Archive for category Humanitarian

Stories of the Elderly Remind Us of the Pain of Cutting Social Security Payments | Alternet

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Government, Health, Housing, Humanitarian, Perspective, Social on December 21, 2012


Stories of the Elderly Remind Us of the Pain of Cutting Social Security Payments

Altering the formula for Social Security payouts is not innocuous, it will have grave human costs.

December 19, 2012  

When I was a young organizer for Iowa Citizen Action Network, we were doing a lot of work on utility rate hikes. I met an elderly woman, maybe late 70s, who was living on her Social Security check. As utility prices went through the roof, her cost of living increase in that check wasn’t coming anywhere close to covering the costs she had. She was extremely worried, because as frugal as she was she couldn’t figure out how to keep her heat on, pay her rent, and buy a few meager groceries. She thought the utilities might end up shutting her heat off. I suggested a social services agency she could go to, and that she might check with neighborhood churches to see if they had funds that could help. And I promised that I would do everything I could to fight for her. I pushed hard on the local utility companies to try and shame them away from turning the heat off the dead of an Iowa winter, which didn’t work very well because the utility companies had no shame. And my organization pushed in the legislature to get a bill passed that would prohibit utility shutoffs in the wintertime, which didn’t pass the first year but did the second year we worked on it. But it didn’t pass in time to save the woman I met. Reading the Cedar Rapids Gazette one day that winter, I saw that the woman I met had been found dead in her apartment of hypothermia after the utility company had turned off her heat.

When we got the bill passed in the next session, I thought of her. I was proud that no one would die in the coming years in Iowa because of having their heat turned off, but I was also mourning that we were too late to save her. And I vowed to keep my promise to her as long as I lived, that I would keep fighting for her and people like her.

It’s 30 years later, but I still have promises to keep, as do all Democrats who claim to be on the side of the middle class and poor. As Dean Baker makes clear, if the President’s apparent offer of changing the CPI formula is part of the budget deal, it will be a very hard blow for generations to come for seniors who will be unlikely to have decent pensions or much in the way of savings to cushion the blow of these cuts. And with prices for necessities (utility prices, gas, groceries, health care) tending to go up more than the inflation rate in general, this is the absolute worst kind of cut to be making.

I have been having some interesting conversations with Democrats over the last 24 hours about what being a loyal Democrat means with the President seeming likely to go forward with this deal. The point has been made that the Republicans are far worse than Obama on these issues, as all they want to do is to gut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs for the poor, and that is definitely true. The fact that the President is, according to the Washington Post, proposing to exclude SSI disability payments and provide a bump-up in benefits for those 85 and older is a good thing and much appreciated. People have said to me that the President’s heart is in the right place, and that he is working hard to get the best deal he thinks he can get, which may well be true- I gave up judging politicians’ motives long ago. And I have been told I should be a loyal Democrat, that the President is our party’s leader, and we should be unified in supporting him.

But here’s the deal: I didn’t get into politics to help the Democratic party. I came to the Democratic party because they more often wanted to help the people I cared about helping- the poor, the disabled, the middle class folks fighting for a decent life for them and their families. When forced to choose, as it looks like I will in this case, I will choose the people I got into this work to fight for.

My first loyalties are to my middle class family, who will depend heavily on Social Security because they mostly won’t have lots of savings or generous pensions; to the kids I grew up with in a working class part of Lincoln, NE, who are getting ready to retire and mostly don’t have those savings or pensions either; to the people like my late brother Kevin who have lived with serious disabilities, who may or may not be taken care of depending on what is negotiated away next; and to the poor people and seniors who I got to know as a young organizer, like the elderly woman I made a promise to that I would keep fighting for her.

If the President decides to give into Republican demands to cut this kind of deal, thinking that launching a civil war with people like me who were part of his winning coalition in the election is better for the country and worth the trade-off, he will do what feels like he should. The DC pundits will be ecstatic (“the President is so brave to take on those seniors and cut Social Security”). Wall Street will be thrilled, they have been wanting to cut middle class benefits and the Social Security system for years. But on behalf of those people to whom I owe my first loyalties, I will do whatever I can to fight the kind of plan being described in news accounts today. I hope the rest of the progressive movement that has pledged to fight this kind of deal will fight the good fight along with me. The President will do what he thinks is best. The rest of us need to as well. If the deal goes down, it will be quite a way to start the President’s second term, an ugly fight with the people who fought by his side to elect him. We’ll see what’s ahead. 

 Stories of the Elderly Remind Us of the Pain of Cutting Social Security Payments | Alternet.

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Much Grief, but Little Action From Congress on Guns – NationalJournal.com

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Government, Humanitarian on December 14, 2012


Much Grief, but Little Action From Congress on Guns

 

By Fawn Johnson

Updated: December 14, 2012 | 4:07 p.m.
December 14, 2012 | 2:34 p.m.

AP PHOTO/JESSICA HILL

Parents leave a staging area after being reunited with their children following a mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Friday.

Thoughts and prayers. That’s what you get from members of Congress. They said it after the Aurora, Colo., shooting in July. They said it after the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida, the assassination attempt on former Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, and the massacre of 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007.

Now they are saying it after a gunman opened fire on Friday at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school in one of the nation’s worst mass killings.

This tragedy may hit a little harder, as policymakers are hinting at action on gun legislation. President Obama choked up during his statement on the incident. “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this.” That’s the closest he has come to saying he wants action on gun control legislation in the wake of other shootings.

On Capitol Hill, the reaction was mostly an outpouring of sympathy and grief. House Speaker John Boehner ordered the flags at half mast.

Sens. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., and Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., went further than most lawmakers in their reactions. Feinstein is important because she has already pledged to introduce legislation to bring back the ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004. Obama has said he supports reviving the ban, but there has been almost no activity from the White House to make it happen. That could change after Friday. Lautenberg is important because has also has called for an assault weapons ban and he sponsors legislation on that same topic.

