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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 facts about the effects of American gun psychosis are indisputable and irrefutable. We have what amounts to an addiction epidemic that separates us from the other countries of the developed world. Look at these charts. This is the profile of who we are as a society.
How does the US compare with other countries?
There were 14,400 gun-related homicides in 2019.
Killings involving a gun accounted for nearly three quarters of all homicides in the US in that year.
That’s a larger proportion of homicides than in Canada, Australia, England and Wales, and many other countries.
Who owns the world’s guns?
While it is difficult to know exactly how many guns civilians own around the world, by every estimate the US, with more than 390 million, is far out in front. The latest figures from the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss-based leading research project, are for 2018.
Switzerland and Finland are two of the European countries with the most guns per person – they both have compulsory military service for all men over the age of 18. The Finnish interior ministry says about 60% of gun permits are granted for hunting – a popular pastime in Finland. Cyprus and Yemen also have military service.
Dominic Erdozain, Research Fellow at Emory University - CNN
Stephan: The fantasy tale the gun psychotics tell themselves about the 2nd Amendment is nonsense. And the idea that today we have people wandering around with everything from pistols to military-grade combat weapons committing mass murders with almost daily regularity would appall the Founders.
Every time America suffers a mass shooting, I wonder how James Madison would have reacted.Despite the grinding familiarity of gun massacres, today’s America seems to have developed strategies of denial. Many on the right would arm everyone except “felons” and “the mentally ill,” and the left teaches a version of the same dichotomy: The problem is not “firearms themselves,” it is often argued. It is “who gets access to them.”
The founders did not think that way. They did not divide the world into good guys and bad guys, darkness and light. “If men were angels,” wrote Madison, “no government would be necessary.” But they are not. The founders held what may be termed a democratic theory of tyranny: a conviction that anybody is capable of violence. “Remember,” wrote Abigail Adams to her husband in 1776, “all men would be tyrants if they could.”The minds that framed the Constitution had none of the gun culture’s faith in “the law-abiding citizen”: the airy […]
Stephan: THe warnings have been coming for years, and we just haven't been taking them seriously enough because atmospheric CO2 is higher than it has ever been in 15 million years. And you can bet there are going to be major consequences resulting from this willful ignorance.
The concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide surged past 420 parts per million for the first time in recorded history this past weekend, according to a measurement taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the Big Island of Hawaii.
When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research station “began collecting CO2 measurements in the late 1950s, atmospheric CO2 concentration sat at around 315 PPM,” the Washington Postreported. “On Saturday, the daily average was pegged at 421.21 PPM—the first time in human history that number has been so high.”
Climate activist Greta Thunberg took notice of NOAA’s most recent data on CO2 levels. She described the first-ever documented eclipse of 420 PPM of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere as “truly groundbreaking.”
Exceeding 420 PPM of the heat-trapping gas “is a disconcerting milestone in the human-induced warming of the planet, around the halfway point on our path toward doubling preindustrial CO2 levels,” the Post noted, adding:
There is special significance in reaching and surpassing a concentration of 416 PPM. It means we’ve passed the midpoint between preindustrial […]
Stephan: "Stay out of politics," Mitch Mcconnell tells corporations but, oh yes, please keep sending money. But, of course, in the United States thanks to Citizens United, the worst Supreme Court decision in the last 100 years, giving money is politics. You pay for what you support. And this is what a number of corporations support: Voter suppression to make it harder for non-Whites, the elderly, and the young to vote. Please stop doing business with these corporations if you presently do so. And you wonder why I keep saying our democracy is under the greatest threat it has faced since 1861?
Since 2015, AT&T, Comcast, UnitedHealth Group, Walmart, and other big businesses have donated a combined $50 million to state Republican lawmakers who are currently supporting voter suppression bills across the United States—generous political spending at odds with recent corporate efforts to rebrand as defenders of voting rights.
A new report (pdf) released Monday morning by consumer advocacy group Public Citizen found that during the 2020 election cycle alone, U.S. corporations donated $22 million to Republican architects of voter suppression bills that are advancing through state legislatures nationwide.
“Corporations should keep their money out of our democracy—and Congress must put the people back in charge by swiftly passing the For The People Act.” —Rick Claypool, Public Citizen
“AT&T [since 2015] has given the most, $811,000,” Public Citizen found, citing data from The National Institute on Money in Politics. “AT&T is followed by Altria/Philip Morris, Comcast, UnitedHealth Group, Walmart, State Farm, and Pfizer. Household names that fell just out of the top 25 list… include Nationwide ($182,000), Merck ($180,000), CVS ($174,000), John Deere ($159,000), and Caterpillar ($157,000).”
“This is why you follow the money, not the good PR,” […]
Stephan: "The number of billionaires on Forbes’ 35th annual ranking swelled by 660 to 2,755 — a roughly 30 percent jump from a year ago — and 493 of them are first-timers. Seven of eight are richer than they were before the pandemic. Forbes calculates net worth by using stock prices and exchange rates from March 5."
