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Montebello E-News

  August 30, 2009

Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth.

Will Rogers

 (Humor aside, is there a grain of truth in this?  Perhaps more than a grain?)

1.  Announcements

2.  Tell Me It Isn’t So

3.  About Montebello E-News and “My Montebello ”

This is so very useful and so sad.  There is a video, a public-service announcement, about texting and driving.  The video gets its message across well.  If you have tried to impress upon anyone the need to focus on the road when driving, this video might help make a strong impression:  http://www.break.com/index/dont-text-and-drive.html.

Hundredth anniversary kickoff.  Wednesday, September 9, 2009.  Montebello High School celebrates one hundred years!  Contact Denise Manookian Hagopian, montebelloreunions@msn.com, 323 728-2728.

Have lunch with us.  The Montebello Friends of the Library will be having a luncheon to install officers.  This is an opportunity to meet current members and meet our new officers for 2010.  Bring your friends and family to join the Friends of the Library.  Date:  August 29, 2009;  time: 1:00 pm  -  4:00 pm;  place:  La Costa Restaurant, 854 N. Garfield Ave., Montebello, CA 90640.  Cost is $16.00 per person, including tax, tip, food, beverages, dessert.  Please RSVP to Mary or Ruben at (323) 724-3709.

Yard sales.  Our quarterly citywide yard sales will take place from Friday, September 4, through Sunday, September 6, 2009.  For more information:  http://www.mymontebello.com/lists_tc_garagesales.htm.

Now a yard sale for a cause.  The Sierra Club's Save The Montebello Hills Task Force will be having a super yard sale Labor Day Weekend, Sept. 4 - 6.  As the campaign's Margot Eiser writes, "This is a wonderful opportunity to clear out some clutter while also helping to save Montebello 's last remaining open space."  Items may be brought on the days of the sale at the corner of La Merced Ave. and Hibiscus, Montebello . All proceeds will be donated to the Save The Hills cause.  To make arrangements for your donated items to be dropped off or picked up before the sale call or email Mike at (213) 507-9960, madrussian90640@yahoo.com, or Linda at (323) 810-6276, lindacuyama@aol.com.

Are we doing our part to avert this or are we averting our eyes?   As the world's population grows, competition for food, water and energy will increase. Food prices will rise, more people will go hungry, and migrants will flee the worst-affected regions.  That's the simple idea at the heart of the warning from John Beddington, the UK government's chief scientific adviser, of a possible crisis in 2030.  Specifically, he points to research indicating that by 2030 "a whole series of events come together":

• The world's population will rise from 6bn to 8bn (33%)
• Demand for food will increase by 50%
• Demand for water will increase by 30%
• Demand for energy will increase by 50%

He foresees each problem combining to create a "perfect storm" in which the whole is bigger, and more serious, than the sum of its parts. … http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8213884.stm

A slap to our American pride or a chance to demonstrate our pride?  The Healing of America:  A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care, by T.R. Reid.  My global quest demonstrated that America 's approach to health care is unique in the world for a good reason: No other country would dream of doing things the way we do. So it's clear that we can't fix the basic problems by tinkering at the margins of our existing system. Any proposal for "reform" that continues to rely on our fragmented structure of overlapping and often conflicting payment systems for different subsets of the population will not reduce the cost or complexity of American health care. Any proposal that sticks with our current dependence on for-profit private insurers - corporations that pick and choose the people they want to cover and the claims they want to pay - will not be sustainable.  To put it simply, the United States does well when it comes to providing medical care, but has a rotten system for financing that care. We need a health care system that permits the strong facets of American medicine to flourish, makes their benefits accessible to everybody, and does it in a cost-efficient way. As we've seen, this is not impossible. All other rich countries have found financing mechanisms that cover everybody and they still spend much less than we do. We've ignored those foreign models, partly because of "American exceptionalism" - the notion that the United States has nothing to learn from the rest of the world. ...

Bookmark this.  Our city now has an excellent calendar of city meetings and events.  www.cityofmontebello.com/cals/default.asp.  One thing missing is for our community organizations to come together, obtain the calendar design from the city, and agree among themselves to faithfully maintain, for the public, a separate master community calendar on the Internet.

Remember that not long ago the Washington Post compromised itself by trying to sell sponsorships. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/11/AR2009071100290.html.  In light of that, should the comparison below raise concern?  [Background.  The political battle over health-care reform is waged largely with numbers, and few number-crunchers have shaped the debate as much as the Lewin Group, a consulting firm whose research has been widely cited by opponents of a public insurance option.]

This is how a passage from an article appeared on July 22, 2009:

Lewin's clients include the government and private groups with a variety of perspectives, including the Commonwealth Fund and the Heritage Foundation. A February report contained information that could be used to argue for a single-payer system, the approach most threatening to private insurers, Sheils noted.  But not all of the firm's reports see the light of day. For example, a study for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association was never released, Sheils said.  "Let's just say, sometimes studies come out that don't show exactly what the client wants to see. And in those instances, they have [the] option to bury the study -- to not release it, rather," Sheils said. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/22/AR2009072202216.html

This is how the passage appeared the next day:

Lewin's clients include the government and groups with a variety of perspectives, including the Commonwealth Fund and the Heritage Foundation. A February report by the firm contained information that could be used to argue for a national system known as single-payer, the approach most threatening to insurers, Sheils noted.  But not all of Lewin's reports see the light of day. "Let's just say, sometimes studies come out that don't show exactly what the client wants to see. And in those instances, they have [the] option to bury the study," Sheils said. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/22/AR2009072203696.html