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 6, 2014
While workers waited and hoped that things would get better, the capitalist class took full advantage in 2013.
In 2013, the stock market performed better than in any year since 1997.
At the end of 2013, there were more millionaires and billionaires in the world than ever before. The richest 10 percent own 85 percent of the financial wealth. The richest 1 percent owns nearly half–42 percent.
Meanwhile, the average worker’s wage remained at 1972 levels, while having to pay 2013 prices. If you had a job!
In 2013, the number of working age persons who could find work fell to its lowest percentage in 30 years. Plus, of those, one out of three could find only a part-time or temporary job. In other words, one-third of the workforce in the entire country is temporary or part-time!
The working class is in a dire situation. The reason could not be more clear. The capitalist class has used its hold over society to drive down workers’ wages and to lay off more workers. Meanwhile, the working class, which already operates the society, has a superior potential power. Yet, the working class has remained quiet in the face of these attacks.
It’s blindingly simple. The wealthy got wealthier by spitting in the face of working people, taking the value produced by the workers and hoarding it for themselves.
The billionaires wheel and deal on the stock market, they speculate on derivatives and real estate, they bribe some more politicians–but the very last thing they do is invest in job creation! In fact, the more layoffs they announce, the more their stocks go up!
There are vast needs of our society that cry out for work to be done. The infrastructure of today’s society–the roads, rail, water, electricity, transportation–are far past their use-by dates. It all needs massive up-to-date redesign and rebuilding. Restoring and revitalizing the public education system, libraries, city parks and recreation centers, in city after working-class city, would provide many more thousands of jobs.
The needs, the shortages in our society, are immense. The homeless need homes. The disabled need care. The children need education. Yet these are the very needs that the wealthy refuse to meet for anyone outside their own little private gated islands.
Will we keep waiting in 2014? Will we continue to believe those liars who tell us that our waiting will eventually be rewarded?
The working class’s needs are basic. Jobs–jobs for everyone who can work. Wages–wages that adjust to the cost of living, and keep up. Security–health care, education, and retirement.
The right to enjoy the benefits of the society their labor has produced.
There can only be one master of the situation. The capitalist class can continue to use its power to drive workers backwards. Or the working class can use its own enormous social power, turn the tables, and become itself the master of the situation. We need what the wealthy have taken. They need to make them cough it up.
In 2014, the working class can stop waiting and prepare to fight for its future. The wealth is there, waiting on us.
Jan 6, 2014
More than 400 former homeowners in Maryland are being sued by their old mortgage banks, even after the banks foreclosed on their homes. In most states, banks can sue to garnish wages for the difference between the loan balance and the foreclosure value. And the banks can charge interest.
Isn’t it enough to take away someone’s home? But in tens of thousands of cases around the country, the banks also make this extra nasty move.
It’s obvious: under capitalism, home lending is not done to let people have homes. No, private banks are in the business of competing for profit before anything else. Squeezing thousands of dollars from working people who already lost their home is just part of their business model.
Jan 6, 2014
Funny thing how gas prices seem to always jump up before a holiday.
Natural disaster? Political turmoil? No. Just a small group of billionaires giving themselves a holiday bonus!
Jan 6, 2014
If it felt like the economy wasn’t so great for you last year, maybe it’s because you aren’t a billionaire. For them, the economy was great. The world’s 300 wealthiest people made 524 billion dollars in 2013, bringing their total net worth to 3.7 trillion dollars–that is $3,700,000,000,000–for just three hundred people!
Bill Gates still sits at the top. He may have started out making money through Microsoft, but now he owns pieces of more than 35 companies, including the Four Seasons hotel chain, Canadian National Railway, and Caterpillar. Like every other capitalist, Gates makes his money by exploiting the thousands of people who work for these companies.
Gates has a reputation for charity–he’s given 28 billion dollars to the foundation he and his wife control–but he’s kept more than 78 billion dollars of the wealth he’s grabbed from workers for himself.
