The solution is Improved Medicare for All

By Kay Tillow

http://my.firedoglake.com/kaytillow/2012/10/06/post-election-deficit-deal-threatens-medicare-and-social-security/

After the November election, there will be a major effort in Congress to
pass a budget deal that will make cuts in Social Security, raise the
Medicare and Social Security eligibility age, and perhaps more–unless we
act to stop it with a solution that is close at hand.

There is agreement from the Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel to liberal
economists Dean Baker and Paul Krugman that the pressure will be on to
reach a Simpson/Bowles type of compromise. Such a bipartisan plan would
damage our most cherished programs and excuse the dastardly deed by
asserting that the cuts are small and necessary because of the deficit.
Those who relentlessly scream at us and finance ads to persuade us that
the deficit threatens our grandchildren are obscuring the truth. The fact
is that the transfer of wealth from public funds and the rest of us to the
super rich is the real crisis. But those who have gorged themselves on
this massive transfer of wealth also seek to undermine the Medicare and
Social Security which are our grandchildren’s heritage from generations of
struggles for a better life.

The projected cuts are not minor but very harmful. Even a small decrease
in the Social Security Cost of Living Adjustment would deliver an ever
increasing downward push on benefits while corporations continue to
threaten secure pensions by turning them into lump sums that will fade
with the stock market.

Raising the Medicare age to 67 would be disastrous. There will be no
affordable health insurance for those in their 60’s. The Affordable Care
Act allows private insurance companies to charge premiums three times
higher based on age. Under popular pressure, there were regulations
placed into the health care reform bill to stop insurance companies from
charging higher premiums based on pre-existing conditions. But the
companies were allowed to charge three times the premium based on age.
Because of this allowed age discrimination, the Kaiser Foundation
estimates that an individual of age 60 in 2014 with an annual income of
$50,000 will pay a health insurance premium of over $10,000, or over 20%
of income. That does not include out-of-pocket costs which can add up to
an additional $6,000 annually. That brings the total to 32% of income—a
bankrupting figure.

There is a solution that the single payer movement must place on the
nation’s table. Even Bill Clinton said that we could save $1 trillion a
year if we adopted the health care system of any of the other developed
countries in the world. No more stewing over the deficit!

An Expanded and Improved Medicare for All, HR 676, would save Medicare,
end the uncontrolled, gargantuan rise in all health care costs, ease the
deficit pressure, and actually bring universal health care to the nation.
This single payer legislation, HR 676, introduced by Congressman John
Conyers and co-sponsored by 76 representatives, would divert $400 billion
annually from profits and waste generated by the private health insurance
industry into care for all. Care would be expanded and costs bought under
control through bulk purchasing, global budgeting, and the elimination of
administrative expenses forced upon our system in the pursuit of profit.
Doctors would be freed from insurance industry interference with care.
Patients would be freed to choose their physicians. Dental, eyeglasses,
hearing aids, prescription drugs, long term care, doctors, hospitals, home
health, mental health—all medically necessary care would be included. Our
health care costs would stop driving us over the cliff and level off just
as Canada’s did when that country fully implemented their single payer
health care.

Co-pays and deductibles would be banned ending today’s growing problem
that health insurance policies are so miserly that even the insured forego
care because they can’t afford it.

Our country spends about twice per capita what other industrialized
nations spend on health care, yet our health care system lags far behind
at number 37 in the world.

So why are we even debating cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and
Medicaid when the solution is at hand that would bring us both better care
and cost controls? HR 676, an improved Medicare for All, is sitting in
the Congress, awaiting the rising of a movement that will insist upon its
passage.

Distributed by:

All Unions Committee for Single Payer Health Care–HR 676
c/o Nurses Professional Organization (NPO)
1169 Eastern Parkway, Suite 2218
Louisville, KY 40217

(502) 636 1551

Email: nursenpo@aol.com

http://unionsforsinglepayer.org

10/8/2012

by James Thompson

This article should not be viewed as an endorsement of Maoist tactics. However, perhaps some communists can benefit by reviewing some of Mao Tse-Tung’s writings which may have some relevance to the current conditions of struggle of the working class. As with Joseph Stalin, it is important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Both Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung led great nations forward in the struggle for socialism and against fascism and imperialism. This should never be forgotten.

The first quotation is from Mao Tse-Tung’s work “On Contradiction”:

“Every difference in men’s concepts should be regarded as reflecting an objective contradiction. Objective contradictions are reflected in subjective thinking, and this process constitutes a contradictory movement of concepts, pushes forward the development of thought, and ceaselessly solves problems in man’s thinking.

