Republicans and Democrats are Responsible For Our Barbaric Health Care System

From the video

“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 10doctors in the country….”

 

Richard Mellor

What we have to recognize 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. 

 

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 20^th and 21^st 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 marginalized 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 ahigher 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. 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 of the Eastern Seabord. The slave revolts, the formation of the CIO and the Black Revolt that followed. Read working class and labor history.

 

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

Reprinted from the UK Socialist website Left Horizons.

No end in sight to political crisis in France

14 December 2024Posted by Editor

By Greg Oxley of La Riposte

The nomination of François Bayrou as Prime Minister, replacing Michel Barnier, who was overthrown by a vote of no confidence earlier this month, solves nothing. The mountain has laboured and brought forth yet another mouse. Just as Barnier’s government was doomed from the outset, for lack of support in the National Assembly, Bayrou will no doubt suffer the same fate.

A former Justice Minister under Macron in 2017, Bayrou was forced to resign after being charged with “misappropriation of public funds”. His case is still going through the courts. The first task of the new government will be to get the Barnier’s budget through parliament. But how can that be done, given that Bayrou has no more support than Barnier? The institutional crisis is clearly far from over. It could well lead to the end of the presidency of Emmanuel Macron.

To understand how this situation came about, we have to go back to the events of June 2024. In the European elections of that month, Macron’s party suffered a crushing defeat, gaining only 14.6% of the vote, making him the most unpopular sitting president since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958.

That election also showed a further increase in the social basis of the right-wing nationalist party, the Rassemblement National (RN), led by Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, which got 7.76 million votes (31.7%). The left parties, individually weak and bitterly divided, made a poor showing.

Snap election made matters worse for Macron

Macron’s response to his defeat was to dissolve the National Assembly (the French parliament), which provoked a snap election, a little more than two weeks later. He appealed to the electorate to give him a strong parliamentary base, as the only alternative to what he called “the extremes”, meaning the RN on the right and the left parties. The latter, alarmed by the upsurge in support for the RN, decided (literally overnight), to end years of squabbling and division by creating a broad alliance called the New Popular Front (NFP).

New Prime Minister, Bayrou was forced to resign after being charged with “misappropriation of public funds”. His case is still going through the courts. 

Macron’s ploy failed miserably, and instead of strengthening his position, it was weakened even further. On the far right, the RN won 33% of the vote, against 27% for the NFP. After the second round, the NFP emerged as the largest parliamentary group, followed by the RN. Macron only got 20%. Macron’s candidates won 168 seats, the other right-wing party, the Republicans (formerly that of Chirac and Sarkozy), got 66. The NFP won 180 and the RN won 143.

It took Macron no less than 60 days to name a Prime Minister, which he eventually chose from among the Republicans! Former PM, Dominique de Villepin, met the announcement by ironically recalling the words attributed to Jesus Christ in the book of Saint Matthew: “And the last shall be the first.”

Thus, the “zombie government” led by Michel Barnier was doomed to impotence from the outset. The budget he presented to parliament amounted to yet another round of the vicious cuts and austerity measures that Macron has pushed through since he first came to power in 2017.

Barnier lasted only three months

The NFP tabled a vote of no confidence, and the RN declared they would also vote against the government. Seeing that there was no chance they would get majority approval of the budget, Macron and Barnier used the infamous clause 49.3 of the Constitution, which allows a government to adopt laws without parliamentary support. However, the vote of no confidence still took place. The Barnier government fell three months after coming into existence, and the budget fell with it.

Finding himself back to square one, Macron had to find another Prime Minister, and Bayrou will now have to cobble together a new minority government, which will probably collapse in turn. How long can this go on?

Macron says he will not resign, that he will stay on until 2027. But it would seem that the only way he could do that would be through permanent institutional upheaval, or through ruling directly by presidential decree. Neither option is politically viable, and so it seems that sooner or later Macron is likely to resign, which will mean new presidential and parliamentary elections.

The social and economic backdrop to these developments is such that France is heading for a period of profound instability. When Macron came to power, he claimed to represent the political “centre”. Promoted as some kind of economic whizz kid, “breaking the mould of traditional politics”. He claimed he was neither left nor right, and would simply apply policies that ‘worked’, to guarantee job creation and prosperity, reduce inequality and unite the nation.

In practice, however, he carried out an implacable defence of capitalist interests at the expense of the rest of society. His first act was to reduce taxes on the super-rich amounting to €5bn of lost revenue for the state.

