Racism has become such a strong trend in the United States, greater in many ways than even the 1950s and 1960s, that the other day I ran a report on Asian Americans arming themselves because of a gross increase in racist hate crimes aimed at them by White MAGAts. Here are some facts explaining why they feel as they do. This report is almost a year old, but one of the most recent I could get, and the situation is even worse in 2023 than it was in 2022. When one sees this in the context of Marjorie Taylor Greene advocating splitting the country into two countries, and all the other racist crap that pours out of Fox propaganda and the other MAGAt media, it is becoming clear that the Great Schism Trend is reaching a real crisis level. What the MAGAt schism advocates don't seem to understand, however, is that the Red states depend on the support of the Blue states to function.
A rally in New York City on March 16 on the first anniversary of the Atlanta spa shootings. Credit: Timothy A. Clary/AFP / Getty
Asian Americans are adjusting to a new long-term reality as the number of anti-Asian hate crimes and incidents across the U.S. continue to climb.
By the numbers: Between March 2020 and March 2022, Stop AAPI Hate documented over 11,400 self-reported anti-AAPI hate incidents, according to its latest report released Wednesday
67% of reported incidents involved harassment, such as verbal or written hate speech and discriminatory gestures; 17% involved physical assault, and 16% took the form of avoidance or shunning.
Public settings (40%) and businesses (27%) saw the largest proportions of reported incidents. Nearly 1 in 10 occurred on public transit.
Last year over 45,000 people were killed by gunfire in the United States, and many of those deaths resulted from murderers using AR-15 assault rifles. The Republicans, having nothing better to do in Congress, want to pass legislation making it the "National Gun." This is an example of what the Republican Party has become. I'll just leave it at that.
Republican Representative Andrew Clyde listens to a question from a reporter during a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol on June 14, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Credit: Win McNamee / Getty
House Republican has introduced a bill that would make the AR-15, which has been used in many of the nation’s most horrific mass shootings, the “National Gun of the United States,” positioning it alongside official symbols like the bald eagle and Francis Scott Key’s “Star Spangled Banner” in representing the U.S.
The bill was unveiled this week by gun store owner Rep. Barry Moore of Alabama. It has been cosponsored by Representatives Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado), Andrew Clyde (R-Georgia) and George Santos (R-New York). “We must send a message that we will meet every attack on any of our constitutional rights,” Moore said while unveiling the bill earlier this week, referring to the Second Amendment.
The AR-15 was used by the school shooter last year in Uvalde, Texas, to massacre 19 elementary school children and two teachers. It was used during the 2019 shooting in Parkland, Florida, to murder 17 students and […]
Maya Yang, Contributing Writer - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
Last week I dedicated an entire issue of SR to focus on Mississippi to demonstrate what I meant by a failed state so my readers would understand what I was talking about when I mentioned the Great Schism Trend. Well, as it turns out Mississippi is even more of a third-world country than I thought. The Republican-controlled state spends so little on pre-natal care for its citizens that they are experiencing a 900% increase in infant syphilis, as this article describes. It isn't that Mississippi is so poor it can't help, it's that the overwhelmingly White Republican politicians who control the state just don't give a damn about the wellbeing of poor people Black or White. All they care about is protecting rich Whites and the businesses they control. I cannot tell you how vile and disgusting I find this dereliction of duty and morality.
A baby with Congenital pemphigus syphiliticus. Credit: BMJ
Mississippi has registered an alarming rise in the number of infants being treated for congenital syphilis.
According to hospital billing data shared with NBC, the number of babies who have been treated for the sexually transmitted disease has increased by more than 900% over five years.
Medical professionals attribute the increasing cases of disease to inadequate prenatal healthcare and understaffed workforce.
Ten newborns that were born in the poorest American state in 2016 received treatment for the disease. In 2021, 102 newborns were treated for the disease, including at least one who died, according to the Mississippi state health department, NBC reported.
Syphilis is a contagious disease that is mostly spread through sex, but babies can also contract the illness from infected mothers. The disease produces an ulcer in the area where it entered the body, which usually appears between 10 and 60 days after infection.
Congenital syphilis can cause a variety of issues in infants, including disfigured bones, severe anemia, enlarged liver and spleen, jaundice, brain and nerve problems such as blindness and deafness, […]
West Virginia is another failed state controlled by Republicans. Not quite as bad as Mississippi, but with social outcome data notably and glaringly inferior to its neighbors Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Even Red state Ohio puts West Virginia to shame. And once again it is not that the state is so impoverished that it can't create programs that foster wellbeing, it is that the White Republicans who control West Virginia just don't care about fostering wellbeing; they care only about rich Whites, and the corporations they control. Look at Joe Manchin a pseudo-Democrat as one example of what I mean. This business of prison deaths also is an example of America's growing new slavery movement -- the functional enslavement and brutality aimed at prisoners, particularly in Red states.
A handcuffed prisoner languishes in a prison cell. Credit: Doug Berry / Getty
Activists with the Poor People’s Campaign and relatives of some of the 13 inmates who died at West Virginia’s Southern Regional Jail last year held a press conference Thursday to implore the Biden administration to investigate conditions at the notorious lockup, as well as the deaths of more than 100 prisoners in the state during the last 10 years.
“We’re doing this on behalf of the 13 people who have died senselessly, we believe, at the Southern Regional Jail… and on behalf of over 100 more who have died within West Virginia regional jails over the last decade,” Bishop William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, said at the online conference.
Speaking to Common Dreams by phone after the press conference, Barber said that “we need a full, independent investigation by the Justice Department. We’re talking about basic civil rights and human dignity. Give us the truth. Give us justice.”
“There are too many unanswered questions here,” he added. “We’re […]
With the notable exception of the Quakers, something has gone dreadfully wrong with religious denominations in the United States. It's not just the sexual molestation issues that plague so many religious groups. It's the prejudice against the LGBTQ communities, the White Supremacy, the Christian nationalism, the obsession with male dominance, and the general lack of ethical behavior and morality. This report on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is just the latest example of what I mean.
The Washington D.C. Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Kensington, Maryland. Credit: Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a nonprofit entity that it controlled have been fined $5 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission over accusations that the religious institution failed to properly disclose its investment holdings.
In an order released Tuesday, the SEC alleged that the church illicitly hid its investments and their management behind multiple shell companies from 1997 to 2019. In doing so, it failed to disclose the size of the church’s equity portfolio to the SEC and the public.
The church was concerned that disclosure of the assets in the name of the nonprofit entity, called Ensign Peak Advisors, which manages the church’s investments, would lead to negative consequences in light of the size of the church’s portfolio, the SEC said.
The allegations of the illicit shell company structure first emerged in 2018, when a group formerly called MormonLeaks — now known as the
