Fox Host Tells Caller Her Bipolar Disorder Is "Made Up" And "The Latest Fad" For Money | Blog | Media Matters for America

This is why I fight, because ignorant fucks like Tom Sullivan,,,

“I’m very skeptical. And I’ve got to tell you, if you haven’t been told, I will tell you. I think bipolar is like the latest fad. Everybody and their brother is getting diagnosed with bipolar. And last time I checked, we all have good days and we all have bad. And I don’t consider that an illness. And I don’t consider it a disability.”

Latest "fad" my ass!! Another able-bodied, privileged, white male telling us how life really is. Honey child, you wouldn't last 24 hours in my world on my best day. You would be crawling back to your momma asking to suckle on her teet and protect you from the monster that is your brain (if you have one).

Oh and Tom in answer to your question, "What were these people called 25 years ago?" They were called manic depressives back then, it was my original diagnosis 22 years ago. You may want to brush up on your pre-Hippocratic history to understand more and then follow up with a more contemporary history. It was in the 1850s that the "concept" of manic-depression (or what we call bipolar disorder) took its current place in psychiatry beginning with Baillarger and Falret. Kraeplin continued in the early 1900s coining the term manic depressive psychosis. It progresses from there,,, [Edited to add: The DSM-III (1980) is the first official publication in the US where the nomenclature surrounding bipolar disorder was changed from manic-depression.]

Make no mistake in believing that this was "just" an off-hand comment(ary). Unless one was living on a remote island, who can forget Romney's forty-seven percent comment. But this animosity towards the under-served and disadvantaged seems to be a common thread among the Reich. Consider, Rand "get them a job on the first floor" Paul's recent statement alluded to in the article:

You know, the thing is is that with all of these programs, there's always somebody who's deserving and everybody in this room knows somebody who is gaming the system. What I tell people is, "If you look like me and you hop out of your truck, you shouldn't be getting a disability check." You know, over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts. Join the club! [Laughter] Who doesn't get up a little anxious for work every day and their back hurts?! Everybody over 40 has a back pain.

This is no coincidence, the Reich has made it clear what they are trying to accomplish. As TPM points out, it has been going on for 80 years:

Social Security, in more ways than one the mother of all U.S. entitlement programs, has been the dragon that conservatives have succeeded in slashing, but never slaying, over its 80-year history. Their opposition has morphed from outright ideological grounds as the program was being debated during the New Deal era to a campaign masked in careful rhetoric once Social Security became virtually untouchable as a political animal.

Republicans know they have a new opportunity with the disability trust fund and a leverage point that comes along once every 20 years, and they're seizing it. Price floated some favorite proposals like means-testing, increasing the eligibility age, and individual accounts (otherwise known as privatization). He described it as the GOP's effort to "normalize the discussion and debate about Social Security."

Privatization is their goal and has been since the early 80s, beginning in earnest with Reagan's luke-warm attempt at revamping the program.

Privatization -- called "individual accounts," which had people investing their money, eliminating the base benefit that Social Security had been conceived as -- was the goal. They considered young people "the most obvious constituency for the private alternative" and pondered ways "to detach, or at least neutralize" the older Americans who were or would soon be benefitting from the program in its current form.

It continues to this day.

As one of its first orders of business upon convening Tuesday, the Republican House of Representatives approved a rule that will seriously undermine efforts to keep all of Social Security solvent.

The rule hampers an otherwise routine reallocation of Social Security payroll tax income from the old-age program to the disability program. Such a reallocation, in either direction, has taken place 11 times since 1968, according to Kathy Ruffing of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

But it's especially urgent now, because the disability program's trust fund is expected to run dry as early as next year. At that point, disability benefits for 11 million beneficiaries would have to be cut 20%. Reallocating the income, however, would keep both the old-age and disability programs solvent until at least 2033, giving Congress plenty of time to assess the programs' needs and work out a long-term fix.
,,,
The rule change reflects the burgeoning demonization of disability recipients, a trend we've reported on in the past. it's been fomented by conservative Republicans and abetted by sloppy reporting by institutions such as NPR and "60 Minutes."

Disability recipients are easily caricatured as malingering layabouts by politicians, academics and journalists too lazy to do their homework. They'll say disability benefits are easy to obtain, so lavish they discourage work, and convenient substitutes for welfare payments. None of that is true.

As Jason Easley explained in response to Bernie Sander's statement, "[t]he rule change is a part of a Republican effort to kill Social Security. If the disability fund can’t be replenished, Benefits will have to be cut, and some of the most economically vulnerable people in our society will be pushed deeper into poverty. According to experts, the problem with the Social Security disability cash assistance programs is that it limits the earnings of disabled individuals to just above the poverty line. This creates a trap that makes it impossible for individuals who can’t work to escape poverty."

