Articles
Articles
Why We Should Fight for the Veterans Health Administration
Suzanne Gordon/Steve Early: Republicans and centrist Democrats love to pour money into more and more wars. But when it comes to providing public health care for the soldiers they put in harm’s way, they try to privatize and starve vets’ programs. ... In 2018, Democrats on the Hill helped conservative Republicans and the Trump administration pass the VA MISSION Act. As currently being implemented, this legislation will siphon billions of dollars away from the VHA’s budget and direct that money toward private doctors and for-profit hospitals often ill-prepared to treat veterans. ... As the VHA is starved of needed funding, its staffing levels will further decline and then its nationwide network of public hospitals and clinics will be dismantled. ... veterans who qualify for VHA medical benefits, due to their low income or service-related condition, land on an island of socialized medicine within our larger system of private insurance and for-profit health care providers...
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Sep 1, 2019, 11:22am
Articles
The Social Movement Photography of David Bacon: Part Six, Homeless & Hungry in People’s Park
David Bacon: For residents of Berkeley, the park represented a transformative moment. In 1969 they transformed it in just a few days from a vacant lot to a green expanse of trees, grass, a performance stage, and more. ... The area sat vacant for two years, until April 1969, when it was taken over by the surrounding community ... On May 15, after the university’s chancellor ordered the property cleared, Berkeley police, backed by the California Highway Patrol, deployed guns and teargas against demonstrators up and down Telegraph Avenue. In the escalating conflict, cops shot and killed James Rector as he stood on the roof of a building watching it all unfold below. ... On May 30, 35,000 people marched from the campus to the park to protest, but a fence remained around People’s Park until May 1972, when protesters took it down for good...
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Jul 31, 2019, 2:46pm
Articles
In Venezuela, the Right to Housing is Made Possible by the Revolution
Alex Anfruns: In the Antímano neighbourhood of the capital district of Caracas, a very special block of flats has been built. Its inhabitants built it with their own hands. ... The idea was to rescue abandoned urban land that did not fulfill any social function to benefit families in a situation of “social risk, without their own housing and young couples who are founding families”. ... Many people among these families had no idea how to hit a brick. There were certainly others who were bricklayers, but most of us were women. The first challenge was to assume that a five- or six-story building had to be built; it was difficult, we couldn’t even conceive of it. ... here there is a prototype of a different family. Our goal was to build a community ... There are no elevators in the building, so elderly and disabled people live on the ground floor. ... Once the housing was raised as a right, returning the use to an abandoned land, the tool for the community to consolidate its objective was to assume self-government...
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Jul 30, 2019, 11:58am
Articles
On July 26, Cuba Has a Lot to Be Proud of
Bill Hackwell: Today marks the 66th anniversary of the simultaneous assaults on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba and the military garrison in Bayamo led by Fidel Castro and less than 200 combatants in what is known as the impossible storming of the heavens against the brutal U.S. puppet dictator Fulgencio Bautista ... For the Cuban people July 26 is a day of great pride for all the gains they have made through determination and sacrifice ... Just this past week Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) graduated another 500 doctors from 84 countries most of whom received full scholarships. ... The World Health Organization has reported that Cuba has 9 doctors per thousand inhabitants where the United States has 2.3 doctors per thousand. ... A Save Our Children report has ranked Cuba as the safest country in Latin America to be a child or adolescent (not to mention visit). And UNICEF has declared that Cuba, despite the blockade, has no malnutrition...
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Jul 26, 2019, 2:06pm
Articles
The Sun Dance
Mark Kodama: It was the summer of 1876. The great white father was demanding that we sell our land to them – land that was not ours to sell – and then move to the reservation – where only hardships and starvation awaited us. The buffalo was dying fast as white hunters shot them on the plain, taking only their skins and leaving their carcasses to rot on the plains. ... The prophet Sitting Bull called for us to resist. He called for us to meet in council. He called for a sun dance. There they would offer themselves to the creator. There the creator through the buffalo would provide answers to them. ... Plains Indians – the Sioux, the Cheyenne and the Arapaho — answered Sitting Bull’s call in great number joining his Hunkpapa Lakota at his camp near the Wolf Mountains...