Feinstein said “weapons of war don’t belong on our streets or in our theaters, shopping malls and, most of all, our schools. I hope and trust that in the next session of Congress there will be sustained and thoughtful debate about America’s gun culture and our responsibility to prevent more loss of life.”

Lautenberg said, “If we do not take action to address gun violence, shooting tragedies like this will continue.”

“The nation is ready for this conversation,” said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chimed in.

Those statements went beyond the typical ones from Capitol Hill:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said, “The entire nation will continue to stand as a source of support to this community in the days and weeks to come.”

Rep. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said, “I am shocked and saddened by the horrific news from Sandy Hook Elementary School this morning, and I pray that kids, teachers, staff, and families reach safety as quickly as possible.”

Senate Republicans said in a tweet: “Our thoughts and prayers are with everyone affected by today’s tragic shooting in Connecticut. Please keep them in yours as well.”

Yes, anyone within range of a television or an Internet connection can’t help but think about the shootings, where the death toll has been estimated as high as 30 and parents are worried sick about their children.

You get much grief but precious little action on guns in Congress. The best shot at legislative action comes from Feinstein’s attempt to reinstate the assault weapons ban.

Another hope, but without a lot of momentum, is legislation by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., to tighten up state background-check laws. It has the advantage of piggy-backing on existing laws to improve the databases.

That’s cold comfort to gun-control advocates.

“If you don’t have the human decency at this point to speak up about this issue, you’ve lost your humanity. This has gone too far. Everybody literally should be sick right now,” said Ladd Everitt, communications director for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “It’s time for the president to speak about this. Not long ago we saw the power of the bully pulpit when he spoke out on gay marriage. It’s time for him to find his voice and stop cowering to the [National Rifle Association].”

His outrage echoes some of the people sounding off on Twitter.

“Please let this be a wake-up call for gun control if all of the other shootings haven’t been,” said one tweet.

“As much as I love Americans, today I would be ashamed to [be] a citizen of a nation whose lawmakers have yet to end this madness for good,” said another tweeter.

Gun-rights advocates tend to ride out these waves of turmoil in relative silence. They say that tragedies like the Connecticut shooting (and the Aurora shooting) are used as emotional wedges for gun-control groups to win political points.

Advocates on both sides of the gun issue say part of the problem with the public outcry in the wake of such tragedies is that the facts about each individual circumstance aren’t always known immediately. In some cases, an assault weapon was used. In other cases, a handgun was used. That makes it difficult for anyone lobbying on a specific gun issue to react quickly.

Generally, the lack of immediate facts helps the gun-rights advocates because they can keep their responses general without delving into the areas that they deem dangerous. After the Aurora shooting, an NRA spokesman gave a generic “thoughts and prayers” comment but declined further speculation until all the facts were known. By then, the story had gone cold.

 Much Grief, but Little Action From Congress on Guns – NationalJournal.com.

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4 Secrets Republicans Are Keeping About Medicare to Convince Us That $600 Billion in Cuts Are Necessary | Alternet

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in GOP, Government, Humanitarian, Social on December 11, 2012


4 Secrets Republicans Are Keeping About Medicare to Convince Us That $600 Billion in Cuts Are Necessary

This entire Medicare debate’s being held under false pretenses.

December 10, 2012 

The Republicans are demanding $600 billion in Medicare cuts over the next ten years. Their only concrete proposal is to deny Medicare coverage to Americans during what is now their first two years of eligibility, at ages 65 and 66. But their official offer isn’t even that specific. It just throws out that figure: $600 billion. But you can’t get there from here.

At least you can’t do it their way – not without causing enormous hardship, and not without costing the public twice as much from other sources as would be saved in government spending.

In fact, there are only two paths to $600 billion in savings. One’s macabre and morbid, and is offered here only to make as a Swiftian ”modest proposal.” The other would take a chunk out of corporate profits.

Which path do you think the GOP would prefer?

This entire Medicare debate’s being held under false pretenses. Here are four multibillion-dollar Medicare secrets they don’t want you to know – along with that funereal “modest proposal”:

1. Runaway corporate profits are squeezing medicare.

Republican Sen. Bob Corker echoed the party line today when he said that cutting “entitlements” was needed in order to “save the nation.” But benefit cuts aren’t where the money is: profits are.  We did some rough calculations to show you just how much profit’s involved:

Roughly $200 billion in Medicare spending will go to drug company profits in the next 10 years. (We got that figure by averaging the profit margins for large pharmaceutical corporations by projected Medicare drug expenditures.) And yet the Republicans have blocked legislation that would allow the government to use its purchasing power to negotiate for a better deal. So the drug companies can charge us whatever they want – and we pay it.

Medicare has reportedly underpaid for hospital services at times. But for-profit hospitals have an average profit margin of 5.5 percent. What they’re not receiving from Medicare is ‘cost-shifting’ to private health insurance. We pay for that, too –  in insurance premiums and tax concessions for employer-sponsored coverage.  With Medicare hospital expenditures likely to approach $2.5 trillion in the next ten years, that’s costing society a fortune.

And that doesn’t include high margins in the non-profit hospital field, where CEOs frequently earn more than a million dollars as a reward for maximizing revenue. Nor do these figures include the profits received by all sorts of other for-profit health providers ranging from diagnostic centers to ambulatory surgery clinics.

2. We receive far too much unnecessary care, and are often fraudulently billed for the care that is given.

Then there’s what may be the most expensive effect that greed has on Medicare: overtreatment. A series of exposés (some of which we discussed in “Sick Money,” a review of Bain Capital’s health investments) have revealed gross patterns of fraudulent Medicare overcharging.

Even worse tis the overtreatment that’s done to boost profits. Unnecessary procedures are difficult and uncomfortable at best, and at worst they can lead to pain, disability, even death. This overtreatment’s been documented in both academic studies (John Wennberg’s Dartmouth Atlas is a great resource) and some excellent journalism.

