Join PDA's Healthcare for All Issue Organizing Team (IOT); learn more here. Since millions of American patients face medical debt they didn't know they'd have--and many if not most of them purchased insurance to protect against that debt--it seems logical to me that patients should be fully informed up front of the financial risks they are taking on when they seek medical care. Doctors and others providers should publish and post in their offices their methods of debt collection and the numbers of patients they sue in an average practice year. They can put the disclosures of medical debt collection practices right next to the little signs that tell patients they must pay their co-pays prior to receiving medical care. [more]

Join PDA's Stop Global Warming/Environmental Issue Organizing Team (IOT); learn more here. Published by The Huffington Post. You can't but help admire Tom Friedman's enthusiasm for technological innovations. The NY Times columnist and mega-bestselling author has probably interviewed more scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs about high tech clean energy ideas than anyone in the last few years. [more]

Published by Creators.com. You know what we need to juice up the performance of our weak economy? Viagra. Yes, America needs a new Viagra, specifically targeted to stiffen backbones--in particular, the limp backbones of Barack Obama's team, as well as the flaccid spines of Democratic congressional leaders. Where's the drug industry when we really need it? The Obama-ites seem incapable of firm stands. They excite us by boldly addressing our economic woes, then they seduce us by proposing stout actions. But when it comes time to follow through--it's droopsville. Take America's job crisis. Obama and the Democrats eloquently empathize with the plight of struggling families who are falling out of the middle class. They point out that after Wall Street banksters crashed our economy and created the Great Recession, which began in December 2007, the number of jobs available to Americans has plummeted by more than 8.4 million. Since then, another 2.7 million jobseekers have come into the workforce. That leaves us in a hole that is 11.1 million jobs deep. [more]

Take Action: Tell Congress "You bailed out Wall Street, now bail out Main Street" Published by The Nation. The Simpson-Bowles Commission, just established by the president, will no doubt deliver an attack on Social Security and Medicare dressed up in the sanctimonious rhetoric of deficit reduction. (Back in his salad days, former Senator Alan Simpson was a regular schemer to cut Social Security.) The Obama spending freeze is another symbolic sacrifice to the deficit gods. Most observers believe neither will amount to much, and one can hope that they are right. But what would be the economic consequences if they did? The answer is that a big deficit-reduction program would destroy the economy, or what remains of it, two years into the Great Crisis. [more]

Published by AlterNet. Horrific news surrounding the too-big-to-fail banks continues to march onward into absurdity. A rapacious Bank of America forecloses on a house that's already paid for. Goldman Sachs hides Greece's hundreds of billions in debt until the entire country is a toxic asset to the global economy. Henry Paulson baldly admits that his tenure as Goldman Sachs' CEO helped him rob American taxpayers of trillions. Media, political and financial hypocrites hilariously continue to insist that homeowners shouldn't walk away from underwater mortgages as banks walk away with cash stuffed in their high-end underwear. The frustrated public would laugh, but it'd have to pull the financial gun out of its mouth first. [more]

Join PDA's Israel/Palestine Action Group; learn more here. Published by Tribune Media Services. DOHA, Qatar—Internationally speaking, there are only two subjects to talk about in the Middle East. These are Israel, the Palestinians and the Americans; and Iran and Israel. The two subjects dominated the annual meeting here of the Institute for Mediterranean Political Studies, a group of senior or retired European, American and Middle Eastern officials and observers, otherwise known as the Club of Monaco. [more]

Published by Palestine Video. Israeli Defense Force chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi, called 'The Butcher of Gaza' by Palestinian activists and some of their supporters, spoke at a 'Friends of the IDF' fundraising dinner on Tuesday. Outside New York's well known Waldorf Astoria, protesters let Ashkenazi know how they felt about his presence. [more]

Published by Alternet. John Hall is a former musician and supporter of progressive causes. But since he was elected to Congress, he has become one of the most shameless defenders of Israel's crimes. In the face of expected Republican gains this year, receiving the support of MoveOn, one of the country's largest progressive advocacy groups, is of particular importance for Democratic candidates. One of only a handful of House incumbents to receive the coveted endorsement by MoveOn's political action committee is Democrat John Hall, who represents the 19th district in upstate New York. [more]

Published by The New York Times. As much as half the food aid sent to Somalia is diverted from needy people to a web of corrupt contractors, radical Islamist militants and local United Nations staff members, according to a new Security Council report. The report, which has not yet been made public but was shown to The New York Times by diplomats, outlines a host of problems so grave that it recommends that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon open an independent investigation into the World Food Program’s Somalia operations. It suggests that the program rebuild the food distribution system—which serves at least 2.5 million people and whose aid was worth about $485 million in 2009—from scratch to break what it describes as a corrupt cartel of Somali distributors. [more]

