Dear comrades,

We denounce anti-communism, we struggle against the anti-communist positions of the EU and the anti-historical equation of the socialism’s contribution with the monstrosity of fascism at the International Meetings of Communist and Workers’ Parties, as well as at the other meetings of the CPs.

We highlight the irreplaceable contribution of the Soviet Union to the struggle of the peoples and we refer to the 20 million dead which it gave to defeat Nazism.

We expose the dangerous rationale of the “two extremes” and the relevant framework of the EU, as well as of the bourgeois governments, a framework that has led to the persecution and banning of Communist Parties.

We all understand that the struggle against anti-communism and against the distortion of the historical contribution of socialism is a very serious task and that the anti-communist stance must be decisively denounced.

Consequently, we want to inform you that recently the MEP Helmut Scholz, a cadre of the German Left party “Die Linke”, a member of the presidium of the European Left Party (ELP), organized in the European Parliament on the 12th and 13th of November a meeting with the title: “I traveled to your country as a guest – German opponents of Hitler as victims of Stalinist terror: Family histories 1933-1956”.

As the EU Parliamentary Group of the KKE denounced: “This is a wretched attempt to present German anti-Nazis as victims of the Soviet workers’ state, an even more sordid version of the official political line of the EU that equates fascism-Nazism with communism and promotes the “theory of the two extremes”. It is an insult to the thousands of German communists and other anti-fascists who resisted, paying the price with their own lives, against the Hitlerite barbarity. A blatant insult to the millions of Soviet people, communists and militants of the USSR and in all the countries of Europe, who gave their lives to crush the fascist atrocity. A vulgar slander at the expense of the first workers’ state in the history of humanity, at the expense of the unprecedented gains achieved by the workers under Socialism.”

We assess that this issue is very serious and exposes the dangerous role of opportunism as a vehicle for the promotion of the bourgeois ideology and political line, as a force that defends and disseminates the anti-communist positions of the European Union.

The communist men and women are obliged to provide a decisive response.

15.11.2013

International Relations Section of the CC of the KKE

“…The True Revolutionary Is Guided By Great Feelings Of Love”:
Last night the millions of the people of South Africa, majority of whom the working class and poor, and the billions of the rest of the people the world over, lost a true revolutionary, President Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, Tata Madiba.

The South African Communist Party (SACP) joins the people of South Africa and the world in expressing its most sincere condolences to Ms Graca Machel and the entire Mandela family on the loss of what President Zuma correctly described as South Africa’s greatest son, Comrade Mandela. We also wish to use this opportunity to express our solidarity with the African National Congress, an organisation that produced him and that he also served with distinction, as well as all his colleagues and comrades in our broader liberation movement. As Tata Madiba said: “It is not the kings and generals that make history but the masses of the people, the workers, the peasants…”

The passing away of Cde Mandela marks an end to the life of one of the greatest revolutionaries of the 20th century, who fought for freedom and against all forms of oppression in both their countries and globally. As part of the masses that make history, Cde Mandela’s contribution in the struggle for freedom was located and steeled in the collective membership and leadership of our revolutionary national liberation movement as led by the ANC – for he was not an island. In Cde Mandela we had a brave and courageous soldier, patriot and internationalist who, to borrow from Che Guevara, was a true revolutionary guided by great feelings of love for his people, an outstanding feature of all genuine people’s revolutionaries.

At his arrest in August 1962, Nelson Mandela was not only a member of the then underground South African Communist Party, but was also a member of our Party’s Central Committee. To us as South African communists, Cde Mandela shall forever symbolise the monumental contribution of the SACP in our liberation struggle. The contribution of communists in the struggle to achieve the South African freedom has very few parallels in the history of our country. After his release from prison in 1990, Cde Madiba became a great and close friend of the communists till his last days.

The one major lesson we need to learn from Mandela and his generation of leaders was their commitment to principled unity within each of our Alliance formations as well as the unity of our Alliance as a whole and that of the entire mass democratic movement. Their generation struggled to build and cement the unity of our Alliance, and we therefore owe it to the memory of Cde Madiba to preserve the unity of our Alliance. Let those who do not understand the extent to which blood was spilt in pursuance of Alliance unity be reminded not to throw mud at the legacy and memory of the likes of Madiba by being reckless and gambling with the unity of our Alliance.

The SACP supported Madiba’s championing of national reconciliation. But national reconciliation for him never meant avoiding tackling the class and other social inequalities in our society, as some would like to make us believe today. For Madiba, national reconciliation was a platform to pursue the objective of building a more egalitarian South African society free of the scourge of racism, patriarchy and gross inequalities. And true national reconciliation shall never be achieved in a society still characterized by the yawning gap of inequalities and capitalist exploitation.

