Homeless Children and Obama.

In the last two years the number of children in homeless families rose between 75 and 100%. There were 679,000 homeless children 2006-2007 and one million in the spring of 2009. This in the richest country in the world. A country that spends trillions on wars of occupation and in tax cuts to the rich. This country is ripe for a major movement for change. The union leaders have the forces to build this. But they are so committed to capitalism and so privileged in their own positions that instead of building a movement for change they kill any sign of a movement for change. Capitalism has forfeited the right to rule and the trade union leaders have forfeited the right to lead. 

On another topic. 

I see that Obama is making a big speech on Wednesday on his health initiative. Why is this initiative going so bad? Of course the Republicans and the right are attacking him but this is not why. 

His priority is to please the health industry complex with its addiction to profit. So he is letting them keep their control over the industry with a little tweek here and there, and at the same time saying he will make the 47 million who are not insured buy insurance. He says those of these 47 million who cannot afford to buy this will get help from the government. The health industrial complex is very happy with this; 47 million more customers, many of them paid for by government money and the system remains driven by profit. The public option was where if you could not buy insurance from the private profit mad insurance companies a public insurance company would be set up and you could buy it from there. This would have helped those who would not have been able to get private insurance and it would have provided some competition for the private profit mad insurance companies and perhaps have pulled their prices down a little. This has come up against the opposition of the health industrial complex and the Republicans and many Democrats and is now being emasculated if it will exist at all. 

The result of this approach is that Obama cannot mobilize support. He will not take on the profit mad merchants of death in the insurance industry and put them on the defensive. He cannot because he is bootlicking these precise forces to try and get his bipartisan deal. He cannot get the support of the working class because he will not take on the profit mad health industrial complex who are so viciously exploiting the working class and meanwhile the health industrial complex and the right whip him for planning to set up death panels and whip him with planning to spend another $1trillion in the next ten years to subsidize health. 

All This makes the older section of the population many of whom have health care very nervous. They worry the country will be bankrupted and they will be worse off than they are now. So many of them opt for doing nothing. Obama's pathetic efforts to work in partnership with the profit addicted forces of capitalism that run this country, whether it is Wall Street and the Banks, or the health industrial complex, show him for the weak capitalist politician he is and will lead to a worsening of the economic, social and political crisis in this country. 

The more thoughtful elements of capitalism are watching Obama carefully and offering their advice. The New York times on Sunday 6th of September had an article on Obama's coming speech on health care. It said, "His job that night will not just be to sell a health care plan, but to reassure Americans that his approach will remain within their ideological comfort zone. To do so he will have to convince the nation - to a degree not required of him as he rushed to pass the economic stimulus package and take other emergency actions - that it can trust government to be both competent and restrained."  An interesting piece of advice. Stay within "Americans" ideological comfort zone." "Convince the Nation."  But there is not such thing as "Americans", there is no such thing as an American "nation." The American profit mad health industrial complex have totally different interests from the American people they claim to insure and so many of whom they turn down when they need coverage. Health care reform has to decide which Americans it supports, the owners and robbers in the insurance industry or the people who need health care. Health care reform has to decide which part of this so called nation it supports, the profit addicted insurance companies or the people who need care.

We stand for a fully publicly owned health care industry where profit plays no part at all. All hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, all sectors of the industry to be publicly owned and democratically run by workers and patients  and to be funded by resources taken from military spending and increased taxes on the rich. A fully publicly owned, a fully publicly financed, health care industry free at the point of use. This is the solution. For this we need to stop supporting the Democratic or Republican Parties and build a mass workers' party on democratic socialist policies.