Take AFL-CIO’s online health care survey

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The AFL-CIO has launched its largest-ever online survey to capture Americans’ real experiences with our broken health care system. Survey responses will be given to the presidential candidates, every U.S. senator and representative, every candidate for Congress and state and local officials in every state in our country. The AFL-CIO expects many thousands of responses, which will make this survey one the largest data sets available on individuals’ and families’ health care experiences. The survey is available here.

“You don’t have to look far to see how broken and expensive health care in America is,” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said. “We are doing this survey because we want to be sure every leader in our country understands exactly what’s going on – every elected official from mayor right on up to the top, and every candidate.”

Questions cover such topics as:

* Whether Americans are going into debt because of medical bills;

* Whether they are instead skipping follow-up visits, treatments and prescriptions because they can’t afford to pay for them;

* Whether people are locked in to jobs for fear of losing health insurance;

* What Americans are paying out of pocket each year for health care.

Perhaps most importantly, the survey will invite respondents to tell their own personal stories, in as much detail as they choose.

The survey will run for one month and is open to anyone. Participants can choose to keep their responses anonymous or have them published online with their first name.

In addition to reminding candidates what voters are going through, the results influence the legislative debates about policy reform.

“No doubt, special interests like insurance and pharmaceutical companies will try to scare Americans into accepting the unacceptable system we have now,” Sweeney said. “The results of this survey will keep America on track, reminding everyone of how little there is to lose and how deeply the problems run.”

Book on Strom a must-read

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I just finished reading the only honest book ever written about South Carolina politics. I had avoided it like the plague because I had mistakenly thought since 1998 that the authors were paying homage to an aging Strom Thurmond. Boy was I wrong! Ol’ Strom by Jack Bass and Marilyn Thompson is an unvarnished expose of every politician of any importance in SC since 1876…in a single context…as they related to the life of Strom Thurmond. It is at once shocking, fascinating, embarrassing and laugh-out-loud funny as Bass and Thompson connect all the political dots of South Carolina’s last century.

I actually felt personally cleansed after reading the second half of the book…mostly because at 10:15 PM I realized that I had been sitting in the Jacuzzi for six hours riveted to this book! I highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in South Carolina history or politics. It’s a great read.

Charlie Smith, Charleston

Sign petition urging GOP to support clean elections

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By David Donnelly
Director, Campaign Money Watch

Last night as I was watching President Bush’s final State of the Union address I was struck by his unwillingness to recognize the need for change in this country. War profiteering, global warming, poor health care—nothing’s changed. He promoted a weak version of earmark reform, but it’s too little, too late, and doesn’t address the real problem.

Last week 5,000 people signed a petition asking the Republican presidential candidates to support full public financing of elections like the three leading Democratic candidates.

Will you join us? Sign our petition today!

Once we collect signatures for this petition, we’ll fax the Republican presidential candidates a letter the day before Super Tuesday, February 5th, to urge them to support full public financing of elections.

From big campaign contributions to the influence of bundlers and lobbyists, the role of campaign cash in our electoral process has gotten worse. The Republicans are pretending the problem doesn’t exist. They need to hear from people like you that you demand real change in Washington.

Let’s tell the Republican presidential candidates that Washington needs full public financing of elections.

We need to end the status quo in Washington. Thanks for your help.

The beginning of the end

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By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Columnist

And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.
– Revelations 8:1, King James Bible

George W. Bush’s State of the Union (SOTU) speeches have been the basis for a new kind of drinking game for several years now, basically because the things have always needed some kind of actual substance from somewhere, and because it was a good way to dull the pain of it all. The rules: 1. When he says the word “terra” or “terra-ists,” take a drink. 2. When he says “tax cuts,” take a drink. 3. When he says “Iraq,” take a drink. 4. When he says “nook-yuh-lerr,” take a drink and a shot and a good swift kick to the head. Et cetera.

But that’s just one night out of the year. Reality has proven to be far more alcoholic in nature. For seven years now, the whole phenomenon of this government has been one long drinking game played out each and every day. The rules of this game? 1. Say the words, “George W. Bush is in charge of the country.” 2. Turn off the TV. 3. Just drink.

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The true worth of South Carolina’s primary

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By Elizabeth G. Hines
The Women’s Media Center

I’ve been giving thanks quite a lot this election season: thanks that the field of candidates looks different from ever before; that we who are not white men can believe that our nation has a place for us in its leadership, too. And I’ve been giving thanks that the advent of this diverse slate of candidates has created just a little space in which we Americans can begin to address, on a national level, the issues of race and gender that have plagued us since our very beginnings as a country. We may not yet be good at talking about those issues, but at least now we’re trying.

Today, however, I am here to admit that my greatest measure of thankfulness has recently settled on nothing so predictable, for a black woman, as seeing Clinton and Obama’s faces plastered across every newspaper and television screen from here to Tallahassee. No, today I want to give thanks for the state of South Carolina.

That’s right, South Carolina. The first state to secede from the Union when that pesky “War of Northern Aggression” became inevitable. Hotbed of slaveholding activities as late as 1860, with 45.8 percent of all white families holding slaves – the highest rate in the nation. Home to legendary states rights leader and segregationist presidential candidate Strom Thurman. And the last place in the USA where the Confederate flag was allowed to retain its place of so-called honor, flying atop the State House dome until the year 2000 – 135 years after the abolition of slavery, in case you’re counting.

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Notes on South Carolina primary

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By Harry Targ
Professor, Purdue University

I confess. I have been a supporter of the presidential candidacy of John Edwards (particularly since Dennis Kucinich was made to disappear). I think his clear populist stance, his anti-corporate agenda, and his critique of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council represent an advance over the ambiguous and limited centrist politics of Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama and the way John McCain will reframe himself if he is the Republican Party nominee.

