April, 2008

If gas and milk price hikes seem steep, check out health insurance premiums. They have increased 10 times faster than incomes in recent years, a study shows. Workers with job-based coverage for their families saw earnings rise 3% from 2001 to 2005, while their health insurance premium contribution increased 30%, according to the study by researchers at the State Health Access Data Assistance Center at the University of Minnesota. The average cost nationally of family coverage during the period increased nearly $2,500, to $10,728 from $8,281. The average cost for job-based family coverage in California increased more than $2,650, to $10,551 from $7,898. "Providing insurance coverage takes a bigger bite from the family budget every year," said Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which helped fund the research.

If countries took psalms as slogans, Haiti’s certainly would be the lament uttered from the cross: My God, why have you abandoned me? Psalm 22 ultimately resolves in hope. And if there is hope in Haiti today, it is due in no small measure to the fact that this tiny country is teeming with religious women and men who have taken up residence at the heart of the despair, at times with little more to go on than the promise of the beatitudes.

Crops are fetching far higher prices in markets worldwide, but farmers in poor countries have not seen their incomes rise as a result, international officials said Tuesday. World Bank President Robert Zoellick said that increases in fertilizer and fuel costs had kept many poorer producers from meeting the huge demand for food staples that has driven up prices and caused shortages, hoarding, and riots. In Berne, Switzerland, where UN leaders met this week to chart a way out of the current food crisis, Mr. Zoellick said that even in areas where crop prices are higher, farmers "are not planting more because they are fearful that they face very high input costs."

Sen. John McCain on Tuesday rejected calls by his Democratic opponents for universal health coverage, instead offering a market-based solution with an approach similar to a proposal put forth by President Bush last year.
McCain's belief in the power of the free market to meet the nation's health-care needs sets up a stark choice for voters this fall in terms of the care they could receive, the role the government would play and the importance they place on the issue. Democratic Sens. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) have vowed government action to fulfill what they cast as a moral right for Americans to have health insurance.

Senator Barack Obama broke forcefully on Tuesday with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., in an effort to curtail a drama of race, values, patriotism and betrayal that has enveloped his presidential candidacy at a critical juncture. Mr. Obama denounced remarks Mr. Wright made in a series of televised appearances over the last several days. In the appearances, Mr. Wright has suggested that the United States was attacked because it engaged in terrorism on other people and that the government was capable of having used the AIDS virus to commit genocide against minorities. His remarks also cast Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, in a positive light.

If the flow of venture capital is any indication, the new green economy is not just coming, it's about to boom. There's good reason to be excited about capitalists pouring money into saving the planet. But is it really the panacea that true believers say it is? The idea behind "social uplift environmentalism" is that the new green economy is strong enough to lift people out of poverty. The argument: millions of "green-collar jobs" — defined as living-wage, career-track jobs that contribute directly to improving or enhancing environmental quality — will be created as the need for green energy, transportation, and manufacturing infrastructure grows. If green is the new black, eco-populism is the new environmentalism. But the pesky realists out there question whether the private sector will work quickly or efficiently enough to solve crises as massive as global warming.

U.S. farmers are expected to plant about 64 million acres of wheat this year, down from a high of 88 million in 1981. In Kansas, wheat acreage has declined by a third since the mid-1980s, and nationwide, there is now less wheat in grain bins than at any time since World War II -- only about enough to supply the world for four days. This occurs as developing countries with some of the poorest populations are rapidly increasing their wheat imports.

U.N. agencies and the World Bank pledged on Tuesday to set up a task force to tackle an unprecedented rise in global food prices that is threatening to spread social unrest. The international bodies called on countries not to restrict exports of food to secure supplies at home, warning that could make the problem worse. "We consider that the dramatic escalation in food prices worldwide has evolved into an unprecedented challenge of global proportions," the United Nations said in a statement.

Amid a tottering economy, rising inflation, increasing unemployment and a housing market meltdown, waiters, beauticians and pet groomers report that customers are growing tightfisted. It is hard to determine just how much people are cutting back on tipping. But the stakes are huge. The slowdown in tips is another blow for increasingly squeezed service workers who often don't have much of a cushion to fall back on when times get tough.

Cardinal Edward M. Egan said on Monday that former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani should not have received holy communion during the visit of Pope Benedict XVI because Mr. Giuliani supports abortion rights. Cardinal Egan, head of the Archdiocese of New York, said in a statement that he and Mr. Giuliani had reached “an understanding” when he became archbishop in 2000 that Mr. Giuliani “was not to receive the eucharist because of his well-known support of abortion.”

The Rev. Jim Wallis finds it unexpected and refreshing that the majority of "God talk" in this presidential election season has been among and about Democratic candidates and that the dialogue takes a broad view of what's important to religiously motivated voters. "The surprise is that something we believed in and hoped would happen happened a lot faster than we thought," said Rev. Wallis, CEO of Sojourners and an ordained minister of the Sojourners Community, at an April 24 panel discussion on the role of religion in politics.

200 Protestant and Catholic churches across the state worked to collect 20,000 signatures for the Health Care for Michigan campaign, which began in January and needs 375,000 signatures by July 7 to appear on the November ballot. The effort has garnered 110,000 signatures. The interfaith effort kicked off the annual national Cover the Uninsured Week, aimed at highlighting the 47 million Americans nationally without health insurance, including 1,070,791 Michiganians.

The globe's worst food crisis in a generation emerged as a blip on the big boards and computer screens of America's great grain exchanges. At first, it seemed like little more than a bout of bad weather. In Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City, traders watched from the pits early last summer as wheat prices spiked amid mediocre harvests in the United States and Europe and signs of prolonged drought in Australia. But within a few weeks, the traders discerned an ominous snowball effect - one that would eventually bring down a prime minister in Haiti, make more children in Mauritania go to bed hungry, even cause American executives at Sam's Club to restrict sales of large bags of rice.

