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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: Trump is leaving office having so severely reduced America's stature in the world that it will take years to rebuild it. And importantly it places the Republican Party, particularly, in a highly compromised position. In geopolitical terms, Trump has given China a deal closing refutation of any claim America makes about democracy or moral authority.
Trumper terrorists in the Capitol Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP
China’s internet erupted in mirth at America’s troubled democracy after supporters of President Donald Trump broke into the US Capitol, comparing the chaos to the Hong Kong anti-government protests of 2019.
On Thursday morning, state media tabloid Global Times tweeted side-by-side photo comparisons of Hong Kong protesters occupying the city’s Legislative Council Complex in July 2019 with Wednesday’s Washington riots.
The latter saw hardcore Trump fans invade the US Capitol to protest the election defeat, taking selfies, scuffling with security and ransacking parts of the building.
“@SpeakerPelosi once referred to the Hong Kong riots as ‘a beautiful sight to behold’,” the Global Times said in the tweet, referring to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s June 2019 comment about Hong Kong’s mass pro-democracy demonstrations, which were mostly peaceful at that time.
“It remains yet to be seen whether she will say the same about the recent developments in Capitol Hill.”
China’s Communist Youth League also described the unrest as a “beautiful sight” on the Twitter-like Weibo platform.
The hashtag “Trump supporters storm US Capitol” pinballed across Weibo […]
Stephan: We have a problem in this country. The Trumper Right is infiltrating police and sheriff departments all over the country. There needs to be a massive reassessment of law enforcement hiring procedures and training. If you watched the insurrection on Wednesday and compare it with any Black Lives Matter demonstration you can see the racial bias of American law enforcement writ large. I hope that the Biden administration will acknowledge this and develop policies to address it.
A highway patrolman stands guard as the “Stars and Bars” Confederate flag flies in front of the South Carolina statehouse on July 9, 2015, in Columbia. Credit: John Moore/Getty
The FBI has long been concerned about the infiltration of law enforcement by white supremacist groups and its impact on police abuse and tolerance of racism, the unredacted version of a previously circulated document reveals.
The FBI threat assessment report was released by Rep. Jamie Raskin, chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Subcommittee, ahead of a hearing about the white supremacist infiltration of local police departments scheduled for Tuesday.
A heavily redacted version of the 2006 document had previously been published, one of a handful of documents revealing federal officials’ growing concern with white supremacists’ “historical” interest in “infiltrating law enforcement communities or recruiting law enforcement personnel.” A different internal document obtained by The Intercept in 2017 had also noted that “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers.”
Stephan: Don't think for a moment that the insurrection that occurred on Wednesday is the end of the Trumpers' anti-democratic, racist, anti-Semitic criminality and violence, or that all Americans have condemned the trashing of the American Capitol. Here are the facts. The last four years have taught me two main things:
1.) Just as you cannot yell fire when there is no fire in a crowded theater, so something has to be done with the social media platforms to correct the deliberate spreading of disinformation.
2.) The Republican Party should be disbanded and a new party needs to be created by ethical pro-democracy people who do not support the Democrats.
A new poll released in the aftermath of Wednesday’s violent coup attempt—incited by President Donald Trump and enabled by Republican lawmakers who questioned the legitimacy of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory—shows that nearly half of GOP voters approve of the pro-Trump mob’s storming of the U.S. Capitol, findings that observers say are inseparable from how right-wing media outlets are lying about the insurrection.
“The right’s favored media… offered an alternate reality in which everyone but pro-Trump rioters were to blame for the mayhem at the Capitol.” —Sara Fischer, journalist
YouGov Direct conducted the survey on Wednesday night between 5:17 pm and 5:42 pm. A majority (62%) of the 1,397 registered voters who had heard about the day’s events told pollsters that they consider the pro-Trump mob’s actions a threat to democracy. But while 93% of Democrats and 55% of Independents perceive what happened as a threat to democracy, only 27% of Republicans see it that way.
In fact, a greater percentage of Republicans (45%) actively support the storming of the Capitol than oppose it (43%). Overall, 71% of registered voters are opposed to the coup attempt, including […]
Stephan: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, like Obama and Biden after Bush the younger, are coming into office at a time when the country is in a state of collapse. It is an historically proven pattern: Republicans trash the country and Democrats come into office and have to spend the first part of their time in office repairing the Republican damage. Personally, I think 2021 is going to be a very difficult year, the national equivalent to an individual facing a long recuperation after a devastating illness.
The U.S. economy shed 140,000 jobs in December, while the unemployment rate held at6.7%, the government said on Friday.
Why it matters: The job market recovery that had been underway for the past seven months ended last month, buckling from the pressure of the coronavirus pandemic.
Details: The leisure and hospitality sector shed nearly 500,000 jobs, reflecting the enormous stress the sector faces as coronavirus cases surge and states impose economic restrictions — leading to worker layoffs.
