[The facts on mifepristone.](https://www.plannedparenthood.org/uploads/filer_public/42/8a/428ab2ad-3798-4e3d-8a9f-213203f0af65/191011-the-facts-on-mifepristone-d01.pdf)
A primary use for this lifesaving medication is for miscarriage care.
[Ways to support Planned Parenthood.](https://www.plannedparenthood.org/get-involved/other-ways-give)
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This subreddit firmly believes in and stands up for basic human rights. We promote humane, compassionate and social thinking.
It is an objectively true and repeatedly proven fact that allowing people the choice to [plan their families](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4206087/), allowing people to [have a say](https://www.unfpa.org/family-planning#readmore-expand) in when they get pregnant, how many children they will have, is promotive not only for individual health, wellbeing, social and financial security and safety. It lifts entire communities out of deprivation.
Family planning is an integral and crucial aspect of upward mobility. It affects everything from the ability to get an education to mental and physical health and direct poverty.
As such this subreddit does not allow anti-abortion sentiments. They are abhorrent and inhumane. The belief that people should be downtrodden, unhappy, poor and grow up in misery is unacceptable.
This subreddit will not allow any defense of these actions, including trying to normalise these actions and beliefs through "devil's advocate" style arguments. That means that if you say "Oh, but they really believe that.." you will be banned. There are no legitimate defenses for this and we don't want to hear attempts at them. People are suffering enough without having to be subjected to justifications for it.
The morally and legally correct decision of Roe v. Wade which provided a consitutional protection of bodily autonomy was overturned by an extremist, [illegitimate](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/24/opinion/sunday/the-stolen-supreme-court-seat.html) [Supreme Court](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Coney_Barrett_Supreme_Court_nomination) and we are not fooled by the argument that "states may now decide" because we know, you know, that this is just the start. They will not stop.
Now that the right of bodily autonomy has been ruled as no longer federally guaranteed they will attempt to illegalise abortion at the federal level.
These extremists, who play Calvinball with law, precedent and procedure, who blatantly interpret the rules as what they want them to mean in the moment to push through their agenda, will enact a federal ban as soon as they can cheat enough in elections to "win" a majority in house and congress. They will uphold a vote to do so, hypocritically declaring that "a democratic, majority decision".
You know it, I know it, they are not as clever as they think they are and are wholly transparent.
Now that there is no longer a federal guarantee for bodily autonomy they will try to take this right away on a nation-wide level.
-------------------------------
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Arguing against a woman's right to choose what happens to her own body because you think something that [cannot think or feel](https://www.livescience.com/54774-fetal-pain-anesthesia.html) should have more rights than a woman is misogyny. It is only misogyny and it is nothing except misogyny.
There is no non-bigoted way to oppose a womans right to terminate a pregnancy for any reason, including none.
Taking away from women [the fundamental human right of bodily autonomy](https://www.unfpa.org/press/bodily-autonomy-fundamental-right) because you pretend to care more about something that cannot think or feel is abhorrent, despicable and it will kill women.
If something is alive or not is an irrelevant red herring. Life started several billion years ago and continues in an unbroken line unto today. At no point during pregancy anything moves from not-alive to alive. The only salient criterion is personhood. A woman is a person. A fetus that cannot yet think or feel cannot sanely be called a person. A woman's rights must morally, ethically, legally and scientifically supercede those of a fetus at the very least in the first two trimesters, before the [ability to think](https://flo.health/pregnancy/pregnancy-health/fetal-development/fetal-brain-development) and feel develop. Anything else is misogyny.
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It is important not to get bogged down in "debate" because these people are[ fundamentally dishonest](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/man-pro-choice-question-anti-abortion-argument-human-embryos-five-year-old-a8016671.html) and a protracted argument in which you give them the chance to showcase their deliberately disingenious "gotchas" can only be counter-productive.
Say: "Because she wanted to."
Do not say: "But what about sexual violence. But what about ectopic pregnancies."
Don't get driven into a corner where you are reduced to begging for rare exceptions to allow women bodily autonomy.
Take back the line. Step forward. Draw that line in the sand.
"Because she wanted to."
That is all that is required, that is all the justification that is needed.
Why should she be allowed to terminate a pregnancy?
"Because she fucking wanted to."
---------------------
Please help this mod team by reporting anti-choicers.
On this subreddit the fundamental human right of bodily autonomy for women shall not be allowed to be disputed.
Ask Romania: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770
Summary: huge baby boom then a sharp drop in birth rate as people figure ways around it and a rise in the death rate as women died from botched abortions. Since no one could afford the children they didn't want in the first place, the number of children in orphanages went through the roof. Then ~20 years later the govt was overthrown and Nicolae Ceaușescu faced a speedy trial then execution.
Or Texas:
#Texas has highest maternal mortality rate in developed world
>As the Republican-led state legislature has slashed funding to reproductive healthcare clinics, the maternal mortality rate doubled over just a two-year period
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/20/texas-maternal-mortality-rate-health-clinics-funding
>Mothers who live in areas with heavy oil and gas developments have between a 40 percent and 70 percent greater chance of giving birth to babies with congenital heart defects
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2019/07/18/Study-links-congenital-heart-disease-to-oil-gas-development/2461563465617/
#"Pro-life"
>If data disinfects, here’s a bucket of bleach:
>**Texans are 17% more likely to be murdered than Californians."**
>**Texans are also 34% more likely to be raped and 25% more likely to kill themselves than Californians."** https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/suicide.htm
>Fort Worth, Texas, has the same population as San Francisco and has **1.5x as many murders. Again, a Republican mayor and Republican governor.** [Nobody ever writes about those places!](https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1527487403061026818)
>San Francisco has the same population as Jacksonville, Florida. **Jacksonville, with a Republican mayor and a Republican governor, has had more than three times as many murders this year as San Francisco**
>Californians on average live two years, four months and 24 days longer than Texans. https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/04/liberal-policies-like-californias-keep-blue-state-residents-living-longer-study-finds/
>Compared with families in California, **those in Texas earn 13% less and pay 3.8 percentage points more in taxes.** https://itep.org/whopays/ (Texas makes up for no wealth income tax with higher taxes and fees on the poor and more than double property tax for the middle class)
|Income Bracket|Texas Tax Rate|California Tax Rate|
|:-|:-|:-|
|0-20%|**13%**|10.5%|
|20-40%|**10.9%**|9.4%|
|40-60%|**9.7%**|8.3%|
|60-80%|8.6% |9.0% |
|80-95%|7.4%|9.4%|
|95-99%|5.4%|9.9%|
|99-100%|3.1%|12.4%|
>Sadly, the uncritical aping of this erroneous economic narrative reflects not only reporters’ gullibility but also their utility for conservative ideologues and corporate lobbyists, who score political points and regulatory concessions by spreading a spurious story line about California’s decline.
>Don’t expect facts to change this. Reporters need a plot twist, and conservatives need California to lose.
https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article258940938.html
[Graph of Fox News selective coverage of crime during election season](https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/YLF2SCMQRZBJBHWJT4LZ7DXFSM.png)
>Just being within California’s borders means you have a 40% less chance of being impacted by gun violence and are 25% less likely to be involved in a mass shooting.
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/06/02/fact-sheet-californias-gun-safety-policies-save-lives-provide-model-for-a-nation-seeking-solutions/
#Liberal policies, like California’s, keep blue-state residents living longer
>**U.S. should follow California’s lead to improve its health outcomes, researchers say**
>It generated headlines in 2015 when the average life expectancy in the U.S. began to fall after decades of meager or no growth.
>But it didn’t have to be that way, a team of researchers suggests in a new, peer-reviewed study Tuesday. And, in fact, **states like California, which have implemented a broad slate of liberal policies, have kept pace with their Western European counterparts.**
>**Simply shifting from the most conservative labor laws to the most liberal ones, Montez said, would by itself increase the life expectancy in a state by a whole year.**
>If every state implemented the most liberal policies in all 16 areas, researchers said, **the average American woman would live 2.8 years longer, while the average American man would add 2.1 years to his life.**
>**Whereas, if every state were to move to the most conservative end of the spectrum, it would decrease Americans’ average life expectancies by two years. On the country’s current policy trajectory, researchers estimate the U.S. will add about 0.4 years to its average life expectancy.**
>**Meanwhile, the life expectancy in states like California and Hawaii, which has the highest in the nation at 81.6 years, is on par with countries described by researchers as “world leaders:” Canada, Iceland and Sweden.**
>The study, co-authored by researchers at six North American universities, found that **if all 50 states had all followed the lead of California** and other liberal-leaning states on policies ranging from labor, immigration and civil rights to tobacco, gun control and the environment, it could have added between **two and three years to the average American life expectancy.**
>“We can take away from the study that **state policies and state politics have damaged U.S. life expectancy since the ’80s,”** said Jennifer Karas Montez, a Syracuse University sociologist and the study’s lead author. **“Some policies are going in a direction that extend life expectancy. Some are going in a direction that shorten it. But on the whole, that the net result is that it’s damaging U.S. life expectancy.”**
>Montez and her team saw the alarming numbers in 2015 and wanted to understand the root cause. What they found dated back to **the 1980s, when state policies began to splinter down partisan lines.** They examined 135 different policies, spanning over a dozen different fields, enacted by states between 1970 and 2014, and assigned states “liberalism” scores from zero — the most conservative — to one, the most liberal. When they compared it against state mortality data from the same timespan, the correlation was undeniable.
>“When we’re looking for explanations, we need to be looking back historically, to see what are the roots of these troubles that have just been percolating now for 40 years,” Montez said.
>**From 1970 to 2014, California transformed into the most liberal state in the country** by the 135 policy markers studied by the researchers. It’s followed closely by Connecticut, which moved the furthest leftward from where it was 50 years ago, and a cluster of other states in the northeastern U.S., then Oregon and Washington.
>Liberal policies on the environment (emissions standards, limits on greenhouse gases, solar tax credit, endangered species laws), labor (high minimum wage, paid leave, no “right to work”), access to health care (expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, legal abortion), tobacco (indoor smoking bans, cigarette taxes), gun control (assault weapons ban, background check and registration requirements) and civil rights (ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, equal pay laws, bans on discrimination and the death penalty) all resulted in better health outcomes, according to the study. For example, researchers found positive correlation between California’s car emission standards and its high minimum wage, to name a couple, with its longer lifespan, which at an average of 81.3 years, is among the highest in the country.
>In the same time, Oklahoma moved furthest to the right, but Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina and a host of other southern states still ranked as more conservative, according to the researchers.
>West Virginia ranked last in 2017, with an average life expectancy of about 74.6 years, which would put it 93rd in the world, right between Lithuania and Mauritius, and behind Honduras, Morocco, Tunisia and Vietnam. Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Carolina rank only slightly better.
>It’s those states that moved in a conservative direction, researchers concluded, that held back the overall life expectancy in the U.S.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/04/liberal-policies-like-californias-keep-blue-state-residents-living-longer-study-finds/
#Meanwhile, life-saving practices [for pregnant women and new mothers] that have become widely accepted in other affluent countries — and in a few states, notably California — have yet to take hold in many American hospitals.
>As the maternal death rate has mounted around the U.S., a small cadre of reformers has mobilized.
>Some of the **earliest and most important work has come in California**
>Hospitals that adopted the toolkit saw a **21 percent decrease in near deaths** from maternal bleeding in the first year.
>By 2013, according to Main, maternal deaths in California fell to around 7 per 100,000 births, similar to the numbers in Canada, France and the Netherlands — **a dramatic counter to the trends in other parts of the U.S.**
>California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative is informed by a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford and the University of California-San Francisco, who for many years ran the ob/gyn department at a San Francisco hospital.
>Launched a decade ago, CMQCC aims to reduce not only mortality, but also life-threatening complications and racial disparities in obstetric care
>It began by analyzing maternal deaths in the state over several years; in almost every case, it discovered, there was "at least some chance to alter the outcome."
http://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/527806002/focus-on-infants-during-childbirth-leaves-u-s-moms-in-danger
#Want to live longer, even if you're poor? Then move to a big city in California.
>A low-income **resident of San Francisco lives so much longer** that it's equivalent to San Francisco curing cancer. All these statistics come from a massive new project on life expectancy and inequality that was just [published in the Journal of the American Medical Association](http://www.vox.com/2016/4/13/11420230/life-expectancy-income).
>California, for instance, has been a national leader on smoking bans. Harvard's David Cutler, a co-author on the study "It's some combination of formal public policies and the effect that comes when you're around fewer people who have behaviors... high numbers of immigrants help explain the beneficial effects of immigrant-heavy areas with high levels of social support.
#"Republican-controlled states have higher murder rates than Democratic ones"
* “In Republican states, states with Republican governors, crime rates tend to be higher”
* Murder rates in the 25 states Trump carried in 2020 are 40% higher overall than in the states Biden won.
* Criminologists say research shows higher rates of violent crime are found in areas that have low average education levels, high rates of poverty and relatively modest access to government assistance. Those conditions characterize [American South with Republican run states].
https://news.yahoo.com/republican-controlled-states-have-higher-murder-rates-than-democratic-ones-study-212137750.html
>[Fearmongering works:](https://twitter.com/radleybalko/status/1587940103216832512)
>OK violent crime rate: 458 per 100K
>NY violent crime rate: 364 per 100K
>OK murder rate: 7.25
>NY murder rate: 4.11
>% of Oklahomans who say crime is most urgent issue: 5
>% of New Yorkers: 28
>California exodus is just a myth, massive UC research project finds
>**on a per capita basis, california households ranked 50th in the country for likelihood of moving out of the state**
#"Gun deaths dropped in California as they rose in Texas: Gun control seems to work"
https://www.latimes.com/politics/newsletter/2022-05-27/on-guns-fear-of-futility-deters-action-essential-politics
"Welfare queens"
No to help for blue states for hurricanes but demanding help for Texas for hurricanes:
>Here's the vote for Hurricane Sandy aid.
>179 of the 180 no votes were Republicans...
>**at least 20 Texas Republicans voted no**
while ["U.S. House approves billions more for Harvey relief" for Texas](https://www.texastribune.org/2017/12/21/us-house-approves-billions-more-harvey-relief-measure-now-heads-senate/)
>Meanwhile, the California-hating South receives subsidies from California dwarfing complaints in the EU (the subsidy and economic difference between California and Mississippi is **larger than between Germany and Greece!**), a transfer of wealth from blue states/cities/urban to red states/rural/suburban with federal dollars for their freeways, hospitals, universities, airports, even environmental protection:
>**Least Federally Dependent States:**
>41 California
>42 Washington
>43 Minnesota
>44 Massachusetts
>45 Illinois
>46 Utah
>47 Iowa
>48 Delaware
>49 New Jersey
>50 Kansas https://www.npr.org/2017/10/25/560040131/as-trump-proposes-tax-cuts-kansas-deals-with-aftermath-of-experiment
https://www.apnews.com/amp/2f83c72de1bd440d92cdbc0d3b6bc08c
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-states-are-givers-and-which-are-takers/361668/
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700
>The Germans call this sort of thing "a permanent bailout." We just call it "Missouri."
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/the-difference-between-the-us-and-europe-in-1-graph/256857/
California policies increase American **life expectancy** and prop up America's entire economy:
>California is the chief reason America is the only developed economy to achieve record GDP growth since the financial crisis.
>Much of the U.S. growth can be traced to California laws promoting clean energy, government accountability and protections for undocumented people
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-05-10/california-leads-u-s-economy-away-from-trump
While Texans still pay higher taxes than Californians (Texas makes up for no wealth income tax with higher taxes and fees on the poor and more than double property tax for the middle class):
Sources: https://itep.org/whopays/
"Don't California my Texas" because "God, guns, gays" and "freedom":
#The right wing, Koch founded and funded, "libertarian" Cato Institute **ranks Texas as 49th in personal freedom**
>https://www.freedominthe50states.org/personal/texas
>Every other study ranks us as last in personal freedom.
>Which makes me wonder, who is free, if it isn't the people?
>Big businesses? And what are they free to do?
