Sorry, Science Deniers, the earth is not flat

The current trend among some conservatives to ignore science or change established facts to suit a religion-based political agenda is a threat to more than just the intelligence of the human species. Extolling false claims puts the entire economic and social structure of the planet at risk of catastrophic failure.

America is suffering from fundamental socioeconomic flaws that are getting worse, and reducing the role of government is part of the problem. Governments by their very nature are charged with the role of stabilizing society, protecting the public and promoting self-improvement and creativity among the general population. In a truly advanced society, basic humans needs such as food and medicine have been met, so individuals can focus on intellectual growth.

However, the exact reverse has taken hold in America. Programs that help the hungry are being cut, while government assistance for the economically sufficient is expanded. More than 50 million Americans suffer from food insecurity in a country that has an abundance of food. Another 44,000 die each year because they have no health insurance and medical care. Allowing so many people to struggle without basic needs being met is not the path to an advanced society.

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Why Sea World needs to stop keeping Orca's captive

Killer whales in captivity: Sea World tragedy tells us something is not right here (via http://crooksandliars.com)

By David Neiwert February 26, 2010 4:00 pm [media id=11990] Marine parks like Sea World can be great places to take your kids and introduce them, in a safe way, to the wonders of marine life. Marine parks like Sea World can be great places to take your…

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Study: US hopsitals are over charging

Data shows Hernando hospitals are price gouging.

A study released on Jan. 6, 2014, by National Nurses United, shows that half of all US hospitals on the top 10 list for price gouging are in Florida, and two of those are in Hernando County.

Details reveal that Brooksville Regional has been price gouging their patients at a rate of 1083 percent. Oak Hill inflates their charges by 1052 percent. 

Top 10 Most Expensive Hospitals in the U.S.
(by total charges as a percent of total costs)

1-      Meadowlands Hospital Medical Center, Secaucus, NJ – 1192%
2-      Paul B. Hall Regional Medical Center, Painsville, KY – 1186%
3-      Orange Park Medical Center, Orange Park, FL – 1139%
4-      North Okaloosa Medical Center, Crestview, FL – 1137%
5-      Gadsden Regional Medical Center, Gadsden, AL – 1128%
6-      Bayonne Medical Center, Bayonne, NJ – 1084%
7-      Brooksville Regional Hospital, Brooksville, FL – 1083%
8-      Heart of Florida Regional Medical Center, Davenport, FL – 1058%
9-      Chestnut Hill Hospital, Philadelphia, PA – 1058%
10-    Oak Hill Hospital, Spring Hill, FL – 1052%

So, what makes Brooksville Regional and Oak Hill hospitals among the most over-priced in the country? 

The study was based on official Medicare Cost Reports, and according to Census data, Hernando County has a higher percentage of seniors at 26.8 percent, than the state average of only 18.2 percent. 

Since millions of Florida seniors have Medicare to cover their primary health insurance costs, could there be a connection between the type of health insurance plan a patient has and hospital price gouging?  

With health care costs skyrocketing and taking an ever-larger chunk out of the federal budget, waste, fraud and abuse on the part of for-profit hospitals appears to be a significant part of problem.

No other industrialized country earth allows private, profit-based companies so much power over their health care networks. Perhaps that is also why America has the most expensive system in the world.

Sources and more info:

FACT SHEETS BY STATE:

• Top 100 most expensive hospitals by state
• Most expensive hospitals in alphabetical order by state
• Average charge-to-cost ratio by state

http://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/entry/new-data-some-hospitals-set-charges-at-10-times-their-costs/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ralph-nader/medical-price-gouging_b_4589748.html

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/12/12053.html

Author’s note: The opinions and commentary included in this report are based on the author’s original reporting and independent analysis of official documents and public information.

Is Congress deliberately creating poverty in America?

What happens in Washington can change lives thousands of miles away, whether people realize it or not. Ideally, elected representatives work on laws intended to make the lives of their constituents better. However, that has not been the case of late. 

