[Marxism] Community Work By Bonnie Weinstein

[Bonnie Weinstein <giobon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Community Work
By Bonnie Weinstein
Socialist Viewpoint Magazine
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/janfeb_07/janfeb_07_07.html

I came across an email from the Direct Action & Research Training (DART)
center?a self-described national network of 21 congregation-based community
organizations working toward social and economic justice?touting their good
community work. One paragraph stood out in their appeal in particular. It
brags about one of their trainees winning a sales-tax increase to fund
desperately needed healthcare for indigent patients:
³As a result of her work, the organization won the approval of a permanent
half-cent sales tax that will provide over $35 million annually to fund one
new health clinic a year for the next five years and increase indigent
patients seen from the current 2,000 to 45,000 patients per year.²
Punishing the victim
Sorry, but raising taxes on the poor (sales-tax increases) are not the
solution. In fact, it¹s a major part of the problem. It¹s the wealthy that
should be paying their fair share of the taxes. Increasing the sales tax is
not community service; it¹s community shakedown. The poor are told, ³You
must pay more out of your own pocket for all nonfood, necessary items to
support the meager and insufficient services that will become available!²
How is that economic justice?
Cigarettes: The hypocrisy of a regressive tax system
How is it justice to charge tobacco smokers extra taxes for the poison they
have been made addicted to? Smokers already are victims of the wholly
unscrupulous multi-trillion-dollar business of manufacturing, marketing, and
obscenely profiting off the slaughter and addiction of billions of people
across the globe.
During WWII and before, the cigarette companies had huge contracts with the
government to pack cigarettes into the rations of our troops, ensuring the
lifelong addiction of tens of millions of men and women. U.S. military bases
in France at the time were named after the different cigarette companies:
Camp Old Gold; Camp Chesterfield; Camp Phillip Morris; Camp Herbert
Tareyton; Camp Home Run; Camp Pall Mall; Camp Lucky Strike; Camp Twenty
Grand; Camp Wings.
But it didn¹t stop there. At the very start of the TV age, one of the
tobacco companies?claiming that its cigarettes were ³smoother² than
others-featured a doctor in its ads, wearing a white coat and a stethoscope
around his neck. And each manufacturer claimed its cigarettes were not
harmful at all! This wasn¹t accidental; it was planned to get masses of
people puffing away.
It was during WWII that a big push was made to get more women to smoke. This
trend had already permeated Hollywood. Nick and Nora Charles of the famous
³Thin Man² series were never seen without either a cocktail or a cigarette
in their hands. How many Hollywood leading men had cigarettes as trademarks?
John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart immediately come to mind. And both died from
lung cancer, by the way. (And let me point out here that it¹s much easier to
battle lung cancer surrounded by the most skilled medical professionals and
every luxury money can buy than in a cold tenement or out in the streets
burdened by years of poverty, receiving minimal healthcare or none at all!)
Cigarettes were embedded into every aspect of our lives through every form
of mass communication at the tobacco companies¹ disposal?newspapers,
magazines, and billboards. In movie newsreels and in all the movies and TV
programs, cigarettes were incorporated as part of normal adult life and
something to strive for if you were a child. (Born in 1945 I began smoking
in 1954, when I was nine, and stealing cigarettes from my parents. My
younger sister set fire to the bathroom curtain when she was sneaking a
smoke at about the age of 11. When I set out looking for work as a young
woman of 17, I made sure there were ashtrays around and that I was permitted
to smoke on the job or I wouldn¹t take it. I smoked until sometime in my
50s.)
Tobacco industry subsidized by tax dollars
Today cigarette companies are still getting tax breaks and even in some
cases being subsidized by the government! A PBS ³Online Forum² dated July
11, 1997, debated an agreement among the attorneys general of 40 states and
the tobacco companies to go before Congress to ³put in place the first truly
comprehensive nationwide system designed to drive down the number of
children who become addicted to tobacco products each day, and help adults
who are already addicted to quit.² The forum described such subsidies and
how they work:
³The agreement calls on tobacco companies to: pay billions of dollars for a
host of public education and health programs; reimburse states for the cost
of treating tobacco-related illnesses; set aside a multi-billion-dollar fund
to compensate smokers who win individual lawsuits against the tobacco
companies; and severely curtail marketing and advertising cigarettes,
especially to teenagers.... The settlement took months of intensive
negotiation. The tobacco industry is rich, powerful, and until recently,
doggedly determined to fight any efforts to reform its marketing tactics. To
maintain its position, it has even allegedly lied under oath to Congress
that it was unaware that nicotine is addictive. So, sign the deal?
³?Not so fast,¹ says Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) whose committee leaders
of the tobacco industry allegedly were lied to during a 1994 House
investigation. ?The agreement eliminates class action suits, the state
lawsuits, and the right of individuals to bring addiction claims; it caps
what individuals can recover annually,¹ wrote Waxman in a recent Washington
Post article. ?And it allows the industry to pay for judgments against
