Stephan: President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, declared a national "War on Crime" on March 8, 1965, shortly after his declaration of a War on Poverty. Johnson labeled crime a crippling epidemic hindering the progress of the nation. Republicans loved the idea so much that starting with Nixon they pushed the idea of a "war on crime" claiming that more incarceration would produce less fear of crime and make society safer. And every Republican and many Democrats since that time have supported those policies. Americans love to punish people, and that has made us the world leader in imprisonment, with over two million men and women in jails or prisons, including 58,000 pregnant women. Did the "war on crime" work? Of course not. Punishing large segments of the population, particularly people of color, does nothing but harm society. Can that be true? Here is the hard evidence.
To get the primary research paper in the Justice Quarterly journal upon which this general audience article is based go to: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07418825.2022.2060284?journalCode=rjqy20
Credit: Donald Tong / Pexels
UNIVERSITY PARK, PENNSYLVANIA – There are currently two million people sitting in prisons and jails across America — making the United States the world leader when it comes to incarceration. Despite that, a new study reveals that putting more people in prison isn’t helping to make Americans feel any safer in their communities.
Researchers from Penn State University compared feelings of safety across the country, both in areas with high and low incarceration rates. They found that no matter where a person lived, Americans were no less afraid of being the victim of crime, regardless of how many people the justice system locks away.
The study explored data from 18,010 people on a state-level and 7,053 people on a county-level from the General Social Survey. Participants revealed how fearful they felt near their home as well as the county they lived in. Researchers also gathered data about each county and state’s imprisonment rates throughout the past 10 years.
Researchers conclude that there is no significant difference in fear of crime for those living in states or […]
Stephan:
Just as we lead the world on imprisoning our citizens, so we lead the world in the cost of pharmaceuticals. You will notice, of course, that both of these are strongly negative leaderships. Because our healthcare system is not about fostering wellbeing it is strictly about greed and profit, the prices Americans pay for their prescriptions are bizarrely overpriced, as anyone who has ever had to have a prescription filled in another country discovers. There is, of course, a simple solution to this vulgar greedism. Have Medicare negotiate drug prices. We have not done that because the pharmaceutical industry rents Congressional whores as needed to assure no laws are passed that diminish their profit. How bad is it? Here is hard data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Will something pass this summer? Wait and see. Of course, most of the opposition comes from the Republicans, although Joe Manchin, one of the leading Senate whores has to be placated.
Demonstrators from the People’s Action protest pharmaceutical companies’ lobbying against allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices, during a rally outside Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) headquarters in Washington, DC. Credit: Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty
The Congressional Budget Office said Friday that a pending proposal by Senate Democrats to allow Medicare to negotiate directly with drug companies for lower prices would yield nearly $290 billion in savings and new revenue over ten years of implementation, a predictable yet crucial finding as lawmakers try to revitalize a legislative deal in the coming weeks.
The Democratic effort to revitalize a broader reconciliation package that could be passed in the narrowly-split Senate without Republican votes is considered the best that can be achieved after Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema tanked the much larger Build Back Better plan—one that included sweeping climate provisions and other social investments—last year.
“By empowering Medicare to directly negotiate prices for prescription drugs Congress can end the days of seniors missing lifesaving medications because they cannot afford them,” said Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Stephan: If you, or someone you know, uses Roundup do yourself or them a service and get rid of it. Do not keep it on your property, do not use it. Why? Here is the hard evidence on how dangerous this product is. Most developed countries in the world have outlawed it. But in the United States where profit is more important than people, and a large percentage of the Congress members are just whores waiting to be rented it is still legal, and widely advertised on television. I just saw a Roundup ad on MSNBC.
To get the CDC scientific paper upon which this general audience article is based go to: https://wwwn.cdc.gov/Nchs/Nhanes/2013-2014/SSGLYP_H.htm
The CDC has only recently started examining the extent of human exposure to glyphosate in the US. Credit: Benoît Tessier / Reuters
More than 80% of urine samples drawn from children and adults in a US health study contained a weedkilling chemical linked to cancer, a finding scientists have called “disturbing” and “concerning”.
The report by a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that out of 2,310 urine samples, taken from a group of Americans intended to be representative of the US population, 1,885 were laced with detectable traces of glyphosate. This is the active ingredient in herbicides sold around the world, including the widely used Roundup brand. Almost a third of the participants were children ranging from six to 18.
Academics and private researchers have been noting high levels of the herbicide glyphosate in analyses of human urine samples for years. But the CDC has only recently started examining the extent of human exposure to glyphosate in the US, and its work comes at a time of mounting concerns and controversy over […]
Stephan: If you don't spend time in the world of MAGAt Media, and why would any rational compassionate human being do something that toxic, you will have seen that MAGAt Republicans are doing everything they can to end public education in the United States because they want children indoctrinated, just as the Nazis did, not factually educated. The Republican Party is committed to transforming America into an authoritarian White supremacy, male-dominant christofascist anocracy. And, unless enough Americans vote in November to keep the Democrats in the majority, and an increased majority, in both houses of Congress that is what is going to happen.
Criminal Trump hugs one of his Fox followers Credit: Gage Skidmore
Laura Ingraham is the latest on the far right to attack a bedrock institution of American society: public schools. The Fox News propagandist on Thursday called to “defund government education” and wrongly implied the National Education Association, a labor union, was responsible for establishing education standards and curricula, which is the responsibility of government agencies.
Ingraham hosted Terry Stoops of the right-wing think tank The John Locke Foundation, which Accountable.US has said “repeatedly alleged Democrats conspired to allow widespread voter fraud.”
Stoops complained that Twitter took action against him after he posted what allegedly were proposed agenda items from the National Education Association’s annual meeting. Ingraham showed excerpts saying the NEA will support the right to abortion, LGBTQ rights, and other mainstream positions, which Ingraham attacked as “whackpot declarations.”
Reading some of the proposed items, Ingraham mocked them, saying, “Reading, writing, and abortion.”
Stoops berated the NEA’s discussion of critical issues facing America, suggesting the group, America’s largest labor union […]
Stephan: Think about this: 319,000 died because they chose not to get vaccinated. In contrast, as this report describes, over 200,000 lives were saved in just nine months because they chose to get vaccinated. I confess that looking at this data, to me, not getting vaccinated is moronic and puts your life at risk. As I have written (see SR archives) such moronic behavior constitutes an American death cult.
COVID-19 vaccines Credit: Scott Olson/Getty
During the peak years of the United States’ armed involvement in the Vietnam War, more than 58,000 American soldiers lost their lives in combat. This sobering figure not only scarred the conscience of a nation but also shaped a generation.
If a new study is accurate, lives in excess of four times that number were saved by the U.S. COVID-19 vaccination program during a nine-month span of the historic pandemic. It wasn’t an ordinary mass vaccination program — the scientists behind the first successful inoculations to reach the market had to utilize a revolutionary mRNA vaccine technology, one that was able to prove tremendously effective against earlier variants.
In the study, which was published this week in the medical journal JAMA Network Open, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other government agencies compiled data on COVID-19-associated hospitalizations that took place between Dec. 1, 2020 to Sept. 30, 2021. The figures […]