Budget cuts to food stamps and unemployment benefits are having a real effect on American families; they are sending more of them from the middle-class into poverty.

The Republican leadership leading the charge on stark austerity measures claim they will eventually lead to prosperity for more Americans. Precisely how and when remains vague. In the meantime, while millions find themselves unable to find work and with government assistance cut off, the lofty idealism of smaller government is actually creating more poverty in a nation with more millionaires than any other on earth.

Read the full article here.

Image: Poverty in America during the Great Depression/wikipedia

Why are Republicans so afraid of Obamacare?

As the October deadline to opening the Obamacare health insurance marketplace draws near, you can almost smell the sweat on the brows of Republicans.

The mere thought of easy access to affordable health insurance terrifies them so much, Republicans are planning a government shutdown to try to stop it.

What is so horrible about Obamacare that Republicans are willing to punish millions of Americans with a government shutdown?

Find out here

Image: Barackobama.com

Gabrielle Giffords blasts senate Republicans for filibuster of gun safety bill

Former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords wrote a scathing op-ed in the New York Times on Thursday, after Republicans in the senate successfully filibustered new gun safety legislation.

Giffords wrote: “I’m furious. I will not rest until we have righted the wrong these senators have done, and until we have changed our laws so we can look parents in the face and say: We are trying to keep your children safe. We cannot allow the status quo — desperately protected by the gun lobby so that they can make more money by spreading fear and misinformation — to go on.”

Just days ago, it looked as though senate Democrats had the votes to overcome the GOP filibuster on gun buyer background checks. But hopes for action died on Wednesday when there were only 54 votes in favor of the bill, 6 votes shy of the 60 needed to break the filibuster.

Click here to read the full story

Recommended links:

GOP lawmakers defend NRA after massacre of 20 children

Wayne LaPierre: Guns are for Armageddon and 'fun'

Gun control wars: Is the Sandy Hook massacre enough to fight the NRA?

How Bible-thumping works for the Republican propaganda machine

 

Income inequality may be here to stay

Once an animal knows what it’s like to run free, it’s never happy to be tied up again.

That pretty much sums up the problem America faces when it comes to the growing wealth of the wealthy and the shrinking middle-class.

Former president Ronald Reagan began lengthening the leash of corporate America more than 3 decades ago. The most notable event is perhaps the breaking of the air traffic controllers union. The message sent was clear. Workers’ rights matter less than corporate profits.

So it began and so it continued with the presidents that followed.

Bill Clinton got rid of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, a law that kept commercial banks from using depositors’ funds for risky investments.

George W. Bush came in behind Clinton and cut even more of corporate America’s leash. Bush added a cookie on top, with two massive tax cuts that made the rich even richer, and ultimately exploded the US federal deficit.

In the years following multiple levels of deregulation on corporate America, income inequality has spread like a disease. Low wages and lack of opportunity are now trapping more than 50 million Americans in poverty.

When Barack Obama took office in 2009, he did little to repair what the previous administration had done to damage the middle-class. Although he was successful in lifting the Bush tax cuts on higher income Americans in 2013, it hasn’t changed the fundamentals of the economic disparity.

The Daily Beast notes, “Our national conversation now is dominated by the voices of the small, thriving minority…Perhaps the economy has been bad enough for long enough that its expiration date for news has expired, one more sign this terrible reality is the New Normal.”

To say that the rich have the American economic system rigged may be an understatement. In the 2009 documentary, “Capitalism, A Love Story,” award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore explains how to the collapse of the U.S. economy, brought on by  deregulated Wall Street greed, was a “financial coup d’état.”

Looking back at the taxpayer bailouts of America’s banking industry, it’s hard to refute Moore’s claims. The big winners in the years following the TARP bailouts have been the banks. JPMorgan and Wells Fargo, along with the rest America’s biggest banks, continue to post record profits.

The New York Times points out just how bad income inequality has gotten in the U.S.

“NEW statistics show an ever-more-startling divergence between the fortunes of the wealthy and everybody else….. 

