Sunday, June 7, 2009
Health Insurance and Bankruptcy
Health Insurance is a number one issue for the public as well as for the Obama Administration. A new study found that personal bankruptcies have a direct link to medical costs. Having health insurance is by no means an answer.
From MSNBC:
From MSNBC:
From CNN: Story HighlightsCostly illnesses trigger about half of all personal bankruptcies, and most of those who go bankrupt because of medical problems have health insurance, according to findings from a Harvard University study to be released Wednesday.
- Study: More than 60 percent of bankruptcies are linked to medical bills
- Three-quarters of people with a medically-related bankruptcy had health insurance
- Researcher: "You're one illness away from financial ruin in this country"
- Situation likely to worsen: study was done a year before recession
Simply stated, there are three major problems to our current system of for profit medical insurance:
1. Numerous uninsured due to cost, job, etc
2. Insured but medical procedure or Rx not covered
3. Insured but due to job lose or illness etc become uninsured
Our health care system needs real & thoughtful change. 'For profit' health care has not, is not and will not work for everyone.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Climate Change Sucks!
The following videos have been made for Oxfam GB as part of the YouTube Cannes Young Lions Ad Contest 2009.
This is what it is about. The 48 hour Ad Contest:
For more info:
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/get_involved/campaign/climate_change/youtube-young-lions.html
Love that Jesse
Ex-Governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura was on the View on 5-18-09 and gave Elisabeth Hasselbeck a lesson on torture. Hasselback was more concerned about the Democrats, specifically Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, than about waterboarding. WATCH:
The Radical Violent Right Joins Pro-Life
Have you ever wondered how radical hates groups joined forces with anti-abortion groups? An in-depth discussion of this phenomenon can be found in a Mother Jones article by James Ridgeway titled, A Brief History of the Radical Right. Explaining Scott Roeder’s journey from anti-government extremist to anti-abortion fanatic.
The revelation that Scott Roeder, the alleged murderer of Dr. George Tiller, belonged to an anti-government, white separatist group called the Montana Freemen might seem like an unlikely twist. After all, such groups are generally thought of as either indifferent to the issue of abortion or actively enthusiastic about its potential for reducing the nonwhite population. As it turns out, however, the journey from radical racialist to anti-abortionist isn't as unusual as you might think.
The Freeman's Goals
The Freemen aimed to rid the nation of "14th Amendment citizens" -- anyone who wasn't a white Anglo Saxon directly descended from God. Nonwhites, or "mud people," weren't really people at all, but God's failed attempts to create Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. A bad Xerox copy, they used to say. These beliefs derived from a school of thought known as Christian Identity, which holds that Jews, blacks, and other minorities aren't actually people and therefore don't deserve constitutional rights. Instead, those rights are reserved for so-called "white Sovereigns," who aim to take over government and run it through grand juries of the people, with laws enforced by old-time posses.
The Link
One might think that the divisions between pro-life Christians and far-right racists would preclude any sort of working alliance. Evangelical Christians thought that the creation of Israel was a sign of the Second Coming of Christ and became keen supporters of that country. The racialists, meanwhile, hated Israel and detested Jerry Falwell for supporting it. The Klan historically loathed Catholics, and modern far-right leaders like Tom Metzger in California thought abortion was a great way to stem the tide of brown and black babies who were burdening the welfare system and who as adults would threaten white political power.[...]
By the 1990s, the far right had started to attack abortion clinics.
The Bridge Between the Two
What was the bridge between the posse movement and anti-abortionist fanaticism? The Sovereign crowd viewed women as chattel, and the prospect of an independent woman deciding to seek an abortion didn't sit well with them. I gained some insight into this line of thinking in another piece I once wrote about a young woman in Oklahoma who aspired to join the Christian Identity group, hoping that its followers would teach her to shoot and become a guerrilla. Instead, the men asked her for sex. When the woman replied that she wanted a relationship first, one of them replied, "Women are for breeding." According to one faction of the group, women who have abortions are race traitors and should be stoned to death. With that in mind, the fact that some members of the far-right became violent anti-abortionists perhaps shouldn't come as such a surprise.
