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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.
And so criminal Trump’s self-created recession begins. All you Trump voters, I hope you enjoy it, you chose it.
A customer shops for produce at an H-E-B grocery store on Feb. 12, 2025 in Austin, Texas. Credit: Brandon Bell | Getty
The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow tracker of incoming data is indicating that gross domestic product is on pace to shrink by 1.5% for the first quarter.
While the tracker is volatile through the quarter and typically becomes more reliable much later in the quarter, it does coincide with some other indicators showing a growth slowdown.
Early economic data for the first quarter of 2025 is pointing towards negative growth, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta measure.
The central bank’s GDPNow tracker of incoming metrics is indicating that gross domestic product is on pace to shrink by 1.5% for the January-through-March period, according to an update posted Friday morning.
Fresh indicators showed that consumers spent less than expected during the inclement January weather and exports were weak, which led to the downgrade. Prior to Friday’s consumer spending report, GDPNow had been indicating growth of 2.3% for the quarter.
While the tracker is volatile and typically becomes a more reliable measure much […]
The Trump coup is now destroying the National Weather Service, so your weather reports will deteriorate in accuracy. Criminal Trump is going to attempt to privatize the National Weather Service and let one of the oligarchs that bought him his job own the NWS and turn it into a profit-making system for themselves. All you Republican farmers, foresters, and fishermen, hope you love what’s coming, even as it destroys your livelihood.
Weather Service station Credit: DNYUZ
Twice a day for years, meteorologists in Kotzebue, Alaska, have launched weather balloons far into the sky to measure data like wind speed, humidity and temperature, and translated the information the balloons sent back into weather forecasts and models. It’s a ritual repeated at dozens of weather stations around the United States.
On Thursday morning, the National Weather Service, which for years has struggled with worker shortages around the country, announced that it had “indefinitely suspended” the launches from Kotzebue because of a lack of staffing.
Hours later, word of mass layoffs began to spread at the Weather Service and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. More than 800 people were expected to lose their jobs, the latest cuts in the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to reshape the federal work force. As they have elsewhere, the cuts appeared to have been focused on probationary employees who are easier to dismiss.
Though not entirely unexpected, the terminations were shocking to employees of the Weather Service, the government agency responsible for […]
As with all fascist oligarch governments, criminal Trump and his minions are cutting off information the government provided for free as a service. The result will be that help and support from a wide range of agencies, including Social Security, IRS, Medicare, and Medicaid, will be severely limited in the support they can provide. Given the last month’s news about what Trump’s coup is doing to American lives, it should be clear by now that criminal Trump couldn’t care less about your personal wellbeing.
The 18F tech unit was cut Saturday morning. | Credit: Jacquelyn Martin / AP
The General Services Administration cleaved one of its technology units Saturday morning as part of a Trump administration directive to cull the federal workforce and reduce government spending.
The agency announced the cut to the 18F office — which employs researchers, website designers and product managers — on Saturday at around 1 a.m., according to an internal email obtained by POLITICO.
The cuts affected about 70 product and account managers; procurement specialists; user interface engineers; researchers; and front-end, content and service designers, said a GSA manager who, like other government workers in this story, spoke anonymously to avoid retribution. About two dozen more 18F employees were slashed in February when the agency cut probationary staffers.
The 18F department was responsible for building key government services like Login.gov, the central login system for programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. This work touches many agencies, which means cuts here could have a ripple effect across the government.
“This decision was made with explicit direction from the […]
The Trump coup, as one of its main goals, is eliminating any preparation for climate change, or encouraging transition out of the carbon energy era. I don’t think criminal Trump is smart enough to really understand what climate change is going to mean to the United States. Or, maybe, he just figures he will be dead by the time it is the overwhelming issue so he doesn’t care and just wants to help the carbon energy oligarchs who bought him his job.
U.S. Coal powered electric plant. Credit: Getty
President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, is reportedly pursuing plans that would wipe away most federal climate change rules with a single move.
According to Bloomberg, the EPA considered scrapping “its formal conclusion that greenhouse gases endanger the public, a move that would sweep away the legal foundation for regulations limiting planet-warming pollution from power plants, automobiles and oil wells.”
The EPA would rewrite the so-called endangerment finding at the heart of most climate change rules if Zeldin has his way, sources told Bloomberg.
Trump has frequently referred to the rules as the “green new scam,” but it was unclear if he had signed on to the plan.
“This is the holy grail of the climate agenda,” prominent climate change denier Marc Morano told the outlet. “If you want to permanently cripple the United States climate agenda you have to go at the heart of it. This is the heart of it: the endangerment finding.”
From building new power plants to eliminating incentives for electric vehicles, most climate change initiatives could quickly be reprioritized if Zeldin has his way.
You have undoubtedly heard of the unprecedented Zelensky, criminal Trump and his mini-me Vance meeting in the White House. What you may not know is that while the Associated Press and Reuters, the premiere journalist networks in the country were barred from entering the Oval Office, Russian state propaganda network TASS was admitted. A White House official then lied about it, of course, as if anyone can get into a meeting between two Presidents in the Oval Office without being authorized. Putin is ecstatic about the meeting’s outcome, and the video of shouting between Zelensky and the petty tyrant that now runs the United States will be prominently featured on Russian television. What this meeting made clear is that “king” Trump has now aligned America with Putin’s Russia, and against Ukraine and NATO. There has never been anything like this in the history of the United States. You may not believe it but we are now aligned with the fascist oligarch states and against the democracies.
