With the health giant again under scrutiny by California regulators for alleged denial of care, many therapists are leaving for private practice.
 

By Jack Ross and Kristy Hutchings, for Capital and Main

When Susan Whitney was a therapist at Kaiser Permanente, her colleagues missed working in prison. Whitney’s coworkers first practiced mental health care in the region’s penitentiaries before joining the state’s largest health care provider.

by Pamela Appea

This article was originally published at Prism.

Julie Ramos first realized her husband’s forgetfulness was far more serious than she had previously suspected the day he and their then 6-year-old daughter got lost in Mexico City while walking in a familiar location near their relatives’ home. Ramos, who is using a pseudonym, ended up having to call the police to find her husband and daughter.

Amid Starbucks’ vicious union-busting campaign, which has involved the firing of at least 70 pro-union workers—more than 50 of them since April, in what’s clearly an escalating effort—the company tried to convince the National Labor Relations Board that union activists in Phoenix, Arizona, violated labor law by “threatening and coercing employees and the public.” Starbucks claimed workers surrounded a store and pounded on the windows during an action.

Connect! Unite! Act! is a weekly series encouraging the creation of face-to-face networks in each congressional district. Groups meet to socialize, support candidates, get out the vote, and engage in other local political actions that help our progressive movement grow and exert maximum influence on the powers that be.

From Friday’s news: Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema released the hostages, and Democrats will be voting on the Inflation Reduction Act on Saturday. The July jobs report was so good that Republican heads were exploding across the nation. The Defense Department (finally gets around to) telling all federal employees to save mobile phone records.

According to Ukrainian General Staff, Ukraine has launched a new offensive in Kharkiv area in northern Ukraine, “The defense forces of Ukraine advanced into the depths of the enemyʼs defenses and gained a foothold.” No details were offered, but will definitely bear watching. Russia is already emptying out the Izyum area to reinforce the Kherson front.

The July jobs report crushed both expectations and Republican hopes for bad economic news. The economy added 528,000 jobs, defying predictions of 250,000 new jobs. Unemployment fell to 3.5%—or, economist Justin Wolfers tweeted, more precisely 3.46%, which would be “THE LOWEST UNEMPLOYMENT RATE IN OVER HALF A CENTURY.”

Remarkable number.

We need a thorough, deep dive into the four-year-old allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh if we’re ever to get to the bottom of what “boof” means. It would also be nice to know if the guy who voted to wrest reproductive rights away from every American with a womb is a concupiscent churl and serial sexual assaulter. But first things first.

Indiana state Rep. John L. Bartlett proposed an amendment Thursday to a bill as ludicrous as the anti-abortion bill the state is attempting to pass. The congressman suggested that if pregnancy was “an act of god,” then “impotency” must also be. Obviously, he was illustrating a point about bodily autonomy.

“We’re forcing young girls to mothers, but not forcing the men to be fathers,” Bartlett argues.