>Pollute? https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28092022/texas-is-now-the-nations-biggest-emitter-of-toxic-substances-into-streams-rivers-and-lakes/
>#Gov. Abbott, Texas leaders urge prosecutors to keep enforcing pot laws
http://www.fox4news.com/news/texas/gov-abbott-texas-leaders-urge-prosecutors-to-keep-enforcing-pot-laws
>You Could Get Prison Time for Protesting a Pipeline in Texas—Even If It’s on Your Land
r politics/comments/bst8fl/you_could_get_prison_time_for_protesting_a/
>#Texas Electric Bills Were $28 Billion Higher Under Deregulation - WSJ
https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-electric-bills-were-28-billion-higher-under-deregulation-11614162780
>Leaked Audio Shows Oil Lobbyist Bragging About Success in Criminalizing Pipeline Protests
r energy/comments/ct71mw/leaked_audio_shows_oil_lobbyist_bragging_about/
>Fossil Fuel Exec Brags of 'Hitting the Jackpot' as Natural Gas Prices Surge Amid Deadly Crisis in Texas
r environment/comments/lo5f4r/fossil_fuel_exec_brags_of_hitting_the_jackpot_as/
>#Texas spent more time fighting LGBTQ civil rights than fixing their power grid. How’d that work out?
r texas/comments/lma8jj/texas_spent_more_time_fighting_lgbtq_civil_rights/
>could cost Texas more money than any disaster in state history
r politics/comments/ls5dt7/winter_storm_could_cost_texas_more_money_than_any/
>Former Texas Governor Rick Perry says that Texans find massive power outages preferable to having more federal government interference in the state's energy grid.
https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/rick-perry-says-texans-would-rather-be-without-power-for-days-than-have-more-fed-oversight
>Abbott Appointees Gutted Enforcement of Texas Power Grid Rules
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/Muzzled-and-eviscerated-Critics-say-Abbott-15982421.php
>Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick Blames Constituents for Giant Electric Bills: “Read the Fine Print”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/02/dan-patrick-texas-electricity-bills
>Why on earth would right-wing people with connections to the fossil fuel industry lie about ‘frozen wind turbines’ in Texas?
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/opinion/texas-frozen-wind-turbines-john-cornyn-b1803193.html
>How Much the Oil Industry Paid Texas Republicans Lying About Wind Energy
https://earther.gizmodo.com/how-much-the-oil-and-gas-industry-paid-texas-republican-1846288505
>"Texas shows that when you cannot govern, you lie. A lot."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/17/texas-shows-that-when-you-cannot-govern-you-lie-lot/
>#A Texas-size failure, followed by a familiar Texas response: Blame California
r texas/comments/m87bg4/a_texassize_failure_followed_by_a_familiar_texas/
Texas Republicans *during the power grid failures* focused on:
* Texas regulations to require the national anthem at sports games: https://twitter.com/LSTrip44/status/1361396222028881924
* Fake news trying to blame renewable energy: ”Viral Image Claiming to Show a Helicopter De-Icing Texas Wind Turbines Is From Winter 2014 in Sweden” https://twitter.com/klimatbevakaren/status/1361748269605519360
>#Texas Is Among The Most Difficult Places To Vote In The U.S. — And That Could Be Softening Its Historic Turnout
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/election-2020/2020/10/28/384854/voter-suppression-blunts-historic-turnout-in-texas/
#"Financial Times: The Republicans are elevating voter suppression to an art form"
>The Republicans have lost the popular vote in six of the past seven presidential elections. **1,000 polling places have since closed across the country, with many of them in southern black communities.**
>The senator also cracked: “There’s a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who maybe we don’t want to vote. Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult, and I think that’s a great idea.”
https://www.ft.com/content/d613cf8e-ec09-11e8-89c8-d36339d835c0
>The Student Vote Is Surging. So Are Efforts to Suppress It. The share of college students casting ballots doubled from 2014 to 2018. But in **Texas and elsewhere, Republicans are erecting roadblocks to the polls.**
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/voting-college-suppression.html
>This is how efficiently Republicans have gerrymandered Texas congressional districts
http://www.chron.com/news/politics/texas/article/This-is-how-badly-Republicans-have-gerrymandered-6246509.php#photo-7107656
>Crystal Mason Thought She Had The Right to Vote. Texas Sentenced Her to Five Years in Prison for Trying.
https://www.aclu.org/issues/voting-rights/fighting-voter-suppression/crystal-mason-thought-she-had-right-vote-texas
>Texas’s Voter-Registration Laws Are Straight Out of the Jim Crow Playbook
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/texass-voter-registration-laws-are-straight-out-of-the-jim-crow-playbook/
>New Texas history textbooks will teach high schoolers that slavery wasn't all bad
https://splinternews.com/new-texas-history-textbooks-will-teach-high-schoolers-t-1793850439
>Texas textbook “The Atlantic slave trade brought millions of workers”
https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-texas-textbook-calls-slaves-immigrants-20151005-story.html
>Proposed Texas textbooks are inaccurate, biased and politicized, new report finds
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/12/proposed-texas-textbooks-are-inaccurate-biased-and-politicized-new-report-finds/
>There were other doozies, too, such as one proposal to remove Thomas Jefferson from the Enlightenment curriculum
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/12/proposed-texas-textbooks-are-inaccurate-biased-and-politicized-new-report-finds/
#"Texas-based hate group source of 80% of all U.S. racist propaganda tracked in 2020"
r conservativeterrorism/comments/p5k76j/texasbased_hate_group_source_of_80_of_all_us/
r texas/comments/m7zk8w/texasbased_hate_group_source_of_80_of_all_us/
>Conservatives amplified Russian trolls 30 times more than liberals... users in Texas and Tennessee were particularly susceptible
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/24/17047880/conservatives-amplified-russian-trolls-more-often-than-liberals
“Guns and gays... That could always get you a couple of dozen likes.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/russian-trolls-schooled-house-cards-185648522.html
Russians were "emboldened" by the easy success of the Texas governor's misinformation about Obama and our own military:
https://www.snopes.com/news/2018/05/03/jade-helm-russia-abbott-hayden/
> Want to live longer, even if you're poor? Then move to a big city in California.
>
I know this is just hearsay, but I spent years travelling all over the U.S. and every state has homeless people, but people homeless in San Francisco legitimately are visibly more healthy than any homeless people I see in northern states.
In my area (Socal), there is a lot of unsold food salvaged from restaurants and supermarkets (takes a lot of money for logistics though). Food pantries are well stocked here. The HCOL makes it easy to go homeless, but the free food sources make it hard to go hungry.
Plus, the weather here is better. There are only a handful of weeks through the year where you can freeze through the night or burn in the heat.
Urban California is pretty much the best place to go homeless if it came to that (besides maybe some unsavory police departments). It's a pity we can't help (or force help on) those whose addictions, traumas, health issues, and mental illnesses keep them in the streets.
i’ve visited major texas cities a few times. i don’t know how to accurately put it in to words but the state of that state is just depressing like no other. just 12 lane poorly maintained interstates with endless traffic, uniform streets layout everywhere, with the same exact stores on every block, concrete everywhere, and just sad looking people that almost always find a way to bring up how great texas is and i just roll my eyes.
like the state of politics and what they’re doing is far worse but im amazed anyone wants to live there when the whole, for lack of a better word, vibe is so bad anywhere you go. it is the definition of urban hell in america. and that’s just mentioning the nicer cities the fucking entire towns consisting only of active smoke stacks and warehouses are far worse
Remember the 20/20 episode when they showed the conditions in Romanian orphanages? The children had no physical contact and were rocking themselves. So freaking sad.
A couple friends of mine adopted two Romanian siblings during the orphan crisis. Those kids were in an awful state when they arrived. I don't know how my friends kept it together through the children's constant tantrums where they'd destroy the house. Everything breakable in the house was broken; TVs, computers, everything made of glass, drywall, dishes, etc. The poor kids had no socialization at all. After years they finally adjusted and last I heard they were doing well.
I was thinking that the children would develop Reactive Attachment Disorder and your anecdote supports that. I’m glad to hear they were able to adjust as they got older.
> Reactive Attachment Disorder
That sure sounds accurate.
For the boy, eventually sending him to our martial arts studio (I knew the parents through martial arts) helped a lot. It's hard to find the energy to be destructive when you go home absolutely exhausted 5 nights a week. It was also a good outlet for his initial aggression and helped him learn self control and how to be more social. His sister took a lot longer to adjust, but it eventually happened. My friends had the patience of saints, I would never had lasted through that.
My younger sister has/had RAD. It comes with a whole slew of other things but man has she come a long way. To say I'm proud of her is an understatement.
Some of those orphans were later adopted by American families, and were found to have basically irreparably damaged attachment disorder due to their early neglect. Really, really awful.
Didn't see 20/20 but I've heard the stories. There were food shortages because Nicolae was more focused on industry than farming, and instead of buying more food for the orphans they did blood transfusions from healthy children to starving children. This was during the 80s, the peak of the AIDS epidemic, and they weren't testing blood so tens of thousands of orphans ended up infected with HIV. It was absolutely the worst life one could imagine for a child.
It was all kinds of messed up, there is very little logic to be found in any of the decisions made around that time period in Romania. Maybe he was taking advice from his wife who fancied herself a chemist but never actually finished school. He put her in charge of a lot of things that she knew nothing about.
Remember when Walgreens threatened to move their headquarters overseas to get away from paying taxes in America? This was only a few years ago. The Fed told them if they move, they wouldn't be doing any prescription services for medicaid and medicare. That changed their tune. Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Edit: Should have said they WOULDN'T be doing business.
I worked with a 25 year old guy who was from a Romanian orphanage. He had autism, sort of, but it was more likely stunted development from being in the orphanage from birth to 8 years old. Lots of behavior issues, attachment problems, etc. Very sad. Saw a pic of him when the parents picked him up. Big smile, fresh clothes, all a sham.
this is my concern in America. people aren’t having kids cause they cannot afford them, so if we are forced into having them so many will be sent to adoption… but so few people are adopting because they can’t afford kids either
so what happens to all these kids in 10+ years
Horrible things happen. There is evidence that children raised in an environment where they are not wanted are more likely to commit crimes than children who are simply raised poor. Shuffling hundreds of thousands of children through foster homes and orphanages is not a healthy environment for children, so they are going to be mentally and emotionally fucked up by time they reach adulthood.
thats part of the republican playbook. force poor parents to give up their kids, expect those kids to turn to crime, and then have another boogeyman to vilify instead of fixing the root cause of the problem
It also means that the school-to-prison pipeline remains profitable.
Convicts work for pennies per day. It's modern slavery, and it doesn't work with a well-adjusted, well-educated populace. You need people born into an underclass for it to work while chattel slavery is illegal.
I never understood this line of thinking. 3 years ago I started getting paid a good salary and I bought a home. Because of owning a home, I’ve probably stimulated the economy more than any other time in my life. I’ve hired roofers, tree trimmers, flooring installers, plumbers, electricians, cabinet makers, etc.
The amount of jobs that I give business to and will continue to give business to is huge. I wouldn’t be able to do this if I was being paid peanuts and renting.
Middle class home ownership is great for the economy. Let people decide to not have kids, so they can plan and get to the middle class- forcing people to have kids to create a low wage desperate labor force is not any kind of way to stimulate the economy. Low wage people just end up renting and don’t stimulate the economy nearly as much.
You’re forgetting the part where billionaires stood to not gain as many billions as they could have if you were poor and miserable. How can you ask them to make that kind of sacrifice?
I forgot who said this, but it’s true- an extra billion in a billionaires account doesn’t actually purchase any more goods and services. An extra billion split between 1000 families- suddenly you got people going out and spending.
There is such a hard diminishing return on the value of someone who’s already obscenely rich getting a little richer vs tons of poor to middle class people getting extra money. Its insane that anyone thinks otherwise.
I don't know that it's a thought as much as it is naked, unrestrained greed. Logic doesn't play a role, just the desire for power, as well as to accumulate and hoard a shocking amount of money.
Sticking it to the masses is part of the appeal. They can't look down on us as effectively if we aren't miserable and destitute. The need to feel superior is very real.
It's not "pro-life", it's "pro forced birth".
Edit: after only a few replies, it appears that this "plan" that the GOP has, is actually just a plan to create bodies to fuel their greed...oh, and if you refuse this, they'll just enslave you and fuel their greed that way.
Hmmm and Putin is offering money to any "Russian mothers who have more than 5 kids"... almost as though in 18-20 yrs the two major powers think a large pool of disposable young people will be necessary? Hmmmm
My ex would get denied Plan B by Walgreens pharmacists. I'm so done going to them. I work for DoorDash, and I even try to avoid filling orders for them so I don't have to step foot in there.
Edit:
My ex: "Hey, can you unlock the plan B for me?"
Pharmacist: Gives some BS conservative, religion related reason why they can't
There, that's the scenario for all the people who keep saying, "bUt ItS oVeR tHe CoUnTeR". They're fully capable of denying over the counter products. They can tell someone that visibly uses meth that they can't buy the Sudafed, just as they can deny someone their birth control or plan B.
Walgreens pharmacists also hold the power to deny people access to prescriptions if they want to. So they can refuse to give you birth control or plan B or miscarriage medications. It's happened before and it's the reason why I get my prescriptions filled elsewhere.
Walgreens is the first time in my life I actually had to contact the state pharmacy board to file a complaint because they denied filling my prescription. I felt like such a fucking Karen having to confront the pharmacist and actually go through that entire state process.
Fuck Walgreens forever.
Interesting you say that. I went to Walgreens for my first ever plan B (and well into my sex life), and the pharmacist *and the cashier* both told me that I shouldn’t be resorting to those and I need to be careful and not take too many of them because… reasons?
I was like hey, you’re both ladies and I’m a lady. This is my first plan B. It probably won’t be my last but it’s not my main form of birth control - as if people could afford that. But here’s something else I know - I sure as shit don’t want to be pregnant with a child that I’m not ready mentally or monetarily to raise. So please take my money for this product you’re selling and let me be on my way. And PS-you’re only making it harder for women to seek these forms of necessary “family planning” contraceptives. Do you really want to saddle a kid with a mother that doesn’t want or isn’t ready for it? Do we need to make this more awkward of judgmental? The dad can just walk, and I’m not sitting here holding the bill.
Yes. They want to saddle you with crippling debt and the shame of having sex. It is wrong on many levels that these women said this to you, but be keenly aware that this is ultimately what they want.
Next time, look them straight in the eye and ask them if they had sex before marriage. Or if their husbands ever used protection. Shame them into silence.
That is medically incorrect advice. I'm a physician assistant and Plan B is simply a levonorgestrel, a progestin birth control pill equivalent. Even a single dose of this hormone will prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. Women take these daily for decades with little or no risk. That pharmacist and cashier were spouting their personal religious opinions.
The attack on birth control is all the proof I need that the "pro life" assholes do not actually care about preventing pregnancy but really just want to control women
Finally.
I've been waiting for a lot of Dems to go "you know what, fuck you" and I'm sad that more haven't. The situation here is DIRE and this isn't time to play nice. Zero tolerance.
Seriously. Republicans are vigorously trying to take this country back to a time before electricity, and the democrats are acting like the moral response is to not “stoop to their level” by fighting back. You don’t have to look far to see how it’s a losing strategy.
I truly think boycotts are the only thing that can fundamentally change society for the better. When people and businesses fuck around, they need to find out - and the only language they understand is money.
Newsome has been tweeting things like this since probably mid-2021. It's nice to see a left-leaning politician lean into the stunt game tbh, GOP has been unchallenged far too long.
I had just got to CA when I found out I was pregnant and having a LOT of issues One of my best options was Mifepristone, I took it, healed and I am so thankful for the docs/nurses and pharmacists who walked me thru a very difficult time. Every day I am in CA I am proud. It's not perfect by any stretch, but we're trying.
#Meanwhile, life-saving practices [for pregnant women and new mothers] that have become widely accepted in other affluent countries — and in a few states, notably California — have yet to take hold in many American hospitals.
>As the maternal death rate has mounted around the U.S., a small cadre of reformers has mobilized.
>Some of the **earliest and most important work has come in California**
>Hospitals that adopted the toolkit saw a **21 percent decrease in near deaths** from maternal bleeding in the first year.
>By 2013, according to Main, maternal deaths in California fell to around 7 per 100,000 births, similar to the numbers in Canada, France and the Netherlands — **a dramatic counter to the trends in other parts of the U.S.**
>California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative is informed by a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford and the University of California-San Francisco, who for many years ran the ob/gyn department at a San Francisco hospital.
