Burlington – The Vermont Workers’ Center’s “Healthcare is a Human Right” campaign is looking to hear from Vermonters about their healthcare horror stories.

For months volunteers for the Vermont Workers’ Center have been surveying Vermonters from all across the state, about their experience with the healthcare community. The results have been clear: Vermonters believe that healthcare should be a human right.

The state, however, has come up woefully short on this issue. More than 11 percent of all Vermonters are without health insurance, including more than 11,000 children. Thousands more are grossly under-insured, and cannot afford their costly premiums and co-pays,which are only rising as the cost of healthcare soars.

The Vermont Workers’ Center is currently undertaking its “Healthcare is a Human Right” campaign to help end this injustice. The goal of the campaign is to spread awareness and build a movement that can help reform the state’s system so it will guarantee care to all Vermonters, regardless of income. In order to better understand the system’s failings, the Workers’ Center is asking Vermonters to tell their stories about the healthcare system.

Have you ever been denied treatment or surgery does to a lack of money or insurance? Have you had to declare bankruptcy or put off needed medical care? Have you or anyone you know become sick due to a lack of access to quality, affordable healthcare? Any other ways you feel your

basic rights were denied under the current healthcare system?

If any of this applies to you, or if you have other experiences with the system that you would like to share, please call us toll free at 866-229-0009, or email healthcare@workerscenter.org and put “My Horror Story” in the subject line.

“In speaking to Vermonters, we have found that many have suffered greatly, both personally and physically, when they try to navigate through a a healthcare system that leaves so many behind,” said James Haslam, the director of the Vermont Workers’ Center. “We are asking Vermonters to help tell these stories, so we can better address this problem and fight to have healthcare be treated as a human right, and not as a commodity.”

Please join our effort to fight for a just healthcare system that

values human lives over profit.

For more information visit: www.workerscenter.org/healthcare.

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In yesterday’s installment, we drove around the world on dollar bills.

Today we’re going to play 2 more games: “Barrel Full o’ Dollars” and “One of These Days, Alice!”

Let’s start with the easy one.

Go get all the money you have in your house – dollar bills, pennies, whatever. Do me a favor and bring the coins to the bank and get ’em changed into bills – they get heavy. As a matter of fact, get everything converted into singles. Get everyone in your family to do the same.

Count that money.

Let’s say you have 100 dollars. Keep $7 of it, and put the other $93 into that big red wheelbarrow I’ve conveniently placed by your front door.

OK, I’m now taking the wheelbarrow to your neighbor’s house, and waiting while he does the same thing. Then to the next house, and so on. If I pass any homeless people, I’m taking their money, too. Ditto for apartment dwellers.

Done.

I’ve now got the biggest wheelbarrow to ever grace the face of the Earth. It’s REALLY big. This wheelbarrow is more than 250 feet wide, 200 feet deep, and 450 feet tall – plus a little extra for the handles and wheel.

Being about the size of a NYC block full ‘o skyscrapers, it’s a bit tipsy. Next time I’ll get one that’s wider and not so tall, and maybe add some more wheels…

There are 300 million people in the US, and I just took almost every penny they had – $0.93 from every $1. If everyone in the your family combines what’s left (unless you’re one of the homeless folks), you may be able to squeeze a nice last dinner out of the remainder.

What I took is $700,000,000,000.

Does that number look familiar?

It’s the amount being asked for in the bailout. Ironically, it turns out that there is currently $750,000,000,000 in circulation as cash in our economy.

Of course, since that $700,000,000,000 is a moving window, I should have taken the rest of your cash – because it will be taken as soon as the treasury gets around to it after the first round of bailing.

One interesting thing to note about the chart – it’s hard to see, but between roughly 1992 and 1999 there was a little bit of a plateau in the printing of money – it slowed a bit.

Then it skyrocketed again.

This means a couple of things – the treasury is using a LOT of ink (barrels full), and the “stable” stock market has actually been losing value due to inflation (let’s pretend it didn’t take a bath last week).

The stock market has been hovering around the same level for the entire Bush administration. Sometimes it spikes higher, sometimes it drops lower, but generally it stays in the same neighborhood. Maybe it has agoraphobia?

Anyway, the Dow, for example, has been somewhere around $10,000. It’s a nice round number to work with, so let’s use it.

If on November 2, 2000, you invested $10,000 in a fund that holds all 30 stocks traded on the Dow Jones, today you’d have had roughly $10,080 with little bumps up and down for the last 8 years.

Or would you? See, the Dow’s value isn’t listed in inflation-adjusted dollars.

That $10,000 in the Dow in 2008 is worth $7,860 year 2000 dollars. You’ve lost $2,140 in purchasing power. Oops!

