare is less visible.

As the 1 percent worries about how to avoid paying taxes on the fortunes they pass on to heirs, tens of millions of workers, nearly half of all retirees, will die broke.

For millions of people, especially the elderly, Social Security is all that stands between them and abject poverty. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Social Security keeps some 21 million people, including 14 million elderly and 1 million children, out of official poverty. In 2012, average monthly Social Security benefits were just $1,230, enough to keep an individual out of official poverty--barely--but not enough to ensure seniors with expensive medical bills that they wouldn't go without.

And because of decades of cutbacks to pensions--and the steady decline of fixed-benefit retirement programs overall--more and more retirees rely mostly or entirely on Social Security benefits in old age. According to the Social Security Administration (SSA): "Social Security benefits represent about 39 percent of the income of the elderly...[A]mong elderly Social Security beneficiaries, 53 percent of married couples and 74 percent of unmarried persons receive 50 percent or more of their income from Social Security, [and] 23 percent of married couples and about 46 percent of unmarried persons rely on Social Security for 90 percent or more of their income."

Social Security also provides for over 10 million disabled workers and their dependents, and over 6 million survivors of workers who have passed away.

For tens of millions of people working today, Social Security will be their only source of income in retirement--"51 percent...has no private pension coverage [and] 34 percent...has no savings set aside specifically for retirement," according to the SSA.

This is especially true for Blacks and Latinos. As a result of institutionalized racism, Blacks and Latinos are much less likely to have pensions and assets that provide income in retirement. In 2010, the AARP reported that among the elderly, 22.2 percent of African Americans and 18.5 percent of Latinos relied on Social Security for 100 percent of their income, compared with just 12.4 percent of whites.

The cuts will also disproportionately affect women. Women live longer on average than men and make up over two-thirds of Social Security beneficiaries 85 years old and up--and since the cuts to benefits under the chained CPI grow over time, older beneficiaries will be hit hardest.

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PERHAPS THE most neglected point in all the talk about "entitlement reform" as a necessary part of reducing the deficit is that Social Security doesn't actually contribute to the deficit. The Social Security program is funded through payroll taxes, and the fund for paying benefits is expected to remain solvent for another quarter century.

At that point, Social Security would only be able to pay about three-quarters of benefits if no changes are made. But the shortfall could be covered by raising the payroll tax cap--currently, the highest-income Americans pay payroll taxes only up to $106,800.

The drive to cut Social Security is not about fixing fiscal problems. It's about cutting spending on the backs of elderly and disabled workers, with Blacks, Latinos and women taking the hardest hits. And it's part of a broader assault on workers' living standards to restore U.S. capitalism's competitive advantage.

Those at the top of U.S. society are quite willing to sacrifice what remains of dignity and security in retirement for elderly workers to achieve their aims. Social Security, itself the product of the mass social upheaval of the 1930s, can only be defended by mass struggle again today.

The vultures that prey on disaster

Published in Socialist Worker.

FREE-MARKET fundamentalists went to work on some of New York City's most vulnerable communities even before the last winds from Superstorm Sandy had died down.

Privatization and deregulation are the tools these vultures use to exploit disaster, but the irony is that Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath have shown the need for more government assistance and regulation of corporate excess, not less.

One week after Hurricane Sandy hit, Naomi Klein wrote a piece titled "Hurricane Sandy: Beware of America's disaster capitalists" to warn of attempts to apply the "shock doctrine"--the phrase she coined for how a crisis is used to further entrench corporate interests and neoliberal policy--in New York City in the wake of the storm.

Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and a leading participant in 350.org's "Do The Math" tour to combat global warming, explained the goals of those seeking to exploit this crisis:

[T]he fact that this storm has demonstrated that poor and working-class people are far more vulnerable to the climate crisis shows that this is clearly the right moment to strip those people of what few labor protections they have left, as well as to privatize the meager public services available to them. Most of all, when faced with an extraordinarily costly crisis born of corporate greed, hand out tax holidays to corporations.

She catalogued a series of arguments from right-wingers--including those who "blamed New Yorkers' resistance to Big Box stores for the misery they were about to endure" or who warned that reconstruction would be slowed by the Davis-Bacon Act that "requires workers on public works projects to be paid not the minimum wage, but the [higher] prevailing wage in the region."

Klein also had words of caution about efforts to use the hurricane to push "public-private partnerships"--infrastructure-rebuilding projects that involve private companies that "could install tolls and keep the profits."

Some advocates of such neoliberal measures have been particularly bald-faced, according to Klein:

The prize for shameless disaster capitalism, however, surely goes to right-wing economist Russell S. Sobel, writing in a New York Times online forum. Sobel suggested that, in hard-hit areas, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) should create "free-trade zones--in which all normal regulations, licensing and taxes [are] suspended." This corporate free-for-all would, apparently, "better provide the goods and services victims need."

Even some "liberals" got in on the act. Writing in Slate, Matt Yglesias argued against laws banning price-gouging during disasters, asserting that such safeguards against profiteering cause shortages and overconsumption. He does not address what happens to poor people who cannot afford inflated prices.

At a time when more regulation is needed to stop climate change and the for-profit polluters responsible for it, these arguments are especially insidious. And less than a month after the hurricane hit, the failings of the private sector to provide relief for the victims of the storm are clear. A key lesson is that more--not less--government planning and intervention is needed.

