Why? Because it would require people to buy goods from private companies, without being able to opt-out.
So says Karl Manheim, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, and Jamie Court, chairman of Consumer Watchdog in Santa Monica, Calif.
Don’t think that just because Clinton’s plan would have “covered everyone,” that it is better than Obama’s. Clinton’s plan would be a boon for the private insurance industry — not for families.
I guess it’s a moot point at this time; she can’t get the nomination.
To cover everyone, a better option is universal single payer government provided healthcare.
Hawaiians make move for national sovereignty and occupy historic palace, declaring it would take over the official government duties. The Hawaii Kingdom Government is a constitutional monarchy of the rightfully independent nation of Hawaii. They do not recognize Hawaii as a U.S. state, but as an autonomous nation occupied by the United States.
Radiohead joins MTVexit to make this video about sweatshop labor.
Because the project is funded in part by USAID, I’m surprised how not terrible it is. Sure, it’s cliche and not insightful, but at least, it’s not dehumanizing and it makes the connection between the two kids.
It just doesn’t offer any analysis about the problem — why is the white kid wearing the shoes made by the other kid? And who is profiting from the exploitation of child labor? Corporations — like those who sponsor MTV programming and that of other Viacom networks.
And it doesn’t really offer any solutions. But MTVexit isn’t really about stopping sweatshop labor. Their mission statement says they want to increase awareness about human trafficking through education and outreach with local anti-trafficking organizations. Sounds like they’re trying for an easy PR boost.
Few would deny that child labor and human trafficking are bad — besides Nicholas Kristof, Milton Friedman and a few other insane ideologues who deny reality and ignore human suffering — so I can’t see what this campaign actually hopes to do — besides give MTV the false appearance of caring.
By the way, MTV’s website has a whole section on activism, listed under the subtitle “Movies, Games & More.”
SOUTH BEND, Ind. - Hillary Rodham Clinton, a former first lady who hasn’t driven a car or pumped gas in many years because of Secret Service restrictions, joined a blue-collar worker at a filling station Wednesday to illustrate how the high price of gasoline is squeezing consumers.
The Democratic presidential candidate and sheet metal worker Jason Wilfing, 33, pulled into the station in a large white Ford 250 pickup truck, Clinton riding shotgun. Never mind that it wasn’t even Wilfing’s truck — he had borrowed his boss’s larger vehicle to accommodate Clinton’s security agent and personal assistant, who rode in the back.
Trailing Wilfing and Clinton was a Secret Service motorcade consisting of six gas-guzzling Suburbans, two squad cars and a green SUV bearing photographers and TV cameras. Several other reporters and cameramen stood shivering in unseasonably cold temperatures, ready to capture the multi-vehicle arrival.
Clinton and Wilfing stepped out of the car and approached the pump. Wilfing chose regular unleaded gasoline, and began filling the tank. The two engaged in chit chat, with New York senator mentioning her proposal for a temporary gas tax holiday to ease the price pinch on consumers.
The tank filled, Clinton looked at the price recorded at the pump and shook her head.
“Sixty-three dollars,” she said. “For just about half a tank.”
A few pies to the face greeted Thomas Friedman - New York Times columnist - as he was preparing to give the keynote address on Earth Day before a packed auditorium at Brown University.
His talk - titled “Green is the new Red White and Blue” - was about how corporate environmentalism (which would give corporations ownership of our common resources and legal rights to pollute our air and water under the facade of conservation) can restore the United States to its “natural place in the global order.”
“Luckily, this outrageous neoliberal capitalist propaganda was interrupted with a surprise visit from the Greenwash Guerrillas.”
That’s a very successful pieing. You can see Friedman flustering as he visibly debated himself about whether to continue with the speech.
And his lecture made the reasons for the pieing — his racism and imperialism — all the more apparent.
For example, two of his talking points:
“He used two hands to graph the price of oil against the freedom of the people in the country selling it, which he argued is an ‘inverse correlation.’”
“We’re going to get really super-efficient at raping the natural world,” he said during the lecture, adding that clean, cheap energy can become “a license to buy a Hummer and drive it through the Amazon.”
Right, corporations are kicking families from their homes and communities, destroying the farmland and natural environment to produce pseudo-fuels known as biofuels — e.g., corn ethanol — for fucking hummers that CEOs can then drive over the ruin they caused — a purely callous final insult.
