Die, Healthcare Serf-Slave Mommy! Die! Die!

Yuh, we hear of employers who want to dump providing health insurance for employees.


This worker's dumping work to dump her health insurance provider-profiteer.

Yes, Ms NBFH just quit her job because the insurance her not-quite-ex-employer offers so sucks.

Big-time insurance profiteering company. Cost $12K a year. New plan began July 1 of this year, effects became clear in the past 3 weeks. Same outrageous price, but even worse coverage. If that is imaginable. $12K for family "coverage," with a huge deductible. You get an ultrasound for $525, they pay all of $125, you get stuck with--surprise! A bill for $400! And they tell you if you'd just driven an hour and a half away for a potentially life-threatening condition, they gladly would have picked up more of the tab.

I've been a healthcare insurance serf-slave to this company for years. And it's just not worth it anymore. I will be saving money by not working, because for the last six weeks, every penny I earn there has gone only to pay this crappy insurance company's crappy rates for crappy coverage.

So I'm done.

I can't be the only one who's re-cycling Paddy Chayevsky: mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

Thus Empire crumbles under the weight of its own stupidity and greed.

Midterms: money changes everything - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Midterms: money changes everything - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Spying and lying about the left - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Your tax dollars at work: Spying and lying about the left - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

The Pleasures of Eating - Wendell Berry | Center for Ecoliteracy

The Pleasures of Eating - Wendell Berry | Center for Ecoliteracy

SNL : I'm not a witch

Nanny Backs Up Maid for Whitman's Let 'Er Eat Cake-Gate

Meg Whitman--a woman who can't clean up after herself.

Finding love in the wrong places - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Finding love in the wrong places - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Fund-Raiser for Corrente!!!!

Pass it on!

TMI

"Are You Going to Man Up, Or Just Lie There and Bleed?"

This is from the NYT on the phrase, "man up."

Yes, Virginia, flagrantly gender-biased language remains invisible, because sexism just, well, you know, it just is how things is, isn't it?

NBFH to Corporate Sickness Profiteers: Drop Dead

So. So. So.

So I had a family member with a potentially life-threatening condition who needed an ultrasound, two ultrasounds, in fact. The employer through whom our family has health insurance dropped our secondary coverage on July 1, saying they could no longer afford to provide a secondary coverage benefit, essentially giving us a $4K cut in salary.

So our family's health insurance serf-slave had to drop PPO coverage, and get into a HMO just to keep some benefits. These "benefits" cost us ~$1400 month.

So today we get a bill for $375 out of the blue, for the first ultrasound. The first ultrasound cost $504 at our local hospital. Corporate Sickness Profiteer paid all of $125 of this. Remember, our family is paying them $16,800 for "coverage," and now, it turns out, we must absorb a $4000 deductible in addition for services such as this ultrasound. Oh, and the CSP would have reimbursed more if sick person with potentially life-threatening condition had been driven sixty miles away to have ultrasound at a "cheaper" hospital.

So really the first $20K of earnings (which is nearly all of earnings from this employer) is going to CSP to provide us sh*tty coverage.

Question is -- serf-slave is working there, why? Serf-slave is paying extortionate rates to CSP because, why?

Serf-slave will be better off unemployed, serf-slave thinketh.

What thinketh our gentle readerth?

Consciousness of Guilt (Or, Yes, Bush/Cheney's Still Getting Away With Murder)

It's Rosemary Woods on crack and steroids: the convenient "disappearance" of evidence which, by federal law, must not be disappeared. Not a miserable few minutes on Nixon's tapes, but ALL SORTSA emails. Especially Dick Cheney's emails. You know, sensitive emails. Stuff that is meant to be preserved.

But it did disappear.

No biggie.

I mean, cui bono? These things just happen! Why would you think this spontaneous event involved destruction of evidence? Why?




Hat-tip to Corrente.

American Family Values, or, How Random Parenthood Becomes Cruel and Unusual

Here's a man starving a 7-month old child. His own child, btw.

Here's a Minnesota dad wreaking havoc on his four-week-old daughter.

A Fargo man wreaking havoc on his girlfriend's 4 month old child.

Call for Boycott: Dr. Pepper, Snapple, Mott's

For: Conduct Unbecoming an Employer.


Yes, that's right. A corporation tries to screw its employees and get away with it. Well, I'm not buying.

How about you?

Buffalo Cops Save Life of Live Cat Being Marinated Prior to Becoming Owner's Meal

Yikes.