Friday, June 5, 2009
Jon Stewart: Dick (Uncut)
Good Times with Dick Cheney
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M - Th 11p / 10c | |||
| Dick (Uncut) | ||||
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The 'Who Done It' Battle
The true reality is that people are the losers while the heads of the banks and the corporate CEO's get richer. Money going to the top does not trickle down to the bottom. But Paul Krugman and Robert Scheer are both sure they know 'Who Done It.'
Reagan Done It By Paul Krugman
“This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. ... All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.
He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the thrifts. On the contrary, the bill turned the modest-sized troubles of savings-and-loan institutions into an utter catastrophe. But he was right about the legislation’s significance. And as for that jackpot — well, it finally came more than 25 years later, in the form of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.Now, the proximate causes of today’s economic crisis lie in events that took place long after Reagan left office — in the global savings glut created by surpluses in China and elsewhere, and in the giant housing bubble that savings glut helped inflate.
But it was the explosion of debt over the previous quarter-century that made the U.S. economy so vulnerable. Overstretched borrowers were bound to start defaulting in large numbers once the housing bubble burst and unemployment began to rise.
These defaults in turn wreaked havoc with a financial system that — also mainly thanks to Reagan-era deregulation — took on too much risk with too little capital.
Reagan Didn’t Do It By Robert Scheer
Who will change it?Reagan didn’t do it, but Clinton-era Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, now a top economic adviser in the Obama White House, did. They, along with then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and Republican congressional leaders James Leach and Phil Gramm, blocked any effective regulation of the over-the-counter derivatives that turned into the toxic assets now being paid for with tax dollars.How can Krugman ignore the wreckage wrought during the Clinton years by the gang of five? Rubin, who convinced President Clinton to end the New Deal restrictions on the merger of financial entities, went on to help run the too-big-to-fail Citigroup into the ground. Gramm became a top officer at the nefarious UBS bank. Greenspan’s epitaph should be his statement to Congress in July 1998 that “regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.” That same week Summers assured banking lobbyists that the Clinton administration was committed to preventing government regulation of swaps and other derivatives trading.
Then-Rep. Leach, as chairman of the powerful House Banking Committee, codified that concern in legislation to prevent the Commodity Futures Trading Commission or anyone else from regulating the OTC derivatives, and American Banker magazine reported that the legislation “sponsored by Chairman Jim Leach is most popular with the financial services industry because it would provide so-called legal certainty for swaps transactions. … ”
Legal certainty for swaps—meaning the insurance policies of the sort that AIG sold for collateralized debt obligations without looking too carefully into what was being insured and, more important, without putting aside reserves to back up the policies in the case of defaults—is what caused the once respectable company to eventually be taken over by the U.S. government at a cost of $185 billion to taxpayers.
Leach, an author of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which allowed banks like Citigroup to become too big to fail, is now a member of the board of directors of ProPublica, which bills itself as “a non-profit newsroom producing journalism in the public interest.” Leach serves as the chair of a prize jury that ProPublica has created to honor “outstanding investigative work by governmental groups,” and perhaps he will grant one retrospectively to Brooksley Born and the federal commission she ran so brilliantly before Leach and his buddies destroyed her.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Things To Know
Hospitals Save Money with Homeless OutreachHospitals actually saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by helping to provide additional services to the homeless.
Two studies, one in Chicago and the other in Seattle, prove we can save health care dollars by housing and helping the homeless. Read More...
200 Executions and Counting: Texas Gov. Rick Perry's Cruel Death Tally
Today marks the 200th execution under Perry, a record even deadlier than George W. Bush's tenure. What's the matter with Texas? Read More...
How Much Has Changed? Obama Administration Deals Series of Anti-Environmental Blows
The Dems have unleashed a slew of anti-environmental policies that would have enraged any reasonable conservationist during the Bush years. Read More...