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The Guerrillas also threw leaflets to the audience, stating: (more…)
People are dieing younger in many of our nation’s worst off counties, a new study has found. The study authors conclude, “[T]he 1980s and 1990s marked an era of increased inequalities in mortality in the United States.”
“[These inequalities are] particularly troubling,” the researchers explain, “because an oft-stated aim of the U.S. health system is the improvement of the health of all people, and especially those at greater risk of health disparities.”
Despite its stated goals, our health system is leaving many people without the care they need to live. The insurance driven healthcare is not covering everyone. It is inadequate and the price is deadly.
We need universal, single payer healthcare to remove these unjust inequalities, so no one’s life is needlessly cut short.
Two researchers from the University of Cambridge studied the testosterone and cortisol levels of 17 men trading on the London stock exchange. The findings? High levels of testosterone are associated with risky decisions and higher earnings. Cortisol with stress, caution and loss.
Of course, all traders are men. And of course, that means they’re controlled by testosterone. And thus, the market is controlled by testosterone.
The researchers found that the economy’s “bubbles and crashes are coming from these steroids.”
So it was testosterone that led many of these men to a house-load of money from the housing market crash that cost many people their homes.
The researchers suppose, “If more women and older men were trading, the markets would be more stable.”
Gee thanks. I love it when science uses a social characteristic to understand a biological concept that then is used to explain that very social characteristic.
Men are aggressive and testosterone is the “male” hormone, so testosterone causes aggression. If testosterone causes aggression, men are aggressive because of testosterone.
It’s circular, just like balls, that’s where testosterone comes from, so these men scientists use circular reasoning because they’re dicks!
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.
And now he makes about a million dollars a year - about half of which comes from sales of his two books. His family’s gross income was $3.9 million from 2000 to 2006.
Meanwhile, Clinton made 28 times what Obama did, with income totaling more than $100 million in the same period.
A recent poll found that 35 percent of corporate executives think the heads of their companies are paid too much. Last year, 21 percent said the same. The median compensation for a CEO of a large U.S. company is $8.8 million.
Over the past decade, CEO pay (for the companies of the Dow Jones industrials) increased at a whooping annual rate of 15.1 percent - while the median household income rose at a rate of 0.68 percent annually from 1996 to 2006.
Today the Haartz editorial board spoke against Israel’s boycott of Jimmy Carter - who Israel PM Ehud Olmert refused to see because of his visit with a Hamas leader - declaring that “he deserves the respect reserved for royalty for the rest of his life.”
More to the point, Haartz agreed with Carter’s characterization of the situation in Palestine and acknowledged that it “begs” such a comparison to Apartheid South Africa: “the system of separate roads for Jews and Arabs, the lack of freedom of movement, Israel’s control over Palestinian lands and their confiscation, and especially the continued settlement activity, which contravenes all promises Israel made and signed.”
20 percent of scientists polled by Nature Magazine use either ritalin (66 percent of users), provigil or beta blockers (this was just an April Fool’s Day joke)
Republicans boo latest addition to the U.S. Congress - Jackie Speier (D-CA).
“The process to bring the troops home must begin immediately,” she told Pelosi. “The president wants to stay the course and a man who wants to replace him suggests we could be in Iraq for 100 years. But Madam Speaker, history will not judge us kindly if we sacrifice four generations of Americans because of the folly of one.”
She’s not particularly different from other democrats, so why the hostile reception? If anything, her life is just tragic.
including parts for F-14 fighter jets, unused chemical-biological canister and a used Nuclear Biological Chemical protective suit, all stolen from the Department of Defense, of course.
Obama is a friend of Palestine? So says an article on the front page of the L.A. Times.
The Nation implies it is poor and misleading reporting on the LA Times part, and I agree. By hyping up the article and catering to Anti-Palestinian groups, the author confounds the facts and obscures the truth.
The evidence that Obama supports Palestine? He attended events with prominent literature professors and scholars of Arab history - Edward Said [an influential critical theorist and major contributer to the founding of postcolonial theory] and Rashid Khalidi [the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University].
