Support Senator Durbin

The following was Senator Durbin's reaction to FBI reports of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay being chained to the floor, deprived of food and water, and held in extreme hot or cold temperatures for days at a time [link]:

"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others - that had no concern for human beings."

Senator Durbin is absolutely correct. This is disgraceful, and those responsible belong in prison. I don't normally come out in support of specific candidates in this way, but I would ask all of my readers to send supportive comments to Senator Durbin [link].

Bill Hemmer is a Tool

Bill Hemmer is leaving CNN [link].

I am reminded of their coverage of the Loyalty Oaths that Cheney made reporters sign in order to be let in to his press conferences. Rather than treat it like actual news, they showed a segment from The Daily Show which made fun of the spelling errors. The actual Daily Show story was more extensive, and expressed outrage that the oaths were required at all, but the only part that was shown on CNN was the part about the spelling errors. It essentially said that the oaths themselves were not an issue at all, but that the spelling errors were quite comical. And then, of course, after the clip, Bill Hemmer made some stupid comment about how those guys need to remember to proof-read.

Now if they could just get rid of Jack Cafferty, Soledad O'Brien, Wolf Blitzer, Robert Novak, Tucker Carlson, Paul Begala, James Carville, Paula Zahn, Aaron Brown, Lou Dobbs, and Anderson Cooper, I might just give them a chance. Maybe.

Stop The Presses...Another Missing Pretty White Girl!

Natalee Holloway, 18, of Mountain Brook, Alabama, has gone missing in Aruba [link]. Hundreds of FBI, local police, and private citizens have been mobilized in the search.

This is a terrible catastrophy, yet does it really deserve the kind of national attention it is sure to get? After Laci Peterson, Jennifer Wilbanks, and several others, it is clear. Americans love to see stories about Pretty White Women. Or at least the major news outlets really love to cover them. They are much nicer to look at than dead women and children in Iraq.

Conservatives Do The Darndest Things...

While looking at some conservative blogs (it's always good to know what the opposition is saying) I came across this site: [link]. The site reminds me a lot of Homer Simpson's website, where he just posted as many little animations he could find. If you scroll down a little bit, on the right hand side, there is an animation of Bush repeatedly pounding on Jonh Kerry. After staring at it for a minute, I realized that I have seen it before. It is stolen from the scene in the movie Office Space when the three main characters decide to finally take out their aggressions on the office printer that never worked. They pasted George W. Bush's head over Michael Bolton's, when he just lost it and started punching the machine with his bare fist.

It is so unbelievable ironic that they chose such an ant-corporate, anti-capitalist movie. That scene, which could be used to represent the ideology of the entire movie, is about the triumph of human ideals over the frustrations of corporate life, and they have mutiliated it to show precisely the opposite: the triump of corporations over the American people.

Of course, I am no fan of John Kerry, but the irony of what they did is almost unbelievable. It is like when Regan funded terrorist attacks on the civilian population of Nicaragua and called it a "War On Terror". It is like how the "Clear Skys Initiative" makes the air much less clear by allowing more pollution in industrialized areas. It is like how the "No Child Left Behind" program leaves many, many children behind by withdrawing funding from failing schools, exactly the schools which need more funding.

Temp Agencies and Nationalized Health Care

It used to be, back in the good old days, that a permanent full time employee at a company was, believe it or not, an actual employee of the company. That employee was entitled to health insurance, vacation, retirement benefits, raises, and other perks. Now, employees rarely are employed by the actual company. Although they work in full-time, permanent positions, they are officially employed by seperate agencies. The agencies are responsible for providing health benefits, although in most cases they find creative ways around it through strict limits on the length of contracts, making sure employment is not consistent enough to qualify.

Aside from the short-term effects, I believe these agencies will have the long-term effect of driving down wages and eliminating benefits in permanent positions as well. Untimately, the workplace is becoming increasingly hostile to the health and well-being of employees everywhere. Employers are no longer compelled to make sacrifices for the sake of worker safety and morale, but rather employees are expected to make any and all personal sacrifices possible for the sake of company profit.

It is claimed that this trend is a result of health insurance being simply too costly for employers. This has led to many companies requiring physical examinations as a condition for employment. Some companies even terminate employees for smoking, even if they don't smoke while on the clock. I wonder how far they will take this? I have asthma. Will I, one day, be unable to find employment simply because health insurance for me would cost too much?

It is estimated that 18,000 Americans die each year from lack of health insurance. This is not a result of being denied emergency care, since hospitals are required to treat all life-threatening emergencies, but rather a result of a lack of early treatment. I am a good example of this. My asthma is considered "under control" if I need to use my inhaler for sudden attacks no more than once or twice per week. Before I lost health insurance when I graduated from college three years ago, I met this standard. Now, when I am lucky enough to have asthma medication, I need to use my inhaler 2-3 times per day for sudden attacks due to a lack of consistent treatment.

It seems the best way to address this issue is through some form of national health care. The United States currently spends more per-capita on health care than countries which have a national health care system [link]. I believe this is due in a large part to the completely unregulated pharmaceutical industry. In countries such as Canada, which spends slightly more than half what the US spends per-capita on health care, the government has strict regulations on what pharmaceutical companies can charge for medications.

While I do believe that national health care would put the Temp Agencies out of business, it remains a far-fetched plan, since the corporate interests opposed to it hold so much power. There have been other positive developments, such as a Temp Worker's Union in San Francisco, but it seems there has been little, if any success. In the case of Hughes v. Microsoft, it was ruled that Microsoft was required to provide certain benefits to what it deemed "common-law" employees, or employees who are in essence employees of Microsoft, regardless of who their official employer may be.

Manpower claims to have placed 2.5 million workers in temporary positions in the year 2004 [link]. This is a growing problem, and is threatening the rights that workers fought so hard for throughout history.