Saturday, November 21, 2009
Search

Yonder Flash

  • Health
    Wal-Mart and Democratic Health Care Reform
    09/09/2009

    Wal-Mart supports key provisions of the Democratic health care reform plan. Yep, the largest retailer in rural America is backing parts of the Obama package. Nelson Lichtenstein noted in the L.A. Times recently that before the election, Wal-Mart warned its employees that if Democrats won the White House, the company would face a "disruptive unionization campaign." Now, the historian writes, the rural-based retailer supports a "key, controversial plank in the health insurance reform plan." 

    Wal-Mart is in favor of "pay or play," the provision that would require large firms to either provide their workers with health insurance or to pay as much as $750 an employee to the government for coverage. This is a provision favored by some labor unions and abhorred by the National Retail Federal, which reported that it was "astonished" at Wal-Mart's "catastrophic" decision to support the mandate.

    Lichetenstein says that Wal-Mart's decision to join Democrats and unions in supporting some parts of the reform bill was a calculated effort to win back some customers through a more friendly kind of corporate citizenship. The company has been criticized for paying low wages and offering few benefits, and supporting health insurance for its workers may garner some good press, according to the history professor. Lichtenstein also says the employee mandate may be cheaper in the long run for Wal-Mart than other plans floating around Congress.

     

  • Ag and Trade
    Commodities Market Regulations to Remain Separate
    09/08/2009

    As agricultural markets moved wildly over the last year — the same crops (or pork belly, above) were sold time and again — many said part of the problem may have been with oversight from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The markets went kaplooey and the move into Congress initially was to combine the CFTC with the Securities and Exchange and to give the new entity more powers. "Many experts have long believed that it makes no sense to have both the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission regulating markets that have become increasingly indistinguishable," writes L.A. Times reporter Jim Puzzanghera. "They have advocated merging the agencies." 

    But, as Puzzanghera writes, the CFTC was under the jurisdiction of the agriculture committees in both the House and Senate. The members of Congress are reluctant to give up the power over these markets — and the contributions that come with regulating some of agriculture's giant corporations. Combining the CFTC and the SEC threatened to derail the entire reform process, so, for now, it appears the two agencies will remain separate. The Obama administration has backed off on merger plans.

    "But even though President Obama had wanted to combine the agencies to close the gaps, the agriculture committees' power, many believe, was the reason the administration decided against merging them," Puzzanghera wrote. "I think they correctly judged the politics . . . that it would be a serious impediment to the passage of the overall reform bill to merge the SEC and CFTC," a Brookings Institution scholar told the L.A. Times writer.

  • Food
    Smart Choice? Says Who?
    09/07/2009

    Shoppers look for some sign that the food they buy is good for them and so industry provides the labels — even if the combination of the label and the food makes no sense. For instance, Fruit Loops and Cocoa Krispies are considered a "smart choice"  when in comes to nutrition, at least according to the latest in labeling programs organized by the food manufacturers. 

    The New York Times' William Neuman reviews the strange recommendations appearing in food stores now under the Smart Choices labeling initiative. Some of the largest food companies in the country have signed up with the private Smart Choices program, including Kraft, ConAgra and Tyson. They pay $100,000 a year, and in return some of their food gets a green "Smart Choices" label that take the place of nutritional  labels that individual companies had begun using. The companies agree to discontinue their own labeling system in favor of the "Smart Choices" label (which, by the way, contain little real information about the nutritional content of the food). Fruit Loops qualify (as do the other foods in the picture above).

    “These are horrible choices,” said Walter C. Willett, chairman of the nutrition department of the Harvard School of Public Health. “It’s a blatant failure of this system and it makes it, I’m afraid, not credible,” Mr. Willett said. Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture have sent a letter to the manufacturers saying they intend to monitor the program's effects on consumers.

  • Main Street Economics
    Postal Service Cutting Number of Post Offices
    09/05/2009

    The Postal Service plans to close 413 post offices. You can see the list here.  Just from a glance (and we should do a real analysis), the list of post offices scheduled to die doesn't appear to be particularly rural. Glancing at the Texas list, for example, none of the six offices are in small towns. Most of the cuts are in California, followed by Florida, Ohio and New York. Lots of states -- Montana, Mississippi, Colorado, Minnesota — aren't losing a single post office. 