Cheney's Caveat
Former VP Dick Cheney says that he supports 'gay unions.' But there is a caveat. He believes that this is not a federal question but a state's right to determine the legality and definition of marriage.
Speaking at the National Press Club, Cheney was asked about the legality of gay marriage in the US:
Cheney's statement that "... it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family" speaks volumes!Speaking at the National Press Club, Cheney was asked about the legality of gay marriage in the US:
"I think that freedom means freedom for everyone. As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. Any kind of arrangement they wish. The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute to protect this, I don't support. I do believe that the historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis. ... But I don't have any problem with that. People ought to get a shot at that."
Cheney Disavows 9/11-Iraq Link
Truthdig has the story...
White House photo by David Bohrer
Dick Cheney, then vice president, laughs as he makes a fool of us all.
Bloomberg:
Former Vice President Dick Cheney disavowed intelligence he once cited to suggest that then-Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein collaborated with al-Qaeda to stage the Sept. 11 attacks.
Cheney said reporting by the Central Intelligence Agency of collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda on Sept. 11 “turned out not to be true.” Still the vice president said there had been a longstanding relationship between Hussein and terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, that justified the U.S. invasion in 2003.
Mike's Letter
Goodbye, GM ...by Michael Moore
I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.
As I sit here in GM's birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in the city have been abandoned. Imagine what it would be like if you lived in a city where almost every other house is empty. What would be your state of mind?
It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh -- and that wouldn't start falling apart after two years. GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the "inferior" Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to "improve" the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? History will record this blunder in the same way it now writes about the French building the Maginot Line or how the Romans cluelessly poisoned their own water system with lethal lead in its pipes.
So here we are at the deathbed of General Motors. The company's body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with -- dare I say it -- joy. It is not the joy of revenge against a corporation that ruined my hometown and brought misery, divorce, alcoholism, homelessness, physical and mental debilitation, and drug addiction to the people I grew up with. Nor do I, obviously, claim any joy in knowing that 21,000 more GM workers will be told that they, too, are without a job.
But you and I and the rest of America now own a car company! I know, I know -- who on earth wants to run a car company? Who among us wants $50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM? Let's be clear about this: The only way to save GM is to kill GM. Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we've allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?
Thus, as GM is "reorganized" by the federal government and the bankruptcy court, here is the plan I am asking President Obama to implement for the good of the workers, the GM communities, and the nation as a whole. Twenty years ago when I made "Roger & Me," I tried to warn people about what was ahead for General Motors. Had the power structure and the punditocracy listened, maybe much of this could have been avoided. Based on my track record, I request an honest and sincere consideration of the following suggestions:
1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.
We are now in a different kind of war -- a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call "cars" may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.
The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn't give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true -- that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.
President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately.
2. Don't put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce -- and most of those who have been laid off -- employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now.
3. Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high speed trains for nearly five decades -- and we don't even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven't used it, is criminal. Let's hire the unemployed to build the new high speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to DC in under 7 hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now.
4. Initiate a program to put light rail mass transit lines in all our large and medium-sized cities. Build those trains in the GM factories. And hire local people everywhere to install and run this system.
5. For people in rural areas not served by the train lines, have the GM plants produce energy efficient clean buses.
6. For the time being, have some factories build hybrid or all-electric cars (and batteries). It will take a few years for people to get used to the new ways to transport ourselves, so if we're going to have automobiles, let's have kinder, gentler ones. We can be building these next month (do not believe anyone who tells you it will take years to retool the factories -- that simply isn't true).
7. Transform some of the empty GM factories to facilities that build windmills, solar panels and other means of alternate forms of energy. We need tens of millions of solar panels right now. And there is an eager and skilled workforce who can build them.
8. Provide tax incentives for those who travel by hybrid car or bus or train. Also, credits for those who convert their home to alternative energy.