From left to right, Michelle Obama, then Illinois state senator Barack Obama, Columbia University Professor Edward Said and Mariam Said at a May 1998 [TEN YEARS AGO] Arab community event in Chicago at which Edward Said gave the keynote speech. Electronic Intifada
I think it’s great that Obama heard lectures from the late Edward Said - I wish I could have! Said as “a Palestinian and a leading American intellectual” wrote one of the most important critiques of Western constructions of the East - Orientalism. (more…)
Apparently, the punishment for corporate fraud is further bribery in Bush’s Department of Justice, according to a recent NYT article.
When facing charges for bribery and fraud, corporations can sideswipe criminal indictment by merely paying small token fees - “peanuts” compared to damages paid after criminal conviction.
For example, a medical supply company [Zimmer Holdings Inc.] avoided criminal prosecution by the Department of Justice by paying up to $52 million to the consulting firm of John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, to act as an “outside monitor.” Sounds like a little conflict of interest, no? or a “a backroom, sweetheart deal” in the words of the chairperson of a House Judiciary subcommittee. (more…)
The Atlantic Monthly offers a good assessment of the media’s reaction to Jeremiah Wright and his condemnation of racist U.S. policies. The uproar of many white pundits was less to do with the content of Wright’s message - as demonstrated by their rampant de-contextualizing - and more to do with how that message shattered their dearly-held conceptions of who Obama is.
Many white people finally realized Obama cannot be colorblind because he, in fact, is a black man with the lived experiences of a person of color in a racist society. And because of that, he may very well - let’s hope - share some of Wright’s opinions.
No matter the rhetoric he employs, Obama cannot be “post-racial” in a world that still churns profits and white comfort out of oppressions based on race.
His glamour explains a campaign paradox: how a man who wrote a race-conscious coming-of-age memoir about his search for a black identity could be touted as a “post-racial” candidate. The allure of his origins obscured his own account of his inner life.
That’s one reason the revelation of his religious mentor’s racially charged sermons proved so potent. Obama’s association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright revealed to white audiences that the senator is a self-defined black man who listens sympathetically to—and might even share—the angry grievances of other African Americans. His rhetoric may be inclusive, but he is not colorblind. He does not, by his mere existence, make America’s racial divisions disappear.
The Huffington Post has received an advanced copy of Cliff Schecter’s biography of John McCain - The Real McCain.
Schecter’s research reveals that McCain got into a physical brawl with his fellow Arizona congressman Rick Renzi (R). I think it has something to do with gender roles.
In 2006, the Arizona Republican congressional delegation had a strategy meeting. McCain repeatedly addressed two new members, congressmen Trent Franks and Rick Renzi, as ‘boy.’ Finally, Renzi, a former college linebacker, rose from his chair and said to McCain, “You call me that one more time and I’ll kick your old ass.” McCain lunged at Renzi, punches were thrown, and the two had to be physically separated. After they went to their separate offices, McCain called Renzi and demanded an apology. Renzi refused. Apparently this posture made McCain admire him, as they became fast friends.
Oh, what good friends he keeps: On February 22, 2008 Rick Renzi was indicted on 35 criminal counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and official extortion stemming from land deals in his state.
McCain also called his wife a “cunt.” The vagina as an insult. What a misogynist.
Bill Clinton, who passed NAFTA during his reign, supports a free trade agreement with Colombia. The agreement would undercut environmental regulations, unions and workers’ rights to fill the pockets of multinational corporations.
Hillary Clinton says she would vote against such a deal and has recently employed a little “historical revision” to her initial stance on NAFTA, now claiming she has always had reservations about it. Will she fire her husband like she fired her top strategist Mark Penn for supporting the Colombian deal?
We’ll see if she sticks to her word. On Monday Bush sent the agreement to congress, which has 90 days to act on it.
And what about the violent oppression of trade unions in Colombia, Bush/Clinton? And NAFTA’s legacy of jobloss and economic hardship for U.S. workers and Mexican farmers?
Fortunately, Mike Michaud (D-Maine), co-founder of the House of Representatives Trade Working Group, says, “The Colombia FTA is dead on arrival.”
I like it - the idea behind the ad, that is, not the ad itself.
Today the company pulled it because cranky u.s.ers hate thinking about their violent history and theft of land. I guess people don’t care that the map looked like that a little more than a century and a half ago (1848).
