Category: 1st Issue

Perpetual War Abroad, Mass Shootings at Home: It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s America the Beautiful

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War Comes Home 2019

People mowed down shopping for back-to-school supplies for their kids. Thirteen hours later and fifteen hundred miles away revelers enjoying a night of fun and frolic run for their lives as an assault rifle shatters the peaceful night. Thirty-one will pay the ultimate price. The rest will remember the terror and the horror forever. Grieving relatives will mourn and through their tears ask why. Life in 21st century America is risky business. The specter of fearful American parents buying bullet-proof back packs for their elementary school children should shock all Americans. A reflection of our foreign policy, perhaps, as the global image of America spirals downward from freedom and democracy to violence and militarism. The corporate media doesn’t like to talk about it, but endless war is eating us alive. U.S. diplomats have been outsourced by generals and admirals, strategic policy-making replaced by deadly threats and sanctions, and the passage of sky-high military budgets pays for seven wars and 800 military bases We live in a country falling apart where millions face economic ruin and social programs are dying on the vine while the U.S. war machine rolls merrily along. What’s wrong with this picture? We make a stab at the answer in “Perpetual War Abroad, Mass Shootings at Home: It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s America the Beautiful”

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Will a Charm Offensive and Oodles of Money Land Pete Buttigieg in the Oval Office? Ask Barack Obama

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Obama Remembered

Here we go again. In an eerie reprise of 2008, along comes Pete Buttigieg with good looks crowd-pleasing rhetoric, the right credentials and most important the staffers and big-time donors who won it for Obama. Mayor Pete is running a campaign large on half-truths, misdirection, and feel-good platitudes and short on principled policy positions. His big donor fetes are drawing the cream of the oligarchic crop. They are the real engine driving his campaign. His “meet and greets” with ordinary Americans are window dressing. Like his mentor, he’s not for a national healthcare system, free college tuition, scaling back a hopelessly bloated military, restoring sanity to a surveillance-obsessed government, or putting a dagger in the heart of income equality. We aren’t the first to point out the resemblance but we are the first to do it in living color with actual quotes from the horses’ mouths. Ready for eight more years of Obama? Before you drink the Kool-Aid, read “Will a Charm Offensive and Oodles of Money Land Pete Buttigieg in the Oval Office? Ask Barack Obama”

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That Sound You Hear is the Stampede of Democratic Hopefuls Running Away from National Health Insurance

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That Sound You Hear is the Stampede of Democratic Hopefuls
Running Away from National Health Insurance

Medicare For All

National health insurance was MIA in the first Democratic debate. Over two nights 18 of the 20 candidates declined to get behind it. Make that 19 as one, Kamala Harris, seeing which way she thought the wind was blowing, walked back her support the next day. Their excuse: 158 million Americans who get their health insurance at work and are allegedly invested in corporate healthcare. And what a great deal they’re getting — premiums up 55% in the last decade, rising twice as fast as wages and three times as fast as inflation. Workers forced to give up 10 to 12% of their pay to cover their health insurance premiums and 85% paying deductibles as high as $2,000. What’s not to like? Thanks to corporate media the lies and misstatements of the corporate health industry get widespread coverage. More than one-half of Americans believe they will still have to pay premiums, deductibles, and copays under a national health plan. Thanks to the hundreds of millions of dollars the healthcare lobby showers on Congress, many of them sing from the same hymnal. We make the case for national health insurance with every sector of the economy paying their fair share: wealthy individuals and corporations, the finance industry, and taxpayers. It’s time for America to join the rest of the world and deliver healthcare to anyone who needs it.

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How Healthcare Went from a Healing Profession to a Profit-Driven Business

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Hospitals Buy Prctices

EMAIL Will Americans ever wake up to the shoddy treatment they receive in their doctor’s office? Will they ever say “no mas” and give a collective heave-ho to a system run by the rich for the rich that costs each American $11,212 every year but ranks near the bottom of the barrel at 27th in effectiveness among 36 of the most economically developed countries in the world? It’s a $3.75 trillion boondoggle done up to make you think there’s really a wizard behind a magical curtain instead of a fraudster behind a piece of cloth. Read “How Healthcare Went from a Healing Profession to a Profit-Driven Business” and guaranteed you’ll be shouting “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”

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“The Fruits of Empire: The American People at the End of their Ropes”

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The Surveillance State

Welcome to the U.S. police state where talk of war, threat of war, and actual war takes center stage. Which country will feel the heavy hand of the American colossus next? Venezuela, Iran, or the long shot North Korea? War abroad means massive surveillance and repression at home and bankrupt social programs. While the U.S. blows over $1 trillion dollars on defense and the costs of maintaining 800 bases (that we know about) in over 70 countries and troops in 150 countries, the people suffer under a privatized healthcare system that has big business written all over it, 44 million young people stagger under a student debt load of $1.5 trillion, and “deaths of despair” claim 150,000 U.S. lives every year. Where but in the U.S. police state is suicide the second leading cause of death among children (ages 10-18)? What happens to today’s middle-aged Americans, 25% of whom have no retirement savings, when the government makes good on its threat to cut social security. The paradox is inescapable— the richest country in the history of the world yet its citizens have run up a collective debt of $13.5 trillion, 80% of U.S. households live paycheck to paycheck, 20% can’t pay their monthly bills and the U.S. booming economy has left 54% of Americans feeling no appreciable upswing in their personal financial situation. When the drive to colonize the world is the major objective, what happens to the people? We try to answer that question in “The Fruits of Empire: The American People at the End of their Ropes”