In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year…went to the top 1 percent.”

Yet for American workers, opportunities for upward mobility continue to sink. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report issued on March 28, 2013, there are more jobs available in the U.S., but “average weekly wages declined.”

GOP Voter suppression laws growing at frightening pace

Voter suppression efforts led by Republican-controlled state legislatures are accelerating in the wake of  their 2012 GOP election losses. 

Some of the new laws require voter ID, but others involve financial penalties, like North Carolina Senate Bill S666, which among additional constitutionally illegal restrictions, eliminates tax deductions for the parents of students who register to vote. 

Indiana has also introduced a law aimed at banning college students from voting.

As in North Carolina, Indiana House Bill 1311 is in direct violation of the 1979 Supreme Court decision in Symm v. United States, which prohibits discrimination against college student voting rights.

New barriers to voting targeted at specific groups of people have become top priorities for Republican lawmakers in Iowa, Illinois, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Indiana, Kansas, Arizona, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Michigan, Idaho, South Dakota, Ohio, Nebraska, Maine, and dozens of other states.

Why are the Republicans in these states so worried about letting too many people vote without additional new restrictions? 

The most significant motivation for voter suppression relates to what Republicans have already done in states where they have a veto-proof monopoly of power. 

Many of the new policies solid “red state” lawmakers have enacted are broadly unpopular among Independents, Democrats, low income groups, seniors, students, Latinos, women, and disabled veterans. If Republicans can successfully block access to voting among these groups, they can escape viable threats to their reelection bids. This strategy combines election rigging with the destabilization of representative government law.

Why Americans need to be terrified of the Radical Republican Party

Gerrymandered redistricting  after the 2010 elections has made Republican lawmakers unresponsive to public objections to their drastic new policies. With no fear of backlash from the voting booth, the GOP has dictatorship-level control.

Drunk with power, solid Republican legislatures have been promoting laws that ignore or attempt to dismantle the US Constitution.

As recently as last week, the Arkansas Senate voted to reject the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution.

In the 2013-2014 session, 15 North Carolina Senate Republicans co-sponsored House Joint Resolution 494, which attempts to establish an official state religion. 

Such a law is a direct violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The  Bill of Rights  states that the government shall “make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

Is it even possible that such a large group of elected lawmakers do not know what’s in the Bill of Rights?

In Michigan, Republican Governor Rick Snyder, with the help of his GOP majority state legislators, created an “emergency manager” law in 2011 that gave the governor the power to completely eliminate representative democracy.

Emergency managers have since been used to strip cities and towns of their democratically elected officials in places including Benton Harbor, Detroit, and other cities. The unelected czar as unlimited power to break contracts, sell assets, and even dissolve the entire local government permanently if they so choose. 

A month after Michigan voters rejected the emergency manager law on the 2012 ballot, Gov. Snyder created it again and signed it into law. This time it included a provision to prevent voters from ever putting it on the ballot again.

If you think any of this sounds more like dictatorship than democracy, you are correct. 

By definition, a dictatorship is: 

“A form of government in which one person or a small group possesses absolute power without effective constitutional limitations. 

The term dictatorship comes from the Latin title dictator, which in the Roman Republic designated a temporary magistrate who was granted extraordinary powers in order to deal with state crises.”

Add together gerrymandering, attempts to overrule the Bill of Rights, blatant disregard for election results, plus voter suppression efforts spreading on a frightening scale, and it is impossible to dismiss the obvious. 

Republican states with majority control are carrying out an orchestrated assault on the founding principles of American democracy, freedom, and the documents that have bound them together for more than 250 years.

Sources and more info:

Voter Suppression is Back: Arkansas’ GOP-Led Legislature Passes Voter ID Law

ACLU of Iowa Restarts Its Voter Suppression Lawsuit Against the Iowa Secretary of State

Push to overturn Voting Rights Act tied to GOP voter suppression efforts

Sharpton Group Sues Against Michigan Emergency Management

Top North Carolina Republican Introduces Florida-Style Voter Suppression Bill