This article has already been published on this site here:

https://en.internationalism.org/wr/310/unity-in-struggles  [1]

No one really denies anymore that there is a health care crisis in the US. Every Republican and Democratic presidential hopeful is touting some kind of plan to fix it. In reality, there are two versions of the health care crisis in the US - one for the working class and a separate one for the ruling class.

The Health Care Crisis for the Workers

Any worker in America can give you the details on the health care crisis. Those who are lucky enough to have medical benefits at their jobs find that these benefits are under a generalized, all-out attack. Medical benefits have been a central feature in virtually every strike in the past three years, as workers seek to resist the erosion of their benefits. Costs for workers are spiraling out of control. It used to be that companies paid 100% for health insurance as part of the wage/benefit package. But today workers are forced to pay for a percentage of the medical premiums. Once management wins the end of 100% employer-paid insurance, the percentage workers must contribute is constantly being increased. Within the plans themselves, worker's costs are skyrocketing, co-pays, fees, and deductibles are constantly going up. Workers' insurance coverage is being eroded. Younger workers often lack coverage or have substandard coverage that doesn't cover much, and they have to pay exorbitant contributions to extend coverage to the entire family.

Quality of care is also declining, and the government keeps granting doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies exemptions from liability for malpractice, incompetence, and defective drugs with disastrous side effects. Then of course there are the estimated 46+ million Americans who have no medical insurance at all. While the poorest Americans are covered by Medicaid, sponsored by the federal government's social welfare system, and Medicare covers retired workers, increasing numbers of workers who earn too much to be covered by Medicaid are left to their own devices.   Recent court rulings have empowered unions and companies to drop retirees from medical insurance programs, forcing them to rely solely on Medicare and purchase their own supplemental coverage while retired from private insurance companies.

The Health Care Crisis for the Bourgeoisie

For the ruling class the health care crisis is that they are saddled with an incredibly inefficient and expensive system that damages American capitalism's economic competitiveness on the world market. Insurance costs, doctor fees, hospital costs, overhead and administrative costs are out of control. The US has the costliest health care system in the world, with per capita expenditures more than double that of most major industrialized nations. Health care costs as a percentage of GDP are 9.9% for Canada, 10.1% for France, and 8% for the United Kingdom, but an astronomical 15.2% for the US. And all of this extra cost provides an inferior quality medical care that makes the US look ridiculous on the international scene. Patient outcomes are among the worst in the industrialized world. In Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, life expectancy ranges from 79.5 years (France, UK) to 82.5 in Japan. In the US it lags behind at 77.  A study by the World Health Organization evaluating the overall quality of health systems ranked the US as 37th in the world, trailing behind Dominica, and Costa Rica. Infants born in the US are three times more likely to die in their first month as children born in Japan, and newborn mortality is 2.5 times higher in the United States than in Finland, Iceland or Norway.

The cost of having so-many uninsured people actually hurts the US economy, as the  costs for emergency care for such patients is passed on to everyone else.  The dominant fractions of bourgeoisie see the value in rationalizing the system, getting more people covered to save overall costs and help competitiveness. So there should be no mistake. The motivation for health care reform is NOT to improve the health of workers in America, but rather to cut costs and improve competitiveness in the world economy.  The crisis is so serious actions are already being taken on a piece meal basis. Massachusetts, for example, has passed a plan to implement a near-universal mandatory coverage law, requiring residents to purchase health insurance - the so-called individual mandate.  Maine, Pennsylvania, and Vermont are also considering universal systems at the state level.  In California, Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is pushing a plan that also includes an individual mandate-requiring residents to purchase insurance coverage or pay extra taxes. Unions, especially the breakaway Social Employees international Union (SEIU) supports ending employer based health care and has actually teamed up with Wal-Mart to push this agenda on the "corporate elite."  SEIU Pres. Andy Stern is a strong advocate of this approach.

Health Care "Reform" and the Presidential Campaign

Presidential candidates in both parties are floating proposals to overhaul the health care system and to provide coverage for the uninsured. Republican candidates tend to propose some version of so-called "market-based" reforms that will use tax credits and deductions to encourage people to purchase medical insurance. The Democratic candidates tend to propose some form of direct government intervention to control costs and provide universal coverage.   For example, Republican Rudolph Giuliani has proposed granting tax credits of up to $7,500 for individuals and $15,000 for families, provided the money is spent on health care insurance -that gives you an idea of how expensive health insurance can be. Senator John McCain proposes a similar plan, with tax deductions of $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is more vague, proposing a plan to "encourage the private sector to seek innovative ways to bring down costs and improve the free market for health care services." Mitt Romney proposes allowing the cost of insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to be taken as a tax deduction.

