A common form of sexual harassment, in my case, is through technology. Someone I briefly dated many years ago sent me unsolicited and unwanted explicit pictures and videos shortly after socially reconnecting online. He was married, I was not interested. I immediately broke our connection and blocked him. For months afterward, I beat myself up about it. Did I lead him on by accepting his friend request? Should I have ignored him? What would his wife think about me if she knew?

I am an adult woman in my 30’s who knows better than to blame myself for that. Imagine a young girl experiencing that. It happens.

This scenario has played out so many times, I can’t even recount each individual experience. The DM’s and private messages on social media, wherein a stranger or casual acquaintance casually drops sexual suggestions or nude photos, or both. Sometimes the comments are even public. Ah, the anonymity of the Internet. You might be surprised how often that type of behavior goes unchecked or is accepted as commonplace.

When I was a teenager, it was worse. Men twice, three times, four times, five times my age gawked at me, tried to touch me–and sometimes succeeded–without invitation or permission. They sat too close, exposed themselves to me, made sexual suggestions, stalked me, invaded my privacy, and much, much worse. Most of the time it was a complete stranger. Sometimes it was a neighbor or parent of a friend or other trusted adult figure. Other times, it was boys my own age, coworkers and students.

A man in a sports car once pulled alongside me as I was walking home from a car accident. He asked me for directions. I knew better than to get too close to his car but I didn’t need to in order to see that he was completely nude and touching himself. I ran the rest of the way home and tearfully told my mom, who immediately called the police and filed a report. I was 15 years old.

At a crowded live music event in my home town, I was repeatedly grabbed, pinched, and touched while navigating through the crowd. My t-shirt was ripped, I had bruises. I never even knew who was doing it. I was 16 years old.

Two different ex-in-laws grabbed and molested me–one of them had to be pulled off of me with force (it took two adult men) because he was drunk and wouldn’t let go even while I was pushing at and kicking him. I was almost 21 years old and 7 months pregnant with my first baby.

I won’t horrify you with the details of the more serious incidents. The recounting is a form of reliving these experiences and I have no interest in that. But I want everyone to know, if there’s any doubt in your mind, that this happens on a daily basis. Sexual assault and harassment take many forms, happen in many settings, and come from many people of different ages and backgrounds and levels of familiarity. Victims can be any age, any demographic. It is always unwanted, unsolicited, uncalled for, and wrong. Wrong. Wrong. It should be a crime with consequences. Every. Single. Time.

It is beyond wrong that we allow this to happen and that victims are afraid to tell anyone. Our fearful silence is another form of abuse being perpetrated on us by a system that punishes, doubts, and blames victims and lets the criminals go. I know the world can be a horrible place and we have many big, important issues to tackle. But this is one we have complete control over. Let’s stop it already.

The post Me, too: a lifetime of sexual harassment and abuse appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Bernie Sanders has some pretty great ideas about what America should look like. Medicare-for-all and tuition-free college are two of his biggest proposals. Those ideas have a lot of support and have long been popular with progressives.

However, there are some who don’t think Medicare-for-all and tuition-free college are possible. It’s too hard, they say. It’s too expensive, they say. It will never pass Congress, they say. Where’s that progressive can-do attitude?

We can do it. It is possible. And I can prove it.

Humans—and Americans in particular–have accomplished some amazing feats against the odds and despite overwhelming backlash. For centuries, we have been fighting uphill battles—and winning. Let’s examine a few of them, briefly.

