Gothic Capitalism Redux

A year ago I published this essay on horror literature , legends and mythology and their cultural impact on the modernist culture of 20th Century Capitalism. I thought it was worth posting the abstract for it here, with the link back to the original article.

It is a piece of original writing that counters the concept that the blogosphere is dying, or just about diaries, or lacks the depth of other forms of web based publishing, or publishing period.

It is buried deep in the dusty back pages of this blog and so I blow the cobwebs off it and present here for those who missed it the first time around. Yes I am rather proud of it....just like Dr. Frankenstein, "It's Alive", when the creature arose from the slab. I guess like the good doctor you could say I am reanimating this essay.

I left out the Vampire in this essay but later in the year found an excellent article on the subject that fit my thesis. I also have expanded on my writings on cyborg culture and AI since then.

GOTHIC CAPITALISM

The Horror of Accumulation and the Commodification of Humanity.

ABSTRACT:

This article is in six parts with appendices. All footnotes are at the end of the article

1 ZOMBIE CAPITALISM
In Haiti under American Imperialism, 1915-1935, the cult of the Zombie developed and under capitalism became a tool for creating a docile labouring class for work on American controlled sugar plantations. With the publication of the Magic Island by William Seabrook in 1929 American popular culture was introduced to the Zombie, and it quickly became a popular character in horror literature, news stories and movies.

2 FRANKENSTEIN THE LUDDITE
The first monster of ascendant capitalism was Frankenstein’s monster. Like the Zombie this creature had no name and was made up of the spare parts of capitalisms rejects, (the criminal, the vagabond, the worker starved and thrown out of work), he was a scientific experiment to create man, man the machine, the human result of mechanization, the mechanical man. He was in short a prototype not only of the Zombie but the later Robot or android, the ultimate proletarian, a machine man to operate the machinery of capitalism.

3 REVOLT OF THE ROBOTS
Like the mechanized working class the majority of robots in science fiction revolt against their human masters, whether it is the artificial environment of the spaceship computer Hal in 2001, the worker robot Hector in Saturn 3, or the artificial human ‘replicants’ in Blade Runner, or the recent movie version of I, Robot, the fact remains that as the robots become self conscious they recognize their oppression and revolt. This metaphor could not exist without the class struggle that has actually occurred under capitalism itself.

4 THE GOLEM: the Origin of Artificial Man
The Jewish legend of the Golem is another form of the Zombie/Frankenstein/Robot iconography. The Golem is written after Frankenstein, in 1889. The legend of the Golem, is about a man of clay created by Rabbi Loew in 16th Century Prague to free the Jews in the Ghetto from their endless toil and oppression. The mindless clay monster eventually learns and becomes conscious and like Frankenstein he must be destroyed when he attacks those who would oppress the Jews.

5 CAPITALIST GHOULS
The modern day ghoul is the doctor and his criminal working class accomplices who preyed on the poor in Edinburgh’s working class ghetto for their body parts for scientific research. The ghoul appears in English literature as the short story the Body Snatchers by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1881 based on the actual 19th century grave robbers and murders Burke and Hare.

6 THE MANY HEADED HYDRA: The Proletarian History of Atlantic Expansion. Leviathan and the Great Beast go head to head in the New World as workers, peasants, slaves and indigineous peoples struggle for liberty in the first age of global capitalism.

If you would like you can download GOTHIC CAPTIALISM as a PDF or Word Doc


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Goth, horror, literature, zombies, frankenstien, Golem, Capitalism, Ghouls, body, snatchers, modernism, film, books, movies, culture, Haiti,

Gothic "Voodoo" in Africa and Haiti

E Tropic, 2019

Eric J Montgomery

This paper seeks to historicize and demystify “Voodoo” religion in Africa and Haiti while also drawing comparisons and contrasts to concepts and themes related to “the gothic”. What is assumed to be “supernatural” or “paranormal” in Western and Gothic circles has long been a part of everyday reality for many peoples of African descent and devotees of Vodun in Western Africa and Vodou in Haiti. Tropes that are essential to realms of the gothic (supernatural characters, mystery, the macabre, spirits, and paranormal entities) — are also central to the cosmology and liturgy of so-called “Voodoo”. As “the gothic” undergoes a resurgence in academic and popular cultures, so too does “Voodoo” religion. And yet, both terms continue to be conflated by popular culture, and by equating “voodoo” with “the gothic”, the true spirt of both concepts become confounded. A certain racialized Eurocentric hegemony devalues one of the world’s least understood religions (“Voodoo”) by equating it with equally distorted concepts of “the gothic”. As globalization transforms society, and the neo-liberal order creates more uncertainty, the continued distortion of both terms continues. Vodun does more than just speak to the unknown, it is an ancient organizing principle and way of life for millions of followers. Vodou/Vodun are not cognates of the “American Zombie gothic”, but rather, are a mode of survival and offer a way of seeing and being in an unpredictable world.

Doi: 10.25120/etropic.18.1.2019.3666

Issue: 1

Volume: 18

Publication Date: 2019

Publication Name: E Tropic

Tropical Gothic: arts, humanities and social sciences

eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics, 2019 

Anita Lundberg

Katarzyna Ancuta

Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska

The Gothic is undergoing a pronounced resurgence in academic and popular cultures. Propelled by fears associated with massive social transformations produced by globalisation, the neoliberal order and environmental uncertainty-tropes of the Gothic resonate. The gothic allows us to delve into the unknown, the liminal, the unseen;; into hidden histories and feelings. It calls up unspoken truths and secret desires. In the tropics, the gothic manifests in specific ways according to spaces, places, cultures and their encounters. Within the fraught geographies and histories of colonisation and aggression that have been especially acute across the tropical regions of the world, the tropical gothic engages with orientalism and postcolonialism. The tropics, as the region of the greatest biodiversity in the world, is under enormous stress, hence tropical gothic also engages with gothic ecocriticism, senses of space, landscape and place. Globalisation and neoliberalism likewise impact the tropics, and the gothic imagery of these 'vampiric' capitalist forces-which impinge upon the livelihoods, traditions and the very survival of peoples of the tropics-is explored through urban gothic, popular culture, posthumanism and queer theory. As the papers in this special issue demonstrate, a gothic sensibility enables humans to respond to the seemingly dark, nebulous forces that threaten existence. These papers engage with specific instances of Tropical Gothic in West 

Doi: 10.25120/etropic.18.1.2019.36 

Publication Date: 2019 

Publication Name: eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics

Tropical Gothic' Special Issue

Tropical Gothic, 2019

Verena Bernardi

The rise of supernatural creatures throughout different media in the post-­2000 era has resulted in a significant change of audiences' perceptions of vampires, werewolves and witches (among others). Traditionally used to reflect human fears, lack of morals or instinct-­related insufficiencies, these creatures are no longer fear-­inducing monsters. Instead, their depiction tends to adopt human qualities to confront the audience with missteps and downfalls of contemporary societies and politics. This paper analyzes the television series The Originals as a supernatural mirror image of American society, where the different communities' struggles for power and their place in New Orleans becomes a micro-­cosmos for the American nation. The setting plays a crucial role in the series, which Gothicizes New Orleans to construct a space in which the characters are shown to operate in a posthuman context. This paper will clarify how the protagonists' posthuman characteristics and their placement in the subtropical landscape of Louisiana uncovers contemporary societal concerns and brings aspects such as Urban Gothic and tropicality closer to the audiences' reality. Ultimately, it is in the capital of the subtropical Deep South of America where the hegemonic discourse and practices of discrimination and spatial separation are reflected and challenged.

