Boycotting the RIAA

Gizmodo has the scoop, and the "why," on fighting the recordo-thugs:

In case you missed it, last Friday we declared the month of March Boycott the RIAA Month. We've gotten sick and tired of always seeing the RIAA pulling deplorable moves and decided it was time for us to do something about it. We're kicking the month off with this, our manifesto. We want to be absolutely clear about what this fight is about and why it's so important. This is an overview of what the RIAA does, why it's damaging, and what we need to do to stop it. Consider this our planted flag.

First off, we want to be clear that this battle won't be over on March 31st. We declared March the Boycott the RIAA month to draw a line in the sand and to make a strong statement, but this is merely the beginning. Everything we're going to lay out here will still be true in April, in May, in June, and in the months that follow. March will be not the entirety of our efforts, but rather a kick off of our organized campaign to make a difference. We'll be posting tips for how to get the word out, ways to support artists without supporting the RIAA, and keeping you updated with everything that's going on throughout the entire month. With your help, we can educate people about how important this issue is and really make a difference.

The RIAA is the industry group that represents the four major record labels — Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal, and Sony BMG — and all of their subsidiaries. They work on behalf of their members, and they have been accused of a wide range of offenses, from price-fixing to stifling innovation. They're able to perpetuate these crimes due to their huge bankroll, but that happens to be the one aspect of their organization we have control over. As consumers, we are the ones who stuff their coffers. By buying albums released by RIAA labels, we're giving them the money they use to sue our peers, stifle innovation, and force DRM down our throats. By cutting off their income stream, we can help make the RIAA less effective and therefore less damaging.

We're huge music fans here at Gizmodo, and that's why it's really hard to advocate not purchasing albums from artists we love. However, what everyone needs to understand is that we are in no means advocating piracy or not supporting musicians. The fact of the matter is, the RIAA's practices do not, in the end, support musicians or put money into their pockets. A fraction of the money from album sales actually makes it to artists, and not a single penny that the RIAA has received from their series of lawsuits has actually made it back to the artists that had their "copyrights infringed" in the first place.

The goal of the RIAA's lawsuits is to make people so afraid of being sued that they will stop downloading music. However, in their lawsuits they circumvent the law and extort money from people who haven't been given the benefit of a legal trial.

The process that the RIAA has in place to find and sue plaintiffs is designed not to provide a fair trial and prove guilt, but rather to confuse and intimidate people into settling out of court. What exactly happens is too detailed and lengthy for me to go into here, but Grant Robertson's Layperson's Guide to Filesharing Lawsuits is a must-read for anyone interested in what exactly happened in the 20,000+ lawsuits (so far) the RIAA has brought upon the citizens of this country.

Recently, the RIAA began looking to streamline the entire lawsuit process by cutting courts, lawyers, and any semblance of due process out altogether. Their new plan is to have ISPs point people to p2plawsuits.com (catchy!) and offer to discount their settlement by $1,000 if they pay up without going to court at all. By avoiding the court system, the RIAA can avoid paying those pesky lawyer's fees. Even better for them, they plan to require ISPs to retain all of their customer records for at least 180 days in order to be eligible for the $1,000 discount. This would make everyone's surfing and downloading history available to a non-governmental organization in order to make it easier for them to gather evidence for their intimidation lawsuits.

Beyond the harassment, extortion, and privacy invasion that the RIAA commits under the guise of lawsuits, they also stifle innovation by treating any open Internet source as a potential way for people to violate their copyrights. Recently, they filed a "motion for reconsideration" in a suit claiming that anything downloaded via an Internet connection is the responsibility of the owner of said connection. While the RIAA is trying to make it easier for them to get money out of the parents of kids they sue, the precedent that it would set would make it difficult, if not impossible, for open WiFi hotspots to exist. That means that the RIAA would make it impossible for you to connect to the web for free while out in a city that provides Internet access merely because you might use it to download music.

READ THE WHOLE THING on the Gizmodo website here.

Corporate kleptocracy takes aim at Web radio

The aim of Revolution 21 is to morph into a 24-hour Internet radio station, with an ultra low-power AM service on the side.

Well, was.

See, it's like this. The U.S. Copyright Royalty Board is hell-bent on killing Internet radio . . . at least Internet radio committed by programmers who can't afford to pay anywhere from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars in rights fees per year.

Non-profit, non-commercial webcasters still would pay just $500 a year under the new ruling -- so long as they don't get popular. But if non-comms average more than 146,000 aggregate tuning hours per month -- that is, average number of simultaneous listeners x number of streaming hours x 30 days -- they have to pay the commercial rate on everything over the cap.

That works out to an average of 202 simultaneous listeners if you stream your station 24 hours a day. Go over that, and it gets real expensive real fast.

And that's enough to give me -- Revolution 21 -- pause.

Veteran broadcaster Bill Goldsmith --who runs the popular Radio Paradise with his wife, Rebecca -- explains it all here:

I have been in love with radio all of my life, and spent 30-odd years dealing with the conflict between my vision of radio as an art form and my FM-station employers’ vision of radio as a conduit for advertising. I have watched the medium that I love turn from an essential part of the process of connecting those who love making music with those whose lives are touched by it into a mindless background hum of advertising and disposable musical sludge.

With the advent of the Internet, we were finally able to bring to life the radio station I had always wanted to work for (and listen to): commercial-free, passionate, and embracing a wide universe of musical treasures, from the classic rock artists I grew up with to the latest indie discoveries, with a liberal sprinkling of world music, electronica, jazz, even classical. We have slowly built up a loyal audience and have been able to support ourselves while living our dream.

The Internet has changed radio in a profound way. Instead of a business that required investments so huge (millions of dollars for even a small-market FM station) that a programming focus on the lowest common denominator and an extreme aversion to risk or experimentation was an unavoidable consequence, a radio station with a global reach was now within the grasp of anyone with the talent and determination to make it happen.

