Category: Uncategorized
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Birth of the Cuban Polyclinic
During the 1960s, Cuban medicine experienced changes as tumultuous as the civil rights and anti-war protests in the US. While those in western Europe and the US confronted the institutions of capitalism, Cuba faced the challenge of building a new society. The tasks of Cuban medicine differed sharply between the first and the second…
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Blackstone, BlackRock or a Public Bank? Putting California’s Funds to Work
http://EllenBrown.com May 26, 2018 California has over $700 billion parked in private banks earning minimal interest, private equity funds that contributed to the affordable housing crisis, or shadow banks of the sort that caused the banking collapse of 2008. These funds, or some of them, could be transferred to an infrastructure bank that…
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Nuclear Disaster at Chernobyl: Reality and Unreality
With the escalating doom of climate change hovering over us, it is tempting to push nuclear horror to the back of our minds. To those of us who grew up in the 1950s, it was omnipresent. Nuclear war could not exist without nuclear power and on April 26, 1986 the world experienced a form of…
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Jane F. McAlevey, ‘No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age’: A Review Essay
New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. ISBN: 978-0190624712 This is an absolutely important—and brilliant—recent book by someone who knows what she’s talking about. It is clear, thoughtful and, yes, inspiring. It is a book that I believe should be read by every social change activist in (at least) North America. It is written by…
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Corporations, Labor, and the Need for Stronger Unions
Introduction Conservative economist Milton Friedman once said, “The [only] social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” Noam Chomsky was more blunt. He stated, “Corporations [have] no moral conscience. [They] are designed by law to be concerned only for their stockholders, and not…their stakeholders, like the community or the work force.” This essay will…
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Fox in the Hen House: Why Interest Rates Are Rising
Ellen Brown http://EllenBrown.com April 22, 2018 The Fed is aggressively raising interest rates, although inflation is contained, private debt is already at 150% of GDP, and rising variable rates could push borrowers into insolvency. So what is driving the Fed’s push to “tighten”? On March 31st the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate for…
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Book Review: October; The Story of The Russian Revolution
What exactly is the legacy of the 1917 Russian Revolution for socialists today? Over the past century much of the discussion has been dominated by two tendencies. For Marxist–Leninists the Russian Revolution was the guiding light leading humanity onward to socialism. For Anarchists and Social-Democrats Russia in 1917 seemed to offer a model…
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For Climate Mobilization, Look to 1960s Vietnam before Turning to 1940s America
Confronting the global ecological emergency will require a mobilization far more ambitious than any actions now being considered by governments or international bodies. In response, several of the people and groups urging much more drastic action here in America have been saying that it needs to happen on the scale of the country’s mobilization…
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Gun Violence – The War Against Ourselves
The number of Americans killed by firearms since 1968, including suicides, homicides, and accidental shootings, is 1.4 million, more than the 1.2 million killed in all the wars involving our country from the Revolutionary War to the present. While Americans constitute just under 5% of the world’s population, we account for almost ½ of…
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Arms of America: From Yemen to Florida
H. Rap Brown was right: violence is as American as cherry pie. It's also as Indian as dal chawal. (Image: Mutant Freedom, chainstitch embroidery on khadi, 48 x 28 inches, 2008] In the United States of America it’s all about the quantity, not the quality, of so-called freedom. That may be because only a few powerful…