Doi: 10.25120/etropic.18.1.2019.3689

Publication Date: 2019

Publication Name: Tropical Gothic

blood_and_soil_2018 

https://www.academia.edu/37005421/blood_and_soil_2018.pdf

Lisa Lampert-Weissig

The third season of The Vampire Diaries introduces the story of the “Originals”, a family who came to North America with Vikings in the eleventh century and became vampires as a way to protect themselves against ‘native werewolves’. This mythology draws on the legend of Vinland, a paradise supposedly settled by Vikings in North America and recounted in thirteenth-century saga of the same name. The Vinland story has been used since the nineteenth century to legitimate white nationalism in North America. Further, medievalism more generally permeates both vampire narrative and the mythology of the ‘Old South’ so important to the fictional Mystic Falls where The Vampire Diaries is set. Focusing primarily on season three of The Vampire Diaries, I argue that the series’ emphasis on a Nordic origin for its “Original” vampires, combined with obfuscation of the history and legacy of slavery and racism in the United States, results in a narrative that ultimately, if inadvertently, legitimates white nationalist claims.

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/01/my-2005-paper-gothic-capitalism-full.html

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=CLR+JAMES

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=BLACK+JACOBINS

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=HAITI

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=VOODOO

'Zombie Debt': Homeowners face

 foreclosure on old mortgages

MICHAEL HILL

Tue, November 15, 2022 

Rose Prophete thought the second mortgage loan on her Brooklyn home was resolved about a decade ago — until she received paperwork claiming she owed more than $130,000.

“I was shocked,” said Prophete, who refinanced her two-family home in 2006, six years after arriving from Haiti. "I don’t even know these people because they never contacted me. They never called me.”

Prophete is part of a wave of homeowners who say they were blindsided by the start of foreclosure actions on their homes over second loans that were taken out more than a decade ago. The trusts and mortgage loan servicers behind the actions say the loans were defaulted on years ago.

Some of these homeowners say they weren't even aware they had a second mortgage because of confusing loan structures. Others believed their second loans were rolled in with their first mortgage payments or forgiven. Typically, they say they had not received statements on their second loans for years as they paid down their first mortgages.

Now they're being told the loans weren't dead after all. Instead, they're what critics call “zombie debt” — old loans with new collection actions.

While no federal government agency tracks the number of foreclosure actions on second mortgages, attorneys aiding homeowners say they have surged in recent years. The attorneys say many of the loans are owned by purchasers of troubled mortgages and are being pursued now because home values have increased and there’s more equity in them.

“They’ve been holding them, having no communication with the borrowers," said Andrea Bopp Stark, an attorney with the Boston-based National Consumer Law Center. "And then all of a sudden they’re coming out of the woodwork and are threatening to foreclose because now there is value in the property. They can foreclose on the property and actually get something after the first mortgages are paid off.”

Attorneys for owners of the loans and the companies that service them argue that they are pursuing legitimately owed debt, no matter what the borrower believed. And they say they are acting legally to claim it.

How did this happen?

Court actions now can be traced to the tail end of the housing boom earlier this century. Some involve home equity lines of credit. Others stem from “80/20” loans, in which homebuyers could take out a first loan covering about 80% of the purchase price, and a second loan covering the remaining 20%.

Splitting loans allowed borrowers to avoid large down payments. But the second loans could carry interest rates of 9% or more and balloon payments. Consumer advocates say the loans — many originating with since-discredited lenders — included predatory terms and were marketed in communities of color and lower-income neighborhoods.

The surge in people falling behind on mortgage payments after the Great Recession began included homeowners with second loans. They were among the people who took advantage of federal loan modification programs, refinanced or declared bankruptcy to help keep their homes.

In some cases, the first loans were modified but the second ones weren't.

Some second mortgages at that time were “charged off,” meaning the creditor had stopped seeking payment. That doesn’t mean the loan was forgiven. But that was the impression of many homeowners, some of whom apparently misunderstood the 80/20 loan structure.

Other borrowers say they had difficulty getting answers about their second loans.

In the Miami area, Pastor Carlos Mendez and his wife, Lisset Garcia, signed a modification on their first mortgage in 2012, after financial hardships resulted in missed payments and a bankruptcy filing. The couple had bought the home in Hialeah in 2006, two years after arriving from Cuba, and raised their two daughters there.

Mendez said they were unable to get answers about the status of their second mortgage from the bank and were eventually told that the debt was canceled, or would be canceled.

Then in 2020, they received foreclosure paperwork from a different debt owner.

Their attorney, Ricardo M. Corona, said they are being told they owe $70,000 in past due payments plus $47,000 in principal. But he said records show the loan was charged off in 2013 and that the loan holders are not entitled to interest payments stemming from the years when the couple did not receive periodic statements. The case is pending.

“Despite everything, we are fighting and trusting justice, keeping our faith in God, so we can solve this and keep the house,” Mendez said in Spanish.

Second loans were packaged and sold, some multiple times. The parties behind the court actions that have been launched to collect the money now are often investors who buy so-called distressed mortgage loans at deep discounts, advocates say. Many of the debt buyers are limited liability companies that are not regulated in the way that big banks are.

The plaintiff in the action on the Mendez and Garcia home is listed as Wilmington Savings Fund Society, FSB, “not in its individual capacity but solely as a Trustee for BCMB1 Trust.”

A spokeswoman for Wilmington said it acts as a trustee on behalf of many trusts and has “no authority with respect to the management of the real estate in the portfolio.” Efforts to find someone associated with BCMB1 Trust to respond to questions were not successful.

Some people facing foreclosure have filed their own lawsuits citing federal requirements related to periodic statements or other consumer protection laws. In Georgia, a woman facing foreclosure claimed in federal court that she never received periodic notices about her second mortgage or notices when it was transferred to new owners, as required by federal law. The case was settled in June under confidential terms, according to court filings.

In New York, Prophete is one of 13 plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit claiming that mortgage debt is being sought beyond New York’s six-year statute of limitations, resulting in violations of federal and state law.

“I think what makes it so pernicious is these are homeowners who worked very hard to become current on their loans,” said Rachel Geballe, a deputy director at Brooklyn Legal Services, which is litigating the case with The Legal Aid Society. “They thought they were taking care of their debt.”

The defendants in that case are the loan servicer SN Servicing and the law firm Richland and Falkowski, which represented mortgage trusts involved in the court actions, including BCMB1 Trust, according to the complaint. In court filings, the defendants dispute the plaintiff's interpretation of the statute of limitations, say they acted properly and are seeking to dismiss the lawsuit.

