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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
Stephan: It is becoming clearer and clearer that the illness profit model cannot continue. We are being damaged, the country's wellbeing is being compromised, by the greed of the pharmaceutical industry. This is another one of those issues that is being blocked by the whoring of the Republican Party, and its subservience to its corporate masters. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Katie Porter have the right program. The question is do Americans really understand why this issue is so important? I am no longer sure.
American biopharmaceutical company Abbvie logo seen displayed on a smartphone with USD (United States dollar) currency in the background. (Illustration by Budrul Chukrut/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty
Pharmaceutical giant AbbVie inflated prices for widely-used drugs while its executives pocketed growing bonuses, according to a new report from the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Now it’s helping fund ads attacking legislation that would lower prescription drug costs.
The committee’s two-year investigation found that AbbVie “pursued a variety of tactics to increase drug sales while raising prices for Americans, including exploiting the patent system to extend its market monopoly, abusing orphan drug protections to further block competition, and engaging in anticompetitive pricing practices.”
The company raised the cost of the popular drug Humira, which is used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other ailments, 27 times and by a total of more than 470%, according to the report. An annual supply of the drug now costs $77,000. AbbVie, along with Jannsen Biotech, also hiked the price of Imburvica, a drug used to treat certain cancers, by 82%, raising the cost of an annual supply to between $181,529 to $242,039, according to […]
Stephan: I have been telling my readers for over a decade that this was coming, and now it is beginning. The migration out of the Southwest as a result of climate change is one of the three big internal migrations that are going to occur in the United States, and if you live in the Southwest I would think about my options.
Illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios
One of the fastest-warming regions of the U.S. is the Southwest — and that region, plus the broader West, is stuck in its most expansive and intense drought of the 21st century.
Why it matters: Studies show that a warming climate is exacerbating the drought, and in some ways may be triggering it in the first place. That means the Southwest is drying out — and California’s large wildfires could start as soon as next month.
And one climate researcher says California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains saw one of the fastest snow melt-outs in history this year.
The drought situation is particularly severe in the Colorado River Basin and northern California. Scientists and public officials are warning that the California wildfire season is likely to be severe, due to the combination of dry vegetation and above-average temperatures.
This one comes on the heels of the worst fire season in state history, which turned the skies above San Francisco a “Blade Runner” orange last year.
The big picture: Some parts of the world are already getting close to, or have […]
Stephan: I do so agree with this excellent essay about something that has increasingly concerned me. Think about what is going on in the United States, and be aware of what is being said about these things publically by major political officials in the Republican Party. How can this possibly be normal? How can American citizens listening to this, who have lived through the 6 January insurrection, the 230 some mass murders from our national gun psychosis, and all the rest of the White nationalist toxic violence sit still for this? I find this very alarming.
Lawmakers such as Reps. Andrew Clyde and Marjorie Taylor Greene don’t seem to have been hurt too much by their gaslighting over the events of Jan. 6, Curtis writes. CreditTom Williams/CQ Roll Call
Is America getting a thirst for blood?
It’s a question I ask after hearing too many Republicans dismiss the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a violent pro-Trump mob trying to halt the counting of American citizens’ votes as a “normal tourist visit,” in the words of Georgia Rep. Andrew S. Clyde, the same Clyde seen — mouth open and terrified — helping to barricade the besieged doors that day.
When I was a Baltimore schoolgirl, we often visited Washington, D.C., to tour the monuments. It was an easy and informative field trip, barely an hour away by bus. Now kids can occasionally be unruly, and the nuns had to raise their voices once or twice. But I don’t recall ever erecting gallows on the Capitol lawn, breaking windows or pummeling police officers with batons and their own shields. In fact, I’m sure it would […]
Stephan: I think the success of Qanon's hysterical nonsense can be traced back to the fact that America has not had the kind of civil disruption that has affected both Western and Eastern Europe. Americans don't really have any idea what it would be like to live under an authoritarian fascist government. They just can't imagine it, and for about a third of the country their racism, resentment, and grievances blind them from being able to even conceive of such a change. And this is augmented by the fact that one of the country's political parties is made up of grifters and corporate whores.
To figure out who might be a follower of the unhinged conspiracy movement QAnon, researchers might look at a person’s religious beliefs, or their devotion to Donald Trump, or even their belief in other conspiracy theories.
And while all of these can be indicators of a predilection to believing in QAnon, the single best predictor is which TV news station you watch, with those who favor right-wing sources up to nine times more likely to believe in the conspiracy than those who trust mainstream broadcast network news.
