Every year, the Social Security Administration collects billions of dollars in taxes that it doesn’t know who paid. Whenever employers send in W-2 forms that have Social Security numbers that don’t match with anyone on record, the agency routes the paperwork to what’s called the Earnings Suspense File, where it sits until people can prove the wages were theirs, allowing them to one day collect retirement benefits.
The Earnings Suspense File now contains Social Security tax forms that date back to 1937 and are linked to the taxes that were paid on nearly $1.3 trillion in wages. Some of the W-2s in it belong to people who got married and never reported changing their name. Others are people who filled out their tax forms incorrectly. As of 2014, efforts to track these taxpayers down allowed the Social Security Administration to match 171 million tax forms to their rightful owners.
But there are still about 340 million unclaimed tax forms recorded in the file, compared to 270 million nearly a decade ago. A good portion of those forms were filed by employers on behalf of some of the most unlikely funders of Social Security: undocumented immigrants. In fact, illegal immigration is considered largely responsible for the mushrooming of the file, with undocumented workers paying billions in taxes for retirement benefits they will likely never receive.
It works like this: Many immigrants who aren’t authorized to work in the United States buy fake Social Security cards and present them to their employers, who either don’t know they are fake or don’t look too closely. When the employer submits a W-2 form and a tax payment on those workers’ behalf to the Social Security Administration, the federal government holds onto those payroll taxes, even if the Social Security number isn’t linked to anyone on file. And then, a large chunk of that money ends up in the Social Security trust funds, from which retirement benefits are doled out to aging Americans.
The Social Security system has grown increasingly reliant on this stream of revenue, particularly as aging Baby Boomers start to retire. Stephen Goss, the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, estimates that about 1.8 million immigrants were working with fake or stolen Social Security cards in 2010, and he expects that number to reach 3.4 million by 2040. He calculates that undocumented immigrants paid $13 billion into the retirement trust fund that year, and only got about $1 billion in benefits. “We estimate that earnings by unauthorized immigrants result in a net positive effect on Social Security financial status generally, and that this effect contributed roughly $12 billion to the cash flow of the program for 2010,” Gross concluded in a 2013 review of the impact of undocumented immigrants on Social Security.
Ironically, it was a piece of legislation aimed at curbing the hiring of undocumented immigrants that created this steady source of revenue for the Social Security system. In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act set penalties for employers who knowingly hired undocumented immigrants. It was the first time the federal government had made it a crime to employ undocumented workers. Yet instead of destroying the underground labor market, this new law just made it more sophisticated, producing a thriving market for fake U.S. birth certificates, IDs and social security cards, which undocumented workers presented to their employers when asked for their papers. Undocumented workers started filling out W-2 forms, and the federal government began receiving and holding onto payroll taxes, even though the fake social security numbers didn’t match anyone in the system. The Social Security Administration sends no-match letters to employers to alert them of the problem and urge them to resolve it.
As rhetoric about illegal immigration dominates this election cycle, it’s hard to argue that undocumented immigrants drain the system. It’s true that not all undocumented workers pay federal income and social security taxes; many are still paid in cash and never fill out W-2 forms, so it’s unclear how many of them independently file tax returns as self-employed contractors. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington, D.C., think tank, estimates that about half of undocumented workers in the United States pay income taxes. They also help fund public schools and local government services by paying sales and property taxes like any other resident. This added up to about $10.6 billion in state and local taxes in 2010, according to an analysis by the institute.
And in the past 20 years, the Internal Revenue Service has made it easier for workers to pay taxes if they don’t have a social security number (or a fake one, for that matter). Workers who are paid illegally in cash can still pay their taxes with an Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN), filing a return just like any other taxpayer; having a history of paying taxes can be an important step in securing legal status. In 2010, about 3 million people paid over $870 million in income taxes using an ITIN, and according to the IRS, ITIN filers pay $9 billion in payroll taxes annually. (The IRS says it does not share ITIN information with immigration authorities.)
Tanya Gonzalez, the executive director of the nonprofit Sacred Heart Center in Richmond, Virginia, organized the first federally-funded, bilingual tax-assistance program in the region, which sits in one of the two states that have seen increases in the number of undocumented immigrants since the recession. She kept hearing that undocumented immigrants in the Richmond area were getting ripped off by tax preparers, and a friend at the IRS told her about the federal grants offered to open free tax-assistance centers in low-income areas.