Every day we hear from listeners who are profoundly touched by our efforts - by the music we play, by the way we assemble the songs into meaningful sequences that are more than the sum of their parts, by our passion for what we are doing, and our commitment to never contaminating the music with advertising. And our station is but one of many who have attracted that kind of passionate following, and provided that kind of outlet for radio artists like myself.

The Internet’s paradigm-shifting gift to radio programmers and music lovers - at least those in the US - is now in danger of being taken away by the misguided actions of the US Copyright Board. The performance royalty rates released by the Copyright Board on March 1, 2007 are not just extreme, not just burdensome. They are a death sentence for all US-based independent webcasters like Radio Paradise, SOMA-FM, Digitally Imported, and many others.

The facts and figures of the new rates are detailed in Kurt Hanson’s newsletter for 3/2/07. Kurt’s analysis of the financial impact of the new rates is entirely accurate, and chilling.

There has been much discussion about how unfair these rates are, but our listeners find one fact particularly appalling: while Internet stations like ours are being told they must pay royalty fees that exceed their income, sometimes by several times over, FM stations - including those owned by media conglomerates like Clear Channel - pay nothing at all!

Yes, both FM stations and Internet stations pay royalties to songwriters and/or music publishers. But the royalties in question are owed to the owners of performance copyrights, which means, in most cases, record companies - and to them, FM stations pay nothing at all.

How is it possible for such a massive disparity to exist? For the answer to that we need to go back to the 1990s, when music industry lobbyists persuaded Congress to include wording in two pieces of legislation (the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998) that drew a sharp division between analog and digital broadcasts. Their reasoning was that a digital radio transmission was not a radio broadcast at all, but a sequence of perfect digital copies of music performances provided to the user, who could then copy them rather than paying to own a CD.

This is a profoundly flawed piece of reasoning, but members of Congress (who at that time had no idea how this whole digital thing worked) accepted it at face value, and agreed that it was only fair that digital broadcasts be subject to additional copyright fees, to be determined by an impartial (in theory…) ruling by the Copyright Office.

Let’s reassess that reasoning in the light of 21st-century reality. Is there, in truth, a fundamental difference in the experience of an online listener to Radio Paradise and someone who was listening to identical programming on an FM station? Every one of our listeners - indeed, anyone who has ever clicked on a webcast as background music while working - knows the answer to that question. No! There is no difference whatsoever. Radio is radio, whether it comes in digital or analog form.

As for the recording angle, I would challenge any random group of RIAA lawyers, copyright judges, or members of Congress to listen to a digital recording of our radio station and a high-quality cassette recording of an analog FM station and tell which was which. I guarantee that they could not. The differences in quality are too subtle for all but the most discerning listener to notice.

The quality jump between AM and FM broadcasts was an order of magnitude more significant, yet the music industry managed to thrive their way through that transition. The advent of decent-quality cassette recorders in the 70s, coupled with stereo FM broadcasting, made it possible for anyone who wanted to to make copies of their favorite songs from the radio, with a quality not too different from the analog LPs sold at the time. Did that spell a death-knell for the music industry? Not hardly. The 70s and 80s saw a phenomenal growth in the sales of LPs and, later, CDs.

Ah, but the music industry thought that home music recording would destroy their sales, and lobbied unsuccessfully in the 1970s to cripple that technology. The same fear-based and misguided reasoning popped up again in the 90s, with the advent of digital recording and broadcasting, and this time the industry - flush with dollars earned after their earlier fears were proved groundless - succeeded in this attempt to preserve their bottom line at the expense of, well, pretty much every one else.

Crippling an exciting, groundbreaking industry like Internet radio is certainly not in the best interests of the public, nor that of musical artists, and not even - if history is any judge - of the music industry itself. Just as they were unable to see how the advent of home music taping actually spurred the sale of LPs and CDs, they are unable to tell exactly what impact Internet radio and other forms of digital media will have on the future of their industry - and to behave as if they do know, and for Congress to go along with them, is a grave error, and public disservice, that needs to be recognized and corrected.

So, if we are building a business - even a non-commercial business like Radio Paradise - by the use of copyrighted material, isn’t it fair that we pay for its use? Perhaps it is. But the fact remains that what we are doing does not differ in any substantive way from what a company like Clear Channel is doing, and to move forward under the fiction that such a distinction exists is neither fair nor rational.

Perhaps the most equitable solution is for all broadcasters - analog or digital, terrestrial, satellite, or Internet - to pay such royalties equally, just as they all pay more or less equally for the use of music compositions. This is the situation in many other places in the world, including most of Europe. The fact that the US broadcasting lobby has successfully out-spent and out-maneuvered the music industry on this issue should not be “balanced” by Internet radio royalty rates so high that they cripple that entire industry.

That kind of reform will take some time - time that people like my wife and myself just don’t have. We are hoping that we can, along with a small group of other independent webcasters, negotiate a separate settlement with the RIAA, similar to the one we negotiated in 2002. That agreement allowed us to operate by paying a royalty equal to 10% - 12% of our gross income in performance royalties. That has been enough of a burden for a struggling “mom & pop” operation like ours, but it has allowed us to survive since that point. However, that agreement has expired, and we are now liable for royalties, retroactive to the beginning of 2006, that are equal to approximately 125% of our income.

Trust me, it has been difficult to write those checks knowing that the foundation that the entire royalty structure is based on is a lie. Perhaps we will succeed in negotiating a new deal with them. If we do, it will probably be at a significantly higher rate - creating even more of a burden on small businesses like ours.

My question is this: why should we continue to be penalized for the mistakes made by Congress back in the 1990s?