Recent letters from the Justice Department to Congress state that U.S. intelligence agents working to prevent terror attacks can legally use interrogation techniques banned by international law, The New York Times reported on Sunday. President George W. Bush issued an executive order last summer in which he said the CIA would observe international regulations regarding detainee treatment. The letters indicate the Bush administration now contends these boundaries may be stretched in some interrogations.

Pope Benedict XVI urged local and international efforts to quell renewed violence in African trouble spots. Addressing pilgrims at his Sunday blessing at the Vatican April 27, the pope cited worsening situations in Somalia, Sudan and Burundi and asked prayers for the innocent people involved. "The news arriving from some African countries continues to give reason for deep suffering and intense concern. I ask you not to forget these tragic circumstances and the brothers and sisters who are affected," the pope said.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Sunday called Democratic rival Barack Obama insensitive to poor people and out of touch on economic issues. The GOP nominee-in-waiting rapped his Democratic rival for opposing his idea to suspend the tax on fuel during the summer, a proposal that McCain believes will particularly help low-income people who usually have older cars that guzzle more gas. Obama said McCain "not only wants to continue some of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and corporations, he actually wants to extend them, and he hasn't told us really how he's going to pay for them. It is irresponsible. And the irony is he said it was irresponsible."

Despite multiple peace efforts, the crisis in Sudan's western region of Darfur often appears only to deepen as time goes on. But now security is beginning to improve. This was once a no-go area for the beleaguered, 7,000-strong African Union (AU) force charged with trying to bring peace to Darfur. Outgunned by rebels and powerless to take on government-allied militias, they had become increasingly confined to their bases. But on January 1 they changed their green helmets for UN blue and resumed night patrols as part of a hybrid force comprising both the UN and AU.

The continued failure of Congress to approve a final version of the 2007 farm bill could adversely affect low-income families who rely on food stamps and other federal nutrition assistance as food prices continue their dramatic rise, according to food assistance and nutrition experts. Food and relief agencies said the continued delays—with Thursday's votes marking the fourth time Congress has extended the 2002 bill to enable more negotiations on the 2007 bill—is making it tougher for low-income and fixed-income Americans who rely on federal food assistance.

For more than a decade, immigrants both legal and not have helped turn around the bleak demographic trends of towns across the rural Midwest. But many Iowans struggle to find a balance between gratitude for their revitalized towns and growing anti-immigrant sentiments. Under a new proposal, which passed the Iowa lower house last week, law enforcement agencies would be required to hold illegal immigrants until the charges against them were resolved, or federal immigration staff took custody of them.

Rising food prices are a significant worry for Americans, with 73% of consumers in a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll citing higher grocery bills as a concern, and nearly half saying food inflation has caused a hardship for their households. Prices are being influenced by several factors, including rising U.S. exports, growing demand in nations such as China and India, poor crops in some important producing countries such as Australia, and the emergence of the biofuels industry. Economists predict a third of the U.S. corn crop will be diverted to government-subsidized ethanol production.

House Democratic leaders plan to add extended unemployment benefits and new education funding for veterans to President Bush's war-funding bill while dropping many other party priorities. Facing a veto threat, Democrats such as Speaker Nancy Pelosi do not want to try to add billions of dollars for roads, bridges, and other ideas such as heating subsidies for the poor and increases in food-stamp benefits. Democratic aides say Pelosi's plan is tentative and had not been widely shopped to rank-and-file lawmakers. The still-emerging plan is a sign that Democrats want to avoid loading up the war-funding bill and losing a veto and public-relations clash with the president, who insists lawmakers keep his bill free of add-ons.

States have considered more than 1,100 bills that deal with aspects of immigration this year, while a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus April 23 called the Democratic leadership "spineless" for not taking up comprehensive immigration reform. Meanwhile, the House passed a bill to extend a visa program for religious workers, and three border states asked Congress to extend an operation that has placed National Guard troops along the U.S.-Mexican border. Catholic organizations and religious orders joined with other church groups in signing a letter protesting a bill introduced in Congress that would force immigrant families to live in a detention center until their immigration cases are resolved.

More than four decades ago outside this small Appalachian town, President Johnson began his War on Poverty. In the 1980s, President Reagan scoffed that poverty had won the war. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) tried to position himself somewhere between Johnson and Reagan while campaigning here Wednesday, styling himself as a compassionate conservative but emphasizing his crusade against "wasteful" government spending. "I wouldn't be back here today if government had fulfilled the promises that Lyndon Johnson made 44 years ago," McCain told reporters as his campaign bus rolled through the green hills of eastern Kentucky. "The moral of the story is -- government isn't always the answer."

When people's health is seen primarily in relation to their ability to work, an economic downturn results in less attention to the health needs of the population, said Bishop Michael J. Bransfield of Wheeling-Charleston, W.Va., in a recent talk. "As long as health care remains part of the social capital overhead of economic activity, the health needs of people are measured by their value to work," the bishop said at the 2008 Conference on Catholic Social Teaching and Access to Health Care. "When that economic activity falters and the demand for workers declines, so will the health care, and other forms of social capital, invested in them," he added.

The House voted Wednesday to block the Bush administration from cutting federal spending on Medicaid health care for the poor by $13 billion over the next five years. President Bush has threatened a veto, but supporters have more than enough votes to override him in the House, and maybe in the Senate, too. Supporters of the bill said the rules would merely shift financial burdens to the states at a time of economic distress, while reducing access to health care for the country’s neediest people.