Use nudity when potentially child-killing chemicals don’t garner enough attention

Back in September, Senator Al Franken and Rep. Steve Israel has introduced the "Household Product Labeling Act," which will enable consumers to determine whether potentially harmful chemicals are present in the household cleaning products they use. Here's the full text of the Senate version of the Act. Here's the problem:

In many households across the country, the entire family pitches in on household cleaning chores. The effort is obviously intended to keep everyone healthy by cutting down on germs, bacteria, and mold. But unfortunately, many of the ingredients in commonly used cleaning products may be dangerous themselves. Current law requires that product labels list immediately hazardous ingredients, but there is no labeling requirement for ingredients that may cause harm over time. Many chemicals contained in household products have been shown to produce harmful health effects. Consumers have a right to know which of these potentially harmful chemicals might be present in their kitchen and bathroom cupboards. This information is particularly important to families with small children, who as we all know have more direct contact with floors and household surfaces. This legislation simply makes that information readily available to consumers, giving them the opportunity to make an informed choice about the chemicals they bring into their homes.
This is an incredibly important bill, because consumers should have a right to know the chemicals to which they are exposing their families (see here for related post). How do you promote a bill when the "mere" sickness and death fail to attract enough attention? A private company called Method decided to shoot this clever (and somewhat provocative) video:

Continue ReadingUse nudity when potentially child-killing chemicals don’t garner enough attention

Tear up the health care bill and start over.

I wrote a comment on this same issue last night, but I wanted to make it into a post as well, given the importance. Marcia Angel, M.D., former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, is highly critical of the proposed "health care reform." Although she admits that it accomplishes a few things, it is worse than doing nothing.

It throws more money into a dysfunctional and unsustainable system, with only a few improvements at the edges, and it augments the central role of the investor-owned insurance industry. The danger is that as costs continue to rise and coverage becomes less comprehensive, people will conclude that we've tried health reform and it didn't work. But the real problem will be that we didn't really try it.

Read the full post at Huffpo for Angel's clear and understandable ideas for meaningful (and not corrupt) health care reform. I agree with Angel that the current bill is an industry-coddling joke and that it is worse than doing nothing, for the reasons she offers. The House bill has a few pieces of low hanging fruit (e.g., portability), but at great unnecessary expense and waste. We need to tear up this celebrated new bill (celebrated by the Democrats, anyway) and start over. For more on Angell's ideas for reform, also see her recent appearance on Bill Moyer's show.

Continue ReadingTear up the health care bill and start over.

Time to go read the House version of the health care reform bill.

It would be irresponsible to take a position on the new House version of the health care bill without reading it, right? Despite the importance and expense of the bill, many national news websites don't even contain a link to the actual words of the bill. Therefore, go to this link and read the full text of the bill. It's almost 2,000 pages long and it's loaded with specialized terminology and ambiguities. To read it, you'll need to give up many hours of your life. I'm a lawyer, and I read difficult documents all day at work. I can guarantee that it would take me more than a week to read this bill and to obtain a thorough understanding of its main provisions. How many Americans would be willing to read this bill without being required to read it as part of a special healthcare-related job (much less understand it) prior to taking a position on it? Probably only a handful. Out of almost 300,000,000 Americas, only a few would exert the effort to read the entire thing. In fact, send in a comment if you are not being paid to read this bill, and you've nonetheless read it on your own just to be an informed citizen. This House bill will eventually need to be reconciled with a Senate bill, which will be comparable in length and complexity. Completely responsible people will read both versions and map out the differences. That could take many weeks, even for those of us who are even able to analyze text at this level. To really follow this legislation in real time would require one to give up everything he or she cares about for many weeks. It means giving up time with one's family, exercising, entertainment and probably burning vacation time at work. I doubt that it is a rare legislator has read more than 1/4 of this bill. What does it mean when it takes 2,000 words to put an idea into a law containing numerous vague provisions? I have become cynical about this process (as you can probably tell). My presumption is that this bill is representative of many modern pieces of federal legislation (there are many other similarly long and vague federal laws that have been passed over the past couple of decades). My suspicion is that when a bill is written in lengthy prose that is often vague, it means that it is intentionally written this way to discourage ordinary people from understanding it. It is written with lots of bells and whistles that will work to the benefit of private businesses. It is written for those who can afford to hire teams of lawyers who can "work" the law to their advantage in federal courts. Something for everyone who can afford to litigate, it seems, based on the many provisions. Or would it be more accurate to say that this bill is an attempt to put off for another day the dirty details of who, exactly will be covered, whether those who are being insured by the federal government get the same gold-plated coverage as those who work hard to shell out $1,000/month to insure their families, how much it will really cost to give this kind of coverage to the poor and working poor, who will pay for it in the end and what will we no longer be able to afford as a country given that we are going to be paying a presumably huge sum for health care? These are the kinds of questions that good and decent people want to know before they make a commitment. I should make it clear that the current system is terrible in many ways, both for people who are insured and those who aren't. We need a new law to keep purchasers of health insurance from getting ripped off by insurers, but this is low-hanging fruit that could be knocked out with a 10-page bill. We also need to figure out some affordable level of coverage to provide to those who we feel moral compulsions to cover. I suspect that all of this could be done in far less than 2,000 pages. Like I mentioned, I'm suspicious about this process, which has proven to be opaque in more ways than one. Seeing this bill makes me realize how daunting it is for most folks to "get involved" in the government process. No wonder so many people, driven by emotions, give up entirely and insist that living locally can take care of national or global problems. These include many of the "free market fundamentalists," as well as many others who haven't quite articulated why they are so reluctant to get involved.

Continue ReadingTime to go read the House version of the health care reform bill.

Our love-hate relationship with animals

In "Flesh of your Flesh," published in the November 9, 2009 edition of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert reviews several books that investigate the kinds of creatures we eat. Well, actually, we love our creatures too:

Forty-six million families in the United States own at least one dog, and thirty-eight million keep cats. Thirteen million maintain freshwater aquariums in which swim a total of more than a hundred and seventy million fish. Collectively, these creatures cost Americans some forty billion dollars annually.
We love our animals, but we also love to eat them:
This year, they will cook roughly twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five million cows. Additionally, they will consume roughly twenty-three billion pounds of pork, or the bodies of more than a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, some nine billion birds. Most of these creatures have been raised under conditions that are, as Americans know—or, at least, by this point have no excuse not to know—barbaric.
Isn't this a contradiction that we love our pets but that we don't care that we treat farm animals so incredibly badly? Kohler quotes Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals: “Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list.”

Continue ReadingOur love-hate relationship with animals