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THE MARKET fails to meet human needs even in normal times. There are tens of millions of people in the U.S.--and billions more around the world--who cannot afford what they need and therefore must go without, even when there is enough to go around.

Without money, their demand is not "effective," as economists say. During crises, the market makes this worse, not better: gaps between rich and poor sharpen, and the consequences of these disparities become more grave, even deadly.

In times of crisis, as in the "normal" periods between them, the production of goods and services under capitalism is driven by the pursuit of profit, not human need. Decades of neoliberal reforms--privatization of the public sector, attacks on unions and workers' rights, the elimination of subsidies to the poor, deregulation--have only worsened inequality and insecurity across the globe.

The most obvious immediate failing of the private sector in the wake of Sandy was widespread power outages, which hit more than 8 million households and still darkened more than 100,000 homes in New York and New Jersey nearly two weeks after the storm. The scale and the duration of the outages were almost certainly made worse by energy corporations prioritizing profits over service.

As Chris Williams pointed out at Socialistworker.org, Con Edison, a for-profit corporation that provides electricity to New York City, did not "spend the $250 million in investment the company deemed necessary to install submersible switches and move high-voltage transformers above ground level, things that may have prevented the explosion that wiped out electricity in lower Manhattan--even though the company made $1 billion in profit last year."

Without the profit motive, making these investments would have been a no-brainer, but since they would have cut into Con Ed's bottom line, the company took the chance and delayed upgrades. In addition to poor infrastructure, power companies lacked sufficient staff to deal with the emergency and were forced to call in tens of thousands of workers from across the country--workers unfamiliar with the particulars of the local power grid.

The Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) faced the most severe criticism and even a lawsuit as residents went weeks without power, leading to the resignation of its chief operating officer and an executive order from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to investigate the authority.

While LIPA is under the authority of New York state, it is an example of a "public-private partnership"--LIPA contracts with National Grid to provide "the operation, maintenance and construction of LIPA's transmission and distribution facilities, customer service, financial services and back-office support services." National Grid is a for-profit corporation, with the profit motive creating an incentive to cut costs as much as possible.

On the other hand, the publicly owned Metropolitan Transit Authority received the most praise for getting New York City's subway system up and running quickly--despite years of mismanagement and chronic lack of sufficient funding. Buses were back online almost immediately, running free of charge. Limited subway service was restored two days after the storm hit, and most of the lines were running when power was restored the weekend following the storm.

Despite their efforts, many MTA employees were docked for missing work on the Monday and Tuesday of the storm, when the city's transportation system was shut down.

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THE AFTERMATH of the storm also brought price gouging--namely, companies charging vastly higher prices because of the sudden shift in the balance between supply and demand.

Price gouging on essential goods during a crisis is illegal in many states, including New York and New Jersey, but that didn't stop businesses from looking to make a quick buck. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman launched an investigation into price gouging after receiving hundreds of complaints, such as businesses jacking up prices for necessities such as food, water and gasoline.

If special "free trade zones" were set up in disaster areas, as Sobel suggested, price gouging would have been legal, and thus even more widespread, as desperate people would have no choice--due to the conspicuous absence of government aid and relief--but to pay sky-high prices for basic goods. Those without extra disposable cash would have been even less able to procure the goods and services they needed to survive.

During Hurricane Sandy, residents in areas without power had to rely on cash on hand because ATM machines and credit/debit cards didn't work in stores without power. And since many businesses were shuttered for a number of days, money was especially short for workers making hourly wages or dependent on tips from service-industry jobs.

When power went out, some households lost hundreds of dollars of perishable food. Tens of thousands of those without power in New York City were public-housing residents, nearly half of whom live below the poverty line.

According to the New York Daily News, food service workers, most of whom "are employed by catering companies in corporate dining rooms," were docked sick or vacation days during the time when their offices were closed.

At a time when needs were especially great and money exceptionally scarce, the removal of laws preventing price gouging would have made the crisis more acute for those with the least means. Even more poor and working-class people would have gone without, while businesses would have made even greater profits at their expense. The rich, as always, would have been able to afford everything they needed and then some.

Nor would allowing Wal-Mart to build in New York City have solved the problem. First of all, it's unclear how people trapped without public transportation or cars would have gotten to and from Wal-Mart in the first place. And while Wal-Mart brings lower prices, this comes at a cost.

As Wal-Mart workers standing up to the corporate giant have made clear, Wal-Mart does not pay a decent wage and is willing to do whatever it takes to bust unionization efforts. Wal-Mart is leading the race to the bottom, and its expansion into New York City--which has union density double that of the nation as a whole--would serve to further undermine living standards and thus workers' ability to ride out crises like Hurricane Sandy.

The recent fire that killed at least 112 people at a Bangladesh factory which produces goods for Wal-Mart is a tragic reminder of the steep costs that Wal-Mart imposes on workers around the world in order to keep prices low and profits high.

Similarly, the removal of protections for workers employed in various aspects of Sandy cleanup and recovery is not only unfair, but it would also set a precedent that would plunge more workers into poverty, turning every day into a manmade crisis for those getting the city back on its feet.

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AT THE core of arguments in favor of privatization and deregulation is the idea that the best way to coordinate economic life is through unleashing private gain as a motivating factor--in other words, the profit motive. In this view, government will only get in the way.

One major problem with this argument is that in an unequal society, where large sections of the population don't have the money to buy what they need, the market won't provide for the needs of everybody. That's especially true in New York City, the most unequal city in the most unequal country in the advanced industrialized world.

