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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: This condemnation of the vulgar little gremlin who occupies the White House is unprecedented. Lancet is one of the three most prestigious medical journals in the world -- the other two being The Journal of the American Medical Association, and The British Medical Journal. As far as I can remember Lancet has never before taken such a position against an American president, and this Lancet editorial, I think, should be seen as a major alarm bell from a non-American source, telling us how seriously Donald Trump and the ethically depraved people around him have debased and degraded the United States.
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to worsen in the USA with 1·3 million cases and an estimated death toll of 80 684 as of May 12. States that were initially the hardest hit, such as New York and New Jersey, have decelerated the rate of infections and deaths after the implementation of 2 months of lockdown. However, the emergence of new outbreaks in Minnesota, where the stay-at-home order is set to lift in mid-May, and Iowa, which did not enact any restrictions on movement or commerce, has prompted pointed new questions about the inconsistent and incoherent national response to the COVID-19 crisis.The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the flagship agency for the nation’s public health, has seen its role minimised and become an ineffective and nominal adviser in the response to contain the spread of the virus. The strained relationship between the CDC and the federal government was further laid bare when, according to The Washington Post, Deborah Birx, the head of the US COVID-19 Task Force and a former director of the CDC’s Global HIV/AIDS Division, cast doubt on the CDC’s […]
Stephan: This exegetic essay, in my opinion, states the true state of America, and the rapid dismantlement and politicization of the legal and judiciary systems that once made us the envy of the world. As this essay described we are way down the road to becoming an authoritarian christofascist kleptocracy. If Trump is re-elected, and I think he could lose the popular vote by five million votes, and still win through the Electoral College, the United States as a democratic republic will be gone from the pages of history by the time his second term ends. It is that dire.
Three years ago, President Donald Trump appeared to be politically wounded and legally encircled. On May 17, 2017, eight days after Trump had fired James Comey, then the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel, to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Memos written by Comey stated that Trump had asked him to “let go” of the F.B.I. investigation of Michael Flynn, Trump’s national-security adviser, who had been fired after he lied to Vice-President Mike Pence and other officials about the nature of a phone call that he’d had with the Russian Ambassador. As 2017 came to a close, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to F.B.I. agents about the call and agreed to serve as a coöperating witness for Mueller’s investigation. Trump’s effort to flout post-Watergate reforms, which were designed to prevent a President from pressuring the F.B.I. into halting a politically embarrassing investigation, appeared to have failed.
Yet now, six months before he faces reëlection, Trump, with the help of Attorney General William Barr, is successfully rewriting that history. Last Thursday, Barr
Jodi Dean, Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges - Los Angeles Review of Books
Stephan: The material covered in this article will all be very familiar to regular readers., but that makes it no less accurate an assessment. Vampire capitalism and its absurd emphasis on individualism is destroying our society. The Covid-19 pandemic and the comparison of America's response compared to other developed nations makes that screamingly clear.
A minor note that pleased me personally: I particularly noted that the term neofeudalism I coined in this context, 15 years ago, appears to be moving into the mainstream, along with christofascism, and illness profit system.
In Capital is Dead, McKenzie Wark asks: What if we’re not in capitalism anymore but something worse? The question is provocative, sacrilegious, unsettling as it forces anti-capitalists to confront an unacknowledged attachment to capitalism. Communism was supposed to come after capitalism and it’s not here, so doesn’t that mean we are still in capitalism? Left unquestioned, this assumption hinders political analysis. If we’ve rejected strict historical determinism, we should be able to consider the possibility that capitalism has mutated into something qualitatively different. Wark’s question invites a thought experiment: what tendencies in the present indicate that capitalism is transforming itself into something worse?
Over the past decade, “neofeudalism” has emerged to name tendencies associated with extreme inequality, generalized precarity, monopoly power, and changes at the level of the state. Drawing from libertarian economist Tyler Cowen’s emphasis on the permanence of extreme inequality in the global, automated economy, the conservative geographer Joel Kotkin envisions the US future as mass serfdom. A property-less underclass will survive by servicing the needs of high earners as personal assistants, trainers, child-minders, cooks, cleaners, et […]
Stephan: And here we have yet another revelation of how the American system has been rigged against ordinary people in favor of the corporations and the rich. It is a picture of deliberate anti-wellbeing. And yet millions of those souls whose lives are, as this article describes, structured against them will, in November, vote for the continuance of their impoverishment. It makes my heart sick,
The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced on May 8 that the US economy lost 20.5 million jobs in April. This is the largest decline in jobs since the government began tracking the data in 1939. Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty
Don, a commercial boat captain in Sarasota, Florida, wasn’t on Twitter before the coronavirus pandemic. Recently, though, he decided to join; after weeks of struggling with his state’s unemployment insurance system, signing up for Twitter was a last-ditch attempt to make progress. “I googled how I can get ahold of the state, just looking for answers, and I saw some Twitter posts popping up,” he told me.
