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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 christofascists have achieved yet another win in gutting public school libraries. South Carolina, a Republican Red State, of course, has now made it possible for the christofascists to make sure that school children can only read what they approve. As a result, an already rather poorly educated state will now become more ignorant. It is happening in Republican-controlled states all over the country. It is all part of the Great Schism Trend that is splitting us into two countries.
Ellen Weaver speaks in Anderson, South Carolina, on 22 August 2022. Credit: Meg Kinnard / AP
South Carolina has implemented one of the most restrictive book ban laws in the US, enabling mass censorship in school classrooms and libraries across the state.
Drafted by Ellen Weaver, the superintendent of education and close ally of the far-right group Moms for Liberty, the law requires all reading material to be “age or developmentally appropriate”. The vague wording of the legislation – open to interpretation and deliberately inviting challenge – could see titles as classic as Romeo and Juliet completely wiped from school shelves.
“All we’re going to have left is Lassie from here on out,” said Shanna Miles, an author and school librarian born and raised in South Carolina. “They’re not going to stop at one aspect of society they don’t like; they will keep on going. Now [that] they have a taste of power, this is never going to end.”
South Carolina’s recent regulation is part of an alarmingly broader nationwide fight against literature exploring race, sexuality, or anything seemingly contentious or divisive. The severity […]
Loz Blain, Staff Writer - New Atlas / The Japan News (Japan)
Stephan:
Here is a fascinating bit of good news from Japan. The country’s engineers, scientists, and, leadership have come up with a technology to get freight-hauling trucks off their highways.
The Tokyo-Osaka automated logistics system, pictured using generative tools, will use conveyor belts or small, autonomous carts to move cargo. Credit: Japan News
The Japanese government is planning to connect major cities with automated zero-emissions logistics links that can quietly and efficiently shift millions of tons of cargo, while getting tens of thousands of trucks off the road.
According to The Japan News, the project has been under discussion since February by an expert panel at the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism ministry. A draft outline of an interim report was released Friday, revealing plans to complete an initial link between Tokyo and Osaka by 2034.
Japan’s well-known population collapse issues foretell severe labor squeezes in the coming years, and one specific issue this project aims to curtail is the continuing rise in online shopping, with a forecast decline in the numbers of delivery drivers that can move goods around. The country is expecting some 30% of parcels simply won’t make it from A to B by 2030, because there’ll be […]
Anthony Salvanto, Fred Backus, Jennifer De Pinto, and Kabir Khanna, Reporters - CBS News
Stephan:
The only way the U.S. or any other country is going to survive climate change is by making fostering wellbeing its first priority. Neither party really seems to comprehend what is coming, except for Bernie Sanders and a few others. The whole Biden age issue is not how old he is now, it is that he will be 86 the last year of his term, and four years from now the world will be radically different and beyond the abilities of either octagenarian.
My personal hope is it would be helpful if both criminal Trump and Biden had something happen and neither could run. We need a man or woman of a younger generation with the skill, energy, and commitment to fostering wellbeing. On another front, the Supreme Court decisions today and in the last recent days are turning the United States into Hungary, and my hope there is that the Senate is overwhelmingly Democratic and four more justices are appointed for a total of 13, and the Electoral College is eliminated.
For months before the first debate, the nation’s voters repeatedly expressed doubts over whether President Biden had the cognitive health enough to serve.
Today, those doubts have grown even more: now at nearly three-quarters of the electorate, and now including many within his own party.
And today, after the debate with former President Trump, an increased number of voters, including many Democrats, don’t think Mr. Biden should be running for president at all. Nearly half his party doesn’t think he should now be the nominee.
(Trump, for his part, does better, but still only gets half the electorate thinking he has the cognitive health to serve.)
The move came across the partisan board, but it includes a double-digit movement among Democrats, and movement among independents.
Given that, today nearly three in four voters also don’t think Mr. Biden should be running for president in the first place. That’s a higher-percentage sentiment than in February, when almost two-thirds said he should not run.
Most voters who say he shouldn’t run say it’s both […]
The christofasscist cabal that controls the laws of the United States, have made the President a kind of king. The Founders would be appalled; this is exactly what they did not want. I think it should also be noted that Associate Justices Alito and Thomas, were they ethical men, which they are not, would and should have recused themselves but did not. That is how corrupt American justice has become.
Associated Justice Sonia Sot0mayor. Credit: AP
WASHINGTON, DC — In an unsparing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the Supreme Court allowed a president to become a “king above the law” in its ruling that limited the scope of criminal charges against former President Donald Trump for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol and efforts to overturn the election.
She called the decision, which likely ended the prospect of a trial for Trump before the November election, “utterly indefensible.”
“The court effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding,” she wrote. She was joined by liberal justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who wrote another dissent referring to the ruling’s consequences as a “five alarm fire.”
