Friday, May 16, 2014

PCN: Hispanic children work on tobacco’s fields in U.S., et al




Children as young as 7, many of them Hispanics, are working in tobacco fields under hazardous health conditions, according to the report “Tobacco’s Hidden Children” released on Wednesday by the Human Rights Watch. The majority of children interviewed were of Hispanic origin. Many were U.S. citizens born to non-citizen parents, and almost all reported working out of a need to provide for themselves and their families.
 
 
Despite vocal opposition to Obamacare, Governor Mike Pence of Indiana just joined the ranks of conservative state officials willing to compromise with the federal government to expand health coverage for their states' poorest residents.
 
After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy. As for health-care, the chronic diseases forcing spending ever upward are rooted in the way Americans eat. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet....There’s been a timidity when it comes to looking at the food system.
 
In short, because fixing the VA backlog isn’t just a question of putting the proper resources into an overwhelmed agency. Solving it would require not only untangling a Gordian knot of dysfunctional bureaucracy surrounding the VA claims system and decades of neglect, it would also mean overcoming a perfect storm of factors in the past few years that has made the problem much, much worse.
The real story is that SOCOM has done things that have incensed members of Congress and thus Congress is resorting to the only thing it feels safe doing: squeezing programs that don't cost a lot of money and won't affect big-ticket platforms that translate into jobs and corporate money for campaigns. Forcing SOCOM to fire a few physical therapists and psychologists won't result in a loss of donations...But the loss of those services for those who have deployed numerous times, are suffering from PTSD and suicide, and dealing with the loss of physical abilities is shameful and Congress should stop it.
 
 

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