9. To help pay for this, impose a two-dollar tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them.
Well, that's a start. Please, please, please don't save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs. This is not a long-term solution. Don't throw bad money into a company whose tailpipe is malfunctioning, causing a strange odor to fill the car.
100 years ago this year, the founders of General Motors convinced the world to give up their horses and saddles and buggy whips to try a new form of transportation. Now it is time for us to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine. It seemed to serve us well for so long. We enjoyed the car hops at the A&W. We made out in the front -- and the back -- seat. We watched movies on large outdoor screens, went to the races at NASCAR tracks across the country, and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time through the window down Hwy. 1. And now it's over. It's a new day and a new century. The President -- and the UAW -- must seize this moment and create a big batch of lemonade from this very sour and sad lemon.
Yesterday, the last surviving person from the Titanic disaster passed away. She escaped certain death that night and went on to live another 97 years.
So can we survive our own Titanic in all the Flint Michigans of this country. 60% of GM is ours. I think we can do a better job.
Monday, June 1, 2009
A Most Difficult Decision
The following article is from The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan. It is a personal and compelling account of the difficult, emotional and torment filled decision of abortion.
It's So Personal: Not Knowing For Sure
A reader writes:
When I was pregnant with my second child, this is what happened to me. I was in the middle of the"feel good" sonogram at 21 weeks when the technician made a funny face and said that she was having difficulty getting some measurements. Her supervisor came in and took over, after asking me whether I had any other children and whether they were normal. And then I spoke with the radiologist, who was blunt and dour, and helped me get an immediate referral to Children's Hospital, where, several specialized sonograms later, we got as grim a verdict as I could possibly have imagined: a severe brain defect, a severe heart defect, other highly unusual but not easily interpreted "signs" of impairment, including structural or neurological deficits associated with swallowing and other motor functions. It all pointed to chromosomal anomaly, but, too bad for me, it wasn't possible to get definitive diagnosis in the time frame I had to make up my mind to obtain a legal termination.
My choices were to do nothing, undergo termination with less than definitive diagnosis, or wait for the definitive diagnosis, and then go to New York or Colorado, or, I guess, Kansas.Technology has made the chromosomal test a lot quicker than it used to be. My doctor was very helpful -- telling me to consider what I would do if the amnio cam back normal, because even if chromosomally normal, we were looking at a grim prognosis. I also had the help of a genetics counselor who told me that she often found herself in the position of trying to keep people from overreacting in the face of alarming information -- accentuating the positive, if you will, but she had to admit that in my case, there was no positive information. So we did what we could to sort out the information we had, and we realized that there was almost no chance that the baby would live.
If she lived at all, she was destined for debilitating and probably inexplicable pain and suffering (at least three and probably more major surgeries), and a short life. There would never be any surgery for her brain defect, and if she was chromosomally abnormal, most doctors would refuse to do surgery, and she would simply be allowed to die. When we scheduled the termination, they did an amnio to get the definitive diagnosis, which turned out to be a rare and unsurvivable trisomy (#22 if you are interested -- it is so rare that the geneticist got a little excited because she had never personally seen it). The last time I saw her on the sonogram screen, her heart rate had decelerated to below 100, which is abnormal for a fetus. I believe that she was sustained as far as she was by me, and that she was already starting to die.
I was haunted for a while that I had to decide before I knew for sure that death was inevitable, and once I got over the grief of having done that, the experience only deepened my belief that abortion should be the province of individual men and women. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I have concluded that a decision to undergo abortion or continue a pregnancy is often made instinctively, with a nearly primal conviction that it is the right thing to do under the circumstances. Trying to impose a rigid moral framework based on an extreme notion of equality of personhood doesn't even begin to speak to the complexities of what most people experience when trying to decide this question for themselves.
Decorating a Room for $10
A little ingenuity plus enormous talent.