Sotomayor read her dissent aloud in the courtroom, with a weighty delivery that underscored her criticism of the majority. She strongly pronounced each word, pausing at certain moments and gritting her teeth at others.
“Ironic isn’t it? The man in charge of enforcing laws can now just break them,” Sotomayor said.
We are no longer a genuine democracy and the minority of Justices on the Supreme Court realize this. Read this dissent on the Corner Post regulatory decision and you can see that Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan all recognize that the federal regulatory agencies are being castrated so that corporate and uber-rich interests are further empowered and wealth inequality will increase and your wellbeing will be diminished.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson attends President Joe Biden’s state of the union address on February 7, 2023. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)
As the U.S. Supreme Court dealt yet another blow to the federal government’s regulatory authority, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Monday stressed that “the ball is in Congress’ court” to enact legislation to “forestall the coming chaos” wrought by the right-wing supermajority’s decision.
The justices ruled 6-3 in Corner Post Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System that the Administrative Procedures Act’s (APA) statute of limitations period does not begin until a plaintiff is adversely affected by a regulation. The ruling reverses a lower court’s dismissal of a lawsuit filed by Corner Post—a North Dakota truck stop that challenged a U.S. Federal Reserve rule capping debit card swipe fees—because the six-year statute of limitations on such challenges had passed.
Monday’s ruling makes it much easier to sue government agencies. As Sydney Bryant and Devon Ombres […]
I think Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe has the correct view of the immunity decision the Supreme Court just issued. The court as I said in my earlier comment, by decision after decision is turning the United States into Hungary. I am not even sure we should be called a democracy anymore. We have become a nation I, and perhaps you, barely recognize anymore.
U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge John G. Roberts Jr. testifies before Senate Judiciary Committee during confirmation hearings to be Chief Justice. Credit: Rob Crandall / Shutterstock
Harvard University’s Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe unleashed a ferocious attack on the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court after the ruling in Donald Trump’s immunity case Monday.
Tribe cited Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent, in which she called the decision a “five-alarm-fire for self-government under democracy. The reason is that the court was really flying the flag of the Constitution upside down.”
Chief Justice John Roberts and five other justices ruled that a president has immunity for core official actions carried out while in office, though was constituted official was for a lower court to decide.
“It is worse to use the cloak of presidential authority to commit ordinary crimes for which the rest of us would go to jail than it is to do things […]
, - Americans United for Separation of Church and State / Mother Jones
Stephan:
I am seeing more and more explicit calls to make and enforce Christianity as the national religion of the state, and to breach the firewall separating church and state. That firewall was one of the things the Founders felt most strongly about. At the time of the Revolution (and today for that matter) Great Britain was a nation that since King Henry VIII split from the Roman church, had been ruled by a monarch who was head of both church and state. This linkage for two centuries had caused endless conflict, misery, and death. Several of the original 13 colonies were founded to get away from this linkage and most of the Founders felt very strongly that church and state should not be linked. The christianfascist Republicans are trying to change that, and you should keep that in mind as you vote in November.
Supporters of then-President Donald Trump gather in front of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. A pro-Trump mob later stormed the building. Brent Stirton/Getty
Remember that crushing feeling when we lost Roe v. Wade? The experts warned us. The Christian nationalists told us that was their main goal and the litmus test for their judges. Still, the moment was as devastating as it was surprising. Big steps backward don’t seem possible. But they are. And we’re on the precipice of another appalling and disastrous backward slide.
Christian nationalists are publicly declaring their goal: They want to create a Christian nation, a theocracy, that favors the “right” kind of conservative Christian. And they’re calling it Project 2025. Their handbook is a play-by-play of Christian nationalism gone mainstream.
One of the major issues with the United States’ awful illness profit system, instead of universal birthright healthcare, is the obscene greed of the pharmaceutical industry. For many Americans, the cost of the drugs they need to stay healthy or even alive is a daily crisis. I hope this article will help any of you who are caught up in this disgusting system to find a solution that works for you and your family.
Prescription drugs can be prohibitively expensive—but there are ways to reduce your costs. Credit: Getty
After Jackie Trapp was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer, in 2015, she thought her biggest health shock was behind her. Then came the bills for Revlimid, a powerful cancer drug that her doctor said was her best hope for controlling the disease. The first month’s supply cost $11,148; the second, $12,040—and her insurer denied coverage. “I’d need to take the drug every month, for years,” says Trapp, 59, a former high school teacher and realtor from Muskego, Wis. “My husband and I had done well in our careers, we’d been frugal and we’d saved, but there was no way paying $120,000 a year or more was sustainable.”
Figuring out how to pay for the drug that’s keeping her alive has become an all-consuming project. Trapp fought her insurer’s denial and won, and has switched health plans twice to ensure continued coverage. […]
