Here's one where we're #1: Prevalence of mental illness in the population. "One-quarter of all Americans met the criteria for having a mental illness within the past year, and fully a quarter of those had a 'serious' disorder that significantly disrupted their ability to function day to day, according to the largest and most detailed survey of the nation's mental health.

http://bartdz.blogspot.com/...

From the same study: "The United States is the wealthiest, mightiest country in all of human history, and yet it has a higher proportion of poor or, worse, hungry citizens than almost every other industrialized nation

I awaken  at 6AM to the sound of huge garbage trucks grinding bags of malodorous refuse piled curbside.

The garbage men do not collect the litter piled beside them, broken bags torn asunder by the homeless men and women who wander the streets nearby searching   for bottle returns to pay for the next few vials of crack.  Fat flies hover, searching for another place to alight, and the soft buzz of mosquitoes is drowned out by the sound of West Indian jitney vans and private car service drivers honking horns loudly; impatient to speed on their way to the next fare, competing with New York Transit buses for fares and winning at 1.00 a ride to the subway.   The neighborhood stirs and awakens to start yet another day of grinding poverty.

Most people know that the cost of prescription drugs is going up, and that the drug companies are not hurting despite most business and industries taking a hit in the recent recession.  We look at the cost in one county, and the causes nationwide.

Haven't we had enough Ron Kovics, Patrick McCaffrey...? In the 21st century, we need a peaceful productive army that builds not bombs nations.  The organizations named in People's Lobby's non-partisan American World Service Corps Congressional Proposals builds that productive army that has yanks compete on the field of sane, healthy development.  Push your Congressperson to cosponsor the AWSC, so we lose fewer legs and loving hearts.

Obama doesn't know how to handle a knuckleballer like Nader (no surprise) but unfortunately he doesn't recognize what a gift the caustic Nader really is (surprised now?).

Firstly, the 'no surprise' is that the Dems still haven't figured out how to out-radical a radical without pissing off the Reagan Democrats. For all their talk of being liberals, the Democrats really aren't. As a party they supported Iraq, welfare reform, and virtually nothing that has come out of Berkley post-Vietnam. From the environment to prisons to social and economic reform, the Dems have moved centrist and away from their New Deal roots - something that Lush Rimbaugh conveniently forgets.  

In a time that Obama is being called the most liberal Senator, Nader could remind everyone what a real liberal sounds like. Yes, Code Pink has nothing on Nader, a man that could sit next to you in coach section and regale you with decades of stories that would fire up even the most burnt out Peace Corp volunteer. If Obama is seen as a smoldering threat to conservative America, Nader and the Green Party is a five alarm fire that calls attention to everything wrong in an industrialized globalized America.  

Nader relishes playing with matches...now if Obama would only learn to toss gas and scorch Rove's a**.

To say it will suck a lot is an understatement.  Let me spell it out for the Bushies and McCainanites who have no earthly clue how much it costs to heat a house in the northeastern US with oil.

Right now, oil is running $4.60 a gallon.  By the time heating season starts, sometime in October, it might get to five bucks.  Let's go with five bucks for no better reason than to keep the math simple.

David Korten of YES Magazine poses the question of what must be done to save the planet.

Cheap oil provided an energy subsidy that defined the wars, economies, settlements, values, and lifestyles of the 20th century. The result was a century of wasteful extravagance and inefficiency that encouraged us to squander virtually all Earth's resources -- including water, land, forests, fisheries, soils, minerals, and natural waste recycling capacity. We are now waking up to the morning-after consequences of a brief but raucous party. These include depleted natural systems, unsustainable economies, an obsolete physical infrastructure, and a six-fold increase in the human population dependent on the diminished resources of a finite planet.

Mike Davis, the author of Planet of Slums, has a new piece up at The Nation about the science, economics, and politics of global climate change.  If you haven’t yet read it, you should.  But be warned: he paints a bleak portrait.  

It must be known first that I am a pediatrician. I practice in a blue-collar community in Oregon, and I enjoy a richly diverse mix of patient families liberal and conservative, religious and secular, urban and rural, and from all colors of the human rainbow.