1. American Independence. The battle for independence started long before the war, which officially began in 1775 and ended in our favor in 1783. This was a decades-long, bloody struggle. Historians not only put the odds against us. John E. Ferling, an expert American Revolution historian, said our victory was “Almost a Miracle.”
2. Ending slavery. It took an entire century and a civil war to abolish slavery in the United States. Slavery existed in this country from the Declaration of Independence until the Emancipation Proclamation was enforced across the country after the war ended, in 1865. Abolition pitted families against each other and cost us many lives. One of our greatest presidents was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer. But we didn’t let any of that stop us from doing the right thing.
3. Women’s suffrage. The suffrage movement is thought to have picked up steam in the 1840’s but it was 1920 before women won the legal right to vote. For 142 years, risking arrest and abuse, women fought for the right to participate in our own government. We still haven’t given up fighting for equality. We still don’t have the right to make our own healthcare decisions or to pay equity.
4. Civil Rights. As with women, African-Americans have been fighting a long and frightful battle for basic rights. Protestors faced physical assault, arrest, and even death to obtain desegregation and an end to discrimination. As highlighted by a rash of police shootings, we are still fighting this battle as well. We have made great strides but there is work yet to be done to end institutionalized racism. If #BlackLivesMatter is any indication, this is a fight we are still willing and ready to participate in.
5. Space travel. It was said to be an impossible dream, a waste of time and resources. It was so mind boggling, that conspiracies still exist that claim the moon landing was faked. First, we entered space, escaping the earth’s gravitational pull. Then humans set foot on the moon. Most recently, and again despite the improbability, we landed a probe on Mars. We landed a probe on a planet that lies, at it’s very closest, 35 million miles from Earth. What’s more—you guessed it—we haven’t given up. Human occupation of Mars is very real and in the making.
6. Modern medicine. Cures for small pox, polio, and other horrific diseases are commonplace. We can transplant just about any human organ–and grow new ones in labs! Soldiers who have lost their legs can walk again with amazingly accurate prosthetics. We can restore hearing to the deaf. We restore life to the clinically dead. Our medical achievements have no end in sight and new discoveries are made practically every day. We are still fighting cancer and other life-shattering diseases, we haven’t give up.
7. The Internet. It’s still amazing to me. I can communicate with anyone anywhere in the world with Internet access. We can share ideas, keep in touch with loved ones, innovate, create, problem solve, learn, educate, ask, find a job, petition governments, protest wrongful deeds, hold meetings, navigate the earth with maps, watch cat videos…all via the Internet. Google. Need I say more? And we’re not giving it up. The fight for net neutrality—the Internet as we know it—is on.
8. Transportation. About a century ago, we were still using horses and carriages to get around. Of course, we’ve always had these two digits called legs but they aren’t very efficient for long travel. Take a moment to marvel that you can traverse the country in a matter of mere hours. I can see my sister in Vermont 6-7 hours from now with a major credit card and the click of a mouse. But mass transit wasn’t an easy achievement. By now, we all know the difficulties of the railroad, for example. There were human, economic, and political ramifications to laying tracks across the entire country but we toiled, innovated, and achieved.
9. Marriage equality. Victory! We have all lived through this so I don’t need to elaborate much here. Suffice it to say this was a long, arduous, and uphill battle against rightwing obstruction and extremist ideology. Some still refuse to accept that LGBT’s have the same rights, but we don’t allow them to ruin it for the rest of us and we’re not about to give up the fight for equality.
10. Germany’s renewable energy. Okay, Germany is not America. I’m not that terrible at geography. But they are a prime example of humanity’s best achievements, through hard work and demand. Maybe you have already heard, but Germany recently achieved 100% of their power demands through clean, renewable energy. It was not a permanent achievement, they are currently at about 80% renewable energy consistently. But this is a huge deal and indicative of what we can accomplish when we are united on a cause. The cause being saving humankind from global warming, in this case.

People died (and are still) fighting these battles. They have been arrested; physically assaulted; pepper-sprayed and gassed; their lives, homes, and families destroyed. They sacrificed, they toiled, they cried, they raged. But they persevered. We persevered. We have endured. We continue to fight.

We can do this. We can give everyone an equal opportunity for success. We can have Medicare-for-all. We can have tuition-free college. We can have it all. We just have to be willing to fight and yes, sacrifice, for something we want. Bernie Sanders is willing. So are millions of Americans and people around the world whose hopeful eyes are on us. How about you?

What great human achievement inspires you?

The post 10 awesome things we accomplished that were bigger than Medicare-for-All appeared first on Occasional Planet.

We don’t take advice from celebrities on many issues, like how to avoid scandal or how to turn down Oprah’s request for an interview. Why? Because celebrities are renowned for both scandalous behavior and illuminating Oprah interviews. But it’s surprising what we do take advice from celebrities about and increasingly, that is whether or not to vaccinate our children.

There are a lot of wacky theories surrounding immunizations, from secret government microchips transmitted through vaccination shots to the effectiveness of faith-only “medicine”. Faith-only “medicine” is the practice of using religious devotion and prayer in place of real medicine to cure disease and heal the afflicted. While there is an abundance of evidence favoring science-based medicine with predictable results, faith-only “medicine” requires…well, faith; most often with unfavorable results, as in Texas right now. By the way, if this practice sounds medieval, it’s because it is.

