Posts Tagged ‘single payer’
May Day Links, Not All of Them about May Day Exactly
* Is today the day Marty McFly arrives when he travels to the future?
* Jacob Remes on May Day from a year ago.
* Lost generation: on unemployment in Spain.
* A May Day Manifesto: Seven Principles for Adjuncts.
1. Increase the starting salary for a three-credit semester course to a minimum of $5,000 for all instructors in higher education.
2. Ensure academic freedom by providing progressively longer contracts for all contingent instructors who have proven themselves during an initial probationary period.
3. Provide health insurance for all instructors, either through their college’s health insurance system or through the Affordable Care Act.
4. Support the quality education of our students by providing their instructors with necessary office space, individual development support, telephones, email accounts and mail boxes.
5. Guarantee fair and equitable access to unemployment benefits when college instructors are not working.
6. Guarantee eligibility for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program to all college instructors who have taught for ten years, during which they were repaying their student loans.
7. With or without a time-in service requirement, allow all college teachers to vote and hold office in institutional governance, including faculty senates and academic departments.
* There were a few radical writers like Tom Paine who did use the word “democracy” from early on, but the first official use was by Jefferson and Madison when they founded the “Democratic Republican” party — which is clearly just some sort of PR trick, since Jefferson himself never uses the word “democracy” at all in his own writings. But the person who really transformed the language was Andrew Jackson. He ran as a “democrat” and it was so effective that over the course of the 1830s, everyone started calling themselves that. So basically the Republican system that was set up to contain democracy itself got renamed “Democracy.” Interview with David Graeber on Democracy in America.
* After Neoliberalism? The Kilburn Manifesto.
* Washington Post editorial urges the closing of Guantánamo.
For the prison to close, lawmakers would have to lift a ban on transferring prisoners to the United States. But it was good that Mr. Obama also pledged to “examine every option that we have administratively” — because there are steps he could take without Congress.
* US soldier not found alive after 44 years in Vietnam. Via the comments.
* Japan and Russia want to finally end World War II.
* Interesting interactive chart from the Guardian about violence in recent best-selling video games.
* Interactive infographic at the New York Times shows long-term Democratic hegemony (at least at the presidential level) given most demographic assumptions.
Friday
* Dolphins: smarter than you think!
* You know what they say: a socialist is just a conservative who has moved to Canada.
* The land of the free: Judge says it’s OK to use your seized phone to impersonate you and entrap your friends.
* 1009 variations on “Language X is essentially language Y under conditions Z.” Via Kottke. Watch out! There’s some weird racism mixed in among the good ones.
English is essentially the noise made by people who don’t believe you can use language but want your stuff handed over politely.
–John M. Ford
* And the Internet, once again, has won everything. Trust me on this.
Fourth of July-ish Links
* Your single chart that explains everything, academia edition:
* The student loan suicides. The graduates of 2012 are already dead. Every Article About Graduate Unemployment Ever.
* This is education in the neoliberal age: a quest not for success, but for survival. You ask what it is that will give your children ‘a better chance’. You find a dispassionately technocratic answer, based on the rigorous analysis of academic achievement data. You discount every factor that might make your children non-average, beginning with their attitudes and desires. While you’re at it, you put out of your mind the very idea of social relationships and of the social good. Remember: your children are drowning. It would be quite absurd at this time to wonder what your friends’ children, what their own friends are up to.
* “Yesterday—only the first day of the month—was hot enough to shatter 27 records and tie 24 others for the highest ever July temperatures. Here’s the whole last week:
Back to back 105 days in my beloved Durham. Are any scientists working on this trying to figure out what’s going on? Firsthand Accounts: Parts of WV, Ohio “Apocalypse” due to the Derecho. Colorado Wildfires Shutter Climate Lab. Get used to wildfires.
* All your preconceptions confirmed: 69 Politicians As They Were In High School.
* Libertarianism and the Workplace.
* Via Bitter Laughter, Reddit explains ACA. Another great piece from Amanda Marcotte that shows how fact-free right-wing opposition to Obamacare has been allowed to be: Questions for Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney and Other Opponents of Health Care Reform: Where Are Your Facts?
* As Supreme Court Affirms Patchwork U.S. Healthcare System, Vermont Pushes Ahead with Single Payer.
* The truth is out there: U.S. government lies about the existence of mermaids.
* And sometimes Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal gets it all right. Happy Fourth of July.
Freedom’s Just Another Word for 101,000 Preventable Deaths
If the U.S. health care system performed as well as those of those top three countries, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the United States per year, according to researchers writing in the journal Health Affairs.
Occupy Wednesday
* The Occupy Oakland general strike seems to have been really pretty amazingly successful. The view from Twitter. Another. And here’s Matt’s picture again, having gone viral through me by way of @zunguzungu and @rortybomb. Half those pageviews are rightfully mine, Matt!
* General strikes in U.S. history.
* Arguments not taken seriously that should be: A federal court is being asked to grant constitutional rights to five killer whales who perform at marine parks — an unprecedented and perhaps quixotic legal action that is nonetheless likely to stoke an ongoing, intense debate at America’s law schools over expansion of animal rights.
* When advertising works too well: the strange case of Axe Body Spray.
* Women hold slightly more than half (52.3 percent) of creative class jobs and their average level of education is almost the same as men. But the pay they receive is anything but equal. Creative class men earn an average of $82,009 versus $48,077 for creative class women. This $33,932 gap is a staggering 70 percent of the average female creative class salary. Even when we control for hours worked and education in a regression analysis, creative class men out-earn creative class women by a sizable $23,700, or 49.2 percent.
