Investing Public Pensions in Fossil Fuel and AI Companies Is More Than Amoral – It’s Bad Business

Public pension money should be directed to where it will do the most good

Liz Perlman and Stephen Lerner for Common Dreams

We're not this guy

Our country faces an affordability crisis amidst fundamental attacks on democracy. Public employee pension plans can either be part of the solution or part of the problem.

Late last year, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander recommended the city’s pension boards drop BlackRock and other portfolio managers that don’t have decarbonization plans up to the city’s standards. Lander’s initiative was blocked, and the editorial board of The Washington Post accused him of playing politics. But Lander argued that his recommendation was in line with the government’s fiduciary duty to protect the long-term value of pension funds, the retirement systems most public sector workers rely on—and have been paying into their entire careers. He’s right. 

In this critical moment in history, companies that are actively hastening climate change, threatening housing security, eliminating jobs and industries, and destabilizing our democracy and economy do not deserve our investment. Yes, they are acting immorally but they are also very bad investments with little promise of future returns for public sector workers. It’s not “playing politics” to refuse to fund their efforts to dismantle our society. That’s why we’re calling on pension boards across the country to take a hard look at their portfolios and make the smart business decision: stop investing in companies like this today.

The stakes could not be higher: pension funds account for $6.1 trillion in state and local defined-benefit funds alone. Every month, nearly 15 million workers across the country contribute part of their paycheck to ensure they have enough income to retire securely. This is a big pot of money and the companies that boards choose to invest it with matter. 

For public sector workers, pensions are not only retirement funds, but deferred current compensation. Workers are forsaking their hard-earned money today for the potential of a dignified future. Meanwhile, corporations are using that money today to further their own goals—many of which are directly at odds with the goals, livelihoods, and futures of public employees.

EDITOR'S DISCLOSURE: Steve Lerner and I go back 40 years when he was a young textile worker organizer. Steve was a frequent house guest at our suburban DC home. On one of his visits, Cathy and I (well, mostly Cathy) introduced him to Marilyn Sniederman. I told Cathy I wouldn't recognize her skills as a yenta until the bris of their first son. When that happened, I admitted my mistake. Later on, when I went to work in the labor movement, I worked with both Marilyn and Steve in my first union job. I owe them both.  - Will Collette

Makes total sense

Campaign Training for Women

Campaign Training for Women

Venue provided upon registration
Venue provided upon registration
East Providence, RI
View larger map

Event Date

Friday, March 27, 2026

Event time

10:00 AM - 3:00 PM

Cost / donation

$30

Website

https://secure.qgiv.com/for/eventswfri/event/theyalecampaignschool/

For women who may be interested in running for elected office, a one-day nuts-and-bolts training session is coming to Providence Friday March 27.

The League of Women Voters of Rhode Island and the Women’s Fund of the Rhode Island are sponsoring The Campaign School at Yale’s (TCSYale) “The Basics” training to help women (and those supporting their campaigns) gain the skills needed to run and win.

The session runs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and offers practical guidance, campaign fundamentals, and the confidence to take their first step toward public leadership. Registration is $30 and lunch is included.

Event Date

Friday, March 27, 2026

Event time

10:00 AM - 3:00 PM

Cost / donation

$30

Website

https://secure.qgiv.
com/for/eventswfri/e
vent/theyalecampaign
school/

How much does it cost to keep Sec. of "War" Pete Hegseth going?

EPA’s ‘Endangerment Finding’ Revocation Likely to Have Far-Reaching Repercussions for Rhode Island

While the scientific evidence about climate change has not changed, the legal obligation to act on it has

By Bonnie Phillips / ecoRI News staff

The Environmental Protection Agency on Feb. 12 revoked its own 2009 “endangerment finding,” a scientific conclusion that for 16 years had been the central basis for regulating planet-warming emissions from power plants, vehicles, and other sources.

The finding itself is straightforward: carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — caused by burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas — endanger public health and welfare. The finding relied on evidence from multiple scientific authorities, including the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and was adopted after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases are air pollutants that can be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

The Trump administration has claimed the endangerment finding hurts industry and the economy and that the Obama and Biden administrations twisted science to determine that greenhouse gases are a public health risk. While other air pollutants will still be regulated, the decision specifically removes the main legal foundation for federal greenhouse gas limits tied to fossil fuel use.

