A response to Deseret News editor Drew Clark, by Lew Jeppson

Writing in the Deseret News yesterday, Mr Clark has shown that he is really obsessed with the matter of contraception. The conservative Christian faiths (and Islam) are particularly exercised that businesses and corporations which are owned by members of their faiths not be required to provide contraceptive drugs. Why? The answer provided by Mr Clark and others is that such would interfere with their free exercise of religion.

But we need to probe deeper.

Why do conservative faiths so fear contraception? Because contraception liberates women! Women, both single and married, can avoid pregnancy through the use of contraceptives. This diminishes the control of women by men. And of course that is the last thing conservative Christianity and Islam want.

So the freedom of religious expression as Mr. Clark sees it, is containment and erosion of actual freedom for women.

The Socialist Party USA — including the Utah chapter, the Wasatch Socialist Party — defends the rights of women to control their reproductive destinies. As we say in our Principles:

We work against the exploitation and oppression of women who live with lower wages, inferior working conditions and subordination in the home, in society and in politics. Socialists struggle for the full freedom of women and men to control their own bodies and reproductive systems and to determine their own sexual orientation.  

We stand for the right of women to choose to have a safe and legal abortion, at no cost, regardless of age, race, or circumstance. Women’s independent organizations and caucuses are essential to full liberation, both before and after the transformation to socialism. Women will define their own liberation. 

The images out of Ferguson, Missouri are terrifying: police officers looking more like Army infantry holding lines against protesters with assault rifles.

Hands up, indeed.

In response to the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X said that “the chickens have come home to roost,” meaning that the violence that Black Americans faced on a daily basis appeared at the highest levels of the white government.

We’re facing a similar situation today. We’ve been fighting a “war on terror” for more than a decade now, with massive military buildups all over the world, benefiting weapons manufacturers who sell their wares to the US government. Well, like any good capitalists, these companies are expanding their markets, selling weapons to police departments around the country. The global war on terror is coming home to roost in our city streets.

Including here in Utah. As Salt Lake County Sheriff Jim Winder told the Deseret News, “I don’t deny that the look and feel [of today's police] can seem militarized. It’s a style that we have embraced.”

As if turning cops into occupying armies is a fashion statement.

But of course, this new fashion is justified by the increasing violence of the “bad guys”. As the Salt Lake Tribune reported earlier this year,

“Your bad guy, he’s always out there training, looking for the biggest baddest thing,” Wasatch County Sheriff Todd Bonner said.

His office has received M-14 and M-16 rifles that go in his deputies’ patrol vehicles. Up the street from the sheriff in the county seat, the Heber City Police Department received four M-14 rifles.

Except that violent crime rates are down across the US, and have been for years. While the Utah police speak of hyper-armed, organized, violent criminals terrorizing our streets, this isn’t reality. So why do Utah cops need over 1200 assault rifles, an MRAP, a BearCat, and 4 grenade launchers?

You might say, “What about people like Christopher Dorner, who shot and killed three police officers and injured three more?” The reply: Dorner was a cop and ex-military. He already had access to the “biggest, baddest weapons” because that was his job.

You also might say, “Riot gear cops during riots makes sense. We won’t see them here in Utah unless there’s a riot.” Wrong. We’re already seeing SWAT teams use military tactics to break into people’s homes, kill their pets, and violently arrest sleeping people.

What we’re seeing is a defacto subsidy for weapons manufacturers, transferring our tax dollars to them in order for them to sell our cops weapons that aren’t needed. And along with the unneeded weapons is an unneeded ideology that policing is a matter of overwhelming force, fighting “bad guys,” military-style operations, and shoot-em-up tactics, rather than “Protecting and Serving.”

The Wasatch Socialist Party joins with people across the political spectrum who have rightly pointed to what’s happening in Ferguson as evidence for the need to demilitarize the police. Stop paying weaponsmakers for guns. Start building infrastructure, offering real healthcare solutions, increase funding for education.

For those of you interested in Marxian Economics, we cannot recommend a better source than Richard Wolff. His latest intensive course is now freely available online.

By Lew Jeppson,

In a op-ed reprinted in the Deseret News, economist Robert Samuelson makes a startling admission: we don’t know what to do about the long term unemployed!

