In 2014, a wave of enthusiasm swept the medical field as new medicines to cure hepatitis C became available. Older treatments had limited success in eradicating the virus, and side effects stopped many from completing treatment. The new medications can eliminate the virus in 80 to 95 per cent of cases, are in easy-to-take pill form and have few, if any, side effects over the 8 to 24 weeks of treatment.
The wave crashed, however, on the cost of the medications: a thousand dollars per pill. Profits to Gilead Sciences, the first to get a new drug approved, are projected in the billions. In yet another chapter of the racist U.S. bosses’ history of medical apartheid, the high cost of these medications hits Black workers hardest, along with millions of workers around the world suffering from this virus.
Hep C and Racism
Hepatitis C affects from 135 to 160 million people worldwide, including an estimated three million in the United States. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Black workers comprise 22 per cent of all hepatitis C patients, despite being only thirteen percent of the U.S. population. The mortality rate for middle-aged Black workers with hep C (8 percent) is twice that of comparable white workers; native Americans and Alaskan natives with hep C have an even higher mortality rate. In the U.S., more people die from hepatitis C complications than from HIV-related illnesses! Hepatitis C causes death from liver cancer and cirrhosis of the liver in 5 to 10 per cent of sufferers, and is the leading cause of liver transplants in the U.S.
Hepatitis C is usually a chronic disease. Life-threatening complications take 10 to 30 years to develop. HIV and alcoholism increase the rate and speed of complications. While physicians agree that almost all of those infected should be treated, the insurance companies have decided that only those with the worst disease should get medication. The process to get approved for treatment under Medicaid frustrates both doctors and patients. Many give up, and the cost is prohibitive for the uninsured and undocumented. If you live in states like Louisiana, which opted out of expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, you’re similarly out of luck.
Pharmaceutical price-gouging has been in the news of late—particularly the company that raised the price of Daraprim, which treats an HIV-related illness, from $13 to $750 per pill. But Daraprim is only the best-known example. Current costs for the new hepatitis C treatments—Harvoni, Solvadi, and Veikira Pak—would bankrupt public health programs like Medicaid. Medicare faces huge costs as well, since federal rules bar Medicare from negotiating lower prices. Legislative efforts to change this policy have failed, because politicians are bought and paid for by the drug companies.
Bosses Profit, Workers Die
Pharmaceutical companies like Gilead claim that prices are driven by research costs. In fact, research on the hepatitis C virus was funded publicly, through taxes paid by the working class to fund institutions like the National Institutes of Health. Scientists and investors developed this public research, claimed the patent rights for the first drug, Solvadi, and formed a company, Pharmasett, that invested less than $500 million in research and development to produce the medication. Gilead then bought the drug for $11 billion and promptly began selling it. Production costs per patient are about $100, but the price of treatment is approximately $100,000—a markup of one thousand to one. In the first year alone, Gilead billed Medicare and Medicaid $6 billion. This naked capitalist struggle for profits leaves workers without lifesaving treatments.
International treatment of hepatitis C is likewise controlled by the drug companies. Trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement are designed to protect companies’ patents. Egypt, with the highest rate of hep C in the world, was offered a discount but only for “a sliver of people abroad who are lucky recipients of some specialized access program…access is fatally compromised and the human right to health is fundamentally violated” ((Jeffrey Sachs, consultant to World Health Organization).
Smash Global Medical Apartheid!
A communist society would prioritize research, development and mass production of every life-saving treatment. Communist worker-scientists would no longer be driven by profit; medical breakthroughs would be the property of all. The communist Progressive Labor Party is fighting for that world. In Washington, DC, where the prevalence of hep C runs from 9 to 12 percent in Black working-class clinics and hospitals, PL’ers have been calling for screening and treatment. We are preparing to move to the next level with a campaign at the American Public Health Association (APHA), protests at lobbying giant PhRMA headquarters, and continued patient advocacy.
