Stephan: Here is more on the trend I have been tracking concerning the dismemberment of national parks, monuments, and lands. It seems like a blatant story of greed and mixing politics with religion.
Temple Square, Salt Lake City Utah
Credit: visitutah.com
President Trump’s visit to Salt Lake City Monday to sign two orders slashing the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments also included a meeting with Mormon religious leaders who shared “Church doctrine” with the president before he signed the controversial proclamations.
Trump’s unprecedented, two-million-acre cut in public land protection was spurred by Mormon political leaders, including Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, and supported by the entire Utah congressional delegation, Utah governor and Utah legislature.
It remains unknown what was discussed when Trump met with the top leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the closed meeting.
But if Trump had also chosen to sit down with experts such as Thomas Murphy and Angelo Baca, two scholars of American Indian descent who were raised Mormon, he surely would have heard a different perspective on Mormon doctrine from the one offered by church leaders.
Trump would have heard how latent racism, a history of grave […]
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Friday, December 8th, 2017
MALCOLM BURNLEY, - Politico
Stephan: I'm just going to let this story speak for itself.
M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO
PICHER, OKLAHOMA — Tar Creek, Oklahoma, is breathtaking in a terrible way: At one time the world’s deepest source of lead and zinc, the three-town region is now a cratered landscape so poisonous that no one, aside from 10 holdouts, can live there. Mountains of ashlike “chat,” a toxic residue from lead-zinc milling, rise majestically among the remains of homes torn from their foundations. Abandoned pets forage around the ruins. A child’s teddy bear lies sprawled in a ghostly living room. A gorilla statue fronts an empty high school, atop a sign proclaiming “1A Football State Champs, 1984.”
Tar Creek is also part of the environmental legacy of one of the state’s—and nation’s—leading politicians, Senator Jim Inhofe, and his longtime ally, Scott Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general who is now head of President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency. After the EPA struggled to clean up the area, in 2006, Inhofe endorsed a plan in which a trust overseen by local citizens would use federal dollars to purchase […]
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Friday, December 8th, 2017
Zac Auter, - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: The sad truth is you don't want to be a poor person in the United States. The safety net is a joke, and the health care is demonstrably rotten. Here are some facts.
U.S. Adults’ Reports of Their Own Health, by Insurance Source
Would you say your own health, in general, is …
Medicaid
Uninsured
Medicare
Military or veteran’s
Employer or union
Something else
%
%
%
%
%
%
Excellent/Very good
30
33
40
51
59
52
Fair/Poor
40
31
31
21
11
18
GALLUP-SHARECARE WELL-BEING INDEX
WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. adults who receive their healthcare coverage through Medicaid are in worse health than those with other forms of health insurance. Three in 10 adults covered by Medicaid describe their health as ” excellent” or “very good,” compared with 59% of those receiving employer- or union-based insurance and 51% receiving military or veteran’s health insurance. Even the uninsured (33%) and adults covered by Medicare (40%) — which predominantly insures adults aged 65 and older — are more likely than Medicaid recipients to rate their health positively.
These results are based on 147,465 interviews conducted among U.S. adults aged 18 and older Jan. 2-Nov. 5, 2017, as part of the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index. Currently, 9.3% of U.S. adults younger than 65 receive their coverage through Medicaid.
One reason that Medicaid recipients may be less likely to report being in good health is that the system is designed for individuals with disabilities and those in lower-income households who cannot obtain health insurance elsewhere. According to Gallup/Sharecare data, 63% of those insured by Medicaid report […]
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Thursday, December 7th, 2017
SUSANA FERREIRA, - The Comnmon
Stephan: If you go back into the SR archives you will find the initial story I did on Portugal's decision to take an entirely new national approach towards drugs, and my prediction that the result would be a sharp increase in wellbeing and a precipitous decrease in sexually transimitted diseases, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, criminality, and a host of other civil disorders.
Well, the evidence is in, and it's all true. Portugal's policies have done all those things. This report lays it all out.
Meanwhile U.S. drug policies have played a major role in the creation of the New American Slavery Trend. Its fundamentally racist nature has become clear to anyone with the wit to look at the data.
When the drugs came, they hit all at once. It was the eighties, one in ten residents slipped into the deep of heroin addiction—bankers, university students, carpenters, socialites, miners—and Portugal fell into a panic.
The way Álvaro Pereira tells the story, it all began in the south. The eighties were prosperous in Olhão, a Portuguese fishing town thirty-one miles west of the Spanish border. Coastal waters filled nets from the Gulf of Cádiz to Morocco, local and international tourism was growing, and currency flowed with relative ease throughout the southern Algarve region. Portugal had emerged from a seventies full of massive changes: the death of long-ruling President António Salazar, the fall of his repressive government, the end of brutal colonial wars, and the bumpy return of thousands of soldiers and colonial settlers. Sunny Olhão, brimming with potential in this new, freer era, was a prime place for a young doctor to set up shop, and Álvaro Pereira moved south with his wife to do just that.
I met Pereira three decades later. He was sprightly and charming, with […]
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