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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 EU nations are really trying to get out of the carbon power era. This also makes a difference, or should, to Americans, because the Earth’s matrix of life is is an interconnected interdependent system, and the success of the EU countries helps the Earth and all the countries on it.
Eurostat has now released electricity data from 2023, and it shows that 44.7% of EU electricity production came from renewable energy sources last year!* Fossil gas (aka “natural gas”) production was down, a lot. Coal production was down even more. Even production from oil and petroleum products (already quite low) was down. Meanwhile, of course, renewable energy production was up! Clearly, in Europe, renewable energy is now winning.
And this is a crossover year, because in 2022, electricity production from fossil fuels was higher than electricity production from renewable energy sources (by a smidge). Let’s get to some graphs and more actual stats now — just note the difference between supply and production with these.
Looking at supply stats for 2023 vs. 2022:
Brown coal supply down by 24.2%, to 222,840 million tonnes
Hard coal supply down by 20.4%, to 130,437 million tonnes
Fossil gas supply down by 7.4%, to 12.8 million terajoules (TJ)
Oil/petroleum electricity supply down 1.5%, to 526,862 thousand tonnes
Renewables supply increased 4.4%, up to 10.9 million TJ.
I confess I do not understand Israel. How can a religious nation of Jews who themselves for hundreds of years were persecuted, ghettoized, and killed by the millions, become a nation carrying out a genocide, and carrying out policies that replicate what was once done to them? To be candid I just can’t get past the tens of thousands of children that have been killed or are missing. I understand why Biden is supporting this war Israel is carrying out from a geopolitical perspective, but I cannot stomach his moral failure. The only positive statement I can make is that criminal Trump who had an affinity for Netanyahu, a fellow fascist, would have been even worse in his decisions than Biden.
Israel opposed a proposal at a recent United Nations forum aimed at rebuilding the Gaza Strip’s war-ravaged telecommunications infrastructure on the grounds that Palestinian connectivity is a readymade weapon for Hamas.
The resolution, which was drafted by Saudi Arabia for last week’s U.N. International Telecommunication Union summit in Geneva, is aimed at returning internet access to Gaza’s millions of disconnected denizens.
It ultimately passed under a secret ballot on June 14 — but not before it was watered down to remove some of its more strident language about Israel’s responsibility for the destruction of Gaza. The U.S. delegate at the ITU summit had specifically opposed those references.
Israel, for its part, had blasted the proposal as a whole. Israel’s ITU delegate described it as “a resolution that while seemingly benign in its intent to rebuild telecommunications infrastructure, distorts the reality of the ongoing situation in Gaza,” according to a recording of the session reviewed by The Intercept. The delegate further argued the resolution does not address that Hamas has used the internet “to prepare acts of terror against Israel’s civilians,” and that any rebuilding effort must include unspecified “safeguards” that would prevent the potential use of the internet for terrorism.
This is what America has come to. Frankly, I find this Supreme Court decision by the christofascist cabal of Justices to be so heartless I don’t understand how a person with any integrity or compassion, certainly no one who is a genuine Christian, could make such a decision. Homeless people are not homeless by choice, and criminalizing them for being poor or mentally incapacitated and homeless is not only nasty, it is stupid. The Court is basically telling them they shouldn’t exist. What a strange country we have become that instead of creating a way for the homeless to be housed, we make them criminals for being too poor to find any housing but a tent.
Kimberly Morris holds up a notice a police officer gave her giving her 72 hours to move her tent from a park in Grants Pass, Oregon, on 18 April 2024. Credit: Reuters
The US Supreme Court ruled Friday that cities can fine and jail unhoused people for sleeping outside, arguing that criminalizing camping when there is no shelter available does not constitute “cruel and unusual punishment”.
The 6-3 ruling is the most consequential legal decision on homelessness in decades in the US.
The case was brought by Grants Pass, Oregon. The city has local laws that authorize law enforcement to ticket and prosecute unhoused people. But the city had been barred by several courts from enforcing its ordinances because of a landmark 2018 ruling by the ninth circuit court of appeals.
That ruling, in Martin v Boise, applied to nine western states and held that giving people citations for sleeping outside when a community can’t offer shelter violates the eighth amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
With its ruling Friday, the Supreme Court reversed the protections for unhoused people.
If you are a regular SR reader you know about what I call the Great Schism Trend, that is very deliberately tearing the United States into two countries in a single nation. Thom Hartmann is one of the few commentators that gets this, and understands that it is a policy the Republicans have been following since the Reagan presidency. If Trump is elected to the Presidency in November as Hartmann describes in this excellent essay. This trend is why I thought and still think that Biden should not have run for a second term. Not because he is too old today, but because he will be 86 in the final year of his term. A man in his 80s leading a Democratic Party that is not of one mind simply will not be able to do what must be done to stop what the Republicans are trying to do.
