Biden was simply in on it. He was on board with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s war plans. He even attended the war cabinet where the plans were adopted.

In an exit interview with the Times of Israel, Biden’s outgoing ambassador to Israel even bragged about the Biden administration never exerting pressure on Netanyahu to halt the killing. “Nothing that we ever said was, Just stop the war,” Ambassador Jack Lew proudly declared.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/biden-ceasefire-credit/

A groundbreaking new study published in the medical journal JAMA Health Forum found that, of the nearly 200,000 primary care physicians analyzed, the percentage of doctors affiliated with hospital systems has almost doubled since 2009, with about half of general practitioners affiliated with a hospital in 2022. Another small but growing number of family doctors have been selling their practices to private equity firms encroaching on the health care industry.

As of 2023, nearly four in five physicians were employees of hospital systems, private equity firms, insurance giants, or other corporations.

These affiliations come with heftier price tags: according to the study, prices for office visits are 11 percent higher for hospital-affiliated family doctors and 8 percent higher for private-equity-affiliated doctors as of 2022.

https://jacobin.com/2025/01/private-equity-hospitals-doctor-costs/

In other words, Chinese nationalism under Xi is emerging as a composite of three inter-connected traditions. It evidences: a nationalist-revisionist core; a Marxist, historically determinist rationale concerning the inevitable collapse of the international capitalist order led by the United States; while also wrapping itself in the classical garmentry of universal Confucian values, Tianxia, and other forms of more ancient Sino-centrism.

https://trackingpeoplesdaily.substack.com/p/ideology-matters-my-review-of-kevin

Real resistance is not #Resistance. It’s much more than that. If you truly want to stop Trump, you’ll have to go outside, talk to other people, and do hard work. You’ll have to intervene in political events yourself, not wait for someone else to do it for you, because no politician is going to swoop in and save the day.

- the Black Panther Party fought racism and deprivation by running extensive mutual aid programs that gave free meals to schoolchildren living in poverty and free medical care to people who couldn’t get it any other way
- The Young Lords, a group of militant Puerto Rican and Latino activists occupied Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx to demand better healthcare for their community and launched a “Garbage Offensive” to protest the lack of sanitation services
- César Chávez and the United Farm Workers led strikes and marches across the American Southwest for more than a decade, and successfully pressured California’s Governor Jerry Brown into signing the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975.
- When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, former Panther Malik Rahim and his comrades organized the Common Ground Collective and held free health clinics for the people George W. Bush was busy neglecting
- Latin America has a long and honorable record of resisting dictators: Chileans fought Pinochet and overthrew him.
- In Argentina, when President Fernando de la Rúa ordered people to stay in their homes during a 2001 financial crisis, they defied him en masse, showing up to his speeches and drowning out his voice with the sound of banging pots and pans
- Today, they’re doing the same to Milei. Plus, the Argentinian labor movement has launched nationwide strikes that shut the entire country down for 24 hours. Local officials, too, have refused to go along with Milei’s agenda. In the province of La Rioja, the regional government has responded to Milei’s austerity cuts by creating a whole new currency, the “chacho,” to fund state services and jobs that Milei refused to provide for
- Elsewhere, there are nonprofits like Women on Waves in the Netherlands—together with more secretive and unofficial networks based in Mexico—that smuggle abortion pills into countries that ban them,
- In Britain, activists for Palestine successfully shut down an Elbit weapons factory in Tamworth this March.
- The uprisings against police brutality after George Floyd’s murder were some of the largest and most impressive in American history, and the protesters didn’t just walk in a circle waving signs
- People have been making life hell for Republican school administrators by dumping memes and gibberish into the “snitch line” websites they build to report “wokeness” in schools.
- There are the Democratic Socialists of America’s famous brake light clinics, which take away one of the most common excuses cops use to pull people over and harass them.

Many of the greatest social movements in American history involved civil disobedience and illegal acts: think of Rosa Parks at the front of the bus, or the Stonewall riots, or the Flint sit-down strike of the 1930s. Unjust laws have to be defied, not followed.

