Bhaskar Sunkara: A US hospital fired an acclaimed nurse for talking about Gaza. Where’s the outrage?The problem goes far beyond NYU Langone. Looking around the world, it’s easy to find examples of state authoritarianism. Citizens in countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran face lengthy prison terms or even death for exercising their basic human rights. Thankfully, in the United States, we don’t have to worry about being locked up for tweeting the wrong thing or joining the wrong civil society organization. But despite our protection from public tyranny as citizens, as workers we face forms of private tyranny on a grand scale. A full quarter of private-sector workers have said that they have received political messages or requests from their employers; some workers report extreme instances of being fired for having the wrong message or candidate on their bumper sticker.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/06/hospital-fired-nurse-gaza-free-speech South African elections: ANC suffers historic defeat as crisis intensifies This result represents first and foremost a damning indictment of the ANC, which has been in power for 30 years. It won only 40 percent of the vote, down from 62 percent in 2019, and much lower than expected. In truth, the seeds for this collapse were sown by the historic class compromise made by the ANC leaders during the fall of Apartheid. From the 1940s onwards, the ANC became recognised as the leader of the anti-Apartheid struggle. When the mass revolutionary movement of the workers and youth erupted in the 1980s the ANC placed itself at its head, uniting with the South African Communist Party and the Confederation of South African Trades Unions (‘Cosatu’) to form the ‘Tripartite Alliance’. Therefore, when the ruling National Party turned from naked repression to negotiations as a means of preventing the revolution from going ‘too far’, the ANC naturally took the lead in representing the liberation movement in these negotiations. At this time, the programme of the ANC was officially the ‘Freedom Charter’, which combined democratic demands, such as universal suffrage, with radical social demands, including the nationalisation of the land, the mines, the banks and industrial monopolies. For
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