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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
Here is the best article I have seen on what I see as an alarming obsessive right-wing trend, the child sex trafficking conspiracies. Do you remember the conspiracy about Hillary and Bill Clinton running with other Democrats a child sex trafficking operation in the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., otherwise known as Pizzagate? I am not really sure why the United States is so vulnerable to this craziness. Partly, I think, it is the weaponization of misinformation on the internet; partly it is the fact that 54% of Americans can’t read past the 6th-grade level, and 43% can’t get past the 5th-grade level, which means half the American population can’t read and properly comprehend a story in The New York Times, or The Guardian, or The Atlantic Magazine. Partly, I think, it is a manifestation of the sexual insecurity and confusion of christofascism, and partly it is the decline in the quality of American journalism. It is a trend doing real damage to our democracy and social wellbeing.
Sex workers and their supporters protest a police raid on Oct. 25, 2016, in Minneapolis saying shutting down sites like Backpage.com exposes them to more risk. Credit: Fibonacci Blue
Americans adore a moral panic.
During the Red Scare, we believed that Soviet agents were everywhere, having secretly infiltrated all levels of society. In the 1950s, the U.S. government banned switchblades over unfounded fears that we were in the throes of “West Side Story”-style knife violence. The Satanic Panic convinced Americans of the 1980s that absurd claims of ritual abuse and sacrifice were somehow credible. Around the same time, there was “stranger danger” — which was debunked like other moral panics, but never went away entirely.
At any given time, America is moving in and out of some moral panic or another. Harm to children is a persistent theme. In recent years, however, our national obsession with these moral panics has consumed our politics. We’ve come to believe that sex trafficking rings are all around us. The driving force may come as a surprise: a […]
What I am seeing on college campuses today remains me more than anything of the anti-Vietnam war rallies of the of the late 60s early 70s. What Hamas did was a war crime, no question, but what Israel under Netanyahu has done is far worse. The way I see it Netanyahu like Trump, a fellow fascist, has destroyed his country’s reputation in the world, and it may take more than a generation for it to rebuild, if it ever does. These two men will go down in history as historically evil individuals. But Biden is not going to escape historical condemnation either. What the Israelis have done was done with weapons America gave them.
Palestinians in Khan Yunis have continued to unearth dead bodies in what is believed to be the largest mass grave in Gaza’s history, first discovered at Nasser Hospital last Saturday. The discovery comes two weeks after the Israeli military withdrew its troops from the southern city on April 7 after a three-month siege, leaving utter destruction in their wake.
The massacre site is teeming with rescuers in hazmat suits digging corpses out of the ground with primitive hand tools and digging trucks, while horrified survivors and family members stand there in fraught anticipation, waiting for a sign of their loved ones who have been missing for two or more months. A video taken by Motasem Mortaja, a Palestinian journalist in Khan Yunis, shows a grieving mother kneeling on the hospital grounds and embracing the body of her son, weeping. She is one of the fortunate ones, as most bodies remain unidentified. Of the nearly 400 bodies recovered so far, only 65 have been identified, the head of the Khan Yunis Civil Defense told Al Jazeera.
Hundreds of mothers have gathered daily at the hospital, looking for their children, moving from body to body. One woman toldAl Jazeera, “I came here for the fifth day looking for […]
Selcuk Uluagac, Professor of Computing and Information Science, Florida International University - Raw Story / The Conversation
Stephan:
The internet is becoming an increasingly dangerous world, as this article describes. Why? Because governments have not really comprehended or been willing to develop regulatory approaches that do not impact freedom of speech but do hold people who misuse the net accountable. Personally, I suspect what is required is simply above the comprehension of members of the U.S. Congress or the Biden Administration.
Hacker over a screen with binary code. Credit: Shutterstock
You probably know better than to click on links that download unknown files onto your computer. It turns out that uploading files can get you into trouble, too.
Today’s web browsers are much more powerful than earlier generations of browsers. They’re able to manipulate data within both the browser and the computer’s local file system. Users can send and receive email, listen to music or watch a movie within a browser with the click of a button.
