Click here to download the January 2021 issue of Workers Voice.
A Worker Goes to the State Capitol
by Caleb Wassell
On December 18th, I visited the Louisiana state capitol building in Baton Rouge for the first time. The visit was equal parts nauseating and unsettling.
There are about a million steps that lead up to the face of a jutting tower. Carved into the stone walls of the Capitol building are tributes to Louisiana’s most depraved genocidal maniacs and defenders of white supremacy: DeSoto, Claiborne, Bienville, Iberville, Jackson, and E D White. Inside it’s all marble and shiny wood with gold handrails and giant chandeliers. In these gold encrusted chambers, politicians have been quietly defunding the people for decades.
Incarcerated people are the only ones doing any real work in the building. “CORRECTIONS” is boldly marked across the shoulders of the workers’ gray jumpsuits. They’re forced to serve food and clean up after politicians and corporate lobbyists who meet over lunch to scheme against the people of Louisiana.
I learned that you are safer from COVID exposure in your average Walmart than on the floor of the state capitol, as there is no mask mandate. A Black lawmaker wearing a mask and face shield told us as much after the session adjourned. She lost her husband to the disease this year. Another representative that was with her told us that her district suffers “repercussions” when she raises objections or asks too many questions.
The language of the day’s proceedings is boring and legalistic. It’s hard to track what’s really going on through all the jargon. This is by design. I watched millions of dollars of our money get moved around in minutes. Incredibly, public comment was not allowed until the end of session, after the agenda items were already voted on. Online there was an email address to submit comments for those who can’t make the meeting in person. These comments were never read or mentioned. At the seat of our state’s “democratic” government, the people’s voice can barely be heard.
Louisiana Movement for Workers Councils Tells Louisiana Legislature: Bail Out the People!
On December 18 members of the Louisiana Movement for Workers Councils (LMWC) held a press conference at the Louisiana state Capitol to demand that state legislators use the tens of millions of unspent federal relief dollars to bail out workers suffering hardship because of the COVID pandemic.
The state of Louisiana received $1.8 billion in federal relief (CARES Act) funds to supposedly cope with the fallout from the pandemic. Around $525 million of those funds were used to reimburse local governments for “pandemic related expenses.” Yet many of the poorest parishes were excluded from relief because they couldn’t afford the expenses in the first place.
Tens of millions of dollars were used to pay off sheriff’s departments instead of going to food, housing assistance, health services, or economic relief.
Of the $50 million dollars set aside for (pitifully low) $250 payments to essential workers, $11 million never made it into the hands of workers.
$362 million in CARES Act funds are simply unaccounted for.
LMWC demands that these funds go directly to low income households who are bearing the brunt of the crisis. 200,000 Louisianans are jobless. At least 1 in 6 Louisiana households is struggling to put food on the table. Around 30,000 households are on the verge of eviction in Orleans Parish alone.
We refuse to go hungry and die as our tax dollars are used to bail out big corporations or buy arms for the police. We need jobs, income, housing, and healthcare. The LMWC is prepared to fight to get what we deserve. Join us!
Pandemic Relief Showered on Anti-LGBTQ Orgs
by Sally Jane Black
The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) gave $4.3 million to anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion organizations, including American College of Pediatricians, American Family Association, Center for Family and Human Rights, Church Militant/St. Michael’s Media, Liberty Counsel, Pacific Justice Institute and Ruth Institute.
The American Family Association, which targets not only LGBTQ people, but also women and non-Christians, received $1.4 million alone. They have 200 radio stations across the country that tout their violent and divisive ideology. The Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, which received over $600,000, was foudned and named after a demagogue who promotes child abuse.
These organizations are funded by the same capitalists, such as the Koch Brothers and the DeVos family, that are behind the anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ laws that have swept through state legislatures in the last few years. Their goal is to pit people in the working class against one another, misusing religious freedom to make religious workers and LGBTQ people blame each other for their oppression instead of the capitalists. The use of PPP loans to fund these hate groups during the pandemic while millions of workers have lost their jobs is not an accident, but the priorities of the super-rich.
These right-wing organizations should be shut down and their leaders jailed, not funded by money that should be spent supporting workers during these crises.
Racism in Healthcare: A Disease We Must Eradicate!
