Thursday, August 27, 2009

Ted Kennedy Makes Case for National Health Care

From DemocracyNow.org:

Senator Edward Kennedy makes his case for National Health Care in address he made April 2009.

His remarks start at about 21:43 minutes into the clip.

I heart DemocracyNow !

Also see ShantyWorld.com 's Semi-Big List of Info on Health Care Reform.

Posted via web from ShantyWorld2

Friday, August 21, 2009

HealthCare Reform Info & Graphics

ShantyWorld.com Resources in Support of National Health Care Reform.

ShantyWorld has joined some Flickr groups posting Signs and Graphics related to supporting Health Care Reform for Americans.

Health Care Reform Graphics [slideshow]








The Graphics are "postcardware", so we would prefer if you download images, you send us a note and/or photo of you using your sign. (45 Mil Image from FreeStylee on Flickr.)

Image files can be printed out up to 11x17 inches with very good clarity. (Anything larger than that might get more blurred results.)

You can take or email the image to a local copy print shop. Places like Office Max, Kinkos, Office Depot etc., print 11x17 color prints for about $1.49. Laminating adds another $2 in most copy shops. So, for about $3.49 you can get a YARD SIGN in support of Health Care for America. If you have any architect, engineer or graphics friends, their plotters can probably spit out some copies. Images are 300dpi, so 17x22 might print out OK at your local BluePrint/ Large Format copy shop.

Get informed about the facts, before you listen to any of the talking heads on TV or radio.

For more info on the National Health Care Debate, check out these sites:

Sick for Profit - 6 of the CEOS of the largest Health Care Insurance Companies earned more than $1.5 BILLION dollars in personal compensation in the last 5 years. That's money used to deny claims for life saving treatment. Money used to make record profits the last 5 years. 33 cents of every dollar you spend on premiums, goes toward Insurance company profits, so Insurance execs can ride private jets with gold trim china. You don't really know if you have insurance until you are forced to try to use it for a major illness or accident.

HOW FIVE CAPITALIST DEMOCRATIC NATIONS PAY For NATIONAL HEALTH CARE and WHY IT WORKS. "Sick Around the World", From PBS' Frontline series. [video] In-depth view of how other Democratic Nations have solved providing National Health Care for its Citizens. It makes the other nations (and their businesses) more competitive internationally. Health Care Reform is a National Security Issue as well. The Health of our nation's Economy depends on it. We can not be competitive with other nations if we have a sick population nor can we be competitive if our businesses are handcuffed by rising health care costs. (Click on the link above to watch the FULL PBS PROGRAM.)


Proposed Health Reform Consumer Protection Provisions - A MUST READ for anyone who has ever been hassled by an Insurance Company about a claim.

Health Care for America Now - Advocacy Group

The WhiteHouse's Position on Health Care Reform - http://www.healthreform.gov/

Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) - http://www.pnhp.org/

Read the Actual Text of the U.S. National Health Care Act (H.R. 676). Don't take the word of some talking head. Read the Bill for Yourself. (Note these are preliminary, as the Senate and House bills will be refined before any final legislation will be voted on by the entire Congress.)

Former CIGNA Insurance Executive Wendell Potter discusses with PBS Journalist Bill Moyers how the Insurance Companies deny your claims so they can turn a profit- a profit used to pay high executive salaries, pay for private jets and gold china. Insurance gets rich while your friends and family get sicker and die due to denied claims. [video]

Watch the Moyer Video with Wendell Potter - potter2.m4v

10 Reasons to Support Single Payer - from National Nurses Organizing Committee (PDF immediate download link) - http://ow.ly/kzbX

SICKO Facts on How Americans are being abused by Insurance Companies - from Documentary Filmmaker Michael Moore. His BIG LIST OF FACTS and resources on National Health Care and how the USA compares (poorly) to other Democratic Nations.

Minn Nurses Association Supports National Health Plan -

AFL-CIO , SEIU and other Labor organizations Support National Health Care Plan so that American Business can compete internationally with companies who don't have the financial burden of paying for Health Care costs for their workers.

Health Care Now - http://www.healthcare-now.org/

Contact Congress (House & Senate) - It only takes about 3 minutes. Really. Tell them how you feel about How you are Treated by the Health Insurance Companies. Can you afford health care? Can your friends / family ? One person files bankruptcy per minute in America due to Health Costs.