MEANWHILE, a commenter Sunday to a Wired magazine blog post laid out what such a blatantly onerous ruling means for him and his webcasting business:

With my current properties and listeners I would end up paying $100,000.00 a month to stream. That's just to Sound Exchange!! This is the MOST outrageous ruling I have ever seen in my life. 60 Million Internet Radio listeners ever day are streamed, I don't think they are going to be too happy when their favorite stations go away. The whole thing is depressing and I personally have around 20,000 listeners currently. So for me, this will be the end if something isn't done to fix this. I know of 50 different broadcasters that are going to file Bankruptcy as soon as they can over this. It's a damn shame, we work SO hard 24 hours a day sometimes to break even with the current rates, and now they want a whole year of retroactive money! That for me will be the end, if I have to do that. I'm not looking for sympathy, just want people to know that its really hitting everyone hard. The trickle down effect will be tremendous. I can see Cogent Corp. going down, Small Hosting companies, digital music sales will be generated from out of the country, Amazon.com will loose tons of revenue. The measuring and stats companies will die. Andomedia, Webcastmetrics, and thousands of other companies based in the USA will go under. I hope we can do something about this. I'm beside myself, don't know what to do. Have a family and will have to work somewhere else and start over at a late age. It's horrible. Hope everyone can write their congress reps or let the CBR know what they have done.

LAWS WHICH ALLOW the big and powerful to target and victimize the small and relatively powerless are inherently immoral and unjust. This applies to human relations, and this likewise applies to free expression and commercial activity.

To quote the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his Letter From Birmingham Jail:

One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.” . . .

We presently face a situation where an American government professing to be "of the people, by the people and for the people" is anything but. Successive Republican -- and Democrat -- administrations and Congresses consistently have placed the interest of transnational corporations above the well-being of average Americans, not to mention vulnerable and poor Americans.

This pattern naturally has extended now to regulation of Internet broadcasting. Under the present unjust regulations and onerous fee structure, Clear Channel (or NPR, for that matter) will have the clout and the resources to cut a deal.

You won't. And I sure as hell don't.

So where does that leave us?

MY SUGGESTION for an initial way to fight back is to starve the bastards. In this case, the "bastards" would be the Recording Industry Association of America. This is the organization representing all the big labels, and this is the organization that was pushing the Feds to bleed the last drop of cash flow from the Internet radio industry.

It's also the organization suing college kids into oblivion for illicit music downloading.

The way to "starve the bastards" is to cut off THEIR cash flow. Don't buy their stuff.

Of course, that also would "starve" the good (independent music retailers, for example) along with the bullies. So, to mitigate the damage to places like Homer's in Omaha, I would suggest not buying any new music (unless it's on small, local labels) but buying the hell out of used CDs and used vinyl, which a great many independent music stores also deal in.

That way, money flows to the retailer but not a penny to the avaricious executives hiding in the shadow of their corporate lobby, the RIAA.

FIGHT. Fight now.

Big Brother is closer than you think.

Psalm 150

1 Praise ye the LORD. Praise God in his sanctuary: praise him in the firmament of his power.
2 Praise him for his mighty acts: praise him according to his excellent greatness.
3 Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise him with the psaltery and harp.
4 Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed instruments and organs.
5 Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.
6 Let every thing that hath breath praise the LORD. Praise ye the LORD.

Psalm 2

1 Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?
2 The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying,
3 Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.
4 He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.
5 Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.
6 Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.
7 I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.
8 Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.
9 Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.
10 Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth.
11 Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling.
12 Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him.

Ann Coulter: Fascist or jackass? You decide.

Now that conservatives are pretty much done raising hell (rightly) about John Edwards' former staff fascists, Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, they are confronted with an old dilemma of their own: What, oh what, to do with Ann Coulter?

After the right's resident bomb-thrower called the Democratic presidential candidate a "faggot" Friday, her audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference made their choice. They cheered and applauded her.

Which makes them -- not to mention Coulter (whom I consider both a fascist AND a jackass) -- not one bit better than Edwards' erstwhile Internet mavens, who were noted for using the same level of language about Christians that Coulter routinely spews . . . to the delight of the GOP's lynch mobs.

Coulter claims to be a Christian. I say she's more like a Pharisee with jackbooted overtones.

She throws around slurs like "faggot" like so much self-righteous confetti. But here's how the Lord she claims to follow dealt with her ilk long, long ago:

2
But early in the morning he arrived again in the temple area, and all the people started coming to him, and he sat down and taught them.
3
Then the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and made her stand in the middle.
4
They said to him, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.
5
Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?"
6
They said this to test him, so that they could have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger.
7
But when they continued asking him, he straightened up and said to them, "Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her."
8
Again he bent down and wrote on the ground.
9
And in response, they went away one by one, beginning with the elders. So he was left alone with the woman before him.
10
Then Jesus straightened up and said to her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?"
11
She replied, "No one, sir." Then Jesus said, "Neither do I condemn you. Go, (and) from now on do not sin any more."

YOU'LL NOTE that it wasn't the adulterous woman who raised hell until the Romans crucified Jesus. It was the people who used their religious faith for political ends, which is tantamount to making your political ends your true religious faith.

And that's anti-Christ, if not Antichrist.

Psalm 15

A Psalm of David.

1 LORD, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in thy holy hill?
2 He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart.
3 He that backbiteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil to his neighbour, nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbour.
4 In whose eyes a vile person is contemned; but he honoureth them that fear the LORD. He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.
5 He that putteth not out his money to usury, nor taketh reward against the innocent. He that doeth these things shall never be moved.

How do you say the Big Show is scary to the fascist oppressors in Mandarin?

Hey! Great news, y'all!

The parent site of the Revolution 21 podcast -- www.revolution21.org -- has been blocked by the Chinese government.

I found this out when, on a whim, I checked our URL on The Great Firewall of China, which tells you what sites are allowed -- or blocked -- in the People's Republic. For the life of me, I don't know why this is . . . Revolution 21 being blocked, that is.
What could be threatening to the Chinese government in our little old website? The subversive rock 'n' roll music? Jesus Christ? The Roman Catholic Church? Commitment to the dignity of all human life, from the womb until natural death?

Disdain of repressive regimes of every stripe?

I DON'T GET IT. But there we are -- banned. Blocked. Apparently unavailable in the workers' paradise of low wages, with the exception of the no-wage policy in the laogai.

But in typically inefficient bureaucratic bungling, there's a catch. If you avoid the Revolution 21.org domain, you can get to the blog and podcast in mainland China. Just go right here directly -- to www.revolution-21.blogspot.com.

