the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jan 9, 2023
The crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border has been getting worse. Thousands of desperate and freezing-cold migrants have been gathering on the Mexican side, looking for a way to get into the U.S., while facing heavily armed regiments of the U.S. Border Patrol and National Guard. Meanwhile, in U.S. border cities there are thousands more homeless migrants seeking asylum status.
Faced with this growing crisis, in early January, President Biden announced a new crackdown: anyone from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela trying to gain asylum along the U.S. border would be arrested and expelled. “My message is this…” threatened Biden, sitting comfortably in the White House, “do not just show up at the border”.
The Biden administration did claim to offer a supposed alternative for these migrants. Said Biden, up to 30,000 migrants per month from those four countries would be allowed to seek asylum. But the conditions are so restrictive and inhuman, even several prominent Democrats, including U.S. Senators Melendez and Booker, denounced them.
In fact, the Biden administration’s policy toward immigration has followed in the same repressive footsteps as the Trump administration, whom the Democrats had spent four long years denouncing. This is hardly a surprise. Under Obama a record number of migrants had been arrested and expelled. Immigrant-rights activists dubbed Obama the “Deporter-in-Chief”.
The migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border are fleeing from Mexico, the countries of Central and South America and the Caribbean. Smaller numbers of migrants are fleeing from poorer countries of Europe and Asia. This mass of humanity makes up a vast United Nations. What they all have in common is that they are fleeing worsening disasters, including hunger and starvation, repressive dictatorships, wars, and gang violence.
U.S. leaders and the news media might pretend that these catastrophes are just those country’s problems. But that’s a lie. The same big U.S. companies and banks that dominate the U.S. economy also dominate the economies of Latin America.
U.S. capital considers the entire Western Hemisphere as its empire, its own “backyard”, as they say. U.S. corporations and banks plunder the wealth produced by the working masses and peasants in all those countries. They drive the peasants off the land, creating massive unemployment and desperation. U.S. businesses in those countries take advantage of this desperation by paying the workforce extremely low wages. As these economies plunge, drug traffickers and gangsters often become the main employers and main enforcers. U.S. banks and companies do business with and enrich themselves from the loot stolen by traffickers and gangsters.
Backing up these companies and banks is the U.S. military, the mightiest in the world. The military forces in most of these countries are little more than an extension of the U.S. military, repressing the working class, protecting U.S. imperial interests first. In those few countries that have attempted to take the tiniest bit of distance from U.S. domination, such as Cuba and Venezuela, U.S. leaders impose harsh trade embargoes and threaten invasion. They then blame those governments for the hardships that U.S. imperialism itself has imposed.
In other words, U.S. corporate, financial and military domination creates the savage and barbaric conditions that force big parts of the population to flee for their lives, trying to escape hunger and starvation. U.S. leaders, the news media, and the government, always try to turn workers in the U.S. against these immigrants, blaming immigrants for the lack of jobs, the lack of security, and the worsening conditions in this country. That’s a lie!
Workers in this country have the same enemies as the migrants fleeing those countries. The same big U.S. companies and banks that are destroying jobs in this country, imposing wage and benefit cuts, and robbing workers through skyrocketing price hikes, are the same U.S. bosses who are attacking those migrants, depriving them of even the most basic rights.
Workers in the U.S. and immigrants are part of the same working class. We have the same interests. When we overcome our divisions and unite together, our fight, our ability to defend our common interests, becomes much, much stronger.
Jan 9, 2023
Hundreds of thousands of customers scheduled to fly on Southwest just before Christmas experienced utter chaos. After Southwest’s flights began to be delayed by a huge winter storm, those delays snowballed into massive flight cancellations. In the end, Southwest cancelled 15,000 flights, or 60% of its schedule.
Southwest’s problems were not simply caused by bad weather conditions, as Sam Pizzigati of Counterpunch.org, among others, points out. Other airlines weathered the storm in much less disastrous fashion. Southwest executives made deliberate choices that directly led to the holiday disaster.
Over the last decade, Southwest’s executives chose not to invest in technology and to reduce the airline’s workforce and instead give massive handouts to themselves and their shareholders. The airline cut its workforce by 1,400 in 2021, according to Accountable.US. Southwest ground workers were forced to work 16-to-18 hours during the recent storm, with some experiencing frostbite, according to their union president Randy Barns.
The company has neglected to invest in technology. It provides weather and baggage reports to its pilots and gate employees on paper because it has no computerized system to do so. Really? In 2023?
When Southwest cancelled all those flights in December, its pilots and flight crews had to call into a switchboard which was way understaffed. Some complained of being put on hold for hours and still not being able to get through!
Southwest’s failure to invest in technology and its workforce is no accident. The company chose instead to give huge handouts to its stockholders and top executives. It spent eight billion dollars on stock buybacks and 1.6 billion dollars on dividends since 2015. It paid its CEO Gary Kelly 9.2 million dollars in 2020 and 5.8 million in 2021. This, all while the company said it was 3.1 billion in debt and received a 7 billion dollar Covid-related bailout from the federal government!