Owner said cat was mean to him.

No wonder.

Also called his cat "possessive, greedy, and wasteful."


Yuh, somebody's got issues.

Buffalo police rescued a cat from a Cheektowaga man who apparently was planning to make a meal out of his pet because he thought it was ill-tempered, authorities said Monday.

When Ferry-Fillmore District officers pulled over a car driven by Gary L. Korkuc on Sunday night during a traffic stop, they said they heard a cat crying from inside the trunk and investigated.

What they found has left animal lovers at the SPCA Serving Erie County in shock.

The cat, according to police, was in a cage “marinating” in a mixture of crushed red peppers, chili pepper, salt and oil.

“It’s disgusting. It surprises me every day what people are capable of when it comes to violence, whether it is animals or people,” said Gina M. Browning, the SPCA’s director of public relations. “I’ve never heard of anything like this before.”

Korkuc, 51, was arrested on one count of cruelty to animals by Officers Jerry Guilian and John Poisson, shortly after he was stopped on the 1100 block of Broadway at about 7:45 p. m. for allegedly passing a stop sign.

Police took the 4-year-old cat to the SPCA on Ensminger Road in the Town of Tonawanda, where Korkuc had adopted it May 11. He told police the cat had been “mean” to him, authorities said.

In condemning the treatment of the cat, whose name is Navarro, Browning read from an SPCA memo put together in part from information provided by the officers and shelter staff:

“Do not under any circumstances adopt to this man ever again. He claims he did not want the cat because it was ‘possessive, greedy and wasteful.’ That the cat got pregnant after ‘spaying,’ even though it was a neutered male. This man is a danger to animals. . . . was soaking cat in marinade to ‘cook.’ ”

People Who Love You Get to Hit You and Hurt You, Cape Cod Church Edition

Cape Cod Calvary Church pastor Silas Coellner advocates causing children -- and crawling infants -- pain. On purpose. To teach them that people who love you get to hit you and hurt you, a lesson they will carry with them forever.

MATTAPOISETT — A pastor and father of three poised to become the assistant principal at Old Rochester Regional Junior High School is under fire for sermonizing that spanking children is "critical" — starting with when they crawl.

"I have this little bundle of innocence. When do I start dealing with them?" Silas Coellner said in an online podcast he took down after the Herald inquired about it.

"There's something about when they reach that crawling stage, I have found, in my experience, when you can suddenly see that heart of defiance, of rebellion, for the first time. That's when you begin."

Pastor Silas is one sick puppy. Maybe he needs someone to beat some sense into him?

Shock And Awe: Trickle-down Ace Reaganomicist David Stockman, of All People, Sees Da Light

They said it couldn't be done.

Th[e ] debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.

Read It And Weep

Via Corrente, Stirling Newberry: Government prints money. Arabs raise price of oil. Checkmate. Thank you.

Another Oilist Outrage: BP Uses Prisoners, Mainly Black Prisoners, For Gusher Clean-Up

Full story here.

Let me guess why.

They're cheaper?

They're expendable?

They're helpless?

They're uh, you know, prisoners?

In the first few days after BP's Deepwater Horizon wellhead exploded, spewing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, cleanup workers could be seen on Louisiana beaches wearing scarlet pants and white t-shirts with the words "Inmate Labor" printed in large red block letters. Coastal residents, many of whom had just seen their livelihoods disappear, expressed outrage at community meetings; why should BP be using cheap or free prison labor when so many people were desperate for work? The outfits disappeared overnight.

Work crews in Grand Isle, Louisiana, still stand out. In a region where nine out of ten residents are white, the cleanup workers are almost exclusively African-American men. The racialized nature of the cleanup is so conspicuous that Ben Jealous, the president of the NAACP, sent a public letter to BP CEO Tony Hayward on July 9, demanding to know why black people were over-represented in "the most physically difficult, lowest paying jobs, with the most significant exposure to toxins."

Hiring prison labor is more than a way for BP to save money while cleaning up the biggest oil spill in history. By tapping into the inmate workforce, the company and its subcontractors get workers who are not only cheap but easily silenced—and they get lucrative tax write-offs in the process.

Bankster Lenders Discriminate Against the Pregnant

Just when you think Banksters couldn't have any more egg on their faces--or whatever that viscous stuff is--they come up with a new outrage.

Here's a NY Times story about banksters and mortgages for the pregnant--long story short, if banksters find out you're pregnant, they'll screw up your mortgage! Wow!

