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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: The three second-raters that Trump and McConnell put on the court, who have aligned themselves with Thomas and Alito two other second-raters appointed by earlier Republican administrations are actively working to render American democracy a pseudo-democracy. I suspect you have already seen several articles from legal scholars making this point in print or on one of the news channels. Here is one that encapsulates an overall assessment. As I have said repeatedly none of this is a coincidence; it is all a carefully planned strategy on the part of Republican White supremacists. We are in a cold civil war, racial in nature as it was in 1861, and the only way to stop this is massive, and I do mean massive, citizen pushback at the ballot box. So which side are you on?
Trump appointed Supreme Court Associate Justices
“The harmful rulings coming out of this court make it critical that Congress pass legislation to protect voting rights and shore up our democracy.” —Ben Jealous, PFAW
Confirming fears progressive critics shared ahead of the confirmations of all three U.S. Supreme Court Justices appointed by former President Donald Trump, an analysis published Friday details the devastating impact of having a GOP supermajority on the nation’s highest court.
“The 2020-2021 term that just ended shows that our rights are not safe at the Supreme Court, and that we must work to change the makeup of the court,” warns the progressive advocacy group People For the American Way (PFAW) in its latest annual report.
This is the first term that includes Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who Trump appointed after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last year. The other two Trump appointees are Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.
“This Supreme Court is dominated by Trump-appointed justices, with predictably disastrous results for voting rights as well as workers, consumers, and immigrants this term,” said PFAW president Ben Jealous in a statement Friday.
Stephan: Everyone I know who has an EV is amazed at the reduced maintenance costs. The real hang-up is going to be getting charging stations built across America. What we need is the kind of single-minded focus Dwight Eisenhower created when he decided to make the internet highway system a reality. It created millions of jobs and changed the American economy in the United States.
EV charging
Maintenance costs for a light-duty, battery-powered car are around 40 percent less per mile than for a gas-powered car, according to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.
The Office Of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy highlighted the findings in a new post, which explains that electric vehicles lack timing belts, oxygen sensors, fuel filters, spark plugs, multi-speed transmissions and other parts than can prove costly to service in conventional cars. And, whereas gas-powered cars require regular oil changes, EVs have no need for motor oil.
The report finds that while gasoline-powered cars cost around 10 cents per mile on average to maintain, electric cars cost only around 6 cents per mile. Hybrid cars cost around 9 cents per mile to maintain, with savings on brake maintenance making them cheaper to service than conventional vehicles. The findings add to a growing body of work showing that, factoring in savings on maintenance and fuel, EVs are often cheaper to own than conventional cars, despite having higher upfront costs.
The difference in maintenance costs between gasoline-powered cars […]
Stephan: If you have ever travelled in Europe, Japan, or China you know how inferior the American infrastructure is. Our airports look like those of developing nations, our passenger rail system is a bad joke from the 1950s, our bridges are an aging catastrophe waiting to happen. And everything about our infrastructure is absurdly expensive. This article raises issues that you rarely hear discussed in the media, but which are, in my opinion,of great importance.
As Congress argues over the size of the infrastructure bill and how to pay for it, very little attention is being devoted to one of the most perplexing problems: Why does it cost so much more to build transportation networks in the US than in the rest of the world?
In an interview in early June, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg acknowledged the problem, but he offered no solutions except the need to study it further.
Biden’s original infrastructure proposal included $621 billion for roads, rail, and bridges. His plan is billed not only as an infrastructure plan but one that would help respond to the climate crisis. A big part of that is making it easier for more Americans to travel by mass transit. The Biden plan noted that “America lags its peers — including Canada, the U.K., and Australia — in the on-time and on-budget delivery of infrastructure,” but that understates the problem.
Not only are these projects inordinately expensive, states and localities are not even attempting to build particularly ambitious projects. The US is the sixth-most […]
Stephan: Stop using plastic wherever and whenever you can.
Drinking water is supposed to be good for you, but what happens when you diligently carry that disposable water bottle around all day, to remind yourself to take a sip? With that sip, you take in an undue amount of plastic, according to recent research. And that’s not all.
Takeout cartons, shelf-stable wrapping, those water bottles, even canned goods can be the culprit. And while no one likes the idea of consuming plastic, most of us still shrug and throw that container in the microwave.
4 Reasons Not to Eat or Drink From Plastic Containers:
1. The plastic transfers from the containers to your food.
Humans ingest at least 74,000 particles of microplastic a year, according to research in The Journal of Food Science. A lot of this comes from our takeout containers. In fact, we could be ingesting more than 200 particles a week, just from our plastic food storage units.