Unfortunately, these capabilities also mean that hackers can find clever ways to abuse the browsers to trick you into letting ransomware lock up your files when you think that you’re simply doing your usual tasks online.
I had the most informative email exchange this morning with a MAGAt, a man I have never met, who wrote to tell me I was being very unfair and biased against Trump. I was making him out to be a criminal. I responded by saying to him This is a man who is a convicted rapist, who has multiple fraudster convictions and is under indictment for 44 federal and 44 state felonies, including treason, and an attempted coup. What would you call him? He responded by saying it was all a scheme by Biden and the Democrats to make Trump look bad so that he, Biden, would win the election. I spent some time looking at conservative websites, and watching the Fox propaganda operation, and I realized that the Trump trials are another example of the Great Schism Trend. We have become two quite different countries, and I don’t quite see how we are going to go on. But I don’t see how to come apart either.
By the way, I also got an email from a reporter who has been in the courtroom who told me that apparently, because Trump is reported to wear diapers and doesn’t have control over either his bladder or his bowels, the smell in the courtroom is appalling. I did a Google on this and found a number of confirmatory reports from reliable sources. As much as I loathe Donald Trump it made me feel sorry for him. It must be extraordinarily stressful to try to maintain a facade of wellbeing when you are this disabled. Psychologically, ethically, and physically this man should never be president again, and yet millions of voters, as this article describes, just don’t get or care to get the reality of Trump.
Donald Trump appears in court with his attorneys Emil Bove, left, and Todd Blanche during his trial on 25 April in New York City. Credit: Getty
In one America, he cuts a diminished, humbled figure during coverage that runs from morn till night. “He seems considerably older and he seems annoyed, resigned, maybe angry,” said broadcaster Rachel Maddow after seeing Donald Trump up close in court. “He seems like a man who is miserable to be here.”
But in the other America – that of Fox News, far-right podcasts and the Make America Great Again (Maga) base – the trial of the former president over a case involving a hush-money payment to an adult film performer is playing out very differently.
Here, anger at what is seen as political persecution meets with another emotion: sublime indifference. Barely a handful of Trump supporters bother to protest each day outside the court in New York, a Democratic stronghold. The trial receives less prominence in conservative media, which prefers to devote airtime to other national news including protests on university campuses against the war in […]
As this article describes, in the Southern Red states the Republicans are doing everything they can to undercut and stop unionization. It is part of The Great Schism Trend that is transforming the United States into two quite different countries. It surprises me that many hourly workers vote Republican because the Republican Party for decades has done everything it could to undermine unions. Many workers don’t seem to comprehend that the two things that created the middle class in America are the post-World War II veterans’ housing and education programs, and before and during that time the rise of the unions. If you look at the social outcome data it is very clear that if you work for an hourly wage and you want to improve your and your family’s wellbeing you want to join a union. If you live in a Red state though that may not be possible.
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, right, speaks as local organizers raise their fists at a UAW vote watch party on April 19, 2024 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Credit: Elijah Nouvelage / Getty
Since six Southern Republican governors last week showed “how scared they are” of the United Auto Workers’ U.S. organizing drive, Tennessee Volkswagen employees have voted to join the UAW while GOP policymakers across the region have ramped up attacks on unions.
The UAW launched “the largest organizing drive in modern American history” after securing improved contracts last year with a strike targeting the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis. The ongoing campaign led to the “landslide” victory in Chattanooga last week, which union president Shawn Fain pointed to as proof that “you can’t win in the South” isn’t true.
