ISO Website

SocialistWorker.org looks good to me. I think the paper has gone fortnightly though.

Here are the encomia:
Messages of solidarity
Welcome to the new Socialist Worker, with more-up-to-date news and action, which will provide more effective organizing, together with more informed commentary. Forward to our socialist world.--Dennis Brutus, University of Fort Hare, South Africa

You can now get your grit on the Web as well as the street. SocialistWorker.org--the real-time avatar of Socialist Worker--promises to become the indispensable portal for activism-based analysis and radical social commentary.--Mike Davis, author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire and City of Quartz

For someone originally trained in Marxism by the ISO, in early 1980s Baltimore, this Web site reminds me of the finest traditions and also the strongest contemporary analysis. In South Africa, we'll keep a close eye and expect your coverage of this super-exploited continent to remain rich and deep.--Patrick Bond, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa

A daily Socialist Worker Web site from the U.S. is not just something needed by the leftists in America, but also by the international left. Now, when a new global capitalist crisis is spreading from United States and the system of political control in your country seems to have started falling apart, it is becoming exciting to follow political developments in the U.S. This is not to underestimate the strength of American ruling class, but there is a space emerging for radical politics.--Boris Kagarlitsky, author of Empire of the Periphery: Russia and the World System

The new website design is fantastic. It is simply amazing to see how far the Socialist Worker reaches, even in my workplace. Don't stop what you all are doing!--Todd M. Jordan, UAW Local 292

The Socialist Worker is not only a brilliant form of expression, but a most incisive reader that continues to present new realities within the left tradition. This marks it a one of the leading lights on contemporary left discourse, worth all the support that can be rendered.--Kiama Kaara, Kenya Debt Relief Network

The Socialist Worker consistently provides critical analysis of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, among other pressing issues of our day. SW can always be counted on for important reportage and insightful contextualizing of current events which is so often lacking in most news outlets today.--Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq

The Socialist Worker site is a valuable resource for everyone who wants to do something to arrest and reverse the imperial goals of the American ruling class.--Michael Schwartz, author of the forthcoming War Without End: The Iraq War in Context

Best of luck as you launch a new look for your publication. May it bring you even broader readership and success. As one of the people interviewed over the past year, I know how important it is to have a publication that offers an alternate view and can tell the stories of ordinary people who work and strive for a solid, meaningful life but often feel left out. Thank you for the work you do, and I will look forward to reading more about health care reform in future issues. Together, we can change this broken system.--Donna Smith, American SiCKO and founder, American Patients for Universal Health Care

Socialist Worker online is very good news, for it reflects the great and growing disquiet among a broad range of people. I would say its informed dissent is the true mainstream. All power to it.--John Pilger, veteran activist and journalist, and author of Freedom Next Time and The New Rulers of the World

Whenever my activism requires me to become informed about a particular issue facing our society, the Socialist Worker is always at the top of my list of reliable sources. It covers a wide variety of both national and international news, but more importantly, its journalists and guest writers have the courage to present the stories from a humanistic perspective. When there are crimes and injustices being committed anywhere in the world, it is not the job of reporters to present a neutral version. The Socialist Worker has not only the courage but also the moral clarity to take the side of the oppressed and speak for justice. I hope the relaunch of your web site is successful in helping you reach a wider audience. It is not only in their best interest, but in the best interest of all of us.--Camilo Mejía, board member, Iraq Veterans Against the War

Socialist Worker is a voice for voiceless inmates and a wonderful chance to reach society for those who are oppressed and depressed by the U.S. prison system. Keep up the good job.--Mark Clements, victim of police torture in Chicago and wrongfully incarcerated for 27 years

American Socialist Worker Feb 22nd

The American(ISO) Socialist Worker (Feb 22nd) is promising big changes, especially a more interactive and speedier web-site. They explain the changes (which will also involve a shift to a fortnightly paper - no cynicism here please) and ask for paypal donations here.

Amongst other articles just a mention of 'Radical roots of the civil rights movement' by Aaron Hess on the 'role of Communists in the struggles that led to the civil rights movement' via a review of Resisting Dixie by Glenda Gilmore and a review of Kim Moody's new book.

Socialism 2007

Socialist Worker also covers the ISO event Socialism 2007 in Socialism for the 21st century by Nicole Colson June 22, 2007
AROUND 1,000 activists from across the U.S. and beyond turned out in Chicago June 14-17 for Socialism 2007, organized around the slogan “Socialism for the 21st Century.”

