The White House
announced today that it is taking North Korea off the list of countries that 'directly support terrorism'.

This may be true. As far as we know, North Korea only supports counterfeiting, drug manufacture, and mass enslavement of its people, not manufacturing nuclear bombs for sale. (although they have been known to sell complete missile making kits to Middle Eastern and African nations)

So -this can be misleading! They are not on the right path, yet.

Shouldn't one of the major reasons for placing North Korea in the category of pariah nations be their horrible treatment of their own people?

In that respect, little has changed.

From the Bush administration statement:

""This can be a moment of opportunity for North Korea," said President Bush, announcing the declaration at the White House. "If it continues to make the right choices it can repair its relationship with the international community."

I would ask Mr. Bush to make a stronger effort to force North Korea to open up its borders and release the millions of people held in its huge network of slave labor camps, where human rights conditions are among the worst in the world.

Also, economic conditions in the parts of North Korea that are reserved for those from 'bad' 'family background' are so bad that cannibalism is not unknown (although it is punishable by death) For that reason, hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have fled the only way possible, into China, where they are hunted down like animals, sold or kept in slavery as illegal immigrants.

This is a terrible situation. Surely, the United States has it in our hearts to provide some kind of help to North Koreans living as refugees in China.

North Korea pays China a bounty of around $300 for each North Korean caught and returned to North Korea. Returned escapees will typically be prosecuted, then imprisoned, or, if it is their third attempt, summarily executed, for the crime of betraying the fatherland by leaving.

Surely the US could match that $300 and provide a new start for North Korean refugees somewhere in the US, where they would be happy to get a new start. Many have led terrible lives and they are also discriminated against in South Korea (Still, around 3000 have finally made it there, often having had to traverse all around Asia to finally reach South Korea, since travel through the DMZ, and indeed, travel through the DPRK, since one needs a permit for any inter-county travel, is impossible.)

Several North Korean refugees live in the US. Many others live in South Korea. Their stories are heartbreaking, but they are also interesting because they show in graphic detail what life is like under totalitarianism. They will make you count your blessings.
The escapees accounts can be read on a number of websites that support North Korean human rights. This is an issue that transcends politics. Hundreds of thousands of North Korean refugees hide in northeast China.

Their plight is also of crucial importance. They need a safe place they can go and live in peace.

I am linking to some web pages where you can learn more about human rights in North Korea after the link.

Please write your elected representatives and ask that the US put more pressure on North Korea to end the prison camps and open up to the rest of the world, regardless of the scrutiny that a legacy of 60 years of mass murder on a gargantuan scale would reveal.

The New York Times today has another article
"Fuel Prices Shift Math for Life in Far Suburbs"
about the housing shifts due to increases in gas prices, this time its about how the rise in gas prices is driving many to abandon life in distant exurbs and more back into the cities, where warehouses and former slums are being renovated, and new condominium housing is being built to address this rapidly rising need. They use Denver as an example, but these changes are occurring in many American communities.

Many are selling or even giving away old or even fairly new (sometimes large) fuel-inefficient homes and larger gas guzzling cars in the distant, low density exurbs, and moving in, closer to jobs and public transport, displacing the traditional residents of inner cities.

If gas prices stay high, this trend may accelerate.

Its simple economics, supply and demand.

"Many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and '70s -- slums characterized by poverty, crime and decay," declared Christopher B. Leinberger, an urban land use expert, in a recent essay in The Atlantic Monthly.

"It's like an ebbing of this suburban tide," said Joe Cortright, an economist at the consulting group Impresa Inc. in Portland, Ore. "There's going to be this kind of reversal of desirability. Typically, Americans have felt the periphery was most desirable, and now there's going to be a reversion to the center."

What do people think about this non-unsurprising revelation?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/weekin review/22lohr.html

Decoupling health care from jobs by instituting a Hillary-style, real universal healthcare plan would take a huge burden off of employers, which would be good at a time when many companies are weighing the benefits of office automation. Lowering the age at which people can receive Medicare to 50 or 45 might be another solution, because it would allow Medicare to be the first insurer for workers over those ages, in effect providing a subsidy which can account for up to 22% of the cost of hiring an older worker.