In honour of this gallant fighter the SACP will intensify the struggle against all forms of inequality, including intensifying the struggle for socialism, as the only political and economic solution to the problems facing humanity.

For the SACP the passing away of Madiba must give all those South Africans who had not fully embraced a democratic South Africa, and who still in one way or the other hanker to the era of white domination, a second chance to come to terms with a democratic South Africa founded on the principle of majority rule.

We call upon all South Africans to emulate his example of selflessness, sacrifice, commitment and service to his people.

The SACP says Hamba kahle Mkhonto!

Issued by SACP

Contact:

Alex Mashilo – National Spokesperson
Mobile: 082 9200 308
Office: 011 339 3621
Email: alexmashilo.sacp@gmail.com

By Rose Ann DeMoro

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/27/obamacare-flaws-medicare-for-all

The Guardian (UK)
November 27, 2013

There’s no reason to rollback the progress the ACA has made. But we should
go all the way and dump the for-profit system.

Lost amidst the well-chronicled travails of the Affordable Care Act
rollout are the long term effects of people struggling to get the health
coverage they need without going bankrupt.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s been the main story line of
the US healthcare system for several decades. Sadly, little has changed.

Still, with all the ACA’s highly publicized snafus, and less discussed
systemic flaws, there’s no reason to welcome the cynical efforts to repeal
or defund the law by politicians whose only alternative is more of the
same callous, existing market-based healthcare system.

US nurses oppose the rollback and appreciate that several million
Americans who are now uninsured may finally get coverage, principally
through the expansion of Medicaid, or access to private insurance they’ve
been denied because of their prior health status.

At the same time, nurses will never stop campaigning for a fundamental
transformation to a more humane single-payer, expanded Medicare for all
system not based on ability to pay and obeisance to the policy confines of
insurance claims adjustors.

Website delays – the most unwelcome news for computer acolytes since the
tech boom crashed – are not the biggest problem with the ACA, as will
become increasingly apparent long after the signup headaches are a distant
memory.

What prompted the ACA was a rapidly escalating healthcare nightmare, seen
in 50 million uninsured, medical bills plunging millions into un-payable
debt or bankruptcy, long delays in access to care, and record numbers
skipping needed treatment due to cost.

The main culprit was our profit-focused system, with rising profiteering
by a massive health care industry, and an increasing number of employers
dropping coverage or just dumping more costs onto workers.

The ACA tackles some of the most egregious inequities: lack of access for
many of the working poor who will now be eligible for Medicaid or
subsidies to offset some of their costs for buying private insurance
through the exchanges, a crackdown on several especially notorious
insurance abuses, and encouragement of preventive care.

But the law actually further entrenches the insurance-based system through
the requirement that uncovered individuals buy private insurance. It’s
also chock full of loopholes.

Some consumers who have made it through the website labyrinth have found
confusing choices among plans which vary widely in both premium and out of
pocket costs even with the subsidies, a pass through of public funds to
the private insurers.

The minimum benefits are also somewhat illusory. Insurance companies have
decades of experience at gaming the system and warehouses full of experts
to design ways to limit coverage options.

The ACA allows insurers to cherry pick healthier enrollees by the way
benefit packages are designed, and as a Washington Post article noted on
21 November, consumers are discovering insurers are restricting their
choice of doctors and excluding many top ranked hospitals from their
approved “network”.

The wide disparity between the healthcare you need, what your policy will
cover, and what the insurer will actually pay for remains.

Far less reported is what registered nurses increasingly see – financial
incentives within the ACA for hospitals to prematurely push patients out
of hospitals to cheaper, less regulated settings or back to their homes.
It also encourages shifting more care delivery from nurses and doctors to
robots and other technology that undermines individual patient care, and
that may work no better than the dysfunctional ACA websites.

Is there an alternative? Most other developed nations have discovered it,
a single-payer or national healthcare system.

Without the imperative of prioritizing profits over care, Medicare for all
streamlines the administrative waste and complex insurance billing
operations endemic to private insurance. That waste is a major reason why
the US has more than double the per capita cost of healthcare of other
developed nations, yet lower life expectancies than many.

Medicare for all eliminates the multi-tiered health plans that plague both
the individual and group insurance markets that are tied to the girth of
your wallet not your need for care. Class, gender, and racial disparities
in access and quality of care vanish under Medicare for all.