it?including judgments based on future wrongdoing?by reducing its payments
for child health insurance and other public health needs.¹ ... On the
regulatory side, the settlement gives the industry ?something equally
unprecedented: It effectively bars the FDA from regulating the nicotine
content of cigarettes.¹
³One provision mandates that the industry pay for the settlement by raising
cigarette prices, not by reducing profits. Another makes all industry
payments (to states and education programs) tax deductible, in effect
forcing taxpayers to pick up 35 percent of the costs.²
Someone else wrote on the same site:
³?The Federal government already provides price supports for tobacco. Under
this agreement, the government would also be obligated to provide 35 percent
of the healthcare expenses associated with this industry¹s product. The
industry ends up getting two government subsidies, then, instead of one.¹²
Do not punish the victims
My response to DART is, no?the worker¹s movement should have nothing to do
with promoting regressive taxes that blame and charge the victims for the
crimes that have been committed against them for profit! The poor are not to
blame for their lack of healthcare. The poor should not be taxed because
they are in dire need of many forms of social services?for improved schools
and housing?for a bigger ³piece of the pie.²
It¹s the corporations that should be paying. In the case of the tobacco
industry, every penny these corporations earn should go to fund free
healthcare for all those they have addicted.
In general, corporations should be paying for all the environmental damage
their careless production practices have caused. They should pay for all the
land they have poisoned, all the water they have made unfit to drink, all
the air that is making people sicker, all the work-related accidents caused
by speed-up or disregard for health and safety practices, and all the
injuries due to faulty products and poor manufacturing craftsmanship. Most
of all, every penny the war profiteers make should go to the health and
welfare of those they illegally and immorally declared war against and those
they tricked into fighting the war for them.
Tax the rich!
You can¹t solve the overwhelming problems of poverty and injustice by taxing
dishwashing liquid, laundry detergent, toothpaste, shampoo, baby diapers and
toilet paper-all the things the poor people need just as much as the
wealthy! Just who ends up contributing the most tax dollars?
The wealthy make up one-tenth-of-one-percent of the population and they are
currently getting such huge tax breaks that not only are they not paying any
taxes but they are getting huge sums of money back from the government, from
the very pockets of the overwhelming majority of us who earn less that
$50,000 a year?and most who earn far less than that!
Any sales tax on such items has zero impact on the billionaires. But it has
a tremendous impact on a family of four trying to live on $15,000 a year!
This is food out of their children¹s mouths!
Sales tax is one of the most fundamentally reactionary measures ever
invented. The same is true for such things as parking tickets and gasoline
tax. Capitalism creates a society dependent on these products and then socks
it to workers with regressive, punitive taxes that powerfully impacts
them?though the sum represents less than the small change that may drop onto
the floor of the Bentley.
For progressive income tax
The income tax is the king of all regressive taxes. Working people routinely
pay almost 30 percent of their income in federal and state income taxes
while the multibillionaires get huge tax breaks to ³stimulate² the
economy?the old trickle-down theory?and pay a tiny fraction of their income
in taxes. To be fair, taxes should be charged on an income-contingent,
profit-contingent, proportional basis, with no tax on incomes below $100,000
per year and a progressively higher proportion of tax on incomes above
$100,000 per year.
As it is, the current tax structure is actually a massive subsidy for the
wealthy?to fund their wars, their acquisitions, their infrastructure, their
police, their army, their federal, state, and city governments. It is
dedicated to protecting them at the expense of the masses of the poor and
working poor worldwide, not just in this country. And you can rest assured
that any social services the working poor receive are paid for out of the
huge proportion of taxes they themselves have paid!
The gap between the rich and the poor has never been wider, and the chasm is
growing at an alarming rate. Community work such as that carried out by DART
may be well intentioned but it cannot solve the problems created by the
capitalist system. Our efforts are best expended demanding, organizing, and
fighting for an end to the wars being carried out in the names of, but
against the interests of, ourselves, the masses of American people?and
certainly against the interests of the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Palestine who are feeling the brunt of the brutal U.S. military might.
Taxing those who need services the most is not conducive to community
wellbeing by any stretch of the imagination. We need to make up for a long
history of wanton waste of lives and resources that benefits only the
wealthy elite and leaves the rest of us to fight over the crumbs they throw
down upon us?when they feel generous, of course.
We must organize to demand that the wealthy pay their fair share, and create
a tax structure in which those with the most money pay the most taxes; that
those taxes be used to elevate the masses of people out of poverty?to end
starvation, homelessness, and illiteracy. And finally, there must be an end
to wars fought with our taxes and at the expense of our lives, between
between the greedy despots who maintain their stupendously lavish lifestyles
safe from harm.


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