Archive for May, 2006
A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that Americans are considerably less healthy than Brits. One of the study’s authors thinks that reasons for the difference lie in the horrible quality of life typical in America: overwork, insecurity, theclimate of fear, the lack of community.
So, then, just what are the underlying reasons for our comparatively unhealthy conditions? Dr. Michael Marmot, an author of the report, told The New York Times, “I’m arguing that it’s due to the differences in the circumstances in which people live. Work, job insecurity, the nature of communities, residential communities … that’s the place we should try to look.”
Oh, and did I say overwork?
Between 1970 and 2002, “per capita hours rose by 20 percent in the U.S.,” according to statistics gathered by the Sloan Work and Family Research Network at Boston College. That’s an extra day’s work we’re squeezing in for the benefit of employers between Mondays and Fridays. Another factoid from that source: “38 percent of Americans say they work more than 45 hours every week versus … 28 percent of Britons.”
A new article in Yahoo Finance takes this further and points to the abomidable vacation policies and practices in the United States:
According to a study by Expedia last year, Americans get 12 vacation days on average — compared to 39 days for the French, 27 days for Germans, 25 days for the Dutch and 23 days for the Brits. On top of that, Americans tend to give back an average of three vacation days each year, opting to pocket the extra money instead.
So, here’s a new argument for the shorter workweek and for mandatory five weeks vacation by law: We need it to preserve our economy. Our healthcare system will collapse if we don’t find a way to reduce work-related stress.
The world can no longer afford to have the United States as a pariah, putting pressure on workers elsewhere to give up their hard-won benefits in order to compete. Under globalization, American policies threaten all.
May 13th, 2006
As usual Greg Palast provides a unique perspective on today’s news of NSA spying on almost every single one of us. Greg tells of story of Republican-controlled huckster company ChoicePoint [the company that stole the 200 election for GWB with its phony Florida felons list], a data mining company forming a database of many billions of records on every aspect of our lives [The Spies Who Shag Us]:
Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain’t nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration….
They are paid to keep an eye on you — because the FBI can’t. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you’re suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect if for “commercial” purchases — and under the Bush Administration’s suspect reading of the Patriot Act — our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint….
And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, “hope[s] to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States …linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]” from medical to voting records.
Be afraid! Be very afraid! The only bright spot is that ChoicePoint seems to be as much a traditional corporate scam as a threat. They get things wrong even when its not necessary:
” And that scares the hell out of me,” said the executive (who has since left the company), because ChoicePoint gets it WRONG so often. We are not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It’s more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding Florida “felons,” Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering ChoicePoint had produced test “results” on rape case evidence … that didn’t exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for letting identity thieves purchase 145,000 credit card records.
We can only hope that the NSA are actually as incompetent as ChoicePoint. Maybe they don’t know who Greg Palast’s sources are after all. By the way, do you think they know why that pizza I ordered two hours ago never arrived?
May 12th, 2006
Only 22% of those deemed to be at risk of having PTSD by the Department of Defense are referred for treatment, a new GAO study reports: More veterans with combat stress may need extra help. The full GAO Report: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: DOD Needs to Identify the Factors Its Providers Use to Make Mental Health Evaluation Referrals for Servicemembers [pdf]. Also available: Report highlights [pdf]. Note that DOD says only 5% of returning soldiers are at risk for PTSD, whereas 2004 New England Journal of Medicine study found about 16% of veterans have PTSD. It seems unlikely that the rate of PTSD has declined that dramatically since then, as the initial invasion has metamorphosed into a brutal war of occupation again a hard-to-identify enemy often indistinguishable from civilians.
Thus, the DOD is underestimating those at risk by a large factor, and then not referring them for treatment.
May 11th, 2006
David Rosinger, on LewRockwell.com has a fascinating article on the White Rose, an antiwar movement in Germany in 1943. [The German Anti-War Movement, 1943] I’m ashamed to say I knew nothing about this. It seems that veterans who had served as doctor’s aids on the front and seen the brutality against conquered civilians, as well as the carnage the Wehrmacht soldiers suffered, decided it was time to oppose the war. There was a demonstration at a university:
here was even a campus riot of sorts on January 13, 1943. In a speech to university students in Munich, the Gauleiter of Bavaria took female students to task for wasting their time in the classroom when they should be performing their duty to bring forth sons for the Fatherland. If they were not pretty enough, the gauleiter gibed, then he would provide them with willing studs. At this juncture, a number of women in the audience made for the exit doors. When the gauleiter ordered them arrested, an even larger group of men rose to their feet and secured their release.