The Tennessee win “is breaking the brains of Republicans in that region. They’re truly astonished that workers might not trust their corporate overlords with their working conditions, pay, health, and retirement,” Thom Hartmann Read the Full Article
Materialism and greed are destroying the earth’s matrix of life, and plastic pollution is a major factor in this. Just 56 companies are responsible for over 50% of the branded plastic items that are creating this pollution, led by the Coca-Cola Corporation. Think about that for a minute. A minuscule number of corporations are impacting the wellbeing of over 8 billion people, as well as trillions of other beings, and they are doing it for one reason, greed. Profit is literally more important to them than life itself. What can you do about this? Don’t buy, drink, eat or use anything that is plastic until corporations start using only plastic that degrades biologically. Recycling is not enough, because much of it never gets collected and recycled. The vulnerability of greed is people stop buying what a company is offering for sale that involves plastics. If they know enough people are not buying their products for that reason their greed will force them to change.
Plastic bottles littering a beach in Norway. Credit: Bo Eide / Flickr
A new study on plastic pollution in 84 countries has linked half of branded plastic pollution to only 56 firms, with about 24% of the branded plastic waste analyzed connected to only five companies, including The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Danone and Altria.
A team of researchers analyzed plastic pollution data from the Break Free From Plastic Brand Audit. The data spanned a total of 1,576 brand audit events over five years, from 2018 to 2022.
The analysis revealed about 52% of the 1,873,634 plastic items in the study were unbranded, which could be because sunlight, water or other environmental factors caused fading on labels.
“We found over 50% of plastic items were unbranded, highlighting the need for better transparency about production and labeling of plastic products and packaging to enhance traceability and accountability,” the authors wrote in the study, which was published in the journal Science Advances. “We suggest creation of an international, open-access database into which companies are […]
Diana Ramirez-Simon, Dani Anguiano, Isabeau Doucet and agencies, Reporters and news agencies - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
When I read this report what I thought about was: Have we become this debased and sad a country that we can’t even house the almost a million people who have nowhere to live, nowhere to sleep, except outdoors on the ground? And you will notice once again that Republican politicians are the ones trying to punish these people without doing anything to help them or improve American society’s wellbeing.
With Fruitdale Elementary School in the background, a homeless man adjusts his shoe at Fruitdale Park in Grants Pass, Oregon, Credit: Jenny Kane / AP
The debate over how US cities can respond to America’s spiraling homelessness crisis reached the supreme court this week, as justices heard arguments over the constitutionality of local laws used against unhoused people sleeping outside.
The justices on Monday considered a challenge to rulings from a California-based appeals court that found punishing people for sleeping outside when shelter space is lacking amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
The case stems from a 2019 camping ban enacted by city officials in Grants Pass, a small mountain town in Oregon where rents are rising and where there is just one overnight shelter for adults. Debra Blake, who had lost her job a decade earlier and was unhoused, was cited for illegal camping. After being convicted and fined, she soon joined other unhoused residents in suing the city.
The city has passed three ordinances that target sleeping and camping in public streets, alleyways and parks. Under those laws, violators can […]
David Badash, Senior Editor - New Civil Rights Movement
Stephan:
What I have taken away this week from the coverage of the Supreme Court is how corrupt, fascist, and anti-women, the male clique of the Supreme Court has become. These are not justices interested in the law and the wellbeing of American society. These men are political hacks who believe they themselves are above the law, and have the power to determine what the law means and how it should be enforced.
Corrupt christofascist Associate Justice Samuel Alito
The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case centered on the question, can the federal government require states with strict abortion bans to allow physicians to perform abortions in emergency situations, specifically when the woman’s health, but not her life, is in danger?
The 1986 federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), signed into law by Republican President Ronald Reagan, says it can. The State of Idaho on Wednesday argued it cannot.
U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, The Washington Post’s Kim Bellware reported, “made a clear delineation between Idaho law and what EMTALA provides.”
“In Idaho, doctors have to shut their eyes to everything except death,” Prelogar said, according to Bellware. “Whereas under EMTALA, you’re supposed to be thinking about things like, ‘Is she about to lose her fertility? Is her uterus going to become incredibly scarred because of the bleeding? Is she about to undergo the possibility of kidney failure?’ ”
Attorney Imani Gandy, an award-winning journalist and Editor-at-Large for Rewire News Group, highlighted […]