According to one billionaire, John Catsimatidis, 2014 looks to be just as good. “The rich will keep getting richer,” he said, in part because “the economy will grow at less than 2 percent.” He’s admitting that a “bad” economy is actually good for these parasites! If the economy grows slowly, workers will still be desperate for jobs, the bosses will be able to keep wages low, and the billionaires will be able to exploit us even more.
The fabulous sums accumulated by these leeches show how much wealth there is in this society, that could be used to meet the populations’ needs. But that won’t happen until workers find a way to take control of the economy and make it serve us, instead of the blood-sucking billionaires.
Jan 6, 2014
In November, the Blackstone Group, one of the biggest Wall Street private equity firms, issued a rated bond backed by securitized rental payments. In plain English, Blackstone is bundling rental payments of thousands of single-family homes and selling them to investors, the same way that Wall Street firms bundled home mortgages and sold them before defaulted mortgage payments burst that bubble, leading to the financial crisis of 2008.
During the “Great Recession” that followed, millions of people lost their homes to foreclosure. Now, Wall Street firms and banks have been buying a lot of houses, foreclosed as well as new. Blackstone alone has spent 7.5 billion dollars to buy 40,000 houses across the country. Blackstone and other Wall Street companies and banks are not selling the houses–at least not yet. Instead, they are renting many of them–and now, “bundling” and “securitizing” these rental agreements to make more money off them too.
It’s another housing bubble–this time a rent bubble–waiting to burst. And the money feeding this bubble comes from the billions of dollars of taxpayer money the government gave the banks to bail them out when the previous bubble burst. It’s a crazy, vicious cycle driven by the unstoppable urge of the capitalist class to increase profit.
Jan 6, 2014
Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress consciously made sure that a federal program extending long-term unemployment benefits ended last week, cutting off that aid to 1.3 million jobless workers.
Republicans justify the cut-off by saying that the benefit actually interferes with getting those 1.3 million people back to work–as if the jobs were out there for those workers, if only they would get out there and look for them!
Democrats are happy to blame Republicans for the cut-off, since Republicans are the majority in the House of Representatives. They’re happy to have an issue to campaign on in this election year–an issue that would disappear if an extension were actually passed!
President Obama himself began the campaigning this past week, urging Republicans to “make it their New Year’s Resolution” to extend the benefits–knowing full well that they won’t.
What cynicism! If Obama and the Democrats truly wanted to force an extension through, there are plenty of things they could do to put pressure on the Republicans, even in a Republican-dominated House. Money and contracts going to Republican districts could be threatened until the representatives come around, for example. But no, that’s not the Democrats’ interest.
The Republicans arrogantly mock the unemployed; the Democrats cynically use them. No one in this charade truly represents the workers’ interests.
Obama himself said it best: “Denying families that security is just plain cruel.” And pretending to care to get some votes is just as cruel!
Jan 6, 2014
U.S. banks have reported record profits–141 billion dollars in 2012, and are on track to make as much or more for 2013. That works out to about half a billion dollars in profits every single day. And the banks have made these record profits for eight of the last ten years–no recession for them.
In fact, the U.S. taxpayers keep shoveling money at the banks and financial services. And the U.S. Federal Reserve keeps buying up billions of dollars of bad mortgages every month, left over from the days of the housing bubble.
Still, many banks have announced thousands of job cuts: Bank of America plans 30,000 job cuts; JPMorgan Chase plans 20,000 job cuts; Citigroup plans 11,000.
With profits up and bad mortgages disappearing from their books, why do banks want to cut jobs? Is it the high wages of their work force? Ha, ha!
Bank tellers average $24,000 per year, or less than $14.00 per hour. So bank tellers are the “working poor,” making many of them eligible for food stamps and Medicaid and CHIP, the subsidized Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Banks are cutting more jobs because they want to roll up still more profit on the backs of these workers. The system is working exactly the way the capitalists prefer.
Jan 6, 2014
Carmen Figueroa, a detective with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, has lost her job and is facing deportation.
Figueroa, who is 42, knows no other country than the U.S. Her parents, who were immigrants, told her that she was born in the U.S. But immigration authorities say her birth certificate is false, and they are threatening Figueroa with deportation.
