Doctors and patients alike lobbied the Massachusetts Department of Public Health at a packed public hearing on February 25th to block Children’s Hospital’s proposed $1.68 billion expansion plans, which would demolish the much-beloved Prouty Garden, asking that the Determination of Need be denied because hospital executives did not meet state requirements for proving cost effectiveness.

Save the Prouty Garden

Tanya King of the Massachusetts Nurses Association is seen here signing up Councillor Yancey on the petition for the 2014 ballot question which would have held hospital administrators accountable for safe staffing to protect patients. Charles Yancey has fought for decades for our schools, our safety and our health. He has been our strongest voice on the Boston City Council in opposing Boston University’s drive to work on our planet’s deadliest germs in its laboratories on Albany Street in the heart of the community and near Boston Medical Center, our premier safety-net hospital.

The fight for a just, healthy society has grown much more intense in recent weeks, as reflected in all the actions in which thousands in the Boston area have participated.

Boston Celebrates Labor Day

Change Everything or Face A Global Katrina - Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything, August 28, 2015 For me, the road to This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate begins in a very specific time and place. The time was exactly ten years ago. The place was New Orleans, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The road in question was flooded and littered with bodies. Today I am posting, for the first time, the entire section on Hurricane Katrina from my last book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. ... [T]he same military equipment and contractors used against New Orleans’ Black residents have since been used to militarize police across the United States ... Change

How the Ruling Class Remade New Orleans - The language of social justice has been used to sell intensified neoliberalism in post-Katrina New Orleans. Thomas Jessen Adams, Jacobin, August 29, 2015 It’s one of those ironies that New Orleanians tend to especially appreciate. Today, on the tenth anniversary of the failure of the federally maintained levees, the keynote speaker at the annual Rising Tide Conference on the Future of New Orleans will be DeRay Mckesson. ... [B]ut before McKesson became an activist in that movement, he was a standard-bearer for Teach For America and the New Teacher Project ... How

Hurricane Katrina & Bernie Sanders: From Neoliberal Disaster to 'Political Revolution' There is only one presidential candidate who has consistently fought for the kinds of policies that New Orleans so desperately required prior to and during Katrina, and that it needs now more than ever. Adolph Reed Jr., Michael Francis & Steve Striffler, Common Dreams, August 30, 2015 The 10th anniversary of the devastation of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has been an occasion for reflection ... But the celebration can gloss important facts about the nature of the disaster and the limited nature of the recovery ... Hurricane