National Health Care - What is It? How is it Different? What Happens? FAQ - Physicians for National Health Program

Health Reform FLYERS & Signs - from http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/healthreformfliers

NATIONAL HEALTH CARE IS A MORAL ISSUE. America has a PAY or DIE Class system of Health Care. You shouldn't have to be wealthy in order to be able to receive quality health care. Americans should not die from preventable illnesses because they couldn't afford the co-pay, their deductible or were afraid if they tried to file a claim, for fear they would be cancelled by their insurance company. Emergency Room care is a strategy to kill poor people. PAY or DIE Health Care is an immoral policy.

Images are not for commercial use nor resale. All Rights Reserved.

©ShantyWorld.com 2009

Posted via web from ShantyWorld

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Deather Hate Mobs Mirror White Mobs of Segregated 1950s

The Hate Speech and batant racism is growing with each passing week since President Obama has taken office. I remember telling people before the 2008 election, that should Obama get into office, the fringe but vocal part of racist America would become agitated, and would resort to threats, violence, harassment, and old-fashioned American hate not unlike the mobs we saw during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 60s in America.

What's old is new again.

Of course, hate and racism wasn't new to the 1950's. America was founded on a system of slavery-- a system many white families and corporations still benefit from today. As I work for advocacy of reforming an unjust and immoral Die or Pay [anti] American Health System in America, the threats on my various social media accounts grows. For those of us who knew Obama's election was in no way a signal of the end of racism, it just confirmed to those are grounded in reality that in spite of the advances America has made in electing Obama, the nation still has a very long way to go in the culture divide. One only has to look at the hate mail received by all progressive bloggers (myself included) to see how widespread racism is in America. We have the recent events of the Holocaust Museum murders, the murder of Dr. Tiller (who performed legal medical procedures), the false & racist arrest of Harvard Professor H.L. "Skip" Gates, the racist attacks by GOP Senators on Justice Sonia Sotomayor (during her hearing) and any number of thousands of attacks per day on progressive bloggers as proof. While a well-known Black Harvard Professor is arrested for daring to rightfully, legally demand (in his own home) I.D. from an officer, a (formerly) unknown white working class man wears a loaded gun to a Presidential event in New Hampshire (8/11/09) but isn't even arrested. (Of course now, the Secret Service & FBI will be sure to tail that guy until he dies.) Arrest disparities between whites and people of color aren't new either. Racial profiling that adversely, unjustly & disproportionately affects people of color, is an unacknowledged (unearned) benefit that white Americans routinely ignore, shrug-off.

This kind of culture war has not gone unnoticed among conscientious, supporters of democracy. The hate mobs of New Hampshire and Missouri, Pennsylvania etc., are reminiscent of the Bull Connor style hate mobs of the 1950s and 60s. See the full Spike Lee Documentary "4 Little Girls" -- a true story of 4 Black girls killed by racist whites in Birmingham, Alabama. The hate mobs remind me of the Birther, Deather mobs today. See the hate in their faces.

From Amanda Marcotte of rhRealityCheck.org

Last week, when I wrote about the birther phenomenon and its parallels to the anti-choice movement, the phenomenon was still largely relegated to email lists and mainstream media interviews with wide-eyed conspiracy theorists. It was alarming because it's so widespread and so obviously rooted in a need to express racist contempt towards Barack Obama and his parents' interracial relationship, but it didn't seem like it would grow much bigger. Well, obviously I didn't draw a strong enough parallel between the birthers and the anti-choice movement. If I'd been paying attention to my own ideas, I would have realized that as anti-choicers' frustration with their daily lack of control over women's bodies erupts into violence, so too would birther frustration over the perceived loss of control over the reins of power enjoyed by white people for the entirety of our nation's history.

There's not a formal link between the birther conspiracy theory and the mobs that are trying to shut down discussion about health care reform--and not-so-subtly sending the signal that they are flirting with resorting to violence in order to stop it--but it's not a coincidence that the birther energy rolled up into this mob scene, or that the leaders pushing the birther line are also encouraging mobs of right wingers to shut down town halls by being disruptive. Unsurprisingly, these mobs have turned violent, something anyone who's dealt with the anti-choice protestors could have told you was inevitable. Right wing mobs have broken out in violence in Tampa, FL and St. Louis, MO. Journalists, union activists, and Democrats, who are the perennial favorite villains of right wing talk radio, seem to be favorite targets for violence and threats.

Looking back over the timeline of the growing volume in birther conspiracy theories that rolled up into mobs threatening and delivering violence, it's easy enough to see what instigating issue activated the right wing, furious about its loss of power. Oh, they've been angry and right wing violence has been on the rise, with domestic terrorism incidents that include the murder of Dr. George Tiller. But there's organization and momentum where there wasn't much before, and as Sara Robinson points out, the leadership has been more overtly enabling and cheerleading conspiracy theorists and right wing disruption mobs than they have before - all in the service of hamstringing health care reform.

