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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.
Sheila Kaplan, Matthew Goldstein and Alexandra Stevenson, - The New York Times
Stephan: In the world of Trump everything is a grift. He doesn't try to hide it because he is not embarrassed by it. I believe he thinks the grifters he appoints demonstrate his unquestioned power to do as he likes with the government. I'd be curious to know if any Trump family members own stock in Moderna, and when they bought it.
Moncef Slaoui, a former pharmaceutical executive and now the chief scientist of the White House’s initiative to develop a coronavirus vaccine, in the Rose Garden last week. Credit: Samuel Corum for The New York Times
Moncef Slaoui, a former pharmaceutical executive, is now overseeing the U.S. initiative to develop coronavirus treatments and vaccines. His financial interests and corporate roles have come under scrutiny.
The chief scientist brought on to lead the Trump administration’s vaccine efforts has spent the last several days trying to disentangle pieces of his stock portfolio and his intricate ties to big pharmaceutical interests, as critics point to the potential for significant conflicts of interest.
The scientist, Moncef Slaoui, is a venture capitalist and a former longtime executive at GlaxoSmithKline. Most recently, he sat on the board of Moderna, a Cambridge, Mass., biotechnology firm with a $30 billion valuation that is pursuing a coronavirus vaccine. He resigned when President Trump named him last Thursday to the new post as chief adviser for Operation Warp Speed, the federal drive for […]
Stephan: Donald Trump isn't very smart to start with, he makes that clear almost daily; and he is astonishingly uneducated and ignorant. But worse, he is utterly incurious and uninterested in learning. Consequently, he makes one geopolitical mistake after another, because he can't be bothered, or doesn't have the attention span, to learn how geopolitics works.
As a result, in three and a half years, he has more or less destroyed America's leadership in the world, in the process, making the world more dangerous for everyone including Americans.
Here is his latest stupidity.
A man wearing an orange prison outfit and a Donald Trump mask during a protest against the U.S. president’s U.K. visit to attend the NATO summit on December 3, 2019 in London. Credit: Sam Mellish / In Pictures/Getty
In a move that alarmed nuclear experts, anti-war activists, and policymakers around the world, the U.S. government notified international partners on Thursday that President Donald Trump is withdrawing the country from the Treaty on Open Skies over alleged Russian violations.
“Trump and enablers are systematically undoing the systems [put] in place at end of cold war to prevent accidental conflict and escalation.” —Jon Wolfsthal, Global Zero
“Once again, Donald Trump’s belligerent approach to foreign policy has put us all at risk,” declared Win Without War advocacy director Erica Fein, warning that the withdrawal “puts us further down the path of nuclear brinkmanship.”
The Open Skies Treaty (OST), which has over 30 other party states, was signed by then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker under President George H.W. Bush in 1992 and entered into force a decade later. The agreement aims to build trust and reduce the […]
Stephan: I don't usually run one-off stories like this one but, in this case, I am doing so because I see more and more such stories and they are always Republican politicians. I think it is time to start asking: Why is it from the lowest to the highest level the Republicans put forward people, mostly men, but there are some notable women, who are obviously low IQ morons with really nasty prejudices? Why has this become the hallmark of one of the two American parties?
Republican Mayor Eric Hogue
In an email that was posted online, the mayor of a small town in Dallas, Texas, said that women shouldn’t be leading prayers in city council meetings because it’s forbidden by the bible.
According to WFAA, Wylie Mayor Eric Hogue referred to passages from the New Testament in an email to another member of the Wylie City Council, who asked if some local student could be allowed to lead the public prayer at the next council meeting on May 26.
The passages Hogue cited were 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, which he quoted in the email as reading, “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And […]
Stephan: History shows and this story is but another example, one thing that sanctimonious self-righteous people who want everyone else to conform to their rules always do is lie and grift to achieve their aims. You have probably already heard or read about this revelation in the Jane Roe story. I am running it because it represents two trends I believe we need to acknowledge and deal with in this election. If a woman does not own and control her own body she owns nothing and is a subordinate being. If the anti-choice people really cared about babies they would be leading advocates for prenatal care, early childhood care, healthy school lunches, older childcare. They are, in fact, not leaders or even participants in any of those movements.
Also, my decades of research into the nature of consciousness has convinced me of the following:
1.) The evidence for me is overwhelming that there is a continuity of consciousness. That is: consciousness exists prior to incarnation, during incarnation, and continues after incarnation, to emerge again in another incarnation.
2.) Personality is a construct. Informational patterns of genetics, and emotional responses, habit patterns, and the potentiality of skill sets, that carry over from earlier incarnations that are created by the eternal self (soul) Ian's Biology and Reincarnation speaks particularly to this. The manifested personality through the choices in makes adds to this informational construct. Basically what comes across incarnations is information.
3.) Upon corporeal death personality continues for some unknown length of time but recedes at some point. It never disappears but is taken off for reasons who we do not know like a suit of clothes. The informational personality constructs of all incarnations remain incorporated in the totality of the nonlocal self which, itself, is a component of the matrix of consciousness.
4.) Episodically, for reasons we only dimly comprehend, but which seem to deal with compulsions and personality patterns another personality is manifested and incarnated, a composite of the informational patterns, whether manifested genetically, or psychophysically, and so the pattern goes on.
These are my conclusions based entirely on the reported data, whether experimental or clinical. Specifically, it is not based on emotions, religious affiliation (I have none), or pre-existing personal philosophy. And from my perspective abortion is a denial of incarnation. The eternal self, what religion calls the soul, continues.