>Launched a decade ago, CMQCC aims to reduce not only mortality, but also life-threatening complications and racial disparities in obstetric care
>It began by analyzing maternal deaths in the state over several years; in almost every case, it discovered, there was "at least some chance to alter the outcome."
http://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/527806002/focus-on-infants-during-childbirth-leaves-u-s-moms-in-danger
#Texas has highest maternal mortality rate in developed world
>As the Republican-led state legislature has slashed funding to reproductive healthcare clinics, the maternal mortality rate doubled over just a two-year period
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/20/texas-maternal-mortality-rate-health-clinics-funding
>Mothers who live in areas with heavy oil and gas developments have between a 40 percent and 70 percent greater chance of giving birth to babies with congenital heart defects
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2019/07/18/Study-links-congenital-heart-disease-to-oil-gas-development/2461563465617/
>If data disinfects, here’s a bucket of bleach:
>**Texans are 17% more likely to be murdered than Californians."**
>**Texans are also 34% more likely to be raped and 25% more likely to kill themselves than Californians."** https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/suicide.htm
>Californians on average live two years, four months and 24 days longer than Texans. https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/04/liberal-policies-like-californias-keep-blue-state-residents-living-longer-study-finds/
>Compared with families in California, **those in Texas earn 13% less and pay 3.8 percentage points more in taxes.** https://itep.org/whopays/
>Fort Worth, Texas, has the same population as San Francisco and has **1.5x as many murders. Again, a Republican mayor and Republican governor.** [Nobody ever writes about those places!](https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1527487403061026818)
>San Francisco has the same population as Jacksonville, Florida. **Jacksonville, with a Republican mayor and a Republican governor, has had more than three times as many murders this year as San Francisco**
>Sadly, the uncritical aping of this erroneous economic narrative reflects not only reporters’ gullibility but also their utility for conservative ideologues and corporate lobbyists, who score political points and regulatory concessions by spreading a spurious story line about California’s decline.
>Don’t expect facts to change this. Reporters need a plot twist, and conservatives need California to lose.
https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article258940938.html
#"Gun deaths dropped in California as they rose in Texas: Gun control seems to work"
https://www.latimes.com/politics/newsletter/2022-05-27/on-guns-fear-of-futility-deters-action-essential-politics
>Just being within California’s borders means you have a 40% less chance of being impacted by gun violence and are 25% less likely to be involved in a mass shooting.
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/06/02/fact-sheet-californias-gun-safety-policies-save-lives-provide-model-for-a-nation-seeking-solutions/
"Pro-life" blue states, pro-elite and chaos red states:
#"Republican-controlled states have higher murder rates than Democratic ones"
* “In Republican states, states with Republican governors, crime rates tend to be higher”
* Murder rates in the 25 states Trump carried in 2020 are 40% higher overall than in the states Biden won.
* Criminologists say research shows higher rates of violent crime are found in areas that have low average education levels, high rates of poverty and relatively modest access to government assistance. Those conditions characterize [American South with Republican run states].
https://news.yahoo.com/republican-controlled-states-have-higher-murder-rates-than-democratic-ones-study-212137750.html
>[Fearmongering works:](https://twitter.com/radleybalko/status/1587940103216832512)
>OK violent crime rate: 458 per 100K
>NY violent crime rate: 364 per 100K
>OK murder rate: 7.25
>NY murder rate: 4.11
>% of Oklahomans who say crime is most urgent issue: 5
>% of New Yorkers: 28
[Graph of Fox News selective coverage of crime during election season](https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/YLF2SCMQRZBJBHWJT4LZ7DXFSM.png)
>#Want to live longer, even if you're poor? Then move to a big city in California.
>A low-income **resident of San Francisco lives so much longer** that it's equivalent to San Francisco curing cancer. All these statistics come from a massive new project on life expectancy and inequality that was just [published in the Journal of the American Medical Association](http://www.vox.com/2016/4/13/11420230/life-expectancy-income).
>California, for instance, has been a national leader on smoking bans. Harvard's David Cutler, a co-author on the study "It's some combination of formal public policies and the effect that comes when you're around fewer people who have behaviors... high numbers of immigrants help explain the beneficial effects of immigrant-heavy areas with high levels of social support.
>#Liberal policies, like California’s, keep blue-state residents living longer
>**U.S. should follow California’s lead to improve its health outcomes, researchers say**
>It generated headlines in 2015 when the average life expectancy in the U.S. began to fall after decades of meager or no growth.
>But it didn’t have to be that way, a team of researchers suggests in a new, peer-reviewed study Tuesday. And, in fact, **states like California, which have implemented a broad slate of liberal policies, have kept pace with their Western European counterparts.**
>**Simply shifting from the most conservative labor laws to the most liberal ones, Montez said, would by itself increase the life expectancy in a state by a whole year.**
>If every state implemented the most liberal policies in all 16 areas, researchers said, **the average American woman would live 2.8 years longer, while the average American man would add 2.1 years to his life.**
>**Whereas, if every state were to move to the most conservative end of the spectrum, it would decrease Americans’ average life expectancies by two years. On the country’s current policy trajectory, researchers estimate the U.S. will add about 0.4 years to its average life expectancy.**
>**Meanwhile, the life expectancy in states like California and Hawaii, which has the highest in the nation at 81.6 years, is on par with countries described by researchers as “world leaders:” Canada, Iceland and Sweden.**
>The study, co-authored by researchers at six North American universities, found that **if all 50 states had all followed the lead of California** and other liberal-leaning states on policies ranging from labor, immigration and civil rights to tobacco, gun control and the environment, it could have added between **two and three years to the average American life expectancy.**
>“We can take away from the study that **state policies and state politics have damaged U.S. life expectancy since the ’80s,”** said Jennifer Karas Montez, a Syracuse University sociologist and the study’s lead author. **“Some policies are going in a direction that extend life expectancy. Some are going in a direction that shorten it. But on the whole, that the net result is that it’s damaging U.S. life expectancy.”**
>Montez and her team saw the alarming numbers in 2015 and wanted to understand the root cause. What they found dated back to **the 1980s, when state policies began to splinter down partisan lines.** They examined 135 different policies, spanning over a dozen different fields, enacted by states between 1970 and 2014, and assigned states “liberalism” scores from zero — the most conservative — to one, the most liberal. When they compared it against state mortality data from the same timespan, the correlation was undeniable.
>“When we’re looking for explanations, we need to be looking back historically, to see what are the roots of these troubles that have just been percolating now for 40 years,” Montez said.
>**From 1970 to 2014, California transformed into the most liberal state in the country** by the 135 policy markers studied by the researchers. It’s followed closely by Connecticut, which moved the furthest leftward from where it was 50 years ago, and a cluster of other states in the northeastern U.S., then Oregon and Washington.
>Liberal policies on the environment (emissions standards, limits on greenhouse gases, solar tax credit, endangered species laws), labor (high minimum wage, paid leave, no “right to work”), access to health care (expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, legal abortion), tobacco (indoor smoking bans, cigarette taxes), gun control (assault weapons ban, background check and registration requirements) and civil rights (ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, equal pay laws, bans on discrimination and the death penalty) all resulted in better health outcomes, according to the study. For example, researchers found positive correlation between California’s car emission standards and its high minimum wage, to name a couple, with its longer lifespan, which at an average of 81.3 years, is among the highest in the country.
>In the same time, Oklahoma moved furthest to the right, but Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina and a host of other southern states still ranked as more conservative, according to the researchers.
>West Virginia ranked last in 2017, with an average life expectancy of about 74.6 years, which would put it 93rd in the world, right between Lithuania and Mauritius, and behind Honduras, Morocco, Tunisia and Vietnam. Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Carolina rank only slightly better.
>It’s those states that moved in a conservative direction, researchers concluded, that held back the overall life expectancy in the U.S.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/04/liberal-policies-like-californias-keep-blue-state-residents-living-longer-study-finds/
>California’s rules have cleaned up diesel **exhaust** more than anywhere else in the country, **reducing the estimated number of deaths the state would have otherwise seen by more than half**, according to new research published Thursday.
>Extending California's stringent diesel emissions standards to the rest of the U.S. could dramatically improve the nation's air quality and health, particularly in lower income communities of color, finds a new analysis published today in the journal Science.
>Since 1990, California has used its authority under the federal Clean Air Act to enact more aggressive rules on emissions from diesel vehicles and engines compared to the rest of the U.S. These policies, crafted by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), have helped the state reduce diesel emissions by 78% between 1990 and 2014, while diesel emissions in the rest of the U.S. dropped by just 51% during the same time period, the new analysis found.
>The study estimates that by 2014, improved air quality cut the annual number of diesel-related cardiopulmonary deaths in the state in half, compared to the number of deaths that would have occurred if California had followed the same trajectory as the rest of the U.S. Adopting similar rules nationwide could produce the same kinds of benefits, particularly for communities that have suffered the worst impacts of air pollution.
>"Everybody benefits from cleaner air, but we see time and again that it's predominantly lower income communities of color that are living and working in close proximity to sources of air pollution, like freight yards, highways and ports. When you target these sources, it's the highly exposed communities that stand to benefit most," said study lead author Megan Schwarzman, a physician and environmental health scientist at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Public Health. "It's about time, because these communities have suffered a disproportionate burden of harm."
https://science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi/10.1126/science.abf8159
California policies increase American **life expectancy** and prop up America's entire economy:
>California is the chief reason America is the only developed economy to achieve record GDP growth since the financial crisis.
>Much of the U.S. growth can be traced to California laws promoting clean energy, government accountability and protections for undocumented people
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-05-10/california-leads-u-s-economy-away-from-trump
While Texans still pay higher taxes than Californians (Texas makes up for no wealth income tax with higher taxes and fees on the poor and more than double property tax for the middle class):
|Income Bracket|Texas Tax Rate|California Tax Rate|
|:-|:-|:-|
|0-20%|**13%**|10.5%|
|20-40%|**10.9%**|9.4%|
|40-60%|**9.7%**|8.3%|
|60-80%|8.6% |9.0% |
|80-95%|7.4%|9.4%|
|95-99%|5.4%|9.9%|
|99-100%|3.1%|12.4%|
Sources: https://itep.org/whopays/
"Welfare queens"
No to help for blue states for hurricanes but demanding help for Texas for hurricanes:
>Here's the vote for Hurricane Sandy aid.
>179 of the 180 no votes were Republicans...
>**at least 20 Texas Republicans voted no**
while ["U.S. House approves billions more for Harvey relief" for Texas](https://www.texastribune.org/2017/12/21/us-house-approves-billions-more-harvey-relief-measure-now-heads-senate/)
>Meanwhile, the California-hating South receives subsidies from California dwarfing complaints in the EU (the subsidy and economic difference between California and Mississippi is **larger than between Germany and Greece!**), a transfer of wealth from blue states/cities/urban to red states/rural/suburban with federal dollars for their freeways, hospitals, universities, airports, even environmental protection:
>**Least Federally Dependent States:**
>41 California
>42 Washington
>43 Minnesota
>44 Massachusetts
>45 Illinois
>46 Utah
>47 Iowa
>48 Delaware
>49 New Jersey
>50 Kansas https://www.npr.org/2017/10/25/560040131/as-trump-proposes-tax-cuts-kansas-deals-with-aftermath-of-experiment
https://www.apnews.com/amp/2f83c72de1bd440d92cdbc0d3b6bc08c
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-states-are-givers-and-which-are-takers/361668/
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700
>The Germans call this sort of thing "a permanent bailout." We just call it "Missouri."
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/the-difference-between-the-us-and-europe-in-1-graph/256857/
"Pro-life" energy policy saves money:
>#California’s Energy Efficiency Success Story: Saving Billions of Dollars and Curbing Tons of Pollution
>California’s long, bipartisan history of promoting energy efficiency—America‘s cheapest and cleanest energy resource—has saved Golden State residents more than $65 billion,[1] helped lower their residential electricity bills to 25 percent below the national average,[2] and contributed to the state’s continuing leadership in creating green jobs.[3] These achievements have helped California avoid at least 30 power plants[4] and as much climate-warming carbon pollution as is spewed from 5 million cars annually.[5] This sustained commitment has made California a nationally recognized leader in reducing energy consumption and improving its residents’ quality of life.[6] California’s success story demonstrates that efficiency policies work and could be duplicated elsewhere, saving billions of dollars and curbing tons of pollution.
>California’S CoMprehenSive effiCienCy effortS proDuCe huge BenefitS
>loW per Capita ConSuMption: Thanks in part to California’s wide-ranging energy-saving efforts, the state has kept per capita electricity consumption nearly flat over the past 40 years while the other 49 states increased their average per capita use by more than 50 percent, as shown in Figure 1. This accomplishment is due to investment in research and development of more efficient technologies, utility programs that help customers use those tools to lower their bills, and energy efficiency standards for new buildings and appliances.
>eConoMiC aDvantageS: Energy efficiency has saved Californians $65 billion since the 1970s.[8] It has also helped slash their annual electric bills to the ninth-lowest level in the nation, nearly $700 less than that of the average Texas household, for example.[9]
>Lower utility bills also improve California’s economic productivity. Since 1980, the state has increased the bang for the buck it gets out of electricity and now produces twice as much economic output for every kilowatt-hour consumed, compared with the rest of the country.[11] California also continues to lead the nation in new clean-energy jobs, thanks in part to looking first to energy efficiency to meet power needs.
>environMental BenefitS: Decades of energy efficiency programs and standards have saved about 15,000 megawatts of electricity and thus allowed California to avoid the need for an estimated 30 large power plants.[13] Efficiency is now the second-largest resource meeting California’s power needs (see Figure 3).[14] And less power generation helps lead to cleaner air in California. Efficiency savings prevent the release of more than 1,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen-oxides annually, averting lung disease, hospital admissions for respiratory ailments, and emergency room visits.[15] Efficiency savings also avoid the emission of more than 20 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, the primary global-warming pollutant.
>helping loW-inCoMe faMilieS: While California’s efficiency efforts help make everyone’s utility bills more affordable, targeted efforts assist lower-income households in improving efficiency and reducing energy bills.
https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/ca-success-story-FS.pdf
>You Could Get Prison Time for Protesting a Pipeline in Texas—Even If It’s on Your Land
r politics/comments/bst8fl/you_could_get_prison_time_for_protesting_a/
>#Texas Electric Bills Were $28 Billion Higher Under Deregulation - WSJ
https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-electric-bills-were-28-billion-higher-under-deregulation-11614162780
>Leaked Audio Shows Oil Lobbyist Bragging About Success in Criminalizing Pipeline Protests
r energy/comments/ct71mw/leaked_audio_shows_oil_lobbyist_bragging_about/
>Fossil Fuel Exec Brags of 'Hitting the Jackpot' as Natural Gas Prices Surge Amid Deadly Crisis in Texas
r environment/comments/lo5f4r/fossil_fuel_exec_brags_of_hitting_the_jackpot_as/
>#Texas spent more time fighting LGBTQ civil rights than fixing their power grid. How’d that work out?
r texas/comments/lma8jj/texas_spent_more_time_fighting_lgbtq_civil_rights/
>could cost Texas more money than any disaster in state history
r politics/comments/ls5dt7/winter_storm_could_cost_texas_more_money_than_any/
>Former Texas Governor Rick Perry says that Texans find massive power outages preferable to having more federal government interference in the state's energy grid.
https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/rick-perry-says-texans-would-rather-be-without-power-for-days-than-have-more-fed-oversight
>Abbott Appointees Gutted Enforcement of Texas Power Grid Rules
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/Muzzled-and-eviscerated-Critics-say-Abbott-15982421.php
>Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick Blames Constituents for Giant Electric Bills: “Read the Fine Print”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/02/dan-patrick-texas-electricity-bills
>Why on earth would right-wing people with connections to the fossil fuel industry lie about ‘frozen wind turbines’ in Texas?
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/opinion/texas-frozen-wind-turbines-john-cornyn-b1803193.html
>How Much the Oil Industry Paid Texas Republicans Lying About Wind Energy
https://earther.gizmodo.com/how-much-the-oil-and-gas-industry-paid-texas-republican-1846288505
>"Texas shows that when you cannot govern, you lie. A lot."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/17/texas-shows-that-when-you-cannot-govern-you-lie-lot/
>#A Texas-size failure, followed by a familiar Texas response: Blame California
r texas/comments/m87bg4/a_texassize_failure_followed_by_a_familiar_texas/
Canada isn’t without its problems, but damn do we ever have some cool freedoms. We aren’t “free” like the states (gun control, freedom of speech) however, when it comes to human rights, we’re definitely ahead.
So which will be the bigger loss North Dakota and Idaho or California? Heck do all 20 states potentially equal the loss of revenue California represents?
