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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 ruthless, nasty incompetent madness of the Trump coup and its dismemberment of the CDC, and healthcare generally are beginning to impact states. Here is a story from Iowa, a state with an abnormally high cancer rate. Personally, I think this high rate is the result of the toxins used in chemical monoculture agriculture, but whatever the cause, the high rate is what it is. And Iowa is a largely rural state where telemedicine has become a critical part of healthcare. Trump and his Frankenstein Musk are trying to shut telemedicine down, and the Republicans in Congress can’t get up from kissing Trump’s ass to do anything to help you. In my next story I will give you the most accurate information about telemedicine I can find.
Bri McNulty pictured when she was in Atlanta for training in the CDC’s Public Health Associate Program. She and all other members of the competitive program in her cohort, deployed around the country, were fired by the Trump administration earlier this month. Credit: Bri McNulty / npr
Kathie Evenhouse has lived in cities, but what she loves about rural life is how people care for one another, helping drive neighbors to doctors’ appointments, for example.
Evenhouse herself is 73 and has had multiple cancers — in the soft tissue near her spine, as well as her thyroid, blood, and left leg. Most of her doctors work in Iowa City — an hour and a half’s drive from where she lives in Pella, the small town best known for manufacturing windows that go by the same name.
Care closer to home
Mahaska Health, on the other hand, is a 25-bed hospital that’s in Oskaloosa, relatively close to home. From there, Evenhouse can remotely access doctors from around the state to help her decide her care. Recently, for example, a team determined surgery on […]
The Trump coup is explicitly designed to make you and your family less healthy. Of course, Trump and his Frankenstein Musk don’t say that, but what they are doing tells us everything we need to know. There is an enormous amount of misinformation on the social media platforms about telemedicine. But this report on Snopes, I think, can be trusted. I have also checked the Medicare government site but the information on that site is not as clear and as well presented, so I am using this.
Credit: Getty
In February 2025, a rumor spread that Medicare would stop covering telehealth services — which allow patients to access health care remotely using digital technology — as of April 1, 2025.
On Feb. 20, 2025, U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, posted an image on X that said Medicare would “stop covering most telehealth services (phone and video visits)” from the beginning of April (archived). It also said people with a telehealth appointment after that date might be contacted to switch to an in-person appointment. At the time of this writing, the post had amassed 2.9 million views.
Khanna also posted a video to TikTok including the same image. In it, he told viewers: “Breaking news, the Trump administration just announced that Medicare will stop covering telehealth starting April 1. This is going to be devastating for so many seniors who are homebound or don’t live close to a doctor’s office.”
Francesca D’Annunzio, David McHam Investigative Reporting Fellow - Texas Observer
Stephan:
Here is the fact-based truth about what is going on with deportation. Two things stand out for me. The first is that the Trump coup is actually deporting fewer people than Biden’s presidency did. The second is that Trump is now basically militarizing local and state police exactly as Hitler did. If you track the Trump coup carefully, it is amazing how closely it aligns with how Hitler dismantled Germany’s democracy, and how little corporate media is recognizing this equivalency, and making that point. The same silence happened with German media as the Nazis rose to power.
Police listen to President Trump in New York in 2017. Credit: Evan Vucci / AP
Since he began touting it on the campaign trail, the idea that President Donald Trump could enact “mass deportations”—totalling perhaps a million a year or more—has been criticized as a tall order. In his first term, Trump’s administration only carried out about 1.5 million removals total, well short of the yearly deportation rates set by the Obama administration.
Now, first-month deportations data obtained by Reuters shows Trump expelling immigrants at a slower rate than Joe Biden did last year, when the Democrat ramped up his deportation efforts. Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) initially shared daily arrest counts on social media, with numbers approaching 1,000, but has since ceased the practice. Population counts in ICE detention under Trump 2.0 have increased from around 40,000 to around 41,000.
Though they’ve successfully spread fear among immigrant communities, Trump and his border czar Tom Homan—who has pledged to run “the biggest deportation […]
The 28 February “Don’t Buy for 24 hours” boycott doesn’t seem to have amounted to much. What that tells me is that a large percentage of Americans don’t yet realize what is going in their country with the Trump coup. Very sad.
Many consumers nationwide plan to participate in a 24-hour economic blackout on Friday, which started after midnight, to protest what they call corporate greed, companies that have rolled back their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and President Donald Trump’s efforts to eliminate federal DEI programs since taking office.
During Friday’s one-day event, consumers participating in the boycott are encouraged not to spend any money anywhere for one day. If they have to spend, they are encouraged to buy from a local business.
It is difficult to gauge the economic impact of a one-day action with data. But one measure showed Amazon sales were up slightly instead of down.
The 24-hour economic blackout is one of several protests launched by consumer groups, which also includes specific boycotts against Target by national activists upset with the retailer for its retreat from DEI efforts.
What is the Feb. 28 consumer blackout?
