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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: This has been talked about for weeks now, so it can not be considered a surprise. I take the vote for Trump as a statement by a large percentage of Americans that they don't care about climate change, because they voted for the man who has done this. All the effects of this withdrawal, I think, will be negative at many levels. America is passing off the world stage as the international leader.
Call it the long goodbye from the Paris climate agreement.
Driving the news: President Trump’s 2017 announcement withdrawing America from the 2015 accord becomes official at midnight Wednesday after a prolonged process required by the United Nations. It’s a chaotic coincidence that it comes the day after Election Day.
Where it stands: The outcome of the presidential election was unclear as of midnight. If Joe Biden wins the White House, he has vowed to return to the deal.
Trump’s official exit from the deal would be fleeting, but America’s retreat on climate change over the last four years would linger and be laborious to reverse.
The intrigue: Wednesday’s news is anticlimactic from the administration’s perspective. In Trump’s mind, he exited the deal the day he announced his intention to do so in June 2017, according to Axios’ Jonathan Swan.
A White House spokesperson declined to comment and referred Axios to the State Department, which has authority over global deals. The department is also not expected to mark the exit in any official way.
Stephan: I don't think it can be disputed that America is an increasingly fascist racist nation. It makes me very sad to write that sentence but the voting results demand it be seen as the truth.
TrumpersCredit: MOAR
Financier and philanthropist George Soros must have seen Trump coming as early as 2011. He certainly saw where a disturbingly large proportion of American voters were going. “The United States has been a democracy and open society since its founding. The idea that it will cease to be one seems preposterous; yet it is a very likely prospect,” he wrote in the New York Review of Books in June of that year.
George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004 had convinced Soros “that the malaise in American society went deeper than incompetent leadership.” The public had proved “unwilling to face harsh reality and was positively asking to be deceived by demanding easy answers to difficult problems.”LISTEN: Mark Cuban Joins The New Raw Story Podcast!
Will the American public now reconfirm Soros’ observation? This year’s campaign has given us plenty or reasons to worry.
By the end of Bush’s second term in 2009, few Americans denied the harsh realities of the Iraq war fiasco and of failed federal responses to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation and to […]
Stephan: Elizabeth Kolbert has been saying sensible accurate things about climate change for over two decades, and I think she is spot on in this essay. I am not optimistic about the future of the U.S. because I don't see anything like what ought to be happening to prepare for climate change taking place.
The events of the next several millennia hinge on actions that will be taken by the time today’s toddlers reach adulthood.Credit: Raphael Neal / Agence VU / Redux
Like millions of other Americans, I first learned about climate change in the summer of 1988. For its day, it was a scorcher: Yellowstone National Park burst into flames; the Mississippi River ran so low that almost four thousand barges got backed up at Memphis; and, for the first time in its history, Harvard University shut down owing to heat. It was on an afternoon when the mercury in Washington, D.C., hit ninety-eight degrees that James Hansen, then the head of nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told a Senate committee that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now.” Speaking to reporters after the hearing, Hansen went a step further: “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”
Hansen’s warning was certainly not the first. A report to President Lyndon […]
Helen Regan, Ivana Kottasová and Drew Kann, - CNN World
Stephan: Climate change cares nothing for national borders; it is a planet-wide trend, and as this report describes what happens in the U.S. is going to have an effect on the entire world.
SATKHIRA, BANGLADESH – 2020/06/05: People crossing the broken flooded road after the landfall of cyclone Amphan during the aftermath. Thousands of shrimp enclosures have been washed away, while numerous thatched house, trees, electricity and telephone poles, dykes and croplands were damaged and many villages were submerged by the tidal surge of the Amphan in Satkhira District. Credit: by Piyas Biswas/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty
What we can learn from Covid-19 for the climate crisis 03:01
(CNN)The climate crisis has become a key issue not just for American voters in this US election — but people across the world.What the next president does or doesn’t do over the next four years will have a profound impact on the whether the world is able to avert the worst effects of climate change, scientists, policy makers and activists say.They say the world needs a US president who cares about climate change, for two main reasons. First, many nations take their cue from US policy, particularly on issues such as the climate crisis, meaning Washington has a unique opportunity to […]
Stephan: As is the case in so many negative trends women bear the brunt of the negative effects much more than men and, as this report describes, climate change is not any different.
Pregnant woman sitting in the shade under water vaporisers on a hot day. Credit: Davide Zanin / Alamy
But this impact is not being felt equally. A growing body of research suggests that the world’s most disadvantaged people are also the most vulnerable to the health impacts of climate change and the least likely to be able to adapt.
Gender is just one of many factors that can influence a person’s standing in society. This in-depth explainer looks into how climate change can have differing impacts on the health of men and women around the world.
An analysis of 130 peer-reviewed studies – visualised below on an interactive map – finds that women and girls often face disproportionately high health risks from the impacts of climate change when compared to men and boys.
The analysis shows that 68% (89) of the 130 studies found that women were more affected by health […]
Stephan: First, I hope every one of my readers has or is, today, voting. We have the opportunity to restore honor and integrity to our country and to develop policies that preserve our democracy and foster wellbeing at every level.
Today's edition has a single story. If you have any questions as to for whom you should vote, or you want to be sure you have made the right choice, read this factual report.
JOHN McMURTRIE, BEN PARKER, STEPHANIE STEINBRECHER, KELSEY RONAN, AMY SUMERTON, RACHEL VILLA, and SOPHIA DuROSE, - McSweeny's
Stephan: If you are voting today, consider this before you cast your vote.
The Trump family
Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors — happening almost daily — would not be forgotten. This election year, amid a harrowing global health, civil rights, humanitarian, and economic crisis, we know it’s never been more critical to note these horrors, to remember them, and to do all in our power to reverse them. This list will be updated between now and the November 2020 Presidential election.- – –
Various writers have compiled this list during the course of the Trump administration. Their work has been guided by invaluable journalistic resources, includingWTFJHT, NPR, theNew York Times, theWashington Post, and other sources, to whom we are grateful.- – –
ATROCITY KEY
– Sexual Misconduct, Harassment, & Bullying – White Supremacy, Racism, Homophobia, Transphobia, & Xenophobia – Public Statements / Tweets – Collusion with […]
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate Economist and Professor - Columbia University - The New York Times
Stephan: Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, both Nobel Laureates in economics, are the two economists in which I repose the greatest trust. They have the highest accuracy assessment of any economists I know. And this is what Stiglitz has to say about the tax law the Republicans pushed through in 2017. For those of us who are not billionaires, or even millionaires, it is nothing but bad news. Your taxes are going up thanks to Trump and the Congressional Republicans. Think about that when you vote.
Celebrating the 2017 tax act at the White House. Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times
The Trump administration has a dirty little secret: It’s not just planning to increase taxes on most Americans. The increase has already been signed, sealed and delivered, buried in the pages of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
President Trump and his congressional allies hoodwinked us. The law they passed initiallylowered taxes for most Americans, but it built in automatic, stepped taxincreases every two years that begin in 2021 and that by 2027 would affect nearly everyone but people at the top of the economic hierarchy. All taxpayer income groups with incomes of $75,000 and under — that’s about 65 percent of taxpayers — will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019.
For most, in fact, it’s a delayed tax increase dressed up as a tax cut. How many times have you heard Trump and his allies mention that? They surmised — correctly, so far — that if they waited to add the tax increases until after the 2020 election, few […]
– Sexual Misconduct, Harassment, & Bullying
– White Supremacy, Racism, Homophobia, Transphobia, & Xenophobia
– Public Statements / Tweets
– Collusion with […]
