Debbie April 3, 2008

Walmart is the country’s largest non-governmental employer (>1.3 million employees). Last year they made over 11 billion dollars in profit. After suing Debbie for 400,000 dollars for medical care she received, they finally came to their senses.

Debbie Shank was a Walmart employee when she had the car accident. Her car crashed into a semi-track causing her brain damage so severe that she can’t feed herself and lost her short-term memory. For some time, she received medical attention from the insurance associated with her job at Walmart. Then, she successfully sued the trucking company, getting some 400,000 dollars to help pay her medical bills. But a clause in Walmart’s contract allowed Walmart to sue Debbie for the fees and expenses paid to her before she got the trust money from the trucking company. And Walmart won! The Shank family appealed but they lost. They took the case to the Supreme Court, but the court decided to not to hear the case. So the funds were frozen, and Debbie’s husband could not use it to pay the sky-rocketing nursing prices.

Jim Shank, Debbie’s husband had to divorce her so that she could receive more money from Medicare.

And then, as if this wasn’t enough, his 18 year old son died in Iraq. Sometimes she remembers. When she asks for him, they have to tell her the story all over again, and she cries again.

Finally Walmart released a statement dropping the suit, so the money for her care can be unfrozen.

Yet another Walmart horror story (though they finally changed their minds). And yet another health insurance horror story.

For more information on this story, listen to the first half of today’s Democracy Now!

We Have a Little Problem, Sir: The World Hates Us December 18, 2007

Six years ago, at the wake of 9/11, we came to the realization that what we’ve done to the world through our foreign policy is getting back at us — a global political warming of sorts.

During the McCarthy days we fought communist countries that were rather poor and the average revolutionary dude was a working folk. In some cases, the people in these countries did not even realize that their governments were overthrown by puppet dictators controlled by the CIA. So they didn’t fight back.

But we went along getting our nose into more and more countries’ business making far more dangerous enemies along the way, like Russia. The Russians have always scared the living daylights out of US governments, and for that reason we’ve supported Islamic Organizations working against Russia and hired people like Bin Laden to help out with our Intelligence operations. Professor Michel Chossudovsky puts it as follows in this article:

Prime suspect in the New York and Washington terrorists attacks, branded by the FBI as an “international terrorist” for his role in the African US embassy bombings, Saudi born Osama bin Laden was recruited during the Soviet-Afghan war “ironically under the auspices of the CIA, to fight Soviet invaders.”

And you know the rest of the story. Bin Laden bombs us, we bomb Afghanistan and Iraq along the lines of Bush’s War on Terror and we threaten Iran, under the presumption that 1) They may be enriching Uranium (though the latest CIA report claims they stopped their nuclear weapons programs on 2003) and 2) only US and out NATO allies are entitled to have nuclear weapons.

And there goes Russia again, playing the devil’s advocate. They just gave Iran nuclear fuel, clearly unconcerned about what Bush may think of them. For more on this, read this NY Times article. And what did Bush do? Was he outraged?

The Bush administration, for its part, took pains not to publicly criticize the Russian move, and said that the fuel delivery means Iran should suspend its nuclear enrichment program. “If the Iranians accept that uranium for a civilian nuclear power plant, then there’s no need for them to learn how to enrich,” President Bush told reporters on Monday.

Not quite outraged, but rather… pathetic.

The US is the only country that has ever used a nuclear weapon against another country. And we didn’t target the middle of the ocean, as to scary people off. They put the bomb right in the middle of a city populated by civilians. Doesn’t that make us the most dangerous country in the world?