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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.
More and more of these horrible stories about women in Red states not getting the healthcare they need keep coming out. I picked this one not only because it proves what the Republicans have done to women’s healthcare in the states they control but also because it is from a British paper, and it gives one a sense of how the rest of the world now sees America. We are coming across as an increasingly unattractive country, and that is going to have long-term consequences.
Breanna Cecil and her husband in 2021 Credit: Handout
A Tennessee woman who was denied an abortion despite a fatal abnormality says the state’s anti-abortion laws resulted in her losing an ovary, a fallopian tube and her hopes for a large family.
“The state of Tennessee took my fertility from me,” Breanna Cecil, 34, told The Independent. She added that state lawmakers “took away my opportunity to have a family like my own biological family because of these horrible laws that they put in place.”
The mother-of-one said she has not felt the same since her doctor told her in January 2023 that her fetus was diagnosed with acrania, a fatal condition where the fetus has no skull bones.
Then, 12 weeks pregnant, Ms Cecil was getting her first ultrasound. She attended the appointment alone, so when the doctor told her the fetus was not viable outside the womb, she was left with only asking the doctor what she should do.
However, she was left with few options. The state’s near-total […]
BRENDAN BORDELON, Tech Lobbying and Influence Reporter - Politico
Stephan:
Here we see once again the corruption of the U.S. Congress, and how this country gets into the terrible situations in which it so frequently finds itself. Instead of developing policies that foster wellbeing, once again Congress is whoring itself out to lobbying money. They are creating policy based not on facts, they are making policy on the basis of corporate profits. As a result, the future of our children may be severely damaged because of decisions based on greed.
The new influence web is pushing the argument that AI is less an existential danger than a crucial business opportunity. Credit: AP
In a shift for Washington tech lobbying, companies and investors from across the industry have been pouring tens of millions of dollars into an all-hands effort to block strict safety rules on advanced artificial intelligence and get lawmakers to worry about China instead — and so far, they seem to be winning over once-skeptical members of Congress.
The success of the pro-tech, anti-China AI push, fueled by several new arrivals on the lobbying scene, marks a change from months in which the AI debate was dominated by well-funded philanthropies warning about the long-term dangers of the technology.
The new influence web is pushing the argument that AI is less an existential danger than a crucial business opportunity, and arguing that strict safety rules would hand America’s AI edge to China. It has already caused key lawmakers to back off some of their more worried rhetoric about the technology.
Grotesque wealth inequality has become a major social force shaping the United States and much of the rest of the world. Here is a very good take on this reality.
In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, residents in unplanned settlements live just blocks away from wealthy suburbs. Credit: Viviane Moos / Corbis / Getty
BOOK:Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme WealthIngrid Robeyns Allen Lane (2024)
As radical as they might seem, calls for limits on wealth are as old as civilization itself. The Hebrew Bible and Torah recognized years during which debts should be cancelled, slaves set free and property redistributed from rich to poor. In classical Greece, Aristotle praised cities that kept wealth inequality in check to enhance political stability. And in 1942, then-US president Franklin D. Roosevelt argued that annual incomes should be capped at the current equivalent of US$480,000.
In Limitarianism, Dutch and Belgian economist and philosopher Ingrid Robeyns argues that it’s time for twenty-first-century governments to do the same. She explores what setting limits on wealth ownership might mean, and why our societies should want to do so. It is a fresh take on a much-needed discussion at a time when, for example, the richest 1% of the […]
Here is a recent report on the state of America’s Illness Profit System. It isn’t good, things that were already bad are getting worse. As the report lays out it is all about the social status of the patient and money. The United States has the worst and most expensive pseudo-healthcare system in the world. And, because the healthcare industry rents through lobbying funding most Congress members like hookers at a politic conference, except for a few ethical members like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Katie Porter, not many are even trying to do anything about this.
Illustration: Lindsey Bailey / Axios
For the decade-ish that I’ve been reporting on health care, insurance coverage has dominated conversations about who has access to care. But in the post-pandemic era, it’s become clear that having insurance is only the first step toward receiving quality care.
Why it matters: Where Americans live, their health status and a range of socioeconomic factors increasingly determine their experience with the health care system, and in many cases that experience appears to be getting worse.
Affordability, while critical, isn’t synonymous with access. Long wait times for doctor appointments, crowded emergency departments, complicated insurance requirements and a dearth of local providers are all making things tougher on patients.
