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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:
Today as the nation's economy is crashing, as 39 states are experiencing Covid-19 surges so great that local health care systems are collapsing, as millions of American children are facing food stress, while their parents are weeks away from being evicted, losing their cars, and going bankrupt, I have decided to devote today's edition of SR to where the billions of our tax dollars have gone instead of going to ordinary Americans.
We are in the midst of a catastrophe created by the corruption, and incompetence of the Trump administration, the silence and ineptitude of the Congress, and the complete moronic incompetence of Republican governors. But also, importantly, this situation is due to the utter stupidity of a large percentage of Americans themselves. And it is all getting worse, not better. Meanwhile, Trump has a 40% approval rating.
Today I saw this Trumpian support play out in the real world. I went to the pharmacy to pick something up, and as I was going into the store a White woman looking to be in her 50s, a "Karen" in the parlance of the day was just in front of me. She was not wearing a mask but did have a little label pasted on her chest, that she had downloaded from some website, saying she was an American and was not required to wear a mask As she tried to enter the store manager stopped her, and told her it was the store's policy that everyone wear a mask. She pointed to the label on her chest and said she was an American and she was exercising her rights. He politely told her he did not care about her label. And that if she had no mask she could not enter. She became agitated and rude, but he was unyielding and she finally stormed off, cursing him as she walked away.
I realized as I watched this little scene that the Great Schism Trend about which I have written on multiple occasions (see SR archives), has reached a level that I have never seen before, not even at the height of the anti-Viet Nam War movement and that the November election, at both the presidential and congressional level, is going to determine what kind of country America will be going forward.
Stephan: It should come as no surprise that the Kushners and Trump families, and their cronies, are raking in buckets of your tax dollars, but even saying that the scale is gobsmacking. Children may be hungry, elders may living day to day, and your brother or sister may be on the verge of losing their homes, but Trumpian grifters couldn't care less; they are just trying to get every dime they can. Here is some data making this point.
White House senior adviser Jared Kushner attends a meeting with President Donald Trump and several CEOs of major banks discussing the coronavirus response during a meeting in the Cabinet Room at the White House on March 11, 2020 in Washington, D.C. Credit: Mark Wilson/Getty
The Kushner family, large chains backed by private equity, Wall Street investors, Kanye West, members of Congress, and the law firm that represented President Donald Trump during the Mueller probe were among the thousands of beneficiaries of a Covid-19 relief program aimed at rescuing struggling small businesses and keeping workers employed, according to new federal data released Monday.
While the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) data disclosure reveals just a fraction of recipients of forgivable Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, critics voiced concern that large, wealthy firms were able to readily access millions of dollars in relief funds as more vulnerable companies frequently received less money than they applied for—or nothing at all.
“We cannot allow those small businesses that were grossly underfunded or disadvantaged by the program to disappear and not have their stories told and rectified.” —John Arensmeyer, Small […]
Stephan: Betsy DeVos was appointed by Trump, and confirmed by a Republican senate with the explicit intention that she work to dismantle public education in the United States and privatize it so that profit not education could become the system's first priority. Therefore, this story should come as no surprise. That doesn't make it any less despicable, or destructive of the nation's wellbeing.
From right, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, and Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia listen during a White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing the U.S. Department of Education on July 8, 2020, in Washington, D.C. Credit: Alex Wong/Getty
Charter schools across the country tapped the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) for what could have been more than $1 billion, according to a preliminary analysis of Treasury Department data.
One network alone, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), appears to have pulled somewhere between $28 million and $69 million in taxpayer dollars.
Another network of publicly-funded, privately-run schools, Achievement First, appears to have taken in between $7 million and $17 million in PPP loans. The network also received $3.5 million from a special $65 million federal grant that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos awarded to 10 charter management organizations in April, weeks after the PPP was passed, to “fund the creation and expansion of more than 100 high-quality public charter schools in underserved communities across the country.
Citizens of the World Charter Schools in Los Angeles […]
Stephan: Trumper hate groups, of course, got a good chunk of your tax money. Got to keep your homies happy. Here's the story.
A number of hate groups received loans from the government’s small business coronavirus relief fund. Credit: Getty
At least 10 groups with a history of making anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ or anti-immigrant statements received loans from the government’s small business coronavirus relief fund.
The Center for Immigration Studies, for instance, a Washington, D.C.-based organization described as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, got as much as $1 million from the Paycheck Protection Program, with the loan made by United Bank. The Southern Poverty Law Center in 2017 documented more than 2,000 instances in which the Center for Immigration Studies “circulated the writings of white nationalists and antisemitic writers.”
The 10 policy groups received a total of as much as $10 million in assistance from the Paycheck Protection Program. Eight of those groups are identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Another group is headed by James Dobson, whom Southern Poverty Law Center has said “is well known for his anti-LGBT views,” claiming that homosexuals will “destroy the earth.”