Capitalist restrictions on biological breakthroughs extend beyond hepatitis C medications. New medicines for HIV, cancer and heart disease are often price-gouged, even though government scientists did the research. We are organizing and fighting back while also showing that attempts at reforming drug pricing will never be enough. Reforms will always exclude the hundreds of millions of our working-class sisters and brothers around the world who won’t ever be able to gain access to these medicines under capitalism. Only a communist revolution will enable the working class to manage its own health care, research and pharmaceutical distribution. Only a communist world can eradicate the virus of capitalism.
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Mary Harris: Heart & Thunder for the Working Class
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- 02 October 2015 86 hits
Mary “The Jewel” Harris, who died on September 4, was known by everybody in Progressive Labor Party’s Philadelphia hospital work. She was a wonderful friend, a force of nature, the salt of the earth—and a terror if you got on her bad side. Mary was also a pillar of PLP. When she worked in housekeeping, she routinely distributed up to 60 CHALLENGEs. After each issue, she would pass over a bag heavy with coins and bills.
Mary steered many CHALLENGE readers toward the Party and was invaluable in recruiting new members. Whenever we organized union and PLP events, her participation helped guarantee success.
Mary took to heart the egalitarian promise of communism and participated in her club’s political discussions with an unpretentious sincerity. She viewed May Day as the day for “our family,” meaning the working class. Mary also embraced her hospital comrades, Black and white, as family, something she didn’t take lightly.
In a fight, she was someone you wanted on your side. When actions were needed on the job, some might be scared, but Mary was always up to the task. Short in stature, she had a booming voice that never needed amplification, and a fierceness that intimidated larger adversaries. Respect for Mary and her loyal friends and co-workers helped to restrain attacks on PL members by the union and hospital bosses.
Two years ago, Mary accompanied us when 50 hospital union retirees marched into the hospital administration offices to protest benefit cutbacks. When an executive vice president emerged with menacing security men to “reason” with us, Mary stood directly in front of him. At full volume, she yelled, “I need my medicine! I need my medicine!” The executive was about six-foot-three and Mary only came up to his belly button, but she unnerved him. Afterward, she observed with her sly grin that the administrator “looked like he was ‘bout to cry.”
One PL comrade remembers transporting Mary and a carload of her friends to a union meeting. The women workers talked about how they protected themselves in some dangerous Philly neighborhoods. The comrade was impressed by the women’s matter-of-fact courage, especially when each of them pulled knives or clubs from their purses; one even produced an enormous revolver. For these women, the need for violence was not some abstract philosophical question. Armed with PLP’s ideas they will be a formidable revolutionary force.
Mary kept up her political activism and personal relationships to the day of her death. She was so sick when she came to the emergency room that she couldn’t remember the phone numbers of the two comrades who were her emergency contacts. For six days, Mary’s friends and family didn’t know she was in the hospital. Then a hospital social worker who knew Mary from her activism found a comrade’s contact number.
Workers from many departments visited Mary in the hospital. Retirees came from their homes. Many younger workers described how she had been a mother figure to them. Worker after worker told stories like, “When my husband died, Mary gave me a bag with $1,000 she had collected.”
As her cancer rapidly progressed, Mary was soon told she needed to go into hospice. She had no local relatives. But for two of her friends and comrades, Mary was family, and on her 75th birthday they brought her home with them. Mary died three days later.
When the working class seizes power for communism, Mary’s voice will be part of that thunder.
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Bosses’ Oil Wars Turn Millions of Workers into Refugees
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- 21 September 2015 81 hits
Every day, thousands of working-class families trying to escape war are facing militarized cops, razor-wire fences, concentration camps, and death. These refugees are fleeing an un-natural disaster—capitalist wars over resources such as oil—that have torn their homes apart and left them with a choice between risking their lives to escape and risking their lives by staying. The refugee crisis is exposing how there is no such thing as a safe place under capitalism.