* Legal Pain Killers Killed 15,000 People In 2008, Marijuana Likely Killed Zero.
* New Report Finds Vermont Could Save As Much As $1.8 Billion By 2020 From Shifting To Single Payer.
* Legendary Glenn Beck sponsor Goldline charged with fraud.
* Jon Corzine’s new firm likely to soon be charged with fraud. My father reminded me today that one universe over Jon Corzine never got in a horrific car accident as a result of his state police driver texting on the highway—which means he’s still the governor of New Jersey, which means he’s cruising towards a run for the presidency in 2016. In this universe he’s probably going to go to jail. It’s hard to think of another public figure whose life has hinged so completely on such a fluke event.
* In thirty years, college tuition has tripled.
* The worst part of the catastrophic implosion of the Hermain Cain candidacy is that he was the only one with a chance of stopping China from getting the bomb. None of the other candidates are even talking about this issue.
* And J.K. reveals she wanted to kill off Hagrid, too. You fiend!
Monday Night Links
* “The Foundation Movie Inches Closer to Being the Worst Film Ever Made.”
* Jesse LaGreca, a member of the Occupy Wall Street protests, talks to Fox News.
* Michael Lewis on debt, Vallejo, and the coming California disaster.
Crane is a lifelong Democrat with no particular hostility to government. But the more he looked into the details, the more shocking he found them to be. In 2010, for instance, the state spent $6 billion on fewer than 30,000 guards and other prison-system employees. A prison guard who started his career at the age of 45 could retire after five years with a pension that very nearly equaled his former salary. The head parole psychiatrist for the California prison system was the state’s highest-paid public employee; in 2010 he’d made $838,706. The same fiscal year that the state spent $6 billion on prisons, it had invested just $4.7 billion in its higher education—that is, 33 campuses with 670,000 students. Over the past 30 years the state’s share of the budget for the University of California has fallen from 30 percent to 11 percent, and it is about to fall a lot more. In 1980 a Cal student paid $776 a year in tuition; in 2011 he pays $13,218. Everywhere you turn, the long-term future of the state is being sacrificed.
* There was a moment during the 2008 convention that I thought Brian Schweitzer might be the Democrats’ best candidate for 2016. I’m starting to maybe feel that way again.
* Baby pictures of famous authors.
* Having a Facebook account means the boss is always watching, even before you’re hired.
* And Think Progress goes inside the denial-industrial complex.
Friday Morning Links
* Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 has a cover and a description.
The year is 2313. Scientific and technological advances have opened gateways to an extraordinary future. Earth is no longer humanity’s only home; new habitats have been created throughout the solar system on moons, planets, and in between. But in this year, 2312, a sequence of events will force humanity to confront its past, its present, and its future.
I know just a little bit about this and I’m really looking forward to it.
* Anwar al-Awlaki has been killed in a drone attack. Is the war over yet?
* The headline reads, “Canadian Arctic nearly loses entire ice shelf.”
* The Many Successes of Occupy Wall Street.
* The plan is working! First Vermont, now Montana: Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D-MT) announced yesterday that he will be seeking a waiver to set up his own universal health care system in his state modeled after the single payer Canadian health care system that began in the province of Saskatchewan.
* Krugman on the obsessive search for some reason not to fight mass unemployment:
Just to reiterate a point I’ve made before, none of this reflects actual economic theory. Throughout this crisis, people like Adam Posen and yours truly have been basing our arguments on standard textbook macroeconomics, whereas the Very Serious People have been making up stories on the fly to justify their calls for pain. As Wolf, who really seems to have eaten his Wheetabix, puts it,
The waste is more than unnecessary; it is cruel. Sadists seem to revel in that cruelty. Sane people should reject it. It is wrong, intellectually and morally.
And this cruelty rules our world.
* And the New York Times games Obama 2012, saying the new threshold states are not Ohio and Florida but Colorado and Virginia.
Friday Everything
* Ralph Nader has found an awesome new way to troll the nation: he will campaign to kill athletic scholarships.
* Fox has renewed Fringe. This is great news—but I still haven’t forgive them for Firefly.
* Vermont’s not green, it’s red: Vermot House passes single-payer health care bill. It’s also expected to pass the state senate, too, which means things are about to get very interesting.
* I haven’t put up anything about Fukushima in a while, but suffice it to say things still sound very bad. (UPDATE: More here.) Nuclear power advocates—who I seem to recall assuring me that nothing bad could possibly happen at Fukushima because of updated, failsafe reactor designs—have now begun assuring me that what happened at Fukushima could never happen again because of updated, failsafe reactor designs. Okay, that ship turned out to be sinkable. But this one…
* Great moments in abuse of power: A deputy prosector in Johnson County, Indiana, has resigned his job after it was revealed that in February, during the large protests in Wisconsin over Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-public employee union bill, he e-mailed Walker’s office and recommended that they conduct a “false flag operation” — to fake an assault or assassination attempt on Walker in order to discredit the unions and protesters. Josh Marshall catches the most interesting angle: “the fact that he lists his 18 years of experience working in GOP politics as his experience for doing this sort of stuff.”
* Cheating scandal in the game of kings.
* Incomprehensible Shouting Named Official U.S. Language. It drives me crazy when people don’t speak it.
* And from Inside Higher Ed: Who’s in your fantasy research institute this season?