However entertaining (or scary) the hokier theories sound, by far the anti-immunization myth with the most traction out there is the claim that immunizations cause autism. Because the idea is so popular, it is also the most damaging to children and public health.

Where the autism myth comes from

It all seemingly began in 1998. A study by discredited British doctor Andrew Wakefield was published in the medical journal The Lancet. In the paper, Wakefield suggested a link between autism and the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccination. For the study, skillfully summarized here, the former doctor scrutinized a dozen children with “chronic intestinal disorders” and “severe mental regression”. He posited that the MMR vaccine could have caused an intestinal infection, and further, that infection instigated damage to the brains of his subjects.

After the paper was published, large numbers of fearful parents from the UK and Australia to the United States refused to have their children immunized. Preventable infectious disease, once all but eradicated from these countries, began to spread anew. When the vast majority of the public is immunized against deadly disease, a few people without the immunities are protected. This is called herd immunity. When the number of people without immunities grows, as it did following Wakefield’s paper, a large number of people are at risk of infection and that measure of protection disappears.

Another theory behind the immunizations-cause-autism myth is the idea that the preservative thimerosal, once used in vaccinations, caused autism. Due to this concern and a fear that another unfounded theory would prompt an even greater decrease in immunized children, thimerosal–which contains mercury–was removed from nearly all vaccinations well over a decade ago.

The science-based reality

Not only is there no causal evidence that merits debate on this issue, the elimination of thimerosal from vaccinations in 2001 has had no statistical effect on occurrences of autism. The Centers for Disease Control has a fairly extensive review of this and other autism-related subjects. Thimerosal is still used in one type of influenza vaccine, but according to the CDC, there is a non-thimerosal alternative available.

Three years ago, the journal that originally published Dr. Wakeman’s ill-devised study retracted the paper. The reason? It turns out Dr. Wakeman had treated the children he used in his study unethically and harmfully, subjecting them to invasive and unnecessary tests. Britain’s General Medical Council found that he “showed a callous disregard” for the pain of the youths he and his colleagues studied.

Furthermore, he had a ton of financial incentive to make his assertions: a year before the paper was published, he had patented his own measles vaccine that could be used in the event the MMR vaccine he was studying was discontinued. Additionally, his study was partially funded by attorneys representing a group of parents hoping to be paid damages in a lawsuit against vaccine makers. Given the council’s findings, Andrew Wakeman’s medical license was summarily revoked.

Despite the scandal—or maybe because of it–Dr. Wakefield now insists that he never suggested a link between autism and the MMR vaccination. Just so, considering a laudable number of subsequent studies have found no causal link between autism and the MMR vaccination. Most pediatricians—including my children’s own, in the interest of full disclosure—continue to recommend life-saving vaccinations for infants and children.

A lack of evidentiary findings doesn’t necessarily mean definitive proof, as any scientist can tell you. Scientific theory changes when new evidence presents itself. That is the crux of the issue; there has been no corroborating evidence. Lack of evidentiary findings in addition to an inability to replicate Wakeman’s discredited assertions makes an autism-immunization link not only highly unlikely but has compelled general consensus in the medical community.

The bad news

The evidence, or lack thereof in this case, hasn’t stopped stars like Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey from using their celebrity status and whatever soapbox they can borrow to disseminate these harmful anti-immunization theories. Jenny McCarthy has made many public appearances and wrote a book about her son’s experience with autism. Jim Carrey famously wrote an article that was published on the Huffington Post website. Both stars are part of a growing movement to resist vaccinations and were part of a “Green Vaccine” rally in 2008.

Meanwhile, preventable infectious diseases like measles and whooping cough are spreading; with deadly consequences. The number of people endangering the public’s health and helping to eliminate herd immunity has risen to such an extent that some areas of the country are revising immunization policy.

Even though we are only 99.9% sure vaccinations do not cause autism, the jury is not still out. Medical professionals and science-based medicine agree: immunizations save lives. So long as infectious disease exists, it is vitally important to immunize against it.

The post Do immunizations cause autism? Don’t ask a celebrity appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In a recent e-newsletter, Senator Bernie Sanders shared a video about a little town in Vermont called Swanton. Swanton has recently made an important change to its water treatment plant that will save area residents from a rate hike.