Among the Democrats, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards advocate requiring health insurance for everyone, requiring employers to contribute to covering the costs and funding the rest by rescinding Pres. Bush's tax cuts on Americans earning over $250,000 per year. Barack Obama favors requiring only that all children will have to be covered by insurance, which he claims will lead to near universal coverage as families will wind up purchasing insurance for the parents as well.

Meaning of the proposed "reforms"

The campaign propaganda about "universal" health care has tremendous mystifying power for the ruling class. For individuals who currently have no health insurance, any of the plans proposed by the politicians surely sound like they'll be better than nothing. The leftists push for universal care as a central "reform" demand. In his recent Sicko documentary, filmmaker Michael Moore portrayed the health care systems in France, England, and Canada in the most idyllic light, as if those countries were heaven on earth. However, wherever these so-called universal plans exist, they are in crisis. Everywhere the bourgeoisie faces the same task, to cut costs, to attack health care. This is especially true as the post World War II baby boom generation begins to retire and suffers deteriorating health.

Whatever form they may take, the coming change in the health care system will NOT be a reform, not an expansion of health care, not an attempt to improve the health of the working class. It will be an austerity attack.  The goal is the same as in Europe --  to cut society's expenditure on health care. None of the plans will do anything to combat the erosion of health benefits for workers already insured at work - co-pays and premiums will go up, coverage will continue to deteriorate. Those covered by the new plan will pay a lot of money. Most of what has been proposed will only provide very basic coverage to the poorest people. Everyone who can "afford it"-i.e. the working class will have to take their employers' plan, or pay out of their own pocket for basic coverage. These plans give employers an incentive to drop coverage and pay less into the state fund instead. Coverage will decline for most who already have "good coverage".

The US ruling class is trying to manage a crisis that threatens its economic competitiveness, not to solve a medical crisis.  Yes, more people will be covered-but they will have to pay for it and coverage will be minimal with no reimbursement until you have paid considerable out of pocket expenses. The health care crisis is yet another manifestation of the general economic crisis of world capitalism. The attack on medical benefits and on pensions is essentially an attack on workers wages, the total compensation package paid to the workers for their labor. More and more the economic crisis forces the ruling class to attack the working class standard of living, amply demonstrating that capitalism has no future to offer humanity. The attacks on pensions and medical benefits pose life and death issues for the working class. Only the replacement of a society driven by the quest for profits, with one where the operating principle is the fulfillment of human needs offers the possibility to seriously address the health problems that we confront today. --J. Grevin, 1/8/08.

This article has already been published on this site here:

https://en.internationalism.org/wr/310/october-1917 [3]

In the last few months, there has been a series of simultaneous strikes and struggles in the US, the likes of which we haven't seen in quite a while. This includes a number of official union strikes, such as the strike by the Access-A-Ride drivers in New York who provide transportation for people with disabilities, as well as the Broadway theater stagehands, and the film and tv writers which has paralyzed production of new movies and television programs.The tendency of the working class in the US to come back to the path of the struggle also confirms that it is totally inscribed in the international resurgence of class struggle, which has been happening for the last four or five years across the globe, and was highlighted most importantly by the students' movement against the CPE in France in November 2005.

However, by far the most interesting struggle was the wildcat strike by so-called "free-lance workers" at MTV in New York City. These workers, many of them in their 20's and 30's, lead precarious existence but have long put up with little or no health care and relatively low wages because of the ‘glamour' associated with ‘working for MTV'. The bosses like to call them ‘free-lancers,' non-permanent employees, to justify the fact that they are not included in the standard benefits and wage programs at the company. MTV employs nearly 5,000 of these workers, who prefer to call themselves ‘permalancers', because many of them have been working for MTV for years. They are non-unionized, and treated as "independent contractors" by the company. When the company unilaterally announced a plan to cut their minimal medical benefits and contributions to their 401k retirement accounts on December 11, 2007 these young workers walked out spontaneously and took to the streets, carrying signs reading, "there are too many of us to ignore." And they did so again on January 3, 2008.

