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

A People’s Reconstruction. A real post-Katrina revitalization of New Orleans would have meant more jobs and public services, not cutbacks and privatization. Jay Arena, Jacobin, August 28, 2015 “We finally cleaned up public housing. We couldn’t do it, but God could.” So crowed Richard Baker, the real-estate entrepreneur and former Baton Rouge Republican congressman, while bantering with lobbyists on the House floor in the days after Hurricane Katrina floodwaters busted through New Orleans’s ill-maintained federal levees and swamped the city. ... People’s

A Decade After Katrina, RNs Reflect on What We’ve Learned and Refuse to Learn. National Nurses United, August 26, 2015 On the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction along the Gulf Coast, registered nurse volunteers with the disaster relief program, Registered Nurse Response Network (RNRN), which sent hundreds of RN volunteers to provide disaster relief to the region in the wake of the deadly storm, say that critical lessons which exacerbated the 2005 crisis – global climate change, our lack of a national healthcare system, and failure to invest in public resources and infrastructure – have still not been learned. ... A Decade

Boston Got to Celebrate Twice!

New York’s State Assembly in May overwhelmingly passed a bill to establish a single-payer-style health care system.

The bill isn’t expected to pass the Senate or be signed into law anytime soon. But getting it through, with unprecedented support from big unions, shows that state-level campaigns are still a fertile ground for health care justice organizing, despite the recent setback in Vermont.

Down & Dirty

Sandy Eaton, RN, CommonHealth, Spring 2015

Vermont: What went wrong, and what can we learn?

Gerald Friedman, PhD, CommonHealth, Spring 2015

NNU Statement on Black Lives Matter and the Health Impact of Societal Racial Disparities - National Nurses United, July 23, 2015 National Nurses United joins with the AFL-CIO and activists across the United States in urging all presidential candidates to address the pervasive problems of racial and economic justice that have so stained our nation. For nurses, the national dialogue this week about structural racism is a reminder that health, which includes personal safety, is a broad thematic that affects all corners of the national debate ... NNU

Wrong Prescription? The failed promise of the Affordable Care Act. Trudy Lieberman, Harper’s Magazine, July 2015 In July 2009, as the Affordable Care Act moved through Congress, Steny Hoyer, the second-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, laughed at the idea that any legislator would actually read the bill before voting on it. If such full-body immersion were necessary to support the ACA, he said, “I think we would have very few votes.” ... Wrong

Thursday, July 30th ~ 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Massachusetts State House ~ Senate Reading Room
Third Floor ~ Across from Senate Chambers
Music, Speakers & Cake!

2024 Olympics & Franklin Park