And it’s getting worse. Now hospitals are buying physician practices and exerting financial pressure on doctors to perform more surgeries. But the truth is that doctors have always been under financial pressure to overtreat. They graduate from medical school with tons of debt and must then maintain a profitable practice, including everything from equipment to office staff.

And yet Republicans have beaten back attempts to control this overtreatment with their “death panel” hoax. That  myth is only slightly less believable than “black helicopters.” There are death panels – but they’re manned by insurance executives, not bureaucrats.  Republicans have fought Medicare by telling us that doctors shouldn’t be “employees” of the government. Now they’re employed by MBAs who want a fat bonus.

Does overtreatment research interfere with our right to choose our own care?  I want to make an informedchoice – and I don’t want anybody cutting me open if it isn’t absolutely necessary.

3. Seniors are already being hit hard by medical costs.

People who aren’t covered by Medicare and don’t know much about it often assume it covers all, or most, medical expenses. But the average person on Medicare pays roughly $4,600 per year in out-of-pocket medical costs, and that figure can be much higher for those who are severely or chronically ill or who have suffered a serious injury.

Boehner’s figure of $600 billion over 10 years is a reduction of approximately 7.8 percent from current projections. But Medicare enrollment will increase from 49 million people to 85 million over the same period. Assuming that these Republican cuts are made permanent, that means that Medicare’s per-person budget will have been cut by more than 15 percent by the year 2022.

4. Chronic conditions and end of life illnesses are extraordinarily expensive.

They’re not proposing to do anything about Medicare’s biggest cost problem: the care that’s provided to the severely ill, especially in the final year of life. As the Dartmouth Atlas reports, “Patients with chronic illness in their last two years of life account for about 32% of total Medicare spending.” That comes to nearly 2.5 trillion dollars over the next ten years, based on current projects. And yet the GOP is proposing to slash, not increase, funding for research that might help us provide end-of-life care more effectively and humanely.

The elderly are particularly prone to other costly chronic conditions like cancer and diabetes, which can be treated much more effectively – and much less expensively – if they are caught early. Instead, their plan to deny Medicare to people aged 65 and 66 will lead to less early diagnosis and intervention, making us sicker and driving up Medicare’s costs.

It’s Your Funeral

That leads us to our “modest proposal.” Any way you look at it, we’re going to be seeing an increase in the number of funerals if Medicare benefits are cut. Research has shown that the survival for seniors in this country increased by 13 percent when Medicare was introduced in the 1960s.

It’s reasonable to assume that those survival rates will begin to fall again – and death rates will rise – if we impose mindless benefit cuts, instead of taking an intelligent cost management approach that focuses on expense drivers such as overtreatment, overbilling, and excessive profiteering.

The Republicans want drastic cost reductions without disturbing corporate profits. Using their logic, they shouldn’t take away our first two years of Medicare coverage. They should take away the last two years.  That would cut Medicare expenditures by more than a third.

And what do they care about one more funeral here or there – as long as it’s not theirs?

 4 Secrets Republicans Are Keeping About Medicare to Convince Us That $600 Billion in Cuts Are Necessary | Alternet.

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How One GOP Plutocrat Helped Make 20,000 Kids Homeless | Alternet

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Housing, Humanitarian on December 3, 2012


How One GOP Plutocrat Helped Make 20,000 Kids Homeless

Homelessness in New York has skyrocketed, thanks in part to years of conservative policy predicated on right-wing ideology.

November 29, 2012 

 

A series of ads placed in New York’s subways by Coalition for the Homeless highlights skyrocketing rates of child and family homelessness in the city.

 

There are  20,000 kids sleeping in homeless shelters in New York City, according to the city’s latest estimate, a number that does not include homeless kids who are not sleeping in shelters because their families have been turned away. Up to 65 percent of families who apply for shelter don’t get in, and their options can be grim.

“Some end up sleeping in subway trains,” Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst at Coalition for the Homeless, tells AlterNet. “Some go to hospital emergency rooms or laundromats. Women are going back to their batterers or staying in unsafe apartments.” 

Families that make it into shelters are taking longer to leave and move into stable, permanent housing. Asked by reporters why families were staying 30% longer than even last year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, “… it is a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before.”   

“Is it great?” He elaborated a day later in response to outcry over his comments. “No. It’s not the Plaza Hotel … but that’s not what shelter is supposed to be and that’s not what the public can afford or the public wants.” 

That deep-seated empathy for the poor also runs through the mayor’s policies, which have helped create a crisis that the New York Times  has called “an emergency.” Since the mayor took office, promising to slash the rate of total homelessness by two thirds in five years, the homeless rate in New York City has ballooned to 46,000 people sleeping in shelters, an increase of almost 40 percent. The administration blames the financial crisis, but as it turns out, there are ways to make the lives of the very poor tougher in the middle of a recession: you just need to subscribe to a governing philosophy that assumes the poor are both too lazy to get on their feet and working hard day and night to cheat the system. 

Here is a guide to how the Bloomberg administration managed to increase family homelessness while using up a lot of public money.  

1. Cut access to federal aid.

For decades, Republican and Democratic mayors kept family homelessness down by giving homeless parents and their kids priority access to federal housing subsidies and rental vouchers. But in 2004, as part of the mayor’s five-year plan to combat homelessness, the administration knocked homeless families from the top of the massive waiting list for federal rent subsidies. Administration officials, offering no empirical proof, claimed that poor people were scamming the system by moving into shelters in order to get Section 8 vouchers. (Like many conservative fantasies involving scheming minorities, it’s no doubt true that someone, somewhere, cheated  – but studies show this was not a widespread problem straining the system.)