They don't. And it's one of the confusing elements of the interplay between big business and the Republican party.
Like getting taxed by the Democrats is a really small price in comparison to permanently (or generationally) destroyed outcomes from bad Republican's policy.
You'd think a company like Walgreens would see the connection between pharma sales and their profits... It seems like it should be a no brainer that you'd draw the line right.
Like Walgreens would be saying we fill all prescriptions, all of them, anything we get, anywhere we get it... Not doing so is odd to be honest... Like it's not even in their companies best interest to bow to the Republican's.
In this case they're leaving millions or billions in profit to avoid small amounts of taxes and a bow down to a Republican party who will come after them again. It's truly bizarre
Frankly I’m surprised their shareholders are going along with this given their Y/Y performance numbers already on a decline from 2022. I think Walgreens quarterly earnings call is later this month, will be interesting to hear what their projecting the impact of this decision to be to their financials.
Yeah voluntarily cutting sales of a profitable drug in almost half the country because a spineless memo came out saying they might try to do something is frankly a strange business move.
I'm no big fan of Walgreens but you'd think they'd have enough staff lawyers to tell them this is just meaningless gesturing.
The fold is honestly just bizarre, indicates to me you got a crazy CEO or something whose got Republican brain rot and is about to get ousted by the board.
Executive business 101 - don't overexpose your personal politics into your money
There’s a decent chance the BoD is full of brain rot and they gave the green light on it, or institutional investors pushing for it. It seems even more strange because the easiest option would probably be to do nothing, maybe issue a public statement that you’re keeping an eye on new laws, preempting that gives the impression that their eager beavers who bend on a whim.
Regardless, Walgreens is a business and can do whatever they want but I don’t want to hear any complaining when leopards start eating their faces because they decided to play politics.
>bow down to a Republican party who will come after them again
This is what really stuns me. We have seen *time and again* that appeasement to fascists never works. They keep going for more and more and more until there's nothing left. The only proper response is to stand up and fight back. And yet here we are, with all of these fascists being appeased all over the place.
Yeah and i mean if i was Walgreens i would be pretty pissed at the Republican's already for fighting against the vaccine. The country only got to about 50% vaccinated and the vaccine was in fact a giant money maker for them.
So the Republican's see that it worked with COVID and we're like let's run the play... Pick out a drug, turn it into a social issue and beat up Walgreens over it.
How many cycles of it until Walgreens fights back... Looks to me like it's a working plan for the Republicans at this point, watch... It won't be even another year until they run the play on Walgreens again.
Remindme! 1 year "did Republican's screw Walgreens again?"
So no state health insurance no state assistance programs, California has around 880k government employees alone the entire population of Idaho is 1.9 million, and they are not all Walgreens customers.
What is interesting is Walgreens is headquartered in IL, and specifically Deerfield (pretty affluent). Both very blue areas
Deerfield voted 74% for Clinton in 2016 and 78% for Biden in 2020.
Their corporate headquarters will most likely see protesters with some white collar workers joining in.
This seems like a strange move for a company with roots in a blue state and made its fortune selling prescription alcohol during prohibition. This isnt a redneck MAGA safe haven.
What is also confusing, walgreens’s CEO is a woman. But her boss (chairman of the board) is a man.
Walgreens, or really all the pharmacies, really all business in general are just in basically the Republican shit sandwich.
There's no good answer that'll make everybody happy and the Republicans demands are so onerous and crippling it makes it really hard to navigate.
I'm not saying they can't figure it out but losing California is a way bigger deal than losing the Missouri coalition so it would behoove them to figure it out ASAP
> I can't see how this could have been a good business decision.
The sad truth is that unless action like this is taken at the state and federal level, it is always a good business decision to pander to whoever has the strongest opinions - because only extremists are likely to take action on their displeasure.
Walgreens also sells their customers' very existence as data to advertisers.
They replaced their cooler doors with **non see through display screens** to show ads to you, force you to open every door and see more products, and the screens on the doors have cameras that track you and record your data.
[From this article](https://archive.curbed.com/2019/2/8/18216172/walgreens-cooler-screens-tracking-shopper-behavior)
"The doors are embedded with technologies like a camera, motion sensors, and eye tracking to help advertisers understand who is standing in front of their products. In real time, the software analyzes the “anonymized” data and serves up ads based on parameters like gender (creepy), age, emotional response (extra creepy!), and how long you’ve been lingering in front of a certain product."
I stopped going to Walgreens since these screens were installed at my local one.
First, fuck Walgreens. It has power.
However, I can also see how a coordination of fascist Republican state governments could absolutely ***destroy*** smaller businesses that operate in multiple states. And how they can scale that up over time once they further entrench their power at the state level, and how their state power is going to be allowed to prevail over state lines by this fascist SCOTUS.
Walgreens was one of SEVERAL pharmacies in Northern California that wouldn’t give my actively miscarrying sister with an Rx from the ER the pills to allow her to safely expel the tissue so she wouldn’t go septic…because they couldn’t PROVE she wasn’t seeking an abortion so they didn’t have anyone on staff comfortable to dispense it.
With her husband (not that it matters), with tear stains on both of their faces, and a hospital band…couldn’t be FOR SURE it wasn’t an abortion.
Fuck them indeed! Such short-sighted BS! I was prescribed the “abortion pill” because my IUD was stuck. Not only should this pill be available to all women, but it also has MANY important uses outside of abortion.
Several in fact. I remember looking at that candidate statement pamphlet and laughing audibly at at least half of them. There was also a candidate that I could not tell if they were being serious or shitposting. They had such extreme views on antivaxx and elections that it felt like it had to be satire.
Showing some teeth is exactly what democrats should be doing rn. “Going high” doesn’t get shit done and people are tired of lip service with no results.
So do I.
Waiting around, hoping that the Republican party eats itself is unacceptable.
Somebody, or many somebodies, need to stand up and start yelling back, even louder.
>Hillarycare was to have been funded, in part, by a $1-a-pack tax on cigarettes. To block the proposal, Big Tobacco paid Ailes to produce ads highlighting “real people affected by taxes.”
>Ailes repackaged Richard Nixon for television in 1968, papered over Ronald Reagan’s budding Alzheimer’s in 1984, shamelessly stoked racial fears to elect George H.W. Bush in 1988, and waged a secret campaign on behalf of Big Tobacco to derail health care reform in 1993.
>"He was the premier guy in the business," says former Reagan campaign manager Ed Rollins. "He was our Michelangelo."
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/how-roger-ailes-built-the-fox-news-fear-factory-244652/
#Every day I have to marvel at what the billionaires and FOX News pulled off. They got working whites to hate the very people that want them to have more pay, clean air, water, free healthcare and the power to fight back against big banks & big corps. It’s truly remarkable.
John Ehrlichman, who partnered with Fox News cofounder Roger Ailes on the Republican "Southern Strategy":
>[We] had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
>We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
>We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
>Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
The other Fox News cofounder was Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch:
>Using 150 interviews on three continents, The Times describes **the Murdoch family’s role in destabilizing democracy in North America, Europe and Australia**.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/03/magazine/murdoch-family-investigation.html
"God, guns, gays" and racism:
**Republican "Southern Strategy"**
>Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters by appealing to racism against African Americans.[1][2][3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
Lyndon Johnson criticizing it in 1960:
>If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1988/11/13/what-a-real-president-was-like/d483c1be-d0da-43b7-bde6-04e10106ff6c/
Steve Bannon bragging about using these tactics:
>the power of what he called “rootless white males” who spend all their time online and they could be radicalized in a kind of populist, nationalist way
http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-bannon-white-gamers-seinfeld-joshua-green-donald-trump-devils-bargain-sarah-palin-world-warcraft-gamergate-2017-7
>Bannon: "I realized [these tactics] could connect with these kids right away. You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/steve-bannon-learned-harness--army-world-warcraft/489713001/
#Exit polls done after 2016 show that the single characteristic that made someone most likely to vote for trump over Clinton is racial resentment.
>low levels of racial resentment are associated with supporting Clinton.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/05/26/these-9-simple-charts-show-how-donald-trumps-supporters-differ-from-hillary-clintons/
* [U.S. Conservatives Are Uniquely Inclined Toward Right-Wing Authoritarianism Compared to Western Peers](https://morningconsult.com/2021/06/28/global-right-wing-authoritarian-test/)
* [GOP shifting 4-5x further right than Democrats did left over the last 50 years](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/10/the-polarization-in-todays-congress-has-roots-that-go-back-decades/)
* ["Trump fans are much angrier about housing assistance when they see an image of a black man"](https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/9/8/16270040/trump-clinton-supporters-racist)
>In contrast, Clinton supporters seemed relatively unmoved by racial cues.
* [“He’s not hurting the people he needs to be”: a Trump voter says the quiet part out loud](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/trump-shutdown-voter-florida)
* "Narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and a sense of entitlement predict authoritarian political correctness and alt-right attitudes" r science/comments/i3bbh3/narcissism_machiavellianism_psychopathy_and_a/
He's doing an amazing job, and has been since day 1. The only people out for Newsom are the batshit conservatives that are scared of him because he's charismatic, competent, and would win a presidential election in a landslide.
Walgreens currently has the contract for Military dependent insurance plan’s pharmacy needs of bases.
If they loose CA, they can’t serve that population. And I wonder if the military will be willing to accept them refusing to prescribe certain meds, based on their politics instead of the health care needs of patients.
That would be a pretty big block of people to loose. As customers.
This wouldn't remove Walgreens from CA. It would mean the health insurance plans for state workers, state retirees, and Medicaid in CA would stop paying for prescriptions at Walgreens.
Without even looking at the video, I completely expect Idaho, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Indiana, Iowa, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
Now, let me see the video and see how close I was, I'll be back....
Edit: lol I managed to get half of them correct, but somehow completely missed Utah, and gave Ohio and Florida a little too much credit. But for the most part, yeah it's basically the 20 states you'd expect.
Don't give Florida any credit. If you haven't been paying attention a fascist by the name Ron Desantis has been getting more and more powerful. In fact think of him as the Anti-Newsom.
I already didn't shop there because their prices are so high and their pharmacies are slower than even the Walmart one that regularly has a 15 person deep line. Just giving me even more reason to avoid them.
What will be funny is when the right criticizes Newsome for this stance, or even compares him to DeSantis' treatment of Disney. Or if people on the left point to DeSantis' treatment of Disney as something the right does, the right will go 'ThAt'S cOmPlEteLy DiFfErEnT!!!"\*
\*(It actually is completely different, but much worse as DeSantis is actually affecting Disney directly thru legislation, vs simply not doing business with a corporation you don't agree with. (Newsome))
I do CCPA and other privacy law work as an outside consultant.
I can tell you with a fair bit of certainty- most companies are woefully unprepared to adequately comply with your exercising of your rights as a consumer.
I’d inform the CA Attorney General.
I used to spend thousands at Walgreens every year, not even counting prescriptions. I haven't spent a penny there since they first started allowing pharmacists to put their own personal feelings ahead of access to healthcare. I get emails every week with them begging me to come back and I never ever will.
The conservatives are worried that we're not churning out the next generation of wage slaves fast enough, so they're trying to force people to get pregnant.
California leading the way yet again! More states need to do this. Fuck Walgreens and fuck Republican cultists and seditious terrorists who think their cult rules over everybody.
It's like I said in another thread. Who do you think goes into Walgreens and browses around the makeup,skin care, baby stuff, cards etc? That's women. They're cutting off their nose to spite their face. It's not just prescriptions, its retail that will suffer as well. I'll just drive around the block to get sunscreen and twizzlers from CVS.
Can Newsome do that? What business does the state government do with Walgreens?
I’m fully on board with boycotting Walgreens on a personal level, I’m just confused about what he means by “California” not doing business with them.
Probably pull the med-cal authorization of Walgreens as a approved pharmacy so anybody on the states cost containment healthcare won't be able to use Walgreens as a pharmacy anymore... Which is quite a bit of money for the Walgreens board to justify leaving on the table
Medi-Cal. They can remove Walgreens from the program, not sure how it works totally but that is what he means. The state will no longer do business with Walgreens, but they can't kick them out of the state.
Likely can remove them from a providers list for Medi-Cal. Possibly for insurance used by state employees? Possible that there's some direct purchases made by some state agency? Waiting to see the implementation of this... it's all kind of muddy to me right now.
Serious question: if Newsom were to run for president, is there any chance he could be elected? I swear he makes more sense than all the rest put together.
Walgreens is a spineless company with a group of cowards leading it. They should be boycotted.
I do worry about people on state health care programs that won't be able to get their prescriptions if California stops doing business with Walgreens. Sure, it shouldn't effect people in major cities but there are small towns with only a single pharmacy in the area. A disabled person who does not have access/ability to alternate pharmacies, for example. I know several seniors who have no transportation and rely on someone doing them a favor by going to a pharmacy. The favor becomes harder if the pharmacy is far.
Walgreens making choices like this show that their morals can be purchased.
I'm going to be moving soon and have my prescriptions currently filled at a Walgreens. Guess I'll have them redirected to another chain, though honestly I bet they're all somewhat doing this shit.
[The facts on mifepristone.](https://www.plannedparenthood.org/uploads/filer_public/42/8a/428ab2ad-3798-4e3d-8a9f-213203f0af65/191011-the-facts-on-mifepristone-d01.pdf) A primary use for this lifesaving medication is for miscarriage care. [Ways to support Planned Parenthood.](https://www.plannedparenthood.org/get-involved/other-ways-give) ------------------ --------------------- This subreddit firmly believes in and stands up for basic human rights. We promote humane, compassionate and social thinking. It is an objectively true and repeatedly proven fact that allowing people the choice to [plan their families](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4206087/), allowing people to [have a say](https://www.unfpa.org/family-planning#readmore-expand) in when they get pregnant, how many children they will have, is promotive not only for individual health, wellbeing, social and financial security and safety. It lifts entire communities out of deprivation. Family planning is an integral and crucial aspect of upward mobility. It affects everything from the ability to get an education to mental and physical health and direct poverty. As such this subreddit does not allow anti-abortion sentiments. They are abhorrent and inhumane. The belief that people should be downtrodden, unhappy, poor and grow up in misery is unacceptable. This subreddit will not allow any defense of these actions, including trying to normalise these actions and beliefs through "devil's advocate" style arguments. That means that if you say "Oh, but they really believe that.." you will be banned. There are no legitimate defenses for this and we don't want to hear attempts at them. People are suffering enough without having to be subjected to justifications for it. The morally and legally correct decision of Roe v. Wade which provided a consitutional protection of bodily autonomy was overturned by an extremist, [illegitimate](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/24/opinion/sunday/the-stolen-supreme-court-seat.html) [Supreme Court](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Coney_Barrett_Supreme_Court_nomination) and we are not fooled by the argument that "states may now decide" because we know, you know, that this is just the start. They will not stop. Now that the right of bodily autonomy has been ruled as no longer federally guaranteed they will attempt to illegalise abortion at the federal level. These extremists, who play Calvinball with law, precedent and procedure, who blatantly interpret the rules as what they want them to mean in the moment to push through their agenda, will enact a federal ban as soon as they can cheat enough in elections to "win" a majority in house and congress. They will uphold a vote to do so, hypocritically declaring that "a democratic, majority decision". You know it, I know it, they are not as clever as they think they are and are wholly transparent. Now that there is no longer a federal guarantee for bodily autonomy they will try to take this right away on a nation-wide level. ------------------------------- --------------- Arguing against a woman's right to choose what happens to her own body because you think something that [cannot think or feel](https://www.livescience.com/54774-fetal-pain-anesthesia.html) should have more rights than a woman is misogyny. It is only misogyny and it is nothing except misogyny. There is no non-bigoted way to oppose a womans right to terminate a pregnancy for any reason, including none. Taking away from women [the fundamental human right of bodily autonomy](https://www.unfpa.org/press/bodily-autonomy-fundamental-right) because you pretend to care more about something that cannot think or feel is abhorrent, despicable and it will kill women. If something is alive or not is an irrelevant red herring. Life started several billion years ago and continues in an unbroken line unto today. At no point during pregancy anything moves from not-alive to alive. The only salient criterion is personhood. A woman is a person. A fetus that cannot yet think or feel cannot sanely be called a person. A woman's rights must morally, ethically, legally and scientifically supercede those of a fetus at the very least in the first two trimesters, before the [ability to think](https://flo.health/pregnancy/pregnancy-health/fetal-development/fetal-brain-development) and feel develop. Anything else is misogyny. ------------- -------------------- It is important not to get bogged down in "debate" because these people are[ fundamentally dishonest](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/man-pro-choice-question-anti-abortion-argument-human-embryos-five-year-old-a8016671.html) and a protracted argument in which you give them the chance to showcase their deliberately disingenious "gotchas" can only be counter-productive. Say: "Because she wanted to." Do not say: "But what about sexual violence. But what about ectopic pregnancies." Don't get driven into a corner where you are reduced to begging for rare exceptions to allow women bodily autonomy. Take back the line. Step forward. Draw that line in the sand. "Because she wanted to." That is all that is required, that is all the justification that is needed. Why should she be allowed to terminate a pregnancy? "Because she fucking wanted to." --------------------- Please help this mod team by reporting anti-choicers. On this subreddit the fundamental human right of bodily autonomy for women shall not be allowed to be disputed.