    The list was longer, but the Postal Service spared 200 sites. The Washington Post reports that the earlier list predictably "launched a firestorm of outrage from those who live in affected neighborhoods, as well as their congressional representatives." This is all considerably less than the 1,000 post offices that the Postal Service had earlier thought might be closed. 

    Al Tompkins at the Poynter Institute notes that a position paper issued by the National League of Postmasters argued in favor of keeping rural post offices: "Rural post offices are the backbone of rural America and are an integral part of the social, political, and economic fabric of small towns. They are the glue that holds the nation's rural communities together. If a rural post office disappears, the town often disappears. Rural customers are not second-class citizens; they deserve access to the postal services that citizens in big cities enjoy." 

  • Health
    Where the "Death Panel" Myth Began
    09/04/2009

     

    The Washington Post reports this morning that the "death panel" myth began in La Crosse. La Crosse isn't officially Yonder — Harrison County has a total population of over 125,000 and is considered a "metro" area — but the town on the western edge of Wisconsin isn't Chicago either. Besides, it's interesting to see how a helpful innovation in a smallish town has come to roil the nation. 

    As Alec MacGillis tells us, the Gundersen Lutheran hospital in La Crosse (photo from 1902 above) "has taken the lead in seeking to have Medicare compensate physicians for advising patients on end-of-life planning." This began when a local guy, Bud Hammes, returned with a doctorate in philosophy from Notre Dame to work at the hospital. He found a "troubling pattern" as family members struggled to make medical decisions for sick and dying relatives. The hospital urged people to plan ahead, while everyone was still healthy, and even offered doctors to help people write directives for how they wanted their care to proceed. People found the process helpful and over time 90 percent of the people in town have these legally binding directives. As a result patients at Gundersen spend 13.5 days on average in the hospital during their final two years of life. At UCLA's hospital, it's 31 days. At NYU, 54 days.

    Gundersen and a few other hospitals sought to change federal law so that these end of life planning sessions could be paid for by Medicare. Gundersen officials testified before Congress and the provision was placed in a health care reform bill. Then former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin warned of "death panels" and the circus began. It all started, however, in La Crosse.

     

  • Broadband and Tech
    Defining Broadband Speed Slower
    09/03/2009

     

    The Communications Workers of America have issued a report on internet speed — Speed Matters. nocdn=1 The union finds that the speed of broadband connections in the U.S. hasn't changed much in the last few years, on average. And compared to other countries, America is slow, slow, slow. At the current rate of increases, it will take the country 15 years to catch up with current Internet speeds in South Korea. Rural areas, of course, are well behind the national average.

    You can look at maps in the report to find the average speed in your county. Or you can go to the CWA site speedmatters.org to test the speed or your Internet connection. (Ours here at the Yonder is average.)

    The report has stirred interest in the regional press. The Roanoke Times writes this morning about "an unhealthy broadband lag" that particularly affects the rural portions of Virginia. The Dubuque, Iowa, newspaper laments the state's average speed. 

    Meanwhile, TG Daily reports that the big telecom companies are arguing that the way to provide all Americans with broadband is to define broadband speeds waaaaay down. The telecos have told the Federal Communications Commission that most Americans don't want fast broadband. They can do with slow speeds. 

     

  • Education
    Is Federal Education Policy Tilted Urban?
    09/02/2009

    The big thing in the Obama administration's education department is charter schools. But who needs school choice in rural communities where there are just a few hundred students. In small districts, what students need are qualified teachers. Education Week reporter Michele McNeil writes that rural schools advocates say policies promoted by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (above) "favor education improvement ideas that are best suited to urban settings. Initiatives such as the Race to the Top Fund competition fail to recognize the distinctive problems facing rural districts, which serve some 13 million students, or about one-quarter of the nation’s public school enrollment, according to the Rural School and Community Trust, based in Arlington, Va.