After this, a group of students decided to write and distribute antiwar leaflets. One of these was Sophie Scholl, who was caught, tried, and executed. Scholl is the subject of a 2005 German movie, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, Germany’s 2005 Oscar nominee for best foreign language film. It sounds like a must-see film:
The portrait that emerges is that of a young, middle class woman of strong religious beliefs, committed to the classical liberal ideals of freedom of speech, freedom of belief and the universal value of human life. But we also see she has a boyfriend and loves jazz and Schubert. Clearly this is no fanatic eager for martyrdom. When she is taken to police headquarters for questioning, she denies having anything to do with printing or distributing the seditious pamphlets. She acknowledges only the act of pushing a stack of them off a ledge — which, she says, was just an expression of her impish nature. She convincingly explains away the empty suitcase (she was on her way back home to Ulm to pick up clean laundry) and what she was doing in the empty corridor (waiting to speak to a friend in class).
Only after police discover incriminating evidence in her apartment and exact her brother’s confession does Sophie admit to acts of treason. Suddenly, she abandons the alibi and embraces her civil disobedience without apology.
At this critical point, the suspense that has been building is released — we know her prospect is hopeless. But something even more provocative takes over. What we get in the second half of the film is a rarity in moviemaking: a dialogue of ideas between Sophie and her captors. That those arguing against her are puppets of the regime makes her case no less spirited or persuasive.
When the police inspector tells her, “The law protects order,” Sophie replies, “People are imprisoned for speaking freely. Is that order?”
When the inspector calls her a child who was not brought up properly, she responds, “You think I wasn’t raised right because I feel pity for killing mentally ill children?”
In Julia Jentsch’s remarkable performance, Sophie’s passion burns not as a wildfire but as a votive candle of hope. In her is an abiding sense of a higher justice and loyalty to country above government. In the clutches of the Gestapo and isolated from her companions, she does not waver from principle nor retreat from what a patriot of another land called “the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country.”
One of her leaflets had promised, “We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!” Even in the face of death, Sophie keeps her word. When the Goebbels-like presiding judge pronounces her sentence, Sophie calmly answers, “You’ll soon be standing where I am now.”
Yet the most unsettling scene in Sophie Scholl is not the interrogation or the show trial or the execution by guillotine.
No, the most disturbing moment comes when Sophie is read her indictment. Her distribution of mimeographed pamphlets, says the prosecutor, is an act of “troop demoralization and aiding the enemy.” It is a “crime against our hard-fighting troops.”
That is when this film should hit home with American audiences. Or at least with those who are not mere puppets.
It turns out (of course) that there is a good article on the White Rose in Wikipedia.
May 11th, 2006
On all fronts, our rights and freedoms are under attack as the wave of government illegality washes over the country. A Cap Cod school conducted illegal criminal background checks on their students’ prom dates, and banned six of them, for such offenses as passion of marijuana years ago [http://news.yahoo.com/s/wcvb/20060509/lo_wcvb/3455946]:
Tonya Dockray, 18, and her family have already spent nearly $700 for Saturday’s prom at the Cape Codder Resort in Hyannis.
“I bought a dress, purse, shawl so I don’t get cold,” she said.
As required, Dockray turned in a form to the school with information about her date, a 20-year-old she’s been dating for three years. Last Thursday, her date was denied after failing a criminal background check.
“A couple of years ago, he was caught in possession of marijuana,” Dockray said, adding he was not selling drugs. “He just had it on him.”
May 11th, 2006
On CNN today, at least one commentator had the guts to talk of the looming dictatorship in our country. Of course, the Democrats were much meeker. Some, such as Senator Kennedy, couldn’t even feign outrage Read the Transcript below, or watch on Crooks and Liars:
CNN’s WOLF BLITZER: …[some wisdom] from Jack Cafferty in New York.
CNN’s JACK CAFFERTY: I don’t know about wisdom but you’ll get a bit of outrage. We better hope nothing happens to Arlen Specter, the Republican head of the Judiciary Committee, because he might be all that’s standing between us and a full blown dictatorship in this country. He’s vowed to question these phone company executives about volunteering to provide the government with my telephone records and yours, and tens of millions of other Americans.
Shortly after 9-11, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth began providing the super secret NSA with information on phone calls of millions of our citizens, all part of the war on terror, President Bush says.
Why don’t you go find Osama Bin Laden and seal the country’s borders and start inspecting the containers that come into our ports?
The President rushed out this morning in the wake of this front page story in USA Today and he declared the government’s doing nothing wrong and all of this is just fine.
Is it? Is it legal?
Then why did the Justice Department suddenly drop its investigation of the warrantless spying on citizens? Because the NSA said Justice Department lawyers didn’t have the necessary security clearance to do the investigation.