The conference, sponsored by the Center for Economic Research and Social Change, publisher of Haymarket Books and the International Socialist Review, and the International Socialist Organization, publisher of Socialist Worker, brought together some of the most important voices on the left for three full days of debate and discussion about the way forward for building the left in the U.S.

This year’s participants included people on the front lines of some of today’s most important struggles--from members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and Gold Star Families for Peace, to activists for immigrant rights and those fighting the death penalty,
Left-wing journalists and authors John Pilger, Amy Goodman, Jeremy Scahill, Jeffrey St. Clair, Ron Jacobs and Josh Frank were on hand to represent the voices that are rarely heard in mainstream media--and debate and discuss the fight to rebuild the left.

IVAW members Camilo Mejía, Kelly Dougherty, Garett Reppenhagen, Martin Smith and Chanan Suárez Diaz spoke about fight to build the antiwar movement among soldiers and veterans.

In a meeting on the fight for social justice among athletes, radical sportswriter Dave Zirin stood alongside former NFL player Anthony Prior and Dr. John Carlos, who raised the Black power salute at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

“It’s been such a great weekend,” said Chicago activist Mario Garcia. “I think it’s great when you get people from all over the country--to hear the debates and what the fight is like where they are.”

Dr. Dahlia Wasfi, who has family living in Iraq, speaks out about the impact of war and occupation on the lives of ordinary Iraqis. “This is my first socialism conference, and I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to come,” she said.

“I wish my family could know what’s going on here, because they’re at the point now where my cousins have known nothing but war and occupation their whole lives. This is the worst it has ever been for them, and I hear them starting to lose hope.

“And even though this weekend doesn’t bring them more electricity, and it doesn’t bring them more water, I just wish they could know the compassion that I’ve received here for them and will send back to them.”

There's also PANEL DISCUSSION FROM SOCIALISM 2007: Confronting empire including speakers John Pilger, and More Voices with excerpts from some of the other talks.

US Socialist Worker June 22nd

The American Socialist Worker leads on Michael Moore's Sicko with Who’s killing health care in America?

NANCY WELCH looks at the causes of the health care crisis depicted in Michael Moore’s Sicko.
AS MICHAEL Moore’s Sicko hits theaters, the simmering health care crisis appears headed for a boil.

The number of Americans without coverage has soared from 40 million in 2000 to upwards of 50 million today. Plus, researchers estimate that a further one-fifth of those who are insured don’t have the coverage they need for a chronic condition or catastrophic illness, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

In other words, for every member of the U.S. Senate enjoying full government-administered health coverage, 1 million Americans go entirely or mostly without.

A total of 27 corporations, classified as health care and pharmaceutical companies, rank in the Fortune 500 list of big U.S. corporations, with total revenues of more than $600 billion among them.

And that’s not counting mega-corporations like General Electric, which counts diagnostic equipment and medical financial-management systems among its many holdings--or insurance giants such as Prudential and Metlife, which peddle Medicare supplements and disability insurance among their other “products.”

The truth about U.S. health care is one most people know too well: This system isn’t “the best in the world,” with “private medicine” encouraging “innovation and change,” as George Bush boasted at a meeting of the American Hospital Association.

Instead, by innovating new ways to ration care and boost profits, this sick system causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year. And that’s just the annual U.S. death toll for those who have no health coverage. Moore’s new documentary tells the stories of the millions more whose health coverage doesn’t ensure adequate, affordable care.

It portrays a woman denied treatment for her ailing infant at a Los Angeles emergency room outside her HMO network. Hours later, en route to an approved hospital, the baby dies.
A Kansas City woman recounts the perpetual battle she faced to get insurers to cover her husband’s kidney cancer medicines--and their refusal to approve what might have been a life-saving bone-marrow transplant.

A couple in their mid-50s facing cancer and heart trouble is forced to sell their home and move into their daughter’s basement when the bills not covered by their HMO pile up faster than they can pay.

Such stories from Sicko aren’t the result of a few “bad apple” insurance companies and corporate hospital chains. In fact, a surveillance camera captures disoriented patients herded from a University of Southern California hospital to a homeless shelter when their coverage runs out.

Even Time’s usually churlish Richard Corliss concedes that “the HMOs and pharmaceutical companies have made billions while Americans have health care below the standard of other industrialized countries, and pay more for it.”

Sicko packs a phenomenal punch--even Fox News lauds it as “brilliant”--because, as London’s Independent puts it, “Everyone in America has a health-care horror story or knows someone who does.”