Today's New York Times has a good article explaining how many in the younger generation are not going to be receiving much, if any, of an inheritance from their middle-class parents. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/busine ss/yourmoney/21money.html

The money that they might have received in many other societies, elsewhere, here is being siphoned away by the rapidly escalating costs of medical care and other increased costs that did not exist for generations past (who typically died much earlier, for example, when Social Security was instituted in 1934, the average lifespan was 63.)

This leads me to speculate on where this all is taking us.
Obviously, the well-to do - who often have long term care insurance, annuities, etc, and who can afford those costs and then some, can still expect substantial windfalls due to the low inheritance tax, which leads to extreme concentration of wealth (at the extremes -  as the US is becoming a so called "M society")

just kidding

(I think whoever wins the popular vote should get the Presidency..)

But the idea of job sharing would enable us to put off dealing with the disappearance of jobs for at least two or three years more and it would also give stressed people more time to live their lives, since jobs are increasingly demanding. They would have to liev on less, but they would get benefits.

Sometimes called "Flex-ecutives" people who share jobs are often better at the jobs they share than a single, harried executive. Two heads are better than one.

Here is an example..

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg i?f=/c/a/2008/06/09/MN3C10KV8E.DTL

Another option to improve work-life balance is an idea borrowed from the academic world, the sabbatical. After several years of continuous employment, the employee can take a long (sometimes paid, sometimes unpaid) work-related time off (to work on a personal project, write a paper, do research, etc. )

Some other companies (like NASA, for example) allow workers to devote typically one fifth to one quarter of their time to long term, company oriented projects that they think up, (with management buy-in) allowing them to contribute ideas which otherwise would not be done.

Last night I was reading another story about how, EVEN now - when Hillary Clinton has bowed to pressure and endorsed Obama, still, approximately 20% of the likely Democratic voters
refuse to say they will vote for him.

Well, that 20% figure keeps coming up again and again, and I think that it represents the 20% of Americans who have chronic illnesses.  As we know from Austan Goolsbee, Obama's healthcare plan, like Jim Cooper's 1994 plan, Tenncare, and the MA state healthcare plan, a consistent 20% of those currently uninsured are uninsured because chronic illnesses have rendered insurance very expensive for them.

That 20% are the chronically ill and many of them are also the so called 'uninsurables'. Basically, they are people with often common, but increasingly expensive illnesses. Their only common denominator is that as the price of drugs rises, and the political and economic clout of the American middle class declines, their often manageable conditions are increasingly seen as costing 'too much' to treat by insurers. Which means that people who were doing okay last year, find that this year, they get left out in the cold, abandoned.

And apparently, also abandoned by Obama. (Hillary would have covered them, and limited out of pocket, uncovered expenses too, which means the difference between bankruptcy and solvency for millions of people)

These illnesses can be common illnesses like athsma, hypertension, etc. but they typically require drugs to manage them. When people lose their jobs, if they dont find another job in a short period of time, and COBRA runs out, or they cant afford to pay the full cost of their insurance, which is often more than they realize it is, then they become forced to look for insurance on the so called open market. Everyone who shops for individual insurance pays a lot, but some find it almost impossible to get. basically, that group is everyone who has been using the healthcare benefits, sometimes even the perfectly healthy. People who have been to the doctor more than around once a year often find that they have to pay more for insurance. Obama basically classifies normal families as families without health issues.

What happens, though when you don't have a chronic illness, but you have seen the doctor for things that come up. Self employed or even employed people whose employers dont buy insurance for them, people who have had spider bites or people who have called the doctor over minor medical issues find themselves paying far more for insurance.

This is perfectly legal, just like charging people more for drivers insurance who have tickets is. It enables the insurance companies to charge 'normal families' less, they say.

They feel that this is not 'discrimination' it is how the insurance business works. (But it has the effect of making middle class people these days terrified of seeing the doctor. THAT IS NOT THE WAY THINGS SHOULD BE! But it is, and even if Obama can overcome the WTO rules and implement his plan in 2012, Obama proposes to keep it that way. Insurance is priced by risk, to the insurer. Or if he forces them to insure everyone who asks of the same age at the same price, insurance costs will go up a lot of everyone. Thats the obscene cost of not havig a mandate! Its unavoidable!)

That is the hard reality of risk-priced insurance.

