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Don Fitz
United States: Other revolving doors
By Don Fitz
July 16, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — It’s more than doors between the US government and the businesses that they supposedly regulate that go round and round. One of the other swinging doors is between the Democratic and Republican Parties.
The birth of the Cuban polyclinic
By Don Fitz
June 29, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Monthly Review — During the 1960s, Cuban medicine experienced changes as tumultuous as the civil rights and antiwar protests in the United States.1 While activists, workers, and students in western Europe and the United States confronted existing institutions of capitalism and imperialism, Cuba faced the even greater challenge of building a new society.
The tasks of Cuban medicine differed sharply between the first and the second halves of the revolution’s first decade. The years 1959–64 aimed at overcoming the crisis of care delivery, as half of the island’s physicians fled. It was during the second half of the decade (1964–69) that Cuba began redesigning medicine as an integrated system. The resulting reconceptualization of health care, which put the area polyclinic at the center of medical care, created a model for poor countries that has changed medicine ever since.
United States: Where any white police officer can kill any Black man at any time…
… And the police officer will not go to jail.
By Don Fitz
September 23, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — This is what has sparked protests by thousands of people in St. Louis since September 15.
In 2011, St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley fired five to seven shots at Anthony Lamar Smith, killing him. Stockley claimed that Smith was selling drugs, chased him at high speed and shot him to defend himself. The story was briefly reported as another drug deal gone bad and that it was just incidental that the police officer was white and the victim was black.
United States: Attack on St. Louis homeless sneaks under a dark cloud
By Don Fitz
December 31, 2016 –– Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal –– The sub-freezing temperature was dropping. As the snow began to fall, many felt their hands were too cold to hold signs during the December 17 action. Two dozen had answered the Green Party call to picket the mayor of St. Louis for his efforts to close down New Life Evangelistic Center, the city's homeless “shelter-of-last-resort.” They knew things would be much worse for those forced to sleep in the cold if the shelter were shut down. The action was one in a series of efforts to draw attention to the city government's continual onslaught against those with no place to go.
