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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.
Twenty Republican-controlled states have now passed legislation allowing non-medical politicians to control a woman’s body. Now several are going after contraception, and so this is what the Senate of the United States has been reduced to. It will be interesting to see how the vote goes Wednesday. I predict many Republicans will vote against contraception rights. The MAGAt cult more and more resembles the Taliban.
Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) addresses reporters following a procedural vote on the Border Act at the Capitol on Thursday, May 23, 2024.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has announced in a “Dear Colleague” letter that the Senate will vote Wednesday on the Right to Contraception Act, timing the vote shortly before the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court decision striking down the right to an abortion.
Schumer opened his letter by noting that June 24 will mark the two-year anniversary of the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and that at least 20 states now have near-total bans or severe restrictions on abortion.
“There’s no question in the American people’s minds that Republicans have brought our country to this point. And as Donald Trump reminded us recently, he is ‘proudly the person responsible’ for the annihilation of Roe v. Wade and the grotesque reversal of women’s personal freedoms,” Schumer wrote, referring to the reversal of the landmark decision in 1973 that established a national right to abortion.
ROBERT REICH , Carmel P. Friesen Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California - Berkeley, and a Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies - truthdig
Stephan:
The oligarchs are making it clear that they want to put criminal Trump back into office, and they are putting their money where the mouths are. How it is possible for a political party to put forward a candidate who is a proven grifter and thief, convicted rapist, 34 count convicted felon, with 54 more felonies yet to come to court, and that a third of Americans are okay with such a candidate tells one the sad state of America today. I know that some who read this will think me highly partisan, but I am not. This is not a partisan issue, it is a matter of integrity.
Credit:Sourced images via AP Photo and Adobe Stock. Graphic by Truthdig
Elon Musk and entrepreneur and investor David Sacks reportedly held a secret billionaire dinner party in Hollywood last month. Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and reinstall Donald Trump in the White House. The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury secretary.
Meanwhile, Musk is turning up the volume and frequency of his anti-Biden harangues on his X platform.
Since January, Musk has posted about Biden at least seven times a month, attacking the president for everything from his age to his policies on immigration and health. Last month, Musk posted on X that Biden “obviously barely knows what’s going on” and that “He is just a tragic front for a far left political machine.”
So far this year, Musk has posted more than 20 times in favor of Trump, arguing that he’s a victim of media and prosecutorial bias in the criminal cases that Trump […]
There was a time in the United States when there were safe residential mental health institutions staffed by physicians, nurses, and orderlies all over the country. My father, who was an anesthesiologist, would volunteer time for surgeries at one called Longwood and, in the summer, I would sometimes go out with him and swim in the swimming pool they had for the residents while he was at work. Then the Republicans, under Nixon, arranged to close them all throwing thousands of mentally ill men and women out on the streets, or frequently into jails and prisons. The American Gulag is the largest most populous incarceration system in the world. Over two million people are under lock and key, many there more for their mental illnesses than any crime they have committed. And the whole system since Reagan and the rise of private prisons has been increasingly turned into profit operations. One result of that has been the creation of the new American slavery where prisoners are made to work for less than a dollar an hour (See my podcast on The New American Slavery).
IAN BAZUR-PERSING WAS in a good place. Mental illness had dogged him for years, but by 2022, the 41-year-old was stable: settled into a sober living community in his hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana, working for a lawn care company, and meditating regularly. He felt so good, in fact, that he went off his medication.
Within weeks, he was in a state of psychosis. He and his parents sought assistance from local emergency rooms and the city’s crisis intervention team, but they couldn’t get any real help. On Christmas Eve, armed with an axe and a hunting knife, Bazur-Persing — who’d never before committed a serious crime — performed three robberies in quick succession, walking away with $610, a pair of earbuds, and a Bluetooth speaker.
He landed in the Allen County jail. No one gave him a psychological evaluation to determine his mental health status, and when Bazur-Persing’s parents, mindful of their son’s suicidal tendencies, urged medical personnel to reach out to his longtime provider about medications he might need, they refused.
“It was substandard care,” Ian’s mother, Lori Bazur-Persing, recalled. The crowded facility where her son remained for 75 days pretrial was the opposite of therapeutic. “There are no recreational facilities, […]
Criminal Trump on the Fox propaganda network, and elsewhere is doing just what he did January 6th; he is stirring up his MAGAts for violence if he is jailed. What we are seeing is a political cult putting forward as their leader a convicted felon who is trying in every way he can to create civil violence.
Felon Trump trying to stir up civil violence on Fox.
Former President Donald Trump, a convicted felon, suggested that a jail sentence would be a “breaking point” that leads to violence from his supporters.
Trump made the remarks during a Fox News interview aired Sunday.
