Nurses Union & Liberation News Statements Opposing the Debt Ceiling Compromise

Nurses Union & Liberation News Statements Opposing the Debt Ceiling Compromise

In this posting:
1. Statement by Liberation News rejecting the debt ceiling deal
2. NNU Statement "Nurses Call on Congress to Reject Flawed Debt Ceiling Deal"


End Union Support for the Democrats!

For Strikes to Make the Demands of the Working Class!

Statement of Liberation News

Liberation News joins the 170,000 member National Nurses United in calling for a rejection of the debt ceiling deal (i.e. the Democrat and Republican plan to screw the working class with more austerity). We support the nurse's demands of "Stop all federal cuts in job programs, healthcare, education, retirement security, and housing and nutrition assistance."

We also join Unity and Independence (affiliated with Socialist Organizer) in further demanding:

- For a Federally Funded Pubic Works Program to Put Every Unemployed and Underemployed Person Back to Work at a Living Wage!

- Bring the Troops Home Now from Iraq and Afghanistan! Money for Jobs and Human Needs, Not for War!

It is Not Our Crisis, We Refuse to Pay For Any of It! Make the Billionaires and the Corporations Pay -- NOT Working People!"

But we add the following essential points that differentiate our class struggle program from that of National Nurses United and Unity and Independence who are are telling us the solution is to call "our" representatives to beg for mercy.

As the current crisis of capitalism threatens the break-down all that is left that is civil in our society, the Democrats charge ahead with the Republicans in making sure it is the poor and working class who pay for the crisis of capitalism, not capitalist profits. All reformist dreams of the Democrat Party in any way being a source of any sort of “hope” should be abandoned in favor of recognizing reality. Labor unions must abandon their illusions in the Democrats and stop giving them our money and instead prepare to fight by putting union dues in strike funds. The true power of labor will never be found groveling at the feet of hostile Democrat politicians. Instead, labor has the potential to win demands by shutting down the profits of the capitalists.

As opposed to the Democrat’s program of more war, more cops, criminalization of poverty, political repression, and austerity labor should move forward with our own demands. Those could include a massive jobs program to house the homeless, the seizure of housing foreclosed by the banks to be used by those who need it, and an end to capitalist medicine in the United States, a major cause of debt, homelessness, and death. Without an independent fight-back of the working class, using the power of the strike for political demands, the situation will just continue to grow bleaker.

A revolutionary worker’s party should be built to advocate and lead on just such a class struggle program. To remain a tool of the working class in the long run such a party also needs to have an anti-capitalist program for the building of socialism. Political parties without a clear anti-capitalist program, once in power, just become mere rulers over the inherent injustices of the capitalist system. Instead of capitalism, an egalitarian socialist economy in the United States with production based on human need rather than capitalist profit could provide everyone with a job, housing, health care, and free education. Such a society needs to be built on principles of workers’ democracy rather than Stalinist dictatorship or American style dictatorship of the wealthy.

The alternative to socialist revolution becomes increasingly clear as capitalist society becomes less and less able to take care of its people; climate change caused by capitalist greed becomes an increasing threat to the future of human civilization; the capitalist state becomes increasingly repressive; and the leading capitalist countries plunge the world into war after war of imperialist domination and conquest. As the great German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg said in 1918, the alternatives are socialism or barbarism.

End Union Support for the Democrats!

For Strikes to Make the Demands of the Working Class!

Steven Argue, for Liberation News

******************************

Press Releases
Nurses Call on Congress to Reject Flawed Debt Ceiling Deal
Media Advisory
August 1, 2011

Plan Does Nothing to Address Real Economic Crisis in U.S.

http://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/entry/nurses-call-on-congress-to-reject-flawed-debt-ceiling-deal

Congress members should vote “no” on the debt ceiling deal announced by the White House and Republican leaders Sunday night, and work instead on measures to address the real economic crisis plaguing the nation, said the nation’s leading voice of registered nurses today.

“At a time of the worst economic crisis facing our country in decades, it is disgraceful that Washington continues to ignore the deep pain in Main Street communities across the nation, and instead is pushing a plan for more punishing cuts that will only worsen the crisis,” said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the 170,000-member National Nurses United.

“What this latest deal does is make those who vote for it a full partner in the discredited theory that our economy is in free fall because of public spending on programs that help people, and kicks the can further down the road on real solutions that are needed to promote genuine recovery,” DeMoro said.

“President Obama could avoid this current high wire act by invoking the 14th amendment to raise the debt ceiling, as many have proposed, and start this process over with solutions designed to address the real economic problems facing American families.”

“What Congress and the White House should be doing is promoting programs that create jobs and reduce the suffering for those millions of American families who can’t pay their medical bills, are losing their retirement savings, and face the loss of their homes while more and more resources are transferred to big corporations and the wealthy who need it the least.”

“It’s time for Congress to stop pandering to economic elites, who fund their campaigns and continuously lobby to protect their vested interests. We will see them in their districts until they become champions of Main Street, not Wall Street. They should vote down this deeply flawed deal, and start acting as the real leaders our country so desperately needs,” DeMoro said.

NNU is calling on Congress to reject the debt ceiling deal, and immediately move to:
• Restore a more equitable tax system and ensure the end of the Bush-era tax cuts.
• Close all the corporate tax loopholes that have enabled a majority of U.S. corporations to escape paying any federal taxes for at least one year or more during the past decade.
• Enact a tax on Wall Street high rollers who created the current economic crisis with a tax on major Wall Street trades on dividends, default swaps, futures, stocks and bond transactions, as many other industrial countries have already adopted.
• Stop all federal cuts in job programs, healthcare, education, retirement security, and housing and nutrition assistance.