Moore apparently squanders some of that power, however, by pitting health care for U.S. citizens against health care for Guantánamo prisoners. His attempted visit to this notorious gulag could have underscored that the United States leads not in health care, but in prisons; it could turn emotion into solidarity and struggle against Washington’s twisted priorities.
Nevertheless, commentators suggest that viewers will take from footage of American patients welcomed at a Havana hospital a sound, straightforward lesson: “A poor Caribbean island, whatever its ideology, can afford health care for everyone, while we do not,” writes Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir. “The only possible conclusion is that our society has chosen not to.”

BUT HOW did this “choice”--leaving the U.S. alone among 40 industrialized nations in failing to provide universal coverage--come about?

Sicko points to 1971, when Richard Nixon speculated about the boon that health care could be for the insurance industry because “the less they give ’em, the more they make.” The 1970s were indeed a turning point. Faced with intensifying global competition and declining profits, U.S. capitalism sought new markets, turning to resources and services such as health care that had been largely outside the for-profit realm.

After Nixon, corporate health care had many more politicians to thank for its more than 30-year bonanza. In the 1980s, Congress handed out the bipartisan gifts of the Hatch-Waxman and Bayh-Dole bills, permitting drug companies to patent medicines created with federal funds and shutting out competition from lower-cost generics.

This is the reality of America’s “free-market” medicine: Spending hardly a dime on research and protected from competition, Big Pharma scoops up the drugs developed in the NIH and university labs, and reaps colossal rewards.

At the start of 1980s, Wyeth was the only drug company in the Fortune 100, with barely a toehold at 99. Today, there are four pharmaceuticals in the top 100, and two others ranked just outside.

But it was the 1990s that really fulfilled Nixon’s dream. After abandoning an attempt to implement the Democratic Party’s 40-year-old promise of a national health program, Bill Clinton gave the green light for for-profit HMOs, which helped complete U.S. health care’s corporate domination.

The result has been a full-blown crisis, made in Washington for Wall Street. As one insurance industry employee explains in Sicko: “You’re not slipping through the cracks. They made the crack and are sweeping you toward it.”

While critics who’ve caught sneak peaks widely agree that Sicko makes a convincing case against for-profit health care, some, like Time’s Richard Corliss, chide Moore for not presenting the tab for a universal, government-administered (or single-payer) program. For all the virtues of universal coverage, Corliss implies, it could prove too costly.

On the contrary, data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows that countries with universal coverage, such as France, Germany, and Canada, spend at least one-fourth less of their gross domestic product--between 8 and 11 percent--on health care while keeping virtually everyone covered.

By contrast, the U.S. spends 16 percent of GDP--more than $2 trillion every year--while failing to insure or insure adequately 35 percent or more of the population.

Where does the money go? For starters, to profits--especially profits made through cutting care and marketing lifestyles. For instance, UnitedHealth Group (number 21 on Fortune’s list) reveled in earnings up 26 percent last year, while also facing racketeering charges for routinely denying patient claims.

Pfizer (39 on the Fortune 500) likewise saw its bottom line swell by 139 percent. Pfizer isn’t getting rich by inventing needed treatments for malaria or drug-resistant TB. Instead, it pushes the profit-enlarging Viagra.

A piece of every health-care dollar also goes to Republican and Democratic Party candidates, plus lobbying organizations--to keep them on corporate health care’s side.

The results are obvious. In 2003, Congress could have expanded traditional Medicare to include prescription drugs, for which the government would negotiate a reasonable price.

Instead, the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act puts no government brake on the price-gouging drug companies. What it does do is turn over a chunk of this program to for-profit insurers--which are charging, two recent studies show, 11 to 19 percent more than traditional Medicare to deliver the same care.

Now the AARP wants in on this lucrative business too, announcing in April that it would team up with UnitedHealth and Aetna to become the nation’s biggest provider of private insurance to Medicare recipients.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ALL THIS profit-making comes at a steep bureaucratic cost. A 2005 study in Health Affairs found that only 66 cents of every private-sector health-care dollar goes to medical care. Another 21 cents goes to billing paperwork--the price for extracting profit.

Compare this with the purchasing power of every public Medicare dollar: 97 cents for patient care and only 3 cents for overhead. According to Physicians for a National Health Program, we could shift everyone to a program like Medicare, scrap our current system of some 1,500 insurance plans--each with its own marketing, premiums, paperwork and money-guzzling CEO--and save $150 billion in bureaucracy every year.

When Physicians for a National Health Program’s David Himmelstein met with Hillary Clinton in the early 1990s to pitch the affordability of a national program, Clinton reportedly replied, “You make a convincing case, but where’s the power to do that?” At Himmelstein’s response--“How about the president of the United States leading a crusade of the American people?”--Clinton scoffed, then asked “for something real.”