At Sacred Heart’s tax-assistance site, she has helped hundreds of immigrants apply for a taxpayer identification number, which allows them to file their taxes as contractors. The use of ITIN has grown popular among immigrant workers in Richmond, she says, as many await comprehensive immigration reform. Past legalization efforts have required undocumented immigrants to prove how long they’ve been living in the United States, and to pay the taxes they owe before receiving legal status. “They want to show that they’ve been paying taxes and have their papers in order as much as they can.” says Gonzalez, adding that some people are on payment plans, while others simply can’t afford to pay taxes at all.
One undocumented worker from Central Mexico who gets help with his taxes at Sacred Heart told me that he began paying taxes four years ago, after learning that it might one day help him stay in the United States. (He asked not to be named because of his legal status.) A 31-year-old landscape worker, he moved to Richmond in 1999 and now makes up to $1,700 a month maintaining golf courses seven days a week. Workers at Sacred Heart told him that if he filed taxes with an ITIN, it could help him gain legal status in the United States if Congress passes comprehensive immigration reform. As those efforts remain stalled in Washington, D.C., his wages are recorded into the Earnings Suspense File, and his taxes go into the Social Security trust funds. “So many people say we are here burdening the country, but we are paying their retirements,” he told me. For now, he doesn’t mind supporting the social security system, he says, but hopes one day he can reap the benefits too.
This article is part of our Next America: Communities project, which is supported by a grant from Emerson Collective.
You'd think that the richest country on earth would be able to house, clothe , feed, educate, and maintain the health of all of it's citizens without problem or question. Well, I suppose that in theory they could, but that would start the unraveling of their entire system built on exploitation and blood . What they are completely willing to do, however, is take health c are benefits away from millions of people, including the elderly and mentally ill.
The Trump/Pence Regime Releases Its STARVE OR DIE Budget
May 29, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The Trump/Pence regime’s final version of their budget for 2018 was made public on May 23. Its grotesque title—”A New Foundation for American Greatness”—should really be called the Fascist Starve or Die Budget.
In the name of “balancing” a budget that massively increases funds for the U.S. military, for hunting down immigrants, and for unleashing police in the inner cities, these monsters are calling for over $1 trillion dollars in cuts over the next decade to the most vital needs of tens of millions of people forced to live on the bottom rungs of this society. These cuts are genocidal in their intent, and in their effect. They are going to cause enormous harm to millions of Black, Latino, Native American, and other oppressed people, and to millions of poor, elderly, and disabled whites as well. The architects of this budget are fully aware that it is going to cost people’s lives.
Medical coverage is being taken away from an estimated 10 million people in the first year, and 23 million over the next 10 years. Medicaid provides medical coverage to more than 74 million people who cannot afford private insurance plans, including 60 percent of nursing home residents and millions of people who are disabled. The Trump/Pence budget cuts Medicaid by over $800 billion dollars in the next decade. That’s one-fourth of the budget. How many will have to stop taking life-saving medications because of the cost? How many will avoid seeing a doctor until they’re so sick they have to go to the emergency room? What will it mean to the mentally ill, the disabled, or the elderly?
Women’s health is attacked in the budget, which refuses to allow any Medicaid funds at all to go for services provided by Planned Parenthood. Life-saving health services like cervical and breast cancer screenings and pregnancy care are being cut off to as many as 2.5 million women who rely on Planned Parenthood and have no other choice because of cost, or because no other provider exists where they live. This will make access to affordable abortions even more difficult.
Close to $200 billion infood will be ripped away from a section of the nearly 44 million children, elderly, and disabled, as well as the working poor, the homeless, and mentally ill who count on food stamps for the most basic nutritional assistance.Already, one out of five kids in this country struggle with food hunger. A recent study found that food insecurity in early childhood is associated with impaired brain development, lower academic achievement and more frequent hospitalizations. How many more children will be forced to go without meals at the hands of this regime?
The Trump/Pence budget, with all of its targeted attacks on the poor and oppressed, is designed to demoralize people and reduce them to the status of a despised, “lesser” group, and to get the rest of society to “go along,” if only passively, and thus enable this inhumanity to become the new norm.
The “Taxpayer First” Lie
How are these fascists “selling” a plan so cold-blooded that it openly tells a section of people they’re on their own to starve or die? According to the introduction by Trump, this budget “champion(s) the hardworking taxpayers.” This bullshit appeal to “taxpayers” is really a code word the Trump/Pence regime uses to appeal to its most hard core, racist social base. They’re being mobilized behind the white-supremacist rallying cry: “No more stealing money from us hardworking taxpayers to give handouts to those ‘lazy,’ criminal Black and other oppressed people, and the immigrants who’ve come here just to mooch off government handouts.”
Who Really Feeds Whom?
