CHICAGO, October 13 — Students, hospital workers, and patients’ family members gathered in the rain in front of Stroger Hospital of Cook County this morning to denounce the institutionalized murder of ventilator-dependent patients. “Does a system that kills its weak to save money deserve to exist? No, it does not,” one speaker said.

As public hospitals like Oak Forest Hospital (OFH) are being shut down here, the bosses have trained their sights on the last remaining patients — those too sick and dependent to escape on their own — transferring these patients to poorly-staffed, for-profit nursing homes.

In early September, Michael Yanul, a 58-year-old ventilator patient with muscular dystrophy, who had lived at OFH for 17 years, was forced tomove. At a nursing home called Oak Lawn Respiratory and Rehab, Michael only survived three weeks before succumbing to pneumonia.

According to the national ratings Web site nursinghomerating.org, this 143-bed facility has an overall rating of one out of five stars. They have “widespread administrative deficiencies” and show a “pattern of quality-care deficiencies.” Among short-stay residents at that nursing home, 34% have bedsores and fewer than half received flu vaccine.

Another one of the long-term ventilator patients from OFH, David Moreno, 34, is particularly concerned about what happened to his former friend. Michael lived down the hall from David on the OFH vent unit. David suffered paralysis from a spinal cord injury 12 years ago and, like Michael, cannot breathe without a machine.

After OFH closed on September 2, he was moved to the Coronary ICU at Stroger Hospital until a long-term placement could be arranged. His social worker told him that the hospital administration plans to move him to Oak Lawn Respiratory and Rehab, where Michael died last month. “I’m scared of going to that place,” he said in a recent interview.

By attacking the most vulnerable patients first, the bosses expect to desensitize workers and prepare the way for more murderous attacks. The Nazi Holocaust began as coordinated, hospital-based murders of physically and mentally handicapped patients (see box).

We distributed CHALLENGE and passed out flyers to patients and workers arriving for the morning shift, exposing the hospital administration’s plans to kill off the few remaining ventilator-dependent patients through deliberate decisions that result in completely predictable deaths.

Their calculations are straightforward. It costs nearly $3,000 a day to keep a patient on a respirator in the ICU. It costs about $2,000 in a high-quality long-term vent unit. It costs about $500 a day at the death-trap nursing home. In a year the administration can save enough to pay the salary of the new CEO, about $550,000.

Our picket line featured large photographs of three OFH vent patients, Michael, David and one other survivor, Posey Conley. Their large images looking directly at passers-by made a stark contrast to the cold financial calculations that administrators were making to sacrifice their lives for the budget.

Several nurses, technicians and other hospital workers came out for our actions even though they had never been to a protest before. They helped pass out flyers and chanted. They didn’t lose confidence even when the hospital police harassed us and threatened protestors with arrest. Eventually we moved about 40 yards away from the front door and resumed our picket. The husband of a patient joined the picket line. He grabbed the bullhorn in a spirited defense of his wife and every other patient who depends on public medical services, asking “This could happen to anyone — Who’s next?”

We collected names of new contacts and deepened our relationships with friends in this little skirmish. For years we have been talking about the development of fascism in society at large and in medicine in particular. Today it is right in front of us and we confronted it squarely. We made some modest gains; this fight is far from over. All workers’ lives are precious to our class. But none of our lives mean anything to the billionaires unless we can be used to make them richer. Their murderous system must be destroyed if workers are to live.J

Hitler’s ‘Euthanasia’: Medical Murder

The Nazi “Euthanasia” Program, 1939-1944

The gas chambers and other mass killing techniques that the Nazis eventually used to kill millions of Jews and others were developed on Germans living in chronic-care public hospitals.

Dr. Leo Alexander, a Boston neurologist and psychiatrist, was called as a special expert witness to testify before the Nuremberg tribunal investigating the actions of German physicians during World War II.  In 1949 he published a summary of his testimony in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). He described how the most advanced medical profession in the world was transformed into an appendage of the militarized state, how it lost touch with its mission to care for the sick and infirm. Embracing the politics of the day with patriotic fervor, doctors and other health professionals actively organized a program that was referred to as euthanasia.