Those who face social and economic oppression and marginalization--poor and working-class people, people of color, undocumented immigrants and others--will be least able to afford to buy what they need on the market, especially during crises, when high demand and scarce supply drive up prices.

This dynamic was evident in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Thousands of poor and working-class residents--overwhelmingly African American--were left to fend for themselves and then demonized by the media and hunted by police.

During Hurricane Sandy, disproportionately Black and Latino public-housing residents, nearly half of whom live in poverty and many of whom are elderly or disabled, were less likely to have the means to evacuate and were far more likely to be left stranded without power and heat. And poor and working-class neighborhoods were some of the hardest-hit areas, but among the last to receive attention from the government.

Preyed upon by payday lenders and corner-store price gougers in normal times, the private sector abandoned the poorest people in the wake of the hurricane because they lacked the ability to pay for what they desperately needed: food, water, warm clothes and other essentials.

Instead, tens of thousands of volunteers sprung into action, answering the call put out by Occupy Sandy and other community organizations to meet the urgent needs of residents abandoned by city, state and federal agencies. In any case, these agencies have been gutted over they years by budget cuts and layoffs--cuts that were justified by tall tales about the "invisible hand of the market" meeting the needs of those stuck in disaster scenarios, instead of government agencies.

Driven by a sense of solidarity and an ethos that anyone in need is deserving, some 50,000 volunteers have already donated their time, and countless thousands more donated their money and supplies. As in so many disasters, ordinary people--driven not by the promise of personal gain but by a desire to serve the common good--sought to fill the vacuum left by the private sector, the hollow neoliberal state and the shredded social safety net.

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A KEY lesson of Hurricane Sandy is that, after decades of neoliberal privatization, the free-market fundamentalists have gotten much of what they want. Seemingly unlimited resources are available for record profits, wars abroad and repression here at home--to secure markets for Corporate America and to expand the wealth of the elite--while these same elites claim there is not enough for social spending and basic public services.

There is a need for more, not less, government intervention in disaster relief, prevention and reconstruction. Many more relief workers--including hundreds of thousands of un- and underemployed New Yorkers who need the work--could have been mobilized had government funds been made available to pay them for their efforts.

And the impact of what efforts did take place could have been exponentially increased had the government provided trucks and buses, rather than leaving volunteers to rely on private cars, U-Hauls and other donated private vehicles.

The shortages of goods that worried Yglesias could be easily addressed by the government providing necessities free of charge. The state distributed free gasoline during the storm--there is no reason why this should not have been expanded to include food, water, diapers, cleaning supplies and other basics that Occupy Sandy and various community groups continue to scramble to get to those in need.

If the U.S. government is able to maintain military bases in three-quarters of the world's countries, including equipping an occupying force of nearly 70,000 troops in Afghanistan, certainly it has the resources and technical know-how to supply the people of the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area with basic goods in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

Beyond the nearly $1 trillion spent each year on war, the richest 400 Americans alone are worth $1.7 trillion. The money is there. It is simply a question of priorities.

Finally, the workers who do the difficult and dangerous work of reconstruction in the months and years following the storm should receive a living wage and full benefits to support a family. The reconstruction effort provides the opportunity to implement a public jobs program at a time when workers continue to face high rates of unemployment.

A system of affirmative action in hiring could make a dent in the Black unemployment rate, which is more than double that of whites. And an effort to employ those with felony convictions would be a blow against the New Jim Crow and the exclusion of Blacks and Latinos from the economy.

This is not without precedent. The mass struggles of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1950s and 60s, including the ghetto uprisings that involved hundreds of thousands, forced the government at all levels to expand social services. Public-sector union organizing won decent pay and benefits. These struggles won bans against racial discrimination, the result of which is that public-sector jobs became a key means of advancement for African Americans.

Weeks after the storm, residents of impacted areas, union and nonunion workers, activists and others have begun to build movements to demand that the city, state and federal government address needs for decent housing, health care and a "peoples' recovery." While these efforts remain modest, they are a step towards the mass struggles needed to shift the balance of class forces and begin to turn the demands outlined above into a reality.

Disabled and left to fend for themselves

Published in Socialist Worker.

FOR PEOPLE with disabilities, Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath poses unique dangers.

The storm has also exposed how--as in so many other ways that affected poor and working class New Yorkers most of all--the government was disgracefully unprepared to protect the disabled from life-threatening danger, nor provide them with the services they needed in the days and weeks following. Once again, tasks that should be the responsibility of the state have fallen on volunteers.

Take Nick Dupree and his partner Alejandra Ospina, disability rights activists living in lower Manhattan, who lost power during the storm. On her blog, Crystal Evans-Pradhan recounted how she and a group of activists and others coordinated an effort via social media to save Nick's life.

Both Nick and Alejandra rely on wheelchairs, and Nick depends on a ventilator to breathe. When the power went out as a result of the hurricane, the two were stuck 12 flights of stairs above ground level--without electricity to charge batteries for the vent that Nick needs to stay alive, and with no landline and bad cell phone reception.

Luckily, Crystal, who lives near Boston, saw Alejandra's plea for help on Facebook and was able to mobilize a network of people to raise hundreds of dollars and secure the help of volunteers to supply Nick with batteries and distilled water. This was no small feat. During the several days that power was out in lower Manhattan, Nick required a new car battery every twelve hours, and each of these heavy, expensive batteries had to be carried up 12 flights of stairs.