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May 21, 2019, 11:08am
Articles
A Route 66 Road Trip Through Indigenous Homelands
Shoshi Parks: I’m seeking out the histories and communities that existed before Route 66 and that survive still today. ... The wind is so powerful on top of the mesa that even hours after I’ve returned to the valley below, I’ll be wiping its ancient sand from the cracks and crevices of my skin. In the Keres language, this is Haak’u, New Mexico’s Pueblo of Acoma, a sky city perched on a 300-foot bluff, some 7,000 feet above sea level—the oldest community in the United States. ... Although there is no running water or electricity, around 50 people live on the mesa year-round in brick homes—some covered in wattle and daub, others in adobe—just as their ancestors have since at least the 12th century. ... Beyond the pueblo is a 156-square-mile territory of mammoth stone formations and cottonwood trees that road trippers traveling Route 66 have been visiting since the 1950s...
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May 14, 2019, 3:04pm
Articles
BRI Forum Points to Tectonic Shift in Geopolitical Power
James ONeill: The second BRI Forum was held in Beijing from 21st to 27th of April 2019. It was intended by 5000 delegates from 150 countries, including 40 heads of government and representatives of 90 international organisations. ... the scheme has captured the attention, imagination and support of more than 150 countries. There are two major elements: a land-based road, rail and optic fibre network throughout Asia and extending to Europe, and a maritime series of routes linking China to Europe, Africa, and Latin America ... As Andre Vltchek says, “nothing outrages the West more than the prospect of losing absolute control of the world.” ... The United States has for decades sought to prevent a political, strategic and military partnership developing between Russia and China. They fail to see that it is their policies and actions that provide a major impetus for Sino-Russian cooperation. .... The fact that 152 nations have joined the BRI from every region of the world is evidence that the majority of the world’s nations see the BRI as a better alternative then the bullying, financial destruction, invasions and occupations employed by the United States to maintain their hegemonic view of the world...
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May 7, 2019, 3:47pm
Articles
A hundred years ago, May Day was a very big deal
Lloyd Alter: May Day used to be a happy celebration of spring and fertility. Now it is almost completely ignored. What happened? ... Everywhere people "went a-Maying" by going into the woods and bringing back leaf, bough, and blossom to decorate their persons, homes, and loved ones with green garlands. Outside theater was performed with characters like "Jack-in-the-Green" and the "Queen of the May." Trees were planted. Maypoles were erected. Dances were danced. Music was played. Drinks were drunk, and love was made. Winter was over, spring had sprung. ... Really, everyone was having such a good time, but once the industrial revolution took hold, it got harder for people to take the day off work, and the long hours made a thing such as May Day impossible for most workers. ... But the day was still important for workers, and labor unions were pushing the Eight Hour Movement...
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May 1, 2019, 2:50pm
Articles
Ignorance and Russophobia
Gordon Duff: The roots of Russophobia run deep in the US. They go much further than censored or slanted media or political gameplaying in Washington. What has to, or at least should be accepted is that Russophobia is a belief system, just like a religion, but with no spiritual nature, no holy prophets but resembling the worst of religion. Russophobia is a religion of hate that no one understand or will acknowledge the root cause of. ... We’re going to show how a powerful group, called the China Lobby, financed by massive American military aid, intended to fund Chaing Kai Shek’s fake war against Japan, bought Washington, “lock stock and barrel,” and began blaming Russia for the world’s ills. ... A similar “blame Russia” effort went on when the US “lost Vietnam” to Ho Chi Minh. ... This cabal, now certainly a Deep State organization, were unleashed on Democratic President Harry Truman, they brought Eisenhower into the presidency, quite possibly eliminated the Kennedy brothers, rigged two Nixon elections, and have dominated American politics, with some exceptions, since their inception....
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Apr 28, 2019, 3:19pm
Articles
Frontiersmen vs. Wusses
Linh Dinh: Smaller than California and settled for millennia, how can Vietnam even have a frontier?! But that’s what the Central Highlands were until very recently. ... For four months now, I’ve been living in the Central Highlands, in Ea Kly, a merely functional town with no attractions to speak of. ... Vietnam is still far behind the West in the flight from nature and against it, but this is to its advantage, I believe, for its people still retain the essentials to endure whatever comes next. ... Vietnamese understand perfectly that power underpins all human relations, so they act accordingly. There’s a proverb, “The smart eat men, the stupid are eaten,” so life’s first aim is to avoid being devoured. ... Though it has been the most aggressive nation for over a century, the United States insists on defining its domineering streak, war profiteering or even sadism as selfless benevolence...
