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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.
Robert Reich , The Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies - truthdig
Stephan:
I really am sorry, my readers, but I just don’t see any good news trends in the United States. Of course, there are some local good trends happening, but not nationwide. The facts and trends are what they are so I must report them. The American government has been sold to a small group of oligarchs and they are going to get wealthier while you bear the economic burden.
President Donald Trump listens as Elon Musk speaks in the Oval Office at the White House on Feb. 11, 2025. Credit: Alex Brandon / AP
Connect the dots.
Last week, Trump’s social media corporation — Trump Media and Technology Group, in which Trump owns a majority of shares — announced plans to sell financial products, including a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF), aimed at what Trump calls the “patriotic economy.” Its shares jumped 6 percent on the news.
Devin Nunes, Trump Media’s CEO, said the Trump ETFs give investors a chance to put money into “American energy, manufacturing and other firms that provide a competitive alternative to the woke funds and debanking problems that you find throughout the market.”
Woke funds? Debanking problems?
Two weeks ago, Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to direct the FBI, was given 25,946 shares in Trump Media, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. They are now worth about $840,000. What was this a payoff for?
The federal government is no longer protecting consumers of financial products.
Damian Carrington, Environment Editor - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
Professor James Hansen, known as the “Father of Climate Change for his 1988 presentation to the U.S. Senate, has been warning the American government and the world about climate change. The U.S. under the autocracy of criminal Trump and his lackeys is obviously paying no attention to his or anyone’s warnings, and we are all going to pay for this stupidity. All you Trump voters please let’s not also have to listen to your whining when the quality of your life is downgraded. Here is Hansen’s latest warning, “it’s too late.”
The analysis concluded that recent cuts in sun-blocking shipping pollution have raised temperatures more than thought. Credit: scphoto / Alamy
The pace of global heating has been significantly underestimated, according to renowned climate scientist Prof James Hansen, who said the international 2C target is “dead”.
A new analysis by Hansen and colleagues concludes that both the impact of recent cuts in sun-blocking shipping pollution, which has raised temperatures, and the sensitivity of the climate to increasing fossil fuels emissions are greater than thought.
The group’s results are at the high end of estimates from mainstream climate science but cannot be ruled out, independent experts said. If correct, they mean even worse extreme weather will come sooner and there is a greater risk of passing global tipping points, such as the collapse of the critical Atlantic ocean currents.
Criminal Trump’s coup is literally tearing the American democracy apart, and now he is even endangering the country’s security against nuclear war.
The first convicted felon and sex offender to ever hold the Presidency, Donld J. Trump. Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty
There appears to be mass chaos at the agency responsible for keeping a “safe, secure, and reliable” watch over the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.
ABC News is reporting that hundreds of employees at the 1,800-person National Nuclear Security Administration were fired on Thursday. Many of them described the situation as a “national security crisis.”
The Department of Energy then suddenly paused the firings on Friday, frantically calling back employees to tell them they still have a job.
“This is creating unbelievable threats to our national security. Trump, Musk, and DOGE are wiping out the employees who manage our nuclear arsenal,” attorney and former Ukrainian Armed Forces member John Jackson wrote on X. “Every time someone retires, there will be no one to fill their slot.”
The confusion comes as the Trump administration on Thursday directed agencies to fire thousands of probationary employees in the federal workforce. While Trump is framing these mass firings […]
Louisiana has a quality of life roughly equivalent to a third-world country. It has the shortest life span in the United States, an infant mortality and maternal mortality rate like a developing country, Only 15% of lower-income students and less than half of higher-income students can read proficiently. The state is controlled by MAGAt Republicans. Now the MAGAts are attacking vaccination standards. As a result, I predict we will see outbreaks of childhood diseases that used to plague the U.S. but no one has thought much about them for decades because vaccines have eliminated them.
Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham, MD,
The Louisiana Department of Health has terminated mass vaccination campaigns and barred public health workers from recommending seasonal vaccines, The Times-Picayune reported Feb. 13.
Five notes:
1. Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham, MD, issued a memo to state health workers Feb. 13 that said medical decision-making should occur between patients and physicians, not public health workers.
“Rather than instructing individuals to receive any and all vaccines, LDH staff should communicate data regarding the reduced risk of disease, hospitalization, and death associated with a vaccine and encourage individuals to discuss considerations for vaccination with their healthcare provider,” he wrote in the directive, obtained by The Times-Picayune.
2. While the state’s public health divisions will still stock vaccines, the department “will no longer promote mass vaccinations,” the document said.
3. The New Orleans Health Department, which operates independently of the state, told The New York Times it would continue to promote childhood and seasonal vaccines, and expand its efforts to fill any gaps left by […]
Erika Edwards, Sara G. Miller and Jason Kane, Staff Writers - NBC News
Stephan:
Texas is another MAGAt-controlled state that is not supporting mandatory vaccination of children. And here you see what happens. It is amazing to me how stupid anti-vaxxers are. They clearly care nothing for the actual facts about vaccination.
