March 29, 2015

Seattle Times Poll on TPP: (currently) 89% OPPOSE! (3% favor, 5% want more info)

Here's the link to the Seattle Times poll on the TPP following the Wikileaks revelation on the investor-state dispute resolution tribunal:


Vote: Thumbs up or down for the Trans-Pacific Partnership
After a secret chapter was leaked from the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. Has it changed your opinion of the deal?


http://www.seattletimes.com/business/international-trade/vote-the-trans-pacific-partnership/




Currently the total show 89% opposed, (5% want more information, 3% favor, 2% favor but have concerns.)

March 27, 2015

Senate Votes To Help States Sell Off Public Lands.

Here is the roll call of the 51-49 Senate vote:

March 27, 2015

Maker of tainted medical scopes issues new cleaning guide.

So the company that has dominated the global market for endoscopes for over a half century, whose endoscopes have been used by for the majority of endoscopies for decades, now discovers, after an outbreak of antibiotic resistant bacteria at 2 California hospitals, that it didn't know enough about disinfecting endoscopes to devise an adequate disinfection protocol for its duodenoscope.

If the Olympus duodenoscope has smaller biopsy channels than a colonoscope, it could be more difficult to adequately disinfect using only the chemical disinfectants that these heat intolerant fiberoptic scopes will tolerate, especially given the difficulty of adequately removing all material from the biopsy channels.

Unlike bacterial infections, which if it does not result in an acute infection, often resolves spontaneously, hepatitic C usualloy lies dormant for years or decades before symptoms develop. Of the estimated millions of Americans walking around with undiagnosed occult infections, many when eventually diagnosed turn out to have no known risk factors. The long latency period between infection and symptoms/diagnosis makes it virtually impossible to know how or when the infection was acquired.

Despite these difficulties, isolated cases of endoscopically transmitted hepatitis C have been documented after contaminated colonoscopies, generally following a coloscopy which required biopsy. When such a case is identified, other patients who had proceedured with the same scope can be notified for testing. Small outbreaks have been documented in this fashion.

But without such an index case who becomes acutely ill shortly after the proceedure, it is unlikely that isolated asymptomatic endoscopic transmissions will be diagnosed until it becomes symptomatic years later, when it will impossible to correlate the infection with theinfecting event.

Given the often non-specific symptoms, occult status, and long latency period of hepatitis C, and the many patients diagnosed each year who have had undiagnosed subclinical disease for years despite having no midentified risk factors for hepatitis C, a most relevant question becomes :

How many cases of hepatis C (bothnthose currently diagnosed and undiagnosed occult cases) have been caused by inadequate chemical sterilization of difficult-to-brush-out and impossible-to-heat-disinfect endoscopic biopsy channels?




The fact that the major pioneer in medical endocopy, after 50 years, still can't come up with an effective protocol when it markets a new scope is more a bit disconcerting.





(Here's a bit more
Patient Safety Authority, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
The Dirt on Flexible Endoscope Reprocessing









Endoscope Infection Risk Highlighted in FDA Warning

March 26, 2015

There is only one thing to fear regarding Ted Cruz.

And it is NOT that he will be nominated. (We all know he won't. And the GOP knows that would doom them.)

What we should fear is that Cruz will succeed in his role in framing the melodrama, and that our defunct media will be given an excuse to peddle the eventual Republican nominee as "moderate conservative" and/or "sane".

Ted's role is to be so crazy that CNN, CBS, ABC, MSN, NPR will be enabled in their continued laundering of RW memes to independents, and to frame the discourse so that an eventual nominee to the right of anyone ever nominated, perhaps a Scott Walker, can be falsely peddled as a "compromise".

And, given the complicity of our "media", that is truly something to fear, and to defeat.

(Which we will.)

We can see the real enemy, and it is certainly NOT Ted Cruz, professional rodeo clown, decoy.





















:

March 25, 2015

50% of charges at Texas ERs in IN-NETWORK hospitals being billed as out of network.

And those out of network bills are not only paid 100% by the patient, but the amount billed is often a fantasy "regular price" which is ofter 250 -600 percent higher than any insurance company ever pays.

When the culture of predatory capitalism in medicine gets so bad that even Republicans introduce bills to curb it, it's clear that this is an issue that we need to address.

March 21, 2015

Democracy for America: "Stop the TPP" petition:

(In today's email from Democracy for America) :








Signed!

March 21, 2015

Froman should be fired (yesterday):

Perhaps he can go back to Citigroup, or managing his sleazebag Cayman investments:






Actually, what did we expect from a "trade" representative that Warren voted against because he refused to commit to even the pathetic transparency standards of the Bush 43 administration?

March 17, 2015

NYT: House GOP budget proposes to voucherize Medicare, block grant Medicaid, repeal ACA:

Well, do we have the issue to throw these bums out?

March 17, 2015

Warren: "ISDS is a bad deal for America" (TPP Petition)

(In today's Email, from Elizabeth Warren):



The United States is in the final stages of secret, closed-door negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive trade agreement with 11 other countries.

Who will benefit from it? One provision hidden in the fine print – “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” – may sound harmless, but don’t let that fool you: ISDS could let foreign companies challenge US laws without ever stepping in an American court.

That would undermine US sovereignty and tilt the playing field even further in favor of multinational corporations.

Sign my petition and spread the word: ISDS is a bad deal for America.

Here’s how ISDS would work: Imagine that the United States bans a toxic chemical that is often added to gasoline because of its health and environmental consequences. If a foreign company that makes the toxic chemical opposes the law, it would normally have to challenge that regulation in a US court.

But with ISDS, the company could skip the US courts and go before an international panel of arbitrators. If the multinational company won, the ruling couldn’t be challenged in US courts, and the arbitration panel could require American taxpayers to cough up millions – and even billions – of dollars in damages.

If that seems shocking, buckle your seat belt. ISDS could lead to gigantic fines, but it wouldn’t employ independent judges. Instead, highly paid corporate lawyers would go back and forth between representing corporations one day and sitting in judgment the next. Really.

And if the tilt toward giant corporations wasn’t clear enough, consider who would get to use this special court: only international investors, which are, by and large, giant corporations. So if a Vietnamese company with US operations wanted to challenge our refusal to import a dangerous chemical, it could use ISDS. But if an American labor union or human rights group believed Vietnam was allowing Vietnamese companies to pay slave wages in violation of trade commitments, the American labor group would have to make its case in the Vietnamese courts – and if an environmental group thought the Vietnamese company was dumping waste in their rivers in violation of the new trade agreement, they would have to go to a Vietnamese court as well. In other words, the great deal for corporations is only for corporations – everyone else is left out.

Giving foreign corporations special rights to challenge our laws outside of our legal system would be a bad deal for America. Sign my petition to say no to ISDS.

Opposing ISDS isn’t a partisan issue – even your Tea Party relatives should be worried about this dangerous provision:

Conservatives who believe in US sovereignty should be outraged that ISDS would shift power from American courts, whose authority is derived from our Constitution, to unaccountable international tribunals.
Libertarians should be offended that ISDS effectively would offer a free taxpayer subsidy to countries with weak legal systems.
And progressives should oppose ISDS because it would allow big multinational corporations to weaken labor and environmental rules.

If a final TPP agreement includes Investor-State Dispute Settlement, the only winners will be multinational corporations. Join me in saying No to ISDS.

Thank you for being a part of this,

Elizabeth















http://my.elizabethwarren.com/page/s/isds?source=20150316emb


(I signed it.)

March 12, 2015

Petition now over 238,000

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/file-charges-against-47-us-senators-violation-logan-act-attempting-undermine-nuclear-agreement/NKQnpJS9