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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 G20 nations is a group of19 countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Türkey, United Kingdom and United States and the European Union. The wealth inequality of the G20 nation has become obscene, with the United States leading the pack. OxFam, a global organization that “fights inequality to end poverty and injustice,” has just issued a report on this inequality saying, “…the $42 trillion figure was nearly 36 times more than the wealth accumulated by the poorer half of the world’s population. Despite this, billionaires ‘have been paying a tax rate equivalent to less than 0.5 percent of their wealth’ across the globe.”
The world’s richest one percent increased their fortunes by a total of $42 trillion over the past decade, Oxfam said Thursday, ahead of a G20 summit in Brazil where taxing the super-rich tops the agenda.
Despite this windfall, taxes on the rich had plummeted to “historic lows”, the NGO added, warning of “obscene levels” of inequality with the rest of the world “left to scrap for crumbs”.
Brazil has made international cooperation on taxing the super-rich a priority of its presidency of the G20, a group of countries representing 80 percent of the world’s GDP.
At this week’s summit in Rio de Janeiro, the group’s finance ministers are expected to make progress on ways to raise levies on the ultra-wealthy and prevent billionaires from dodging tax systems.
The initiative involves determining methodologies to tax billionaires and other high-income earners.
The proposal is due to be fiercely debated at the summit on Thursday and Friday, with France, Spain, South Africa, […]
KATHERINE SCHAEFFER, Research Analyst - Pew Research Center
Stephan:
The leading cause of death for children 17 and under is a bullet in their body. It is one of the most outstanding manifestations of America’s gun psychosis. A mentality distinct from any other country in the world. No other nation not in active war has the kind of killing that goes on in the United States. What are the real facts about how Americans currently look at guns. It is hard to get objectively verifiable data on this subject because of the emotions it evokes. Pew Research, a reliable fact-based research organization, however, provides us with some real answers.
Guns are deeply ingrained in American society and the nation’s political debates.
The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms, and about a third of U.S. adults say they personally own a gun. At the same time, in response to concerns such as rising gun death rates and mass shootings, the U.S. surgeon general has taken the unprecedented step of declaring gun violence a public health crisis.
Here are some key findings about Americans’ views of gun ownership, gun policy and other subjects, drawn from Pew Research Center surveys.
Aboutfour-in-ten U.S. adults say they live in a household with a gun, including 32% who say they personally own one, according to a Center survey conducted in June 2023. These numbers are virtually unchanged since the last time we asked this question in 2021.
There are differences in gun ownership rates by political affiliation, gender, community type and other factors.
Rachel Leingang and Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Reporters - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
The Heritage Foundation is a christofascist organization closely intertwined with the MAGAt cult. Opus Dei, similarly, is a secret — they don’t release the names of it members — radically conservative cult within the Roman Catholic Church. Both are obviously against abortion, but they are also against birth control. They are very right wing and highly political about their views. Is it any surprise then that Kevin Roberts the president of the Heritage Foundation, is deeply involved with Opus Dei and, as this article describes, also the architect of Project 2025? This 900 page screed is the text book of the policies criminal Trump and his Frankenstein J.D. Vance espouse although they are publicly backing away from being identified with Project 2025.
Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president and the architect of Project 2025, the conservative thinktank’s road map for a second Trump presidency, has close ties and receives regular spiritual guidance from an Opus Dei-led center in Washington DC, a hub of activity for the radical and secretive Catholic group.
Roberts acknowledged in a speech last September that – for years – he has visited the Catholic Information Center, a K Street institution headed by an Opus Dei priest and incorporated by the archdiocese of Washington, on a weekly basis for mass and “formation”, or religious guidance. Opus Dei also organizes monthly retreats at the CIC.
In the speech – which he delivered at the CIC and was recorded and is available online – Roberts spoke candidly about his strategy for achieving extreme policy goals that he supports but are out of step with the views of a majority of Americans.
Outlawing birth control is the “hardest” political battle facing conservatives in the future, the 50-year-old political strategist said, but he urged conservatives to pursue even small legislative victories – what […]
Josh Marshall, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Talking Points Memo - Talking Points Memo
Stephan:
If you are a woman how would you feel about your state government, or even the federal government, monitoring your menstrual cycle? Criminal Trump’s Frankenstein signed a bill
This spring, HHS finalized new regulations under HIPAA to limit law enforcement access to medical records tied to reproductive health. The rule was first proposed in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision as a way to limit the ability of state and local law enforcement agencies to access medical records to stymie or criminalize access to legal reproductive health services, most specifically abortions, but not only abortions. It also applies to contraception and the full range of other endangered reproductive care.
So for instance, consider the ability of a woman from an abortion-ban state to travel to another state to get a legal abortion, or her ability to receive legal abortion drugs through the mail. The news has been filled with proposed or actual laws which would attempt to restrict travel to receive abortions in other states, charge those who travel or criminalize those who might facilitate such travel or facilitate the legal shipment of prescribed abortion drugs […]
I have been telling you for decades now that based on objectively verifiable social outcome data Red State Republican governance is always inferior to Blue State Democratic governance and always produces significantly less wellbeing for the people who live in those Red States. In every election it always amazes me that the voters in Red States don’t seem to understand this and, by voting for Republicans, they are assuring their lives will be more stressed and miserable. Here is yet more proof of what I am saying.