But where does all of this wealth actually come from? Who creates it? For 250 years there was the horror of the slaves’ unpaid labor in conditions that were an almost indescribable hell... followed by the century of super-exploitation that built up the industry of the U.S., where Black workers were confined to the most dangerous, most low-paid and filthiest jobs, first fired and last hired... down to today, with Black people continuing to be discriminated against and oppressed when it comes to employment and credit.
Or take the immigrants, who are being exploited mercilessly and off whose backs a tremendous amount of surplus value has been created—first in the countries they left, and now here, as part of the international accumulation process of capitalism-imperialism. Undocumented immigrants are denied welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, and most other public benefits. And yet they pay billions of dollars in taxes to Social Security—for retirement benefits they will never receive. In fact, “The Social Security system has grown increasingly reliant on this stream of revenue [from the undocumented workers], particularly as aging Baby Boomers start to retire.”[*]
Why Is There No Right to Eat?
But the more fundamental question is: Why is something as basic to morality and humanity as access to food, or medicine, not guaranteed? Why, in the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world, is there no “right to eat”? Bob Avakian has spoken very powerfully to why, under capitalism, there can be no “right to eat”:
If this became a mass phenomenon—people taking something as basic as food, for which they have a vital need but which many cannot afford under this system—the system would come completely unraveled. And that is why, although the law does not make it illegal to lay people off work and have people unemployed—since that is actually crucial to the dynamics of capitalist accumulation—it does make it illegal to act on the right to eat without paying for what you eat. And, if people do declare that they have a right to eat, regardless of whether they can be employed in a way that makes profit for some capitalist, then they are denounced by at least certain representatives and spokespeople of sections of the ruling class as “lazy” and “undeserving” people. (From Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles, But Humanity Can Soar Beyond the Horizon, Part 1: REVOLUTION AND THE STATE)
What the Trump/Pence regime is out to accomplish through this budget is criminal and genocidal. This cannot be allowed to become the “new normal.” It has to unleash a clarion call, more urgently than ever, to drive these fascists from power. Don’t Normalize... Don’t Accommodate... Don’t Conciliate... Don’t Collaborate!
[*] “The Truth About Undocumented Immigrants and Taxes,” Alexia Fernandez Campbell, The Atlantic, September 12, 2016. [back]
Presidents of the u.s throughout history have been calling regimes who won't tow their line and capitulate to their orders , " evil", "anti-democratic" and other bullshit names that mean absolutely fucking nothing, especially when coming from amerikkka. Check out some of the horseshit going on in their fucked up country.
In Trump’s America: The Open Revival of KKK-Style Terror
Mississippi Legislator Calls for Lynching Opponents of Confederate Monuments
May 26, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
For 150 years the South has been awash in Confederate flags and scarred by hundreds of monuments to so-called “heroes” of the Confederacy—people who led a bloody war to maintain and expand the enslavement of Black people. These flags and monuments were and are a means not just to celebrate one of the most monstrous “causes” in human history, but to assert dominance over and terrorize Black people today. They are instruments of white supremacy.
In recent years, thousands of people have been struggling to take these hateful symbols down. Now, in defense of these symbols—and of the modern-day leader and representative of all that, Donald Trump—reactionaries are reviving a legacy of threats and terror.
On May 20, Mississippi State Representative Karl Oliver posted on Facebook that anyone wanting to “destroy historical monuments of OUR HISTORY… should be LYNCHED!” (Emphasis in original)
A few days later Oliver “apologized” for his “choice of words.” But he knew exactly what he was saying—for almost a century, lynching was the cutting edge of the terror directed at Black people in the South, sowing the fear that forced people to accept daily insult and discrimination, and to labor from dawn to dusk in fields only to end up in debt. And lynching was nosecret.
At least 3,959 Black people were lynched by whites in the South—576 in Mississippi alone—between 1877 and 1950. In 1937, right in Oliver’s district, two Black men were tied to a tree and burned to death before a mob of 500; the next day the local paper ran gruesome photos. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was beaten, tortured, and drowned by a group of white men who were acquitted by an all-white jury and then went about bragging that they did it. That was in Money, Mississippi, also in Oliver’s district.
Oliver knows what it means to invoke lynching, just like the two other Mississippi state legislators, and the Highway Patrol Public Affairs Officer who rushed to “like” Oliver’s post before it was taken down.
And this is not just some backwater Mississippi thing.
In New Orleans, after the City Council voted to take down four Confederate monuments, a contractor was hired to do the work but quit after receiving death threats and his car was set afire. Another was told his son would be killed, his wife raped. According to the mayor, “Anybody who anybody has known is involved in this in any way has received threats,” including from the KKK.
