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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: The racist southern states of the old confederacy continue to be overwhelmingly racist, which politically translates to Republican. Republicans do not like democracy and are doing everything the party can do, at the state level, to see that people of color find it very difficult to vote, and that congressional districts are rigged so that as many as possible are majority White. That may sound partisan but it is, in fact, simply factual.
Credit: www.politicspa.com
Southern states will be especially vulnerable to partisan and racial gerrymandering due to single-party control over the process and weaker protections for communities of color, a new report has found.
The Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal public policy institute at New York University Law School, analyzed the redistricting landscape across the country, categorizing states based on their projected risk for partisan and/or racial gerrymandering. The 27-page report, released Thursday, found abuse in the mapmaking process will be most severe in four Republican-controlled Southern states: Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas.
Meanwhile, every state is facing a shared challenge: a compressed timeline to draw the new maps. Typically, population data needed for redistricting is released in April, but due to delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Trump administration, the Census Bureau is now expecting those figures to be ready in late September. This will further complicate this year’s redistricting process, and therefore preparations for the 2022 midterms as well.
Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center who authored the report, said this round of redistricting is likely to be the […]
Stephan: This is what has really begun to worry me. We have one political party that is actively working against American democracy. My hope is that the Republican Party schisms into two parties, one an ethical genuinely conservative party and the other a racist Trumpian party, and this nasty little cult is such a minority that it withers to irrelevancy. But as is obvious by what is happening at the state level and in the Congress, the United States is in a very parlous position; don't think for a moment that we have shed Trumpism.
Seven Republican members of the U.S. Senate voted to find former President Donald Trump guilty of inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that left five people dead. By the end of this week, six of the seven may have faced censures from local and state Republican parties back home because of those votes.
Together with the 10 Republican House members who voted to impeach Trump, the seven GOP senators made Trump’s second impeachment the most bipartisan in American history. But if those votes foreshadowed a looming civil war within the GOP, the hasty efforts to censure anyone who crossed Trump are a good indication of which side has the larger army.
As the riot in the Capitol played out, even the GOP lawmakers who helped incite it briefly attempted to distance themselves from the mess they had created. But rather than a reckoning, the Republican Party is attempting a purge. From Congress to state legislatures, and in the state- and county-level parties that make up its base, the […]
Stephan: Marcotte has it right. I would only add that what is happening in Texas is a natural and predictable event in a society that has no social priority but profit. If this were a society that made fostering wellbeing the first priority none of this would be happening because it is a completely avoidable social catastrophe.
Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott
Donald Trump may be gone, having left behind a pandemic that has killed nearly 500,000 Americans, due to his malicious incompetence. Still, his spirit of governing the people like you hate them and want them to die lives on in the Republican Party and its propaganda apparatus, Fox News. Just take a look at the GOP response to the crisis in Texas, which has been buried under blizzards so bad that “unseasonable” is a comical understatement. The ice and snow has caused the power grid in the state to collapse, leaving millions of Texans without power and heat in deadly conditions. Rather than deal with the problems with maturity and grace, however, Texas’s Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and his allies are taking a page directly from Trump’s coronavirus response playbook by abandoning people while exploiting the situation to push a far-right, authoritarian agenda that will only make the problems much worse.
Just as Trump’s response to the pandemic suggested he was rooting for the coronavirus, Abbott and company are using this […]
Stephan: Could the far right view be any clearer? The people of Texas elected these incompetents and are now living with the consequences of those choices. That is the truth that dare not be spoken. We will see what they learned in 2022.
Former Republican Governor of Texas, and Secretary of Energy in the Trump cabinet
Rick Perry once wanted to get rid of the U.S. Department of Energy. Now, he’s apparently fine with temporarily ridding Texas of energy altogether.
As the former Republican governor of Texas and energy secretary under former President Donald Trump, Perry had a lot to say about the state’s ongoing blackouts amid an unprecedented winter storm. But even as it becomes clear Texas’ energy system needs a major overhaul, Perry said Texans would rather remain in the dark if it meant keeping the federal government out, he told House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) office in a blog post published Wednesday.
Perry, like other conservatives, blamed Texas’ renewable energy sources for the outages, and alleged the Biden administration’s focus on decreasing fossil fuel dependence would make this happen again. Perry did note that natural gas supplies most of Texas’ power, not solar and wind, but still claimed Texas would refuse to adopt more of those renewable sources no matter how […]
Stephan: One of the main takeaways for me from this pandemic is how it has brought into focus our abysmal illness profit system. In America healthcare is about making profit, not fostering wellbeing. Very few Americans seem to realize that about one-third of emergency rooms in this country are not owned by the hospitals that house them, they are owned by three hedge funds. And the hospitals themselves, 20.2% are state-owned, 58.5% are non-profit and 21.3 are for-profit. Collectively this system has produced healthcare that ranks 37th in the world, one of the worst systems in the developed world, yet the most expensive system on earth.