Thirty percent of my practice lives in poverty or near-poverty, and qualifies for Medicaid (in Oregon, the Oregon Health Plan) and for the Women, Infants, & Children (WIC) program. Most of the remainder of my practice is solidly middle-class, though within my practice I have several obscenely wealthy families.

It is about one of these families, about a parent of this family, that I write today.

Scarborough had this nugget to say about race, Nader, Obama, and America’s cities (sorry, the link is to NewsBusters):

Given the rising price of petrol, many people have advocated the movement towards increased production of biofuels as an alternative to oil-based fuel sources. In fact, the european union has proposed a mandatory policy advocating that 10% of all member states' transport fuels are derived from  biofuels.

We also have seen increased production of biofuels from developing economies like Brazil and Indonesia. Biofuels are also less polluting than traditional oil-based fuels. Many have seen this as a potential way to move away from a resource-constrained fuel (i.e., non-sustainable) to others that are producible and would be less devastating for the environment.

While clearly biofuels are a positive step from traditional oil-based fuels, there are substantive difficulties indicated given the rising price of foodstuffs.

An outsider, an intruder, a giver of charity and nothing more.

In one of my previous articles titled; "A Divine History," I gave a snapshot of the rich, royal and magnificent past of African people and the tremendous contributions that people of African descent have made to religion, spirituality, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, science, architecture, literature, and the first civilization based on communal order.

Considering the apathetic state of many of today's Black people, one could scarcely surmise that these are the same people who have traveled from exceedingly majestic origins to being the social pariahs of the world.  What happened?

I stumbled onto an article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic which discussed one of the places in the West Virginia Panhandle, where I live, that I have shopped at: the local Wal-Mart.

Or, as he put it, the "crappiest Wal-Mart in America".  An exerpt:

If you want to see the underside of the unregulated capitalist economy, the people who can't find the non-existent escape ladder from poverty and its pathologies, visit the Martinsburg, West Virginia Wal-Mart. Morbid obesity; spontaneous, public bouts of corporal punishment directed against dirty children; ten-year girls dressed as whores; tattoos running up necks and down legs; smoking like you only see these days in Baku; it's all here.

In Martin County, Kentucky this week, John McCain added another one his "Forgotten Places" to the growing list of places his campaign would now like to forget. With a straight face, McCain told the residents of the economically devastated region that eBay represents their economic future. And he did so by appropriating the words of Meg Whitman, who just happens to be not only McCain's national campaign co-chair, but the former CEO of eBay.

perrspectives

First District Representative John Sullivan (R-OK) sent out a sugar coated e-newsletter today praising fatherhood but does not mention the hard issues the reality-based community must deal with, like skyrocketing gasoline prices.

Sullivan goes on to say the National Fatherhood Initiative finds that the closer adolescents feel to their fathers, regardless of the type of family structure which they live in, the less likely it is that they will engage in the use of drugs or delinquent behavior. Nobody can disagree with that.

Written by Joan Entmacher, Vice President for Family Economic Security
National Women’s Law Center

No woman who’s bought gas or food recently will be surprised by today’s news: inflation registered its biggest jump in six months.

This comes on top of last Friday’s news that unemployment grew by 10 percent between April and May -- the largest one-month increase in 22 years. (And among women, unemployment rose even faster -- by 11.6 percent.)

Women and families will take another hit in a couple more weeks. Come July 1, many states start their new fiscal year. Many states facing budget shortfalls will start making cuts in vital services. Health care, education, child care, child support enforcement, child welfare, elder services, and other supports could be on the chopping block.

http://nwlc.blogs.com/...

I wrote this in November of 2007.  It seems that given the way things are going, it's even more relevant now than it was then.  There's a lot I can add to the mix here: gas prices; the state budget cuts which are terminating my employment at the end of the month.  But really, it stands on its own and though the details may have changed a little, they're still the same basic idea.

Okay.

So.

Poverty.

Let me start by saying that, for a lot of people, it's going to get worse.

I don't mean it's going to get worse before it gets better.

I don't mean it's going to get worse unless we elect a Democratic president.

I mean it's going to get worse.

I'm not making a prediction here.

I'm just going with the odds.

What does this mean?

It's simple.