Reading Crystal's account, it becomes increasingly clear that Nick may have died had he been forced to rely on the government for relief. Crystal had talked back and forth with FEMA's Office of Disability Integration and Coordination for hours without any luck, and after she travelled from Boston to New York with batteries and supplies, the Fire Department refused to help carry the items up the stairs to Nick and Alejandra's apartment.

Because Crystal also relies on a wheelchair, her friend Sandi Yu had to carry the supplies up by herself. Eventually, Crystal emailed FEMA to let them know that the potential crisis had been averted--no thanks to them.

In a second post, Crystal quotes Nick, who explains why he chose not to evacuate prior to the storm. Any hospital he went to would have had to switch to a hospital ventilator, which nearly killed him four years ago:

I wish there was a hospital I could trust to "first, do no harm," but right now, I just trust them to: a) put me on a ventilator that will maim or kill me; b) not have enough staff to feed or medicate me, because they have genuine emergencies on their hands. I am from Mobile, Alabama and was there until 2008; I tried to go to USA Children's hospital when Hurricanes Georges and Opal hit the Gulf Coast, and no beds or medicine were forthcoming (plus, the hospital lost their electricity, stranding us in our wheelchairs staring at dead elevator doors for hours during Opal), which forced us to un-evacuate, go back home.

And as Crystal points out:"[M]any of the 'evacuation centers' in the area were not wheelchair accessible, if we got him to one of those as the Red Cross had suggested." This included centers with makeshift ramps too steep for many wheelchairs, as well as one with "a sign telling people to ask security for access assistance, except that security is inside at the top of the stairs."

It is inspiring that individuals came together and went to great lengths to make sure Nick's ventilator didn't run out of batteries during the several days he was without power. But it is a case of criminal neglect that the city did not have disaster plans in place for Nick and others like him who depend on electricity to run lifesaving medical devices.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg waited nearly two weeks to announce that he was sending medical personnel door to door to check on people like Nick and Alejandra. Without the ad hoc efforts of volunteers, this would likely have been too little--and far too late.

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THE CASE of Nick Dupree is just one example of New York City's negligence when it comes to meeting the needs of disabled residents. Nor should it come as a surprise.

Just recently, a judge granted class action status to a lawsuit filed by advocates for the disabled that, according to DNAinfo.com, alleges that "the city does not have adequate plans in place to help the disabled population evacuate, find proper shelter or find electricity for medically necessary devices in the event of power failures." The lawsuit was filed last year, in the wake of Hurricane Irene.

For the 900,000 New Yorkers with disabilities, marginalization is not just an issue they face during emergencies like Hurricane Sandy. It's a fact of everyday life.

One of the biggest issues facing the disabled, particularly those in wheelchairs and others with impaired mobility, is the lack of accessible transportation. In New York, just 2 percent of taxis--less than 250--are wheelchair accessible, in a city with some 60,000 people who use wheelchairs.

By comparison, London requires all of its taxis to be wheelchair accessible, according to Jesse Lemisch of the Nation. Most of the subway system is inaccessible to those in wheelchairs, according to Lemisch:

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the United Spinal Association has brought suit against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for inaccessible subway stations: "It is an absolute disgrace that twenty years after the ADA was passed, more than 80 percent of the subway stations in New York are inaccessible," says attorney Julia Pinover.

Buses are the most widely accessible form of transportation for New Yorkers in wheelchairs--but as a result, cuts to bus lines have disproportionately impacted the disabled.

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THE FULL impact of the storm on the disabled is not yet fully known, but DNAinfo reports that some families have lost thousands of dollars in equipment, including electric wheelchairs and devices that allow people with conditions such as cerebral palsy to communicate. Replacing them will involve navigating the bureaucracy of FEMA and Medicaid.

Compounding this, organizations that serve the disabled are stretched thin, according to DNAinfo:

Amy Bittinger, director of Family Support Services for United Cerebral Palsy, said they have dozens of families in tough situations. One client is a disabled man trapped on the fifth floor of a building, where his family moved to avoid flooding. Unlike Schevon, who weighs just 90 pounds, no one is able to carry him down the stairs until the elevator is repaired.

Some adults without electric wheelchairs have been unable to return to classes. The agency may also have to dig in to its own charitable funds to help clients who don't receive federal assistance. The agency had to move 41 clients to temporary shelters from its locations in lower Manhattan during the storm and is still waiting for full power at its offices on Maiden Lane.

For the mentally disabled, the disruption to their daily routines and the lack of a prompt, coordinated comprehensive response from city, state and federal officials, has caused them significant distress.

Maria Vultaggio wrote in the International Business Times about the storm's impact on Felicia, her 21-year-old sister with Autism: "For those who know people with the learning disability, many of them don't like change. In fact, not only do they not like change, they find it virtually impossible to deal with change."

After days without power, Internet or cable, which Felicia relies on as part of her routine: "[S]he seemed to have reached her wits' end, and nothing we said could make her feel better. Her constant cries were starting to wear the family down."

CBS News interviewed Kirsten Nataro, who works on Long Island at a group home for the mentally disabled that went without power for several days after Sandy hit. She said that the disruption to the daily routine "just rocks their world to a different extent than I think a lot of people understand...regiment and schedule makes it a lot easier for them to function on a daily basis." She also worried about the chance of accidents in the darkened home.

