Category Archives: June-July 2024

The June-July issue of the Iguana is now available, and you can access it here! If you want to get your hands on a hard copy, check out our distro locations here.

Florida ‘callously’ strips healthcare from thousands of children despite new law
Gov. Ron De Santis’s challenging of a ‘continuous eligibility’ rule has booted over 22,500 children off insurance since January
by Richard Luscombe ~ The Guardian ~ April 29 ~ tinyurl.com/Iguana1988
The DeSantis administration has stripped Medicaid “KidCare” coverage from at least 22,000 needy Florida children — probably illegally. 

House GOP committee pits young against old
Mainstream media often gets it wrong these days when covering Social Security
by Tia Maria ~ Gainesville Iguana ~ June 1 ~ tinyurl.com/Iguana2002
It’s not just seniors who should be concerned about cutting social security — young people will need their earned Social Security benefits perhaps even more than their parents and grandparents. Let’s change the conversation from cutting benefits to increasing revenue sources.

By Tia Maria

Mainstream media often gets it wrong these days when covering Social Security. Details from current Democratic proposals to strengthen the program and Republican proposals for cuts, such as raising the retirement age, usually are lost in the verbiage of the overly confident, or are just ignored completely.

But young people will need their earned Social Security benefits perhaps even moreso than their parents and grandparents. One main reason is that previous generations relied on income from pensions in their retirement years. Today, pensions are rare and 401(k)s depend on Wall Street in a market subject to extreme volatilities. Think of 2000, 2008 and 2015. Add to this decades of tax cuts for the wealthy resulting in the inequality, poverty and homelessness we see today. 

by Bill Gilbert

We are being overwhelmed by our failure to keep up with change. Forty-six percent of the American population, according to recent studies, experience stress, anxiety and/or depression.

The United States has the worst social record of any developed country in the world and many developing countries. The character of a society depends on how it treats its most vulnerable members: the poor, minorities, children, elders, and immigrants, LGBTQ, and migrants. We are: number one in prison population with 2.3 million people incarcerated, first in teen birth rates, and some of the highest rates of STD’s, first in illiteracy, poverty, racism, homelessness, income disparity, child hunger, child poverty, drug use and drug related deaths, use of antidepressants, violence, firearms deaths, not providing access to health care for all of its citizens, not providing child care for working parents, never-ending inflation, the most military spending, hazardous waste production, recorded rapes, and the poor quality of its public schools, and lowest in life expectancy. This is warp-speed decline.  Some political observers call the inability of government to solve these problems, ‘constitutional rot,’ that has contributed to wrong decisions in the past.