“The allegations in the various mortgage foreclosure actions are truthful and not misleading or deceptive," Attorney Daniel Richland wrote in a letter to the judge. "Plaintiff’s allegations, by contrast, are implausible and thus warrant dismissal.”

___

Associated Press writer Claudia Torrens and researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed to this report.

What Lies Beneath: Vets worry polluted base made them ill


By MARTHA MENDOZA, JULIET LINDERMAN and JASON DEAREN

February 23, 2022 

FORT ORD NATIONAL MONUMENT, Calif. (AP) — For nearly 80 years, recruits reporting to central California’s Fort Ord considered themselves the lucky ones, privileged to live and work amid sparkling seas, sandy dunes and sage-covered hills.

But there was an underside, the dirty work of soldiering. Recruits tossed live grenades into the canyons of “Mortar Alley,” sprayed soapy chemicals on burn pits of scrap metal and solvents, poured toxic substances down drains and into leaky tanks they buried underground.

When it rained, poisons percolated into aquifers from which they drew drinking water.

Through the years, soldiers and civilians who lived at the U.S. Army base didn’t question whether their tap water was safe to drink.

But in 1990, four years before it began the process of closing as an active military training base, Fort Ord was added to the Environmental Protection Agency’s list of the most polluted places in the nation. Included in that pollution were dozens of chemicals, some now known to cause cancer, found in the base’s drinking water and soil.

Decades later, several Fort Ord veterans who were diagnosed with cancers — especially rare blood disorders — took the question to Facebook: Are there more of us?

Soon, the group grew to hundreds of people who had lived or served at Fort Ord and were concerned that their health problems might be tied to the chemicals there.

The Associated Press interviewed nearly two dozen of these veterans for this story and identified many more. The AP also reviewed thousands of pages of documents, and interviewed military, medical and environmental scientists.

There is rarely a way to directly connect toxic exposure to a specific individual’s medical condition. Indeed, the concentrations of the toxics are tiny, measured in parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of an immediate poisoning. Local utilities, the Defense Department and some in the Department of Veterans Affairs insist Fort Ord’s water is safe and always has been.
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But the VA’s own hazardous materials exposure website, along with scientists and doctors, agree that dangers do exist for military personnel exposed to contaminants.

The problem is not just at Fort Ord. This is happening all over the U.S. and abroad, almost everywhere the military has set foot, and the federal government is still learning about the extent of both the pollution and the health effects of its toxic legacy.

The AP’s review of public documents shows the Army knew that chemicals had been improperly dumped at Fort Ord for decades. Even after the contamination was documented, the Army downplayed the risks.

And ailing veterans are being denied benefits based on a 25-year-old health assessment. The CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry concluded in 1996 that there were no likely past, present or future risks from exposures at Fort Ord.


But that conclusion was made based on limited data, and before medical science understood the relationship between some of these chemicals and cancer.

This is what is known:

Veterans in general have higher blood cancer rates than the general population, according to VA cancer data. And in the region that includes Fort Ord, veterans have a 35 percent higher rate of multiple myeloma diagnosis than the general U.S. population.

Veterans like Julie Akey.

Akey, now 50, arrived at Fort Ord in 1996 with a gift for linguistics. She enlisted in the Army on the condition that she could learn a new language. And so the 25-year-old was sent to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and lived at Fort Ord as a soldier. By then the base was mostly closed but still housed troops for limited purposes.

“It was incredibly beautiful,” she said. “You have the ocean on one side, and these expansive beaches, and the rolling hills and the mountains behind.”

What she didn’t know at the time was that the ground under her feet, and the water that ran through the sandy soil into an aquifer that supplied some of the base’s drinking water was polluted. Among the contaminants were cancer-causing chemicals including trichloroethylene, also known as the miracle degreaser TCE.

She’d learn this decades later, as she tried to understand how, at just 46 and with no family history of blood cancers, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

“No one told us,” she said.

___





Despite the military’s claims that there aren’t any health problems associated with living and serving at Fort Ord, nor hundreds of other shuttered military bases, almost every closure has exposed widespread toxic pollution and required a massive cleanup. Dozens have contaminated groundwater, from Fort Dix in New Jersey to Adak Naval Air Station in Alaska. Fort Ord is 25 years into its cleanup as a federal Superfund site, and it’s expected to continue for decades.

To date, the military has only acknowledged troops’ health could have been damaged by drinking contaminated water at a single U.S. base: Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and only during a 35-year window, between 1953 to 1987. Servicemembers there were found by federal epidemiologists to have higher mortality rates from many cancers, including multiple myeloma and leukemia. Men developed breast cancer, and pregnant women tended to have children with higher rates of birth defects and low birth weight. Like Fort Ord, Camp Lejeune began closing contaminated wells in the mid-’80s.

Soldiers are often stationed at different bases during their years of military service, but neither the Defense Department nor the VA has systematically tracked toxic exposures at various locations.

Fort Ord’s primary mission was training troops who deployed to World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam. It supported several thriving small towns on a piece of coastal land the size of San Francisco. Soldiers and their families lived in houses and apartments connected to its water system, and civilians worked at its airfields, hospitals and other facilities.

In the course of their work preparing for battle, they spilled solvents into the base’s drains, sloughed chemical sludge into underground storage tanks and discarded 55-gallon drums of caustic material in the base landfill, according to a 1982 hazardous waste inventory report.


Curt Gandy, a former airplane mechanic, recalls being routinely doused with toxic chemicals from the 1970s to the 1990s. He said he hosed down aircraft with solvents, cleaned engine parts and stripped paint off fuselages without any protection. There were barrels of toluene, xylene, jet fuel and more.

“It gets on your body, it gets in your face, you get splashed with it, and we’re using pumps to spray this stuff,” he said. “It’s got 250 pounds of pressure and we’re spraying it into the air and it’s atomized.”

On Fridays, crews would forklift barrels of the used flammable liquids down a bumpy sandy road, dumping solvents, paint and metal chips onto the hulks of broken aircraft and tanks at a burn pit. One weekend a month, airfield firefighters would light up the toxic sludge and then douse the roaring fires with foam.

In 1984, an anonymous caller tipped off Fort Ord’s officials that “approximately 30 55-gallon drums,” containing about 600 gallons of a “solvent-type liquid” had been illegally spilled there, an Army report said. The state, which ordered a cleanup two years later, determined the Army had mismanaged the site in a way that threatened both ground and surface waters.

And the burn pit wasn’t the base’s only polluted site.

In 1991, when the Army began investigating what had actually been disposed of at the base’s dump overlooking Monterey Bay, officials told the public the trash was similar to what one would find in the landfill of any small city, according to transcripts of community meetings.




(AP Video/Serginho Roosblad and Marshall Ritzel)

While it’s true that much of the trash going into that dump came from nearby houses — food scraps, old furniture, busted appliances, even gasoline — the Army officials who spoke at the meetings made no mention of the toxic stew of paints and solvents that today are banned from open landfills. The solvent TCE was among dozens of pollutants that scientists discovered as early as 1985 and today still exists in concentrations above the legal limit for drinking water in the aquifer below, according to local and federal water quality reports.

