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HHS Employees Learn Of Layoffs When Their ID Badges Stop Working

April 3, 2025 Jory Heckman, Federal News Network, , , , ,
The Department of Health and Human Services is laying off thousands of employees, in some cases eliminating entire offices and programs. HHS began sending reduction-in-force (RIF) notices around 5 a.m. EDT Tuesday morning, according to more than half a dozen employees who spoke to Federal News Network. Several HHS employees shared photos of staff waiting in long lines to get into their buildings. Employees targeted by the RIF learned their Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards were deactivated. “The way people are finding out whether they are RIF’d this morning is to go through this very long process to get to the building and to go through security, and then badge-in at the main atrium.

Organizing To ‘Green’ Your Job: What Works?

March 30, 2025 Keith Brower Brown, Labor Notes. , , ,
Stewards often build fights around small issues, and they need to. But stewards also have a special charge to stay ahead of the boss—to think big about shifting power on the job, including by driving the move to green production. The union can fight smarter when it’s not just reacting to the boss’s plans—when members have talked over their own goals for making work different. The first task is to open up talk beyond the usual suspects. No matter the good intentions, passing resolutions and creating isolated green committees doesn’t flex much worker power.

Climate Justice Committee Holds Community Meeting On Big Polluter

March 18, 2025 Charlie Berg, Fight Back News!. , , , ,
The Climate Justice Committee (CJC) and East Side Environmental Justice hosted a community meeting, March 15, in the Payne-Phalen neighborhood of Saint Paul, raising awareness among community members about the growing campaign against the Northern Iron foundry, a major polluter in the area. Around 50 people were in attendance, including local residents, neighborhood activists, elected officials such as Saint Paul City Council Member Nelsie Yang and state House Representative Peter Fischer, and other concerned community members.

Landless Workers’ Movement Pressures Government With Occupations

March 17, 2025 Carolina Bataier, Resumen English. , , , , , ,
A series of actions on Thursday led by women from Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST, in Portuguese) increased the pressure on the Lula government (Workers’ Party) to push agrarian reform policies forward. The mobilization occurred in 24 Brazilian states where there are MST activities and was part of the Landless Women’s Day of Struggle,previous to the MST’s Red April, massive actions to demand agrarian reform in the country. Landless families occupied areas in the states of Bahia and Ceará that did not comply with the social function provided for in the Brazilian Constitution.

New Study: Highways Block Social Connection

March 16, 2025 Eliana Perozo, Next City. , , ,
A new study confirms what urban residents and advocates have known for decades: that America’s urban highways are barriers to social connection. The research, published this month in the journal PNAS, quantifies for the first time how highways have disrupted neighborhoods across the 50 biggest U.S. cities. Every single city studied showed less social connectivity between neighborhoods where highways are present. “Nobody could put a number on the disruption, and now we can give a score to every single highway segment,” says Luca Aiello, a professor at the IT University of Copenhagen and the study’s lead author.

Long Covid Awareness Day On March 15

March 14, 2025 The Canary. , , ,
Saturday 15 March marks Long Covid Awareness Day, a critical opportunity to raise awareness of the ongoing and often debilitating effects of Long Covid, which continues to impact millions of individuals across the UK. As the pandemic’s long-term consequences remain stark, communities and advocacy groups across the country are coming together to raise their voices in solidarity and demand urgent action from the government. This year’s awareness day is marked by a series of coordinated campaigns, focusing on increasing government commitment to funding crucial research and support services.

Trump Bids World Health Organization Goodbye

January 27, 2025 People's Health Dispatch. , , ,
In January 2026, the World Health Organization (WHO) is poised to lose a member state, following US President Donald Trump’s executive order to withdraw from the UN health agency. Should this plan go ahead, it will mark the end of US participation in the world’s main global health forum and bring budgetary headaches to the WHO, given that the US remains its top financial contributor. The WHO’s rather dry response to the announcement suggests it was expected and that the agency has likely begun preparing to navigate a second Trump presidency on reduced resources.

3M Knew ‘Forever Chemicals’ In Its Firefighting Foams Were Toxic

January 18, 2025 Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, EcoWatch. , , , , ,
For decades, 3M — a multibillion-dollar chemical company based in Minnesota — sold its firefighting foams as safe and biodegradable, while having knowledge that they contained toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), according to newly uncovered documents, reported The Guardian. Starting in the 1960s and continuing until 2003, 3M’s firefighting foams contained perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), two types of PFAS “forever chemicals.” The synthetic chemical compounds have been linked to a variety of health problems like thyroid disease, hormonal and fertility problems, high cholesterol and cancer.

