J. David McSwane and Ryan Gabrielson, - ProPublica
Stephan:
This report makes clear the link between grifting Christian clergy and churches, and grifting Republican politicians. It is one of the great tragedies of the last 50 years that Christian churches and fascist Republican politicians have joined forces to the detriment of the members of those churches. This is why Americans, particularly young Americans, are leaving Christian churches in the United States in droves.
Health care sharing ministries — alternatives to health insurance that are based on religious principles — received an exemption from the individual mandate in the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Credit:Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica. Photos: Rafael Suanes / MCT / Tribune News Service / Getty, Saul Loeb / Getty
Joe Guarino rescued an entire industry with help from what some called “divine” intervention.
A little-known lobbyist from Virginia, Guarino was hired in 2007 by the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries, the trade association for nonprofit alternatives to medical insurance founded on Christian principles. Health care sharing ministries take fees from members, which are then used to pay other members’ health bills.
At the time, the industry had been tainted by a scandal involving one of the largest ministries in the country, the Christian Brotherhood Newsletter, based outside Canton, Ohio. State authorities won $14 million in civil judgments against two of its top leaders for enriching themselves instead of paying the medical bills of its members. A ProPublica investigation last month revealed that many of the Brotherhood’s executives, including Daniel […]
Marcus Eriksen , Win Cowger, Lisa M. Erdle , Scott Coffin, Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, Charles J. Moore, Edward J. Carpenter, Robert H. Day, Martin Thiel, and Chris Wilcox, - PLOS ONE
Stephan:
For every person on earth, there are 21,000 pieces of plastic waste in the world's oceans. While the Republicans consume our politics and the media with their masturbatory cultural fantasies real issues like what to do about plastic waste infecting all life on earth go unacknowledged and ignored.
As global awareness, science, and policy interventions for plastic escalate, institutions around the world are seeking preventative strategies. Central to this is the need for precise global time series of plastic pollution with which we can assess whether implemented policies are effective, but at present we lack these data. To address this need, we used previously published and new data on floating ocean plastics (n = 11,777 stations) to create a global time-series that estimates the average counts and mass of small plastics in the ocean surface layer from 1979 to 2019. Today’s global abundance is estimated at approximately 82–358 trillion plastic particles weighing 1.1–4.9 million tonnes. We observed no clear detectable trend until 1990, a fluctuating but stagnant trend from then until 2005, and a rapid increase until the present. This observed acceleration of plastic densities in the world’s oceans, also reported for beaches around the globe, demands urgent international policy interventions.
Policy implications
The accelerating abundance of plastic in the OSL demands urgent international policy intervention to minimize […]
When most people think about plastic waste they seem to think about plastic bottles that have been thrown away. That's a threat to the environment to be sure. But it is when plastic breaks down into teeny tiny bits -- microplastics -- that the real danger occurs. This story ought to seriously scare you. So why isn't anyone in Congress talking about it?
Pregnant Belly | Microplastics Photo illustration by Salon / Getty
The price we pay for living in an industrial civilization is reading alarming news about pollutants, from PCBs to PFAS to microplastics. Microplastics, extremely small pieces of plastic debris that flake off of industrial waste and plastic consumer products, are believed to be causing adverse health effects in nearly every form of life on Earth that they touch. Yet there’s an even bigger threat to human health that is, paradoxically, smaller in size: nanoplastics.
Researchers fed five pregnant rats nanoplastics, focusing on the potential effect of ingesting such pollutants.
As the “nano-” prefix implies, nanoplastics are very small pieces of plastic, less than 100 nanometers in size, that are released into the environment as a result of plastic disintegration. It is currently estimated that an estimated six billion metric tons of plastic waste has been deposited in the environment. While nanoplastics have been identified in our collective food chain, and some research has shown that they can affect marine life, […]
Alex Henderson, Staff Writer - Raw Story / Alternet
Stephan:
There are so many bad indeed in some cases evil things about America's Illness Profit System, but here is one I had never even thought about -- your credit score. It is a measure of the corruption of the American Congress that in spite of all these negative aspects the illness profit industries have such a strong stranglehold on the Congress, particularly its Republican members, that nothing ever seems to change, and we remain the only developed democratic nation in the world without universal birthright healthcare. That's why, I think, President Biden's budget proposal is so important. It does offer at least some change.
MAGAt Republican Governor of Arkansas Sarah Huckabee Sanders Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty
The United States’ credit scoring system is something that residents of some European countries have a hard time comprehending. Credit cards are king in the U.S., yet in parts of the European Union (EU), debit cards are more popular. And European banks and lenders don’t necessarily regard credit card use as a sign of one’s financial health.
Regardless, the credit scoring companies Equifax, Trans Union and Experian have enormous influence in the U.S., where one’s credit score can mean the difference between qualifying for a mortgage and not qualifying for a mortgage. According to reporting from the Washington Post’s Andrew Van Dam, the South is the U.S. region that tends to have the country’s lowest credit scores. And the reporter lays out some reasons for that in an article published on February 21.
I simply cannot convey in publishable language how vile and evil I think the Republican Party has become. The party of Lincoln and Eisenhower has morphed into America's political cancer, dangerous, life-threatening, and potentially lethal. And nothing illustrates this more than the Republican attempt to legalize child labor. In my opinion, you cannot be an ethical person and vote Republican.
May 1, 1909 labor parade in New York City.
Brad Greve has been a Scout leader for more than 20 years. The Davenport, Iowa retiree leads 50-mile canoe trips on Minnesota’s Boundary Waters that test teens’ mettle while teaching them essential skills.
Greve told a story recently where two boys, despite being warned repeatedly, let their canoe drift perilously close to a section of stream that swept over rapids into a lake below. They just barely recovered and made it to streambank.
That near-accident a few years ago, Greve said, underscores the vulnerability of young teens. And it fuels Greve’s anger at Republicans across the country who want to gut child labor laws and fill dangerous jobs with still-maturing high schoolers.
A GOP bill in Iowa, for example, would allow 14-year-olds to work in industrial freezers, meatpacking plants, and industrial laundry operations. The legislation would also put 15-year-olds to work on certain kinds of assembly lines, allow them to hoist up to 50 pounds, and allow employers to force kids into