It’s beyond time that we stop vilifying government and perpetuating a
corporatized healthcare system that has abandoned so many. We can, with a
system of Medicare for all, we can cut healthcare costs and promote a much
more humane society.

Medicare for All/Single Payer Comparison Chart is beneath the article at
this link:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/27/obamacare-flaws-medicare-for-all

RoseAnn DeMoro is executive director of National Nurses United and member
of the AFL-CIO Executive Council.

_____________________________________________________________

News on HR 676

On Nov. 19, 2013, Congresswoman Betty McCollum of Minnesota signed on to
HR 676, Expanded and Improved Medicare for All, bringing the total of
cosponsors in the House to 53. Congressman John Conyers, Jr. of Michigan
introduced HR 676 into Congress in 2003, and reintroduced it in every
Congress since then. McCollum has been in Congress since 2001, but this
is the first time that she has become a cosponsor of HR 676.

Three other Congresspersons have signed on to HR 676 since September.
They are Chaka Fattah (PA 2), Alan Lowenthal (CA 47) and Linda Sanchez (CA
38).

HR 676 would institute a single payer health care system by expanding a
greatly improved Medicare to everyone residing in the U. S.

HR 676 would cover every person for all necessary medical care including
prescription drugs, hospital, surgical, outpatient services, primary and
preventive care, emergency services, dental (including oral surgery,
periodontics, endodontics), mental health, home health, physical therapy,
rehabilitation (including for substance abuse), vision care and
correction, hearing services including hearing aids, chiropractic, durable
medical equipment, palliative care, podiatric care, and long term care.

HR 676 ends deductibles and co-payments. HR 676 would save hundreds of
billions annually by eliminating the high overhead and profits of the
private health insurance industry and HMOs.

In the current Congress, HR 676 has 53 co-sponsors.

HR 676 has been endorsed by 609 union organizations including 146 Central
Labor Councils/Area Labor Federations and 44 state AFL-CIO’s (KY, PA, CT,
OH, DE, ND, WA, SC, WY, VT, FL, WI, WV, SD, NC, MO, MN, ME, AR, MD-DC, TX,
IA, AZ, TN, OR, GA, OK, KS, CO, IN, AL, CA, AK, MI, MT, NE, NJ, NY, NV,
MA, RI, NH, ID & NM).

For further information, a list of union endorsers, or a sample
endorsement resolution, contact:

Kay Tillow
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

12/02/13

Ted Cruz Does Not
Represent Us!

Join the Protest Against
the Tea Party Republican Senator!

• He led the shutdown of the federal government in order to prevent
the expansion of health care.
• He rejects a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented
immigrants.
• He opposes women’s health care and reproductive freedom.
• He opposes LGBT anti-discrimination laws and marriage equality.
• He has made racially charged statements about President Obama,
segregationist Jesse Helms, and other people.
• He denies human-caused climate change and opposes new
environmental protections.
• He supports unbridled capitalism and more wealth for the 1% while
opposing unions, workers’ rights, Social Security, and food stamps.

Saturday, December 7, 2 pm
3333 Allen Parkway, Houston

Organized by the Progressive Workers Organizing Committee and
the Latin American Organization for Immigrant Rights. For more information,
call (832) 692-2306, (281) 935-9248, or (832) 282-6997.

¡Unase a la protesta contra el Senador Republicano!

• El causo el cierre del Gobierno Federal para impedir la implementacion del
programa de salud del president Obama.
• El se niega a la legalizacion de los 11 millones de inmigrantes indocumentados.
• El se opone al acceso de cuidados de salud para las mujeres y a su derecho de
reproduccion (embarazo).
• El se opone a las leyes contra la discriminacion de los homosexuales y Lesbianas
y a la igualdad en el matrimonio.
• El a hecho comentarios raciales en contra del Presidente Obama, Senador Jesse
Helms y otras personas.
• El niega que los cambios de clima sean causados por los Humanos y se opone a
nuevas leyes para proteger el medio ambiente.
• Apoya un capitalismo sin control y mas riqueza para el 1% mientras que se opone
al derecho de los trabajadores a organizarse, al seguro social, y a las estampillas
de comida.

Sabado 7 de diciembre a las 2 pm
3333 Allen Parkway en Houston

Organizado por el comite de trabajadores progresivos y
la organizacion Latino Americana Pro derecho de Inmigrante.
Para mas informacion llame al 832-282-6997 o al 281-935-9248 o al 832-692-2306.

