by Ellen McClennan, posted on Sunday, September 29th, 2013 at 9:00 am
We can’t afford to keep Randy Hultgren and Peter Roskam in office any longer. They continue to waste our taxpayer money in vain attempts, 42 at last count, to end the Affordable Care Act. Each Hultgren and Roskam attempt to defund the law, which was enacted by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court, costs us taxpayers (according to research by CBS) approximately $1.45 million.
Hultgren and Roskam join with the rest of the House Republicans in collectively spending 15% of its activity since 2011 on repealing the ACA (Obamacare), or about $17 million in Congressional Republican salaries– according to a recent report published by the New York Times.
When considering all the facts, it becomes quite clear that the Republican temper-tantrum over the ACA is nothing more than them serving the financial services industry–their primary campaign donors–rather than any concern about American people.
As California voters prepare to vote on whether to label GMOs in food, we go to Berkeley to discuss Prop 37 and its implications for the broader food system with journalist and best-selling author Michael Pollan. Among the nation’s leading writers and thinkers on food and food policy, Pollan is the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley School of Journalism. He’s written several books about food, including “The Botany of Desire,” “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual,” and the forthcoming, “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.”
From California’s Proposition 37 initiative to New York City’s soda ban, journalist and best-selling author Michael Pollan argues that local efforts hold the key to challenging the agricultural industry’s stranglehold over national food policy. With companies like Monsanto influencing Congress and state legislatures, Pollan warns the United States risks falling into a “two-class food system,” where only those who can afford to live outside the industrial food system can access healthy ways to eat. Among the nation’s leading writers and thinkers on food and food policy, Pollan is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Journalism and author of several best-selling books, including “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”
by Pam Verner, posted on Sunday, October 7th, 2012 at 3:42 pm
I was eight the day I grew up. I know that’s too young, really. But life is hard, and we all have to buck up and grow up someday. It’s just that some of us have to grow up when we’re younger than others. For me it was eight. I remember the moment. At age eight I found out the world is unfair and that terribly unfair circumstances can take away your life or the life of someone you love.
It was the middle of the night and I was sitting by myself on a folding chair placed along the wall of a long dark empty hallway outside the emergency room of our small community hospital. It was 1956. My mom was inside talking to the two doctors who had been wakened in the middle of the night to come to the ER to tend to me. I could hear voices coming from inside the room, but not words. I thought I could hear my mom crying. They were talking about me.
by Ellen McClennan, posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2012 at 7:00 am
Representative Randy Hultgren (R IL-14) showed typical Republican spin at his Oswego Town Hall meeting recently. When asked direct questions regarding taxes, healthcare, social security, and Citizens United, he was long on spin, wrong on facts, and empty of solutions.
One frustrated attendant who tried to get a direct answer on healthcare, commented after the meeting that Hultgren “…seemed detached and unfeeling. His voice was just so syrupy and sweet he appeared unbelievable and unconcerned.”
His comments on Social Security were a surprise but shouldn’t have been, given the Republican Party’s relationship to corporate money and financial companies wanting to gamble with social security investment money.
“I’m not planning on Social Security,” Hultgren said. “Most people my age aren’t planning on Social Security.”
In the years ahead, the country’s aging population will grow to become the largest in US history, says Caring Across Generations Co-Director Ai-Jen Poo. As that happens, the demand for long-term care will skyrocket. “Right now, if you’re aging or if you have a disability, your choices are really limited,” says Poo. “You can go and live in a nursing home or perhaps an assisted living facility, but we want to create more choices so that people can stay in their homes and in their communities, live independently in a context that they know, for as long as possible.”
