That Americans travel to India for affordable health care, but so many of the Indians can’t afford it.
Category: Class War
Comcastic
I am supposed to believe there is such a thing as real competition in this country. I just got off the phone with Comcast, telling them I wanted only the bare minimum of services, reduced from what I currently have.
I keep going through this exercise, and I keep forgetting how Kafkaesque the whole thing is: By cutting off premium and HD channels, I can save (wait for it) $1.89 a month. Wow.
No one ever believes me when I tell them, either. Comcast just threw in a $15 a month credit and free HBO and Showtime if I keep the same service for $2 more. This is some crazy shit.
UPDATE: Hello to all the visitors from Shakesville. I’m really enjoying your comments on this.
This is how to respond to bad laws
“The single biggest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.”
That’s how yesterday’s Montreal protest is being described today. Hundreds of thousands red-shirted demonstrators defied Quebec’s new “anti-protest” law and marched through the streets of downtown Montreal filling the city with “rivers of red.”
Tuesday marked the 100th day of the growing student protests against austerity measures and tuition increases. In response to the spreading protests, the conservative Charest government passed a new “emergency” law last Friday – Bill 78.
Since Bill 78 passed, people in Montreal neighborhoods have appeared on their balconies and in front of their houses to defiantly bang pots and pans in a clanging protest every night at 8 p.m.
Bill 78 mandates:
Fines of between $1,000 and $5,000 for any individual who prevents someone from entering an educational institution or who participate in an illegal demonstration.
Penalties climb to between $7,000 and $35,000 for protest leaders and to between $25,000 and $125,000 for unions or student federations.
All fines DOUBLE for repeat offenders
Public demonstrations involving more than 50 people have to be flagged to authorities eight hours in advance, include itinerary, duration and time at which they are being held. The police may alter any of these elements and non-compliance would render the protest illegal.
Offering encouragement for someone to protest at a school, either tacitly or otherwise, is subject to punishment. The Minister of Education has said that this would include things like ‘tweeting’, ‘facebooking’, and has she has implied that wearing the student protest insignia (a red flag-pin) could also be subject to punishment.
No demonstration can be held within 50 meters of any school campus
Bill 78 not only “enraged civil libertarians and legal experts but also seems to have galvanized ordinary Quebecers.” Since the law passed Friday, people in Montreal neighborhoods have appeared on their balconies and in front of their houses to defiantly bang pots and pans in a clanging protest every night at 8 p.m.
The American injustice system
From Guardian UK:
The US criminal justice system is a broken machine that wrongfully convicts innocent people, sentencing thousands of people to prison or to death for the crimes of others, as a new study reveals. The University of Michigan law school and Northwestern University have compiled a new National Registry of Exonerations – a database of over 2,000 prisoners exonerated between 1989 and the present day, when DNA evidence has been widely used to clear the names of innocent people convicted of rape and murder…
Nancy, Nancy, Nancy
When Democrats try to be Republicans, the Republicans always win.
Suicide’s widow stilll fighting Wells Fargo
The big picture is disgusting — the fact that the Obama administration is letting the big banks get away with grand-scale fraud and harassment in foreclosure proceedings against millions of desperate homeowners. But the individual stories, including that of Norman and Oriane Rousseau, are infuriating. Norman, as you may have read, killed himself two weeks ago, at the point when the couple’s long battle against Wells Fargo seemed lost:
From The Raw Story:
[The story] began in May 2009, when Wachovia, now part of Wells Fargo, told the Rousseaus they had missed a mortgage payment on their home in Newbury Park, an hour outside Los Angeles.
Even though the Rousseaus had made the payment – and had the receipt to prove it – that kicked off a foreclosure process they were never able to escape, battling against the seemingly careless bureaucracy of a major American bank that eventually took their home…
…Wells Fargo still intends to evict Oriane, though it has temporarily suspended proceedings.
Read the whole story.