U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy at the White House. Credit: Brian Snyder/Reuters
A member of Russia’s state-owned news agency gained access to the Oval Office on Friday to cover President Trump’s sit-down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky – even as the AP and Reuters were barred from the high-level meeting. The White House said the journalist was not authorized to be in the press pool.
A correspondent for TASS, a Russian state media organization, was among a group of hand-picked pool reporters present in the Oval Office for the leaders’ meeting, which is part of the US’ efforts to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. The testy Trump-Zelensky sit-down may yield a signed deal that would exchange US access to Ukraine’s mineral resources for security guarantees.
Though the group of pool reporters in the Oval Office was hand picked, the White House has denied the TASS staffer was permitted entry.
“TASS was not on the approved list of media for today’s pool,” a White House official told CNN in a statement. “As soon as it came […]
Is fascist Trump a Russian agent? That would appear to be the case. My opinion is that it is very possible that Trump and Putin made a deal decades ago that he would serve Russian interests in return for getting the rights to build hotels in Moscow and St Petersburg. Readers, today my wife and I went to a demonstration against what is happening in the United States. It was organized by young people on the island, and reminded me of the late 1950s and early 1960s. I keep telling you the only thing that is going to save the America we have known all our lives is for millions of Americans to be out in the street just as we did in the civil rights and anti-Viet Nam war era. What are you doing? Did you buy anything today? I hope not.
A former senior Soviet KGB spy chief has claimed that Donald Trump was recruited as a spy by Russian intelligence as early as 38 years ago by his department, and given the codename ‘Krasnov’.
Russia’s ‘Committee for State Security’, abbreviated as KGB, was the main security agency of the Soviet Union between 1954 to 1991, responsible for internal security, foreign intelligence, counterintelligence and secret police functions.
In an extraordinary post on Facebook on 20 February, Alnur Mussayev – who used to run the successor to the Soviet-era KGB in Kazakhstan – claimed that he was personally aware of Trump’s recruitment by the agency in 1987.
The recruitment, he said, was undertaken by his own KGB department. One of the key roles of that department was to acquire intelligence through business leaders in Western countries.
“In 1987, I served in the 6th Directorate of the KGB of the USSR in Moscow. The most important area of work of the 6th Directorate was the recruitment of businessmen from capitalist countries”, wrote Mussayev in a Russian language post on Facebook.
“It was that year that our Office recruited 40-year-old businessman from the United States, Donald Trump, under the pseudonym ‘Krasnov’”.
He later added: “In the activity of intelligence agencies, as in life, […]
The scumminess of the Trump coup is like nothing that has ever happened in the United States since its founding. It’s not just the authoritarianism, it is the vulgarity of this nouveau riche bully and the nastiness of the people with whom he chooses to surround himself. In just over a month he has destroyed the stature and respect the United States has enjoyed for the last 80 years.
Palestinians examine shrapnel from a rocket allegedly used by Israel in the attack to displaced Palestinian tents in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on November 9, 2024. Credit: Ashraf Amra / Anadolu / Getty
The decision tells the international community that “you can ignore American law with respect to the provision of humanitarian aid and the use of weapons provided by American taxpayers.”
A memorandum aimed at restricting arms sales to protect human rights, issued by former U.S. President Joe Biden last year amid intensifying outcry over his administration’s support for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, ultimately did little to stop the U.S. from continuing to back a military operation in which there is abundant evidence of war crimes.
But advocates decried President Donald Trump’s decision Monday to repeal the document, National Security Memorandum-20 (NSM-20) as “shameful,” warning that it sends the message that “anything goes,” as Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said.
Van Hollen proposed legislation last year that pushed Biden to introduce NSM-20, which required countries that receive military aid from […]
I have been a subscriber of The Washington Post for half a century, and back in the 1970s wrote and published several pieces in the Post. It was the prestige newspaper in Washington, D.C., then edited by Ben Bradlee. Steve Issacs, then the editor of the Sunday magazine, the Post used to publish, gave me virtually the whole issue one week to describe the natural childbirth of my daughter Katherine. (It was then a very rare form of childbirth.) It made me very sad about four months ago when oligarch Bezos, who had bought the Post, manipulated the editorial board to stop it from coming out for Harris as President and I felt I had no choice but to cancel my subscription. Now, as this report describes, hundreds of thousands of subscribers have done the same. Oligarchs for several years now have been buying the prestige newspapers in the United States, as well as the social media platforms, in order to support fascism, and delude Americans with misinformation, so they can take control of the government, as they have now done.
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, center, shown at the inauguration ceremony of President Trump at the U.S. Capitol in January.Credit: Getty
More than 75,000 digital subscribers to The Washington Post have cancelled since its owner, billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced on Wednesday that he would radically overhaul the paper’s opinion pages to reflect libertarian priorities and to exclude opposing points of view.
Wednesday’s announcement led to the immediate resignation of Opinions Editor David Shipley. He had vainly sought to persuade Bezos to drop the plans, according to a person with direct knowledge. Shipley did not respond to requests for comment.
Bezos’ decision also prompted an outcry from longtime Post figures, including Associate Editor David Maraniss and former Executive Editor Marty Baron. Baron called the move “craven” and told Zeteo News that Bezos, whom he praised extensively in his 2023 memoir, was “basically fearful” of President Trump.
The number of cancellations comes from a person who asked for anonymity because of the fear of repercussions at the Post. The Washington Post Co. declined to comment on the figures, first reported here by NPR, citing its […]
