MicroHawk's NewsScan

The Way to "Save" Medicare Is to Expand It

Medicare is broken. Medicare spending is out of control. Medicare will go bankrupt in 2024. If we don't act soon, Medicare will bankrupt the entire country.

Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong.

The whole US health care system is broken, but Medicare isn't what broke it. Medicare is the glue that holds it together. Without Medicare, the whole system would have collapsed long ago.

via truth-out.org

Fracking Fatalities: Organized Labor Implores Federal Agencies to Stop the Killings - Working In These Times

As hydraulic fracturing—aka, "fracking"—has become a more common way to extract natural gas from underneath the United States, employment in the natural gas industry has expanded dramatically. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 2003-2008 there was a 62-percent increase in the number of workers employed in the oil and natural gas industries in the United States. During this same period, the number of fatalities in the industries grew by 41 percent.

via inthesetimes.com

Banyan: The Fukushima black box | The Economist

A dangerous lack of urgency in drawing lessons from Japan’s nuclear disaster

via www.economist.com

JAPAN: Mothers Rise Against Nuclear Power - IPS ipsnews.net

Japan’s nuclear power industry, which once ignored opposition, now finds its existence threatened by women angered by official opaqueness on radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant after it was struck by an earthquake- driven tsunami on Mar. 11.

via ipsnews.net

The Champion of Painkillers - ProPublica

Very important ProPublica articles on corporate ties to health care practices. See excerpt and another link below:

The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared the overdoses from opioid drugs like OxyContin an "epidemic." [3] And a growing group of experts doubts that they work for long-term pain.

But the pills continue to have an influential champion in the American Pain Foundation, which describes itself as the nation's largest advocacy group for pain patients. Its message: The risk of addiction is overblown, and the drugs are underused.

What the nonprofit doesn't highlight is the money behind that message.

via www.propublica.org

 

Both of these links are from an indepth investigative series at ProPublica, Dollars for Doctors.

See also: Two Leaders in Pain Treatment Have Long Ties to Drug Industry

 

 

Japan 'scared' of telling truth to Fukushima evacuees - ABC Sydney - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Former special adviser to Japan's prime minister and cabinet Kenichi Matsumoto has told the ABC that the government has known for months that many who live close to the Fukushima plant will not be able to return to their homes for 10 to 20 years because of contamination.

via www.abc.net.au

NYC Cops to Get More Powerful Tasers « SpeakEasy

I can always count on digby to keep me up to date on taser news. I think we share concerns about tasers on a couple of fronts.

For me, there's a question of how many people who are allowed to carry these things have enough emotional maturity to use them. Second, I think it's amazingly arrogant that anyone could say tasers are safe enough for anyone to use against another human being. The science and technology behind these weapons of mass disruption has -- as near as I can tell -- totally ignored the idea that life (and health) is ultimately about energy and frequency.

Some years ago I came across the idea that electroconvulsive therapy (electroshock, or "shock treatment") is dangerous because any energy going into the body knocks more subtle life processes (for example, subtle energy bodies, chakra systems) out of alignment. This misalignment -- in some models of health and healing -- is considered a cause of illness. There's plenty of evidence for this, though much of it is denied or disputed by those whose power, control or greed give reason for it not to be so.

Not only is this a health justice issue: as long as people of color are unjustly targeted by justice and mental health systems, it is also a matter of social injustice.

This is why I, as a mental health professional, oppose any use of shock treatment and tasers. Here's an excerpt from digby's post (read the whole thing here):

It’s time for a heart to heart talk. If you are confronted by a police officer give yourself up immediately, do nothing at all to make him angry or believe that you are being uncooperative. Don’t argue or fail in any way to follow his orders to the letter. They have permission to electrocute you for any reason and nobody will do anything about it. You have no rights in practice, only in theory, as long as this is true.

via blogs.alternet.org

"Yellow Dirt": Radioactive reservation - Laura Miller - Salon.com

The shocking story of how industry and government poisoned and then abandoned the Navajo Nation

In the summer of 1979, an earthen dam over the town of Church Rock, New Mexico, broke, flooding the arroyo below and then the bed of the Rio Puerco (an intermittent stream) on the southern border of the Navajo Nation. It was a small flood, but a dangerous one. It burned the feet of a boy who stepped into it, and caused sheep and crops along the banks to drop dead. That's because the pond it came from had been used by a nearby uranium mine to store the tailings (residue) of its excavations -- the water kept the radioactive dust from blowing away. The 93 million gallons of contaminated water that poured into the Rio Puerco remains the largest accidental release of radioactive material in U.S. history, bigger than the notorious Three Mile Island reactor meltdown that occurred 14 weeks later.

via www.salon.com