According to the Associated Press, when medical personnel went door to door in the Rockaways on the second weekend after the storm hit, they found several residents in just the first three hours who had to be evacuated to a hospital. As AP reported:

Joseph Williams said that the home care aide who normally helps look after his 27-year-old son, who has cerebral palsy and needs a wheelchair, hasn't been able to visit since the storm. After days of trying to take care of him himself, in a flooded high-rise with no utilities, Williams gave up and carried him down seven flights, so he could be evacuated to Brooklyn.

With thousands still without power--and many of those likely to remain in the dark for several weeks to come--the potential remains for new crises and hardships facing the disabled in the disaster area to emerge.

There is also the potential for the storm itself--and the government neglect felt by some of the poorest, hardest-hit areas--to saddle a new generation with mental disabilities and impairments such as post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression. According to the New York Daily News, children living in areas still without power face trauma that could have a lasting impact.

It is an outrage that the city, state and federal governments did not take steps to prevent the storm and its aftermath from having a disproportionate impact on residents with disabilities. Like poor and working class New Yorkers, in the richest city in the world, those with disabilities have been left largely to fend for themselves.

The storm is still taking a toll

Published at Socialist Worker.

TENS OF thousands of people in New York and New Jersey remain displaced or stuck in their homes without power, heat or water fully two weeks after Hurricane Sandy ripped through the Eastern Seaboard.

Even as Manhattan gears up for the holiday tourism rush that begins in the coming weeks, the government relief effort continues to fall woefully short of what's needed in some of the city's poorest, hardest-hit areas.

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Two weeks later, and still without power
Thousands of residents of New York City public housing are still without power, heat or hot water. Public-housing inhabitants make up half of those in New York City without these basic services, according to the New York Daily News. Residents have been catching colds and falling ill due to the lack of heat, and anger is mounting at the lack of response from the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA).

Much of the city's public housing consists of high rises, and some exceed 20 stories. This has left residents on upper floors, including the elderly and/or disabled, stuck without any assistance or even information from city, state or federal relief agencies. While Occupy Sandy and other community organizations have worked to fill the gap by bringing food, water, blankets and even medical care to public-housing residents, these efforts have not been enough to meet the overwhelming need.

After some long overdue media coverage and a petition demanding NYCHA address the power outages, NYCHA announced November 11 that it would provide rent credits to tenants in January 2013, although residents will still be required to pay full rent until then.

Some residents worry that the city will use the storm as a pretext to eliminate public housing, continuing the pattern of gentrification and displacement of the city's poorest residents. In many neighborhoods, public-housing units are islands of low-cost housing surrounded by apartments only the wealthy can afford, and developers would no doubt jump at the chance to replace these projects with luxury complexes.

The city has left water to fester for days in the basements of public housing units, according to the Daily News. "[Red Hook residents] worried that as more days pass, the damage caused by Sandy will become irreparable," reports New York 1. "They're going to knock down those tall projects over there because their foundation is bad," said one area resident.

This fear is well founded. In New Orleans, the Hurricane Katrina disaster was used as an excuse to destroy large amounts of public housing, replacing it with "mixed-income" housing rather than new public units. Years later, many public-housing residents remained displaced.

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More than enough vacant housing
In addition to makeshift camps, FEMA has put thousands of people in hotels, and New York City is currently working with real-estate moguls in an attempt to work out a system to temporarily house displaced residents in vacant apartments.

It is still unclear what will be done with the tens of thousands of displaced residents in New York and New Jersey. While the city has made noises about a "shortage" of vacant apartments to house the displaced, the scarcity has nothing to do with a lack of space.

A recent survey by Picture the Homeless found that New York City currently has more than 3,500 vacant buildings, enough to house nearly 72,000 people as well as enough vacant lots that if developed could house another 128,000.

In some cases, apartments are left vacant in wealthy neighborhoods in order to restrict supply and drive up prices in a city where the priciest condos go for almost $100 million.

Cost is another barrier: FEMA's $1,800 per month allotment for housing assistance to the displaced is not nearly enough to cover rent in Manhattan, where the average rent is $3,418 per month.

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Atrocious conditions in a FEMA shelter
An investigative report by Bill Bowman and Stephen Edelson for the Asbury Park Press revealed horrific conditions inside a FEMA shelter in Oceanport, N.J. According to reports, evacuees spent the night in sparse tents that did not provide protection from freezing temperatures during the November 7 winter storm that followed in Sandy's footsteps.

"At [Pine Belt], the Red Cross made an announcement that they were sending us to permanent structures up here that had just been redone, that had washing machines and hot showers and steady electric, and they sent us to this tent city," said Brian Sotelo, a resident of the shelter ironically called Camp Freedom. "We got [expletive]."

FEMA has barred the media from the camp, and when evacuees attempted to complain about conditions, wireless Internet access was turned off, and residents were prohibited from charging cell phones. Sotelo continued:

My 6-year-old daughter Angie was a premie and has a problem regulating her body temperature. Until 11 p.m. Wednesday, they had no medical personnel at all here, not even a nurse. After everyone started complaining, and they found out we were contacting the press, they brought people in. Every time we plugged in an iPhone or something, the cops would come and unplug them. Yet when they moved us in, they laid out cable on the table, and the electricians told us they were setting up charging stations. But suddenly there wasn't enough power.

