October, 24 2017, 01:45pm EDT

Nurses Welcome AFL-CIO Call for Medicare for All Resolution Pledges to Make Health Care for All a Reality
National Nurses United today hailed adoption of a resolution by the AFL-CIO at its convention in St. Louis, declaring that "we will support legislation that guarantees health care as a human right through an improved Medicare for All."
Adopted by unanimous vote, the resolution said the Medicare for all system "must guarantee everyone can get the health services they need without exclusions or financial barriers to care." To achieve that, we will engage with all affiliate bodies and constituency groups to win. . . Medicare for All.
WASHINGTON
National Nurses United today hailed adoption of a resolution by the AFL-CIO at its convention in St. Louis, declaring that "we will support legislation that guarantees health care as a human right through an improved Medicare for All."
Adopted by unanimous vote, the resolution said the Medicare for all system "must guarantee everyone can get the health services they need without exclusions or financial barriers to care." To achieve that, we will engage with all affiliate bodies and constituency groups to win. . . Medicare for All.
The AFL-CIO resolution subsumed a resolution brought to the convention by NNU, together with the Amalgamated Transit Union, American Postal Workers Union, Association of Flight Attendants, American Federation of Government Employees, California School Employees Association, International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, United Auto Workers, International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, and Utility Workers Union of America.
The proposed resolution was also sponsored by state AFL-CIO labor federations of California, Maine, South Carolina, Vermont, Massachusetts, Washington State, and a number of other local labor councils. The proposed resolution was inspired by Sen. Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All Act, which is co-sponsored by one-third of U.S. Senate Democrats
Speaking in support of the AFL-CIO resolution NNU Co-President Jean Ross, RN, noted that up to 90 percent of workers on strike across the country were on the picket lines because of health care benefit issues. "We can't keep giving up our raises to insurance company profits," she said.
"Every poll shows strong majority support for Medicare for all," said Ross, including among Democrats, independents, and a plurality of Republicans, 52 percent of Trump voters who earn less than $30,000 per year support a federal guarantee of healthcare. To end the healthcare disparities that afflict our country based on race and class, we need a system of everybody in, nobody out, with a single standard of care."
Vermont State Labor Council President Jill Charbonneau praised the work of Sen. Sanders in introducing S. 1804, and the work he has done for single payer healthcare for many years.
Yvonne Williams, representing ATU, reiterated the importance for unions and workers winning Medicare for all, to allow us in collective bargaining to focus on other critical issues "and remove a giant sledge hammer management holds over all of our heads." Sen. Sanders campaign for Medicare for all, was "the reason ATU backed Sen. Sanders" for President in 2016, she said.
APWU's Judy Beard noted that "today we have more people in Congress with us on this issue." She praised Rep. John Conyers for his role in sponsoring a House single payer bill, HR 676, for many years, now supported by a majority of House Democrats, as well as Sen. Sanders S 1804. "In Detroit, we have a saying, lead, follow or get out of the way. We need to replace for-profit insurance companies with a public, universal healthcare plan."
NNU Secretary Treasurer Martha Kuhl, RN noted how "every day at the bedside, nurses see the impacts of a private insurance-based healthcare industry that denies care and diverts resources away from patients to profits. We must guarantee healthcare as a human right. We spend more and get less than any other industrialized country; we live shorter lives and higher rates of infant and maternal deaths."
NNU, said Kuhl, "is organizing with allies in states across the U.S., especially in California for SB 562 (a state-based single payer bill) and for S. 1804."
IFPTE President Greg Junemann said our care "must not be based on the fine print of insurance companies, with the best care only available to the filthy rich.
"We need to pass this resolution and be on the side of all our people and be for healthcare for all," said Erin McKee, president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO.
Sandy Falwell, RN, an NNU vice president, brought the 1,000 AFL-CIO delegates and guests to silence recounting the story of a premature child in her hospital she cared for whose parents had to get a second mortgage on their house, could not afford to maintain needed after care after taking their baby home, and ultimately had to bring him back to the hospital, tragically too late.
"As nurses, we see this every day. We see families who have insurance and can't afford to pay for their medications and after care. Why can't the U.S. do this?" Falwell asked.
Also speaking for the resolution were Art Pulaski, president of the California Labor Federation AFL-CIO, and Clyde Rivers of CSEA.
