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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: America has the worst wealth inequality of the 37 nations that make up the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, basically the most developed nations in the world. There are several reasons for this, but the manipulation of the tax laws to favor the rich and corporations is a major factor. The results are absurd, as this report bears witness.
A person holds a sign urging lawmakers to “Tax the Rich” at a protest in New York City on March 29, 2021. Credit: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty
For millions of ordinary people in the U.S., 2020 was a painful year in which loved ones and jobs were lost as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and its devastating economic repercussions. But for many of the country’s major corporations, last year was a lucrative one—particularly if they were among the 55 companies that paid $0 in federal income taxes on a combined $40.5 billion in profits, as a new study shows.
“We should be asking bigger questions about a tax system so flawed that it asks next to nothing of profitable corporations that derive great benefit from our economy.” —Matthew Gardner, ITEP
Released Friday, the report is based on the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy’s (ITEP) analysis of 2020 financial reports filed by the country’s largest publicly traded corporations.
Instead of paying a collective $8.5 billion in federal income taxes on last year’s profits of $40.5 billion, as mandated by the statutory 21% rate, the 55 […]
Stephan: Let me say upfront, I am a Planckian. I think the experimental evidence is overwhelming that consciousness is causal and fundamental, and that there is a continuity of consciousness. The nonlocal aspect of your consciousness, what religions the world over call the soul existed before you incarnated, and will continue after your corporeal death.
Reincarnation is a part of this continuity, and this article presents the research, which gets very little attention, pretty well. In the interest of full disclosure, I have known all the researchers mentioned, as well as the critics, for decades. The piece fairly represents their positions, the author is trying to be objective and cites both the deniers and the proponents. The problem with this piece is that in trying to be fair the author does not explicitly state that the denier side of the argument is a false equivalency.
Credit: VICE
The nightmares began when Ryan Hammons was 4 years old. He would wake up clutching his chest, telling his mother Cyndi that he couldn’t breathe and that his heart had exploded in Hollywood. But they didn’t live in Los Angeles; Hammons’s family resided in Oklahoma.
A few months prior, in early 2009, Ryan had started talking about going home to Hollywood and pleaded with Cyndi to take him to see his other family. He would yell, “Action!” and pretend to direct films when he played with friends; he knew scenes from a cowboy movie he had never watched; and said a cafe reminded him of Paris, where he had never been. He talked about his child, worldly travels, and his job at an agency where people changed their names. Cyndi didn’t think much of it until the nightmares set in and Ryan started describing death.
Hoping to figure out what he was talking about, Cyndi went to the public library and checked out a few books about Hollywood. She was flipping through one of them when Ryan […]
Stephan: The White evangelical christofascist community by refusing vaccination is threatening the wellbeing of the rest of us as this article explains. it is one thing to be stupid and endanger your own life, but this threatens their neighbors, and people they walk or stand next to in grocery stores, dry cleaners or anywhere people gather. They talk Jesus but live and act out Donald Trump.
Trump and White supremacist christofascist evangeliical supporters Credit: Raw Story
White evangelicals in America are rejecting the coronavirus vaccine and threatening the country’s goal of emerging from the pandemic by achieving herd immunity.
“The deeply held spiritual convictions or counterfactual arguments may vary. But across white evangelical America, reasons not to get vaccinated have spread as quickly as the virus that public health officials are hoping to overcome through herd immunity,” the newspaper reported.
And they might not just be a threat to America.
“The opposition is rooted in a mix of religious faith and a longstanding wariness of mainstream science, and it is fueled by broader cultural distrust of institutions and gravitation to online conspiracy theories. The sheer size of the community poses a major problem for the country’s ability to recover from a pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of half a million Americans. And evangelical ideas and instincts have a way of spreading, even internationally,” the newspaper noted.
“There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in […]
Ryan Felton, Lisa Gill and Lewis Kendall, - Reader Supported News
Stephan: I have been writing about this issue for over a decade. When I was younger and traveled a great deal internationally for me the sign of whether a country was developed or developing was whether you could drink water from the tap safely. The United States back in the 1960s defined itself in part by the fact that in America you could turn on any tap and be safe. Well, today that is no longer true, or even close to true. Our infrastructure is falling apart and I think you should be very aware that not a single Republican voted or will vote for the Biden bills to bring our water systems, bridges, electricity grid, and on and on into the 21st century.
In Connecticut, a condo had lead in its drinking water at levels more than double what the federal government deems acceptable. At a church in North Carolina, the water was contaminated with extremely high levels of potentially toxic PFAS chemicals ( a group of compounds found in hundreds of household products). The water flowing into a Texas home had both – and concerning amounts of arsenic too.
All three were among locations that had water tested as part of a nine-month investigation by Consumer Reports (CR) and the Guardian into the US’s drinking water.
Since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, access to safe water for all Americans has been a US government goal. Yet millions of people continue to face serious water quality problems because of contamination, deteriorating infrastructure, and inadequate treatment at water plants.