In the opening paragraph of his NEJM article, Dr Alexander describes “a rapid decline in standards of professional ethics. Medical science in Nazi Germany collaborated … in the following enterprises: the mass extermination of the chronically sick in the interest of saving ‘useless’ expenses to the community as a whole; [and] the mass extermination of those considered socially disturbing or racially and ideologically unwanted…”

He goes on to describe the system: “The decision regarding which patients should be killed was made entirely on the basis of [limited] information by expert consultants…. These consultants never saw the patients themselves. …[Q]uestionnaires were collected by a ‘Realm’s Work Committee of Institutions for Cure and Care.’ … The ‘Charitable Transport Company for the Sick’ transported patients to the killing centers, and the ‘Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care’ was in charge of collecting the cost of the killings from the relatives, without, however, informing them what the charges were for; in the death certificates the cause of death was falsified.”

When Cook County arranges transportation of undocumented patients to home countries where we know they will not receive the treatments that are keeping them alive, that policy should be referred to as administrative euthanasia. When patients on ventilators are forced to move to nursing homes with none of the resources or expertise needed to care for them properly and a track record of extremely high mortality, that, too, should be labeled administrative euthanasia.

Dr. Alexander concluded, “Whatever proportions these crimes finally assumed, it became evident to all who investigated them that they had started from small beginnings. The beginnings at first were merely a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitude of the physicians. It started with the acceptance of the attitude, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived.”

Recently, “liberal” National Public Radio’s “Fronteras” program staged a “town hall” in Texas to discuss the DREAM Act, a proposed law to allow immigrant youth without papers to stay in the U.S. and go to college or join the military. The composition of the panel and the conduct of the event showed that the purpose was to promote racism and fascism. Anti-racist students from local colleges came to confront this panel.  

In preparation, we passed out a leaflet on our campus and at the town hall that criticized the DREAM Act as a tool to force immigrant youth into the military. It exposed the composition of the panel: Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, who had approved the torture at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and is now running as a Democratic candidate for the Senate; a member of the racist, vigilante Minutemen/Border Watch; George Rodriguez, the head of a regional “Tea Party” organization; as well as an immigrant student and an immigration lawyer.

We called on students, teachers and workers to unite as one working class to “smash all borders and the capitalist profit system.” On the day of the event, we brought signs with slogans like “Workers’  Struggles Know No Borders.”   

As the event opened, the moderator, who had selected the panelists, gave each a few minutes to speak. None of the liberals took a critical approach to the Dream Act. In defending youth who were “illegal through no fault of their own” and who could “contribute” to U.S. society, they demonized undocumented parents as “law-breakers.”

When pressed by a college student, General Sanchez reluctantly admitted that the DREAM Act would force people into the military since “dreamer” students would not be allowed federal financial aid for college or work permits. But, he continued, this was good for the military since immigrant soldiers were more likely than citizens to complete their service “honorably.”

Neither of the open racists addressed the DREAM Act. Each repeatedly called for more deportations and more militarization of the border. As the Tea Party’s Rodriguez ranted that the “illegality” of immigrants came before immigration reform, the crowd broke their silence with boos and hisses and calls of “YOU ARE A RACIST!” 

The majority in the audience were anti-racists, including pro-Dream Act activists from local colleges and a large group of Latino high school students. During the Question-and-Answer segment, speakers challenged the Minuteman/Tea Party positions. A high school student denounced the term “illegal alien” as dehumanizing and racist. A teacher asked the Minuteman if he would have “teachers perform the duties of ICE agents?” and if he would deport students attending the forum. His reply was “yes,” teachers should be required to turn in “illegal” students and that he would deport youth without papers “in a heartbeat.” 