“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
by Z Petrosian
In the U.S. COVID-19 has infected Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian people at rates higher than whites, and the disparity is even greater when it comes to the severity of illness and death from COVID-19. Centuries of racism in the U.S. healthcare system are to blame. We don’t need more studies. We need action to demand expanded access to healthcare for all, especially people of color and very poor people, through national Medicaid for all. We must also create independent community-based boards that have the power to accept complaints, implement changes, and review materials and practices.
Centuries of racist abuses call for reparations
Racism in healthcare can be traced to the foundations of the U.S., which is based on the genocide of Native peoples and chattel enslavement of Africans. For centuries, non-white, particularly Black, people were treated as less than human, only to be kept healthy enough to work or to be experimented on without consent, as in the case of gynecological experimentation carried out by James Marion Sims on enslaved Black women. This abuse and experimentation continued long after slavery was abolished, most infamously in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study wherein Black men were deliberately infected with syphilis and denied treatment.
This abuse is not just in the past but continues to exist in healthcare, particularly in the lack of equal access to quality medical care. Studies show that, overall, Blacks who report medical problems receive less timely and lower quality treatment than whites; illness and disease is more likely to be found and addressed later in its course, resulting in worse outcomes and preventable deaths.
Dr. Susan Moore, 52, dies of COVID-19 while fighting for equal care
The quality of care routinely given to rich whites and politicians is denied to the working class and people of color. Recently Susan Moore, a dedicated Black family medicine doctor, called out racism at the hands of a white doctor and staff who were treating her for COVID-19 at a hospital in suburban Indianapolis. Being a medical professional, Dr. Moore was able to make detailed demands about the specific treatments she knew she needed even as her reported symptoms went unheeded.
Despite her objections, Dr. Moore was sent home prematurely while her condition deteriorated. “This is how Black people get killed, when you them home and they don’t know how to fight for themselves,” Dr. Moore said. Just hours later, she was transported in an ambulance to another hospital where she died from COVID-19.
This most horrible outcome was compounded by a lifetime of unequal access to medicine due to the racism of the system. Income, housing access, geography, and education all play a major role in the health outcomes of U.S. residents. But Black people are sicker and die younger even when their education levels and incomes are the same as whites. Racism kills.
Affected communities should have the final say on care and equal access to medical education, research, & healthcare delivery
One way to address racism in healthcare is to guarantee free medical coverage and high-quality care to everyone through national improved Medicaid for all. There should be no red tape and no medical bills; this system should cover all necessary medical care for every person in the U.S. for their entire lifetime.
Socialist countries, such as Cuba, provide excellent healthcare at no cost to patients, keeping their populations healthy through a focus on equal access to both prevention and treatment. We can also look here at home to the Veterans Administration (VA) health system to see evidence that guaranteeing health coverage improves health outcomes, especially for Black people. The VA is a health system in need of improvements – long demanded by veterans – still, while Black people in the general population have higher rates of heart disease and death than whites, a study of three million people guaranteed care through the VA showed Blacks were 37% less likely than white men to develop heart disease and had a 24% lower death rate than white patients.
Calls for improved Medicaid for all are urgent during pandemic
It should not have taken a global pandemic for racism to be more broadly recognized as a pervasive and insidious public health issue affecting all aspects of U.S. society, including the healthcare system. However, the current crises give urgency to demands for consistent, free, and equal access to healthcare.
All medical knowledge, treatments, medicines, and therapies are produced by the global working class. It is wrong to allow governments and corporations – including pharmaceutical, insurance, and hospital corporations – to hoard healthcare for the privileged few and make profits. We must take up the fight for Medicaid for all. Equal, quality healthcare is a right!
Colombian People Charge U.S. Puppet Government with Mass Murder
by Adam Pedesclaux
On September 9, 2020, the Colombian police brutally murdered father and engineer Javier Ordonez on the street for violating a coronavirus curfew. They tased and beat him with clubs as he lay pinned on the ground, begging them to stop. At the hospital, Javier was pronounced dead.
Like the protests that erupted after the death of George Floyd, the people of Colombia had had enough. While the people were on the streets denouncing the fascist government of Ivan Duque Marquez, the police shot live rounds into the crowds, injuring many and killing several. The police continued to terrorize citizens throughout the month, shooting people down in the street, even going as far as to throw bombs at people and into open windows. At one point, the military killed a trans woman in a moving car, ignoring her lover begging for an explanation as to why they would do such a monstrous thing.