That’s the finding of a new survey from the Washington-based Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), which surveyed over 5,500 adults in all 50 states over a two week period in early March.
Nationally, the survey found that a whopping 15% of Americans—roughly 31 million people—believed in the completely unfounded claim that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”
The figure jumped to 20%—or 42 million Americans—for the less outlandish, but still baseless, claim that […]
Stephan: I am not going to say anything about this, but I felt it should be noted.
Credit: Getty
There are a lot of theories why IQ tests are falling. Some say it’s bad food, poor schools, or obscene amounts of screen time. Others suggest it’s a matter of people with lower IQs having more kids, who inherit their lower numbers.
You’ve seen Idiocracy, right?
The thing is, there’s a lot of variation among the U.S. states in terms of IQ averages. So while the nation as a whole averages roughly a 98 IQ, individual states range as much as six points higher or four points below the national average.
So, here are the estimated average IQ rates for residents of each U.S. state, as compiled by Michael McDaniel, formerly a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, and reported by The Washington Post.
It’s worth noting that the IQ test in and of itself is controversial to begin with. The Post in fact ranked states according to not just IQ test, but also average SAT and ACT score, along […]
Stephan: The Maga world is like an evil comic book, and Arizona is a living examplar of this truth. First the circus audit, and now this.
The Auschwitz concentration camp, which was liberated by Soviet troops in April 1945 (AFP)
On Saturday, Business Insider reported that Arizona has purchased the materials needed to manufacture hydrogen cyanide gas — the same chemical the Nazis used to murder Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz and other death camps — just as they are refurbishing a gas chamber used in death row executions.
“The Arizona Department of Corrections spent more than $2,000 in procuring the ingredients for the gas, The Guardian reported, citing the partially-redacted documents,” reported Alexandra Ma. “The ingredients purchased include a solid brick of potassium cyanide, sodium hydroxide pellets, and sulfuric acid, per the documents … The documents published by The Guardian also included instructions on how to operate the gas chamber.”
“Cyanide is lethal in that it prevents the body from using oxygen. It was used in both World Wars — by French and Austrian troops in World War I, and by Nazi Germany in World War II, according to a 2014 fact sheet by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health […]
Stephan: I am running this because I don't think most people understand that media is owned by a tiny number of corporations. Look at the chart. Some of these companies still respect journalism while others, like Fox, are explicitly propaganda disinformation operations. There is another trend though that makes this more complex: the rise of social media. QAnon is a manifestation of that trend's power.
A diagram that organizes distributors, content companies, and internet video companies by market cap — the value investors assign to the companies — and their main lines of business. Credit: Vox
The media landscape used to be straightforward: Content companies (studios) made stuff (TV shows and movies) and sold it to pay TV distributors, who sold it to consumers.
Now things are up for grabs: Netflix buys stuff from the studios, but it’s making its own stuff, too, and it’s selling it directly to consumers. That’s one of the reasons older media companies are trying to compete by consolidating. Disney, for example, bought much of 21st Century Fox — though much of the early success of its Disney+ streaming service looks like it’s a result of earlier purchases of Lucasfilm, Marvel, and Pixar. Meanwhile, distributors like AT&T, which bought Time Warner, and Verizon, which bought AOL and Yahoo, thought they wanted to become media companies — and have now done an about-face and are bailing out of those acquisitions.
Stephan: I completely agree with this article. The vote that just occurred about the 6 January Commission, made it as clear as one could make this point that the Republican Party is not at all interested in the substance of democracy, only the form. I tell you now that if the Republicans take the House and the Senate in 2022, the United States as we have known it will be gone.
U.S. Senate and House Republican members attend President Donald J. Trump address Thursday, Feb. 6, 2020 in the East Room of the White House, where the President responded to being acquitted in the U.S. Senate Impeachment Trial.Official White House. Credit: D. Myles Cullen)
During the 2020 presidential race, a wide range of Donald Trump critics — including arch-conservative columnist/author Mona Charen (who worked in the Reagan White House) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described “democratic socialist” — slammed Trump as dangerously authoritarian. They warned that U.S. democracy itself was on the line. Now-President Joe Biden won the election, but the threat of authoritarianism was evident when Trump tried to overturn the election results and a violent far-right mob attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6. Four months into Biden’s presidency, journalist Susan B. Glasser examines the state of American democracy this week in an article for The New Yorker — and she warns that there is a lot to be worried about.
“Far from embracing Biden’s call for unity,” Glasser explains, “Republicans remain in […]