It's clear they have become painfully aware of their proletarianized status and totally identify themselves as workers, with the same needs, and the same plight, as their own parents. In the heat of the struggle, MTV workers not only identified themselves with the rest of the working class, but, in an echo of the methods used by their class brothers in France at the time of the struggles against the CPE, they also attempted to self-organize. At the walkout on December 14, a list was circulated of everyone's personal email address, so "...we can organize a website that people can go to for information." They also organized groups of delegates to approach the film and television writers, who were on strike at the same time.

While this mobilization has not seen the maturity or development of the students' movement in France, we see the reflection of the same dynamic toward the search for solidarity and the recognition of class identity. In the words of one young demonstrator: "We are not free-lancers because we come in and work at the same place every day, don't work on equipment we own, have taxes taken out of our paychecks, and report to people that are staff." The result of this struggle is that MTV reinstated the 401k plan that it had rolled back, and conceded health benefits for workers who had worked steadily since March, without an additional waiting period, as envisioned in the new package to take effect on January 1. But the MTV workers are not settled yet on the health care plan, which, under the proposed package, includes higher deductibles and a $2,000 cap on hospital expenses each year.

Although these workers did not win a clear victory in this confrontation, it is clear that the bosses want to avoid an all-out confrontation. Above all, their struggle shows the capacity of the workers to take the struggle into their own hands, to organize autonomously and to the see the possibility to seek unity with other workers in struggle.

Where workers are unionized, their only weapon is their militancy. The building cleaners, doormen, and elevator operators' carried out a series of mass demonstrations in Manhattan in December reflecting their militancy and threatening to strike on New Year's Day. The strike was averted by a last minute tentative agreement -that still has to be ratified - which includes increases of 20 percent in management contributions to the health benefit and of 40 percent to the pension benefit funds. In addition wages will increase by 4.18 percent a year for the next four years. Also, many jobs have been transformed from part time to full time and many janitors were given family health coverage. Of course this isn't the "big" victory that the union claims, because these workers' wages and benefits have been always very low to begin with. But it is certain that if the workers had not been as militant, they would have gotten a much worse deal.

In the film and television writers strike the unions have done their time-honored job of sabotaging the struggle. The demands of the writers, to share in the revenues from the sales of DVDs and online downloads of the shows they have written, have widespread support in the industry. Many actors who sympathize with the striking writers have refused to cross the picketline, but the dozen or more unions in the entertainment and broadcasting industry (separate unions for actors, news writers, news reporters, carpenters, electricians, stagehands etc) have maintained their institutionalized tradition of not only crossing each other's picket lines, but of never asking other workers to respect the pickets, let alone join the struggle. Nevertheless, despite their relatively high salaries and "glamour" jobs, the writers are increasingly aware of their proletarianized situation, as illustrated by remarks by one writer at a Writers Guild of America meeing shortly before the strike began: "This (residual payment for the DVDs and downloads) is such a big issue that if they see us roll over on this without making a stand, three years from now, they're gonna be back for something else. ...it'll be ‘we want to revamp the whole residual system,' and in another three years, it'll be "y'know what, we don't really want to fund the health fund the way we've been.' And then it will be pension. And then it'll be credit determination. And there just is that time when everybody has to see-this is one where we just gotta stand our ground."

These recent developments confirm what we wrote in Internationalism 143, that the NYC Transit workers' strike of December 2005 marked in the US the entrance to a "...period in which the class struggle will once more be at the center stage of the social situation during which the bourgeoisie's policies of austerity and war will not go unchallenged." The recent and present struggles are a manifestation that this new period is beyond simply a ‘beginning'; it is now maturing, and the perspective can only be that of extension and strengthening of the confrontations and of class consciousness. As we said above, this is an international development in which the workers in the US are full participants.

Today in the belly of the beast, the workers' struggles are demystifying the bourgeoisie's campaign about the ‘superiority' of American-style capitalism and how it benefits the workers' standard of living. This is a ‘gain' that goes beyond an immediate victory on the defensive terrain, because it teaches the workers that the present struggles are only a preparation for a much bigger struggle against this dying system. The working class is undergoing a tremendous reflection and the dynamics of its struggle show a growing maturation of the understanding of the need for solidarity and the impasse of capitalism. This dynamic will deepen and extend as the workers engage in the struggles and become more and more conscious of the task their class has to carry out. A new period has opened up toward important confrontations between the two leading classes in our society. Our responsibility is not to stand and watch but to intervene to help the class advance its understanding of what needs to be done and how to do it. Ana 1/5/08

As 2007 come to a close the American bourgeoisie was not in a party mood and rightly so, because there wasn't much to celebrate for American capitalism. By all accounts 2007 has been a horrendous year for the US economy. It opened with the bursting of the real estate bubble, then in the summer came the bust of the financial sector, a series of mini-crashes of the stock market, and the drastic devaluation of the dollar. Finally, to top it all off, the year ended with ominous news of low job creation, anemic holiday season sales and fears of rising inflation, fueled by the rising prices of oil and other commodities.