Then he attacked health and education. In the midst of the Covid pandemic, he closed nearly 18,000 hospital beds. A series of measures effectively cut pensions. He slashed benefits for the unemployed and the poorest sections in society. The numbers of the ‘officially poor’ rose to 14.4% of the population. Among families with three or more children, the percentage is 26%.

Macron adopted many of the policies of the far right

The economy has been stagnant since 2019 and GDP grew by just 0.8% in 2023 and is projected to grow by 1.1% in 2024. Inflation has been undermining living standards, driving many people to despair, as shown by the insurrectionary demonstrations and blockades of the ‘Gilets Jaunes’ in the winter of 2018-2019.

In an attempt to divert public anger away from the government and the capitalists, Macron adopted many aspects of the racist and nationalist policies advocated by Le Pen. His ‘”anti-separatism” laws framed sections of society deemed to be “not really French” as a potential internal threat, separate from and hostile to the interests of the ‘Nation’ and democratic values.

The police have been given sweeping powers, and increasingly deadly arms and equipment, to use in defence of ‘law and order’. Tens of thousands of job losses have been announced in the last few weeks alone. Companies like Michelin, after having received millions of euros in public subsidies and making record profits in 2023, has announced the closure of two factories and major cuts in the workforce.

Manufacturing industry accounts for only 10% of GDP. The working people are restless. Civil servants, teachers, workers in the agricultural sector, railways workers, moved into action. These movements are relatively low-key for the moment, but attitudes are hardening. Governmental chaos is unfolding amid social chaos.

The workers’ organisations will have to take bolder action in the future, and yet, unfortunately, growing anger in society has also seen widening of the social basis of right-wing nationalism. It can by no means be excluded that the next presidential and legislative elections could bring the RN to power. In the first round of the last legislative elections, more than 10.6 million people voted for the RN.

Tensions and failures among NFP leaders

The only force that can prevent an RN victory is the NFP left alliance. However, this alliance includes the Socialist Party whose right-wing elements are attempting to sabotage the NFP from within, and the Communist Party (PCF) whose leadership, around Fabien Roussel, has had a conciliatory attitude towards participation in a government – which would necessarily be a minority government – under Emmanuel Macron.

Tensions within the NFP, therefore, mean that the alliance may not survive long enough to face up to threat from the RN. Not only that, but the program of the NFP, despite the inclusion of a number of important social and economic reforms, is fundamentally flawed.

Previous left governments which tried to carry out social reforms, such as the socialist-communist government of 1981-1986, have been forced to abandon them and adopt policies in the interests of big business. They were not prepared to take decisive measures to break the power of the capitalists, which is rooted in private ownership of the banks, productive industry and distribution, and therefore had no means of fighting against capitalist sabotage. The program of the NFP, which contains no measures whatsoever to deal with this fundamental problem, shows that its leaders have learned nothing from the failures of the past.

Nationalist rise is an international phenomenon

 The rise of nationalism is an international phenomenon and is essentially a reaction to the social and economic consequences of capitalist “internationalism”, or globalisation. People are desperate. In France and elsewhere, workers have been let down by previous left governments. The trade unions have proved incapable of defending them in the face of declining living standards. Even the better off sections of society feel that they are losing ground.

The difficulties are not just financial. Many areas, especially rural areas, have seen a collapse of vital services such as public transport, post offices, schools and hospitals, not to speak of affordable housing and stable employment. It appears to many workers that globalisation has meant a loss of control, rendering governments impotent in the face of foreign competition and open borders.

Powerful forces are driving a trend towards protectionism and the notion of national “preference” or “priority”. In the minds of tens of millions of people, a major change is necessary, to put an end to social and economic decline. If the left cannot convince workers that it can and will bring about this change, then right-wing nationalism and racism will inevitably gain ground.

The struggle against this reactionary danger can only be waged and won by the emergence of a mass movement of the working people around bold socialist policies that strike at the roots of capitalist power and privilege, linking social reform to the need to expropriate the capitalist class and open the way for democratic planning in the interests of the mass of the population.

Greg Oxley is editor of the French marxist website, La Riposte, which can be found here. Pictures: from Wikimedia Commons, Macron (top) here and Francois Bayrou here, and NFP flags from NFP website here. 

Biden Harris, the Entire US Congress are Guilty of Mass Murder.

Ever wondered how the German people allowed the Nazis' to attain power and murder millions? Well now you know.

