On July 4, Independence Day, 720 nurses at St. Joseph Medical Center in Joliet, Illinois went on strike, their first walkout since 1993, to demand adequate staffing, decent pay and an end to management intimidation. The coronavirus pandemic has only further exposed the precarious working conditions faced by many health care workers, who are asked to place themselves on the frontlines, but in return are hit with furloughs and wage freezes.
Nurses at St. Joseph Medical Center voted 558 to 53 to authorize a strike against AMITA health system. A nominally nonprofit Catholic and Adventist health system founded in 1973, AMITA Health is one of the largest health systems in Illinois, with approximately $4 billion in annual net patient revenue from 19 hospitals and more than 230 care facilities. The conglomerate operates in nine states, with 45 hospital campuses and more than 8,200 beds, which provide treatment to over five million patients a year.
Even before the pandemic, nurses across the country were fighting against rising patient-to-nurse ratios forced upon them by hospital administrators. With the pandemic, they now face the deadly consequences of understaffing and the lack of protective equipment. At least 735 frontline health care workers have died from COVID-19 in the US, according to a study by the Guardian and Kaiser Health News, and an estimated 78,000 have tested positive.
Nursing staff are being asked to assume more responsibilities, such as accepting more shifts or longer ones, leaving them exhausted and placing their patients at risk of injury or errors in treatment.
The strike in Joliet follows on the heels of a ten-day strike of 500 nurses against HCA Healthcare subsidiary Riverside Community Hospital in California over unsafe conditions and understaffing. The nurses at Riverside are set to return to work today with no indication that their demands have been met.
Strikes and other actions by health care workers are becoming a growing international phenomenon. Nurses in Zimbabwe went on strike last week for the second time this year over poverty wages and a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE). Also last week, doctors treating coronavirus patients in Sierra Leone launched a strike over unpaid bonuses and the government’s misuse of funds for the pandemic response. Last month, health professionals in Piauí, in Brazil’s Northeast, started a statewide indefinite strike over the failure of the Health Department to give a promised 40 percent risk bonus, as well as the low quality PPE provided them.
Is this being covered in the corporate news? I don't know. I'm very busy at work due to the pandemic (I'm a nurse). Today, I was asked if I could 'volunteer' for more shifts. No, I can't. I'm already doing my regular forty at the clinic. I'm grabbing a shift at the hospital Friday night/Saturday morning. I don't have more time to give. They need to hire more nurses.
The demands on everyone I work with right now are immense. Not just other nurses, the custodial staff, the front desk staff, everyone feels the strain.
Everyone. Except maybe management?
I applaud the nurses in Joliet.
I will be sharing their story at work tomorrow. Good for them.
In an exciting development for the Party for Socialism and Liberation, on July 2 the PSL was officially designated by the New Mexico Secretary of State as a qualified political party in the state of New Mexico. This despite the onerous requirement of signature gathering, made even tougher in time of the pandemic.
Now, when New Mexicans register to vote or update their registration, they can make their party affiliation the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Also, when they go to the polls in November, New Mexicans will be able to vote for a grassroots socialist presidential campaign!
Karina Aracely, New Mexico PSL organizer, stated, “Soon, the Statewide Convention of the PSL-NM will be held. There, delegates of the party will officially nominate our 2020 socialist candidates for the November 3 presidential election: the national candidates of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Gloria La Riva for president and her running mate, Native activist and political prisoner Leonard Peltier. Our campaign is raising Leonard Peltier's freedom struggle and in support of his longtime defense efforts. In reality, he should have never spent one day of his 44 years in prison.
“We are excited about the opportunity to talk with people throughout New Mexico, of an alternative not only for the election, but the urgent need for the system we are fighting for, socialism, which puts the people first, not profits.”
In addition to being the PSL candidates in several states, La Riva and Peltier will be the 2020 candidates for the Peace and Freedom Party of California, and the Liberty Union Party of Vermont.
The U.S. electoral system is rigged to give only the two ruling-class parties a competitive chance to win. Third-party candidates are subject to exclusionary and expanding obstacles in every state. For more than two years, the Democrat and Republican candidates have had non-stop media coverage, while the people only get realistic exposure to third-party candidates at their polling place, due to strict media censorship.
Still, the PSL nationally is running an energetic campaign to put forth our 10-point program, while also marching in the streets against racism and police brutality, holding car caravans to Cancel the Rents and more.
In New Mexico, candidates of the “major” Democratic and Republican political parties get to appear on the ballot automatically, no petition signatures required.
On the other hand, in order to qualify as a “minor” party, the PSL was required to collect 3,483 valid petition signatures from registered voters. In reality, the number needed is much higher.
Any signature where the voter’s name doesn’t match the address on file with the SOS is struck. That kind of error occurs when people move around a lot and lose track of the address they used to register. In states with widespread poverty like New Mexico, people are constantly on the move because even the smallest fluctuation in household income can turn into an eviction.
When this is accounted for, the real number of signatures needed to be safe is closer to twice the required amount: 6,966. The task is all the more daunting because low population density makes it hard to find large concentrations of people, and the places where people do assemble are often privately owned and petitioning forbidden.
The window to collect signatures was supposed to last from March 1 to June 25, just shy of four months.
PSL petitioners hit the streets on March 4. In just 11 days of petitioning, PSL members collected 4,553 signatures, an amazing feat powered exclusively by an all-volunteer apparatus!
