MEGAN O'NEIL, - Bloomberg
Stephan: We send our representatives and senators to act on behalf of the best interests of the people they represent. They don't do that, as any SR reader knows. The level of corruption would embarrass a banana republic. But what is not generally known is how little they actually do accomplish. If there is a more feckless legislative body in the world I can't think of it. Big fancy historic buildings, lots of perks, excellent pay, lots of media. Virtually no substance.
The current U.S. Congress, facing a backlog of unfinished business and sliding approval ratings, is on pace to clear fewer bills than its predecessor — which had the least number of measures signed into the law since modern record keeping began in the 1940s.
Since the 113th Congress convened in January, the Senate has been in session 80 days and the House 84 days. Lawmakers passed 15 bills that were then signed by the president. That’s eight fewer than in the first six months of the last Congress and 19 fewer than in the same stretch of the 111th Congress.
‘The 113th Congress is on track to be even less productive than the historic 112th Congress,
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Stephan: The War on Women by the Theocratic Right continues unabated. The only way to stop this is by voting these anti-women politicians out of office. Women ought to lobby to require all men seeking an erectile augmentation drug like Viagra to be forced to undergo an anal probe proctology exam.
Abortion restrictions are popping up everywhere, it seems.
While activists and celebrities protest a bill in Texas, Ohio just enacted legislation of its own.
A thousand miles from Austin, Texas, Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich signed new restrictions Sunday night as part of a new state budget. Ohio will soon require that women receive ultrasounds before having abortions, and the state will ban public hospitals from having written agreements with abortion clinics to receive women for further care after they have elective abortions.
Those laws won’t take effect for 90 days, according to Kasich’s office.
But new laws, already passed and signed earlier this year, went into effect Monday in Alabama, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi and South Dakota. Another in Montana, and part of a law in Alabama, would have taken effect but were blocked by federal courts. All were passed by GOP-controlled state legislatures and signed by GOP governors.
Here’s what they do:
Alabama – HB 57: Starting Monday, women in Alabama aren’t able to obtain ‘abortion pills
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MARK VORPAHL, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: Oregon is an increasingly interesting state. You will remember the story I ran Friday about the state's new college funding policy. Here is an account of how Portland, one of the greenest cities in North America, pushed back from the nonsense austerity policies so beloved by the Right.
On June 20, Oregon’s Portland City Council unanimously voted to approve a budget that had been one of the most grassroots-contested examples of austerity in recent memory.
Weeks earlier, in a vote to approve the framework of this budget on May 29, the City Council’s long-maintained show of consensus was broken when Commissioner Amanda Fritz voted ‘No.’ (More on her vote later). However, by the final budget vote last Thursday she had been compelled to change her mind.
How has the 2013 budget developed? When the Portland Budget process began several months ago, newly elected Mayor Charlie Hales announced a $25 million deficit in the city’s General Fund. Each bureau was told to submit budgets with 10 percent cuts, signaling Hales’s determination to oversee mass lay-offs and the slashing or elimination of essential programs that many Portlanders have come to rely on.
This latest round of cuts promised to be the worst of several successive years of austerity measures. Each time city officials have told the public that ‘temporary’ sacrifices need to be made now to enable the economy to turn around tomorrow. Each time there was no turn-around and more cuts were, predictably, peddled the next year despite this economic ‘tonic’s’ miserable […]
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Stephan: Here is some good news and some bad news. More jobs were created, but they are generally low level jobs, and 53 per cent of adult Americans still don't have jobs. We cannot have a prosperous democracy when over half the adults don't have secure full-time employment.
The release of the June Jobs’ Report Friday was something of a relief for the markets. The Labor Department reported that the economy gained 195,000 jobs in June, which beat economists’ expectations. The Department also reported that the economy gained 70,000 more jobs in April and May than it originally estimated. The report, however, also provides clear evidence that the the nation is splitting into two; only 47% of Americans have a full-time job and those who don’t are finding it increasingly out of reach.
Of the 144 million Americans employed last month, only 116 million were working full-time. Friday’s report showed that 58.7% of the civilian adult population of 245 million was working last month. Only 47% of Americans, however, had a full-time job.
The market’s positive reaction to Friday’s report is another sign of how far our economic expectations have fallen. If today the same proportion of Americans worked as just a decade ago, there would by almost nine million more people working. Just in the last year, almost two million Americans have left the labor force. With a majority of the population not holding a full-time job, it isn’t surprising that economic growth has been so weak. […]
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SARAH KLIFF, - The Washington Post
Stephan: This is a very interesting piece that may have some impact on the catastrophically bad illness profit system that passes for healthcare in the U.S.. It is not the rational universal single-payer approach that most high technology societies use, but it is certainly better than what we have now.
n 2012, MedStar Health, like many large employers, struggled to keep up with rapidly rising health-care costs. For three years, the company held down premiums for its 19,000 employees by absorbing the increases itself.
Most employers would have had no choice but to raise premiums - in this case, by about $550 for a family - and cope with frustrated employees. MedStar, one of the Washington area’s largest health systems, saw another option.
It would launch its own health insurance plan, offering it first to its employees. Patients would be limited to MedStar-affiliated providers, and as a result, pay lower premiums. In time, MedStar could compete with the Aetnas and Blue Crosses of the world, offering insurance to the public.
‘By putting in the new health plan, we had the ability to give them an option that actually allowed savings,
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