The treatment plant featured in the video replaced sixteen decades old units with only five solar-powered units, not only saving residents a heap of money, but proving that small towns can make big, innovative differences. According to the video, the solar-powered aerators will pay for themselves in energy savings alone. Good for the environment and the pocketbook makes this doubly good news.

Once again, Vermont proves to be a leader in environmental protection and conservation. The state was the first in the country to ban fracking, including the import and storage of the toxic water used in the fracking process. The message is clear: Vermonters want no part in the dangerous and harmful extraction of natural gas known as fracking.

Driving through scenic Vermont, you’re sure to see plenty of energy-creating windmills and rooftop solar panels too. What you won’t see? In 1968, the state banned billboards. In 1972, legislation banning the use of toss-away beverage containers was passed to help rid roadsides of litter.

Senator Sanders also recently welcomed the news that Vermont Yankee–the state’s only operational nuclear reactor–is shutting down for good by the end of 2014:

The closure will allow Vermont to focus on leading the nation toward safer and more economical sources of sustainable and renewable energy like solar, wind, geothermal and biomass.

Residents of “The Green Mountain State” undoubtedly care about the environment and are eager to prove it.

The post Vermont leads by example on environmental issues appeared first on Occasional Planet.

This just in: Serco Inc. will be hiring and training 600 new workers for its new Wentzville, Missouri location. Bright, shiny new jobs.

The Post-Dispatch has the scoop:

Obamacare may be controversial, but it’s about to bring hundreds of jobs to Wentzville.

A Virginia-based government contractor is planning to hire 600 people over the next three months to staff a processing center in the St. Charles County suburb, to handle applications for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

Better yet, these jobs will not be low-wage or lacking benefits.

The new jobs will start at $12 an hour, though higher-skilled positions will pay more, and all the jobs include benefits. Serco is planning to hold a job fair the week of Sept. 23, but it has already started advertising jobs on its website.

This is not only a much-needed boost to the local economy, these jobs will be an opportunity for many entry-level applicants to earn something close to a living wage. With benefits to boot. And Wentzville isn’t the only area to get an employment and revenue boost.

Serco is one of several local companies that are expanding in the region to handle an expected surge in business from the implementation of Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act has been dubbed.

In July, for example, public relations firm FleishmanHillard won a $35 million contract to promote Illinois’ health insurance exchange. Equifax Workforce Solutions also received a contract worth up to $329.4 million to verify incomes of people who apply for federal subsidies through the program.

Whether you are for, against, or still on the fence about the ACA, there is no question that the president’s most hotly debated pieces of legislation is doing some real good for people. I look forward to seeing what the state’s anti-Obamacare legislators have to say about these newly acquired jobs, particularly since many have supposedly put job creation at the top of their state legislative agenda.

The post “Obamacare” is a job creator appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It’s been in the media for just a few days but has already received national attention. Missouri Representative Paul Wieland and his wife are suing the federal government for “forcing” them to receive health insurance benefits that include coverage of birth control, which is against their religious beliefs.

Rep. Wieland, quoted here:

Missouri Consolidated Health Care Plan (MCHCP) sent a letter last month informing me that even though in January 2011 I had enrolled in a plan without coverage of abortion inducing drugs because of my religious belief and moral convictions, they were placing me in an insurance plan that includes these objectionable procedures.

The MCHCP and the Obamacare health plan forces my family to participate in what we feel is an intrinsic evil. Terri and I fervently believe abortion inducing drugs on demand do not constitute medical or healthcare. My family believes abortion is the intentional destruction of innocent human life which according to our beliefs is gravely immoral.

Rep. Wieland and his wife seek an exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) birth control mandate, which states that all employee-based health insurance plans must provide reproductive health coverage at no additional cost. The mandate does not force women to actually use birth control, but makes it available and affordable to women who do need it.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Forget for a moment that in no way does the ACA (commonly referred to as “Obamacare”) force insurance providers to cover abortion services, despite claims to the contrary. It’s possible that Rep. Wieland and his wife have confused emergency contraception with “abortion-inducing drugs,” a rather common mistake made by people who need a better understanding of human reproduction and how birth control works.

