Skip to main content

Arnold Relman, Medicine's Longtime Conscience, Dies at 91

Robert Lowes/Bryan Marquard Medscape
"Will medicine now become essentially a business, or will it remain a profession?" he asked in a 1991 lecture to the Massachusetts Medical Society later published in the NEJM. "We are not vendors, and we are not merely free economic agents in a free market." The cure he prescribed was a single-payer healthcare system in which physicians abstained from financial conflicts of interest.

Picture the World as a Desert

Kanya D'Almeida Inter Press Service
Some activists say the World Bank itself is partly to blame for the conjoined problems of climate change, food insecurity and desertification, by pushing its agenda of large-scale agriculture and mono-crop plantations on the developing world.

Five Strategies to Stop the Northern Gateway Pipeline from Being Built

Brent Patterson Council of Canadians
Brent Patterson, the Political Director at the Council of Canadians, proposes five strategies to ensure that the pipeline is never built. (In the face of widespread opposition, Canada's federal government on Tuesday in fact gave the OK to Enbridge's Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline - Portside moderator)

An Historic Victory for Target Janitors

Lucas Franco Talking Union, a DSA labor blog
This is a precedent setting agreement for the Twin City region, Minnesota and even the nation. Many of the workers affected by this new deal with Target represent a segment of the work force that has often been considered “unorganizable.” Language barriers and use of immigration status to threaten workers have all been contributing factors in explaining the difficulty in organizing vast segments of low-wage workers in the United States.