Yeah, I'm with you. I do think that you may have a -tad- underestimated how difficult it will be to win it, but our position is for universal hc. But until we win it, the goal is to expand the number of people who have hc; by winning it in contracts; by supporting legislation that expands it; and in general just pushing the numbers up whever possible. This is highly non-trivial--- it is people's lives, literally. But as the battle comes, SEIU will be weighed in with massive massed power for hc; where, oh where, will the triumphant peoples' left be? Off in the closets of history, muttering dark imprecations to itself no one will ever hear? Or doing what SEIU is, building power, one worker at a time, into the millions, so that instead of being Mr Say, we can be Mr Do?
BTW guys, in all your calculations about union density, I find it odd no one has executed the most elementary analtical breakdown--- how has CtW membership fared, and how has the rest? Strikes me as slightly important to know, esp since if you look at the list of jobs which are growing in the US, and leave off the ruling-class ones and the computer ones, ALL are covered as a primary industry in CtW unions. Again, organizing the non-offshoreable broadly-defined service industry, and making those jobs into what factory jobs used to be, and using the resulting massed power to turn the direction of the country around, is our strategic project for the intermediate term, and every day tens of thousands bend their energies to making advances in this task. What's yours?
But really, Carrol is right, I am secretly a running-dog agent of the beougesoise, cackling to myself as I dampen the revolutionary ardour of the masses with my constant nattering talk of "pie in the here and now", pshaw, material gains, two dollar raises, contract battles, organizing new wins, talking to actually-existing workers. Every time I see workers unite to fight their boss for more and better I laugh to myself, knowing I've kept the revolution at bay another day. That's why I work all those hours, abandoning the important left project of jerking off with other left intellectuals in universities and sects and closed circles of the cognescenti where all politics is a foregone conclusion mastered a hundred years ago by a bearded German with a bad case of the boils.
Tee-hee, Jim, but really - what are the politics of grafting yet
> another stupid structure on top of the stupid structure that is our
> health care financing system? The hodge-podge of conflicting and/or
> overlapping systems is a major part of the problem. The Mass and
> Calif plans *require* the uninsured, under the threat of substantial
> financial penalities, to buy their own health insurance. If that
> isn't the craziest fucking thing I've heard in a long time, I don't
> know what is: they don't have the money, remember? A union that cared
> about the working class as a whole would be pressing for a universal
> system - that's hardly pie in the sky, since variations on that theme
> work all over the world. Except here in the land of the free.
>
> Doug
>
>
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> End of lbo-talk Digest, Vol 37, Issue 261
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