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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.
I have been writing about the failure of America’s illness profit system for over 30 years, and it has been getting worse and worse as the years have gone by. The United States has the worst healthcare amongst developed democracies as factually demonstrated by the worse factual outcome data. Highest maternal mortality, highest infant mortality, lowest rank in healthcare systems, and on and on. Here is some current to the day facts about how bad our healthcare system is. The question is why does America have such poor healthcare? The answer, of course, is the same thing that afflicts all American society. U.S. healthcare is not a system designed to foster wellbeing; it is all about maximizing profit. So then, one has to ask why can’t the Congress create universal birthright single-payer healthcare like the other developed democracies. The answer, once again, is the corruption of the Congress. Corporations involved with healthcare pour hundreds of millions of legalized graft into the pockets of politicians, particularly, but not only, TCP politicians.
Credit: Adobe
The slang definition of “unwinding” means “to chill.” Other definitions include: to relax, disentangle, undo — all words that, on the surface, appear both passive and peaceful. And yet in Google searches involving such seemingly harmless definitions of decompressing and resting, news articles abound about the end of pandemic-era Medicaid expansion programs — a topic that, for the millions of people now without healthcare insurance, is anything but relaxing.
Imagine this: since March 2023, 16 million Americans — yes, that’s right, 16 million — have lost healthcare coverage, including four million children, as states redefine eligibility for Medicaid for the first time in three years. Worse yet, the nation is only halfway through the largest purge ever of Medicaid as the expansion and extension of healthcare to millions, brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, have ended, leaving some families no longer eligible, while others need to reapply through a new process in their state.
This thrusting of tens of millions of Americans out of the national healthcare system at a moment when healthcare outfits, […]
Fred Schulte, - MedPage Today / Kaiser Family Foundation
Stephan:
It isn’t just that we are on the verge of ceasing to be a democracy. The fundamental problem in the American culture is that integrity and honesty are no longer considered priorities, and our politics and the illness profit system are perhaps the greatest examples of what we have become.
A Maryland firm that oversees the nation’s largest independent network of primary care medical practices is facing a whistleblower lawsuit alleging it cheated Medicare out of millions of dollars using billing software “rigged” to make patients appear sicker than they were.
The civil suit alleges that Aledade’s billing apps and other software and guidance provided to doctors improperly boosted revenues by adding overstated medical diagnoses to patients’ electronic medical records.
“Aledade did whatever it took to make patients appear sicker than they were,” according to the suit.
For example, the suit alleges that Aledade “conflated” anxiety into depression, which could boost payments by $3,300 a year per patient. And Aledade decided that patients over age 65 who said they had more than one drink per day had substance use issues, which could bring in $3,680 extra per patient, the suit says.
The whistleblower case was filed by Khushwinder Singh, MD, in federal court in Seattle in 2021 but remained under seal until January of this year. Singh, a “senior medical director of risk and wellness product” at Aledade from […]
Steven Lee Myers, Misinformation Reporter - The New York Times
Stephan:
It is becoming harder and harder for me to do SR because of the proliferation of misinformation sites put up by TCPs and Russians. I have actually visited some of the sites listed in this article, and I have to double and triple-check everything to make sure what I am publishing in SR is fact-based. Because most people don’t make such an effort I think the weaponization of lies (see the SR archive and search on “weaponization of lies”) is going to seriously distort our election. I doubt our corrupt Congress and Supreme Court will do anything to counteract what is happening. The simple answer is vote only for Democrats if you want to preserve our democracy. After the election, we are going to have to create a citizens’ movement demanding what is posted as news must be objectively verifiable as a fact. We have to make honesty, and the fostering of wellbeing our national priority. The alternative is you will live in a country like Russia or Hungary.
The Miami Chronicle’s website, which mimics an actual news site to push Russia propaganda, first appeared on Feb. 26.