Says Samuleson: “Long-term unemployment is a huge national and personal tragedy. It’s an idleness trap. We don’t know how to solve it; but we can at least not make it worse.”

This is a very frank admission that capitalism has failed, utterly failed, labor.

What do we say? A socialist president and congress would put the long term unemployed to work, doing what they already know how to do if possible, retraining them if necessary. But government would be the employer of last resort. And there are plenty of potential projects to soak up the idle labor, with our rotting transportation infrastructures for just one example.

In the meantime this is a tragedy, a permanent one for many. While a tiny percentage continue to command a greater portion of the world’s wealth, the rest of us fall further and further behind. Capitalism’s promise of raising everyone’s well-being is belied by the continuous theft of wealth by the rich.

Lastly, we socialists need to make it completely clear, we understand that people NEED to work. Not being able to work destroys human beings.

Want to understand the economy? Consult my published works.

by Lew Jeppson

Business columnist Robert Samuelson had an opinion piece in the Washington Post.  It was entitled “Economists in the Dark.”  In it he bemoans the inability of contemporary economists to get or predict anything right. But he offers no solution. Below is my response:

I continue to contend that economics will remain static and ineffective until Marxian analysis is let into contemporary economics. Marxian analysis makes pretty quick work analyzing our current problems:

• First, profits come from incomplete compensation to labor.
• Second, the need of capital to grow profits without limit leads to stagnant wages and off-shoring of jobs.
• Third, the stagnation of wages leads to increasingly top heavy distributions of wealth and income (this is happening, it’s not just theory), and the falling from the middle class of many families.
• Fourth, as capitalism matures banking capitalism becomes more prominent (financial services have climbed to 20% of GDP) and for that reason their recklessness lends increasing instability (Wall Street banking created the collapse of 2007-2008).
• And finally fifth, government steps in to save the system from collapse by borrowing heavily and flooding the system with money to save the banks which in turn loan to the government to finance the bailout of themselves.

Marx predicted all of this. Isn’t this just great? We Marxists understand this stuff. Samuelson and the rest can’t because they don’t have the right tools.

Another title for this article might be – how do we respond to the right wing?  I recently listened to an exchange between Michelle Bachman and Senator Bernie Sanders (thank God he’s around).  As Congressman Bachman went through her talking points I found myself screaming at my CRT.  I called her every name I could think of.  Crazy?  Yes, I’m afraid so. It’s not good for the body to get so angry.

As socialists we need to be proactive and state what we are FOR – continually.  We are for protecting those most vulnerable – the young and the old.  We want early childhood education and protection for Social Security and pension funds.

We need to advocate for an evolution of our system, one which deemphasizes profits and advocates for workers’ receiving full value for their contribution, that is, for the value they add.   We need to be for equal rights always, not only for races, creed, and genders, but also for LGBT.  There should be no ambiguity here.

We need to be for environmental protection.

We need to be for single payer health care, while we are guardedly supportive of what President Obama is trying to do to alleviate health care want.

We need to be for family life as a protection against the capitalist system and the vicissitudes of life in general.

We need to be for worker control of enterprise.  This we need to advocate vigorously.
In short, the Wasatch Socialist Party needs to write a platform, describing what we are FOR!

We need to avoid attacks against opponents.  When we do that we argue on their turf and invite retribution and venom, which could be very harmful to all, to us particularly so, in the years ahead.

What do you think?

Kelsey Brown, Wasatch Socialist

Healthcare reform has been one of the most prominent topics in the news ever since the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010. The ACA is often incorrectly referred to as the “socialization” of medicine. The truth is, the ACA is still capitalist, for-profit healthcare. Socialists always have and always will support a single-payer system of healthcare. We believe that access to good healthcare is a human right completely unrelated to someone’s income. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about why the United States healthcare system is in desperate need of change, and I will give a real-life example of how, even with health insurance, healthcare can be a financial death sentence and why the ACA is incapable of fixing these problems.

How many times have you heard that the United States has the best healthcare in the world and that switching to a single-payer system, the dreaded “socialized medicine,” would ruin it? We don’t want to have to deal with a Canadian or British system, do we? Our taxes would be unbearable and we’d get substantially worse healthcare than we get now, or so the argument goes. What many people don’t realize is that the numbers already indicate that we pay more for healthcare than any other country and we’re not getting our money’s worth.

