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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: There is a serious faction within the United States, insecure in their manhood, obsessed with guns. They are the violent Magas who are just waiting for Trump's call to begin a civil insurrection. In their world you can't own enough guns, and so we have come to this. Trump plays these people as Hitler played his Brown shirts, and Mussolini played his Black shirts.
We have come to a very dangerous place; a place America has not been to since 1861, where civil violence is right behind the door.
In this March 15, 2020, file photo, people wait in line to enter a gun store in Culver City, Calif. Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who was sued by gun-rights groups after trying to shut down firearms dealers in the wake of coronavirus concerns, said Monday, March 30, that he is abandoning the effort. Credit: AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu
Gun sales surged in May as shops reported an uptick in interest and demand amid national protests after the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd and as the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc and stoke fear across the country.
“Almost, you couldn’t even keep up with it. That’s how crazy it was,” said Joe Hawk, owner of Guns & Roses in New Jersey. “After Memorial Day, it spiked again. It just went crazy again.”
Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting, a private research firm, estimated that more than 1.7 million guns were sold in May, an 80% jump from May 2019.
“Yet again, firearms sales have surged in unprecedented ways,” said Jurgen Brauer, the group’s chief economist.
The stock prices for several gunmaking companies, including […]
Stephan: Beginning with Nixon, a corrupt criminal Republican, America began to militarize its police; a trend that has continued now for four decades It wasn't just the weapons, it was the people that were recruited into law enforcement. Throughout America's cities the police are filled with Magas. They despise non-Whites, they are bullies under color of authority, and they are using the civil rights demonstrations and the anarchy created by the Magas, and anarchists to act our their grievances, and racism.
Look at the number of journalists that have been shot with rubber bullets and gassed. Look at the overwhelming number of Black demonstrators arrested and similarly shot with rubber bullets and gassed.
America’s crises are boiling over, one into another. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, masses of people are taking to the streets to protest police brutality after the death of George Floyd in Minnesota and other victims of racial violence.
These two stories are linked. They are both public health stories. The link is systemic racism.
“The same broad-sweeping structural racism that enables police brutality against black Americans is also responsible for higher mortality among black Americans with Covid-19,” Maimuna Majumder, a Harvard epidemiologist working on the Covid-19 response, tells Vox.
“One in every 1,000 black men and boys can expect to be killed by police in this country,” she says. “To me, this clearly illustrates why police brutality is a public health problem; anything that causes mortality at such a scale is a public health problem.”
As the Covid-19 crisis continues, it’s also become clear that black communities, and other communities of color, have suffered a disproportionate burden. Law professors Ruqaiijah Yearby and Seema Mohapatra recently explained this in detail in the Journal of Law and Bioscience:
African Americans make up just 12% of the population […]
Stephan: The attacks by Maga cops on journalists is actually producing a good effect. It is waking up corporate media journalists to what is going on.
CNN Black journalist shot with rubber bullet
The targeting, harassment, shooting and arrest of working journalists by police over the last several days is having a significant — maybe even profound — effect on the coverage of the mass demonstrations over the death of George Floyd.
It’s a shift from watching the protests through the eyes of the police to watching the police through the eyes of the protesters.
It’s a shift from seeing the police primarily as sources and protectors to seeing them as subjects and aggressors.
Exhibit A is the lead story in the New York Times print edition on Monday morning, which, instead of dutifully reporting on the official version of clashes around the nation, boldly addressed the reality that police around the country have been responding to protests against their aggression with yet more of the same, and have themselves been inciting more violence.
Stephan: And here you can actually hear the Maga cops in the NYPD talking about violating people's civil rights under color of authority in the chaos of the demonstrations.
NYPD
According to the local New York site Gothamist, the NYPD was overheard on their radios telling officers to “shoot those motherf*ckers” and “run them over.”
Tens of thousands of peaceful marchers were in the streets Monday afternoon and early evening. But before 7 p.m. officers were overheard on a police scanner threatening physical violence.
The moment came at around 6:20 p.m. when marchers were walking to the 77th Precinct in Brooklyn. The voice on the radio says the group “may be heading towards there please.”
“Shoot those motherf*ckers.” another voice says, according to the audio.
Police vehicles then reported on the radio that they were surrounded by a crowd, said Gothamist.
“Central, we have a group of people blocking traffic on Albany and Dean street. They’re refusing to…go eastbound on Dean Street and Albany, so we’re stuck here.”
Stephan: Beneath the Covid-19 pandemic and the civil rights demonstrations that have completely taken over the media another kind of Trumpian pandemic is growing -- the food crisis.
As you can see in this article it is estimated that 54 million American, men, women, and children are going to find it very difficult to get enough to eat. That's 16 percent of the country's population. And when you look at the map you see this is not going to be even spread across the country. It is going to be the Red value, Republican controlled states that are mostly going to face this oncoming hunger. Because Trump is making no preparations for any of this, I fear that we are going to see hunger zoom to a level never witnessed in this country since the Great Depression.
