There is a significant portion of the youth living in the North Omaha community that is beyond hope of anything better in life than what you see on the news on a nightly basis. Shooting, robberies, thefts, beatings, killings, car chases.

What’s worse, everyone reading this who is familiar with the situation in North Omaha would probably agree. We don’t expect anything better, because we see what’s going on. Nobody with any real choice in the matter would live in those areas with those kids. Why live somewhere where bullets are flying? Why live somewhere where if you have something nice, the odds are that someone else will just try to take it?

As a little mental exercise, let’s make a parallel statement, such as: “Elkhorn’s youth are destined to fail” or “Millard’s youth are destined to fail” or even “South Omaha’s youth are destined to fail.” Do any of those statements resonate with the ring of truth? Do those statements make someone nod in agreement?

Nope. It’s North Omaha.

Some people would like to blame Omaha Public Schools for North Omaha’s problems. After all, 52 schools in the Omaha Public School system have been labeled as low achieving schools. Those darn teachers and administrators are doing it all wrong! They’re not teaching our kids! They’re not leading them by the hand towards success! No child should be left behind! Let’s shuffle around the principals and see if that solves the problem!

Level the worst high school in OPS. Take the best high school in Millard and rip it out of the ground. Shake out all the students while keeping the entire staff down to the janitor. Keep all the books, all the programs, all the equipment and drop the whole thing right in the middle of North Omaha. All the advantages that the Millard students get are now the same advantages enjoyed by Omaha Public School students.

Wait a year and test again. Compare the data for the two years and I’ll bet that you won’t see a single change in test scores or graduation rates. You will still have at least half the student population in the school dropping out or being transferred to the “alternative” high school. You’ll have another sizable portion of the students biding their time until graduation. And then you’ll have your last 20-25% or so who will succeed.

The problem with North Omaha youth isn’t the schools. The problem isn’t the teachers, the principals, the programs, the buildings or the parking.

The problem with North Omaha youth can be boiled down to one thing: the community’s acceptance of thug culture.

What can a teacher do when her thug students just don’t want to learn?

Teacher:

D’Angelo, I’d like to give you a grade for this assignment, but you didn’t finish it. If you finish it, I can give you a grade. Can you finish it, please?

Student in North O:

Fuck no. It’s a stupid assignment. I ain’t gonna do it.

At this point, what tools does a teacher have? Does the teacher go to the parents? What if the parents don’t care?

Teacher:

Mrs. Love, I’ve been trying to get hold of you for a few weeks now, because we need to talk about D’Angelo’s progress in class. He isn’t completing his assignments and because of that, I’m unable to give him the grades necessary for him to pass. Is there something we can do to help motivate him?

Mrs. Love:

I can’t help you. He doesn’t listen to me. He’s the school’s problem.

The kids in North Omaha are destined to fail until the parents and community in North Omaha decide otherwise. It should be a very simple concept, but too many people want to confuse the issue and throw racial politics into the mix.

This is not an impossible problem. There are solutions. It all depends on how badly the community wants things to change. Right now, it doesn’t. It may never get to that point.

If they’d like some ideas to get them started, however, here are some possible ideas for change:

Uniforms – Make everyone dress the same
Get em young – It’s far too late to try to fix high school students
Dorms – Give the students a place of their own to live and eat
Sexually segregated schools – The fewer distractions the better
Vocational Programs – College isn’t the best choice for everyone. An electrician or carpenter who has been working for 5 years makes more than a teacher, degreed journalist, or public service worker.
Filter out the bad kids and concentrate on the good ones – Take the real troublemakers and kick them out. School should be for those who want to learn.

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With Omaha’s Mayor Suttle attempting to re-write the contracts signed in years gone by that detail medical care for retired city workers, the focus on making everyone pay their fair share has come to the fore. On broadcast news station message boards, Facebook and other social media, there has been a considerable call for people to “pay their fair share.”

I’m all in favor of being fair. Fair is good.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that the powers that be have skipped over a large segment of Omaha’s population when they looked for ways to level out our sinking budgets – our county inmates.

What happens now is that an experienced inmate comes into the jail and immediately fills out a kite to see a dentist, for free. Then the inmate usually fills out a kite saying their shoulder is hurting from when they were arrested in order to get a free 30-day prescription for Motrin. If the inmate has any phantom aches or pains, they write a kite to get on sick call to talk to a doctor, for free.

Right now, Douglas County does not charge incarcerated inmates for medical care in any way, shape or form. Inmates, including the ones who shoot your neighbors, kill your dogs, molest your children and run over people crossing the street, get all medical care provided to them absolutely free while they’re in the Douglas County jail.

But how can someone without a job reasonably be expected to pay a co-pay to see a doctor,” you ask? “That’s inhumane,” you scream!

