Reuters asked me for a quick take, thought you might want to read it.
Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
Reuters asked me for a quick take, thought you might want to read it.
A for-profit health company bought by Bain -- that Romney profits from -- has exploded in size and tales of neglect.....
SALON - (My note: the top of the Salon page has picture of 6 dead clients from CRC centers, including 14 year old Brendan Blum "already stiff with rigor mortis" when his body was found at Utah's Youth Care, owned by Aspen, owned by CRC Health Group, owned by Bain Capital various offshore entities.)
(on Brendan Blum) "They never telephoned the on-call nurse and waited until nearly 2 a.m. to contact the on-call supervisor, only to leave a voicemail. There was little else they felt they could do — Youth Care’s protocol on emergency services meant they were too low on the totem pole to call 911 themselves."
.....(Romney) has reported at least $300,000 to $1.2 million, if not more, in fluctuating annual earnings from Bain Capital VIII, the convoluted $3.5 billion array of related funds that owns both name-brand companies such as Dunkin’ Donuts and the lesser-known CRC Health Group. Most of these funds were made more attractive to privileged investors by being registered in the Cayman Islands tax haven.....on CRC’s board, two......gave a total of half a million dollars to Restore Our Future, the super PAC supporting Romney......
...When patients face a medical crisis, ambulances are usually not summoned. Instead, “techs,” whose emergency training, the former employees say, is generally limited to a two-hour CPR course, are ordered by supervisors to use a van lacking medical equipment to drive patients to the emergency room......The tactic, say former employees, helps prevent the facility from being flagged in the 911 system....California’s Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, for example, has never investigated the deaths of nearly 200 patients over five years at CRC’s 12 outpatient methadone clinics.........“The programs have experienced the reality that there are no consequences if anyone dies”
Meanwhile, Ann Romney has said that she would make helping troubled teens a top priority as first lady...CRC is roaring ahead with an expanded sales force; Eckert, the CEO, told investors in May, “We now have [sales] coverage in every major metropolitan area in the United States.”.....
Picture 11 miles of smoothly paved bike path meandering through the countryside. Largely uninterrupted by roads or intersections, it passes fields, backyards, chirping birds, a lake, some ducks and, at every mile, an air pump.
For some Danes, this is the morning commute.
Susan Nielsen, a 59-year-old schoolteacher, was one of a handful of people taking advantage of Denmark’s first “superhighway” for bicycles on a recent morning, about halfway between Copenhagen and Albertslund, a suburb, which is the highway’s endpoint. “I’m very glad because of the better pavement,” said Ms. Nielsen, who wore a rain jacket and carried a pair of pants in a backpack to put on after her 40-minute commute.
The cycle superhighway, which opened in April, is the first of 26 routes scheduled to be built to encourage more people to commute to and from Copenhagen by bicycle. More bike path than the Interstate its name suggests, it is the brainchild of city planners who were looking for ways to increase bicycle use in a place where half of the residents already bike to work or to school every day.
I had recently taken a position at an Ivy League institution when another junior faculty member showed me a micrograph of a macrophage containing intracellular bacteria. I immediately noticed an electron-dense material near the bacterial cells, which I suspected might be actin filaments of the host cell. I agreed to test this hypothesis, and using a fluorescent actin stain, found that, indeed, many of the bacterial cells had actin filaments on one pole. “Could this bacterium be harnessing the host’s actin to move within cells?” I wondered aloud to my colleague.
A month later I brought additional data confirming my findings to my collaborator’s office, where I noticed a paper on his desk with the bacterium’s name and actin in the title. He and a senior professor were listed as the authors, but I was not. “Where’s my name?” I asked. He noted that he and this senior professor had decided to perform their own electron microscopy studies, and were submitting their findings to a prestigious journal. “You’re welcome to publish your work separately,” he suggested.
Despite the fact that he and I had initially discovered the association between this bacterium and actin filaments, because my data was not included in their final manuscript, I was excluded as an author. I was being considered for tenure over the next year, and thought that protesting further might jeopardize my chances. But the loss of credit also had the potential to harm my advancement. In the end, I decided to remain silent, and published my paper 6 months after theirs.
The discovery of the role of actin in bacterial movement within cells subsequently led to a burst of new research and major advances. Their paper, the first to be published on the association of actin and the bacterium, has been cited 765 times. Coming second, my paper has received far less attention, with 233 citations.
The guy cannot tell the truth, that much is for sure. Only the legions of Murdoch controlled brain dead zombies of the wingnut right could ever think this guy should be President.
Obama in Virginia, Romney in Pennsylvania.
OBAMA: If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen....
