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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: When you stress a system its weaknesses and flaws are brought into focus. Yet another example of this is the effect the virus is having on the economy of the professional class, basically the mid-middle and upper-middle class. The wealth inequality in the United States has reached a level that would make Louis XVIth, or King Croesus blush.
This really is an Earth 2. When you fly on private aircraft, cruise on private yachts, and live on an estate, and can basically buy anything you like without thinking about it, you are in another world.
There’s a viral pandemic going on, which has caused the economy to crash. Many U.S. residents who previously lived comfortably on a day-to-day basis are losing some or all of their income and having trouble paying bills. In response, government leaders from both parties have proudly announced generous new unemployment benefits, a massive “stimulus” that will deliver cash to individual Americans, a program of no-interest loans that will allow small businesses to retain workers, and arrangements with landlords and lenders to allow the deferment of rent and mortgage payments.
Credit: Eric Gay/AP
Sounds great! There’s a catch, though: None of those things work.
At least, they don’t work in the sense of reliably delivering relief to everyone who is eligible for the programs and needs them. You can’t get unemployment benefits until you register for unemployment, and many people can’t register for unemployment, even if they’re calling the office hundreds of times a day, because state systems are overloaded. You can get your stimulus if the IRS already has a direct deposit account number for you—but if you didn’t get a refund this […]
Stephan: In the United States, if you have only limited means, you are a modern-day peasant, and things as basic as potable water may be hard to obtain. Can this possibly be true? Surely, I am mistaken. Consider this from this report: "A third of American households — about 120 million people — still risk having their water disconnected and racking up exorbitant fees, despite calls from a coalition of lawmakers and advocates to suspend all utility shutoffs until the country drags itself out of this unprecedented crisis."
Credit: Picture Alliance / Getty
Joshua Haynes was raised to work hard and take care of his family without asking for outside help. But when the utility bills arrived last month, he knew there would be trouble.
Haynes, 34, a construction worker from Newbern, Tennessee, was left without income after the governor issued a stay-at-home order in early April. As a cash-in-hand builder, he is not eligible to claim unemployment insurance, and the stimulus check still had not arrived.
“I always pay my bills on time, but without work, I just didn’t have the money to cover everything, so I asked for an extension. They said no,” Haynes said.
Haynes, who lives with his wife and three children, managed to get the money just six days after the bill was due, but the city refused to accept the payment unless he also paid a $70 reconnection charge. He didn’t have it, and the charge didn’t make sense as they had not been disconnected. A few hours after his payment was turned down, the taps were turned off, even as the
Stephan: As I was writing this comment I was listening to 60 Minutes do a story on the endless screw-ups, failures, and incompetencies of the Trump administration as seen in the lives of ordinary people. I had seen this story about Trump withdrawing from WHO a few days ago but thought, that can't possibly be true, even Trump is not that manically egotistical and incompetent. I was wrong, he is.
History, I think, is going to record this crisis as the collective result of the most incompetent man ever to occupy the presidency, augmented by a Republican Party that simply doesn't care about ordinary people, and made possible by the collective intent of those ordinary people to destroy their lives and society.
Am I exaggerating? According to fivethirtyeight Trump's approval rating is 43.4% The sad truth we have to face is that the problem America faces is Americans. You cannot save a society when 43.4% of the people think what is happening is just fine, unless the other 56.6% to a man and woman vote against the continuation of this madness. What are you willing to do?
Despite the fact that the U.S. is the number one world hotspot for coronavirus, with nearly 1.13 million confirmed cases and over 65,605 deaths (nearly triple that of any other nation), the Trump administration has pulled the U.S. out of a World Health Organization (WHO) global initiative “to speed the development, production and distribution of drugs and vaccines against COVID-19,” a spokesman for the U.S. mission in Geneva told Reuters.
Stephan: Rural hospitals are quickly moving into bankruptcy, they still lack PPE supplies, many hospital corporations are cutting the hours and pay of the those who actually deliver the healthcare and... well you know the story. But the illness profit system in America always, always, looks after its corporate owners. Consider this report.
The truth is we are one of the worst managed countries in the developed world, and yet we have a president and government telling us how well everything is going.
