IF YOU ENJOY SR AND FIND IT USEFUL WOULD YOU PLEASE DONATE
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.
This is what has concerned me from the start of all the criminal Trump trials. Trump is not a billionaire or anything close. When you get to the fundamentals he may no longer even be a millionaire because he is so heavily mortgaged and in debt. This article raises these issues about the E. Jean Carroll issues. But that money is only a fraction of what the New York A.G. is going after, half a billion. I don’t think he has half a billion in unencumbered real estate. So who is going to put that up, and to whom will Trump obligate himself, and about what? He would sell out America’s national interests in a heartbeat for that money. And as this article points out how will anyone know who will control Trump? The Saudis? Putin? Elon Musk?
Magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll arrives for her civil trial against criminal Donald Trump at Manhattan Federal Court on May 4, 2023, in New York City. Credit: Michael M. Santiago / Getty Credit: Trump photo / AFP
Many people are now asking about Evan G. Greenberg, the CEO of the Chubb Group, which has a subsidiary that fronted the cash given to Donald Trump for his bond in New York for the E. Jean Carroll settlement.
Even if Trump intends to appeal the settlement ruled on by the jury, he must put the cash up as a bond to the court. Greenberg is the one who made it happen.
As legal analyst Allison Gill pointed out, he is not only a New York businessman, but was also brought on by Trump in 2018 to serve on the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations. His term ended in 2022.
Yet another report about the TCP’s obsession with controlling and subordinating women. These men are like characters out of The Handmaid’s Tale, and so are the women who vote for them. There seem to be millions of American women who want to be controlled and subordinate to men because that is how they vote.
A top Republican state lawmaker is touting what he suggests are the off-label benefits of aspirin: as a contraceptive, if used as he directs.
The Mirror reports Borrelli “suggested women wouldn’t need contraceptives if they weren’t so promiscuous.”
Arizona Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs has been trying to get lawmakers to pass “The Right to Contraception Act,” but it appears the legislation is likely dead, after Republicans refused to even allow it to be heard in committee.
“This basic, commonsense proposal hasn’t made it past step one,” Hobbs said, speaking about the bill. “It begs the question: Why won’t they codify this basic freedom into law? What do they have against allowing us to have control over our own bodies and access to basic health care?”
The Mirror reports the legislation “sought to protect the ability of Arizonans to obtain all forms of birth control, including Plan B, and guarantee the right of health care providers to prescribe contraceptives or give information about them […]
The submergence of coastal cities, as this article describes, is occurring not just because of sea rise. The subsidence of the land is also a major issue. The United States is not doing enough fast enough to protect these cities and towns, so we are going to see a massive real estate crisis. It has already started in Florida where both forces are changing the coasts and homeowners can no longer get home insurance. Would you want to own a property under threat when you couldn’t buy any insurance to protect your investment? Neither would I. But that is what is happening because we are not dealing with the climate change issues properly.
Several coastal cities around the United States are “disappearing” into the ground, according to new research, which could further exacerbate complications of sea level rise in the near future.
A considerable amount of land in 32 U.S. coastal cities could be at risk of flooding by 2050 due to subsidence, the gradual caving in or sinking of an area of land, according to a paper published Wednesday in Nature.
The continuous loss of land will affect most coastal cities, Leonard Ohenhen, a Ph.D. candidate at Virginia Tech University specializing in coastal vulnerability and large-scale land subsidence, told ABC News.
Large cities surrounded by water — such as Boston, New Orleans and San Francisco — will be among the regions that could experience flooding in the near future due to land elevation changes combined with sea level rise — about 4 millimeters per year, said Ohenhen, who authored the paper.
Up to 273,000 people and 171,000 properties in coastal regions around the U.S. could be impacted, according to the paper’s findings.
Evan Halper, Business Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan:
What most Americans don’t seem to realize and politicians rarely talk about is that what most of us think of as America was created in the forty years from 1920 to 1960. That’s when the roads, bridges, dams, electrical systems, and middle-class families came into being. But, beginning with the Reagan administration, we shifted from being a nation that was grounded in creating wellbeing to a nation structured on greed, profit, and power. That is what made 735 billionaires and almost 22 million millionaires and the middle class became increasingly stressed. At the same time as this was happening, America stopped looking after its infrastructure. Now that failure has created the stress tearing our country apart and has left us unprepared for our future needs.
Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.
In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent major upgrades.
Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction. Texas, where electricity shortages are already routine on hot summer days, faces the same dilemma.
The soaring demand is touching off a scramble to try to squeeze more juice out of an aging power grid while pushing commercial customers to go to extraordinary lengths to lock down energy sources, […]
Wake up Americans. This is where the Republican Party is headed. This is what they are trying to do. How much clearer do they have to make it before the country realizes what the Republicans intend?
