The current US medical system financially rewards hospitals and doctors (particularly highly compensated specialists) for performing more procedures and treating more diseased people, not for prevention (although the Affordable Care Act makes some progress in that direction). It is perverse: The aging of the US population aside, the healthcare system becomes more profitable institutionally and personally (for medical providers) as the number of diseased patients rises and hi-tech tests and operations are performed.

On January 1, 1994, the NAFTA free trade agreement entered Mexico with vigor, promising foreign investment and economic prosperity at the expense of the plunder of natural resources. NAFTA is largely credited for flooding the Mexican market with subsidized corn from the United States, which decimated farmers‘ livelihoods and provoked massive migration to the United States. Two years prior to NAFTA‘s implementation, former President Carlos Salinas opened the floodgates to land privatization by reforming Article 27, which had protected communally owned land known as ejidos, created during the Mexican revolution. Thus, the introduction of NAFTA provided the perfect context for the uprising of the indigenous guerillas who formed the EZLN.

Last week, the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court rejected a request by a conservative “dark money” group to keep its donors secret. The lawsuit alleges that the Law Enforcement Alliance of America (LEAA) illegally “coordinated” its ads with Attorney General Greg Abbott’s (R) 2002 campaign.

Speaking at the United States Conference of Mayors on Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said the approximately 11 million people who are in the country illegally have “earned the right to be citizens.”

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio gave a heartfelt speech praising Israel at a private gala event hosted by AIPAC at the Hilton hotel in midtown Manhattan Thursday night, the local website Capital New York reported.

The government in the Philippines and Muslim rebels have cleared the last hurdle in long-running peace negotiations, paving the way to end a deadly decades-old insurgency in the country‘s south.

Officials in a province in northern India have promised to destroy a Coca-Cola bottling plant that has for years infuriated citizens in the area who claim the facility extracts more than its fair share of groundwater.

With the cost of living here at levels that almost no one but the most affluent can afford, protesters have taken to the streets to block luxury shuttles ferrying tech workers to Silicon Valley companies

Activists want the “Google buses” that have been operating without oversight on the streets of San Francisco for years banned from using public bus stops –- or banned outright.
The meeting was held just hours after protesters blocked a pair of Google buses, hanging a sign on the side of one that read “Gentrification & Eviction Technologies.”