4 Little Girls (1997, 102 minutes, Full movie), by Director Spike Lee -

Notice the footage of the hate mobs at 21-50 mins into the film. "Keep Your Eye on the Prize. Hold On, Hold On".

However, the hate mobs -- and they are irrational mobs, are now feeling emboldened by hate speech from an enabling institutional hate culture. It's a culture defined by people who enjoy a first amendment right to lie about facts in front of TV cameras. US GOP Senators (Sessions, Kyl, Hatch, Coburn, Cornyn), lunatic TV Entertainers like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity (masquerading as journalists on the right-wing propaganda mill Fox network) and quitter Sara Palin routinely encourage and stir-up an under-educated demographic pre-disposed to vote against their own economic interests in favor of a corporate led class system that exploits poor & middle class whites too.

The same hate culture is fearful that in a truly diverse democracy (signaled by Obama's election and a growing Latino population), perhaps people of color (in power positions) will treat white people in America they way many whites have (directly or indirectly) treated people of color the last 400 plus years. That is their fear. Perhpas their fear is warranted, unless there is some kind of national reconciliation.

The Reagan, Bush (41 & 43), and even the Clinton administrations already took away the hate mobs (& the middle class') livable wage, busted unions that allowed the present day Deathers to live a middle-class lifestyle, and permitted said past GOP admins to open the doors to Free-Trade that lost millions of American middle-class jobs to overseas --- perhaps lost forever. Profits in the 1980s & 90s were privatized and now the corporate losses (born of corporate excess and greed) have been socialized (to the American taxpayers.). These same Deathers like to ignore it was Bush's Treasuray Secretary who socialized the wall Street losses, so his investment banker friends wouldn't lose their wealth. The financial debacle the USA now finds itself in was not Obama's doing -- no matter how much you yell and scream racist epithets. Much of the financial groundwork for destruction was laid before Obama even entered into politics. The hate mobs' anger is misplaced, but they're too stupid to know it, or too racist to acknowledge it. Maybe both.

If the haters get laid-off from their jobs, their factories because American companies can't compete with the lower overhead enjoyed by foreign companies, they seem unable --not just unwilling, to recognize how they too are being disposed of by the wealth & corporate classes.

The cost of health insurance, medical costs in other industrialized Democracies are spread more fairly between private citizens and public investment. These other Democratic nations band together (as a nation) sharing the costs among nearly all citizens, which results in lower costs to everyone. All these Birther fools are too stupid to realize their precious health insurance currently won't pay when they file a claim for a serious ailment. You won't know how bad your insurance is until you need it for a life and death treatment. These same Deather fools opposed to national health insurance ALREADY pay for all the expensive emergency care for the un-insured via their premiums which have more than tripled the last 10 years. (Example for the mentally impaired: you fools also pay the higher cost of retail goods because there are people who shop-lift. The cost is already passed onto you, and to everyone via the retail price.)

The USA can lower everyone's cost for Health Insurance, by spreading the cost also to those who aren't paying health insurance presently. Nearly everyone needs to pay in for the system to work. (Umm, that is the basic principle of ALL types of insurance: spread the risk among as many as possible, so as to minimize the individual, private cost to everyone.) That fact isn't left or right, it's a basic truth. No amount of yelling, or racist name calling, or shotgun buying will change those facts. BTW, your violence won't stand either, because history also shows us you are (already) out numbered.

You can either band together with your fellow Americans to keep the country strong. Or you can continue your hateful ways, dividing & weakening the country-- placing it at risk to be dominated by a larger, expanding, richer China. Change is coming. Being racist won't help you -- not now, not later.

Posted via web from ShantyWorld

Angry white Man Rips Rosa Parks Poster from Woman at Town Hall

From the YouTube Site: BluePearOnline -

Mainstream media kept running image of a Black Woman being hauled out of Sen. Claire McCaskills' Town Hoall meeting 8/11/09.

But what the media NEVER reported is that the Black woman was sitting quietly in her seat, when a white man walked over and snatched her poster, ripped it to shreds and that is what provoked the commotion.  The white man was charged with assault but the woman was portrayed in the Media as the hooligan.

HATE. Is this the legacy you want to promote (by not getting involved in civic issues?)

The largely white audience assumes the Black woman is a protester who started the commotion.

The video tells a very different story.

source: HuffingtonPost.com and [YouTube user:]  BluePearOnline 

 

Posted via web from ShantyWorld