Tee hee hee.

I'm too subversive for the web. Imagine that.

Double-U Bee Are AITCH!

WBRH

90.3 on your FM dial

I HAD FORGOTTEN that I'd even taken these 1981 photos until I recently went through old large-format negatives stashed away in a three-ring binder from a long-ago college photojournalism class.

I passed, by the way.

Apparently, I must have been killing time after my classes at Louisiana State University were done for the day that summer session in '81. And, obviously, I had my university-issue Yashica twin-lens reflex camera with me.

Not the greatest camera in the world for fast-paced, run-and-shoot photojournalism, but a FANTASTIC camera if you have a little time and crave detailed images. (Those 2-inch by 2-inch negatives allow fine detail and can be enlarged like nobody's business before the print starts to look grainy.)

SOOOOOOOO . . . that summer afternoon, I swung by Baton Rouge Magnet High School to say howdy to the folks at WBRH-FM, where I'd pulled my last student air shift a little more than two years earlier. When I was at 'BRH, the station operated with a "booming" 20 watts of effective radiated power at 90.1 MHz.

Sometime around when I took these pictures -- but don't quote me on that after 25-plus years -- the station was moving just up the dial to 90.3 FM and increasing its power to 200 watts. (Now the station runs with 20,000 watts and has a sister AM station, 1260 KBRH.)

And everything -- as you'll note from the photos -- was glorious analog. Tape, carts and vinyl. Period. CD players wouldn't hit the market (or the first radio studio) for another two years.

Now, WBRH has a format of "smooth" jazz during the day and classic jazz at night, with specialty programs on the weekends. Back in 1981, student DJs like James Edwards, shown here, would play classical and jazz during the morning and early afternoon, then rock out in late afternoon and at night.

WBRH is going to mark its 30th anniversary this September. Which will be the 29th anniversary of beginning my tenure there. (Sigh . . . didn't work up the nerve to take radio broadcasting until my junior year.)

MAYBE, JUST MAYBE they'll let me come back for one more DJ shift, so I can play Chicago Transit Authority's "Free Form Guitar" on the WBRH air just one more time. Or not.

Can anyone see from the last photo whether they'd finally taken down my joke promo copy for Painful Rectal Itch, the fictitious weekly progressive-rock program, sponsored by the makers of Preparation H? It used to be on the control-room window, above the mixing console.

Psalm 110

A Psalm of David.

1 The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.
2 The LORD shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule thou in the midst of thine enemies.
3 Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power, in the beauties of holiness from the womb of the morning: thou hast the dew of thy youth.
4 The LORD hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.
5 The Lord at thy right hand shall strike through kings in the day of his wrath.
6 He shall judge among the heathen, he shall fill the places with the dead bodies; he shall wound the heads over many countries.
7 He shall drink of the brook in the way: therefore shall he lift up the head.

Psalm 43

1 Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation: O deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man.
2 For thou art the God of my strength: why dost thou cast me off? why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?
3 O send out thy light and thy truth: let them lead me; let them bring me unto thy holy hill, and to thy tabernacles.
4 Then will I go unto the altar of God, unto God my exceeding joy: yea, upon the harp will I praise thee, O God my God.
5 Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God.

Eugenics on the QT

How else do you explain the practical effects of a health-care system that lets poor children die for want of a dentist who will deign to fix the teeth of . . . poor people.

And we thought Marie Antoinette was bad when she said "Let them eat cake" after being told the poor had no bread to eat.

Of course, letting the poor die ends up costing hundreds of times more than just getting on with it and fixing their damned teeth. That is, child's bad tooth abscesses, infection spreads to brain, child ultimately dies . . . but only after two emergency brain surgeries and a quarter-million-buck hospital bill that his momma sure as hell can't pay.

The Washington Post reports:

WASHINGTON - Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday.

A routine, $80 tooth extraction might have saved him.

If his mother had been insured.

If his family had not lost its Medicaid.

If Medicaid dentists weren't so hard to find.

If his mother hadn't been focused on getting a dentist for his brother, who had six rotted teeth.

By the time Deamonte's own aching tooth got any attention, the bacteria from the abscess had spread to his brain, doctors said. After two operations and more than six weeks of hospital care, the Prince George's County boy died.

Deamonte's death and the ultimate cost of his care, which could total more than $250,000, underscore an often-overlooked concern in the debate over universal health coverage: dental care.

Some poor children have no dental coverage at all. Others travel three hours to find a dentist willing to take Medicaid patients and accept the incumbent paperwork. And some, including Deamonte's brother, get in for a tooth cleaning but have trouble securing an oral surgeon to fix deeper problems.

In spite of efforts to change the system, fewer than one in three children in Maryland's Medicaid program received any dental service at all in 2005, the latest year for which figures are available from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The figures were worse elsewhere in the region. In the District, 29.3 percent got treatment, and in Virginia, 24.3 percent were treated, although all three jurisdictions say they have done a better job reaching children in recent years.

"I certainly hope the state agencies responsible for making sure these children have dental care take note so that Deamonte didn't die in vain," said Laurie Norris, a lawyer for the Baltimore-based Public Justice Center who tried to help the Driver family. "They know there is a problem, and they have not devoted adequate resources to solving it."

Maryland officials emphasize that the delivery of basic care has improved greatly since 1997, when the state instituted a managed care program, and in 1998, when legislation that provided more money and set standards for access to dental care for poor children was enacted.

About 900 of the state's 5,500 dentists accept Medicaid patients, said Arthur Fridley, last year's president of the Maryland State Dental Association. Referring patients to specialists can be particularly difficult.

Fewer than 16 percent of Maryland's Medicaid children received restorative services -- such as filling cavities -- in 2005, the most recent year for which figures are available.

For families such as the Drivers, the systemic problems are compounded by personal obstacles: lack of transportation, bouts of homelessness, erratic telephone and mail service.