The Reich is doing what they do best, continuing their insidious attack against those that are unable defend themselves. Creating a wedge issue where one should not be by polarizing the lower and middle classes against each other while the rich just get richer.  "[N]ormalizing the discussion and debate about Social Security" means only one thing, cut it.

During his January 16, 2005, interview with the Washington Post, President George W. Bush corrected the reporter's use of the term "privatization plan", insisting on the phrase "personal savings accounts." Privatization is no longer the term used by Republicans to describe the plan, due to its poor performance in polls and focus groups.  Another euphemism was deployed by Karl Rove during a February 9, 2005, interview with Hannity & Colmes on Fox News. According to the News Hounds blog, Mr. Rove spoke of modernizing Social Security.

Rove's favorite euphemism was also used in a memo sent to the Social Security Administration's regional and public relations directors in February 2004. It stated that "Modernization must include individually controlled, voluntary personal retirement accounts." Also in the memo were talking points on the "long-term challenges facing Social Security." Critics said the memo was evidence of the Bush administration instructing a government agency to promote a certain political agenda.

Fox Host Tells Caller Her Bipolar Disorder Is "Made Up" And "The Latest Fad" For Money | Blog | Media Matters for America

Inside the Private Prison Industry's Alarming Spread Across America | Alternet

An older article but a few interesting bits of information:

1] An example of back-door maneuvering by a politician:

"John Kavanagh was racing against the clock. His position as House Appropriations Chairman afforded him the opportunity to stuff whatever minor extra provisions he wanted into the budget before it went to a vote the following Monday, and he only had a few hours left to do it."
,,,
"This came out of nowhere — I mean that,” Arizona House Minority Leader Chad Campbell told the Arizona Republic. “No one said a word about it. It wasn't in the Senate budget, it didn't come as a request from DOC. There's something really shady here.”

For Kavanagh, there was nothing shady about sweetening the deal with nearly a million extra dollars. On the contrary, he says, it was a moral imperative.

2] Just how powerful is the private prison lobby:

"Rep. John Kavanagh was trying to secure an extra $900,000 gift for the GEO Group, the billion-dollar private prison corporation whose state lobbyists came to him at the last second begging with upturned hats. The $45 million already earmarked for the maintenance of low- and medium-security facilities wasn’t enough, they said."
,,,
The largest and richest prison firm, Corrections Corporation of America, has 22 lobbyists registered in Arizona; the GEO Group, the second largest, has seven.

3] But the most egregious, and I have posted about this before, factoid:

Arizona is one of four states (along with Virginia, Oklahoma and Louisiana) in which state governments are bound to contracts guaranteeing a 95%-100% occupancy in facilities leased by private prisons. Of the four, Arizona’s quotas are the most extreme: as part of the aforementioned “deal” in 2008, prison officials must keep a 100% occupancy rate in the two GEO Group facilities and another facility leased to the state by Management and Training Corporation, according to a 2013 report by In the Public Interest. Paradoxically, this may be costing the state more money: An August 2013 analysis from the Tucson Citizen shows that the “per-prisoner, per-day rates” for those particular facilities have increased by an average of 14% since 2008.

The $45 million allocated for the GEO Group in the state’s new budget not only suggests that lawmakers expect an increase in their prison population, but it also indicates that they have little intention of abandoning policies that casually criminalize its citizens. Since these are low- and medium-security facilities, they will likely be places to house petty drug offenders, who make up 20.5% of the state’s entire inmate population.
,,,
While the total prison population in the country grew 16% between 2000 and 2011, the state private prison population grew 106%. Yet despite this astronomical growth, not a single independent study has ever corroborated the incarceration industry’s claim that its services save taxpayers’ money. So why has it grown so powerful?

Inside the Private Prison Industry's Alarming Spread Across America | Alternet

Preying on the Poor: For-Profit Probation Edition | American Civil Liberties Union

Borrowing from the payday lender playbook, companies like JCS often sign contracts in cities and counties strapped for cash. For the county, the deal seems like a sweet one: The company will collect outstanding court debts for free and make all their profits from charging probationers fees. But the problem is that many of these people were put on probation because they were too poor to pay their fine in the first place and for them, the additional fees are huge. People find themselves scrambling for money they don't have and forgoing basic necessities to avoid being thrown behind bars for missing a payment. The impact on communities, especially low-income communities of color, is devastating.

