68 percent of Mexican adults are overweight and 29 percent are obese

The American Way BABY

With fattier diets and changing lifestyles,

Mexico is packing on the pounds.

By Ioan Grillo - GlobalPost http://www.globalpost.com

MEXICO CITY — Dressed in the hand-woven red cloths of her native village and chatting away in her ancient Nahuatl tongue, Pilar Blanco and her family sit down to dinner in what looks like an age-old meal time ceremony.

But when Hernandez serves up the food, there is one major difference from tradition: instead of tortillas and beans, the family eats instant noodle soups, potato chips and fizzy soda.

“I’m out working all day cleaning people’s houses and I have no time to cook. So the instant soups are a big help,” Hernandez explains, sitting with her husband and three children in a cinder block home on the outskirts of this sprawling capital.

Such radical changes in diet have swept through Mexico in the last decade leading to an explosion of obesity. As families guzzle evermore processed food, hamburgers and french fries, they have piled on the pounds to make Mexico one of fattest nations on the planet.

Studies by the Health Department show that a startling 68 percent of Mexican adults are overweight and 29 percent are obese — just behind the United States, where 74 percent are overweight and 39 percent obese.

Only the tiny Pacific island nations of Samoa and Tonga have heavier populations.

There is particular concern about the rising weight of Mexican children.

The Mexico City government announced this month that an alarming 35 percent of school pupils are over the recommended bodyweight.

To try to fight back, the government has kick-started an anti-obesity campaign of sporting events and healthy-eating propaganda aimed at the young.

“We need you children to understand the importance of taking care of your health and the problem of obesity that is worrying to our country,” Mexico City Health Minister Armando Ahued told 1,000 children panting away in a running race. “You are the future of the capital, and we need you to avoid getting diseases such as diabetes and hypertension.”

The campaign is also encouraging young people to lose pounds by joining 11,000 dancers in the largest-ever routine of Michael Jackson’s song "Thriller," scheduled for Aug. 29 in Mexico City’s central plaza.

The changing dietary habits have come as Mexico has switched from a largely protectionist to an extremely globalized economy.

Since it enacted the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, imports of processed food and drinks have soared.

The nation now consumes more Coca Cola products per capita than anywhere else in the world: a total of 635 eight-ounce bottles per person each year. The amount represents a threefold increase compared to 1988.

Ex Veep Dick Cheney has been appointed president of the RIAA.

RIAA:- Former US vice-president Richard Bruce ‘Dick’ Cheney has been appointed president of the RIAA.

Cheney’s duties will include overseeing senior RIAA personnel currently seconded to the Obama administration’s Department of Justice, and liasing with US vice-president Joe Biden.

Cheney will be responsible for developing and implementing official DoJ copyright infringement and anti-file sharing policies in accordance with established music industry business practices

So that greedy old corpse and his gang has found it's way back into the White House

Does this mean that soon heavily armed Blackwater for profit corporate mercenaries will be invading the side streets and markets here in Nicaragua searching out unauthorized cds?

I guess it isn't that different from the old banana republic days...

http://www.p2pnet.net/story/27459

U.S. Dept of VA is one of the planet's purest examples of government-run health care

5 Myths About Health Care Around the World

By T.R. Reid

Sunday, August 23, 2009

As Americans search for the cure to what ails our health-care system, we've overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced problems like ours, yet they've found ways to cover everybody -- and still spend far less than we do.

I've traveled the world from Oslo to Osaka to see how other developed democracies provide health care. Instead of dismissing these models as "socialist," we could adapt their solutions to fix our problems. To do that, we first have to dispel a few myths about health care abroad:

1. It's all socialized medicine out there.

Not so. Some countries, such as Britain, New Zealand and Cuba, do provide health care in government hospitals, with the government paying the bills. Others -- for instance, Canada and Taiwan -- rely on private-sector providers, paid for by government-run insurance. But many wealthy countries -- including Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and Switzerland -- provide universal coverage using private doctors, private hospitals and private insurance plans.

In some ways, health care is less "socialized" overseas than in the United States. Almost all Americans sign up for government insurance (Medicare) at age 65. In Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, seniors stick with private insurance plans for life. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the planet's purest examples of government-run health care.

2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.

Generally, no. Germans can sign up for any of the nation's 200 private health insurance plans -- a broader choice than any American has. If a German doesn't like her insurance company, she can switch to another, with no increase in premium. The Swiss, too, can choose any insurance plan in the country.