But enough of that. I’m ready for a new Apollo Project…

Yesterday I mentioned the $10,000,000,000,000 (ten trillion) dollars of bets known as over-the-counter derivatives. They are in trouble, because an awful lot of these bets were bets that housing values would continue to go up. Then housing prices went down. So now a very large percentage of those bets went in favor of the house, and the bettors don’t have the cash to pay off their bookies.

Well, the casino has another cool game that became all the rage in the last few years: CDSs – Credit Default Swaps. You can kind of figure out their purpose from their name: If you give someone credit, and they default, you can swap it for something else. It’s insurance on debt – if the debt goes bad, the folks you bought the insurance from will make it up to you.

So say you loan your brother $10 and he doesn’t pay you back. If you bought a CDS at the same time, then the folks you bought the CDS from will pay you something equivalent to $10. (It may not be actual dollars, it could be some bonds, or something else of equivalent value.)

So let’s say that every time anyone who knew about this “insurance” bought insurance every time they issued or purchased debt, debt like the mortgage sludge on the merry-go-round, debt like municipal bonds, debt like credit card debt or car loans. Really, any debt instrument at all.

How much money in these CDS insurance policies would be floating around out there?

I’ll give you a hint: $62,000,000,000,000 ($62 trillion).

If you took each of those dollar bills and taped them together end-to-end, you could make a dollar bill rope 31,000,000,000,000 feet long (31 trillion – note: I’ve chopped .14″ off each bill to make them an even 6″). I’ll make it double-thickness, so it’ll be nice and sturdy. Now it’s only 15,500,000,000 (15.5 trillion) feet long.

I don’t know if you recall, but a few years ago, Bush proposed sending a manned space-craft to Mars. The moon had worked out so well for Kennedy, he figured that he’d be even MORE popular if he got someone to Mars, which is much further away (120 million miles). Apparently, Bush didn’t “get” that the whole purpose of the moon mission was to perfect the ability to get a rocket out of the atmosphere and back into the atmosphere – which would be necessary for long-range warheads. Sadly for Bush, going to Mars would do exactly nothing to further any technological needs, so no one wanted to do it – not even NASA… But I digress.

Since there’s no useful technological purpose to sending a manned rocket to Mars, we may as well save the rocket fuel.

Let’s get a Mars rover to tape one end of our double-thickness $62,000,000,000,000 rope to Mars.

The only problem: the rope would be WAAAAY too long. We could make 129 ropes that stretched all the way from Earth to Mars, and have a whole bunch left over.

Back to the Credit Default Swaps:

Every time a debt goes bad, someone is owed a piece of that 15-trillion foot long double-thick rope.

The 15-trillion foot long double-thick rope is not sitting in a bank vault (or even several thousand bank vaults) ready to be paid out if something goes wrong. As a matter of fact, most of it doesn’t even exist (remember there’s only one-bailout’s worth of actual printed cash in the entire economy).

It’s just a promise. A handshake. A deal between two people.

And now a lot of debts are going bad. Houses. Car loans. Credit Cards.

People are losing their ability to pay, and they’re defaulting in record numbers. Heck, an entire city recently declared bankruptcy.

Be sure to savor that meal you bought with your last $7.

I figured with the nonstop bad news everywhere, y'all could use a good laugh. The New York Daily News hired a Sarah Palin impersonator to go around New York City. Some of the comments from unsuspecting cityfolk:

“You're hot! But I hope you lose.”

“She seems smart. She likes hockey.”

“Obama '08!”

“If her parents see her with anyone who even looks like Palin, they'll strangle me.”

Interestingly enough, the comparison of the impersonator and the real deal show, well, a more worldy candidate in the impersonator. Probaby smarter, too.

There’s a line that threads its way through the recent spate of articles on our newest economic emergency … The Great Bailout of 2008 (yeah, the claimed credit crunch that will freeze the world under glaciers made of economic inactivity), and it goes something like this: “The lack of liquidity is making it impossible for banks to engage in intra-bank loans thus not enabling these same banks have the where-with-all to make loans to businesses and consumers (ya’ know … those bipeds that used to be considered people).”

You’ll see the above stated in various forms, but it’s almost always there.

Simple question: if banks are depending upon intra-bank loans to lend money to businesses and consumers (ya’ know … those bipeds that used to be considered people), who is supplying the input that banks are using as a basis for making these intra-bank loans? For that matter … is there any backing for these intra-bank loans?

Well yes, there is a backer for these intra-bank loans, and that backer is the same group who’re being asked to fund The Great Bailout of 2008. That, good people, is you and I and our family, neighbors, co-workers, acquaintences and others.

Trace these intra-bank loans back and you find all roads lead to the Federal Reserve Bank. This is the place where macro-liquidity (ie. system wide availability of cash) emanates from. This is why (when the time comes to fight wage inflation and protect stock market and financial instrument inflation) the Fed plays with base interest rates.