Sadly, the for-profit probation business is booming. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people are sentenced to probation, often for misdemeanors including unpaid parking tickets. Instead of being able to just pay those fines and move on with their lives, many get sucked into spiraling debt traps they cannot escape. There are hundreds of thousands of people like Hali out there, for whom small court fines have ballooned into hundreds of dollars of debt.

The for-profit probation racket isn't benefiting society; it's only benefiting these companies' bottom line. We need to remember two things: 1) If probationers miss a payment and end up behind bars, taxpayers foot the bill for this imprisonment; and 2) Our communities are not better off when we force people in poverty to choose between their liberty and putting food on their table —and needlessly lining the pockets of for-profit probation companies in the process.

Preying on the Poor: For-Profit Probation Edition | American Civil Liberties Union

How US Private Prisons Are Making Millions by Jailing Migrants in Deplorable Conditions | Alternet

CARs thus act as a middle-arena that wouldn’t exist if the federal government simply conducted immigrant enforcement through the civil system, which is what used to happen. But in 2005, the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice jointly instituted a program called “Operation Streamline” that mandated migrants be prosecuted by the US government in addition to being processed for deportation. There’s little reason to criminally prosecute migrants in addition to processing them for deportation except to send a message.

_____

As states move for the first time in decades to address swollen prisoner populations, federal immigration detention centers are the new front in private prison corporations’ business strategy, and undocumented migrants their easy cash cows.

Around the country there are 13 Criminal Alien Requirement (CAR) prisons, which are managed by private companies contracted by the federal Bureau of Prisons to house a total of 25,000 prisoners convicted of living in the United States without proper documentation. In the pursuit of profits, private prison corporations have created utterly fetid and psychologically frying conditions within these CARs, making even the most squalid prisons for citizens look better by comparison. The vulnerability of an inmate population without recognized citizenship, combined with aggressive immigration policy and legal statutes allowing for-profit detention centers to operate with lax oversight, have created conditions under which carceral corporations can operate legal gulags with an endless supply of incoming prisoners.

Over the last four years, the American Civil Liberties Union investigated five CARs in Texas that together house a total of 14,000 inmates, and on Tuesday released its findings in the report Warehoused and Forgotten: Immigrants Trapped Our Shadow Private Prison System. Shockingly, they found that all of five CARs were serviced with contracts from the Bureau of Federal Prisons that include provisions requiring the CARs have a 10% “isolation cell” quota, which is double the rate at publicly federal managed prisons. With perverse incentives to send prisoners to solitary confinement—a measure the UN has condemned as torture—inmates have reportedly been thrown into isolated cells for complaining about food and medical care or pursuing legal grievances. The profit motive has rendered the CARs nearly absent all drug and medical treatment, along with opportunities for inmates’ self-development. In one facility in Raymondville, Texas, near the Mexican border, the center is so overcrowded that inmates live in cramped, vermin-infested Kevlar tents.

How US Private Prisons Are Making Millions by Jailing Migrants in Deplorable Conditions | Alternet

Despite Community Pleas, Three Chicago Schools Slated for Privatization - Working In These Times

The Chicago Board of Education’s vote on Wednesday to convert three public elementary schools into “turnaround schools” run by the non-profit Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL) was no surprise to most parents and teachers.

The board has consistently voted to close schools or turn them over to private management—laying off most of the staff in the process—despite overwhelming opposition, anxiety and outrage expressed in heartfelt testimony by parents, teachers, students and elected officials at scores of public meetings.

While the concept of turnaround schools was first instituted under former Mayor Richard M. Daley, critics see the use of turnarounds as a signature of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his aggressive privatization agenda. Parents and experts framed the recent vote as part of a larger trend wherein Emanuel, who appoints the school board, has disregarded public opinion to push through his privatization plans. The mayor has met more resistance from the teachers union and parents, however, than he may have expected. He was widely seen as “losing” the standoff with the teachers union that culminated in their seven-day strike in 2012 and a new contract for the teachers. Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard, a prominent proponent of charter schools and privatization, resigned in the wake of the strike.

Even before the April 23 meeting, the board members should have been well aware that public sentiment stood firmly against “turning around” McNair Elementary, Gresham Elementary and Dvorak Technology Academy, all of which are in predominantly African-American neighborhoods. During public meetings at each school in recent weeks, community members berated AUSL officials, calling them “traitors” to the Black community, and pleaded with them to save the jobs of the principals and teachers. The tenor of these meetings echoed scores of hearings held about the plan to close almost 50 public schools in 2013. It was evident this month that to many parents and students, being “turned around” is nearly equivalent to being closed. While the school remains open after a turnaround, students and parents said that without the teachers and staff that they have grown to know and love, the school isn’t the same.

