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.
— Stephan
Schwartz Report Episode 52: Secrets of Happiness
In today’s SR I am only doing two stories because I want my readers to become fully aware and focused on a trend going on in the United States that is not getting enough attention and that is leading us to a civil conflict between the Federal and Red state governments that is on the verge of becoming violent — a modern civil war. It is also yet another aspect of the process that is making us two countries in a single nation.
Because all the media can talk about is criminal Trump, something that threatens the unity of the United States is going on in Texas that 25 other MAGAt Red state governors are supporting, several literally with troops. Criminal Trump is fostering this trend every day. What am I talking about? What is beginning to look like the first steps of a new civil war. This article explains the history and thinking behind what the Republican Party is doing today. By the time of the election, we may see violence between federal and state troops. I think this is much more serious than the media is treating it.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s defiant statement on Wednesday rejecting the federal government’s authority to enforce immigration law at the U.S.-Mexico border ratcheted up the already tense stand-off between the state and the Biden administration — and signaled how fully the GOP has become the party of the Southern conservatives it was founded to fight.
Abbott’s declaration that the Biden administration had “broken the compact between the United States and the States” by failing to “fulfill the duties” of protecting Texas from an “invasion” is an eerie echo of the political thought that gave rise to nullification and secession in the 19th century and resistance to desegregation in the 20th.
Prior to the Civil War, the prevailing view among Southern elites was that the Constitution of the United States of America was merely a compact between the states. Under […]
This is what I mean when I say this situation in Texas is much more concerning than it is being treated by the media, and much further along than most Americans, I suspect, had any idea. This is why, to my mind, the Great Schism trend I have been writing about (see SR archive) for almost a decade now is coming to some kind of crisis, and we are becoming two countries in a single nation.
Multiple Republican-led states began sending personnel and resources months ago to combat increased migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border, with one state saying “nothing is off the table” as tensions bubble between Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the Biden administration.
Abbott has voiced displeasure over Monday’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision, which vacated an injunction from an appeals court and allowed federal Border Patrol agents to remove razor wire installed at the border by Texas officials under Abbott’s direction. It does not prevent Texas from erecting new wire.
On Thursday, 25 Republican governors backed Abbott and “Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself” against what he has referred to as a migrant “invasion” of his state. Some believe the situation is escalating towards a […]
If you think Covid is over you are wrong, as this article spells out. More than that if you don’t realize and acknowledge how badly Republican state governments have dealt with this pandemic than you are either willfully ignorant or just lying to yourself. Covid is still a major threat and the Republican governance, the anti-vaxxer movement, from RFK, Jr to The horrible DeSantis’ quack Surgeon General, have killed hundred of thousands Americans. More than that in year four we should recognize that this is but one of the pandemics we are going to face in the future and the Covid pandemic should teach us something important about the failure of the American illness profit system.
Four years of Covid-19. A total of 1.165 million deaths in the United States. As of December, we were averaging about 1,500 deaths a week from Covid. These numbers may seem abstract to many, but I remember a scientific paper from early in the pandemic that estimated “for every Covid-19 death, approximately nine surviving Americans will lose a grandparent, parent, sibling, spouse, or child”—which means 60,000 Americans were left grieving for the holidays.
Public health is about trade-offs between risks and benefits, just like personal health. Think about your own life: We all weigh the pleasure of that second glass of wine or extra slice of cake against the calories we know that pleasure will bring. And I’m not judging here, as I make these same decisions daily. (Give me that chocolate chip cookie.)
Yet I am not quite sure we’ve ever had an explicit discussion about the collective trade-offs we’ve made when it comes to Covid. As […]
The World Health Organization (WHO) has just issued a fresh warning over measles after an almost 45-fold rise in cases across Europe. Epidemologists from the organization said Europe is seeing an “alarming rise” in the spread of the disease, which has “accelerated in recent months”. Some 42,200 cases were reported by member states in 2023, almost 45 times the 941 cases in 2022. In the United States the Center for Disease Control (CDC), in 2000, declared Measles eliminated but now, as this report describes cases are popping up again. The numbers are still small, but why is this happening? The answer, as with the Covid vaccines, is anti-vaxxer misinformation. I have written about this at length (See SR archive and search on “Covid” and “misinformation”). As people come from Europe, or unvaccinated children play together, we are going to see more cases and, I think, it is telling us something very important. Do not get medical guidance from social media. Go to the CDC or sources like MedPage Today, or the Mayo Clinic website. As I said in the previous article, there are going to be more pandemics. Will we be properly prepared? I think not. The American illness Profit System is very poor, particularly with nationwide emergencies, and the weaponization of misinformation has become a defining trend in this country. We desperately need a universal birthright single-payer healthcare system — Medicare greatly expanded. Will we get such a system? Not if the Republicans have anything to say about it.