Figueroa’s trouble began when her brother, who is in the U.S. military, applied for a passport. The U.S. Department of State then went after Figueroa as well. It also notified Figueroa’s bosses. When her bosses told Figueroa she’d get fired, she resigned.
Figueroa and her brother are not alone–there are thousands of people in the same situation. If the person in question can’t produce documentation accepted by the government as “proof of citizenship,” as would be the case for millions of Americans, he or she is declared guilty and is threatened with deportation, just like Figueroa.
The U.S. government’s witch hunt on immigrants is based on the legal premise that some of the people living and working in this country should not have the same rights as everyone else. But if we allow the government to deny one part of population its rights, no part of the population can count on those rights either.
Jan 6, 2014
As of January 1, a new Illinois law imposes a fine of up to $1500 for throwing a cigarette butt out of a car window. If you get caught throwing a butt out your window a third time, the penalty is one to three years in jail plus a fine of up to $25,000.
If the roads and streets are dirtier than they used to be, it’s because the state has cut back on cleaning the roadways and cities have cut back on their streets and sanitation budgets. Politicians have made cuts in all the services the population needs, while continuing to hand money over to their wealthy corporate buddies.
It takes some nerve to impose these draconian fines, no doubt devised to squeeze more money out of us, while giving the police another excuse to pull us over and harass us.
We’ve got a good idea of where these politicians can put all the cigarette butts–and it’s not the side of the highway!
Jan 6, 2014
The following comes from the text of a public presentation given in Los Angeles in November.
The health care reform, known as the Affordable Care Act, was the politicians’ promise to millions of Americans that they could now have adequate health insurance.
Nearly 50 million people in the U.S. are today without health insurance. Eight million more are uninsured some period of time every year. And many are underinsured, people who have insurance but still spend a significant percentage of their income on health care—another 30 million. Together, the uninsured and underinsured made up nearly half the U.S. adult population in 2012.
For those who can’t afford available insurance plans, the ACA promised subsidies for people and families whose income fell between 138% and 400% of the Federal Poverty Level. For those below 138%, Medicaid, the federal aid program for the poor, would be expanded.
That was the promise.
On October 1, health exchanges in 16 states and D.C., and the federal exchange that serves the remaining 34 states, opened. Millions of people logged into the exchanges’ websites to choose from among the insurance plans offered by private insurance companies.
The result was … total chaos.
The websites, especially the federal website, kept crashing, and even when the websites worked, people who tried to pick up a plan and enroll didn’t fully know their options.
The glitches and technical problems of the websites are symptoms of the real problem, not the cause. There are 150 private insurance companies competing for each cent of premium from each applicant. They are all trying to figure out how much to charge each applicant, checking age, residence, health care history, previous insurance, etc., etc. Plus the computer systems of nine different government agencies are checking whether an applicant qualifies for a subsidy and how much.
So they ended up with a monstrosity of a website.
But the insurance companies made the chaos even worse—by cancelling existing policies right and left, to be able to sell these customers more expensive policies, using the new law as an excuse. The number of cancelled policies reached millions—estimated at five million total.
By the end of 2013, four million of the eight million people eligible to do so had enrolled in Medicaid, while only two million enrolled through the federal and state sites for private insurance.
The enrollment is so low, precisely because the available private plans are so expensive!
Just to give some numbers, a family of two 41-year-old adults and an under-18 dependent, living in Glendale, California and making $51,900 a year, qualifies for a federal subsidy. But the cheapest bronze plan will cost this family about $200 a month AFTER the federal subsidy (the plan costs $476 a month without subsidy—and remember it’s a bronze 60/40!). So this family will have to pay $2,400 a year, for a plan that dumps 40% of medical costs on the insured, has a $5,000 annual deductible for medical expenses and drugs, and a $60 co-pay for a primary care visit!
Glendale is not alone.
Now by law, everybody has to buy health insurance from a private company. The ACA puts the responsibility of buying health insurance on the individual. The subsidies work to provide the medical industry with customers who can’t afford medicine’s outrageous prices.
