Month: December 2018

At a press conference called by parents whose diabetic children have died due to high price of insulin, Sanofi Pharmaceuticals was denounced for its murderous greed. “Sanofi’s high prices are killing people like my son Alec Smith-Holt”. Along with parents of two other young people who died rationing insulin, Holt-Smith attempted to deliver Alec’s ashes to Sanofi officials during a protest at the research facility on November 16. The parents were joined by local diabetes patients, doctors, nurses and students.

A vial of insulin that once cost around $25 now goes for about $400 to $500. Dr. Vikas Saini, co-director of the Right Care Alliance said insulin has been around for a century and costs about $5 to manufacture. Globally, half of the people who need insulin can’t reliably get it. A class-action lawsuit led in a federal court in New Jersey accuses Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi of acting like an insulin “cartel” and raising prices “in lockstep.”

“The Trump administration, and its small maneuvers on drug pricing, ultimately aim to protect Big Pharma from public outrage and calls for greater changes to its abusive, monopolistic business model,” said Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program, in a statement on Friday.

By Gavrielle Gemma

In the latest attempt to criminalize working class folks, the Department of Labor is proposing a new rule that forces a mandatory drug test on people who lose their jobs and need unemployment insurance. They want to extend this to food stamp users.

This is a back-door attack on benefits that we pay for. For years, the right wing, ultra-rich parasites attacked welfare programs with false stories and a lot of racism. The fact that most welfare recipients were white, and a majority children, did not stop racist attacks or keep the greedy from taking from the needy. They wanted workers to turn on each other.

In several states, drug testing is already imposed on adult users of TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (welfare). Tests have shown drug use rates to be very low, around one-tenth the national average. But the dirty work has been done with the help of big business media. Politicians claim that drug tests are aimed at getting people help yet no rehab is actually offered and benefits are cut off regardless of harm to children.

The rich are also trying to cut people off social programs by requiring that recipients work to get benefits. Instead of providing decent paying public jobs, the state gets away with paying welfare recipients less than minimum wage to work in public parks, streets, hospitals, schools, offices and more. Already, more than 12,000 people in Arkansas have lost Medicaid coverage for failing to provide evidence of hours worked; 6,000 more are at risk of losing coverage in December. Many poor and rural residents lack access to the internet in order to complete the mandated web reporting. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said his administration is “actively working” on imposing work requirements for Medicaid recipients.

This is what the capitalists want: slave labor in prisons, forcing people to work just for food. Apart from causing misery to those targeted, these schemes have the effect of lowering wages for all workers. This shows how necessary it is that workers reject the capitalist lies about welfare (another form of unemployment insurance). If you believe their lies, they will come back to take away another benefit that we have paid for.

THE BIG LIE

So how does this work? Rich capitalist parasites and their flunkey politicians hire media firms to convince us overworked and underpaid workers to blame even poorer workers for our troubles. “Those people,” they say, are lazy while you’re working your fingers to the bone. They trot out whatever racist garbage their experts deem effective and maybe show a poor woman driving a Benz. These stories are all invented for the purpose of turning workers against one another and for drawing our attention away from our common enemy: the parasites whose endless piles of cash pay for these ugly fantasies.

The capitalists and war profiteers act like the budgets belong to them even though they use countless loopholes to get out of paying the taxes that we workers pay. The more they cut programs, the more of the budget they feel they’re entitled to. Amazon, headed by the richest man on earth, is getting billions in subsidies and tax cuts and we’re supposed to blame poor people for our unmet needs? Really?

Our lives, just like the lives destroyed by their drone bombs overseas, do not matter to the rich. They don’t consider our lives, our families, our children to be important. They consider themselves royalty entitled to “their” wealth, endowed with the right to own everything and to exploit our labor at whatever cost to us. They think that we’re stealing from them when we demand a raise, a vacation, or a benefit that we paid for!

We need to build a workers’ movement that stands by the motto “An Injury to One Is An Injury to All.” Workers are angry at how difficult our lives are, but we need to turn this anger in the right direction. Just start by asking yourself: How do you know that politicians and the rich are lying? Their lips are moving.

Roads, infrastructure crumbling but these profit-makers won’t pay a dime.

If you were born in New Orleans, chances are it was at Charity Hospital. Now this historic site is being turned over to developers to turn it into luxury housing, a technology and medical center and expansion of Tulane University. All tax exempt.

Charity Hospital is being given away by the state of Louisiana, LSU and New Orleans city officials. They undemocratically chose 1532 Tulane Partners, a partnership of two developers, CCNO and El-Ad Holdings, an Israeli based company that has been destroying Palestinian homes for illegal Israeli settlements. These developers will get huge tax exemptions. 1532 Tulane Partners will get $80 million in tax credits, $25 million in tax-exempt bonds, a $95 million loan and $30 million in equity to finance its plan.