Opposition and struggle between ideas of different kinds constantly occur within the Party; this is a reflection within the Party of contradictions between classes and between the new and the old in society. If there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the Party’s life would come to an end.” (p. 317)

The next quote is from his work “Be a True Revolutionary”:

“Whoever sides with the revolutionary people is a revolutionary. Whoever sides with imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism is a counterrevolutionary. Whoever sides with the revolutionary people in word only but not in deed is a revolutionary in word. Whoever sides with the revolutionary people in deed as well as in word is a true revolutionary.” (p. 38-39)

“At home, we must unite all the nationalities, Democratic classes, Democratic parties, people’s organizations and patriotic Democrats and consolidate the great, prestigious Revolutionary United front already in existence. Whoever contributes to the consolidation of this Revolutionary United front is doing right, and we welcome him; whoever harms this consolidation is doing wrong, and we oppose him. To consolidate the Revolutionary United front, we must use the method of criticism and self-criticism…This is an excellent method, which impels every one of us to uphold truth and rectify error, and it is the only correct method for all revolutionary people to educate and remold themselves in a people’s state.” (p. 39-40)

Of course, the economic and political situation now is different from what it was at the time of these writings. However, the experience of this person in leading the struggle of working people against right wing oppression and terrorism may have some relevance in the current situation. It is always a challenge to find a way to apply learnings from the past to the present. However difficult it may be, the struggle may help advance the cause of working people.

OPINION

By James Thompson

It is nice to have a candidate for president of the United States who has been so effective in proving Karl Marx correct. Marx proved through scientific analyses of capitalism that in order for a capitalistic enterprise to continue to exist, it must constantly increase profits. Such enterprises will do just about anything to continue to increase profits. This means that labor costs must be reduced continually by any means necessary.

Recently some segments of the news have reported that Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital announced they plan to close their Sensata Technologies plant in Freeport, Illinois and relocated it to China. This is being done in spite of the fact that the plant was bringing in a notable profit for the owners. Although the business was profitable, the owners came to the conclusion that they could increase their profits by moving the plant and laying off the loyal workers at the plant.

Although this incident does not justify voting for Mr. Romney, it is a clear example of how right Marx was in his studies of the workings of capitalism.

There are many reasons to vote against Mr. Romney. The above cited incident is one of the best. However, there are many more to include:

His selection of Mr. Ryan as a running mate. Mr. Ryan represents one of the most reactionary candidates for public office ever thrown at the American public.

Mr. Romney’s position on a variety of social issues to include women’s rights, immigrant rights, and civil rights in general. During last week’s regrettable debates, Mr. Romney kept pounding away for states’ rights just as you might expect from a reactionary Dixiecrat.

Mr. Romney’s failure to address this nation’s meaningless, wasteful and destructive multiple wars around the globe. In fact, it appears that Mr. Romney favors military expansion at the expense of working people.

Mr. Romney’s failure to address the issue of climate change. He berated Mr. Obama for creating “green jobs”as if this was some crime against humanity.

Mr. Romney’s 47% remarks.

Mr. Romney’s lies about his policies and positions. It is clear to most people that he intends to cut taxes for the wealthy while simultaneously cutting benefits for workers.

There are many more reasons to vote against Mr. Romney and working people should make an effort to educate themselves fully about all candidates running for public office. The electoral struggle is an important arena for struggle for progress for working people. Unfortunately, in this country, the electoral struggle is about what form of capitalism can be tolerated by working people. Nevertheless, important concessions from the capitalists have been won through the years for working people. This process has been beneficial in the short run but not useful in the long struggle for socialism and democracy.

As working people watch the debates and begin to vote, they should keep in mind what is truly in their best interest and vote for that. Working people should never lose sight of their own interests and vote for a candidate who fights for wealthy people’s interests with the hope that such a candidate will fight for them. Working people know that hope may make a person feel good, but you can’t eat hope and you can’t pay your bills with it.

Working people need a party and candidates for public office that truly fight for workers’ interests. Indeed, workers need a party which will help workers attain political power. It is clear that Mr. Romney is not a worker’s candidate and the GOP is not a worker’s party. It is up to progressives to educate themselves about the alternatives to Mr. Romney and his GOP and make their best decision to vote in their interests in the upcoming elections which are crucial to the future of this nation and the world.

OPINION

By Arthur Shaw

Everybody knows Capriles will lose.

So, the talk has to deal with lies about Capriles false “win” that’s being prepared.

Capriles intends to use a exit poll that will be released about 3:00 PM (Caracas time) — that is, three hours before the polls close — showing deceitfully that Capriles won by 10 points.