After Texas Congressman Al Green said on the House floor that Trump should be impeached, he was flooded with telephone lynching threats, like “You’re not going to impeach anybody, you fucking nigger. You’ll be hanging from a tree.” (The Houston Chronicle posted audio of three of these calls.)
In Charlottesville, Virginia, a nighttime rally of 100 people with burning torches, some with automatic weapons, chanted “We [white people] will not be replaced.” A Black councilman received death threats and was told he should be “taken out behind the woodshed.”
These are just a few examples of the vigilante threats and violence, including murder, that are on the rise in the era of Trump. Trump didn’t invent these people—they are the product of the whole U.S. history of white supremacy, which has been essential to the wealth and power of this country. But from the beginning of his campaign, Trump has embraced and relied on them, encouraging violence at his rallies, refusing to seriously denounce the Klansmen and Nazis who enthusiastically supported him, appointing white supremacist Jeff Sessions as Attorney General and “ethno-nationalist” Steve Bannon as his chief strategic advisor.
Trump has signaled to the vilest forces in U.S. society that he is their man, and this is their time. And now, especially as the Trump/Pence regime faces opposition from many sides, these violent racist reactionaries are stepping out even more in an effort to defend their leaders and symbols, leaders and symbols of savage oppression. The time is now to mobilize millions of people to drive out this fascist regime.
All this is evidence enough, not just of the horror of Trump’s Amerikkka, but of how this whole system, from its very roots in slavery down to the present moment, has always abetted and encouraged, and has built into its very fabric the most horrific oppression of Black people. And evidence as well of the need for this system to be gone, which only the people can do through a total emancipatory revolution to wipe out the oppression of Black people as an integral part of the emancipation of all of humanity.
Just because you're a privileged motherfucker, doesn't mean you can't take a correct stand and do some righteous actions.....
Notre Dame Students Walk Out on Fascist Holy Warrior Mike Pence
May 22, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
As soon as U.S. Vice President Mike Pence opened his mouth to start his commencement address at Notre Dame University on May 21, at least 100 graduating students stood up and began walking out in protest.
The students’ action was a significant and bold public protest against this Christian fascist warrior who has devoted his political career to crusading against rights for women, LGBTQ people, immigrants, and oppressed people everywhere (see “Vice President Mike Pence: The Dangerous Holy Warrior Waiting in the Wings”). The walk-out was widely covered in the national and international press and on social media.
Students organized in advance, knowing that this would be a unique opportunity to let the world know there is principled opposition to the anti-abortion theocracy that Pence has been working to bring into being in the U.S. The student group WeStaNDFor said it was calling for the protest because “The participation and degree-conferring of VP Pence stand as an endorsement of policies and actions which directly contradict Catholic social teachings and values and target vulnerable members of the University’s community.” The student group has sponsored previous protests on the Notre Dame campus against the appearance of racist theorist Charles Murray, in support of immigrant communities under attack, and against exclusion of Syrian refugees by the Trump-Pence regime.
At the commencement ceremony, before Pence’s speech, valedictorian Caleb Joshua Pine called on people to “stand against the scapegoating of Muslims.’’ He also voiced his opposition to the plan for a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.
Because the graduates walked out, they did not receive their degrees or participate in the traditional concluding ceremony. Instead they held their own outside the stadium with supportive faculty and family members. One of the organizers said, “At the conclusion of the ceremony in the stadium, the dean of each college recommends…that graduates of that college be given degrees from University of Notre Dame. I think with your character, with the actions you took today, with the solidarity you’ve shown with one another, you’ve recommended yourselves, I direct you to turn your tassels and celebrate your own graduation.”
A Black woman graduate said the walk-out happened “because we stand with marginalized communities. Because there’s a difference between engaging in dialogue and engaging with voices that are willing and ready to completely stomp you out. It’s one thing to be silent about conversation; it’s another thing to be silent about fascism… It’s another thing to see that someone’s politics literally endanger other people’s lives.”
The deadly brutality underlying Pence’s words was blatantly expressed when, after praising the accomplishments of the graduating class, Pence trumpeted that “most impressive of all,” 38 of the graduates were going on to join the U.S. military. In other words, to become part of the U.S. death machine that destroys so many lives and whole nations around the world. Pence went on to uphold the anti-abortion, anti-women stance of the Catholic university, saying, “I’m so proud that the University of Notre Dame has stood without apology for the sanctity of human life.” In reality, the anti-abortion fanaticism of Pence and the Christian fascists have nothing to do with protecting life—denying women the right to choose when and whether to not give birth is to force them into slavery, and this is part of a whole vicious agenda of enforcing patriarchy and reactionary “family values.”