"Germany and the United States supply 99% of the weapons exported to Israel. They could stop this conflict overnight"

This sort of commentary doesn't get much air time in the US mass media. It's fine to be nauseated and even disgusted at the sexual predator Trump, but the present Administration has financed this genocide, refused to describe it as such, arrested those protesting it and covered for the murderous Zionist regime internationally. Yet people voted to put them in power another four years. Electoral politics is complicated.

Incidentally, with a name like Ben Saul this man may well be Jewish, or in the eyes of Zionists an anti-Semite, or worse, a self hating Jew. He might get arrested.

Why Donald Trump’s election could hasten the end of US dollar dominance

Trump has threatened broad trade penalties when he takes office in January. Phil Mistry / Shutterstock

David McMillan, University of Stirling

Donald Trump’s victory in November’s US presidential election saw the US dollar strengthen. It surged to a one-year high within two weeks, and has since retained its strength against its major peers. His election has also again brought the prospect of US tariffs on imports, and attention has focused on the disruption to global trade that these may bring.

As part of this, Trump made a not-so-veiled threat of steep levies on the Brics group of leading emerging markets should they create a rival to the US dollar, which has been the world’s “dominant currency” since the second world war.

The use and holding of the US dollar by other countries is known as dollarisation. It has different levels of meaning, from countries like Panama using the US dollar as their currency, to its use in the pricing of major internationally traded commodities, and as a reserve and vehicle currency. This latter role enhances global trade.

Take Chile and Malaysia as an example. Any trade between these two countries will involve the exchange of Chilean pesos for Malaysian ringgit, for which there is not a large and active market. So, pesos are instead exchanged for US dollars and US dollars for ringgit, allowing trade to occur in a quicker and more cost-efficient manner.

Indeed, the US dollar is used in more than 50% of foreign trade invoices, and over 80% of all foreign exchange transactions worldwide. However, it is possible that Trump’s “America First” foreign policy could serve to hasten the end of the US dollar’s dominance.

Pros and cons

Dollarisation is beneficial for global trade. But it brings particular benefits to the US, as other countries need to hold US dollars to facilitate trade and pay for many commodities. This means that demand for the US dollar remains high, so it does not come under pressure to depreciate.

A more important point is perhaps that when countries buy US dollars, they don’t hold them in cash. Rather, they buy US Treasury bills and so, in effect, lend money to the US government. This high demand for US Treasuries means the US government is able borrow at a cheaper rate than would otherwise be possible.

However, there are also drawbacks. A strong US dollar increases the price of dollar-denominated commodities and thus the cost of international trade. And for the US itself, a strong US dollar can damage its domestic export business.

These drawbacks have often led to the suggestion of a multi-currency global system, although this has never gained traction or been a serious consideration. But that could change with a second Trump presidency.

During his first term, such calls grew louder. And there have been some shifts in US dollar holdings since then, to the extent that global US dollar reserves have declined.

The US dollar is used in over 80% of foreign exchange transactions worldwide. ibragimova / Shutterstock

So, which Trump policies could hasten the end of US dollar dominance? The incoming president is regarded as pro-business, which will probably translate into policies aimed at lowering regulation and taxes. Stimulating domestic growth will lead to an even stronger US dollar at a time when global output is more modest.

A stronger US dollar, as mentioned above, also increases the price of oil and similar commodities. Countries will inevitably ask themselves why oil from Saudi Arabia, for example, should be paid for in US dollars as those dollars become more expensive.

Trump’s economic policies are likely to increase US debt, and this can reduce the value of the large US dollar reserves held around the world. According to one study, Trump’s plans could add as much as US$15 trillion (£11.7 trillion) to the nation’s debt over a decade. A fall in the value of US dollar reserves may result in some countries being less willing to hold US debt.

The effect of these policies might be considered unintentional. But other policies, such as Trump’s plan for higher tariffs, are more deliberately designed.

A strong US dollar damages US exports, as they become relatively expensive in local currency terms, and makes imports relatively cheap. Tariffs are a way to protect domestic producers from this international competition.

However, assuming no other country retaliates, raising tariffs will serve only to further strengthen the US dollar, as fewer imports will mean less US dollars being sold in the foreign exchange market. This will, at least in part, undo the effect of the tariff policy while imposing trade costs globally.

To avoid elements of this, countries could agree to use alternatives as a reserve currency and a means to pay for international commodities. The Brics nations have mooted a separate currency, which could revolve around one or more existing currencies like the Euro or Yuan. Trump’s threats may simply speed up this search for an alternative.

What would this mean for the US?

