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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.
Stephan: I have two reactions to the Bezos space trip: First, I think it is an obscene example of American wealthy inequality. Forty percent of American families would be pressed to write a $400 check, while a couple of men are so rich they can have their own space programs. Second, it provides irrefutable data showing that the media simply does not understand the implications of climate change, or doesn't want to lose the advertising revenue from the corporations that are creating climate change.
Broadcast news networks are notoriously bad at covering the climate crisis, dedicating a vanishingly small amount of airtime — year after year — to the grave existential threat despite the many potential stories they could be running about it.
Their neglect of the climate crisis is on stark display in a new statistic: According to Media Matters for America, morning TV shows spent nearly as much time on Jeff Bezos’s space launch on July 20, 2021 as they did on the climate crisis in all of 2020.
The morning shows on broadcast networks combined spent 212 minutes covering Bezos’s space trip just on Tuesday alone, Media Matters researchers found. Meanwhile, in the entirety of last year, the shows spent a combined 267 minutes on the climate crisis.
Bezos’s space trip was 11 minutes long. By contrast, the climate crisis has been ongoing for decades and daily threatens the fabric of our society and the continued existence of our species, if it continues unabated.
Further, Bezos’s trip to space was largely a PR stunt, meant to garner excitement around the billionaire and his space company while also buying fawning coverage from […]
Stephan: Our democracy is under a coordinated attack. Why this is going on, who is doing it, and who are its servants is presented in this and the following report which, I believe, give an accurate assessment.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) questions members of the Biden administration during a hearing on April 20, 2021 in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty
Our entire political system is designed to let corporate money speak, through campaign contributions and corporate lobbying.
The hilarious 2006 film “Idiocracy” offers a vivid depiction of American politics. The movie is classified as a sci-fi comedy, but it is more like a searing documentary. It almost perfectly describes America’s crisis of survival today.
In “Idiocracy,” set 500 years in the future, America is suffering from famine. Every public function has been turned over to some self-serving corporate interest. A fruit-drink company controls crop irrigation, and the nation’s crops are being poisoned by the fruit drink. In the meantime, the public is kept in a state of abject ignorance and distraction by demolition derbies, drugs, and debauchery. The nation is saved when an average Joe, miraculously resuscitated from the distant past, reintroduces clean water to the crops, thereby saving the nation. He is hailed as a genius for […]
Alex Kotch, Investigative Reporter - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is today's Democrat Scum Award. Yes, thats right alt-right readers, I highlight scummy behaviorthat I see in public figures regardless of party. What I care about is fostering wellbeing not partisanship. This Scum Award goes to Joe Manchin, and this well-researched article spells out his lack of ethics. As I have said before, what Manchin wants is to stay in office. That's what governs his behavior.
Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, chairs a Senate energy and natural resources committee hearing. Credit: J Scott Applewhite/AP
As “thousand-year” heat waves caused by the climate crisis rock the west coast and biblical floods engulf major cities, Senate Democrats are negotiating a $3.5tn budget package that could include an attempt to slow the use of fossil fuels over the next decade.
One prominent senator is very concerned about proposals to scale back oil, gas and coal usage. He recently argued that those who want to “get rid of” fossil fuels are wrong. Eliminating fossil fuels won’t help fight global heating, he claimed, against all evidence. “If anything, it would be worse.”
Which rightwing Republican uttered these false, climate crisis-denying words?
Wrong question. The speaker was a Democrat: Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
West Virginia is a major coal-producing state. But Manchin’s investment in dirty energy goes far beyond the economic interests of the voters who elect him every six years. In fact, coal has made Manchin and his family very wealthy. He founded the private coal brokerage Enersystems in 1988 and still owns a big stake in the company, which his son currently runs.
Stephan: You didn't think the oil industry was going to sink into the oblivion shared with carriage makers, and whale oil without a fight did you? Of course not. As this article makes clear they are going to spend millions in hopes of protecting billions. It's not going to work, of course, because climate change is going to trump their greed. But they are certainly going to try.
When Royal Dutch Shell published its annual environmental report in April, it boasted that it was investing heavily in renewable energy. The oil giant committed to installing hundreds of thousands of charging stations for electric vehicles around the world to help offset the harm caused by burning fossil fuels.
On the same day, Shellissued a separate report revealing that its single largest donation to political lobby groups last year was made to the American Petroleum Institute, one of the US’s most powerful trade organizations, which drives the oil industry’s relationship with Congress.
Contrary to Shell’s public statements in support of electric vehicles, API’s chief executive, Mike Sommers, has pledged to resist a raft of Joe Biden’s environmental measures, including proposals to fund new charging points in the US. He claims a “rushed transition” to electric vehicles is part of “government action to limit Americans’ transportation choice”.
Shell donated more than $10m to API last year alone.
And it’s not just Shell. Most other oil conglomerates are also major funders, including ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP, although they have not made their contributions public.
Stephan: The American Southwest and Northwest are being ravaged by forest fires, Brazil's Amazon rain forest is being devastated by fire, and Russia's Siberian forest, as this report describes, is aflame.