Evacuee Ashley Sabol told Reuters that when she arrived at the FEMA camp last on the night of the winter storm, she was given only one blanket. "There was no heat that night, and as temperatures dropped to freezing, people could start to see their breath," she said. Reuters reported that "the gusts of wind blew snow and slush onto Sabol's face as her cot was near the open tent flaps. She shivered. Her hands turned purple."

Men outnumbered women--and according to Reuters, "the women said it was impossible not to notice the leering of some men."

While Sotelo likened conditions in the shelter to "being [in] prison," New York state is considering housing some of the 40,000 made homeless by Hurricane Sandy in an actual prison--Staten Island's Arthur Kill Correctional Facility, which was recently closed.

"I lost everything, but I still have my pride," said 44-year-old Wally Martinez. "We don't have to stay in a prison. My brother was once in that very prison, and my mother used to visit him regularly. She used to tell me how miserable he looked and how filthy and disgusting that prison was."

The system of mass incarceration is one of the few public institutions to receive funding increases in recent decades while funding for public housing and social services has been cut, so this outrage should come as little surprise.

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The loss of community resources
Hurricane Sandy destroyed some of the few resources available for two of New York's most vulnerable and marginalized groups: homeless LGBT youth and immigrant day laborers.
The hurricane destroyed the Ali Forney Center's drop-in center, which provides housing assistance, HIV testing, medical and mental health care and other basic services to homeless LGBT youth. They have moved into a temporary space at the LGBT Center. According to Executive Director Carl Siciliano:

Everything was destroyed and the space is uninhabitable...This is a terrible tragedy for the homeless LGBT youth we serve there. This space was dedicated to our most vulnerable kids, the thousands stranded on the streets without shelter, and was a place where they received food, showers, clothing, medical care, HIV testing and treatment, and mental health and substance abuse services. Basically a lifeline for LGBT kids whose lives are in danger.

The hurricane accomplished some of what Mayor Bloomberg had attempted last spring before being stopped by opposition from activists and the City Council. In his budget proposal last year, Bloomberg proposed $7 million in cuts to funding for homeless LGBT youth, including the elimination of 160 of the 250 beds in youth shelters.

Personally, that cut would've been chump change for the billionaire mayor--less than 0.03 percent of his fortune of $25 billion.

Immigrant day laborers also lost a vital resource to Sandy. The storm uprooted the "Bay Parkway Community Job Center, New York City's only center for day laborers, and moved it a couple hundred feet inland from the Bensonhurst shore, cracking one of its walls in the process," according to In These Times. Police have denied day laborers access to the center.

The center provided job protection for day laborers, such as requiring contractors to guarantee an eight-hour day with lunch and minimum pay of $120. According to In These Times:

Since the NYPD's decision to deny entry to the area, workers have been forced to go back to street corners, where they are sometimes given up to 12 hours of work for as little as $90 and forced to buy their own lunches. Wage theft is also a common practice with the workers when they are not being hired under the stewardship of the center, which additionally provides safety and legal trainings.

Despite this loss, workers from the center have organized to participate in relief efforts, putting their skills to use in assisting those impacted by the hurricane.

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Warped priorities revealed
One story from earlier this month highlighted the warped priorities of governments that put profits and the needs of the wealthy before those of the working-class and poor majority. According to Bloomberg Businessweek:

As superstorm Sandy flooded Atlantic City, N.J., one area was shielded from damage by dunes constructed at taxpayer expense: casinos and other beachfront businesses and homes. Nearby, another set of residents didn't get government-paid storm defense. In one of the city's poorest neighborhoods, water from Absecon Inlet filled the streets, knocking down doors, sloshing into bedrooms, destroying furniture and leaving residents wondering if they would drown.

While Atlantic City casinos rake in billions in revenue each year, about one in four city residents live in poverty, two-and-a-half times the statewide rate. City, state and federal spending to build up sand dunes and reconstruct beaches in order to protect the casinos and other "valuable" oceanfront property amounts to some $40 million in recent years.

In 1996, "the [Army Corps of Engineers] called...for building about 1,600 feet of bulkhead in two sections along the inlet," where many of the city's poor, disproportionately Black and Latino residents live. Sixteen years later, the city's poor were left to face Sandy's wrath--unprotected.

Revealing the two New Yorks

Published in Socialist Worker and the Indypendent.

HURRICANE SANDY, the most devastating storm to hit New York City in decades, has left the city divided between areas facing ongoing devastation and those where life is returning to normal.
But the hurricane has also revealed divisions in the city that existed long before Sandy touched ground: between rich and poor, and between the workers who make the city run and the wealthy who reap the benefits.

Some sections of the city, such as Manhattan north of 39th Street, and inland parts of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, are practically back to normal. Residents have power, water and Internet, restaurants and stores are open, and for the most part, the bustle of the city has returned.

In the other New York, however, a humanitarian crisis is looming. As this article was being written on Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of people were still without power--and will be for several days more--after a transformer explosion that affected Manhattan below 39th Street.

Dozens of homes were destroyed in a massive six-alarm fire that hit Breezy Point in Queens on Monday night, leaving hundreds of residents homeless. NYU Langone Medical Center evacuated when its backup generators failed, and Bellevue Hospital, which suffered damage during the storm and was running on generators due to a loss of outside power, evacuated some 500 patients on Wednesday.

