May 1, 2011

http://www.alternet.org/economy/150766/wal-mart_–_it%27s_alive!_how_the_company_is_terrorizing_the_country_with_its_corporate_%27personhood%27/

By Barbara Ehrenreich

If Wal-Mart is a person, as per the Supreme Court, it’s a behemoth terrorizing the countryside. But when it comes to workers’ rights, it remains curiously immune from lawsuits.

April 29, 2011  |  

What is Wal-Mart — in a strictly taxonomic sense, that is? Based on size alone, it would be easy to confuse it with a nation: In 2002, its annual revenue was equal to or exceeded that of all but 22 recognized nation-states. Or, if all its employees — 1.4 million in the U.S. alone — were to gather in one place, you might think you were looking at a major city. But there is also the possibility that Wal-Mart and other planet-spanning, centi-billion-dollar enterprises are not mere aggregations of people at all. They may be independent life-forms — a species of super-organisms.

This, anyway, seems to be the takeaway from the 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court, in a frenzy of anthropomorphism, ruled that corporations are actually persons and therefore entitled to freedom of speech and the right to make unlimited campaign contributions. You may object that the notion of personhood had already been degraded beyond recognition by its extension, in the minds of pro-life thinkers, to individual cells such as zygotes. But the court must have reasoned that it would be discriminatory to let size enter into the determination of personhood: If a microscopic cell can be a person, then why not a brontosaurus, a tsunami, or a multinational corporation?

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/01

Published on Sunday, May 1, 2011 by The Daily Telegram (Michigan)

by Paul F. deLespinasse

ADRIAN, Mich. — In recent months my wife has been treated for a foot problem by some excellent doctors and therapists at the Slocum Center in Eugene, Ore. Walking up to the third floor one notices the large number of steps between each floor. The floors must be 15 or 20 feet apart. The building is elegant, with high ceilings, wide halls and expensive furnishings. But Slocum is not unusually extravagant when compared with other recently constructed medical facilities we have seen.

These buildings, of course, are financed with fees largely paid by insurance companies or Medicare. The enactment of Medicare may account for no small part of the huge increase (way beyond inflation) in the cost of medical treatment during the last 40 years.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/01

Published on Sunday, May 1, 2011 by The Daily Telegram (Michigan)

by Paul F. deLespinasse

ADRIAN, Mich. — In recent months my wife has been treated for a foot problem by some excellent doctors and therapists at the Slocum Center in Eugene, Ore. Walking up to the third floor one notices the large number of steps between each floor. The floors must be 15 or 20 feet apart. The building is elegant, with high ceilings, wide halls and expensive furnishings. But Slocum is not unusually extravagant when compared with other recently constructed medical facilities we have seen.

These buildings, of course, are financed with fees largely paid by insurance companies or Medicare. The enactment of Medicare may account for no small part of the huge increase (way beyond inflation) in the cost of medical treatment during the last 40 years.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/01-0

Published on Sunday, May 1, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

by Peter Dreier

The epidemic of foreclosures that began in 2008 has been devastating America’s families, communities and the state economy.

Nowhere is this more true than in California, where one in five U.S. foreclosures has taken place. Since 2008, more than 1.2 million Californians have lost their homes, and the number is expected to exceed 2 million by the end of next year. More than a third of California homeowners with a mortgage already owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/01/971611/-Folding-Socks

Sun May 01, 2011

by twigg

Difficult as this may be to believe, I did actually have a life before becoming an immigrant, woodworker and part-time Blogger.

I trained, for a while, at a small engineering company, as a production engineer. That was in the early eighties, and I was young, and quite unsure of the direction I wanted to follow.

I sort of “fell” into Social Work, specifically Residential Social Work with abused and neglected children, starting in 1982 and continuing, off and on, until about 2002.