The editors of the bourgeois media — especially in the USA — will order their “journalists” to write that the 3:00 PM exit poll is infallible and, therefore, incapable of error. Naturally, the docile and worthless journalists of the bourgeois media will obey their editors and then explain privately that if journalists didn’t obey editors, journalists would lose their jobs. Cowards!

It’s unclear which firm will claim credit for conducting the rigged exit poll. One side of the Capriles campaign wants to give the contract to tell lies about the exit poll to a Mark Penn firm, because a Penn firm — namely, Penn, Schoen, Berland — lied for the opposition in a similar situation in the 2004 presidential recall referendum.

An opposite side of the Capriles campaign wants to give the contract to lie about the exit poll to a Venezuelan firm called Consultores 20 which has been lying for Capriles during the whole general election.

Consultores 20 was paid peanuts for its critical services from the beginning of the campaign and now some people in the Capriles campaign want to cut Consultores 20 out of its big payday.

The Capriles campaign can postpone making a choice only until late Sunday morning.

It’s peculiar that Communists, Social Democrats, Maoists, Trotskyists, and anarchists (excluding Norm Chomsky’s anarchist sect) in the USA have assiduously avoided coverage of the class struggle in Venezuela during the last year. In a couple of days, these same tendencies on the US “Left” will pose as experts — supporting of course the imperialist line with their usual two-faced “balanced” approach.

5/10/2012

Yesterday, the 4th of October, in every corner of the country the party organizations of the KKE spread the message for the labour and people’s barrier to the storm of anti-people measures and the call for the people to support the bill proposed by the KKE, which demands the abolition of the memoranda and the loan agreements, together with the laws which accompany them. The communist men and women, supporters and friends of the KKE and KNE, thousands of workers and toiling people, with visits in the morning to workplaces, factories, companies, services and with demonstrations in the evening in 32 districts of Attica and 60 cities in Greece, stirred up the neighbourhoods, calling on the people to take matters into their own hands and demonstrate their strength. With organization everywhere and alliance with the KKE, to fight against the barbaric measures, laying solid foundations in the struggle for disengagement from the EU with people’s power and unilateral cancellation of the debt.

The GS of the CC of the KKE, Aleka Papariga, participated in the rally organized by the KKE in Keratsini ( a working class district of Piraeus), from where she made the following statement: “The workers hold enormous strength in their hands and can in this phase hinder and block the new savage measures. If these measures are passed, the price will be very high. We must block them at all costs and in every way possible.”

In response to a journalist’s question regarding “Lagarde’s List”, related to Greeks who had transferred large sums of money in recent years before the crisis to foreign banks, and the discussion that has followed from this, Aleka Papariga noted : “The lists demonstrate the following: There are tax evaders, there are also the hypocrites and all those who want to foster the view amongst the people that the crisis was caused only by theft. Theft exists. The legal theft of the toil of the workers is what caused the crisis.”

e-mail:cpg@int.kke.gr

Via: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90777/7967273.html

(Xinhua)

12:52, October 03, 2012

HOUSTON, Oct. 2 (Xinhua) — Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney holds a safe lead in the U.S. state of Texas, with a support rate of 58 percent against President Barack Obama’s 39 percent, a new poll released Tuesday shows.

The non-partisan Texas Lyceum Poll finds that among likely voters, 58 percent would vote for Romney and Paul Ryan. Thirty- nine percent would vote for Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.

Republican Ted Cruz also leads Democrat Paul Sadler by 24 points on the U.S. Senate ballot, according to the poll which was conducted September 10-26.

When asked about the direction the country is headed, 42 percent of the surveyed believe that the country is moving in the right direction, while 51 percent believe that they are off on the wrong track.

Looking at personal economic evaluations, equal proportions of the surveyed said they were better and worse off than they were a year ago, both at 24 percent, while 50 percent said that they were doing about the same.

By Zoltan Zigedy

Via http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/

Toronto, Canada in late September was the setting for a Peoples’ Tribunal established to secure justice for the five Cuban patriots victimized by the US criminal justice system. Appropriately dubbed “Breaking the Silence,” the tribunal sought to bring attention to a gross injustice largely ignored or distorted by the North American media.

Held over the September 21-23 weekend, the tribunal drew several hundred participants to a review of the bogus case brought against five Cuban agents planted in the midst of the virulently anti-Communist, Miami-based Cuban defector community. As instruments of Cuban State Security, the Cuban Five were charged with ferreting out violent plots concocted to overthrow the Cuban government and harm the Cuban people and their friends. Necessarily operating clandestinely, they were essential counterweights to the US government’s long established and deep engagement with organized criminal elements freely operating out of South Florida with CIA support.

