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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.
Dan Whateley, Senior Media Reporter - Business Insider
Stephan:
Newspapers are dying all over the country, which means that local coverage good and bad, is largely just disappearing. Instead it is being replaced with social media, and particularly TikTok, and that is where GenZers are getting what passes for news. The fact is that Americans are appallingly ignorant of any accurate understanding of the actual facts about news because there are no ethical standards about news coverage as used to be the case. That is why I go to such lengths to make sure SR, both the daily web publication and the SR podcast are entirely and demonstrably fact-based.
Young people on TikTok learn about what’s happening from a hodgepodge of alternative sources, from news commentary influencers to purportedly on-the-ground “citizen journalists.” Credit: James Clapham for Business Insider
Kelsey Russell, a 23-year-old TikToker in New York, is on a mission to pull off what media executives have struggled to do for decades: Persuade young people to buy newspapers.
The grad student posts several videos a week in which she flips through print pages of The New York Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and other legacy publishers to summarize stories. The broadsheets, blanketed with Russell’s notes and highlights, are something of a nostalgic prop for her roughly 88,000 followers, some of whom may have watched their parents flip through physical papers but never touched one themselves.
Before finding a news niche, Russell spent years building a TikTok following by posting restaurant reviews and travel vlogs. Today she often blends her peppycommentary on news she thinks young people care about — such as healthcare and climate — with lifestyle content. In a November post, for example, she began by […]
Yet another example of the corruption and failure of the federal government. Neither the Presidency nor the Congress seems to understand the importance and urgency of protecting the earth’s matrix of life. Future generations are going to hate us for our stupidity and greed.
Data: US Fish and Wildlife Service/National Marine Fisheries Service. Illustration by Eleanor Taylor for Vox
Exactly five decades ago, Congress did what would be unimaginable today: It passed a powerful environmental law with almost unanimous support. In 1973, the House voted in favor of the Endangered Species Act, 390 to 12.
“Nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed,” Republican President Richard Nixon said upon signing the act into law.
Among the most comprehensive environmental laws worldwide, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) was set up to protect the nation’s many plants and animals that are at risk of extinction. It makes it a federal crime to harm species that it deems endangered, with some exceptions. The act also requires that government agencies, such as the Army or the Federal Aviation Administration, try to avoid jeopardizing endangered species or the habitat they need to survive.
Over the last five decades, the law has undoubtedly helped save dozens of creatures from extinction, from American alligators […]
As this article describes, this is one of the worst House of Representatives in over 200 years. The MAGAt Republicans control it and it has been a catastrophe for the country. Why? Because Republicans are not interested in fostering wellbeing in the United States. They are only interested in personal greed and personal and party power. I would say they ought to be ashamed of themselves, but they don’t have sufficient ethics to know what shame is. If you vote Republican you are voting to damage your own wellbeing, whether you want to face that or not.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, left, and Rep. Andy Barr Credit: Getty
The data doesn’t lie. This Republican House of Representatives passed just 22 bills that became law in 2023. In contrast, under Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi the previous House passed 85 bills in 2021, including landmark COVID-19 legislation and the infrastructure law.
In last week’s House Rules Committee hearing, Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado pointed that out, blasting Republicans for the profound waste of time they’ve been all year. “The data speaks for itself,” he said. “This will go down as the least productive Congress since 1933.”
“Think about that: the least productive Congress since the Great Depression,” he continued. ”That is what Republicans have brought the country in the form of their majority.” They’ve also brought the ridiculous and utterly baseless formal impeachment inquiry, which is what the House Rules Committee was wasting its time on when Neguse called Republicans out.
This House did manage to get the debt ceiling lifted and keep the government’s doors open. Their other accomplishments? They renamed some Veterans Affairs clinics and authorized a […]
I think it time for each of us who want democracy to survive to realize that there is a very strong chance that the United States is likely to become a fascist dictatorship if criminal Trump is re-elected as President, and there is a considerable probability that may happen unless you and everyone you know who is a voter votes only for Democrats. I am not exaggerating here. This poll of Iowa voters should scare the hell out of you. In this country we have a growing White minority who support fascism and a dictator like Trump. This past weekend their were several hundred bombs threats all over the country against Jewish synagogues and temples. I think we are on the edge of violence. This is how it always starts with fascists. I warn you to take this very seriously.
As Donald Trump seeks the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, he has laid out his vision for a second term that includes locking up political opponents, conducting sweeping immigration raids and searching for replacements for Obamacare.
On the campaign trail, he has engaged in harsh rhetoric to describe political enemies as “radical thugs that live like vermin,” said that immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S., touted himself as “the only one who will prevent World War III,” and suggested suspending parts of the Constitution because of the “stolen” 2020 presidential election.
The former president’s comments have ignited concerns from critics and scholars who have warned that a second Trump administration threatens democracy — even as his advisers push back on those fears, dismissing them as baseless.