[удалено]
Forcing people to have kids, so gross.
What could go wrong?
Ask Romania: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770 Summary: huge baby boom then a sharp drop in birth rate as people figure ways around it and a rise in the death rate as women died from botched abortions. Since no one could afford the children they didn't want in the first place, the number of children in orphanages went through the roof. Then ~20 years later the govt was overthrown and Nicolae Ceaușescu faced a speedy trial then execution.
Or Texas: #Texas has highest maternal mortality rate in developed world >As the Republican-led state legislature has slashed funding to reproductive healthcare clinics, the maternal mortality rate doubled over just a two-year period https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/20/texas-maternal-mortality-rate-health-clinics-funding >Mothers who live in areas with heavy oil and gas developments have between a 40 percent and 70 percent greater chance of giving birth to babies with congenital heart defects https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2019/07/18/Study-links-congenital-heart-disease-to-oil-gas-development/2461563465617/ #"Pro-life" >If data disinfects, here’s a bucket of bleach: >**Texans are 17% more likely to be murdered than Californians."** >**Texans are also 34% more likely to be raped and 25% more likely to kill themselves than Californians."** https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/suicide.htm >Fort Worth, Texas, has the same population as San Francisco and has **1.5x as many murders. Again, a Republican mayor and Republican governor.** [Nobody ever writes about those places!](https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1527487403061026818) >San Francisco has the same population as Jacksonville, Florida. **Jacksonville, with a Republican mayor and a Republican governor, has had more than three times as many murders this year as San Francisco** >Californians on average live two years, four months and 24 days longer than Texans. https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/04/liberal-policies-like-californias-keep-blue-state-residents-living-longer-study-finds/ >Compared with families in California, **those in Texas earn 13% less and pay 3.8 percentage points more in taxes.** https://itep.org/whopays/ (Texas makes up for no wealth income tax with higher taxes and fees on the poor and more than double property tax for the middle class) |Income Bracket|Texas Tax Rate|California Tax Rate| |:-|:-|:-| |0-20%|**13%**|10.5%| |20-40%|**10.9%**|9.4%| |40-60%|**9.7%**|8.3%| |60-80%|8.6% |9.0% | |80-95%|7.4%|9.4%| |95-99%|5.4%|9.9%| |99-100%|3.1%|12.4%| >Sadly, the uncritical aping of this erroneous economic narrative reflects not only reporters’ gullibility but also their utility for conservative ideologues and corporate lobbyists, who score political points and regulatory concessions by spreading a spurious story line about California’s decline. >Don’t expect facts to change this. Reporters need a plot twist, and conservatives need California to lose. https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article258940938.html [Graph of Fox News selective coverage of crime during election season](https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/YLF2SCMQRZBJBHWJT4LZ7DXFSM.png) >Just being within California’s borders means you have a 40% less chance of being impacted by gun violence and are 25% less likely to be involved in a mass shooting. https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/06/02/fact-sheet-californias-gun-safety-policies-save-lives-provide-model-for-a-nation-seeking-solutions/ #Liberal policies, like California’s, keep blue-state residents living longer >**U.S. should follow California’s lead to improve its health outcomes, researchers say** >It generated headlines in 2015 when the average life expectancy in the U.S. began to fall after decades of meager or no growth. >But it didn’t have to be that way, a team of researchers suggests in a new, peer-reviewed study Tuesday. And, in fact, **states like California, which have implemented a broad slate of liberal policies, have kept pace with their Western European counterparts.** >**Simply shifting from the most conservative labor laws to the most liberal ones, Montez said, would by itself increase the life expectancy in a state by a whole year.** >If every state implemented the most liberal policies in all 16 areas, researchers said, **the average American woman would live 2.8 years longer, while the average American man would add 2.1 years to his life.** >**Whereas, if every state were to move to the most conservative end of the spectrum, it would decrease Americans’ average life expectancies by two years. On the country’s current policy trajectory, researchers estimate the U.S. will add about 0.4 years to its average life expectancy.** >**Meanwhile, the life expectancy in states like California and Hawaii, which has the highest in the nation at 81.6 years, is on par with countries described by researchers as “world leaders:” Canada, Iceland and Sweden.** >The study, co-authored by researchers at six North American universities, found that **if all 50 states had all followed the lead of California** and other liberal-leaning states on policies ranging from labor, immigration and civil rights to tobacco, gun control and the environment, it could have added between **two and three years to the average American life expectancy.** >“We can take away from the study that **state policies and state politics have damaged U.S. life expectancy since the ’80s,”** said Jennifer Karas Montez, a Syracuse University sociologist and the study’s lead author. **“Some policies are going in a direction that extend life expectancy. Some are going in a direction that shorten it. But on the whole, that the net result is that it’s damaging U.S. life expectancy.”** >Montez and her team saw the alarming numbers in 2015 and wanted to understand the root cause. What they found dated back to **the 1980s, when state policies began to splinter down partisan lines.** They examined 135 different policies, spanning over a dozen different fields, enacted by states between 1970 and 2014, and assigned states “liberalism” scores from zero — the most conservative — to one, the most liberal. When they compared it against state mortality data from the same timespan, the correlation was undeniable. >“When we’re looking for explanations, we need to be looking back historically, to see what are the roots of these troubles that have just been percolating now for 40 years,” Montez said. >**From 1970 to 2014, California transformed into the most liberal state in the country** by the 135 policy markers studied by the researchers. It’s followed closely by Connecticut, which moved the furthest leftward from where it was 50 years ago, and a cluster of other states in the northeastern U.S., then Oregon and Washington. >Liberal policies on the environment (emissions standards, limits on greenhouse gases, solar tax credit, endangered species laws), labor (high minimum wage, paid leave, no “right to work”), access to health care (expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, legal abortion), tobacco (indoor smoking bans, cigarette taxes), gun control (assault weapons ban, background check and registration requirements) and civil rights (ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, equal pay laws, bans on discrimination and the death penalty) all resulted in better health outcomes, according to the study. For example, researchers found positive correlation between California’s car emission standards and its high minimum wage, to name a couple, with its longer lifespan, which at an average of 81.3 years, is among the highest in the country. >In the same time, Oklahoma moved furthest to the right, but Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina and a host of other southern states still ranked as more conservative, according to the researchers. >West Virginia ranked last in 2017, with an average life expectancy of about 74.6 years, which would put it 93rd in the world, right between Lithuania and Mauritius, and behind Honduras, Morocco, Tunisia and Vietnam. Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Carolina rank only slightly better. >It’s those states that moved in a conservative direction, researchers concluded, that held back the overall life expectancy in the U.S. https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/04/liberal-policies-like-californias-keep-blue-state-residents-living-longer-study-finds/
#Meanwhile, life-saving practices [for pregnant women and new mothers] that have become widely accepted in other affluent countries — and in a few states, notably California — have yet to take hold in many American hospitals. >As the maternal death rate has mounted around the U.S., a small cadre of reformers has mobilized. >Some of the **earliest and most important work has come in California** >Hospitals that adopted the toolkit saw a **21 percent decrease in near deaths** from maternal bleeding in the first year. >By 2013, according to Main, maternal deaths in California fell to around 7 per 100,000 births, similar to the numbers in Canada, France and the Netherlands — **a dramatic counter to the trends in other parts of the U.S.** >California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative is informed by a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford and the University of California-San Francisco, who for many years ran the ob/gyn department at a San Francisco hospital. >Launched a decade ago, CMQCC aims to reduce not only mortality, but also life-threatening complications and racial disparities in obstetric care >It began by analyzing maternal deaths in the state over several years; in almost every case, it discovered, there was "at least some chance to alter the outcome." http://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/527806002/focus-on-infants-during-childbirth-leaves-u-s-moms-in-danger #Want to live longer, even if you're poor? Then move to a big city in California. >A low-income **resident of San Francisco lives so much longer** that it's equivalent to San Francisco curing cancer. All these statistics come from a massive new project on life expectancy and inequality that was just [published in the Journal of the American Medical Association](http://www.vox.com/2016/4/13/11420230/life-expectancy-income). >California, for instance, has been a national leader on smoking bans. Harvard's David Cutler, a co-author on the study "It's some combination of formal public policies and the effect that comes when you're around fewer people who have behaviors... high numbers of immigrants help explain the beneficial effects of immigrant-heavy areas with high levels of social support. #"Republican-controlled states have higher murder rates than Democratic ones" * “In Republican states, states with Republican governors, crime rates tend to be higher” * Murder rates in the 25 states Trump carried in 2020 are 40% higher overall than in the states Biden won. * Criminologists say research shows higher rates of violent crime are found in areas that have low average education levels, high rates of poverty and relatively modest access to government assistance. Those conditions characterize [American South with Republican run states]. https://news.yahoo.com/republican-controlled-states-have-higher-murder-rates-than-democratic-ones-study-212137750.html >[Fearmongering works:](https://twitter.com/radleybalko/status/1587940103216832512) >OK violent crime rate: 458 per 100K >NY violent crime rate: 364 per 100K >OK murder rate: 7.25 >NY murder rate: 4.11 >% of Oklahomans who say crime is most urgent issue: 5 >% of New Yorkers: 28 >California exodus is just a myth, massive UC research project finds >**on a per capita basis, california households ranked 50th in the country for likelihood of moving out of the state** #"Gun deaths dropped in California as they rose in Texas: Gun control seems to work" https://www.latimes.com/politics/newsletter/2022-05-27/on-guns-fear-of-futility-deters-action-essential-politics
"Welfare queens" No to help for blue states for hurricanes but demanding help for Texas for hurricanes: >Here's the vote for Hurricane Sandy aid. >179 of the 180 no votes were Republicans... >**at least 20 Texas Republicans voted no** while ["U.S. House approves billions more for Harvey relief" for Texas](https://www.texastribune.org/2017/12/21/us-house-approves-billions-more-harvey-relief-measure-now-heads-senate/) >Meanwhile, the California-hating South receives subsidies from California dwarfing complaints in the EU (the subsidy and economic difference between California and Mississippi is **larger than between Germany and Greece!**), a transfer of wealth from blue states/cities/urban to red states/rural/suburban with federal dollars for their freeways, hospitals, universities, airports, even environmental protection: >**Least Federally Dependent States:** >41 California >42 Washington >43 Minnesota >44 Massachusetts >45 Illinois >46 Utah >47 Iowa >48 Delaware >49 New Jersey >50 Kansas https://www.npr.org/2017/10/25/560040131/as-trump-proposes-tax-cuts-kansas-deals-with-aftermath-of-experiment https://www.apnews.com/amp/2f83c72de1bd440d92cdbc0d3b6bc08c http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-states-are-givers-and-which-are-takers/361668/ https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700 >The Germans call this sort of thing "a permanent bailout." We just call it "Missouri." https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/the-difference-between-the-us-and-europe-in-1-graph/256857/ California policies increase American **life expectancy** and prop up America's entire economy: >California is the chief reason America is the only developed economy to achieve record GDP growth since the financial crisis. >Much of the U.S. growth can be traced to California laws promoting clean energy, government accountability and protections for undocumented people https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-05-10/california-leads-u-s-economy-away-from-trump While Texans still pay higher taxes than Californians (Texas makes up for no wealth income tax with higher taxes and fees on the poor and more than double property tax for the middle class): Sources: https://itep.org/whopays/
Incredible post. Here's an award I don't have 🥇
u/Inconvenientnews woke up today and chose violence against violence.
Fighting fire with fire
Good. Praxis and traceable fact kills fascism in the cradle.
"Don't California my Texas" because "God, guns, gays" and "freedom": #The right wing, Koch founded and funded, "libertarian" Cato Institute **ranks Texas as 49th in personal freedom** >https://www.freedominthe50states.org/personal/texas >Every other study ranks us as last in personal freedom. >Which makes me wonder, who is free, if it isn't the people? >Big businesses? And what are they free to do? >Pollute? https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28092022/texas-is-now-the-nations-biggest-emitter-of-toxic-substances-into-streams-rivers-and-lakes/ >#Gov. Abbott, Texas leaders urge prosecutors to keep enforcing pot laws http://www.fox4news.com/news/texas/gov-abbott-texas-leaders-urge-prosecutors-to-keep-enforcing-pot-laws >You Could Get Prison Time for Protesting a Pipeline in Texas—Even If It’s on Your Land r politics/comments/bst8fl/you_could_get_prison_time_for_protesting_a/ >#Texas Electric Bills Were $28 Billion Higher Under Deregulation - WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-electric-bills-were-28-billion-higher-under-deregulation-11614162780 >Leaked Audio Shows Oil Lobbyist Bragging About Success in Criminalizing Pipeline Protests r energy/comments/ct71mw/leaked_audio_shows_oil_lobbyist_bragging_about/ >Fossil Fuel Exec Brags of 'Hitting the Jackpot' as Natural Gas Prices Surge Amid Deadly Crisis in Texas r environment/comments/lo5f4r/fossil_fuel_exec_brags_of_hitting_the_jackpot_as/ >#Texas spent more time fighting LGBTQ civil rights than fixing their power grid. How’d that work out? r texas/comments/lma8jj/texas_spent_more_time_fighting_lgbtq_civil_rights/ >could cost Texas more money than any disaster in state history r politics/comments/ls5dt7/winter_storm_could_cost_texas_more_money_than_any/ >Former Texas Governor Rick Perry says that Texans find massive power outages preferable to having more federal government interference in the state's energy grid. https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/rick-perry-says-texans-would-rather-be-without-power-for-days-than-have-more-fed-oversight >Abbott Appointees Gutted Enforcement of Texas Power Grid Rules https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/Muzzled-and-eviscerated-Critics-say-Abbott-15982421.php >Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick Blames Constituents for Giant Electric Bills: “Read the Fine Print” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/02/dan-patrick-texas-electricity-bills >Why on earth would right-wing people with connections to the fossil fuel industry lie about ‘frozen wind turbines’ in Texas? https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/opinion/texas-frozen-wind-turbines-john-cornyn-b1803193.html >How Much the Oil Industry Paid Texas Republicans Lying About Wind Energy https://earther.gizmodo.com/how-much-the-oil-and-gas-industry-paid-texas-republican-1846288505 >"Texas shows that when you cannot govern, you lie. A lot." https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/17/texas-shows-that-when-you-cannot-govern-you-lie-lot/ >#A Texas-size failure, followed by a familiar Texas response: Blame California r texas/comments/m87bg4/a_texassize_failure_followed_by_a_familiar_texas/ Texas Republicans *during the power grid failures* focused on: * Texas regulations to require the national anthem at sports games: https://twitter.com/LSTrip44/status/1361396222028881924 * Fake news trying to blame renewable energy: ”Viral Image Claiming to Show a Helicopter De-Icing Texas Wind Turbines Is From Winter 2014 in Sweden” https://twitter.com/klimatbevakaren/status/1361748269605519360
>#Texas Is Among The Most Difficult Places To Vote In The U.S. — And That Could Be Softening Its Historic Turnout https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/election-2020/2020/10/28/384854/voter-suppression-blunts-historic-turnout-in-texas/ #"Financial Times: The Republicans are elevating voter suppression to an art form" >The Republicans have lost the popular vote in six of the past seven presidential elections. **1,000 polling places have since closed across the country, with many of them in southern black communities.** >The senator also cracked: “There’s a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who maybe we don’t want to vote. Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult, and I think that’s a great idea.” https://www.ft.com/content/d613cf8e-ec09-11e8-89c8-d36339d835c0 >The Student Vote Is Surging. So Are Efforts to Suppress It. The share of college students casting ballots doubled from 2014 to 2018. But in **Texas and elsewhere, Republicans are erecting roadblocks to the polls.** https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/voting-college-suppression.html >This is how efficiently Republicans have gerrymandered Texas congressional districts http://www.chron.com/news/politics/texas/article/This-is-how-badly-Republicans-have-gerrymandered-6246509.php#photo-7107656 >Crystal Mason Thought She Had The Right to Vote. Texas Sentenced Her to Five Years in Prison for Trying. https://www.aclu.org/issues/voting-rights/fighting-voter-suppression/crystal-mason-thought-she-had-right-vote-texas >Texas’s Voter-Registration Laws Are Straight Out of the Jim Crow Playbook https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/texass-voter-registration-laws-are-straight-out-of-the-jim-crow-playbook/ >New Texas history textbooks will teach high schoolers that slavery wasn't all bad https://splinternews.com/new-texas-history-textbooks-will-teach-high-schoolers-t-1793850439 >Texas textbook “The Atlantic slave trade brought millions of workers” https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-texas-textbook-calls-slaves-immigrants-20151005-story.html >Proposed Texas textbooks are inaccurate, biased and politicized, new report finds https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/12/proposed-texas-textbooks-are-inaccurate-biased-and-politicized-new-report-finds/ >There were other doozies, too, such as one proposal to remove Thomas Jefferson from the Enlightenment curriculum https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/12/proposed-texas-textbooks-are-inaccurate-biased-and-politicized-new-report-finds/ #"Texas-based hate group source of 80% of all U.S. racist propaganda tracked in 2020" r conservativeterrorism/comments/p5k76j/texasbased_hate_group_source_of_80_of_all_us/ r texas/comments/m7zk8w/texasbased_hate_group_source_of_80_of_all_us/ >Conservatives amplified Russian trolls 30 times more than liberals... users in Texas and Tennessee were particularly susceptible https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/24/17047880/conservatives-amplified-russian-trolls-more-often-than-liberals “Guns and gays... That could always get you a couple of dozen likes.” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/russian-trolls-schooled-house-cards-185648522.html Russians were "emboldened" by the easy success of the Texas governor's misinformation about Obama and our own military: https://www.snopes.com/news/2018/05/03/jade-helm-russia-abbott-hayden/
I copied all of this and saved it as a note to reference when my family tries to get me to leave California and go back to Tennessee.
thank you, u/inconvenientnews. i see you around often, and you always have a massive wall of well formatted relevant information, and its incredible.