Laura Durkay, a resident of the East Village and a SocialistWorker.org contributor, walked over 30 blocks on Wednesday to charge her cell phone in a deli in Midtown. "People are helping each other and sharing information," she said. "A man parked his truck on 12th Street with his radio on, and people gathered around to listen to the news. Electricity is the biggest issue. Starbucks and other places are jammed with lines of people waiting to charge their phones." In addition, cell phone service for many is spotty or down in areas without power.

SW contributor Sherry Wolf, who lives in Park Slope in Brooklyn, described the scene at a makeshift shelter in her neighborhood:

The Park Slope Armory that usually serves as a colossal YMCA--built by the 19th century robber barons as a fortress against the poor--is currently packed with more than 600 climate refugees, mostly seniors and others in desperate need. They appear like any of us would who haven't worn dry socks in days--happy for the donated hot meals and a dry place to sleep, but uncomfortable, frustrated and frightened about what happens next. Even teens off school this week are helping out, though, so many of us have displaced friends staying with us. In fact, I've got two camped out at my small place.

Although the Red Cross said that food relief was on the way, on Wednesday, residents stuck in lower Manhattan were relying on the few restaurants, such as pizza parlors with gas ovens, that were serving food to long lines of those who could afford it. Other restaurants, such as Northern Spy Food Co., "served [free] lunch to everyone who lined up outside their restaurant at Avenue A and 12th Street," according to the Gothamist.

Another obstacle for the poor stuck in the blacked-out area of Manhattan: They can't use the assistance they receive for food purchases from the state's food stamp program because the subsidy is delivered electronically, via Electronic Benefit Cards. Wherever the power is out, the cards are useless.

Durkay described the contrast between her neighborhood and Midtown as "surreal. Midtown is basically functional, while my neighborhood is a disaster zone--no power or cell phone service, maybe one business of out of every 10 or 20 open, no water or heat for many people, a few restaurants and bodegas open, but no grocery stores. Two guys called it the 'dead zone.'"

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RESIDENTS OF public housing were especially hard hit, with nearly 60 complexes without power as of Wednesday. Durkay reported seeing residents on the Lower East Side, many of whom were without water or power, filling up buckets of water from fire hydrants outside their buildings.

Several of the public housing complexes in New York City are in Zone A, which is at greatest risk for flooding. Inside the high-rises of 14 stories high or more, thousands of residents, including the elderly, disabled and those with limited mobility, are stuck without water or power, with humanitarian consequences.

Hector lives in the Jacob Riis housing project, which is located in Zone A on the Lower East Side. "They shut down the elevators and hot water just a few hours after I found out about the mandatory evacuation on Sunday," he said. The pre-emptive shutdown, presumably intended to force people to evacuate, actually made it more difficult for those trying to get out.

According to Hector, most residents of his complex decided to stay. Some thought that Sandy, like last year's Hurricane Irene, which mostly missed New York City, would end up being mostly hype. Others, especially immigrants, had nowhere to go because they were without family in the area--or no way to get there because of a lack access of transportation.

The subway and bus system shut down at 7 p.m. on Sunday, and a cab ride from Manhattan to the outer borough, with extra fees for bridges and tolls, can run $40 or more.

While most of New York City's homeless population rode out the storm in one of the city's 46,631 shelter beds, according to Russia Today: "Lacking enough beds to house all those in need, many shelters made exceptions, allowing their buildings to go over capacity for the night. But although the efforts helped many in need, there still wasn't room for everyone."

As the hurricane approached on Monday, several homeless remained on the streets to face the storm unprotected. But billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg had little sympathy. "There are some people that are just very difficult," he told the New York Observer. "They want to avoid interacting with others, and how you get to those has always been a challenge and as far as I know, we're doing a good job with that."

One homeless man, 43-year-old James, told freelance journalist Julia Reinhart: "I can't go back to the shelter system for another two months...Only once you've been out for a year, can you be classified as long-term homeless, and therefore get access to additional assistance." When Reinhart asked about the emergency shelters, James said, "No, they don't want us there. These shelters are for the good folks, the families that get evacuated. There is no room in there for me."

Also left twisting in the wind during the storm were the thousands of prisoners jailed at Rikers Island. Most are awaiting trial, but can't afford or were denied bail, or are awaiting transfer to serve minor sentences. Amy in Queens reported that the buses to Rikers Island, which had begun running again by Wednesday, were full of people anxious to visit their loved ones to make sure they were okay.

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THE STORM also raises questions about the state of New York City's basic infrastructure--and the priorities of the city's elites.

ProPublica, reporting on the failure of backup generators at NYU Langone Medical Center, explained that part of the system was in the basement, which flooded. New hospitals build generators above the level floodwaters are likely to reach, but according to hospital trustee Gary Cohn, "The infrastructure at NYU is somewhat old."

Tragically, lives were put at risk, including infants in neonatal intensive care, who had to be transported while nurses helped them breathe manually. Years of medical research were also lost when the generator failed.

Cohn, the NYU trustee, is president of banking giant Goldman Sachs, which is helping fund the construction of a nonunion Harlem Children's Zone charter school on public housing green space, in spite of community opposition. There is plenty of money for union-busting and school privatization, but updating hospital infrastructure is apparently lower down on the list.

Nor is there a centralized plan for dealing with hospital evacuations. According to a nurse at a downtown hospital, because of the continuing power outage, every hospital below 34th Street in Manhattan has been ordered to evacuate its patients by the weekend. But there is no plan for where to put the patients--nurses and other staff are working around the clock to find hospital beds for all the people who are soon to be displaced.