Many likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers have no issue with several of Trump’s recent controversial statements, a new Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll has found — and more often than not, they say the same statements make them more likely to support the former president.
Jamelle Bouie lays it out. Criminal Trump is just the leader. It is the troops, the White minority for fascism, that are the problem. The only way we are going to keep a country we recognize is rewrite the tax laws, so the rich are not favored, and to make fostering wellbeing the core value of all social policies, a massive rewrite of our laws just as happened with Roosevelt after WWII.
Credit: Damon Winter / The New York Times
The easy and obvious way to understand the various Republican power grabs underway in states across the country is to look at them as attempts to secure as much unaccountable political power as possible and to curtail the expression of identities and beliefs Republicans find objectionable. That’s how we get the “Don’t Say Gay” laws and attacks on gender-affirming care and aggressive efforts to gerrymander entire state legislatures.
But there is another angle you can take on the Republicans’ use of state power to limit political representation for their opponents or limit the bodily autonomy of women or impose traditional and hierarchical gender relations on those who would prefer to live free of them. You could say the point is the cultivation of political despair.
Now, it is too much to say that this is premeditated, although you do not have to look hard to find Republican officeholders expressing the belief that political participation should be made more onerous.
American police are the least educated, least trained, most violent, and least accountable of all the police in other developed nations. The idea for body cameras was excellent but, as this report describes, it was never really put into practice as originally planned. The killing just keeps going on.
In the last 10 years, taxpayers have spent millions to outfit police officers across the country with body-worn cameras in what was sold as a new era of transparency and accountability. But a survey by ProPublica shows that when civilians die at the hands of police, the public usually never sees the footage.
At least 1,201 people were killed in 2022 by law enforcement officers, about 100 deaths a month, according to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit research group that tracks police killings. ProPublica examined the 101 deaths that occurred in June 2022, a time frame chosen because enough time had elapsed that investigations could reasonably be expected to have concluded. The cases involved 131 law enforcement agencies in 34 states.
In 79 of those deaths, ProPublica confirmed that body-worn camera video exists. But more than a year later, authorities or victims’ families had released the footage of only 33 incidents.
Philadelphia signed a $12.5 million contract in 2017 to equip its entire police force with cameras. Since then, at least 27 people have been killed by Philadelphia police, according to Mapping Police Violence, but in only two cases has body-camera […]
Have you noticed how long it take a first class letter to get where you mail it? Or how much it now costs? I do not understand why Biden has not dealt with DeJoy, an appointee of criminal Trump, who owns a company which is in competition with the Postal Service.
USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Credit: YouTube screengrab
US Postal Service (USPS) employees are sounding the alarm over postmaster general Louis DeJoy’s 10-year plan to gut the agency, saying it will put people out of work and delay mail service for millions of Americans.
According to the Guardian, DeJoy — whom then-President Donald Trump appointed to head the USPS in 2020 — is in the midst of enacting a 10-year plan to consolidate mail sorting facilities dubbed “Delivering for America,” which he claims will reduce costs. As of December 2023, there are currently 30 mail processing facilities that are being considered for consolidation, which the Guardian estimates could cost 25 jobs per consolidation. DeJoy is ultimately aiming to consolidate approximately 400 over the course of the strategic plan.
“It will eliminate jobs, good jobs,” said Pennsylvania Postal Workers Union president Mike Stephenson. “It’s one more process in the 10-year plan that DeJoy put in when Trump appointed him to destroy the postal service.”
While Democrats have repeatedly called for DeJoy’s ouster […]
The Western states are experiencing growing water difficulties, and yet they continue to ship out a high percentage of their water in the form of alfalfa a water intensive crop. It is an aspect of the water issue that has received almost no consideration in corporate media, but it is going to affect millions of people. We, as a country, just are not thinking about water in a comprehensive way.
Alfalfa hay is a water-intensive crop, and exporting it is equivalent to exporting precious groundwater.Credit: Jack Richardson
Water is life. It’s also big business. In our November + December 2023 issue, Mother Jones dives into the West’s deepening water crisis—and the forces behind it, from historic drought to short-sighted policies to corrupt lawmakers and the special interests they serve. Read the full package here.
About a decade ago, having depleted their own ancient aquifers to grow livestock feed, some wealthy Middle Eastern nations, along with China, began tapping into the largely unregulated aquifers of drought-stricken American states. Notably, megafarms in the Arizona desert and in other Western states have been exporting vast quantities of precious groundwater in the form of alfalfa hay.
Even without the exports, unchecked growth and industrial-scale farming across the nation are draining this finite resource more rapidly than it can be replenished. States, meanwhile, are doing an abysmal job of managing it—Arizona, for instance, has even encouraged exports of its groundwater. Here’s a brief timeline of that situation, based on original reporting from Reveal. For a deeper dive, listen to […]
