NYC: Capitalist crisis drives racist healthcare cuts

NEW YORK CITY, February 23—NYC’s City Council held hearings on a bill that would cut city sponsored health benefits. These cuts are coming because capitalism is in crisis and at war. The bosses are trying to manage their crisis on the backs of the working class. The bosses view the lives of retirees as expendable since they no longer produce profits. At the hearing city and union leaders spoke on the need to control costs by cutting benefits. Retirees spoke against decreasing access to health benefits or increasing the costs to workers when they use these benefits. The struggle to stop the reduction of city sponsored health benefits to these and the current workforce continues. The racist cuts are also exposing once again that the union’s leadership is loyal to the bosses system and will do whatever the ruling class needs them to do.Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members active in this struggle are urging our friends to join our movement to build a communist world where healthcare will be free to all based only on their needs.

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Imperialist rivalry fuels global vaccine apartheid

As of March 30, over 60 countries had not received a single dose of vaccine, and many are not on track to be fully vaccinated before 2024 (New York Times, 3/30). Even as thousands of workers die daily from coronavirus, capitalism sees the vaccine as another vehicle for racist profits and a weapon in inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and Chinese imperialists.
In wealthy countries, vaccine apartheid is apparent. The U.S. has vaccinated white people  at 2.5 times the rate for Latin and 2 times that of Black workers (KFF.org, 3/17). Israel has fully vaccinated over 50 percent of the Jewish population and is denying vaccines to the 4.5 million Palestinians under its military occupation. Capitalism will always see the lives of the working class as expendable. We must fight for communist revolution to build a society that serves the needs of the working class.

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Antisexist struggle Nurses strike for patient safety!

WORCESTER, MA, March 16— St Vincent's Hospital workers are on strike for safe patient staffing. The hospital is owned by Tenet Healthcare, which made $478 million in the last quarter alone. PLP is supporting this strike. The nurses won't give up!
Capitalism means understaffing, cutbacks and systemic, racist, sexist healthcare! Whenever there is a scarcity of a commodity under capitalism (e.g. healthcare, covid vaccines), racism, sexism, and poverty determines who gets left behind.

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