Mortgage lenders are taking a harder look at prospective borrowers whose income has temporarily fallen while they are on leave, including new parents at home taking care of a baby. Even if a parent plans on returning to work within weeks, some lenders are balking at approving the loans.

“If you are not back at work, it’s a huge problem,” said Rick Cason, owner of Integrity Mortgage, a mortgage firm in Orlando, Fla. “Banks only deal in guaranteed income these days. It makes sense, but the guidelines are sometimes actually harsher than they need to be.”

Back in the slapdash days of easy credit, lenders were more likely to overlook the fact that a parent was out on maternity or paternity leave. But now that lenders have become more conservative, they are requiring new parents to jump through more hoops to prove their income will be enough to cover the mortgage.

So before some prospective parents start spending their Sundays at open houses, they should be prepared to deal with some complications. They may have to delay the purchase, deal with the banks’ bureaucracy (and requests for extra paperwork) or buy a home they can afford on one salary.

“Maternity leave or any other leave of absence often prevents a person from obtaining a mortgage,” said John Councilman, president of AMC Mortgage in Fallston, Md. “There are some who long for the days when such strict proof of income was not required.”

The lenders’ new attitude can be traced, in part, to new loan quality-control measures that went into effect earlier this year. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two quasi-governmental mortgage giants that buy the bulk of conventional loans from lenders, have not changed their rules for qualifying for a mortgage. But the system of checks and balances has been tightened, making lenders increasingly skittish.

Fannie, for instance, now requires lenders to recheck a borrower’s financial situation right before the loan closes. That includes calling an employer to verify employment. Before, lenders required only a statement in writing. Fannie’s new rules went into effect on June 1. Freddie’s similar rule took effect in January.

Both Fannie and Freddie have always required that borrowers have enough income to pay for the loan on closing day — and the lender must document that the income is likely to continue for at least three years.

But here is how some lenders are interpreting the guidelines for, say, a new mother receiving short-term disability insurance for a couple of months (new mothers may receive disability payments while on maternity leave, though the amount and length depend on state law and company policies).

Since the disability payments will not continue for three years, these lenders will not count it as qualifying income, brokers said, and will require the new mother to reapply for the mortgage once she returns to work. (The same logic may apply to an injured employee receiving worker’s compensation.)

That is what happened to Elizabeth Budde, a 33-year-old oncologist who lives in Kenmore, Wash. She nearly lost her mortgage after a loan officer learned she was home with her newborn.

With stellar credit and a solid job, Dr. Budde said she had been notified via e-mail that she was approved for a loan on June 15. But that note prompted an automatic, “out of the office” e-mail reply from Dr. Budde’s work account, which said she was out on maternity leave.

The next day, Dr. Budde received a second e-mail message from the lender, this time denying her loan approval. Since “maternity leave is classified as paid via short-term or temporary disability income,” the e-mail message said, it could not be used because it would not continue for three years.

And now for something completely different. Again.

Got a lot on my plate.

But shrieking with laughter helps my mood a lot:

Rev. BillyBob Neck on "Soccer: America's Path to Socialism."





Soccer -- America's Path to Socialism.

Nobody Coulda Predicted . . . Oilist Boilerplate (or, Oilism Triumphant!)

After the Exxon Valdez disaster, nobody coulda predicted another environmental disaster would happen again.

And nobody did.

Hat-tip to quixote at Corrente, this article from McClatchy, pointing out blatant rubber-stamping of drilling proposals by separate companies who apparently all use the very same same xerox machine, typist, and well, um, the very same rubber stamp!

And y' know what all the identical triplet rubber stamps say?

Environmental impact?

Pfft!

Zero, zip, no way, nada!

No worries!

WASHINGTON — The names, locations and geographical coordinates are different. Otherwise the drilling plans for three oil companies in the Gulf of Mexico contain identical fonts, footnotes, overly optimistic projections and even typographical errors.

The companies employed the same small Houston consulting firm, R.E.M. Solutions, to prepare environmental information to submit to federal regulators for drill sites hundreds of miles from each other. R.E.M.'s analyses read like photocopies, each saying 11 times that an oil spill was "unlikely to have an impact based on the industry wide standards for using proven equipment and technology for such responses."