In France and Japan, you don't get a choice of insurance provider; you have to use the one designated for your company or your industry. But patients can go to any doctor, any hospital, any traditional healer. There are no U.S.-style limits such as "in-network" lists of doctors or "pre-authorization" for surgery. You pick any doctor, you get treatment -- and insurance has to pay.

Canadians have their choice of providers. In Austria and Germany, if a doctor diagnoses a person as "stressed," medical insurance pays for weekends at a health spa.

As for those notorious waiting lists, some countries are indeed plagued by them. Canada makes patients wait weeks or months for nonemergency care, as a way to keep costs down. But studies by the Commonwealth Fund and others report that many nations -- Germany, Britain, Austria -- outperform the United States on measures such as waiting times for appointments and for elective surgeries.

In Japan, waiting times are so short that most patients don't bother to make an appointment. One Thursday morning in Tokyo, I called the prestigious orthopedic clinic at Keio University Hospital to schedule a consultation about my aching shoulder. "Why don't you just drop by?" the receptionist said. That same afternoon, I was in the surgeon's office. Dr. Nakamichi recommended an operation. "When could we do it?" I asked. The doctor checked his computer and said, "Tomorrow would be pretty difficult. Perhaps some day next week?"

3. Foreign health-care systems are inefficient, bloated bureaucracies.

Much less so than here. It may seem to Americans that U.S.-style free enterprise -- private-sector, for-profit health insurance -- is naturally the most cost-effective way to pay for health care. But in fact, all the other payment systems are more efficient than ours.

U.S. health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs in the world; they spend roughly 20 cents of every dollar for nonmedical costs, such as paperwork, reviewing claims and marketing. France's health insurance industry, in contrast, covers everybody and spends about 4 percent on administration. Canada's universal insurance system, run by government bureaucrats, spends 6 percent on administration. In Taiwan, a leaner version of the Canadian model has administrative costs of 1.5 percent; one year, this figure ballooned to 2 percent, and the opposition parties savaged the government for wasting money.

The world champion at controlling medical costs is Japan, even though its aging population is a profligate consumer of medical care. On average, the Japanese go to the doctor 15 times a year, three times the U.S. rate. They have twice as many MRI scans and X-rays. Quality is high; life expectancy and recovery rates for major diseases are better than in the United States. And yet Japan spends about $3,400 per person annually on health care; the United States spends more than $7,000.

4. Cost controls stifle innovation.

False. The United States is home to groundbreaking medical research, but so are other countries with much lower cost structures. Any American who's had a hip or knee replacement is standing on French innovation. Deep-brain stimulation to treat depression is a Canadian breakthrough. Many of the wonder drugs promoted endlessly on American television, including Viagra, come from British, Swiss or Japanese labs.

Overseas, strict cost controls actually drive innovation. In the United States, an MRI scan of the neck region costs about $1,500. In Japan, the identical scan costs $98. Under the pressure of cost controls, Japanese researchers found ways to perform the same diagnostic technique for one-fifteenth the American price. (And Japanese labs still make a profit.)

5. Health insurance has to be cruel.

Not really. American health insurance companies routinely reject applicants with a "preexisting condition" -- precisely the people most likely to need the insurers' service. They employ armies of adjusters to deny claims. If a customer is hit by a truck and faces big medical bills, the insurer's "rescission department" digs through the records looking for grounds to cancel the policy, often while the victim is still in the hospital. The companies say they have to do this stuff to survive in a tough business.

Foreign health insurance companies, in contrast, must accept all applicants, and they can't cancel as long as you pay your premiums. The plans are required to pay any claim submitted by a doctor or hospital (or health spa), usually within tight time limits. The big Swiss insurer Groupe Mutuel promises to pay all claims within five days. "Our customers love it," the group's chief executive told me. The corollary is that everyone is mandated to buy insurance, to give the plans an adequate pool of rate-payers.

The key difference is that foreign health insurance plans exist only to pay people's medical bills, not to make a profit. The United States is the only developed country that lets insurance companies profit from basic health coverage.

In many ways, foreign health-care models are not really "foreign" to America, because our crazy-quilt health-care system uses elements of all of them. For Native Americans or veterans, we're Britain: The government provides health care, funding it through general taxes, and patients get no bills. For people who get insurance through their jobs, we're Germany: Premiums are split between workers and employers, and private insurance plans pay private doctors and hospitals. For people over 65, we're Canada: Everyone pays premiums for an insurance plan run by the government, and the public plan pays private doctors and hospitals according to a set fee schedule. And for the tens of millions without insurance coverage, we're Burundi or Burma: In the world's poor nations, sick people pay out of pocket for medical care; those who can't pay stay sick or die.