Pence also spent a good part of his speech trying to turn reality upside down on the very hot issue of campus “free speech.” The fascists have been stung lately by student protests across the country against fascist operatives, especially at the University of California, Berkeley (see The Battle for Berkeley, Why it’s Right, and Righteous, to Drive Fascists Off Campus, Out of Berkeley... and Out of Power!). Pence was fully aware of the walk-out that had been planned against his speech at Notre Dame, and he did not directly mention it. But he tried to portray himself and his fellow fascist leaders and agitators as victims of suppression, talking about “the noxious wave that seems to be rushing over much of academia. While this institution has maintained an atmosphere of civility and open debate, far too many campuses across America have become characterized by speech codes, safe zones, tone policing, administration-sanctioned political correctness, all of which amounts to nothing less than suppression of the freedom of speech… This should not and must not be met with silence.”
The courageous students who stood up and walked out on Pence have not been intimidated or fooled by such double-talk. Their example of active protest right up against the Trump-Pence fascist regime should be emulated, spread, and defended far and wide.
~~~~~~~~~~
Protest at the Notre Dame Campus Gate: “Drive Out the fascists, before it’s too late, Dump Trump, Dump Pence, the world can’t wait”
From a reader:
While over 100 graduating students turned their backs and walked out of the Notre Dame Stadium to protest Mike Pence’s presence as commencement speaker, there was a spirited protest of a couple of hundred people at the main gate to the Notre Dame campus.
Protesters indicted the Trump/Pence regime on many issues and found creative ways to express themselves. A sharp focus was the attacks on women and LGBT people. Pence has an ugly and vicious history of this as Indiana governor. A woman wore a coat hanger on her head symbolizing the impact of making abortion illegal or inaccessible.
A group of “Handmaids” attired in red robes and white bonnets—evoking the current TV series based on the novel TheHandmaids Tale that evokes a future fascist society where biblical law and patriarchal values are brutally enforced—were highly visible, processing throughout the protest area saying things like, “God be with you.” One “Handmaid” was quoted in the press saying: “If Mike Pence gets his way, this is what our world will be like, where women are just going to be used to reproduce and not have a choice what they do with their bodies.”
Homemade posters included a breadth of anger. “Refugees In—Racists Out!”; No Human Being is Illegal!”; “Warning: Electric Fence Pence”; “Protect Women’s rights, LGBT rights, Black rights, Brown rights, religious rights, Stop Pence/Trump.” Many signs protested the attack on health care. Another focus was Trump/Pence’s moves to radically change the form of governance—“The Only Wall We Need is Between Church and State” and “Stand up for the Constitution.” “In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse a Fascist America” picket signs were visible throughout the crowd. The Notre Dame gate is on a busy street, and many cars honked support for the protest.
Protesters included many people from the immediately surrounding area, as well as people who traveled from farther-away Indiana towns and Chicago. The protest was organized by South Bend Equity, a local Indivisible chapter along with other organizations.
The Chicago Revolution Club marched in and helped focus up the understanding and anger, including focusing up how all this is fascism and connected this to the crimes of the system.
A high point of the demonstration was when some of the graduating Notre Dame students who had walked out joined and addressed the protesters. A Revolution Club member emphasized the role of students in fighting the fascist regime and how their spirit needs to spread.
Refuse Fascism banners were very visible, especially, “Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime.” Refuse Fascism activists reported that people grabbed up the NO! posters quickly as they arrived, and a crew of youth held one of the banners across the street throughout the protest. Refuse Fascism spoke to the crowd about why the Trump/Pence regime is fascist, and Pence’s role at the head of fascist forces in the regime and society, and why this is a pivotal moment of both danger and urgent need to organize thousands to mobilize millions to drive out the whole regime before it’s too late. Chants that spoke to this were taken up broadly, for example, “Drive Out the fascists, before it’s too late, Dump Trump, Dump Pence, the world can’t wait.”
The u.s. has always been known as the place where if you have no money, you die, and the powers that be don't fucking care. The fact that health care is a commodity defies any sense of humanity or even common sense. It's fucking barbaric that if you can't afford to be healthy, tough shit. Fuck trump and the u.s. government, and every government they've ever fucking had.
Health Care in the Hands of Fascists: “If They Can’t Afford It, They Shouldn’t Have It.”
