Revolutionizing Healthcare for the People: When Cuban Polyclinics Were Born
As discontent increases with overly expensive and totally inadequate US health care, it is time to look closely at the beginnings of the modern Cuban medical system.
An Unprecedented Wave of Feminist Civil Disobedience Sweeps Chile
Chile has a long history of student protests, normally mobilizing against the privatized education system put in place by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. What’s happening today emerges from that experience, but with feminism at its core.
Imagining a Better World in Afghanistan in the Midst of War
On average, during Trump’s first year in office, the Pentagon dropped 121 bombs per day on Afghanistan. The total number of weapons – missiles, bombs - deployed in Afghanistan by manned and remotely piloted aircraft through May this year is estimated at 2,339.
Unions Have Been Down Before, History Shows How They Can Come Back
Two ways we can honor unions at this time of trial are to ask others to join union picket lines and to learn from their innovations and successes for whatever campaigns we are committed to today. According to labor historian Sidney Fine, the union breakthrough in Detroit and Flint, Michigan, was “the most significant American labor conflict in the twentieth century.” In some ways the struggle was more strategically sophisticated than many campaigns are today, which is why it offers important lessons on tactics, racism, using the spectrum of allies and sequencing the focus of organizing.
The Biggest Lesson from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Win? Run on Democratic Socialism.
Source: In These Times
The 28-year-old Latina scored the biggest upset of 2018 by rejecting Democratic Party orthodoxy and running on a laser-focused message of economic justice. If other candidates want to win, they should follow her lead.
On Tuesday morning, just hours after unseating one of the most powerful Democrats in U.S. Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe in which she offered a succinct, yet compelling, rundown of her insurgent campaign’s “laser-focused” message:
The Soldier’s Tale: A Man Who Went to War and Realized His Side Was the Enemy
Source: Truthdig
The troops live under
The cannon’s thunder
From Sind to Cooch Behar
Moving from place to place
When they come face to face
With a different breed of fellow
Whose skins are black or yellow
They quick as winking chop him into
Beefsteak tartar
—“The Cannon Song” from “The Threepenny Opera”
The soldier’s tale is as old as war. It is told and then forgotten. There are always young men and women ardent for glory, seduced by the power to inflict violence and naive enough to die for the merchants of death. The soldier’s tale is the same, war after war, generation after generation. It is Spenser Rapone’s turn now. The second lieutenant was given an “other than honorable” discharge June 18 after an Army investigation determined that he “went online to promote a socialist revolution and disparage high-ranking officers” and thereby had engaged in “conduct unbecoming an officer.” Rapone laid bare the lie, although the lie often seems unassailable. We must honor those like him who have the moral courage to speak the truth about war, even if the tidal waves of patriotic propaganda that flood the culture overwhelm the voices of the just.