Bernie Sanders Strikes The Heart Of The Koch Empire With Bill To Give Solar Energy To The Poor

Bernie Sanders Strikes The Heart Of The Koch Empire With Bill To Give Solar Energy To The Poor Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) hit the Koch brothers where it counts by proposing new legislation that make solar energy more accessible for low-income families.      Read more »

Gone and Already Forgotten: Sarah Palin Fails And Quits Her Own TV Channel First she got dumped by Fox News, then Sarah Palin did the only thing that she has ever been good at. Palin quit her own television channel.     Read more » Holder: Charleston Murders Should Be A Wake Up Call About the Threat of Domestic Terrorism Former AG Eric Holder called the murder of nine people in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17 "clearly an act of terrorism" that should serve as a warning about the threat of domestic terrorism.     Read more » Clinton Advisers Admit to Being Worried About Bernie Sanders’ Growing Support In Iowa The Clinton campaign acknowledges that Sanders is a real threat to win in Iowa.     Read more » Kentucky County Clerk Demands His Bigotry Be Accommodated By The State Government On Monday, Casey County, Kentucky clerk, Casey Davis, showed up at his governor's office without an appointment to get privileged standing for his bigotry against same sex couples     Read more » Hillary Clinton Throws Gasoline On The GOP Fire By Ripping Republicans For Trump’s Racism Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton took Republican Party's Donald Trump led implosion to a whole new level by linking Trump's racism to the GOP during her interview on CNN.     Read more » Felon Dinesh D’Souza Spreads Fake Photo Of Hillary Clinton Posing By Confederate Flag Right-wing activist Dinesh D'Souza posted a doctored image of Hillary Clinton posing by a Confederate flag to his social media accounts.     Read more » Bernie Sanders Strikes The Heart Of The Koch Empire With Bill To Give Solar Energy To The Poor Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) hit the Koch brothers where it counts by proposing new legislation that make solar energy more accessible for low-income families.     Read more » New Jersey Is Fed Up With Chris Christie and Is Introducing A Bill To Make Him Resign New Jersey is fed up with Chris Christie, and Democrats are introducing legislation that will force him to resign if he wants to run for president.     Read more » Surprise! Hillary Clinton Is Farther Left Than Senator Bernie Sanders For the record, then-Senator Hillary Clinton, like many Democrats, voted against the PLCAA which protects gun and ammo sellers from liability     Read more » David Barton Rejects Retirement as a Pagan Concept Were he being honest, or did his words bear an even passing resemblance to fact, I would say that I have never been more proud to be a Pagan     Read more »

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Speak up against the abuses lived by Qatar Airways’ employees.

I’m a football player who had the misfortune of living under Qatar’s brutal labour system. I'm using SumOfUs community to speak up against the abuses lived by Qatar Airways’ employees. The Barcelona Football Club is sponsored by Qatar Airways. Football should not be complicit in the abuse of workers -- will you join me in pressuring the Club to drop Qatar Airways?  Friend, The women who work for Qatar Airways face an extremely grim reality: cabin crew are being exploited, imprisoned without charge, forcibly confined on company premises and automatically sacked if they become pregnant. These abuses are an everyday event not only in Qatar Airways but in the Qatari national employment system. My name is Abdeslam Ouaddou. I am an ordinary person who had the good fortune to make a living as a professional football player. My last two years in Qatar were by far the worst of my career. My employer decided to end my contract without any valid reason and stopped paying me. Having refused to accept this, I was prevented from leaving the country. I was forced to train on my own, in temperatures of over 120 degrees, for several weeks. Eventually I was able to leave, but the migrant women who work for Qatar Airways don’t have that same luck, so I decided to use SumOfUs’ new community platform and speak up. Qatar Airways sponsors one of the biggest football clubs out there, the Barcelona Football Club -- and right now it is election season. If we come together now, we could get one of Qatar Airway’s most prominent business deals, Barcelona Football Club, to drop the airline as a sponsor over its mistreatment of workers. Sign my petition asking the Barcelona Football Club to drop Qatar as a sponsor Qatar’s national employment system, kafala, is cruel and brutal. Employers are allowed to prevent workers from leaving the country, even if they fail to pay wages and treat workers with dignity and fairness. The Qatar Airways CEO exploits this system for his own profit -- even saying publicly that he “doesn’t give a damn about workers rights”. Barcelona’s millions of fans see the team as “more than a club”, revered not only for the quality of its players -- like Neymar, Andrés Iniesta and of course, Lionel Messi -- but for its allegiance to ethics, fairness and social justice. That's why we're asking the world’s most respected football club to cut ties with the airline. My message to the sporting world, Barcelona and FIFA: we cannot legitimize a company that exploits thousands of vulnerable workers. It is against the values of the sport. We need to drop Qatar Airways as a sponsor. Join me asking the Barcelona Football Club to take action against Qatar Airways’ working conditions now! Thanks for standing with me, Abdesalam Ouaddou SumOfUs member and former Nancy Football Club player SumOfUs is a worldwide movement of people like you, working together to hold corporations accountable for their actions and forge a new, sustainable path for our global economy. Please help keep SumOfUs strong by chipping in $3 .