Well, before we call the ACLU in to Douglas County to head off conversation on this topic, let’s look at how other jails run things. Do other jails and prisons charge for health care? Yes, absolutely. There are many, many more jails and prisons that charge a co-pay when an inmate sees a doctor than those jails and prisons that do not. Take a look at Polk County, Nebraska as an example. This is from their inmate handbook:

Polk County Health Care Fees
A co-pay fee will be charged to inmates who sign up for sick call and are seen by a physician or physician’s assistant, or receive a prescribed medication. Federal inmates will be billed for co-pays after 30 days in custody. Medical care is provided to all inmates regardless of finances.
The co-pay fee schedule is as follows:

Sick call – $5.00
Physician, Physician’s assistant, Psychiatrist visit -$10.00
Dental Visit -$10.00
Prescription Medications -$5.00
Mental Health Visit – $5.00

Note: Due to the rising cost in the medical field, the co-pay fees may change. If this change occurs, a notice will be placed in the housing units.

It is a federal rule that inmates incarcerated in United States jails must have access to health care despite their finances. That means an inmate without the money on his or her inmate account to cover a co-pay or a prescription bill will never be charged. If Douglas County started charging their inmates co-pays and prescription fees, indigent inmates in Douglas County would continue to receive their medical treatment and drug prescriptions absolutely free.

The only people that this would affect are the inmates who have money on their inmate accounts. And there are a lot of inmates with money on their accounts.

With that money, they’d be forced to make a series of decisions:

Do I want to go see the dentist, or do I want to buy 4 candy bars and a bag of chips?
Do I want to pay $5 for that 30-day Motrin prescription or do I want to buy some Tylenol off commissary?
Do I want to go see the doctor for a sprained ankle I twisted while playing basketball in my shower shoes, or would I rather save that money for something else?

In addition to teaching inmates to make good financial decisions, charging inmates co-pays would dramatically reduce the amount of frivolous kite-writing to the Douglas County medical department for every ache and pain. All those kites have to be answered and returned. That’s a lot of man-hours wasted every day.

Now, instituting a program to charge inmates for medical visits and prescription drugs may not be the answer to the area’s budget problems – but it might be a step in the right direction. It’s something that should at least be on the table for discussion.

Now, so you don’t think I’m selling you sunshine and roses, there are some facilities who have reported problems with co-pay systems for inmates. For example:

The Pinellas County Jail will no longer charge an $8 co-payment to inmates seeking medical care, forfeiting an estimated $50,000 in annual revenue from a policy that jail officials said created more problems than profit.

The jail used co-pays to help offset millions of dollars in medical bills and discourage requests for unnecessary treatments or bogus ailments. Most medical insurance does the same thing.

In 1995, when the co-pays began, jail officials told the Times that the charges had cut demand for care in half, an early sign that they were clearing waiting rooms of all but those with real medical need.

But in the years since, said Pinellas County Sheriff Jim Coats, the co-pays have bred hostility among inmates and bogged down staff with paperwork, making the tens of thousands in lost cash “not even worth it.”

“The administrative reviewing and tracking of all that cost us more than we make,” said Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Bob Gualtieri. “The bang wasn’t worth the buck.”

After further review of the information available, I have yet to see this example as anything other than an isolated case. And who knows? Maybe there were extenuating factors involved in the Pinellas County system’s failure to make it work. Maybe someone was in love with paperwork for paperwork’s sake. Maybe someone couldn’t figure out a good way to automate or computerize the process and eliminate the wasted time and frustration involved when the people involved in running a system don’t like the system. Who knows?

What we do know is that there are thousands of jails and prisons nationwide that do have a copay system in place, one that works.

So why don’t we?

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As I’m sure you’ve seen on all the major media outlets, the Tea Partiers have been going on and on ad nauseum about “protecting their constitutional freedoms,” “fighting unconstitutional government programs” and “resisting a government that oversteps its authority.”

They’re really just a bunch of negative bigots!

Who else but a negative bigot would think that the healthcare bill, which will give millions of poor people access to free healthcare, is a bad thing?

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves. – William Pitt (1783)

Who else but a negative bigot would be opposed to the only fair institution – the United States Government – regulating the automobile and healthcare industries? Hell, why would they be opposed to the government regulating every industry?

The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt, are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife. – Thomas Jefferson (1821)

The majority vote of the people gives the moral right and the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce gives them the legal right to do it! You can’t trust the corporations, they’re only in it for the money!

On every unauthoritative exercise of power by the legislature must the people rise in rebellion or their silence be construed into a surrender of that power to them? If so, how many rebellions should we have had already? – Thomas Jefferson (1782)

Who else but a negative bigot would be opposed to introducing a fair cap-and-trade system that could only possibly lead to reduced carbon emissions and to mankind finally saving the planet?

