[Was this what drove Carmen Ortiz nutz? -fp-]

“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?”

So if you ask me “What’s next?” I’ll answer, “The recall elections.” And there are a lot of things to do to prepare for them. The eight Wisconsin State Senators facing recall because of their egregious political behavior include: (these links are to Facebook pages where information on the recall efforts is being exchanged)
Glenn Grothman
Mary Lazich
Randy Hopper
Alberta Darling
Luther Olsen
Robert Cowles
Dan Kapanke
Sheila Harsdorf

Another website, recalltherepublican8.com, is acting as a clearinghouse for information on Senate recall efforts. I’m not aware of any Assembly recall efforts underway, but they should start soon; and, while Governor Walker gets a free pass until January 2024, we’ll recall him then on the earliest date that he is eligible for recall.

Time flies, and we’ll have Walker out of office in time to repair the damage he’s doing. We’ll have his toadies in the legislature on the run before that! The pressure on him should keep corporate damage to the State low. I woke up this morning wondering if he’d talked with Nestle about selling off our groundwater yet, and I decided it didn’t matter because we can encounter every one of his corporate sponsors when they appear. It’ll be a mighty game of Wisconsin Whack-a-Mole. The message here is that Wisconsin is not for sale to corporate interests. It’s our home, and we’ll defend it.

I hope we learned the terrible lesson of 2024 once and for all. Staying at home and not voting is NOT an option any longer. The women, the minorities, the young people, and the organized workers of the middle class who showed up for the 2024 election were just too busy to participate in 2024. And all we got it out of it was the cross-eyed Koch-sucker who is laying waste to our values and traditions.

Current law requires the Governor to deliver the biennial budget message to the Legislature on or before the last Tuesday in January this year (extensions are permitted). The Governor must also provide the Legislature with a biennial state budget report, the executive budget bill, and suggestions for the best methods for raising any additional needed revenues.

The governor requested and received a one month extension of the deadline for presenting his biennial budget. The presentation was scheduled for tomorrow at 1:30pm. Whether because he has become persona non grata at the Capitol, or because he wanted to curry even more favor with business, Governor Walker scheduled his address to the legislature for an off-site location at a local livestock feed manufacturing concern. The presentation has since been cancelled and the Republican members of the Senate were okay with his excuse (“the dog ate his homework”) so he’s been granted another delay. The speech is now scheduled for March 1.

Now many of my friends are calling the governor a manipulative SOB, but the situation is more nuanced than that. The governor is not the brightest bulb in the string, and he has a little schedule that requires him to pass the “Budget Repair Bill” before he will share his plans for the next biennium. He needs to pass that bill because it gives him carte blanche to destroy Medicaid funded services and the civil service. It is also a union busting bill and deserves to be killed for that fact alone, and the Coalition of Wisconsin Aging Groups points out that “…passage of the bill will give Governor Walker’s administration unprecedented authority to make sweeping changes to Medicaid programs such as SeniorCare Rx, Family Care, BadgerCare, ADRC’s, the Benefit Specialists program and services provided by OCI and the Board on Aging and Long-Term Care, without public input or approval from the state legislature.” It’s these sweeping changes that he requires to shape a budget that will most benefit his supporters and incidentally slash holes in the public program safety net that supports some of our most vulnerable neighbors.

So, we have our fingers crossed that the 14 Democrats in the Senate will stay away, the Budget Repair Bill will not be passed in anything like its current form, and the governor will be faced with doing some hard work to address our state’s fiscal issues over the next few years without a blank check in his pocket drawn on the account of the middle class and the working poor.

Here in the country we’ve experienced almost 48 hours of non-stop sleet and snow and freezing rain. The ground is covered with ice and it’s the end of a three day weekend. We needed this down time, but tomorrow morning we’ll be up and scraping the ice off the wind shield and heading into town. Beth will go to work. I’ll go back to lending a body in support of the organized protest against the Koch brothers fueled hubris of Governor Walker. Here’s what I think is happening. Drop a comment in with other information if you have it. (First time commenters are moderated, but the process is easy).