For many people, whether they can get the care they need when they need it seems to come down to the luck of the draw.
State of play: Provider shortages and a post-pandemic surge in demand for care have played a large role in today’s squeeze.
Here is further information on the absolute corruptness of criminal Trump. (And yes, I say criminal Trump given all his convictions for rape, and fraud, what else should he be called.) The carbon industry CEOs who went down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss criminal Trump’s ass and to whine about how ineffective the $400 million they spent on Congressional whores last year were told as blatantly as you could imagine: Spend a billion dollars to get me elected and I will gut all the programs designed to prepare for what climate change is doing. Screw the people of America, I don’t care about any of them. All I care about is getting elected so I don’t go to prison even if I am found guilty. That is the Republican Party’s candidate for president, and I assume it will cheer the MAGAts who are now going around wearing diapers. This is the state of the United States of America today.
Former president Donald Trump shakes hands with North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R), who is leading the Trump campaign’s development of its energy policy, at a rally in Laconia, N.H., on Jan. 22. Credit: Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post
As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.
Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, […]
Yet another report on the decline of healthcare for women in states controlled by Republicans. Tracking this trend is one of the saddest American stories I have ever tracked. So much misery for no reason other than prejudice.
Dr. Leilah Zahedi-Spung spent four years in medical school, four years in an OB-GYN residency, and three years in a maternal-fetal medicine fellowship learning how to care for high-risk pregnant patients. In her decade-plus of medical training, she learned that in some cases, the only rational and responsible option for medical intervention is an emergency abortion. In July 2021 she moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and discovered she was the sole provider in her area trained to perform second-trimester dilatation and evacuation abortions for patients who needed them to survive.
But in 2022, the Supreme Court delivered its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, and Tennessee’s trigger ban—written in preparation for the possibility that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe—went into effect a month later. Suddenly, providing an abortion in Tennessee became an immediate Class C felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. There were no exceptions, even when an abortion was necessary to save a life or prevent serious bodily harm. Only after being arrested could a physician provide something called an “affirmative defense” to fight the charges. (Eight months after the trigger law took effect, […]
Mexico City, I think, should be seen as an alarm bell warning cities throughout the United States, and the world come to that. Water and how it it handled is going to become a major factor in the wellbeing of communities, and neither Mexico nor the cities in the United States are preparing properly. I urge you to do some research into the community in which you live to see whether they are doing what should be done to face what is happening.
Mexico City is being threatened by a water crisis after the main reservoirs remain under 40 percent of their full capacity due to low rainfall, geography, and lack of infrastructure. Credit: Hector Vivas/Getty
Mexico City is parched.
After abysmally low amounts of rainfall over the last few years, the reservoirs of the Cutzamala water system that supplies over 20 percent of the Mexican capital’s 22 million residents’ usable water are running out.
“If it doesn’t start raining soon, as it is supposed to, these [reservoirs] will run out of water by the end of June,” Oscar Ocampo, a public policy researcher on the environment, water, and energy, told my colleagues over on the Today, Explained podcast.
The crisis is also leading Mexico City to siphon more from the underground aquifers on which the city sits, a decision that’s not just unsustainable without replenishment but also causes the ground to […]
Emma Shortis, Adjunct Senior Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University - The Conversation
Stephan:
Project 2025. This is what the TCP Republican Party and criminal Trump seek to do to American society, including eliminating true democracy in the country. We stand at a precipice, and a large percentage of Americans bow down to Trump’s goals. We have a two party system, you and everyone you know must vote only for Democrats or you will elect a christofascist.
Current polling separates Biden and Trump by just 2%. Credit: Andy Manis / AAP
In April 2022, conservative American think tank the Heritage Foundation, working with a broad coalition of 50 conservative organisations, launched Project 2025: a plan for the next conservative president of the United State
The Project’s flagship publication, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, outlines in plain language and in granular detail, over 900-plus pages, what a second Trump administration (if it occurs) might look like. I’ve read it all, so you don’t have to.
The Mandate’s veneer of exhausting technocratic detail, focused mostly on the federal bureaucracy, sits easily alongside a Trumpian project of revenge and retribution. It is the substance behind the showmanship of the Trump rallies.
Developing transition plans for a presidential candidate is normal practice in the US. What is not normal about Project 2025, with its intertwined domestic and international agenda, are the plans themselves. Those for climate and the global environment, defence and security, the global economic system and the institutions of American democracy more broadly aim for nothing […]