Southwest Airlines is hardly alone in choosing to pursue short-term rewards for its stockholders and top executives at the expense of customers and employees. CEOs receiving stock options as a large part of their compensation gives them an incentive to drive up the value of their stock by paying out dividends and buying back stock.
In the case of Southwest Airlines, it plays a large role in the country’s transportation system. The disaster faced by so many travelers during the recent holidays is a perfect example of the consequences having “public transportation” in this country left in private hands organized around the goal of profit. This system needs to go.
Jan 9, 2023
After four days and 15 rounds of voting, the U.S. House of Representatives finally elected Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House.
During the November election, the Republican Party gained a narrow majority in the House. That meant the Republicans would be able to elect someone from their party to replace Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker—the person who is the leading figure in the House of Representatives and is second in line for the U.S. Presidency. Almost all of the Republicans supported McCarthy, but a handful of mostly far-right Republicans wanted to use their needed votes to extract concessions from McCarthy.
So, for four consecutive days, during day sessions and night sessions, this made-for-TV drama played out live on CNN, Fox, and other channels. The TV coverage made it seem like the fate of the world was hanging in the balance.
We heard one Representative after another making serious-sounding and emotional speeches. There was almost a fist fight between two Republicans. McCarthy kept making more and more concessions to the far right-wingers to get their votes. In each session, the votes against McCarthy narrowed down from 20 to 19 to 17 to 12 to 6 to 2. Finally, at a late-night 15th vote, those last holdouts voted “present”, allowing McCarthy to get a majority of votes cast. Finally, a new Speaker was elected, and the House of Representatives could actually convene.
And what was all this drama and debate and argument actually about? Were these elected Representatives dealing with the issues that the voters were concerned about? Were they talking about how to fix inflation, how to lower prices and raise wages? Were they discussing how to fix the schools and roads and infrastructure? Were they debating how to lower drug prices and medical costs? No, No and No!
The concessions that McCarthy agreed to had nothing to do with any issue that affected ordinary people. They had to do with which Congressmen would serve on which House committee and how the House would function. They agreed that in the future it would take just one single Representative out of the 435 House members to call for a new vote for a new Speaker of the House. And then we could watch all this same BS play out all over again—“Live on CNN and Fox!”
While this Congressional clown show was going on, the Democrats were happy to sit back and let the Republicans make themselves look like a bunch of fools. The Democrats were happy to make their party seem like the reasonable and serious party.
Of course, for the last two years, the Democrats had their own chance to control the House—and the Senate and the Presidency. And we can see the little or nothing that the Democrats did to address the problems that working people face.
The fact that neither party has an answer for the problems of working people is not a surprise. Both parties serve the interests of the capitalist class—first, last and always. All these politicians are good for is to try to put on a show for TV. Fortunately, this time, we were able to change the channel.
Jan 9, 2023
More public high schools in poorer areas are forcing students to take military-run Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) classes. JROTC is supposed to be voluntary. The Pentagon provides instructors and textbooks so long as 10% of a school’s students choose to take the class. But now many schools are making it mandatory.
Half a million students are in JROTC. Schools where more than half the students are enrolled in JROTC are now found in many big cities all across the country, as well as in many rural areas. The program operated in 3,500 high schools last year, more than double as many schools as during the Vietnam War. The military intends to raise the number to 6,000 schools by 2031.
Veterans run these classes with military discipline. Students must wear military uniforms, and instructors often yell orders. The textbooks are chosen by the military, without review by educators. The books are obvious pro-militarist propaganda. For example, a discussion of the Trail of Tears in the 1830s, when Native Americans were forced to leave their land, neglects to say that many died on the road. A discussion of the Vietnam War repeats the long-debunked lie that a U.S. Navy ship was attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.
Administrators defend their increasing reliance on JROTC by saying the military discipline controls some rebellious teenagers. What they don’t say is that as public school districts receive less and less funding to hire enough teachers, the military subsidy makes their budgets easier to balance.
JROTC is part of how the capitalist system tries to prepare young workers to submit to a life of exploitation—and a world at war.
Jan 9, 2023
When Karen Bass took office as L.A.’s new mayor in December, she said her first act would be to take on homelessness. She declared a state of emergency on homelessness, which the city council immediately approved.
Tens of thousands of people live in the streets of L.A., pitching their tents wherever space is available, including on city sidewalks. The latest official count of the homeless in L.A., taken in September, was about 42,000—a shockingly high number, yet a severe undercount.
Data from the school system may actually give a better idea of just how widespread homelessness really is. Last year, Los Angeles public schools reported that one out of 11 students were homeless.
Among community college students, the figures are even worse. A 2021 memo prepared for the California legislature stated that nearly 20% of students at California’s community colleges reported experiencing homelessness!
The new mayor’s emergency plan, which she calls “Inside Safe,” centers on the master-leasing of housing units by the city. The problem is that everything Bass proposes relies on private companies. It ends up being a big gift for landlords and hotel owners, but not for the homeless.
Look at Proposition HHH, for example, a $1.2 billion city bond measure to build 10,000 new apartments over 10 years for homeless people. The measure passed in November 2016, but five years later, in late 2021, only a little more than 1,000 units had been opened, even though all the money was already committed. The average cost of a unit—a studio apartment—was more than $500,000, with the latest ones costing up to $837,000 each!