In the United States, we spend over $8000 per capita annually (the next closest country is Norway at less than $6000) and still have a lower life expectancy than other Western countries (although we’re still ahead of China and Brazil, if that makes you feel any better). We rank 46th of 48th in terms of healthcare efficiency. We’re paying much more than anyone else and receiving much worse care.

Maybe efficiency isn’t everything though. Our doctors make a lot of money, this must attract a lot of bright minds to the field, right? Not so much. A common argument is that if we go to a single-payer system American doctors will flee the country (I’m not sure where they’d go since we’re the last westernized country without a single-payer system) and good students will be deterred from going into healthcare. This fear is probably unfounded. The United States has actually fewer physicians per person than most other OECD countries (34 countries) and our average of 2.6 hospital beds per 1000 people is lower than the OECD average 3.4.

As of 2012 (before the ACA went into effect), 47 million Americans under 65 lacked health insurance. 75% of the uninsured were working and only 40% lived before the poverty line. Before the ACA, only 57% of companies offered their employees health coverage. Even then, though, coverage is not guaranteed. Part-time and contract employees (a growing portion of the population) usually do not qualify for employer-sponsored health coverage. Employer-sponsored coverage isn’t necessarily affordable either. In 2013, the average premiums for family coverage were $16,351. Employees don’t bear this whole cost, but the amount that employees have been asked to pay has risen as much as 70% over the past 10 years. This leaves many employees unable to afford health insurance even if they are offered it. The worst part is that in 2012 due to the high cost of medical services, 27% of those with insurance put off getting needed healthcare and 23% reported difficulty paying medical bills in the past 12 months.

In summary, the United States spends more on healthcare than any other country, has fewer doctors per 1000 people and a lower life expectancy than most other western countries and still manages to leave a significant portion of its population unable to access healthcare. Around half of all bankruptcies in this country are due to medical bills and the vast majority of filers had health insurance. The next entry on healthcare will focus on a real-life example (mine) of how medical bills, even with insurance, can easily become overwhelming to a family well above the federal poverty line.

By Kshama Sawant, Socialist Alternative, Seattle City Council
Tuesday January 28, 2014

Tonight, President Obama talked about the deepening inequality.

But that is a testament of his own presidency. A presidency that has betrayed the hopes of tens of millions of people who voted for him out of a genuine desire for fundamental change away from corporate politics and war mongering.

Poverty is at record-high numbers – 95% of the gains in productivity during the so-called recovery have gone to the top 1%.

The president’s focus on income inequality was an admission of the failure of his policies.

An admission forced by rallies, demonstrations, and strikes by fast food and low wage workers demanding a minimum wage of $15. It has been forced by the outrage over the widening gulf between the super-rich and those of us working to create this wealth in society.

While the criminals on Wall Street are bailed out, courageous whistleblowers like Edward Snowden are hunted down and the unconstitutional acts he exposed are allowed to continue.

Obama is the president who is using smartphone apps – games like Angry Birds – to spy against tens of millions of ordinary people in a completely blatant violation of basic constitutional rights.

The President claims ending two wars while he continues to intensify a brutal campaign of drone wars in multiple countries, killing hundreds of innocent civilians, and not to mention the plight of US soldiers returning with permanent medical conditions and declining veterans’ benefits.

Obama is the president whose broken website is a symbol of the broken hopes of millions who believed his promises for affordable healthcare.

“Climate change is a fact,” says Obama.

Here is another fact: Climate change is getting worse and worse, on his watch. There has been a massive increase in incredibly destructive practices like the use of coal and fracking.

Leadership in stopping the disastrous Keystone XL pipeline has come not from Obama or Congress, but from the thousands of courageous people organizing and taking direct action to stop it.

Obama shouts “Fix our broken immigration system.” He is the president with record numbers of deportations.

My brothers and sisters, these problems are not new. And they are not an accident.

Working people have faced nearly four decades of wage stagnation and rising income inequality.

Four decades, with four Republican presidents and three Democratic presidents. Four decades that show neither party can solve these problems and that both fundamentally represent the same interests – the interests of the super-wealthy and big corporations.