Countries would then need to hold less US dollars, so would sell off their US Treasuries. The result will be a rise in the cost of debt for the US, and a fall in the value of the US dollar. Ironically, this would increase the price of imports (the goal of Trump’s tariff policy), but it could also lead to inflation.

In a worst-case scenario, should countries coordinate their selling of US dollars and Treasuries, a run on the US dollar would have major implications for the US and the world. This would lead to higher debt costs in the US and a need to reduce its trade deficit.

Globally, it would disrupt trade, raise transaction costs, and there would be a loss of value for any dollar-denominated assets and reserves. This would most likely culminate in a significant global recession.

The US dollar will remain a global currency for the foreseeable future. But Trump’s “America First” policy, as well as the greater weaponisation of the US dollar, could lead to its relegation from being the only world currency.

David McMillan, Professor in Finance, University of Stirling

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Palestine: genuine revolution versus another round of betrayal

Sharing this commentary for the interest of our readers.

Palestine: genuine revolution versus another round of betrayal

Kevin Ovenden London UK

 

The very first thing any truly revolutionary force would do on walking into an Arab capital at the collapse of its degraded regime would be to issue a declaration of struggle for the cause of Palestine. 

It would be to call on all sincere supporters of the Palestinians to come together right now to engage in mass struggle in all its forms across the piece and across the region. Appealing to solidarity internationally. 

 

It would be instant denunciation of all those states that back Israel and are in alliance with the US, whose war against the Palestinians this is. 

 

You may call on representatives internationally - civil and political - to join together in existing and fresh initiatives to come to the aid of the Palestinian people. Prepare for a historic Congress. 

 

You would proclaim: there is a genocide happening in Palestine. The immediate issue now is to stop that genocide. You could demand of those Western - and Arab - governments wanting to bathe in the fall of the old regime that you will not entertain them until they declare for Palestine and break off relations with Israel. 

 

You could say - even with some diplomatic obliquity - that the emptying of one torture prison should signal the same happening right across the region: in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, Libya, Turkey, Iran... and above all and most directly - in Israel. 

 

And you would say that whatever those other state actors do we will fight for that and with the common people everywhere to that end. 

You would say immediately that there can be no peace with the genocidaires of Israel. Nelson Mandela declared that South Africa would not be free until Palestine is free. 

 

That or similar is not what anyone is saying in Syria right now. Not those in the decapitated regime, not the official opposition, not the HTS militia. 

 

Instead there is the deadly hand of Realpolitik. It is a childlike delusion to imagine that that is not present via blood-soaked state actors and their proxies just because there have been statues pulled down. The biggest of those political actors is the US and its allies. It does actually control Syria's relations to the global financial system and it is occupying strategically vital territory of the country. 

 

For us in the West, we must redouble our efforts for Palestine as the lodestone and centrepiece of what we can do to help curb our own murderous states and thus contribute to progress in the Middle East. 

 

That is if we truly believe that there is a genocide unfolding and a growing Israeli, expansionist land grab and ethnic cleansing, greater even than the Nakba. 

 

In the alternative, is it that we didn't really believe that but just engaged in hyperbolic rhetoric? That would mean that we deserve utter damnation and never to be trusted in our own societies ever again. It would mean we lied to people about something so absolute as a genocide. It would mean Israel and its apologists were right about us all along. 

 

The truth is that there is indeed a genocidal war against the Palestinians. There is a catastrophic push for more Israeli war for "Lebansraum", as one public figure put it. All with the proximate additional boost of Netanyahu himself relying upon expanding war to stave off domestic opposition and legal difficulties. 

Palestine and the genocide are the issue of issues here.

 

And when we keep our eyes firmly on that, it becomes easier to navigate what will be yet more war and unfolding chaos in the Middle East. 

 

Hatta al nasr, hatta al quds.

Luigi Mangione is a Victim of Violence. Johnson was Perpetrator of It

Luigi Mangione

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired
HEO/GED

12-11-24

Here's the reason for the bourgeois, or big business media's, obsession with Luigi Mansion's assassination of the United Healthcare CEO. 

Workers are supposed to feel sorry for the guy Mangione shot and see Mangione as the crazed assassin. Most workers will not shed a tear for the corporate millionaire while at the same time recognizing that he has a family, children, and so on and feel for them; this is not a bad thing. It is not weakness, it’s what makes us strong and the corporate CEO and his class colleagues weak. 