When Charlie Kratzer started on the basement art project in his south Lexington home, he was surrounded by walls painted a classic cream. Ten dollars of Magic Marker and Sharpie later, the place was black and cream and drawn all over. More here.
h/t Crooks and Liars
h/t Crooks and Liars
The Meaning of Traditional Marriage
After listening to conservative religious leaders talk about preserving the 5000 years of traditional marriage between a man and a woman on NPR last week, I just had to laugh at the notion that marriage was a true reflection of family values and love. For the most part, marriages were arranged and women were considered property to be bartered like animals or land. Traditional Marriage link…
Marriage as we know it today is a partnership based on love and trust…or so we would like to believe. So why is it hard for some people to understand that contemporary marriage cannot extend itself to same sex couples? Just 40 years ago we had segregated bathrooms. There’s no doubt we have a long way to go as a society to push for equal rights for all members of the human race, I just want to set the record straight on how far we have come since the days of arranged marriages and the feudal system that in some degree still exists today.
No More Compromise
The recent haggling over Guantanamo Bay is such classic Democratic Party politics, it almost makes you want to laugh. Almost, except that it’s, you know, revolting. Eight years of Clintonian squirming was bad enough, but now we have Barack Obama, smoking Habeas Corpus and not inhaling it.
Making a Decision/Not!
Why is the Gitmo decision classic Democratic Party thinking? Because when certain of us said we wanted Gitmo closed, we sort of meant a change in policy -- we didn’t mean just physically closing the plant, moving the prisoners elsewhere, and leaving the policies essentially unchanged. This is what this generation of Democrats does every time: every time they come to a fork in the road, they try to take it.
There’s always some sort of semantic twist involved with their policies, an asterisk, some kind of leprechaun trick to get around doing the simple right thing. They’re all for gay rights, and then once the lights come on, they’ve basically codified the closet by ushering in Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
They campaign against the war in Iraq, promise to get us out, and say they were against it all along -- and then once they get in power, they start using words like eventually and in 4-6 years and once the situation stabilizes. Later it turns out that what they meant by being against the war all along was their conviction that we should have invaded on a Thursday instead of a Tuesday, or some such bullshit.
The Matter of Gitmo
Now there’s this Gitmo business. This, folks, just isn’t that tough a call. The prison (and the much less publicized archipelago of hard sites in foreign countries where more terror suspects are held) was a symbol of everything wrong and stupid about the Bush administration. Snatching people up by force and dumping them in rocks on the middle of the ocean without due process is the kind of thing that was last done by "civilized" cultures back in the days of the Roman Empire; since then it’s been the exclusive province of sociopathic third-world dictators like Stalin and Mobutu Sese Seko.
It was absolutely imperative, from a public relations standpoint if nothing else, that Obama immediately repudiate these practices, design some kind of due process to deal with the already incarcerated prisoners, and show the world that what happened during the Bush years was an insane aberration, a result of our having accidentally elected an emotionally retarded sadist to the White House.
Obama's Decision/Indecision
Instead, Obama is on his way to doing exactly the wrong thing. He’s going to make a show of closing the base, but retain the underlying idea by keeping some of the prisoners in indefinite legal purgatory. In some ways this is worse than what Bush did, because Bush at least took a clear stand -- he was nuts and thought this was the right thing to do. No matter how you look at Obama’s decision, it’s weighed somewhere along the line by political calculation. Either he thinks indefinite decision is right and he’s bowing to public appeals by closing the base, or else he thinks it’s wrong and is bowing to opposition outcry by maintaining the old policy.
It’s one thing to change your mind or play both sides of the fence on matters that don’t involve human lives, on theoretical/hypothetical campaign issues, but another thing to do it with actual incarcerated human beings as the key variable in the political equation.
Better than the Alternative, But...
I still like Obama, in a lot of ways. Having a president with less ability to inspire public confidence at a time like this, with our economy in such a death spiral, would be a disaster; God knows where we’d be right now with a McCain or a Mike Huckabee at the helm. But this guy has to show some stones somewhere along the line. He has to just forget the DC game and just take a clear stand on an issue like this sometime. He’s kind of running out of time to rescue his all-important first impression.
Also See: The Official End of Obama’s Honeymoon
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