OCAP says no to welfare merger cuts

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SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2014 9 On New Year’s Day 2014 there’s not much to celebrate for those who are un­ employed, low-waged, who rely on wel­ fare, or live on disability benefits in On­ tario. To make matters worse, only 35 per cent of the unemployed even qualify for Employment Insurance benefits (which have been reduced), compared to 74 per cent eligible in 1990. Two priority cam­ paigns of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) highlight this reality.

The first is the campaign to “raise the rates.” The rates paid by Ontario Works (welfare) were brutally slashed by nearly 22% by the notorious regime of Mike Harris in the mid-1990s. Since then, for single claimants, the payments have lost a staggering 56 per cent of their spend­ ing power.

These rates were frozen since 1995, until the advent of the present Liberal ... Socialism (continued from page 7: “Socialism, Then and Now”)

of $7.25 an hour, as a recent New York Times report documented. Notably, the number of such jobs in the city has increased by more than 50 percent since 2000.

For the McDonald’s worker earning $8.25 an hour in 2013, he or she would have to work more than 100 years to earn the $8.75 million the company’s CEO earned in 2011. More generally, it’s reported that nearly half of all New Yorkers were considered poor or almost-poor in 2011. Is all this a sign of a healthy, just economy? Yet where are the elected politicians who stand in uncompromising opposition to the gro­ tesque, expanding reality of poverty under capital­ ism? Who among Democrats and Republicans even talks any more about a “war on poverty”?

From 1968 to 2013 and Beyond This is not our war; the people of Vietnam are not our enemy, declared the socialist message of 1968.

Likewise, the message of the Occupy Wall Street pro­ tests of 2011 rejected the competitiveness, greed, and inequality of modern capitalism, asserting a vi­ sion of a society based on human solidarity, equality, regime, but any increases have been min­ iscule—only 15% over the last 10 years, far less than the rate of inflation.

OCAP demands an immediate 55% in­ crease. It is common knowledge that wel­ fare recipients have little left over after paying rent. They rely on food banks to survive and have almost nothing for oth­ er needs. Supplementary benefits have been under continuous attack, despite the laughable “poverty reduction” man­ tra of the austerity-mongering Wynne government.

As OCAP organizer John Clarke wrote in the Bullet (May 2013): “The fundamen­ tal nature of the welfare system can be traced all the way back to its roots in the old English Poor Laws. The system has always been there to reluctantly provide enough assistance to stave off unrest and social dislocation, but to do so at levels and in forms that maximize the flow of la­ bour into the lowest paying and most ex­ ploitative jobs on offer.” “Ontario Works” says it all.

The same approach to disability ben­ efits leads into a second major campaign to prevent the merger of Ontario Works and the Ontario Disability Support Pro­ gram (ODSP).

At a Nov. 20 rally in Toronto, attended by over 120 people, speakers outlined their concerns. Historically, disability and welfare rates have been separate. If combined, from where will any increases for disability come?

With downloading to municipalities, will “reassessment” of disability claim­ ants follow the notorious British model?

Rally participants learned about the sav­ age cuts to disability programs by the reactionary coalition government in Brit­ ain, which has handed this process over to ATOS, a private company.

Huge numbers of people there have been disqualified on incredibly specious and an end to violence and war. And, the Occupy voic­ es dared to declare, we believe this vision is realistic and possible.

In retrospect, the Occupy movement represented almost a kind of utopian moment in the American po­ litical story, a precious few months when many thou­ sands of Americans, mostly young, came together in the streets and in the parks to decry the injustice and absurdities of life under capitalism, to assert their humanity and vision for a better future. Life should be so much more than just a grubby, competitive rat race, they declared, one in which privileged elites feed at the trough of their own unending sense of entitle­ ment, while so many more struggle just to get by.

In this sense, Buckley’s political and social vision, the air of upper-class polish notwithstanding, remained essentially a grubby one, at least for anyone whose so­ cial status as a rule wasn’t based on inherited wealth. For “free market” capitalism even at its best has only structural inequality, permanent war, and economic instability to offer the majority of the people.

How much better the words and vision of Albert Ein­ stein, who in the inaugural issue of Monthly Review in 1949 declared: “I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate (the) grave evils (of capitalism), namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, ac­ companied by an educational system which would be grounds. A video showed a large field of flowers, each representing a disabled person who died within a short period of being disqualified, often by suicide.

It is hardly “alarmist” to think that the same could happen here, since the On­ tario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) has already privatized re­ assessment with a stupefying increase in disqualifications. The austerity agenda, which has particularly targeted disabled people, is international, as is the capital­ ist system, which promotes it in the inter­ est of ever-cheaper labour platforms.

These two campaigns by OCAP clearly merit the unqualified support of labour, the left and social movements. Attacks on welfare and disability benefits will not only further impoverish poor people, but everyone.

The greater the number of people desperate enough to accept the most wretched jobs, the more downward pressure there will be on wage levels, and the more intense will be the attacks on unions. n oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion.”

When Buckley in his 1968 show remarked that he represents a country that went to war a hundred years ago to liberate Black people, Boutelle respond­ ed that there were a lot of Black people in Mississippi and Alabama who would be very curious to hear him say that. He suggested Buckley take a trip down South to tell them directly. Buckley responded, “Let me put it this way, Mr. Boutelle. I’m sure if I ran for office in Mississippi, I’d have more Negroes voting for me than for you.”

Boutelle’s retort was well-aimed. “I’m sure of one thing,” he replied. “If you went down to Mississippi and told Black people they were ‘free,’ you would be running, but it wouldn’t be for office.”

As clever as William F. Buckley Jr. was supposed to be, the flimsy façade of argument and opinion upon which he built his endless apologies for the status quo were often surprisingly easy to disassemble. For, strip away the oil stocks and the erudite pose, and what we were left with was just another grubby salesman with a bad product. In this case what was being sold was the bankrupt ideology of “free enterprise,” a system that then as well as now offers no future to humanity; at least not a peaceful, just future. n

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Simphiwe Nkwali / Johannesburg Times (Left) NUMSA members block garage in strike affecting 30,000 workers, which ended in October. and controlled by workers and their communities. Only the self-eman­ cipation of the working class can decisively undo the inherited struc­ tures and systems of neo-apartheid, ecological destruction, capitalism, and the limited liberal democracy presently being eroded by the ANC government.

The NUMSA Congress resolved to i) explore the building of a social­ ist workers’ party, ii) to mobilise for both a United Front and a Movement for Socialism, iii) to reclaim COSA­ TU from below, iv) to actively unite worker and community struggles through coordinated mass mobilisa­ tion on socio-economic demands, and v) to consolidate NUMSA as a worker-controlled union that orga­ nises along entire value chains and that provides the best service to its members. At this moment there can be no stronger foundation to radi­ cally transform South Africa The NUMSA Congress have stated in no uncertain terms the future must rest in the organised and class conscious power of the working class, working poor, and the dispossessed, united in action to challenge capitalism by building the struggle for the socialist alternative in the here and now. The DLF believes that the post-Congress process must build on the bottom-up worker driven process and tradition of democratic debate, solidarity and mass struggle that NUMSA followed. This would lay a strong foundation for bottom-up, democratic left renewal. Important in this regard is the need to recognise and integrate struggles against multiple oppressions reinforced by capital­ ism: racial oppression and reproduced white supremacy, gender oppression, oppressive rule by the tribal elites, the social oppres­ sion of people with non-heterosexual sexual orientations, cultural alienation, ‘new impe­ rialism’, ecological destruction, and so on. As the social movements, independent trade unions and left groups that constitute