San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Health

Social Security Stuck with the Bills as Companies Subvert Workman’s Comp

by

By Doug Porter

A study released today by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) makes the case that so-called reforms to workman’s compensation programs at the state level are tied to a rise of the number of workers receiving Social Security Disability Insurance (DI).

Over the past quarter century, the number of beneficiaries in this program has gone from 25 per thousand to 59 per thousand, bringing the DI trust fund close to depletion in 2015.

Republicans are claiming the rise in claimants for disability benefits is being fueled by lower-wage workers seeking an easy way out of the labor force. It’s just the latest wrinkle in the old “poor are shiftless and lazy meme” at the heart of so-called reform schemes.   [Read more…]

Hey, Here’s An Idea! Let’s Sexualize A God-Awful Disease That Kills and Maims Thousands of Women!

by

By Abby Zimet / Common Dreams

Today we mark the low point of the breast cancer industrial complex’s already sketchy Pinktober – the month wherein insatiable capitalism touts spending money on all things pink “for the cure” – with National No Bra Day, the semi-pornographic, useless, entirely counter-intuitive “holiday” that calls for women to let their (blessedly healthy) breasts flow free in the name of ill women who are “scarred, radiated, burned, nauseated, and fighting for their lives.” No Bra Day, notes one observer, is “the latest way to do nothing about breast cancer.”   [Read more…]

Global Parents Unite to Protect Children from Climate Catastrophe

by

By Sarah Lazare, Common Dreams

In the lead-up to the United Nations talks in Paris next month, parents and grandparents from around the world announced Tuesday that they are launching a global coalition to demand climate solutions for the people they love most: their children.

“When I became a parent for first time, catastrophic climate change became a lot more real to me,” Frida Berry Eklund with the Swedish organization Parents Roar told reporters on a call Tuesday. “To build parent power around the world we need to reach out to others around the world.”

That’s exactly what Our Kids’ Climate plans to do when it stages marches and meetings at the COP21 meeting in Paris in November and December—alongside international civil society and social movement organizations, including youth organizers from around the world.   [Read more…]

As Secret Trade Talks Reveal Cracks, Demonstrators Aim Death Blows at TPP

by

Pacific trade deal opponents hope that if Atlanta round fails, pro-corporate TPP could be knocked off track indefinitely

By Deidre Fulton / CommonDreams

As trade ministers from around the world continued meeting in Atlanta on Thursday for final-stretch negotiations on the corporate-friendly Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), civil society groups demonstrated on the streets in a final salvo against a deal they describe as “a wholesale auction of our rights, our freedoms, and our democracy to multinational corporations who put profits over people.”

“They’re getting close, but we can stop them,” reads the Citizens Trade Campaign’s call-to-action. “If we do, and the Atlanta round fails, many believe the TPP could be knocked off track indefinitely.”   [Read more…]

University Contract Workers Wages –Or Lack Thereof– in the Crosshairs

by

By Doug Porter

Today (Oct 1), some contract employees working on University of California facilities will be seeing a pay hike to $13 an hour. The university system is California’s third largest employer and the largest employer in San Diego.

Earlier this year UC President Janet Napolitano announced a plan to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour over a three-year roll-out for all workers, including contract ones, and today’s bump is just the first stage.  

Or maybe they won’t be seeing that raise. The Los Angeles Times reports the Department of Labor has launched an investigation into long-time contractor Performance First Building Services failure to pay overtime to workers cleaning up after sporting events at UC Berkeley.   [Read more…]

To Cut Costs, College Students Are Buying Less Food and Even Going Hungry

by

By Sara Goldrick-Rab, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Katharine Broton, University of Wisconsin-Madison / The Conversation

Studies have long shown that a college student’s odds of achieving financial security and a better quality of life improve when he or she earns a degree.

But what are some of the obstacles that prevent degree attainment?

At the Wisconsin HOPE Lab, we study the challenges that students from low- and moderate-income households face in attaining a college degree. Chief among these are the many hurdles created by the high price of college. Paying the price of attending college, we find, changes who attends and for how long, as well as the college experience itself – what classes students take, the grades they earn, the activities in which they engage and even with whom they interact.

Our recent research shows an alarming trend on college campuses: an increasing number of students tell us that they are struggling in college, sometimes even dropping out, because they can’t afford enough of life’s basic necessity – food.   [Read more…]

Stand Up for Planned Parenthood on #PinkOutDay in San Diego

by

By Doug Porter

Today’s the day. Three months into the latest effort by the self-righteous right to make women’s health into a wedge issue, supporters of Planned Parenthood are standing up for their cause.