Emergency contraception, like the many forms of birth control regularly prescribed by doctors, prevents pregnancy from happening in the first place; it does not end or abort an already fertilized egg. Emergency contraception–also known as Plan B and the “morning after pill”–is sometimes wildly misrepresented by politicians with an anti-women’s health agenda. Despite this, the FDA recently approved Plan B for over-the-counter purchase, eliminating the need for a doctor’s prescription and health insurance coverage.

So back to the claim that the ACA forces the insured to pay for abortion against their will. This particular topic has long been argued and debunked as political hyperbole. Federal funds cannot be used to fund abortions, except when medically necessary to save the life of a woman, or in the case of rape and incest. Furthermore, the ACA stipulates that every state must have at least one plan on the exchange that does not offer abortion coverage. There is no opposing requirement that one or more plans on the exchange must offer abortion coverage.

Check it out:

The law requires at least two national plans in every state within four years, overseen by the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which will negotiate rates and contracts.  The law says at least one of the multi-state insurers must be a nonprofit, and at least one must not offer abortion services.

That’s not enough? States have the right to prevent insurance providers on the health insurance exchange from covering abortion services. Thus, anti-choice folks are more than protected by law from paying for or otherwise participating in religiously objectionable abortion services.

Why this matters

Clearly, Mr. Wieland has only two options; keep the “intrinsically evil” health insurance coverage he is offered as a government employee or, as he put it:

Do I just cancel the coverage and put my family at risk? I don’t believe in what the government is doing.

Perhaps feeling backed into a corner and unaware of the irony, Rep. Wieland is keeping his insurance coverage and suing the federal government for putting him in this morally awkward, unavoidable position. Unavoidable, that is, unless there were another option. Another option such as paying for his own private insurance plan. This is a popular alternative to government health care [Medicare/Medicaid] espoused by more than a few state lawmakers who don’t want to expand Medicaid to cover uninsured Missourians. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

RFT reports:

He tells us he conferred with a friend who works in the health-insurance industry and realized there was no insurance plan accessible to him that excludes coverage of these practices.

It’s interesting to note that there may be no other health insurance plans accessible to Rep. Wieland [R-Imperial], given that Congressional Republicans have voted dozens of times to repudiate the ACA, which includes the aforementioned health insurance exchange. The health insurance exchange, accessible this October, would offer consumers more insurance options and promote competition amongst health insurance providers.

The intention there is to make a wide range of insurance coverage more affordable for and accessible to everyone. Another provision of the ACA offers tax credits to help Americans pay for private health insurance, ostensibly making pricier options available to people who could not otherwise afford them. Lest we forget, the exchange would also have at least one insurance plan that does not cover abortion services.

But Wieland’s own voting record shows he has voted “yes” on Missouri legislation prohibiting the implementation of the ACA. Say, isn’t that like shooting yourself in the foot? I hope the state’s government employee health insurance covers self-inflicted wounds, this seems to be a trend.

It will be interesting to see if Rep. Wieland’s dilemma and resulting lawsuit will put things in perspective for him. Right now, there are thousands of hard-working Missourians who have even fewer health insurance options than him, and they could really benefit from the ACA, particularly the expansion of Medicaid. This is an opportunity to do more than take a moral stand for himself and his own family, he can still do the right thing for about 300,000 Missourians too.

The post This week in litigious politicians: MO state rep sues federal gov’t over birth control in ACA appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Many of us in progressive circles pride ourselves on being a diverse, tolerant, and accepting group. And we are. It’s not hard to see how that plays out in politics, with the GOP constantly struggling for relevancy among minorities, not usually an issue for Democrats. Thanks to Dustin Cable at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, now we can see how our cosmopolitan attitude affects us–or not–geographically. The results are stunning.

A new and interesting map based on 2010 census data shows every single person in America as a colored dot. Blue dots represent caucasians, green represents blacks, red represents Asians, orange represents Hispanics, and brown represents “other”, which can mean Native American and people of more than one race.

Looking at the map, it appears there are large metropolitan areas of diversity. Here is what the St. Louis area looks like:

It looks pretty segregated, even at a distance. Zooming in provides us with a clearer picture, often much more segregated than first glance. Here we can see how individual neighborhoods look:

Where are you on the racial dot map? Is your neighborhood diverse or largely segregated?

