Subjects Archives: Inequality

  • Massachusetts Health Reform Bill: A False Promise of Universal Coverage

      Listen to Steffie Woolhandler on Doug Henwood’s Behind the News radio show (6 April 2006). Read David U. Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, “Mayhem in the Medical Marketplace” (Monthly Review 56.7, December 2004). It’s a stirring scene.  The Governor, legislative leaders and leaders of Health Care for All standing in the State House Rotunda declaring […]

  • Minneapolis-St. Paul, 9 April 2006

      Yiwen Cheng lives in Kansas City, and Stephen Philion lives in Minneapolis.

  • Latino Milwaukee

      Click on an image to watch a slide show of the immigrant rights march in Milwaukee on 23 March 2006. SOURCE: Kristyna Wentz-Graff, “A Day without Latinos,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 23 March 2006 March 23, 2006 was a historic day for Milwaukee.  It was a day of Latinos in a city that still thinks […]

  • Anne Braden, 1927-2006

      Click on the image to watch video interviews with Anne Braden. The 6 March 2006 issue of the Louisville Courier-Journal reports the death at 81 of Anne Braden, the veteran Southern white civil rights leader and organizer of the fight for black integration and equality, and an American radical of untameable commitment who — […]

  • Antiwar Activists Arrested at House Appropriations Committee Hearing

      Washington, D.C., March 9 — Two peace activists were arrested on March 8 for disrupting the House Appropriations Committee hearing on additional funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Mike Ferner and Ed Kinane of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, interrupted the hearing called to consider the $67 billion “supplemental” appropriation which was ultimately approved […]

  • Danish Cartoons: Racism Has No Place on the Left

    I’ve just about had it.  I cannot watch one more episode of the Daily Show which makes racist jokes about Arabs and Muslims.  I am sick and tired of people who see themselves as part of the left writing articles that put a liberal gloss over what is, in essence, a right-wing “clash of civilizations” […]

  • “As Free as the Words of a Poem”: Las Krudas and the Cuban Hip-Hop Movement

      The fate of socialism after the fall of the socialist bloc will be determined, more than ever, by socialism’s capacity to sustain in theory and in practice the . . . idea that the intellectual’s adherence to the Revolution (like that of any other ordinary citizen), if the intellectual “really wants to be useful, […]

  • Las Krudas: To Be Lesbian, Feminist, and Hip-Hop in Cuba!

    Las Krudas is a Cuban hip hop duo, an interracial couple of HOT, HOT, HOT lesbians Odaymara Cuesta and Olivia Prendes.  Their feminist lyrics and performance battle machismo and celebrate the power and beauty of women of color. In “Vamo’ a vencer la dificultad,” the track that opens their CD Cubensi, Las Krudas repeat: Sexo […]

  • Las Krudas: Lesbian, Feminist, and Hip-Hop!

      LAS KRUDAS Las Krudas <http://www.krudas.org/> is a Cuban hip hop duo, an interracial couple of HOT, HOT, HOT lesbians Odaymara Cuesta and Olivia Prendes.  Their feminist lyrics and performance battles machismo and celebrates the power and beauty of women of color. In “Vamo’ a vencer la dificultad,” the track that opens their CD Cubensi, […]

  • In the Land of Bolivar

      Caracas, Venezuela — Under the elevated lines in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union has been waging a battle against poverty that has taken them to center stage of the World Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela.  Led by Cheri Honkala, a formerly homeless mother, the KWRU began by building encampments […]

  • Workers’ Rights ARE Human Rights — Not Just in the USA, but around the World

    Click on the image for a larger view. Chicago, 2005 In the middle of a blizzard in Chicago on December 8, 2005, I stood with about 250-300 union members and supporters at the Haymarket Memorial, chanting, “Workers’ Rights Are Human Rights.”  This was one of a number of rallies around the country that the AFL-CIO […]

  • Cuba and Venezuela: A Bolivarian Partnership

      José Martí and Simón Bolívar, two of Latin America’s most respected independence fighters, recognized nearly a century ago that their homelands would never be free of imperial domination, until Latin America came together in solidarity as a united force. Martí and Bolívar’s insights remain relevant in the age of neo-liberal globalization.  The colonizers of […]

  • Invisible Immigrant Workers in Our Midst

      In October 2005, I ran into several Guatemalan guest workers in a village laundromat.  My first guess was that they worked on a large dairy farm, but in my poor Spanish and their almost non-existent English, we managed to communicate, and they made me understand that their jobs were in new home construction!  I […]

  • “We Will Educate Our Colleagues, the Policy Community, the Media, and Our Patients”: Physicians for a National Health Program Meet in Philadelphia

    Physicians for a National Health Program held its annual meeting on December 10, 2005. Originally planned for New Orleans, it was relocated to Philadelphia after Hurricane Katrina. Founded in 1987, the organization has over 14,000 members nationally. PNHP advocates and educates for a single national health insurance plan: in the words of PNHP National Coordinator […]

  • “Airline Workers United” Forms to Fight Concessions Industrywide

      Things seem to keep going from bad to worse for workers at Northwest Airlines (NWA).  While striking mechanics and cleaners face a bitter winter after more than four months on the picket line, pilots, flight attendants, gate/ramp agents, baggage handlers, customer service reps, and other union workers face a fresh round of givebacks against […]

  • Note to Health Care Reform Activists: Public Employee Health Benefits to Evaporate

    According to two recent articles, one in the New York Times and one in the Wall Street Journal, the federal Governmental Accounting Standards Board has begun to require municipalities — states, counties, cities — to account for how much it will cost them to provide all the health care promised to present and retired public […]

  • Killing the Dark Bodies: Execution as Market Sustainability & State Redemption

      From: Sam <xxx@xxx.com> Subject: Re: The Soul of Money Date: December 13, 2005 11:40:11 AM CST To: Lisa Arrastía<arras004@umn.edu>Good morning, chica, Mom and Marty hosted a brunch fundraiser for “Death Penalty Focus” on Sunday, which was uplifting. Mike Farrell (Captain B.J. Hunnicut of M.A.S.H. fame) spoke at the fundraiser. He’s a long time death […]

  • Seattle Votes for a Right to Health Care

    Measure No. 1, as it appeared on the ballot: Advisory ballot measure No. 1 concerns the right to health care. If approved, the measure would advise the mayor and the city council that every person in the US should have an equal right to quality health care, and that Congress should implement that right.  The […]

  • Blind Man with a Pistol: The Evolution of the Modern Police State as Seen by Prison Authors

    “What started it?” “A blind man with a pistol.” “That don’t make sense.” “Sure don’t.” — Chester Himes Minorities and most poor people in the inner cities have always lived with the knowledge that (for them at least) the forces of unlawful suppression and misuse of power far too often masqueraded as the forces of […]

  • Economic Inequality and US Politics

    Over the last twenty-five years, economic inequality in the US grew. As the gap between haves and have-nots worsened, social injustices and tensions increased. As usual, politicians in power have devised projects and campaigns designed to distract attention from these realities. Opposition politicians wonder whether they dare attack growing inequality and champion programs for less […]