Last week rebelling refugees were slandered as “armed mobs” by the Hungarian government who vow to defend “Christian Europe” against the mainly Muslim refugees. The refugees threw rocks and other projectiles at the Hungarian police who were blocking them from crossing the border. Just like in Ferguson, Missouri, the cops’ work is to defend capitalist inequality – defend the system that creates haves and have nots. Just like in Ferguson, some courageous workers refuse to accept police repression.
The refugee crisis is exposing the injustice of an unequal world in which a few rich countries profit from the poverty of hundreds of poor countries. We workers must do the crucial work of breaking down language, religious, ethnic, and gender-based barriers and unite as one international working class. We workers, all over the world, must support the refugees as they defy and break down capitalist borders!
Refugees of Imperialist War The bosses’ media incorrectly calls this a migrant crisis. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have created millions of refugees. These wars are mainly proxy wars, where the imperialists support and arm local bosses against each other. Now in its fifth year, the war in Syria is actually between Iran, Russia versus the U.S. and most of Europe. More than four million Syrians have fled the country. Another 6.5 million have been forced out of their homes but are still in Syria. As tension heats up among chief imperialist rivals like Russia, U.S., and China, there will be more war. And more refugees from the Middle East, Africa, South East Asia, and Latin America.
Capitalism creates problems it cannot solve. European governments are trying to fix the crisis by closing borders, setting quotas, demanding documents from people fleeing for their lives, and passing laws to search homes for migrants in hiding. Is this going to help the refugees? Is this going to stop more refugees from fleeing the mass disruption caused by the bosses profit wars? To the extent that countries like Germany are welcoming refugees, it is to use them as a source of cheap labor in a country that needs low wage workers. Is this a long range solution for refugee families?
Fight for Communism In the faces of the fleeing refugees we can see the urgent need for a new system—one that is organized to serve humanity and solve our problems collectively. How about a system that will guarantee all workers and youth a place to live, food to eat, and a job? A system that workers run for our own needs. We don’t need a system based on money and profits; we need communism.
We have a responsibility to respond! Workers have a history of responding to disasters — from Hurricane Katrina to the earthquake in Haiti. Today, too, large numbers of workers in Slovenia, Croatia, Germany, England, and France are welcoming the refugees, showing us, once again, the kind of world workers could build if our class had power. Where ever workers come from and where ever they are going, we need to fight the racist forces that blame our sisters and brothers and cause them to die. Respond to this capitalist refugee crisis with antiracist solidarity!
Let’s draw the connections of the war against workers inside and outside the U.S. borders. Raise the idea of international solidarity in our classrooms. Organize a forum fighting anti-immigrant racism. Protest in front of the European consulates. Organize solidarity campaigns through the unions. Fight for a world without borders! Fight for communism!
Three year-old Aylan Kurdi, lying drowned on a beach in Turkey after his family’s desperate flight from Syria, is one of millions murdered or displaced by capitalist terror. Workers become refugees because their lives are unbearable and their homes unliveable. The root cause is U.S. imperialism, a plague that devastates the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Working-class families are forced to brave suffocating containers, perilous overland crossings, and flimsy rubber rafts. They are compelled to entrust their lives to human traffickers, the callous predators who ape the capitalist bosses in putting profit first and last. Those lucky enough to survive their journey to Europe or the U.S.—mothers, fathers, children—come up against police attacks, razor wire, concentration camps, and racist abuse in places they hope might offer a better life. Women workers face sexist violence and maternal and reproductive health crises. Their children are dying en masse.
The latest refugee crisis is one more indictment of capitalism, a system that treats workers as disposable commodities. The international working class has responded by fighting back and serving the masses. All along the way, workers have greeted refugees with food, clothing, medicine, and housing. Millions have rejected the bosses’ attempts to divide workers with anti-Muslim racism or the capitalist competition for jobs, a by-product of a system that can never meet workers’ needs. The Progressive Labor Party strives to emulate their example in serving our class. We struggle to build class consciousness into the fight for a world with no refugees or imperialist war. PLP fights to win millions to the vision of a communist world, and to smash racist borders once and for all.