But if you don’t buy insurance? (Which many people probably will opt for because, even after the subsidy, the less expensive plans are worth practically nothing.) You’ll pay a fine, to be added to your taxes at the end of the year. In 2014, the fine is $95 or 2.5% of the person’s income, whichever is higher. And it will go up every year after that.
Note that this “individual mandate” takes the “responsibility” of providing health coverage from the shoulders of employers—a “responsibility” which they have been shedding more and more anyway.
So the medical industry has been losing customers in recent years, and in a big way.
In the three years between 2007 and 2010 alone, insurance companies lost 10 million customers in employer-sponsored plans, that is, one out of every six they had in 2007. That trend has been continuing—companies have been eliminating jobs, hours (full-time to part-time and on-call) and benefits to cut their own costs.
No surprise that the ACA was written by the medical industry—those same big corporations that profit from the existing health care system in the U.S. The only thing this reform extends is what we already have—a health care system run by private interests, for their own profit.
The subsidy is nothing but another government handout to big corporations that are already enormously profitable—a huge handout, as a matter of fact. According to the New York Times, just the subsidies, paid directly to insurers from the U.S. Treasury, are expected to total more than one TRILLION dollars over 10 years!
Expanding Medicaid amounts to another big subsidy for companies that have a low-wage work force, such as Walmart and McDonald’s, who will now be able to push even more of their workers into Medicaid, shifting costs onto taxpayers and increasing their profits.
Yes, the available insurance plans are all expensive, ACA supporters say, but at least insurance companies now have to provide essential health benefits, such as maternity, mental health, prescription drugs.
In fact, even with these minimum coverage requirements, the Obama administration admits that the least expensive plans are not worth buying. To people who qualify for the federal subsidy, the administration recommends to spend some money out of their pockets and buy a “silver” plan instead of a “bronze” that doesn’t really cover anything else but those “essentials,” saddled with high deductibles and co-pays.
OK, ACA supporters say, but now insurance companies don’t have a right to reject people with pre-existing conditions, as they have been doing.
Yes, but these people will still depend on the insurance companies. And those insurance companies are already undermining the care their new customers will get, even before the customers buy the policies. They severely restrict provider networks. People will not get the care they need, whether insurance companies call the way their body functions a “pre-existing condition” or not.
As a whole, the ACA makes us all pay a very steep price for health care.
People who qualify for the federal subsidy will find their subsidy status will change as they move in and out of jobs. Many will actually have to pay the credit back, and pay more in premiums too. A study published in Health Affairs magazine in September estimated that 38%, or more than one in three, of families that qualify for federal premium subsidies will have to repay some portion of the subsidy, with a median repayment of $857.
People who supposedly qualify for the expanded Medicaid, if they live in the 25 states that did NOT expand Medicaid, won’t have any coverage.
Even where Medicaid is available to people, there is the problem of eligibility. Eligibility will change by the month. Another study in Health Affairs found that in over a year 50% of people will be tossed in and out of Medicaid because their eligibility will change.
The people who newly qualify for Medicaid will be entering a system hit by big budget cuts in recent years. Medicaid recipients have already been paying higher co-pays and premiums. Medi-Cal, California’s program, underwent some severe cuts in recent years. In 2011, Governor Jerry Brown cut Medi-Cal reimbursements across the board to providers—a move that needed, and got, the approval of the Obama administration. As a result, only 57% of California physicians accept new Medi-Cal patients. And this cut, made and approved by Democrats, followed the cuts made about five years ago by the then-governor, the Republican Schwarzenegger, which restricted different types of care for Medi-Cal patients, such as vision and dental, and imposed higher co-pays and premiums too.
Finally, if you have employer-sponsored health insurance—things will change for you also, in the same direction they have been changing already. Companies, and also the public sector, have been eliminating benefits aggressively in recent years.
This “reform” gives employers incentives to dump more workers from health benefits. IBM and Time Warner are already pushing retirees to private exchanges. Trader Joe’s and Home Depot are shifting part-time workers to ACA exchanges, while Walgreens is moving all of its employees—all 160,000 of them—to a private exchange next year.