 

We are human and so are the captains of industry; we are the same species. But as Marx so eloquently said, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” This is what makes workers different from bosses, from the purchasers of labor power, as we are the sellers of it. We are the same species but we are also different. Isn’t that what the materialists call the dialectic?

 

The owners of the mass media, want to blame the victim of violence rather than the perpetrator of it. Without a doubt, any CEO of a major corporation is by far a more efficient and prolific killer than Luigi Mangione. As far as I know, Hitler never killed anyone and Charles Manson either.

 

It doesn't matter to me if Mangione killed the CEO just to get his own back as a very sick patient in the barbaric US health care system. Oh. I'm sorry, a very sick customer in the US healthcare system, I can sympathise fully with it. What I will take issue with is certain people who will claim that Mangione is some sort of revolutionary and that this act will be the spark that sets off the revolution that will rid us of the capitalist system and usher in a better, egalitarian society based on human need and cooperation.

 

I have been away for a few days without much access to media so I am not familiar with the latest developments about the assassination and the motive behind it. If it turns out that Luigi Manzione, a young man from a bourgeois background assassinated a representative of the ruling class in the belief that it is through this method, individual acts of violence that, capitalism can be sent to the garbage can of history; he was terribly wrong. 

 

As a revolutionary Irish friend once said to me as a criticism of the IRA’s methods against the British occupation of Ireland, (the north) “they won’t be able to bomb the British out of Ireland” And capitalism will not overthrown without the intervention of the working class internationally.

The Shooting of a Corporate CEO Will Not Change a Barbaric US Health Care System

Richard Mellor

Afcme Local 444, retired

HEO/GED

12-10-24

 

The assassination of a United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, by Luigi Mangione, a 26-year Ivy League graduate from Maryland, has opened up a barrage of complaints about the state of US health care, without doubt the worst of the advanced capitalist countries. There are many articles about this on this blog. I often refer to the US health care system as the Sickness Industrial Complex.

 

Mangione was arrested in a McDonald’s after a customer recognized him from the photos and called police. 

 

Most people, and most workers hate corporate bosses, but would not approve of dealing with the health care crisis or any other serious crisis of the so-called free market by assassinating parasites like Thomson. But there will be few tears shed for a health care corporation CEO or any other insurance company executive. In response to Mangione’s arrest, the restaurant received a barrage of negative reviews on Yelp, rats in the kitchen and so forth.  

Source

 

The hatred of the rich in US society runs deep and the doctor in the video gives some reasons why. But he never mentions the capitalist system. He points out that five Republicans on the Supreme Court passed a law allowing corporations to bribe politicians, but that’s nonsense. 

They have a profession here in the US called a lobbyist. These lobbyists spend their lives bribing politicians it’s in their job description. Many lobbyists are former members of Congress themselves whose knowledge of how the corrupt system works is the perfect qualification for a bribery job after retirement.

 

One of the reasons Americans kill each other at the rate we do is the stress, despair, insecurity and fear we have of homelessness, and particularly becoming sick as medical care or costs is the leading cause of bankruptcy. This compounded by the dominant ideology in capitalist society that you are in control of your own destiny and the self blame that results from it when the system crushes you.

 

You can lose your home, your life’s savings, or your small business due to the poor health care system.  People are overwhelmed with just surviving and it’s not just poor people but middle class people as well; they want to keep us in a permanent state of fear apprehension here. And we are never free of them picking our pockets, nickel and diming us as we say, day in day out. 

Source

The ads on television for prescription drugs are relentless. There are pills and all sorts of medicine for diseases or more often than not what they call, syndromes with multiple acronyms, most I’ve never heard of. Restless Leg Syndrome is one. The ads always end with, “Call you doctor and ask if….(the drug they’re selling…)is right for you”. This is illegal in other advanced capitalist countries.  They create the need, they have the cure. This is capitalism at its best.

A doctor friend of mine told me a patient asked her about an ailment she’d never heard of. The patient told her she’d heard about it on TV. They dress someone up in a white coat with a stethoscope around their neck in order to influence the customer and a sick person in the US is a customer, not a patient. We are still living in a nation of snake oil salesmen.

 

The doctor in the video shares valuable information about this barbaric health care system but never raises the cause. The idea that we live in a system is rarely mentioned. All we need is to elect someone with integrity, a “good” person, a “Christian” or at very least a believer. As the election of Trump shows, a sexual deviant, racist and habitual felon is far more acceptable at the helm than an Atheist. 