The post The racial dot map appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Alfred McCoy over at TomDispatch.com has taken the time to provide us with a brief, sordid history of the U.S. surveillance state and proven, to me at least, that there is still much to learn about where we are and how we got here. I was surprised, for example, to discover that the path to an Orwellian future began in the late 19th century with our presence in the Philippines.

McCoy writes (and elaborates later in the piece):

In 1898, Washington occupied the Philippines and in the years that followed pacified its rebellious people, in part by fashioning the world’s first full-scale “surveillance state” in a colonial land. The illiberal lessons learned there then migrated homeward, providing the basis for constructing America’s earliest internal security and surveillance apparatus during World War I.  A half-century later, as protests mounted during the Vietnam War, the FBI, building on the foundations of that old security structure, launched large-scale illegal counterintelligence operations to harass antiwar activists, while President Richard Nixon’s White House created its own surveillance apparatus to target its domestic enemies.

Perhaps the most damaging [domestically speaking] interference via illegal government surveillance took place during the civil rights movement and amidst heavy war opposition.

In response to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s, the FBI deployed its COINTELPRO operation, using what Senator Frank Church’s famous investigative committee later called “unsavory and vicious tactics… including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths.”

In assessing COINTELPRO’s 2,370 actions from 1960 to 1974, the Church Committee branded them a “sophisticated vigilante operation” that “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity.” Significantly, even this aggressive Senate investigation did not probe Director Hoover’s notorious “private files” on the peccadilloes of leading politicians that had insulated his Bureau from any oversight for more than 30 years.

After New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh exposed illegal CIA surveillance of American antiwar activists in 1974, Senator Church’s committee and a presidential commission under Nelson Rockefeller investigated the Agency’s “Operation Chaos,” a program to conduct massive illegal surveillance of the antiwar protest movement, discovering a database with 300,000 names.  These investigations also exposed the excesses of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, forcing the Bureau to reform.

To prevent future abuses, President Jimmy Carter signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, creating a special court to approve all national security wiretaps.  In a bitter irony, Carter’s supposed reform ended up plunging the judiciary into the secret world of the surveillance managers where, after 9/11, it became a rubberstamp institution for every kind of state intrusion on domestic privacy.

It’s not all bleak. It turns out that Republicans of the early 20th century were actually a force of opposition to government sponsored violations of privacy.

In the aftermath of those wars, however, reformers pushed back against secret surveillance.  Republican privacy advocates abolished much of President Woodrow Wilson’s security apparatus during the 1920s, and Democratic liberals in Congress created the FISA courts in the 1970s in an attempt to prevent any recurrence of President Nixon’s illegal domestic wiretapping.

The two leading parties have, at times, agreed that unchecked government surveillance is a danger to all and took steps to prevent the massive levels of information gathering that we have today. For all the good it did, right? Unfortunately, public consent is a pretty large part of this history lesson. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have participated (and still do), perhaps misguidedly, in the surveilling of anti-war protesters, dissidents, and suspected terrorists. In the 20th century, remember, it was suspected communists and/or spies.

Just one example, as follows:

After the U.S. entered World War I in 1917 without an intelligence service of any sort, Colonel Van Deman brought his Philippine experience to bear, creating the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) and so laying the institutional foundations for a future internal security state.

In collaboration with the FBI, he also expanded the MID’s reach through a civilian auxiliary organization, the American Protective League, whose 350,000 citizen-operatives amassed more than a million pages of surveillance reports on German-Americans in just 14 months, arguably the world’s most intensive feat of domestic surveillance ever.

This brief history is at turns horrifying and breathtaking. It seems to me the missing ingredient is a massive popular uprising against such illegal violations of our amendment and human rights. Much of what we have seen these past decades is apathy, as Mark Twain predicted.

During the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, Mark Twain wrote an imagined history of twentieth-century America.  In it, he predicted that a “lust for conquest” had already destroyed “the Great [American] Republic,” because  “trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.”

It’s true, sadly. Under President Obama, we have seen an unprecedented and largely unopposed prosecution of whistleblowers using the Espionage Act. There have been seven prosecutions thus far under Obama, preceded by only three since the law’s 1917 origins. As Linda Greene wrote back in 2011, proving once again the utter disconnect between what the president says to us and what he and those he appointed actually do:

When campaigning in 2008, Obama promised to protect whistleblowers, saying their “acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled,” ABC News’ Megan Chuchmach and Rhonda Schwartz reported on Aug. 4, 2009.