I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. – Thomas Jefferson (1824)

Who else but a negative bigot wouldn’t want to give their fair share so that people who are less lucky and less fortunate can share in the wealth? Those less-fortunate people have children, and by denying those people their fair share of the wealth of this country, you’re denying their children the opportunity to better themselves!

The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale. – Thomas Jefferson (1816)

What makes these “patriotic,” racist, corporate slaves think that they’re any wiser than Nancy Pelosi or Barney Frank? By what right do they have to go against the will of the majority? Democrats won the last election, and to the winners go the spoils, after all.

The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government. – Patrick Henry

We’ve been making huge strides since Obama was elected! We’ve ensured that government will have the power to really push equality and justice for everyone! Everyone who needs to be taken care of, will, and if you’re not on board, you’re just a greedy, racist bigot.

Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. – George Washington

And why do the tea-partiers think they’re so special? What makes these tea-bagging fascists think that they have all the right answers?

If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen. – Samuel Adams

People trust government to fix the roads, defend the country, provide legal justice and run our schools. We all trust the government to do those things, so why do the tea-baggers close their eyes, plug their ears and scream, “No, no, no” when the idea of the government stepping in and fixing problems comes up?

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. – Thomas Jefferson

All this talk of rebellion and “fighting back” against the government is bullcrap. Nobody will do anything. The army has the guns and missles and tanks. They’ll maintain order if the Tea Partiers ever get out of line and make sure the trains run on time.

What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. – Thomas Jefferson (1787)

There aren’t more than a handful of corporate ass-kissers in the tea-bagging party. Vote Democrat or Republican in November 2010, don’t waste your vote on the Tea Party!

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Liberty, the ability for the individual to act as he or she sees fit, without outside coercion, has been dead for a century or more, so why do we keep playing lip service to it?

Let’s look at the recent health care debate for a minute. I won’t take long.

You have one very large group of people who feel everyone deserves to be taken care of when they are sick. You have another very large group of people who feel that they’re not entirely comfortable with the idea of working hard to pay to take care of someone else.

The first group has the best interests of everyone at heart. They want everyone to be taken care of when they are sick, or injured, or in pain. They don’t want to pass people on the street, dying of appendicitis because they cannot pay a doctor to fix the problem. They don’t want people to lose their homes because they paid a doctor to fix a problem and now can’t afford to pay the doctor.

The second group doesn’t want any of that either. However, they also don’t feel that they should have money taken out of their pockets to pay to fix the situation. The second group respects liberty and hates coercion. They feel that perhaps some of the people who are in bad situations are in bad situations healthcare-wise because of bad choices that they made. They realize that some people who are in bad situations healthcare-wise because of circumstances beyond their own control.

Sometimes people from both groups help those less-fortunate people with money, time or other resources, but not enough to completely alleviate the problem.

So the first group has decided that everyone is now going to chip in and work for a portion of the year in order to try to fix the problem of some people not being able to afford to go to a doctor. This, over the objections of the second group, who is just as numerous as the first.

So who is right? Who is moral in this situation?

The answer to that question lies in what is more important to the people involved in the argument. Is either liberty or security more important?

The only honest way to phrase that argument is to put it in the starkest terms – are we willing to all be slaves so that some of us will have an easier time of it?

The most important aspect of liberty is the presence and enforcement of property rights. You have the right to earn what you can as best as you can. You have the right to do nothing if you choose. You do not have the right to take someone else’s property, or time, because once someone is having their property (or time) unwillingly confiscated for someone else’s good, that person is a slave for the portion of time that it took to earn/build that property.

If you infringe on property rights you have decided that in order to preserve the life and liberty of X, you will violate the life and liberty of Y. And once you go down that road, it means you don’t really care about life or liberty – you just favor X over Y for some reason.

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I read today that in Australia during the years of 2005 and 2006, the top 20% of households in that country held around 61 per cent of total household wealth, with an average net worth of $1.7 million per household. In comparison, the poorest 20% of households in Australia had an average net worth of $27,000 – with only about 1% of Australia’s total household wealth concentrated in that group.

Oh Noes!

When you take that fact, and then consider that the 225 richest people in the world have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion – which is equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 per cent – you might get the idea that there’s something wrong. Things aren’t equal. Oh noes!

What’s worse is that the poorest countries in the world are themselves becoming more unequal, if you believe the World Bank’s report that 78% of poor countries between 1990 and 2004 experienced a growth in inequality. Over the same period, an extra 60 million people were living on less than $1 a day in sub-Saharan Africa.

Is that fair?

