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Privatization

Valedictorian Rips Into Erosion Of Public Education In Graduation Speech

Los Angeles, CA - On June 6, Axel Brito, Hollywood High School Class of 2022 valedictorian, gave a powerful speech during his senior graduation ceremony at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. His speech is an indictment of the entrenched corruption within the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) at the expense of quality education and services for students and the working conditions of teachers and school workers. Video footage of Axel’s speech has gone viral on social media, having been viewed over 2.6 million times on TikTok, over 24,000 times on YouTube and over 11,000 times on Instagram.

Machinists’ Retirees 751 Resolve To End ACO REACH

On June 13th the International Association of Machinists IAM 751 Retirement Club voted overwhelmingly to end the privatization of Medicare and to send their resolution to their congressional delegation, to President Biden, and to Secretary Xavier Becerra at Health and Human Services. Machinists’ District 751 represents 27,000 members who work at Boeing and some smaller shops across the state of Washington.  It is one of the largest organizations within the IAM. The privatization scheme the 751 Retirement Club opposes is ACO REACH, formerly called direct contracting entities (DCE).  It is a pilot program in which seniors who chose traditional Medicare are placed, without their consent, into plans that are run by insurance companies, private equity, and venture capitalists who can take as high as 40% in overhead and profit from the Medicare program.

25 Issues Of Increasing And Serious Concern In India

There is increasing worry that in some areas of critical importance the situation in India has been deteriorating steadily during the last eight years or so. As India is home to about 18 per cent of people in the world, this is clearly a matter of urgent concern. Hence a review of these disturbing trends is urgently needed with a view to suggesting suitable remedial actions for checking this deterioration. Inequalities have been increasing recently to record levels. According to the World Inequality Report, after years of significant reduction of inequalities in the post-independence period, inequalities are coming back to their colonial levels in recent times. This report tells us that the bottom 50% have only 6% of the wealth, while the top 1% have 33% of the wealth. The bottom 50% have only 13% of the income, while the top 1% have 22% of the income.

Honduras Repeals Colonialist ZEDEs

President Xiomara Castro fulfilled a major campaign promise last week when she signed the decree to repeal the ZEDEs law. We spoke to Honduran Vice Minister for Agrarian Reform, Rafael Alegría, on this important victory for the campesinos and social movements of Honduras. Rafael is a historic leader of the international peasants movement, La Vía Campesina. Having been at the forefront of years of struggles in Latin America, he’s now a strong anti-imperialist voice with the Partido Libre administration. Kawsachun News’ Camila Escalante sat down with Rafael in Managua, where he and other movement leaders participated in commemorative events marking the 30th anniversary of the founding of La Vía Campesina.

Oakland Teachers And Dockworkers Fight For Their Community

Oakland, California - On April 29, thousands of teachers, students and parents from Schools and Labor Against Privatization (SLAP) rallied at Oscar Grant Plaza next to City Hall in Oakland, California, then marched to the Port of Oakland where they held a picket line that shut the port down. The innovative joint labor action was an historic day in the campaign led by SLAP, union teachers of the Oakland Education Association (OEA) and International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10, against racist gentrification in Oakland. Local 10 honored the picket line with a stop-work action in solidarity with the teachers and community to fight the privatization and destruction of the port and Oakland’s public school system engineered by billionaire John Fisher.

School Privatization Movement’s Scheme To Undermine Public Education

Last August, when the school year began at Tyner Academy in Chattanooga, Tennessee, nearly 100 students walked out to protest the conditions at their public school building. These students were demonstrating because the freshman building had closed due to structural problems, while other parts of the school faced issues of mold, rust and leaky ceilings. Marching across the campus, students held signs reading “Fix our school,” “Water is dripping on our food” and “Stop diverting our funds.” While local officials approved funding to construct a new school building for Tyner by 2024 after meeting with student protest leaders, the problem is widespread—more than half of public school buildings in the county have been rated either fair, poor or unsatisfactory as opposed to “good” or “excellent.”

Lessons On Fighting Privatization From The Recent Postal Service Victory

Congress recently passed the Postal Service Reform Act - the result of 15 years of organizing to end the mandate to prefund 75 years worth of retirement benefits and other changes that were hurting the people's post office. The new act opens the door to building on the current postal infrastructure to provide more services to people, especially in poor and rural communities. Clearing the FOG speaks with Chuck Zlatkin, the legislative and political director of the largest local postal worker union, about what the new law will do and how it was won. Zlatkin also discusses the fight over making the new postal fleet electric and Biden's new nominees to the Board of Governors. Zlatkin warns us not to underestimate the Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who is playing a long game to privatize the postal service.