A cursory examination of media framing of national political life over the last thirty years would suggest that populist candidates, who verbalize even modest condemnations of corporate power, face public marginalization. It happened to Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich and it is happening to John Edwards. Corporate media vigorously oppose any political forces at home or abroad who are anti-corporate and who embrace a grassroots approach to policymaking. “The people” are not and cannot be seen as capable of shaping their own political destinies. In the end, it is the corporate elite who must rule.

Having admitted my political “biases,” I have some thoughts about the potential political significance of the Democratic Party primary election in South Carolina. First, the campaign tactics of candidate Clinton and particularly former President Clinton should finally put to rest the popular view that they are crusaders against racism in American life. President Clinton did everything he could to remind voters that Barak Obama was after all an African American and that this election was occurring in South Carolina. In a totally irrelevant response to a reporter’s question after the results were announced President Clinton reminded the reporter and the audience that Jesse Jackson carried South Carolina in the 1980s; i.e. the outcome on Saturday will not count and it will not count because Obama, like Jackson, is an African American.

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War on the war on drugs loses warrior

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South Carolina reform organization closes shop
By Skip Johnson
President of South Carolinians for Drug Law Reform

Norm Stamper, retired chief of police in Seattle, says America’s so-called war on drugs “has arguably been the single most devastating, dysfunctional social policy since slavery.” His words are being heard. All over America – the main exceptions being South Carolina and other Southeastern states – people are making concrete progress in changing that policy. For example:

Twelve states have enacted medical marijuana bills; California alone has more than 1,000 shops selling marijuana today to sick and dying people who have prescriptions from their doctors.

Delaware, New Jersey and D.C., among others, have new needle exchange programs in operation that are cutting back on the spread of AIDS, Hepatitis-C and other wasting diseases. Needle exchanges, illegal in most states, are also protecting police officers and medical personnel from being accidentally stuck.

Local governments in Colorado and several other states have ordered their police departments to put marijuana arrests on the bottom of their list of priorities, thus freeing up police to go after real criminals and easing pressure on the courts and prisons.

Nationally, only recently did the U.S. Sentencing Commission toss out guidelines that dictated penalties involving crack cocaine be 100 times harsher than penalties involving powdered cocaine, realizing that the two are just two versions of the same thing. (As is true with most drug laws, the crack/powder discrepancy was a racist thing: White people prefer powdered cocaine; blacks prefer crack. So black people were getting punished 100 times harsher than white people for the doing the same thing.) The commission found the difference so abhorrent that it made its decision retroactive, meaning some 19,500 inmates, most of them black, can seek reductions in their sentences.

In each case change came only after grassroots efforts forced it. In South Carolina, however, because too few people are willing to work for change, South Carolinians for Drug Law Reform is folding.

I’m sad about that because we are the only organization in South Carolina that is devoted exclusively to reforming our cruel, racist, counterproductive drug laws.

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Stop stalkers before they become headlines

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By Marianne Hill

She could have been my daughter, or my neighbor’s daughter. Carnesha Nelson was a bright, attractive 19-year-old college student who unfortunately became the obsession of a young man who worked on her campus at the University of Mississippi. He hounded her relentlessly, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. The night he assaulted her, she ran screaming from him, pounding on dormitory doors. Fellow students called the police, but did not let her in. He caught and killed her.

January is stalking awareness month, an appropriate time to assess our treatment of stalkers, and unfortunately “awareness” is lacking. Most are not aware that stalking that ends in violence is not uncommon. Each year there are many young women who say no to boyfriends and suitors, and lose their lives as a result. Over 1,100 women were killed by intimate partners in 2005, and another 860 by male acquaintances, with women from 18 to 30 years old the most at risk. However the number of women killed by stalkers is only a fraction of those affected by the violence: over one million protective orders are issued annually by the states to protect women from assault or stalking. Stalking is a growing problem on college campuses where over 20 percent of college women report fearing for their safety as a result of being stalked, according to a 2004 study cited by the National Center for Victims of Crime.

The suffering inflicted by stalking is great. Fearing for their safety, victims will often move, change jobs, or drop out of college and training programs to elude their pursuers. If they rely instead on protective orders, they can expect to find an angry stalker taunting them at their home or workplace: over 69 percent of protective orders for women are violated, according to a 1996 Justice Department survey. At times the stalker is not even served with papers notifying him of the protective order, since budget priorities lie elsewhere. In many states, some victims cannot even apply for protective orders: teens under 18 years old or women who have never dated their stalkers may not have this legal recourse. These same women may also be ineligible for access to women’s shelters.

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Obama vs. Billary

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By Scott Galindez
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

The race for the Democratic Party nomination for president has increasingly become a three-way race. The problem for John Edwards is he is no longer the third person in the race, Bill Clinton is.

To be fair, Edwards was the big winner in Monday night’s debate in South Carolina, but most observers think it is too late to save his campaign.

When I talked to Latino voters in Nevada who supported Hillary, they all talked about Bill Clinton’s record, not Hillary’s. Except for the exchange in Monday night’s debate, the strongest attacks against Obama have come from the former president, not his opponent.

In Nevada, Hillary was able to deny any connection to a lawsuit to prevent shift workers from voting on the strip, while Bill blew up at a reporter while defending the lawsuit. It was Bill that tried to claim Obama has not opposed the war from the beginning, based on his votes for funding, votes he has in common with Hillary, who now claims to oppose the war despite the same votes. It was Bill that claimed that Obama said he agreed with the ideas of Ronald Reagan when he clearly didn’t.

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