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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: One of the side-effects of the pandemic is that a change in modern economic theory which had already started replacing inflation as the determinant with debt has during the pandemic reached a paradigm-shifting consensus. The good news is that this new theory can allow the Biden administration to achieve real wellbeing fostering changes in America's social policies.
Congress has authorized $6 trillion in deficit spending to defeat the coronavirus. That’s more than the United States spent fighting World War II, when $4 trillion of government spending released the country from the clutches of the Great Depression.
Naturally, politicians and pundits debate whether the amount is excessive. But implicit in their seemingly routine deficit debate is a remarkable shift: Inflation has replaced debt — the old stalking horse for defeating progressive legislation — as the primary concern with deficit spending.
It’s a subtle change, with profound consequences. And it augurs the rise of a revolutionary approach to political economy, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), as the dominant paradigm in the politics of money.
Like Keynesians of yesteryear, Modern Monetary Theorists urge government to achieve full employment through fiscal policy, even when it requires deficit spending. Their comfort with large deficits emerges from an understanding that an obsession with national debt is a relic of another time, the age of gold standards and fixed currency arrangements. Today, in the age of national monetary sovereignty and free-floating currencies, countries like […]
David Badash, - Raw Story/New Civil Rights Movement
Stephan: Do I really need to say anything about the moral depravity of this Republican vote.
172 House Republicans voted against renewing the Violence Against Women Act Wednesday, just 24 hours after eight people – including seven women, six of Asian decent – were gunned down in a shooting spree at a series of Atlanta spas by a shooter who is now claiming he has a sex addiction.
The legislation passed 244-172, with a mere 29 Republicans joining Democrats to support the bill. No Democrat voted against it. The bill now heads to the Senate.
The Violence Against Women Act is Clinton-era legislation that was sponsored in 1993 by then-Senator Joe Biden. Originally so uncontroversial it passed on a voice vote in the House and 95-4 in the Senate. It must be regularly renewed, and is currently expired because then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refused to allow it to be re-authorized in 2019.
Urging passage of the critical bill, President Biden in a statement last week said: “Delay is not an option, especially when the pandemic and economic crisis have only further increased the risks of abuse and […]
Stephan: Today as I was working I thought the current racism that is so prominently in the spotlight of American culture can either be a social destroyer, or a challenge that will finally cause Americans to exorcise from our society the racism that has been our shadow since colonial times. In my view, this is an essential step to getting through the existential threat of climate change. We must create a society focused on fostering wellbeing. And wellbeing and racism are antipodal. Are we ready to wake up to the reality of racism and expunge it? That's the challenge.
White supremacy milita
On March 16, 2021, Robert Aaron Long opened fire on businesses in the Atlanta area that employ a large number of Asians. Six of his eight murder victims were Asian women. Similar to Dylan Roof who murdered nine Black parishioners inside an African Methodist Episcopal church in South Carolina and Patrick Wood Crusius who murdered 23 people in Texas in the deadliest anti-Latino attack in recent history, prosecutors should consider hate crime charges for Long.
Yet, some people are actually buying that Long’s actions were solely over an alleged sex addiction. There are a ton of massage places in the Atlanta area. Why did he only target the ones operated by Asians? It is because he is racist and probably sexist; plain and simple. It should not take domestic terrorists writing white supremacist manifestos, like those of Roof and Crusius, in order for us to classify their behavior as hate crimes. It is not enough for people to only be convicted of murder. They should also be convicted of hate crimes or we will continue to see […]
Stephan: If you don't realize White terrorism is having an existential effect on our democracy, read this. When members of Congress don't feel safe in their nation's capital, or in their own homes something is seriously awry. And as this report details that is exactly where we are.
Riot fencing and razor wire reinforce the security zone on Capitol Hill in Washington on Jan. 19, 2021. Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Earlier this year, the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance received an unusual inquiry from a state lawmaker: Could campaign funds be used to purchase bulletproof vests, gas masks and pepper spray?
It was a question the independent state agency, which regulates political spending and hands down advisory opinions on campaign finance issues, had never been asked before.
Yet in the weeks and months after the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot, it is the kind of query that is surfacing with regularity both in Washington and in state capitals across the country. Alarmed by a growing number of threats, harassment and scenes of violence at government buildings, lawmakers in both parties are seeking clarity from election agencies on whether they can spend campaign dollars and taxpayer money on security and personal protective equipment — everything from body armor to panic buttons at home.