Raise the Fed rate and intra-bank loans get more expensive thus driving up the price of loans to businesses and consumers (ya’ know … those bipeds that used to be considered people). Lower the Fed rate and the opposite occurs. Higher rates will remove some of the capital liquidity (availability of cash) because fewer businesses/people will be applying for loans thus reducing the amount of cash running around … lower interest rates go the other direction.

IMPORTANT POINT: The Fed is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, and thus any monies created by their loans has the same protection as that $10 bill, treasury note or other government issued financial instrument (including bailouts via credit financed purchases of bad debt related instruments).

What I’m describing above is nothing more nor less than a check kiting scheme. I write you a check that bounces, and when you complain I write another bad check to cover the one that bounced.

Under normal circumstances (ie. not involving the uber rich and powerful) once that second one bounced, I would be held legally and financially liable … you wouldn’t take any more checks from me, and life would go on.

With today’s intra-bank lending situation, however, people/businesses have been allowed to keep writing known bad checks to cover the last bad check. Out of liquidity? No problem … the Fed is keeping rates real nice and low just for you … and by the way … you can use those bad debt instruments that are making you run out of liquidity as collateral to borrow the cash you need for liquidity.

Not only can the banks continue kiting checks, but they can use the kited checks given them for intra-bank loans as collateral to cover their own kited checks.

And the buck does stop … not at the Fed, but at the taxpayer … because in the end we are on the hook because we’ve covered everything with the full faith and credit of the United States of America.

( – promoted by odum)

As usual flying under the radar Brian Dubie kicked off his campaign at what one newspaper is calling a quickly organized and quiet event. Dubie declared himself ready to “fill up his Saturn with gas ” and travel the state. A common criticism of Dubie is that he actually does very little in his post as Lt.Gov.and has few solid achievements to cite.

His website does make note among other things of his declaration of a symbolic heating emergency last summer or was it a symbolic declaration of a real heating emergency?  

From the Free Press:

To help voters learn more about the candidate’s records and ideas, Costello(Dubie’s Democratic challenger ) proposed weekly conversations among the four lieutenant governor candidates at locations across the state, starting Oct. 2 at Castleton State College.

“His Thursdays are booked,” said Susie Hudson, Dubie’s campaign manager. She complained that Costello set the schedule without consulting the Dubie campaign.

A check this morning shows his official State website calendar of events listing only April and March 2007. The campaign website lists no campaign events …..just keep a sharp eye out for a saturn full of gas coming to your town (unannounced) .

With the winds of change starting to threaten Jim Douglas’s job (where he doesn’t have to actually do anything), he’s upping the slime ante to a level not seen in Vermont politics up to this point. To get a sense of what he’s scared of, take a look:

Rothenberg Report: Race was re-rated from “Currently Safe” for Douglas down to to “Clear Advantage Incumbent Party.”

Stateline.org: Re-evaluated from “Safe Republican” to “Worth Watching.”

And Congressional Quarterly:

Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas’ politically moderate profile and modest personal manner have enabled him to win three two-year terms as a Republican, overcoming the strong partisan trend that has given the Democrats the upper hand in his home state’s politics. And his Democratic opponent, state lawmaker Gaye Symington has to worry about losing a chunk of the liberal vote to independent candidate Anthony Pollina, who has long been associated with Vermont’s left-leaning Progressive Party and who has received the backing of several unions in the state.

But at least some uncertainty about the outcome has been produced by Symington’s prominence as the state House Speaker, along with a Democratic voter turnout boost likely to be spurred by Barack Obama’s effort to run the party’s presidential winning streak in Vermont to five elections dating to 1992. CQ Politics, which had rated the race as Safe Republican, has changed its rating to Leans Republican.

And of course, only a day after I said the nasty ads should be coming any moment, they’re here (see diary below). But rather than mocking with namecalling, which is Douglas’s usual M.O., he’s moved up to outright lies. From the ad:

“She tried to pass off four years of bogus tax returns before the press caught her.”

The charge that Symington was passing bogus documents has clearly been demonstrated to be false, and not simply by this site, but by the very press Douglas is invoking. From Remsen:

The Burlington Free Press did not report that she filed separately, but did state — mistakenly — that the forms Symington provided were the actual tax returns she filed… The campaign also included a note on an accompanying e-mail to the media indicating that the documents were “pro-forma tax forms prepared by her accountant.”

Douglas and Casey know this, but put out this trash anyway. A naked lie – one that they couldn’t sell the press on at the time, but we’re in the era where McCain-style casual, routine lying is a bona fide communications strategy. After years where he’s derided his opponents as “flip floppers”, “Mr. Property Tax,” calling them Commies by tying them to Sandinistas and accusing them of “squealing like a stuck pig,” Douglas is showing he’s willing to join his presidential candidate in taking sleaze to this next level.

As a Vermonter, I am both ashamed and disgusted. Let’s get some letters to the editor calling Douglas out for exactly what he’s chosen to become.