Privatizing public services from Barnet UK to Chicago Illinois

This video concerns a London borough called Barnet. It will be of interest to folks in Britain. But as we watch it, it could be Detroit MI or Stockton, Vallejo or Riverside here in California. It could be Central Falls Rhode island. Workers of the world unite makes sense when we see that what is happening here is happening thousands of miles away, an almost identical process. In the underdeveloped world it is happening in a slightly different and more openly brutal way. Striking miners shot in South Africa, garment workers that provide Walmart and other retailers with their wares murdered by criminal negligent bosses who refused to provide emergency exits in case of a fire and a fire killed them.

Workers and indigenous people being poisoned by energy companies in Latin America and Africa. The idea that those within a nation cannot be divided, are "one" is a ruse; workers and capitalists all Americans. We have more in common with workers throughout the world no matter what their language or cultural differences, we have a common class interests, the role we play in the production of human needs. We can only stop this madness because,  as Mario Savio famously said

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

The time is even more ripe now, we have to stop their machine and set ours in motion. We cannot make capitalism "nice". Capitalism is a permanent state of war. We have allies in India, Africa, Latin America, all the continents. We have the power to change the world and build a future for all humanity. Time will not wait forever. Below is a short report from some of the activity in Barnet against these measures.  We are all in the same boat. We can all fight back against the same enemy.

Blue Shield turns communist, says profit is bad for your health.

by Richard Mellor

Readers might wonder why I have put on our blog a video advertising Blue Shield, a health industry company. Well, in my usual round about way, I'll explain.

The US is the most powerful capitalist economy in the world. When it comes to capital and the rights of capital, it is the belly of the beast; it is the worst of the major advanced capitalist countries to be poor in.  Since their precious market was dragged from the edge of the abyss by public funds in 2008, we have commented on the nature of the mood.  The bankers are hated, the rich scorned, polls showed that 36% of the US population were favorable to socialism.

This is despite massive propaganda on behalf of the market, for private ownership of the dominant sectors of the economy and against public services in all forms from freeways to communication.  The USPS for example is an extremely efficient operation.  No matter where you are in this country and those comrades that live outside of it need to recognize that it is more a continent than a country; no matter where you live, in the most rural areas, you get your mail.  In some rural areas, the post office is a community center and mail persons have even been deliverers of medicines and other important items for older residents.

For big capitalists though, that's not efficient. It's a service they could be providing, for a profit of course. But to do that they want to close 4000 post offices, cut jobs, lower wages, reduce benefits. That's their efficiency

But I don't want to get too much in to that we have previous blogs on that issue.

Back in 2010, the US Chamber of Commerce embarked on a campaign to boost the image of capitalism as the crash had severely undermined people's confidence in the system.  The COC set up focus groups to get a sense of the mood and found unfortunately that they couldn't use the term "capitalism" as respondents overwhelmingly associated the term with the strong devouring the weak.

This reflects a powerful, inherent sense of fairness and solidarity among most US workers and the middle classes.  This also occurs during declining Union power and the lack of any kind of workers' political party, as the heads of organized Labor capitulate to the capitalist offensive.

This video, or its message, is another stark example of the anti-capitalist mood that exists in US society.  This company, a competitor in the notorious US sickness industrial complex, chooses the motto, "For Care Not Profit" to advertise its services.  What's wrong with profit? Blue Shield are saying in no uncertain terms, that profit cannot provide adequate health care. Horrors! Sacrilege! Downright unAmerican.

I just mentioned this to a friend on the phone and he said that "Well, they're lying", meaning they don't put care before profit.  That's true, but it's why they're lying that is the issue.  Blue Shield has determined that there is a strong current in US society that believes people's health cannot be provided for by the private sector, by a "for profit" system.  They found out in a very simple way----they asked people,  and people told them about their experiences, or in many cases they might have told them about their lack of experiences as they put off going to the doctors as they can't afford it. Most bankruptcies in the US are related to health care.  Many people pay for doctors visits with credit cards and they pay for food more frequently that way as well.

So despite all the hype, conservative thinking or worship of capitalism and the market, is not as dominant in US society as we are led to believe.  The confusion that does exist exists primarily because the heads of organized Labor refuse to tap in to this mood to build an offensive our own; they have the same world view as the bosses.  The Democrats can't tap in to it because on the economic fundamentals they are not much different than the Republicans, the presidential debate showed how similar they really are on what matters, bread and butter. The left has also failed for reasons this blog has explained, to build a left current in the workers' movement.  Unfortunately, for various reasons, the Occupy Movement failed to tap in to it as well and Occupy has lost much of its momentum and more importantly its support among workers; plenty of this has been due to the massive state violence waged on these courageous youth.

It is difficult to say how much longer the mood will last.  The global economy is teetering on the edge of another slowdown or more. The US capitalist class is not yet finished with the war at home that it is waging on US workers in order make us competitive and to pay for its wars abroad.  But it is clear, and lessons from the decline of the Occupy Movement teach us, that building a leadership in preparation for the next upsurge is crucial. That fighting to build militant opposition caucuses in our Unions is a necessity.

It is not just health care that the market fails us on.  It fails on all levels; its time in history as a system of producing the needs of human existence has expired.

In times of heightened class struggle, leadership can be the deciding factor. Many younger workers and students have or will draw correct conclusions from the present ebb, will have learned I'm sure, that a movement that is not rooted in the working class, our communities and organizations is more easily crushed by the state and its forces. 