Approximately 40 people showed up for measles testing this week at a mobile site in Seminole, Texas. Credit: NBC News
SEMINOLE, TEXAS — When Aganetha Unger pulled up her large, white van to the emergency measles testing site, several of her eight children were coughing.
“We had some sickness in the house, not very bad, but some fever, some cough,” said Unger, who is Mennonite. One child, she said, had a fever of 103 degrees.
Her youngest getting tested was a 2-month-old, wrapped tightly in a pink blanket on her mom’s lap. When the EMS team swabbed her nose, she didn’t cry.
On Friday, the number of confirmed cases rose to 49, up from 24 earlier in the week, the state health department said. The majority of those cases are in Gaines County, which borders New Mexico.
We, in the United States, are not only going through a coup that is destroying our democracy we are awash in corruption. Criminal Trump believes himself to be a king who can do whatever he wants. But the damage he is doing extends far beyond our borders. America has had status as a fair leader, and is has been seen as such by other nations and peoples. All of that is being washed with the acid of Trump’s ego and the result is what this article describes. The United States has lost its stature in the world, and may never regain it. We are now just another nasty autocracy bully.
US President-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin Credit: Reuters / Getty
Two geopolitical thunderclaps on Wednesday will transform transatlantic relations.
Donald Trump’s call with Vladimir Putin brought the Russian leader in from the cold as they hatched plans to end the war in Ukraine and agreed to swap presidential visits.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, meanwhile, went to Brussels and told European allies to “take ownership of conventional security on the continent.”
The watershed highlights Trump’s “America First” ideology and his tendency to see every issue or alliance as a dollars and cents value proposition. It also underscores his freedom from establishment advisors steeped in the foreign policy mythology of the West, who he thinks thwarted his first term.
Although Hegseth recommitted to NATO, something fundamental has changed.
America’s interventions won two world wars that started in Europe and afterwards guaranteed the continent’s freedom in the face of the Soviet threat. But Trump said on the campaign trail he might not defend alliance members who haven’t invested enough in defense. He thus revived […]
The Great Schism Trend has taken on a new and very nasty aspect. Louisiana a state with a social outcome data profile like a third-world country is run by MAGAts. They are totally committed to assuring politicians not physicians control women’s lives and the state is trying to reach beyond its borders to try for murder a New York doctor who helped a Louisiana woman obtain Mifepristone. The good news is that Blue state New York’s Democrat Governor. Kathy Hochul, has told Louisiana’s MAGAt Governor Jeff Landry that there is no chance of her complying with his nastiness.
Mifepristone tablets Credit: The Associated Press
A New York doctor was criminally indicted by a grand jury in Louisiana—which has some of the strictest abortion regulations—for allegedly prescribing an abortion pill taken by a minor in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit that could test interstate abortion laws and shield laws intended to protect doctors in states where abortion is legal.
Key Facts
The grand jury indicted Dr. Margaret Carpenter on charges of criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs, local news outlet WFAB reported, for prescribing mifepristone, which was reclassified as a “controlled dangerous substance” in Louisiana last May.
Carpenter practices family medicine in New Paltz, New York, and co-founded the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, which helps doctors located in states with shield laws—to protect them from criminal penalties in states where abortion is illegal—practice interstate telemedical abortion care.
The grand jury also charged Carpenter’s practice, Nightingale Medical, PC, and the minor’s mother for criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs, which is a felony in the state.
The minor’s mother requested the abortion medicine from Carpenter online in April 2024, and Carpenter then mailed […]
Another MAGAt lackey testifies basically to her intent to destroy public education. It is part of the coup we are undergoing. It has not passed notice of the oligarchs that the less well-educated men and women are the more likely it is that they will vote for Republicans. That’s why they want to end public education. It not only turns what was public education into an indoctrination system it gives them another opportunity to suck money out of average American pockets turning primary through college education into a profit system.
Linda McMahon, the nominee for secretary of education, testifies during her confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee in Washington, D.C. on February 13, 2025. Credit: Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call / Getty
Critics of U.S. President Donald Trump’s plans for the Department of Education pointed to billionaire GOP megadonor Linda McMahon’s Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday as the latest proof that the Republican administration intends to destroy public schools.
McMahon, accused of “enabling sexual abuse of children” as World Wrestling Entertainment CEO, appeared before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions as the education secretary nominee despite Trump making clear that he wants to shutter the department and billionaire Elon Musk—who is trying to obliterate the federal bureaucracy as chair of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—claiming last week that “it doesn’t exist” anymore.
Most of us believe every student deserves the opportunity, resources, and support to reach their full potential no matter where they live, the color of their skin, or how much their family […]