    'Both Duncan and [President Barack] Obama are so narrowly focused on inner-city solutions for education challenges,' said South Dakota state Sen. Sandy Jerstad, a Democrat from Sioux Falls and a member of her legislative chamber’s education committee."

    Duncan has heard the criticism from rural schools and is unimpressed. "Rural schools should let their unique challenges become excuses for keeping the status quo," he wrote in an Ed Week column in June. Still, McNeil notes, when Duncan shows up in a rural community as part of the administration's "listening tour," his "answers didn't seem to distinguish the problems of rural districts from those of their urban counterparts." Of particular interest to rural educators is the criteria for determining who will receive grants from a $4.35 billion "Race to the Top Fund." Charter schools are a big part of the formula in that competition.

     

  • Health | Politics and Government
    Democrat's Rural/Urban Split Stymies Health Care
    09/01/2009

    "Congress' efforts to overhaul the nation's health care system are plagued by an age-old urban-rural, east and west coast vs. the heartland schism in the Democratic Party," write McClatchy Newspapers reporters David Lightman and William Douglas. The reporters point to a remark from California Democrat Rep. Pete Stark, the urban chair of the House Ways and Means health Subcommittee as evidence of the "tension" between city and country. "Well, the only co-op I know about is when I used to milk cows and we sold the milk to Golden Guernsey. And I think there's only one co-op left," said Stark, who considers the co-op idea a non-starter. "There aren't many of you listening who remember the co-ops of the '30s, which was a — just kind of a Roosevelt outgrowth of rural electric co-ops, phone co-ops."

    Meanwhile, Democrat Rep Charlie Melancon of Louisiana announced he would run for the U.S. Senate as a "pro-life, pro-gun Southern Democrat." "The two sides don't understand each other. They're reading from different scripts," said Steven Schier, professor of political science at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn.

    The health care fight has centered on whether there should be a public option for health insurance, or whether co-ops should be created as a competitor to the for-profit health insurance industry. Republicans have not shown an inclination to endorse either model.

  • Main Street Economics
    Business Week Finds Success in North Dakota
    08/31/2009

    The recession is giving great press to North Dakota. Business Week is the latest national publication to admire the low unemployment rates on the Great Plains amidst the jobless carnage in the rest of the country. Business Week writer Rebecca Reisner goes to Bismarck and finds a city that "has remained largely unmarred by the global financial crisis, which has wrecked the U.S. housing industry, felled hundreds of banks of all sizes, and sent the national unemployment rate to nearly 10%. Right now, Bismarck residents have scant reason to worry." (Remember, however, that the Yonder found that these low unemployment rates were helped in part by outmigration.) 

    Reisner notes that farm commodity prices are expected to fall. But it's energy, especially wind energy, that holds the greatest promise for new jobs. North Dakota does have optimal conditions for wind farms, and wind farms are being built, including the $250 million, 77-turbine PrairieWinds ND1 project near Minot. It will be the largest wind project owned by an electric cooperative (the Basin Electric Power Cooperative). The state also has 3 to 4 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

    No wonder North Dakota has a $1 billion budget surplus. Property taxes have been lowered and because no flakey "liar loans" were given in North Dakota, the state doesn't have a foreclosure problem.  

     

  • Environment
    Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska face largest temperature increases
    08/29/2009

    Writing in The Huffington Post, Ryan Grim reports on a new analysis from The Nature Conservancy that, if correct, should stir major action in the rural Midwest. (Go here to see an interactive map, like the one above.)

    "Climate change is, in fact, a regional issue, but not in the short-term way that the coal senators think, according to new analysis from The Nature Conservancy," Grim writes. "The environmental group finds that rural Midwestern states will face the greatest consequences of climate change. The three that will face the steepest rise in temperature -- Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa -- are farm states whose soil will be significantly less productive as temperatures rise more than 10 degrees Fahrenheit there by 2100."

    What does this mean? The consequences to these farm states will be far reaching. As droughts become more common, their soil and climate will begin to look more like their neighbors' to the south in Texas and Mexico, Grim reports.

Daily Yonder | Keep It Rural
Syndicate content
Syndication Feeds