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General Mills Will Go 100 Percent Cage-Free

Hi FRIEND,  I'm excited to be able to share this breaking news with you. Today, General Mills joins food giants like Walmart, Nestle and Starbucks in publicly committing to ending the use of eggs from battery-caged hens. General Mills is grounding its new policy on the Five Freedoms of Animal Welfare -- a set of principles that will continue to guide the company toward better outcomes for animals across its supply chain. I hope you’ll join me in celebrating both this landmark decision and the great progress that’s been made by some of the nation's leading food companies in just a few short months. General Mills Will Go 100 Percent Cage-Free  July 7, 2015 SHARE General Mills joins some of the biggest names in the food business to announce their commitment to stop selling eggs from caged hens, including Aramark, Compass Group, Dunkin Brands, Hilton, Kellogg, Nestle, Sodexo, Starbucks, and Walmart.Photo by iStockphoto Within the last six months or so, we've worked with many of the biggest names in the food business to announce their commitment to stop selling eggs from caged hens. Aramark, Compass Group, Dunkin Brands, Hilton, Kellogg, Nestle, Sodexo, Starbucks, and Walmart have all made public pledges to shift their egg-purchasing practices away from battery cage confinement systems. Today, we're pleased to announce that General Mills, one of the nation's largest food makers, is joining the list. "We commit to working toward 100 percent cage free eggs for our U.S. operations," says General Mills -- which owns brands like Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Progresso Soups, and Hamburger Helper -- in its new policy. "We recognize that the current avian influenza outbreak has been deeply disruptive to the U.S. egg supply and producers. As the industry works to rebuild its supply chain, we will work with suppliers to determine a path and reasonable timeline toward this commitment." General Mills is grounding its policy on the Five Freedoms of Animal Welfare, a set of principles that will translate into better outcomes for all of the animals in its supply chain. With the Five Freedoms in mind, the company's policy pledges continual improvement by also examining solutions to solve other key animal welfare concerns, including subjecting animals to tail docking, de-horning, and, without the administration of pain killers, castration. It's also translating into an examination of issues related to rapid growth of broiler chickens and turkeys. Certainly the highlight of this announcement is the commitment to switch to 100 percent cage-free eggs. And as the egg industry considers its production strategies in light of the impact of bird flu on cage confinement facilities, there's an opportunity for the industry to pivot away from caging hens altogether and make the transition to higher-welfare, cage-free systems. Commodities expert Urner Barry recently reported that cage facilities have been hit much harder by bird flu than cage-free facilities. In many parts of the country, prices for battery-cage eggs doubled at the height of the outbreak. Because the volume of birds in a single cage confinement facility is so large, if even a single bird gets sick, then the entire flock must be killed -- a devastating outcome for the birds and the farmers. Common sense and sound science tell us that warehousing animals in cramped cages is bad for both the animals and for us. The veal industry is eliminating its cruel crates. Many of the largest pork producers are eliminating gestation crates. And now, with many food companies like General Mills pledging to eliminate chicken cages from their egg supplier chains, the egg industry can accelerate its own shift toward cage-free housing. For the sake of animals and consumers, it can't happen fast enough. Support the work of The HSUS' Farm Animal Protection campaign» The post General Mills Will Go 100 Percent Cage-Free appeared first on A Humane Nation. Related Stories In Oklahoma, A Right to Harm? USDA Report Misses the MARC Is Industrialized Agriculture a House of Cards?   © 2015 The Humane Society of the United States | All rights reserved | 2100 L Street, NW | Washington, DC 20037 humanesociety@hsus.org | 202-452-1100 | humanesociety.org

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Private Health-Insurance Monopoly or Single Payer?