The system is never mentioned because the conclusion of that line of thinking is that we have to change the system and the dominant ideology of any system is the ideology of the class that governs, for them, there is no other way; the system they govern is the best there is. The US mass media refers to the existence of a social system when they want to point to Soviet totalitarianism (Stalinism) and inform us that communism or socialism failed. Other than that, your poverty is your fault. Only “crony capitalism” fails, not real capitalism.

 

Eugene Debs the great US socialist and trade union leader said that, “I would not be a Moses to lead you in to the promised Land because if I could lead you in to it, someone else could lead you out of it.”  

 

It is only the working class, the wage worker that can change the system and that can build a society, a system based on the production of human needs in harmony with nature rather that at war with it. For this we have to rely on our own strength, our own organizations, our own political party. No other source can save us.

 

Because there is no such mass force at the present time, people turn to all sorts of charlatans and con men. Trump is an example of this. If the left and mass organizations of the working class won’t fill this vacuum, then the right will. The so-called strong man will save us. For millions of others they sink in to despair, are attracted to cults, religious salvation, drug addiction alcoholism and so forth. Most of our problems including racism and other forms of oppression are systematic in nature, just like wars. Capitalism is a system based on war.

 

The doctor above talks of government, or what we call the state and that the “Founding Fathers”believed the role of their state or government  was to ensure “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” They did indeed, but they were talking about their people their class as capitalists with their world view, their concept of society, a free market capitalist system where the central goal is profits. And the role of their government and the government we have today is to defend that profit system, a system where a few get rich at the expense of the many. It is an oppressive, violent system, the whole history of capitalism and the US shows this.

 

One can sympathize with the actions of an individual and what causes them while opposing such methods. The method of struggle of the working class is clearly not individual assassination, or acts of individual terrorism. We have won what we have through mass direct action movements, international working class solidarity and the formation of political parties. Mass strikes, occupations, general strikes and popular insurrections are the methods of the working class.

 

If assassinating a political figure could lead to a transformation of society in the direction I suggest, it would be worth it but it is not. The ruling class simply replaces one despot or representative of their rule with another. Individual acts of violence are substitutions for the conscious intervention and mass action of the working class in the struggle to change society.

 

Luigi Mangione is from an upper middle class or bourgeois family. He does not grasp the potential power of the working class or understand the working class as a worker does. We now know he had serious medical issues, horribly painful experiences and dealing with the sickness industrial Complex and likely with arrogant doctors must have driven him mad at times. We don’t know the all of it, but we know what he must have gone through over the years. His action may well have simply been revenge, we don’t know for sure. But it won’t change the root cause of a barbaric health care system like we have in the US.

And it's highly unlikely Luigi Mangione will receive the same praise awarded Kyle Rittenhouse as Mangione shot one of theirs.

A degenerate regime falls – what may replace it?

Reprinted from Counterfire.org 

Kevin Ovenden  

8 December 2024

|Analysis

Syrian rebels in City of Hama. Source: FMT / cropped from original / CC BY 4.0

 

Kevin Ovenden outlines the rise and fall of Arab nationalism and asks what are the options now for Syria and the region 

The outcome of the Second World War brought the end of the colonial and mandate period of direct Western imperialist control in the Middle East. It did not bring the end of imperialist domination. That was refashioned to meet the realities of formal state independence. 

It was done in order to push back and then contain revolutionary developments in one state after another across the region. The Egyptian victory over nationalising the Suez Canal in 1956 was a global boost to all standing against the old colonial powers and new imperialist order. It spurred a massive wave of radicalism throughout the Middle East from Algeria fighting French colonialism to Britain’s colony in Yemen. 

The first enervation of that post-war radical Arab nationalist movement in Syria, which had grown in the 1950s and of which the Baath party was one major expression, came the following decade. The failure of the short-lived United Arab Republic uniting post-colonial Egypt and Syria from 1958 to 1961, and dominated by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, was followed by three coups in Syria. There were many internal factors driving the split between Syria and Egypt. But it was still a triumph for imperialist diplomacy. 

The Syrian coups brought the Baath party to power and as part of that the rise of airforce commander Hafez al Assad. Already by 1971 he led a sharp turn to deradicalisation of the regime. It abandoned the ‘Arab Socialist’ orientation that was part of the contradictory original Baath programme and moved in a more openly capitalist direction. That also happened in Egypt under Nasser’s successor. 

There was a violent purge of the left and radicals in Syria. With it came the institutionalisation of sectarian and patrimonial rule. Into the growing void of any radical transformative policy for ordinary people within Syria, and thus across the Arab nation, came a rejuvenation of the old colonial methods against which revolutionary Arab nationalism had set itself in the 1930s and 1940s. 