Medicare For All Is Not Enough

We have long advocated for single-payer national health insurance. By eliminating private insurers and simplifying how providers are paid, single-payer would free up hundreds of billions of dollars now squandered annually on insurance-related bureaucracy. The savings would make it feasible to cover the uninsured and to eliminate the cost barriers that keep even insured patients from getting the care they need. And it would free patients and doctors from the narrow provider networks and other bureaucratic constraints imposed by insurance middlemen. We still urgently need this reform. However, the accelerating corporate transformation of US health care delivery complicates this vision. In the past, most doctors were self-employed, free-standing hospitals were the norm, and for-profit ownership of facilities was the exception. 

Colorado Community Stops Profit-Driven School Closure

Aurora, CO - On March 22, residents of the Sable Altura Chambers community in Aurora, Colo., won a four-month-long struggle to keep Sable Elementary School from being shut down by the Aurora Public Schools Board of Education. This grassroots struggle, its members made up primarily of parents and teachers, has called into question the true motives behind the BOE’s “Blueprint APS initiative” and the decision to close Sable Elementary. Blueprint APS is a plan created by Aurora Public Schools Superintendent Rico Munn that aims to consolidate and repurpose multiple public schools in Aurora due to what Munn refers to as “changing enrollment trends.” Blueprint APS divides Aurora into seven geographical regions.

Physicians Slam Industry Push To ‘Fix’—Not End—Medicare Privatization

Physicians and progressive advocates on Tuesday urged the Department of Health and Human Services to reject an industry appeal to tweak and rebrand—not end altogether—a Medicare privatization scheme known as Direct Contracting, which the Trump administration launched in 2020. Members of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), which represents 24,000 doctors and other health professionals, has been working for months to bring lawmakers' attention to the DC program and pressure the Biden administration to terminate it while it's still in an experimental phase. As a result of PNHP's efforts, dozens of Democrats—including Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—have spoken out against the DC pilot, opposition that appears to have caught the notice of healthcare industry groups that stand to benefit from the program.

Chicago Parking Meters: Harbingers Of Neoliberal Privatization

Chicago, IL - Parking on most streets in Chicago will cost you at least $2 an hour. In some busier areas that jumps up to $4.50, and the downtown Loop area can run as high as $7. You’d be hard pressed to find pricier street parking in the United States. A 2019 study by the parking services company Parkopedia found only Miami Beach and New York City are more expensive.  But this wasn’t always in the case. Before 2008, parking in the Windy City was a relatively reasonable 50 cents per hour, no matter where in town you were. But 14 years ago the City Council, at the urging of then-Mayor Richard M. Daley, sold the entirety of the city’s street parking system to a private company for a cool $1.15 billion.

Rethinking Land And Relation In Berlin’s Struggle For Housing Justice

Across Europe, affordable housing is being pushed farther and farther out of reach. Homes are increasingly owned not by the people who live in them, but by companies who rent them out for profit. Housing is no longer treated as a public good, but as a commodity and vehicle for wealth and investment. In Berlin, which currently boasts some of the fastest-rising housing prices in the world, the situation is particularly extreme. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1992, private investors flocked to the city to capitalize on the state-supported financialization of the housing market. As of today, more than a quarter of Berlin’s roughly two million apartments are owned by private companies. According to researcher Christoph Trautvetter, more than half of the city is owned by fewer than one thousand multimillionaires.

The Limits Of Privatized Climate Policy

For many in the climate movement, Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020 was a moment of euphoric optimism. With Joe Biden in charge, we could look forward to a possible return to climate action and diplomacy. No longer would policy be shaped by denialists, politicians proudly in Exxon’s back pocket, and a media fixated on the “costs” of public investment. A year on, it’s become easier to see the limits of the Biden administration’s approach, and how little has really changed. There have been moments of genuine ambition from the Oval Office. The clean electricity pledges of the fall 2021 budget package and the climate-related investment promised in early versions of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act were among the most significant climate commitments we’ve seen from the U.S. government (hence the staunch resistance to their passage from Exxon’s man on Capitol Hill, Joe Manchin).

On Contact: Corporate Assault On US Postal Service

The corporate seizure of public utilities and privatization of schools is part of a broad assault to turn government assets into assets that will swell corporate profit. The post office has been a coveted target for decades. Corporations such as FedEx and UPS have used their lobbyists and campaign contributions to cripple the government postal service in an effort to destroy it and take it over. These corporations engineered a congressional mandate in 2006 that requires the post office to pre-fund the next 75 years of retiree health benefits in one decade. No other federal government agency is required to carry out a similar pre-payment plan, nor is there any actuarial justification for this measure.

Elizabeth Fowler Defending Trump Program To Privatize Medicare

Put aside Democrat versus Republican. Let’s just look at corporations versus people. Elizabeth (Liz) Fowler has a stellar corporate resume. For seven years, she worked at Johnson & Johnson, as vice president for global health policy. Before joining Johnson & Johnson, she was chief health counsel to Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus, who banned single payer advocates from the deliberations that led to the insurance company dominated Affordable Care Act. In her off time, Fowler is a runner. She runs marathons and triathlons around the world. During work hours, she carries the torch for the health insurance industry and big pharmaceutical companies. And it doesn’t matter whether she is in the public or private sector. 
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