In fact, these measures don’t even address the root causes of homelessness: extremely low wages and a severe lack of affordable housing units, which is getting worse, due to gentrification. There is a growing reservoir of the working poor who face the prospect of homelessness. They are literally the loss of one paycheck or one illness from being booted out into the street.
The prospect of homelessness is a chronic problem that comes out of the functioning of the capitalist economic system, in which the profit motive is the driving force of the economy.
Jan 9, 2023
The Juvenile Detention Center in Detroit recently transferred youths to a facility in the city of Hamtramck, a city within the boundaries of Detroit. These young people haven’t had in-person instruction, with teachers, for the past 2 months.
Now students have been given packets of worksheets to do on their own, because teachers with a charter school authorized (according to some agreement with the Detroit Public School Community District (DPSCD)) to provide in-person instruction cannot do so because the latest facility is not located within Detroit. Yet this charter school has received the $9,150 per pupil foundation allowance from the State!
The fact that they are receiving no schooling is just the latest in a string of troubles that these young people first faced at the Detroit Wayne County Juvenile Detention Facility. It’s just a vicious cycle. In this class society, where racism is part of the social fabric, these are young people who already have strikes against them, starting with the fact that, for whatever reasons, they find themselves incarcerated. Many of their backgrounds meant that they were already deprived of a quality education before going behind bars. And now, the absence of any kind of real education can’t do anything more than make their future worse.
Some of the parents of these young people have spoken out—about the lack of education, the fact that their kids are kept in their rooms, that is, their cells, for 23 hours out of the day, and were deprived of daily showers in Detroit even before they were transferred to Hamtramck. If the parents hadn’t done so, the public would not even know what is going on. It will take that, and more, noise, and organization, for parents and all those ordinary people who DO consider children as our most valuable resource, to organize, to fight to have a society where children do come first, and all children have a right to a decent life and future.
To hell with whatever the “official” reasons are, why a charter school can’t provide teachers and on-site instruction because Hamtramck isn’t within Detroit proper.
To hell with the system where for-profit charter schools are allowed to collect public money to educate our kids in the first place, and then don’t do it.
To hell with the excuses that there are staff shortages, or not enough teachers, or not enough, whatever. Pay teachers and other people who work with youth excellent salaries, with benefits. Then there would be no teacher or staff shortages.
If there is money to subsidize Little Caesar’s arena in downtown Detroit; if there is money to consistently give tax breaks to the auto companies, and to the billionaire real estate developers; if there is money to give yet more money for the Q Line to the tune of 85 million in tax money, there can be money for our children—ALL OF THEM, no matter what their backgrounds.
Jan 9, 2023
Three Catholic dioceses with parishes in Maryland paid over $200,000 to lobbyists to block or limit lawsuits by people sexually abused by priests. A recent 450-page report by Maryland’s attorney general has been withheld from release to the public. Former victims demanded the publication of the report. Apparently, it exposes more than 150 priests who abused 600 victims, some as young as nine years old. Maryland is only the second state to investigate and report on sexual abuse by clergy, after Pennsylvania did in 2018.
Protecting the secrets of these lying priests who have sexually abused children follows the decades long tradition Pope Benedict continued. The pope may have died but the tradition lives on.
Jan 9, 2023
A longtime tenant and community activist in Washington, D.C.’s Highland Dwellings public housing complex sued the city over its security camera program. She and her son were arrested and jailed overnight several years ago for resisting when the housing authority installed wires inside her apartment for an exterior camera. Over the last five years the housing authority has installed over 4,000 surveillance cameras at public housing. They livestream to a command center with a dozen widescreen monitors.
The city’s public safety chief declared, “What we find is a lot of loitering of people who do not live on the property. Dice games or other things of that nature a lot of times precede violence. We are now able to see the activity [and] dispatch an officer to break up that game before someone gets robbed or gets shot.”
These cameras are supposed to deter crime. But crime continues. Finally, they end up being used against the residents.
Jan 9, 2023
In a bill signed by Governor Whitmer in December, yet more tax money is going to subsidize the 3.3-mile QLine streetcars that run from the New Center Area, down Woodward to downtown Detroit. The 85 million dollar spending plan would continue for the next 17 years, at $5 million a year, and that money is to come from hotel and liquor taxes.
For the likes of businessmen, especially the high rollers of Detroit, like Dan (Rocket Mortgage/Bedrock) Gilbert, this is another win. It helps to build up the businesses in downtown and Midtown and the New Center area. These businessmen want tourists to frequent their restaurants, sports arenas, and go to concerts along that Woodward Avenue Corridor.
Because the QLine is for tourists. Heaven forbid that tourists have to actually ride in a bus, with ordinary working class and poor people, who are the ones who ride the buses—when there are any.
Heaven forbid that we actually have a functioning, efficient, timely mass transit system that would allow people to actually get to their jobs—not just within the 3.3 miles that the QLine covers, but all over the Detroit Metropolitan area.
And P.S. Sometimes you can actually walk and get downtown faster than the QLine travels on that 3 mile stretch!