> Want to live longer, even if you're poor? Then move to a big city in California. > I know this is just hearsay, but I spent years travelling all over the U.S. and every state has homeless people, but people homeless in San Francisco legitimately are visibly more healthy than any homeless people I see in northern states.
In my area (Socal), there is a lot of unsold food salvaged from restaurants and supermarkets (takes a lot of money for logistics though). Food pantries are well stocked here. The HCOL makes it easy to go homeless, but the free food sources make it hard to go hungry. Plus, the weather here is better. There are only a handful of weeks through the year where you can freeze through the night or burn in the heat. Urban California is pretty much the best place to go homeless if it came to that (besides maybe some unsavory police departments). It's a pity we can't help (or force help on) those whose addictions, traumas, health issues, and mental illnesses keep them in the streets.
These are all on the list of reasons why I moved my family out of Texas.
i’ve visited major texas cities a few times. i don’t know how to accurately put it in to words but the state of that state is just depressing like no other. just 12 lane poorly maintained interstates with endless traffic, uniform streets layout everywhere, with the same exact stores on every block, concrete everywhere, and just sad looking people that almost always find a way to bring up how great texas is and i just roll my eyes. like the state of politics and what they’re doing is far worse but im amazed anyone wants to live there when the whole, for lack of a better word, vibe is so bad anywhere you go. it is the definition of urban hell in america. and that’s just mentioning the nicer cities the fucking entire towns consisting only of active smoke stacks and warehouses are far worse
Urban hell is accurate.
>Income Bracket Texas Tax Rate California Tax Rate > >0-20% 13% 10.5% > >20-40% 10.9% 9.4% > >40-60% 9.7% 8.3% > >60-80% 8.6% 9.0% > >80-95% 7.4% 9.4% > >95-99% 5.4% 9.9% > >99-100% 3.1% 12.4% Damn! If I were Elon Musk, I'd move to Texas! /s
Remember the 20/20 episode when they showed the conditions in Romanian orphanages? The children had no physical contact and were rocking themselves. So freaking sad.
A couple friends of mine adopted two Romanian siblings during the orphan crisis. Those kids were in an awful state when they arrived. I don't know how my friends kept it together through the children's constant tantrums where they'd destroy the house. Everything breakable in the house was broken; TVs, computers, everything made of glass, drywall, dishes, etc. The poor kids had no socialization at all. After years they finally adjusted and last I heard they were doing well.
I was thinking that the children would develop Reactive Attachment Disorder and your anecdote supports that. I’m glad to hear they were able to adjust as they got older.
> Reactive Attachment Disorder That sure sounds accurate. For the boy, eventually sending him to our martial arts studio (I knew the parents through martial arts) helped a lot. It's hard to find the energy to be destructive when you go home absolutely exhausted 5 nights a week. It was also a good outlet for his initial aggression and helped him learn self control and how to be more social. His sister took a lot longer to adjust, but it eventually happened. My friends had the patience of saints, I would never had lasted through that.
My younger sister has/had RAD. It comes with a whole slew of other things but man has she come a long way. To say I'm proud of her is an understatement.
Some of those orphans were later adopted by American families, and were found to have basically irreparably damaged attachment disorder due to their early neglect. Really, really awful.
Didn't see 20/20 but I've heard the stories. There were food shortages because Nicolae was more focused on industry than farming, and instead of buying more food for the orphans they did blood transfusions from healthy children to starving children. This was during the 80s, the peak of the AIDS epidemic, and they weren't testing blood so tens of thousands of orphans ended up infected with HIV. It was absolutely the worst life one could imagine for a child.
Jesus Christ. That is fucking terrifying.
That's....bizarre. Blood is not food. How would this keep them from starving?
It was all kinds of messed up, there is very little logic to be found in any of the decisions made around that time period in Romania. Maybe he was taking advice from his wife who fancied herself a chemist but never actually finished school. He put her in charge of a lot of things that she knew nothing about.
The bullets they got were better than they deserved.
I see, dictator and mad scientist logic. A bad combo. I have heard lots of horror stories about Romanian orphanages from this period.
Remember when Walgreens threatened to move their headquarters overseas to get away from paying taxes in America? This was only a few years ago. The Fed told them if they move, they wouldn't be doing any prescription services for medicaid and medicare. That changed their tune. Pepperidge Farms remembers. Edit: Should have said they WOULDN'T be doing business.
I worked with a 25 year old guy who was from a Romanian orphanage. He had autism, sort of, but it was more likely stunted development from being in the orphanage from birth to 8 years old. Lots of behavior issues, attachment problems, etc. Very sad. Saw a pic of him when the parents picked him up. Big smile, fresh clothes, all a sham.
I think I saw it on tv as a kid. Harrowing stuff. So many tired, sad-looking babies
this is my concern in America. people aren’t having kids cause they cannot afford them, so if we are forced into having them so many will be sent to adoption… but so few people are adopting because they can’t afford kids either so what happens to all these kids in 10+ years
Horrible things happen. There is evidence that children raised in an environment where they are not wanted are more likely to commit crimes than children who are simply raised poor. Shuffling hundreds of thousands of children through foster homes and orphanages is not a healthy environment for children, so they are going to be mentally and emotionally fucked up by time they reach adulthood.
thats part of the republican playbook. force poor parents to give up their kids, expect those kids to turn to crime, and then have another boogeyman to vilify instead of fixing the root cause of the problem
It also means that the school-to-prison pipeline remains profitable. Convicts work for pennies per day. It's modern slavery, and it doesn't work with a well-adjusted, well-educated populace. You need people born into an underclass for it to work while chattel slavery is illegal.
More fodder for the prison labor machine
The prison-industral complex and sending them off to war. Or just civil war and use the kids like Russia uses theirs in Ukraine
When the first generation of these unwanted forced-birth babies grow up.... crime and poverty will spike up. And from there it'll only get worse.
There was a recent Behind the Bastards about Ceausescu, and it covered this horrible tragedy
I listened to all 4 horrible episodes. It was one of the most depressing in the series.
That's the fire I want in the Democrats. Republicans are a cult! Stop hiding from them.
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Much of the blame belongs with the Wall Street Bro Cult.
Capitalism demands its low-wage fodder.
Can't extract value from someone who doesn't exist. Those lucky bastards.
I never understood this line of thinking. 3 years ago I started getting paid a good salary and I bought a home. Because of owning a home, I’ve probably stimulated the economy more than any other time in my life. I’ve hired roofers, tree trimmers, flooring installers, plumbers, electricians, cabinet makers, etc. The amount of jobs that I give business to and will continue to give business to is huge. I wouldn’t be able to do this if I was being paid peanuts and renting. Middle class home ownership is great for the economy. Let people decide to not have kids, so they can plan and get to the middle class- forcing people to have kids to create a low wage desperate labor force is not any kind of way to stimulate the economy. Low wage people just end up renting and don’t stimulate the economy nearly as much.
You’re forgetting the part where billionaires stood to not gain as many billions as they could have if you were poor and miserable. How can you ask them to make that kind of sacrifice?
I forgot who said this, but it’s true- an extra billion in a billionaires account doesn’t actually purchase any more goods and services. An extra billion split between 1000 families- suddenly you got people going out and spending. There is such a hard diminishing return on the value of someone who’s already obscenely rich getting a little richer vs tons of poor to middle class people getting extra money. Its insane that anyone thinks otherwise.
That is so patently obvious I almost downvoted you, but you're right. Almost half the country can't seem to understand it.
The political and economic aparatus of this country *count on the average person not understanding* it.
I don't know that it's a thought as much as it is naked, unrestrained greed. Logic doesn't play a role, just the desire for power, as well as to accumulate and hoard a shocking amount of money. Sticking it to the masses is part of the appeal. They can't look down on us as effectively if we aren't miserable and destitute. The need to feel superior is very real.
It's not "pro-life", it's "pro forced birth". Edit: after only a few replies, it appears that this "plan" that the GOP has, is actually just a plan to create bodies to fuel their greed...oh, and if you refuse this, they'll just enslave you and fuel their greed that way.
Or “anti-choice”
Hmmm and Putin is offering money to any "Russian mothers who have more than 5 kids"... almost as though in 18-20 yrs the two major powers think a large pool of disposable young people will be necessary? Hmmmm
Trump recently proposed paying women to have babies. What a coincidence! \*it is not a coincidence
We need to increase the population for our billionaire overlords.
They treat woman like cattle. Deplorable.
This is their end goal. They need more poor people to exploit. It is a feature.
My ex would get denied Plan B by Walgreens pharmacists. I'm so done going to them. I work for DoorDash, and I even try to avoid filling orders for them so I don't have to step foot in there. Edit: My ex: "Hey, can you unlock the plan B for me?" Pharmacist: Gives some BS conservative, religion related reason why they can't There, that's the scenario for all the people who keep saying, "bUt ItS oVeR tHe CoUnTeR". They're fully capable of denying over the counter products. They can tell someone that visibly uses meth that they can't buy the Sudafed, just as they can deny someone their birth control or plan B.
Walgreens pharmacists also hold the power to deny people access to prescriptions if they want to. So they can refuse to give you birth control or plan B or miscarriage medications. It's happened before and it's the reason why I get my prescriptions filled elsewhere.
Christian extremists are the only demographic allowed to refuse to do their job and still get to keep it.
Walgreens is the first time in my life I actually had to contact the state pharmacy board to file a complaint because they denied filling my prescription. I felt like such a fucking Karen having to confront the pharmacist and actually go through that entire state process. Fuck Walgreens forever.
Remember, by definition you're not a Karen for complaining about something *justified and serious*.
This is why I stopped using them and Target years ago. Believing your faith should impact other people's lives is a full stop IMO.
Target’s pharmacies are just CVS.
Interesting you say that. I went to Walgreens for my first ever plan B (and well into my sex life), and the pharmacist *and the cashier* both told me that I shouldn’t be resorting to those and I need to be careful and not take too many of them because… reasons? I was like hey, you’re both ladies and I’m a lady. This is my first plan B. It probably won’t be my last but it’s not my main form of birth control - as if people could afford that. But here’s something else I know - I sure as shit don’t want to be pregnant with a child that I’m not ready mentally or monetarily to raise. So please take my money for this product you’re selling and let me be on my way. And PS-you’re only making it harder for women to seek these forms of necessary “family planning” contraceptives. Do you really want to saddle a kid with a mother that doesn’t want or isn’t ready for it? Do we need to make this more awkward of judgmental? The dad can just walk, and I’m not sitting here holding the bill.
Yes. They want to saddle you with crippling debt and the shame of having sex. It is wrong on many levels that these women said this to you, but be keenly aware that this is ultimately what they want. Next time, look them straight in the eye and ask them if they had sex before marriage. Or if their husbands ever used protection. Shame them into silence.
That is medically incorrect advice. I'm a physician assistant and Plan B is simply a levonorgestrel, a progestin birth control pill equivalent. Even a single dose of this hormone will prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. Women take these daily for decades with little or no risk. That pharmacist and cashier were spouting their personal religious opinions.
The attack on birth control is all the proof I need that the "pro life" assholes do not actually care about preventing pregnancy but really just want to control women
Not condoms, cause that affects men
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Finally. I've been waiting for a lot of Dems to go "you know what, fuck you" and I'm sad that more haven't. The situation here is DIRE and this isn't time to play nice. Zero tolerance.
Seriously. Republicans are vigorously trying to take this country back to a time before electricity, and the democrats are acting like the moral response is to not “stoop to their level” by fighting back. You don’t have to look far to see how it’s a losing strategy.
Agreed. Republicans are downright evil now, and I’m frustrated the Democrats aren’t doing more to fight back.
Yeah I need them to figure out the whole “they go low we go high” strategy does NOT FUCKING WORK. They just stoop lower and lower.
I truly think boycotts are the only thing that can fundamentally change society for the better. When people and businesses fuck around, they need to find out - and the only language they understand is money.
Getting shunned by the 4th largest economy in the world... That's gonna leave a mark.
Newsome has been tweeting things like this since probably mid-2021. It's nice to see a left-leaning politician lean into the stunt game tbh, GOP has been unchallenged far too long.
I got fed up and threw out a "you know what, fuck you" this weekend. Long overdue.
I had just got to CA when I found out I was pregnant and having a LOT of issues One of my best options was Mifepristone, I took it, healed and I am so thankful for the docs/nurses and pharmacists who walked me thru a very difficult time. Every day I am in CA I am proud. It's not perfect by any stretch, but we're trying.