The ACA is providing the companies with a justification for reducing benefits: the so-called “Cadillac tax.” This ACA, which has nothing to say about controlling the cost of insurance plans on the exchanges, claims to deal with the cost issue with a 40% tax on “Cadillac” (sometimes also called “gold-plated”) insurance plans.
Now, what exactly constitutes a Cadillac plan? Is this the kind of plan that millionaires and corporate executives have, as the name suggests? Well no, a Cadillac plan can easily be the plan that a retired worker has, because the ACA defines Cadillac status by the amount of premiums—and insurance companies charge high premiums if you are older.
This tax doesn’t go into effect until 2018; but 2018 is already here, because insurance companies are already using the Cadillac tax as an excuse to increase deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs (as a way to reduce premiums, they say).
Of course, companies have been doing all these things already, for years.
This so-called health care “reform” is a continuation of what we had before—people, and all of us as a society—are paying more and more for health care, and getting less and less care.
Workers who have coverage have been paying more and more for it. Last year alone, workers’ share of the cost of a family policy jumped an average of 14%, an increase of about $500 a year—while the cost of a policy increased just 3%.
From 2000 to 2011, U.S. health care spending increased from $1.6 trillion to $2.7 trillion, amounting to 17.9% of the U.S. GDP in 2011. And for all this spending, the amount of health care the U.S. population gets is declining. A 2012 survey found that a total of 80 million Americans did not get care that year because of the cost; 75 million had difficulty paying medical bills; and, over two years, 4 million went bankrupt as a result.
So if all this money we are paying is not going to health care—where is it going?
To profits, of course—and for the entire capitalist class. Insurance companies—that’s finance, that is, Wall Street. And as in every sector of the industry, big medical corporations are intertwined—the big shareholders in the big companies are the same big capitalists.
The capital class seeks to profit off of sickness, like it does off of everything else. But access to medical care is literally a question of life or death. Like food, air, or water, people need health care to live, and human beings deserve the right to these things without going through capitalist middle-men. When the working class starts to move and deal with the problems this sick capitalist system has created, making sure everyone has the right to medical care will be high on the list.
Jan 6, 2014
On October 25, 1983, the Reagan administration sent over 8,000 U.S. troops to invade the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada. This was the first time since the Viet Nam War in the 1960s and early 1970s that large numbers of U.S. combat troops had been sent to fight a war abroad.
The long and bloody U.S. war in Viet Nam in the 1960s and early 1970s had produced lasting mass opposition and mistrust in the U.S. population to any foreign wars. This mistrust even extended inside parts of the U.S. military. This became known as the “Viet Nam syndrome,” like it was some kind of horrible disease or condition.
For U.S. rulers, it was this so-called “syndrome” that constrained them from imposing their domination over poor peoples all over the world through direct military force, as U.S. rulers had done throughout much of this country’s history. Their fear of provoking a new anti-war movement inside the U.S. was one reason the U.S. didn’t send its own troops to directly intervene even when loyal dictators it had supported for many years, like the Shah of Iran and General Somoza of Nicaragua, were deposed in revolutionary upheavals in 1979. When many of the U.S.’s own diplomatic personnel were taken hostage and held for well over a year by the new Iranian regime, the mighty U.S. seemed paralyzed.
In this period, U.S. military planners mounted only a few small, limited military actions. In April 1980, there was the spectacularly unsuccessful rescue mission of the U.S. hostages in Iran. The rescue mission was aborted after a U.S. helicopter and a transport plane collided at a remote staging area. And then twice during the early 1980s, the U.S. deployed troops to Lebanon as a so-called “peacekeeping” force after the Israeli invasion of that country. On October 23, 1983, a truck bomb exploded at the marine headquarters in Lebanon, killing 241 marines–the largest U.S. troop loss in a military operation since Viet Nam. In response, President Reagan promptly pulled the remaining U.S. troops from the country.
Two days after the Lebanon truck bombing, the U.S. invaded tiny Grenada. In many ways, Grenada presented a perfect target for the U.S. military, especially after the retreat of U.S. troops from Lebanon proved once again its weakness and vulnerability. The regime in Grenada had been a bit of a problem for the U.S. It had come to power by overthrowing a U.S.-sponsored dictator, and the government of Grenada tried to take a distance from the U.S., including by establishing friendly ties with the U.S.’s arch-rivals, both Cuba and the USSR. Given that Grenada’s poorly equipped military force had only a couple of thousand soldiers, the U.S. invasion was a quick success.
