Election deepens illegitimacy of Trump’s minority rule

December 3, 2018

A 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.

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Editorial: Abuser-in-chief trashes women

November 12, 2017

The 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. .

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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.

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Transgender Day of Remembrance

February 3, 2017

A 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.

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Inauguration of neo-fascism faces widespread revolt

January 23, 2017

The 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.

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Workshop Talks: Why allow Assad to kill the sick?

September 7, 2016

Healthcare 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.

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Workshop Talks: Reclaim our labor

March 7, 2015

Working 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.”

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Workshop Talks: Ebola fearmongers

November 21, 2014

In 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….

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Workshop Talks: Nurses vs. Kaiser

August 29, 2014

Contract bargaining has begun between the California Nurses Association and Kaiser Permanente. CNA has steadfastly rejected management’s demand to hold negotiations in closed sessions.

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WORKSHOP TALKS: Veteran Affairs care is for data

July 5, 2014

Healthcare 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.

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Birth control and being human

May 12, 2014

The 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.

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Measured to death

May 11, 2014

Reliance 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.

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Revolt and retrogression at home

May 6, 2014

Draft 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

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Tea Party wreaks havoc

November 15, 2013

That 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.

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Some cuts don’t heal

March 20, 2013

Workshop 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 [=>]

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