Parents reiterated the same points at the April 23 meeting, but all five of the school board members present voted in favor of the turnaround proposals. (The board has seven members total, but can hold votes with five.)



Despite Community Pleas, Three Chicago Schools Slated for Privatization - Working In These Times

Thrown in jail for being poor: the booming for-profit probation industry | Money | theguardian.com

It is unconstitutional for any person to have an economic interest in the criminal justice system,,,We don’t pay judges based on the percent of fines they impose, or police officers based on the number of tickets they issue. This shouldn’t be any different.”


--

The cost to taxpayers of Hayes’ eight-month jail sentence: $11,500, according to Georgia court documents.

Despite the fact that the US supreme court ruled in 1983 that offenders cannot be jailed when they can’t afford to pay their fines, an increasing number of poor, low-level offenders are doing time because they can’t keep up with fees they owe to courts and private probation companies. To some it resembles a variation on the old Victorian workhouses and debtors’ prisons, moved from Dickensian England to the modern United States.

[,,,]
More than 1,000 low-level courts across the US rely on the so-called “offender-funded” probation model, signing contracts with for-profit companies that oversee probation requirements like monitoring, drug tests and fine collection. The decades-old, for-profit probation industry is deeply rooted in the south, and especially in Georgia, but courts in states as far-flung as Michigan, Montana and Washington have also embraced aspects of privatized probation.



[,,,]
Those companies make offenders pay for their own probation by charging them fees. It saves the states and counties a lot of money. It also makes the companies a lot of money: Human Rights Watch estimated that private probation companies in Georgia alone rake in nearly $40m in fees a year.

While states save and companies profit, the offenders pay a lot. There is no cap on the amount of fees a private company can charge minor offenders, and the longer the probation period, the higher the fees.

In some cases, the probation fees can add up to twice as much – or more – than the court-ordered fines.



[,,,]
“Private probation companies have a really perverse financial incentive in each case,” said Chris Albin-Lackey, author of the recently-released Human Rights Watch report titled “Profiting from probation”.

Company employees behave more like “aggressive, muscular debt collectors” than probation officers responsible for administering justice, Albin-Lackey says. Others have noted that the courts are to blame for looking the other way.

Thrown in jail for being poor: the booming for-profit probation industry | Money | theguardian.com

See also:  
US: For-Profit Probation Tramples Rights of Poor

The Education of Ted Mitchell | CAPITAL & MAIN

The nomination of Californian Ted Mitchell to the number two position at the U.S. Department of Education is the latest indication that proponents of school privatization are continuing to gain influence over the Obama administration’s education policy.

“He represents the quintessence of the privatization movement,” Diane Ravitch, an education historian and former Assistant Secretary of Education under President George H.W. Bush, tells Capital & Main. “This is a signal the Obama administration is committed to moving forward aggressively with transferring public funds to private hands.”

[,,,]
But critics like Ravitch say that Mitchell and NewSchools Venture Fund are in the forefront of a movement to privatize public education, a radical transformation that would benefit technology, testing and textbook companies such as Pearson, the London-headquartered multinational publishing and education giant.

[,,,]
Sabrina Stevens, the executive director of Integrity in Education, says in an interview that “[Mitchell’s] nomination is an example of the kind of thing we are worried about – corporate influence at the U.S. Department of Education.”

The Education of Ted Mitchell | CAPITAL & MAIN

Court-Sanctioned Extortion by Private Probation Companies: Modern Debtors' Prisons | American Civil Liberties Union

The revival of "debtors' prisons" first hit my radar at the end of last year. It seems it is striving to catch up with prison privatization in terms of abuses.

Yesterday, Human Rights Watch released Profiting from Probation, a report that confirms the ACLU's worst fears about the privatization of probation services: for-profit companies are increasingly working with county and city courts around the country to extort poor people for money, including by illegally jailing them simply because they are too poor to pay court-imposed fines and fees. While poor people suffer and taxpayers foot the bill for hidden costs, private companies make big money—to the tune of an estimated $40 million in revenue in Georgia alone, according to the report.

,,,Yet at no point did Sentinal or the court take into consideration Barrett's ability to pay—the latter, a clear violation of the law. Imprisoning someone because she cannot afford to pay court-imposed fines or fees violates the 14th Amendment.