So military intervention in Lebanon in 1976, which was gripped by civil wars and then outright Israeli invasion, led not to Syria pressuring Israel and strengthening the Palestinian movement, but instead to a resented occupation of part of the country. Long forgotten now is the fact that after Hezbollah was founded in 1982 to destroy Israel’s continuing occupation of the south of Lebanon it also had to fight the Syrian presence in the centre and north, which tried to crush resistance. 

Behind Arab nationalist rhetorical flourishes there was the consolidation of an increasingly repressive state representing the interests of a narrow core of capitalist, ruling class families. That was centred on the Assad family and state-military bureaucrats making compacts with other powerful figures and relying on sectarian religious and ethnic division. That, and on navigating the last years of the Cold War. 

The massacre of the Muslim Brotherhood and the uprising in the city of Hama in 1982 was the bloodiest illustration. Probably 25,000 people were killed by Assad’s forces. They were commanded by his brother Rifaat – who was welcomed in the West having fled with billions of dollars following a failed coup in 1984. 

At the same time Saddam Hussein in Iraq, ostensibly also leading a fellow Baathist ‘Arab Socialist’ state and urged on by the US, had invaded Iran in order to prevent the impetus of the 1979 revolution destabilising regimes across the Middle East. Whether those regimes were considered Soviet- or US-aligned. 

Saddam, like Assad, was also engaged in a brutal internal purge of opponents – Communists who refused to capitulate, residues of the left of the Baath party, Nasserists, religiously inspired movements, independent intellectuals, the Kurdish rights groups and certainly any trade union or popular organisation. 

Despite all the talk of Arab unity, the Syrian regime endorsed the US-led Gulf War of 1991 against its Iraqi rival. Both the Assad regime and Saddam’s did find themselves at odds with US imperialism, especially after 9/11 and the hubristic declaration of a war on terror to remake the whole Middle East as compatible with US interests. Decades of accommodation by both Damascus and Baghdad meant acceptance of the imperialist order internationally and the full adoption of capitalist and authoritarian dictates domestically. 

Two decades more of degeneration followed, such that the Syrian state increasingly stood mainly upon an apparatus of repression. Its own divide and rule methods and tribalist clientelism made it easier for outside powers of all kinds to shift popular discontent along those lines. 

That happened devastatingly as the initial wave of the ‘Arab Spring’ reaching Syria in 2011 gave way to civil war. The regime turned to the most violent repressive methods. Local and imperial powers backed favoured groupings – oppositional or regime malcontents – for their own ends. It was one aspect of a three-faced strategy in dealing with the Arab revolutionary uprisings that had toppled Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt. 

First was to rally to the key western allies in the Gulf and to back their military-state repression, as in Bahrain and Yemen. Second was to seek to suborn various revolutionary forces, as in Libya, and then Syria, to direct them along channels that did not threaten western interests and to play on sectional and sectarian division. The third strand was to bury popular revolutionary impetus under a deluge of regional conflict and sectarian strife – enabled also by other powers, local and imperialist. Israel has played a vital role in this. 

It was the US invasion of Iraq and its defeated occupation that strengthened Iran more than anything that the Islamic Republic did of its own accord regarding US imperialism or Israel. Establishment opponents of the Iraq war warned that this would be the result as a violent unstable equilibrium of sorts had operated since 1979 by playing off Iraq and Iran against each other. That is the root of the US and Israeli obsession with Iran today. It is the shadow of their own failures. 

We see now that there was nothing left underpinning the Syrian regime as it fell and its army evaporated, even though many people fear now with good reason further sectarian civil war and manifold intervention. Everything that the West has done makes that more likely. It is what it did in Libya by usurping the fall of another state, Muammar Gaddafi’s. Its underpinnings had also rotted away and no amount of prison torture was able to compensate. 

Now the torture is done by rival militias and paid for by the European Union to stop Africans from crossing the Mediterranean to seek sanctuary or a better life in Europe. The mechanism has been extended to Tunisia, where the first advance of the Arab Spring 14 years ago has been turned back. There is an authoritarian, pro-western president in power. The opposition Muslim Brotherhood and secular figures are heavily repressed. There is a regime of racist violence against black Africans. 