Hopefully, the healthcare disaster the Covid-19 pandemic has produced will give the Biden administration the support they need to create universal birthright single-payer non-profit healthcare so that Americans can get the kind of healthcare other developed nations enjoy.
Private equity firm Leonard Green and other investors extracted $645 million from Prospect Medical before announcing a deal to sell it and leave it with $1.3 billion in financial obligations. Four states approved it — but Rhode Island is holding out.
In a David-and-Goliath battle, a group of Rhode Island officials and a union for hospital workers have so far stymied a multi-billion-dollar private equity fund’s attempt to unload its controlling stake in a national for-profit hospital chain. Investors led by the private equity firm, Leonard Green & Partners, previously extracted $645 million in dividends from the investment, and the firm now seeks to leave behind another $1.3 billion in financial obligations at the chain. In the face of more than a year of often-vehement public opposition in Rhode Island, the hospital chain suddenly agreed in the final days of December to pay $27.25 million to resolve a group of lawsuits they had previously refused to settle. But a Jan. 29 deadline for the state to approve the deal has been extended indefinitely and other obstacles remain.
Stephan: The United States is the most expensive nation on earth to have a baby. Not by a little bit but by multiples. The system is crazy, and benefits no one but the profit takers.With climate change growing worse each year, with more pandemics inevitable as viruses and bacteria mutate the United States has reached the moment of truth. We are either going to make healthcare a first priority instead of being a profit system or we are going to see endless suffering and death, and economic collapse.
I’m delighted to announce my partner has been struck with a short-term disability. She is pregnant. Which, in the capitalist utopia that is the US, is pretty much the same thing. It’s the only developed country without mandated paid maternity leave; in some states, however, short-term disability insurance covers your income for a few weeks while you recover from the miracle of birth.
You know what is really a miracle? The fact that anyone gives birth in the US at all. (And, in fact, not many people do: the birthrate has plummeted.) It doesn’t just have the worst parental leave in the rich world, it is also the most expensive country in which to have a baby. It is hard to pin down exact costs because they vary wildly depending on your location and your health insurance. However, even with decent insurance, you can expect to pay a few thousand dollars out-of-pocket for an uncomplicated birth. Indeed, the cost of delivering a regular American baby is more than that of delivering a Royal baby in the UK.
Stephan: What kind of country does not make arrangements for the care of its elderly. It is a measure of how out of order American society is that we do not do this. Instead, we do this.
Employees of LHC Group describe a business model that prioritized profits and compromised patient care. Soon they reached a breaking point: “It just didn’t make me feel right, doing what I did.”
A few years ago, Stella started working as a nursing assistant at Almost Family in Chilton, Wisconsin. She liked the job at first—the hours were flexible, and she had a good connection with her patients. She would spend a few hours at each of her patients’ homes, cleaning up and helping them get dressed or take baths.
When Stella moved from Chilton to Green Bay to start nursing school, she decided to keep working for the company at a new location there. But upon transferring to the new agency, she said her workload increased: She recalled that the company expanded her patient roster from two or three patients to seven or eight, and since she didn’t have the use of a car, she had to shorten her visits with one patient in order to get to the next. She found herself working as many as 65 hours a […]
Stephan: The Republicans in the Georgia State Legislature are trying to rig their government to protect Trump; it really is that bad, they are that willing to destroy democracy. But the crimes are so obvious I don't think they will succeed and now Lindsey Graham very appropriately is being dragged in. I think we are going to spend the next several months searching for accountability, and I hope we find it and hold Trump and all his orcs accountable.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham
In Georgia, a criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump’s post-election conduct is expanding to include close Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham, according to a Friday report by the Washington Post.
The investigation, which was opened by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis earlier this month, will probe whether Trump — and now Graham — violated state law in the course of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election results in Georgia following the 2020 presidential election.
According to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Graham — a Republican from South Carolina — asked Raffensperger in November whether the secretary of state had the power to throw out all mail-in ballots in certain Georgia counties, a move that could potentially have tipped the state, and its 16 electoral votes, to Trump in the November election.
Raffensperger was reportedly “stunned” by Graham’s question and rejected the idea, which would have been beyond his power as secretary of state. After multiple recounts, President Joe Biden ultimately won Georgia by 11,779 votes, becoming the first Democratic presidential […]