Summary: For at least the last 40 years, pay and job quality for workers across the South has been inferior compared to other regions—thanks to the racist and anti-worker Southern economic development model.
Key findings
For over four decades, the typical worker in the South has been paid less than their counterparts in every other region of the country.
The share of workers in the South who are paid less than $15 per hour—22% in 2021—is substantially higher than that of any other region.
Workers across the South are the least likely to receive employer-provided health insurance or a pension compared with workers in other regions. They are also least likely to have paid sick leave.
The South has by far the lowest rates of union coverage; the states with the lowest rates in 2023 are South Carolina (3%), North Carolina (3.3%), and Louisiana (5.1%)—compared with 11.2% nationally.
Why this matters
Lower wages and less access to health insurance, pensions, and paid leave for workers are deliberate outcomes of the Southern economic development model. Southerners from all backgrounds—across race, ethnicity, gender, immigrant statuses, and income levels—must come together to demand a new economic model that centers and empowers workers and families.
MARGIE MASON AND ROBIN MCDOWELL, Investigative Reporters - Associated Press
Stephan:
As I have written and published,(see SR Archive) the American Gulag is the largest in the world with the largest number of prisoners under lock and key of any country in the world. And this system has produced another effect. Slavery has not ended in the United States, particularly the Southern Red States, where they literally force prisoners to work for no pay whatever or a few pennies long hours on what were formerly slave plantations. It is that blatant. It is all incredibly racist as well.
Beneath the blazing summer sun on a former slave plantation, Lamont Gross and fellow prisoners stooped in long rows, picking vegetables by hand under the watchful eyes of armed guards on horseback. He said breaks were short and infrequent, with nothing to protect workers from the heat.
“I saw guys collapse,” Gross said of his days on the so-called farm line at Louisiana’s state penitentiary, where men work for pennies an hour or nothing at all and face punishment if they refuse. “There were dudes that got heat stroke. There were dudes with underlying conditions, older or had some sort of disability, but they had to go out there, too.”
As daily temperatures hit record highs across much of the South, a federal judge took an unusual step, challenging the treatment of mostly Black incarcerated workers in the fields.
America’s largest maximum-security prison, known as Angola, […]
Recently I have done articles on the Incel movement of celibate men, and yesterday I published a piece on the “Boy Sober” movement of women. Now this. Increasingly younger men and women are not making having children a priority in their lives. The net-net of this is that our population is going to get older — which has all kinds of negative implications — and, except for immigration, smaller. To remain stable in its population a country has to have 2.1 children born for every death. The fear of the 1970s that America would be devastated by overpopulation turns out to be a fear-based fantasy and miscalculation by futurists.
When Jurnee McKay, 25, imagines having children, a series of scary scenarios pop into her mind: the “horrors” of childbirth, risks associated with pregnancy, a flighty potential partner, exorbitant child care costs.
Abortion care restrictions are also on her list of fears. So Ms. McKay, a nursing student in Orlando, decided to eliminate the possibility of an accidental pregnancy. But the first doctor she consulted refused to remove her fallopian tubes, she said, insisting that she might change her mind after meeting her “soul mate.”
“For some reason,” she said, “society looks at women who choose not to make life harder for themselves as crazy.”
Next week, she will speak with another doctor about sterilization.
Like Ms. McKay, a growing number of U.S. adults say they are unlikely to raise children, according to a study released on Thursday by the Pew Research Center. When the survey was conducted in 2023, 47 percent of those younger than 50 without children said they were unlikely ever to have children, an […]
David Corn, Washington, DC, Bureau Chief - Mother Jones
Stephan:
J.D. Vance is one of the weirdest people in the history of American politics. Spend a few moments Googling his quotes, and what he believes. The Republican Party in 2024 is running a crook and a weirdo, and in Project 2025 they tell you exactly what they have in mind for your future. It strikes me as one of the most bizarre tickets any country has ever seen.
During his acceptance speech at the Republican convention last week, Sen. J.D. Vance, the GOP vice presidential candidate, praised Donald Trump’s call for “unity.” But this year, Vance endorsed a new book co-written by a far-right conspiracy-monger that calls progressives “unhumans” and claims they are waging an “Irregular Communist Revolution” against American civilization.
The book, Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), was written by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec. Posobiec is a well-known alt-right agitator and conservative media personality who promoted the bonkers Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Lisec is a professional ghostwriter. And their book professes to be a history of communist and leftist revolutionary abuses over the decades—but with a twist. They claim, “For as long as there have been beauty and truth, love and life, there have also been the ugly liars who hate and kill.” And these “people of anti-civilization” have always gone by different names: communists, socialists, leftists, and progressives. The […]