By Patrick Snipes

John Stanford

A speech delivered on November 29, 2013 at a rally of WalMart workers in Durham, North Carolina also reported at:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/02/my-years-at-wal-mart/

WalMart: The rising tide that drowns the workers while the owners sail their yachts

Hi, I’m Patrick. I’m a former Wal-Mart deli sales associate from store #2137, where I worked for about two and a half years. Firstly, I would like to give thanks to my mother, who is currently a Wal-Mart associate, and to all other Wal-Mart associates who’re working today and were kept from their families yesterday. When I was asked to speak here today, I was a bit taken aback; I haven’t done any public speaking since high school and wasn’t entirely sure what I should talk about. So, let’s start with a simple fact, nothing more, nothing less. The six Wal-Mart heirs (Christy Walton, Jim Walton, Alice Walton, S. Robson Walton, Nancy Walton Laurie and Ann Walton Kroenke) hold more wealth than the bottom 42% of Americans put together. Now, let’s do some math! The population of the United States is about 314 million. 42 % of that is 131.88 million people. Divide by 6 and you get 21.98 million. What this means is that for every dollar the average person in the lower 42% of the country has, these 6 people have, on average, 21.98 million dollars. As easily as you or I can buy a Kit-Kat, they can buy a custom-made 145 foot yacht and still have 2 million leftover. Please keep this fact in mind as I continue.

And… now I’m unsure again as to what I should talk about. After 2 years and 7 months there are a great many things. I could talk about how my family didn’t have Thanksgiving yesterday because my mother was at work. I could talk about schedules which left me running the deli single-handed from 4 PM to 11, essentially asking me to do 30 man-hours worth of work in 8 as though I were blessed with 7 arms. I could talk about how similar schedules were in no way uncommon, once 4 times in a single week, and how, when I approached management (even going so far as to show them the schedule for a few days out and asking that they fix it), my complaints fell upon deaf ears; the schedules remained unchanged. How the flip-side of this under-staffing was hours-cuts which left me earning the equivalent of 9,000 $/year, for months on end, and forced me to choose between paying my bills on time or having food. How I saw my co-workers, who rode the bus to get to and from work everyday, who have children whom they love and want to spend time with, get off work at 11 o’clock at night just to come back the very next day at 7 in the morning. And how, despite all that, they still had to be on food stamps to feed their kids because we were paid so little. About how one of our cart-pushers came down with a severe case of the flu and, for forgetting to call-out during ONE of the days he spent in the hospital, got fired. How one of my co-worker from the deli was fired on her very last day at Wal-Mart, after they had no more use for her, for having forgotten one day to pay for a meal plate worth 3 dollars and 50 cents three months prior; she’d signed a new lease earlier that day, but termination for theft caused her to lose her new job and forced her to move back in with her family in Florida. Later that night I was required to throw away hundreds of dollars worth of food. About how, at my mothers store, an Assistant Manager, offended that one of his underlings, and a woman no less, had the gall to speak back to him, conspired to get rid of a zone-manager, a diabetic, while she was out on medical leave for her second heart-attack; she was demoted to part-time cashier and lost her medical coverage. He was promoted to co-manager.

But… any single one of these things, perhaps even all of them since they’re drawn from merely 2 stores, might, by the limitation of their scope, play into the very narrative Wal-Mart wants its workers to believe. “These are isolated cases of improper management”, they might say, “which can be dealt with by the open door policy.” The same open door policy which was put forward to us on the very first day of orientation as the reason we do not need a union. Also, not one of those things really captures how impersonal an experience it is to work at Wal-Mart, a store which tracks its workers comings and goings down to the minute by their barcode. A store so impersonal that, in order to call-in sick, its workers must dial a 1-800 number, identify themselves by their eight-digit birthday, the last four digits of their social security number and their four digit store number followed by the pound key, and then press 1 to indicate they’re calling to report an absence, 1 to indicate that absence is for today, any number 1-5 for reasons ranging from personal illness to natural disaster, only to get a 10 digit confirmation number and be re-routed to their store, where they’re expected speak with a salaried member of management before getting off the line, itself a process that can take upwards of 20 minutes. And a store which, after hiring me on September 11th 2010, thought it a good idea, on September 11th 2011 and September 11th 2012, to display a message on the time clock which read “Happy Anniversary!”.