The rate of homeless families who used federal subsidies fell to the low single digits. According to Giselle Routhier, policy analyst for Coalition for the Homeless, ”In fiscal year 2010, at a time of then record homelessness, homeless families received only 2 percent of the 5,500 available public housing apartments and only 3 percent of 7,500 Section 8 vouchers.” 

In place of programs that gave them access to permanent housing, homeless families got the gift of personal responsibility! First the administration introduced Housing Stability Plus, a subsidy that fell by 20 percent each year. HSP was mired in controversy following revelations that families were being exposed to hazardous conditions in their new digs: “[M]any formerly homeless families and their children have suffered from lead poisoning, lack of heat and hot water, vermin infestation,” according to a Coalition for the Homeless report. 

The Advantage program, introduced in 2007, helped with a percent of families’ rents (requiring they work or take job training) but cut aid after either one or two years. When their subsidies ran out, families were supposed to find their own way into permanent housing. Instead, many found their way back to the shelter, because, as homelessness advocates point out, rents did not magically go down in New York. One out of three families whose Advantage assistance expired applied for shelter in 2011, according to city numbers crunched by Coalition for the Homeless.   

2. Cut and run.

Still, the administration touted the program as a success, defending it against homelessness advocates and city officials who pushed the mayor to give families priority in federal housing assistance. So it was strange that when the governor of New York cut half of Advantage’s funding in March 2011, the Bloomberg administration refused to make up the difference and just killed the program. Around that time the mayor suggested that poor families were pretending to be homeless to scam Advantage subsidies.“You never know what motivates people,” he said on his radio show. “One theory is that some people have been coming into the homeless system, the shelter system, in order to qualify for a program that helps you move out of the homeless system.”

When the city officially cut the program, 15,000 families who relied on Advantage to make rent were informed by letter that they had exactly two weeks to find other arrangements. An emergency court order forced the city to continue helping families in the program, but when the order was lifted in February 2012, the city abruptly cut off aid to tenants, saddling 7,000 households with full market rent for apartments they’d struggled to pay 30% to 40% on. 

The inevitable return to the shelter of many former Advantage families helped push the number of homeless people sleeping in shelters up to 43,000 in 2012. “In the last 18 months, there has been no housing plan,” Markee tells AlterNet.  

3. Spend money on temporary solutions.

Instead, the administration is just frantically opening up more and more emergency shelters. The AP reports that 10 new shelters for single adults and families have opened in recent months to deal with the crisis. The administration plans five more before the year is over.

The problem with that is everything. Putting up a family in a shelter costs $3,000 a month — way more than a rental subsidy. Beyond that, studies have shown that not having a permanent place to live is destabilizing and harmful to kids, even if they end up in one of those NYC shelters that so impressed the mayor with their luxury. Homeless kids get sick more often and with stranger and more serious ailments than poor kids who have homes, suffering respiratory infections and digestive infections at significantly higher rates. The lack of safe, permanent housing delays normal development  and homeless kids have higher levels of anxiety and depression, which often manifest in behavioral problems. 

“If homelessness is hard on adults, for the young, it can be disastrous, starting a slide into a lifetime of problems,” a NYT editorial put it. (It’s not entirely clear what the long-term impact of Hurricane Sandy will be on the city’s homelessness rates. Right now, families who lost their homes in the storm are staying in hotels paid by the city and reimbursed by FEMA.)

4. Refuse to change course.

The New York City Council has outlined a plan to revive programs proven to reduce homelessness. As Christine Quinn, Annabel Palma and Coalition for the Homeless director Mary Brosnahan wrote in a Huffington Post op-ed, “That means returning to the proven strategy of setting aside a reasonable share of open slots in public housing and marshaling valuable federal housing vouchers for those trapped in the shelter system. In addition, a new rental assistance program, modeled on the successful federal voucher program, must be created.” 

An assessment of the plan by the City of New York’s Independent Budget Office found, “if a total of 5,000 families a year were moved out of shelter through priority referrals for NYCHA and Section 8, family shelter costs would be $29.4 million lower, of which $11.0 million would be savings of city funds.” 

So far, the administration has rebuffed the plan. At a hearing in September, Department of Homeless Services commissioner Seth Diamond pointed, improbably, to job training programs as the way to address the city’s skyrocketing homelessness. One council member called it a “head-in-the-sand” approach.  

Diamond reiterated the administration’s position that shelter residents should not be prioritized for housing aid.

 How One GOP Plutocrat Helped Make 20,000 Kids Homeless | Alternet.

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In Need, in New York – NYTimes.com

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Economy, Government, Humanitarian, Job Search, Jobs, Opinion, Perspective, Society on June 22, 2012


June 21, 2012

In Need, in New York

By ALEX MILLER

Townies

A native of Chicago’s South Side, I was raised in poverty. Several times my mother and I had to take refuge in other people’s homes, and sometimes in shelters. I thought that by joining the Navy at 18, I would get the training and education I needed to improve my life and help my family.

Yet once I was honorably discharged in 2008, with good conduct medals and, from a service-related injury, seven screws in my foot and ankle, I found the recession had left few available jobs. I worked as a server at a pizza joint and as a salesman at a retail store. Finally I did maintenance at the veterans hospital in the Bronx. I should have taken a full-time job there when it was available, but felt sure I could find something that paid higher. I was proud, and I was wrong. For a long time, I got by on the G.I. bill benefits and scholarship grants I received from going to community college and, more recently, the New School. But eventually I couldn’t get by anymore; I couldn’t even pay rent.

One in seven homeless people have previously served in the military. This year, at 25, I became one of those homeless veterans.

One of my most vivid memories of New York City shelters is of watching a fellow black veteran having a heated argument with himself. The oddest thing was that no words were said — the man spit and sputtered and pounded his fist on his chest, all while only moving his lips. It was as if a mime was violently illustrating anger to a person who had never experienced it.