Nevertheless, it was just an ad - meant to capitalize on a popular sentiment.
And to mitigate this damage, they must to explain why they were upset. But it doesn’t bode well for men to explain why they were angered.
I wonder if the study from a former Hillary Clinton Congressional Fellow (Uhlmann) considered race and other social factors in their analysis.
Of course, white men are rational and everyone else should be presumed emotionally liable until proven otherwise. And yet, when a man explains himself, his peers lose a little of their credence in his reasoning ability. Perhaps, his actions are a little less justifiable - he is used to getting his way without needing to explain himself.
During her bid for the democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton has been ardently denying her support of NAFTA - an epic disaster for U.S. and Mexico workers - but MSNBC has pulled up some of her earlier statements during her hubby’s term when she expressed clear and strong support of trade deal.
Not that Barack Obama hasn’t lied in his campaign, but come on, Clinton, this is ridiculous.
After receiving permits through a maze of government offices, graffiti artists organized a large community art project to decorate an ugly 10,000 square foot block of concrete along the L.A. river. Six months later city officials now want the project organizers to whitewash it or pay a $70,000 fine.
“It would be beautiful if the river went back to its natural state and was actually a river and a park,” said Alex Poli, a graffiti artist, gallery owner and an organizer of the art project. “But right now we have concrete walls, so the next best thing is to beautify it with art.”
Wal-Mart has ended its ridiculous effort to collect more than $400,000 in health-care reimbursement from a former employee, Deborah Shank, who suffered brain damage in a traffic accident. The corporation was seeking a refund of the medical expenses it paid because Shank also collected damage money from the trucking firm of the driver that hit her.
Finally. What bullshit to try that.
And I can’t believe we still don’t have universal health care. We’re such fools for not having it. Pawns of the corporate lobby.
The FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, wiretapped Martin Luther King, Jr. for nearly five years from 1963 until his assassination in 1968. After approving the wiretaps, attorney general Robert Kennedy specifically requested to be personally informed about any findings.
After his “I have a dream” speech, the FBI called him, the “most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.”
When King learned he would be the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, the FBI decided to take its harassment of King one step further, sending him an insulting and threatening note anonymously. A draft was found in the FBI files years later. In it the FBI wrote, “You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that.” The letter went on to say, “The American public … will know you for what you are — an evil, abnormal beast,” and “Satan could not do more.”
It really begs the question of what was blacked out, a friend points out. If all of that horribleness was deemed acceptable, what could be so bad to warrant the censorship?
The letter’s threat was ominous, if not specific: “King you are done.” Some have theorized the intent of the letter was to drive King to commit suicide in order to avoid personal embarrassment. “King, there is only one thing left for you to do,” the letter concluded. “You know what it is … You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”
“Obama has given a beautiful speech on race and his affiliation with the Trinity Unity Church of Christ.” — Barbara Ehrenreich, March 2008
“It’s hard sometimes for me to understand how Obama is able to milk so much reaction out of speeches that are not only pedestrian, but which contain truly startling statements. The speech he made yesterday, for example: how can he manage to dedicate a whole address to the importance of overcoming racism, and in the middle of that talk not only essentially smear his pastor with the ‘Angry Black’ stereotype, but also endorse the ongoing US policy of racism and injustice towards the Palestinians, and then somehow come out of the whole thing smelling like roses, sending hyperventilating progressives all over the country to their smelling salts, believing that they’ve heard the ‘greatest speech’ of modern times!” — “epppie,” an e-mail correspondent, March 19, 2008
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I just read Barack Obama’s Latest Greatest Speech – his celebrated address on race, titled “A More Perfect Union” [1], yesterday (I am writing on the morning of March 19 2008), in Philadelphia. Sparked by recent broadcasts of his longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright’s angry denunciations of U.S. imperialism and racism, the speech changes nothing for me.
Deluded Obamanists can stop sending me e-mails saying (to quote one this morning) “wow he really knocked them dead in Philly telling it like it is on Race. Now will you please finally get on board with the Great Barack?”
As his most recent Grand Oration shows, the Chosen One is not about to sacrifice political ambition for the sake of truth and justice.