“The water from the aquifer above leaks down into the aquifer below and the pollution just gets deeper,” said Dan O’Brien, a former board member of the Marina Coast Water District, which took over the Army’s wells in 2001. “The toxic material remains in the soil under where it was dumped. Every time it rains, more of the toxin in the soil leeches down into the water table.”

The Army’s early tests of Fort Ord’s wells near the landfill detected levels of TCE 43 separate times from 1985 to 1994. The VA told the AP the contamination was “within the allowable safe range” in areas that provided drinking water.

But 18 of those TCE hits exceeded legal safety limits; one reading was five times that amount. It’s unclear how long and at what concentrations TCE may have been in the water before 1985. And TCE was only one problem. The EPA identified more than 40 “chemicals of concern” in soil and groundwater.

“It was not recognized that it was so toxic back then, and they threw it on the ground after use. They used a ton of it. Now, it’s the most pervasive groundwater contaminant we have,” said Thomas Burke, an environmental epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a former EPA official.


Contractors initially brought in to clean up the contaminated groundwater were warned not to tell community members what they found in their drinking water, specifically not the news media or even local public agencies, according to a 1985 military memo.

At the time, there were elevated levels of TCE in the aquifers, yet the military assured the public the drinking water was safe.

“There never have been any test results that indicate that Fort Ord’s water was unsafe,” an Army official told several local papers in August 1985.

Since then, advances in medical science have increased the understanding of the dangers of the chemicals at Fort Ord. TCE, for example, is now a known human carcinogen, and epidemiological studies indicate a possible link between TCE and blood cancers like non-Hodgkin lymphoma and multiple myeloma.

TCE “circulates in the body real effectively when you breathe it or drink it,” Burke said. “It’s related strongly to kidney cancer, the development of kidney cancers and suspected in several other cancers.”

Julie Akey spent years collecting names of people who lived at Fort Ord and were later diagnosed with cancers. Her database eventually grew to more than 400 people, nearly 200 of which were listed as having those blood cancers.
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___

Akey spent most of her Fort Ord days in a classroom, studying Arabic. But in the afternoons and evenings, she’d run along the coastline and do military drills. At home, she watered her small vegetable plot with the base’s water supply, harvesting the fresh crops to chop into salads.

She filled her water bottle from the tap before heading out each morning, and thought nothing of the showers she took each night. After all, she was among hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the base’s history who did the same.

She fell ill in Bogota, Colombia, in 2016. She’d left the military after nearly six years as a translator and interrogator to become a State Department foreign service officer, a dream job that gave her the chance to travel the world with her twin sons. Quite suddenly she became fatigued with a persistent ache in her bones. Soon she was in screaming pain.

When the Colombian doctors couldn’t find a cause, Akey was sent to the U.S. for what she assumed would be a quick trip. She left plants on the mantel, food in the refrigerator and clothes at the dry cleaners.

She never went back.

After weeks at the Cleveland Clinic, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare and aggressive form of cancer that attacks plasma cells, and is most often detected in elderly African American men. The disease is treatable but has no cure.

“I was a zombie,” she said. “I cried all the time.”

Worried about keeping her government health insurance, she applied to work at a nearby airport as a part-time baggage checker while recovering from a bone marrow transplant.

“You don’t ever think you’re going to have cancer at 46. Why? Why do I get this crazy cancer that no one’s ever heard of? So, I started looking for answers,” she said.





Akey meticulously reviewed her assignments in Spain and Haiti, her stints in Guyana, Ecuador, Nigeria, at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Gordon in Georgia. And Fort Ord — a federal Superfund site.

“I think that that was my answer,” she said.

Akey read as much as she could about the base, and searched for others like her. She combed through EPA reports, water records, newspaper clippings and obituaries. She scoured social media, and built a database of sick veterans; it’s grown to 491 people to date.

Soon after Akey started a Facebook group in June of 2019, she connected with Tracy Lindquist. Lindquist’s husband, Scott, was stationed at Fort Ord for two years in the 1980s. He has three types of rare cancers, including multiple myeloma. He had a stem cell transplant a few years back, and has been on chemotherapy since 2014.

He has health insurance through the VA, but when he applied for disability payments that would have allowed him to stop working, Tracy said, his claims were denied — twice.

Until May, he drove a van for $11 an hour, shuttling people with developmental disabilities from their group homes to daylong workshops. Sometimes he had to change the oil or do maintenance, and the physical labor was hard on him, Tracy said. Then he started having seizures, and could no longer drive. He tried working three days a week, cleaning the vans and assisting clients, but he couldn’t even manage that. Earlier this month, he was approved for Social Security disability payments.

“Scott hardly ever left the base and he drank water like a fish, and that water was contaminated,” Tracy said. “I know there are people out there, they’ve lost legs and arms, and they need to take care of those people who got hurt in action. But this is a disability, too.”

Debi Schoenrock, who lived around the corner from Akey’s house at Fort Ord, was diagnosed in 2009 with multiple myeloma at 47. Like Akey, she was stunned. She was a military wife and lived on base for three years, from 1990 until 1993. She’d never been sick, and had no family history of cancer. Nobody said anything about toxic substances, she said.


In 1991, the Army surveyed dozens of community members to find out what they knew about groundwater contamination at Fort Ord. Everyone said they were concerned, and no one reported receiving any information from the Army.

Five years later, a federal report assured them that “because the concentration of contamination detected in the past in Fort Ord and Marina drinking water wells was low and the duration was not over a lifetime (70-years), those exposures will not likely result in adverse health effects.”

Decades on, such health assessments at Fort Ord and other military bases are outdated and based on old science, said Burke of Johns Hopkins.

“A 1990s health assessment is a weak thing,” he said.

Peter deFur, a biologist who worked as an EPA-funded scientific adviser at the base, agrees. The report “stated that there could not be future health effects, which is not possible to know,” he said.

While the federal government has established acceptable standards for the amount of TCE in drinking water, no level of such carcinogens is safe, according to the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. Complicating matters, TCE vaporizes easily, and when it is inhaled it can be even more dangerous, according to a National Toxicology Program assessment.

William Collins, who is leading Fort Ord’s cleanup for the Army, said he’s never heard of anyone sickened by pollution at the base. Like the VA, Collins points to the 25-year-old study that found no likely human risks from exposure at Fort Ord. He said anyone can request a new, updated study if they want, which is what happened at Camp Lejeune in 2017.

Federal health officials told the AP no one has done so at Fort Ord.

___





LeVonne Stone and her husband, Donald, were living at Fort Ord when the base shut down. LeVonne had a civilian job there, and Donald had been in the 7th Infantry Division.

During the base conversion, Stone formed the Fort Ord Environmental Justice Network, demanding answers about the toxic materials and the impact on friends and neighbors, who, at the time, made up the only significant Black community on California’s central coast. But she said military and state officials were determined to develop the valuable coastal property and, in her mind, didn’t want to deal with the pollution.

