The Saudi rulers want "protection" from the rulers of Iran, a major rival for regional influence. But they also want "protection" from the angry masses inside Saudi Arabia. unemployment among Saudi citizens is officially 13% and double that among young adults.
Two years ago, conditions like these fueled the Arab Spring – and those fires are still burning. The Saudi rulers' fascist response has been "Saudisation," including a ban on foreigners in some professions and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers, who were two-thirds of the overall workforce.
It remains to be seen how many Saudi youth will accept the brutally low wages and slave-like working conditions forced on immigrant laborers. Meanwhile, 6,000 street-cleaners in Mecca, mostly from Bangladesh, held a five-day strike protesting non-payment of wages, harassment by immigration authorities, and dangerous working conditions. Masses of Ethiopian immigrants fought the police who targeted them in Riyadh.
After at least two were killed by the cops, solidarity demonstrations were held in Ethiopia, in Dallas and Portland (USA), and elsewhere. In Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began, a general strike shut down Gafsa, Siliana, and the eastern Gabes region, where unemployment and poverty have, if anything, worsened in the last two years. The spark for the strike, on the anniversary of last year's mass protests, was a government decision to refuse to build new hospitals in historically underserved Gafsa and Gabes. Masses fought police and burned an office of the ruling party in the working-class region of Gafsa, strategic for its phosphate mines. "The people want the fall of the regime," they chanted. In Egypt, thousands of workers started a sit-in at the state-owned Iron and Steel Company on November 26, demanding an overdue "profitshare" bonus. They are now on a partial strike. university students responded to a November government crackdown with protests and strikes. They exposed the government's lie that it was "just keeping the Islamists in line," seeing the repression as an attack on their protests against poor conditions on campus, rising tuition fees, and inadequate student housing.
The masses need more than jobs, more than better conditions, more than "the fall of the regime." They need the fall of capitalism-imperialism! Only the masses, mobilized for communism, can make that happen. We must take full advantage of every opportunity created by the class struggle.
As the Communist Manifesto stated 165 years ago, "Let the ruling classes tremble. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."

The conflict continues between the National union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), whose members are health care professionals in California, and Kaiser Permanente, California's largest Health Maintenance Organization (HMO). While Kaiser has reported $10.2 billion in profits since 2009, it aims to cut worker benefits and has already laid off 1,000 workers, the largest mass layoff at Kaiser in three decades. Kaiser makes a profit by demanding as much work as possible from employees in exchange for an hourly wage.
Workers have limited their struggle to using the bosses' laws/system. After the California Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) completed the first phase of the state's investigation, Kaiser Permanente was fined $4 million for not providing mental health services to patients in a timely manner. Kaiser had to increase staffing to meet requirements.
As the investigations continued, Marcy Gallagher, the DMHC attorney responsible for leading the investigation into Kaiser's substandard mental health care "switched sides." She now works for Kaiser in the division that's responsible for defending Kaiser against the DMHC's investigation. Workers can't win using the bosses' laws and rules because the capitalist system was designed for the bosses to win, not the workers. unions argue for staying within the confines of the law or for continued reform struggles, but these are deadend answers to workers' problems under capitalism.
The conflict between management and workers is systemic and the solution is in destroying the rotting capitalist system and creating a system designed and run by workers: communism. NUHW and Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, say that a government-run single-payer plan would be far more beneficial. The union says that by expanding Medicare to cover all Americans, "we could solve the country's historic healthcare crisis once and for all."
However, workers are not better under the Medicare system. The existing system of Medicare (single-payer health plan for seniors) was built around a so-called fee-for-service model, in which doctors, hospitals and other practitioners are paid procedure by procedure. A healthy person under this system is far less "valuable" to the health care industry than one who overeats, smokes, misuses medicine and ends up with diabetes, heart conditions or a host of other ailments that require hospital beds, enrollment in high-cost nursing facilities and expensive interventions. On average, Medicare, with its 50 million enrollees, pays for about 2,000 days per year in a post-acute care facility for every 1,000 beneficiaries. By comparison, Kaiser Permanente, with its ongoing pattern of substandard care, averages 600 days per 1,000 clients. Providers under Medicare try to get as much money as possible from Medicare and providers under Kaiser try to provide as little as possible with as little staff as possible to make their profit.
The problem is that all healthcare systems under capitalism run on the profit motive, not on what is best for patients. under communism, workers will no longer be treated as commodities and money will no longer be an obstacle to good healthcare. No more insurance companies or bureaucracy. under communism knowledge about medicine will not be restricted to schools and doctors, but made available for all to learn. Many mental health problems and addictions will be eliminated and/or addressed by communities rather than addressing problems as individual problems detached from society. Good health will become one of society's main goals.
At present the US bosses seem concerned with our health care because they must curb the high cost of health care. They need a healthy workforce in their factories and in their military for inevitable wars to come. They need to keep costs down due to the declining rate of profit worldwide. Currently, the US spends twice as much per person on health care as other rich countries, yet US life expectancy is among the worst. When we compare the US to all other rich countries in the world for which there is data, the US has the highest infant mortality rate, highest child poverty rate, and highest child injury death rate. If Healthcare workers at Kaiser and all around the world put their energy into organizing to smash capitalism rather than for dead end temporary reforms, we could win a true victory for the world's working class! Read and distribute Red Flag. Join Red Flag study groups to learn more.