But the choice issue, as important as it is, is not all of the story. What it does do is provide more compelling evidence that christofascists are not honorable. They do not play a clean game. Their political activity is a manifestation of their character.
Norma McCorvey aka “Jane Roe” of Roe v Wade
In its final 20 minutes, the documentary film AKA Jane Roe delivers quite the blow to conservatives who have weaponized the story of Jane Roe herself—real name, Norma McCorvey—to argue that people with uteruses should have to carry any and all pregnancies to term.
McCorvey, who died in 2017, became Jane Roe when, as a young homeless woman, she was unable to get a legal or safe abortion in the state of Texas. Her willingness to lend her experience to the legal case for abortion led to the passing of Roe v. Wade in 1973, which legalized abortions in all 50 states (though red states do all they can to get around this; recently, several have even used the COVID-19 pandemic to make abortions functionally impossible to procure). But conservatives had a field day in the mid ’90s when the assertive, media-savvy pro-choice advocate and activist McCorvey became an anti-abortion born-again ex-gay Christian with the help of leaders of the evangelical Christian right, Reverend Flip Benham (of the infamous Operation Rescue) and Reverend Rob Schenck. A conservative film, Roe v. Wade, starring Jon Voight and Stacey Dash, will dramatize […]
Stephan: Franklin Roosevelt's response to the Great Depression was a whole range of programs to foster wellbeing that changed America for the better. Harry Truman's response to the devastation of WW II was the Marshall Plan in Europe, and a whole range of wellbeing fostering programs for vets at home. The response of Donald Trump and the Republican Senate to the Coronavirus pandemic is to turn it into a grift.
While tens of millions of Americans are out of work, many desperate for cash to feed their children, the richest Americans merrily float on a rapidly rising tide of cash thanks in good part to Trump & Co.
My analysis of Federal Reserve data shows a record flow of greenbacks let the corporate rich pour trillions of dollars into bank accounts and institutional money market funds even as they fired workers by the tens of millions.
The Trump administration and its Radical Republican Senate allies are taking care of those who need help the least while declaring enough already for the unemployed.
Part of the answer is as simple as it is awful: The Trump administration and its Radical Republican Senate allies are taking care of those who need help the least while […]
Stephan: Another illustration of the points I made in the previous article.
US President Donald Trump visits the US-Mexico border fence in Otay Mesa, California on September 18, 2019. Credit: NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty
A scandal-plagued North Dakota company landed a $1.28 billion contract to build a small stretch of border wall after President Donald Trump repeatedly brought up the firm to officials following the CEO’s Fox News blitz.
The Army Corps of Engineers awarded the massive contract to North Dakota-based Fisher Sand and Gravel on May 6, the Arizona Daily Star first reported. The funds will be used to build 42 miles of border wall in Arizona. That figure marks the biggest contract awarded to any company for a stretch of wall to date. Fisher previously received a separate $400 million contract last December despite little experience building projects like the border wall.
When the company’s initial bids were passed over by government officials, CEO Tommy Fisher launched a media blitz, The Washington Post reported, repeatedly appearing on Fox News in an effort to directly appeal to Trump. The president an avid viewer of cable news, frequently tweeting about segments he watches.
Stephan: I do so like actual facts. Here are some.
People applaud from their fire escapes to show their gratitude to medical staff and essential workers on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic in the Upper East Side on May 2, 2020, in New York City. Credit: Noam Galai / Getty
Social distancing and stay-at-home measures instituted across the country may have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, according to the findings of one study.
Researchers at the Urban Health Collaborative at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University sought to find out how many lives were affected in a positive way due to social distancing rules that were implemented to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the nation’s 30 highest populated cities. According to their findings, stay-at-home orders (versus taking a course of having done nothing at all) likely prevented an additional 232,878 deaths within the combined populations of those jurisdictions.
In addition to the total number of deaths that were likely prevented, stay-at-home orders also likely resulted in 2.1 million fewer coronavirus-related hospital visits as well.
Jennifer Kolker, associate dean for public health practice at the Dornsife […]
Stephan: There is no vileness, no little move that Trump will not make to show his indifference and contempt for ordinary Americans. But this, this is really something special for its callous nastiness.
Ithinkthereshouldbesomekindofnationalrecognition,somethingspecial,formal,thatthewholenationsfocusesondoneforthemenandwomenofwhateverrankorstatus who, whentheCovid-19virus challenged the nation's wellbeing, stepped up to fight for human life. IthinkitoughttobeaphysicalsymbolsuchasthenecklaceswomeninCongresswear.Orasalapelpin, such as the male members of Congresswear.Somethingthatwillkeeprespectandhonoraliveforalongtime.
Members of the Connecticut National Guard with hospital staff in Stamford, Conn. Credit: John Moore/Getty
More than 40,000 National Guard members currently helping states test residents for the coronavirus and trace the spread of infections will face a “hard stop” on their deployments on June 24 — just one day shy of many members becoming eligible for key federal benefits, according to a senior FEMA official.
The official outlined the Trump administration’s plans on an interagency call on May 12, an audio version of which was obtained by POLITICO. The official also acknowledged during the call that the June 24 deadline means that thousands of members who first deployed in late March will find themselves with only 89 days of duty credit, one short of the 90-day threshold for qualifying for early retirement and education benefits under the Post-9/11 GI bill.
The looming loss of crucial frontline workers, along with questions about whether the administration is shortchanging first responders, would require a delicate messaging strategy, the official — representing FEMA’s New England region — told dozens of colleagues […]