As I read the agricultural literature I see an increasing number of stories of farmers fearful they will have to plow their crops under because there is no one to work for them to harvest what has been grown. And even when food is available the prices are going to put it out of reach of many. Six dollars for a head. of lettuce. Two dollars an ear for corn.
A record number of Americans face hunger this year as the catastrophic economic fallout caused by the coronavirus pandemic looks set to leave tens of millions of people unable to buy enough food to feed their families.
As a result, an estimated one in four children, the equivalent of 18 million minors, could need food aid this year – a 63% increase compared to 2018.
Overall, about 54 million people across the US could go hungry without help from food banks, food stamps and other aid, according to an analysis by Feeding America, the national food bank network.
America’s food insecurity crisis was dire even before the Covid-19 pandemic, when at least 37 million people lived in households without adequate resources to guarantee consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life.
Food insecurity varies vastly from state to state, and county to county, and had only recently […]
Stephan: Here is another take on the coming food crisis. What concerns me is that at the federal level there is not planning for this and, therefore, millions are going to suffer needlessly. I urge my readers, in the absence of reasonable federal planning, to work within your community to prepare for what seems to be coming.
Farmers being tested for COVID-19 (Coalition of Immokalee Workers)
Last week, an Intensive Care doctor in a central Florida hospital placed a call to Mexico to the parents of Juan Santiago (pseudonym) to inform them that their son was not expected to survive the next twenty-four hours. The next day, Juan, a farmworker from Immokalee, Florida, died from complications of the novel coronavirus. Sadly, his last days were spent without family in a city he had never even visited before he was intubated. “It’s so tragic”, said the ICU doctor, “and he was so young.”
Like many other essential workersinfected who couldn’t shelter at home during the pandemic, Juan was healthy before being exposed to the virus. When he became ill with a cough and fever in April, he’d been working at Oakes Farm, based in Naples, Florida. Alfie Oakes, the founder and CEO of Oakes Farm, claimed in March that COVID-19 was “the largest government and media hoax in history” and posted on Facebook that “the people that have propagated this hoax should get the death penalty for […]
Stephan: Tens of millions are unemployed, over 100,000 have died from Covid-19, and more are dying daily, millions face eviction from their apartments or foreclosures of their homes, millions have no healthcare insurance, schools are closed, but there is no childcare. Hunger haunts millions. The country is literally coming apart and so what is Trump up to? Why he can think of nothing better than taking us back 4o years to a nuclear arms race.
We have to get this man out of that office. It should have happened with an impeachment conviction, but the Republicans didn't have the guts to rise above their personal greed and hunger for power to serve the country's interest. And you will notice they are as quiet as rats in a garden today. So it is up to you and me, and everyone we can get to agree with us, to vote this monster out of office.
Spending by the world’s nine nuclear nations climbed to nearly $73 billion in 2019, nearly half of it by the United States alone. At the same time, the Trump administration has prioritized nuclear weapons in its defense budget while abandoning nuclear treaties, fumbling negotiations and confounding allies. The administration’s lack of coherent goals, strategies or polices have increased nuclear dangers, leaving the U.S. “blundering toward nuclear chaos with potentially disastrous consequences.” Those are the findings of two separate reports published in May that examine nuclear spending and strategy under Trump.
The findings of the reports lay bare the soaring costs and dangers of the Trump administration’s pursuit of more nuclear pits; the fast tracking of a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles; and the deployment of new, low-yield submarine-launched nuclear weapons. In May, The Washington Postreported that Trump officials are in ongoing discussions about resuming explosive nuclear weapons testing.
The first report, titled “Enough is Enough: Global Nuclear Weapons Spending 2019,” published by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), is a densely-packed 12-page snapshot of how the […]
Stephan: As I watch the civil rights demonstrations, what I see honorable men and women exercising their Constitutional rights infiltrated by anarchists and rightwingers set on creating as much conflict as possible, each for their own and different reasons. Trump I think is setting in motion a narrative in which he thinks he wins either way.
If the disturbances get bad but not horrible, he orders in the army and, for one of the very few times in our history, he directs the American military to dominate the American people. If it gets really bad then Trump declares martial law in American cities and maintains that the pandemic plus the civil unrest makes a fair election impossible. It's a win in his view, either way.
There is something else going on and that is as the civil stress is going on it is revealing for all to see that American law enforcement is partly decent honorable men and women, but it is also partly authoritarian thugs whose bullying and racism is done under the color of authority that protects them.
Demonstrations continued across the United States on Sunday as the nation braced for another grueling night of unrest over police shootings and the death of George Floyd, amid growing concern that aggressive law enforcement tactics intended to impose order were instead inflaming tensions.
Videos showed police officers in recent nights using batons, tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets on protesters, bystanders and journalists, often without warning or seemingly unprovoked. The footage, which has been shared widely online, highlighted the very complaints over police behavior that have drawn protests in at least 75 cities across the United States.
In Salt Lake City, officers in riot gear shoved a man with a cane to the ground.