I think this may be the most obscene and offputting sentence I have ever published. At the same time this was happening 8 million Americans were reduced to poverty.
Could there be a clearer proof that something is fundamentally wrong with the American social order that makes profit its only social priority?
Here is my prediction: As climate change stresses human civilization in a thousand ways, those societies which make wellbeing their priority, and adapt and create the post-carbon, post-pollution world it will demand, will prosper and change geopolitics
The number of billionaires on Forbes’ 35th annual ranking swelled by 660 to 2,755 — a roughly 30 percent jump from a year ago — and 493 of them are first-timers. Seven of eight are richer than they were before the pandemic. Forbes calculates net worth by using stock prices and exchange rates from March 5.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, with an estimated fortune of $177 billion, topped the list for the fourth year running. Tesla chief executive Elon Musk came in at No. 2 at $151 billion. The shares of both companies soared last year, largely contributing to both men’s net worth and causing them to toggle for the “richest man” title on various lists.
Bezos, who will step down as Amazon CEO and become executive chairman later this year, owns The Washington Post and Blue Origin, an aerospace company that is developing […]
Stephan: The Dominion story has been out of the U.S. news recently because it has been dominated by Republican scandals, grifts, and corruption. But that does not mean what is going on has stopped happening. Because we no longer have a functioning two-party legislative system, actual policy is increasingly being made through executive action and at the judicial level. The Dominion case is, I think, an example of this in process, as this report lays out.
Dominion has filed defamation lawsuits against several Trump allies for pushing election ‘radioactive falsehoods’ – could it triumph?
When Donald Trump and his allies pushed the “big lie” of voter fraud and a stolen election, it seemed nothing could stop them spreading disinformation with impunity.
Politicians and activists’ pleas fell on deaf ears. TV networks and newspapers fact-checked in vain. Social media giants proved impotent.
But now a little-known tech company, founded 18 years ago in Canada, has the conspiracy theorists running scared. The key: suing them for defamation, potentially for billions of dollars.
“Libel laws may prove to be a very old mechanism to deal with a very new phenomenon of massive disinformation,” said Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist. “We have all these fact checkers but lots of people don’t care. Nothing else seems to work, so maybe this will.”
The David in this David and Goliath story is Dominion […]
Stephan: If you have been reading SR for a while you know that for over a decade I have been talking about a major transformative trend that I see going on in the United States, a trend almost unique to America, because unlike Europe or Asia we are and always have been a nation primarily of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants. I am speaking about the fact that within the next 20 to 25 years the United States is going to become a majority-minority nation. No one racial group will be a dominant majority.
For many Americans, even most Americans, I hope, that isn't a big issue. Your physician may wel be Asian, your mayor a Black person. Look at the number of mixed-race couples you see on television series and in television advertising. But for a small but substantial group of White people, particularly White men, this is a huge issue that they see as growing larger with more threatening with each passing day. These are the Whites who find the change in the culture threatening, and who are resentful and fearful about what they see as a loss of status and privilege. White nationalism dominates what was once Christianity in this country. It is the power source of the Republican Party, and it was fully on display on the 6th of January.
Here is a very good report on this trend, which is going to be a growing source of violence unless we acknowledge it, and starting in schools defuse it.
When the political scientist Robert Pape began studying the issues that motivated the 380 or so people arrested in connection with the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, he expected to find that the rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession.
But instead he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.
If Mr. Pape’s initial conclusions — published on Tuesday in The Washington Post — hold true, they would suggest that the Capitol attack has historical echoes reaching back to before the Civil War, he said in an interview over the weekend. In the shorter term, he added, the […]
Stephan: The two economists with the best track record for analysis and solution recommendations, in my opinion, are Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. I am not surprised they are both Nobel Laureates in economics.
Both men told us in the event that the trillion-dollar tax cut the Republicans were passing was was crap and would not do what Trump and the Congressional Republicans said it would. Now in 2021 Krugman has taken a look at the results. And what does he see? Here are some of the highlights. Stiglitz and Krugman were right, of course. The tax cut did nothing but make the rich richer.
President Joe Biden has proposed a corporate tax hike as a way to pay for his ambitious infrastructure plan, and some Republicans are objecting vehemently — insisting that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was a raging success. But liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman disagrees, slamming the Trump-era GOP tax cuts as a “dismal failure” in a Twitter thread posted on April 5.
Passed when Donald Trump was president and Republicans controlled both branches of Congress, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act lowered the United States’ corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% — and Biden has proposed increasing it to 28%. Many Democrats have emphasized that the Republican tax cuts of late 2017 did precious little for the American middle class and greatly increased the federal deficit.
Krugman, in his Twitter thread, writes, “I’ve been a bit surprised to see some Republicans opposing Biden’s plans by claiming that the Trump tax cut for corporations was a big success. I thought they’d gone into hiding […]