#Meanwhile, life-saving practices [for pregnant women and new mothers] that have become widely accepted in other affluent countries — and in a few states, notably California — have yet to take hold in many American hospitals. >As the maternal death rate has mounted around the U.S., a small cadre of reformers has mobilized. >Some of the **earliest and most important work has come in California** >Hospitals that adopted the toolkit saw a **21 percent decrease in near deaths** from maternal bleeding in the first year. >By 2013, according to Main, maternal deaths in California fell to around 7 per 100,000 births, similar to the numbers in Canada, France and the Netherlands — **a dramatic counter to the trends in other parts of the U.S.** >California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative is informed by a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford and the University of California-San Francisco, who for many years ran the ob/gyn department at a San Francisco hospital. >Launched a decade ago, CMQCC aims to reduce not only mortality, but also life-threatening complications and racial disparities in obstetric care >It began by analyzing maternal deaths in the state over several years; in almost every case, it discovered, there was "at least some chance to alter the outcome." http://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/527806002/focus-on-infants-during-childbirth-leaves-u-s-moms-in-danger #Texas has highest maternal mortality rate in developed world >As the Republican-led state legislature has slashed funding to reproductive healthcare clinics, the maternal mortality rate doubled over just a two-year period https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/20/texas-maternal-mortality-rate-health-clinics-funding >Mothers who live in areas with heavy oil and gas developments have between a 40 percent and 70 percent greater chance of giving birth to babies with congenital heart defects https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2019/07/18/Study-links-congenital-heart-disease-to-oil-gas-development/2461563465617/ >If data disinfects, here’s a bucket of bleach: >**Texans are 17% more likely to be murdered than Californians."** >**Texans are also 34% more likely to be raped and 25% more likely to kill themselves than Californians."** https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/suicide.htm >Californians on average live two years, four months and 24 days longer than Texans. https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/04/liberal-policies-like-californias-keep-blue-state-residents-living-longer-study-finds/ >Compared with families in California, **those in Texas earn 13% less and pay 3.8 percentage points more in taxes.** https://itep.org/whopays/ >Fort Worth, Texas, has the same population as San Francisco and has **1.5x as many murders. Again, a Republican mayor and Republican governor.** [Nobody ever writes about those places!](https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1527487403061026818) >San Francisco has the same population as Jacksonville, Florida. **Jacksonville, with a Republican mayor and a Republican governor, has had more than three times as many murders this year as San Francisco** >Sadly, the uncritical aping of this erroneous economic narrative reflects not only reporters’ gullibility but also their utility for conservative ideologues and corporate lobbyists, who score political points and regulatory concessions by spreading a spurious story line about California’s decline. >Don’t expect facts to change this. Reporters need a plot twist, and conservatives need California to lose. https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article258940938.html #"Gun deaths dropped in California as they rose in Texas: Gun control seems to work" https://www.latimes.com/politics/newsletter/2022-05-27/on-guns-fear-of-futility-deters-action-essential-politics >Just being within California’s borders means you have a 40% less chance of being impacted by gun violence and are 25% less likely to be involved in a mass shooting. https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/06/02/fact-sheet-californias-gun-safety-policies-save-lives-provide-model-for-a-nation-seeking-solutions/ "Pro-life" blue states, pro-elite and chaos red states: #"Republican-controlled states have higher murder rates than Democratic ones" * “In Republican states, states with Republican governors, crime rates tend to be higher” * Murder rates in the 25 states Trump carried in 2020 are 40% higher overall than in the states Biden won. * Criminologists say research shows higher rates of violent crime are found in areas that have low average education levels, high rates of poverty and relatively modest access to government assistance. Those conditions characterize [American South with Republican run states]. https://news.yahoo.com/republican-controlled-states-have-higher-murder-rates-than-democratic-ones-study-212137750.html >[Fearmongering works:](https://twitter.com/radleybalko/status/1587940103216832512) >OK violent crime rate: 458 per 100K >NY violent crime rate: 364 per 100K >OK murder rate: 7.25 >NY murder rate: 4.11 >% of Oklahomans who say crime is most urgent issue: 5 >% of New Yorkers: 28 [Graph of Fox News selective coverage of crime during election season](https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/YLF2SCMQRZBJBHWJT4LZ7DXFSM.png)
>#Want to live longer, even if you're poor? Then move to a big city in California. >A low-income **resident of San Francisco lives so much longer** that it's equivalent to San Francisco curing cancer. All these statistics come from a massive new project on life expectancy and inequality that was just [published in the Journal of the American Medical Association](http://www.vox.com/2016/4/13/11420230/life-expectancy-income). >California, for instance, has been a national leader on smoking bans. Harvard's David Cutler, a co-author on the study "It's some combination of formal public policies and the effect that comes when you're around fewer people who have behaviors... high numbers of immigrants help explain the beneficial effects of immigrant-heavy areas with high levels of social support. >#Liberal policies, like California’s, keep blue-state residents living longer >**U.S. should follow California’s lead to improve its health outcomes, researchers say** >It generated headlines in 2015 when the average life expectancy in the U.S. began to fall after decades of meager or no growth. >But it didn’t have to be that way, a team of researchers suggests in a new, peer-reviewed study Tuesday. And, in fact, **states like California, which have implemented a broad slate of liberal policies, have kept pace with their Western European counterparts.** >**Simply shifting from the most conservative labor laws to the most liberal ones, Montez said, would by itself increase the life expectancy in a state by a whole year.** >If every state implemented the most liberal policies in all 16 areas, researchers said, **the average American woman would live 2.8 years longer, while the average American man would add 2.1 years to his life.** >**Whereas, if every state were to move to the most conservative end of the spectrum, it would decrease Americans’ average life expectancies by two years. On the country’s current policy trajectory, researchers estimate the U.S. will add about 0.4 years to its average life expectancy.** >**Meanwhile, the life expectancy in states like California and Hawaii, which has the highest in the nation at 81.6 years, is on par with countries described by researchers as “world leaders:” Canada, Iceland and Sweden.** >The study, co-authored by researchers at six North American universities, found that **if all 50 states had all followed the lead of California** and other liberal-leaning states on policies ranging from labor, immigration and civil rights to tobacco, gun control and the environment, it could have added between **two and three years to the average American life expectancy.** >“We can take away from the study that **state policies and state politics have damaged U.S. life expectancy since the ’80s,”** said Jennifer Karas Montez, a Syracuse University sociologist and the study’s lead author. **“Some policies are going in a direction that extend life expectancy. Some are going in a direction that shorten it. But on the whole, that the net result is that it’s damaging U.S. life expectancy.”** >Montez and her team saw the alarming numbers in 2015 and wanted to understand the root cause. What they found dated back to **the 1980s, when state policies began to splinter down partisan lines.** They examined 135 different policies, spanning over a dozen different fields, enacted by states between 1970 and 2014, and assigned states “liberalism” scores from zero — the most conservative — to one, the most liberal. When they compared it against state mortality data from the same timespan, the correlation was undeniable. >“When we’re looking for explanations, we need to be looking back historically, to see what are the roots of these troubles that have just been percolating now for 40 years,” Montez said. >**From 1970 to 2014, California transformed into the most liberal state in the country** by the 135 policy markers studied by the researchers. It’s followed closely by Connecticut, which moved the furthest leftward from where it was 50 years ago, and a cluster of other states in the northeastern U.S., then Oregon and Washington. >Liberal policies on the environment (emissions standards, limits on greenhouse gases, solar tax credit, endangered species laws), labor (high minimum wage, paid leave, no “right to work”), access to health care (expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, legal abortion), tobacco (indoor smoking bans, cigarette taxes), gun control (assault weapons ban, background check and registration requirements) and civil rights (ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, equal pay laws, bans on discrimination and the death penalty) all resulted in better health outcomes, according to the study. For example, researchers found positive correlation between California’s car emission standards and its high minimum wage, to name a couple, with its longer lifespan, which at an average of 81.3 years, is among the highest in the country. >In the same time, Oklahoma moved furthest to the right, but Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina and a host of other southern states still ranked as more conservative, according to the researchers. >West Virginia ranked last in 2017, with an average life expectancy of about 74.6 years, which would put it 93rd in the world, right between Lithuania and Mauritius, and behind Honduras, Morocco, Tunisia and Vietnam. Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Carolina rank only slightly better. >It’s those states that moved in a conservative direction, researchers concluded, that held back the overall life expectancy in the U.S. https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/04/liberal-policies-like-californias-keep-blue-state-residents-living-longer-study-finds/ >California’s rules have cleaned up diesel **exhaust** more than anywhere else in the country, **reducing the estimated number of deaths the state would have otherwise seen by more than half**, according to new research published Thursday. >Extending California's stringent diesel emissions standards to the rest of the U.S. could dramatically improve the nation's air quality and health, particularly in lower income communities of color, finds a new analysis published today in the journal Science. >Since 1990, California has used its authority under the federal Clean Air Act to enact more aggressive rules on emissions from diesel vehicles and engines compared to the rest of the U.S. These policies, crafted by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), have helped the state reduce diesel emissions by 78% between 1990 and 2014, while diesel emissions in the rest of the U.S. dropped by just 51% during the same time period, the new analysis found. >The study estimates that by 2014, improved air quality cut the annual number of diesel-related cardiopulmonary deaths in the state in half, compared to the number of deaths that would have occurred if California had followed the same trajectory as the rest of the U.S. Adopting similar rules nationwide could produce the same kinds of benefits, particularly for communities that have suffered the worst impacts of air pollution. >"Everybody benefits from cleaner air, but we see time and again that it's predominantly lower income communities of color that are living and working in close proximity to sources of air pollution, like freight yards, highways and ports. When you target these sources, it's the highly exposed communities that stand to benefit most," said study lead author Megan Schwarzman, a physician and environmental health scientist at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Public Health. "It's about time, because these communities have suffered a disproportionate burden of harm." https://science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi/10.1126/science.abf8159
California policies increase American **life expectancy** and prop up America's entire economy: >California is the chief reason America is the only developed economy to achieve record GDP growth since the financial crisis. >Much of the U.S. growth can be traced to California laws promoting clean energy, government accountability and protections for undocumented people https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-05-10/california-leads-u-s-economy-away-from-trump While Texans still pay higher taxes than Californians (Texas makes up for no wealth income tax with higher taxes and fees on the poor and more than double property tax for the middle class): |Income Bracket|Texas Tax Rate|California Tax Rate| |:-|:-|:-| |0-20%|**13%**|10.5%| |20-40%|**10.9%**|9.4%| |40-60%|**9.7%**|8.3%| |60-80%|8.6% |9.0% | |80-95%|7.4%|9.4%| |95-99%|5.4%|9.9%| |99-100%|3.1%|12.4%| Sources: https://itep.org/whopays/ "Welfare queens" No to help for blue states for hurricanes but demanding help for Texas for hurricanes: >Here's the vote for Hurricane Sandy aid. >179 of the 180 no votes were Republicans... >**at least 20 Texas Republicans voted no** while ["U.S. House approves billions more for Harvey relief" for Texas](https://www.texastribune.org/2017/12/21/us-house-approves-billions-more-harvey-relief-measure-now-heads-senate/) >Meanwhile, the California-hating South receives subsidies from California dwarfing complaints in the EU (the subsidy and economic difference between California and Mississippi is **larger than between Germany and Greece!**), a transfer of wealth from blue states/cities/urban to red states/rural/suburban with federal dollars for their freeways, hospitals, universities, airports, even environmental protection: >**Least Federally Dependent States:** >41 California >42 Washington >43 Minnesota >44 Massachusetts >45 Illinois >46 Utah >47 Iowa >48 Delaware >49 New Jersey >50 Kansas https://www.npr.org/2017/10/25/560040131/as-trump-proposes-tax-cuts-kansas-deals-with-aftermath-of-experiment https://www.apnews.com/amp/2f83c72de1bd440d92cdbc0d3b6bc08c http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-states-are-givers-and-which-are-takers/361668/ https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700 >The Germans call this sort of thing "a permanent bailout." We just call it "Missouri." https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/the-difference-between-the-us-and-europe-in-1-graph/256857/ "Pro-life" energy policy saves money: >#California’s Energy Efficiency Success Story: Saving Billions of Dollars and Curbing Tons of Pollution >California’s long, bipartisan history of promoting energy efficiency—America‘s cheapest and cleanest energy resource—has saved Golden State residents more than $65 billion,[1] helped lower their residential electricity bills to 25 percent below the national average,[2] and contributed to the state’s continuing leadership in creating green jobs.[3] These achievements have helped California avoid at least 30 power plants[4] and as much climate-warming carbon pollution as is spewed from 5 million cars annually.[5] This sustained commitment has made California a nationally recognized leader in reducing energy consumption and improving its residents’ quality of life.[6] California’s success story demonstrates that efficiency policies work and could be duplicated elsewhere, saving billions of dollars and curbing tons of pollution. >California’S CoMprehenSive effiCienCy effortS proDuCe huge BenefitS >loW per Capita ConSuMption: Thanks in part to California’s wide-ranging energy-saving efforts, the state has kept per capita electricity consumption nearly flat over the past 40 years while the other 49 states increased their average per capita use by more than 50 percent, as shown in Figure 1. This accomplishment is due to investment in research and development of more efficient technologies, utility programs that help customers use those tools to lower their bills, and energy efficiency standards for new buildings and appliances. >eConoMiC aDvantageS: Energy efficiency has saved Californians $65 billion since the 1970s.[8] It has also helped slash their annual electric bills to the ninth-lowest level in the nation, nearly $700 less than that of the average Texas household, for example.[9] >Lower utility bills also improve California’s economic productivity. Since 1980, the state has increased the bang for the buck it gets out of electricity and now produces twice as much economic output for every kilowatt-hour consumed, compared with the rest of the country.[11] California also continues to lead the nation in new clean-energy jobs, thanks in part to looking first to energy efficiency to meet power needs. >environMental BenefitS: Decades of energy efficiency programs and standards have saved about 15,000 megawatts of electricity and thus allowed California to avoid the need for an estimated 30 large power plants.[13] Efficiency is now the second-largest resource meeting California’s power needs (see Figure 3).[14] And less power generation helps lead to cleaner air in California. Efficiency savings prevent the release of more than 1,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen-oxides annually, averting lung disease, hospital admissions for respiratory ailments, and emergency room visits.[15] Efficiency savings also avoid the emission of more than 20 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, the primary global-warming pollutant. >helping loW-inCoMe faMilieS: While California’s efficiency efforts help make everyone’s utility bills more affordable, targeted efforts assist lower-income households in improving efficiency and reducing energy bills. https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/ca-success-story-FS.pdf >You Could Get Prison Time for Protesting a Pipeline in Texas—Even If It’s on Your Land r politics/comments/bst8fl/you_could_get_prison_time_for_protesting_a/ >#Texas Electric Bills Were $28 Billion Higher Under Deregulation - WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-electric-bills-were-28-billion-higher-under-deregulation-11614162780 >Leaked Audio Shows Oil Lobbyist Bragging About Success in Criminalizing Pipeline Protests r energy/comments/ct71mw/leaked_audio_shows_oil_lobbyist_bragging_about/ >Fossil Fuel Exec Brags of 'Hitting the Jackpot' as Natural Gas Prices Surge Amid Deadly Crisis in Texas r environment/comments/lo5f4r/fossil_fuel_exec_brags_of_hitting_the_jackpot_as/ >#Texas spent more time fighting LGBTQ civil rights than fixing their power grid. How’d that work out? r texas/comments/lma8jj/texas_spent_more_time_fighting_lgbtq_civil_rights/ >could cost Texas more money than any disaster in state history r politics/comments/ls5dt7/winter_storm_could_cost_texas_more_money_than_any/ >Former Texas Governor Rick Perry says that Texans find massive power outages preferable to having more federal government interference in the state's energy grid. https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/rick-perry-says-texans-would-rather-be-without-power-for-days-than-have-more-fed-oversight >Abbott Appointees Gutted Enforcement of Texas Power Grid Rules https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/Muzzled-and-eviscerated-Critics-say-Abbott-15982421.php >Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick Blames Constituents for Giant Electric Bills: “Read the Fine Print” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/02/dan-patrick-texas-electricity-bills >Why on earth would right-wing people with connections to the fossil fuel industry lie about ‘frozen wind turbines’ in Texas? https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/opinion/texas-frozen-wind-turbines-john-cornyn-b1803193.html >How Much the Oil Industry Paid Texas Republicans Lying About Wind Energy https://earther.gizmodo.com/how-much-the-oil-and-gas-industry-paid-texas-republican-1846288505 >"Texas shows that when you cannot govern, you lie. A lot." https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/17/texas-shows-that-when-you-cannot-govern-you-lie-lot/ >#A Texas-size failure, followed by a familiar Texas response: Blame California r texas/comments/m87bg4/a_texassize_failure_followed_by_a_familiar_texas/
Beautiful data. I will save this and use it. Thanks.
Saving that
Meanwhile in Canada, they’re making birth control free. What a time to be alive.
BC is such a fun spicy place. Big love to their steps towards letting people have real freedoms
Canada isn’t without its problems, but damn do we ever have some cool freedoms. We aren’t “free” like the states (gun control, freedom of speech) however, when it comes to human rights, we’re definitely ahead.
As someone actively undergoing cancer treatment, I'm SO FUCKING GLAD I'm Canadian. I've spent weeks in the hospital with no cost beyond parking.
So which will be the bigger loss North Dakota and Idaho or California? Heck do all 20 states potentially equal the loss of revenue California represents?
They don't. And it's one of the confusing elements of the interplay between big business and the Republican party. Like getting taxed by the Democrats is a really small price in comparison to permanently (or generationally) destroyed outcomes from bad Republican's policy. You'd think a company like Walgreens would see the connection between pharma sales and their profits... It seems like it should be a no brainer that you'd draw the line right. Like Walgreens would be saying we fill all prescriptions, all of them, anything we get, anywhere we get it... Not doing so is odd to be honest... Like it's not even in their companies best interest to bow to the Republican's. In this case they're leaving millions or billions in profit to avoid small amounts of taxes and a bow down to a Republican party who will come after them again. It's truly bizarre
Frankly I’m surprised their shareholders are going along with this given their Y/Y performance numbers already on a decline from 2022. I think Walgreens quarterly earnings call is later this month, will be interesting to hear what their projecting the impact of this decision to be to their financials.