May 22, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
At the beginning of May, the U.S. House of Representatives, with a strong push by Trump, passed the American Health Care Act (AHCA)—their replacement for Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA), which went into effect in 2010. The replacement of the word “Affordable” with the word “American” is entirely appropriate. If the AHCA bill becomes law, it will cut $880 billion from Medicaid over the next 10 years—a quarter of the Medicaid budget. Estimates are that 14 million people will lose their health care by 2026.
The Senate is now taking up its version of the health bill, where significant changes will likely be made before there is a final law. But the basic framework is in place with the House bill, so let’s call it what it is. What these ghouls are doing, in the most chilling and grotesque way, is deciding who will live and who will die. Deciding who will have their medical care taken away, and delivering death sentences to unknown numbers of people no longer able to afford health coverage. This is going to disproportionately impact Black, Latino, Native American and other oppressed people, and it is also going to threaten the lives of much broader sections of the poor of all nationalities; those sick with pre-existing conditions, women, and the growing population of older adults.
Disastrous for Women
This bill is disastrous for women. It denies the use of any federal funds at all to go to any services provided by Planned Parenthood (half of their 2.5 million patients rely on Medicaid), doing the greatest harm to Black and Latina women. And in 105 counties, especially rural counties, Planned Parenthood is the only clinic that offers a full range of reproductive health services. That means denying women basic health services like life-saving cervical and breast cancer screenings and access to birth control. This bill could allow insurance companies to define things like treatment for sexual assault, domestic violence, postpartum depression, pregnancy, and Caesarean sections as pre-existing conditions—making women who have these “pre-existing conditions” face higher premiums. And it endangers all abortion coverage—by barring federal subsidies to any insurance plans that offer abortion.
“If They Can’t Afford It, They Shouldn’t Have It.”
One liberal congressman recently told the story of a constituent who, when told that “Obamacare” would provide medical coverage to some people who couldn’t afford it, said that was not a good thing. And that constituent went on: “If they can’t afford it, they shouldn’t have it.” What better way to capture the ugly, reactionary logic at the core of capitalism—that something so basic to humanity as health care is a commodity, which those who can afford it “deserve” to have and those who can’t, don’t. What kind of system and what kind of society breeds this kind of mentality!
And who are the “they” that this asshole and others like him are saying “shouldn’t have it”? Clearly, they’re talking about immigrants, Black and Latino people, Native Americans, and other oppressed nationalities in this country. The reality is that there are all kinds of government subsidies that disproportionately go to white people—and the higher up the economic scale, the better the employer-paid health insurance and the greater the government benefits from things like tax breaks, with the most generous benefits going to those who least need them. (See “Unspeakable Realities Block Universal Health Coverage In America,” Chris Ladd, Forbes, March 13, 2017.)
“Make America Great Again” Health Care
The logic and direction of the new American Health Care Act that the House has passed and Trump has welcomed is completely in line with what the Trump/Pence regime means when they say “Make America Great Again.” A cornerstone of the ideology of these fascists, and the program rapidly being put in place, is the contention that a major cause of America’s “decline” is that—in response to the uprisings of the 1960s, especially the revolutionary movements of Black and other oppressed people—the government has increasingly interfered with the “natural” workings of the cutthroat “survival of the fittest” capitalist-imperialist system by creating and enforcing a “welfare state.” For them, it’s the imagined “government handouts” going to those darker-complexioned “freeloaders” that is to blame for the deteriorating conditions confronting large sections of lower middle class and poor whites. In fact, it is the workings of the capitalist-imperialist system, and the consequences of its global scramble for profits, that is the cause. This is a country that has racist white supremacy and anti-immigrant xenophobia deeply woven into its history and present-day reality.
To fully recognize the magnitude of the crime of turning the Trump/Republican health care bill into law, look at the savage inequalities that already exist today in the access to desperately needed medical treatment of the people at the bottom of this society. (See “Inequality and the health-care system in the USA,” Samuel L. Himmelstein, MD, The Lancet, April 8, 2017.) For the 27 million uninsured, this means no routine medical visits, tests, treatments, and medications because of cost; neglecting chronic conditions; and waiting till it’s an emergency before going for help. It means people with serious psychiatric disorders unable to get care. And on top of that, for Black people and other oppressed people, all of this is magnified through the lens of all-encompassing racism within the medical field. Together with the lack of a healthy diet and the stresses that come from everyday survival in the inner cities, this becomes genocidal in its implications for the oppressed.
Today in this country, the life expectancy of the wealthiest Americans is 10-15 years greater than for the poorest. At the time the ACA was being debated, there were 45,000 needless deaths each year in the U.S. because people did not have adequate health care. The Trump/Pence regime and its fascist cohorts in Congress are fully aware that their “Make America Great Again” hell-care law will mean death for many—with the poor and oppressed targeted at the top of their list. We cannot allow this to happen!