Private Health-Insurance Monopoly or Single Payer? Robert Reich: If we continue in the direction we’re headed we’ll soon have a health insurance system dominated by two or three mammoth for-profit corporations capable of squeezing employees and consumers for all they’re worth. READ MORE SHARED FROM

TUESDAY, 7 JULY 2015 Greece: A New Marathon? John Peeler: Syriza must now define an alternative within capitalism without submitting to the capitalist conventional wisdom that more austerity is the only way out. READ MORE Friend on Facebook Follow on Twitter Forward to a Friend Bad Wars and Their Consequences Steve Hochstadt: In Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in many other places, our leaders did not know what they were doing. The result has been disaster for our soldiers, for the countries where we intervened, for our global image and our image of ourselves. READ HERE A Country Without a Military! Can That Ever Be Us? Lila Garrett: Where does this ugly epidemic of paranoia come from? Its core is our government’s basic belief that “might makes right”. War is good for the winners, so let’s make sure that’s us. READ HERE Private Health-Insurance Monopoly or Single Payer? Robert Reich: If we continue in the direction we’re headed we’ll soon have a health insurance system dominated by two or three mammoth for-profit corporations capable of squeezing employees and consumers for all they’re worth. READ MORE Three Commandments for Every State Capitol Walter Brasch: God didn’t give the Ten Commandments to the Southern Baptists, Muslims, Hindis, or even the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. So, if the legislatures and other politicians want a Ten Commandments monument in public places, they must first become Jews. READ HERE

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The Choice Ahead: A Private Health-Insurance Monopoly or a Single Payer

The Choice Ahead: A Private Health-Insurance Monopoly or a Single Payer

Robert Reich

This originally appeared on Robert Reich's blog.

The Supreme Court’s recent blessing of Obamacare has precipitated a rush among the nation’s biggest health insurers to consolidate into two or three behemoths.

The result will be good for their shareholders and executives, but bad for the rest of us – who will pay through the nose for the health insurance we need.

We have another choice, but before I get to it let me give you some background.

Last week, Aetna announced it would spend $35 billion to buy rival Humana in a deal that will create the second-largest health insurer in the nation, with 33 million members.

The combination will claim a large share of the insurance market in many states – 88 percent in Kansas and 58 percent in Iowa, for example.

A week before Aetna’s announcement, Anthem disclosed its $47 billion offer for giant insurer Cigna. If the deal goes through, the combined firm will become the largest health insurer in America.

Meanwhile, middle-sized and small insurers are being gobbled up. Centene just announced a $6.3 billion deal to acquire Health Net. Earlier this year Anthem bought Simply Healthcare Holdings for $800 million.

Executives say these combinations will make their companies more efficient, allowing them to gain economies of scale and squeeze waste out of the system.

This is what big companies always say when they acquire rivals.

Their real purpose is to give the giant health insurers more bargaining leverage over employees, consumers, state regulators, and healthcare providers (which have also been consolidating).

The big health insurers have money to make these acquisitions because their Medicare businesses have been growing and Obamacare is bringing in hundreds of thousands of new customers. They’ve also been cutting payrolls and squeezing more work out of their employees.

This is also why their stock values have skyrocketed. A few months ago the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 Managed Health Care Index hit its highest level in more than twenty years. Since 2010, the biggest for-profit insurers have outperformed the entire S&P 500.

Insurers are seeking rate hikes of 20 to 40 percent for next year because they think they already have enough economic and political clout to get them.

That’s not what they’re telling federal and state regulators, of course. They say rate increases are necessary because people enrolling in Obamacare are sicker than they expected, and they’re losing money.

Remember, this an industry with rising share values and wads of cash for mergers and acquisitions.

It also has enough dough to bestow huge pay packages on its top executives. The CEOs of the five largest for-profit health insurance companies each raked in $10 to $15 million last year.

After the mergers, the biggest insurers will have even larger profits, higher share values, and fatter pay packages for their top brass.

There’s abundant evidence that when health insurers merge, premiums rise. For example, Leemore Dafny, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and his two co-authors, found that after Aetna merged with Prudential HealthCare in 1999, premiums rose 7 percent higher than had the merger not occurred.

The problem isn’t Obamacare. The real problem is the current patchwork of state insurance regulations, insurance commissioners, and federal regulators can’t stop the tidal wave of mergers, or limit the economic and political power of the emerging giants.

Which is why, ultimately, American will have to make a choice.

If we continue in the direction we’re headed we’ll soon have a health insurance system dominated by two or three mammoth for-profit corporations capable of squeezing employees and consumers for all they’re worth – and handing over the profits to their shareholders and executives.

The alternative is a government-run single payer system – such as is in place in almost every other advanced economy – dedicated to lower premiums and better care.

Which do you prefer?

ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers “Aftershock" and “The Work of Nations." His latest, "Beyond Outrage," is now out in paperback. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause. His new film, "Inequality for All," is now available on Netflix, iTunes, DVD, and On Demand. 

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