The Driver children have never received routine dental attention, said their mother, Alyce Driver. The bakery, construction and home health-care jobs she has held have not provided insurance. The children's Medicaid coverage had temporarily lapsed at the time Deamonte was hospitalized. And even with Medicaid's promise of dental care, the problem, she said, was finding it.

When Deamonte got sick, his mother had not realized that his tooth had been bothering him. Instead, she was focusing on his younger brother, 10-year-old DaShawn, who "complains about his teeth all the time," she said.

DaShawn saw a dentist a couple of years ago, but the dentist discontinued the treatments, she said, after the boy squirmed too much in the chair. Then the family went through a crisis and spent some time in an Adelphi homeless shelter. From there, three of Driver's sons went to stay with their grandparents in a two-bedroom mobile home in Clinton.

By September, several of DaShawn's teeth had become abscessed. Driver began making calls about the boy's coverage but grew frustrated. She turned to Norris, who was working with homeless families in Prince George's.

Norris and her staff also ran into barriers: They said they made more than two dozen calls before reaching an official at the Driver family's Medicaid provider and a state supervising nurse who helped them find a dentist.

On Oct. 5, DaShawn saw Arthur Fridley, who cleaned the boy's teeth, took an X-ray and referred him to an oral surgeon. But the surgeon could not see him until Nov. 21, and that would be only for a consultation. Driver said she learned that DaShawn would need six teeth extracted and made an appointment for the earliest date available: Jan. 16.

But she had to cancel after learning Jan. 8 that the children had lost their Medicaid coverage a month earlier. She suspects that the paperwork to confirm their eligibility was mailed to the shelter in Adelphi, where they no longer live.

It was on Jan. 11 that Deamonte came home from school complaining of a headache. At Southern Maryland Hospital Center, his mother said, he got medicine for a headache, sinusitis and a dental abscess. But the next day, he was much sicker.

Eventually, he was rushed to Children's Hospital, where he underwent emergency brain surgery. He began to have seizures and had a second operation. The problem tooth was extracted.

After more than two weeks of care at Children's Hospital, the Clinton seventh-grader began undergoing six weeks of additional medical treatment as well as physical and occupational therapy at another hospital. He seemed to be mending slowly, doing math problems and enjoying visits with his brothers and teachers from his school, the Foundation School in Largo.

On Saturday, their last day together, Deamonte refused to eat but otherwise appeared happy, his mother said. They played cards and watched a show on television, lying together in his hospital bed. But after she left him that evening, he called her.

"Make sure you pray before you go to sleep," he told her.

The next morning at about 6, she got another call, this time from the boy's grandmother. Deamonte was unresponsive. She rushed back to the hospital.

"When I got there, my baby was gone," recounted the mother.

AND, ANYMORE, it's not just the poor who are being whipsawed by a health-care and insurance framework that's wildly out of control.

I mentioned, about two months ago, that I'd had a heart-attack scare that ultimately turned out to be (probably) a 24-hour bug that did a wonderful job of mimicking the chest pain of a coronary. Nevertheless, I ended up in the hospital emergency room for eight hours after the doctor on call at my primary-care provider told me to get myself there pronto.

I mean, if you think that maybe, possibly something could be a heart attack, you get to the hospital.
But what about when it turns out to be nothing big, but you've run up an almost $6,000 tab and your insurance carrier -- which for years has been going way up on premiums but way down on actual coverage -- pays what it's going to pay, and you're still stuck with a thousand-dollar hospital (and cardiologist) bill?

Do you think I'll think twice about being "better safe than sorry" next time I have chest pains? Damn straight I will. It's not like we have $1,000 to blow on what just might be a false alarm.

And we're a middle-class family. And we're insured. And I'm worried about the calculus of bankrupting family vs. "Could this radiating chest pain be the Big One."

So imagine the calculus if you're poor, you have no insurance because you barely even have a place to sleep, and it's hell on earth to find a doctor who'll treat po' folks.

I'm serious as a . . . uh . . . heart attack when I say the practical effects of how America administers health care to Americans is tantamount to eugenics -- let the poor and non-optimal die.

Just in the, ultimately, most convoluted and expensive manner imaginable.

'The station where your friends are'

KJAN

Radio Atlantic

I'M HOPING, from time to time, to post some pictures dealing with . . . whatever.

I was playing with the scanner the other day, and I took the opportunity to scan in some old negatives that never saw the light of . . . being turned into actual prints.

These pics are from a 1998 feature story I wrote about KJAN, 1220 AM, in Atlantic, Iowa. KJAN is one of a dying breed of radio stations -- intensely local, full-service (meaning airing music AND news) and run by humans instead of computers.
 
That a station such as KJAN -- "The station where your friends are" -- exists at all anymore is notable in an age of corporate ownership and "efficiencies." This, after all, represents radio the way it was in 1967 . . . or 1947 . . . or 1937, for that matter.

But KJAN's existence as a fully staffed, "full service" radio station in little Atlantic, Iowa, is amazing. And it's still that way in 2007.

Evening DJ (and music director) John Scheffler, shown here, is still at KJAN. He first got the "radio bug" when his Cub Scout troop toured the station in the late 1950s, and that's where he is today. (Note that he's still, in 1998, playing 45s . . . seven-inch vinyl to those under 35. Cool, eh?)

RADIO IS ABOUT PEOPLE. Radio is about public service. Radio is about community.

Or at least it used to be, in an age long ago and far away -- before the advent of Clear Channel, the "efficiency" of one staff running five stations and "Hold your wee for a Wii" contests.

It's good to know that at least one little 500-watt AM station in the middle of Iowa still is about those things.

Psalm 111

1 Praise ye the LORD. I will praise the LORD with my whole heart, in the assembly of the upright, and in the congregation.
2 The works of the LORD are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein. 3 His work is honourable and glorious: and his righteousness endureth for ever.
4 He hath made his wonderful works to be remembered: the LORD is gracious and full of compassion.
5 He hath given meat unto them that fear him: he will ever be mindful of his covenant.

