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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.
Charles King, Professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University - Foreign Affairs
Stephan: History is very clear: no empire lasts forever, or in geologic terms no more than a couple of heartbeats. We have been watching the dismantlement of America's international stature under the psychopath we have as president. Is this the end of the American era? This essay provides some insights.
Protestors in Moscow in 1991 at the end of the Soviet Union
On November 11, 1980, a car filled with writers was making its way along a rain-slick highway to a conference in Madrid. The subject of the meeting was the human rights movement in the Soviet Union, and in the vehicle were some of the movement’s long-suffering activists: Vladimir Borisov and Viktor Fainberg, both of whom had endured horrific abuse in a Leningrad psychiatric hospital; the Tatar artist Gyuzel Makudinova, who had spent years in internal exile in Siberia; and her husband, the writer Andrei Amalrik, who had escaped to Western Europe after periods of arrest, rearrest, and confinement.
Amalrik was at the wheel. Around 40 miles from the Spanish capital, the car swerved out of its lane and collided with an oncoming truck. Everyone survived except Amalrik, his throat pierced by a piece of metal, probably from the steering column. At the time of his death at the age of 42, Amalrik was certainly not the best-known Soviet dissident. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had published The Gulag Archipelago, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and immigrated to the United States. Andrei Sakharov had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which he was forced to accept in absentia because the Soviet […]
Stephan: At no time since the Civil War has the United States been as split into two camps as it is today. What is scary about the Trumpers is that they literally operate only on emotions, fear, hate, resentment, racism, and seem impervious to facts. The politicization of mask-wearing being one of the most prominent examples of this dichotomy. I don't think there is going to be much conversion of Trumpers, which is why it is so important that everyone else vote Democratic. This is a campaign not of conversion, but of overwhelm.
The Grim Reaper chats with Florida Man on the beach. Credit: Twitter/@RambleRaconteur
Normally, I wouldn’t be at all concerned about a professional tabloid weirdo like Kanye West running for president. Today, however, I’m actually quite concerned, and not because I think Kanye is likely to win or even fumble his way onto enough ballots to make a dent. He won’t. For now.
The problem with Kanye or other political hobbyists running for president is that it further erodes the already threadbare integrity of our presidential politics, making it increasingly acceptable for other famous-for-being-famous nincompoops to run, and perhaps win. The last four years have illustrated how profoundly dangerous that can be.
These days, the ground is especially fertile for dilettantes and tourists to run for national office. Even on the Democratic side, sparingly. There are myriad reasons for it, but chief among them is that we appear to be experiencing an American nervous breakdown — a societal form of psychological imbalance that’s abundantly evident and worsening by the day.
It became blindingly noticeable in 2016, but during the course of this […]
Stephan: I think it is very important that Democrats not get over-confident because of the poll results; it ain't over until it is over. The Republicans, through voter suppression and other schemes, coupled with lazy over-confident Democrats who don't vote may end up giving us a catastrophic outome. Four more years of Trump and America as we have known it will be gone. This essay makes points I hope every Democrat will take to heart.
Biden in Texas
The message to the DNC and all progressives: Stop scaring Middle America
Within days before the 2016 election there were assertions that Hillary Clinton might sweep the board, or at least win in a significant landslide. There were several key factors that led to defeat. The largest, by far, was the number of voters (many of them Democrats who had supported Obama) who failed to go to cast ballots.
There is no rational reason why Trump’s approval rating now should be as high as 38 percent, yet it is. Some pollsters claim the problem in predicting the outcome of the 2016 election was pooling the data on a national level. That they claim failed to take into account the state by state contests. Thus, while Clinton won the popular vote by a significant margin, she lost the electoral college.
But this is not about history, it is about current events and how hard many progressives are working to get Trump re-elected. Obviously, that is not their intent, but certainly consistent […]
Stephan: In most of the rest of the developed world there is only one pandemic going on, and in most of those countries, with the notable exception of Russia, Brazil, and India, it seems to be almost over. In the United States things are very different. It is my view that in America we have two pandemics going on concurrently. One is the Covid-19 pandemic. The other is the Trumper stupidity pandemic. They may be able to cure Covid-19, but death seems to be the only cure for stupidity.
Misinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 continue to flourish in the wake of the pandemic.
A recent online survey of about 2,500 people found that 25 percent either showed a consistent pattern or “very high levels” of endorsing “conspiracy thinking” about the novel coronavirus.
Medical experts urge people to listen to medically credible individuals who speak from knowledge and experience instead of following ideas and untested therapies from social media and even the White House.
Knowledgeable professionals suggest simple interventions to keep yourself and others safe from COVID-19: Wear a mask. Wash your hands. Seek medical care if you feel ill, and follow the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Anti-mask Trumper Credit: New York Magazine
All data and statistics are based on publicly available data at the time of publication. Some information may be out of date. Visit our coronavirus hub and follow our live updates page for the most recent information on the COVID-19 outbreak.