CR and the Guardian selected 120 people from around the US, out of a pool of more than 6,000 volunteers, to test for arsenic, lead, PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), and other contaminants. The samples came from water systems that together […]
Stephan: Rex Weyler in this essay is asking what I think is a very important question. Why is it so hard to change something in our society even when it is obvious that it is destructive of our individual and social wellbeing?
Rex Weyler
I saw the danger / yet I walked / along the enchanted way. —Peter Kavanagh, Raglan Road, 1946
Over the past few decades a recurring question arises in public ecological discourse: In the face of overwhelming evidence, scientific warnings, existential urgency, and countless examples of ecological disintegration, why are societies worldwide so slow to respond appropriately?
Why, fifty years after the Limits to Growth study, are we still not able to slow human expansion and consumption? Why, fifty years after the UN first raised the issue of human population stress, are we still quibbling about whether or not we should even discuss the delicate issue? Why — 80 years after Alice Hamilton’s Exploring The Dangerous Trades, and 60 years after Rachel Carson’s, Silent Spring — are we still flooding our environments and our bodies with toxins? Why — after 33 international climate meetings over 41 years, two centuries since science understood the greenhouse effect — are human carbon emissions still rising?
As a species, and as diverse societies, we’re acting like an immature student, who keeps avoiding a simple homework assignment. Except […]
Stephan: Today's Republican Scum Award goes, for the umpteenth time, to the Grifter-in-Chief, Donald Trump. I don't think Donald Trump is capable of honest behavior; at every turn in his life, he has lied, cheated, and bullied. But I don't think that is what we should focus on. To me, the real issue is that a third of the country doesn't seem capable of seeing what Trump really is, or they see him and don't care that he is a crook. That willful ignorance has major implications for America.
Donald Trump, grifter, crook, liar, and bully. Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty
Donald Trump may be a man with a very limited set of talents, but he has learned to apply those talents to masterful effect. His talent is to employ shameless lies to create an image of himself in the media, and then use that media to bilk people.
Typically, a grifter runs up against the limits of public knowledge: Once he is exposed, it becomes progressively more difficult to find new marks. But here is where Trump’s particular genius exceeds all who came before him, and allowed him to operate his scam on a world-historical scale. Trump has always attracted so much media that any particular exposé of his crooked deeds is overwhelmed by the cacophony.
Shane Goldmacher reports at the New York Times that Trump’s campaign bilked donors out of tens of millions of dollars. The scam was not complicated. When people gave them money online, the donations came with pre-checked boxes authorizing the campaign to take donations every single week. They needed to uncheck the box to stop the automatic transfer.
Stephan: I rarely agreed with Republican John Boehner when he was Speaker of the House, but I never thought of him as a grifting crook. Rather I see him as the last of the real Republicans, honorable men and women with whom I might disagree, but who I never thought of as orcs, as I do most Republicans in public office today. Here is John Boehner's view of what his party has become. It is devastating, but it is important to read this and think about what he is saying, and its implications.
In the 2010 midterm election, voters from all over the place gave President Obama what he himself called “a shellacking.” And oh boy, was it ever. You could be a total moron and get elected just by having an R next to your name—and that year, by the way, we did pick up a fair number in that category.
Retaking control of the House of Representatives put me in line to be the next Speaker of the House over the largest freshman Republican class in history: 87 newly elected members of the GOP. Since I was presiding over a large group of people who’d never sat in Congress, I felt I owed them a little tutorial on governing. I had to explain how to actually get things done. A lot of that went straight through the ears of most of them, especially the ones who didn’t have brains that got in the way. Incrementalism? Compromise? That wasn’t their thing. A lot of them wanted to blow up Washington. That’s why they thought they were elected.
Stephan: I see what is described in this article happening, and I think the christofascist cult that has become what used to be Christianity as one of the most dangerous movements in the U.S. today.
Donald Trump and Jerry Falwell, Jr. at Liberty university in May 2017, Credit:Shealah Craighead
For decades, far-right White evangelical Christian fundamentalists have feared the United States would, like Western Europe, become increasingly secular — and now, according to Gallup, that has come to pass.
Gallup has been polling Americans on their religious affiliations for 82 years, beginning in 1939. The polling company has been asking, “Do you happen to be a member of a church, synagogue or mosque?” And the answer went from 73% saying “yes” in the early 1940s to only 47% saying “yes” in the early 2020s. It’s a staggering and monumental decline.
Journalist Eric Levitz analyzes this polling in an article published by New York Magazine this week, arguing that it his significant implications for American politics.
Levitz argues, “In assigning culpability for this trend, one could assemble a long list of plausible co-conspirators. The ascendance of the evangelical right likely damaged Christianity’s brand with social liberals by associating the faith with theocratic politics, while pedophilic priests and their enablers surely […]