Three quarters of these losses (372,000) were in restaurants and bars. Cold weather prevented them from taking advantage of the outdoor dining that helped keep business afloat in earlier months.
The bottom line: The labor market was digging out from the over 22 million jobs lost because of the coronavirus. The way worse-than-expected December numbers chips away at that progress, dashing any lingering hopes of a “V-shaped’ job recovery.
The job market is 9.8 million jobs short of where it was before the pandemic hit, with 55% of the jobs lost in March and April having come back.
Lisa Rein and Eric Yoder, Reporters - The Washington Post
Stephan: Here is some good news, really excellent news. The orcs, criminals, and cretins appointed by Trump must all resign when he leaves. Think of it as cleaning the Augean stables.
The White House on Thursday told thousands of political appointees — from ambassadors to schedulers — to resign on Inauguration Day, a formality the Trump administration had stalled for weeks as President Trump disputed the election outcome.
A directive was emailed to agency heads that political appointees must resign effective Jan. 20, the day President-elect Joe Biden takes office, a White House spokesman confirmed. The order was issued by Chris Liddell, the deputy White House chief of staff who has been leading transition arrangements with the Biden team, and was first reported by Politico.
The call for resignations came within hours of Trump’s statement early Thursday that there would be an orderly transfer of power, and as a wave of senior political appointees quit in protest over Wednesday’s storming of the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. They include Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and several senior-level national security officials and press aides.
The White House had refused since the November election to issue the call for resignations, which has been made by every outgoing administration between Election Day and mid-December.
Robert Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies - Salon
Stephan: Here is Robert Reich's view of what the Georgia elections mean, and I agree with every word of what he says, and it is excellent news
Next to the Trumps America’s leading grifter couple Elaine Chao and Mitch McConnell. Credit: Jeff Swensen/Getty
The runoff elections in Georgia are about more than replacing two corrupt Republican senators with Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. They are about flipping the Senate.
They are referenda on the disastrous tenure of Mitch McConnell and the damage the Republican Party has inflicted on America.
I don’t want to mince words. Mitch McConnell is the most duplicitous, morally bankrupt politician in America. (Well, maybe Trump beats him, but not for long.) He has wielded the GOP to inflict massive damage on our democracy.https://www.youtube.com/embed/R6F0jcpJxy0?feature=oembed
Stephan: While America's democracy is under the greatest stress it has experienced since the 19th century, as hundreds of thousands are sick with Covid-19, our illness profit system healthcare is facing collapse, our vaccination rate is pathetic, as our economy for ordinary Americans is crashing, even in this cacophony of crises, we have yet another that will overpower all of those -- climate change. And this is what science is telling us about that.
One year after over 11,000 scientists from 153 countries came together to declare a climate emergency and urge ambitious action, the Oregon State University researchers who launched that effort said on Wednesday that an urgent massive-scale mobilization is necessary to address the human-caused global crisis.
“As we move into 2021 and beyond, we need a massive-scale mobilization to address the climate crisis.” —five scientists
Scientists’ renewed call for bold climate policies came just days after a new study in the journal Nature Climate Changewarned existing carbon pollution will cause global temperatures to rise about 2.3 degrees Celsius or 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels—with devastating consequences worldwide.
As Common Dreamsreported last year, William Ripple, distinguished professor of ecology in OSU’s College of Forestry, and postdoctoral scholar Christopher Wolf co-authored a paper in BioScience. Backed by thousands of scientists, they wrote that greenhouse gas missions “are still rapidly rising, with increasingly damaging effects on the Earth’s climate” and “an immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis.”
Ripple and Wolf—along with William R. Moomaw of Tufts University, Thomas M. Newsome of the University of Sydney, and Phoebe Barnard of […]
Terry H. Schwadron, DCReport Opinion Editor - DC Report
Stephan: It is my view that the real bottom-line about what happened yesterday is who is held accountable and how that accountability plays out.
If you looked at the election state certification last you saw that hours after the Capitol was violently assaulted, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and 10 other senators raised objections against Biden's certification, as did 147 Republicans in the House. We have a party that is openly against democracy and the question is what happens to those men and women? My view is they should all be ejected from public office and never allowed to run for public office again.
RepublicanSenator Josh Haley, a traitor to American democracy. Credit: Francis Chung/E&E News and Politico/Associated Press
The only good thing we can see in next Wednesday’s planned stage set of Trump vs. Democracy is that the challenge finally will put the names of Republicans who believe in a coup on the record.
In any normal world, that should mean that they have signed a political death warrant. Who wants to stand election in a world where elections are declared null and void?
But in these divided United States, these Republican plotters may well emerge as some kind of patriotic if zany Donald Trump loyalists worthy of a return to office. After all, it has been reported widely that most of the 74 million who voted for Trump believe without evidence the election for president was fraud-filled, and stolen by Joe Biden’s radical leftists. Almost five dozen court challenges later, there still is no evidence.
The only three election fraud cases to be prosecuted this year have involved individual Republicans seeking to vote for Trump.