This would have been the perfect site to create affordable housing and a child care center for hospitality workers who have been forced out by high rents. Instead, hundreds of mostly white technocrats will move here to take advantage of the food, music and good jobs. The contract for the project includes no guarantees for local hiring or training of New Orleanians. We are treated as their servants. They feel entitled to luxury at our expense.

Charity Hospital belongs to the people of New Orleans. But this deal was struck behind closed doors, denying the people of New Orleans any say in the decision. There should have been public hearings and tax paying residents should have had a vote on these decisions.

This rip-off follows proposals to give profit making enterprises exemptions at the Convention Center, DCX Technology, the World Trade Center development on top of the hundreds of other exemptions handed out by the rich to their friends. Of course, the politicians who receive campaign contributions (bribes) from these companies are celebrating with them.

With developers running the city and controlling the politicians, nothing will get better until the working class organizes to flex our powerful muscles and make demands that benefit us.

Less than two months ago, teachers and other school employees in East Baton Rouge demonstrated that when they organize themselves and their community, they can use their collective power to hold thieving corporations to account.

Members of two teachers unions, the Louisiana Association of Educators and the East Baton Rouge Federation of Teaches, as well as members of a Service Employees local and the East Baton Rouge Bus Operators Association came together under the auspices of a local faith, labor, and community coalition called Together Baton Rouge to study, discuss, and strategize around the issue of corporate theft of tax dollars.

Louisiana, pays out in one year as much as $200 million more in tax credits and rebates that it collects in corporate taxes. In 2016, the state granted ExxonMobil over $70 million in property tax exemptions alone.

Meanwhile, teachers haven’t received an across-the-board raise since 2008 and lack for basic classroom resources. “People don’t have have what they need to have to do their jobs,” said Gretchen Lampe of the Louisiana Association of Educators.

As a routine measure, ExxonMobil expected to submit a request for a $6.5 million property exemption at the Oct. 31 meeting of the Board of Commerce and Industry. Teachers and school staff decided to act. On October 23 they almost unanimously (445-6) voted to stage a one-day walkout the following week. Teachers planned to pack the hearing to protest ExxonMobil’s requests.

Within hours of the union vote, the company had withdrawn its bids for exemptions and the walkout was postponed “permanently, if the exemption requests do not return; temporarily, if they are placed on a subsequent agenda,” according the members of Support Our Educators Coalition. “If these after-the-fact exemption requests do return, so will our fierce opposition to their approval, along with our commitment to assure that public school funds are used for the purpose for which they were intended… for the education of the children of our community.”

On October 29, hundreds of call center workers in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, held a rally protesting low wages. Most of these workers are Black women. They were calling for fair pay and for a union. The workers are employed by General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), a federal contractor. These workers handle calls by people from across the country with complex questions concerning the Affordable Care Act’s Marketplace and Medicare. The job requires a level of expertise relating to healthcare. The recent raise to 10.35 an hour given to the workers by GDIT is not even a living wage; according to the Living Wage Calculator project at MIT, a living wage for U.S. workers in 2015 would be $15.12 per hour.

Call center workers had already filed a complaint with the Department of Labor, claiming that GDIT had misclassified them in order to pay them at a lower rate than their job duties required. However, forming a union would give these workers not only greater bargaining power, but open up the possibility of receiving federal funds to supplement a wage increase, with no cost to GDIT. Nevertheless, GDIT has resisted unionization, launching an anti-union campaign. In a federal lawsuit filed in September, it has also been alleged that GDIT has engaged in racial discrimination and wage theft.

For the rally itself, dozens of workers gathered outside the GDIT center in Hattiesburg. Employee, Regenia Keys, told the Hattiesburg American, “When I get paid this Friday, I’ve got a car note that’s due,” she said. “I’ve got to pay my rent. My check is gone. My paycheck is not even enough to cover my bills. I’m having my kids come to help with odds and ends and whatever.”

Don Freeman of Hattiesburg has worked at GDIT for three years. He said, “A great number of us are in favor of joining a union, but I understand that a lot of them are scared,” he said. “Unions are not looked at favorably in these parts.”

Don Freeman, Regenia Keys, and other organizing GDIT workers understand that, although unions have been demonized by the media mouthpieces of the ultra-rich ruling class (all over the country, and not just in states like Mississippi), forming a union is their best bet for improving their conditions. Workers are the majority and bosses are the minority. Banding together and fighting gives workers the ability to take on the bosses who want to horde all wealth and resources for themselves. The GDIT workers in Hattiesburg are part of a wider trend of workers organizing in this country, including in the South.

On November 24, Take Em Down NOLA marched from Congo Square to Jackson Square to demand that any statue or monument that honors mass murderer and slaver Andrew Jackson be removed from public land. Jackson led attempted wars of extermination against the Native peoples. In 1830 he enacted the “Indian Removal Act” to seize the homelands of Native Americans for the sole benefit of his fellow white slaveholders.

With righteous outrage and determination, indigenous members of the community marched alongside Black leaders, and lent their voices in the chant “We won’t get no satisfaction until we take down Andrew Jackson!”