6 He hath shewed his people the power of his works, that he may give them the heritage of the heathen.
7 The works of his hands are verity and judgment; all his commandments are sure.
8 They stand fast for ever and ever, and are done in truth and uprightness.
9 He sent redemption unto his people: he hath commanded his covenant for ever: holy and reverend is his name.
10 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: a good understanding have all they that do his commandments: his praise endureth for ever.

Demographics are destiny

And in the case of my benighted home state, Louisiana, that means that demographics are doom.

To steal a portion of a line from National Lampoon's Vacation, "If you hate it now . . . ."

To explain it all, Louisiana political blogger Emily Metzgar invites demographic analyst Elliott Stonecipher to her New Day Louisiana podcast. If you care anything about Louisiana -- even just as a struggling part of the greater American whole (for what it's worth) -- be forewarned that this is grim listening, demographically speaking.

Can you say "death spiral"? I knew that you could.

Lord help it, Louisiana could use a little deus ex machina-ing right now to save its dysfunctional butt.

When the 'hood looks like . . . David Duke

It's a pop quiz, boys and girls.

In what large-ish American city was this newspaper story published Monday? Remember, no fair Googling:

"It used to be real bad," said Ray Bazer, who has lived in the area for most of his 54 years.

"I've seen blacks get chased out of here. Nobody would sell their house to a black family, and the ones that rented them out wouldn't rent to blacks. Once, they built a duplex over on 14th Street, and a black family came and looked at it, and the next day it was ashes, burned down."

That arson, committed in 1981, leveled a nearly completed (city name deleted) Housing Authority scattered-site duplex under construction. In 1995, a black woman's car was tipped over and set ablaze at the same location.

But Bazer and other neighborhood residents, noting that there have always been a few black people living in the area, said the situation gradually had been improving.

Then came the Feb. 18 attack on Bob's Food Mart.

Police said two white men robbed the store at 5301 N. 16th St. They bound the hands and mouth of the manager - an Ethiopian immigrant - with duct tape, led him to the basement and fled. There was a boom that rattled neighbors' windows up to a block away, and then the store was on fire. The manager, Kassahun Goshime, escaped and survived. The store did not.

When the smoke cleared, what remained of Bob's Food Mart was a roofless shell of charred rubble with a crude message scrawled in crimson on its white back wall: "Go home" and a racial epithet.

Police say the attack may have been a racially motivated hate crime. The case remains under investigation, and no arrest has been made.

SURELY, it was somewhere in the racist South, right?

Naw, too obvious. Somewhere in some dying, nasty, ugly city in the gritty Northeast?

No?

OK, it was Mississippi, then. Definitely Mississippi. Maybe Louisiana . . . just on grounds of general dysfunctionality?

Nope.

TRY OMAHA. Relatively sedate, relatively affluent, relatively progressive and relatively civic-minded Omaha, Nebraska. The newspaper was the Omaha World-Herald. Here's more of the story:

The FBI is monitoring the Omaha police investigation to see whether a hate crime investigation is warranted. And black leaders spoke out against what they called the neighborhood's long-held "off-limits" attitude toward minorities.

Several neighbors said they hope it wasn't a hate crime. They said the spray-painted writing on the wall did not represent neighbors' attitudes overall, but they acknowledged that the graffiti and the arson looked bad.

"It just puts a blight on everything," said Doris Polsley, who has lived in the area for 58 years, since fourth grade. "It's not a reflection of the neighborhood. There are a few bigots, but not the majority."

Polsley and several other women happened to gather last week around homemade ice cream cake and other treats for their monthly ladies' fellowship meeting at Asbury United Methodist Church, across Fort Street from the burned store.

They said they felt bad for Goshime. Echoing many neighbors' opinions, they said he seemed like a nice man who was trying to run a business where one was badly needed.

The store, after decades as a neighborhood grocery, had been vacant for several years before Goshime and his sister, Tsedey, opened their business last year under the old name of Bob's Food Mart.

It was a rare retail business in one of Omaha's older neighborhoods, where homes mix with industry on flat land north of Carter Lake, roughly between 19th Street and Eppley Airfield.

The neighborhood is mostly low-income. Most streets in its eastern stretches are unpaved. Portions of the neighborhood have no sewers.

Cars stolen from around the city often end up in east Omaha, and vacant properties are quickly burglarized for salvageable metal, but there are few police calls to the neighborhood.

Area residents said most problems are settled between neighbors.

"If something goes missing from your garage or yard, you pretty much know where to go to look for it," Bazer said.

Omaha restaurateur and east Omaha resident Tom Foster said that five or six years ago, it was common to hear gunfire at night.

"I had to take bullets out of my roof and patch it, because people had been firing guns in the air," he said.

But gunfire is rare now, Foster said. He said he has been the victim of just one crime in his 15 years of living and commercial gardening in east Omaha. His car was stolen - after he had left the keys in it.

"It's a live-and-let-live kind of neighborhood," Foster said. "If people want to have a bunch of junked cars in their yards, you let 'em. If they want to have loud parties, you let 'em. If they have an unruly dog, you let 'em. There's enough room between our houses that it's not a problem."

He said the neighborhood is friendly - to people who are white.

(snip)

White neighbors said a few black families have moved in, but they are few enough that the white neighbors can point out the houses they occupy. Across the street from one black family's home, KKK graffiti is spray-painted on a metal utility box.

Imogene Gilbert, a longtime resident who owns nearly 30 houses in the neighborhood, said she would have no problem selling or renting to black people. But she said black people don't even come to look at houses on the market in the neighborhood.

That may have to do with the neighborhood's reputation. North Omaha leader LaVon Stennis Williams said she grew up hearing that, "If you're black, you didn't go to east Omaha unless you were going to Carter Lake for the Stone Soul Picnic - and then you went in numbers."

She said white people from the neighborhood literally would chase away black people who came down "horseshoe bend," a steep, winding stretch of street between Florence Boulevard and Carter Lake.

Omahan Michael Robinson said he experienced that himself and knew many others who did.