As dead protesters were being buried, spineless coward Ivan Duque commended the police for their work and even visited the police station.
For those unfamiliar with Colombia, such a story that parallels that of our own in America may come as a surprise. Being an Amerikkkan puppet state comes with all the racism, misogyny and homophobia that the U.S. has. The two governments work hand in hand to run the dehumanizing capitalist machine that has run people into the ground for short term gain for the wealthy in both countries, from massacring over a thousand striking banana harvesters to stealing land from working class people and having one of the largest disparities in land ownership between the rich and the poor. It only makes sense then that the people who get tired of the bullshit pick up rifles and fight against the enemy that kills them. Therefore, the people created guerrilla militias such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), which would survive in the jungles while fighting the state.
After many years of fighting a desperate war against the state, the guerrillas were promised peace in a deal brokered by Hugo Chavez and Cuba. In 2016, the deal came with agreements for certain requirements to be met, such as honoring the victims of the war between factions as well as reparation. One of the major factors of the agreement, however, was the disarming of FARC. With this came an agreement of peace in Colombia and the promise of no more violence that both sides were supposed to adhere to.
Fast forward four years and the Colombian state is still enacting violence against working people. Thousands of former FARC members and activists, trade unionists, women’s and community group members have been killed by the government and government sponsored paramilitaries while the capitalist machine goes on. The recent rampage by the police left dozens of people dead.
It is up to the Colombian people to drive their struggle forward, but it is up to us in the U.S. to stop the boot that crushes all in its wake. As working people, we must stand up to all oppression if the death and despair is to stop.
Military Industrial Banking Complex Fosters Fascism
U.S. capitalism is in constant crisis, desperately striving by any means to sustain the profits of the ultra-rich. To do this, capitalists are driving us into the dust, reducing wages and social programs (social wages) here and around the world.
The capitalists’ addiction to war profits clears the path for fascism.
Capitalism has reached a stage where a growing section of capitalists relies on government military spending for their profits. As a result, capitalist governments hand over larger and larger portions of their national budgets to war profiteering corporations at the expense of social programs. In the U.S., the military and financial sectors have come to dominate civilian production. In doing, their political power has grown.
The military industrial banking complex is run by the most right-wing, racist sector of the capitalist class. More than any other sector, they determine U.S. domestic and foreign policy. The growth of the fascist movement can no longer be ignored. All those openly supporting the fascists should be ousted and jailed. But to snuff out fascism completely, we must go to the heart of the U.S. capitalist system.
Will the Democratic party stop the growth of fascism or fuel it?
Any change in government may sound good after Trump. And we may get a few urgently needed and long overdue relief bills. But the Democratic Party did nothing meaningful to challenge Trumpism other than carry out a sham impeachment that urged for war on Russia at the behest of the CIA and the Pentagon.
In the middle of a pandemic and a world economic crisis, both Republicans and Democrats put aside their difference to pass a record military spending bill. Our money is stolen for more jets, nuclear weapons, and aircraft carriers while people have nothing. They have also co-conspired to conceal the fact that while we die and beg for relive, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank is giving trillions to banks and private corporations.
Trumpism didn’t spring from the head of a rotten politician. Trumpism is an outgrowth of the dominant capitalist sectors wanting to divide the people, push us down, and violently crush any nation that dares to jeopardize their profits by struggling for independence.
Is it possible to combat fascism at home and fund and arm it elsewhere? No.
It is deeply disturbing how some call themselves socialists yet side with the U.S. capitalist regime change wars designed to re-impose the rule of the ultra-rich in Venezuela and Cuba. The U.S. funds and arms the fascist Columbian and Israeli governments and is responsible for genocide in Yemen and across Africa. How dare politicians say that the U.S. doesn’t resolve differences with violence when the U.S. military carries out endless wars and coups on behalf of the super-rich? The U.S. drops a bomb once every 12 minutes somewhere in the world. How many children and families does that add up to?
We must cast aside illusions and mobilize the people.
We must go to workers of all nationalities and expose the truth: fascists are puppets of the super-rich who are paid to use racism and other means to divide the people so the rich can hold on to their wealth. Just like the Nazis, the job of the fascists is to turn the people away from the real enemy so that total war can be waged against the working class.