Memories of work

by Richard Mellor

I have been retired for almost nine years now.  I am a retired public sector worker.  I started working for the local water company as a laborer in 1976.  It was the job of a lifetime.  Prior to this I was working  for a private contractor busting my ass for $3.00 an hour. That was in construction. I also worked for $3.50 an hour as a teachers aide in the Oakland schools which I loved and that taught me to have a serious respect for teachers in urban schools.

My retirement I am told is what is destroying the US economy. I can live on my retirement so far, of course, this is the US, and if I get sick who knows?  Most bankruptcies in the US occur because of medical expenses.

Whenever I drive around the area I see my former co-workers, or the water company taking care of business, making sure residents get water 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This water company was formed in 1923.  Prior to this, there were competing private companies and water service was just too unreliable, after all, profit is what matters in private business.  I remember one time when we were called out for an overtime job at three in the morning. It was a concrete street and it was those days before we had concrete saws and we had to spend hours on end leaning on a paving breaker trying to break the concrete. Most of us have structural problems due to those days.

A woman came out of her house complaining about the noise. "Do you want a shower in the morning?" I said to this women, "If you do, then this is what we have to do, I don't want to be out here either." We were always proud of ensuring during an emergency that we had a consumer's water on in time for work in the morning.  Despite all the propaganda to the contrary that we don't care, this was what almost every employee saw as their goal including our immediate supervisors. Human beings are productive animals, we want to go home at the end of the day and feel like we have contributed to society, produced something as opposed to speculating and gambling on stock markets or spending the day counting money. In those days when we had to work overtime on emergencies, there were no restrictions.  So we might work 24 hours our 18 hours and then we'd have to take sick time to go home and sleep although on occasion a supervisor, many of whom came out of the ditch, would give a crew that had been up most or all of the night an easy job that day. Later on, the Union won us fatigue time so we could go home and sleep and not lose a day's pay.

We in the public sector are under the gun these days.  The hedge fund managers, Wall Street bankers and other the coupon clippers who make all the money in society want to blame us because our wages, benefits and pensions are destroying the economy. This is a smoke screen of course as it is the crisis of capitalism, the wars, the speculation, the gambling that is destroying the economy.  It used to be auto, but since they have driven the auto workers to 1930's wages and conditions with the help of the leaders of the UAW, now it is us, the public sector that they want to make the scapegoats along with immigrants.

Since being retired, I cannot help when I drive in the community stopping by when I see the crews that I used to work with doing some repair or another. Sometimes, I don't even recognize the guys as I have been gone almost 9 years, but often I do and it warms my heart to stop by and chat with them.

I did yesterday when I saw a crew working and it turned out they had a small split on a 6" cast iron main.  Man, that's a muddy job but I miss it. I have a couple photos here to show you what went on.  The right wingers and the bosses' media portray us as people that don't work.  But we provide water, energy, drivers licenses, transportation, garbage collection and all these services to the people of this country. We fight the fires and actually fight the wars.  I am not competing with our brothers and sisters in the private sector here, like the auto workers for example.  Generations of auto workers contributed to making this a rich country and people like Ford and Kirk Kerkorian billionaires. Generations of slaves and immigrant agricultural workers did too, but the coupon clippers don't care about that. If we gain anything from this,  they consider it welfare.

I read about the miners in South Africa today and the Mau Mau fighters who fought against the British to get their land back and the Chinese workers who are striking Foxconn  and Apple and the indigenous in Latin America fighting Chevron.  These are my kin, my brothers and sisters and I am inspired by their struggles on behalf of all of us.

Small split on a 6" CI main.

In these photo's you see a machine that sucks up dirt so we don't have to dig so much with shovels like I have done most of my life.  This is a good thing.  But the problem is that the machine, or the technology which is what it really is, is not owned by us, the workers and our communities. If it was, we would use it to give us more leisure time and make our lives easier.  But as my co workers said, we are doing as much if not more work with less people.  So labor saving devices, technology, is used not to make our lives easier but to increase our workloads, to exploit us further, to get more work out of fewer workers while others are thrown on to the dole queue; the owners of capital call it "squeezing" more production out of the workforce.

While I worked for a public agency, we still functioned in a capitalist economy and there is more and more pressure for us to "compete" to be more like the private sector. The coupon clippers want to privatize public services because public investment crowds out private and reduces opportunities for making profits.  Michel Kalecki, the radical Keynesian, wrote in a paper titled:  The Political Aspects of Full Employment, in 1942: “The economic principles of government intervention require that public investment should be confined to objects which do not compete with the equipment of private business (e.g. hospitals, schools, highways).  Otherwise the profitability of private investment might be impaired, and the positive effect of public investment upon employment offset, by the negative effect of the decline in private investment.”

The problem is that capital is a social product, a collective product and should be collectively owned and collectively allocated in a planned, rational way.  We have to look at the world differently to the coupon clippers who see an expenditure like the USPS as a missed profit making opportunity and wasteful expenditure.  In reality it is simply the wealth created by our collective Labor being returned to us as a public service, profit shouldn't enter in to it, but it always will to the capitalist because that is what they seek when they set production in to motion, not the use of the final product but the value contained in it that is greater than the value they invested in its production.

This is capitalism. We need to not remove ourselves from the workplace but control the workplace and the Labor process. We need to own the machinery. own the technology and labor saving devices that become, in the hands of the capitalists, labor exploiting devices.