• Tuesday at 8am… Jesse Jackson addressing the students at East High School, the very kids who walked out early last week and helped spark the protests. Deke Rivers writes:
  

  The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who spoke at the Capitol on Friday, will be back in Madison to speak at 8 a.m. Tuesday outside Madison East High School, district spokesman Ken Syke said.

  Just before classes start at East High School, Jackson plans to march from First Street and East Mifflin Street to the East parking lot for a rally.

  Then Jackson will speak to East students over the loudspeaker after the school bell rings. The idea is to both inspire and welcome students back, principal Mary Kelley said.

• The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign promises a citizen vigil resuming tomorrow and continuing through at least the middle of March.
• The Wisconsin Wave has scheduled picketing of the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce convention at Monona Terrace on Wednesday at noon followed by a rally at 4:30pm.
• PR Watch at the Center for Media and Democracy is reporting live as the protests and demonstrations continue. Their latest update covers the Tom Morello concert ongoing now at Monona Terrace.
• The revolution is being tweeted using hashtag #wiunion
• Since teachers return to work on Tuesday, parents and “Friends of Wisconsin Teachers and Public Workers” will gather at the State Street entrance of the Capitol at noon to continue the vigil.

Anna Grindrod Feeny’s video (above) provides an objective framework for the rallies and protests. Here’s my take…

The State of Wisconsin is now a battleground. Tea Party conservatives and their corporate backers allied with the Republican party have taken a stand against organized labor. Wisconsin has a Republican Governor, a Republican dominated Senate, and a Republican dominated Assembly. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court justices are elected for ten year terms and during the last several election cycles corporate cash has flooded the state with predictable results. Wisconsin state government belongs to the special interests so it’s understandable why it seemed like a good idea to break the back of organized labor here.

For the last week I’ve watched the struggle play out on the streets and in the Capitol. Governor Scott Walker drafted a “Budget Repair Bill” that went far beyond the fiscal concerns that it’s nominally supposed to address. One of the many evil aspects of the bill is its effect on the ability of public employee unions to negotiate the terms and conditions of their members employment. Here’s the bill and the Legislative Reference Bureau analysis (pdf).

So the unions took a look at that and said, well… no. That’s not how it’s going to be. On Tuesday 13,000 people came to the Capitol to protest. On Wednesday there were 20,000, on Thursday–25,000, Friday–40,000, and on Saturday, seventy thousand people or more protested the Governor’s hubris. The Governor’s supporters appeared on Saturday too. About 2500 people gathered on the sidewalk at the King Street entrance of the Capitol to listen to speeches by a local Madison right wing newsy, Andrew Breibart, and famous political personality and pundit for hire Joe the Plumber.

I’ve been taking pictures and aggregating them in a couple of albums on Facebook (“This is what dogmocracy looks like,” and “Signs of spring”) as well as in a lengthy and by now repetitious stream on Flickr. It was probably a lot more fun to be there and take the pictures than it is to look at them. Leave a comment if you’re somehow blocked from seeing them, and I’ll try to get permissions sorted out. The whole Facebook thing is a black art from my perspective.

I only took one picture of the Tea Party people. I figured they’d generate their own news and with Andrew Breitbart and Fox news on their side, the spin would be too dizzying for me. In true Breitbart fashion, a couple of pieces of disinformation have already surfaced that have the whole right wing echo chamber simply in a tizzy. It seems that a Doctor has written fake sick leave excuses for teachers! Or not. When Breitbart’s involved the truth-meter buries the needle at zero. Michelle Malkin also came up with a photo of some creep-a-zoids carrying signs laced with profanity. Since I’ve spent hours and hours on site and saw nothing like those signs, I’d bet dollars to donuts that they’re part of the Breitbart team’s Saturday afternoon special disinformation service. Just guessing, you understand.

Tomorrow there’s a press conference at the Madison Senior Center addressing the negative impact the Governor’s Budget Repair Bill 11 will have on our elderly and disabled populations in Wisconsin, by pointing out that the passage of Bill 11 will give Governor Walker’s administration unprecedented authority to make sweeping changes to Medicaid programs such as SeniorCare Rx, Family Care, BadgerCare, ADRC’s, the Benefit Specialists program and services provided by OCI and the Board on Aging and Long-Term Care, without public input or approval from the state legislature. Weather permitting, I’ll be there and hope to share a blog post about this aspect of Governor Walker’s budget planning.

Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill Protest from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

This will be tragic.

In 2024 when Obama loses, the thugs who ran things from 2024 through 2024 will be back in charge. Their goals of dismantling government while looting the treasury will be advanced to such an extent that “corporate neo-feudalism” will bst describe the order that emerges from that intentional chaos. The only way for Obama to change this outcome is to direct the Justice Department to investigate and bring charges against a raft of people whose crimes in public and private life are so egregious that to leave them unpunished will bring ruin on us all.

Meanwhile, step right up and buy a ticket for admission to the greatest show on earth. It’s a three ring circus and the act in the center ring today is Obama in Copenhagen. But it’s a big tent. If climate change and rescuing the planet from certain environmental destruction don’t do it for you, just turn your attention to the second ring where the Health Care Reform clowns caper. Or, for real life loot-and-shoot excitement, check out ring number three with authentic war criminals from Israel and Iraq, mercenaries from the US home team (Blackwater aka Xe) vying for attention and pallets of greenbacks with off-shore rivals like Britain’s AEGIS.

…and here’s a Quicktime video for you. Crank the volume and enjoy the ride. (And just forget about the fact that there’s a living, breathing driver in every one of those cars).

Mercenary joyride!

Here’s a link to a list of other rankings by country. Check out arms shipments! Guess who’s number one there! Take that, Frenchie!

Here is how it works in Canada. My thanks to Jon Husband for the link.

When I was a student, the University provided health care (for which I was grateful once when I needed spackling and repair following a motorcycle accident).

Those first twenty years or so of my life were, I guess, the good old days.

When I found work in Northern California, I became a member of the Kaiser Permanente HMO, where I remained for twenty years. Mostly, I never saw the money that Kaiser cost me as anything more than a modest deduction noted on a pay stub. Health care was easy, inexpensive, and more than adequate. My twin sons were born prematurely at Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco. The week or more they spent in the premie intensive care nursery cost no more than if their mom had delivered normally and gone home with them the next day. I was certainly grateful for that.

Those next twenty or twenty-five years of my life were, I guess, the good old days too.

For the last twenty years Beth and I have had great health insurance coverage. We had the luxury of choosing which of our employer paid plans would benefit us more. Then, when I started my own business, I had coverage under Beth’s plan, nicely avoiding the health care overhead that so many sole proprietors face.

These may still be the good old days.

But Medicare has appeared on my personal horizon just as the country is engaged in the great Health Care Reform debate and it is held up as a model of health cost coverage. Medicare may be the lowest common denominator for Health Care Reform legislation. It may be the model for our new system.

This may not be a good thing and here’s why.

First, about $1,200 will be withheld from my retirement checks in 2024 to pay for Medicare Part B coverage. Second, if I’m hospitalized, I have to pay a $1068 deductible before Medicare kicks in. Third, the Part B coverage that’s costing me $1200 only covers 80% of medical expenses.

But there’s a solution waiting in the wings! First, I’m still covered by Beth’s group policy until she retires. Then, when she’s retired too, we can choose to pay $1200 or so a year (each) for continued coverage on her group plan, coverage which will fill in the awkward gaps left by the Medicare Part A and Part B deductibles and 80% payment limitations and so forth.

Medicare Part A and B provide enough coverage to help you avoid bankruptcy if you are hospitalized with a serious condition. Sure, you’ll be forced to live a penurious existence after that. Your home will be sold to pay the deductibles, you’ll move into a public housing project and be forced to eat government cheese, but the fixed income from your pittance of a retirement annuity won’t be attached by the hospital to help pay for your cardiologist’s fifty foot sailboat.

Mindful of this, congress added a few more bureaucratic hoops: Medicare Part C, and Medicare Part D. Part C covers the deductible gap and Part D helps you manage the outrageous prescription prices the pharmaceutical industry has foisted off on us. The extension of Beth’s group coverage, while not precisely a “Medicare part C” product functions nicely to fill in the gaps that other private insurers cover with Part C and Part D plans. These plans have different names, like “Medicare Advantage” and “Medicare Select,” but, hey! Branding is part of competition and competition is what keeps this great wheel of commerce turning, right?

