Our Blog Roll’s Blog Stroll

From the Editors

Our Blog Roll’s Blog Stroll

If you're feeling a little bit beaten down and exploited by the health insurance industry, this video game, called "Nurse Avenger," will help you stick it to the industry that so often sticks it to families struggling to keep up with skyrocketing rates. Although it might only be virtual, this lesson - that comes to us care of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights is an important one: insurance is expensive because its allowed to be expensive. Oh yeah, and when a huge percentage of health care costs leave middle class bank accounts only to become runaway corporate profits, that's unacceptable, too.

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A quick salute to Washington Post Online columnist Leslie Morgan Steiner for giving press to the value of affordable child care for people working to pull themselves out of poverty: something so commonsensical, yet so widely undervalued and ignored. In her "On Balance" blog, Steiner writes:

An article in The Washington Post, "Law May Force Some Working Poor Back to the Support of Welfare Rolls", explored how essential child care -- more than job or educational opportunities-- has been key to single moms' success leaving welfare dependency behind. "The job and the degree are important, and I'm proud of them," said Bianca Jones, a 23-year-old single working mom who's son's day care costs only $33 a week because of a Fairfax county daycare voucher program. "But it's the child care that's been the biggest help to get me where I am." Another single mom of three, Alicia Granados, spoke about how rumored cuts in the program may force her to move her four-year-old from a licensed childcare with development specialists and certified teachers to a homecare provider where "she just sits in front of the television all day."

The majority of welfare recipients are single mothers. And for this bloc, moving off the welfare rolls into actual financial security is entirely predicated on being able to afford GOOD child care. What sort of society would tell mothers to just abandon their children without care?

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Via Alternet, I bring you a little recommended reading on the eve of the sale (and potential loss to the middle class) of Manhattan's largest middle class housing development, one which was built in a private/public partnership, Stuyvesant Town. A new book called Design Like You Give a Damn, profiles rebuilding and community investment projects, like Bayview, Virginia's "rural Village, where, over the span of six years, "what was once a decaying 52-family outpost with only one contaminated well as its water source has become a vibrant rural community with affordable, high-quality homes to rent and own."

And in honor of Labor Day the Bush administration showed little honor in making the backdoor appointment of a former lawyer for Wal-Mart to lead the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division. You know, the folks charged with enforcing some of our nation’s most comprehensive labor laws, including: the minimum wage, overtime, and child labor provisions. As a lawyer in private practice Paul DeCamp

* Represented Wal-Mart’s efforts to prevent a class of 1.5 million women - the largest employment class action ever certified - from suing the company for discrimination in pay and promotions.

* His proposals for taking away overtime from workers are even more extreme than those ultimately passed by Congress - and he has suggested easy ways for bosses who misclassify workers as not eligible for overtime pay, "so that the changes draw less attention."

(info Care of the AFL-CIO's great blog)

Have a great Labor Day. Don't forget the reason for the season so to speak.