And yet more Random Blathering

Still working on the healthcare article. There is just so much information to sift through.

Amazingly enough it turns out that save for those who have a vested interest in forcing us to pay for what we now get for free, our healthcare system is a standard for many.

If the US were to adopt our system it would save their country $280 billion dollars.

Not exactly chump change.

"Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States," the Institute said. Therefore, "By 2010, everyone in the United States should have health insurance...

I should mention the above quote comes from here
Good news on the Canadian medical front. Now that the CMA has been hijacked by the for profit types a new organization has been founded, Canadian Doctors for Medicare.
From their website;

CDM - Vision and Mission
A responsive, sustainable publicly funded healthcare system exists as the highest expression of Canadians caring for one another.

The mission of CDM is to provide a voice for Canadian doctors who believe in and support Canada's publicly funded system for physician and hospital care, and who reject private insurance and direct payment for these medically necessary services.

Finally for those that can don't forget the anti P3 rally this Sat. June 3rd. @ Queens Park. 12:30

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Random blathering

So I started a new board, Bread and Roses

Leftwing and feminist naturally.

If you are looking for a place to discuss politics, news, books, pretty much anything check it out.

I'm also working on a post about the LHIN's. For anyone who hasn't heard of them, and it isn't like the government is putting the word out, it means Local Health Integration Network.

Don't let the "local" fool you. Our LHIN stretchs from Algonquin to Scarborough and takes in 1,459,800 or 11.8% of Ontario's population. Anyway more on that to come.

If you live in Ontario and can get to Queen's Park on Saturday June 3rd there will be a rally against P3 hospitals. I believe it starts at 12:30.

Will add more later.

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Fat is a Feminist Issue

Fat is a Feminist Issue

I have long thought there is a corelation between poverty and obesity.

Seems to me that people know how to eat healthly they just are unable to.

Apparently I was correct in this assumption as a number of studies have been done showing that people are more likely to be obese the lower their level of income.

I think of it like this.

At one time white breads, sugars, cakes the goodies lets call them were only available to the rich and chubbiness was seen as good.

The poor had whole grain breads, berries collected from local fields and forests, porridges, fish from local streams

Then something happened, the way we lived changed, the foods available changed and the medical field realized that the diet the poor were eating was healthier than what the rich were eating.

After a time whole grain foods became the expensive items, root and cruciferous vegetables became more expensive, and the poor were left with the nutritionally challenged foods such as hot dogs, kraft dinner, and other high calorie "filler foods".

there are a number of studies and news articles on this site.
http://www.frac.org/html/hunger_in_the_us/hunger&obesity.htm

Some of which point to the fact that when young people (most studies focus on girls) are given nutritious school lunches or their families are given food stamps the incidence of obesity decreases.

Quote:

The best evidence now is that the child nutrition programs contribute to reducing obesity in this country, rather than exacerbating the obesity problem. Broadening access to the programs is a part of the solution, not a part of the obesity problem. http://www.frac.org/html/news/090503obesity_reduction.htm

Recently there was a study on Having it All one of the "benefits" of being a working mom was a lower incidence of obesity. Could this in fact be due to a higher household income?

There is a quote from one of the links that of course I can't find now that says it is too easy to tell the poor to subsist on rice and beans, but why should they be denied the fruits and vegetables and other foodstuffs just as vital to a good diet?

This is also a good quote;

Quote:

"The rich can afford to be thin in America, and the poor can't," says Barry Popkin, a nutrition professor at the school of public health at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. "If you make a decent income and decide to lose some weight, you can eat grilled chicken, salads and fresh mango, and play a little tennis," says Adam Drewnowski, director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition at the University of Washington-Seattle. "But a person in a lower-paying job or working two or three jobs is in no position to do that. "To suggest to the lower middle class or poor that they eat a diet filled with foods like red snapper, radicchio, fresh tomatoes, baby lamb chops, olive oil and merlot wine is blatant economic elitism."

The reason I see this as a feminist issue is that more women tend to be poor, women usually have the responsibility for the children and more senior women tend to be poor.