Credit: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty
In one of the largest ironies of the coronavirus pandemic, thousands of health-care workers across the country have had their wages cut and hours slashed as profitable elective procedures are put on hold. Hospital CEOs have called these measures “painful” and “difficult,” though necessary to make up for millions of dollars in lost revenue. But some executives don’t seem willing to share in the suffering.
Last month, executives at Denver Health received bonuses of up to $230,000, just days after asking hospital workers to reduce their hours or take time off. At the University of Kentucky—which boasts some of the highest-paid administrators in the country—the college president has refused to take a pay cut, despite furloughing 1,500 medical workers. And executives at McLaren Health Care in Michigan have agreed to cut their salaries by just 2 percent—an amount employees facing furloughs called “a slap in the face.”
“These people are making millions of dollars and they’re going to give 2 percent back?” said Jeff Morawski, a registered nurse at McLaren Macomb. “I […]
Stephan: We have been warned, and warned, and warned that we cannot continue to manage the earth on a for-profit basis. The greed and stupidity that benights us cannot continue; it is time we woke up to the reality that we live in a matrix of consciousness that must be respected not exploited.
Credit: Taylor Callery
SARS, Ebola and now SARS-CoV-2: all three of these highly infectious viruses have caused global panic since 2002—and all three of them jumped to humans from wild animals that live in dense tropical forests.
Three quarters of the emerging pathogens that infect humans leaped from animals, many of them creatures in the forest habitats that we are slashing and burning to create land for crops, including biofuel plants, and for mining and housing. The more we clear, the more we come into contact with wildlife that carries microbes well suited to kill us—and the more we concentrate those animals in smaller areas where they can swap infectious microbes, raising the chances of novel strains. Clearing land also reduces biodiversity, and the species that survive are more likely to host illnesses that can be transferred to humans. All these factors will lead to more spillover of animal pathogens into people.
Stopping deforestationwill not only reduce our exposure to new disasters but also tamp down the spread of a long list of other vicious diseases that have come from rain […]
Stephan: The big threat of violence in the United States is White Supremacy militia morons. As they displayed in Michigan these White men, and the White women who support them, are anxious for violence. It is a trend that Trump has nurtured since the day he became president, and it is only a matter of time until there is an incident and someone gets killed. We are in such a fragile state in this country, and few seem to realize it.
White Supremacy milita morons on the steps of the Michigan state house Credit: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty
Ever since Donald Trump declared his presidential candidacy and rank racism in 2015, those of us who’d witnessed the nationalist undoing in the Balkans at the end of the last millennium have found the subsequent rise of Trumpism frighteningly familiar. We quickly recognized a host of nationalist pathologies: the tactical importance of bigotry, since enemies must be ceaselessly identified and hated; relentless misogyny as a means of controlling women and their bodies, because the nation is a masculinist project where women serve as wombs for national reproduction; a profusion of lies, conspiracy theories, and plain nonsense, since reality is controlled by the enemies (fake news, deep state, the Jews, etc.) and must be perpetually undone and redone; the coalescing of a diverse political field around a leader and a stupidly conceptual goal (Greatness! Capitalism! Freedom!); loyalist cabals who are vetted, validated, and eliminated by the leader’s whims; and rampant venality combined with a criminal reconfiguration of the economy.Join Our NewsletterOriginal reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to […]
Stephan: I am increasingly concerned with the rising fascism in America that is being courted and supported by Trump, Pence, and the Republican Party. These people do not like democracy, they don't like non-Caucasians, and they really don't like poor people. It is my profound hope that you and I and the people we know will be able to vote these people out of office, flip the Senate, and the White House, and retain Democratic control of the House.
It isn't that I am a Democratic supporter, as I tell you frequently, I don't care about political partisanship except anthropologically. All I care about is fostering wellbeing. In my view the Republican Party does none of that and has become a cancer in the body of the United States. Their programs, their policies, their heroes, are all anti-life, anti-wellbeing, and skewed to support the rich, and screw the great bulk of American citizens.
Our futures, yours and mine, and our families are going to turn on how the 2020 election comes out. If Trump is re-elected, and Mitch McConnell stays in office, and remains majority leader in the Senate I think America is headed to a period of darkness from which it may never recover, if recovery means a healthy democracy with policies oriented towards wellbeing.
