Undermining the Idea GateKeepers

Love this interview with Levar Burton on Building 43 – Communities without Gatekeepers

Broadcast  media & commercial communication are one-way conversations bundled with sales messages, actors, branding, and entertainers. Often it is marketing made to look like authentic human interaction.

he goal of most mass media communication is to generate revenue.

When you unpack Broadcast media messaging we find it is often a partial hollow representation of human communication. In the age of mass media, companies and large organizations have controlled, or at the very least influenced, the messages that people receive in the broadcast channel.

Mass media messages have been tightly controlled. With revenue protection in mind,  the distribution channel owners and funders have acted as the message gatekeepers. 

No more.

Check out LeVar’s thoughts in the video above. He has has been a champion for challenging people to think, discover, and ask “what if?” for decades now.

In the Web 2.0 Social web, we are increasingly able to find and choose messages that make sense and resonate; conversations that enhance our perspective and our understanding. And ironically, it is technology that is extending our authentic conversations beyond our local reach.

The many-to-many Social Web now matches and extends beyond the reach of one-way broadcast media.

More than ever we are able to choose an alternative to the status quo of how we hear, understand, and discuss issues that involve all of us. With broadcast messaging declining and non-commercial communication increasing, we are finding connections with new people and forming new communities – along the way uncovering those things that make us more alike than different. We are able organize around different commonalities and undertsandings. It is here that we are collectively remembering that there is more to life than selling, consumption, and commercial agendas.

The hegemony of the idea gatekeepers is eroding every passing day.

And it is in this sharing of stories of being human, LeVar Burton says, we have an opportunity for imagination – An opportunity to say “what if …?”

We should not be afraid of, “more accountability and integrity in our communicating.” That, friends, is an starting point and ideal worth hollering about.

Insurance Company Executive Salaries 2007

This is part of what a for-profit healthcare system gets you. Behaviors are always incented to create net proft. That’s expected in business - however when profit is made from reducing  cost by denying  health care, what that really means is people are Broken.

Here are the 2007 insurance company executive salaries:

 ANNUAL COMPENSATION 2007:

* Ronald A. Williams, Chair/ CEO, Aetna Inc., $23,045,834
* H. Edward Hanway, Chair/ CEO, Cigna Corp, $30.16 million
* David B. Snow, Jr, Chair/ CEO, Medco Health, $21.76 million
* Michael B. MCallister, CEO, Humana Inc, $20.06 million
* Stephen J. Hemsley, CEO, UnitedHealth Group, $13,164,529
* Angela F. Braly, President/ CEO, Wellpoint, $9,094,771
* Dale B. Wolf, CEO, Coventry Health Care, $20.86 million
* Jay M. Gellert, President/ CEO, Health Net, $16.65 million
* William C. Van Faasen, Chairman, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Mass., $3 million plus $16.4 million in retirement benefits
* Charlie Baker, President/ CEO, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, $1.5 million
* James Roosevelt, Jr., CEO, Tufts Associated Health Plans, $1.3 million
* Cleve L. Killingsworth, President/CEO Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, $3.6 million
* Raymond McCaskey, CEO, Health Care Service Corp (Blue Cross Blue Shield), $10.3 million
* Daniel P. McCartney, CEO, Healthcare Services Group, Inc, $1,061,513
* Daniel Loepp, CEO, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, $1,657,555
* Todd S. Farha, CEO, WellCare Health Plans, $5,270,825
* Michael F. Neidorff, CEO, Centene Corp, $8,750,751

21ST CENTURY PRINCIPLES FOR SMART GROWTH

Short term growth where the objective is to quickly extract resources or capital is a short sighted dead-end. Let’s hope the conjunction of utility computing, the social network, and the rapid conversion to Cloud flatten out the relationships between consumer and business; fostering new efficiencies and tighter collaboration.  A long view of business relationships goes beyond quarterly gains, and monthly quotas, what Rick Schaefer and Rick Cummings teach – It is always a business of people, and not parts.

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/01/davos_discussing_a_depression.html

1. Outcomes, not income. Dumb growth is about incomes – are we richer today than we were yesterday? Smart growth is about people, and how much better or worse off they are – not merely how much junk an economy can churn out. Smart growth measures people’s outcomes – not just their incomes.