Understandably as the new year begins the mood in the ruling class is beset by gloomy forecasts for the coming year. In fact, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. 2008 does not promise to be much better than 2007. On the contrary even by the most optimistic predictions, the worst is still to come.

A worsening economic crisis

The bourgeoisie's official definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Based on the avalanche of bad economic news that have come out in the last weeks, some economists are saying that a recession may have already begun in December. However not all economists are convinced that things are that bad. Despite all the bad news, the GDP is still showing small positive growth rates today, so, some economists express hope that the American economy may avoid falling into a recession. On the other hand some other experts think "it literally could go either way."

These predictions that fill the pages of the economic sections of newspapers and magazines are very misleading. In the last instance they only contribute to hide the catastrophic state of American capitalism that can only get worse in the months to come regardless of whether or not the economy officially enters recession.

What is important to emphasize is that we're not talking about a supposedly "healthy" American economy that is simply going through a troubled phase in a supposedly normal business cycle of expansion and bust. What we are witnessing are the convulsions of a system in a chronic state of crisis that can only buy ephemeral moments of "health" by toxic remedies that will only aggravate the next catastrophic collapse.

This has been the history of American capitalism -and worldwide capitalism- since the end of the sixties with the return of the open economic crisis. For the last four decades through official expansions and busts the overall economy has only kept a semblance of functionality thanks to systematic state capitalist monetary and fiscal policies that the government is obliged to apply to fight the effects of the crisis. However the situation has not remained static. During these decades of crisis and state intervention to manage it, the economy has accumulated so many absurdities that today there is a real threat of an economic catastrophe, the likes of which we have not seen in the history of capitalism.

The bourgeoisie bought its way out of the burst of the tech/internet bubble in 2000/01 by creating a new bubble based, this time, on real estate. Despite the fact that key industries in the manufacturing sector -the auto and air line industries for instance- continue going bankrupt, the real estate boom for the last five years gave the semblance of an expanding economy. Now the boom has transformed itself into the present bust that has shaken the whole edifice of the capitalist system and which will still have future repercussions that no one can yet predict.

According to the latest data about the real estate crisis, the activity related to private housing is in total disarray. The construction of new homes has already fallen by around 40 percent since its peak in 2006; sales have fallen even faster dragging down with it prices. Home prices have dropped by 7 percent nation-wide since the peak in 2006 with predictions that they will fall by another 15 to 20 percent before hitting bottom. The real estate boom has left a huge inventory of vacant unsold homes - about 2.1 million, or about 2.6 percent of the nation's housing supply. And the glut is bound to increase as the wave of foreclosures continues to broaden, hitting even borrowers with supposedly good credit. Last year's foreclosures were mostly limited to the so-called subprime mortgages -loans given to people with essentially no means to repay. Nearly one-fourth of such loans were in default by last November. Although default rates on loans given to people with relatively good credit are much lower, they are also rising. In November, 6.6 percent of these loans were either delinquent, in foreclosure, or had been repossessed. In a sign of worse things to come, this spike in foreclosures is happening even before many mortgages have reset to higher interest rates.

The bursting of the real estate bubble is wreaking havoc in the financial sector. So far the crisis in real estate has generated over 100 billion dollars in losses at the world's largest financial institutions. Billions of dollars in stock market value have been wiped out, rocking up Wall St. Among the big names that lost at least a third of their value in 2007 were Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Moody's, and Citigroup. MBIA, a company that specializes in guaranteeing the financial health of others, lost nearly three-quarters of its value! Several of yesterday's high-flying mortgage related companies have gone bankrupt.

And this is only the beginning. As foreclosures accelerate in the coming months banks will be counting new losses and the credit crunch already in place will tighten up even more, impacting other sectors of the economy.