ROMNEY: He (Obama) said this: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." That somebody else is government in his view. To say that Steve Jobs didn't build Apple. That Henry Ford didn't build Ford Motor. That Papa John didn't build Papa John's pizza. That Ray Kroc didn't build McDonald's. That Bill Gates didn't build Microsoft. To say something like that is not just foolishness, it's insulting to every entrepeneur, every innovator in America.
Oops, forgot the part on the American system, and the roads and bridges. That's OK though as The Base doesn't care about truth or reality. Nope, Romney, you are an insult to the nation every time you open your big yapper.
By Sean Cockerham, McClatchy Newspapers, July 16, 2012
NEW ORLEANS — [.....] many residents say New Orleans is a better place to live now than even before the devastating flood. There is a surge in entrepreneurship, with newcomers and native New Orleanians launching tech startups and other new businesses, saying there’s a spirit of creativity and possibility the hidebound city lacked before the storm. The traditional, clubby networks that ran the city were broken up by the disaster, said Tim Williamson, who runs a group that helps entrepreneurs attract investors. Everyone had to start over, he said, and that demanded ingenuity and risk taking.
“New Orleans became a startup city,” Williamson said.
The Brookings Institution reports entrepreneurial activity in New Orleans at 40 percent above the national average, with an average of 450 out of 100,000 adults starting businesses each year. That is nearly double the rate it was before the hurricane.
The city has become a magnet, in defiance of those who forecasted its downfall. New Orleans grew faster than any major U.S. city in the 15 months following the 2010 Census, the latest figures available [.....]
Not all New Orleanians benefit from the city’s renaissance. It is a different city for the very poor. Much of the Lower 9th Ward, a low-income African-American neighborhood hit the hardest by the storm, remains blighted [.....]
New Orleans has the highest per-capita murder rate in the country, with killings concentrated in the city’s poorer neighborhoods. The city is still sick from the storm. An estimated one out of every four homes in New Orleans remains vacant [.....]
By Sam Alipour, ESPN The Magazine, July 14, 2012
[.....] Home to more than 10,000 athletes at the Summer Games and 2,700 at the Winter, the Olympic Village is one of the world's most exclusive clubs. To join, prospective members need only have spectacular talent and -- we long assumed -- a chaste devotion to the most intense competition of their lives. But the image of a celibate Games began to flicker in '92 when it was reported that the Games' organizers had ordered in prophylactics like pizza. Then, at the 2000 Sydney Games, 70,000 condoms wasn't enough, prompting a second order of 20,000 and a new standing order of 100,000 condoms per Olympics.
Many Olympians, past and present, abide by what Summer Sanders, a swimmer who won two gold medals, a silver and a bronze in Barcelona, calls the second Olympic motto: "What happens in the village stays in the village." Yet if you ask enough active and retired athletes often enough to spill their secrets, the village gates will fly open. It quickly becomes clear that, summer or winter, the games go on long after the medal ceremony. "There's a lot of sex going on," says women's soccer goalkeeper Hope Solo, a gold medalist in 2008. How much sex? "I'd say it's 70 percent to 75 percent of Olympians," offers world-record-holding swimmer Ryan Lochte, who will be in London for his third Games. "Hey, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do." [.....]
It would seem all is not as it appears in the Mitt Romney fairy tale about his “success” as CEO of the Salt Lake City Olympic Committee. Such a twisted yarn this has become; from his fictional exit as head of Bain Capital to his being the “savior” of the 2002 Salt Lake City Games....
Excellent piece about this issue, with factoids including:
It would seem the real hero of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics was President Bill Clinton and the Federal government, at least according to Senator Bill Bennett (R-UT), “In fact, most of the federal money was already in place before Mitt came on,“ said Senator Bob Bennett, “The Clinton Administration was completely supportive in saying these are ‘America’s Games,’ we will do whatever we can to make sure they are successful...
I wonder if a Romney Administration would be as willing to support such an effort. Evidently Mr. Romney thought government spending was a good thing before he thought it was a bad thing: “Recognizing that our government spends billions of dollars to maintain wartime capability, it is entirely appropriate to invest several hundred millions to promote peace,” this from an article on ABC.com.
This is an excellent article about the REAL divide in not only the country, but the world. It is not a Democrat/Republican divide (although the participants tend to some small degree to fall into these categories) but rather a rich/not so rich divide.
It is a frightening story that we ALL need to at least consider, regardless of party affiliation.
By Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane, New York Times, July 14/15, 2012
WASHINGTON — A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration against a group of its own scientists used an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama, previously undisclosed records show [....]
Moving to quell what one memorandum called the “collaboration” of the F.D.A.’s opponents, the surveillance operation identified 21 agency employees, Congressional officials, outside medical researchers and journalists thought to be working together to put out negative and “defamatory” information about the agency.
