International

By Richard Mellor in California

This is from the video embedded below…

“In 2023 UnitedHealth raked in a whopping $22 billion in profits making you the most profitable health care company in the country. In fact, by revenue, United Health is the 11th largest company in the entire world. Now Mr witty, United Health Group owns the country’s largest insurer, the country’s largest claims processor, the country’s third largest pharmacy benefit manager, a huge Pharmacy chain, it is the largest employer of physicians nationwide, or controller with at least 990,000 physicians, as you just testified that’s about one out of every 10 doctors in the country…”

What we have to recognise is that these committees or testimonies that take place in the US Congress are shams. I am not saying Warren’s motives are suspect but certainly her belief that they will actually lead to any serious changes in the US health sickness industry are.

Testimonies and questioning of this sort occur daily in the US Congress about one issue or another. Both capitalist parties and their politicians are guilty. The US working class is in the situation we are because there is no political party or voice in Congress that represents the interests of working class or middle class people.

Bernie Sanders has introduced some decent reform and then time and time again points to the Democratic Party as the agent of change. The material  conditions of the US working class has deteriorated under Democratic and Republican administrations alike. The foreign policy of both parties is as violent and brutal as the ongoing genocide in Israel, the mass murder of millions of people from Vietnam and Indo-China, to Iraq and Afghanistan shows. 

Predatory wars fought by poor working class Americans

The funding of what are predatory wars fought by working class Americans to protect the financial interests of a tiny section of US society took 67,000 young US lives in Vietnam and more throughout the late twentiethand twenty-first centuries. I saw an ad on TV but a few minutes ago for a group that is asking us to donate money for those wounded in these capitalist ventures. Wounded Warriors they are called.

They are not warriors, they are overwhelmingly working class Americans: poor, from low-waged families and marginalised communities. They join up to get three meals and a paycheck They get some perks regarding housing and medical care. Why is some private business making a buck appealing to the kindness of others for money that will not solve the problem and using those injured in combat to do it?

We have been witnessing billions being sent to the racist apartheid regime in Israel to incinerate children and destroy a culture in order to maintain a foothold in this region of the world. Billions more to Ukraine, not because our government likes Ukrainians or Ukraine is a strategic interest to the US war machine, although it is to firms like Blackrock, but as cannon fodder in US Imperialism’s efforts to weaken Russian imperialism’s ambitions as a global competitor. The habitual liar, Antony Blinken, told the truth for once, when he admitted that the support for Ukraine was about undermining Russia’s power.

We have some of the worst social services in the industrial world, some of the worst statistics regarding health and certainly the worst and most expensive healthcare system in the advanced capitalist countries. We have a higher infant mortality rate than Cuba.

As we listen to some of the details in the video and, more importantly, if we reflect on our experiences with the private health care industry, housing, at the dentist, education, public transportation and more, let’s give the anti- immigration platforms of both parties a hard look.

Trump: buffoon, con-man, snake-oil salesman and sexual preditor

I say both parties because it’s not simply Trump. Trump is an accident of history, a buffoon, a con man, a snake oil salesman and at worst, a sexual predator. Everyone here who has no indigenous blood is an immigrant, or the children of settlers. Immigrants are not the problem, the system is, and those that promote and profit from it.

Last week I drove up highway 101 from San Luis Obispo and passing through the farmlands. I never saw one worker out in those fields who wasn’t Latino. Let’s not insult our own intelligence and think that those sisters and brothers are the cause of the decline in our living standards. 

It can be somewhat depressing, there is no major social movement on the ground that we can join, that has real social power. But that will come. A movement cannot be manufactured, it will come from below. Out of such a movement an independent working class based political alternative will be born.

Given the absence of these factors, we will be going through some serious battles, some steps forward and some back, but there will be a forward leap as long as the climate catastrophe or nuclear war doesn’t strike first.

Despite the racist and violent history of this nation, including the genocidal war against the native population, the US working class has seen moments of great struggle and unity from the early colonial struggles against the plantation bourgeois like Bacon’s Rebellion, or the battles in the great early days of the Eastern seabord. The slave revolts, the formation of the CIO and the Black revolt that followed. Read working class and labour history.

Educating ourselves about this great history will help us understand our past and help us navigate the future.

From the US socialist website, Facts for Working People. The original is here.