Jan 9, 2023
Six months ago, a large sinkhole opened up in front of several houses in East Baltimore. The sinkhole quickly grew larger, undermining the foundations of several homes and forcing the closure of a lane of an important road.
The sinkhole was caused by the collapse of a large storm drain. Eventually the city had to demolish several houses in order to repair the drain.
Now, six months later, home insurance companies have refused to compensate the owners of the demolished homes and the city is refusing to compensate them too.
The city says it isn’t required to compensate the owners because they never notified the city that the storm drain was failing and needed to be repaired!
How were the homeowners expected to know that this drain was failing before the sinkhole occurred? Wasn’t it the city’s responsibility to monitor the condition of its own storm drain?
The issue is now going to be resolved in court since two of the owners have sued the city for their losses.
Jan 9, 2023
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky came to Washington on December 22 in a display of hugs and flag-waving from Biden and the leaders of the U.S. state.
For U.S. leaders, this was a chance to try to rally the U.S. population to support this war being waged against Russia with U.S. money and weapons, if with Ukrainian skins. And for Zelensky, it was a chance to reinforce his image as the inflexible war chief, especially to his own state apparatus and the most nationalist part of his own population.
But in addition to its public face, Zelensky’s visit surely included plenty of discussions behind the scenes. While nothing has been leaked from these “informal” conversations between Zelensky and his hosts, we can easily imagine they were not quite as agreeable as the show both sides put on for television.
Zelensky repeatedly declares that the Ukrainian people are ready to continue the war until Ukraine is freed of occupying forces, including both the Donbass and Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. But some U.S. military leaders, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have already made public statements suggesting that its Ukrainian ally should start negotiating sooner rather than later.
Certainly, the U.S. has proven itself more than willing to take advantage of this war. The U.S. has affirmed that it remains the world’s dominant power, giving orders to all the rest, and it has dramatically weakened Russia, one of the few states that doesn’t jump at U.S. commands. It has reinforced the position of its energy and arms companies vis-à-vis its European and Asian “allies” and rivals alike. U.S. military leaders have also undoubtedly enjoyed this chance to try out their weapons against a traditional army, unlike what they faced in Iraq or Afghanistan.
But while U.S. imperialism has an interest in weakening the Russian state, it relies on that state to act as guardian of the world order in its zone and it has no interest in Russia’s complete collapse. This is why some officials in the U.S. military and state department have long insisted that it will eventually be necessary to give Putin some way out that doesn’t force him to lose too much face with his own population. And so, behind the scenes, U.S. leaders were undoubtedly taking the chance to tell Zelensky in person that he should not push the war past what his U.S. patrons wish at the current stage.
Of course, whatever the interests of the various sides, it remains to be seen if anyone will be able to contain this war that now has a momentum of its own.
Jan 9, 2023
On January 1, missiles launched by Ukrainian troops hit a vocational school housing Russian troops. This attack killed between 89 and 400 Russian soldiers.
But this was not just an attack by Ukrainian forces. They were using a highly sophisticated rocket-artillery system called HIMARS. Not only were these HIMARS systems built by the U.S., but the Ukrainian troops using them had to be trained by Americans. On top of that, these systems are guided by satellites—again, provided by the U.S.
Russia at first said its troops were targeted by intercepted cell phone communications that pinpointed their position. Maybe—though if so, Ukraine is certainly only able to do so with U.S. military technology. But as the Wall Street Journal reported on December 21, “The U.S. has been providing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s forces reams of data on the location and movement of Russian troops and equipment and other battlefield information under a vastly expanded intelligence-sharing arrangement….” This almost surely includes satellite imagery used in the January 1 strike.
In other words, for this attack that killed many Russian soldiers, the U.S. supplied the weapon and the training to use it and told the Ukrainians where to aim.
This HIMARS strike is just one step in the escalation of the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine. At first, the U.S. was hesitant to even send Ukraine older Javelin anti-tank missiles, but in March it decided to flood the country with 17,000 of them. In the spring, it began providing heavy howitzers. In June, the U.S. began providing HIMARS, but not yet the long-range missiles that would allow Ukraine to hit targets deep in Russia.
The U.S. recently announced it would give Ukraine Patriot missiles and aerial smart bombs. And now, in addition to long range HIMARS missiles, Zelensky is asking for more advanced tanks, fighter jets, and cluster bombs.
Ukrainians may be the foot soldiers doing the fighting and dying, but the accelerating level of U.S. military support shows that this is really a U.S. war against Russia, bought and paid for.
Jan 9, 2023
This article is translated from the December 21 issue #1138 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group of that name active in France.
In Peru, the right-wing Parliament’s dismissal of President Pedro Castillo on December 7th provoked a major response. Tens of thousands of demonstrators went into the streets throughout the country, and they are confronting the forces of repression and refusing the dismissal of Castillo.
To ease the tension, the new president, Dina Boluarte, promised to move the general elections forward to 2024. But on December 12, she dismissed all ministers appointed by Castillo and declared a state of emergency in the places where the demonstrations are the strongest. She did not succeed in her attempts to push back the mobilization.