But again I can hear the corporate response already. They might say something like: “These precautions are necessary for maintaining operations on the scale of Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailerâ„¢, and in no way reflect upon Wal-Mart’s respect and consideration for its associates.” If only I had something which could fuse together the deeply personal grievances I hold against my previous employer with the cold, impersonal way it seemed to regard me. Oh wait… I do! In the back-room at my store, tossed in among a maudlin mix of motivational posters (ya know, the kind they make fun of on the internet), was this one poster which obviously came down from corporate on high. On the top it read “Wal-Mart’s Model for Success,” and below it had this little circular flow-chart surrounding an image of a cashier happily working, grinning the sort of wide, iridescent smile we’ve all come to expect of folks who work part-time for minimum wage, at a job which always charts their productivity according to scans-per-minute but provides no dental coverage. And this little flow-chart, in which this Cheshire-Cashier found herself encased, was broken down into four parts which read: “Buy for Less,” “Sell for Less,” “Grow sales” and, ultimately, “Reduce Operational Costs.” And when I saw that I said to myself: OH. NO. YOU. DID. NOT! Just call me, my mother, and my co-workers, loving mothers to their own children, OPERATIONAL COSTS to be reduced ad infinitum in the endless cycle of YOUR success. And that, right there, posted on the wall for all to see, yet masked with kindly imagery and sanitized corporate phraseology, is the logic at work behind it all. And it is that logic which can never be changed by any “open door policy” however perfectly implemented, but which CAN be changed by an association of associates standing together to say as one: We are human beings, not numbers and we will not stand idly by while you seek to subtract, from us, our livelihoods! And now I’m, briefly, going to go through these steps to demonstrate what they really are: a depraved diminution of the human soul into the mere fuel which drives a great engine of profit.

Step 1: Buy For Less

To see this step, you have to go all the way to the other side of the globe. For only distance is capable of providing a veil thick enough to obfuscate its moral reprehensibility. On November 24th 2012, the Tazreen Fashions factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which was creating goods for Wal-Mart stores, caught fire killing at least 117 people. They were locked inside. The building had no fire exits and the windows were barred. Those who escaped did so by kicking out exhaust fans and leaping onto the roof of an adjacent building. For the injuries they incurred, some of which rendered young, able-bodied people incapable of ever walking again, they have received no compensation, nor have the families of those lost in the fire. Five months later, Rana Plaza, a massive building housing 8 garment factories collapsed, killing 1,129 and injuring 2,515. And it was against practices such as these, that the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, in one of his less publicized quotations, once said: “A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, ‘This is not just.'”

Step 2: Sell For Less

I find this step somewhat curious. After all, wouldn’t a business want to sell for more? The key is how this step flows into the next, “Grow Sales.” In this, the step reveals itself as being “Sell Less than the Competition.” Wal-Mart uses its ability and willingness to leverage its foreign producers into producing goods at “everyday low prices,” without regard to the “everyday squalid conditions” of their workers, as a weapon against other domestic businesses which are unwilling or unable to do the same. Thus, it consolidates our commerce into fewer and fewer stores.

Steps 3 & 4: Grow Sales and Reduce Operational Costs

I’m going to tackle these two steps together, because they are seemingly contradictory. A growth in sales would increase the size of the operation, and would thus seem to point toward “Increase Operational Costs” as opposed to its opposite. But, though these two steps may not flow into one another as sensibly as their predecessors, together they point toward an ideal, a dream, a fantasy which seems to motivate Wal-Mart. Namely, the idea of an infinitely productive worker. If they can make one do the work of two, they will. If they can make one do the work of three, they will. Trust me, they made me do the work of three and a half! Hell, if they could get one guy to run the whole store, they’d do it in a heart-beat. And if they could pay that guy minimum wage, they’d do that too! All the while, lobbying our government to let that minimum wage atrophy. These steps, taken together, expose the impetus behind the overwork and under-pay of Wal-Mart’s domestic workers, and it calls into question whether or not this too is a country from which profits are taken with no concern for social betterment.

And I would like to wrap this up by posing a question: If the entire economy was made up of such businesses, an economy of businesses all pushing production abroad to wherever people can be maximally exploited, an economy consolidated into as few stores as possible, an economy of stores which pay workers little as they can and which operate with as few as they can, what would that look like? And how long would it take to crash? Make no mistake, Wal-Mart is not alone in this. Its model serves as a model for a great many others. Wal-Mart is but the largest wave in a rising tide, and, unless we stand together, united and with dignity, as a great levy for justice to hold and push it back, this tide threatens to drown us all. Except, of course, for those among us who can afford custom-made, 145 foot yachts. Thank you.

Occupy Houston supporters on 11/17/11

Here is a link to a lecture by Michael Parenti delivered at the Modesto Junior College, Modesto, California on 9/20/01 right after the tragedy which occurred on 9/11/01.

http://youtu.be/fxcgm-atVlc