This fragmentation is another reason that we spend more than anybody else and still leave millions without coverage. All the other developed countries have settled on one model for health-care delivery and finance; we've blended them all into a costly, confusing bureaucratic mess.

Which, in turn, punctures the most persistent myth of all: that America has "the finest health care" in the world. We don't. In terms of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health statistics than the United States does. In terms of finance, we force 700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero. Japan: zero. Germany: zero.

Given our remarkable medical assets -- the best-educated doctors and nurses, the most advanced hospitals, world-class research -- the United States could be, and should be, the best in the world. To get there, though, we have to be willing to learn some lessons about health-care administration from the other industrialized democracies.

T.R. Reid, a former Washington Post reporter, is the author of "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care," to be published Monday.

a Bukowski day in the jungle

It's as cool as it gets today on the edge of the jungle...gray and cloudy with just enough rain to keep things shiny and the folks inside..It's days like this that make me wish I liked to drink more:

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. "

"It was true that I didn't have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?"
—Factotum, 1975

"The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn't interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative."
—Sunlight Here I Am: 2003

http://bukowski.net/

Where can I find this "Liberal Media?" I might like it

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I have the v chip set to block Fox News but still I hear of the liberal media and it's agenda of liberal fascism..

I thought their agenda was selling soap...

Ownership Chart: The Big Six

The U.S. media landscape is dominated by massive corporations that, through a history of mergers and acquisitions, have concentrated their control over what we see, hear and read. In many cases, these giant companies are vertically integrated, controlling everything from initial production to final distribution. Here is information about the largest U.S. media firms.

http://www.freepress.net/ownership/chart/main

D.C. scumbag aligns w Honduran Coup Leaders

I Debated the Honduras Coup With Lobbyist and Clinton Confidant Lanny Davis -- Here's How He Lied

By Greg Grandin, AlterNet. Posted August 17, 2009.

Last Friday, I debated lawyer-turned-lobbyist Lanny Davis, now working for the business backers of the recent Honduran coup, on Democracy Now.

It actually wasn't much of a debate -- in the way that word means an exchange of ideas -- as Davis was fast out of the box, pre-emptively trying to paint host Amy Goodman and me as "ideologues."

As Hillary Rodham Clinton's major fundraiser during last year's presidential primary, Davis is known for, among other things, leading the attack on Barack Obama for his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. "Why didn't he speak up earlier?" Davis asked in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, demanding to know why Obama didn't distance himself from Wright's remarks.

Recently, Davis has been hired by corporations to derail the labor-backed Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for unions to organize. And all the while, he has touted himself as a "pro-labor liberal."

Davis was also the chief U.S. lobbyist for the military dictatorship in Pakistan in the late '90s and played an important role in strengthening relations between then President Bill Clinton and its de facto president Gen. Perez Musharraf.

Now Davis finds himself defending another de facto regime, in Honduras, that is engaging in "grave and systemic" political repression, suspending due process, harassing independent journalists, killing or disappearing at least 10 people and detaining hundreds as "constitutional."

And all the while he has touted himself as a (Honduran) constitutional expert.

The Honduras coup occurred on June 28, when soldiers working on behalf of a the small group of business and political elites who now control the country, kidnapped democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya and sent him into exile.

Since then, the military-backed regime of Roberto Micheletti has argued to the world that it was acting constitutionally, even though nearly every country in Latin America, along with the European Union, isn't buying it.

Only in the U.S. is there a debate as to whether the Micheletti government is legal -- largely thanks to the lobbying efforts of Davis.

Davis's argument is based on a disingenuous description of the legal and political maneuvers by Zelaya's opponents in the Supreme Court and Congress prior to the coup. He calls these power grabs constitutional.

REST OF THE STORY:

http://tiny.cc/scumbag

Putting the wacky in wacky doodle

This is some more crazy right wing fear mail, another boogie man from those Xtian wack jobs at Digital Minitries..
The Socialist Elite is going to declare martial law!!
YIKEs forced lattes and mandatory chablis...

Militarization of Swine Flu Preparations
By Alex Newman

The increasing militarization of preparations for an outbreak of swine flu is proceeding rapidly and without very much public debate, despite the relatively mild nature of the disease so far and the fact that many experts believe the panic has been overblown.

Earlier this week, Republican Representative Paul Broun of Georgia warned a town hall meeting that a “socialistic elite” may be preparing to declare martial law in the United States using a pandemic disease as the pretext. “They’re trying to develop an environment where they can take over,” he told attendees according to an article in the Athens Banner-Herald. “We’ve seen that historically.”