As the days went by, in Libertad in the north, in Trujillo in the northwest, in Cuzco, where Machu Picchu is located, protesters blocked the roads. In Arequipa, the country’s second city after Lima, they blocked the Pan-American highway. 2,000 protesters took to the airport runways, blocking traffic before being driven back by police. During demonstrations in Ayacucho, soldiers fired on demonstrators approaching the airport. The number of wounded sent to nearby health centers has paralyzed the hospital system. In Apurimac, public service employees stopped work.
The many peasant organizations and trade unions, the National Assembly of Indigenous Peoples, student organizations, are all mobilized. Left and far-left organizations support them. All demand the release of the deposed and imprisoned president, the dissolution of Parliament and new elections. They add to that the demand for the resignation of the new president.
The clashes between demonstrators and police have not always worked to stop the demonstrators, but they have been violent and deadly. The toll as of this writing was 26 dead, some of them very young, several hundred injured and many arrests.
On the continent, four center-left governments, in Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Bolivia, have shown support for Castillo, victim since the start of his term in 2021 of a "hostile and anti-democratic" movement. Conversely, Washington and the European Union support impeachment and the new presidency.
Supporters of Castillo believe that it was Congress that carried out a coup against the president and not the other way around, as claimed by right-wing and far-right elected officials. They consider Dina Boluarte, Castillo’s ex-vice-president who agreed to succeed him, to be a "traitor, dictator and usurper."
Pedro Castillo is the fifth president thus deposed by Parliament. But this is the first time such a move has triggered a popular reaction of this magnitude. The corrupt politicians who intended to get rid of a humble teacher of peasant and half-Indian origin, one who was overshadowing them, they didn’t see that coming!
Jan 9, 2023
This article is translated from the January 6 issue #2840 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group of that name active in France.
Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu finally managed to put together a governing cabinet on December 29 after lengthy negotiations. Half of his cabinet chiefs belong to the religious and nationalist extreme right. Some are openly racist.
The traditional right-wing Likud Party reserved key ministries such as Justice. This matters because Netanyahu himself, who is Likud’s leader, is on trial for three charges of corruption! But he worked hard to win the support of his far-right allies. This was important for his obtaining a majority in Israel’s legislature, the Knesset.
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party is accustomed to cabinet dealmaking, as it has shared power with the Labor Party. But its leader was convicted of tax evasion, which meant he couldn’t hold high public office anymore. It required ramming through a new law to allow him to become Minister of the Interior and Health as well as deputy prime minister!
Next to this assortment of old hands in Israeli politics sit elements from a fringe of the far right which until now have been kept away from government responsibility. The leader and legislator from the ultra-religious Noam Party—which is for reducing the rights of women and gay people—was appointed to the newly created post of deputy minister in charge of promoting “Jewish national identity.”
The Religious Zionism Party supports building more Jewish colonies in the West Bank. Its leader lives in one of these colonies. He was appointed defense minister. He will have control over buildings in Area C of the West Bank, a region under Israeli military and civilian control. So, he will be able to support the establishment of Jewish colonies by evicting Palestinians from their land.
Another representative of the settlers, Itamar Ben Gvir of the Jewish Power Party, became head of the national security ministry. This despite the fact that he was convicted of inciting racism and of supporting Jewish terrorist organizations. He says he supports re-populating part of Israel’s Arab population to neighboring countries.
The new government plans to reform the judicial system. It particularly plans to limit the power of Israel’s Supreme Court, which was able to block some measures advocated by the most reactionary extreme right. Courts also could have blocked Jewish settlements. The rights of Israeli Arabs, who are already considered second-class citizens, could be further challenged. But many Israelis rightly fear a general rollback of rights and civil liberties.
The first act of this government on the international level was to bomb the airport of Syria’s capital Damascus on January 2, killing four people. The next day Minister Ben Gvir added a provocation against the Palestinians by touring the Jerusalem Mosque.
With its policy of oppressing Palestinians, the only prospect this government can offer Israelis is of strengthening the extreme right and evolving toward an increasingly authoritarian regime and a permanent state of war.
Jan 9, 2023
Many hospitals in the U.S. are officially “non-profit.” But in reality, they operate just like any other capitalist business. Ascension, one of the country’s largest health systems, covering 19 states and 6 million patients, is a perfect example.
While top executives boldly lie that “we are a mission and not a business” and its hospital grounds are adorned with religious statues, the organization amassed over $18 billion in cash reserves and an investment fund of over $41 billion. Last year the chief executive of this “mission” raked in a cool $13 million.
The scam involves an arrangement between the government and the capitalist health industry owners it serves. Hospital owners make a phony pledge to help poor patients and are awarded “non-profit” status to avoid all federal, state, and local taxes. Ascension pockets over one billion dollars in tax savings per year with its “non-profit” tax status. To further this deception, the word “profits” is excluded from Ascension’s financial records, replaced by the phrase “excess of revenues and gains over expenses and losses.” It’s no wonder that over half of U.S. hospitals are registered as “non-profit.”
Since “labor” accounts for over 50% of Ascension’s costs, slashing jobs is Priority One! In 2019 their job cuts returned a windfall of over $500 million. Remaining jobs are often diverted from working class communities to wealthy suburbs. Prior to the pandemic, they consistently refused to fill open jobs. Then, during the COVID surges they reduced capacity by more than 500 beds.