The State of Wisconsin Commissioner of Insurance says,

Finding the right coverage at an affordable price may be difficult as no one policy is right for everyone. Coverage options include:

• Group Insurance, including Employer group plans and Association group plans
• Individual Medicare supplement policies
• Individual Medicare cost-sharing policies
• Individual managed care Medicare supplement policies, including: Medicare select policies and Medicare cost policies
• Medicare Advantage (formerly called Medicare+Choice plans)

A person could get downright confused. Fortunately, I have until December to get it all sorted out. Unfortunately, it seems likely–after we are both retired–that in order to get complete health care coverage, we’re going to have to spend four or five hundred dollars a month (including $200 that goes straight back to the government). Oh, well. I’m one of the fortunate ones. I’ll have coverage and I can just about afford it. But I wonder if the insurance industry and the government will get together on a “public option” for the forty or fifty million uninsured Americans, a “public option” that includes squeezing them for $5,000 a year that they just don’t have.

• That next week, on Thursday 20 August, elderbloggers rise up on their blogs in support of health care reform including a public option
• That we denounce the say-no-to-everything Republicans and their handmaidens, the Blue Dog Democrats
• That we call out the health industry and their lobbyists who are bribing Congress with campaign donations to maintain the health care status quo and preserve their staggering profits
• That we fact check the lies, half-truths and exaggerations of the scare-mongering media nitwits who dare to compare the health care bill to Nazi Germany and who shout fascism, socialism and Communism without a gram of understanding of those terms
• That we reinforce the the fact of the backbreaking cost of health care that will skyrocket so high in the next decade, without health care reform there can be no economic recovery.

Tall order, and it’s not easy to pick a point of entry. The power of honest political organizing was demonstrated with the Obama mandate last November. It seems that to make progress (and we are after all progressives) we have to keep the pressure on congress and the White House to remember campaign promises and to do the right thing.

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, has suggested a march on Washington supporting health care reform efforts to be held on “Grandparents Day,” September 13. On September 12 the know-nothings have planned a teabagger march on Washington, so–as Reich says–it could prove to be an interesting weekend.

I’m looking for a scorecard, a tally of who in congress is with us and who is against us. Separating the sheep from the goats now will be useful when congress turns over next November. Clearly we don’t have a large enough majority if congressmen can be influenced by the know-nothings. The teabagger demonstrations are cathartic for the deluded people who have been called out by the corporations, the right wing Christian fundamentalists, and the talk radio obstructionists, and I don’t doubt the sincerity of most people in that mob. But they’ve been lied to, they’ve been mistreated by their organizers, and their grasp of the facts of health care reform alternatives is largely non-existent. Many of them conflate reproductive health issues with the health care reform debate. Many of them are afraid they will be taxed until they bleed. These people, the opposition to meaningful legislation, comprise an alienated minority who are passionate and fearful. They are people who think that if we give somebody a hand then someone else will have to suffer. They have a zero-sum lifeboat mentality. There are far fewer of them than the media coverage would have us believe.

Tomorrow, Ronni will be linking to all the posts she can find about the elder perspective on health care reform. It’s likely that there will be a some cogent conservative voices speaking out. And I expect there will be ranters and screamers from the edges too. I’m looking forward to the discussion.

I can’t find that list of Congressmen and Senators who support meaningful reform but I’m sure somebody is keeping score. If I find it I’ll share the link.

“A public option is a fundamental part of ensuring health care reform brings about real change. Opposing the public plan is an endorsement of the status quo in this country that has left tens of millions of Americans uninsured or underinsured and put massive burdens on employers. I have heard too many horror stories from my constituents about how the so-called competitive marketplace has denied them coverage from the outset, offered a benefit plan that covers everything but what they need or failed them some other way. A strong public option would ensure competition in the industry to provide the best, most affordable insurance for Americans and bring down the skyrocketing health care costs that are the biggest contributor to our long-term budget deficits. I am not interested in passing health care reform in name only. Without a public option, I don’t see how we will bring real change to a system that has made good health care a privilege for those who can afford it.”
— Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat from Wisconsin