Not sure how to wrap this up, just that from these studies it appears that what a lot of people need is not more shaming, not cook books, not lectures about health issues, what is needed is an adquate amount of money to buy healthy nutritious foods.

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If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride*

* If wishing could make things happen, then even the most destitute people would have everything they wanted.
What is everything we want?
Sure we all at some time have fantasies of big houses, or fast cars, shopping sprees, world peace.
Well ok world peace is probably something nearly everyone wants.
If you really break it down what most people want is shelter, food and a way to support themselves.
Lets examine those issues.

Shelter

How many of us take home for granted?

Oh I can't wait to get home. Going somewhere for the holidays? No I'll be staying home. Look at this piece of merchandise I just bought for my home. Wow the weather out there sucks glad I can stay home. Home is where the heart is . There is no place like home.
HOME a word with so many connotations and yet so many have no home.
I t is comforting to some to think of the homeless as those who have mental illnesses, alcoholics, lazy bums and while none of the afforementioned deserve any less concern or respect the reality is many of todays homeless are people and families with jobs.
Unfortunately, so many of todays jobs are so tenuous and so low paying that people can simply not afford to keep up with their rent.
The governments we are dealing with today do not see long term issues, do not see that x+y=z, they have no concept of pay little now or lots later, they simply want to appeal to the average voter's greed. It works too. How many governments have we seen elected again and again on a platform of dismantling the few social programs that had been ensconced into the Canadian culture.
The few affordable housing programs we have are often ghettos that perpetuate the sense of hopelessness the poor commonly feel.
It is easy to point to these ghettos as examples of how "those people" have no appreciation of what they are given.

What are they given?

Neighbourhoods which are the last to recieve funding. Neighbours who feel the same sense of hopelessness about the future you do. An address with a stigma attached. (perfect for job hunting) Children growing up recognizing the same sense of ostracism, of not being good enough, of not having the right ....anything.
What of the children growing up in shelters? Do we expect them to have a sense of community? To understand what it is to part of a whole? Do we even care as long as we don't have to see them?
Imagine instead integrated communities, nuclear families, one parent families, same sex families, singles, couples , seniors and every permutation therein.
T o have a place to call home is something that strikes at the heart of each and every one of us. That we can so callously deny it to the most vulnerable in our society speaks volumes.

Food

The very thing that enables us to continue to exist from day to day. The thing that we most literally cannot live without.
Yet far too many of us rely on the charity of foodbanks for our daily bread.
Many would consider us a just, sober and sane society, yet we allow so many of our citizens to beg for their dinner like stray dogs.
To deny someone food is to starve them. To starve someone willfully is to commit murder. Yet we refuse to give the neediest members of our society enough money to eat on a regular basis.
Too many are chosing between shelter and food. Too many mothers are starving themselves so their children can eat.
How ironic that the diet industry rakes in approx. 60 billion a year (yes that is a b) while so many go without.
Imagine the how many lunch programs, good food boxes, organic community gardens that kind of money could support.
Imagine every child going to school with a full belly, a good lunch and the promise of a good dinner.
We know the importance of good nutrition on learning, future health and even future earning capacity. You would think the accountants would see the value in small output for large savings.
In the end we cannot call ourselves decent, in the end we cannot call ourselves protectors of human rights, in the end we cannot justify allowing anyone in our country to go hungry.