There are lessons here. The first one is for all authoritarian regimes. That includes those that authenticate themselves in one way or another through a history in which they could once lay claim to be embodying revolutionary and newly independent hope. That is true of Algeria today, for example. It ought to be even more of a lesson for those such Saudi Arabia and General Sisi’s Egypt. They have no such fabled backstory – only one of subordination to the US and its imperialist alliance, with Israel as its centrepiece. That is the dominant axis in the region and the biggest counter-revolutionary force. 

A second axis is centred on Turkey and Qatar. Turkey is a Nato member. But in the words of Erdogan’s former foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu it seeks to ‘draw the bow deep to the east in order for the arrow to fly farther to the west’. That is to advance Turkish capitalism’s interests in the EU and Nato through leaning upon the historic Ottoman Muslim influence in the Middle East and Central Asia. It is the Russia-Iran axis that ranks as a weakened third. But it is that that we are supposed to focus on almost exclusively – along with North Korea and China. 

Uprisings in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Morocco, of course, are not what Western politicians have in mind who have suddenly, and once again, discovered an affection for people toppling statues. (Just don’t try doing that at home – the British state will hand out longer sentences than for rape.) 

These are the same people also urging calm in Seoul and an orderly retirement for a right-wing strongly pro-US president who tried to introduce martial law last week. They do not want him swept out in a process of popular revolt to win a kind of radical democracy that South Korea has never had. Those protesting in Romania against judges cancelling a presidential election are considered ‘Putin stooges’ because the ‘wrong candidate’ was winning the election due to conclude today.

The people of Syria have had to put up with decades of repression and many-sided interference in their country designed to prevent socialist change and instead to channel efforts in the interests of one or other elite, domestic and foreign. 

A second lesson from the last decade and much longer, unfortunately, is that foreign and local reactionary manipulation continues despite the overdue fall of the Assad regime. It does so in conditions of widening war across the region – driven above all by Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians and the support for it by the US state and allies such as Britain. 

The West would like to turn the joyous scenes of popular statue-topping in Damascus today into Syrian acquiescence to Israel and its expansionism. Trump (and the Democrats) are committed to normalisation of Israel over the corpse of Palestine. 

They want to return to the process that 7 October last year violently interrupted of the embrace of Israel by Egypt and Jordan 40 years ago, and recently Morocco, to extend fully to Saudi Arabia, Syria, a vassal Lebanon and eventually a broken, Balkanised Iran. 

The US has troops in Syria and in Iraq. If they were meant to be liberators from the Assad and Saddam regimes, why are they still there? And what of the fate of the Kurdish forces who Turkey’s Erdogan makes no secret of wanting to annihilate and who the US cynically pledged an alliance with. That was when the enemy was supposed to be ISIS. But the enemy of the day shifts all the time. 

Abandoning Palestine and accepting a different overlordship more compatible with US-led imperialism is not the sentiment among most Syrians or Arabs – or Kurds or others in the region. But in conditions of sectarian militias degenerated by reactionary civil war and dependent on rival foreign sponsors, the collective voices and interests of ordinary people, workers and peasants, are usually suppressed in one way or another. That is a bitter truth from seeing throughout history one day of popular joy after another turn into grief. 

It is to be hoped that the revolutionary and socialist voices in Syria, who have a history of internationalist, anti-imperialist radicalism and popular unity to draw on, can find ways to make themselves heard. 

We who are in Nato countries can contribute above all by fighting to curb our states and their proxy forces from doing as they have done for over a century of malign interference in the Middle East. That imperialist domination today is realised in the Palestinian genocide. 

Palestine and the unprecedented international solidarity movement remain a lodestone above and beyond all the other social, political and military battles in the Middle East – however important they are for progress – and they provide a cardinal compass point. 

A litmus test of any politics claiming to stand for freedom and social advance in the Middle East is the extent to which it brings nearer the liberation of the Palestinian people. 

The US state department has boasted that the Pentagon may not occupy most of Syria, but it does have the best wheat growing land and the oil fields under its control. Those belong to the Syrian people. Not to the US. Not to Turkey. Not to any other state. Not to Shell or BP. And not to one or other aspirant state structure looking to replace the Assads in coming months – perhaps by grafting on to remnants of the last one. 

The people of Syria deserve better. So do those across the region, above all in Palestine. And so do all of us.

Kevin Ovenden

Kevin Ovenden is a progressive journalist who has followed politics and social movements for 25 years. He is a leading activist in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, led five successful aid convoys to break the siege on Gaza, and was aboard the Mavi Marmara aid ship when Israeli commandoes boarded it killing 10 people in May 2010. He is author of Syriza: Inside the Labyrinth.