BY MEGAN ARNEY
"We need to take a careful look at the connection between the
employers' broader war on labor and their assault on welfare
and various public programs that provide income security for
the working class - unemployment insurance, workers'
compensation, pensions, and health-care insurance such as
Medicare and Medicaid," says Jack Barnes in Capitalism's World
Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium. "These
programs help make it possible for workers to make it through a
lifetime. They help make it possible for workers to provide
care for the young, to get an education, to have a retirement
pension. They help tie the working class together as a class.
"As workers today face fewer possibilities of getting jobs and holding them, the capitalists' attacks on social welfare programs take a bigger toll.... The so-called culture war is at the heart of this assault. Its aim is decisive to the right, and ultimately to the class dominance of the entire bourgeoisie: to single out the layers of the working class who suffer most from this assault and blame them for the social crisis of capitalism. Point to them as an infection in the social order. Go after human solidarity."
The trial of Tabitha Walrond is a case in point. On May 19 a jury in the New York State Supreme Court convicted the 21-year- old Black woman of criminally negligent homicide in the death of her two-month-old son nearly two years ago. State prosecutors argued that she was guilty of "fatally starving" the child because she didn't change from breast feeding to formula and didn't get medical care. She faces up to four years in prison.
Walrond, who was on welfare at the time, sought prenatal care five months before Tyler's birth, and began the nightmarish task of trying to get Medicaid coverage. Recent laws forcing hundreds of thousands of working people off welfare in New York City have also resulted in many people eligible for Medicaid being turned away.
When Walrond first applied on behalf of her expected child, who should have been eligible, New York's Medicaid computer system rejected the request. A social worker said the coverage would start as soon as a Social Security card and birth certificate were issued. But when Walrond returned to the medical center with the baby, they were turned away because he didn't have a Medicaid card. Walrond brought Tyler to her own postpartum checkup and her doctor noticed the child was underweight, but the Health Insurance Plan (HIP) medical center refused to treat him.
Walrond then went to three city offices for help, including one six days before the infant died. Each time the request was rejected. Months later, two different Medicaid cards and a HIP membership in the child's name arrived in the mail.
If this weren't enough, the Bronx district attorney put Walrond on trial. Prosecutors showed the jury grotesque photos of the child's body 22 hours after an autopsy, arguing they were the way Tyler looked the day he died. Several jurors told the press that although they believed many of the facts in Walrond's defense, it was those photos that convinced them to convict her. Three pediatricians had testified in her defense, explaining that it is common for a woman to fail to notice severe weight loss in an infant she holds every day.
The brutal injustice meted out to Tabitha Walrond is a prime example of why working people need to oppose the scapegoating and means-testing of the worst off layers of our class. On page 249 of Capitalism's World Disorder, Barnes explains, "To the political vanguard of the working class, Social Security has always been about the battle to bring all welfare payments, all medical claims, all supplemental payments for education and child care into a comprehensive, nationwide, government- guaranteed entitlement.
"That is why the term `the social wage' is a useful one. We are talking about something that goes beyond the wage any individual workers receives from an employer. We are talking about something that the working class and labor movement fight to establish as social rights for all."