The Missouri State Capitol building dome is pictured in Jefferson City, Missouri. Credit: Stephen Emlund / istock / Getty
The Missouri House is advancing a bill aimed at limiting abortion-specific training at both private and public medical schools within the state. Sponsored by Rep. Justin Sparks (R), the bill, HB 2621, also seeks to prohibit collaborations between medical schools in Missouri and clinics located in other states for the provision of such training.
“If a university or research institution is going to be involved in that practice, then there will be essentially a financial penalty on the endowment of such institution,” Sparks told Missourinet.
If Missouri outlaws abortion-specific training, doctors may not have the needed information to act in medical emergencies. Additionally, bills like HB 2621 would likely exacerbate the existing maternal mortality crisis in the state and worsen health care deserts.
Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of the constitutional right to abortion, Missouri activated its trigger ban, effectively prohibiting the procedure except in medical emergencies when “a delay will create a serious risk of substantial and irreversible […]
The Republicans and criminal Trump aren’t even trying to hide what they want to do in America. If you vote for any Republican you have no one to blame for what happens to the ending of American democracy but yourself.
Criminal Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban meet in the Oval Office in Washington in 2019. Credit: Szilard Koszticsak /EPA-EFE / Shutterstock / File
The Hungarian prime minister first won power through a democratic election, then proceeded to weaken the institutions of that democracy by eroding the legal system, firing civil servants, politicizing business, attacking the press and intimidating opposition parties and demagoguing migration.
Former President Donald Trump has left no doubt that he’d try something similar in the United States if he wins a second term – so the presumptive GOP nominee will presumably be eager to compare notes when he hosts Orbán in Florida on Friday.
The prime minister isn’t meeting Biden administration officials. (A Biden administration official told CNN’s Betsy Klein that no invitation for a meeting between the current US president and Hungarian leader was extended.) Instead, he’s choosing to meet the man he hopes will again be US president next year. The two men have a long history of mutual admiration. The fact that one of Trump’s first moves since […]
David Campbell, Angela R. Logan, and Michael Moody, Binghamton University | State University of New York | University of Notre Dame | Indiana University - digg
Stephan:
My fundamental problem with money coming from the wealthy is the political donations. It is my view we should have publicly funded elections; it should be illegal, and seriously so, to mix politics and private money in any way because that is what creates the terrible corruption that is eating American democracy alive. I also think this would radically change if our tax structure was not so corrupt. The wealthy should be taxed as they were in the 1950s.
Donations by top 50 US donors fell again in 2023, sliding to $12B — Mike Bloomberg, Phil and Penny Knight, and Michael and Susan Dell led the list of biggest givers.
The top 50 American individuals and couples who gave or pledged the most to charity in 2023 committed US$12 billion to foundations, universities, hospitals and more. That total was 28% below an inflation-adjusted $16.5 billion in 2022, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s latest annual tally of these donations.
The Conversation U.S. asked David Campbell, Angela R. Logan and Michael Moody, three scholars of philanthropy, to assess the significance of these gifts and to consider what they indicate about the state of charitable giving in the United States.
What trends stand out overall?
David Campbell:As was the case in 2022, more than one-third of these big gifts – $4.4 billion – went to donors’ personal foundations. Another $764.3 million flowed into donor-advised funds. Also known as DAFs, these charitable savings accounts make it possible for donors to reserve assets such as cash, stocks and bonds for […]
Shannon Firth, Health Policy Reporter - Medpage Today
Stephan:
Our healthcare system based on profit not wellbeing, and further complicated by the Republican attempt to control women, has left us with medical deserts, and limited medical care, particularly in Red states, and this has all kinds of implications as this medical report details. If you vote Republican you are voting against the quality of your own medical care. That is the sad truth.
Rates of emergency surgery, serious complications, and hospital readmissions were higher among Medicare patients living in primary care shortage areas, according to a cross-sectional retrospective cohort study of data from 2015 to 2019.
Medicare beneficiaries living in areas with the most severe primary care shortages had higher rates of three types of emergency surgeries compared with those living in areas with the least severe shortages (37.8% vs 29.9%; risk ratio [RR] 1.26, 95% CI 1.17-1.37, P<0.001), reported Sara Schaefer, MD, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and co-authors.
Those in areas with the most severe shortages were also more likely to have serious complications (14.9% vs 11.7%; adjusted RR 1.27, 95% CI 1.12-1.44, P<0.001) and readmissions (15.7% vs 13.5%; adjusted RR 1.16, 95% CI 1.01-1.33, P=0.03), they noted in Health Affairsopens in a new tab or window.
However, beneficiaries in areas with the most and least severe shortages had similar rates of 30-day mortality (5.6% vs 4.8%; adjusted RR 1.17, 95% CI 0.93-1.47, P=0.17) and any complications (25.9% vs 24.5%; adjusted RR 1.05, 95% CI […]
