Image via WikipediaJared Loughner and Mental Illness: The Devastating Effects of Budget Cuts that Slash Care to the Mentally Ill
Saturday’s attack and Jared Loughner’s apparent mental health problems have shone a spotlight on issues surrounding mental health treatment in Arizona. The state made drastic budget cuts to behavioral health services in 2010. The unprecedented cuts slashed all support services for non-Medicaid behavioral health patients and took away coverage for most name-brand drugs. As many as 28,000 state residents were affected. Meanwhile, Arizona is facing even bigger budget cuts this year and is facing an estimated $1.4 billion deficit in 2012.
The availability of services has diminished due to these budget cuts, and although there’s no direct link, it just makes it less likely that people would be able to get services, even if they overcome the stigma of admitting or acknowledging that they have these illnesses. It just makes the availability of services even more difficult to obtain.
What we’re finding in the community is that the costs were not really eliminated; they were just pushed down to less visible areas in the community, and we’re responding to the difficulties with the most expensive form of services that the community has to offer to people. That’s emergency rooms, hospitalization, law enforcement intervention. So, the communities are spending the money, even though it appears that the lawmakers believe that they have actually cut the budget and saved money. It’s just coming out of a different pocket down at the community level. And I think that we need to acknowledge that it ultimately is less expensive in the community to offer necessary services. And this is all without respect to the devastating impact this has had on people’s lives.
People who have a serious mental illness diagnosis beginning last July were denied any further coverage in a number of areas—case management, brand-name medications, access to support groups, transportation subsidies, and more recently, housing subsidies. So these individuals who have the most serious forms of mental illness were essentially, except for generic medications, were basically pushed out of the system. And these are individuals who have a serious illness, who, in many cases, were managing with a support network, are now being pushed to the point where they can’t manage. So they’re decompensating. There’s suicide attempts. There’s one woman that we know that’s very ill, but she’s been managing OK. She’s now been hospitalized for 36 days over the last six months.
The Internet: Unindicted Co-conspirator?
The Internet can also be very isolating. When you are bonding with people who share your opinions or interests, you can safely shun those who have distinctly different views.
The result is that leftists hang out at left-leaning websites, while right-wingers hang out at right-leaning sites. We only seek out the information that reinforces our existing opinions, making them more rigid.
In his book, Going to Extremes, Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor who is now head of President Obama’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote about the phenomenon of “group polarization.” In an experiment, he asked participants to write down their views on several political issues, and then divided them in like-minded groups for discussion. The result was that each group’s view hardened and became more dogmatic.
The Violence of the Broken Economy
A picture has begun to emerge of a reality that rarely makes the front page. The Washington Post notes that fallout from the recession is visible on Loughner’s own block, where jobs have gone and the construction bubble’s burst. The New York Times describes the withdrawal of Loughner’s dad, who, they write, was “once more of a presence… as he went off to work as a carpet-layer and pool-deck installer.”
The ranks of the long-term unemployed are still rising. Especially for people in their fifties or early sixties, hope of ever finding a job again, let alone one that pays close to what they were making, has disappear
Image via Wikipediaed.
Workers are being squeezed from all angles, with union-busting governors, wage-slashing employers, and a tax-hiking Congress combining to put the pressure on.
We’re no doubt in for loads of discussion of the destructive effects of believing in nothing. What we really need to start talking about in this country are the destructive effects of having nothing.
Kochs Fulfill Father's Campaign To Segregate Public Schools, End Successful Integration Program in NC
The AFP campaign in Wake County was also aided by the private school industry, including a company called the Thales Academy. AFP has called for more charter and private schools, and now with its slate of Tea Party candidates controlling the system, they will have the power to continue their racially-segregated privatization scheme.
( You might notice that government unions, foreign governments, state and municipal governments all suffer what is variously called 'creeping communism' or other names like fascism : which goes to show the 'left - right' meme is nonsense when discussing Authoritarianism and the loss of Liberty. Nowhere is this more evident than in international Monopoly control of access to seeds, organic and sustainable farming; lack of insulation of small and medium sized businesses from international conglomerates which evade taxes and regulatory expense of doing business responsibly ( globalization) ; and a protection racket of 'healthcare insurance' run to the convenience of the Mob. )
Vision: Why the Fall of American Empire Can Be a Good (and Peaceful) Thing
These days are for many of us the winter of our discontent. Weird and dangerous weather on the rise, persistent fossil-fuel dominance, never-ending wars, unraveling of the social fabric, looming shortages of food and water, and lack of money for basic needs aren't just some unpatriotic ravings of those who want to put America down. Rather, the growing uncertainty of our survival, individually and for our families, has everyone's skull in a vice tightened by unseen or unknown hands. Those hands are actually of our own making: our dominant culture has been building up to a colossal, spectacular, global failure.
The Democratic Party's General Attitude Towards Labor Unions
Over the last few years, we've learned a great deal about the Democratic Party's attitude toward the labor movement. Through the Employee Free Choice Act debate (or lack thereof), we've learned that Democrats are happy to rely on union workers hard-earned money to get elected, and then happy to block major pieces of legislation that would help workers join a union. Through the Obama administration's push for a new NAFTA-style trade deal, we've learned that Democratic presidential candidates are happy to sound pro-labor on the campaign trail, and happy to be anti-labor in Washington, D.C. I could go on, but you get the point: We've learned that the Democratic Party and labor are in neverending abuser-abused relationship.