Published by The Nation. Long before Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi began talking up health care reform as a top priority for the Democratic Party, Congress and America, Dennis Kucinich was doing so. Indeed, the former Cleveland mayor, Ohio legislator, two-time presidential candidate and now senior U.S. House members has across the past 35 years been one of the country's steadiest proponents of real reform of our broken health-care system. So Kucinich's questioning of the reform legislation being advanced by President Obama and House Speaker Pelosi is neither casual nor uninformed. [more]

Join PDA's Healthcare for All Issue Organizing Team (IOT); learn more here. Published by Common Dreams. Bill Moyers sits down with former insurance executive turned public health advocate Wendell Potter, who argues that all is not lost in the healthcare bill and details what he likes about the legislation. [more]

Take Action: Join or create a brown bag lunch vigil. Published by AfterDowningStreet.org. The tea and coffee parties have cornered the market on vacuous meanness and niceness, respectively. But brownbagging is where the substance and sustenance are. Every third Wednesday of the month, those who want war defunded and everything useful funded are bringing brown bag lunches to vigil at their congress member's local office. This month that means March 17th, St. Patrick's Day. And that means more than food: Kicking off the Green Beer Party. [more]

Take Action: Tell Congress "Support debate of the Afghan War" Published by The Nation It's been a long winter for the peace movement. Waiting for Obama has proved fruitless. The Great Recession has strengthened Wall Street and diverted attention from the wars. The debate over healthcare still won't go away and has demoralized progressive advocates. Given a chance to exit from Afghanistan when the Karzai election proved to be stolen, President Obama escalated anyway, but also promised to "begin" exiting almost before an opposition could mobilize at home. [more]

Join PDA's Accountability and Justice Issue Organizing Team (IOT); learn more here. Two Americans claim they were tortured by US officials after making bribery allegations. Published by Raw Story. A federal judge in Chicago ruled on Friday that a lawsuit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, brought by two Americans who had worked for an Iraqi contractor, can be allowed to proceed. [more]

"Make Markets Be Markets" conference of financial reform all-stars offers an alternative to Washington's disastrous oversight of the economy. Published by Alternet.com. Last Wednesday, I attended a conference initiated by the Roosevelt Institute on the financial mess, called Make Markets Be Markets. The conference's speakers included people with experience on Wall Street, the banking industry, government and academia; Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz, Elizabeth Warren, and other luminaries who have offered an alternative and reformist narrative to our recent financial crisis. At two and half hours, it was relatively short, giving each speaker the opportunity to make their points and providing a sharp focus. One underlying theme of the event was fraud, the great elephant in the room, that neither the press or our government officials acknowledge, though it is a fundamental element to the financial crisis and its solutions. [more]

Join PDA's Stop Global Warming/Environmental Issue Organizing Team (IOT); learn more here. Published by The Washington Post. As climate change legislation stalled in the Senate, the Obama administration noted that it had a workable--although admittedly unwieldy--Plan B. If Congress wouldn't cap U.S. emissions, officials said, the Environmental Protection Agency would do it instead. Now, even Plan B may be in trouble. [more]

Published by The Huffington Post. "In the US Senate, Mother Jones was once called the 'grandmother of all agitators.' She replied that it was her desire to one day be the 'great-grandmothers of all agitators.'"--Mother Jones On International Women's Day, let us now praise the muckrakers, the agitators, the coal mining women, the organizers, the fearless ones willing to stand up to Big Coal. Or, as writer and coal miner organizer Agnes Burns Wieck once responded to the bogus "Ladies Auxiliary" friends of Big Coal: "We are not ladies, we are women." I love two women agitators, in particular: Mary "Mother" Jones, and Agnes Burns Wieck. [more]

Published by The New York Times. No one knows what history will make of the present—least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen. [more]

Join PDA's Stop Global Warming/Environmental Issue Organizing Team (IOT); learn more here. Published by TomDispatch. Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many have called the first book for a general audience on global warming. One of the more interesting reviews came from the Wall Street Journal. It was a mixed and judicious appraisal. "The subject," the reviewer said, "is important, the notion is arresting, and Mr. McKibben argues convincingly." And that was not an outlier: around the same time, the first President Bush announced that he planned to "fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect." [more]

Published by Common Dreams. A month ago, writing in the New York Times about the economy and the escalating war in Afghanistan, Bob Herbert warned President Obama that he was developing a "credibility gap." Now, the advance advertising designed to help launch the president's Nuclear Posture Review and the stalled negotiations with Russia on the START 1 Follow On Treaty are leading people around the world to ask their version of "Where's the beef?" The administration's policies and actions are severely undermining its commitment to non-proliferation and its promise of working to create a "nuclear weapons free world." [more]