Regrettably, Campaign Obama is not around to protect the likes of Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning from either the media persecution or from government prosecution. It is difficult for an uniformed public to protest something they are unaware of, such as the NSA’s PRISM program. But it seems to me that when we allow the imprisonment and prosecution of those whistleblowers who seek to inform and empower us, we are granting the government permission to carry on with illegal acts of surveillance against us.

The people’s unspoken permission also sets the stage for our own possible imprisonment. When everything you say or do is subject to secret recordings and filed away in vast government-owned digital storage facilities, anything you have said or done can be used against you by a government with a history of “unsavory and vicious tactics… including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths.”

At the very least, the mere possibility of such is an effective tool of suppression and submission, perhaps most starkly proven by how easy it was for the NSA to obtain near-total corporate complicity in illegal information gathering. And as McCoy’s history lesson teaches us, this is not just an American fear. U.S. surveillance is of global concern; it is a much-used weapon in our war chest, as it is with some foreign governments.

Perhaps it is time to learn from our history, both distant and recent past, and act upon what we learn…in large, unimpeachable bipartisan numbers.

The post A brief history of the U.S. surveillance state appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Industrialists Charles and David Koch, well known for their climate change denial, have very recently expressed interest in buying newspapers. We all know the Koch brothers by now. They are known to create and support partisan astroturf groups [e.g. Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity] that have no problem bending and/or denying the truth to fit their tea party narrative.

Remember back in 2008 when Americans for Prosperity passed around a pledge to government officials asking them to “oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in state or local government revenue”? Or when the brothers funded a study on climate change only to have the study conclude that climate change is real? Those are just the sort of shenanigans the Kochs are involved in.

It’s not hard to imagine the level of spinning that might take place in a Koch-owned newspaper, but there’s a group of climate change believers over at Forecast the Facts that have made it simple to toy with this idea. It’s easier to spread misinformation through the media when you own said media, right? Take a look at this entertaining [fictional] version of a Koch-owned L.A. Times newspaper.

In the would-be Koch post, this serious article:

Turns into this denial:

If you want to try “Kochifying” the news, visit kochifythenews.com.

The post Koch-ifying the news appeared first on Occasional Planet.

As a constituent concerned about the state legislature’s decision to expand Medicaid to cover more Missourians, I wrote to my local lawmakers. They were kind enough to respond personally to my concerns, but one response had me even more concerned–concerned about the misinformation readily accepted as fact in the state capital.

Read below the laundry list of rightwing talking points from State Rep. Thomas Flanigan. What’s left unsaid? Everything.

Thank you for your recent email requesting that the General Assembly commit more borrowed federal money to the state’s Medicaid program.  I have consistently opposed this proposal for the following reasons:

1) Our federal government created this crisis by reducing DSH payments to hospitals and I believe the federal government should shoulder the entire responsibility of working to ensure hospitals are not threatened.

DSH or Disproportionate Share Hospital is a program that provides funding to hospitals-such as poor rural and inner city hospitals-that care for a larger number of people who are unable to afford paying for treatment. What Mr. Flanigan did not say is that the ACA’s (Affordable Care Act) Medicaid expansion would have made DSH payments all but irrelevant, because the people unable to pay for hospital care would be covered under the expansion.

SCOTUS’s decision allowing states to opt out of the Medicaid expansion put a wrench in the cogs and Missouri Republicans’ unwillingness to expand Medicaid has hospitals asking for DSH cuts to be reversed. Missouri Hospital Association spokesperson, Dave Dillon, says DSH cuts should not be an argument against expanding Medicaid. That’s right, Missouri hospitals want an expansion of Medicaid.

2) The federal government is severely in debt and shows no signs of alleviating that burden on our kids and grandkids.  Our current spending levels are unsustainable and we cannot keep kicking the can and giving people false promises of entitlements we know will be cut drastically to curb the deficit.

We should be concerned about the debt. Which is why the popular anti-tax sentiment of  the majority party in our state government is alarming in its lack of logic. You cannot sustain government or provide for the general welfare of the people simply by cutting the budget repeatedly. That is as unsustainable as Mr. Flanigan claims social programs are. Increases in the cost of living never end. There must also be revenue increases to protect essential programs–but raising taxes (and cutting the behemoth that is our country’s absurd defense budget) has become taboo and is often taken off the budget table entirely. We’ve witnessed as much time and time again during federal budget talks.

