Stephan: Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, in my opinion, are the most interesting members of the Senate. They are both unusually intelligent, they are not corrupt, and they get why fostering wellbeing is the correct way to govern.
This is also a story of how corrupt the U.S. Senate actually is.
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren
Over the past four decades, private equity has become a powerful, and malignant, force in our daily lives. In our May+June 2022 issue, Mother Jones investigates the vulture capitalists chewing up and spitting out American businesses, the politicians enabling them, and the everyday people fighting back. Find the full package here.
For years, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has railed against the excesses of private equity firms, including megadeals that leave companies bankrupt and their workers jobless as fund managers line their pockets with fees and performance bonuses. In 2013, for instance, Warren proposed legislation that would shrink PE’s sway by barring commercial banks—where most Americans hold their money—from investing in the industry. Two years later, she went after what Insider called PE’s “golden goose,” asking the Treasury Department and the IRS to crack down on waivers that allow fund managers to pass off their entire compensation as “carried interest,” which is taxed at a far lower rate than ordinary income.
But her reputation as private equity’s greatest foe in Washington may have been cemented in 2019, when—as a top presidential contender […]
Stephan: Year after year tens of thousands of Americans are murdered or die by their own hand because of the country's obsessive gun psychosis. Yet nothing gets done to change the laws because no president has the courage to change the dynamics that shape our society, and the weapons making corporations have corrupt control over the House and Senate, and the corrupt Supreme Court will take no action. And so America is the most dangerous country of the developed democracies in which to live.
Far too often, Dr. Debra Houry found herself covered in blood.As an emergency physician in the United States for about 20 years, Houry said, it was a “frequent occurrence” to treat young men in the emergency room for gunshot wounds. They often would “bleed out” on her as she was resuscitating them.Then she would search the hospital for a clean white coat to wear “so that I’d look respectable and presentable to talk to their families — or to somebody that did survive but then was paralyzed or had traumatic stress as a result of it,” Houry said.
“That was heartbreaking.”
The rate of gun-related deaths in the US appears to be getting worse.
The US firearm homicide rate in 2020 was the highest recorded since 1994, according to data published Tuesday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where Houry serves as acting principal deputy director and head of the National Center for Injury Prevention.
Between 2019 and 2020, the overall firearm homicide rate increased about 35%, according to the new data in the CDC’s […]
Meryl Kornfield, Staff Writer - The Washington Post
Stephan: Even greater than the gun deaths are the drug overdose deaths. The reality, which few want to discuss is that Americans are miserable. Because the entire tax system and the pay scale are rigged to favor the rich, wealth inequality has condemned millions to poverty or near poverty. What about the middle class you ask? Since Reagan and very deliberately thanks to Republican economics the middle class has been diminished. You have a handful of individuals so rich they can afford to run their own space programs, while one in seven children face food insecurity. And because we don't have a healthcare system in the United States only an illness profit system, mental health just isn't of much interest to that system, except for pharmaceuticals that tweak your consciousness. So is it a surprise that the poor and stressed self-medicate themselves to death.
What I don't understand is why Americans don't seem to understand this. How is it possible that year after year they vote for Republicans who are largely responsible for creating the mess we are in? I don't know but by gun or pill it is literally killing us.
A sign calling attention to drug overdoses is posted to the door of a gas station on the White Earth Reservation in Ogema, Minn. Credit: David Goldman/AP
More Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021 than any previous year, a grim milestone in an epidemic that has now claimed 1 million lives in the 21st century, according to federal data released Wednesday.
More than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021, up 15 percent from the previous year, according to an estimate released by the National Center for Health Statistics. The tally of 107,622 reflects challenges exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic: lost access to treatment, social isolation and a more potent drug supply.
More than 80,000 people died using opioids, including prescription pain pills and fentanyl, a deadly drug 100 times as powerful as morphine and increasingly present in other drugs. Deaths from methamphetamine and cocaine also rose.
Since the start of the 21st century, an overdose epidemic led by prescription pain pills and followed by waves of heroin, fentanyl and meth has […]
Stephan: The inferiority of Republican governance, assessed by objectively verifiable social data has become a major trend in the United States. And because of the way power has been apportioned, a minority operating on the inferior Republican view of governance is shaping America. The result is as our social reality and our democracy are diminished and this is recognized by the world, our status and leadership are also diminished.
Texas Governor Republican christofascist Greg Abbott. Brandon Bell / Getty
On Wednesday, without a word of explanation, the nation’s most radicalappeals court reinstated a Texas law that imposes sweeping censorship on social media companies. The statute—which Republicans passed in retaliation against the perceived liberal bias of “Big Tech”—forces these companies to disseminate hateful expression, dangerous misinformation, and foreign propaganda, among other objectionable speech. It empowers aggrieved users to file an unending stream of lawsuits to combat content moderation while creating a slew of onerous regulations that are literally impossible to comply with. Texas’ statute is, in short, an egregious affront to corporations’ First Amendment rights.
Texas Republicans passed their internet censorship bill, known as H.B. 20, in the fall of 2021. Its sponsors said that the legislation was necessary to prevent “West Coast oligarchs” from silencing “conservative viewpoints and ideas.” (Their theory that social media companies discriminate against conservative speech has no evident basis in reality.) The bill applies to social media companies […]
Stephan: I think Gail Collins has made a correct assessment of the christofascist obsession with sex and the dominance of women. What amazes me is so many women volunteer to be handmaidens to this obsession.
Credit: Professional Studio Images/Getty
When I was back in high school — a Catholic girls’ school in Cincinnati at the beginning of the sexual revolution — our religion class covered the abortion issue in approximately 45 seconds.
“Abortion is murder,” said the priest who was giving the lesson, before moving on to more controversial topics, like necking and heavy petting. I still have a vivid memory of being marched into the auditorium for a lecture from a visiting cleric who assured us that when Jesus was dying on the cross, he was tortured by a vision of the sins of mankind — notably adolescent girls “making out with boys in the back seat of a car.”
Now, that was a long time ago, and the bottom line was at least clear and consistent: no sex except for married couples who want to have babies. You don’t hear that specific message too much in today’s political debates about reproduction, but as a way of thinking, it’s most definitely still there.