Bénédicte Muller

It reminded me of a conversation I’d once had in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Bored of waiting to hit land, which could take two months or more, my shipmates and I made up games. One such game, which we called “Wish List,” was simple. We had to envision the most extravagant thing we’d do in order to get an early discharge from the Navy. One guy said he’d pretend he was crazy — eat foreign objects and pull his pants down while pledging allegiance to Harvey the pooka instead of the United States of America. That got laughs.

It was hard to laugh at that veteran in the shelter, though. And others were worse off than he. The mistake that the shelter system makes is to clump everyone together. Those unstable vets lay in cots directly next to stable soldiers who lay next to ex-cons with any number of offenses. It was hard sleeping at night not knowing how innocent or guilty the former prisoner in the bed next to me was. Just about every shelter had gang members or former gang members and stories of violence and theft. Sadly, there was always someone who had taken, or at least claimed to have taken, the life of another. There was speculation that sex offenders were being quietly shuffled through the system, too.

I experienced firsthand the frustrations veterans feel in shelters each day. We were told how little we mattered by social workers with limited patience and even less training in working with recently deployed soldiers, and pushed into applying for public assistance. I wanted a job, not welfare, but I was told that no New York City shelter would house me if I didn’t apply for food stamps and warned I would fail to find work.

Despite the setbacks, I am grateful for some of the acquaintances I made. I met a former service member who worked for NASA before a crack addiction led to theft, a prison sentence and homelessness. I got to know an Army doctor who served in Vietnam. Doc, as we called him, lost it during combat and even admitted to enjoying killing people, but his charm and patience made that hard to believe. Another former-Navy man was an astronomy geek, just like me, so we hit it off instantly.

In the beginning, I blamed the government for our fate, for training us for sophisticated equipment that is found only in the military, thus limiting our job opportunities in the civilian world, and for failing to put better safeguards in place to keep veterans off the streets. I pointed fingers at my college for only granting me a small sum for food and transportation while my world was crumbling. I even found fault with my mother, for dying and leaving me and my siblings to pay for her funeral and burial costs.

But ultimately, my experience has made me realize that I’m more responsible for my situation than I’d like to admit. Drinking to excess and my uncanny ability to withstand hardship when help should be requested are two of the main culprits. Today I’m focusing on my education; I moved out of the shelter last month and am now living in a beautiful duplex in New Jersey. I have been able to find purpose in all of this: a persistent determination to do better for myself, ironically the very lesson the Navy instilled in me when I joined eight years ago.

 In Need, in New York – NYTimes.com.

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BBC News – NeverSeconds blogger Martha Payne school dinner photo ban lifted

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Censorship, Humanitarian, Schools, Social, Society on June 15, 2012


15 June 2012

NeverSeconds blogger Martha Payne school dinner photo ban lifted

Martha

Martha’s NeverSeconds blog started as a writing project with her dad

A controversial ban preventing a nine-year-old girl from photographing her school meals has been lifted following a storm of protest on the internet.

Martha Payne, from Argyll, has now recorded more than three million hits on her NeverSeconds blog.

Argyll and Bute Council said press coverage of the blog had led catering staff to fear for their jobs.

But council leader Roddy McCuish later told the BBC he had instructed senior officials to lift the ban immediately.

Martha began publishing photographs of her Lochgilphead Primary School lunches on 30 April.

She gave each meal a ‘food-o-meter’ and health rating, and counted the number of mouthfuls it took her to eat it.

The schoolgirl had been using the blog – which she started with the help of her father Dave – to raise money for the Mary’s Meals charity.

But in a post published on Thursday evening, Martha said her headteacher told her not to take any more photographs for the blog.

Under the headline “Goodbye”, the post stated: “This morning in maths I got taken out of class by my head teacher and taken to her office.

Charity blog

“I was told that I could not take any more photos of my school dinners because of a headline in a newspaper today.”

The council’s decision to impose the ban came after the Daily Record newspaper published a photograph of Martha alongside chef Nick Nairn under the headline “Time to fire the dinner ladies.”

An explanatory note posted on the blog by her father read: “I contacted Argyll and Bute Council…and they told me it was their decision to ban Martha’s photography.

Photo of Martha's school lunch

Martha gave this cheeseburger a health rating of just 2/10

“It is a shame that a blog that today went through two million hits, which has inspired debates at home and abroad and raised nearly £2,000 for charity is forced to end.”

Mr Payne later told BBC Radio’s Good Morning Scotland programme his daughter was not happy about the council’s decision.

He added: “I understand that it’s brought pressure from around the world and media interest, but that is really out of our control.

“But we are very supportive of the school – the fact that she has been encouraged to blog and she got permission to do this is testament to them.

“Everyone in the kitchens has been wonderful to Martha and she enjoys going into lunch every day.”

By Friday morning, the council’s decision had sparked a furious reaction on social media.

Local MSP Mike Russell, Scotland’s education secretary, tweeted he would be writing to the council’s chief executive in his capacity as local MSP, calling for the “daft” ban to be overturned.

Job fears

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver tweeted: “Stay strong Martha” before urging his 2.3 million followers to retweet the message to show their support for the schoolgirl.

Argyll and Bute Council later issued a statement defending its position and claimed media coverage of the blog had led catering staff to fear for their jobs.

It added: “The council has directly avoided any criticism of anyone involved in the ‘never seconds’ blog for obvious reasons despite a strongly-held view that the information presented in it misrepresented the options and choices available to pupils.

It is a good thing to do, to change your mind, and I have certainly done that”

Roddy McCuishArgyll and Bute Council Leader

“However this escalation means we had to act to protect staff from the distress and harm it was causing.

“In particular, the photographic images uploaded appear to only represent a fraction of the choices available to pupils, so a decision has been made by the council to stop photos being taken in the school canteen.

“There have been discussions between senior council staff and Martha’s father however, despite an acknowledgement that the media coverage has produced these unwarranted attacks, he intimated that he would continue with the blog.”