Top 5 Health Insurance Companies Net Profit 2007

http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS187049+15-Jul-2008+PRN20080715

HEALTH INSURANCE COMPANY PROFITS IN 2007:
• UnitedHealth Group — $ 4.654 BILLION. UnitedHealth Group owns Oxford, PacifiCare, IBA, AmeriChoice, Evercare, Ovations, MAMSI and Ingenix, a healthcare data company
• WellPoint — $ 3.345 BILLION. Wellpoint owns BLUES across the US, including Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Wisconsin, Empire HealthChoice Assurance, Healthy Alliance, and many others
• Aetna Inc. — $ 1.831 BILLION
• CIGNA Corp — $ 1.115 BILLION
• Humana Inc. — $ 834 million

According to the data, the five largest groups based on total revenue reported to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) and the  California Department of Managed Health Care were WellPoint, Inc., the Kaiser Family Foundation, UnitedHealth Group, Health Care Services Corporation and Aetna.  Among them, net premiums written grew an average of nearly 6 percent even as total members declined by almost 2 percent.  Total revenue and net premiums written for the health industry as a whole grew 8.7 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively.
The five largest publicly traded groups by total revenue reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission — UnitedHealth Group, WellPoint, Inc., Aetna, Humana, Inc. and the CIGNA Corporation — saw an average total revenue increase of 9.4 percent in 2007.

Common Sense and My Kids’ Indoctrination

The furor coming from right-wing camps about the POTUS speech at Wakefield High School has completely befuddled and frustrated me as a Parent, Texan and US citizen. It’s as if we have allowed our common senses to be over-run by a small group spouting a vulgar coarse rhetoric. It smacks of McCarthyism and HUAC.

Personally it makes me sick. It makes my bones ache. It makes me suck my teeth with disdain at those who willingly tear apart discourse, institutions, & government. Shameful.

A friend, @lettergirl, wrote a blog post that captured what many of us parents have been thinking, and searching for a way to express. I have included it below along with the speech Obama delivered to American students today.

May reason, civil discourse, mutual respect, and the center hold … before we harden into rigid sides, with jaws clenched, staring into the unfamilar future of  internal dischord and looming separation.

From Dawn at http://notgoingpostal.com/2009/09/07/indoctrination/

I admit it. I’m worried this week about my children being indoctrinated.

Within a mile of our house, we have a McDonald’s, a Taco Bell, Taco Cabana, KFC, Jack in the Box, DQ and a Sonic. They can sing the commercials or tell you the slogans of pretty much all of them, and know at any given time what the Happy Meal/Wacky Pack/Cabana Kids Meal prize is.

The other girls in Middle School indoctrinate my daughter about the need to be popular, the importance of names like Aeropostale, why it’s just not cool to take a shower after gym, and why having a “boyfriend” is important for a sixth-grader.

The boys in elementary school tell my son only nerds have to play E-rated video games, and tell him the Halo and Doom and Mortal Kombat are way more fun than Wii Sports.

My kids are indoctrinated by Hannah Montana, the Wizards of Waverly Place, the Transformers, Ben 10 and a sponge who lives in a pineapple under the sea.

Sure, I swim against these tides. It’s what parents do. We teach our children our values, share our wisdom, encourage them to think for themselves. I fight indoctrination tooth and nail.

But this?

Obama’s Speech to School Children

This “indoctrination?” I say this.

Bring. It. On.

Take the bully pulpit, Mr. President.

Tell my son, whose birth family was torn apart by addiction and violence, “Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.”

Tell my daughter, struggling with the pressure to conform, worried about popularity, that ”Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is,”

If their schools lack the courage to stand up to the fearmongers and won’t play your address in the classrooms, we will read it at home. Because sir, I need all the back-up I can get. We’ve got a great support system. Good neighbors, committed teachers, a church family, grandparents, lots of friends who share our values.

But if you are willing to take time away from wrestling with our nation’s present struggles, and encourage the guardians of our country’s future? Mr. President, we don’t agree on everything. But in this, you be my guest.

Indoctrinate away.

 

National Deficit as a Percentage of GDP

CBO – Projected Federal Spending

The federal budget is on an unsustainable path, primarily because of the rising cost of health care.

(Percentage of gross domestic product)

http://www.cbo.gov/publications/collections/health.cfm

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Voter Registration

With the embarrassing and possibly illegal actions from a small group of Acorn employees, I am compelled to repost these thoughts from the 2008 Presidential Election. I’ve registered several 1000′s of voters in my lifetime. And I never did it for money. I did it because I believed in people and open ended democracy. Even more so today, I remain committed to ideals and concepts that are often bigger than the individual self.

– Brian 

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every thing is possible

I always had faith in the idea that filling the ballot box was the best way to change courses. It’s hard work. It’s non-violent force of collective wills.

 The beauty of America is a our ability to change directions; not locked down by the baggage of history, and the trajectory of that history. Our society has a built in mechanism of change. We are not forced to keep living the errors and mistakes of the yesterday’s decisions. We avoid anachronistic systems, we avoid extinction … we change, adapt, and improve.

Thesis, Anti-thesis, Synthesis.

 Rinse, repeat.