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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.
By most research estimates one in three Americans consider themselves evangelicals, and they are the Trump hard-core base. That’s why the TCPs are pouring so much money into getting these low-education low-IQ people ginned up to vote for Trump. This is how Trump plans to win back the Presidency. That’s part of Trump’s plan. The other part is bringing Paul Manafort back to his campaign because, I also think, he hopes Manafort can get someone to cover the $500 million judgment he faces in New York. Suppose the Saudis put up the money through some corporation they control, or the Russian government by giving it to some oligarch who passes it through some corporation to Trump. The TCP has become so openly criminal at this point that I think Trump will try anything and believe he will get away with it because the TCP will protect him through inaction.
Chair of the Faith and Freedom Coalition Ralph Reed pats Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump on the shoulder at the Faith and Freedom Road to Majority conference on June 24, 2023. Credit: Drew Angerer / Getty
A prominent evangelical advocacy organization plans to significantly ramp up political spending in the 2024 election with one goal in mind: returning Donald Trump to the White House
Faith & Freedom, a conservative-leaning organization, intends to spend $62 million registering and turning out evangelical voters, texting and calling supporters, and door-knocking — $10 million more than it spent four years ago. The group is expected to, among other things, hand out 30 million pieces of literature in 125,000 churches — many of them in battleground states.
“In terms of home visits and voters reached at the door, to my knowledge it’s the largest effort on the right outside of the Republican National Committee ever,” Ralph Reed, a longtime Republican strategist and Trump ally who oversees the organization, said of the direct voter contact enterprise.
The investment underscores the degree to which the white evangelical community has allied itself with Trump, even as he faces a […]
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON, - Letters From an American
Stephan:
How blatant the TCP has become that dictator Viktor Orban was so welcomed by evangelicals, The Conservative Action Project, and the Heritage Foundation. The TCP is actively trying to turn America into a pseudo-democracy like Hungary and Russia. Hold elections but rig them so the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
Heritage Foundation Makes Plans to Staff Next G.O.P. Administration Credit: The New York Times
On Friday, journalist Casey Michel, who specializes in the study of kleptocracy, pointed out that reporters had missed an important meeting last week. Michel noted that while reporters covered Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s visit to former president Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, they paid far less attention to the visit Orbán paid to the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Heritage Foundation on Friday, March 8. There, Orbán spoke privately to an audience that included the president of the organization, Kevin Roberts, and, according to a state media printout, “renowned U.S. right-wing politicians, analysts and public personalities.”
Michel noted that it was “nothing short of shocking” that Orbán declined to meet with administration officials and instead went to Washington, D.C., to meet with a right-wing think tank. With Roberts’s appointment as head of Heritage in 2021, the conservative organization swung to the position that its role is “institutionalizing Trumpism.”
Roberts has been vocal about his admiration for Orbán, tweeting in 2022 that it was an honor to meet him. At last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Orbán boasted that Hungary is […]
In my view, Benjamin Netanyahu and his fascist cabinet should be indicted and tried for war crimes against humanity. They are carrying out an attempt at genocide, and as an American, I am ashamed that Biden is still supplying the weapons to carry out much of this devastation. The U.N. children’s agency said on Sunday “Over 13,000 children have been killed in Gaza in Israel’s offensive, adding many kids were suffering from severe malnutrition and did not even have the energy to cry.” Because I am so appalled by what Israel is doing I have been researching to see how Netanyahu might at least be forced from office, which might stop these atrocities. Like Trump, Netanyahu is under indictment in Israel, but that doesn’t look like it is going anywhere. What might make his government collapse is something unique to Israel as this report describes.
Israel’s ultra-Orthodox don’t serve in its armed forces. That’s getting harder than ever to justify. Credit: Ilia Yefimovich / Getty
The most controversial Israeli comedy sketch of the current war is just 88 seconds long. Aired in February on Eretz Nehederet, Israel’s equivalent of Saturday Night Live, it opens with two ashen-faced officers knocking on the door of a nondescript apartment, ready to deliver devastating news to the inhabitants. The officers are greeted by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man who is similarly stricken when he sees them.
“I’ve been terrified of this knock,” he says. “Ever since the war began, I knew it would eventually come for me.” But before the pained officers can continue, he interjects: “Listen, there is no situation in which I will enlist—forget about it.”
It turns out that the officers have the wrong address. This is not the home of a fallen soldier, but of one of the many thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews who do not serve in Israel’s army, thanks to a special exemption. As the officers depart to find the right family, the man calls after them, “Tell them that we prayed for him! We did everything we could.”