Nurses are left holding the bag and forced to work 16 hour shifts with little or no prior notification. Those that refuse for whatever reason are chastised as “not in line with our value of dedication”!!
The impact on patient care is devastating. At a Joliet, Illinois hospital a single nurses’ aide was left alone to care for 32 covid patients, most of whom were on oxygen. Ambulances are sometimes re-directed away due to severely understaffed ERs, and health inspectors found many patients with serious bed sores after not being moved for up to 20 hours.
At a Flint, Michigan, hospital, overworked nurses report that patients needing help with serious, time-sensitive medical conditions were left waiting for hours. They regularly find patients unattended lying in dried feces. The work environment is one of perpetual crisis. “Every day is unsafe staffing!!!” one nurse reported.
Regardless of what hospitals call themselves, they exist in a system that prioritizes profits over everything else. Such a system that tramples upon the health and well-being of its citizens is in urgent need of replacement.
Jan 9, 2023
Hospice allows people to die at home instead of spending their last days in the hospital. Terminally ill patients are supposed to receive care to treat pain and help with tasks like bathing, medications, and housekeeping, while giving up treatments aimed at curing them.
When it was introduced in the 1960s, and expanded in the 1970s and 1980s, it was presented as a benefit for patients, who could die with more dignity surrounded by loved ones, and as a cost saving plan for Medicare, because sending nurses and other workers to patients’ homes is still much less expensive than hospitalization. And for decades, hospice seemed to be accomplishing these goals.
At first, charities and non-profit organizations provided all hospice care. But over the last decades, every pot of public money to pay for something the population needs has been raided by profit-making bandits, and hospice is no exception. Hospice is now a 22-billion-dollar-a-year industry, still almost entirely funded by taxpayers, but for-profit hospice companies make up more than 70% of providers.
Companies make a profit off hospice in one simple way: they charge Medicare more than they pay for the services they provide. Medicare margins, or the difference between money these hospice companies collect from Medicare and the money they pay for services, are three times higher at for-profit hospice companies than their nonprofit counterparts. In other words, these companies profit by enrolling as many hospice patients as possible while providing as little care as they can get away with.
Like every other company, hospice providers hire as few people as they can get away with, so there are not nearly enough nurses, aides, or social workers. A 2016 study found that more than 12% of hospice patients got no visits from hospice workers in their last two days of life, meaning many died in filth and pain.
Even when hospice workers do visit, they are increasingly exhausted and given little time to provide care, run ragged by driving across whole regions or even whole states. A government review of hospice inspection reports from 2012 to 2016 found the majority of all hospices had “serious deficiencies,” including failures to manage pain and treat bedsores—yet the government did nothing to address these “deficiencies.”
Hospice companies also have an incentive to enroll as many patients as possible. The New Yorker magazine reported that some hospice companies have given their workers steep quotas for the number of patients they must enroll, regardless of how many people are terminally ill in the area. Patients have been enrolled in hospice without even knowing about it.
But while companies profit by keeping as many hospice patients as possible, the federal government demands repayment from a company if the average patient is on hospice more than six months—so when they have too many patients living too long, these companies “graduate” patients from hospice, which means they lose diapers, pain meds, wheelchairs, nursing care—even their hospital bed!
If we don’t want to accept seeing our loved ones—and ourselves—die in pain and filth, we will have to organize to take the wealth back from these thieves and use it to meet the population’s needs.
Jan 9, 2023
Across the U.S., there is a shortage of hospital beds for babies and children. Resuming normal activities has meant society’s youngest are getting exposed for the first time to viruses like RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus), the flu and coronavirus. Children’s inexperienced immune systems can easily become overwhelmed and a huge increase in hospitalizations has resulted.
The shortage of pediatric beds is not only the result of more sick children. The shortage of life-saving healthcare for children is coming from a profit-sick society.
For a number of reasons, pediatric hospital beds generate less profit than adult beds. In general, aside from kids with cancer, children have less complex medical problems, so insurance reimbursement is less.
Also, due to the number of working families in poverty, 40% of children qualify for Medicaid, the government-sponsored low-income insurance. Medicaid pays 30% less than Medicare, the government insurance for older adults. To put it bluntly, providing joint replacement surgery under Medicare brings in way more money than admitting sick children under Medicaid.
The blind drive to maximize revenue is at the point where the number of hospitals offering any pediatric services is only two-thirds of what it was in 2000.
The American Hospital Association defends eliminating hospital beds for babies by saying that the U.S. government, insurance companies, and consumers want to curb rising healthcare costs. One parent begs to differ. The father of a critically ill child transferred 200 miles to the “closest” pediatric hospital bed in December said, “It seems like they are really not caring about the kids.”
Children are not mini-adults. Having smaller, special equipment and medical staff experienced in caring for children can make a life and death difference. A recent study found that cuts to pediatric care have reached the point that for 90% of children, the emergency room closest to them is not “highly pediatric-ready.” Why does this matter? Another study found that critically ill children are four times more likely to die if first seen in an emergency room with low “pediatric-readiness”.
How many sick children must die so that sick healthcare for profit lives?