Read that sentence again.
A secret government agency has told our Justice Department that it’s not allowed to investigate it. And the Justice Department just says okay and drops the whole thing.
We’re in some serious trouble here boys and girls.
Here’s the question.
“Does it concern you that your phone company may be voluntarily providing your phone records to the government without your knowledge or permission?”
If it doesn’t it sure as hell ought to.
Thanks to AmericaBlog for the Transcript.
May 11th, 2006
Radio host Doug McIntyre voted for President Bush. He supported the Iraq war. But no more. In his An Apology From A Bush Voter, as he explains why, he provides insight into who Bush’s approval rating are now close to the worst ever seen. Even rock-hard conservatives are catching on:
So, I’m saying today, I was wrong to have voted for George W. Bush. In historic terms, I believe George W. Bush is the worst two-term President in the history of the country. Worse than Grant. I also believe a case can be made that he’s the worst President, period….
After five years of carefully watching George W. Bush I’ve reached the conclusion he’s either grossly incompetent, or a hand puppet for a gaggle of detached theorists with their own private view of how the world works. Or both.
Presidential failures. James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, Jimmy Carter, Warren Harding-— the competition is fierce for the worst of the worst. Still, the damage this President has done is enormous. It will take decades to undo, and that’s assuming we do everything right from now on. His mistakes have global implications, while the other failed Presidents mostly authored domestic embarrassments….
You can make a case that Abraham Lincoln did what he had to do, the public be damned. If you roll the dice on your gut and you’re right, history remembers you well. But, when your gut led you from one business failure to another, when your gut told you to trade Sammy Sosa to the Cubs, and you use the same gut to send our sons and daughters to fight and die in a distraction from the real war on terror, then history will and should be unapologetic in its condemnation.
He has no love of Democrats either, and not for the reasons I don’t. But he is afraid of what this portends:
The two party system has always been clumsy and imperfect, but it has only collapsed once, in the 1850s, and the result was civil war.
I believe, as I have said countless times, the two party system is on the brink of a second collapsed. It’s currently running on spin, anger, revenge, and pots and pots and pots of money.
We’re being governed by paper-mache patriots; brightly painted red, white and blue, but hollow to the core. Both parties have mastered the cynical arts of media manipulation and fund raising. They’ve learned the lessons of Watergate and burn the tapes. They have learned to divide the nation for their own gain. They have demonstrated the willingness to exploit any tragedy for personal advantage. The contempt they have for the American people is without parallel.
We’re in for a really rocky time, he fears. There are no saviors on the way. That means the future is up to us:
I believe that George W. Bush has taken us down a terrible road. I don’t believe the Democrats are offering an alternative. That means we’re on our own to save this magnificent country.
While I’m sure I’d differ with Doug on many, many issues, I suspect he’s someone I’d enjoy discussing our situation with.
May 9th, 2006
A new Music Video from Jackson Browne joins the rising chorus of antiwar and anti-Bush popular music. Finally the war in Iraq is getting the kind of treatment in music that the Viet Nam war got. Thanks to AmericBlog we can watch it: Lives in the Balance.
My son and I cried together as we watched it.
The lyrics are available here.
May 9th, 2006
Another sign that times are changing. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is fighting back against the fundamentalists trying to deny women access to the morning after pill. [Gynecologists Fed Up With Morning-After Pill Delays] They are launching an “Ask Me” campaign, “encouraging women to get an advance prescription from their ob/gyn.”
ACOG, which represents more than 49,000 U.S. obstetricians and gynecologists, has long advocated for national over-the-counter access to Plan B, and has accused the Food and Drug Administration of stalling to approve over-the-counter use for political reasons.
“This is really a call to action — a call to make Plan B available and to make sure patients know how to use it,” said Dr. Vivian Dickerson, the college’s past president. “This is a call to physicians to educate their patients and to discuss this with their patients. This is a call to patients that this is something available, that this is an option available. Most importantly, this is a call to the FDA so they can make a decision….”
The “Ask Me” campaign will include posters for doctors’ offices and red buttons that doctors and other health professionals can wear.
One of the posters states: “Accidents happen — morning afters can be tough. … No matter what the circumstances, women need fast and ready access to emergency contraception. … Ask me today — so you have it when you need it.”
Let’s hope that other sectors of society like, say, journalists, will start rebelling again the culture of lies, fear, hate, and death that grips our country.
[Thanks to DarkSyde on Daily Dos for this.]
May 8th, 2006
After being pulled offline by C-Span, Stephen Colbert’s show in front of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is back online. Watch it before it gets yanked again!
May 8th, 2006
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