Despite having a very effective and easily available vaccine, measles outbreaks have continued to pop up in the United States over the last two decades.
Most recently, there have been eight cases confirmed in Philadelphia since December 2023, all among unvaccinated individuals. Additionally, a person with measles traveled through D.C.-area airports and cases have been identified in Delaware, New Jersey and Washington state, according to local reports.
In 2023, there were 41 confirmed cases of measles, according to incomplete data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
While the number of measles cases in the past few years are not at record highs and the 2023 numbers are lower than recent years, the fact that outbreaks are still occurring is a trend that concerns health officials and experts.
Measles was declared eliminated in 2000 — meaning the disease “is no […]
If you are a woman, or girl in a Republican-controlled state with the usual abortion ban that party advocates, and you are raped and become pregnant, you will probably be one of the over 65,000 women or girls who this year had to bear the child of that rape and have your life changed forever. It amazes me that a woman in a Red state still chooses to vote for Republicans, but millions do.
Nearly 65,000 rape-related pregnancies occurred in states with total or near-total abortion bans post-Dobbs v. Jackson, new research finds, while those same states saw only a handful of legal abortions performed on average per month.
According to research published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on Wednesday, there were an estimated 64,565 pregnancies related to rape during the periods when abortion bans were active across the 14 states with total or near total bans between July 2022 and the beginning of this year.
Researchers estimate that 5,586 of these pregnancies occurred in states whose bans technically — though often not in practice — have exceptions for rape, while 58,979 happened in states without exceptions. In Texas alone, where there are no exceptions except for medical emergencies — which, again, are often not granted in practice — there were 26,313 rape-related pregnancies in this period.
Meanwhile, the study found that these same states saw 10 or […]
The attempt of the MAGAt christofascists to take over the United States is not a singleton event, it is part of an international trend. Around the world, this is happening, and Europe is part of the trend, as this article describes. Because of fear, manipulated by misinformation, the future of humanity is beginning to look much darker, and climate change is going to dramatically affect this change.
It would be funny if it weren’t so potentially tragic — and consequential. No, I’m not thinking about Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign but a related development: the latest decisions from the European Union (EU) about Ukraine.
As 2023 ended, European nations failed to agree on a $54-billion package of assistance for Ukraine at a time when that country was desperately trying to stay afloat and continue its fight against Russian occupation forces. Bizarrely, the failure of that proposal coincided with a surprising EU decision to open membership talks with that beleaguered country.
In other words, no military aid for Ukraine in the short term but a possible offer of a golden ticket to join the EU at some unspecified future moment. Ukrainians might well ask themselves whether, at that point, they’ll still have a country.
One person, right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is largely responsible for that contradictory combo. He Read the Full Article
I have noticed the same thing Robert Reich has. Corporate media is grossly misreporting what is happened in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries. I read it as Reich does, although I see it as even worse. Trump is winning but nothing in the numbers suggests he is having any kind of landside dominance. His opponents collectively took nearly half the Iowa vote, and Haley did better than the Trumpers predicted. What is even more disturbing is they are not properly reporting his growing mental deterioration. Jonathan Capehart at the Post noted it, but the paper generally did not. And the electronic corporate media has hardly touched it. I got an email today from a reader who went to a Trump rally, and she reported that not only was the crowd smaller than she anticipated, the meeting was more a racist hatefest than a political rally, but what really stood out for her was that Trump as alarmingly incoherent despite having a teleprompter. She said he repeated himself over and over, sometimes almost word for word and some sentences made no sense at all. She told me, “I voted for Trump twice but never again. The man is mentally disordered. I don’t understand why the media isn’t covering this. It was my main takeaway.”
The mainstream media is flabbergasted at Trump’s success in sweeping the Iowa caucuses, dominating the polls, and destroying all his rivals but Nikki Haley before today’s New Hampshire primary.
CNN is gobsmacked, calling Trump’s “landslide victory in Iowa” a “stunning show of strength.”
The New York Times is wowed by an “expected Trump coronation,”and how Trump has “methodically drained the political life out of his rivals.”
Time magazine marvels at his “commanding position” to secure the Republican nomination and how “nothing has slowed him down.”
The Washington Post’s Dan Balz writes that “the end of any real competition could come very soon.”
Headline after headline offers the same breathless, spellbound story: “Trump is dominating.” “Disciplined, ruthless.” “Hugely effective.” “Remarkable.” “Powerful.”
Earth to the MSM: This is dangerous nonsense.
Why should Trump’s dominance be surprising? He’s dominated the Republican Party since 2016. He dominates by ridiculing opponents, blasting anyone who stands in his way, bullying, browbeating, and bellowing. The media eats it up. He’s […]