“We tried telling everybody, the state, the federal, everybody,” she said. “There’s so many people who have died of cancer. They have not done anything for the community locally. … They just turned their heads, they looked the other way.”

There have been efforts in recent years to force the government to come to grips with the effects of the military’s environmental abuses.

Numerous bills have been introduced seeking to compensate veterans sickened by exposure to toxic chemicals during their service, but nothing significant has passed.

Last year President Joe Biden called on the VA to examine the impact of burn pits and other airborne hazards. In November, the White House announced that soldiers exposed to burn pits in a handful of foreign countries, who developed any of three specific ailments — asthma, rhinitis and sinusitis — within 10 years can receive disability benefits.

The Board of Veterans Appeals has ruled repeatedly that there’s no presumptive service connection for any disease — stroke, cancer, vision problems, heart disorders and more — due to exposure to toxic chemicals at Fort Ord, according to an AP review of claims.

The VA told the AP that it is updating how it determines links between medical conditions and military service, and encourages veterans who believe their ailments may have been caused by their service to file a claim.

Burke, the Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, said doing a study of health effects of living at Fort Ord now is difficult, if not impossible. “We can’t reproduce what happened on that base in California,” he said. “We need to admit we exposed people to a huge amount of toxic materials.”

And it’s not just a matter of exposures in the past.

Today Fort Ord is home to a small public university; some students live in former Army housing and spend weekends “Ording,” exploring the abandoned, and contaminated, military buildings. More than 1.5 million mountain bikers, hikers and horseback riders a year enjoy some 85 miles of trails in a vast national monument. Brand-new neighborhoods with million-dollar homes are being built across the street from the Superfund landfill cleanup. Local water officials say drinking water is now pulled from other areas and treated before being delivered to customers.


Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta grew up next to Fort Ord, went through basic training on the base and now runs a nonprofit institute there.

Too often, he said, the military does whatever is necessary at its bases to ready troops for war, “and they don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the implications of what will happen once they leave.”

Panetta said the military is abandoning communities, leaving huge messes to clean up.

“I think that they have every right to ask the question whether or not whatever physical ailments they may have was in part due to the failure to provide proper cleanup,” Panetta said. “And in those situations, there is liability. And somebody has to take care of people who have been adversely impacted.”

___

For Akey and other veterans with cancer, it’s a matter of accountability. Health insurance, disability benefits and an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, she said, “isn’t asking for too much.”

“You’re not just serving for six years, like me, and then you’re out,” she said. “If you’ve been given cancer, that’s a life sentence.”

On a recent foggy morning, Gandy, the former airplane mechanic, walked past the rusting hangar at the old airfield where he used to work. The single-landing strip and buildings are now the Marina Municipal Airport. But much of the legacy military infrastructure remains, including sheds with old paint cans, an oil separator the size of a school bus and disconnected nozzles and hoses.

Gandy became an outspoken activist along with LeVonne Stone, and also founded community groups to maintain pressure on the military to clean up the site.

His group repeatedly sued the Army, but a judge agreed with Defense Department attorneys who said the claims were moot because a rigorous cleanup was underway.

Gandy, now 70, said he talked to the base commanders, every mayor and health and safety officer. Twenty-five years later, Gandy’s comments — captured in videos and transcripts of contentious community meetings — seem prescient.

“I told them, ‘If we do what we need to do now, nobody will know that we did the right thing. But if we do it wrong, they’re going to know, because in about 20 years people are going to start dying,’” he said.

The AP obtained a roster of Gandy’s co-workers on a single day at the airfield in 1986. There were 46 pilots and welders, mechanics and radio engineers. Today, he was told, almost a third of them are dead, many of cancers and rare diseases, some in their 50s.

He knew three former colleagues had died, not 13. “I feel terrible,” he said, tearing up. “It breaks my heart. Those guys were good guys and they deserved better.”

___

Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org.

How Canadians Are Losing Medicare

Dr. Susan Rosenthal describes the rise of Canada’s public health system during labor’s rebellious postwar period and the corporate profiteering by which it is now being destroyed.

By Susan Rosenthal

March 17, 2023

Source: Consortium News


Ontario’s Bill 60 has delivered a potential death blow to public Medicare. If it becomes law, the provincial medical system will no longer operate as a public service but as a profit-taking business managed by the private sector.

While defenders of public Medicare blame Conservative Premier Doug Ford, British Columbia, Quebec and Saskatchewan are going down the same road.

If we hope to reverse this disaster, we need to know how Canadians won Medicare in the first place, and why they are losing it.

World War II saw a global upsurge of labor protest. Union membership more than doubled in Canada, and the number of strikes tripled. During the early 1940s, one-third of all workers in Canada were on strike. To calm the rise in worker rebellion, governments agreed to fund social programs like Medicare.

At the time, Canada had virtually no public medical system. Doctors charged whatever they pleased and bankruptcy from high medical bills was common.

The Canadian Labour Congress pushed for a comprehensive public medical system available to all. The corporate class pushed back, opposing any government control over medicine. Insurance companies feared losing business. Drug companies feared losing profits. And doctors were horrified at the thought of losing their elite status as independent entrepreneurs.

On July 1, 1962, Saskatchewan launched North America’s first government insurance plan to cover hospital care and doctor visits. That same day, 90 percent of Saskatchewan’s doctors went on strike. The doctors’ strike was deeply unpopular and collapsed after 23 days.

The 1964 federal Royal Commission on Health Services suggested a class compromise. For the working class, it recommended government-funded medical insurance. For the business class, it recommended the right to deliver medical services “free of government control or domination.”

Class Compromise


The Saskatchewan Legislative Building. (Stonedan, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The business class and the working class have opposite interests. For the working-class, medical care is a human right and a vital necessity. For the business class, healthy profits take priority. This class conflict shapes the quality and accessibility of public programs.

Workers in Canada were strong enough to win public funding for medical care, but not strong enough to kick out the profiteers and win the fully public system they wanted.

The federal Medical Care Act of 1966 was based on class compromise. It established government funding for hospital care and doctors’ visits, while excluding essential medical services such as dentistry, eye care, home care, long-term care and prescriptions. These exclusions enabled insurance companies to continue selling policies to cover such services. (The insurance industry is exempt from human-rights legislation and can legally deny coverage on the basis of a person’s age, past medical history and current state of health.)

Another class compromise was to maintain private-sector control over out-patient care. Doctors were allowed to remain independent contractors charging for each service they provide.

From the start, Canadian Medicare was designed as a two-tier system that gave the private sector room to grow. And grow it did.

Funding Cuts

When Medicare began, Ottawa agreed to pay half the cost of all medical services performed in hospital. This did not last.

In response to the 1970s’ global recession, governments boosted profits by cutting corporate taxes.

Canadian corporations contributed more than half of all tax revenue in the 1950s. Today, they contribute around 12 percent. To offset the loss of corporate revenue, governments cut spending on public programs.

“From the start, Canadian Medicare was designed as a two-tier system that gave the private sector room to grow. And grow it did.”