Into the depleted field of journalism in America, a handful of websites have appeared in recent weeks with names suggesting a focus on news close to home: D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and a newer sister publication, the Miami Chronicle.
In fact, they are not local news organizations at all. They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, meant to mimic actual news organizations to push Kremlin propaganda by interspersing it among an at-times odd mix of stories about crime, politics and culture.
While Russia has long sought ways to influence public discourse in the United States, the fake news organizations — at least five, so far — represent a technological leap in its efforts to find new platforms to dupe unsuspecting American readers. The sites, the researchers and officials said, could well be the foundations of an online network primed to surface disinformation ahead of the American presidential election in November.
I realized tonight as I was doing the research and writing for SR something that I had not fully comprehended: The Great Schism Trend is reaching its crescendo, and we are in the midst of a civil war. One-third of Americans mostly low-income, low education resentful angry Whites, with some Blacks and Latinos financed by White oligarchs want a christofascist authoritarian nation ruled by what they think of as “Christians”, and controlled by the ultra-wealthy Whites who funding the TCP. The low income, low education Whites have armed and are being trained for violence in militias, Proudboys, etc.. They think they will win what they plan to be America’s last democratic election. They want the United States to become something like Hungary. That’s why the Christian Nationalists were meeting with Viktor Orban. The other two-thirds of Americans are mostly asleep to what is really going on. They think this is just another election. It is not. If the TCPs lose and the Democrats win, and I will certainly do everything I can to make that happen, I fear we are going to see civil violence increase, and that it will become a large issue in Biden’s last term.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban speaks at CPAC in Dallas, Aug. 4, 2022. Credit: LM Otero / AP
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was in Washington DC on Thursday. But the controversial autocrat wasn’t making an official state visit. Indeed, President Joe Biden had intentionally declinedto extend a White House invitation to a man who has pursued a vision of “illiberal democracy” and cracked down on press freedom since taking power in 2010. Instead, Orbán was in town to participate in a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation, a Christian conservative think-tank.
The authoritarian leader was introduced by failed GOP presidential candidate and aspiring authoritarian Vivek Ramaswamy, who has become a regular at the Hungarian embassy in DC over the past year. Orbán posted a slick video of his Washington visit on social media, including a clip of Heritage president Kevin Roberts gushing that Orbán has “a lot of fans here in the United States. You have a lot of people who are intrigued by policies you enacted.”
According to information distributed by the prime minister’s press office to
I think Biden keeps funding fascist Netanayou and his cabal of fascists who are obviously attempting a genocide of Palestinians or, at least, reducing Gaza to rubble and claiming control of the territory, because they fear if they stop backing Israel the Iranians and other Middle Eastern terrorists will attack Israel and disrupt the entire region and take it into war. I think that is a mistake because nothing justifies the genocide that is occurring in Gaza, with over 30,000 mostly innocent women and children and the complete destruction of the buildings that once made up the homes, shops, hospitals, and offices of Palestinian society. In addition, I think the Biden team has miscalculated the political impact on Israel, which is becoming a loathed country. It is also having a very negative effect on Democratic voters in the U.S., particularly young people. I think Biden’s team has assessed that Trump will be so awful, with multiple court convictions, that the election will become basically democracy vs authoritarianism and that will overwhelm this growing antipathy. It is a very cynical and calculated political call, and while it may work, I have lost great respect for Biden.
Biden announced his pier plan after the United Nations raised the alarm about an “imminent” famine in the Gaza region Credit: Said Khatib / AFP / Getty
The U.S. military estimates that building a temporary floating dock on Gaza’s shores to speed up humanitarian operations might take two months.
U.S. President Joe Biden announced the plan in his State of the Union address on Thursday, calling the situation in the Gaza Strip “heartbreaking” as the Israeli military continues its retaliatory bombings on Hamas after the militant group’s October 7 terror attack on Israel.