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It Took Forty-Two Years for the Democrats to Figure Out that Millions of Poor Women Can’t Get an Abortion

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Rosie Jiminez

From the halls of congress to the Oval Office to the Supreme Court, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion is the talk of the town. Will a new conservative majority on the Court declare Roe unconstitutional? Will the twelve states that have already passed laws restricting abortions or the fourteen others preparing to succeed in making legal abortions extinct? Lots of questions, few answers. But there’s a huge part of the abortion debate that flies under the radar. Did you know that for a certain class of women (poor) of a certain ethnicity (women of color) abortion has not been on the table since 1977? These are the women who depend on Medicaid, the federal insurance program, to cover their healthcare. Every year enough senators and representatives vote to extend a rider prohibiting federal insurance from paying for abortions and every president since Reagan agrees and Supreme Court Justices sit on their hands. In the U.S. where freedom is supposed to be a constitutional right, millions of women of childbearing age are not free to end an unwanted pregnancy. To find out how we got here and why the 2020 presidential election will probably not change the outlook for women, especially poor women read “It Took Forty-Two Years for the Democrats to Figure Out that Millions of Poor Women Can’t Get An Abortion”

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Going to Hell in a Handbasket — Is U.S. Healthcare Too Broken to Fix?

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Health Insurance

How does the exceptional nation stack up to the rest of the developed world? Ask young American men, who for the last thirty years have the lowest chance in the developed world of surviving to age 50 or the infants who have the best chance of dying before age 5. Americans have the exceptional opportunity to die more often than people in other developed countries from heart or lung disease, obesity or diabetes. Isn’t it time to point the finger of blame where it belongs —at the heart of a corporate scam to make as much money as possible while ordinary Americans pay the price in untreated illness and premature death. Time to start fighting for single payer universal healthcare in a country that has the highest rate of women dying from complications of pregnancy and childbirth, workers paying 12% of their earnings to get poor-quality health insurance that comes with unaffordable premiums, deductibles, and co-pays, where medical errors, the third leading cause of death in the U.S., kill over 250,000 people every year. A country where suicide is the second leading cause of death among children 10-18, where 20% of the people cannot pay their monthly bills. Are we talking about some banana republic in South America, or maybe one of the poorest countries in the world in Sub-Sahara Africa like Guinea or Mali where average life expectancy is around 60? If that’s what you think, you’re in for a big surprise, read “Going to Hell in a Handbasket — Is U.S. Healthcare Too Broken to Fix?”

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Putting Patients Last: The Corporate Capture of Doctors

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Corporate-Healthcare

U.S. healthcare has become a free market nightmare. Corporate medical practices limit patient visits to eleven minutes, their doctors sell expensive and mostly unnecessary procedures and treatments to frightened patients. Half of Americans take at least one prescription drug adding to the already bloated profits of big Pharma. A healthcare system in crisis— medical errors the third leading cause of death in the U.S., highest maternal death rate in the developed world, and life expectancy dropping for two straight years. U.S. healthcare is also the most expensive in the world at $3.65 trillion and ranks last among the world’s developed nations in most outcomes. In “Putting Patients Last: The Corporate Capture of Doctors” we report on the newest attacks on patient choice and access as huge medical practices become monopolies, swallowing up sole practitioners and delivering substandard care to millions of Americans.

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Getting Away with Murder: Big Pharma’s Chickens are Coming Home to Roost

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Sackler Empire

Now you see it, now you don’t. Which cup is the pea under? It’s a sucker’s game and America’s giant corporations have been playing the American people for decades. When exposure of their dirty dealings is imminent, there’s always a charity willing to perform cosmetic surgery for the right price. The drug companies have always been hugely successful at using philanthropy to hide their criminal behavior. The Sackler family, owners of the now-infamous Purdue Pharma which is internationally reviled for its killer drug OxyContin, has thrown money at such distinguished charities as Harvard, Columbia, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian. While the right hand is doling out the goodies, the left is producing a highly addictive opioid that currently has 200,000 victims and makes life miserable for hundreds of thousands more. Serial murderers to the core, are the Sacklers spending the rest of their lives in the slammer? Not exactly. Their sins have made them the nineteenth richest family in the U.S. with a fortune of $13 billion. While drug companies distract you with their “good works,” the pea is hidden under the cup labeled profits. Meanwhile the body count keeps rising. SA takes the gloves off in “Getting Away with Murder: Big Pharma’s Chickens are coming home to Roost.”

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Will there be a 46th President Without an Election? Why the Rush to Impeach Trump is Dangerous

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Pence Waiting

Impeachment stalwarts take heed. If you succeed and by some miracle Trump gets booted out of the Oval Office, guess who’s waiting in the wings? Mike Pence, the politically ambitious, morally bankrupt, BFF of the titans of criminogenic capitalism— the Kochs, the thugs who run the fossil fuel industry already hitting a home run with Trump’s “climate change what’s that” EPA and the fat cats in the defense industry who want to keep the money spigot open by supporting a believer in perpetual war. Known in Congress as the “hawk’s hawk,” with a Saudi prince’s view of woman’s place, author of a bill to make same sex marriage unconstitutional, and a tax policy that would make even a billionaire blush, Vice President Pence is poised to move bag and baggage into the Oval Office. How about the voters? Have they drunk the impeachment Kool-Aid? Or are they on the hunt for solutions to problem affecting their lives and the future of their children? Some brand-new poll results have us scratching our heads. Read “Will there be a 46th President Without an Election? Why the Rush to Impeach Trump is Dangerous” and prepare to be amazed.

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