At age 13 or 14 in the late 1960s, he was riding bikes with friends from their north Omaha homes to goof around on the shore of Carter Lake. A white man with a St. Bernard in the back of his pickup met them at the bottom of the hill.

The man yelled racial slurs at the teenagers. He told them to get out.

"Then he set his dog after us," Robinson said.

Thomas Wells and other black employees at Omaha Paper Stock in the neighborhood said they had heard a lot of stories of that sort through the years. They said east Omaha isn't as bad now. They feel comfortable working there, going into neighborhood businesses and driving through the neighborhood.

"But you're not going to walk down here," Wells said.

BEFORE WE DECRY THE WOES of the black underclass -- and there are numerous woes to decry, and much work to be done (as opposed to merely decrying) -- it is a useful inoculation against Caucasian self-righteousness to contemplate what it looks like when the 'hood is white . . . like me.

Psalm 83

A Song or Psalm of Asaph.

1 Keep not thou silence, O God: hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God.
2 For, lo, thine enemies make a tumult: and they that hate thee have lifted up the head.
3 They have taken crafty counsel against thy people, and consulted against thy hidden ones.
4 They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.
5 For they have consulted together with one consent: they are confederate against thee:
6 The tabernacles of Edom, and the Ishmaelites; of Moab, and the Hagarenes;
7 Gebal, and Ammon, and Amalek; the Philistines with the inhabitants of Tyre;
8 Assur also is joined with them: they have holpen* the children of Lot. Selah.
9 Do unto them as unto the Midianites; as to Sisera, as to Jabin, at the brook of Kison:
10 Which perished at Endor: they became as dung for the earth.

11 Make their nobles like Oreb, and like Zeeb: yea, all their princes as Zebah, and as Zalmunna:
12 Who said, Let us take to ourselves the houses of God in possession.
13 O my God, make them like a wheel; as the stubble before the wind.
14 As the fire burneth a wood, and as the flame setteth the mountains on fire;
15 So persecute them with thy tempest, and make them afraid with thy storm.
16 Fill their faces with shame; that they may seek thy name, O LORD.
17 Let them be confounded and troubled for ever; yea, let them be put to shame, and perish:
18 That men may know that thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth.

* -- holpen is an archaic past participle of "help"

Psalm 58

EDITOR'S NOTE: Just in case you forgot, we continue today with Revolution 21's "Psalms for Lent" series.

To the chief Musician, Altaschith, Michtam of David.

1 Do ye indeed speak righteousness, O congregation? do ye judge uprightly, O ye sons of men?
2 Yea, in heart ye work wickedness; ye weigh the violence of your hands in the earth.
3 The wicked are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies.
4 Their poison is like the poison of a serpent: they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear;
5 Which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never so wisely.
6 Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth: break out the great teeth of the young lions, O LORD.
7 Let them melt away as waters which run continually: when he bendeth his bow to shoot his arrows, let them be as cut in pieces.
8 As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass away: like the untimely birth of a woman, that they may not see the sun.
9 Before your pots can feel the thorns, he shall take them away as with a whirlwind, both living, and in his wrath.
10 The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.
11 So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth.

Posted without comment . . .

. . . because I don't want to A) have to go to confession or B) have the Secret Service or FBI knocking on my door some morning soon.

ANYWAY, Newsweek tells a sad, sorry, infuriating, shameful -- and true -- tale in its latest issue. Here is but a small part of it:

After returning from Iraq in late 2005, Jonathan Schulze spent every day struggling not to fall apart. When a Department of Veterans Affairs clinic turned him away last month, he lost the battle. The 25-year-old Marine from Stewart, Minn., had told his parents that 16 men in his unit had died in two days of battle in Ramadi. At home, he was drinking hard to stave off the nightmares. Though he managed to get a job as a roofer, he was suffering flashbacks and panic attacks so intense that he couldn't concentrate on his work. Sometimes, he heard in his mind the haunting chants of the muezzin—the Muslim call to prayer that he'd heard many times in Iraq. Again and again, he'd relive the moments he was in a Humvee, manning the machine gun, but helpless to save his fellow Marines. "He'd be seeing them in his own mind, standing in front of him," says his stepmother, Marianne.

Schulze, who earned two Purple Hearts for wounds sustained in Iraq, was initially reluctant to turn to the VA. Raised among fighters—Schulze's father served in Vietnam and over the years his older brother and six stepbrothers all enlisted in the military—Jonathan might have felt asking for help didn't befit a Marine.

But when the panic attacks got to be too much, he started showing up at the VA emergency room, where doctors recommended he try group therapy. He resisted; he didn't think hearing other veterans' depressing problems would help solve his own. Then, early last month, after more than a year of anxiety, he finally decided to admit himself to an inpatient program. Schulze packed a bag on Jan. 11 and drove with his family to the VA center in St. Cloud, about 70 miles away. The Schulzes were ushered into the mental-health-care unit and an intake worker sat down at a computer across from them. "She started typing," Marianne says. "She asked, 'Do you feel suicidal?' and Jonathan said, 'Yes, I feel suicidal'." The woman kept typing, seemingly unconcerned. Marianne was livid. "He's an Iraqi veteran!" she snapped. "Listen to him!" The woman made a phone call, then told him no one was available that day to screen him for hospitalization. Jonathan could come back tomorrow or call the counselor for a screening on the phone.

When he did call the following day, the response from the clinic was even more disheartening: the center was full. Schulze would be No. 26 on the waiting list. He was encouraged to call back periodically over the next two weeks in case there was a cancellation. Marianne was listening in on the conversation from the dining room. She watched Jonathan, slumped on the couch, as he talked to the doctor. "I heard him say the same thing: I'm suicidal, I feel lost, I feel hopelessness," she says. Four days later Schulze got drunk, wrapped an electrical cord around a basement beam in his home and hanged himself. A friend he telephoned while tying the noose called the police, but by the time officers broke down the door, Schulze was dead.