“The legal maze that you’re still facing and they could the judge could decide to say house arrest or even jail It could be faced,” Fox News host Pete Hegseth told the former president.
“I saw one of my lawyers the other day on television saying, oh, no, you don’t want to do that to the press. I said don’t you don’t beg for anything,” Trump recalled.
“That could happen,” he added, speaking of jail, “I don’t know that the public would stand it, you know, I don’t. I’m not sure the public would stand for it with a I think I think it would be tough for the public to take, you know at a certain point, there’s a breaking point.”
I don’t know about where you live but I do know this. Cultivate plants on your property that nourish bees, butterflies, and other insects. Humans are destroying Earth’s matrix of life, and the end result will be humanity’s endangerment. Our grandchildren will curse us if we do not work now to restore the health of the matrix.
Not a single bug… Credit: Thom Hartmann
It’s early summer here in the Pacific Northwest and the flowers are blooming; above is a photo Louise took with her iPhone yesterday morning as we were walking along the Columbia River. The hillside is ablaze with wildflowers.
But it was also eerily silent. Look carefully: No matter how much you enlarge the photo you’ll not see a single insect. Thirty years ago this hillside was swarmed with bees, flies, and dozens of other winged bugs. Today, although pretty, walking by it felt like I was passing a graveyard.
I’ll never forget the day the trucker called into my radio show from southern Illinois. It was about seventeen years ago, and he was a long-haul driver who regularly ran a coast-to-coast route from the southeast to the Pacific Northwest a few dozen times a year.
“Used to be when I was driving through the southern part of the Midwest like I am right now,” he said, “I’d have to stop every few hours to clean the bugs off my windshield. […]
You would think that wind energy would be the obvious next step for the carbon energy industry, as we exit the carbon power era. You might think that but the carbon corporations don’t or can’t see it as this important article on this technology reports. Note also how criminal Trump did everything he could to sabotage the development of wind energy, to serve the carbon industry’s interest, and how disinformation to damage the development of wind power was used by MAGAt world. Note finally, as the article describes how the China is leading the world in wind power development.
In 2020, installation was completed on the first wind turbines installed in U.S. federal waters 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach, Va. The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind pilot project is designed to demonstrate a grid-connected, 12-megawatt offshore wind test facility. Credit: Stephen Boutwell / Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
In the early 2000s, a long-time Louisiana engineer and entrepreneur thought it would be natural for the oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico to expand into offshore wind. The industry could use the same workforce, the same shipyards and possibly even the same platforms to generate renewable power.
With designs, data and offshore leases from Texas, Herman Schellstede and his team planned to build a 62-turbine wind farm off Galveston’s coast— one of the first such proposals in the United States and the first in the Gulf of Mexico.
The team approached banks and even Koch Industries seeking financing for the $300 million wind farm, he […]
Here is some semi-good news. The industrialized nations, including the United States, are doing better to help developing nations prepare for what climate change is doing, but late and not nearly enough. The governments of the developed nations of the world just seem to understand yet that the Earth’s matrix of life is under threat, and that humanity is simply not taking climate change seriously enough — with criminal Trump and the Republicans amongst the evilest examples of this failure
Why it matters: The delay in fulfilling the pledge, which was made at the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009, generated resentment and doubts among developing nations regarding future climate funding promises.
Zoom in: According to a new OECD report, developed countries provided $115.9 billion in climate finance for developing nations in 2022, exceeding the $100 billion annual goal for the first time.
This was a 30% jump in climate finance from 2021, the report found, which was the biggest year-on-year increase.
Hitting the $100 billion goal comes just as countries work to come up with a new climate finance target, known as the New Collective Quantified Goal, to be decided at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November.
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, Associate Writer - The New Republic
Stephan:
About 8% of pregnancies in the US develop complications that could harm the mother or baby if left untreated. If you are a pregnant woman in Texas and something goes wrong you now have only two choices. Leave the state or die.
Texas pro-choice demonstration. Credit: Montinique Monroe / Getty
The Texas Supreme Court unanimously rejected a challenge to the state’s abortion laws Friday, overturning a lower court’s decision that would have allowed women within Texas to actually access abortions granted within the confines of the state’s ban.
The case, Zurawski v. Texas, began with five women and eventually grew to represent 20 women and two doctors. It became the strongest challenge to the constitutionality of the state’s myriad abortion restrictions implemented since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.
The Center for Reproductive Rights, which brought the suit last year, argued that while the state’s laws technically left room for abortions in urgent circumstances, they were also so vague that they practically restricted all medical practitioners from actually considering the procedure as an option. Specifically, people could undergo abortions during complicated pregnancies so long as their doctor made a “good faith judgment” that it was medically necessary.
But opponents to the laws have argued that “good faith” is too subjective for language determining medical access—and could potentially open doctors up […]