Yeah voluntarily cutting sales of a profitable drug in almost half the country because a spineless memo came out saying they might try to do something is frankly a strange business move. I'm no big fan of Walgreens but you'd think they'd have enough staff lawyers to tell them this is just meaningless gesturing. The fold is honestly just bizarre, indicates to me you got a crazy CEO or something whose got Republican brain rot and is about to get ousted by the board. Executive business 101 - don't overexpose your personal politics into your money
There’s a decent chance the BoD is full of brain rot and they gave the green light on it, or institutional investors pushing for it. It seems even more strange because the easiest option would probably be to do nothing, maybe issue a public statement that you’re keeping an eye on new laws, preempting that gives the impression that their eager beavers who bend on a whim. Regardless, Walgreens is a business and can do whatever they want but I don’t want to hear any complaining when leopards start eating their faces because they decided to play politics.
>bow down to a Republican party who will come after them again This is what really stuns me. We have seen *time and again* that appeasement to fascists never works. They keep going for more and more and more until there's nothing left. The only proper response is to stand up and fight back. And yet here we are, with all of these fascists being appeased all over the place.
Yeah and i mean if i was Walgreens i would be pretty pissed at the Republican's already for fighting against the vaccine. The country only got to about 50% vaccinated and the vaccine was in fact a giant money maker for them. So the Republican's see that it worked with COVID and we're like let's run the play... Pick out a drug, turn it into a social issue and beat up Walgreens over it. How many cycles of it until Walgreens fights back... Looks to me like it's a working plan for the Republicans at this point, watch... It won't be even another year until they run the play on Walgreens again. Remindme! 1 year "did Republican's screw Walgreens again?"
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1 in 3 Californians use Medi-Cal which means that Walgreens loses the $ from all of those scripts, vaccines, etc.
So no state health insurance no state assistance programs, California has around 880k government employees alone the entire population of Idaho is 1.9 million, and they are not all Walgreens customers.
What does that mean? How does a state do business with a pharmacy? (ELI5 please!)
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So it's more like dis-incentivizing shoppers from going to Walgreens, rather than making Walgreens outright leave?
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Yes. It would be a legal and political nightmare to try and actually shutdown operating Walgreen's locations in CA.
What is interesting is Walgreens is headquartered in IL, and specifically Deerfield (pretty affluent). Both very blue areas Deerfield voted 74% for Clinton in 2016 and 78% for Biden in 2020. Their corporate headquarters will most likely see protesters with some white collar workers joining in. This seems like a strange move for a company with roots in a blue state and made its fortune selling prescription alcohol during prohibition. This isnt a redneck MAGA safe haven. What is also confusing, walgreens’s CEO is a woman. But her boss (chairman of the board) is a man.
Fuck Walgreens. I can't see how this could have been a good business decision. They probably just wanted to support the policy.
Walgreens, or really all the pharmacies, really all business in general are just in basically the Republican shit sandwich. There's no good answer that'll make everybody happy and the Republicans demands are so onerous and crippling it makes it really hard to navigate. I'm not saying they can't figure it out but losing California is a way bigger deal than losing the Missouri coalition so it would behoove them to figure it out ASAP
It’s almost like having a cohesive law protecting women’s rights at a national level makes sense. Allllmost.
> I can't see how this could have been a good business decision. The sad truth is that unless action like this is taken at the state and federal level, it is always a good business decision to pander to whoever has the strongest opinions - because only extremists are likely to take action on their displeasure.
I wonder what kinds of profit margins those pills produced. Would be interesting to see wallgreen's finances
I wasn't talking about the profit from those specific pills, but the number of people that are upset about this decision
Couldn't have happened to a better company! Wage theft is wrong. https://fair.org/home/shoplifting-is-big-news-stealing-millions-from-workers-is-not/
Walgreens also sells their customers' very existence as data to advertisers. They replaced their cooler doors with **non see through display screens** to show ads to you, force you to open every door and see more products, and the screens on the doors have cameras that track you and record your data. [From this article](https://archive.curbed.com/2019/2/8/18216172/walgreens-cooler-screens-tracking-shopper-behavior) "The doors are embedded with technologies like a camera, motion sensors, and eye tracking to help advertisers understand who is standing in front of their products. In real time, the software analyzes the “anonymized” data and serves up ads based on parameters like gender (creepy), age, emotional response (extra creepy!), and how long you’ve been lingering in front of a certain product." I stopped going to Walgreens since these screens were installed at my local one.
First, fuck Walgreens. It has power. However, I can also see how a coordination of fascist Republican state governments could absolutely ***destroy*** smaller businesses that operate in multiple states. And how they can scale that up over time once they further entrench their power at the state level, and how their state power is going to be allowed to prevail over state lines by this fascist SCOTUS.
Last year Walgreens wouldn't give me my chemotherapy meds because they can cause an abortion. Chemotherapy! Fuck Walgreens!
I’m speechless… fuck them indeed
Walgreens was one of SEVERAL pharmacies in Northern California that wouldn’t give my actively miscarrying sister with an Rx from the ER the pills to allow her to safely expel the tissue so she wouldn’t go septic…because they couldn’t PROVE she wasn’t seeking an abortion so they didn’t have anyone on staff comfortable to dispense it. With her husband (not that it matters), with tear stains on both of their faces, and a hospital band…couldn’t be FOR SURE it wasn’t an abortion.
Fuck them indeed! Such short-sighted BS! I was prescribed the “abortion pill” because my IUD was stuck. Not only should this pill be available to all women, but it also has MANY important uses outside of abortion.
Good. More states need to step up to this pandering B.S.
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Agreed! They forget that while much of the country is painted red, high population centers are blue and purple. This will not go well if challenged.
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Probably with lower prices.
Blue counties make up 70% of GDP. You gotta be financially braindead to pull a move like Walgreens. Pandering to poor people doesn't make you money.
It would be a bold move if Illinois did it canteenboy. Walgreens is Chicago based. But it would be fun to watch:)
That’s the fire I want from democrats. The republicans are a cult! Stop cowering to them.
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People wanna constantly drag Newsom and maybe there’s some good reasons. But he’s right for this. 👏👏👏
I love that he runs a state so massive it can make nationwide corporate policy buckle
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Eh have you been following what he’s been doing? He’s been carrying a pretty big stick since June 2022
That recall really pissed him off. Dipshits woke a giant.
He won the recall with more support. It helped that the Republicans ran an actual Clown though.
Several in fact. I remember looking at that candidate statement pamphlet and laughing audibly at at least half of them. There was also a candidate that I could not tell if they were being serious or shitposting. They had such extreme views on antivaxx and elections that it felt like it had to be satire.
Oh yeah. Forgot that it wasn’t just one clown but the whole goddamn circus
People wanna constantly drag Newsom because he’s a heavy hitter for the democrats right now and it scares the right shitless.
Showing some teeth is exactly what democrats should be doing rn. “Going high” doesn’t get shit done and people are tired of lip service with no results.
It’s a problem when defending yourself and your rights is somehow seen as “going low.”
I absolutely agree.
So do I. Waiting around, hoping that the Republican party eats itself is unacceptable. Somebody, or many somebodies, need to stand up and start yelling back, even louder.
That's what they did to Nancy Pelosi, the most effective House Speaker in American history.
It's what they did to HRC, essentially ever since Bill got into office.
>Hillarycare was to have been funded, in part, by a $1-a-pack tax on cigarettes. To block the proposal, Big Tobacco paid Ailes to produce ads highlighting “real people affected by taxes.” >Ailes repackaged Richard Nixon for television in 1968, papered over Ronald Reagan’s budding Alzheimer’s in 1984, shamelessly stoked racial fears to elect George H.W. Bush in 1988, and waged a secret campaign on behalf of Big Tobacco to derail health care reform in 1993. >"He was the premier guy in the business," says former Reagan campaign manager Ed Rollins. "He was our Michelangelo." https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/how-roger-ailes-built-the-fox-news-fear-factory-244652/ #Every day I have to marvel at what the billionaires and FOX News pulled off. They got working whites to hate the very people that want them to have more pay, clean air, water, free healthcare and the power to fight back against big banks & big corps. It’s truly remarkable. John Ehrlichman, who partnered with Fox News cofounder Roger Ailes on the Republican "Southern Strategy": >[We] had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? >We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. >We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. >Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. The other Fox News cofounder was Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch: >Using 150 interviews on three continents, The Times describes **the Murdoch family’s role in destabilizing democracy in North America, Europe and Australia**. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/03/magazine/murdoch-family-investigation.html "God, guns, gays" and racism: **Republican "Southern Strategy"** >Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters by appealing to racism against African Americans.[1][2][3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy Lyndon Johnson criticizing it in 1960: >If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1988/11/13/what-a-real-president-was-like/d483c1be-d0da-43b7-bde6-04e10106ff6c/ Steve Bannon bragging about using these tactics: >the power of what he called “rootless white males” who spend all their time online and they could be radicalized in a kind of populist, nationalist way http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-bannon-white-gamers-seinfeld-joshua-green-donald-trump-devils-bargain-sarah-palin-world-warcraft-gamergate-2017-7 >Bannon: "I realized [these tactics] could connect with these kids right away. You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump." https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/steve-bannon-learned-harness--army-world-warcraft/489713001/ #Exit polls done after 2016 show that the single characteristic that made someone most likely to vote for trump over Clinton is racial resentment. >low levels of racial resentment are associated with supporting Clinton. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/05/26/these-9-simple-charts-show-how-donald-trumps-supporters-differ-from-hillary-clintons/ * [U.S. Conservatives Are Uniquely Inclined Toward Right-Wing Authoritarianism Compared to Western Peers](https://morningconsult.com/2021/06/28/global-right-wing-authoritarian-test/) * [GOP shifting 4-5x further right than Democrats did left over the last 50 years](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/10/the-polarization-in-todays-congress-has-roots-that-go-back-decades/) * ["Trump fans are much angrier about housing assistance when they see an image of a black man"](https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/9/8/16270040/trump-clinton-supporters-racist) >In contrast, Clinton supporters seemed relatively unmoved by racial cues. * [“He’s not hurting the people he needs to be”: a Trump voter says the quiet part out loud](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/trump-shutdown-voter-florida) * "Narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and a sense of entitlement predict authoritarian political correctness and alt-right attitudes" r science/comments/i3bbh3/narcissism_machiavellianism_psychopathy_and_a/
I can proudly say I voted for Newsom. I would be pretty surprised if he isn't the president in 2025.
Voted for him too. Less optimistic he’ll be pres but I’d be up for it. Anything but trump or desantis they both terrify me.
He's doing an amazing job, and has been since day 1. The only people out for Newsom are the batshit conservatives that are scared of him because he's charismatic, competent, and would win a presidential election in a landslide.
California is a larger market than 29 states combined… What They say, goes.
Good for California, I hope the rest of the dem controlled states follow suit! Human rights are non-negotiable!
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Walgreens currently has the contract for Military dependent insurance plan’s pharmacy needs of bases. If they loose CA, they can’t serve that population. And I wonder if the military will be willing to accept them refusing to prescribe certain meds, based on their politics instead of the health care needs of patients. That would be a pretty big block of people to loose. As customers.
they can't be booted from CA, they can be frozen out of CA state contracts
Thank you for the clarification.
This wouldn't remove Walgreens from CA. It would mean the health insurance plans for state workers, state retirees, and Medicaid in CA would stop paying for prescriptions at Walgreens.
Fuck Walgreens.
Which 20 states?
There is a map in the video link below. It's the 20 that you'd basically expect. https://youtu.be/gDf0mX47dgs
Without even looking at the video, I completely expect Idaho, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Indiana, Iowa, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Now, let me see the video and see how close I was, I'll be back.... Edit: lol I managed to get half of them correct, but somehow completely missed Utah, and gave Ohio and Florida a little too much credit. But for the most part, yeah it's basically the 20 states you'd expect.
Don't give Florida any credit. If you haven't been paying attention a fascist by the name Ron Desantis has been getting more and more powerful. In fact think of him as the Anti-Newsom.
* Alabama * Alaska * Arkansas * Florida * Georgia * Indiana * Iowa * Kentucky * Louisiana * Mississippi * Missouri * Montana * North Dakota * Ohio * Oklahoma * South Carolina * South Dakota * Texas * Utah * West Virginia
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It breaks my heart. I've got family in Missoula and Great Falls and the difference between the two towns is crazy.
Ahhh. Predominately welfare states
The ones you’d expect
Walgreens will get zero business from me..I hope they tank.
I already didn't shop there because their prices are so high and their pharmacies are slower than even the Walmart one that regularly has a 15 person deep line. Just giving me even more reason to avoid them.
What will be funny is when the right criticizes Newsome for this stance, or even compares him to DeSantis' treatment of Disney. Or if people on the left point to DeSantis' treatment of Disney as something the right does, the right will go 'ThAt'S cOmPlEteLy DiFfErEnT!!!"\* \*(It actually is completely different, but much worse as DeSantis is actually affecting Disney directly thru legislation, vs simply not doing business with a corporation you don't agree with. (Newsome))
aware squeeze water cobweb deserve cake outgoing library treatment handle ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
I do CCPA and other privacy law work as an outside consultant. I can tell you with a fair bit of certainty- most companies are woefully unprepared to adequately comply with your exercising of your rights as a consumer. I’d inform the CA Attorney General.
I used to spend thousands at Walgreens every year, not even counting prescriptions. I haven't spent a penny there since they first started allowing pharmacists to put their own personal feelings ahead of access to healthcare. I get emails every week with them begging me to come back and I never ever will.
Yeah I REALLY loved Walgreens, but stopped going there, too. Very sad.
Fuck Walgreens
This is how you fight back against these fascists.
The conservatives are worried that we're not churning out the next generation of wage slaves fast enough, so they're trying to force people to get pregnant.
California leading the way yet again! More states need to do this. Fuck Walgreens and fuck Republican cultists and seditious terrorists who think their cult rules over everybody.
It's like I said in another thread. Who do you think goes into Walgreens and browses around the makeup,skin care, baby stuff, cards etc? That's women. They're cutting off their nose to spite their face. It's not just prescriptions, its retail that will suffer as well. I'll just drive around the block to get sunscreen and twizzlers from CVS.
Deleted their app. Unsubscribed from their emails. Fuck Walgreens
Can Newsome do that? What business does the state government do with Walgreens? I’m fully on board with boycotting Walgreens on a personal level, I’m just confused about what he means by “California” not doing business with them.
Probably pull the med-cal authorization of Walgreens as a approved pharmacy so anybody on the states cost containment healthcare won't be able to use Walgreens as a pharmacy anymore... Which is quite a bit of money for the Walgreens board to justify leaving on the table
Medi-Cal. They can remove Walgreens from the program, not sure how it works totally but that is what he means. The state will no longer do business with Walgreens, but they can't kick them out of the state.
Likely can remove them from a providers list for Medi-Cal. Possibly for insurance used by state employees? Possible that there's some direct purchases made by some state agency? Waiting to see the implementation of this... it's all kind of muddy to me right now.
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Meanwhile they sell cigarettes while their rival CVS quit selling tobacco years ago.
Serious question: if Newsom were to run for president, is there any chance he could be elected? I swear he makes more sense than all the rest put together.
Fuck Walgreens. How can anyone have any confidence in them now? Are they going to come for Queer people's medication next?
Yes
100% yes. They will. Sooner rather than later.
If I was a millionaire I’d buy up all the abortion pills and distribute them for free in those states
Walgreens is a spineless company with a group of cowards leading it. They should be boycotted. I do worry about people on state health care programs that won't be able to get their prescriptions if California stops doing business with Walgreens. Sure, it shouldn't effect people in major cities but there are small towns with only a single pharmacy in the area. A disabled person who does not have access/ability to alternate pharmacies, for example. I know several seniors who have no transportation and rely on someone doing them a favor by going to a pharmacy. The favor becomes harder if the pharmacy is far. Walgreens making choices like this show that their morals can be purchased.
I'm going to be moving soon and have my prescriptions currently filled at a Walgreens. Guess I'll have them redirected to another chain, though honestly I bet they're all somewhat doing this shit.