Cleland Sneddon, the executive director of community services at Argyll and Bute Council, told the BBC that school catering staff had been left “in tears” by press coverage.

However, Mr McCuish later told the BBC Radio 4′s World at One programme that he had instructed senior officials to lift the ban immediately.

He said: “It is a good thing to do, to change your mind, and I have certainly done that.”

Mr McCuish said he had not yet been able to inform Martha of the lifting of the photo ban, but had a meeting arranged with her father next Thursday to discuss “a way forward”.

‘Dinner summit’

He said the council had been concerned about criticisms of dining hall staff in an article about Martha’s blog in the national media, but accepted that it should have raised the issue with the newspaper concerned rather than taking action against the schoolgirl.

“I don’t know what went wrong yet, but I will do my very best to find out,” he said.

“I hope, come the summer, we will have a way forward, like a school dinner summit which will take place this summer.”

Martha had been raising money through a Justgiving page for the Mary’s Meals charity, which helps feed some of the poorest children in the world.

Publicity caused by the ban helped her smash through her £7,000 target – with total pledges of more than £30,000 being made by Friday afternoon.

The total stood at only about £2,000 on Thursday evening.

A Mary’s Meals spokesman said: “Martha’s support for Mary’s Meals has been amazing and we are extremely grateful for everything that she has done to help us reach some of the hungriest children in the world.

“We are overwhelmed by the huge response to her efforts today which has led to so many more people donating to her online donation page.

“Thanks to this fantastic support, Martha has now raised enough money to build a kitchen in Malawi for children receiving Mary’s Meals as part of our Sponsor A School initiative and has broken the record for hitting a Sponsor A School online fundraising target in the quickest amount of time”.

Among the pictures Martha published on her blog was one featuring her £2 lunch of a pizza slice, a croquette, sweetcorn and a cupcake.

Martha wrote: “I’m a growing kid and I need to concentrate all afternoon and I can’t do it on one croquette. Do any of you think you could?”

 BBC News – NeverSeconds blogger Martha Payne school dinner photo ban lifted.

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Can you buy technology with a clean conscience? | Analysis | Features | PC Pro

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Business, China, Debate, Economics, Humanitarian, Jobs, Technology, Work Place on May 26, 2012


Foxconn workers

 

Can you buy technology with a clean conscience?

Posted on 25 May 2012 at 16:13

Pitifully paid workers, weak environmental policies, supply chains that allow manufacturers to abdicate responsibility. Simon Brew asks: is it even possible to buy ethically sound technology?

PC World sells, at the time of this magazine going to press, 85 different laptops. Its website stocks 26 variants of the Apple iPod, and an extensive range of tablet computers – each keenly priced, and capable of performing tasks that sizeable desktop PCs of a decade ago would have struggled with.

Chances are, too, that each was made in a factory in China. The reason for this is simple: workers are cheaper in most Eastern economies, and the saving made on labour greatly outweighs the expense of moving tankers full of products to the other side of the world.

In the past, when people have voiced ethical concerns surrounding technology, it’s typically been centred on environmental issues. Such issues, as we’ll see, are still relevant, but it’s increasingly the human consequences of manufacturing technology that are coming under the microscope.

How is the end user supposed to know just how their shiny new product came to be? Do they even care that there’s a sporting chance the manufacturer itself couldn’t tell you where every last component came from? And if they did, how is it possible to have confidence that the product they’ve just bought conforms to any kind of ethical standard? Or do we all just want to buy the cheapest product available?

Is it even possible to buy any technology with a clean conscience, without bankrupting ourselves in the process?

Focus on Foxconn

On 2 January 2012, more than 150 workers at the Foxconn Technology Park in Wuhan, China, took to the roof of the factory and threatened to commit suicide. It took two days to talk them down from the top of the three-storey plant.

The protest started in response to Foxconn’s decision to move hundreds of workers to a different production line. Reporters (including those from PC Pro) dutifully published this news; ironically, they did this using equipment that was more than likely a product of said Foxconn facilities in the first place.

Suicides and stand-offs over poor working conditions at Foxconn’s Chinese factories have been rife for many years, to the point where the company has installed nets to break the fall of potential jumpers. The facilities, which manufacture hardware for many major companies, are responsible for the production of more than a third of the world’s consumer electronics products, employing hundreds of thousands of workers.

Suicides and stand-offs over poor working conditions at Foxconn’s Chinese factories have been rife for many years

Yet those workers are cheap. You don’t have to look far for stories of six-day weeks and 12-hour days among employees, with pay rates reported to start at a mere 30p an hour.

This, it should be noted, partly reflects the lower cost of living in China than in the UK. But even so, it’s the kind of substantive saving in manual labour that companies including Apple, Microsoft, Nokia and Acer have been keen to take advantage of, building up sizeable profits for themselves in the process. Apple alone racked up $20 billion of gross profit in the last 13 weeks of 2011.

Increasingly, these firms have come under fire for continuing to support factories that pay such meagre wages and provide such poor working conditions.

Yet, the question of employee treatment isn’t as clear-cut as campaigners may lead you to believe. The suicide rate in Foxconn’s factories, for instance, is below the national average figure for China as a whole.

Read more…

Can you buy technology with a clean conscience? | Analysis | Features | PC Pro.

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Paralyzed woman uses first mind-controlled robot arm | ExtremeTech

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Cool Stuff!, Engineering, Health, Humanitarian, Medical, Society, Technology on May 17, 2012


Paralyzed woman uses first mind-controlled robot arm

Sebastian Anthony on May 17, 2012

Paralysed woman serves herself coffee for the first time in 15 years

 

Using BrainGate, the world’s most advanced brain-computer interface, a woman with quadriplegia has used a mind-controlled robot arm to serve herself coffee — an act she hasn’t been able to perform for 15 years. I strongly suggest you watch the video below — the expression on her face at the end is really quite beautiful.