Credit: Miltiadis Fragkidis / Unsplash
Republicans have a very specific economic vision for the future of our country, although they rarely talk about it in plain language: they want to make the rest of America look and function just like Mississippi. Including the racism: that’s a feature, not a bug.
It’s called the “Southern Economic Development Model” (SEDM) and has been at the core of GOP economic strategy ever since the days of Ronald Reagan. While they don’t use those words to describe their plan, and neither did the authors of Project 2025, this model is foundational to conservative economic theory and has been since the days of slavery.
The SEDM explicitly works to:
— Maintain a permanent economic underclass of people living on the edge of poverty, — Rigidify racial and gender barriers to class mobility to lock in women and people of color, — Provide a low-cost labor force to employers,
Prevent unions or any other advocates for workers’ rights to function, — Shift the tax burden to the working poor and what’s left of the middle class while keeping […]
It seems like almost every day now I find, or someone sends me, yet another unanticipated consequence of the Dobbs decision. No politician predicted or, I believe, even imagined what the insanity of the christofascists and their political operatives that make up the majority of the Supreme Court, would do to American society. In what kind of country do young women ask to be sterilized?
Sophia Ferst (left) and her wife, Madison Bethke, outside of Helena, Montana. After Roe v. Wade was overturned, Ferst decided to get sterilized. She is one of many people under 30 now seeking permanent contraception. Credit: Shaylee Ragar
HELENA, MONTANA — Sophia Ferst remembers her reaction to learning that the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade: She needed to get sterilized.
Within a week, she asked her provider about getting the procedure done.
Ferst, 28, said she has always known she doesn’t want kids. She also worries about getting pregnant as the result of a sexual assault then being unable to access abortion services. “That’s not a crazy concept anymore,” she said.
“I think kids are really fun. I even see kids in my therapy practice, but, however, I understand that children are a big commitment,” she said.
In my opinion, the entire election dynamic has changed. Here is one example, of many, describing what I mean. This time next year the United States may no longer be a genuine democracy.
President Biden and his wife Jill and granddaughters Natalie Biden and Finnegan Biden arrive at East Hampton airport Satuday, after the debate Credit: Evan Vucci / AP
NEW YORK, NEW YORK — A sense of concern is growing inside the top ranks of the Democratic Party that leaders of Joe Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee are not taking seriously enough the impact of the president’s troubling debate performance earlier in the week.
DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison and Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez held a Saturday afternoon call with dozens of committee members across the country, a group of some of the most influential members of the party. They largely ignored Biden’s weak showing Thursday night or the avalanche of criticism that followed.
Multiple committee members on the call, most granted anonymity to talk about the private discussion, described feeling like they were being gaslighted — that they were being asked to ignore the dire nature of the party’s predicament. […]
All day off and on I have been listening to, reading, and watching media. Everybody gets that Biden was a disaster and that criminal Trump, as usual, endlessly lied and didn’t answer any of the questions he was asked. But, except for Heather Digby Parton, what I haven’t seen is what stood out for me: the complete failure of Jake Tapper, and Dana Bash to behave like competent journalists. They made it obvious they are pseudo-journalist commentators, little more than talking heads. They knew Trump was lying, they knew he wasn’t answering the questions, but they just kept on as if nothing of consequence was going on. It was incompetent and it demonstrated CNN is not a reliable news network anymore.
Moderators and CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Dana Bash Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty
In a scathing appraisal of how the two moderators of the first 2024 presidential debate let Donald Trump run wild with a firehose of lies, one critic stated the pair is responsible for letting the former president hoodwink viewers who aren’t fully immersed in politics on a daily basis.
In her column for Salon, political observer Heather “Digby” Parton wrote that “State of the Union” anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash failed as journalists by letting Trump make a mockery of the debate by lying with impunity, and not calling him out on it before a huge television audience.
Candidly noting that Biden did poorly in the debate, Parton added, “As much as Biden blew the debate and missed his opportunity to dispel the concerns about his age, Donald Trump blew it too. He may have appeared more […]
American society is being restructured by six corrupt christofascists. Think about that for a minute. There are 337 million Americans and their lives are being changed by six people who are political agents, not law-based justice agents. And no one is doing anything about it.
The Supreme Court Credit: Michael A. McCoy / Getty
The Supreme Court upended how the federal government works on Friday. In a landmark decision in its war on federal regulatory power, the justices formally overturned a key doctrine that determined when and how courts should interpret ambiguous federal laws.
Forty years ago, in Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council, the Supreme Court ruled that when a federal agency enforces an ambiguous law, courts must defer to the agency’s interpretation of that law so long as it is “reasonable.” Congress and the executive branch have operated against this backdrop for decades when drafting laws and writing regulations.
No longer. “Chevron is overruled,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. “Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the [Administrative Procedures Act] requires.”
The court’s three liberals denounced the ruling in vivid terms as a […]