Pentagon spokesperson Patrick Ryder said on Friday that constructing the pier may require up to 60 days and the contribution of more than 1,000 American troops. Ryder confirmed Biden’s pledge that no U.S. serviceman will enter Gaza during construction operations.
Biden announced his pier plan after the United Nations raised the alarm about an “imminent” famine in the Gaza region amid reports that Israel’s military operation is hindering road deliveries of aid and food to the Palestinian […]
Speaking of miscalculations, I think the TCP has also made a miscalculation. They put a Hand Maid up as their spokesperson, and the reviews have been, well you have probably read or seen some of them. It was not a success, which I see as good news. This is the best assessment of TCP Senator Katie Britt and her little Hand Maid act that I have read. Jess Piper has all the nuances. The TCP seems to think that the women voters of America will be conned by her. I am sure the TCP women identified with her, but I hope the majority of women saw through her act.
TCP Senator Kattie Britt of Alabama
I was about to head to bed after the State of the Union last night, when I heard a voice coming from my television that stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t know who was speaking, but it really didn’t matter—I recognized the voice. It was so many voices from my childhood. It was so many Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. It was potlucks, and baby showers, and graduations, and birthday parties.
It was Senator Katie Britt using her well-practiced fundie baby voice.
I threw so many folks for a loop last year when I discussed the voice in a video. I used my “training” as a former Evangelical, a Southern Baptist, to describe the breathy cadence and the soft, child-like high pitch. Folks outside of Fundamentalist culture had never heard the term—they just knew the voice made them uncomfortable.
I know that voice well…in fact I can’t shake it myself. It was engrained in every woman I knew from church and every time I speak about it, folks will point out […]
Like you, I hear the TCPs saying over and over again about how crime is so bad and on the rise in the United States. It’s a lie, like almost everything else the TCPs say. Here are some facts. They all mimic criminal Trump their leader who seems incapable of telling the truth about anything.
Credit: Matt Popovich / Unsplash
The FBI’s most recent Quarterly Uniform Crime Report data for Q3 2023 shows that nearly all crime in the US is going down; some to pre-pandemic levels, some to multi-decade lows.
This includes a violent crime average, as well as murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery property crime, burglary, and larceny, with quarterly data showing the largest percentage declines ever recorded for the violent crimes.
It rubs against the public perception of rising crime in America driven, some suspect, by more widely distributed media content than ever before. This is particularly true for larceny, or petty theft and shoplifting, which got out of hand in San Francisco after a 2020 law removed it as a misdemeanor crime.
Videos of shoplifters brazenly robbing places like Rite Aid and Niemen Marcus were fodder for social media virality, and paired with riots across the US in the summer of 2020, it gave the impression that American cities were taking on the character of Kurt Russell’s Escape from New York.
Zoltan Simon and Jennifer Jacobs, Staff Writers - Bloomberg
Stephan:
Criminal Trump openly proclaims his fascism, and members of the TCP applaud. The corporate media is not covering the rise of fascism in the United States properly. It ought to be a major story all media are focusing on, but it is not, and it is putting the entire nation in danger.
Criminal Trump entertaining his soulmate fascist Viktor Orban Credit: Bloomberg
Former US President Donald Trump praised Viktor Orban as a “fantastic leader” while poking fun at criticism of the Hungarian prime minister’s self-proclaimed illiberal tendencies as the two populist leaders met Friday at Mar-a-Lago.
Orban “is a non-controversial figure because he says, ‘this is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it,” Trump joked to a room full of attendees at his Florida resort, according to video of the event posted by Orban on Instagram. “Right? He’s the boss. No – he’s a great leader, fantastic leader.”
Trump feted Orban with a tour of his residence, dinner with former first Lady Melania Trump, an hour-long meeting with senior aides, and musical performance by a band covering Roy Orbison.
The meeting is a defiant act by Trump just a day after President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address accused his presumptive November opponent and Republicans of turning their backs on democratic ideals by blocking additional assistance for Ukraine.