BrainGate, which is being developed by a team of American neuroscientists from Brown and Stanford universities, and is currently undergoing clinical trial, requires a computer chip to be implanted in the motor cortex of the patient. This chip (pictured below) uses its 100 electrodes to measure neural activity, which it then transmits to a computer for processing. Like all brain-computer interfaces, the user must train the software — basically, you just repeatedly think of an action, such as move my hand up, and the software eventually correlates this thought with your measured neural activity. Once this is done, you simply think of a movement, and the software moves the robot accordingly.

BrainGate sensor

It’s also worth noting that the robotic arm itself is quite intelligent: It automatically grasps things that move into its hand, and it goes into “safety mode” if it hits an obstacle. I’m sure other advancements will be added to the arm in due course, too — imagine if it could automatically detect graspable objects; and it definitely would spare the user a lot of effort if the robot could automatically maneuver close to your mouth (or other pre-defined locations).

Moving forward, the researchers would like to miniaturize the system and make it wireless. You’ll notice in the video that both BrainGate users have fairly large boxes attached to their heads, which then tethers them to a computer — not ideal, but it should be rather easy to convert it to wireless (and who knows, maybe that box can be tucked behind your ear instead).

The BrainGate chip, implanted into a (rendered) motor cortex

Last month we wrote about a similar technology that directly restores movement to a paralyzed arm, rather than using a robot arm. A brain-computer interface is still used, but the output is then fed back into a functional electrical stimulation (FES) device that’s wired into your arm muscles. The big difference, though, is that BrainGate is a very mature technology: The first BrainGate chip was implanted in a human back in 2004, after years of in-monkey testing — while the FES version is still trialing its tech on monkeys, meaning it’s probably at least 10 years behind BrainGate.

Between bionic eyes, the successful decoding of your thoughts by computers, and silicon chips that mimic the brain, and these recent brain-computer interface advances, things are definitely looking up for victims of paralysis and neurological diseases — and cyberpunk, bionic implant junkies like myself.

 Paralyzed woman uses first mind-controlled robot arm | ExtremeTech.

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Obama order targets technology used for human-rights abuses – The Hill’s DEFCON Hill

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Humanitarian, Social, Society on April 23, 2012


 

Obama order targets technology used for human-rights abuses

By Jeremy Herb - 04/23/12

President Obama signed an executive order Sunday that would impose sanctions on people who provide technology to help the Syrian and Iranian governments carry out human-rights abuses.

Obama announced the order Monday at a Holocaust remembrance ceremony, where he said the order would stop those who help oppressive regimes “monitor and track citizens for violence.”

Mobile technologies have helped cultivate the Arab Spring, where citizens have launched protests using social media to help with organizing demonstrations. But Iran and Syria, as well as others, have also used technology as a way to stop citizen uprisings by tracking them or shutting down access to the Internet.

“These technologies should be in place to empower citizens, not to oppress them,” Obama said Monday.

The order uses sanctions and a visa ban to target people who have sold or helped implement technology to the Iranian and Syrian governments that facilitates computer or network disruption, monitoring or tracking to enable human-rights abuses.

Obama was introduced at the remembrance ceremony by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. He talked about preventing mass atrocities and his administration’s efforts in Libya and against African warlord Joseph Kony.

In particular, Obama focused on the situation in Syria, where a cease-fire is in peril as violence there continues, with United Nations estimates tallying more than 9,000 dead.

Obama said once again that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must be ousted from power for his army’s violent crackdown against the Syrian opposition. He said the United States is not giving up on the Syrian people, and will continue to provide humanitarian aid, ramp up sanctions and try to document human-rights abuses.

“We need to be doing everything we can to prevent and respond to these national atrocities,” Obama said. “Because national sovereignty is never a license to slaughter your people.”

Obama said the executive order is one more step the administration was taking toward “the day we know will come — the end of the Assad regime that has brutalized the Syrian people.”

The executive order is part of Obama administration’s Atrocities Prevention Board, which was established in August 2011. 

 Obama order targets technology used for human-rights abuses – The Hill’s DEFCON Hill.

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Evolution has given humans a huge advantage over most other animals: middle age – The Washington Post

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Humanitarian, Opinion, Perspective on April 21, 2012


Evolution has given humans a huge advantage over most other animals: middle age

By David Bainbridge, Published: March 26

As a 42-year-old man born in England, I can expect to live for about another 38 years. In other words, I can no longer claim to be young. I am, without doubt, middle-aged.

To some people that is a depressing realization. We are used to dismissing our fifth and sixth decades as a negative chapter in our lives, perhaps even a cause for crisis. But recent scientific findings have shown just how important middle age is for every one of us, and how crucial it has been to the success of our species. Middle age is not just about wrinkles and worry. It is not about getting old. It is an ancient, pivotal episode in the human life span, preprogrammed into us by natural selection, an exceptional characteristic of an exceptional species.

Compared with other animals, humans have a very unusual pattern to our lives. We take a very long time to grow up, we are long-lived, and most of us stop reproducing halfway through our life span. A few other species have some elements of this pattern, but only humans have distorted the course of their lives in such a dramatic way. Most of that distortion is caused by the evolution of middle age, which adds two decades that most other animals simply do not get.

An important clue that middle age isn’t just the start of a downward spiral is that it does not bear the hallmarks of general, passive decline. Most body systems deteriorate very little during this stage of life. Those that do, deteriorate in ways that are very distinctive, are rarely seen in other species and are often abrupt.

For example, our ability to focus on nearby objects declines in a predictable way: Farsightedness is rare at 35 but universal at 50. Skin elasticity also decreases reliably and often surprisingly abruptly in early middle age. Patterns of fat deposition change in predictable, stereotyped ways. Other systems, notably cognition, barely change.