Microplastics from the containers themselves flake off into the food, accounting for 30 percent of the plastic intake from those foods, according to a […]
Stephan: Now you see why the Republicans blocked Garland's appointment to the court and why it has been so important for McConnell and Trump to get three MAGA justices on the court. This is another step in the dismantlement of the substance of American democracy, replacing it with A White supremacy pseudo-democracy.
What I am hoping to see in 2022, is a massive turnout of people of color, young people, and Whites who aren't frightened by the country becoming a majority-minority nation. Such a large turnout that it overwhelms all these cowardly voter restriction laws. We are in a cold civil war, no less threatening to America's future than the hot war of the 1860s. If you don't get that, in my opinion, you don't understand what is going on in this country.
Nicholas Konrad/The New York Times
The 1965 Voting Rights Act was one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history. By outlawing racial discrimination in voting and imposing federal oversight in states with histories of discriminating, it finally enforced the 15th Amendment and marked the first time the nation could call itself a truly representative democracy. Until the last decade, the law occupied a sacred spot in the American legal system. In 2006, Congress reauthorized the law nearly unanimously.
Since then, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been dismantling it, piece by piece.
The latest blow came Thursday, when all six conservative justices voted to uphold two Arizona voting laws despite lower federal courts finding clear evidence that the laws make voting harder for voters of color — whether Black, Latino or Native American. One law requires election officials to throw out ballots that were cast in the wrong precinct; the other bars most people and groups from collecting voters’ absentee ballots and dropping them off at polling places.
Stephan: More corruption from the Trump administration, but it is much more than that. Our laws have been structured by the Congress, and state legislatures, and interpreted by the Supreme Court in a way that favors the rich, both individuals and corporations. We have lost our way. Instead of using our democracy to create wellbeing, we have corrupted it, so that the only thing that matters is short-term profit. Here is the proof of what I am saying.
Lianne Sheppard was sitting in her office on a Friday afternoon when a colleague approached her with an old study on the safety of chlorpyrifos. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency had used the study to set a safety level for the exposure to the pesticide, which is widely used on fruits and vegetables. But when Sheppard, a professor and biostatistician at the University of Washington, looked at the original research that was the basis for the paper and the safety thresholds that were calculated from it, she realized that the underlying data didn’t support its conclusion.
“I tried to reproduce their analysis, and I couldn’t,” Sheppard said of the study, which was commissioned by Dow Chemical, the maker of chlorpyrifos, in the late 1960s. The research was conducted by an Albany Medical College professor named Frederick Coulston, who exposed 16 incarcerated men to the pesticide, dividing them into four groups — a low-, medium-, and high-dose group as well as a control — and recording their nervous system responses. The resulting paper, […]
Stephan: The impact of sea rise in Florida will not be general, instead, it will be very localized. But it will be devastating.
The Champlain Towers complex in Surfside, Florida, on Tuesday. Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty
Danny Rivero was one of the first reporters on the scene of the Champlain Towers South condo collapse in the town of Surfside, Florida, not too far from Miami Beach. He’s been there almost every day since, chronicling what is still, technically, a search and rescue mission. The death toll now stands at 12, but 149 people are still unaccounted-for. And Rivero says the initial shock of the event is “starting to wear off,” turning to grief—and anger. “This didn’t happen for no reason,” he says. “Even though it came out of nowhere, in a sense, it did not come out of nowhere. There were reasons behind why this happened.”
Florida sea rise projections
On Wednesday’s episode of What Next, I talked to Rivero, a reporter for the local public radio station WLRN, about the decisions that led up to the disaster, the role of climate change, and what […]
Stephan: History is beginning to render its verdict, about what you would expect, 41st out of 45, and by the time all the criminal cases against Trump are settled he may move further down to the very bottom. He may well be in prison, which I think would be good for the country. We need to restructure ourselves so that wellbeing is our national priority, wellbeing for everyone regardless of race, gender, or any other difference. We are one people or we are going to be nothing.
Former President Donald Trump was ranked near the bottom of a new list by historians surveyed on who they believe the best U.S. presidents are, and received the lowest leadership grades of any commander-in-chief over the past 150 years.
It was Trump’s first appearance on C-SPAN’s Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership, with the one-term president ranked 41st out of America’s 45 former executives.
Rated by a group of over 140 historians, the survey ranks former U.S. presidents on 10 different leadership qualities, such as “public persuasion,” “international relations” and “crisis leadership.” Since 2000, C-SPAN has taken the survey after every change in White House administration.
On Wednesday, C-SPAN tweeted that the 2021 survey saw a 50 percent increase in the number of historians participating, and a big jump in the diversity of respondents — as defined by demographic information such as race, gender, age and philosophy.
The results of this year’s survey indicate the divergence between Trump’s standing among academics and how his followers have viewed his presidency — historians hold him in the lowest regard of any president since Reconstruction, yet he continues to hold an iron grip on leadership […]
