We celebrate the life of Ron Kelch, a Marxist-Humanist and a revolutionary for nearly 60 years.
Htun Lin
Mental health strike
March 17, 2020Four thousand mental health workers at Kaiser Permanente HMO held a five-day strike, once again calling attention to a serious lack of resources to provide timely care.
Healthcare workers strike!
December 31, 2019On Dec. 16, 4,000 mental health workers at Kaiser Permanente HMO in Oakland went on a five-day strike, calling attention to a serious lack of resources to provide timely care.
Readers’ Views: March-April 2019, Part 1
March 11, 2019Readers’ Views on: workers strike back, genocide and Facebook, Mauritius victory, Syrian Revolution under fire, “55 Steps,” debating yellow vests, women’s struggles, and why read News & Letters.
Workshop Talks: Genocide voted in
February 6, 2018Through a view of his childhood as ethnic Chinese in Burma, Htun Lin takes up the plight of the Rohingya and the betrayal of democratic ideals by Aung San Suu Kyi.
Humanity confronting annihilation
September 3, 2017The peace march on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to commemorate over 70,000 lives lost at the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on Aug. 9 in Livermore, Calif., bring up questions of Marxism, humanism, and the alternative necessary new society.
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. .
Workshop Talks: Workers’ solidarity can stop fascism
March 23, 2017Fascists like Hitler, Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump can only succeed if they create rifts in workers’ solidarity by demonizing an “Other” that some workers will not defend; which is why opposing fascism depends on workers’ solidarity.
Reader’s Views: March-April 2017, Part 2
March 16, 2017Readers’ Views on Hegel’s dialectic and today’s retrogression; Why read N&L?; La Raza unida; Education and freedom; Racism in Burma and U.S.; Voices from behind the bars
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.
Workshop Talks: Roots of Trumpism in swamps of history
January 26, 2017Htun Lin’s Workshop Talks column takes up his experience as a refugee from Burma to the U.S. and today’s plight of the Rohingya, who are experiencing ethnic cleansing at the hands of the state and Buddhist nationalists in Burma today.
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.
Readers’ Views: July-August 2016, Part 2
July 14, 2016Readers’ Views on Needed New Beginnings in Philosophy and Revolution; Making One Year Count; Subjugated Knowledge; Free Syria/May Day; and Voices From Behind the Bars.
Readers’ Views: July-August 2016, Part 1
July 7, 2016Readers’ Views on Hate: Orlando to Brexit; Black Lives Matter; Muhammad Ali and Dr. King; Duterte in the Philippines; News & Letters Readers Unite!; and Deadly Assault on Women From the U.S. to Israel.
Workshop Talks: Alive in struggle
April 27, 2016Chinese university students’ struggle at Tiananmen Square for better living conditions; Kaiser workers’ fight against two-tier wages and the continuous miner; and today’s Hong Kong Youth’s Umbrella Revolution, Occupy Movement and Black Lives Matter all show that workers are alive in struggle.
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: Urgency of solidarity
January 25, 2016Workers often ignore borders to solidarize with fellow humans. Solidarity needed now against atrocities against Syrian civilians and in support of Larycia Hawkins risking tenure to stand with Muslims under attack.
Readers’ Views: January-February 2016, Part 1
California prisoners battle barbaric ‘justice’ system; Against ISIS attacks; Women under attack; Support Maati Monjib; The Burmese Way; Race, class & politics.
Workshop Talks: Workers not robots
October 26, 2015The workplace at Amazon.com is making employees physically and mentally ill which is a hallmark of production under capitalism. What happens at Amazon.com is not unusual and can be seen even in areas like healthcare, for example, at Kaiser.
Readers’ Views, Sept.-Oct. 2015, Part 1
August 31, 2015Readers’ thoughts on “Srebrenica, Bosnia, 1995; Europe and the World, 2015”; “Struggles against Racism”; “After Cecil, People Are Next”; “Teachers and Children”; “Workers, Customers Pay.”
Workshop Talks: When workers’ own time begins
June 28, 2015How, on the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, does that document speak to what workers and prisoners are facing today?
Readers’ Views, May-June 2015
May 3, 2015Letters and comments sent in by readers or taken down, to and about the articles in News & Letters or current events.
Workshop Talks: 1949 coal miners’ general strike today
April 30, 2015We workers see from the inside that capitalism is coming apart. The 1949-50 Coal Miners’ General Strike is significant, not only because it highlights resistance to the early stage of automation, but because the miners’ self-activity signified “The Emergence of a New Movement from Practice That Is Itself a Form of Theory.”
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.”
Readers’ Views, January-February 2015, Part 1
January 30, 2015From Ferguson to Staten Island; Revolutionary Rojava; Youth Protest; Violence Against Women; Detroit Solidarity; Paris March; Recalling Mary Jo
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.”
Debate On Middle East, Revolution And Counter-Revolution
November 23, 2014From the November-December 2014 issue of News & Letters
Readers’ Views, Part 3
I loved the way “Israel decimates Gaza as world faces global counter-revolutions” (Sept.-Oct. N&L) begins by highlighting how Gazans’ suffering represents global counter-revolution. The Left often takes the side of the underdog, the “lesser of the evils” fighting “U.S. or [=>]
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.