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The Swiss Healthcare System a Model for the U.S.?: Even the Swiss Are Growing Dissatisfied with Private Insurance!
| Joanne Landy | March 3, 2010 |
The Swiss health insurance system, which mandates every individual to buy private health insurance, has been held up by many as a realistic model for the United States. In Switzerland, however, private insurers are far more highly regulated than is conceivable to imagine in the U.S. for example, they are not allowed to make profit on “basic” coverage. Yet even so, as my friend Dennis Clagett who lives in Switzerland has written to me, popular dissatisfaction with the country’s healthcare system is mounting due to the way that the private insurers have behaved.
Zimbabwe and Rhode Island: The new exemplar for labor
| Lois Weiner | February 26, 2010 |
“Unions are killing the economy” says Henry Blodget at the Business Insider. He gleefully applauds the firing of every teacher in a Rhode Island school for their arrogance. How dare workers, teachers especially, think they have a voice in their working conditions or salaries? How uppity of teachers to sneer at the bosses’ absolutist control of the workplace. Let’s recall that Henry Blodget was indicated for insider trading.
Winds of change in US teacher unions
| Lois Weiner | February 18, 2010 |
Though you wouldn’t know it from the mass media, which focuses its attention on the way teacher unions impede “educational innovation,” (e.g., standardized testing’s stranglehold; privatization; cuts in funding), we are witnessing a growing swell of reform in teacher unions. Transformation of both national teacher unions is absolutely essential to turn back the neoliberal program that the Obama administration is pushing.
Worcester on NP & Covers
| Joanne Landy | February 4, 2010 |
Former New Politics editor Kent Worcester has written a nice appreciation of New Politics and its covers by Bob Gill.
Judi Chamberlin
| Betty Reid Mandell | February 2, 2010 |
Judi Chamberlin, one of the founders of the mental patients’ liberation movement, died January 2010 at her Arlington, MA home from chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, a lung disease, at the age of 65.
Scott Brown's Win in Context
| Marvin Mandell | January 23, 2010 |
To put the Massachusetts Senate win of Republican Scott Brown in context...
All the news that's fit to print?
| Lois Weiner | December 15, 2009 |
"All the news that's fit to print" is, of course, the slogan of the New York Times. But who determines what's "fit" and why?
We read much liberal hand-wringing about what will become of democracy without daily newspapers and reporters who serve as watchdogs of government. We need an independent press, for sure. But we don't have one.
Propaganda or reportage? The New York Times and education reform
| Lois Weiner | December 12, 2009 |
The New York Times provides a steady diet of glowing PR about the neoliberal policies implemented throughout the world to defund, privatize, and fragment public control of education. Two key projects are charter schools (designed to dismantle public school systems and replace them with individual schools or privately-owned and controlled networks) and “fast track” programs to eliminate traditional teacher education (deskilling teaching and allowing standardized tests to dictate what is taught.)
Obama Fudges History
| Steve Shalom | December 2, 2009 |
In his speech justifying his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, President Obama reminded us why the US was fighting there in the first place. After 9-11, he recalled, the United Nations Security Council "endorsed the use of all necessary steps to respond to the 9/11 attacks." And then, "only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden," did the United States send its troops into Afghanistan.
This account is doubly wrong.
Machover on Collective Decision-Making
| Steve Shalom | November 14, 2009 |
Moshe Machover, one of the founders of the Israeli Socialist Organization (Matzpen) back in the 1960s, is a specialist in the mathematics of voting. He has recently written a very valuable paper on Collective Decision-Making and Supervision in a Communist Society." He explains his use of the term "communist" as follows: