Stephan: We, each of us, is being forced to make a choice. Race fear in America is on the verge of destroying democracy. We either accept racial equality, or we lose democracy. So what do you choose?
Florida Republican governor Ron DeSantis, leading political racist Credit: NGAN/AFP/Getty
Amid growing concerns that Republicans will try to use new voting laws to overturn elections in the wake of a campaign of lies stoking unfounded fears about vote-rigging, GOP-led state legislatures across the country are already trying to reverse popular ballot initiatives approved by majorities of voters.
Missouri voters last year passed a ballot initiative to expand Medicaid. Arizona approved a new tax on the wealthy to fund schools. South Dakota legalized marijuana. But Republicans are trying to block those measures from being implemented and dozens of state legislatures are pushing new bills to make it harder to get voter initiatives on the ballot in the first place.
“As more progressive issues are winning at the ballot, from Medicaid expansion to legalization and decriminalization of marijuana to raising the minimum wage, paid family and sick leave, increasing access to the voting process, we have seen concerted efforts by state legislators to undermine the will of the people,” Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the progressive Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC), said in an interview with Salon.
Senator Bernie Sanders, Democratic Senator from Vermont - Reader Supported News
Stephan: Bernie Sanders is absolutely correct about the pharmaceutical sector of the American illness profit system. It is my devout hope that during the Biden administration we will see the creation of a universal birthright single-payer healthcare system that is really based on fostering wellbeing and that the crippling grip of the pharmaceutical corporations on the pocketbooks of Americans will finally be broken.
Democratic Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders
We are beginning to make progress in creating a government that works for all people, and not just the very wealthy. But we still have a very long way to go.
By now you’ve heard the big headlines about the American Rescue Plan that Joe Biden signed into law in March: the $1,400 direct payments, the massive expansion of the child tax credit, the extension of unemployment benefits and the production and distribution of tens of millions of vaccine doses that are desperately needed if we are going to crush this pandemic.
What you might not have heard is that we have made primary healthcare far more accessible by doubling funding for community health centers and tripling funding to get doctors, dentists and nurses into medically underserved areas. Kids who have been stuck at home for the past year will now be able to do activities this summer because of major new funding for summer and after-school programs.
These are major steps forward.
But in this time of unprecedented crises, it is not enough. Joe […]
Phillip Longman, Senior Editor - Washington Monthly Magazine
Stephan: I have had a series of foot surgeries while this pandemic has raged, and it has given me the opportunity to talk with doctors, nurses, and technicians who are living this nightmare on its frontlines. What that has done is to convince me even more strongly than before that the American illness profit system is a failure. Not because the people who staff the system have done less than their best. Quite the contrary I think they are heroes. No, the issue is now the system is structured, and how it is paid for. Well-being is not the point. Profit is the point of healthcare in the United States and this report shows what it has produced, particularly in small hospitals and clinics. You may have had just such experiences yourself.
Hospitals are among the most opaque institutions in American life. Few allow their doctors to talk to the press except in the hovering presence of “handlers.” Though they often employ cadres of “communications specialists” who pitch reporters with puff pieces, most are obsessed with keeping their finances and internal operations secret.
The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town by Brian Alexander St. Martin’s Press, 310 pp.
The first remarkable thing about Brian Alexander’s new book, The Hospital, is that he managed to pull off an exception to this seeming iron law of U.S. health care. He never explains exactly how, but in early 2018 he persuaded the CEO and board of a small, community hospital in rural Bryan, Ohio, to give him fly-on-the-wall access to their struggling institution—and complete freedom to write up what he witnessed.
For the next year and a half, Alexander attended long rounds of anguished and divisive strategy sessions. Administrators and board members fought with consultants and each other over how to bring in enough revenue to avoid having to shut down or sell out to a big hospital chain. As Alexander became embedded in the hospital’s […]
Stephan: In the 1970s if you had talked with almost any futurist they would have told you the Big Issue in the future was going to be over-population. You would not have heard a word about climate change. Big mistake on both counts. The fact is no democratic nation in the world has a sustainable birthrate, here is the latest data on the U.S., and climate change is humanity's existential challenge.
A newborn baby is cuddled by her mother while asleep. Credit: Tim Clayton/Corbis News/Getty
Births fell for the sixth consecutive year to the lowest levels since 1979, the CDC said.
The U.S. birth rate is so low, the nation is “below replacement levels,” meaning more people die every day than are being born, the CDC said.
U.S. birth and fertility rates in 2020 dropped to another record low as births fell for the sixth consecutive year to the lowest levels since 1979, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
The number of births in the U.S. declined last year by 4% from 2019, double the average annual rate of decline of 2% since 2014, the CDC said in preliminary birth data released Wednesday. Total fertility rates and general fertility rates also declined by 4% since 2019, reaching record lows. The U.S. birth rate is so low, the nation is “below replacement levels,” meaning more people die every day than are being born, the CDC said.
While the agency didn’t directly attribute the overall […]
Stephan: So much of what we are taught as children about our history is distorted at best, and bogus at worst. How slaves liked slavery and the current 3/5s discussion being examples of this. This exegetic essay will give you some fact-based history on what infrastructure means, the origins of Biden's infrastructure proposal, and the Republican resistance to it.
Credit: AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar
President Joe Biden’s proposed infrastructure legislation has the political class seemingly locked in a debate about what “infrastructure” means. Biden and Democratic leaders—backed by a majority of the U.S. population—believe that “infrastructure” is more than just roads and bridges and encompasses all the structures that help modern society function. Their new bill reflects that understanding, including improvements to water pipes and the electrical grid, universal broadband access, charging stations for electric vehicles, physical upgrades to schools and universities, and—perhaps most innovatively—home care for the elderly and disabled, support for families with children, and expanded access to health care.
Republican elected officials, on the other hand, are fiercely opposed to a broad definition of the old term. Biden’s plan is a “Trojan horse” (Mitch McConnell) for massive tax hikes and expanded federal authority. It’s a “Socialist agenda” (Steve Scalise)—a “kitchen sink of wasteful progressive demands.” It will set the nation on a “road to hell” (Rachel Campos-Duffy of Fox News).
