Big Business to Employees: Get Fired If Get Operation to Prevent Breast Cancer

From Denny: Now if this doesn't make you angry. This woman gets fired because she found out, after testing her DNA, that she had an 80% chance of getting the dreaded breast cancer. So, as a preventative measure, she got a double mastectomy to avoid getting sick.

Now, it turns out, her employee figured they could fire her and save some money on their health insurance premiums. Talk about depraved indifference. Now what were these guys doing violating her privacy in the first place? What has her health condition and DNA have to do with her job performance? Answer: none.

Let's see, just how many laws and sense of decency did this energy company violate? Try the Genetic Information Non-discriminaton Act as well as the Americans with Disabilities Act for starters. Health privacy and human rights should be added to the list. Here we go again, women are being treated like second-class citizens in their own country. When is this garbage going to stop?

As long as there are no laws getting enforced there will be egregious corruption and injustices like this case. Just think of all the cases not brought to court because people are so afraid to make a health claim for fear of getting fired from a job they need to pay their bills. In this state of Louisiana doctors are complaining there is little surgery to be had because people injured on the job work with injuries just to avoid getting laid off.

The real inconvenient truth here is that her employer figured out she was a liability as she was getting closer to age 40 and they wanted to start thinning out the employee herd. They went for the older and sick - or those who possibly would be getting sick in the near future - and started firing them.

As long as our current federal government sits on their hands and does nothing to stem this tide in the work place it will only get worse. So, Mr. President, what do you - and this idiot Senate of inconsiderate destructive jerks - plan to do about it? Women and the entire public are tired of these kinds of constant in-your-face injustices.

Pelosi does her job exceedingly well. She has enough toughness to invite the Republicans once and if they refuse she cuts them out from further negotiations. They hate her and respect her. Reid waffles and rarely does his job, achieving a drop of what the Democratic agenda was supposed to be: helping the middle class.

When are you, Mr. President, going to quit listening to the wrong advisors in your administration that are telling you to go softly on Big Business - effectively telling the middle class "Oh, just eat cake if you are hungry!" Mr. President, quit being mollified by these guys who are telling you to sideline the big reforms and just keep the campaign money rolling into the coffers. This is no way to run a transparent and truly ethical government. Stand up for the middle class and be counted.






Pamela Fink Says She Was Fired After Getting a Double Mastectomy To Prevent Breast Cancer: (ABC) Fink Says Her Doctors Told Her She Had an 80 Percent Chance of Getting Breast Cancer


A Connecticut woman claims she was fired despite years of glowing reports by her employer after she told them she had tested positive for the breast cancer gene and would undergo a double mastecomy as a preventative measure.

"I was a great employee and I did really great work," said Pamela Fink, 39. "The only thing that changed from the time that I had a great review to when I didn't was my two surgeries."

Fink has filed complaints at the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities as well as the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that she was fired from the Stamford, Conn., company MXenergy because of her genetic testing results.

She is claiming that by doing so, her employer, MXenergy, a natural gas and electricity provider, violated the Genetic Information Nondiscriminaton Act as well as the Americans with Disabilities Act.





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Good News: Child Abuse Drops Dramatically

From Denny: This is good news! A 38% drop in sexually abused children occurred from a high of 217,700 in 1993 - dropping down to 135,300 in 2006. What about physical abuse during this period? Dropped by 15%. What about emotional abuse during this period? Dropped by 27%.

Experts in the area of child abuse are heralding this finding as proof that public awareness campaigns have made great headway along with judicial crackdowns.

When you combine all the areas of abuse - physical, emotional and sexual - it averages out to being down by 26% since 1993. In this study there were 553,000 children studied as opposed to 743,200 children studied in 1993.

This is a 455-page government mandated study called the National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect is conducted periodically by the Department of Health and Human Services.

What is so encouraging is that this is the first time there has been such a dramatic decrease over a long period of study since we began collecting data. "It does suggest that the mobilization around this issue is helping and it's a problem that is amenable to solutions," said professor David Finkelhor of the University of New Hampshire, a leading researcher in the field of child abuse. "It does suggest that the mobilization around this issue is helping and it's a problem that is amenable to solutions."

Where did they collect this much information? The detailed data was produced by 10,700 "sentinels" - child welfare workers, police officers, teachers, health care professionals and day care workers - that helped create national estimates.

"There's much more public awareness and public intolerance around child abuse now," said Linda Spears who is the Child Welfare League of America's Vice President for public policy. "It was a hidden concern before — people were afraid to talk about it if it was in their family." Spears also commented there is now an abundance of programs to help abusers overcome their destructive behavior.

Professor Finkelhor, who has also conducted similar research and found a drop in abuse rates, believes the study depicts "real, substantial declines." Nor can this decrease be attributed to changing the definition of abuse.

Finkelhor speculated there may be several reasons such as in the 1990s more people were deployed in child protection services and the criminal justice system strongly focused its efforts on more arrests and prison sentences for abusers. Since then more child abusers had available to them medications to help them cope, therefore preventing molesting or mistreating a child.

"There's also been a general change in perceptions and norms about what one can get away with, so much more publicity about these things," he said.




Socio-economic factors were considered. As expected from previous studies, poverty played a starring role as three times more likely for children to be abused than other children. The rates in African-American households were also much higher than in Hispanic and Caucasian homes.

They even took a look at the family structure. It's a bit chilling about what was found here: a single parent, with a live-in partner, might abuse children at 10 times the rate of a two parent household.

The main author of the study is Andrea Sedlak, Westat, Inc. in Maryland. She was concerned over their finding that more than half of the child maltreatment incidents are not actually investigated by a child-protection agency. "Is the system still so strapped?" she asked. "There's still a lot of material here saying the system has a long way to go."

Of course, this study is now almost four years old upon its release this week. Since 2006, this country has sunk down into a deep recession or a depression with over 20% of America out of work like in the 1930s. With all the job loss and family financial pressures and home foreclosures there have been reports of domestic violence on the rise.

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Kid Creates Pet Food Bank 4 Economic Crisis

From Denny: This has to be one proud mother of this nine-year-old boy named Zach Wilson in Central Florida whose passion to help animals created this animal food bank! This year of 2009 has been a troubled one for Americans, losing jobs, losing homes and forced to lose their pets because they can no longer afford to feed them. Tough choices all around.

Zach saw on the news that over 53,000 people in Florida had lost their homes this year and abandoned their pets as a result of job and home losses. So, he decided maybe people would keep their pets if they had help feeding them. It turned out to be a fabulous idea, well embraced by the charitable givers and those in need in his area. His idea has expanded across the nation to help other pets about to be abandoned by their desperate owners. Take a look:

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A web only clip:

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Employment Change by Industry Graphic

From Denny: Found this up on Digg today from visualeconomics.com and it's a bit startling to see all these job changes going on in various industries. If you are unable to see this graphic in enough detail on the blog here you can go to visualeconomics.com.

Staying Up In Down Times

Staying Up In Down Times: "The key to staying up in down times is to build personal resilience, and develop your capacity to create what matters—with whatever life gives you to work with!

Why do we need resilience, and the ability to create? Look at the following reasons:

Financial crises. Climate change, and globlal warming. Weird weather. Peak Oil fears. Resource Wars. Mortgage meltdown. Housing markets collapse. Job losses. Bailouts. Insecurity. The list goes on and on."

by Bruce Elkin