Lest anyone get hopeful instead of realistic about trump's trip to the Middle East , let's keep a level head here, shall we ? Has that stupid arrogant asshole ever shown himself to be anything less than a bully, and the perfect leader for the most bloodthirsty imperialist country that has ever existed ? Fuck no. Let's get to the actual point.
Reality Check on Trump’s Middle East Trip: Imperialist-Godfather Hails Barbaric Violence, Calls For More
May 22, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Like a Mafia-godfather, Trump called together some of the most murderous, barbaric, tyrants on earth for his speech on Sunday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.*Trump praised them—then demanded that they step up, “take on the burden,” and ruthlessly take care of “Islamic extremists” and “terrorists.”
Islamic fundamentalism and jihadism are reactionary, oppressive forces, which have committed terrible crimes against the people. But Trump’s problem isn’t that they’re reactionary and oppressive. His problem is that they’re getting in the way of America’s own reactionary, oppressive stranglehold on the Middle East.
So he offered the junior butchers assembled in Riyadh billions in arms, and carte blanche support for whatever terrors or tortures they carried out against these forces or other opponents. “DRIVE THEM OUT OF THIS EARTH,” Trump bellowed.
For the head-chopping fundamentalist kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Trump pledged $110 billion more in arms, and explicit backing to escalate its genocidal war in Yemen which has already created one of the most massive, hellish humanitarian crises in the world.
Trump began hammering into place new military alliances—”strengthening partnerships, and forming new ones”—and concluded with a bellicose call for military encirclement and aggression against Iran, which he claimed “has fueled the fires of sectarian conflict and terror.”
Millions in the Middle East have already suffered and died at the hands of the U.S. Now Trump is doubling down on the staggering violence U.S. imperialism and its allies are carrying out across the region and preparing for even greater violence and aggression to come.
This isn’t “reaching out” to Muslims, or dialing back his “Make America Great Again” racism, xenophobia and war-mongering. This is threatening the lives of millions and millions in the region, and pouring gasoline on the reactionary clash between imperialism and fundamentalist Islamic jihadism.
~~~~~~~~~
Stay tuned to Revcom.us for further coverage of Trump’s speech and his trip abroad.
* This mafia ball was hosted by King Salman of Saudi Arabia, whose reactionary war in Yemen has been carried out through the war crimes of targeting hospitals, schools, markets, and apartment buildings, and killing or wounding thousands of civilians. Meanwhile Salman has overseen a vicious crackdown on all forms of dissent within his Kingdom, that’s featured widespread torture and executing 47 people on one day, January 2, 2016, alone—most of whom were beheaded.
Among the other 40-plus guests of honor was Egypt’s military dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. In 2013, Gen. El-Sisi took power in a coup d’etat, massacring 100s of anti-coup protesters and rounding up at least 40,000 people, many who were severely tortured. Since then Egyptian police have been “abducting, torturing and forcibly disappearing people in an effort to intimidate opponents and wipe out peaceful dissent,” according to Amnesty International, in which “hundreds of students, political activists and protesters, including children as young as 14, vanish without trace at the hands of the state...Many are held for months at a time and often kept blindfolded and handcuffed for the entire period.” [back]
Queen victoria was a racist colonialist motherfucker who sent her troops to war against people she considered to be inferior and less civilized, all in the name of empire . Those were the times, but fuck her and her blood soaked legacy. Enjoy your shitty victoria day parade and all of those lame annoying marching bands.
There are far too many people int his country both on the right and the "left", who are willing to overlook or simply gloss over the actual history of kkkanada. There's no way that "we" could have the fucking yanks as "our" closest ally without being assholes ourselves. Read.
We love our tales about how Canada offered sanctuary to U.S. slaves for decades, but the unabridged version is it sustained African bondage for much longer.
In a recent rabble.ca story titled “Canada’s earliest immigration policies made it a safe haven for escaped slaves,” Penney Kome ignores the fact that Africans were held in bondage here for 200 years and that the Atlantic provinces had important ties to the Caribbean plantation economies.
According to Kome, Canada’s relationship to slavery consisted of the oft-discussed Underground Railway that brought Africans in bondage north to freedom. But, she ignores the southbound “underground railroad” during the late 1700s that took many Canadian slaves to Vermont and other Northern U.S. states that had abolished slavery. Even more slaves journeyed to freedom in Michigan and New England after the war of 1812.