But, what about the 20%? Again, that 20% isn't just the stubborn. Its the same percentage of us who know we are being abandoned. yes, we are expensive. But more and more people fall into the category every year. You may be well now, but its likely that even you, the reader, will be one of us soon. We are all in that 20%.

That includes both those who to insurance companies are 'uninsurable', and those who they might insure, if they paid what they consider to be a fair price. (The raw cost to treat them plus the profit margin, plus a buffer that is related to the likelihood of a flareup that could cost still more)

That is what Elizabeth Edwards was talking about when she mentioned that neither she nor Senator McCain would be able to buy insurance if they were not rich. Why? Because both she and Senator McCain are cancer survivors. Once somebody has had cancer, they find it hard to switch jobs, they cant do anything that risks a period in which they dont have insurance. If they get laid off, they often find it very hard - often impossible to find insurance because they are not a risk, they are a known loss.

Thats why Hillary's mandate was such a great idea because IT WOULD HAVE ENABLED A PLAN THAT WOULD COVER THAT ONE FIFTH OF US WHO HAVE CHRONIC ILLNESS.

Now, Obama's advisor Austan Goolsbee
said that neither Obama nor Hillary could afford to do it, but Hillary did the math and showed that she could, with her mandate. Nobody is arguing that it is possible any other way.
Not even presumptuous nominee Obama.

What I find is interesting, is that THAT 20% seems suspiciusly close to the 20% who refuse to vote against their own interests and vote for a small chance for adoption, eventually of a healthcare plan that probably will not help them! Can you blame them!? NO.

Would you put a loaded gun to your own head and pull the trigger?

I was just doing some research on John McCains's healthcare proposals and I came across something which I think is VERY important. Right now, there are very few international companies in the US healthcare market, which is apparently good.. for the reasons explained in the following..

Obviously, trade agreements are a mixed bag. However, they can have hidden gotchas, which often, few of us understand. However, we would expect Presidential candidates to know far more than average citizens about these agreements. Which is why the following is -perhaps- surprising!?

John McCain wants - under the guise of saving us money, wants us to create a "national health care market" that would "facilitate entry of more foreign health care providers" into the US market. Well, there could be a huge hidden cost to that. It could pre-empt alternative methods of cutting costs, ones which have been proposed by both Obama and McCain. For example:

McCain has proposed the development of a "national health care market" that would facilitate entry of
more foreign health care providers and thus make it far more costly for the United States to withdraw
the health care sector from WTO jurisdiction. While McCain has provided few details about the
proposal, implementing a real national insurance market would inherently require greatly reducing the
role of states, for instance with the federal government taking control of licensing and standards now
under state authority.
Pre-empting the authority of U.S. states in this area is a key demand of foreign insurance companies in
the context of the WTO's Doha Round of negotiations.42 European and other foreign insurance firms
have long considered U.S. state-level regulation of the insurance market to be a market access barrier
because it requires that they must obtain licenses in each of the 50 states in order to provide insurance
services on a national basis.43 Since the insurance sector and health services are already covered under
the GATS, new federal law that would preempt such existing state authority would facilitate the entry
of foreign service-providers into the U.S. market. "

HOWEVER....now read closely...

"Once the flood gates are open and many foreign
health insurance and health service providers are in the U.S. market, it would be significantly more
costly for future administrations to remove the health care sector from WTO coverage, as all WTO
nations with firms in the U.S. market or with an interest in the market would have to be compensated
under WTO rules.44
Unless U.S. health care services are withdrawn from coverage under various trade rules, federal
and state governments' future abilities to effectively regulate the delivery of health care services,
implement health care reform measures designed to expand access, and reduce the cost of health
care could be stymied. Because the United States must provide compensation under WTO rules
before removing U.S. health care policy from WTO jurisdiction, quick action to do so will be
much less costly, before more foreign insurance and health care providers enter the U.S. market."

That was taken from a report on the chilling impact of our existing trade agreements on the promises made by the nominees that came out a few months ago..

"
Presidential Candidates' Key Proposals on Health Care and Climate Will Require WTO Modifications"

In this case, eliminating state regs and thereby encouraging foreign companies to enter the US health insurance market, could cause an presumptively unintended permanent lock-in! One that would be very expensive to leave- very expensive!