This was not just a military victory, but a political victory as well... against the U.S. population. The invasion was over so quickly, little or no response against the war was organized. That left U.S. rulers freer to carry the U.S. down the road toward more military interventions, in fact, more wars like Viet Nam. This would be underlined in the years to come, after the U.S. invaded Panama in December 1989, and then carried out the much bigger Persian Gulf War in 1990-91, which were a prelude to the much bigger U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The U.S. invasion of Grenada was the first step by the rulers of this country to overcome that “syndrome” that had constrained them from using direct military force, violence and bloodshed all over the world. U.S. rulers used the invasion to declare to the entire world that the period when it hesitated to use its own forces to intervene was over.
These U.S. interventions have not just caused untold suffering for the people in those countries, but the people of entire regions surrounding them. Also suffering under the yoke of the U.S. rulers’ wars have been the people of this country, who have been made to pay for these wars in every way possible.
The reality we must face is the one the Viet Nam War taught several generations ago: the workers of this country have nothing to gain and everything to lose as U.S. imperialism moves to control the rest of the world.
Jan 6, 2014
A federal judge finally granted 74-year-old attorney Lynne Stewart so-called “compassionate release” from prison after her doctor stated she is likely to live no more than 18 months due to stage IV breast cancer. It’s about time.
Stewart was imprisoned because the government targeted her for a lifetime of legally defending the poor and people opposed to the government. Among those Stewart defended was Black Panther Willie Holder, who hijacked a plane in an attempt to negotiate the release of Angela Davis in 1972. She also defended David Gilbert, a member of the Weather Underground.
The government set her up in 2010, when she represented Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as “the blind Sheikh,” a long-time opponent of the bloody Mubarak regime in Egypt, which the U.S. government supported. Abdel-Rahman was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison.
Stewart was charged with violating “Special Administrative Measures,” restrictions aimed at keeping the blind Sheikh in total isolation from his family and the outside world in general, when she issued a short press release on his behalf. In a truly democratic society, it would hardly be something warranting jail time.
Stewart may have made things worse when she made light of the 28-month sentence she was originally issued. After complaints from politically connected people, a higher court ordered the judge in her case to re-sentence her, and he more than quadrupled her sentence to 10 years.
It was effectively a death sentence for someone whose cancer had returned, especially since the prison system denied her a needed surgery for a year-and-a-half.
So now officials of the “injustice” system have found it in their hearts to release her, after more than four years in prison. Compassionate? Not on your life.
Jan 6, 2014
At the beginning of December, the Korean State Railroad Company (Korail) announced the creation of a subsidiary to run a new high speed rail line. The railway workers understood that it was the first step toward the privatization of the railway, along with massive layoffs. They didn’t hesitate to respond and began a strike which was the longest ever to occur against this company. The government decided to use severe methods to break the strike, but failed.
The Korean Railway Workers Union (KRWU) began the strike on December 9th. The strikers increased in number and through their action paralyzed a big part of the national railway network. On December 18th, the government declared the strike illegal and the railway company laid off 7,927 workers. The police entered local union offices throughout the country. They then got an injunction to prevent “obstruction of economic activity” against 28 leaders and union representatives.
On December 22nd in Seoul, almost 4,000 police encircled the high rise housing the office of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), which the KRWU belongs to. They broke in the glass door of the building and made their way up to the 17th floor, hitting and scattering with tear gas strike activists seated on the stops of the stairs to block the way. In all, the clash lasted almost 10 hours. The police arrested 130 people, but didn’t seize the union leaders, who took refuge in a Buddhist temple, where the forces of order didn’t dare enter.
On December 28th, the KCTU called for a one day general strike in solidarity with the railway workers. Several tens of thousands of people assembled in the center of Seoul. For its part, Korail began layoff procedures and launched an ultimatum to the strikers and started to hire new temporary workers.