Don, 47, and his wife both work for the same company and were laid off on March 18. They’ve spent weeks trying to navigate Florida’s unemployment system, dealing with crashing websites and blocked phone lines, sometimes calling hundreds of times a day. Three weeks ago, his wife was finally deemed eligible to start receiving benefits, but he’s still waiting. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it,” he said.
Stephan: I read the media coverage of the murder of a young Black EMT by police and thought about it in the context of the White Supremacy movement Trump is stimulating, and the recurring stories of the murder of non-Whites by the police and decided I would devote today's SR to this trend.
When I was about nine years old I was obsessed with trains, real or model. In the summer, Marilyn, the Black woman who was my nanny would take me by streetcar down to the train station, and let me watch the trains come in and go out. On one of these trips, we waited in the full waiting room for a particular locomotive I wanted to see that was coming in from New York.
Sitting across the aisle from Marilyn and myself was a young Black boy about my age who was with what looked like his grandmother. One of what I thought of as church ladies, with a hat, who has colling her face with a paper fan. It was hot, and this was before air-conditioning was widespread. I heard the boy ask his grandmother something and she pointed towards the segregated water fountains across the room one with a cooler was marked "White" and the other, uncooled was marked "Colored." I watched as he got up and went across the Colored fountain which he could just reach. He fiddled with it but it did not seem to work, and he started for the White fountain when his grandmother quickly called out to him to come back, which he did. He sat there clearly unhappy as she talked to him. There was a kind of soda fountain in the waiting room, and I got up and went over to the counter boy, and asked him for a cold glass of water. He took a metal holder put a V-shaped paper cup put in an ice cube filled it with water and handed it to me.
I went over to the Black boy and handed it to him. Suddenly you could hear a murmur of comment in the room, Marilyn and the grandmother exchanged a look and both women stood up. The grandmother took the boy's hand as he finished the drink, and Marilyn took mine saying, "We have to go." I started to protest but she would not be denied. As we went down the aisle towards the exit, we walked by a White woman who looked at Marilyn and said in a tone of nastiness even a 9-year-old understood, "Teaching him to be a nigger lover are you?" Other Whites around her voiced their support. I had never heard the word before and asked Marilyn what it meant and why the woman and others seemed so angry. Marilyn said, "That's a hateful word some White people call Negroes like me."
That was the day I learned about racism, and I have worked against it ever since.
Stephan: Here, reported in the British newspaper, The Guardian, is yet another gobsmacking story of an innocent Black person murdered by police in her apartment in the middle of the night while she was asleep in her bed. Like the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, it took weeks for this story to surface, and then only because media coverage made it impossible to keep her murder quiet.
It has been two months since Breonna Taylor was sleeping in her apartment on the south side of Louisville, Kentucky, when plainclothes police officers arrived outside her door in the early hours of 13 March.
Across the country, many people were starting to work from home as the grip of coronavirus quickly spread.But Taylor, a 26-year-old certified EMT, was an essential worker, still going to help at two Louisville hospitals as the city braced for the worst.
“She had no regard for her health when it came to helping others,” said lawyer Ben Crump in a virtual press conference on Wednesday.
“And the tragedy is it wasn’t coronavirus that killed Breonna Taylor. It was police officers that were being reckless and irresponsible and shooting from outside the house, shooting through windows. They don’t do this in other neighborhoods.”
With officials and the media largely distracted by the coronavirus pandemic, the police killing of Taylor, who is African American, largely escaped widespread scrutiny. Taylor’s family and friends called for justice, rallying outside downtown Louisville’s court complex in March, but they gained little momentum.
Stephan: Imagine if you saw a crowd of Black men in camos wandering around your state capital corridors en masse, armed with AK-47s, as we recently saw White Supremacist militia doing a few days ago in Michigan? How do you think the police would respond? How would the media report it?
The fact is that if you are a Black man in America and you are in a well-to-do White neighborhood or seen doing something unusual, or just jogging down a public street, you have a real chance of being arrested if not shot by the police. Am I exaggerating? Read this. How many stories in this vein does it take to wake the country up to the racism that is being stimulated by our racist president?