How well do we care for our wounded and impaired when they come home? For a country amid what President Bush calls a "long war," the question has profound moral implications. We send young Americans to the world's most unruly places to execute our national policies. About 50,000 service members so far have been banged up or burned, suffered disease, lost limbs or sacrificed something less tangible inside them. Schulze is an extreme example but not an isolated one, and such stories are raising concerns that the country is failing to meet its most basic obligations to those who fight our wars.

The question of after-action care also has strategic consequences. Iraq marks the first drawn-out campaign we've fought with an all-volunteer military. In practice, that means far fewer Americans are taking part in this war (12 percent of the total population participated in World War II, 2 percent in Vietnam and less than half of 1 percent in Iraq and Afghanistan). Already, the war has made it harder for the military to recruit new soldiers and more expensive to retain the ones it has. If we fall down in the attention we provide them, who's to say volunteers will continue coming forward?

The issue of veterans' care jumped into the headlines last week when The Washington Post published a series about Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. The stories revealed decay and mismanagement at the hospital, and provoked shock and concern among politicians in both parties. "The doctors were fantastic," a Walter Reed patient, 21-year-old Marissa Strock, tells NEWSWEEK. "But some of the nurses and other staffers here have been a nightmare." Strock suffered multiple injuries, including broken bones, a lacerated liver and severely bruised lungs, when her Humvee rolled over an improvised explosive device on Nov. 24, 2005. She later had both her legs amputated. "I think a big part of [Walter Reed's problems] is they just don't have enough people to adequately handle all the wounded troops coming in here every day," she says. (Walter Reed did not respond to requests for comment about Strock's case.) The Pentagon responded swiftly to the Post series. It vowed to investigate what went wrong and immediately sent a repair crew to repaint and fix the damage to the aging buildings.

The revelations were especially shocking because Walter Reed is one of the country's most prestigious military hospitals, often visited by prominent politicians, including the president. But it is just one part of a vast network of hospitals and clinics that serve wounded soldiers and veterans throughout the country. A NEWSWEEK investigation focused not on one facility but on the services of the Department of Veterans Affairs, a 235,000-person bureaucracy that provides medical care to a much larger number of servicemen and women from the time they're released from the military, and doles out their disability payments. Our reporting paints a grim portrait of an overloaded bureaucracy cluttered with red tape; veterans having to wait weeks or months for mental-health care and other appointments; families sliding into debt as VA case managers study disability claims over many months, and the seriously wounded requiring help from outside experts just to understand the VA's arcane system of rights and benefits. "In no way do I diminish the fact that there are veterans out there who are coming in who require treatment and maybe are not getting the treatment they need," White House Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto tells NEWSWEEK. "It's real and it exists."

The system's shortcomings are certainly not deliberate; no organization is perfect. Some of the VA's hospitals have been cited as among the best in the country, and even in extreme cases, the picture is seldom black-and-white. Before he killed himself, Schulze was seen by the VA 46 times, VA Secretary James Nicholson told Congress this month. (He did not elaborate on what care Schulze received.)

Yet, as the number of veterans continues to grow, critics worry the VA is in a state of denial. In a broad sense, the situation at the VA seems to mirror the overall lack of planning for the war. "We know the VA doesn't have the capacity to process a large number of disability claims at the same time," says Linda Bilmes, a Harvard public-finance professor and former Clinton administration Commerce Department official. Last month Bilmes released a 34-page study on the long-term cost of caring for veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. She projects that at least 700,000 veterans from the global war on terror (GWOT) will flood the system in the coming years.

(snip)

How can the system improve? Bilmes, who authored the Harvard study, proposes at least one drastic change—automatically accepting all disability claims and auditing them after payments have begun. (The VA says that would be an irresponsible use of taxpayer money.) Other critics have focused on raising the VA's budget, which has been proposed at $87 billion for 2008. More money could go toward hiring more claims officers and more doctors, easing the burden now and preparing the VA for the end of the Iraq war, when soldiers return home en masse.

But veterans' support groups and even some former and current VA insiders believe there's a reluctance in the Bush administration to deal openly with the long-term costs of the war. (All told, Bilmes projects it could cost as much as $600 billion to care for GWOT veterans over the course of their lifetimes.) That reluctance, they say, trickles down to the VA, where top managers are politically appointed. Secretary Jim Nicholson, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who was chosen by Bush in 2005, tends to be the focus of this criticism.

The senior VA manager who did not want to be named criticizing superiors told NEWSWEEK: "He's a political appointee and he needs to respond to the White House's direction." Steve Robinson of Veterans for America levels the accusation more directly. "Why doesn't the VA have a projection of casualties for the wars? Because it would be a political bombshell for Nicholson to estimate so many casualties." The VA denies political considerations are involved in its budgeting or planning. Nicholson declined to be interviewed but Matt Burns, a spokesman for the VA, called Robinson's comments "nonsensical and inflammatory," adding: "The VA, in its budgeting process, carefully prepares for future costs so that we can continue to deliver the quality health care and myriad benefits veterans have earned."

Fratto, the White House deputy press secretary, says money is not the problem. He points out the VA has had a hard time filling positions in some remote parts of the country. "You need to find people who are trained in PTSD and other disorders that are affecting veterans and find those who are willing to go to places where they are needed."

As is often the case in America when government institutions falter, however, community groups are already stepping into the void. Veterans of Foreign Wars has advocates helping vets negotiate the VA bureaucracy, much the way health facilitators in the private sector help consumers get the most from their health insurance. Robinson, of Veterans for America, has pulled together teams of volunteers—physicians, psychologists, lawyers—who give vets free services when the local VA branch falls down. At his office recently, he was coordinating a traumatic-brain-injury screening with a private doctor for a veteran who'd been denied access to VA care. The fact that Americans are coming forward doesn't absolve the VA of its obligation to provide first-rate care for veterans. Most of the wounded's problems just can't be solved by private citizens and groups, no matter how well meaning. But it does serve to remind us that we should take better care of veterans wounded in the line of duty as they make their way home, and try to remake their lives.