Each of these changes can be explained in evolutionary terms. In general, it makes sense to invest in the repair and maintenance only of body systems that deliver an immediate fitness benefit — that is, those that help to propagate your genes. As people get older, they no longer need spectacular visual acuity or mate-attracting, unblemished skin. Yet they do need their brains, and that is why we still invest heavily in them during middle age.

As for fat — that wonderfully efficient energy store that saved the lives of many of our hard-pressed ancestors — its role changes when we are no longer gearing up to produce offspring, especially in women. As the years pass, less fat is stored in depots ready to meet the demands of reproduction — the breasts, hips and thighs — or under the skin, where it gives a smooth, youthful appearance. Once our babymaking days are over, fat is stored in larger quantities and also stored more centrally, where it is easiest to carry about. That way, if times get tough we can use it for our own survival, thus freeing up food for our younger relatives.

These changes strongly suggest that middle age is a controlled and preprogrammed process not of decline but of development.

A crowning achievement

When we think of human development, we usually think of the growth of a fetus or the maturation of a child into an adult. Yet the tightly choreographed transition into middle age is a later but equally important stage in which we are each recast into yet another novel form.

That form is one of the most remarkable of all: a resilient, healthy, energy-efficient and productive phase of life that has laid the foundations for our species’s success. Indeed, the multiple roles of middle-aged people in human societies are so complex and intertwined, it could be argued that they are the most impressive living things yet produced by natural selection.

The claim that middle age evolved faces one obvious objection. For any trait to evolve, natural selection has to act on it generation after generation. Yet we often think of prehistoric life as nasty, brutish and short. Surely too few of our ancestors lived beyond age 40 to allow features of modern-day middle age, such as the deposition of a spare tire around the middle, to have been selected for.

This is a misconception. Although average life expectancy may sometimes have been very low, this does not mean that humans rarely reached the age of 40 during the past 100,000 years. Average life expectancy at birth can be a misleading measure; if infant mortality is high, then the average is skewed dramatically downward, even if people who survive to adulthood have a good chance of living a long, healthy life.

The evidence from skeletal remains suggests that our ancestors frequently lived well into middle age and beyond. Certainly many modern hunter-gatherers live well beyond 40.

The probable existence of lots of prehistoric middle-aged people means that natural selection had plenty to work on. Those with beneficial traits would have been more successful at nurturing their children to reproductive age and helping provide for their grandchildren, and hence would have passed on those traits to their descendants. As a result, modern middle age is the result of millennia of natural selection.

Lifelong learning

But why did it evolve as it did? In prehistory, and still today, human survival is entirely dependent on skilled gathering of rare, valuable resources. Humans cooperate, plan and innovate so they can extract what they need from their environment, be that roots to eat, hides to wear or rare metals to coat smartphone touch screens. We lead an energy-intensive, communication-driven, information-rich way of life, and it was the evolution of middle age that supported this.

For example, hunter-gatherer societies often have complex and difficult techniques for finding and processing food that take a long time to learn. There is evidence that many hunter-gatherers take decades to learn their craft and that their resource-acquiring abilities may not peak until they are older than 40.

Gathering sufficient calories is crucial for the success of a human community, especially since young humans take so long to grow up. Indeed, for the early years of life they devour calories without contributing many to the group themselves. Research suggests that a human child requires resources to be provided by multiple adults, almost certainly more than two young parents. For example, a recent study of two groups of South American hunter-gatherers suggested that each couple required the help of an additional 1.3 non-reproducing adults to provide for their children. Thus, middle-aged people may be seen as an essential human innovation, an elite caste of skilled, experienced super-providers on which the rest of us depend.

Culture conveyers

The other key role of middle age is the propagation of information. All animals inherit a great deal of information in their genes; some also learn more as they grow up. Humans have taken this second form of information transfer to a new level. We are born knowing and being able to do almost nothing. Each of us depends on a continuous infusion of skills, knowledge and customs, collectively known as culture, if we are to survive. And the main route by which culture is transferred is by middle-aged people showing and telling their children — as well as the young adults with whom they hunt and gather — what to do.

These two roles of middle-aged humans — as super-providers and master culture-conveyers — continue today. In offices, on construction sites and on sports fields around the world, we see middle-aged people advising and guiding younger adults and sometimes even ordering them about. Middle-aged people can do more, they earn more and, in short, they run the world.

This has left its mark on the human brain. As might be expected of people propagating complex skills, middle-aged people exhibit no dramatic cognitive deterioration. Changes do occur in our thinking abilities, but they are subtle. For example, response speeds slow down over the course of adulthood. However, speed isn’t everything, and it is still debated whether other abilities deteriorate at all.

To carry out their roles in society, middle-aged people need not necessarily think better than younger adults, but they may have to think differently. Indeed, functional brain imaging studies suggest that they sometimes use different brain regions than young people when performing the same tasks, raising the possibility that the nature of thought itself changes as we get older.

An elite club

A central and related feature of middle age is the many healthy years we enjoy after we have stopped reproducing. Female humans are especially unusual animals because they become infertile halfway through their lives, but male humans often also effectively “self-sterilize” by remaining with their post-menopausal partners. Almost no other species does this.

The possible benefits of menopause are not immediately obvious: After all, natural selection favors individuals who rear the most offspring. Yet there are other, rare examples of reproductive cessation in the animal kingdom that may provide some clues. Orcas also undergo menopause, and it is striking how much their lives mirror ours. They are long-lived, slow to develop, intelligent and vocally communicative. They invent and apply a complex array of techniques for communal food acquisition, and they are extremely widespread.

Thus, humans can be seen as members of an elite club of species in which adulthood has become so long and complicated that it can no longer all be given over to breeding. Just like farsightedness and inelastic skin, menopause now appears to be a coordinated, controlled process. It liberates women and their partners from the unremitting demands of producing children and gives them time to do what middle-aged people do best: live long and pamper.

 Evolution has given humans a huge advantage over most other animals: middle age – The Washington Post.

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