Check out this little snippet from the Denver Post on Colorado's new Democratic governor, John Hickenlooper
Govs. Christie And Scott Break Out Blunt Promises To ‘Eliminate Teacher Tenure’
Study: Day Laborers Face Exploitation, Wage Theft
Many immigrants endure unforgiving and hard work, and also exploitation by employers. Because of their status, many undocumented immigrants in particular are especially vulnerable to such abuses.
That was confirmed by a Seton Hall University Law School report out this week that found that day laborers commonly faced a range of abuses, from unsafe work sites to lower pay than they were promised, and sometimes no pay at all. More than a quarter of the workers polled said they had been assaulted by an employer, too. Researchers polled over 100 day laborers in New Jersey who said their plight was compounded by the fact that many feared reporting abuses because of their immigration status.
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
The Bullies Have Won (Again)
In a hugely disappointing move, the Obama administration has abruptly backed away from supporting a frank and open discussion about end-of-life planning between doctors and their elderly patients.Only three days after implementing a new regulation that provided Medicare coverage for doctors to talk to their patients about what kind of care they wanted at the end of their lives, the White House announced that they were reversing it.
Why the short order flip-flop? Why disappoint the thousands of hospice workers, geriatricians, doctors, caregivers and seniors who had been working towards and supporting this kind of coverage, some of them for years?
Image by Getty Images via @daylifeSimple: Obama buckled to the bullies. As soon as the loud and vociferous opponents of end-of-life choice began their usual scare mongering and name-calling, he stood down. Instead of sticking to his principles, he chose the politically expedient response and caved…. again.Yep, because these are the exact same folks who hijacked the healthcare reform debate in 2009 by telling us that Obamacare would result in “death panels” and that Big Government would decide whether or not your granny got to live or die. The same rabid conservatives and “Got you in our crosshairs” Palin supporters who managed to wrest our president’s lunch money away from him two years ago -- only this time they just had to yell a little and he handed it right over.
The news is a devastating blow to anyone whose work involves helping people make decisions about end-of-life care. And it will mean millions of the sick and elderly will enter the final chapter of their lives woefully unprepared.
Can 140 Characters Matter?
I don’t see Twitter as some world-changing invention. I do see it — along with Facebook, Scientists Without Borders, the Climate Collaboratorium and other such evolving networks — as potentially vastly amplifying a trait that has been a cornerstone of the human habit of innovating its way past resource constraints and risks.That trait is discourse and commerce.
what the wikileaks files truly reveal
That the Obama administration and the Pentagon brass have been and still are fully aware that they are not only losing the war in Afghanistan, but also have no possibility of winning.
The documents present a powerful indictment against the Pentagon, the Obama administration and the Bush administration for their failure to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan. They provide documentary evidence of the killing of hundreds and perhaps thousands of civilians by U.S. and NATO troops.The files reveal that the Pentagon set up a secret commando unit called Task Force 373 that is nothing other than a death squad. Task Force 373, made up of Army and Navy Special Operatives, is seeking to assassinate individuals from an assembled list of 2,000 targets.
And despite rosy-sounding publicity missives coming from the Pentagon, the information released on Wikileaks shows an obvious pattern of intensifying bomb attacks against U.S. and NATO forces.
The decision by the Obama administration to send 60,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in 2009 is exposed as nothing other than a decision to send more human beings to their death in an ongoing war that cannot be won, so as to avoid taking the political responsibility for a military setback. That is the rule that all U.S. policymakers abide by. No matter what, they must avoid the appearance of military defeat at the hands of an armed resistance.
Image via WikipediaThe White House condemned the release of the classified documents in the most disingenuous and hypocritical way. It denounced those who provided the files for putting “the lives of U.S. and partner service members at risk.” That is turning reality upside down. It is the Obama administration that is putting the lives of U.S. service members and Afghan civilians “at risk” every day by continuing a war just so that it can avoid the political backlash for suffering a defeat on its watch.
Stand with Anti-War Activists Targeted by the FBI! ANSWER condemns FBI intimidation tactics
( Sept 24 - but it isn't as if Clapso is posting regularly )Pinko Paulson Activates his Commie Sleeper Cell
If you don’t have the income to pay off a loan, you don’t get one! Not to those idiots down in Washington! They decided to find a way to give people who couldn’t afford to pay back mortgages a way to get mortgages.
They called their two new socialist economic black holes Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This made it possible for poor people to get mortgages. The rest is history. We are now seeing the red fruits of this “public/private partnership” that involved the government, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and other secondary mortgage lenders. WE HAVE AN ECONOMIC CRASH! Now that the crash has come, Pinko Paulson & company have the unmitigated gall to come up with a tax payer financed bail out scheme that is nothing but corporate welfare.The Crisis
2010 You Tube Video Picks
Prophets of War: How Defense Contractor Lockheed Martin Dominates the Military Establishment
Of all the new ventures that Lockheed Martin has undertaken, the least well known may be its role in interrogating prisoners at U.S. facilities in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The fact that employees of private companies are even allowed to interrogate terror suspects came as a surprise to most Americans when it was revealed in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal. The revelations of the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”—many of which were viewed by human rights analysts as torture plain and simple—rocked the world as pictures of naked inmates threatened by dogs and subjected to other serious abuses were disseminated in print and electronic media. The damage to the reputation of the United States as a country governed by the rule of law is still being felt, even as accountability has been limited to the low-level military personnel involved directly in the abuses.
Clear Threat to National Security
Yet another reason real terrorists don't take us seriously.
The reflexive call for fewer liberties
William Galston -- former Clinton adviser and current Brookings Institution Senior Fellow -- has a column in The New Republic about the Gabrielle Giffords shooting that illustrates the mentality endlessly eroding basic American liberty: namely, the belief that every tragedy must lead to new government powers and new restrictions on core liberties.
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