Now is the moment to find a socialist, anarchist, green, mutual aid, or anti-war group near you, or to start one. They will be badly needed. Now is the time to unionize your workplace, so you and your fellow workers will have the power to say no to exploitation and abuse. Now is the time to reach out to your friend, classmate, or relative who was deceived into voting for Trump, and help them see through his lies.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/america-needs-resistance-not-resistance

Babler’s failings exemplify a dilemma facing all modern social democratic reformist projects, including recent efforts to reverse the decades-long technocratic-neoliberal turn of such parties.

https://jacobin.com/2024/12/austria-babler-spo-left-right/

On 14 January 2025, the European Commission (“Commission”) published the findings of its first investigation under the EU’s International Procurement Instrument (“IPI”). Findings of the investigation concludes that China unfairly treated EU medical devices and suppliers in its public procurement.[1] The Chinese government did not contest these findings, but noted (accurately) that it had not undertaken any international commitments on public procurement

https://competitionlawblog.kluwercompetitionlaw.com/2025/01/25/first-international-procurement-instrument-case-in-china/

Dal 1991 a oggi in Italia i salari sono cresciuti soltanto dell’1% mentre nei Paesi Ocse la crescita è stata del 32,3%. Inoltre la quota dei salari sul Pil è passata nello stesso arco di tempo dal 60 al 40% mentre quella dei profitti dal 40 al 60%. Questi dati suggeriscono due considerazioni.

La prima. Il modello economico italiano -se così si può definire- negli ultimi trent’anni ha impoverito i lavoratori e arricchito il capitale. La seconda. I contratti nazionali non sono stati in grado di difendere la tenuta salariale, alla faccia di chi sostiene che siano sufficienti a garantire i redditi dei lavoratori di fronte alla perdita di potere d’acquisto. Una nota, invece, per chi tira sempre in ballo la scarsa produttività del sistema economico italiano: i salari sono cresciuti assai meno anche della produttività, che evidentemente ha giovato solo ai profitti.

In Italia non indicizziamo gli stipendi ma le tariffe telefoniche, gestite dai fondi, possono seguire, e dunque alimentare, il corso dell’inflazione. Sembra incredibile ma nulla è ormai incredibile nel nostro Paese

https://altreconomia.it/litalia-e-un-paese-per-ricchi/

For capitalists whose businesses are predicated upon ensuring a reliable supply of workers, preferably at low wages, this impending labor shortage poses a challenge. The shrinking supply of laborers will, as a simple matter of supply and demand, push the price of labor upward. [...] Many low-income countries themselves have already arrived at below-replacement fertility rates. In the long run, it seems that such countries will be unable to provide comparable numbers of immigrant laborers as they had previously.

[...] So slower economic growth due to lower birth rates, even to the extreme point of absolute population decline, does not in and of itself result in a decline in average living standards. It simply poses the old question of economic distribution on new terms.

[...] Even left-wing writers have warned of an impending “Social Security cliff” facing the United States in the not-too-distant future because of current demographic trends.
The reasoning for this worry is: Social Security is essentially a giant fund into which different segments of the population either pay into or withdraw from. Payments are contributed by those in the workforce, and withdrawals are made by the elderly. [...] dependency ratios do not account for the possibility that different workers could contribute different amounts of inputs to the fund. In particular, rising labor productivity over time would entail that the same number of working hours would be generating sufficient output to support an increasing number of dependents. Indeed, increasing labor productivity is precisely what has been happening over the past several decades. Projecting into the future, even historically low levels of labor productivity growth would ensure that the fiscal gain of more productive workers more than compensates for the increased disbursements caused by the shift toward the elderly in the old-age dependency ratio.

Demographic aging caused by birth-rate decline does not inevitably entail a rollback of the welfare state. What it may do is pose a choice between welfare-state cuts, on the one hand, or clawing away additional funds from capitalists and/or high-income earners, on the other. And we face this choice largely because workers have lost ground in the class struggle over the past several decades.

Even if a more generous welfare state does not successfully raise birth rates, it is worth putting in place anyway because it eases the considerable burdens of current and future parents and children. It is a shame that the political right has managed to masquerade as a “pro-family” political force when it is dead set against providing the material support that would enable families to flourish. In this respect, the Left has a prime opportunity to seize the “pro-family” mantle from conservatives.

https://jacobin.com/2025/01/falling-birth-rates-welfare-families/