The Obama administration has cracked down on oil companies and federal regulators for the failures that led to the BP spill, but the private consulting firms that helped prepare many Gulf drilling plans have received far less scrutiny. A McClatchy review of plans approved by the Department of Interior's Minerals Management Service in 2009 and 2010 found that consultants were widely used but that in nearly all cases they wrote plans with the same flaws that experts and members of Congress have identified in BP's.

The Obama administration ordered oil companies on June 2 to resubmit drilling plans for the Gulf of Mexico with more environmental information, but it made no mention of the role of consultants. Some experts charge that these small, little-known firms — based throughout the Gulf Coast and often staffed by former employees of oil companies — are part of a self-serving culture among regulators and drillers that's sought for years to process as many plans as possible while ignoring environmental concerns.

"Since you know exactly what to say — you've been saying it for years and you know that MMS is going to rubber-stamp it — if you're a consultant, you're just going to cut and paste from project to project," said Kieran Suckling, the executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation organization. "Why would you spend any money on doing any analysis if no one's looking for it?"

Department of Interior officials said that federal regulators didn't oversee third-party consultants and oil companies were "ultimately responsible for the information they submit."

In the case of offshore drilling, oil companies included environmental impact information as part of their drilling applications, officials said. The MMS — renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement under a recent major restructuring — could request or seek out additional information before deciding whether to approve a drilling project.

Yet for each of the three identical plans written by R.E.M. Solutions, the agency granted waivers that exempted the projects from further environmental review.

Interior officials said that "a limiting factor" in how the MMS evaluated those plans was a law requiring regulators to approve or reject them within 30 days.

"As part of the reforms we are implementing, we have asked Congress to amend the laws governing BOEM's review of exploration plans to provide the agency more time to conduct the reviews," said Matt Lee-Ashley, an Interior spokesman.

The documents McClatchy examined included the plan for BP's ill-fated Macondo well, which didn't list consultants among the preparers. More than 20 plans the MMS approved for the Gulf in 2009 and 2010 were drafted at least in part by consultants, though.

Interior officials said there were no federal guidelines or licenses pertaining to these consultants, who seem to operate in a small, obscure corner of the mammoth Gulf oil industry.

R.E.M. lists 10 employees on its website and says that it provides "information and documents that will benefit our client, our company and the governing agencies." The firm was founded in 2002 by Connie Goers, who "has over 30 years experience in the oil and gas industry."

Three of the plans that R.E.M. prepared — for Rooster Petroleum, Tana Exploration and Marathon Oil, all of Houston — used the same language to say that the risk of a major oil spill was minimal, the companies were equipped to respond to a disaster and drilling activities posed little or no risk to marine life or fisheries.

Each contains the same typographical error near the beginning of the document, where the word "emissions" appears extraneously in a discussion of the physical impact on the drilling site. "There are no anticipated emissions, effluents, emissions physical disturbances to the seafloor, wastes sent to shore, and/or accidents from the proposed activities that could cause impacts to Eastern Gulf live bottoms," all three plans say.

BP Oil Volcano Butterfly-effects Cape Cod Wildlife

Nobody could have predicted . . .

ORLEANS — The BP oil spill is creating uncertainty among the people who watch over some of the threatened and endangered wildlife that visit Cape Cod.

Many piping plovers born here this summer, for example, will eventually fly to winter grounds in the Gulf of Mexico, where BP's Deepwater Horizon rig has been releasing oil since April 20. And rare Kemp's ridley turtles, which ride the Gulf Stream to Cape Cod, now face a gauntlet of burning oil slicks and chemical dispersants as they cross the Gulf from their breeding grounds.

Gulf Coast beaches are also the winter home to terns and oystercatchers that migrate to the Cape.

"How do we face the fact that all of our hard-won successes on breeding beaches might be wiped out in an instant, as birds migrate and flock to their familiar beaches, only to find them covered in oil and their invertebrate meals tainted and smothered?" wrote Becky Harris, coastal water bird director for the Massachusetts Audubon Society, in a blog last week.

After struggling to protect plovers, least terns and oystercatchers from oversand vehicles, coyotes, crows, kites and dogs, wildlife experts feel the new threat looms large.

"They've said (this spill) will have a dramatic effect for five to 10 years, and maybe longer. It's sad," Orleans Parks and Beaches Superintendent Paul Fulcher said Tuesday.

Thanks to banding, bird experts have a good handle on the distribution of the Massachusetts population of American oystercatchers, Ellen Jedrey, assistant director of Massachusetts Audubon's Coastal Waterbird program, said Tuesday. "An estimated 30 percent of the Massachusetts population of oystercatchers — about 200 pairs — does winter along the Gulf Coast," she said.