Imperialism Attacks Refugees Twice
Under imperialism, workers in places like Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea are assaulted twice. Syria, which alone accounts for 4 million refugees and another 8 million displaced within its borders, is a pawn in the competition between imperialist powers to control the vast oil wealth of the Middle East. In an effort to tilt the balance of regional power and counter the influence of Iran, a Russian proxy, U.S. bosses have financed a brutal rebellion against the state-terrorist, pro-Russian Assad regime This four-year-old conflict has besieged workers with chemical weapons, routine bombings of civilians, torture and mass imprisonment. The resulting destabilization has created an opening for the murderous Islamic State, junior capitalists with their own designs on the region’s oil profits. Critical infrastructure—electrical power, clean water, distribution of food and medicine—has been devastated. Workers have no choice but to leave, by any means possible.
The second attack comes with the racist terror these workers face at every step of their route to whatever destinations will admit them. Hungary, a gateway to the European Union (EU), is busy building a fence along its 110-mile border with Serbia. Anti-immigrant vigilantes are on the march in the Czech Republic; fascist parties are gaining strength in France and Italy. British Prime Minister David Cameron is leading the racist charge among capitalist politicians to warn of the refugee “swarm.” French President Francois Hollande called the port city of Calais a “jungle” and complained that truckloads of dead refugees are hurting insurance companies’ balance sheets.
When thousands of refugees chant “Germany! Germany!” in a Hungarian train station, it reflects Germany’s relatively high standard of living—the fruit of decades of immigrant exploitation and the destruction of weaker Eurozone economies like Greece. With their profits threatened by an aging population, the German bosses hope that an influx of 800,000 refugees will keep their profits humming. Their cynical attempt to save face comes after years of neglect for economic refugees from Africa and the former Yugoslavia, where German imperialism supported the U.S. slaughter in Serbia and turned a blind eye to the refugees the U.S. bombing created.
Workers Have No Borders
Germany is the leading finance capitalist power within the EU, a free-travel zone created by the bosses for more efficient trade and exploitation of workers. But as the numbers of refugees escalate and the costs of social services climb, a number of EU countries have balked and are restoring border controls. The capitalist rulers draw national boundaries to divide the international working class. Meanwhile, capital—the profit derived from workers’ hands and brains—flows freely from one country to the next. The international working class has no need for these artificial lines.
Three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, along with his brother and mother, was murdered by racist capitalism while attempting to join relatives in Canada. Thousands of others have died without any headlines. For U.S. and European bosses, the solution is more fascism and war—more air strikes, more mass murders, more refugees.
Workers must respond with class-conscious solidarity. Who are the bosses to draw borders? Who are they to say who should go where? The international working class will erase national boundaries and the racist, imperialist system that created them. We fight to build a mass international PLP. We fight for armed revolution for a communist world. To the workers of the world we say: Our class alone can build a world without nations or refugees. Join us!
Pope Francis, the fake “Peace Pope” and “Pope of the Poor,” kneels in thrall to U.S. finance capital—the world’s leading source of war, suffering, and racist exploitation. With the Catholic church facing steep declines in membership, child-abuse scandals and the loss of critical revenue, Pope Francis has been charged with forging an alliance with U.S finance capital. To deceive Catholics and progressive workers in general, the pope is espousing left-sounding ideas, ranging from an indictment of capitalist inequality to a call to the rich and powerful to take action against climate change.
But don’t be fooled. The Pope is no friend of the poor—and certainly no enemy of the capitalist bosses. In fact, his liberalization campaign reflects the growing influence of U.S. finance capitalists—the dominant wing of the U.S. ruling class—within the church. By visiting the U.S., “His Holiness” hopes to steer Catholics and others toward backing the Democratic Party in 2016—the party that, at least for the moment, appears to be the bosses’ most reliable vehicle for expanding war and fascism. Francis’s job is to pacify workers who are disillusioned with capitalism and to restore their faith in reforming this rotten system.