A survey was recently completed by a Japanese news network that revealed 72% of the Japanese respondents “sense economic disparity.” This is sad, because the Japanese educational system is held up as a model for the rest of the world, and 28% of the Japanese respondents were either idiots or too wrapped up in their anime-tentacle-rape-porn to think clearly. I expected better from Japan.

From the report:

Seventy-two percent of Japanese believe economic wealth is not distributed fairly, according to an opinion poll of people in 20 countries conducted by The Yomiuri Shimbun in conjunction with the BBC.

Only 16 percent of Japanese respondents said they believed wealth was distributed fairly.

The French were the least content with the distribution of wealth, with 84 percent saying it was unfair. France was followed by Russia and Turkey (both 77 percent), Germany (76 percent) and the Philippines (74 percent).

With Japan sixth on the list, it is clear the public strongly perceives a disparity between rich and poor.

A majority of people in 17 of the 20 nations saw the distribution of wealth as unfair. In the United States, 41 percent said the distribution was fair, and 55 percent said it was unfair. In Britain, the figures were 39 percent and 57 percent, respectively, and in China, 44 percent and 49 percent.

The country with the most people believing the distribution of wealth to be fair was Australia, with 64 percent.

Canada also had a majority – 58 percent – that believed the distribution was fair, as did India, with 44 percent responding it was fair and 27 percent saying the spread of wealth was unfair.

I would imagine that the people who responded to that poll with the feelings that the distribution of wealth is unfair would like to see that wealth distributed more evenly. When asked why they feel that they were entitled to a portion of that wealth, I’m sure that they’d explain that the inequality of wealth was inherently unjust.

I came across a very interesting post by an individual who adores Marxism and the general idea of fixing the inequality of injustice by ripping from the haves and re-dispersing those gains to the have-nots. Here is a sample:

The reality is that all wealth, or value as Marx called it, is created by labour. Workers, who don’t own or control any of the means of production – the machinery, buildings etc. – have to sell their ability to labour to those who do, the capitalists. For this they get a wage. But the capitalist gets more value out of workers’ labour than the wages paid to them – this is where profits come from, and is what Marxists mean by exploitation.

In other words, there aren’t just some who are rich and some who aren’t, the rich get rich at our expense. It is our work that produces all the wealth, but it is those who don’t work, the capitalists, who get to own, control and pocket the vast majority of that wealth. It is this class division that is the basis for all inequality.

Mr. CEO makes a million dollars a year, which is 20 times what his average worker makes during that same year. Is that unfair? Yes! Is it injust? Not unless he’s got those workers chained to a desk.

Ever heard this exchange before?

That’s not fair!

Life’s not fair.

You know what? They’re both right.

We live in a rational world. Because we live in a rational world, we’re not equal. There’s no way around it, really.

Everyone I know has differences. Everyone you know has differences.

Everyone has different talents and weaknesses. Everyone has different tolerances for hard work. We all have different backgrounds. We all have different lifestyle choices.

We all have something different that we bring to the table. That’s just how it is, and it will not ever change.

Ever.

Because everyone has something different that they bring to the table, everyone takes away from the table in a different way. Some will walk away with more than others. That’s just how it is.

Is that unfair? Sure.

Is it injustice? Not a chance.

Tiger Woods hits a golf ball a lot better than I do. As a result, Tiger Woods has made a billion dollars. Do I wish I had a billion dollars? Hell yeah! Is it unfair that he has a billion dollars and I don’t? YES! Is it injustice? Well, no. He had a talent, was in the right place at the right time, and is walking away from the table with a hell of a lot of money.

I’m colorblind. That’s not fair. It’s kept me from doing a lot of things I’ve wanted to do. I’ll never be called upon to defuse a bomb left on a bus, especially if it has green and red wires. Is it an injustice? No, that’s just the way it is.

Donald Trump was born to a family that had a lot more resources than my family did. Totally not fair. Unjust? No.

That dude in his wheelchair, rolling around outside, was born with no legs. I can walk. Not fair. Injustice? No.

It’s not an injustice that Kobe Bryant is taller than me. It’s not an injustice that you have to wear glasses and other people have 20/20 vision. It’s not an injustice if you are born poor, or black, or female. It is not an injustice if you have a handicap, or if you are afflicted with a terminal health condition.

I bet that there were a whole lot of people working at General Motors who looked over at Toyota and felt that the situation was unfair. Toyota outproduced General Motors. Toyota had better, more reliable cars. They sold more of those cars that General Motors and took in massive profits that seemed to elude General Motors.

Would it correct the inequality to take Toyota’s profits and give them to General Motors? Yes. Would that be unjust? Yes.

Injustice is when someone takes something that they did not earn. Injustice is knocking down the successful in order to make the unsuccessful happier. Injustice is more and more popular nowadays and it won’t end well, but not for the people who hope to gain from it.

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