Annual ‘Winners’ For Most Egregious US Healthcare Profiteering Announced

January 8, 2025 Marina Dunbar, The Guardian. , , ,
The 2024 “winners” of the annual Shkreli awards, given each year to perpetrators of the most egregious examples of profiteering and dysfunction within the healthcare industry, have been released from the Lown Institute, an independent healthcare thinktank. The recipients are chosen by a panel made up of health policy experts, clinicians, journalists and advocates. The awards are named after Martin Shkreli, the infamous “pharma bro” who rose to international notoriety after increasing the price of lifesaving anti-parasitic drug Daraprim 50-fold.

Whistleblower Demands Governor Fix ‘Completely Unregulated’ Fracking Wastewater Network

December 23, 2024 Justin Nobel, DeSmog. , , , , , ,
A whistleblowing Pennsylvania oil and gas worker, together with the state’s former lead environmental regulator, are ringing the alarm bell on an unregulated and shadowy network of pipelines at least hundreds, and perhaps even thousands of miles long. The pipeline system was constructed over the past decade by oil and gas operators in Pennsylvania to transport toxic and radioactive fracking wastewater. “There is no oversight,” says Robert Green, who works in southwestern Pennsylvania as a hydrostatic tester, a niche job in the industry that involves assuring pipelines can appropriately handle the complex and often hazardous fuels and waste streams they contain.

DOE Study Finds LNG Exports Don’t Just Hurt The Climate

December 22, 2024 Sharon Kelly, DeSmog. , , ,
If you don’t live anywhere near an export terminal for liquified natural gas (LNG), you could still feel big impacts from the industry’s planned construction boom in the U.S. – and not just because the fossil fuel is rapidly worsening the climate crisis. That’s according to a new study on LNG export authorizations by the Department of Energy (DOE), which finds that the average U.S. household will pay an additional $122.54 a year in utility bills if LNG export expansions go forward unchecked. Some households could see rates go up by over $360 a year.

A History Of Success Drives The Ongoing Struggle To Clean Up Cancer Alley

December 17, 2024 Sue Inches, Waging Nonviolence. , , , ,
Two days after the election, I left on a research trip to Mississippi and Louisiana. I joined four others from my church in Yarmouth, Maine. Our purpose was to witness and learn about the struggle for civil and environmental rights in a region known as “Cancer Alley.” This 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi — between Baton Rouge and New Orleans — is home to 150 petrochemical plants, all along the river. It is also home to many working-class people, a majority of them Black. The first thing you notice are the huge refineries. Tall smokestacks spew toxic chemicals and methane flares light up the sky. The scale of industrialization is hard to imagine — there are miles and miles of factories and chemical plants.

Behind UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Is A Larger System Of Corporate Rule

December 13, 2024 Derek Seidman, Truthout. , , , , ,
The killing of UnitedHealthcare’s Brian Thompson — a brazen assassination of a wealthy CEO in the streets of midtown Manhattan — shocked the United States. But the tsunami of mass anger unleashed against a hated for-profit health care system has so far defined the story in the news. The killing sparked a deluge of personal testimonies of horrifying experiences with health insurance corporations. Dark humor around the shooting continues to flood social media. Millions of people in the U.S. viscerally hate health insurance corporations, and see these companies and their CEOs as symbols of the worst kind of corporate greed.

US Healthcare Corporations Reap Profit From Human Misery

December 12, 2024 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. , , , , , , , , , ,
The assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4 has sparked a reaction that few may have suspected. The perpetrator has received an outpouring of popular support, and a profound debate on the brutality of the US for-profit healthcare system has been sparked, with many accusing healthcare corporations of reaping their profits directly from human misery. Thompson was shot and killed while heading to an investors meeting in Midtown Manhattan on December 4. Police have arrested 26-year-old Luigi Mangione in connection with the crime, who quickly has become a working class hero in the eyes of many in the US public, especially after his alleged manifesto revealed that he was motivated by outrage towards healthcare corporations.

Supreme Court Case On Trans Health Shows How Gender Essentialism Harms Us All

December 8, 2024 Lewis Raven Wallace, Truthout. , , , ,
When I had my first gender-affirming medical intervention, I was 21 years old. The year was 2005, and at that time, the idea of a trans surgery being covered by health insurers was outlandish. So, I saved up money starting at age 18, and visited psychologists at the free gender clinic in the San Francisco Bay Area where I lived. I told them I had been “living as a man full time” and pretended to fit the clinical definition of gender dysphoria in order to get a letter allowing the surgeon to work on me. (I was genderqueer and nonbinary, had a high voice and feminine features and had virtually never “passed” as a man.)
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