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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: Why does the richest nation in the world have the worst healthcare. Why doesn’t the United States, like the rest of the developed world have a universal single-payer birthright system As I have pointed out countless times, all backed by factual data, the American illness profit system is an absurdly overpriced failure if the point of healthcare is to foster wellbeing. But, of course, that isn’t the point. Profit is the only priority in the American system. CVS, as this report, spells out is one of the evil corporations trying to stop any change to the system. I use the word evil very deliberately. And so I ask you to please, If you get your prescriptions there, change to another pharmacy. Never spend another nickel in a CVS pharmacy from this day forward. And tell all your friends and family to do the same. Citizen power is pocketbook power. If none of us buy anything at CVS watch how fast they change their tune.
CVS Pharmacy
Last year, as the United States was ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic, CVS Health donated a staggering amount of money to a dark money group that advocated for limiting health care access.
The massive donation is considered the largest financial contribution on record although PAHCF is classified as a 501(c)(4) organization and not required to publicly disclose information about its donors. Reports about CVS Health’s donation come months after PAHCF embarked on a political sweep of voters in Democratic primary states as they urged voters to push back against the promotion of Medicare for All.
The group also targeted the states that are embracing the public health option. The publication notes that “the group hired local lobbyists and aired advertisements designed to discourage state legislators from voting for the plan.” Leading up to the presidential […]
Stephan: Here is another aspect of the pharmaceutical sector of the American illness profit system, showing the conscious choice by the industry to place profit above wellbeing. This industry is completely out of control, and in desperate need of being restructured so that wellbeing becomes the first priority.
The Pharmaceutical Industry is distributing talking points, organizing opposition, and even collecting congressional signatures in an attempt to reverse President Joe Biden’s support for worldwide access to generic Covid-19 vaccines.
The behind-the-scenes moves, revealed in documents obtained by The Intercept, come as the U.S. last week announced that it would support the World Trade Organization proposal, led by India and South Africa, to temporarily waive enforcement of intellectual property and patent rights on coronavirus vaccines. Without a radical expansion in vaccine manufacturing capacity, many developing countries will not achieve mass vaccination rates until 2023 or 2024.
The waiver request, which was unexpectedly endorsed by Biden’s administration on May 5, is designed to provide legal immunity for drug firms to copy the formulas of existing vaccines to supply low-cost vaccines to low-income countries, much of which are facing delays that could prolong the pandemic.
On Wednesday, Jared Michaud, a lobbyist with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a trade group that represents Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, and other major drug firms, sent an email laying out the industry’s role in coaxing lawmakers to […]
Stephan: Just as history looks back and sees Madison, Mason, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and Washington, as historically significant heroes, and Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Henry VIII as villains so, I think, history will look back on men like Lee Raymond and Lucio Noto as historical villains, which is different than just being a bad person. Yesterday I ran that piece on neuroscience's take on the psychopathology of sadism. It mentioned the notably high percentage of corporate heads who suffer from this, and I think Lee Raymond and Lurio Noto, are exemplars of the disorder. Their villainy? They knowingly and deliberately impeded the world's and particularly America's response to climate change. This report lays this out story, but more importantly, it explains how it was done, it speaks to the deeper process, the creation of the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). This is all part of the disinformation trend that is devouring our culture.
Exxon Corporation Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lee Raymond (L) and Vice Chairman Lucio Noto, circa 01 December, 1999. Credit: Henny Ray Abrams/ Getty
In the summer of 1988, the United States experienced the worst heat waves and droughts since the Dust Bowl. Ominous images of burning forests, withering fields and sweltering cities filled the American press and elicited nervous suspicion: was this the work of the so-called greenhouse effect? Had the danger of which some scientists warned already arrived?
It was amid this tense national atmosphere climatologist James Hansen intervened with his testimony to the Senate, in which he forthrightly asserted that “we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.” The suspicions were sound: “It is already happening now.” Describing the extreme summer as a taste of things to come, the report in the New York Times also noted that the testifying scientists “said that planning must begin now for a sharp reduction in the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels that […]
Stephan: Here you see another proof of Schwartz’ Law of Wellbeing. The evidence that policies that foster wellbeing are always more successful, easier to implement, more efficient, more productive, nicer to live under, longer enduring, and much much cheaper, is once again demonstrated in this Canadian project.
The evidence for this law is so irrefutable one has to ask, why isn’t this always the policy choice? The answer, I think, is that people who are well off, feel that people who are not, are in those reduced circumstances because they are lazy and feckless and should be punished for being that way.
A man protests homelessness in Vancouver. Around 235,000 Canadians experience homelessness each year, and the rates continue to rise. Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty
Ray is a 55-year-old man in Vancouver, Canada. He used to live in an emergency homeless shelter. But over the past couple years, he’s been able to pay for a place to live and courses to prepare him for his dream job — in part because he participated in a study called the New Leaf Project.
The study, conducted by the charity Foundations for Social Change in partnership with the University of British Columbia, was fairlysimple. It identified 50 people in the Vancouver area who had become homeless in the past two years. In spring 2018, it gave them each one lump sum of $7,500 (in Canadian dollars). And it told them to do whatever they wanted with the cash.
“At first, I thought it was a little far-fetched — too good to be true,” Ray said. “I went with one of the program representatives to a bank and we opened up a bank account for me. Even after the […]
Senator Bernie Sanders, Democratic Senator for Vermont - The New York Times
Stephan: What both saddens and amazes me about Israel is that for the last thousand years Jews were routinely put in ghettoes, restricted from education, precluded from certain professions, and treated like second or third class citizens. You would think that within that culture there would be an understanding of what such persecution evokes in its victims. WHat the Israelis should have done is make the Palestinians happy and middle class. Why Israelis of all people did not get this, I do not know. But it is causing endless violence, suffering, and death.
Gaza Credit: Khalil Hamra/Associated Press
“Israel has the right to defend itself.”
These are the words we hear from both Democratic and Republican administrations whenever the government of Israel, with its enormous military power, responds to rocket attacks from Gaza.
Let’s be clear. No one is arguing that Israel, or any government, does not have the right to self-defense or to protect its people. So why are these words repeated year after year, war after war? And why is the question almost never asked: “What are the rights of the Palestinian people?”
And why do we seem to take notice of the violence in Israel and Palestine only when rockets are falling on Israel?
In this moment of crisis, the United States should be urging an immediate cease-fire. We should also understand that, while Hamas firing rockets into Israeli communities is absolutely unacceptable, today’s conflict did not begin with those rockets.
Palestinian families in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah have been living under the threat of eviction for many years, navigating a legal system designed to facilitate their forced displacement. And over the past weeks, extremist settlers have intensified their efforts to evict them.
Stephan: I have been researching and writing about what the opioid crisis should teach anyone interested in facts. (Go to the SR archives for these papers) This piece lays the story out very clearly. The illness profit system for healthcare is both absurdly expensive compared with healthcare costs in any other country in the world, it is also markedly and notable inferior.
OxyContin is extremely dangerous, and unless an individual requires immediate relief from extreme pain—say, from a horrific accident, medical procedure, or disease—it’s best avoided. Like its legion of prescription opioid brethren, it is, in effect, heroin in pill form. And yet thanks to the efforts of the Sackler family’s Purdue Pharma and the corporations that followed its lead, OxyContin is now consumed by millions of citizens who are addicted to it, and die from it, just like any other deadly narcotic. No matter Purdue’s protestations to the contrary, this so-called miracle drug has helped spawn a ghastly opioid crisis that from 2000 to 2019 caused 487,842 overdose deaths in America.
And as Alex Gibney’s latest documentary contends, this wasn’t an unfortunate side effect of a vitally needed treatment. It was a deliberate and dastardly crime, carried out in the name of profit.
Gibney’s two-part HBO documentary The Crime of the Century (premiering May 10 and 11) is an evisceration of Big Pharma, which it argues purposefully and aggressively flooded the market with OxyContin—and, later, the even more powerful fentanyl—in order to […]
Simon McCarthy-Jones, Fellow of the US-based Brain and Behavior Research Foundation - Neuroscience News
Stephan: This is an excellent research-based article on an important aspect of the consciousness of our culture that must be recognized and understood before it can be diffused.
Another reason people harm the harmless is because they nonetheless see a threat. Image is in the public domain
Why are some humans cruel to people who don’t even pose a threat to them – sometimes even their own children? Where does this behavior come from and what purpose does it serve?
Humans are the glory and the scum of the universe, concluded the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, in 1658. Little has changed. We love and we loathe; we help and we harm; we reach out a hand and we stick in the knife.
We understand if someone lashes out in retaliation or self-defence. But when someone harms the harmless, we ask: “How could you?”
Humans typically do things to get pleasure or avoid pain. For most of us, hurting others causes us to feel their pain. And we don’t like this feeling. This suggests two reasons people may harm the harmless – either they don’t feel the others’ pain or they enjoy feeling the others’ pain.
Another reason people harm the harmless is because they nonetheless see a threat. Someone who doesn’t imperil your body or wallet can still threaten your social […]
Stephan: I hope my readers are taking very seriously the attempt by Trump Cultists and their dark money masters to destroy democracy in America, and convert it to a christofascist White supremacy authoritarian pseudo democracy. This is a very well funded, and nationally coordinated effort, and it is working, as this report, and the video attest. If you live in a Red state you just lost a lot of your voting rights. Or maybe you are a Trump Cultist and that doesn't matter to you.
In a private meeting last month with big-money donors, the head of a top conservative group boasted that her outfit had crafted the new voter suppression law in Georgia and was doing the same with similar bills for Republican state legislators across the country. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”
The Georgia law had “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended,” Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, told the foundation’s donors at an April 22 gathering in Tucson, in a recording obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with Mother Jones. Those included policies severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes, preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters, making it easier for partisan workers to monitor the polls, preventing the collection of mail ballots, and restricting the ability of counties to accept donations from nonprofit groups seeking to aid in election administration.
All of these recommendations came straight from Heritage’s list of “best practices” drafted in February. With […]