FDA NOTICE
The FDATrusted Source have removed the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for […]
Stephan: You can't travel to Europe. It looks like you may not be able to travel to Mexico, and other nations are considering similar restrictions. America is becoming a pariah nation because of its cruelty, incompetence, and stupidity. Yeah, we're number one all right. But not for what Trump seems to think.
American traveler turned away from entering Europe Credit: AOL.com
As coronavirus cases surge in the U.S. South and West, health experts in countries with falling case numbers are watching with a growing sense of alarm and disbelief, with many wondering why virus-stricken U.S. states continue to reopen and why the advice of scientists is often ignored.
“It really does feel like the U.S. has given up,” said Siouxsie Wiles, an infectious-diseases specialist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand — a country that has confirmed only three new cases over the past three weeks and where citizens have now largely returned to their pre-coronavirus routines.
“I can’t imagine what it must be like having to go to work knowing it’s unsafe,” Wiles said of the U.S.-wide economic reopening. “It’s hard to see how this ends. There are just going to be more and more people infected, and more and more deaths. It’s heartbreaking.”
Stephan: Under cover of the pandemic, the Trumpian orcs are working their agendas. Consider this report on Betsy DeVos, who wants to privatize public education This at a time when American students already score abysmally compared to students from other developed nations, and one horror story after another has emerged on what happens when you privatize what was formerly public education.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos testifies before the House in Washington on Thursday, Feb. 27, 2020. Credit: Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc./Getty
With the Trump administration planning to demand that Congress devote a large chunk of the state and local education funding in the next Covid-19 relief package to a new grant program for private and religious schools, the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers on Thursday accused Education Secretary Betsy DeVos of attempting to exploit the pandemic to advance her privatization agenda.
“It is telling that, after spending more than three years doing nothing to help the public schools that 90 percent of children attend, Betsy DeVos races to divert resources into private hands 48 hours after the Supreme Court’s decision in Espinoza,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement, referring to the high court’s ruling Tuesday that religious schools cannot be excluded from taxpayer aid programs.
“Secretary DeVos and President Trump are using this pandemic as an excuse to push an ideological privatization agenda that would divert much-needed funds away from our public schools.” —Sen. Patty Murray
Stephan: Also under cover of the pandemic, Trump is making sure the rich, including his family, get much richer. Are you getting richer? Probably not.
Some billionaires having a good time, and the common folk affected by the pandemic by Getty/Salon
Where you or I would see misery, the super-rich see opportunity. (That includes the billionaire president.)
Indeed, amid a pandemic with a six-figure death toll, America’s wealthiest capitalists are consolidating their unprecedented gains realized thanks to the spread of a deadly virus, which their chief protector Donald J. Trump is working overtime to spread. The coronavirus news cycle was a perfect cover to mask what has really been happening.
Thus, as Trump’s so-called policies kill tens of thousands of Americans, he’s making the richest even richer.
Even as the death toll mounts, including any number of essential workers, the downdraft of Trump’s Depression is kicking in. Remember all the hot air about premium pay for the essential workforce? According to the latest monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics, hourly earnings for private non-farm payroll shrank by 35 cents and hour, while nonsupervisory workers lost 23 cents an hour.
Based on the President’s actions, it appears that he subscribes […]
Tom Gjelton, Correspondent - npr/Reader Supported News
Stephan: What very few people in the United States seem to realize is that what passes for Christianity in this country has, and has for centuries, been intertwined with White Supremacy. Virtually every White slave owner saw themselves as a Christian, as does every KKK member. They don't burn crosses because they are Jews.
Of course, they don't teach this history in schools, yet it has pervaded every aspect of the Christian faith except the Quakers who, from the 18th century on were abolitionists.
For instance, were you told that in 1852 when the LDS (Mormon) Church was just getting started, Brigham Young, the president of the church pronounced that Black men could not become priests in the church, and that this did not change until well into the 20th century? If you look at the taboo history of Christianity in the United States you discover that the most frequently invoked justifications for White Supremacy are grounded in the Bible. This piece by an npr correspondent lays out some of the issues very well. In my opinion the real facts about slavery and White Supremacy should be required in courses on American history.
When a young Southern Baptist pastor named Alan Cross arrived in Montgomery, Ala., in January 2000, he knew it was where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had his first church and where Rosa Parks helped launched the famous bus boycott, but he didn’t know some other details of the city’s role in civil rights history.
The more he learned, the more troubled he became by one event in particular: the savage attack in May 1961 on a busload of Black and white Freedom Riders who had traveled defiantly together to Montgomery in a challenge to segregation. Over the next 15 years, Cross, who is white, would regularly take people to the old Greyhound depot in Montgomery to highlight what happened that spring day.
“They pull in right here, on the side,” Cross said, standing in front of the depot. “And it was quiet when they got here. But then once they start getting off the bus, around 500 people come out – men, women and children. Men were holding the Freedom Riders back, and the […]
