Author Archives: JaiFitzGibbon

Here’s what Trump’s latest executive order means for our national monuments.

by JaiFitzGibbon Posted on April 26, 2017

The order, which Trump will sign Wednesday, directs the Interior Department to review all national monument designations over 100,000 acres made from 1996 onwards.

That includes between 24 and 40 monuments — notably, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, and Mojave Trails in California.

During the review, the Interior Department can suggest that monuments be resized, revoked, or left alone, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said at a briefing on Tuesday. We can expect a final report this summer that will tell us which monument designations, if any, will be changed.

Environmental groups are already voicing opposition. If designations are removed, it could make it easier to eliminate protections and open land to special interests like fossil fuels.

Zinke, a self-proclaimed conservationist, said, “We can protect areas of cultural and economic importance and even use federal lands for economic development when appropriate — just as Teddy Roosevelt envisioned.”

In between further adulations of his hero, Zinke said that he would undertake the “enormous responsibility” with care. “No one loves our public lands more than I,” he said. “You can love them as much — but you can’t love them more than I do.”

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Here’s what Trump’s latest executive order means for our national monuments.

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A Baton Rouge ER Is Closing Because Bobby Jindal Won’t Accept Medicaid Expansion

by JaiFitzGibbon Posted on February 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Louisiana’s capital city is losing one of its emergency rooms:

The Baton Rouge General Medical Center-Mid City will close its emergency room within the next 60 days, a victim of continuing red ink and the Jindal administration withdrawing the financial support that kept it open.

….The General’s Mid City campus suffered a financial hit as a result of the April 2013 closure of the LSU Earl K. Long Medical Center….More and more poor and uninsured patients from the low-income neighborhoods of north Baton Rouge ended up at the Mid City hospital, which was the next-closest facility.

Mid City hospital reported losses of $1 million a month as more and more patients who could not pay arrived. Losses jumped from $6 million to $8 million annually from 2009 to 2012, then up to $12.5 million in 2013, according to Baton Rouge General. Last year, the facility lost $23.8 million.

The nearest ER for residents who are currently served by Mid-City is now 30 minutes further away, and it’s a certainty that people are going to die because of this. But what’s the real story behind this closure? Shouldn’t the expansion of Medicaid be offsetting the increased losses on uninsured patients?

You bet it should. And it would, if Bobby Jindal were willing to accept Obamacare’s offer of virtually free Medicaid expansion. But he’s not, and that means Baton Rouge is losing one of its central emergency rooms and more people will die who otherwise could have been saved. That’s some nice work, Bobby. Michael Hiltzik has more details here.

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A Baton Rouge ER Is Closing Because Bobby Jindal Won’t Accept Medicaid Expansion

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"This Is the Part of Detroit That Most People Are Not Aware Of"

by JaiFitzGibbon Posted on November 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

In late October, a few days after local news cameras swarmed Detroit’s courthouse to hear closing arguments in the city’s historic bankruptcy trial, “Commander” Dale Brown cruised through the stately Detroit neighborhood of Palmer Woods in a Hummer emblazoned with the silver, interlocking-crescent-moon logo of his private security company.

Brown rolled down the window to ask a middle-aged woman walking her dog whether everything was okay (it was), and whether she had seen anything out of the ordinary (she hadn’t). Satisfied, he continued on, guided by a futuristic tablet map of the neighborhood’s languid streets. These had become even more impenetrable last year when the bankrupt city paid for and constructed a series of traffic barriers on the community’s edges. On his right, he pointed out, was the Bishop’s Residence, a 30-room Tudor Revival castle originally commissioned by a family of fabulously wealthy automobile pioneers who later sold their company to General Motors.

“This is the part of Detroit that most people are not aware of,” Brown told filmmaker Messiah Rhodes and me. And indeed, the turreted neighborhood did look far more like something you would find in Detroit’s mostly white suburbs than deep inside the city itself.

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"This Is the Part of Detroit That Most People Are Not Aware Of"

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