To not employ all available means, including infiltration, would have been tantamount to abandoning the Cuban revolution. No honest person could but see the intervention of the five Cubans in the Miami cesspool of reaction and crime as anything other than an act of national defense and internationalist vigilance.

The Peoples’ Tribunal drove these points home. Speakers developed a detailed case supporting the existence of a dangerous nest of violent, reactionary ex-Cubans organizing in the Miami area with the knowledge and support of US security agencies. Reports to the tribunal established a long history of subversion and assassination on the part of Miami-based paramilitary organizations with the complicity of US officials. Testimony left little doubt of both the reasonableness and urgency of infiltrating these organizations. Nothing underscored the unchecked violence of the Miami murderers more movingly than the testimony of Livio Di Celmo, the brother of Italian tourist, Giustino Di Celmo, who was killed in a brutal bombing of a Havana hotel. The attack was orchestrated by the US government agent and career assassin, Luis Posades Carriles. Carriles bragged openly to the media that “The Italian was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Further, tribunal witnesses exposed the hand of the US government in railroading these patriots with exaggerated charges, a polluted political atmosphere, extra-judicial pressure, and corrupted evidence. A clear picture emerged that nothing even approaching a fair trial landed the Five in Federal penal facilities, an unjust incarceration that has taken 13 years of freedom from them.

Speaker after speaker stressed the necessity of building an international campaign for their freedom. As Elizabeth Labañino, wife of imprisoned Ramón Labañino, stated so eloquently, “We don’t trust in this system, we trust in solidarity.”

Serving on a panel of “magistrates of conscience”– de facto jurors– in the proceedings were fourteen distinguished figures including leading US anti-war activist, Cindy Sheehan, and noted US filmmaker, Saul Landau. Adding gravity to the panel were leaders of the Canadian labor movement: Marie Clarke Walker (Vice-President of the Canadian Labor Congress), Denis Lemelin (National President of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers), Ken Neumann (National Director for Canada of the United Steelworkers), and Naveen Mehta (General Council of United Food and Commercial Workers Canada). Joining the panel from the UK was Tom Woodley (Former Joint General Secretary and current Head of Organizing of the 1.5 million members of UNITE the UNION).

The panel asserted that “…this Peoples’ Tribunal concludes that the Cuban Five were unjustly detained, unjustly prosecuted, and unjustly sentenced, all contrary to international and U.S. domestic law including the U.S. Constitution. This Peoples’ Tribunal proposes the convictions be quashed, and that Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González Llort and René González be set free immediately, without any restrictions on their liberty.”

But the tribunal served as more than an urgent call for solidarity with the Cuban Five; it also exposed the corruption, hypocrisy and cynicism of the US government.

Judicial Corruption: The collusion of the highest levels of government with the judicial frame-up demonstrated what should be in no need of demonstration, namely, that the US judicial system answers to the needs of the rich and powerful. There are no broad interests of the US people served by maintaining a nest of violent anti-Communist thugs in Southern Florida. Nor do the US people support them anymore than they support an internationally abhorred, legally unsanctioned blockade of Cuba. Judicial rulings are fitted to conform to the interests of the US ruling class, just as they were in the Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission Supreme Court decision.

The Hypocrisy of “Terrorism”: The term “terrorism” has been appropriated by colonial and imperial powers to demonize the resistance of subjugated or weaker peoples. Whenever the oppressed rise up, they are labeled “terrorists.” Whether it was the anti-colonial Mau Mau movement, the Algerian National Liberation Front, or the African National Congress in South Africa, those audacious enough to defy British or French imperialism or colonial settlers were tagged as agents of terror. Perhaps the original “terrorists” were the aboriginal peoples of the New World who refused to acquiesce to those stealing their lands.

It is deemed “unsporting” of the weak to use extreme or unorthodox methods in the face of the powerful, overwhelming killing machines of bullies. Hence, they are guilty of terror!

It is another story when powerful states or their agents slaughter defenseless civilians or political adversaries. The North American and European media never saw terrorism when the Indonesian military killed over a million civilian Communists and their supporters. Nor do they see terrorism in the daily violence against Palestinian civilians by the Israeli Defense Force. And, of course, the capitalist media is incapable of finding terrorism in the acts of the Miami mafia and their bombings, assassinations, and intimidation at the behest of US security agencies. It was left to the Cuban Five to expose these dangers and work to prevent their realization. Every day the fear-mongering of a hypocritical “War on Terror” justifies another act of terror inflicted on innocent civilians in some far-away country by the US military.