But real grassroots forces are starting to step up to build this critical crusade. Advocacy groups like Healthcare-Now have called on activists to leaflet outside screenings of Sicko so viewers can channel their anger and ideas raised by the film to work into organizing panels, truth hearings and demonstrations.

In Hartford, Conn., activists didn't wait for Sicko. Twenty-two people, many of them from local unions, were arrested earlier this month when they refused to budge from a state capitol sit-in calling for universal health care and a single-payer program.

“This type of behavior was disruptive to the legislative process,” scolded Capitol Police Chief Michael J. Fallon. But if Sicko helps inspire many more of these disruptions, it could be just what the doctor ordered.

Socialist Worker May 11th 2007

The American SW continus to focus on immgrant struggles with a lead on The new sanctuary movement by Lee Sustar: 'A NEW faith-based movement to “awaken the moral imagination of the country” hopes to provide sanctuary for undocumented immigrants whose deportation would break up families.'

Mike Marqusee comments on the departure of Tony Blair.

There is an interesting piece on The left turn in U.S. politics by Sharon Smith, explaining 'that a leftward shift in consciousness is having an impact on mainstream politics.' This starts with Hillary Clinton leading 'a congressional charge to repeal the authority of Congress bestowed in 2002 upon George W. Bush to wage war on Iraq', contrasting this to her role as a key member of the “National Security Democrats”: embracing 'the Bush Doctrine’s strategy of pre-emptive warfare and the conservative legacy of Republican Ronald Reagan'.

But now better established opponents of the war are gaining on Clinton in the popularity stakes: 'An NBC News/Wall Street Journal opinion poll released on April 25 showed both Obama and Edwards closing in on Clinton’s lead. While she remained 12 points ahead of Obama in March, her lead shrank to just 5 percent in April, with only a 36-31 percent margin. Support for Edwards, just 15 percent in March, rose to 20 percent in April."

The Article continues:
'MOST PRESIDENTIAL candidates may not yet recognize the emerging--and seismic--shift in U.S. mainstream politics, precipitated from below. But opinion polls clearly show that mass consciousness is far left of center, as economist Paul Krugman noted on March 26 in the New York Times:
According to the American National Election Studies, in 1994, the year the Republicans began their 12-year control of Congress, those who favored smaller government had the edge, by 36 to 27. By 2004, however, those in favor of bigger government had a 43-to-20 lead.
And public opinion seems to have taken a particularly strong turn in favor of universal health care. Gallup reports that 69 percent of the public believes that “it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have health care coverage,” up from 59 percent in 2000.
The main force driving this shift to the left is probably rising income inequality. According to Pew, there has recently been a sharp increase in the percentage of Americans who agree with the statement that “the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.”

In a CBS News Poll conducted on April 9-12, fully 66 percent of respondents said they “disapprove” of the way Bush is handling the situation with Iraq.

The current “race to the left” among both Democrats and Republicans can only be understood in its historic significance. The political pendulum is swinging left at a rate not seen since the 1960s, when Sen. Robert Kennedy, who built had his political career as a rabid anti-communist during the 1950s McCarthy era, resurfaced as an antiwar presidential candidate in the late 1960s.
The Republicans and Democrats have historically coexisted as the twin parties of capital. Big business prefers the Republicans’ “Plan A” to aggressively assert its self-interest. But it can always rely on the Democrats’ “Plan B” to salvage its interests when popular dissent threatens to revolt.

The Democrats’ historic mission is to absorb social anger into its electoral folds. Today, the Democratic Party is fulfilling this mission--but this also opens up the possibility for further reform. Yesterday’s “do-nothing” Democrats have evolved into a team of reformers, dragged kicking and screaming by an angry electorate, but responsive to further pressure from below.
The Democrats’ current shift leftward should therefore be viewed cynically. But there is also a discernable difference between “Plan A” and “Plan B,” which merits acknowledgement.

Those who seek social change should not rely on politicians of either party, but at the same time, should recognize that mainstream politics is shifting leftward due to pressure from below. That pressure must continue for real reforms to be achieved.

(US) Socialist Worker #630 May 4th 2007

The ISO's Socialist Worker (May 4, 2007) doesn't seem to cover the May Day protests focussed on migrant rights - well, it was only yesterday. They keep on the topic though with reports on brutal state crackdowns on migrants.

Lee Sustar reports on 'the new face of immigration law enforcement: military-style mass arrests' in the Little Village area of Chicago; . But if the ICE crackdown was intended to intimidate immigrant rights activists, it’s having the opposite effect. Sharon Smith takes up the wider issues.