The agency, using so-called spy software designed to help employers monitor workers, captured screen images from the government laptops of the five scientists as they were being used at work or at home. The software tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted, the documents show.
The extraordinary surveillance effort grew out of a bitter dispute lasting years between the scientists and their bosses at the F.D.A. over the scientists’ claims that faulty review procedures at the agency had led to the approval of medical imaging devices for mammograms and colonoscopies that exposed patients to dangerous levels of radiation [....]
My comment: as has often been the case throughout history, the mythic "civil service," as well as their overlords, have not been civil and have not been non-partisan.
By Robert Mackey, The Lede @ nytimes.com, July 13, 2012
Ulugbek Kodirov, a 22-year-old Uzbek man who moved to the United States planning to study medicine in New York, but ended up working in a suburban Alabama mall, was sentenced to more than 15 years in prison on Friday for plotting to kill President Obama on behalf of a jihadist group in Uzbekistan.
As The Associated Press reports, Mr. Kodirov’s lawyer, Lance Bell, blamed the Internet for radicalizing the young man, who moved to Alabama after giving up on a plan to get a medical degree at Columbia University because his English was not good enough. “I’m not calling him a victim,” Mr. Bell said, “but he’s a victim to a degree of social media.” [....]
By Tim Arango, New York Times, July 11/12, 2012
Photo credit: Duraid Adnan/The New York Times
At more than two dozen locations around this city, officials have posted giant billboards of Ms. Couric, [....] Ms. Couric beams out at passers-by in an advertisement for a daily news bulletin about electricity that is produced by the government and is shown on 11 satellite television channels.
“It doesn’t give me hope about electricity, but I like to see her beautiful face,” Habib Harbi, who sells watermelon in the summer and sweets in the winter, said as he looked across the street at the billboard from his fruit stand [....]
“We were looking for a bright and optimistic face that inspires the people to imagine a better future for electricity,” said Musaab al-Mudarrs, the spokesman for the Electricity Ministry, who said designers had plucked Ms. Couric’s image from the Internet [....]
Murtada Khassim, who sells cologne and bars of soap from a wooden cart near another billboard of Ms. Couric’s smiling face, and who lives in an apartment nearby, said he had had 10 straight hours of power the previous night, a substantial improvement from last summer, when most residents had just a few hours each day.
“Whoever comes here says, ‘What a beautiful face,’ ” Mr. Khassim said. “She’s smiling. She gives us hope.” [....]
By Saeed Kamali Dehghan, guardian.co.uk, 12 July 2012
A former general of Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guards has accused the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, of having blood on his hands over the brutal crackdown on the opposition, and described government claims that its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful as a "sheer lie".
In a letter to prominent opposition activist Mohammad Nourizad (website in Farsi), the former officer gives a rare glimpse of political dissent within the ranks of the elite force in charge of the nuclear programme and Khamenei's personal security.
Identified only by his initials, the general says that he and a number of his colleagues were threatened with execution for disloyalty and then – after a series of secret courts-martial – dismissed "because we refused to participate in the betrayals and the crimes committed by our seniors" [....]
By Barry Meier and Katie Thomas, New York Times, July 11/12, 2012
When a pharmacy sells the heartburn drug Zantac, each pill costs about 35 cents. But doctors dispensing it to patients in their offices have charged nearly 10 times that price, or $3.25 a pill. The same goes for a popular muscle relaxant known as Soma, insurers say. From a pharmacy, the per-pill price is 60 cents. Sold by a doctor, it can cost more than five times that, or $3.33.
At a time of soaring health care bills, experts say that doctors, middlemen and drug distributors are adding hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the costs borne by taxpayers, insurance companies and employers through the practice of physician dispensing.
Most common among physicians who treat injured workers, it is a twist on a typical doctor’s visit. Instead of sending patients to drugstores to get prescriptions filled, doctors dispense the drugs in their offices to patients, with the bills going to insurers. Doctors can make tens of thousands of dollars a year operating their own in-office pharmacies. The practice has become so profitable that private equity firms are buying stakes in the businesses, and political lobbying over the issue is fierce [.....]
Marketwatch, July 12, 2012
SAN FRANCISCO – The Energy Information Administration flung an amazing little factoid out there this week that went largely unnoticed: In April, for the first time ever, natural gas-fired power plants put as much electricity on the U.S. power grid as coal-fired power plants.
A decade ago, natural gas accounted for about a quarter of U.S. power generation while coal accounted for more than half. In April they converged at 32% of overall generation each. Natural gas proponents could not have envisioned in their wildest dreams their “clean, cheap, abundant” fuel of choice would catch up with coal as quickly as it did [....]