American Forum

MISSISSIPPI FORUM

By Elizabeth Crowell

There was some good news at the state Capitol in January.

The Joint Legislative Redistricting Committee met to announce their plans for passage of a redistricting plan this legislative session. It’s good to see that they are listening to Mississippians and are committed to adopting a timely and fair plan.

Once every 10 years, following the release of the U.S. Census Report, every state must draw new lines for the election of local, state and federal officials. A large part of the ability or inability of those elected officials to get anything done rests with the way district lines are drawn.


Click here to read the full article.

MISSISSIPPI FORUM

By Lynn Evans

For anyone planning to vote in the November elections, “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis should be required reading.

Author of “The Blind Side,” on which the Oscar-winning film was based, Lewis went to Wall Street to try to understand the causes of the great Subprime Mortgage Meltdown of 2007-2008 and the resulting government bail-out that has so angered the American public.

As Lewis makes clear, there were few people who understood what was happening inside the world of mortgage investments, but they were not the people in charge of either the investments themselves or the government and ratings oversight agencies that were supposed to protect ordinary consumers.


Click here to read the full article.

MISSISSIPPI FORUM

By Ellen Collins and Gregory Taylor

MISSISSIPPI FORUM

By Lynn Evans

MISSISSIPPI FORUM
By Marsha Meeks Kelly

In another life, I was a public school teacher. English, math and eventually “Skills for Adolescence” were the subjects that consumed my days along with an average of 140 seventh graders.

Every day I worked hard to meet the needs of my students in “inner-city” public schools in Mississippi. I remember the tears of the student who came to me to discuss her pregnancy and how she was going to tell her parents and whether she should get married at 13 years of age.

That year we started a “Peer Ears” program, a peer counseling program, and the next year we started survival skills classes called “Skills for Adolescence.” Too many pregnancies and too many sexually-transmitted diseases forced our school district to incorporate classes to educate our students about their life decisions.

Reading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report on the sexual and reproductive health of young people was depressing. So little progress has been made here! Twenty years ago several concerned Mississippians formed a statewide coalition to work with the legislature to ensure a comprehensive K-12 health education curriculum, but we still do not have even a pilot program offering students sex education, despite attempts to institute such a program in the 2009 legislative session.

Click here to read the full Op-ed

MISSISSIPPI FORUM
By Lynn Evans

The latest polls on health care reform find that most Americans support it, but they are also confused about what is in the proposals currently being worked on by Congress. No wonder. The amount of misinformation floating around is enough to confuse a rocket scientist.

If the American public is feeling left out of the debate on health care reform, it just might have something to do with the $1.4 million per day being spent on lobbying this single issue by the drug, health insurance and other health-related industries. In addition, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the health care industry has given members of Congress nearly $24 million in campaign contributions this year, on top of the $170 million they gave during the last election.

The drug manufacturers’ trade association, known as PHARMA, has spent more than $92 million lobbying Congress this year and is about to roll out a $150 million ad campaign to cut the discounts on drug products that are being planned to help reduce spiraling health care costs. Having enjoyed the largess of the Bush years, these companies are willing to spend big to keep their profits flowing.

Click here to read the full Op-ed

MISSISSIPPI FORUM
By Louis Miller

The Mississippi Sierra Club, AFL-CIO and NAACP strongly oppose Mississippi Power Company’s (MPCO) proposal to build a $2.4 billion dollar ‘clean coal’ plant and adjoining mine in Kemper County.

Mississippi Power’s arguments for the plant are built on three myths that have little or no basis in fact.

The truth is that the Kemper coal plant: 1. is unnecessary; 2. is astronomically expensive and will drive up customer bills; and 3. would be a major polluter.

Click here to read the full Op-ed

MISSISSIPPI FORUM
By Rachel Ann Hicks

Long lines at polling places made big headlines last election cycle. Though remarkable, many expected the unusual Election Day waits which were caused by a record number of Americans participating in the democratic process.

More surprising though were the pre-Election Day polling lines: due to the new national trend known as in-person early voting, thousands of Americans lined up to vote before Election Day.

Like voters in Arkansas, Georgia, and Tennessee, Mississippi should join in and adopt in-person early voting because it will improve democratic participation -- and, therefore, democracy -- in Mississippi.

Despite experiencing our highest voter turnout during the last presidential election cycle, Mississippi’s rate of voter participation still leaves us below the national average for 2008. Historically, the news is even worse. Turnout statistics from the last two midterm elections, 2002 and 2006, show Mississippi ranked last or next to last nationally. Although more Mississippians vote in our gubernatorial election years than in midterm election years, voter participation in these important state races lags that of states whose officials are elected in the same year as the president.

Low voter turnout sends a signal to our elected officials that they do not need to be accountable to all of their constituents. Unless all registered voters express their desires through the ballot box, we undermine a fundamental principle of American democracy -- that our government is “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Click here to read the full Op-ed

MISSISSIPPI FORUM
By Mary Margaret Bollinger

Those of us who experienced the 1993 health care debate should remember the “Harry and Louise fear of change” ads that were used to incite public opposition and defeat health care reform efforts.

Most of the changes the ads warned would come with the Clinton proposal, happened anyway: HMOs and insurance plans limited which doctors patients could see, what hospitals they could go to, and what treatments they could receive. Costs went up, more people lost coverage, Medicare costs continued to increase at an unsustainable rate, and everybody with coverage is paying more for it.

The same “fear” strategy is being used this time as our troubled economy, skyrocketing costs, and the sinking quality of American health care drive the current health care reform effort.

We worry that if everybody has access to health care -- universal coverage -- our own access to health care will somehow be lessened and we will pay more even though we know that everyone who currently has health insurance has seen those costs escalate faster than inflation for more than a decade. We worry that we will not have access to the newest tests and the latest procedures. We worry that we will not have access to the physicians we want to see -- even though that access is limited now as Mississippi has the lowest doctor-to-person ratio in the country.

The best argument for universal coverage is that, by providing more preventive care, it will help drive health care costs down by keeping people healthier in the long run. The man with undiagnosed and untreated high blood pressure dramatically increases his chances of a crippling stroke. The child with asthma whose parents cannot afford the medication or regular doctor visits is more likely to miss school and to end up with an expensive hospitalization. The woman who puts off a mammogram because her insurance does not cover it or she has no health insurance dramatically increases the chances that breast cancer will kill her because treating the disease when it can first be detected is cheapest and has the best odds for success.

Click here to read the full Op-ed