Jan 9, 2023
After 30 years, for more than 4,400 homeless living on Skid Row roads, finding a public restroom still remains a daily struggle. Skid Row is a neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles. About 31 public restrooms are available at all hours in this neighborhood, which is short of the United Nations standard for a refugee camp.
The City of Los Angeles will end the COVID eviction protections on January 31, 2023, causing an estimated 30,000 people to lose their homes and start living on the streets, further increasing the public restroom shortage.
Because of this shortage, the homeless often have no option but to relieve themselves outdoors, worsening hygiene and sanitation conditions in Skid Row. As a result, the residents and the homeless are at risk of contracting diseases such as staph, meningitis, tuberculosis, hepatitis A, and typhus, according to the Los Angeles county health department.
Although this has been a well-known health problem for decades, the City of Los Angeles politicians and administrators look the other way. They argue that, according to 2019 estimates, spending more than $340,000 annually to staff and operate a portable restroom prevents installing sufficient public toilets.
But the County of Los Angeles is ready to spend more than a third of its vast 2022–23 budget, $44.6 billion, to police its residents and allocate more than 40% of its staff for policing. So, spending on public restrooms, even at the inflated public restroom price tag, should not be an issue.
Jan 9, 2023
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of January 1, 2023.
Right before Christmas, Congress passed a massive 858-billion-dollar military spending bill that President Biden signed into law. This latest bill is 80 billion dollars more than what was spent last year, and 300 billion dollars more than eight years ago, when U.S. troops were still fighting the war in Afghanistan.
In fact, the latest U.S. military budget is one of the biggest since the end of World War II, including during the wars in Viet Nam and Korea that each involved millions of U.S. troops. And it is slated to continue to grow in the future.
Big increases in military spending are an enormous Christmas present for military contractors, like Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, and Northrup, providing huge, guaranteed profits.
That’s one reason why the two big parties, the Democrats and Republicans, supported it wholeheartedly. Congress even voted to spend 55 billion dollars more than the Pentagon had asked for. Money is no object when it comes to the military.
The other reason for this military buildup is that U.S. leaders are engaged in two major confrontations against two big rivals.
First, the U.S. has fomented the war in Ukraine in order to try to weaken Russia militarily and economically. The U.S. government is using the people of Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia. The U.S. and its allies have turned the war in Ukraine into the biggest war in Europe since World War II. This war has already destroyed much of Ukraine, and cost tens of thousands of lives of ordinary peoples of both Ukraine and Russia.
But for U.S. arms merchants, it’s been a bonanza. The big oil companies have raked in record profits. And U.S. companies have descended on Ukraine and neighboring countries, buying up their land and resources, putting them in debt to the big international banks.
Second, in Asia, U.S. leaders are now tightening their noose around China. They have instigated a trade war, while positioning huge numbers of war ships, planes, and war materials around China. U.S. leaders are also using the island of Taiwan as a bridgehead, a staging area, both economically and militarily against China.
The U.S. superpower, the most powerful in the world, is using its military to try to pry open new markets, new sources of profit and wealth for U.S. companies and banks.
And they are doing it knowing their actions risk setting off a new world war. Under capitalism, U.S. corporate profits and the wealth of U.S. capitalists are more important than anything else, even the survival of the human race. That’s how out-of-control and insane the capitalists and the workings of their economic system are.
Workers in this country have already paid mightily for the U.S. capitalists and their wars. Past U.S. wars have filled cemeteries and hospitals with the dead and wounded. U.S. streets are filled with homeless vets, who suffer from mental disease and drug addiction. As military spending grows, big parts of the country fall apart. Our schools, roads, and the entire system of health care crumble. Racist and nationalistic propaganda are used to divide peoples against each other.
No human being should have to live like this. The working class has produced more than enough wealth to do away with poverty and to assure that everyone leads a decent and fruitful life. But as long as society is run in the interests of the tiny minority of the capitalists, this is impossible.
However, wars also produce revulsion, revolt, and revolution. Working people can organize together to wrest control of society from the capitalists. It is the only way finally to do away with capitalism’s war madness, and at the same time to tackle humanity’s other problems.
Jan 9, 2023
Book: Women Talking by Miriam Toews, 2018
Based on actual events between 2005 and 2009, in a closed, remote old-fashioned agricultural Mennonite society. Over 150 women (including girls as young as 9) were drugged unconscious and raped by what they were told (by the men of the colony) were “ghosts” or “demons.” The women finally catch the multiple rapists, and they are taken away to be tried.
The book does not focus on the crimes, but rather women’s imagined response to the crimes. While essentially all the men of the society are away trying to bail out the rapists, the women spend two days in a hayloft discussing what to do, how to respond to events. The book artfully imagines their debate: across generations, philosophies, religious and social attitudes. The women keep talking until they reach a consensus that, facing their fear of the unknown, can finally bring hope for themselves and their children’s future.
There is also a movie of the same name set to be released this month, directed by Sarah Polley, and starring Frances McDormand and Rooney Mara.
