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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.
The Republican attack on President Biden, claiming he had accepted a bribe was centered on the testimony to the FBI of Alexander Smirnov who has just been indicted for lying in his testimony. As a result, the whole Republican case against Biden falls apart, not that I think that will make any difference to the MAGAts.
FBI informant Alexander Smirnov indicted for lying under oath
The confidential source at the center of allegations being promoted by House Republicans that President Biden accepted a bribe has been arrested and charged with making false statements to the FBI.
The allegations risk unwinding the House GOP probe into President Biden. In making their case, GOP lawmakers have frequently pointed to conversations the confidential source, Alexander Smirnov, had with the FBI relaying that the head of Ukrainian energy company Burisma told him he had paid both President Biden and his son Hunter Biden $5 million.
The indictment alleges Smirnov made up the allegations given his opposition to President Biden’s candidacy.
“As alleged in the indictment, the events that Smirnov first reported to the FBI Agent in June 2020 were fabrications,” the Justice Department wrote in a press release announcing the grand jury indictment.
“The indictment alleges that the defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against Public Official 1 after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his presidential […]
Mike Colias, Nora Eckert, and Sean McLain, Reporters - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan:
The EV vehicle market is crashing, and this article gives the details. Why is this happening? In my opinion, because people who buy EVs discover that there is no nationwide system for charging them. Why does this not exist? Because under criminal Trump, in contrast to Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s administration where there was a national program to build the interstate highway system, Trump made no effort to create a national program to replace gas stations. What should have happened was a national program to restructure major roads so that they would charge the vehicles driving on them. The truth is Americans who support MAGAt politicians don’t seem to understand that the Republican Party no longer exists as it once did. It has been replaced a cult that worships Donald Trump, and he has no interest in fostering wellbeing.
Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickups being assembled in Dearborn, Mich. Credit: Andia / Universal / Getty
The Michigan plant where the F-150 Lightning electric truck is built used to vibrate with excitement.
President Biden visited in 2021 and test drove the blazing-fast pickup. Before the first ones even started rolling off the assembly line in the spring of 2022, Ford said it would expand the factory to quadruple the number it could build.
That energy is rapidly fading. Ford is cutting the plant’s output by half, and workers are relocating to other facilities, mostly those making gas-powered pickups and SUVs.
The sudden change “was a little bit of a shocker,” said Matthew Schulte, who inspects trucks at the factory in suburban Detroit. “Reality has set in.”
As recently as a year ago, automakers were struggling to meet the hot demand for electric vehicles. In a span of months, though, the dynamic flipped, leaving them hitting the brakes on what for many had been an all-out push toward an electric transformation.
A confluence of factors had led many auto executives to see the potential
Nina Mast, Staff Writer - Economic Policy Institute
Stephan:
Child labor is becoming a significant, although little covered by media, trend. Backed by corporations who want to be able to employ children, and are funding/bribing state legislators across the country, America’s decades-long tradition of ending child labor is being weakened. Look at the map at the head of this article. If you live in one of the states doing this, write your state representative and senators and tell them you will not vote for them if they support weakening child labor laws.
Child labor remains a top issue in 2024 state legislative sessions amid soaring violations and widespread abuse of child labor laws in multiplesectors of the economy. On one hand, the coordinated, industry-backed effort to roll back child labor protections state by state has continued to expand. At the same time, some state legislators are proposing legislation to strengthen the rights of young workers and the laws designed to safeguard their health and education.
Since 2021, 28 states have introduced bills to weaken child labor laws, and 12 states have enacted them. By contrast, 14 states have introduced bills to strengthen child labor protections already in 2024—up from 11 states in all of 2023—as more state lawmakers recognize the need to address increasing violations and threats to current state and federal standards.
Attacks on child labor laws continue trend of weakening important state standards, with eventual goal of diminishing federal child labor laws
From the 1800s onward, states have often led the way on child labor regulation. Today, many important policy tools for preventing exploitative forms of child labor—such as work […]
Missouri is a state with very poor social wellbeing based on objective facts. Poor Healthcare, closing its libraries, terrible laws to control women, and awful, basically insane, gun laws. A 12-year-old can carry an unlicensed AR-15. Today the voters and the governor lived with the consequences of the laws they have voted for and passed. The MAGAt Republican governor was there personally and ran away scared from the post-Super Bowl mass shooting that occurred today and has dominated the news. This is what Red state America has degenerated into.
MAGAt Republican Missouri Governor Mike Parson Credi: Chris Kohley / St. Louis Post-Dispatch / TNS
Someone who says they ran away from the mass shooting at the Chiefs parade on Wednesday says they saw someone else running: a GOP governor who frequently touts his support for firearms.
Earlier on Wednesday, between eight and 10 people were shot near the Chiefs Super Bowl parade, and two armed suspects were then placed under arrest, according to Kansas City police, the New York Post and the Associated Press. Chaos erupted.
In that chaos, one man reported seeing Missouri governor Mike Parson running scared.
Patrick Quaife, identified on his social media as a KC alum, posted his observations after escaping the gunfire.