The AFl-CIO resolution also calls for "retaining a role for workers' health plans, and retaining the Department of Veterans Affairs health care system as the "primary direct provider of fully integrated care to veterans."
National Nurses United, with close to 185,000 members in every state, is the largest union and professional association of registered nurses in US history.
(240) 235-2000LATEST NEWS
US- and Israel-Backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation Must Be Shut Down, Say 165+ Charities
Distribution points run by the group, warns the NGO coalition, "have become sites of repeated massacres in blatant disregard for international humanitarian law."
Jul 01, 2025
More than 165 nongovernmental organizations on Tuesday issued a joint call to shut down the "deadly Israeli distribution scheme" for humanitarian assistance in the Gaza Strip, return to relief efforts coordinated by the United Nations, and end Israel's blockade on aid and commercial supplies into the destroyed Palestinian enclave.
The U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began operations in late May, over widespread objections. As the joint statement explains, "The 400 aid distribution points operating during the temporary cease-fire across Gaza have now been replaced by just four military-controlled distribution sites, forcing 2 million people into overcrowded, militarized zones where they face daily gunfire and mass casualties while trying to access food and are denied other lifesaving supplies."
"Starved and weakened civilians are being forced to trek for hours through dangerous terrain and active conflict zones, only to face a violent, chaotic race to reach fenced, militarized distribution sites."
"The weeks following the launch of the Israeli distribution scheme have been some of the deadliest and most violent since October 2023," the statement notes. The Gaza Health Ministry says Israel's nearly 21-month assault has killed at least 56,647 Palestinians—and, as of Sunday, at least 583 of those deaths occurred while people sought food at GHF sites.
Another 4,186 Palestinians have been injured at the aid sites, according to the ministry. Overall, at least 134,105 have been wounded by the Israel Defense Forces' campaign since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack. Some IDF troops toldHaaretz last week that commanders ordered them to shoot and shell aid-seeking Palestinians, even when they posed no threat.
"For 20 months, more than 2 million people have been subjected to relentless bombardment, the weaponization of food, water, and other aid, repeated forced displacement, and systematic dehumanization—all under the watch of the international community," the NGOs detailed. "The Sphere Association, which sets minimum standards for quality humanitarian aid, has warned that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's approach does not adhere to core humanitarian standards and principles."
"Under the Israeli government's new scheme, starved and weakened civilians are being forced to trek for hours through dangerous terrain and active conflict zones, only to face a violent, chaotic race to reach fenced, militarized distribution sites with a single entry point," the groups wrote. "There, thousands are released into chaotic enclosures to fight for limited food supplies."
"These areas have become sites of repeated massacres in blatant disregard for international humanitarian law," the coalition continued. "Orphaned children and caregivers are among the dead, with children harmed in over half of the attacks on civilians at these sites. With Gaza's healthcare system in ruins, many of those shot are left to bleed out alone, beyond the reach of ambulances and denied lifesaving medical care."
Today, over 130 NGOs have called for the restoration of unified, UN-led aid coordination and distribution in #Gaza based on international humanitarian law, inclusive of UNRWA.👉 www.oxfam.org/en/press-rel...@oxfaminternational.bsky.social @nrc-global.bsky.social @savechildrenintl.bsky.social
[image or embed]
— UNRWA (@unrwa.org) July 1, 2025 at 7:53 AM
The NGOs asserted that "the humanitarian system is being deliberately and systematically dismantled by the government of Israel's blockade and restrictions, a blockade now being used to justify shutting down nearly all other aid operations in favor of a deadly, military-controlled alternative that neither protects civilians nor meets basic needs."
The organizations also stressed that "experienced humanitarian actors remain ready to deliver lifesaving assistance at scale."
In addition to calling on other countries to "uphold their obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law," and to "reject the false choice between deadly, military-controlled food distributions and total denial of aid," the groups reiterated their demands for "an immediate and sustained cease-fire, the release of all hostages and arbitrarily detained prisoners, full humanitarian access at scale, and an end to the pervasive impunity that enables these atrocities and denies Palestinians their basic dignity."
Signatories include ActionAid, American Friends Service Committee, Amnesty International, B'Tselem, Greenpeace, Islamic Relief Worldwide, Jewish Network for Palestine, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), Norwegian Refugee Council, Oxfam International, PAX, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Save the Children, War Child Alliance, and War on Want.