In 1977, the Trudeau Liberals reduced the federal share of medical funding from 50 percent to 20 percent, forcing the provinces to also reduce their spending. The federal share has varied since then, and currently stands at 22 percent. Less funding for public Medicare enabled private corporations to step in to fill the need.

The 1984 Canada Health Act reassured nervous Canadians that Medicare was safe. Behind the scenes, politicians continued to advance the privatization agenda.

The Drive to Privatize

Business and government view public-sector spending as a drain on the economy. While public facilities can deliver social services more effectively, this costs money. The same services delivered for profit in the private sector make money, and that is seen as a benefit for the economy.

In Caring for Profit (1998), Colleen Fuller documents how plans to open Medicare to the private sector date back to the 1990s’ push to integrate the world economy (“globalization”).

Corporations need a profitable home base on which to grow into global players. Governments provide that base by, among other measures, opening public services to the private sector.

A 1994 Report to the Ontario Ministry of Health advised expanding the domestic for-profit medical industry to help it compete in the global market. The federal government was on the same track. As a 1997 Report for Industry Canada stated, promoting Canadian companies as global health-keepers is the main objective driving the strategies and plans of the government for the medical devices, pharmaceutical and health-services sector.

The Canada Health Act compels government to pay for all medical services provided in hospital. It does not prevent those services from being removed from hospital and handed to the private sector.

Every medical service that can be removed from hospital has been removed or soon will be. The only services left in the public sector will be those too unprofitable to privatize.

Loblaw Companies Ltd. is Canada’s largest food and drug retailer, with more than 2,400 retail outlets across Canada, including its Shoppers Drug Mart subsidiary. Ninety percent of Canadians live within 10 km of one of those outlets, enabling Loblaw to position itself as a major private provider of medical services.

In 2006, Loblaw purchased MediSystem Pharmacy. In 2020, it launched the PC Health app that offers live chats with registered nurses and dietitians. In 2021, it purchased a top chain of physiotherapy clinics. New grocery and pharmacy locations will include clinic spaces and older locations are being retrofitted to offer medical services.

Hospitals themselves are being privatized through Public Private Partnerships (P3s). A P3 hospital is built with public funds and managed by a private corporation. There are more than 50 P3 hospitals across Canada, and the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnership is pushing for more P3s in medicine, education, transportation and public utilities.

P3s are a prime investment for the private sector. Governments put up the money and take all the risk, while corporations take all the profit. It’s a familiar story: we pay and they profit.

Working Conditions

Doug Ford campaigning in Sudbury during the 2018 Ontario general election. (CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Whenever the private sector take over a public program, we see a consistent pattern of higher cost, lower quality service and deteriorating working conditions. A 2021 report comparing public and private sector workers in Ontario found,Workers in the government sector (federal, provincial, and local) earn 11 percent higher wages on average than their private-sector counterparts.
84 percent of government workers are covered by a registered pension plan, compared to just 25 percent of private-sector workers.
Government workers retire about 2.5 years earlier.
Private sector workers are more than four times more likely to lose their jobs.

Schedule 2 of Bill 60 allows government to reduce spending in the public sector by creating new categories of lesser-skilled, lower-waged medical workers to perform duties currently performed by registered doctors, nurses and medical technicians.

Poor quality working conditions result in poor quality service.

“Governments put up the money and take all the risk, while corporations take all the profit. It’s a familiar story: we pay and they profit.”

For-profit facilities invest the minimum in patient care so they can maximize dividends to shareholders. That is why the Covid death rate in Ontario’s for-profit nursing homes was four times higher than it was in public municipal nursing homes. Yet these same for-profit corporations, who are responsible for the deaths of 4,000 Ontario residents, were granted 30-year licenses and permission to add 18,000 more long-term-care beds.

Burden the Family

Social services distribute the cost of caring across society. Loss of public support for medical care, childcare, home care, disability support and long-term care shifts the burden of care onto unpaid family care-givers, who are mostly women.

Employers generally pay women less because of their family and care-giving responsibilities. When public care is not available, the person with the lowest wage typically stays home to provide it. The result is a vicious circle that traps women in lower-waged jobs and also in the unpaid work of domestic care-giving.

Globally, it would cost $11 trillion annually to provide the socially necessary care that women provide for free in the home. That’s more than triple the size of the world tech industry. The system saves a ton of money, while 42 percent of all women cannot get waged work because of care-giving responsibilities.

British Columbia Family Day 2016.

 (Province of British Columbia/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The increasing loss of public programs is increasing the need for home-care and for women to be home to provide it. Restricting or eliminating access to abortion is one way to do this.

Women rely on abortion care so they can stay in waged work, support their families and leave violent partners. Loss of access to abortion is driving vulnerable women out of waged work and trapping them in the family.

Growing economic reliance on the family is also driving horrific attacks against trans people, gender rebels, drag artists, cross-dressers — any behavior that challenges traditional family and gender roles.

Damage Control, Not Health Care

It used to be that women could get secure, well-paid, union jobs in the medical industry. No longer. In the 1990s, Ontario adopted a cost-saving, “just-in-time” staffing system pioneered by the auto industry.

In Saskatchewan, hospital managers followed nurses around with stopwatches to track and time every movement, from turning around (one second) to checking supply rooms (three seconds).

“The loss of public programs is increasing the need for home-care and for women to be home to provide it. Restricting or eliminating access to abortion is one way to do this.”

Just-in-time staffing relies more on casual workers than on permanent full-time staff. The result is rising costs, more overtime, more stress-related leave and thousands of nurses leaving hospital work.

Just-in-time staffing crippled the ability of hospitals to respond to the 2003 SARS outbreak and the Covid pandemic. Nevertheless, it is still in use, while governments demand even more cost-cutting measures.

Treating staff as replaceable widgets is stirring systemic violence. So is making people wait too long for the care they need, when they get it at all. No wonder patients lash out in desperation.

Hospitals have become dangerous workplaces where staff suffer beatings, sexual assault and racist attacks every day. In British Columbia, incidents of physical violence directed against medical staff more than tripled between 2015 and 2022.

Medical workers are seven times more likely than manufacturing workers and 45 times more likely than construction workers to be injured from violence on the job. Instead of making work safe, managers post signs warning, “abuse towards staff will not be tolerated.”

When cost-cutting results in fatal medical errors, hospitals are never held responsible for creating conditions that raise the risk of such errors. Instead, individual medical workers are blamed and criminally prosecuted.

A system that violates the health of its workers and those they serve should not be called a “health-care” system. It is a system of damage-control. Employers are free to sicken, injure, and kill workers, and the medical system manages the resulting damage.

Backlog

In The Shock Doctrine, the Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), Naomi Klein explained how the business class exploit social crises for profit.

While populations are reeling and disoriented, their economies are pillaged in a capitalist feeding frenzy. Public wealth is handed to the private sector and private debt is transferred to the public sector. A few become fabulously wealthy, and the majority are impoverished. By the time the population recovers, the economy has been looted and the theft sanctioned by law.

When the Covid pandemic overwhelmed public hospitals, governments promised to “build back better.” They did not mean better for the majority; they meant better for the profiteers.

