Stephan: Here is yet another confirmation that American healthcare is a system run for profit not wellbeing. "Mahin Khatami, a former program director at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), claims that modern day medicine is full of corruption and not focused on health, but rather profit." I couldn't say it better myself.
In Brief
- The Facts:A paper published in 2016 by Mahin Khatami, a former program director at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), claims that modern day medicine is full of corruption and not focused on health, but rather profit.(emphasis added)
- Reflect On:The politicization of medicine and the corporate takeover of governments has plagued multiple countries for a long time. This is now being expressed in peer-reviewed literature by those within the field.
A number of prominent doctors and scientists have shared their criticisms in peer-reviewed publications for quite some time. These opinions are obviously not promoted at all, and anybody who makes such criticisms of the “medical establishment” is usually vilified. In the past, it took a lot of bravery to say what you really felt if it was a perspective that ‘went against the grain.’ Today, it seems to be easier for health professionals to do so given the fact that so many have done it in the past and more are continuing to do it.
I’ve written about this before, using multiple examples. Dr. Marcia Angell, physician and […]
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Alex Henderson, - Alternet
Stephan: When I read stories like this I always wonder, don't the working class Trumpers realize what is happening to them? Don't they remember when holding a factory job was a path into the middle class and home ownership, with guaranteed vacation time, health care, a good retirement package, and enough money to put your kids through college without debt? Don't they recognize that the stress and despair that afflicts them all traces back to policies created by the Trumplican party?
Apparently they don't because they continue to vote for criminal Trump and his Trumplicans. So, in a very real sense, they have no one to blame but themselves. It is a sad and bitter truth.
Steel workers
Bashing European countries and their social and economic programs is a popular pastime among the “American exceptionalists” in right-wing media. But when economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton compare the American working class to the working class in European countries, it is U.S. workers — not European workers — they describe as suffering from “deaths of despair.” And journalists David Leonhardt and Stuart A. Thompson, in an op-ed for the New York Times, draw on Case and Deaton’s data to explain why U.S. workers are more likely to feel worried, pessimistic or stressed out than their counterparts in other developed countries.
Leonhardt and Thompson note that Case and Deaton’s research on “deaths of despair,” first published in 2015, found that “many white working-class Americans in their forties and fifties were dying of suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse.”
“But as Case and Deaton continued digging into the data,” the Times writers explain, “it became clear that the grim trends didn’t apply only to middle-aged whites. Up and down […]
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Erica Pandey and Courtenay Brown, - Axios
Stephan: Almost every day I get emails from SR readers telling me about some negative experience or horror story about their lives. Having to sell their home to pay medical bills, children with a quarter million dollars in university debt; lack of child care trapping them in dead-end jobs. It goes on and on, and collectively it is a tale of the death of the society we used to think of as America. Do you have such a story?
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
The American Dream is moving further and further out of reach for millions in the U.S.
Why it matters: That promise is essential to American identity — and its erosion will affect how we live, work and vote for decades to come.
What’s happening: It’s increasingly unaffordable to buy a home or pay for college — and millennials, many of whom entered the job market at the height of the recession, are feeling the crunch.
- The cost of higher education is ballooning. From 1978 to 2017, the Consumer Price Index grew fourfold, but the price of college increased 14-fold, according to research by Ana Hernández Kent, a policy analyst at the St. Louis Fed.
- The price of homes is rising much faster than incomes. Per a study by real estate company Clever that looked at census data from 1960 to 2017, U.S. housing prices have skyrocketed 121%, but incomes have increased just 29%.
- Wage growth has been sluggish. Wage growth in the U.S. […]
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Tom Conway, - Truthdig/Independent Media Institute
Stephan: Two emails today from men younger than me who wrote to tell me they had just retired but could not quit working. It is an increasingly common story in the U.S.; one you don't hear in other developed nations.
Credit: Kevin Labianco / Flickr
The Dow Jones Industrial Average just dropped nearly 1,200 points in a single day because of the coronavirus’s impact on global trade, leaving many Americans sick with worry.
It’s not just a rapidly spreading, mysterious disease that made Americans feel vulnerable. The Dow’s freefall erased millions of dollars from retirement accounts and exposed another kind of epidemic—retirement insecurity.
There once was a time when the combination of company pension plans, Social Security and personal savings could carry retirees through their golden years.
No longer. Most companies eliminated defined-benefit plans providing a reliable income stream and implemented 401(k) plans that leave workers at the mercy of stock market volatility, like the kind that rattled investors recently and crushed workers in 2008.
Today, Americans have so much angst about the future that about 29 percent of baby boomers, 36 percent of Gen Xers and 77 percent of millennials fear they’ll never be able to retire or will have to work past normal […]
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Stephan A. Schwartz, Editor - Schwartzreport
Stephan: While the news reporting is overwhelmed by the sports game reporting of the Democratic Party's process to determine a candidate, and the storm of information and mostly misinformation, and disinformation, concerning the Coronavirus pandemic something very dangerous to American democracy, is underway. It gets some reporting locally but is not even discussed on most news programs. I am speaking here about the Trumplican attempt to rig the outcome of the 2020 election in criminal Trump's favor. This attempt to subvert American democracy is without precedent in the country's history. A systemic planned attempt that is being carried out by one party. So, today I have put together a small selection of reports, I could probably do 50 similar stories, concerning what I am seeing happening.
If you are an American voter, particular a woman, a person of color, or a young person and you care about your country's democracy, you better get involved because if you don't and Trump and the Trumplicans rig a win then in another four years the United States will be an authoritarian christofascist kleptocracy and the democratic republic of the Founders will exist in name only. I consider this a very big story that is not getting anywhere the attention it should.
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