The distinctive-looking oystercatchers — black and white with a long orange bill for opening shellfish — don't get as much press as piping plovers but need the same barrier beaches and marshes to breed and feed. The oystercatchers are relatively few in number — about 11,000 in the United States.

Piping plovers also are likely at risk from the spill, according to field ornithologist Chris Leahy at the Massachusetts Audubon Society. The birds migrate south in August and September to a variety of wintering grounds along the East Coast and Gulf Coast.

"If you look at the wintering range of the piping plover, it would be very good luck if New England piping plovers happened to winter outside the spill. There's a high likelihood that they will get onto wintering beaches where they will be affected by the oil," Leahy said.

The Kemp's ridley turtle, however, is in immediate danger. The rare sea turtle's only two breeding grounds are on the west side of the Gulf Coast, in Mexico and Texas' Padre Island, and young juveniles are believed to float across the Gulf on clumps of algae.

Now the clumps of algae, many covered with oil, are death traps because BP is burning off great patches of oil to keep it from coming ashore, according to Robert Prescott, executive director at the Wellfleet Bay Sanctuary of the Massachusetts Audubon society.

"There's a group of volunteers that is racing around in the Gulf and trying to net as many juvenile turtles as they can before the burning," he said Wednesday. "A lot of organisms, including turtles, are dying."

For years, Cape Codders have followed the fate of the dinner-plate-size turtles, the world's most endangered sea turtle. Each fall, volunteers walk Cape beaches to rescue cold-stunned ridleys that failed to leave the region before the water temperature gets too cold for them.

Globe: Coakley, Greatest Loser

Globe columnist Adrian Walker:

"Six months ago Martha Coakley was one of the most famous politicians in America for a few agonizing and awkward weeks. Her loss to Scott Brown catapulted him to cover boy status, while people wondered what on earth could be next for the suddenly toxic attorney general.

This week furnished some answers. First, Coakley’s office reached a $102 million settlement with Morgan Stanley, after accusing the Wall Street giant of unscrupulous mortgage lending. On Thursday, US District Judge Joseph L. Tauro struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act, partly as a result of a suit filed by Coakley’s office.

She also went public with some tough questions about Cape Wind and has the final call on whether a New York investment firm can scarf up the Caritas Christi hospital chain. . .

Yesterday, Coakley, with her usual calm, noted that the failures of her Senate campaign had nothing to do with her service as attorney general.

. . .

While Brown became a national celebrity, Coakley simply went back to work. “It’s great to be back working,’’ she said, “especially when we get these kinds of results.’’

The settlement with Morgan Stanley was the latest — and by far the most successful — of several suits against companies that contributed to the subprime mortgage mess. Morgan backed bad loans by a company called New Century, on which many homeowners defaulted. Coakley successfully argued that the loans violated basic guidelines and that the homeowners had been sold loans they clearly could not pay back. About $58 million will go to beleaguered subprime borrowers.

“I think we were able to shed a little bit of light on the way they operated,’’ Coakley said.

Of course, the fight against the Defense of Marriage Act strikes close to home to many in Massachusetts. In essence, the battle is over whether married gay couples are entitled to the same federal benefits as other married couples.

Coakley’s challenge followed one by Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders. She was approached by GLAD after it filed suit and invited to play a role, which grew into filing a separate lawsuit.

“We thought it was an uphill battle, but we made a strong argument that the burden in terms of Massachusetts was unconstitutional,’’ Coakley said.

Many observers believe that Tauro’s ruling, which is certain to be appealed, will have little immediate impact. Coakley, however, chooses to take a longer view.

“If you’re a student of constitutional history, you see that changes that are dramatic rarely happen overnight,’’ she said. “There are steps forward and some steps backward. But this is a big step forward for all Massachusetts married couples.’’

For all the scorn heaped on Coakley after the Senate campaign, she is unopposed in her bid for reelection, as the predicted crowd of opponents never materialized.

If she has hit a political glass ceiling, it is in a job she clearly loves.

“We were able to make a little bit of progress in the area of civil rights and able to make life a little better for the people of Massachusetts,’’ Coakley said.

"







Full story here.

Meanwhile, In Other News . . . .

Exxon Mobile

Morgan Stanley

BP

Securing $3 Billion in Loan Modifications for Homeowners

More here.