Their statement follows a similar one released last week by a coalition of 15 leading human rights and legal organizations, which urged all parties involved in GHF, including countries, corporations, donors and individuals, "to immediately suspend any action or support that facilitates the forcible displacement of civilians, contributes to starvation or other grave breaches of international law, or undermines the core principles of international humanitarian law."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Anti-Poverty Campaigners Cheer Spain-Brazil-South Africa Plan to Tax the Grotesquely Rich
"People are fed up with billionaires' greed eroding the environment and communities we depend on," said one supporter of the new initiative. "It's time for world leaders to listen and act."
Jul 01, 2025
A new plan backed by the governments of Spain, Brazil, and South Africa to tax the fortunes of the uber-rich drew hearty cheers from anti-poverty campaigners, environmental activists, and unions when it was announced on Tuesday.
As described in an announcement by the Spanish government, the initiative aims to create coordination between governments on the taxation of high-net-worth individuals to ensure they are not shuffling money abroad to avoid proper taxation.
"The proposal aims to incentivize and guide different countries to join the initiative and address policy, administrative, and data deficiencies, ensuring that high-net-worth individuals are taxed more efficiently in line with their wealth," the Spanish government explained. "To achieve this, it is necessary to foster international cooperation in multilateral forums to promote and facilitate the implementation of evidence-based reforms and ongoing experiences regarding the taxation of large fortunes in different countries."
The plan—crafted by the governments of Spain and Brazil and presented at the United Nations' Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development being held in the Spanish city of Seville—was quickly praised by an assortment of international nonprofit organizations as an essential tool for tackling global wealth inequality.
Kate Blagojevic, associate director for Europe campaigns for environmental the advocacy group 350.org, described it as "a bold move by Spain and Brazil" that she said could provide funding for clean energy investments around the world, including in countries that lack the resources to make such investments.
"We want more countries to join this coalition so that billionaires and multi-millionaires help to foot the bill for the climate damage they have caused and decrease the huge gap between the rich and the poorest," she said, while also calling for the United Kingdom, France, and Germany to sign on.
Susana Ruiz, the tax justice policy lead at the anti-poverty organization Oxfam, emphasized that international coordination on taxation of high-worth individuals was a serious proposal to address a crisis in global democracy, which she said was being undermined by the corrupting influence of vast sums of money being held by a tiny number of people.
"This extreme inequality is being driven by a financial system that puts the interests of a wealthy few above everyone else," she said. "This concentration of wealth is blocking progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and keeping over three billion people living in poverty: over half of poor countries are spending more on debt repayments than on healthcare or education."
Fred Njehu, the global political lead for Greenpeace’s Fair Share campaign, deemed the tax plan essential at a time when nations are behind their renewable energy goals and when wealthy elites such as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos can go all-out for a lavish three-day wedding in Venice.
"Financing is urgently needed for climate action and public services, not for polluting space travel and luxury weddings," he said. "This new coalition of governments working to tax the super-rich adds to the growing global momentum to make the world’s wealthiest pay their fair share. People are fed up with billionaires' greed eroding the environment and communities we depend on. It's time for world leaders to listen and act."
And Leo Hyde, the campaigns and media coordinator at the Public Services International union, praised the plan and said that was the result of years' worth of advocacy by unions and other organizations.
"The initiative aims to ensure a progressive and efficient global tax system with the aim of reducing social inequality," he said. "This builds directly on years of union-led tax justice campaigning that has already yielded significant victories, including the OECD global minimum corporate tax, Australia's public country-by-country reporting initiatives, and the ongoing UN tax treaty negotiations."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'All Are Now Vulnerable': Legal Scholars Alarmed as DOJ Begins Push to Denaturalize Citizens
"Anyone could be prioritized," a spokesperson for the ACLU told Common Dreams. "It's really chilling."
Jul 01, 2025
As the Trump administration has begun the push to strip citizenship from foreign-born Americans, legal scholars and advocates are calling it a dangerous step toward using citizenship as a political weapon.
On June 11, the U.S. Department of Justice issued an internal memo written by Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate calling on DOJ attorneys to pursue "civil denaturalization" of foreign-born U.S. citizens.
"The Civil Division shall prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence," the memo said, adding that it should be among the division's top five priorities.