The Ontario government insists that the pandemic-related backlog of more than 200,000 surgeries can be cleared only by doing them in private medical clinics. To promote this transition, the province under-spent its budget on public Medicare and overspent its budget on private clinics.

The public medical system could easily clear the surgical backlog if it had enough staff. In 2022, 158 emergency rooms in Ontario had to close for lack of staff, and hospital operating rooms remain underused for the same reason.

On a per-capita basis, Ontario has the lowest hospital funding, the fewest hospital beds, and the fewest nurses in the country. Fifteen thousand registered nurses and registered practical nurses have left Ontario because of low wages and abysmal working conditions, including the outrageous demand to work while sick during the pandemic.

The province insists that moving hospital surgeries to private clinics will reduce patient wait times. It will do the opposite.

No one can work in two places at the same time. Pulling medical staff away from public hospitals to work in private clinics will decimate the public system. Any reduction in wait times in the private sector will be offset by even longer wait times in the public sector.

To maximize profits, private clinics will do simple surgeries such as cataracts and hip-and-knee replacements, leaving more difficult, complex surgeries in the public system. When clinic surgeries become complicated, patients will be off-loaded to the public system, along with the cost of treating their complications (assuming patients survive the transfer).

The loss of simple surgeries will devastate small and rural hospitals. Complex surgeries were moved to larger centers some time ago. Without income from simple surgeries, smaller hospitals will have to close, reducing access in already under-served areas.

Private surgical clinics will not produce more family doctors. Last year, more than 2 million Ontarians did not have a family physician, 24 percent more than two years ago. The shortage of family doctors across Canada is predicted to more than double over the next seven years. Overwhelmed with patients, some Ontario doctors are offering rapid access to a nurse practitioner, for $30 a month.

The province says patients will not have to pay out-of-pocket in private facilities, but they will.

The Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) pays only a base rate. To meet shareholder demands for maximum profit, the province allows private clinics to “upsell” by charging patients a fee for premium or upgraded services. While politicians call this “patient choice,” those who cannot pay will have no choice. Those who can pay will be milked.

The push for maximum profit inevitably leads to fraudulent billing. As the Office of the Auditor General warned, the ministry has no oversight mechanism to prevent patients from being misinformed and being charged inappropriately for publicly funded surgeries.

Finally, the Canada Health Act does not compel government to pay for out-of-hospital care, so public funding will be reduced to the absolute minimum, returning us to pre-Medicare conditions.

Which Way Forward?

Downtown Ottawa, 2012. (Tullia, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

How can we stop the profiteers, revitalize public programs and improve working conditions in the public sector?

The Ontario Health Coalition (OHC) is a prominent research and advocacy organization that opposes profit-taking in medicine, lobbies for public Medicare and is mobilizing public opposition to Bill 60.

In 2016, the OHC launched a referendum campaign at 1,000 polling stations in 40 communities across the province. Almost 94,000 people voted, with 99.6 percent demanding that government stop cutting hospital funding and services.

The OHC is launching another referendum campaign to send the government an even stronger message to reject privatization and invest in the public system. Why would this referendum be more effective than the previous one?

Politicians already know that the majority want fully funded public services. A 2022 poll revealed that 92 percent of Canadians oppose funding cuts to healthcare, education, and other social programs, and 88 percent favour a wealth tax to fund these programs.

Public mobilization campaigns are based on the assumption that politicians will respond if enough people pressure them to do so. When such campaigns fail, blame is directed at a presumably uncaring or apathetic public, as recently expressed by one OHC representative.

There may not be a great impact as a result of the referendum, but it will inform Canadians who think they’ve got public health care. That Canadians are just unaware, completely zombie-like in their perspective is a grave misunderstanding. After decades of setbacks and defeats, most people feel powerless to improve things at work or in society. Their lives are getting harder, and they see no way forward.

Politicians lie (the Ontario premier campaigned on a promise not to privatize Medicare). Unions have failed to deliver real on-the-job improvements. And past public campaigns have proved ineffective. Discouraged people need a real win, not more campaigns that raise their hopes and deliver defeat.

No Democracy

Democracy literally means rule of the people. If Canadians lived in a democracy, they would have a fully public medical system, because the majority want it. The fact that they do not have such a system proves they do not live in a democracy.

There is no democracy in the economy. The majority get no say over what is produced, how it is produced, and for whom. The result is toxic pollution, deforestation, species extinction and global warming.

There is no democracy in foreign policy. Canadians did not vote to send troops to Haiti to put down a popular rebellion (again). They did not vote for Canada to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia or build military bases around the world. And they certainly did not vote for World War III.

There is no democracy at work. Workers have no say over what they do or how they do it, even though they know best what needs to be done and how to do it well and safely.

There is no democracy when it comes to spending the social surplus. Canadians do not get to vote on whether to invest in war or in the environment, in police or social supports, or in private or public services.

In a democracy, the business class would be forced to share their profits, which have never been higher.

In 2022, the Shell oil company posted a record profit of $40 billion, more than double what it raked in the previous year. Chevron reported a similar record-breaking profit. You could make $53,000 every single day for over 2,000 years and still not have that much. Nevertheless, every year, Canada gives $4.8 billion in subsidies to the fossil-fuel industry.

Shell station in Canada. (Raysonho, CC0, Wikimedia Commons)

Capitalism is the enemy of democracy. Any form of collectivism (prioritizing public need) is considered a threat to private enterprise, because it is. Premier Doug Ford calls government-funded or socialized Medicare “communism” and privatized medicine “freedom” — freedom for the few to profit at the expense of the many,

Capitalist Dictatorship

Modern technology could enable everyone to vote on every issue that affects their lives and society. However, capitalism is based on depriving the majority of what they need, and who would vote for that? To maintain capitalist rule, people are not allowed to vote on anything that might disrupt the flow of profit.

The entire social system is structured to transfer wealth from the working class to the business class. Every human activity is treated as an opportunity for profit-taking.

“We live in an anti-democratic, authoritarian, capitalist dictatorship. The entire social system is structured to transfer wealth from the working class to the business class.”

The dismantling of Medicare can only be understood in this context. Capitalism is based on the conversion of common property into private property. From the 18th century enclosure of common lands, to the current privatization of public services, capitalists strive to transform what belongs to all into what belongs exclusively to them. Their wealth is built on deprivation and their power on subjugation. Their greatest fear is a working-class rebellion that could end their rule.

Class Power

The quality of public programs does not depend on what the majority want or who they vote for but on the balance of class forces, that is, on which class is using its power to make the other back down.

Decision-makers respond to majority demands only when their power is threatened. When workers exercise power on the job, when they make the bosses back down, politicians get scared and deliver pro-worker reforms in hopes of buying labor ‘peace.’

Canada’s first Royal Commission to study government-funded health insurance was launched in 1919, the year of the Winnipeg General Strike.

Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) was established in 1948 to calm a post-war workers’ rebellion. As a Conservative member of the British Parliament warned, “If you don’t give the people reform, they will give you revolution.”

Canada’s Medicare system was consolidated in the context of rising workers’ struggles that peaked in the Quebec General Strike of 1972.