A great example of how extreme budget cuts have a negative impact on people is 2005’s huge Medicaid cut that kicked nearly 100,000 Missourians off of the state’s health insurance rolls. There are entire industries in this state that do not offer employees any health insurance benefits. There’s just not enough living wage jobs with benefits for everyone, no thanks to attacks on living wage job holders, but that is an entirely different discussion. Missouri Medicaid used to cover these working class people who had no other options for health care. Now hundreds of thousands of gainfully employed people are uninsured.

What happens to uninsured working class people who get sick and are unable to receive the care they need because they cannot afford to pay out-of-pocket? They become disabled and/or unable to continue working, then fully dependent on the government or the largesse of those who care; a dependency the rightwing has consistently (and offensively) railed against. Healthy people are productive, contributing members of society and much less likely to be dependent. Providing health coverage is ultimately a money saver. As Ben Franklin said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

3) Our state government’s credit rating is in jeopardy because of the level to which it already receives payments from the federal government.   Accepting this “deal” will only worsen that reliance and cost Missouri taxpayers more in the long run.

This point contradicts his first point, where he says “the federal government should shoulder the entire responsibility of working to ensure hospitals are not threatened”. He also inadvertently disproves his own “too much  spending, not enough cutting” argument by bringing up the AFA’s DSH cuts; savings that help pay for a Medicaid expansion.

As he points out later in his list, the federal government will only be making full payments for three years. After that, they will match funding with the state to provide Medicaid coverage to thousands of Missourians. In the end, this vague point leaves me wondering why credit ratings are more important than health care to a party that is so against government borrowing and debt.

4) Medicaid is broken.  I’ve never heard anyone on Medicaid say it was a well-run program.  Instead, I repeatedly hear about how access to care is limited at best and non-existent for many who are on the program.

Medicaid is broken because Missouri state lawmakers broke it. Limited health care is what happens when the program’s budget is cut time and time again. It is non-existent for the 100,000+ people who were kicked off due to budget cuts. This is quite simply a matter of self-fulfilled prophesy. Rightwing lawmakers claim government-run programs are terribly run and inefficient, but they will never utter the reasons why: they are destroying these programs from within by starving them of funding and expounding on the evils of big government. Their no-mercy economic policies create the hardships that make it unnecessarily difficult for working people to become financially independent.

5) Proponents have not signaled where in the budget they would cut once this program expands.  Once our share kicks in, hundreds of millions in revenue will not be available for other purposes.  Right now, education funding is the second largest expenditure in the state (next to social welfare programs) meaning it will likely suffer cuts to make payments for able-bodied adults to receive a Medicaid card.

Note that only budget cuts are supposed here. There’s no mention of revenue increases, which would come from the thousands of jobs created by an expansion of Medicaid. There is no mention of any of the absurd tax legislation being proposed by state Republicans that would take more money away from the “able-bodied” workers of this state while giving huge tax cuts to millionaires; clearly a revenue buster and financially detrimental to large swaths of Missourians. It’s odd that their anti-tax policy does not apply to the working poor or any of the other people (seniors, veterans) who would benefit from a Medicaid expansion.

6) The estimates that were produced that claim this expansion will be a job creator are just patently misleading.  In fact, they assume we will never have to raise taxes to support this vast increase in government spending.  Once those taxes kick in, our economy will react as it always does to new taxes – negatively.

See number 5, specifically this helpful explanation of how expanding Medicaid will create jobs, save us all money, and benefit Missouri businesses. This is why non-partisan groups from all over the place have endorsed the expansion. No explanation or evidence to the contrary was offered by Mr. Flanigan, just the statement that job creation claims are misleading. I asked Mr. Flanigan for data on the correlation between tax increases and a poorer economy. None was provided.

The truth is that Missouri Medicaid has failed countless working and senior Missourians. It is not the failure of a government-run program, however, it is the failure of Missouri’s lawmakers to adequately fund the program. It is the failure of the state legislature that ignores overwhelming support for a Medicaid expansion in favor of political points. State lawmakers need to put aside political shenanigans and get to work creating jobs, a promise as yet unfulfilled. They can start by expanding Medicaid.

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