Barrett is one of hundreds of thousands of poor people across the country who are being squeezed for debt collection by an unholy alliance between private probation companies and cash-strapped county and city courts. More than 1,000 courts across several states, including Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida, and Alabama, seek to generate revenue by collecting unpaid debt from those convicted of misdemeanors without hiring staff to administer probation. Instead, these courts contract with private firms that seek s to make a profit and promise to do the job for free. However, privatization simply shifts costs onto poor probationers through fees paid directly to private firms, which are entirely distinct from fines imposed to punish or deter crime. Perversely, those least able to pay remain on probation the longest and pay the most to private probation companies.

Court-Sanctioned Extortion by Private Probation Companies: Modern Debtors' Prisons | American Civil Liberties Union

The Stealth Privatization of Pennsylvania's Bridges

At midnight of January 20, 2014, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announced that the administration of Gov. Tom Corbett finally decided to take action on the state's crumbling bridges. The action it is taking is to sign a 40-year contract to privatize Pennsylvania bridges.

The word privatization does not appear in any of the announcements. Instead, PennDOT refers to the project as a public-private partnership. However, whether called a PPP, P3, public-private partnership, contracting out or privatization, the result is the same. Infrastructure privatization - that is privatization of roads, bridges, parking garages, parking meters, airports and the like - involves signing a contract, generally for a term of 30 to 99 years.

In the case of Pennsylvania's bridges, the private contractor takes on responsibility for designing, constructing, financing and operating bridges for up to 40 years. [PennDOT, McCalls] Experience with infrastructure privatization shows what we can expect as the bridge privatization proceeds.

The Stealth Privatization of Pennsylvania's Bridges

States Guarantee High Prison Populations for Private Prison Industry’s Profits

Anyone who even tangentially follows the travesty that is America's criminal justice system knows that privately owned prison corporations are gaining a deeper foothold in our nation's prisons. The private prison industry lobbies politicians, donates to campaigns of pro-privatization candidates, supports the ongoing War on Drugs, and has helped to shape criminal justice policies like California's three-strikes law. High incarceration rates insure greater profits for the private prison industry.

A new report from In the Public Interest reveals that private prison companies, including two of the largest, the Corrections Corp. of America and Geo Group Inc., are forging deals with state and local governments that provide huge profits based on guaranteed high occupancy rates.

The report, titled "Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and 'Low-Crime Taxes' Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations," "documents the contracts exchanged between private prison companies and state and local governments that either guarantee prison occupancy rates (essentially creating inmate lockup quotas) or force taxpayers to pay for empty beds if the prison population decreases due to lower crime rates or other factors (essentially creating low-crime taxes)," AlterNet's April M. Short recently reported.

States Guarantee High Prison Populations for Private Prison Industry’s Profits

8 Ways Privatization Has Brought Pain and Misery to American Life | Alternet

Some of America's leading news analysts are beginning to recognize the fallacy of the "free market." Said Ted Koppel, "We are privatizing ourselves into one disaster after another." Fareed Zakaria admitted, "I am a big fan of the free market...But precisely because it is so powerful, in places where it doesn't work well, it can cause huge distortions." They're right. A little analysis reveals that privatization doesn't seem to work in any of the areas vital to the American public.

[,,,]
Free-market health care has been taking care of the CEOs. Ronald DePinho, president of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas, made $1,845,000 in 2012. That's over ten times as much as the $170,000 made by the federal Medicare Administrator in 2010. Stephen J. Hemsley, the CEO of United Health Group, made three hundred times as much, with most of his $48 million coming from stock gains.

[,,,]
A Citigroup economist gushed, "Water as an asset class will, in my view, become eventually the single most important physical-commodity based asset class, dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals."

[,,,]
Bloomberg [not the mayor] notes that deregulators in the 1990s anticipated a market-based decline in phone and cable bills, an "invisible hand" that would steer competing companies to lower prices for all of us. Verizon and AT&T and Comcast and Time-Warner haven't let it happen.

[,,,]
As Republicans continue to deride public transportation as 'socialist' and 'Soviet-style,' China surges ahead with a plan to create the world's most advanced high-speed rail transport network. Government-run high-speed rail systems have been successful in numerous other countries, and England and Brazil both lament industry privatization.

[,,,]
Matt Taibbi explained to us how financial malfeasance led to the bubbles in dot-com stocks and housing and oil prices and commodities that extract trillions of dollars away from society.

[,,,]
One would think it a worthy goal to rehabilitate prisoners and gradually empty the jails. But business is too good. With each prisoner generating up to $40,000 a year in revenue, it has apparently made economic sense to put over two million people behind bars.

and more,,,




8 Ways Privatization Has Brought Pain and Misery to American Life | Alternet