Film: The Duke, a 2020 comedy-drama directed by Roger Michell, starring Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren, $3.99 to stream on Amazon Prime
The Duke is based on the 1961 true story of 60-year-old taxi driver, Kempton Bunton. Much to the chagrin of his wife, he wages a war against injustice and for the common man. He is incensed that in order to watch BBC, you have to pay a fee! The license “police” patrol neighborhoods looking for antennas and fining scofflaws like Kempton.
And to make matters worse, the National Art Gallery goes on TV and brags it spent millions for Goya’s painting of the Duke of Wellington, millions that could have been used to grant free BBC licenses. People are lining up to see this hyped-up painting, and someone steals it! Was it Kempton? He is accused and goes on trial. Some of the best lines of the movie are word-for-word from his testimony in this “trial of the century.” A wonderful film.
Jan 9, 2023
Suraj Thapa Magar, a 28-year-old who left his mud hut in Nepal to install windows on skyscrapers in Kuwait, often dangled from a rope in scorching 120-degree heat. Now he suffers from end-stage kidney disease. There is a growing epidemic of permanent kidney damage among young Nepali workers. These workers labored in other countries doing construction or other outdoor jobs in very hot conditions that ended up wrecking their kidneys.
Nepal is a small and poor country. Most young men have no choice but to work in other countries like Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and Qatar. Those who stay in Nepal to work earn a bag of rice a day, worth less than one dollar, by cutting grass and hauling bags of sand. By working abroad, they are able to send back $150 or so of their earnings to help their families buy fish to eat and other necessities.
For centuries, Nepalese have left their homeland to work. In 1985, Nepal’s government began regulating overseas employment and a private labor recruitment industry flourished. Recruiters sent men to work in construction, manufacturing and agriculture in Southeast Asia and the Persian Gulf. Workers pay $1,000 or more to these recruitment agencies. Last year, remittances made up 22% of Nepal’s economy.
In recent years, scientists and groups including the International Labor Organization have increasingly warned about the deadly link between exposure to extreme heat and chronic kidney disease. That link has been observed among workers laboring in rice fields in Sri Lanka, in steamy factories in Malaysia, and from Central America to the Persian Gulf.
As the world grows hotter and climate change produces more frequent and more extreme heat waves, public health experts fear kidney disease cases will soar among workers who have no choice but to work outdoors.
Medical researchers have long understood how heat can damage kidneys. When the body becomes severely dehydrated, the result is the production of urine which has high concentrations of minerals, like calcium, and waste products. This can lead to the formation of crystals. Over time these crystals scar and cripple the microscopic tubes in the kidneys. Often workers only drink on their breaks, giving them little hope of replacing all the water they are losing.
Workers are left needing dialysis three times a week and a new kidney. All of this is very expensive. Once-healthy young men are removed from the economy and end up stressing an already over-burdened healthcare system.
Most scientists agree that human activity is warming the planet at a faster rate. More specifically, the drive for profit at any cost is also driving temperatures up. Right now, climate change might be more keenly felt in some of the world’s hottest places like Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and the Persian Gulf. But climate change is a global phenomenon with far-reaching effects. It is not likely that anyone or any place will be spared as time goes on.
Jan 9, 2023
This article is translated from the November 18 issue #2833 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group of that name active in France.
There are now more than 8 billion humans on the planet. This number is constantly increasing, since every second two more people are born.
The figures are posted by the United Nations. They come from calculations made by demographers and statisticians on the basis of national censuses carried out since 1950, among other sources. In October 1999, their calculations announced six billion people. After the eight billion announced November 2022, a population of 10 billion is predicted by 2050. Commentators worry: Will the planet resist? Will there be enough food and water? Won’t CO2 emissions increase further, and with them, the temperature?
As if famine, drought, global warming and all the catastrophes that befall humanity today essentially depend on the number of humans. As if a few billion more or fewer women and men would allow a fairer distribution of wealth and guarantee the disappearance of the poverty which pushes some to cross oceans at the risk of their lives, with the simple hope of being able to live.
What is at issue is not the number of humans, it is the social system, capitalism, which dominates the planet and all its people, and which restricts the greatest share of the wealth for those who own capital.
The economic system created famines. For example, grains are not produced to feed people, but to be sold or even hoarded in order to raise prices and get maximum profits. The same goes for health care. The pharmaceutical industry only produces drugs to put them “on the market,” as they say. Too bad for those who cannot afford to buy them. The goal is not to treat, but to produce to sell. The same goes for CO2 emissions. We have known for years we must reduce them. But they persist, because the industrial companies responsible for them do not want to give up a source of profit. In fact, the same goes for all aspects which make life so hard for a majority of the population.
Contrary to what we can read or hear every day ad nauseam, it is not a question of convincing each individual person to choose a lifestyle adapted to environmentalism. The problem is not individual. Peeing in the shower is not the solution to save the planet by saving water. Solving the problems of world hunger or global warming does not depend on individual choices, but collective choices. Ending world poverty and the destruction of the environment by capitalism involves the establishment of a society directed and controlled by the people themselves—planning the economy according to the needs of all people and the needs of the planet overall.
There are not too many humans on Earth. There is far too much of this social order which reserves for those who possess capital the greatest share of the wealth produced by those who are all too often deprived of the most basic means of subsistence.