Picket line during the 1972 Québec general strike.

 (Michel Giroux, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Since the mid 1970s, the working class have suffered decades of setbacks and defeats, losing much of what they won in the past, including solid union jobs, the 40-hour week, and robust public services.

The more workers retreat, the more the business class push their agenda, regardless of which political party is in office. The process of dismantling Medicare began in the 1970s and has continued under every form of government: Liberal, Conservative, and NDP (social democratic).

Experience shows that the problems created by capitalism cannot be solved by electing different politicians or parties to office. No matter who is in charge, a social system that is structured to exploit humanity and nature for profit cannot be made to do the opposite — promote the well-being of people and the planet.

Social systems are structured to achieve specific goals. The goal of capitalism is capital accumulation, which it does extremely well. The call to prioritize human need is a call to change the goal of society. This is no easy task. A different social goal requires a fundamentally different social system, one that only the international working-class can construct.

All Strikes are Political

All strikes are political battles over what matters more, human need or corporate greed.

Strikes are not merely means by which workers achieve gains in the workplace. Rather, they are moments in the process by which workers constitute themselves as a class — building solidarity, raising class consciousness, creating their own norms and institutions and discovering their own forms of class power. (Class Struggle Unionism, p.59)

When factory workers reject forced overtime, when education workers demand smaller classes, when nurses demand staff-to-patient ratios and when anyone demands higher wages, they are challenging the primacy of profit, the foundation of capitalism.

The outcome of these battles depends on which class uses their power to make the other back down.

The power of the capitalist class lies in their control over social institutions including the legal system, the courts, the police, and the media. However, the power of the working class is greater.

Workers are the vast majority, and nothing moves without their effort. Stopping work stops the flow of profit. When workers stand together, they can defeat the bosses and make governments change course. To keep workers down, the ruling class must block effective strikes.

Governments justify anti-strike legislation by insisting that strikes are not in the public interest. The opposite is true. Business-as-usual is not in the public interest. Successful strikes raise living standards, which is very much in the public interest.

Playing by the enemy’s rules is a sure way to lose a battle. To strike effectively, workers must be willing to violate restrictive labor laws and make them unenforceable.

After launching a solid, 17-day, illegal strike, Canadian postal workers won the legal right to strike in 1965.

That same year, Ontario hospital workers were denied the legal right to strike in order to hold down the wages of a predominately female, immigrant and under-paid workforce. (This same strategy is still used against public-sector workers.)

“Playing by the enemy’s rules is a sure way to lose a battle. To strike effectively, workers must be willing to violate restrictive labor laws and make them unenforceable.”

In 1981, 13,000 hospital workers across Ontario launched an illegal strike to protest wage cuts and degraded working conditions. They held out for nine days against hospital management, the provincial government, the courts, the police, and the media.

Initially, union officials for the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) opposed the strike. When workers struck anyway, union officials issued a statement of support, but failed to mobilize other CUPE locals to build the strike. Isolated, the strike crumbled in defeat.

Weak Unions

University of Toronto, 2015. (OFL Communications Department/Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Why do union officials collapse strikes, as CUPE did recently with the education workers, instead of broadening them? Why did the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) surrender to wage-busting Bill 124 instead of mounting a mass public-sector strike to force the province to back down?

While union officials vigorously object to the loss of public services, they refuse to organize the class power of workers to make governments reverse course.

Union officials are committed to bargaining with the business class, not challenging their rule. To protect their relationship with the employer, union officials hold workers back, mounting ineffective strikes that typically end in defeat.

Unwilling to do what it takes to deliver real on-the-job improvements, union officials launch toothless public-mobilization campaigns. Instead of leading class rebellions, they pin their hopes on electing a labor-friendly government that will pass pro-labor laws, meaning, make capitalism work in their favor.

These are safe strategies for union officials. Lobbying campaigns make it appear that they are fighting for workers’ rights, without challenging the social order that violates those rights.

For workers, this has been a losing strategy. The social order must be challenged in order to win meaningful reforms.

Centering Work

Pandemic Physician: one of the doctors in Toronto who joined a protest at the conditions of homeless shelters during the Covid pandemic, April 15, 2022. (michael_swan/Flickr/CC BY-ND 2.0)

Public-pressure campaigns appeal to all social classes to exert moral pressure on authorities to do the right thing. Such mobilizations can be powerful when linked with workplace battles. In the absence of workplace action, they can only threaten to vote for different politicians or parties. An electoral focus limits what can be achieved to what capitalism allows.

Public Medicare could be rebuilt if hospital workers won good contracts that a) pull money back into the public system and b) improve working conditions to attract and keep qualified staff. They cannot do this on their own, nor should they have to.

The labor movement is based on the principle that an injury to one is an injury to all. When any group of workers is attacked, all are at risk. When any group of workers win, it is easier for the next group to win. Workers have tremendous power when they stand together. Fighting separately is a recipe for defeat.

“Workers have tremendous power when they stand together. Fighting separately is a recipe for defeat.”

To build a fighting labor movement that can win real improvements, workers must be willing to challenge the existing order, including defying anti-worker laws. They must be willing to fight together, as a class. That means all-out support for every strike.

All-out support means public-sector workers striking together: medical, education, library, clerical, postal workers, all together. They all have the same employer – the government!

All-out support means public and private sector workers supporting each others’ strikes, not merely in words, but by swelling picket lines and mounting solidarity strikes. A strike that gains momentum day-after-day is the bosses’ worst nightmare. They will concede whatever they must to prevent a workers’ rebellion from growing beyond their control.

Who Can We Count On?

Covid exposed capitalist priorities for all to see. We saw corporations profit from the pandemic while doing nothing to protect their workers. We saw politicians accept millions of Covid deaths instead of legislating paid sick leave and making schools safe. In contrast, we saw ordinary working people risk their lives and those of their loved ones to serve the public.

Who can we count on to protect our public services? Corporations are not required to protect the public interest. Their only legal obligation is to deliver profits to shareholders.

Politicians will not protect the public when doing so means angering the business class and losing corporate donations.

The only people we can really count on are those who work in public services, because their job conditions directly affect the quality of our services.

Who would you rather manage a hospital? Executives and bureaucrats obsessed with the bottom line? Or medical and support staff who actually do the work? I will take my chance with workers in charge, any day.

It is useless to blame the loss of public Medicare on any particular politician or political party. All over the world, people are facing the same problem — a global capitalist system that values profit over human lives. The profiteers are taking everything away from us, and they will not stop until there is literally nothing left.

Last month, a million people marched in Madrid to protest the dismantling of their public medical system. Tens of thousands of nurses in the U.K. went on strike because they know that quality care cannot be delivered without quality working conditions. And in 2021, half of all strikes in the United States were strikes of medical staff.

Power on the job means power in society. A strong labor movement can win strong public programs. The loss of public programs signals a weak labor movement.

Class struggle won public services like Medicare, and class struggle is the only way to win them back. To succeed, workers must not allow the class enemy to dictate what is and is not acceptable. They must exercise their right to fight effectively, and not back down until they win.