As the crowd began to boo, the Tea Party’s Rodriguez chimed in to attack teachers for spreading “liberal ideas.” When the teacher called out the Minutemen/Tea Party as “Nazis,” the audience responded with cheers and applause.

The next speaker, an activist from Veterans for Peace, continued the theme by asking the panelists if they were familiar with Kristallnacht [the 1938 event when the Nazis attacked Jewish homes and began expelling foreign-born residents of Germany]. At this point the moderator, who had allowed the Tea Party far more opportunity to spew its racist anti-immigrant filth but had repeatedly tried to silence anti-racist comment, adjourned the forum.

The meeting ended with a chant of “DREAM Act Now.” Despite the good reception of our leaflet and our success in exposing the Dream Act as a racist military draft, we had limited influence over the chanting. Instead the overt racism of the Tea Party made support of the DREAM Act seem the “lesser of two evils.” Liberal NPR had used Tea-Party racism to build support for an anti-working-class piece of immigration reform.

But we have real opportunities to stretch these limits.

As people left the meeting room, Minutemen threatened the out-spoken teacher and a high school student. Students rallied to their defense. They took our signs and joined us in chanting “Minutemen, Nazis, KKK — Racist, Fascist go away!” The police quickly rescued the racists from the anger of the students. Since then, the Tea Party/Minutemen have launched an attack on the teacher, bombarding his school with calls and e-mail demanding his firing. Their demands have been publicized on the internet and in the local and national press. While the school system has so far refused to fire the teacher, no one should count on this.

We are developing a plan of action to continue the struggle against racism on our campus and to build support for the teacher and his students among our neighbors, coworkers and fellow students. Attacks against immigrants have intensified since the town-hall event, revealing the necessity of anti-racist, communist politics. We will continue to follow up with our friends  and strengthen our contacts so that next time we can shut them down.

Friends in Texas

MEXICO CITY, October 2 — Thousands of students, teachers, and workers participated in massive marches to honor the memory and struggles of the 1968 anti-government protests. The Party participated in the marches in Mexico City and in Oaxaca, distributing hundreds of flyers and putting forward its communist politics.

The marches were marked by the strong presence of youth and it was heartening to see that women led the groups coming from rural schools. We face the great challenge of helping those young people abandon the reform struggles to join the fight for an egalitarian society, communism. The massive police presence indicated that the repression experienced in ‘68 will remain a threat as long as the same oppressive class is in power.

Students, organized in the National Strike Council, mobilized close to a million and a half people. One of their essential demands was to abolish the repressive state apparatus and the laws that supported it.

On October 2, 1968, a peaceful demonstration of several thousand students and workers were violently repressed. The business and financial oligarchy, represented by President Diaz Ordaz and the Governing Secretary Luis Echeverría, ordered the military, the police, and paramilitary groups to murder hundreds of protesters. When the demonstrators realized there wasn’t a legislative way to achieve the reforms they sought, many of those youth joined the guerrilla struggles of the 1970s.

By and large, the media distorted the truth about the movement, making it evident that they were just tools of the ruling class. Print media and television promote, to this day, the criminal idea that one should not protest, because “nothing ever changes.” But the historical struggles of ‘68 demonstrate that workers’ aspirations for freedom can only be accomplished if we change the social and economic system in which we live. That was one of its more important contributions.

Thousand of students, who were part of the movement in ‘68, found organization and inspiration in the communist movement of those days. Militant left-wing organizations were part of the leadership. Capitalism was still expanding then. However students and workers participated in great popular movements around the world.

Currently, the essential demands of 1968 are still relevant, because power remains in the hands of the social class that massacred those protesters. If we workers don’t take power we achieve nothing. Eventually, the system takes back all the reforms that we win. Even if we manage to take power away from the bourgeoisie, we must also eliminate capitalist ideas and practices, to prevent what happened in the Soviet Union, where, by maintaining wages and commodity production it created the basis for capitalism to return. Reforming the system won’t work; it has to be destroyed.