We will only make progress on the basis of fundamental, systemic change. We need a break from the policies of Wall Street and Corporate America. We need a break from capitalism. It has failed the 99%.

Both parties bow down before the free market, and loyally serve the interests of their corporate masters – the only difference being a matter of degree.

The political system is completely dysfunctional and broken. It is drowning in corporate cash.

Working people, youth, people of color, women, the elderly, the disabled, immigrants – the 99% – have no voice or representation

We need our own political party. Independent of big business, and independent of the parties of big business.

Some say it cannot be done.

But look at the example of my campaign for Seattle City Council. I ran as an open socialist. I did not take a penny in corporate cash. My campaign raised $140,000 from ordinary working people. I ran as an independent working-class challenger to the capitalist establishment.

I ran on a platform of $15 minimum wage, taxing the super-rich to pay for mass transit and education, and for affordable housing, including rent control.

I am only taking the average worker’s wage while politicians in Seattle and in Congress are totally out of touch with the lives of the rest of us.

We built a grassroots campaign of over 450 people. With almost 100,000 votes, my election was the first time in decades an independent socialist was elected in a major US city.

Americans are hungry for something different. And it’s not just in Seattle. A recent poll showed that sixty percent of Americans want a third party.

Let’s talk about minimum wage. Obama said, “No one working full-time should have to raise a family in poverty.”

And his solution? Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 over 3 years.

I absolutely welcome any step forward on raising the minimum wage. And it is outrageous how the Republican Party is standing in the way.

But let’s be honest: $10.10/hour over three years – or $20,000 per year if you are lucky enough to have a full-time job – is not a ticket out of poverty for working families.

Fast food workers and Walmart workers have gone on strike and built powerful protests in cities in every part of the country over the past year for $15/hour. And that is the only reason politicians are now talking about raising the minimum wage.

Look at the example of the SeaTac $15/hour initiative. A initiative for $15/hour minimum wage was on the ballot – and won!

“Let’s make this a year of action,” Obama said.

In my view, we need action by working people and the poor for higher wages and a $15/hour minimum wage. Action by young people fighting student fees and the debt around their neck for the rest of their life. Action by homeowners against the epidemic of foreclosures. By trade unionists against anti-trade union laws and for workers’ rights.

Get organized!

Get active in your union. Get active in a local movement. Join the struggle to defend the environment.

Join with me and my organization, Socialist Alternative, to challenge big business and fight capitalism.

The epicenter of the fight back in 2014 is the Fight for Fifteen. I urge you to be part of this struggle. Find out more and sign up to get involved at 15Now.org.

Solidarity!

There are three main branches to economics today – Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian. Each school has something to teach the others. But, unfortunately, the Marxian school is largely absent from the scene in most universities and colleges. Why? Well, frankly, Marx is taboo – pure and simple. Some of this is due to the cold war which prevented examination of Marx’s intricate theory found in works like “Capital” and others. But some of it is due to the laziness of the economics profession and the dominance of right wing dogma today.

The absence of Marx in most economics departments is critical. It has prevented economics from advancing. It is no exaggeration to state that Marx is to economics as Freud is to psychology! Marx explains capital accumulation in capitalism, and moreover explains such as an exploitation of labor. This changes everything! Marx also explains much more. Marx must be let in, and the sooner the better. The environmental crisis requires some degree of socialist action. We need to have Marx’s explanation of how capitalism works to guide us in developing socialist institutions.

The Wasatch Socialist Party will hold some ground-breaking seminars in Marxian economics, open to the public, in conjunction with the Salt Lake Community College Revolutionary Students’ Union. The seminars will be conducted by Lew Elton Jeppson, recently retired professor of economics at SLCC, and others. The seminars will be in open discussion format with lots of Q and A. The Wasatch Socialist Party will keep all informed of dates. The seminars will begin early in March at SLCC.

After a hiatus of a year, the Wasatch Socialist Party is re-forming and meeting again! As you can imagine, it takes a lot of work to establish a local branch of a political party.

For those of you interested in meeting up, we’re going to resume meeting at Mestizo Coffeehouse once month, Saturdays at 4 pm. The next meeting will be Saturday, January 18 at 4.

And if you’re interested in joining the Socialist Party USA, you can do so at the SPUSA site.

Watch this site for new articles and ideas in the coming weeks!