Unfortunately, we had to completely shut down petitioning for more than three months, due to the necessary COVID-19 “stay-at-home” instruction, which our campaign strictly observed. Only after the state had announced a broader reopening mid-June did our campaign leap back into action, carrying out five more days of last-minute petitioning, from June 20 to 24.
Although the formal petitioning window lasts 117 days, in reality, the PSL only had 17 days total to ask the public to support our right to appear on the New Mexico ballot.
But in only 17 days of petitioning, our members and friends collected over 6,000 signatures! This not only speaks to the sheer determination and will power of PSL members and friends, but also to the widespread grassroots interest here in New Mexico for an alternative to the two capitalist parties.
Vote Socialist, Become a Socialist!
Free Leonard Peltier Now!
The exercise didn’t exactly make my profession seem fair or remotely interested in any story that does not confirm the pack’s biases.
Last month saw the release of a handwritten note by fired FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok on a Jan. 5, 2017 meeting between President Barack Obama, Biden, then-FBI Director James Comey and others about an FBI probe into possible collusion between Moscow the 2016 Trump campaign.
According to the note, Biden suggested that Justice Department officials might investigate Mike Flynn, Trump’s designated national security adviser, for allegedly violating the Logan Act — a little-known 1799 law that bans unauthorized Americans from talking to foreign adversaries and never has been used successfully to prosecute anyone — during Flynn’s talks with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Flynn supporters see the note as proof that Obama and Biden actively pushed for the probe.
And Biden seems evasive when he talks about the matter.
In May, the former vice president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he knew “nothing about these moves to investigate Michael Flynn.” When Stephanopoulos reminded Biden that he had sat in on the Jan. 5 meeting on Flynn, Biden responded that he thought Stephanopoulos, “asked me whether or not I had anything to do with him being prosecuted,” which doesn’t quite make sense. Biden then said, “I was aware that they asked about an investigation.”
So did any of the reporters in Tuesday’s press briefing ask Biden if he recommended that federal investigators look into whether Flynn violated the Logan Act? No, they were too busy asking questions on the same topic without getting a good answer.
In late June, the Biden campaign announced that Haines, an attorney who served as deputy director of the CIA from 2013 to 2015, will helm the foreign policy and national security aspects of a potential Biden transition team.
To activists, security experts, congressional aides who are more left than liberal—as well as mainstream human rights campaigners and at least one ex-senator—Haines’ elevation is worrisome or unacceptable. She approved an “accountability board” that spared CIA personnel reprisal for spying on the Senate’s torture investigators, and was part of the team that redacted their landmark report. After the administration ended, Haines supported Gina Haspel for CIA director, someone directly implicated in CIA torture, a decision that remains raw amongst progressive activists. Until late June, she consulted for the Trump-favorite data firm Palantir, which emerged from the CIA.
"We strongly reject and condemn these actions that harm the close, long-standing relations between the two friendly nations," Ahmed Mulla Talal wrote in a statement published to Telegram, urging for an "immediate" halt to Ankara's offensive.
Iraqi troops are enforcing positions along the border with Turkey to prevent Turkish forces from advancing deeper into Iraqi territory, Iraqi security officials said Friday.
The move comes after two weeks of airstrikes as Ankara continues to target Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq.
The officials said Ankara has established at least a dozen posts inside Iraqi territory as part of a military campaign to rout members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who Turkey says have safe havens in northern Iraq.
The airborne-and-land campaign, dubbed “Operation Claw-Tiger,” began June 17 when Turkey airlifted troops into northern Iraq.
Since then, at least six Iraqi civilians have been killed as Turkish jets pound PKK targets, and several villages in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region have been evacuated.
The Iraqi Salvation and Development Front led by former Parliament Speaker Osama Nujaifi on Saturday rejected Prime Minister, Mustafa Al-Kadhimi’s decision to assign Shia figures to top security positions, Anadolu reported.
Al-Kadhimi had appointed a member of the pro-Iran Badr Shia Organisation, Qasim Al-Araji, as national security adviser and Major General Abdul Ghani Al-Asadi, the former head of the counter-terrorism agency, as head of the National Security Agency,
The Iraqi Salvation and Development Front said in a statement that while the government is reshuffling security positions and some independent bodies as part of its reform program, “we would like to remind the prime minister of the issue of national balance and the necessity for real participation of the nation’s partners in decision-making and the management of sensitive institutions”.
“Though Iraqi media outlets have started covering LGBT+ issues in the last 10 years, they are not yet using their platforms to meet these responsibilities. Just the opposite,” reads the report published by IraQueer at the end of June.
“The majority of media coverage today is biased against the LGBT+ community, reinforcing discriminatory ideas that LGBT+ individuals are alien to Iraqi society, and that LGBT+ identities are ailments that must be treated and eradicated,” adds the report, which references special effects such as dangerous sounding music being overlaid on most television programming about LGBT+ people.
The search results from IraQueer’s research reveals that most Iraqi media continues to use derogatory terms to refer to people of diverse genders and sexualities or their actions, including but not limited to the Arabic words for “abnormal”, “shemale”. The organization did observe a slower positive trend of the more neutral “Mujtamaa Al-Meem”, which translates to the LGBT+ community, starting to be used.