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Apr 21, 2019, 3:10pm
Articles
You Elected Them to Write New Laws. They're Letting Corporations Do It Instead.
Rob O'Dell and Nick Penzenstadler: Each year, state lawmakers across the U.S. introduce thousands of bills dreamed up and written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks. ... Disguised as the work of lawmakers, these so-called “model” bills get copied in one state Capitol after another, quietly advancing the agenda of the people who write them. ... USA TODAY and the Arizona Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law. ... Model bills passed into law have made it harder for injured consumers to sue corporations. They’ve called for taxes on sugar-laden drinks. They’ve limited access to abortion and restricted the rights of protesters. ... Models are drafted with deceptive titles and descriptions to disguise their true intent. The Asbestos Transparency Act didn’t help people exposed to asbestos. It was written by corporations who wanted to make it harder for victims to recoup money...
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Apr 5, 2019, 3:46pm
Articles
Dire streets: Roadways and broken promises on the Navajo Nation
Amy Linn and Alysa Landry: SANOSTEE, N.M. — Sharon Begay knows this road by heart. ... The 43-year-old mother of two has spent a lifetime memorizing the jagged surface and thuggish boulders that define Indian Service Route 5010. Locals just call it “the road” and gauge distances with landmarks: windmills, S-curves, a water tower covered with graffiti that once served as the town’s main source of gossip. ... It’s an unpaved byway in the Sanostee Chapter of the Navajo Nation that feeds a network of unnamed dirt roads, serving hundreds of families in the shadows of the Chuska Mountains. Generations of Begay’s family have herded sheep along this road; as a child she traveled it by horseback, alongside her father. ... The federal government and its Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) have historically failed to furnish even the most basic infrastructure necessary to operate local schools. Among the most obvious failures: federal agencies refused to construct roads that would allow children to ride a bus to schools near their home...
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Apr 2, 2019, 10:39am
Articles
The woman in search of Indian Country’s missing
Jessica Lussenhop: When authorities fail families, Lissa Yellowbird-Chase steps in. ... On a blazing hot day in late July, Lissa Yellowbird-Chase drove her black SUV, license plate “SEARCH,” to a muddy landing on Lake Sakakawea. It was a remote entrance to the water on the northern edge of the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota — not much more than a rickety dock at the end of an uneven gravel road. ... Hitched to the back of Yellowbird-Chase’s truck was a 14-foot boat with a half-broken motor and a set of fishing sonar. ... Nine months earlier, in the autumn of 2017, a young mother of five named Olivia Kerri Lone Bear vanished from New Town, a tiny oil-boom city on the Fort Berthold Reservation. ... Yellowbird-Chase joined the effort along with the Sahnish Scouts, a group she founded in 2015 to search and recover missing people in Indian Country — though she had been doing the work on her own since about 2011...
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Mar 28, 2019, 12:52pm
Articles
Honoring Frances Perkins, the 'Mother' of Social Security
Max Richtman: In the iconic photo of Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act of 1935, the dignitaries crowded around the president stare intently at the legislation on his desk. Only one looks directly into the camera. She is the woman without whom we likely would not have Social Security today: Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins ... coaxed, cajoled, and practically willed the program into being, undaunted by formidable obstacles (including the question of its very constitutionality). ... "I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain common workingmen,” Perkins said. ... One of the programs Perkins insisted upon was social insurance for American retirees, many who were literally living in poor houses across the country. ... In addition to Social Security, Perkins successfully advocated for minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, and restrictions on child labor. Ironically, her only unrealized policy goal was universal health care...
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Mar 27, 2019, 3:49pm
Articles
Epifanio Camacho: a Militant Farmworker Brushed Out of History
Tanya Golash-Boza – Michael Golash: Cesar Chavez is perhaps best known for his role in the 1965-1970 Delano grape strike and boycott and his nonviolent tactics in those protests. ... Although Chavez insisted on nonviolence, there was dissent within the National Farmworkers Association as some workers believed more militant tactics were necessary. One of these workers was Epifanio Camacho. ... Camacho developed a revolutionary consciousness through his struggles. He eventually joined the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and began to organize workers in McFarland and other towns in the Central Valley to join the PLP and to become communists. Chavez continued to work with politicians and to organize consumer boycotts to make changes to the existing system...
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Mar 25, 2019, 12:03pm
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