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New Hampshire Alliance for Retired Americans Wins Hearing Aid Help Bill
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Charlie Balban, a retired Sheet Metal Workers (SMWIA) member and president of the New Hampshire Alliance for Retired Americans, suspects his hearing loss started during his apprentice days in a noisy shop.
Now, years later, he knows firsthand how expensive a good hearing aid can be—and how essential. Balban joined with the New Hampshire Alliance, which led the successful fight for state legislation that will help retirees and workers afford the devices.
This week, the New Hampshire Senate has passed a bill that ensures insurance companies provide $1,500 over five years to help people purchase hearing aids and related services. The bill passed the House earlier. “A good hearing aid can cost as much as $6,000,” says Balban.
Retirees use them more than anyone else, but most retirees live on fixed incomes so it’s hard for them to afford an effective hearing aid. This bill will help retirees and also help people still in the workforce.
He says the bill is low cost to business and will “help workers and retirees to pay for these devices and get fitted for them.”
Alliance members wrote letters, made phone calls and sent e-mail messages to build support for the bill and worked with allies, including Commission on Deafness and Hearing Loss, the New Hampshire Association of the Deaf, the New Hampshire AFL-CIO, Granite State Independent Living and the New Hampshire Alliance.
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This the May Day article prompts two comments.
Why doesn’t Obama’s new “Health Care Reform”, massively supported by the AFL-CIO and President Trumka, automatically cover hearing aids? Or how about eyeglasses, or dental care, or the other basic health needs of working people?
The utter failure again of the “leadership” of organized labor to support “single-payer” Medicare-for-all legislation means continued lack of affordable and universal health care for millions of working people.
There now must be a continual political struggle to introduce and pass legislation to “fix’ this corrupt “Health Care Reform”, which was not designed to promote the health of working people. Instead the “Health Care Reform” was designed basically to institutionalize the maximization of profit to corporate gangsters. These gangsters have paid the Democrats and Obama hundreds of millions of dollars in the past election, they have kept “single-payer” from even being considered (“off the table”) in Senate hearings, and completely controlled the “discussion” of the Health Care Reform on PBS and NPR “talk shows”.
The AFL-CIO NOW BLOG apparently has nothing to say special on this May Day 2010. This is not an unfortunate oversight but a reflection of the political bankruptcy of organized labor, that has gone on for decades. There is no new strategy or perspective being considered this May 1st, despite the massive impoverished of working people, despite the election of President Obama and control of Congress by the Democratic Party, which was to bring about finally a “change” for the better.
Obama’s promise of “change” has been proven, on every major level, to be a massive fraud. Obama and the Democrats, once in power, have continued and expanded the despised policies of Bush/Cheny. The “lesser evil” Democrats have always been favored by organized labor have consistently betrayed the needs of working people.
A new strategy for the organized labor movement:
1. Realizing the Capitalist economy of the United States, in decline for 30 years, has now terminally collapsed. Capitalism, even with trillion dollar “bail outs”, is incapable of supplying the economic and social needs of the vast majority of people.
2. The Democratic Party and President Obama have massively supported corporate profit interests at the expense of needs of working people.
* Wars for profit and power are continued and are expanded.
* Global warming is not seriously addressed in order to protect the profits of polluters.
* Capitalist globalization has resulted in the permanent loss of millions of jobs
to “slave-wage” third word countries.
* The corrupt financialization and unregulated speculation of Wall Street bankers has caused the collapse of capitalism on a global scale.
* Thus public education, public social services, public health care, essential state and local governmental functions, are all being destroyed under the false claim that “there is no money available”.
3. Thus we issue a call for the creation of a new political party as an alternative to both corporate corrupted Democratic and Republican Parties. The
new socialist party opposes the continuation of gangster capitalism. We support a socialist party that seeks the transition of the economy to promote the economic needs of the vast majority of people that make up society.
4. We demand equal access to public mass media (NPR, PBS) that efficiently informs and educates working people to become involved in making the changes in society now needed for the survival of humanity.
For another May 1, May Day, perspective, the following was posted on the World Socialist Web Site, with a more international perspective. The first few paragraphs are posted here. Please read the full Perspective article here:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/may2010/pers-m01.shtml
May Day 2010
Peter Symonds
1 May 2010
May Day 2010 takes place amid unmistakable signs of the resurgence of the class struggle. In country after country, workers confront rising unemployment, the evisceration of essential services such as health and education, the erosion of working conditions and attacks on basic democratic rights. They are beginning to fight back.
With the manifest failure of capitalism, the essential message of May Day—for the international working class to unite in the struggle for world socialism—has become an urgent necessity. The global economic crisis that erupted in 2008 raises the spectre of the 1930s: permanent mass unemployment, the impoverishment of broad layers of working people and the drive towards new and ever more terrible wars.
The economic turmoil that broke out on Wall Street has entered a second, more virulent stage. The trillions of dollars pumped by administrations around the world into the major banks and corporations to prevent their collapse now appear on government books as massive sovereign debts. The universal response in ruling circles is that working people must be forced to pay for a crisis for which they bear no responsibility.
Initial attention is focused on Greece, where the Papandreou government is preparing to impose another, more severe, austerity package to cut wages, pensions and services and impose hefty tax rises. But with Spain and Portugal already under pressure from financial markets, economic commentators are nervously speculating where the “contagion” will spread next. No country is exempt: Britain, the US and Japan all sit precariously on huge mountains of debt. While superficially China appears as an exception, its feverish growth, artificially spurred on by stimulus spending, has created enormous speculative bubbles that will inevitably burst.
The size of the amounts to be clawed back from the working class is underscored by the scale of the financial collapse itself. In 2008-09, the estimated loss of global wealth was more than $25 trillion dollars, almost 45 percent of global GDP. Direct support from governments to prop up the financial system amounted to around one quarter of global GDP. In both the US and the UK it was close to three quarters of GDP. Greece is thus the test case for a global agenda.
The fundamental contradictions of capitalism—between socialised production and the private ownership of the means of production, and between the global economy and the outmoded capitalist nation state system—first identified by Karl Marx more than 150 years ago, have burst to the surface of economic and political life. The unprecedented internationalisation of production over the past 30 years has ensured that the crisis takes on a global character from the outset.
Class tensions are rapidly sharpening. The most telling signs appear at the very centre of global capitalism—in the United States—where the financial aristocracy continues to engorge itself through parasitic activities that have thrown millions of Americans out of their jobs, out of their homes and, in many cases, onto the streets. The exposure of the Obama administration as the political instrument of this grasping wealthy elite is setting the stage for explosive class battles.
….
The full article here:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/may2010/pers-m01.shtml
I attended apre apprentice program run by the Buffalo building Trades in 2002.One of the trainers from the Ironworkers had hearing loss from the mag wrenches used.There are many medical devices not covered and retirees,people on medicaid and medicare should be able to get them at reduced or no cost.to them.Regarding May Day in 1886 the working people of chicago and the state of Illinois had the worlds first job action for the 8 hour day at 10 hour pay.The nascent AFofL gave a statement that both May Day and the September Labor day should be honored in the USA.It is time to drop the nonsensical”law day”