“I just ran away from a mass shooting at the Chiefs parade where I saw the Missouri governor (the gun lover below) running scared for his life next to me with an army of officers protecting him,” Quaife wrote, including a photo of the governor supporting “responsible, law-abiding gun owners.”
Just how stupid are the MAGAt Republicans of Missouri? Read this. This is why 18,854 Americans died by gunfire in 2023. America’s gun psychosis has warped our entire society and made attending any mass event in the United States potentially dangerous, as the Kansas City Mass Shooting makes clear. Will anything happen to correct this madness? I doubt it.
US founder Alexander Hamilton died after a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804. Credit: North Wind Picture Archives / Alamy
A Missouri Republican’s proposal to reintroduce dueling to solve statehouse differences was branded “utter stupidity” by a leading historian of political violence.
“Back in the day,” Joanne B Freeman of Yale tweeted, “they were smart enough to take dueling OUTSIDE. The draft that I saw suggests doing it in the chamber. This doesn’t show guts or bravery or manhood – if it’s supposed to. It shows utter stupidity.”
Freeman is the author of The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War.
The state senator behind the proposal said he was making a point about the breakdown of regular order in Missouri politics.
The draft rule change came to national notice when it was posted to social media by Democrats in the state senate.
“The Missouri Republican civil war continues to escalate as a member of the Freedom Caucus faction has filed a proposed rule change to allow senators to challenge an ‘offending senator to a duel’,” they wrote.
It was not my intention when I started to plan SR for Thursday to focus on Missouri. But the wellbeing of this Republican-controlled state is deteriorating so alarmingly and so quickly that when one compares it to what is happening in Texas, Florida, or a dozen other Republican-controlled states one sees The Great Schism Trend playing out openly before our eyes. We have become — not becoming, become — two very different countries within one nation.
Missouri senators voted Wednesday against amendments that would have allowed abortions in the cases of rape and incest in the state.
Missouri senators debated a bill that would make it illegal for public funds to go toward abortion providers, such as Planned Parenthood. During the debate, Missouri state Sen. Tracy McCreery (D) introduced amendments that would allow exceptions for abortion in incest and rape cases.
“I think the consensus is that Missouri law went too far when they banned all abortions,” she said during the discussion, according to audio posted online by the state Senate.
However, her efforts were struck down along party lines by the Republican-controlled state Senate, The Associated Press reported. McCreery also argued the current abortion ban shows the state does not care about women who are victims of rape.
“What we’re saying is, ‘We don’t care,’” McCreery said of the abortion ban, according to the AP. “We’re going to force you to give birth, even if that pregnancy resulted from forcible rape by a family member, […]
The problem with the Republican Party is Republican voters. Here, in this report on who does and does not believe in climate change, you can see why I say this. Our problem as a country is we have a large percentage of the population who are poorly educated barely literate racists. I think what this is telling us is that as a country we need better education, and higher literacy, because Republicans, as a party, are more poorly educated, and less literate than Democrats. That is not, although it may sound like it is, a partisan statement. It is simply based on objectively verifiable facts.
Wilted palm trees line a destroyed property in Lahaina, Hawaii, on 8 December 2023, amid recovery efforts following the August wildfire. Credit: Lindsey Wasson / AP
Nearly 15% of Americans don’t believe climate change is real, a new study out of the University of Michigan reveals – shedding light on the highly polarized attitude toward global warming.
Additionally, denialism is highest in the central and southern US, with Republican voters found less likely to believe in climate science.
Using artificial intelligence, researchers analyzed over 7.4m tweets posted by roughly 1.3 million people on the social media platform X (previously Twitter) between 2017 and 2019. The social media posts were geocoded, and classified as “for” or “against” climate change using a large language model, a type of artificial intelligence developed by OpenAI.
“Over half of the tweets we looked at simply denied that climate change was real, that it was a hoax,” said Joshua Newell, co-author of the study and professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan. “It wasn’t surprising but it was disappointing, I would hope that […]
Here is a very important interview about the grotesque and, in my view the evil wealth inequality that is doing such damage to America’s social wellbeing. It also discusses how to reverse this negative trend. One of the key steps is reversing the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. That isn’t going to happen as long as we have the christofascist cabal that controls the Court today. But if the Democrats could take a strong majority in both Houses of Congress, and Biden wins, laws could be passed changing the tax code and controlling the banks that could accomplish what needs to be done.
Protesters display signs during a demonstration in New York City Credit: Michael Nigro / Sopa Images / Lightrocket / Getty
The fortunes of the five richest men in the world have “shot up by 114 percent since 2020,” according to a January 2024 Oxfam report on global inequality, while “nearly five billion people have been made poorer.”
This most recent gross increase in wealth and income inequality builds on global trends that took hold in the early 1980s, with the decades-long increase in inequality being particularly large in the United States compared to other developed nations. Wealth inequality is typically higher than income inequality, which in turn feeds higher future income inequality. Indeed, income inequality in the U.S. continues to rise, according to the latest report from the Congressional Budget Office, utilizing data through 2020.
At the same time, and quite unsurprisingly, the largest U.S. banks made record profits in 2023, with JPMorgan Chase reporting $49.6 billion in net income for the year. In the meantime, the Federal Reserve, which world-renowned progressive economist Gerald Epstein calls the […]