Austerians of the left
Why they do the greatest damage:
Progressive programs created the aspect of life we most enjoy and value as a people. They have proven to be spectacular successes. The people pushing austerity are the same people that hate progressive policies because their success falsifies their anti-government dogma. The austerian economists were the architects of the global financial crisis, the great depression of the European periphery, and the assault on the needy. They have proven wrong about every important issue. When moderates and progressives adopt the suicidal austerian policies of these architects of disaster they become the most destructive members of the austerian movement.
Taxmageddon
Watch the Thom Hartmann video, it’s quite informative. Don’t you love how this game is played? The temporary Bush tax cuts, the very same ones that helped ballooned the deficit to record levels, are about to expire and the Capitol Hill Chicken Littles are running around screaming “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” So letting them expire will throw the country into recession? For those of us outside the Village, how would we even know the difference? We’re already out of work, or working for peanuts.
Now, you realize where this is going: This is the scary story that’s supposed to provide cover for the usual suspects who want to make the Grand Bargain on Social Security. The Greek chorus is gathering, chanting about the “obvious” solutions (hint, hint). “We’ll let you have a little stimulus now, provided we can slash the hell out of your earned benefits later!”
And because this is a complicated idea, most people won’t understand, the librul media can’t explain because they’re too hooked on access to make waves, only a few reporters will bring up the idea of simply raising new revenue, and the hollowing of Social Security and Medicare will soon be a “bipartisan” victory. Don’t you love politics?
Tax hikes and spending cuts set to take effect in January would suck $607 billion out of the economy next year, plunging the nation at least briefly back into recession, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.
Unless lawmakers act, the economy is likely to contract in the first half of 2013 at an annualized rate of 1.3 percent, the CBO said, before returning to 2.3 percent growth later in the year.
Canceling those tax and spending policies would protect the recovery in the short run and encourage more vibrant growth, around 4.4 percent, in 2013, the CBO said. However, unless lawmakers adopt policies that would reduce budget deficits by a comparable amount down the road, the CBO said, the national debt would continue to climb, imperiling future economic growth.
The report, “Economic Effects of Reducing the Fiscal Restraint That Is Scheduled to Occur in 2013,” comes as policymakers are bracing for the most consequential battle over government tax and spending policies in years. The George W. Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire on Dec. 31, along with a payroll tax cut proposed by President Obama. Meanwhile, sharp cuts are scheduled to hit the Pentagon and other federal agencies to meet a deal cut during last summer’s showdown over the nation’s debt limit.
Anxiety is growing over how the impact of those tax and spending cuts would affect the nation’s economic recovery come January, when what’s been nicknamed “taxmageddon” hits. After the November election, a lame-duck Congress will have barely two months to resolve a grinding standoff over taxes and spending — a battle that brought the United States to the brink of default last summer.
The American dream
Lunchtime with George Carlin:
Bless their thieving hearts!
When the Georgia legislature passed a private school scholarship program in 2008, lawmakers promoted it as a way to give poor children the same education choices as the wealthy.
The program would be supported by donations to nonprofit scholarship groups, and Georgians who contributed would receive dollar-for-dollar tax credits, up to $2,500 a couple. The intent was that money otherwise due to the Georgia treasury — about $50 million a year — would be used instead to help needy students escape struggling public schools.
That was the idea, at least. But parents meeting at Gwinnett Christian Academy got a completely different story last year.
“A very small percentage of that money will be set aside for a needs-based scholarship fund,” Wyatt Bozeman, an administrator at the school near Atlanta, said during an informational session. “The rest of the money will be channeled to the family that raised it.”
A handout circulated at the meeting instructed families to donate, qualify for a tax credit and then apply for a scholarship for their own children, many of whom were already attending the school.
“If a student has friends, relatives or even corporations that pay Georgia income tax, all of those people can make a donation to that child’s school,” added an official with a scholarship group working with the school.
The exchange at Gwinnett Christian Academy, a recording of which was obtained by The New York Times, is just one example of how scholarship programs have been twisted to benefit private schools at the expense of the neediest children.