For over 200 years, New France and the British North America colonies held Africans in bondage. The first recorded slave sale in New France took place in 1628. There were at least 3,000 African slaves in what are now known as Québec, Ontario and the Maritimes. Leading historical figures such as René Bourassa, James McGill, Colin McNabb, Joseph Papineau and Peter Russell all owned slaves and some were strident advocates of the practice.
After conquering Quebec, Britain strengthened the laws that enabled slavery. In The Blacks in Canada, Robin Winks explains:
“On three occasions explicit guarantees were given to slave owners that their property would be respected, and between 1763 and 1790 the British government added to the legal structures so that a once vaguely defined system of slavery took on clearer outlines.”
It wasn’t until 1833 that slavery was abolished in what is now Canada and across the rest of the British Empire.
Canadians propped up slavery in a number of other ways. Canada helped the British quell Caribbean slave rebellions, particularly during the 1791-1804 Haitian Revolution, which disrupted the region’s slave economy. Much of Britain’s Halifax-based squadron arrived on the shores of the West Indies in 1793, and many of the ships that set sail to the Caribbean at this time were assembled in the town’s naval yard. Additionally, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick provided “sticks for the furnishing of a variety of naval stores, especially masts and spars, to the West Indies squadron at Jamaica, Antigua, and Barbados.”
A number of prominent Canadian-born (or based) individuals fought to capture and re-establish slavery in the French colonies. Dubbed the “Father of the Canadian Crown,” Prince Edward Duke of Kent departed for the West Indies aboard a Halifax gunboat in 1793. As a Major General, he led forces that captured Guadalupe, St. Lucia and Martinique. Today, many streets and monuments across the country honour a man understood to have first applied the term “Canadian” to both the English and French inhabitants of Upper and Lower Canada.
In what may be Canada’s most significant contribution to the British war effort in the Caribbean, a dozen Nova Scotia privateers captured at least 57 enemy vessels in the West Indies between 1793 and 1805. Licensed by the state to seize enemy boats during wartime, “privateers were essential tools of war until the rise of large steam navies in the mid-nineteenth century.”
But Nova Scotia privateers weren’t solely motivated by reasons of state. They sought to protect a market decimated by French privateers. In A Private War in the Caribbean: Nova Scotia Privateering, 1793-1805, Dan Conlin writes that “in a broader sense privateering was an armed defence of the [Maritimes’] West Indies market.”
Outside of its role in suppressing Caribbean slave rebellions, the Maritimes literally fed the slave system for decades. In Emancipation Day, Natasha Henry explains:
“Very few Canadians are aware that at one time their nation’s economy was firmly linked to African slavery through the building and sale of slave ships, the sale and purchase of slaves to and from the Caribbean, and the exchange of timber, cod, and other food items from the Maritimes for West-Indian slave-produced goods.”
A central component of the economy revolved around providing the resources that enabled slavery. Nova Scotia and Newfoundland generated great wealth selling cheap, high-protein food to keep millions of “enslaved people working 16 hours a day.”
In Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky explains:
“In the 17th century, the strategy for sugar production, a labour-intensive agro-industry, was to keep the manpower cost down through slavery. At harvest time, a sugar plantation was a factory with slaves working 16 hours or more a day — chopping cane by hand as close to the soil as possible, burning fields, hauling cane to a mill, crushing, boiling. To keep working under the tropical sun the slaves needed salt and protein. But plantation owners did not want to waste any valuable sugar planting space on growing food for the hundreds of thousands of Africans who were being brought to each small Caribbean island. The Caribbean produced almost no food. At first slaves were fed salted beef from England, but New England colonies [as well as Newfoundland and Nova Scotia] soon saw the opportunity for salt cod as cheap, salted nutrition.”
In Capitalism and Slavery, post-independence Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Eric Williams highlights the role of cod in the Caribbean plantations: “The Newfoundland fishery depended to a considerable extent on the annual export of dried fish to the West Indies, the refuse or ‘poor John’ fish, ‘fit for no other consumption.'” High-quality cod from today’s Atlantic Canada was sent to the Mediterranean while the reject fish was sold to Caribbean slave-owners.
From 1770-1773 Newfoundland and Nova Scotia sent 60,620 quintals (one quintal equals 100 pounds) and 6,280 barrels of cod to the West Indies, which comprised 40 per cent of all imports. These numbers increased significantly after the American Revolution resulted in a ban on U.S. trade to the British Caribbean colonies. In 1789 alone 58 vessels carried 61,862 quintals of fish from Newfoundland to the Caribbean Islands.
When it comes to our histories, we choose where and how to focus our lens. A bird’s eye view of the historical landscape quickly reveals that Canada did a great deal more to support African enslavement than undermine it.