“Threats have an impact,” said Michigan Democratic state Rep. Kevin Hertel, who noted that threats against […]
Kenneth P. Vogel and Nicholas Confessore, - The New York Times
Stephan: In the whole of American history we have never had an administration anywhere near the corruption level of the Trump administration. Day after day the stories and evidence pour out like pus from an inflamed wound. Yet who is being held accountable?
WASHINGTON — One hacked the computers of business rivals. One bribed doctors to win referrals for his nursing homes.
Another fled the country while he was on trial for his role in a fraud that siphoned $450 million from an insurance company, leading to its collapse. Still another ran a Ponzi scheme that plunged a synagogue into foreclosure.
Each won clemency from President Donald J. Trump.
They also had something else in common, an investigation by The New York Times found. The efforts to seek clemency for these wealthy or well-connected people benefited from their social, political, or financial ties to a loose collection of lawyers, lobbyists, activists and Orthodox Jewish leaders who had worked with Trump administration officials on criminal justice legislation championed by Jared Kushner.
That network revolved around a pair of influential Jewish organizations that focus on criminal justice issues — the Aleph Institute and Tzedek Association — and well-wired people working with them, including the lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz, Brett Tolman, a former U.S. attorney for Utah, and Nick Muzin, a Republican operative.
Stephan: I saw a recent study that 49% of Republican men don't want to get vaccinated. And this is why. I think Hannity should be charged with murder in the same way one would charge a fire marshal who told people to run down a hall knowing there was a consuming fire at the end. I also think Fox should lose their FCC license to broadcast such disinformation.
Sean Hannity on Fox
Fox News host Sean Hannity told his millions of viewers on Thursday evening that nobody should feel shamed or pressured into getting a coronavirus vaccine, insisting that it’s a “personal decision” and revealing that half of his friends aren’t getting a jab.
In recent weeks, and as federally approved vaccines have been administered at an increasing rate, concern has continued to grow over the large number of Republicans and conservatives who have expressed hesitancy in getting immunized. An NPR/Marist poll, for instance, found that nearly half of Trump supporters would not get a shot when they’re eligible.
During his Thursday primetime broadcast, Hannity—who served as an informal adviser to the ex-president—attempted to find a middle ground. While he said he personally plans […]
Stephan: What I find fascinating is how radically different the Republican and Democratic approach to the future is made obvious. Not just the difference between Trump and Biden, although that is so different it is bizarre, but the two parties as a whole. American infrastructure was largely built about 100 years ago and today it is coming apart. Sewers, waterlines, the electrical grid, bridges, roads, and sidewalks all are falling apart -literally in many cases. Because we only have one social value in this country, profit, fixing infrastructure which is expensive and produces little immediate profit, has been a very low priority. Now we have no choice and it is the Democrats who see why this issue must be addressed.
Construction workers upgrade the Green Line light rail system run by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority in Boston on August 6, 2020. Credit: Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe/Getty
Four congressional Democrats on Friday unveiled the BUILD GREEN Infrastructure and Jobs Act, a bill that would invest $500 billion over 10 years in state, local, and tribal projects to galvanize the transition to all electric public transportation—reducing climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions and health-threatening air pollution while expanding clean mass transit and creating up to one million new jobs.
“This bill would make a dramatic, material difference in the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people.” —Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Modeled after the Department of Transportation’s BUILD grant program, the bill (pdf) to provide grant funding to green the nation’s public transportation infrastructure while creating good-paying jobs in the process was introduced by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) as well as Reps. Andrew Levin (D-Mich.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
“The climate crisis is an existential threat to our planet,” Warren acknowledged in a press release, “but it’s also a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rebuild our […]
The coronavirus pandemic didn’t have to become politicized—or racialized. But last March, President Donald Trump “decided to call coronavirus, which has no ethnicity or zip code or nationality, the China virus,” says Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali on the 100th episode of The New Abnormal.
“There was no reason to make coronavirus a racist thing,” co-host Molly Jong-Fast adds.
Now, not only are people of Chinese descent coming under attack across the U.S., but other Asians—because “bigots aren’t nuanced,” adds Ali, who wrote about the wave of anti-Asian hate for The Daily Beast before the Atlanta massage parlor murders.
“As a Muslim, as a son of Pakistani immigrants, we’ve been through this for the past 20 years,” he tells Jong-Fast. “And I realized that that story in America is the original story that gets a remake, and sometimes the villain just gets changed, right? So right now it’s Chinese or the Chinese, whoever looks Chinese. It’s been Muslims. It’s always African Americans, it’s Latinos. We’re all the invaders.”
“It’s a society-wide problem,” he says, “that requires a society-wide […]