On December 30th, the union leaders announced the end of the strike, having obtained two commissions to study the question of privatization. One commission includes opposition members of Parliament, and the other union representatives. There’s a long way to go to prevent the privatization! But the railway strike, by its determination, ended up by causing difficulties for the administration and President Park Geun-hye, called the “Iron Lady of Seoul,” who has been in office since 2012.
The railway workers showed that the working class has the force to fight. For all the strikers, it’s certainly the most important gain of this movement.
Jan 6, 2014
Hundreds of thousands of people lost power in Michigan, New York State, Vermont and Maine during a winter storm. Power outages lasted over a week in parts of central Michigan. At least 25 people have died. Cities were brought to a grinding halt by unplowed snow.
Power companies blame nature for these outages. They say it’s winter. Isn’t snow and ice in winter months to be expected, especially in northern states?
Nature simply creates what it usually does in winter: snow, ice, cold temperatures. These are completely predictable problems. But power companies have cut back on maintenance; they didn’t prune tree limbs so nature did it for them. They didn’t strengthen the wires so ice brought them down. They have cut back their workforce to the barebones so it takes longer to restore power when it does go out. People are forced to heat their homes anyway they can, leading to fires and carbon monoxide poisonings.
Politicians also blame nature. Never mind that they don’t even bother to plow except maybe when the snow stops. This means more accidents and stranded drivers. Emergency vehicles can’t even travel safely.
Those that suffer the most of course are those without shelter and those who lost power. Many places like libraries, rec centers and so forth, which could be used as shelters, have been closed due to cut backs.
No. Nature did not cause the power outages or deaths due to carbon monoxide poisoning. Cut backs at the power companies and in the cities caused this disaster.
Jan 6, 2014
On December 21st, French doctors put an artificial heart in a man. Unlike devices that up to now were only temporary before the patient received a heart transplant, this device is expected to last five years. This is an editorial in the December 27th issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers’ group of that name active in France.
For four days, a man has been living with an artificial heart. If it’s too soon to declare a success, this is certainly good news. This heart allows a 75-year-old man, with terminal cardiac insufficiency, to live. His heart beats normally, speeds up when he’s excited and then slows down, like any human heart.
If this proves to be a success, the 100,000 people with heart disease in Europe and the U.S. who are awaiting heart transplants could benefit from it. Due to the shortage of hearts available for transplant, only 5 to 7% today will be able to get a transplant. It will take years to evaluate the benefits and risks of this technology, but it offers the hope of increasing the lives of millions of people.
This implantation shows what human ingenuity can do. This isn’t individual genius, but the genius of society: when it brings together its ideas, its knowledge and its competence, it is capable of overcoming the most complex problems.
This is the result of twenty-five years of collective labor by hundreds of researchers, engineers, technicians and doctors. It is also based on the long experience with heart transplants. It is also due to high-tech sectors like microelectronics and numerical simulation.
Yes, humanity is capable of big things. But, as a society founded on capitalism, on exploitation of labor and the race for profit, progress only benefits a minority.
People of means benefit from technologies and the most skilled medical teams for serious diseases. Others do without dental care, glasses and medicine due to a lack of money. On the world scale, women and men die of malaria, cholera and measles that can be treated.
The limits put on humanity aren’t technical or scientific, they are social. The fact that society enables someone to live with an artificial heart, while being incapable of properly feeding a billion human beings, is an overwhelming proof of this.
The hold of profit will weigh on the beginning of this innovation, for as always with capitalism, it isn’t an affair of the heart, but one of a lot of money.
In the future, what profit margin will the stockholders demand? What price will the artificial heart sell for? It’s estimated to be $163,000. Will the national health insurance pay for it? Will there be some sick people who can afford to pay for an artificial heart while others cannot?
In order that progress not be seized by a minority and in order to open up all aspects of human life, a profound transformation of society is needed. The bourgeoisie needs to be expropriated, and the economy reorganized without profit and competition.
“Utopian,” some will say. But everything remains utopian until there are the means to bring them about. Flying in the air and then in space and walking on the moon were utopian, until human beings achieved these advances.