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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.
Here is some good news for California. I hope other states will soon follow suit. This is the sort of wellbeing fostering decision politicians ought to be making, and so few do.
A plastic bag sits along a roadside in Sacramento, California. Credit: Rich Pedroncelli / AP
“Paper or plastic” will no longer be a choice at grocery store checkout lines in California under a new law signed on Sunday by the governor, Gavin Newsom, that bans all plastic shopping bags.
California had already banned thin plastic shopping bags at supermarkets and other stores, but shoppers could purchase bags made with a thicker plastic that purportedly made them reusable and recyclable.
The new measure, approved by state legislators last month, bans all plastic shopping bags starting in 2026. Consumers who don’t bring their own bags will now simply be asked if they want a paper bag.
State senator Catherine Blakespear, one of the bill’s supporters, said people were not reusing or recycling any plastic bags. She pointed to a state study that found that the amount of plastic shopping bags trashed a person grew from 8lb (3.6kg) a year in 2004 to 11lb a year in 2021.
Blakespear, a Democrat from Encinitas, said the previous bag ban passed a decade ago didn’t reduce the overall use of plastic.
A few months ago, I bought a Hewlett-Packard (HP) printer. Somehow in what I thought was registering the printer with HP I became embroiled in the HP Instant Ink program. What I did not know was that this program allows HP to monitor your printer via the internet and record how many pages you print — and who knows what else — and you get charged for each printed page, and have to pay a fee depending on how many pages you have printed. Ostensibly, this is about being sent ink, but I never got any ink. However, when I needed ink I discovered I was faced with a fee of $36.95, based on how many pages I had printed. When I asked how they could possibly know that I learned about the monitoring. I also discovered that I had been involved in the Instant Ink Program when I thought I was registering my printer for its warranty. I immediately asked to be removed from this program, only to discover that they controlled my printer and I could no longer print unless I agreed to re-enroll in the Instant Ink Program. I want to warn any reader that if you buy an HP printer you may find yourself embroiled in this scam. As I was writing this I thought that I couldn’t be the only person who has had this experience and searched to see. It turns out that Hewlett-Packard Instant Ink has been the focus of multiple class action lawsuits.
We are mid-way into a take over of democracies by corporate oligarchs as this research report describes. In the United States nothing is going to stop this but a massive citizen uprising reflected in how people vote and how they demand their their politicians peform, starting with eliminating the Electoral College, adding four uncorrupt justices to the Supreme Court committed to fair and ethical judicial decisions, establishing a Supreme Court code of ethics overseen by a nonpolitical oversight committee, establishing a tenurre of 18 years. Also making all elections publicly funded, and making it illegal for any politician or their PACs to receive any form of financial support. Can we get there? To be honest I’m not sure. A lot is going to depend on how you and everyone you know votes for Democrats. But that is just the start.
As an estimated four billion people vote to elect new governments in a historic year for democracy, trade unions are campaigning For Democracy at work, in societies, and in global institutions.
The Seven Corporations Actively Seeking to Sabotage Democracy
Millions of workers have already mobilised for policy change and in the run-up to political elections. They have organised to expand worker power or took militant strike action on the job. Around the world, they are fighting for a vision of “democracy in which workers set the course in our communities, workplaces, countries, and international institutions together.”
This far-reaching campaign now places its focus on high-level global institutions, where government delegations negotiate key standards, treaties, and goals that effectively shape the world of work and thereby all of human society.
When governments gather in New York, USA, for the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and Summit of the Future (SOTF), in Washington, USA, for the Annual Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), […]
Here is further confirmation of the point the previous article reported. Unless you are a millionaire you are becoming a financial peasant in a neo-medieval financial culture.
A report published Monday by the humanitarian group Oxfam warns that decades of intensifying inequality have left the world in the grip of a “global oligarchy” under which the richest sliver of humanity owns more wealth than nearly everyone else combined—a state of affairs that undermines democratic institutions and international cooperation on climate, pandemics, and other crises.
Oxfam’s analysis of data from the investment banking giant UBS found that the fortune controlled by the top 1% is now larger than the collective wealth of the bottom 95%.
Such inequality pervades the global economy, Oxfam noted, with a small number of corporations dominating key sectors. Nearly half of the global seed market, for example, is controlled by just two corporations, Bayer and Corteva. At the same time, just three U.S.-based financial behemoths—Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard—oversee nearly 20% of the world’s investable assets, around $20 trillion.
What’s more, such massive corporations are increasingly run by billionaires: According to Oxfam, a billionaire either heads or is the top shareholder of more than a third of the world’s leading 50 corporations.
JONATHAN MINGLE , Contributing Writer - Yale Environment 360
Stephan:
Here is some good news about school buses; they are becoming EVs. Slowly local school systems are beginning to awaken to the air pollution their carbon-powered transportation system produces.