Trump and his groupies Credit: Andrew Hanks/White House
Under Donald Trump, the Republican Party is racing toward a transformation that mimics the greatest evil of the 20th century. Long before the Nazis fully engaged with genocidal murder against the Jews, there were persecutions of people deemed “unfit.” These were people whom Adolf Hitler’s extremists arbitrarily deemed insufficiently able to contribute to the greater German society. They included the infirm, people with learning disabilities, the mentally ill, those suffering from epilepsy, the physically disabled, and those struggling with alcohol issues.
According to the Nazis’ white supremacist ideology, those people were not only impediments to their quest in perfecting their master race, but were also economic burdens to society. The Nazis started a campaign of propaganda to mock them. They were called “unworthy of life” and labeled as “useless eaters.” The propaganda even expanded to math textbooks, which were revised to include arithmetic problems on how much it costs to care for these undesirables. This was the first stage.
Stephan: Today, as I regularly do, I spent an hour listening to Right-wing media. My first take away was my usual take away: No one with an IQ above 100 could take any of it seriously as fact. It really is Earth 2. The flavor of the month for this lot seems to be that the Red states are being asked to bail out the Blue. You hear it and read it reiterated endlessly on Earth 2.
Anyone who spent five minutes Googling Chart of red state blue statepaid into treasury and what they each take out could easily see that this is an absolute and deliberate lie on the part of Trumper politicians and media, and Trump himself. And yet the people who listen to, or read Right-wing media don't seem to be able to muster the intellect to check any of it.
With a couple of exceptions, like Texas and Florida, Red states have been living off the generosity of Blue states for years. In fact, if the Red states didn't get support from the Blue states many of them would go into economic collapse because they are governed so incompetently.
Here is a simple map from the Washington Post, but you can find a dozen others like it because the data is very clear and unimpeachable and much analyzed. For every dollar the Blue states put into the Federal treasury they take out less than a dollar. For every dollar a Red state puts into the treasury, they take out more than a dollar. For the old confederacy states it is often much more.
Republican Senator and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
Nothing angers Andrew Cuomo more than the notion that taxpayers in “red states” should resent or resist assistance for “blue states” struggling against the coronavirus. Hearing that message from Senate Republicans provoked the Democratic New York governor to remind the nation several times of the gross disparity between what his state remits to the Treasury and what their states reclaim in federal benefits.
Cuomo noted acidly that New York pays $116 billion more than it gets back annually, while lucky Kentucky, the home of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, gets $148 billion more than it pays. By that reckoning, New York has kicked in far more over the past few decades than any of the states whose Republican leaders criticize supposed liberal profligacy.
“Give us our money back, Sen. McConnell,” roared the New Yorker.
If you add up the excess funds coughed up by the Empire State, it’s a lot of money. The enormous disparity between what New York pays and receives is not a new problem. How long has this been […]
As I was writing this comment I was listening to 60 Minutes do a story on the endless screw-ups, failures, and incompetencies of the Trump administration as seen in the lives of ordinary people. I had seen this story about Trump withdrawing from WHO a few days ago but thought, that can't possibly be true, even Trump is not that manically egotistical and incompetent. I was wrong, he is.
History, I think, is going to record this crisis as the collective result of the most incompetent man ever to occupy the presidency, augmented by a Republican Party that simply doesn't care about ordinary people, and made possible by the collective intent of those ordinary people to destroy their lives and society.
Am I exaggerating? According to fivethirtyeight Trump's approval rating is 43.4% The sad truth we have to face is that the problem America faces is Americans. You cannot save a society when 43.4% of the people think what is happening is just fine, unless the other 56.6% to a man and woman vote against the continuation of this madness. What are you willing to do? 
Today, as I regularly do, I spent an hour listening to Right-wing media. My first take away was my usual take away: No one with an IQ above 100 could take any of it seriously as fact. It really is Earth 2. The flavor of the month for this lot seems to be that the Red states are being asked to bail out the Blue. You hear it and read it reiterated endlessly on Earth 2.
Anyone who spent five minutes Googling 