The Biden administration could easily go to war with China or Iran or drag us into some other war we have no stake in. More than ever we must practice international solidarity. We must oppose U.S. militarism which is a noose around the neck of the whole working class. We cannot be lulled into passivity by heeding politicans’ calls to “heal” the country or defend the democracy of the few. These illusions only disarm the people when we ought to be organizing to defeat the fascists once and for all.
End the U.S./Saudi Genocide of the Yemeni People
World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis Must be Stopped
The people of Yemen are suffering the worst humanitarian crisis in the world because of U.S. imperialism. Since 2015, the U.S. had backed a Saudi led war against Yemen by supplying weapons and bombs that have killed hundreds of thousands of Yemeni people and destroyed the county’s cities and agriculture. 20.5 million of the 29 million people living in Yemen lack access to clean water and sanitation, and over 60% of the people are starving. Half of the country’s healthcare facilities have been destroyed. Every day children are dying from starvation and preventable illnesses.
Stop the War Coalition has called for a global day of action on Monday, January 25. Join the Workers Voice Socialist Movement as we stand in solidarity with workers and oppressed people all over the world to say:
No War on Yemen!
12 Noon, January 25 at Duncan Plaza
Loyola Ave at Gravier St, New Orleans
U.S. uses “terror” designation to starve more children through sanctions and blockades.
Now international organizations are withdrawing aid from Yemen because the U.S. is calling Houthis in Yemen “terrorists.” This designation goes into full effect on January 19. The Houthis are an Indigenous people that have long resisted U.S. imperialism, overthrowing the authoritarian U.S.-backed regime in 2014 and establishing a government in the north of Yemen, while the south is ruled by a U.S. puppet government. The U.S. has no right to determine the national destiny of the Yemeni people.
Not only is the U.S. spreading vicious lies about the Houthis, they are recruiting members of al-Qaeda to help Saudi-backed militias overthrow the Houthi government. The U.S. capitalist ruling class doesn’t care if millions more Yemeni people die so long as they can crush any opposition to U.S. imperialism.
Workers around the world must unite to demand an end to the U.S./Saudi war on Yemen. As workers living in the most powerful and violent imperialist country on Earth, we have a special duty to stand with the people of Yemen and demand that not one more of our tax dollars go towards aiding, supplying, or abetting the Saudis in this genocidal war.
Letter to the Editor: COVID-19 Vaccine Can Save Lives. End Racism in Access.
With great fanfare, as if announcing a miracle, the state proudly declared the vaccine was now available to those 70 and above and those with problems that put them at higher risk. It made a good photo-op for the politicians, who receive vaccines, have healthcare, fat pay checks and are allowed to take bribes and get rich at taxpayers’ expense.
Monday, Jan 4, arrived with 7 pharmacies in New Orleans each getting 107 shots to give out. You had to have known about it and have internet access and time to sit waiting for the list to go online. After pharmacies were listed, the phones were instantly busy, and people spent all day calling, even though the appointments were gone in minutes. Hundreds ran to pharmacies, desperate, only to be turned away without a future appointment. Three hours after all appointments were gone, Mayor Cantrell’s reelection PAC announced the vaccinations were available. Anything to look good, except for those who know better.
With only 749 shots available, a disgrace in itself, the most hard-hit Black seniors and at-risk people should have been offered it first. The vaccines should have been made available at community centers within walking distance, not at far-flung pharmacies.
Once again, capitalist medicine has failed to provide real care, given huge profits to the rich, and resulted in lots of inequality. They probably want us to fight each other for the shot, but we won’t; we’ll fight the capitalists instead.
-At-risk senior in the Florida neighborhood.
Alabama Amazon Workers Build Towards Union (Labor Briefs)
Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, AL are organizing for union representation with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). This is a historic step towards organizing the first union ever in Amazon, at a time when hundreds of Amazon workers around the globe have gone on strike. While CEO Jeff Bezos’ fortune has surpassed $200 billion, Amazon workers continue to fight for benefits, a living wage, hazard pay, and safe working conditions during a global pandemic. But Amazon is already trying to sabotage workers in Bessemer by delaying the union election and will likely spend millions of dollars on union-busting campaigns. Nevertheless the struggle in Bessemer is a tremendous example to other Amazon workers around the world whose labor reaps huge profits for corporations but almost nothing for the workers themselves. A win for Amazon workers would be a win for us all!