Jobs

It is a common myth that one only needs to want to work and a job will magically appear.
This is a myth perpetuated by those with a stake in vilfying those least able to stand up for themselves politically.
Globalization, mechanization, plant closures, poverty have all played a role in the lack of available jobs.
Capitalism in and of itself plays a role as it demands a certain level of unemployment in order to keep profits high and workers scared.
The job market is becoming more keenly divided between low income service positions and upper level careers.
It requires two of these minimum income jobs to provide even the most basic needs for a family.
Leaving single parent families living in poverty. Welfare rates are even less.
The availability of decent paying jobs continues to decline, welfare programs are gutted, and governments tell us we cannot afford social programs yet they provide businesses with larger and larger tax cuts even as CEO wages rise at alarming rates.
As middle level income jobs disappear, benefits disappear, workers are hired on a part time or contract basis, we rush towards a society with very sharp divisions between rich and poor.
Divisions not only of money but of ability. The ability to attain an education, the ability to posses shelter, the ability to dress properly in order to gain employment, the ability to keep oneself properly nourished.
A society which does not provide education to all cannot call itself enlightened, a society which does not provide food and shelter cannot call itself humane, a society which does not care for it's most vulnerable can no longer call itself society at all.

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You've come a long way baby......

I wonder why they ever thought that was a good slogan?

You've come a long way, but we're still gonna call you baby.

There have been superficial changes over the years, certainly women have greater access to more fields, better access to maternity leave, and have cracked some of the glass ceilings.

However, there is still a pink ghetto. Women are still more likely to have lower paying jobs.

We are more likely to live our senior years in poverty and we are still more likely to die at the hands of our partners.

Rape is still underreported and when it is reported is still often met with the same blame the victim attitude it always was.

I see young girls dressing beyond their years, dumbing themselves down, refusing to insist that their partners wear condoms and I wonder what the hell is going on?

Across the country from 1916 to 1951 women won the right to vote. There are most assuredly women alive today who remember being able to become part of the process.

Unfortunately, that is what we did become....part of the process.

There was a brief surge of anger, of railing against the status quo, of fighting for those that could not fight for themselves.

What happened?

There is a news story about women in Zimbabwe not having access to sanitary products, when advised of this the parliament "fell about laughing" well before we get too smug lets not forget that it was only a few years ago that some members of our parliament fell about laughing over the results of a study on domestic abuse.

Have great strides been made to curb abuse?

Of course laws have been changed, ways of dealing with offenders has changed somewhat, real change remains sadly out of sight.

Things that would enable women to leave abusive situations like decent welfare rates, publicly funded day care centres, affordable housing, access to good legal counsel. Why haven't these things been changed?

Too much of our liberation has been smoke and mirrors.

We have made strides in entering the workforce but the economy responded by making it so that one income was not now enough to provide for a family.

We fought for the right to be accepted as ok just as we were and yet the diet industry is a multi billion dollar a year reminder that we can never be too thin.

We fought for sexual and reproductive freedom.

Yes we are less likely to be called sluts but the word has not disappeared, in fact in much of modern culture women are referred to just as a matter of course as sluts and bitches.

Yes we did have a period of time where we were getting close to being able to have control of our bodies but that tenuous hold is getting thinner by the day.

We did not only fight for ourselves, we fought for our daughters, our sons, our brothers, our fathers.

We hoped that an end to patriarchy would help them break free of their bonds as well.

Patriarchy has proven to be hard to kill. We should have been more prepared, we should have realized that while men would be happy to share the workload they might not be so happy to give up the priviledge.

Now the hard part of the fight begins, now when so many believe it is over.

Yes we won the superficial, but we are far from reaching the goal. We are far from a society where women feel safe, we are far from a society where mothers on welfare have enough to care properly for their children, we are far from a society where an elderly woman doesn't have to worry about becoming homeless for her senior years and we are far from a society where men in general are willing to give up the power that they are afforded through patriarchy.

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Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day to all the women in the world.

Especially those who will not been taken out to brunch but instead are watching their children die in war, or from curable diseases, or from non curable diseases.

The mothers for whom this day will not be one of breakfast in bed, for whom breakfast has become a distant memory.

The mothers whose children are finding a comfort in drugs or alchol that they somehow could not find in anything else.

The mothers who will pass another day hoping that they can find the courage to get themselves and their children out of situations of abuse, yet knowing that doing so will end up in another abuse, that of the system.

The mothers whose gifts will not be jewelry, or clothes or spa days, who have to say I can't afford it when their children ask for money to buy them something.