There are 4 “Pink Out Day” events in San Diego County and 249 actions around the country planned for September 29th. Coincidentally (okay, maybe not), this is also the same day Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards will face off against the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Back in July, an organization called the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released a series of videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood doctors selling parts from aborted fetuses to researchers for profit, which would have been illegal. The videos were selectively edited. The people behind the CMP have a long history of harassing medical personnel and women visiting clinics.   [Read more…]

Your Weed Killer Might Kill You

by

By Jill Richardson / OtherWords

When I began writing about agriculture nearly a decade ago, I learned quickly that people generally believed that Roundup, the best-selling weed killer made by Monsanto, was relatively harmless.

Roundup breaks down quickly, everyone said — and into non-toxic components, they added. If homeowners can buy it at gardening stores, and cities around the United States use it to kill weeds in parks where children play, it must be benign, right?

Wrong. Within the past year, the story has changed.   [Read more…]

Returning From Darkness: National Suicide Prevention Month

by

By Will Falk

I am an attempted suicide survivor. I tried to kill myself twice – once in April, 2013 and again in August, 2013. It has been over two years and I am still struggling to make sense of what I did. I just learned that September is National Suicide Prevention Month and for the last several days I have lost myself reading heart-breaking story after heart-breaking story of those affected by suicide – both attempted and successful.

The first time I tried to kill myself I was in Milwaukee, WI. I was a public defender in Kenosha, WI and was overcome with anxiety, guilt, and a spiritual kind of exhaustion when I came back to my empty apartment on a snowy, Wednesday night. Looking myself in the eye in the mirror, I realized I did not want to wake up the next morning. I put on my pajamas, brushed my teeth, and swallowed a whole bottle of sleeping pills.

I woke up in the emergency room – my throat coated in charcoal, the hair on my chest ripped from the monitors, my arms and hands pricked with needle marks where they missed my veins with the I.V. in the ambulance. A doctor asked me if I knew what happened. “I tried to kill myself,” I said. So, they involuntarily committed me to the psyche ward of St. Francis Hospital on the shores of Lake Michigan on the south side of Milwaukee.   [Read more…]

Junipero Serra’s Sainthood Dismays Many

by

By Doug Porter

Eighteenth century Franciscan missionary Junipero Serra will be canonized by Pope Francis this week. Hailed by the church as “the evangelizer of west in the United States” and reviled by descendants of the indigenous people living along the coast, Serra’s ascension to sainthood is a controversial move.

The expulsion of the Jesuit order from the Spanish colonies by King Carlos III brought Serra to Baja California. In 1769, the government, fearful of intrusions by Russian traders to the north, dispatched the Franciscans to what we now call California.  Serra founded nine missions, starting with the Mission San Diego de Alcalá and went about the business of ‘civilizing’ the local inhabitants.

Tales of the conquest of California by Spanish soldiers and Catholic missionaries by supporters of the church tend towards laying the blame for much of the ensuing slaughter on the military. Serra viewed the native population as children, children who needed the kind of brutal discipline meted out by the Franciscan order in order to find salvation.   [Read more…]

The Fight Against GMOs and Toxic Food

by

While Other Countries Ban GMOs, US Congress Endorses Them

By John Lawrence

Scotland has banned genetically modified organisms (GMOs) within its country. “Scotland is known around the world for our beautiful natural environment—and banning growing genetically modified crops will protect and further enhance our clean, green status,” said rural affairs secretary Richard Lochhead. Here in the US the fight is just for the right to know that a food product should be labeled as GMO, and that’s not going so well.

Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 1599, the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015. This is BS, of course, since the bill’s real purpose is to preempt the rights of state and local governments to pass laws requiring the mandatory labeling of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), to overturn GMO labeling laws already in place in several states, and to prevent the passage of any federal mandatory GMO labeling law in the future. So there is no free speech insofar as knowing what’s in something we are eating is concerned. The law’s attempt is to suppress truth in labeling.

GMOs were developed primarily to be resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup so that Roundup could be sprayed directly on crops and only the weeds would die. So whether or not GMO corn and soybeans are good or bad for you, the presence of poison sprayed on them can’t be too good for human consumers when they eat such crops. Especially crops such as grapes and apples which have very thin skins and are vulnerable to soaking up the herbicides and pesticides sprayed on them.   [Read more…]

Creative Protests Mark Planned Parenthood ‘Show Trial’ in DC, Anti-Choice Group Meeting in San Diego

by

By Doug Porter

Battles over abortion, a key element in the right’s war against women, continue on both coasts this week.

In Washington DC, the House Judiciary Committee opened hearings expressly designed to garner publicity for a coming effort to defund Planned Parenthood. Today’s Washington Post quotes a former top Republican congressional budget aide saying there’s about a 60% chance of a government shutdown over the issue.

This week Care Net, an umbrella organization claiming more than 1,100 faux “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs) around the country, is having its 2015 National Conference at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina on Harbor Island. A pro-choice group placed ads in the Daily Aztec and Union-Tribune yesterday touting a “tourist guide” filled with the kind of unreliable information they say women receive when visiting Care Net’s crisis pregnancy centers.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry