Wednesday, February 15th, 2012
SUZANNE GOLDENBERG, US Environment Correspondent - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: This is how the Deniers operate. Does it surprise you that the Koch brothers who are deeply involved with the nastiest, dirtiest carbon energy are bankrolling the small cadre of scientists willing to hire themselves out for money writing papers that confuse and obfuscate this critical issue?
Do you notice, by the way, that you very rarely hear climate change even being discussed on the cable news networks -- be they Social Progressives or Theocratic Rightists? Or that I found this in the U.K. on what is probably the newspaper with the highest integrity in the English speaking world. We are gliding into catastrophe while arguing contraception.
The inner workings of a libertarian thinktank working to discredit the established science on climate change have been exposed by a leak of confidential documents detailing its strategy and fundraising networks.
DeSmogBlog, which broke the story, said it had received the confidential documents from an ‘insider’ at the Heartland Institute, which is based in Chicago. The blog monitors industry efforts to discredit climate science.
The scheme includes spending $100,000 on commissioning an alternative curriculum for schoolchildren that will cast doubt on global warming.
It was not possible to immediately verify the authenticity of the documents. ‘There is nothing I can tell you,’ Jim Lakely, Heartland’s communications director, said in a telephone interview. ‘We are investigating what we have seen on the internet and we will have more to say in the morning.’ Lakely made no attempt to deny the veracity of information contained in the documents.
The Heartland Institute, founded in 1984, has built a reputation over the years for providing a forum for climate change deniers. But it is especially known for hosting a series of lavish conferences of climate science doubters at expensive hotels at New York’s Time Square as well as in Washington DC.
If authentic the documents provide an intriguing glimpse […]
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Wednesday, February 15th, 2012
Stephan: Not much rational is being said about healthcare, we are too deep in the Vagina Wars. But the Illness Profit System is shifting, as this report shows. Exactly how it will play out is not clear, but the game is afoot.
NEW YORK — NEXT month will see the second anniversary of Barack Obama’s health reform. It is unclear whether it will celebrate another. It could die at least two different deaths. The Supreme Court will hear arguments against the suit in late March; the court could throw out the law by July. If that doesn’t kill it, then a Republican could be elected president and scrap the law immediately after his inauguration. By that time, however, America’s health system may have already changed for good.
Nudged by the provisions of Mr Obama’s law, private-sector firms have been reforming themselves. Virtually every insurer and hospital is trying to make care better and more efficient. In many cases their reforms go well beyond the law itself. No-one, however, is staging a bigger experiment than UnitedHealth Group. This is partly because United is an insurance goliath. It had $102 billion in revenue last year and provided cover to more than 34m people, equivalent to the population of Canada. But it is also because it is unveiling particularly bold policies.
An insurer seems an unlikely crusader. United, in particular, has had a long, acrimonious relationship with hospitals. But given its heft, the company’s policies matter. […]
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Wednesday, February 15th, 2012
JOHANNES KORGE and FERRY BATZOGLOU, - Der Spiegel (Germany)
Stephan: This tragic story illustrates a powerful trend: the destruction of the middle class. The Greek story I think particularly important, and I am struck by its comparison with the story of Iceland, where the citizens said, No, we are not going to bail out the banks; we are not going to destroy our middle class. And despite pressure from governments and banks around the world they held true to this through two referendums. Today, just a few years later, Iceland is beginning to prosper again. In contrast Greece has been bullied into drinking the bitter medicine, and may take a generation or more to recover.
If this crisis has reached Piraeus, then it’s done a good job of hiding itself. Even on this cold February night, the luxury cars are lined up outside the chic, waterfront fish restaurants in this port suburb of Athens. But Leonidas Koutikas knows where to look. Not even 50 meters off the main promenade, around two corners, misery is everywhere. Koutikas finds a family of five living behind a tangled tent that has been attached to the wall of an apartment building.
Koutikas and his colleagues from the aid organization Klimaka are expected. They hand out their care packages here every night. ‘Each day the list of those in need gets longer,’ Koutikas says. He speaks from experience. Until recently, the 48-year-old was sleeping on the streets himself.
Athens has always had a problem with homelessness, like any other major city. But the financial and debt crises have led poverty to slowly but surely grow out of control here. In 2011, there were 20 percent more registered homeless people than the year before. Depending on the season, that number can be as high as 25,000. The soup kitchens in Athens are complaining of record demand, with 15 percent more people in need […]
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Tuesday, February 14th, 2012
KAREN M. CHEUNG, - Fierce Healthcare
Stephan: This really surprised me. You would think that the great teaching hospitals would lead the way in safety. Sadly, as this study found that isn't true. The Illness Profit System's failures just keep mounting. Yet no one seems willing to take on the relevant issue -- a healthcare system must be built around wellness not profit.
When you pick a hospital you might keep this in mind.
Not surprisingly this report got virtually no coverage by corporate media. And this one report that I could find is, as you can see, strongly biased in support of the IPS.
Some of the leading teaching hospitals are taking issue with public Medicare data that points to such institutions, including Cleveland Clinic, Geisinger Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital, as poor patient safety performers, Kaiser Health News and The Boston Globe reported.
Major teaching hospitals are 10 times more likely to have serious complications, according to the KHN analysis. Thirty-one percent of major teaching hospitals have serious complications that are worse than the national average, while only 4 percent of non-teaching hospitals do, according to Hospital Compare and the Association of American Medical Colleges.
However, some institutions disagree with Medicare’s safety rankings, arguing the measurements are skewed.
Shannon Phillips, a quality and patient safety officer at The Cleveland Clinic, said its high rates of accidental tears and lacerations and serious blood clots come from thorough documentation rather than poor care. ‘People are careful at documenting, almost to a fault, things that are incidental to the case,’ Phillips said.
This isn’t the first time teaching hospitals have ended up at the bottom of the patient safety performance list. Consumer Reports last summer revealed that renowned teaching hospitals did not perform well in preventing bloodstream infections with high rates of such infections.
Dr. Ira Nash, chief medical officer […]
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Tuesday, February 14th, 2012
Stephan: Yet further information describing how the legalized bribery of Citizens United and the Theocratic Right's The American Legislative Exchange Council are destroying American democracy.
It is no coincidence that so many state legislatures have spent the last year taking the same destructive actions: making it harder for minorities and other groups that support Democrats to vote, obstructing health care reform, weakening environmental regulations and breaking the spines of public- and private-sector unions. All of these efforts are being backed - in some cases, orchestrated - by a little-known conservative organization financed by millions of corporate dollars.
The American Legislative Exchange Council was founded in 1973 by the right-wing activist Paul Weyrich; its big funders include Exxon Mobil, the Olin and Scaife families and foundations tied to Koch Industries. Many of the largest corporations are represented on its board.
ALEC has written model legislation on a host of subjects dear to corporate and conservative interests, and supporting lawmakers have introduced these bills in dozens of states. A recent study of the group’s impact in Virginia showed that more than 50 of its bills were introduced there, many practically word for word. The study, by the liberal group ProgressVA, found that ALEC had been involved in writing bills that would:
¶Prohibit penalizing residents for failing to obtain health insurance, undermining the individual mandate in the reform law. The bill, […]
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