It suggested a wide variety of citizens who could be targeted for denaturalization. This includes perpetrators of violent offenses like "torture, war crimes, or other human rights violations." But it also targets much broader groups of people such as those "who pose a potential danger to national security" or those who "acquired naturalization through government corruption, fraud, or material misrepresentations."
It also calls for "any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue."
Naureen Shah, director of government affairs for the ACLU's Equality Division, told Common Dreams that "it's another devastating attack by the Trump administration on people who they want to cast as not belonging here."
The memo's vague language has Shah and other legal scholars warning that denaturalization could become a tool to deport political opponents, an effort that would be harder for courts to stop following Friday's ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, which hamstrung the ability of lower courts to stop illegal actions by the Trump administration using injunctions.
Joyce Vance, a former United States Attorney, who is now a law professor and a legal analyst for MSNBC and NBC, warned Tuesday about the possible implications on her blog Civil Discourse:
"It could be exercising First Amendment rights or encouraging diversity in hiring, now recast as fraud against the United States. Troublesome journalists who are naturalized citizens? Students? University professors? Infectious disease doctors who try to reveal the truth about epidemics? Lawyers?" Vance wrote. "All are now vulnerable to the vagaries of an administration that has shown a preference for deporting people without due process and dealing with questions that come up after the fact and with a dismissive tone."
"Anyone could be prioritized," Shah said. "It's really chilling."
Cassandra Robertson, a law professor at Case Western University, told NPR that it was "especially concerning" that the administration would plan to pursue denaturalization through civil court.
"Civil denaturalization cases provide no right to an attorney, meaning defendants without resources often face the government without representation," she wrote in a 2019 study on the history of denaturalization along with her colleague Irina Manta. "There are no jury trials, with judges making citizenship determinations alone. The burden of proof is 'clear and convincing evidence' rather than the criminal standard of 'beyond a reasonable doubt.' Additionally, there is no statute of limitations, allowing the government to build cases on decades-old evidence that may be incomplete or unreliable."
Robertson said Trump's approach mirrors that undertaken during the McCarthy era, when those deemed "un-American" were stripped of citizenship due to their political views.
"At the height of denaturalization, there were about 22,000 cases a year of denaturalization filed, and this was on a smaller population. It was huge," she said.
The Supreme Court stepped in to reel back denaturalization in 1967, determining that, in Robertson's words, it was "inconsistent with the American form of democracy, because it creates two levels of citizenship." After that, the number of denaturalization cases plummeted to the single digits each year. The Trump administration seems to be hoping to reverse that trend.
Republican politicians have not been shy about calling for their political opponents to be stripped of citizenship. Last week, following Zohran Mamdani's shocking victory in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) called for the Ugandan-born state assemblyman to be stripped of his U.S. citizenship and "deported," referring to him as an "antisemitic, socialist, communist."
Ogles accused Mamdani of failing to disclose his political "affiliations or sympathies" during the process that led him to become a citizen in 2018. He singled out Mamdani's support for the Holy Land Foundation, whose leaders were convicted in a widely criticized "terrorism financing" case in 2008. Notably, the leaders of the group were never accused of directly funding terrorist groups or terrorist acts.
On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about Ogles' call to deport Mamdani, and she did not shoot down the idea.
"I have not seen those claims, but surely if they are true, it's something that should be investigated," Leavitt said.
It was not the first time Republicans have called to deport leaders in the other party explicitly for their political views.
In June, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier called for the Trump administration to "deport and denaturalize" Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who came to the U.S. as a refugee from Somalia, after she criticized President Donald Trump's deployment of the military to quash protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Los Angeles.
The Trump administration has already targeted lawful immigrants with deportation purely for their political views. In March, the administration abducted and attempted to deport pro-Palestine student activist Mahmoud Khalil, explicitly because he was a "threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States," similar language to what the DOJ now says is justification for denaturalization. The administration has also attempted to deport others, like Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk, for as little as co-writing an op-ed calling on her university to divest from Israel.
"The way the memo is written, there is no guarantee DOJ will pursue cases against violent criminals," Vance said. "They could just do easy cases to ratchet up numbers, like we're seeing with deportation. Or they could target people who, they view as troublemakers."
There are more than 25 million people in the United States who are naturalized citizens.
"They should not have to live in fear that they'll lose their rights," Shah said.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular