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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: I am appalled by the open blatant White racism we are seeing crop up like a toxic fungus all over the United States. It is unapologetic, militant, and brazen. With the present birth rates we have we will be a majority-minority nation between 2040-45. This is the trend that is creating the race crisis that plagues our society and politics. It is going to happen, the question is how are we going to react to it? The Republican Party has essentially become the party for those who cannot process this reality. How do you plan to react?
Mitch McConnell executive officer of America’s racist party Credit: Alex Wong/Getty
As the nation grapples with fighting for racial justice and against police-perpetrated murders of Black Americans, Republicans have evidently found a different cause worth fighting for: making racist, seemingly unprompted defenses of slavery.
On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) said that he doesn’t believe that 1619, the year that enslaved Africans first arrived in the U.S., is an important date in history. People have “exotic notions” about important points in U.S. history, and 1619 isn’t one of them, McConnell said.
“I just simply don’t think [racism is] part of the core underpinning of what American civic education ought to be about,” McConnell continued, speaking at the University of Louisville. McConnell has gone on a tirade against The New York Times’s 1619 Project about slavery in the U.S. and Democrats’ anti-racism agenda — though anti-anti-racism, as commentators have pointed out, is simply just racism.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, who headed the 1619 Project on slavery that has Republicans up in arms, spoke on CNN about McConnell’s comments. “This is not about the facts of history […]
Stephan: The pandemic is worse, much worse than anyone imagined. Not just because of the disease but because the stress it has created, coming on top of what was done in America during the Trump administration has left us with a fragility we do not yet fully comprehend.
Coffins of the Covid dead
A new study estimates that the number of people who have died of COVID-19 in the U.S. is more than 900,000, a number 57% higher than official figures.
Worldwide, the study’s authors say, the COVID-19 death count is nearing 7 million, more than double the reported number of 3.24 million.
The analysis comes from researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, who looked at excess mortality from March 2020 through May 3, 2021, compared it with what would be expected in a typical nonpandemic year, then adjusted those figures to account for a handful of other pandemic-related factors.
The final count only estimates deaths “caused directly by the SARS-CoV-2 virus,” according to the study’s authors. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19.
Researchers estimated dramatic undercounts in countries such as India, Mexico and Russia, where they said the official death counts are some 400,000 too low in each country. In some countries — including Japan, Egypt and several Central Asian nations — the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s death toll […]
Stephan: We, each of us, is being forced to make a choice. Race fear in America is on the verge of destroying democracy. We either accept racial equality, or we lose democracy. So what do you choose?
Florida Republican governor Ron DeSantis, leading political racist Credit: NGAN/AFP/Getty
Amid growing concerns that Republicans will try to use new voting laws to overturn elections in the wake of a campaign of lies stoking unfounded fears about vote-rigging, GOP-led state legislatures across the country are already trying to reverse popular ballot initiatives approved by majorities of voters.
Missouri voters last year passed a ballot initiative to expand Medicaid. Arizona approved a new tax on the wealthy to fund schools. South Dakota legalized marijuana. But Republicans are trying to block those measures from being implemented and dozens of state legislatures are pushing new bills to make it harder to get voter initiatives on the ballot in the first place.
“As more progressive issues are winning at the ballot, from Medicaid expansion to legalization and decriminalization of marijuana to raising the minimum wage, paid family and sick leave, increasing access to the voting process, we have seen concerted efforts by state legislators to undermine the will of the people,” Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the progressive Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC), said in an interview with […]
Senator Bernie Sanders, Democratic Senator from Vermont - Reader Supported News
Stephan: Bernie Sanders is absolutely correct about the pharmaceutical sector of the American illness profit system. It is my devout hope that during the Biden administration we will see the creation of a universal birthright single-payer healthcare system that is really based on fostering wellbeing and that the crippling grip of the pharmaceutical corporations on the pocketbooks of Americans will finally be broken.
Democratic Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders
We are beginning to make progress in creating a government that works for all people, and not just the very wealthy. But we still have a very long way to go.
By now you’ve heard the big headlines about the American Rescue Plan that Joe Biden signed into law in March: the $1,400 direct payments, the massive expansion of the child tax credit, the extension of unemployment benefits and the production and distribution of tens of millions of vaccine doses that are desperately needed if we are going to crush this pandemic.
What you might not have heard is that we have made primary healthcare far more accessible by doubling funding for community health centers and tripling funding to get doctors, dentists and nurses into medically underserved areas. Kids who have been stuck at home for the past year will now be able to do activities this summer because of major new funding for summer and after-school programs.
These are major steps forward.
But in this time of unprecedented crises, it is not enough. Joe […]
Phillip Longman, Senior Editor - Washington Monthly Magazine
Stephan: I have had a series of foot surgeries while this pandemic has raged, and it has given me the opportunity to talk with doctors, nurses, and technicians who are living this nightmare on its frontlines. What that has done is to convince me even more strongly than before that the American illness profit system is a failure. Not because the people who staff the system have done less than their best. Quite the contrary I think they are heroes. No, the issue is now the system is structured, and how it is paid for. Well-being is not the point. Profit is the point of healthcare in the United States and this report shows what it has produced, particularly in small hospitals and clinics. You may have had just such experiences yourself.
Hospitals are among the most opaque institutions in American life. Few allow their doctors to talk to the press except in the hovering presence of “handlers.” Though they often employ cadres of “communications specialists” who pitch reporters with puff pieces, most are obsessed with keeping their finances and internal operations secret.
The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town by Brian Alexander St. Martin’s Press, 310 pp.
The first remarkable thing about Brian Alexander’s new book, The Hospital, is that he managed to pull off an exception to this seeming iron law of U.S. health care. He never explains exactly how, but in early 2018 he persuaded the CEO and board of a small, community hospital in rural Bryan, Ohio, to give him fly-on-the-wall access to their struggling institution—and complete freedom to write up what he witnessed.
For the next year and a half, Alexander attended long rounds of anguished and divisive strategy sessions. Administrators and board members fought with consultants and each other over how to bring in enough revenue to avoid having to shut down or sell out to a big hospital chain. As Alexander became embedded in the hospital’s […]
Stephan: In the 1970s if you had talked with almost any futurist they would have told you the Big Issue in the future was going to be over-population. You would not have heard a word about climate change. Big mistake on both counts. The fact is no democratic nation in the world has a sustainable birthrate, here is the latest data on the U.S., and climate change is humanity's existential challenge.
A newborn baby is cuddled by her mother while asleep. Credit: Tim Clayton/Corbis News/Getty
Births fell for the sixth consecutive year to the lowest levels since 1979, the CDC said.
The U.S. birth rate is so low, the nation is “below replacement levels,” meaning more people die every day than are being born, the CDC said.
U.S. birth and fertility rates in 2020 dropped to another record low as births fell for the sixth consecutive year to the lowest levels since 1979, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
The number of births in the U.S. declined last year by 4% from 2019, double the average annual rate of decline of 2% since 2014, the CDC said in preliminary birth data released Wednesday. Total fertility rates and general fertility rates also declined by 4% since 2019, reaching record lows. The U.S. birth rate is so low, the nation is “below replacement levels,” meaning more people die every day than are being born, the CDC said.
While the agency didn’t directly attribute the overall […]
Stephan: So much of what we are taught as children about our history is distorted at best, and bogus at worst. How slaves liked slavery and the current 3/5s discussion being examples of this. This exegetic essay will give you some fact-based history on what infrastructure means, the origins of Biden's infrastructure proposal, and the Republican resistance to it.
Credit: AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar
President Joe Biden’s proposed infrastructure legislation has the political class seemingly locked in a debate about what “infrastructure” means. Biden and Democratic leaders—backed by a majority of the U.S. population—believe that “infrastructure” is more than just roads and bridges and encompasses all the structures that help modern society function. Their new bill reflects that understanding, including improvements to water pipes and the electrical grid, universal broadband access, charging stations for electric vehicles, physical upgrades to schools and universities, and—perhaps most innovatively—home care for the elderly and disabled, support for families with children, and expanded access to health care.
Republican elected officials, on the other hand, are fiercely opposed to a broad definition of the old term. Biden’s plan is a “Trojan horse” (Mitch McConnell) for massive tax hikes and expanded federal authority. It’s a “Socialist agenda” (Steve Scalise)—a “kitchen sink of wasteful progressive demands.” It will set the nation on a “road to hell” (Rachel Campos-Duffy of Fox News).
Leslie Scism and Arian Campo-Flores, - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan: I have been telling my readers for a decade to watch the insurance corporations because they pay close attention to what is happening with climate change, and when insurance rates start to skyrocket it is a clue that coastal real estate in those areas where rates are going up is in danger of provoking a real estate collapse and the loss of tens of billions of dollars of real estate value. Well, that prediction has come true.
Insurance is becoming less affordable and less available for Florida homeowners. Credit: The Wall Street Journal
MIAMI, FLORIDA — Florida’s property-insurance market is in trouble, as mounting carrier losses and rising premiums threaten the state’s booming real-estate market, according to insurance executives and industry analysts.
Longtime homeowners are getting socked with double-digit rate increases or notices that their policies won’t be renewed. Out-of-state home buyers who have flocked to Florida during the pandemic are experiencing sticker shock. Insurers that are swimming in red ink are cutting back coverage in certain geographic areas to shore up their finances.
Various factors are at play, insurance executives and analysts say. Two hurricanes that slammed the state—Irma in 2017 and Michael in 2018—generated claims with an estimated cost of about $30 billion. The cost of reinsurance, which insurers take out to cover some of the risk in the policies they sell, is swelling. Of particular concern, executives say, are excessive litigation over insurance claims and a proliferation of what insurers see as sham roof-related claims.