About 20 million students in the United States ride to school each day on the familiar yellow bus. The vast majority of the nation’s roughly 490,000 school buses — which comprise the nation’s largest public-transportation fleet — are powered by diesel engines. “We’re poisoning our kids on the way to school,” said Jessica Keithan, cofounder and director of the Texas Electric School Bus Project, of the exhaust that inevitably infiltrates bus interiors and children’s lungs.
But that’s slowly beginning to change. Thanks to a slate of federal and state incentive programs, school districts all over the country are starting to swap out old diesel buses for new, zero-emissions electric-powered models.
This transition is reaching districts of all sizes and demographics, from Martinsville Independent School District in East Texas — which last year became the first in the country to go fully electric with four new buses — to Oakland Unified School District in California — which last month became the first large urban district to fully electrify its fleet, with 74 buses.
As the Environmental Protection Agency, through its $5 billion […]
Here is some more good news. Contrary to what virtually every MAGAt Republican campaigning says, the murder rate actually went down last year. We are still the worse developed nation in the world — except for countries like Ukraine that are in active wars — for gun deaths. And death by gun fire is still the leading cause of death for young people in the U.S. But as the FBI reports things are getting slightly better. There is so much more that could be done to lower this death rate still further, but this is still good news.
Federal Bureau of Investigation seal in Washington DC on 12 July. Credit NurPhoto / Getty
Murder dropped by more than 11% from 2022 to 2023, the largest single-year decline in two decades, according to FBI data released on Monday.
Meanwhile, the broader category of violent crime nationwide decreased about 3%, said the data, which is audited and confirms earlier reporting from unaudited statistics.
Monday’s release of audited data contradicts a talking point that Donald Trump has made on the campaign trail as the Republican presidential nominee seeks a return to the White House during the 5 November election: that crime has been rampant and out of control without him in power.
In its annual Crime in the Nation summary, the FBI said rape decreased by an estimated 9.4%, property crime dropped 2.4% and burglary fell by an estimated 7.6%.
Car theft, however, was up by an estimated 12.6% – and shoplifting had returned to levels seen before the Covid-19 pandemic, from 999,394 reported cases in 2022 to 1.15m in 2023.
The crime agency notes that its 2023 estimates include full-year numbers from “every city agency covering a population […]
Lois Parshley, Senior Investigative Reporter - The Lever
Stephan:
I have been telling you for years that one of the things we were going to see as a result of climate change was an insurance apocalypse. I have said it is going to affect the lives of millions of people, and be the cause of significant internal migrations. Well here it is, as it is well described in this article.
A resident surveys the damage after a superstorm hit New Jersey. Wayne Parry / AP
We’ve got ourselves a little monster out there,” anchorman Jim Cantore warned, facing the camera in the Weather Channel’s newsroom on a sultry August weekend in 1992. At first, few in Florida were paying attention. “It’s very hard to get people to believe that there’s some danger from some element of nature that they haven’t experienced before,” a reporter told Cantore, as the channel played tape of tranquil beaches and neat vacation homes.
As the storm approached Florida, it gained the moniker “Andrew,” rapidly intensifying into a Category 5 hurricane as it exceeded wind speeds of 165 mph. Karen Clark watched updates on TV from her home in Boston with fascinated horror — and her career on the line.
Most insurance companies at that time assessed hurricane exposure in their portfolios by simply multiplying customer premiums by a rough factor of supposed risk, rather than tracking […]
For nearly 10 years the Republican Party has been trying to dismantle public education in the United States, and turn education into a private profit making activity, where children are indoctrinated and converted religiously. Americans are already the least literate and numerate population in the developed world and that is one of the intentions of the christofascists. All of this is designed to destroy the middle-class and turn the American population into ignorant peasants easily manipulated through their fear and anxieties. It is all happening right out in the open and almost no one in the corporate media and only a few real journalists, like ProPublica, seem to understand what is going on.
Families and students tour a new building on the campus of Temple Christian School in Lima, Ohio, in August. The expansion will accommodate increased enrollment thanks to families using vouchers. Credit: Mackenzi Klemann / The Lima (Ohio) News
The state of Ohio is giving taxpayer money to private, religious schools to help them build new buildings and expand their campuses, which is nearly unprecedented in modern U.S. history.
While many states have recently enacted sweeping school voucher programs that give parents taxpayer money to spend on private school tuition for their kids, Ohio has cut out the middleman. Under a bill passed by its Legislature this summer, the state is now providing millions of dollars in grants directly to religious schools, most of them Catholic, to renovate buildings, build classrooms, improve playgrounds and more.
The goal in providing the grants, according to the measure’s chief architect, Matt Huffman, is to increase the capacity of private schools in part so that they can sooner absorb more voucher students.
“The capacity issue is the next big issue on the horizon” for voucher efforts, Huffman, the Ohio Senate […]