In practical terms, this means federal regulators are no longer required to set nationwide limits on these emissions. The scientific evidence about climate change hasn’t changed, but the legal obligation to act on it has.

“Despite overwhelming opposition from state and local leaders nationwide, the Trump administration’s actions depart from well-established scientific consensus and substantially weaken the federal government’s authority to regulate harmful emissions, rolling back longstanding public health safeguards and vehicle emissions standards,” said Terry Gray, director of the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management. “Allowing greenhouse gas emissions to go unchecked exacerbates the climate and public health challenges communities are already experiencing. Rhode Island remains committed to protecting the health, safety, and well-being of its residents.”

As More Americans Embrace Anxiety Treatment, Bobby Jr. Derides Medications

Getting drug advice from a guy who sniffed cocaine off toilet seats and who was a heroin addict

Phillip Reese 

After a grueling year of chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation to treat breast cancer, Sadia Zapp was anxious — not the manageable hum that had long been part of her life, but something deeper, more distracting.

“Every little ache, like my knee hurts,” she said, made her worry that “this is the end of the road for me.”

So Zapp, a 40-year-old communications director in New York, became one of millions of Americans to start taking an anxiety medication in recent years. For her, it was the serotonin-boosting drug Lexapro.

“I love it. It’s been great,” she said. “It’s really helped me manage.”

The proportion of American adults who took anxiety medications jumped from 11.7% in 2019 to 14.3% in 2024, with most of the increase occurring during the covid pandemic, according to survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s 8 million more people, bringing the total to roughly 38 million, with sharp increases among young adults, people with a college degree, and adults who identify as LGBTQ+.

Even as psychiatric medications gain public acceptance and become easier to access through telehealth appointments, the rise of a class of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, known as SSRIs, has triggered a backlash from supporters of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement who argue they are harmful. 

Doctors and researchers say medications such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Lexapro are front-line treatments for many anxiety disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder and panic disorder, and are being misrepresented as addictive and broadly harmful even though they’ve been proved safe for extended use.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has decried broadening SSRI use. During his Jan. 29 confirmation hearing, he said he knows people, including family members, who had a tougher time quitting SSRIs than people have quitting heroin. More recently, he said his agency is studying a possible link between the use of SSRIs and other psychiatric medications and violent behavior like school shootings.

Prices at the pump are already way up.

How Will the War in Iran Affect Your Utility Bills?

By Kiley Bense

Trump's planned ballroom seems to be holding
Trump's attention more than the war he started
with Iran

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine set off a global energy crisis in 2022, sending prices for oil and gas skyrocketing in Europe and the U.S. for months on end. Many Americans struggled to keep up with their bills, and disconnections—when utility companies shut off power or heat because of nonpayment—spiked. 

Now, energy experts fear the Trump administration’s decision to attack Iran could trigger a similar sequence of events. Qatar has shut down production at the world’s largest liquefied natural gas facility. Liquefying natural gas allows it to be stored and moved over longer distances than pipelines can accommodate. Shipments through a critical trade route, the Strait of Hormuz, have been cut off. Fifteen percent of the global oil supply and 20 percent of global LNG normally pass through this waterway.

In response, oil, gasoline and diesel prices are up, and natural gas prices in Europe are surging. The conflict is “wreaking havoc with global gas and LNG markets, even more so than oil,” according to analysts at Wood Mackenzie, the global energy and natural resources consulting firm. Asian markets “are the most exposed,” but “Europe is also in panic mode,” the analysts said.

The world hasn’t yet seen disruption on the scale of what happened at the start of Russia’s years-long attack on Ukraine, but that’s where we could be headed. 

“If this continues for a full week, that’s the kind of trajectory that we might be on,” said Clark Williams-Derry, energy finance analyst for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “The longer this conflict lasts, the more likely we are to see higher prices that people are paying for natural gas.”