Stephan: The Roman Catholic Church took a $1.4 billion payout of your tax dollars. There are so many things wrong with that. First, the Founders very specifically did not want tax money used to support religions. Any religion. They could not have been clearer about this. Second, what this money is really about is bailing out a church in desperate financial trouble because of the hundreds of millions it has had to pay out as recompense for the sexual molestation its clergy perpetrated with parishioners, particularly children. And, third, because the point of the payoff was to try to influence how Catholics will vote in November.
St. Patrick’s gets police protection and at least $1 million for pandemic.
This isn’t the kind of news Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Marco Rubio want to see about the continually problematic Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) they got into this spring’s coronavirus relief bill: The U.S. Roman Catholic Church got at least $1.4 billion in those loans “with many millions going to dioceses that have paid huge settlements or sought bankruptcy protection because of clergy sexual abuse cover-ups.” (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan.)
The AP has found that the Catholic Church got between $1.4 billion and at least $3.5 billion from the program, split among at least 3,500 forgivable loans to dioceses, parishes, schools, and other church programs. The report found that the church, by “aggressively promoting the payroll program and marshaling resources to help affiliates navigate its shifting rules,” became the biggest winner of all from the PPP loan programs. The legislation made an allowance for faith groups and other nonprofits to get the loans, which, being tax-payer funded, are not normally available […]
Stephan: This is what really concerns me about the upcoming election. Not enough Democrats will register, or if they register, won't come out to vote, or will vote for some obscure third-party candidate who has no chance of winning. A repeat of the Jill Stein or Ralph Nader screw-up.
It was a flicker of hope for Donald Trump in an otherwise dismal summer.
Late last month, the Democratic data firm TargetSmart found that while new voter registrations had plummeted amid the coronavirus pandemic, those who were registering in competitive states tended to be whiter, older and less Democratic than before.
When he saw the numbers, Ben Wessel, executive director of NextGen America, said he “got nervous,” and other Democratic-leaning groups felt the same.
The report seemed to confirm what state elections officials and voter registration groups had been seeing in the field for weeks: Neither Democrats nor Republicans had been registering many voters during the pandemic. But Democrats were suffering disproportionately from the slowdown.
Last month in Iowa, where the race between Trump and Joe Biden is surprisingly close, Republicans nosed back ahead of Democrats in active registrations after ceding the lead to Democrats for the first time in years.
“In some states, before the pandemic, you were seeing a net edge for Democrats,” said Page Gardner, founder and president of the Voter Participation Center, which works to […]
Stephan: If you, like me, are seeing the daily figures arising from this pandemic, you know that we have 4% of the world's population and 25% of the world's Covid-19 cases. The United States thanks to the Trump administration at the federal level and Republican governors at the state level has made a catastrophic hash of the pandemic. What I find particularly disgusting is the danger in which these corrupt incompetent morons have put the very people working to save the lives of their fellow Americans. Five months into this crisis and they still can't get enough gear to do their jobs without stress. These men and women, many working double shifts seven days a week, day after day, can't even get fundamental protective gear. How is that possible?
A member of the medical staff listens as Montefiore Medical Center nurses call for N95 masks and other critical PPE to handle the coronavirus pandemic on April 1, 2020, in New York. Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty
A survey from the National Nurses Union found that 85 percent of nurses reported being asked to reuse personal protective equipment that’s meant to be single-use. At one private clinic in Arizona, medical workers are treating Covid-19 patients without being given any N95 masks, according to the New York Times. The shortage is so […]
Weizhen Xie, Stephen Campbell, and Weiwei Zhang, - PsyPost
Stephan: It is usually taboo to talk about, but psychophysiology has become a major factor in American politics. I have been telling my readers this for years, and have written several papers on this subject (go to Academia.edu and search on The psychophysiology of Politics, or Social values, Social Outcomes) as well as a book The 8 Laws of Change all describing that fact that the core of the Trump base is lower IQ, lower education Whites, who are terrified by the social changes that are occurring as America becomes a majority-minority nation. These are facts not political partisan polemics. Now here is yet another study making this point. For the primary research publication upon which this report is based go to: Working memory capacity predicts individual differences in social-distancing compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
Boogoola Trumpers
New research provides evidence that working memory and fluid intelligence are associated with engaging in social distancing in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. The new study has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
On March 11th, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of the novel coronavirus SARS‐CoV‐2 to be a global pandemic. Governments around the world urged people to follow preventive health measures such as frequent hand washing and physical distancing. But not everyone abided by the safety guidelines.
“At the moment, successful containment of the COVID-19 outbreak critically relies on people’s voluntary compliance with social distancing guidelines. However, there is widespread non-compliance in our society, especially during the early stage of this pandemic (and more recently after reopening),” said study author Weiwei Zhang, a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
The researcher noted that there have been numerous media reports about Americans failing to physically distance themselves from one another in public spaces.
