Faced with a $500 million budget shortfall, the county's Board of Commissioners has slashed more than 1300 county jobs, most of them in health care. More than 1,000 hospital and clinic jobs have been cut, including 260 doctors and 230 nurses. Also, 12 of the county's 26 community health clinics were closed, including seven which were located in schools.
These devastating cuts are being imposed on a public health care system already mired in crisis. Up to the early 1980s, the Cook county health care system functioned as a safety net providing comprehensive health care free of charge. The system served as a backup to a private health care system financed by health insurance plans won through collective bargaining led by workers in the major industries.
However, over the past quarter century, hundreds of thousands of workers in Chicago and Cook County (as elsewhere) have lost good-paying manufacturing jobs with benefits as the large corporations "outsourced" production to low-wage areas of the world or eliminated the need for living labor through robotics. Those whose jobs are being eliminated by automation and globalization are a new class of poor. Today, the Cook County health care system is overwhelmed by these casualties of robotics and globalization. Presently, 26 percent of Cook County residents, or 1.4 million people, are uninsured. The corporations have no intention of providing health care for labor they don't need, and the cuts in Cook County's public health system are further evidence of this.
Because the Cook County cuts are occurring under the leadership of the Democratic Party of Cook County/Chicago, responsibility for the cuts and the toll they're taking in human life and suffering rests squarely with the Democrats. For over a half century, the party has held absolute control of city and county government. Its dominance of the political life of the 5.5 million people of the second largest county in the U.S. also makes it a major force in determining the electoral strategy of the Democratic Party nationally.
The question is why would the Democratic Party, which claims to be "the party of labor, of minorities and of the poor," mount an aggressive assault against its "base?" The answer is clear; under an economic system in which jobs that pay enough to provide for a family and a future are being eliminated by the computer chip, this corporate party can no longer masquerade as the champion of poor and working people.
As the continuing tragedy of Katrina discloses so vividly, the politicians and the government are committed to denying resources and services to people no longer needed by the corporations. The Cook County budget cuts and similar actions being taken in thousands of communities across the country are proof that it is capitalism, and not the people, that the Democratic Party serves.
The growing millions of the newly dispossessed and impoverished must be made conscious of the need to organize themselves for political action independent of the major political parties in defense of their right to survive and thrive. They must be educated to the reality that it is the historic mission of their class to reorganize society on the basis of distribution of the necessities of life according to need. From this point on, how things come out hinges on what we, the people, do. We must chart our own course. The future is up to us.