The Ukraine war, he warned, led to “a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary households, people who are paying utility bills, to the people who are providing them with fossil fuels.”

The immediate fallout from the war with Iran illustrates the problems with ramping up U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas without any policy guardrails, he said. The more LNG that America exports, the more domestic natural gas prices are tied to swings in the global market. “It’s U.S. consumers who are bidding against global consumers for the same gas,” he said.

Trump’s war against Iran is uniquely unpopular among US military actions of the past century

Americans hate Trump's poorly planned, ill-conceived war in Iran

Charles Walldorf, Wake Forest University

It’s clear that regime change is among the biggest objectives of the U.S. war in Iran.

“I have to be involved in the appointment” of Iran’s next leader, Donald Trump said on March 5, 2026.

Trump has also said he might put U.S. boots on the ground to get the job done.

Trump now joins a long list of modern U.S. presidents – from Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush and Barack Obama – who started wars to either overthrow hostile regimes or support embattled friendly governments abroad.

For all the parallels to history, though, Trump’s Iran war is historically unique in one critically important way: In its early stages, the war is not popular with the American public.

A recent CNN poll found that 59% of Americans oppose the war – a trend found in poll after poll since the war began.

As an expert on U.S. foreign policy and regime change wars, my research shows that what’s likely generating public opposition to the Iran war today is the absence of a big story with a grand purpose that has bolstered public support for just about every major U.S.-promoted regime change war since 1900. These broad, purpose-filled narratives generate public buy-in to support the costs of war, which are often high in terms of money spent and lives lost when regime change is at stake.

Two historical examples

In the 1930s and ’40s, a widely accepted – and largely true – story about the dangers of fascism spreading and democracies falling galvanized national support in the United States to enter and then take on the high costs of fighting in World War II.

Likewise, in the 2000s a dominant narrative about preventing a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and stopping terrorism brought strong initial public support for the war in Afghanistan, with 88% support in 2001, and the war in Iraq, with 70% support in 2003.

With no comparable narrative around Iran today, Trump and Republicans could face big problems, especially as costs continue to rise.

No anti-Iran narrative

Trump criticized for disrespectful baseball cap
at homecoming of caskets of soldiers killed in Iran War

Iran has been a thorn in the side of many American presidents for a long time. So, what’s missing? Why no grand-purpose narrative at the start of this war?

Two things.

First, grand-purpose narratives are rooted in major geopolitical gains by a rival regime – the danger to the U.S. For the anti-fascism narrative, those events were German troops plowing across Europe and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the anti-terrorism narrative, it was planes crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Gains like these by rivals prove traumatic to the nation. They also dislodge the status quo and provide the opportunity for new grand-purpose narratives with new policy directions to emerge.

Today, most Americans see no existential danger around Iran. A Marist poll from March 3, 2026, found that 55% of Americans view Iran as a minor threat or no threat at all. And the number who see Iran as a major threat, 44%, is down from 48% in July 2025.

By contrast, 64% of Americans saw Iraq as a “considerable threat” prior to the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq.

The poll numbers on Iran aren’t surprising. Iran is far from a geopolitical menace to the United States today. To the contrary, it’s been in geopolitical retreat in the Middle East in recent years.

In the summer of 2025, Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities were significantly damaged – “completely and totally obliterated,” according to Trump, though there is no confirmation of that claim – during the 12-Day war between Iran and Israel.

And in recent years, Tehran has lost a major ally in Syria and witnessed its proxy network all but collapse. Iran has also faced crippling economic conditions and historic protests at home.

As the polls show, none of that has sparked a grand-purpose narrative.

Trump makes definitive statement on his Iran War

No doubt she's eminently qualified. At whatever.

Brown study finds outdated Medicare 3-day rule delays nursing care, wastes hospital resources

Makes patients stay in the hospital when they might not need to

By Carl Dimitri, Senior Writer, School of Public Health, Brown University

A long-standing Medicare policy meant to manage rehabilitation services in nursing homes may keep older Americans in hospitals longer than necessary without improving patient health or saving Medicare money, new research finds.