Yesterday’s address was all about Obama using his former pastor as a pretext for yet more triangulation [2]. Wright was employed as a foil for Obama to pose as reasonable on race and racism while he continued his project of deepening public confusion on racist and other United States oppression structures at the heart of American society.
I heard this on CNN last night, but someone convinced me that the anchor must have just misspoken. Alas, though, it is true. Mike Gravel, presidential candidate from Alaska, has jumped the Democrat ship and landed in the Libertarian sinkhole.
“I’m joining the Libertarian Party because it is a party that combines a commitment to freedom and peace that can’t be found in the two major parties that control the government and politics of America. My libertarian views, as well as my strong stance against war, the military industrial complex and American imperialism, seem not to be tolerated by Democratic Party elites who are out of touch with the average American; elites that reject the empowerment of American citizens I offered to the Democratic Party at the beginning of this presidential campaign with the National Initiative for Democracy.”
Does Gravel not know that the libertarian party of the United States is the capitalist party? It wants to end all taxes, extend neoliberal trade and stop social programs (refer to Ron Paul). The party doesn’t support the war because it doesn’t support any government spending. (more…)
The U.S. subsidies for corn producers may be having global impacts on the food supply. Many U.S. agricultural business switched from growing food crops to corn for ethanol, as a result of the federal money. Big businesses are also clear cutting the Amazon rainforest to grow what Bush touts as “alternative energy” that reduces the U.S. dependence on foreign oil.
With intensifying food shortages and mounting prices, the sad irony is that corn ethanol is a net negative for energy. Because it uses more energy to produce than it yields, it contributes to the growing energy crisis and thus further to the escalating price of food.
A new study from Texas A&M University found that the more people know about global warming the less they care about it. The researchers interviewed over a thousand people and concluded, “More informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming.”
That’s definitely true for me. Because I studied environmental science in college, I couldn’t seem to escape all the brouhaha about global warming. Although I agree it’s important, I just don’t personally care. There are other more immediate threats to people’s wellbeing that warrant greater attention. I can’t worry about green house gases when people are dying from treatable diseases because of the global disparities, which are reinforced by corporations and their government sponsors as they produce their next new “green” technology. (more…)
During the San Francisco antiwar protests on March 19, a security officer outside of a closed Bank of America branch flicked off a protester for taking photographs. The bank was closed because of the protests that marked the five year anniversary of the Iraq War.
I love it. The state protecting capitalism reduced to using the finger against resistance.
Life. In the United States, more than 2,200 people are sentenced to life in prison for crimes they committed as minors. Only 12 people outside the United States face such sentences.
Health. The best doctors are the worst people. The top scoring medical students just want to make money by tending to narcissism of wealth.
Food. Big Business consumes organic food. The NYT found a neat graphic that shows how small organic companies have been bought up by big corporations and private investment firms. The whole organic labeling system itself makes it difficult for local farmers to become certified, so it is no surprise that multinationals own most organic foods. Buy local. Unlike organic food, it’s cheaper.
Across the country, United for Peace and Justice, CodePink, Students for a Democratic Society and many other antiwar organizations held protests today to mark the 5 year anniversary of the Iraq War. In Washington, D.C., the groups had events planned throughout the day.
The response? Military officials are pushing for extended troop presence in Iraq–a 6-week “pause” of troop withdrawal.
Minneapolis Police Department’s Mark Lenass broke the nose of Marcus Brock.
Headline Civil Rights News: Matthew Fleuret v. Orange County Sheriff’s Department et al.
According to his attorneys, Stephen Bernard and David Brown, Matthew Fleuret was taken into the Orange County sheriff’s department for his role in a bar fight. Video shows the cops beat him, strip him of his clothes, hold him to the floor, knee his head, strap him to a chair, and continue to tase him at least 11 times. Fleuret, a construction worker and handyman, was not prosecuted for the bar fight. LA Times
This follows the death of a man after being tased in an Orange County Jail. (more…)
Apparently, the punishment for corporate fraud is further bribery in Bush’s Department of Justice, according to a 
I heard this on CNN last night, but someone convinced me that the anchor must have just misspoken. Alas, though, it is true. Mike Gravel, presidential candidate from Alaska, has jumped the Democrat ship and landed in the Libertarian sinkhole.
