“There is no hospital for a woman to go to give birth in Ward 7,” in Washington, D.C., nursing student Makida Yanbo told Socialist Workers Party campaigners Glova Scott and Arlene Rubinstein as they knocked on the door of her apartment April 29. “But where the rich live there are several.”
“We joined protests by nurses against the closure of Providence last year, the most recent hospital shut down in D.C.,” Scott said. “The SWP demands universal, government-funded health care, from cradle to grave, as a right.”
The SWP opposes the White House’s recent push to cut back the government Medicare program that millions of working people depend on.
And the party counterposes its call for health care as a right to all the various insurance schemes peddled by Democratic and Republican politicians that treat health care as a commodity.
Their schemes — from the so-called Green New Deal to “Medicare for All” — ensure the provision of health care for working people remains an insurance plan that rations care while assuring hospital, insurance and pharmaceutical bosses continue to reap profits. “I am completing my exams later this month, when can you come back to talk more?” Yanbo asked after getting a subscription to the Militant and the book Tribunes of the People and the Trade Unions from the socialist campaigners.
“Whenever you’re ready,” Scott said.
The book is one of hundreds offered at a 20% discount by the SWP and the Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
“More than a newspaper article is able to do, books explain in greater depth, and with more examples, why rule by the capitalist families and their cutthroat profit system is at the root of the problems working people confront,” SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes writes in Tribunes of the People and the Trade Unions. “How different layers of the working population are exploited by wage slavery and by the ruinous burdens of debt slavery. Why the capitalist rulers and the upper middle class and professionals who serve their interests consider all working people ‘deplorable.’”
Militant Fighting Fund
There are two weeks left in the seven-week drive to expand the readership of the Militant and revolutionary books and raise $115,000 for the Militant Fighting Fund. The party’s campaigning at workers’ doorsteps in cities, towns and rural lanes is at the heart of efforts to meet working people and introduce the SWP.
The Militant Fighting Fund received some $15,000 from contributors this week, a step forward. This brings the fund total to $71,461, about $10,000 short of where we wanted to be. A step-up in the final two weeks is needed to raise almost $44,000 to hit the $115,000 goal by May 28. The annual fund is the foundation of the paper’s budget, making it possible to respond to important events in world politics and cover fights by working people. Join the effort! You can contribute online at www.themilitant.com.
“All the wealth of this country was built on the backs of working people. How much can a back take before it breaks?” Ibn Green, a sewer worker in Louisville, Kentucky, asked Samir Hazboun, the SWP candidate for Kentucky lieutenant governor. Hazboun and campaign supporter Ned Measel had called at his home.
Hazboun explained why a socialist revolution in the U.S. was necessary and possible. He described his recent participation in the International May Day Brigade to Cuba, where working people waged a revolutionary struggle to oust the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in 1959, take their destiny into their own hands and overturn capitalist rule.
The SWP is running candidates nationwide to present an independent working-class program, on the road to bring a workers and farmers government to power.
“I like what you guys are saying,” said Green. He bought The First and Second Declarations of Havana by Cuban leader Fidel Castro, adopted at million-strong assemblies of the Cuban people in 1960 and 1962. “The duty of every revolutionist,” Castro explains, “is to make the revolution,” not “sit in the doorways of their houses to wait for the corpse of imperialism to pass by.” Green said he hoped to attend a Militant Labor Forum called by the Louisville SWP to oppose Washington’s recent war threats against Venezuela and Cuba.
The party and sister Communist Leagues organized similar forums and initiated or joined protests demanding U.S. hands off Venezuela and Cuba.
Join SWP members in completing these drives in full and on time! Contact the branch nearest you, listed here.