Established in 1965, the rule was intended to manage the use of skilled nursing facilities, which provide short-term medical and rehabilitative care to Medicare beneficiaries. Known as the “three-day rule,” it requires patients to spend at least three consecutive days in the hospital before Medicare will cover care in a nursing facility. Skilled nursing facilities are used as a post-hospital benefit by one in five Medicare beneficiaries after hospitalization, and Medicare pays an average of about $15,000 for each stay.

The five healthy diets that could add extra years to your life

Eat right. Live longer.

By Paul Arnold, Medical Xpress

Edited by Lisa Lock, reviewed by Robert Egan

The old saying "you are what you eat" suggests that our food choices determine our health and longevity. Now, a study published in the journal Science Advances has put some specifics on it by estimating how many extra years can be gained through a healthy diet.

To crunch the numbers, Yanling Lv at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China, along with her colleagues, analyzed data from more than 100,000 UK Biobank participants. This is a large-scale database containing in-depth genetic and health information from half a million volunteers. They tracked the study's subjects for just over 10 years by giving them regular surveys asking what they had consumed during the previous 24 hours.

Five best diets

The team gave each participant a score based on how closely their meals matched five validated healthy diets: a Mediterranean diet (rich in healthy fats, fish, and vegetables), the Diabetes Risk Reduction Diet (high-fiber and low-sugar foods), the DASH (dietary approaches to stop hypertension) Diet, a plant-based diet, and the AHEI (Alternative Healthy Eating Index). Additionally, the researchers scored participants' DNA for 19 genetic variants associated with longevity.

Should Drug Companies Be Advertising to Consumers?

TV ads push consumer demand for prescription meds

Paula Span 

Tamar Abrams had a lousy couple of years in 2022 and ’23. Both her parents died; a relationship ended; she retired from communications consulting. She moved from Arlington, Virginia, to Warren, Rhode Island, where she knew all of two people.

“I was kind of a mess,” recalled Abrams, 69. Trying to cope, “I was eating myself into oblivion.” As her weight hit 270 pounds and her blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood glucose levels climbed, “I knew I was in trouble health-wise.”

What came to mind? “Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic!” — the tuneful ditty from television commercials that promoted the GLP-1 medication for diabetes. The ads also pointed out that patients who took it lost weight.

Abrams remembered the commercials as “joyful” and sometimes found herself humming the jingle. They depicted Ozempic-takers cooking omelets, repairing bikes, playing pickleball — “doing everyday activities, but with verve,” she said. “These people were enjoying the hell out of life.”

So, just as such ads often urge, even though she had never been diagnosed with diabetes, she asked her doctor if Ozempic was right for her.

Small wonder Abrams recalled those ads. Novo Nordisk, which manufactures Ozempic, spent an estimated $180 million in direct-to-consumer advertising in 2022 and $189 million in 2023, according to MediaRadar, which monitors advertising.

By last year, the sum — including radio and TV commercials, billboards, and print and digital ads — had reached an estimated $201 million, and total spending on direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs topped $9 billion, by MediaRadar’s calculations.

Novo Nordisk declined to address those numbers.

Should it be legal to market drugs directly to potential patients? This controversy, which has simmered for decades, has begun receiving renewed attention from both the Trump administration and legislators.

Trump is actively destroying The Moral Basis of Civilization

Civilized societies do not accept that the powerful should be able to attack the weak

Robert Reich

“We are just getting started,” Trump’s secretary of “war,” Pete Hegseth, said yesterday, adding that the attacks on Iran will escalate, with “death and destruction all day long.”

So far more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in Iran, according to human rights monitors, including 180 children, most of them schoolgirls aged 7 to 12 years old who were killed when a missile directly hit their school.

Wars can be morally justifiable if they are necessary to protect a nation’s people, but Trump has failed to make the case that this war is necessary. His allegation that Iran is close to building a nuclear weapon has been rejected by the International Atomic Energy Agency and much of the intelligence community.

As I have noted before, the moral purpose of civilized society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. Otherwise, we’d be permanently immersed in a brutish war in which only the fittest and most powerful could survive.

Give him the f***ing prize so he'll stop