The organizer of the boycott, John Schwarz, goes by TheOneCalledJai on Instagram. He previously told USA TODAY he started the “bold” idea because the time […]
And so criminal Trump’s self-created recession begins. All you Trump voters, I hope you enjoy it, you chose it.
A customer shops for produce at an H-E-B grocery store on Feb. 12, 2025 in Austin, Texas. Credit: Brandon Bell | Getty
The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow tracker of incoming data is indicating that gross domestic product is on pace to shrink by 1.5% for the first quarter.
While the tracker is volatile through the quarter and typically becomes more reliable much later in the quarter, it does coincide with some other indicators showing a growth slowdown.
Early economic data for the first quarter of 2025 is pointing towards negative growth, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta measure.
The central bank’s GDPNow tracker of incoming metrics is indicating that gross domestic product is on pace to shrink by 1.5% for the January-through-March period, according to an update posted Friday morning.
Fresh indicators showed that consumers spent less than expected during the inclement January weather and exports were weak, which led to the downgrade. Prior to Friday’s consumer spending report, GDPNow had been indicating growth of 2.3% for the quarter.
While the tracker is volatile and typically becomes a more reliable measure […]
The Trump coup is now destroying the National Weather Service, so your weather reports will deteriorate in accuracy. Criminal Trump is going to attempt to privatize the National Weather Service and let one of the oligarchs that bought him his job own the NWS and turn it into a profit-making system for themselves. All you Republican farmers, foresters, and fishermen, hope you love what’s coming, even as it destroys your livelihood.
Weather Service station Credit: DNYUZ
Twice a day for years, meteorologists in Kotzebue, Alaska, have launched weather balloons far into the sky to measure data like wind speed, humidity and temperature, and translated the information the balloons sent back into weather forecasts and models. It’s a ritual repeated at dozens of weather stations around the United States.
On Thursday morning, the National Weather Service, which for years has struggled with worker shortages around the country, announced that it had “indefinitely suspended” the launches from Kotzebue because of a lack of staffing.
Hours later, word of mass layoffs began to spread at the Weather Service and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. More than 800 people were expected to lose their jobs, the latest cuts in the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to reshape the federal work force. As they have elsewhere, the cuts appeared to have been focused on probationary employees who are easier to dismiss.
Though not entirely unexpected, the terminations were shocking to employees of the Weather Service, the government agency responsible for […]
As with all fascist oligarch governments, criminal Trump and his minions are cutting off information the government provided for free as a service. The result will be that help and support from a wide range of agencies, including Social Security, IRS, Medicare, and Medicaid, will be severely limited in the support they can provide. Given the last month’s news about what Trump’s coup is doing to American lives, it should be clear by now that criminal Trump couldn’t care less about your personal wellbeing.
The 18F tech unit was cut Saturday morning. | Credit: Jacquelyn Martin / AP
The General Services Administration cleaved one of its technology units Saturday morning as part of a Trump administration directive to cull the federal workforce and reduce government spending.
The agency announced the cut to the 18F office — which employs researchers, website designers and product managers — on Saturday at around 1 a.m., according to an internal email obtained by POLITICO.
The cuts affected about 70 product and account managers; procurement specialists; user interface engineers; researchers; and front-end, content and service designers, said a GSA manager who, like other government workers in this story, spoke anonymously to avoid retribution. About two dozen more 18F employees were slashed in February when the agency cut probationary staffers.
The 18F department was responsible for building key government services like Login.gov, the central login system for programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. This work touches many agencies, which means cuts here could have a ripple effect across the government.
“This decision was made with explicit direction from the […]
The Trump coup, as one of its main goals, is eliminating any preparation for climate change, or encouraging transition out of the carbon energy era. I don’t think criminal Trump is smart enough to really understand what climate change is going to mean to the United States. Or, maybe, he just figures he will be dead by the time it is the overwhelming issue so he doesn’t care and just wants to help the carbon energy oligarchs who bought him his job.
U.S. Coal powered electric plant. Credit: Getty
President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, is reportedly pursuing plans that would wipe away most federal climate change rules with a single move.
According to Bloomberg, the EPA considered scrapping “its formal conclusion that greenhouse gases endanger the public, a move that would sweep away the legal foundation for regulations limiting planet-warming pollution from power plants, automobiles and oil wells.”
The EPA would rewrite the so-called endangerment finding at the heart of most climate change rules if Zeldin has his way, sources told Bloomberg.
Trump has frequently referred to the rules as the “green new scam,” but it was unclear if he had signed on to the plan.
“This is the holy grail of the climate agenda,” prominent climate change denier Marc Morano told the outlet. “If you want to permanently cripple the United States climate agenda you have to go at the heart of it. This is the heart of it: the endangerment finding.”
From building new power plants to eliminating incentives for electric vehicles, most climate change initiatives could quickly be reprioritized if Zeldin has his way.