You would think this would create an emergency congress of nations to address the climate change that is such a factor in these fires. But no. Corporate greed in each of those countries is too powerful and is blocking a sensible international response. These events are treated as disconnected singularities instead of the coordinated collapse of the earth's ecosystem they actually represent.
Millions are going to die, tens of millions more are going to suffer, and hundreds of millions are going to become migrants as a result of this stupidity. Be prepared.
The Republic of Sakha, also known as Yakutia, is especially vulnerable to wildfires. Credit: Aerial Forest Protection Service / TASS
Record heat and a historic drought in the Siberian republic of Sakha are furthering the spread of extensive wildfires across the region, regional officials have said.
The republic of Sakha, also known as Yakutia, is especially vulnerable to wildfires as more than 80% of the region is covered by boreal forest known as taiga. So far this year, Sakha has already seen record-breaking droughts and abnormally high temperatures, creating ideal conditions for severe wildfires.
More than 250 fires covering 607,000 hectares of land are currently burning across the republic, Russia’s largest region, the region’s emergencies ministry said Monday.
Smoke from the fires has reached the region’s capital of Yakutsk some 4,900 kilometers east of Moscow, damaging air quality and increasing levels of dangerous particles.
Regional head Aisen Nikolayev linked the fast-spreading wildfires to the historic drought conditions.
“There hasn’t been such a dry June [in Yakutsk] for almost 150 years,” Nikolayev said in a Facebook livestream last week. “Of course it leads to huge fires.”
Jack Healy and Sophie Kasakove, National Correspondent | Reporting Fellow - The New York Times
Stephan: If you read me regularly I have been predicting the effects climate change, and lack of water are going to have on the American Southwest. Here is an early report on that now emerging trend. This is going to become a much bigger deal in the months ahead.
Some of the last homes currently being built in Oakley, Utah. The town has cut off new development because it doesn’t have enough water to go around. Credit: Lindsay D’Addato/The New York Times
OAKLEY, UTAH — The mountain spring that pioneers used to water their hayfields and now fills people’s taps flowed reliably into the old cowboy town of Oakley for decades. So when it dwindled to a trickle in this year’s scorching drought, officials took drastic action to preserve their water: They stopped building.
During the coronavirus pandemic, the real estate market in their 1,750-person city boomed as remote workers flocked in from the West Coast and second homeowners staked weekend ranches. But those newcomers need water — water that is vanishing as a megadrought dries up reservoirs and rivers across the West.
So this spring, Oakley, about an hour’s drive east of Salt Lake City, imposed a construction moratorium on new homes that would connect to the town’s water system. It is one of the first towns in the United States to purposely stall growth for want […]
Stephan: What this pandemic has taught us, I think, is that about a third of Americans do not function capably in the real world. They prefer to hold beliefs and to base their decisions on their fears, hates, and resentments. They care only about themselves, and maybe their immediate family and a few friends. They elect officials who reflect this and watch media that supports them in their prejudices. If one of the people they trust says something like the absurd ideas in this article, no matter how bizarre and undocumented, they will believe it.
A medical worker holds a syringe with Sputnik V (Gam-COVID-Vac) vaccine against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) before administering an injection at a vaccination centre in a shopping mall in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Credit: Reuters
Some 20% of Americans believe in the conspiracy theory that microchips may have been planted inside COVID-19 vaccines that millions of people have already taken worldwide, according to a study by YouGov and The Economist that was conducted last week.
Despite a lack of evidence to support such a claim, the poll concluded overall that 15% of Americans said this conspiracy theory was “probably true” while another 5% said it was “definitely true.”
The same poll concluded that 27% of people aged 30-44 support this theory, with 8% of Biden voters and 29% of Trump voters believed it. Some 14% of Democratic voters and 32% of Republican voters also shared the same sentiment.
Misinformation regarding COVID-19 has been a controversial subject during the past year. Just recently, US President Joe Biden said that misinformation spreading on social media regarding the virus has been “killing people.”
Professors Laurence H. Tribe and Stephen I. Vladeck, Emeritus Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School | Professor University of Texas School of Law in Austin. - The New York Times
Stephan: The absolute hysteria of the christofascist Right over maintaining male dominance and the legal control of a woman's body has reached this level in Texas. It is another measure of political karma that the women of Texas voted these people into office, and will now live under their control. But, as this excellent essay makes clear, the state is now encouraging people spying on one another for reward, and that takes everything up to another level. And they expand what the Right is doing and how it could play out. I'm sorry, I would not live in Texas.
Efforts in red states to pass increasingly restrictive limits on abortions have ramped up in the past few years as the composition of the Supreme Court has made it more likely that those laws will be upheld. But a new law in Texas that’s set to go into effect on Sept. 1 is especially worrisome.
Not only has Texas banned virtually all abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy, a point at which many women do not even know they’re pregnant; it has also provided for enforcement of that ban by private citizens. If you suspect that a Texan is seeking to obtain an abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy, not only will you be able to sue the provider to try to stop it, but if you succeed, you’ll also be entitled to compensation. (And what’s known as the litigation privilege would likely protect you from a defamation claim even if you’re wrong.) The law, known as S.B. 8, effectively enlists the citizenry to act as an anti-abortion Stasi.