I am so grateful to my mother, who taught me that we are all the same, regardless of time, money, circumstance we are all just humans, with shared fears, frailties, and needs.

Who also taught me that authority unquestioned is a dangerous thing, and that ordinary people working together can achieve great things.

So on this Mother's Day I pay tribute to all the women who against the backdrops of war, oppresion, disease. poverty and fear carry on with the task of mothering.

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Three card monte, shell game and politics....

What do these three things have in common? Tricky manuvers to make you think that something is somewhere it is in fact not.

For too long the Liberal party claimed to be socially left (and many Canadians believed them) yet our healthcare system is eroding, our social safety nets have gaping holes, and our country has been dragged to the right.

Oh it was a slow process and hardly noticeable to some, like the frog in the pot many have not yet noticed that things are reaching a boil.

Our whole political system has become skewed. Ideas, ideals, strategies that should be a given for the left now become things to be discussed in hushed tones.

Let's not make waves, let's not alienate the masses.

Perhaps the masses would welcome someone who would come right out and say enough is enough!!

I"d like to think that most Canadians believe that everyone has the right to shelter, an education, a good meal, sufficient clothing.

The push to the right has been the quietest of war, but make no mistake war it has been.

Power does not need to take to the streets, power does not need to gather conspicously, power works insidously.

Power smites those achieving a foothold on the ladder of success in the same way that God stripped away the footholds of those building the tower of bable.

And just as in the biblical story power confounds the masses by pitting them against one another.

I could be wrong, however, it seems that our consumer culture has driven many of us to the point where we feel that we need to get the next biggest, greatest thing and the only thing standing in the way is TAXES.

Yes if only that welfare mother would get off her ass, if only that depressed guy would just pull up his socks and get on with it, if only the disabled would stop expecting society to help them, surely taxes would be lower I could afford more stuff, I would be happier.

Power is only too happy to promote that feeling, build upon it and enact legislation which proports to put and end to the various "drains on society".

Next time someone mentions tax cuts with glee think about the things your taxes support. Next time someone blames the poor for their own circumstance react to it the way you would if they said something racist.

The only way we will create change is to be proactive. To not be afraid to speak out, to not be afraid to offer alternatives, to not be afraid of being called leftists or socialists.

Let us not become boiled frogs, let us instead jump.

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And now a musical interlude

I've found myself questioning song lyrics much more often lately.

Songs that I never really thought about just enjoyed the tune.

It's a shame really as music has played a large part in my life.

I do recall when I was young being very upset with the lyrics to 'In the Summertime'

If her daddy's rich, take her out for a meal
If her daddy's poor, just do what you feel

Now what does a young girl make of that?

I used to like Bob Seeger then I started paying attention to some of his lyrics;

A gypsy wind is blowing warm tonight

The sky is starlit and the time is right

And still you're tellin' me you have to go

Before you leave there's something you should know

Yeah something you should know babe

I've seen you smiling in the summer sun

I've seen your long hair flying when you run

I've rnade my mind up that it's meant to be

Someday lady you'll accomp'ny me

Out where the rivers meet the sounding sea

You're high above me now, you're wild and free ah but

Someday lady you'll accomp'ny me

Stalker song?

You're wild and free, but I'll change all that.

The list is never ending and it could be said much of what I feel is overreaction.

Well sure could be, but then I've heard so many women say similar things, we can't all be wrong.

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Talking with idiots

So I had an interesting conversation with a "friend?" last night.

Supposedly progressive guy starts blathering on about how all these women in town are having baby after baby to live on welfare.

Seems he feels welfare is too good a deal to pass up and this is why conservatives are against it.

Mr. Progessive went on to say that if they really wanted work they would drop their kids off at school and get out on the highway to hitchhike to the next town to find jobs.

When advised that this might perhaps lead to sexual assault or other bad things happening he responded with " well I might go outside and trip on a stone"

Ya jackass I can see how those two things are completely the same.

Come home from that conversation to find one of equal stupidity on a board I like to post on.

Some days it just doesn't pay to interact with others.

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