This is nothing new. Going back to feudal times, the Catholic Church has used religion to promote and justify the agenda of the ruling class—along with its own vast business interests. Workers of the world need to see the Pope’s game for what it is: a charade to mislead workers and subvert revolutionary politics. Instead, workers need to channel their anger into support for the Progressive Labor Party, the only organization that can create revolutionary change. PLP fights for the total destruction of capitalism, not the phony cosmetic changes sought by the Pope.
The Catholic Church is in dire need of reform. In 2013, in response to a series of crooked Vatican bank deals and a declining membership base, the church replaced Benedict XVI—a German who’d joined the Hitler Youth—with the more liberal Francis. But this wasn’t enough to check the church’s downward spiral. Francis has been forced to close schools and churches across the U.S. to pay billions in settlements in child abuse cases. Now he’s turning to U.S. finance capital for help.
The Pope’s economic dealings reveal his priorities more clearly than his lofty words. In his effort to clean up the money-laundering Vatican Bank, he replaced Ernst von Freyburg, heir to a ship-building fortune from the Hitler era, with Jean-Baptiste de Franssu, a French-born executive at Invesco, a U.S. asset management firm. On June 25, even as he gave lip service to condemn the profit system’s greed, he blessed the heavyweight imperialist leaders of the phony “Inclusive Capitalism” movement, including Bill Clinton, the British Rothschilds, JPMorgan Chase, Prince Charles, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
The Pope’s lead advisor on the current refugee crisis is ultra-capitalist Peter Sutherland. After granting Francis an audience in June, Sutherland dictated the Pope’s bogus “humanitarian” stance, subsequently adopted by the capitalist rulers in Germany and other European nations as a means to discredit Russian bosses. Sutherland is the chairman of Goldman Sachs International and ex-chairman of British Petroleum. To protect their billions in profits, both Goldman and BP need the U.S. war machine to continue slaughtering workers in the Middle East.
On his U.S. tour, Francis is cheerleading for the Democrats and their campaign to keep hold of the White House. His position on global warming neatly dovetails with theirs, in contrast to the anti-science Republican deniers. Like Democratic hopefuls Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders, Francis backs Barack Obama’s Iran deal, which buys time for the U.S. bosses to build up for global war. The Boston Globe (9/13/15) foresees Francis making pro-Democrat inroads against the GOP on several levels:
Conventional wisdom holds that the Democrats have the most to gain, given the pope’s expected focus on issues such as immigration and the fight against climate change. Moreover, given perceptions that the U.S. Church has been moving into a steadily tighter alliance with the Republicans, anything that cuts in a different direction arguably helps the opposition.
So just where do the Pope’s big ideas come from?
In an address during a meeting organized by the Foundation for Sustainable Development, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church reminded key personalities from the fields of science, religion, politics, and economics that finding solutions to global warming is a matter of social justice, since “peoples, communities, men and women, are at risk” (Christian Today, 9/13/15).
The Foundation has cashed fat checks from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 1996.
The pontiff’s other travels reflect similar U.S.-friendly politics. In July, Francis paid a call on Evo Morales, Bolivia’s “socialist” leader. As Britain’s liberal Guardian newspaper reported (10/14/14), Morales has “transformed Bolivia from an ‘economic basket case’ into a country that receives praise from such unlikely contenders as the World Bank and the IMF.” Both the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are controlled by U.S. finance capital; they were especially pleased when Morales lowered Bolivia’s legal working age to 10 years. The Pope is no friend of the working class.
As workers worldwide see more clearly that capitalism leads to mass poverty and imperialist war, the Catholic Church and the U.S. finance capitalist class are desperately looking for misleaders to stifle workers’ anger. Like his counterpart, Barack Obama, Pope Francis is the friendly face of this monstrous profit system. Only the destruction of capitalism — and its bosses, wars, racism, sexism, exploitation and permanent mass unemployment — can solve our class’s problems. Only a communist society, led by the working class and its revolutionary party, PLP, can end capitalist atrocities and put cynical salesmen like Pope Francis out of business.