Miami Dr. Armen Henderson was handcuffed while helping the homeless during the coronavirus outbreak. Credit: Armen Henderson
A black Miami doctor was handcuffed outside his home last week while on his way to hand out tents to the city’s homeless during the coronavirus outbreak.
The home security footage appeared to show a police sergeant handcuffing Dr. Armen Henderson, an internal medicine physician at the University of Miami Health System, as he was placing camping tents in his van. According to Henderson, the officer asked him what he was doing and if he was littering – Henderson told him he lived there.
“At some point, he got upset with what I was saying and he handcuffed me,” Henderson, who is African American, told MSNBC. The officer then walked him over to the police car and pointed his fingers at him, all while not wearing a mask, the doctor said.
Henderson’s wife, Leyla Hussein, came out of the house with identification to prove they both lived there.
“It was really humiliating,” he said.
In a video statement released last week, Miami Police Chief Jorge Colina acknowledged […]
COREY WILLIAMS and RICK CALLAHAN, Associated Press Race and Ethnicity team - Associated Press
Stephan: About 30 years ago I was having dinner with the Deputy Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. There had been a very controversial killing of a Black man by the police and I asked him how big a problem that really was? He thought a moment, looked at me, and told me that 15% of police "are heroes, everything you could ever ask for an officer to be. After a pause, he continued, "Another 15% are thugs and racists. The rest go with the flow. If they are partnered with a hero, they're heroes too. But if they are partnered with a thug, well you know." I have never forgotten those observations from a man who had started out as a patrolman and risen over the years to Deputy Chief of one of the largest police departments in America.
In this Thursday, May 7, 2020 photo, Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Chief Randal Taylor, left, and family of Dreasjon Reed, his father Jamie Reed and sister Jazmine Reed, right, speak during an emotional meeting at a protest on Michigan Road in Indianapolis. The protest was for the fatal Indianapolis police shooting of Reed, who was killed earlier in the week following a police pursuit on the city’s northwest side. Credit: Kelly Wilkinson/The Indianapolis Star via AP
INDIANAPOLIS — Indianapolis police Chief Randal Taylor solemnly promised thoroughness and transparency as his department investigates the fatal shootings of two black men in the city by officers.
Taylor, an African American and longtime member of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, also made a plea to the community as he faced the first major crisis since becoming chief less than five months ago: Give his office time and he’ll address any mistakes made, but jumping to conclusions won’t help.
Given the department’s contentious history with black residents and numerous police shootings of blacks around the U.S. captured on video in recent years, Taylor’s […]
I read the media coverage of the murder of a young Black EMT by police and thought about it in the context of the White Supremacy movement Trump is stimulating, and the recurring stories of the murder of non-Whites by the police and decided I would devote today's SR to this trend.
When I was about nine years old I was obsessed with trains, real or model. In the summer, Marilyn, the Black woman who was my nanny would take me by streetcar down to the train station, and let me watch the trains come in and go out. On one of these trips, we waited in the full waiting room for a particular locomotive I wanted to see that was coming in from New York.
Sitting across the aisle from Marilyn and myself was a young Black boy about my age who was with what looked like his grandmother. One of what I thought of as church ladies, with a hat, who has colling her face with a paper fan. It was hot, and this was before air-conditioning was widespread. I heard the boy ask his grandmother something and she pointed towards the segregated water fountains across the room one with a cooler was marked "White" and the other, uncooled was marked "Colored." I watched as he got up and went across the Colored fountain which he could just reach. He fiddled with it but it did not seem to work, and he started for the White fountain when his grandmother quickly called out to him to come back, which he did. He sat there clearly unhappy as she talked to him. There was a kind of soda fountain in the waiting room, and I got up and went over to the counter boy, and asked him for a cold glass of water. He took a metal holder put a V-shaped paper cup put in an ice cube filled it with water and handed it to me.
I went over to the Black boy and handed it to him. Suddenly you could hear a murmur of comment in the room, Marilyn and the grandmother exchanged a look and both women stood up. The grandmother took the boy's hand as he finished the drink, and Marilyn took mine saying, "We have to go." I started to protest but she would not be denied. As we went down the aisle towards the exit, we walked by a White woman who looked at Marilyn and said in a tone of nastiness even a 9-year-old understood, "Teaching him to be a nigger lover are you?" Other Whites around her voiced their support. I had never heard the word before and asked Marilyn what it meant and why the woman and others seemed so angry. Marilyn said, "That's a hateful word some White people call Negroes like me."
That was the day I learned about racism, and I have worked against it ever since.