In another alarming development this week, National Guard troops are involved in a drill to take over a high school in Maine to deal with potential riots and panic over distribution of treatment for the H1N1 virus, the Maine Sun Journal reported Thursday. “The National Guardsmen will take on the roles of panicked citizens and military police and practice what they would do, such as using tear gas, in the case of a riot,” said the newspaper article entitled “National Guard Drill at High School to Prepare for Possible H1N1 Riot.” The story also noted that local law enforcement would be involved.

This is all despite the fact that the Maine Center for Disease Control has reported just one death tied to the swine flu, and the man actually died from “underlying conditions complicated by H1N1,” according to Dr. Dora Mills, the center’s director.

“This is just a component of moving the stuff from point A to B,” assured the director of Oxford County’s emergency management agency, Scott Parker. He told the Sun Journal that the plan would only be put in place “if needed.”

Apparently concerns about panic and disorder were raised during a conference in April, so the governor and the adjutant General of the Maine National Guard decided to formulate a plan to bring in military police.

But if state military police preparations weren’t bad enough, the federal government now wants to usurp state forces for domestic use under the Pentagon’s command. Though at least the states are fighting back on this issue.

The National Governors Association wrote a letter to the Department of Defense last week criticizing the proposals to take control of their National Guard units for domestic disasters. “Strong potential exists for confusion in mission execution and the dilution of governors' control over situations with which they are more familiar and better capable of handling than a federal military commander," the letter stated.

But no matter who retains control of the National Guard troops preparing to deal with swine flu, the federal government’s increasingly militarized “emergency preparations” for the virus are developing quickly and mostly under the radar. Just last month CNN and Fox News reported online that the U.S. military was drawing up plans to deal with a spread of the swine flu. “The Pentagon is preparing to make troops available if necessary to help the Federal Emergency Management Agency tackle a potential outbreak of the H1N1 virus,” according to a July 29 Fox News article entitled "Military Poised to Help FEMA Battle Swine Flu Outbreak."

And as early as last year, reports also began to surface that federal troops were preparing for “homeland defense” missions and would be operating on American soil — in what would appear to be a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of military forces in domestic law enforcement.

“They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control,” noted the Army Times in a 2008 article entitled "Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1." The soldiers will also be responsible for things like knowing how to set up road blocks and the use of “nonlethal” weapons normally reserved for war-zones to subdue Americans.

Additionally, the Obama administration has recently resurrected the heavily criticized Bush-era proposal to “update” quarantine regulations, while the U.S. Army advertises jobs for “internment/resettlement specialists” on its website.

The federal government’s health authorities operate quarantine centers from Anchorage to Miami, and in 2005 George W. Bush used an executive order to add flu that has the “potential” to create a pandemic to a list of quarantinable diseases. Will the military be used to enforce the quarantines? It is appearing increasingly possible, if it comes to that.

This is all happening at a time when countless experts are warning that fears about the swine-flu virus have been blown out of proportion. In many places the disease even seems to be dissipating. “We'll probably see something that won't be that bad,” said Ontario’s former chief medical officer, Dr. Richard Schabas. “We would not expect it to be as bad as the flu year was in 2003 with the Fujian strain.”

He noted that a pandemic would be expected to kill thousands just in Canada, but so far the swine flu has claimed 66 lives there. “You tell me how overblown that is.… Our preparations always have to be advised not just by the sense of possibilities, but by a sense of probabilities.”

England’s chief medical officer, Liam Donaldson, recently announced plans to scale back the National Pandemic Flu Service from about 1,600 call-center workers to less than 600 as the number of cases there continues to fall. He warned of the potential for a “second wave,” but so far the disease has been less deadly than even the regular seasonal flu.

Australian National University microbiologist Peter Collignon told ABC News the H1N1 virus was no worse than annual influenza strains. “My major concern about what's happening is the fear is out of proportion to what the data shows," he said, adding that the use of the word “pandemic” was creating unnecessary concern.

But here in the United States, the emergency preparations continue to expand along with the power of the federal government. There has already been discussion of forced vaccinations. And an inspection of so-called “executive orders” issued by past presidents and continuing under Obama reveals that the executive branch already claims sweeping “emergency” powers to deal with health concerns.

Unless Americans start demanding some transparency and accountability, the trend towards bigger and more aggressive government will likely continue. This time the excuse happens to be swine flu, but there will always be some “crisis” not to be “wasted,” as Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel put it.

The preparations currently under way to deal with swine flu are not only unconstitutional, they are probably more dangerous than the virus itself. It is time for Americans to take personal responsibility for their health and their government and to say enough is enough.