Moreover, the financial crisis related to the mortgages is only the tip of the iceberg. The same reckless lending practices that we are learning were dominant in the mortgage market are also the norm in the credit card and auto loans industries, where problems are also increasing. And here lies the essence of today capitalism's "health". Its little dirty secret is the perversion of the mechanism of credit as a way to buy its way out of a lack of solvent markets to sell its commodities. Lending is no longer a promise of repayment with a profit backed up by some material reality (i.e., collateral) that can stimulate capitalist development. It has become a way of keeping the economy artificially afloat and preventing the collapse of the system under the weight of its historic crisis. Already in the 1980's the financial crisis that followed the bust of the Latin American economies weighed down by debts that they had no means to repay demonstrated the limits of credit as a remedy to deal with the crisis. The same lesson could have been learned in 1997 and 1998 at the time of the collapse of the Asian tigers and dragons, and Russia's default on its debt. In fact the housing bubble was a reaction and an effort to overcome the burst of tech/internet bubble. One can justly pose the question, what is the next bubble going to be?

Yet there is another aspect of the present financial crisis. This is the rampant speculation that accompanied the real estate bubble. What we are talking about is not small time speculation by an individual investor buying a house and quickly flipping it to make a quick buck from the fast appreciation of the value of the property. This is peanuts. What really counts is the big time speculation that all the major financial institutions engaged in through the securitization and selling of mortgage-debt in the stock market. The exact mechanisms of these schemes are not easy to come by, but from what is known they look very much like the age old ponzi schemes. In any case, what this monstrous level of speculation shows is the degree to which the economy has become a "casino economy" where capital is not invested in the real economy, but instead it is used to gamble.

The medicine is not working

The American bourgeoisie likes to present itself as the ideological champion of free market capitalism. This is nothing other than ideological posturing. An economy left to function according to the laws of the market has no place in today's capitalism, dominated by omnipresent state intervention. This is the sense of the "debate" within the bourgeoisie on how to manage the present economic mess. In essence there is nothing new being put forward. The same old monetary and fiscal policies are applied in hope to stimulate the economy. Among the big proposals are lower taxes and rising spending - public projects like public infrastructure expansion: highways, bridges, airports.

For the moment what is already being done is also the application of the same old policies of easy money. So far the Federal Reserve has cut its interest rate benchmark three times and seems posed to do so once more this month. In a desperate move to bolster liquidity on the credit market it offered a big Christmas gift -cheap multibillion emergency dollars - to the financial institutions that were short on cash.

Perspectives

What these efforts by the State to manage the crisis will amount to remains to be seen. What is evident is that more than ever the bourgeoisie has less margin of maneuver for its economic policies. After decades of managing the crisis, the American bourgeoisie sits on a very sick economy. The monstrous national debt, the federal budget deficit, the fragile financial system, all this makes it more difficult for the bourgeoisie to deal with the collapse of its system.

For the working class the aggravation of the economic crisis will undoubtedly bring more misery as it deals with the attacks that the bourgeoisie will launch to try to make it bear the impact of its economic difficulties. It is time to prepare to defend itself and give society a different perspective than the present madness of capitalism.

- Eduardo Smith 1/13/08

The hype about the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary seems overwhelming. But it is still too early to tell what consensus will emerge in the dominant circles of the American ruling class about the political division of labor that will best serve its interests in the period ahead. However, it is clear that what is at stake for American capitalism in the coming presidential election are a) a break with the Bush administration's disastrous imperialist policies in order to significantly restore American authority on the international level, and b) a total refurbishment of the democratic mystification, which has taken a terrible beating since the year 2000.

Restoring American Imperialist Authority

Even before the November election, the bourgeoisie has made great strides in setting the stage for a full scale redressment of the catastrophic imperialist policy of the Bush administration. With virtually all of the neo-cons driven from the administration and the forced resignation of their close ally, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney is essentially the only hardcore hawk remaining in the inner circles of the administration. The permanent bureaucracy in the State Department, Defense Department, and the CIA, which represents the continuity of American imperialist policy through both Democratic and Republican administrations since the collapse of Russian imperialism in 1989, is increasingly exerting its influence in Washington. The neutralization of the Cheney-inspired campaign to stir up yet another preventative war, this time against Iran, is testimony to the power of this permanent bureaucracy. Career foreign service officials opposed the war plans as yet another irrational policy that would further isolate US imperialism on the international level. Military leaders were painfully aware that American forces are already stretched way too thin to sustain a third front in yet another theatre. And the intelligence bureaucracy, sick and tired of having its intelligence gathering manipulated and twisted by Cheney and the neo-cons with disastrous consequences, gave the administration's bellicose Iran policy the kiss of death by releasing its National Intelligence Estimate findings that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program over three years ago, thus eliminating the rationale of the Bush administration's bellicose policy.

