Trump’s administration directed border agents immediately to deport immigrants, no hearing required. Refugees in the border region of northern Mexico, already waiting in line for months, are now stranded indefinitely.
Affordable Care Act
Election deepens illegitimacy of Trump’s minority rule
December 3, 2018A Marxist-Humanist view of the 2018 U.S. midterm elections that highlights the illegitimacy of Trump’s rule, showing how it is the rule of a minority won because of anti-democratic voter suppression, gerrymandering, racism, sexism, extreme anti-immigration rhetoric, hate speech and lies. It highlights the other America that opposes such neo-fascism.
II. Spreading revolt opens new doors
May 3, 2018We look at the true opposition to Trumpism: mass revolt worldwide of women, youth, Black people, labor…–the context to work for new beginnings.
Editorial: Abuser-in-chief trashes women
November 12, 2017The Trump administration’s attack on both abortion rights and birth control panders to their anti-abortion fanatical base–in the process torturing a 17-year-old immigrant who tried to get an abortion after being locked up for illegally crossing the border. .
Puerto Ricans suffer as Donald Trump plays to his racist base
Puerto Rico is devastated by hurricanes, with climate change a factor, and by the administration’s racist malign neglect, atop an existing debt crisis the masses did not create. Real solidarity came from below. .
Handicap This! July-August 2017
July 6, 2017“No cuts to Medicaid” sit-in; UK official endorses forced institutionalization; nursing homes dump people with disabilities; rally at Illinois Capitol demanding budget; four prisoners with disabilities executed in Arkansas.
III. U.S. forces of revolt as reason; philosophy as force of revolution
May 17, 2017The unprecedented Women’s March on Washington the day after Trump’s inauguration revealed the blossoming of a universal movement with many particulars, from women’s demand to control their own bodies, to Black Lives Matter, to the struggle at Standing Rock.
I. Trumpism as an excrescence of world capitalism’s crises
Trumpism’s self-perpetuating disorder is based on negation of social movements, trying to stifle the positive in their negation of this exploitative society. His deceit and power grabs express capitalism’s disintegration, exuding racism, sexism, and fascism.
Workshop Talks: Don’t let germs and capitalists win
May 1, 2017Excluding some people from healthcare, as well as vaccinations and treating infectious diseases, puts even those with health coverage at risk. Battling healthcare exclusions is essential to confronting capitalism’s class rule. .
Women take the lead against world retrogression
March 8, 2017An in-depth Marxist-Humanist view of the state of the women’s movement in the U.S. and worldwide as it responds to the rising fascism of U.S. President Trump and other world leaders.
Transgender Day of Remembrance
February 3, 2017A report of the 18th International Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), observed in November, which commemorated Transgender and gender-nonconforming people who were murdered over the last 12 months just for being brave enough to be themselves.
Readers’ Views: January-February 2017, Part I
January 31, 2017Readers’ Views on: environmental and social crises; Martin Luther King Day; healthcare crisis, Donald Trump and the election; brutal “justice”; and who reads News & Letters.
Inauguration of neo-fascism faces widespread revolt
January 23, 2017The lightning move by Republicans in Congress to prepare to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or Obamacare—before Donald Trump even took office, with only the vaguest idea of what is to replace it, and with full knowledge that a large majority of Americans oppose the repeal of its most important provisions—gave a sign of how far the new single-party government intends to roll the clock back, with dizzying speed.
Workshop Talks: Why allow Assad to kill the sick?
September 7, 2016Healthcare worker Htun Lin takes up the relationship between workers in healthcare in the U.S. who are told “not everyone can be saved,” and what is happening in Syria where the Syrian government, Russia and Iran are bombing civilians including–or especially–hospitals and healthcare workers.
Workshop Talks: Do job, get fired
March 8, 2016A critique of HMO practices that sanction nurses for giving quality care, showing the relation of that practice to what Marx worked out about labor time.
Workshop Talks: Reclaim our labor
March 7, 2015Working in healthcare has been transformed in a very alienating way. The workplace is drowning in fancy hi-tech machines. Cadres of bureaucrats spend their working hours promoting the product of healthcare with marketing campaigns. The rank and file hear daily admonitions to smile more and are told, “Just be glad you have a job.” Bureaucrats preach “customers come first,” while cutting service and staffing. Hospital and HMO executives are in a race to eliminate labor as much as possible in their “product.”
Workshop Talks: CNA nurses strike to save lives
January 27, 20152,600 mental health clinicians in California carried out a week-long strike over Kaiser Permanente’s “failure to provide timely, adequate care to patients.”
Workshop Talks: Ebola fearmongers
November 21, 2014In the wake of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, only one person, Thomas Eric Duncan, has died on U.S. soil from the virus. But millions have been led to panic. Irresponsible politicians like Gov. Christie of New Jersey created a climate of fear. Ebola spreads only by intimate contact with biological fluids, but Christie called for mandatory quarantines on healthy healthcare workers like Kaci Hickox returning from West Africa….
Workshop Talks: Nurses vs. Kaiser
August 29, 2014Contract bargaining has begun between the California Nurses Association and Kaiser Permanente. CNA has steadfastly rejected management’s demand to hold negotiations in closed sessions.
WORKSHOP TALKS: Veteran Affairs care is for data
July 5, 2014Healthcare reform took cost-control ideology to a whole new level. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been transformed into its opposite by the HMO industry which sacrifices the lives of patients and workers alike for the sake of fiduciary health.
Birth control and being human
May 12, 2014The war against birth control is a war against the idea that women are actually human beings who have a right to control their fertility and plan when and if to have a child.
Measured to death
May 11, 2014Reliance on metrics in healthcare has become a new Taylorism, or management by time study. Everything in the hospital workplace is now tracked by sophisticated computer programs, down to every last pill, gauze and penny, and down to every last motion. This vast pool of information becomes Big Data.
Revolt and retrogression at home
May 6, 2014Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2014-2015: From the U.S. to Ukraine, crises and revolts call for philosophy. II. Revolt and retrogression at home. A. Women under attack. B. Many dimensions of revolt
Queer Notes, March-April 2014
April 2, 2014CeCe McDonald; Arizona’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act; Global Day of Action called by Solidarity Alliance in Nigeria.
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
March 1, 2014Obamacare responds to a serious problem, yet is a needlessly complex scheme that subsidizes insurance companies and has objectionable features.
Tea Party wreaks havoc
November 15, 2013That a minority faction of one party in one chamber of one branch of the U.S. government could pose a grave threat to the world economy reflects the depth of the capitalist crisis. The sheer nihilism of that Tea Party faction reflects the depravity of American racism, which, as Patrick Buchanan threatened, would not hesitate to “bring down like Samson” the world around it.
Some cuts don’t heal
March 20, 2013Workshop Talks
by Htun Lin
As Congress’s latest self-imposed sequestration crisis makes clear, not all cuts are the same. A campaign slogan of California Nurses’ Association (CNA) goes: “Some Cuts Don’t Heal.”
The looming full launch date of Obamacare in 2014 has the HMO industry imposing cuts, patient care be damned, in a race to the bottom to [=>]