One of the motivators of the struggles of ‘68 was the defense of university autonomy. Currently, UNAM (Autonomous National University of Mexico) authorities are trying to create a climate of intimidation to extend the same police control affecting the country over university installations.

The restrictions that the movement of ‘68 forced on the repressive state apparatus and in favor of freedom of expression were lost in a couple of years during Calderon’s government. “Democracy” is only one face of the capitalist political system; fascism is always latent as the other violent and repressive side. For this reason, capitalism doesn’t work for the workers and must be abolished through revolutionary struggle.

During the last sixty years the police and military apparatus has been fortified; the so-called freedoms won in ‘68 and in other struggles, have been reduced due to the strict ideological control that the media, education, and culture exert over the working class. The emergence of mass movements such the UNAM Students Strike, the Zapatistas, Atenco, and Oaxaca never moved beyond the context of capitalist bourgeois legality and eventually were undermined or co-opted by the ruling class. Nevertheless, the potential for rebellions still remains; to make it a reality we must develop a revolutionary organization capable of guiding the working class towards state power. Only a communist party can fulfill that role, which we are building in the PLP.

The movement showed the unity and solidarity of workers in Mexico and around the world against the falsehoods promoted by the government that we are passive and self-centered. There is a potential to struggle and to live in a free and just collectivist society. Workers and student will turn this potential into a reality.

Join Progressive Labor Party!

DETROIT, MI., October 19 — While the International UAW leadership was drumming up support for the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests, they were also signing new four-year agreements with GM, Ford and Chrysler, the first since the federal bailout and bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler in 2009. These new contracts show that the “progressive” union leaders share the rulers’ vision of a low-wage, highly productive workforce that will keep the profits flowing from the GM Building to Wall St.

GM made more than $1 billion in profit last year and Ford about $4 billion. The new contracts continue the wage freeze of senior workers that began in 2005. Instead, there is a series of signing bonuses and lump-sum payments (as high as $16,000 to senior Ford workers, at least 50 percent less at GM and Chrysler) that do not go into our base pay or begin to make up the concessions taken from us. For new second-tier workers, base pay could rise by $4/hr. over the life of the Ford contract, but there is no bridge from the second tier to the first.  There is no increase in the pension and the retirees’ Christmas bonus has been ended.

‘Improve Competitiveness’ on Workers’ Backs

John Fleming, Ford’s head of global manufacturing and labor affairs, said the new deal “will continue to improve our competitiveness...” Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at the University of California, Berkeley said the union tried to win bonuses and new jobs without creating additional costs.

In fact, overall labor costs could go down. GM and Ford are reopening a few plants and bringing more work to some others, promising as many as 12-15,000 new jobs, all at the lower-wage second tier. At the same time they are starting a new round of buyouts of senior workers. Now, second-tier workers are about 5% of the total workforce. By 2015 they could be as much as 20%. And in the industry as a whole, including the transnational assembly plants and the hundreds of supplier plants, probably two-thirds of the industry is at or below the GM, Ford and Chrysler second tier.

The UAW’s efforts to keep the Detroit Big Three “more competitive” has turned the U.S. into one of the low-wage, non-union centers of the international auto industry. And any promise of new jobs at any wage assumes the economy doesn’t crash again, taking the auto industry with it.

Forty Percent Say ‘No!’

The contracts are not going down easy with the workers. More than a third of the 40,000 GM workers voted to reject the deal and workers at the Ford Assembly and Stamping plants in Chicago turned the deal down by almost 80%. These are both older and newer workers whose communities have been ravaged by racist unemployment and cutbacks. They want to fight the rulers, not serve them.

Then the union hacks pressured the workers at two Kentucky plants to approve Ford’s new offer which resulted in overall ratification on October 18. Forty percent of the total vote rejected it.

The bosses and union leaders got their contracts this time, but as OWS and the high “No” vote indicate, the class struggle is heating up. This means a greater opening to win auto and other industrial workers to the revolutionary communist PLP.  We will be up to the challenge.J