This sets the stage for an even more far reaching realignment of imperialist policy, regardless of whoever wins the White House in November. It is perhaps noteworthy that Huckabee, the surprise winner in the Iowa Republican race, was the only candidate to denounce Bush's foreign policy as "arrogant, bunker mentality." Likewise, in the Democratic race, Obama, who has emerged as the main alternative to Clinton, was the only candidate who could claim that he had been opposed to the war in Iraq from the very beginning. Regardless of who wins the nomination, the struggle of the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie to pursue a more sophisticated, more "multilateral" imperialist policy, that will lessen American imperialism's growing isolation and reestablish its authority on the international level seems to be making significant headway.

Refurbishing the Democratic Mystification

Initially it seemed that the 2006 election constituted a reinvigoration of an electoral mystification that had been badly tarnished by both the stolen presidential election of 2000 and the failure of the American ruling class to accomplish its belated 2004 consensus on the need to elect John Kerry president. By contrast, the 2006 election which put the Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, was portrayed in the capitalist media and by prominent politicians in both major parties, as an expression of the political will of the American people for an end to the war in Iraq, for a change in political direction at the national level. Politicians and political pundits alike threw around phrases like "a swing in the political pendulum," and a "tremendous blow to the Republican party," and there was growing acceptance of the notion that the Republicans were destined to take up the role of political opposition in the future political division of labor. For a while it truly seemed like the sorely eroded public confidence in the electoral process had been restored in the general population, including the working class. But this proved to be short lived as the failure of the Democrats to overcome the Bush administration's continued resistance to end the war in Iraq revived skepticism about the effectiveness of electoralism as a means of expressing the "popular will." Public opinion polls showed the approval ratings of both Bush and Congress hovering at record low levels, approaching 29%. The electorate was just as fed up with the Democrats as they were with the Republicans.

The bourgeoisie desperately needs the 2008 election to revive its central ideological swindle, the idea that participation in its elections is the means to achieve peaceful change in the direction of society. Having squandered the fruit of its 2006 election so quickly and given the persistent difficulty of the bourgeoisie's dominant fractions to control the electoral process in the context of worsening social decomposition, it is not clear whether the ruling class will be successful in reinvigorating the democratic mystification.

Sensing inevitable victory at the polls, Democratic politicians with presidential ambitions started the electoral circus so early this time around that they pose the potential of mutually destroying each other's political prospects by the time the primaries are over. Having started out riding a tidal wave of opposition to the war in Iraq, most of the major Democratic candidates now openly acknowledge that an early troop withdrawal is impossible and predict that troops will have to remain in Iraq for quite some time.

Prominent politicians from both parties are openly pondering whether the traditional two-party system is now too badly bent or broken to effectively serve the political interests of the ruling class and is considering support for a serious independent candidate. In their call for a two-day conference in Oklahoma in early January, former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, who served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and former Democratic Senator David L. Boren of Oklahoma, who served as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote, "Today we are a house divided. We believe that the next president must be able to call for a unity of effort by choosing the best talent available - without regard to political party - to help lead our nation." They went on to state, "Most importantly, we must begin to restore our standing, influence and credibility in the world." Other prominent participants include: former Democratic U.S. Sen. Charles S. Robb of Virginia (son-in-law of President Lyndon Johnson); Bill Brock, former Republican Party chairman and former Tennessee U.S. Senator; Jim Leach, a former Republican congressman from Iowa; former Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart, who also served in the U.S. Senate; departing Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who served on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and denounced the Bush administration's Iraq policy as the greatest foreign policy mistake in American history; and ex-Democrat, ex-Republican New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire ready and able to not only offer himself as the nominee but also able to spend $1 billion of his $12 billion personal fortune to fund the campaign.

Whatever the outcome, the stakes are high for the bourgeoisie, but will mean nothing for the working class except that we will be subjected to a more finely tuned political propaganda used to manipulate us to accept the austerity policies employed to make us bear the brunt of the economic crisis and the imperialist policy that uses us as cannon fodder for American capitalism. -- Jerry Grevin, Jan. 5, 2008