Meanwhile, the demand for hospital beds may be increasing as the supply dries up--as a result of injuries from the storm, the potential for the spread of disease resulting from the breakdown of sanitation systems and the possible worsening of New York's rat problem.

Power is out below 39th Street because of an explosion at a Con Edison substation at 13th Street, next to the water on the eastern edge of Manhattan. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, a senior Con Ed executive said the explosion might have been prevented had they moved some of the equipment to a higher level to avoid flooding, but that is "going to take some time." It's unclear why Con Ed, which knew about the risk of flooding after Hurricane Irene hit last year, did not take this precaution sooner.

A Con Edison employee, speaking anonymously, said that while company executives and Mayor Bloomberg declare that most New Yorkers will have power restored in four days, the real timeframe could be weeks--because of the unprecedented scale of the damage and the challenges it poses.

Con Ed workers are putting in 12 to 16 hour shifts in dangerous conditions to restore power as soon as possible.

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WHILE THE contrast between Hurricane Sandy's impact on different sections of New York City is stark, the truth is that New York has been sharply divided for a long, long time.

It is both a playground for some of the wealthiest people in the world--home of the $175 hamburger, $3 million parking spot and the $95 million condominium--and the home of some of the poorest people in the U.S..

The scale of inequality is staggering. New York City trails only Moscow for the most billionaires with 57, yet it is also home to the poorest congressional district in the nation. The city's inequality surpasses that of Brazil, as Doug Henwood pointed out in a blog post last year: "The bottom half of the city's income distribution has 9 percent of total income; the bottom 80 percent, 29 percent...[the top 1 percent] has 34 percent of total income, compared with 19 percent for the U.S. as a whole."
David Rohde, a Reuters columnist, pointed out that Hurricane Sandy exposed how unequal New York City has become:

Divides between the rich and the poor are nothing new in New York, but the storm brought them vividly to the surface. There were residents like me who could invest all of their time and energy into protecting their families. And there were New Yorkers who could not.

Those with a car could flee. Those with wealth could move into a hotel. Those with steady jobs could decline to come into work. But the city's cooks, doormen, maintenance men, taxi drivers and maids left their loved ones at home.

Rohde praised "the tens of thousands of policemen, firefighters, utility workers and paramedics who labored all night for $40,000 to $90,000 a year," as well as "local politicians who focused on performance, not partisanship, such as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie [and] New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg."

But it is politicians like Christie, Bloomberg and others--along with the corporate elites they serve--who are responsible for rising inequality in the first place.

In the years before Hurricane Sandy devastated his state, Christie took the axe to the benefits of the very workers who are taking the lead in helping residents during this crisis. Christie, with the help of several Democrats in the state legislature, attacked public workers with legislation to "remove health insurance from collective bargaining, more than triple employee health care contributions and raise workers' pension contributions." And Christie has led attacks on teachers' unions in his state, using his platform at the Republican National Convention to demonize teachers' unions further.
Bloomberg, with a net worth of more than $20 billion, is the tenth richest person in the U.S.

Unsurprisingly, he opposed the extension of the so-called "millionaires' tax" that would have raised billions by taxing the very wealthy--money that could go towards repairing the city's outdated infrastructure.

During his term as mayor, Bloomberg's net worth has more than quintupled, while he slashed budgets impacting the neediest; cut funding to education, health care, child care, homeless shelters including for LGBT youth and libraries; and attacked the very public-sector workers whose response to Hurricane Sandy Bloomberg has hypocritically praised in front of television cameras.

According to an article from U.S. News and World Report, the city could have protected New York City from the flooding with sea barriers of the kind used in major European cities--at a cost of just over $6 billion. That's less than one-quarter of Bloomberg's current fortune--and less than one-third the amount that Bloomberg's net worth has increased since he became mayor.

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THE EFFORTS of those workers have done an enormous amount to reduce suffering during this crisis. Limited bus service was active by Tuesday, and full bus service as well as limited subway and train service was restored by Wednesday. The MTA workers who made this possible--and who run the largest public transportation system in the country, the backbone of New York City--are more than two-thirds Black and Latino workers, who have been working without a contract since January due to the MTA's unwillingness to give them a fair deal.

Meanwhile, the MTA has announced further fare increases that will push the cost of public transportation even more onto working class New Yorkers.

Con Edison, despite making over $1 billion in profits each year, locked out employees just a few months ago in order to impose a two-tiered pension system and increased health care costs that cancel out pay increases. These same employees are working around the clock in dangerous conditions in order to restore power.

Then there are Verizon workers, who went on strike in August 2011 after the telecommunication giant, also incredibly profitable, demanded cuts in their pension, health care and retirement benefits. They are currently working 12-hour days repairing the damage done to phone and Internet lines in New York City.

Just as Hurricane Sandy revealed the importance of dealing with climate change, it has also revealed the vital importance of public-sector and utility workers. Sandy has showed that these workers, so often demonized and attacked, are so central to making this city, and our society, run.
Not only that, but the closure of grocery stores and restaurants across much of the city highlighted the vital work performed by a largely immigrant workforce for low wages in New York City's service industry.

While a general strike actively demonstrates the collective power of the working class to shut down production, Hurricane Sandy illustrates--by disrupting the everyday labor of millions of workers--the essential role performed by New York City's under-compensated and under-appreciated working class.