Views in brief
Money for health care, not war
IN RESPONSE to Dennis Kosuth's "Profit and health care don't mix": This is very good, and this is coming from a worker in the health care community, not just a pundit from a university or a journalist.
The system is damaged, and it must be done away with and rebuilt, not just reformed. No one knows this more than the patients and the people who treat them. Even people with insurance are being messed around with high deductibles, co-pays and other pesky out-of-pockets.
What's more, your mobility is limited because, if you are lucky enough to have decent insurance, you have to be tied down to a job in order to get and keep it. In the meantime, Blue Cross/Blue Shield is building a 30-story addition to their already huge, gleaming tower located in Chicago's downtown.
Insurance companies love this system, and they're going to fight like hell to keep it this way. Until Americans can get beyond the profit motive--with huge CEO incomes and the focus on shareholder value--our medical messes will not go away.
Medicare is a good system, and many seniors would be in the gutter without it. It's time to expand this type of program on a wider level. Let's start by getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan and using funds for our social health, instead of spreading our broken empire all over the world.
In the meantime, keep fighting and putting out those blazing fires, Dennis!
MBH, Chicago
Don't lump Hezbollah and the Taliban
IN RESPONSE to "Should the left call for a Taliban victory": Putting aside political jargon, the role of people who genuinely oppose U.S. and Western imperialism and want to have an effective role in combating it is to convince the populace in the U.S. and the UK, the prime malefactors in Afghanistan, that neither country has any justification in being there; that the Taliban--whatever one has to say about it--has never attacked either the U.S. or the UK (though now they have been given many reasons to do so); that the Afghan people must be left to sort out how they wish to live and govern themselves without outside interference; and that the money (not to mention the lives wasted in this criminal war) is more badly needed on the home front.
That is what the people in the U.S. and UK need to hear, not some bloody fool with the proper badges and placards crying "Victory for the Taliban!" Anyone doing that I would immediately suspect of being a government agent.
The writer further confirms his ignorance by lumping together Hezbollah, Hamas and the Taliban--evidence that he, too, has bought the Western simplistic definitions of Islam. The origins of the three organizations are very different, as are their relations with the people, which explains the vast numbers of Afghans who neither like the U.S. and UK occupiers nor the Taliban, who wish to dictate every detail of their lives and punish severely those who don't obey them.
The Taliban, like the mujahideen, was largely a Western creation, taking advantage of particular historical circumstances and exploiting them. There has never been anything progressive about it, particularly when one compares it with Hezbollah, which enjoys wide support not only among Lebanon's Shia population, but also more than half of Lebanon's Maronite Christians. Hezbollah is not a fundamentalist organization, and it is an insult, not only an example of the writer's political ignorance, to compare it with the Taliban.
As for the need for a cheering section of Western leftists: It is useful to note that Hezbollah successfully fought and defeated Israeli occupation over an 18-year period, and then whipped Israel's vaunted military in 2006 without any help or apparent need of a U.S. or UK cheering section.
In that case, what needs to be done is build support for the boycott campaign against Israel. In the case of Afghanistan, it might help to start a boycott campaign against the U.S. in the UK and elsewhere.
Jeff, San Francisco
Why the National Equality March?
FROM A socialist perspective, from a leftist perspective and from a queer perspective, I am totally perplexed by SocialistWorker.org's endorsement of Cleve Jones' National Equality March on Washington.
First of all, the march is cooperating with the Human Rights Campaign, which has stood in the way and been protested by labor for years. They also endorse Republicans, pro-war politicians, pro-lifers, etc.
The march can't even muster up an AIDS/HIV organization with enough resources to do a day dedicated to that issue, which is telling.
At a time when our resources--the resources that support the infrastructure of the queer community--are incredibly drained, we are being asked to spend hundreds of dollars to march...for what?
Mark Snyder, QueerToday.com
Feeling betrayed by Obama
I THINK Obama cannot do anything much right now for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights without taking the focus away from health care reform. Any effort made to act on the Defense of Marriage Act or "don't ask, don't tell," or any of the other rights for which we fight will give conservatives powerful ammunition.
As a lesbian, I am enraged and saddened by the pace of change for LGBT people, but getting health care done is much more important to the welfare of the people as a whole. I hope Obama manages to pass true health care reform, and when that is done, I'll expect to see some real change in the rights and protections of LGBT people.
Obama has let me down. As a constitutional law professor, he has continued and extended unconstitutional practices without much argument from the people, and that shows me more about who he is than anything else he has done as president. I'm appalled that I was taken in by his speeches and his liberal facade. I supported him and contributed money to his campaign.
As a result of his turnabout on so many issues, I have left the Democratic Party, and I now vocally support Democratic Socialism for this country. Thanks for being here.
Leslie Basden, Fresno, Calif.
Lessons of the Minneapolis strike
IN AN otherwise excellent article ("Rebellion in Minneapolis"), there were a few omissions that have lessons.
First, Roosevelt's secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, sent negotiators with a planned settlement, first to the union and then to the bosses. The proposed settlement included a 37 cents-an-hour pay raise and union recognition. Although the wage increase was less than what the union wanted, they agreed. (The proposal was called the Haas-Dunnigan proposal after the Labor Department negotiators.)
The bosses accepted the wage increase, but rejected union recognition. Haas and Dunnigan returned to the union to try to force acceptance but were rejected. The union said that they stood by the original proposal. Haas and Dunnigan (and the Roosevelt administration) began quiet support for the Citizens Alliance. Obviously, to them, the union was being unreasonable. The attempt was to pressure the union into allowing the government to renege on its first offer.
This should be pointed out, because there is a tendency nowadays to idealize the New Deal "support" for organized labor--which leads to the uncritical support of the organized labor movement for liberal "friends of labor" Democrats.
Second, the International Union tried to intervene and settle the strike on a "sweetheart contract." The strikers instead formed a grassroots "Committee of 100" to be the principle spokespersons for strike policy. It provided a stratum of secondary leadership that was essential when the strike leadership was jailed. Leadership in the strike was not from the top down.
Third, discipline was enforced. Farrell Dobbs recounts an incident where Bill Brown and Grant Dunne were driving around town reviewing strategic locations when they saw a scab truck moving. They commandeered a car full of picketers to head off the scabs. It was a trap. The scab truck led the picketers into a blind alley, and a gang of thugs came out of the truck and proceeded to beat them, injuring a couple of them severely.
Kelly Postal was the chief picket dispatcher and took his job very seriously. Picketers were not to be sent without approval of the chief dispatcher. Kelly was also well aware of the hazards facing picketers and was cautious about detailing picketers without backup.
Needless to say Kelly nearly "went postal." He hauled Brown and Dunne up in front of the committee on charges of violating the strike policy on pickets. Brown and Dunne were harshly rebuked. The Committee of 100 made it clear that no matter how high in the leadership, democratically arrived at strike policies would not be violated.
Farrell Dobbs' book Teamster Rebellion, part of a four-book series on the Teamsters, contains these and other invaluable lessons.
Jack Bateman, Silver City, N.M.