Here we have yet another warning that the United States is woefully unprepared for what climate change is going to do to our society. While the TCPs in the House spend most of their time and millions of our dollars trying to find some way to embarrass President Biden and his family, and the Senate TCPs block help for Ukraine, the infrastructure, of bridges, roads, electric grid, and airports built from the 1920s to the 1960s age and falter. We are so unprepared that it is going to produce great misery and deaths, and yet you hardly see it mentioned by corporate news on television, state legislatures, particularly those controlled by the TCPs can’t be bothered, and it is hardly a factor in the 2024 election in November. It took me several Google searches and 20 minutes to find this piece in Time Magazine.
Transmission lines exit the plant at Pacific Gas and Electric’s Diablo Canyon Power Plant, the only operating nuclear powered plant in California. Credit: Los Angeles Times / Getty
Michael Polsky, the founder and CEO of renewable energy developer Invenergy, has earned a reputation as a renewable energy pioneer. His company, founded in 2001, has more than 200 clean energy projects across the world completed or in progress.
When we spoke this week at this year’s Aspen Ideas: Climate conference, he could have taken a bit of a victory lap. But instead he was eager to deliver a warning: without a concerted effort to fix its electric grid the U.S. may soon face electric reliability issues, not to mention challenges meeting its climate goals. “People don’t realize how fragile the grid is,” he said.
Polsky is far from alone. In the year and a half since the passage of the climate-focused Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), energy experts have called for regulatory reforms to help fix the grid—think of expediting permits for transmission lines that deliver electricity from power plants to cities and speeding up the process of connecting new power plants to the grid. A 2022 […]
A major change in real estate transactions has just occurred, as this report describes. It is probably going to lower house prices and change the whole cost of buying or selling a house. If any of you are in the midst or such a sale or purchase check to see what effect it is going to have on your transaction.
An aerial view of homes in a housing development on September 08, 2023 in Santa Clarita, California. Credit: Mario Tama / Getty
In a sweeping move expected to dramatically reduce the cost of buying and selling a home, the National Association of Realtors announced Friday a settlement with groups of homesellers, agreeing to end landmark antitrust lawsuits by paying $418 million in damages and eliminating rules on commissions.
The NAR, which represents more than 1 million Realtors, also agreed to put in place a set of new rules. One prohibits agents’ compensation from being included on listings placed on local centralized listing portals known as multiple listing services, which critics say led brokers to push more expensive properties on customers. Another ends requirements that brokers subscribe to multiple listing services — many of which are owned by NAR subsidiaries — where homes are given a wide viewing in a local market. Another new rule will require buyers’ brokers to enter into written agreements with their buyers.
The agreement effectively will destroy the current homebuying and selling business model, in which sellers pay both their broker and a buyer’s broker, which critics say have driven housing prices artificially higher.
Yet another story of the failure of the U.S. government at both the federal and state levels to plan ahead and foster wellbeing. Anyone who does a half hour researching what climate change is going to do learns quickly there are going to be more forest fires, and to preserve our nation’s forests we need much more preparation and planning, and building a much larger cadre of trained personnel. Here is an earthy but accurate presentation covering this issue. LIke the previous grid story in today’s edition, we just are not doing what is needed to prepare for our future.
Firefighter Credit: ProPublica
Highly skilled firefighters are the last line of defense against wildfires, but that line is fraying because the government decided long ago that they’re not worth very much.
Black Butte is an inactive volcano that rises from the high desert in eastern Oregon. In May 2022, a turboprop plane approached its pine-blanketed slopes, carrying about 10 men wearing bulky Kevlar outfits. They were smokejumpers with the United States Forest Service, the agency that directs the majority of the nation’s efforts to manage wildfires. Within the vast and hierarchical fire service, smokejumpers occupy a singular niche, parachuting into remote areas to fight early-stage wildfires. There are only about 450 nationwide, and the physical requirements are rigorous.
One of the smokejumpers on board was Ben Elkind. Thirty-seven years old with a long, athletic build and restless energy, he had been fighting wildfires for 14 years and jumping for the last eight of them. Despite his elite status, Elkind earned about $43,000 in 2021 over the course of the seven-month fire season. His base paycheck, though, was less than half of that. Like most wildland firefighters, he relied on overtime and hazard pay, which can […]
Paul Kane , Reporter - Microsoft Start / The Washington Post
Stephan:
Most people don’t seem to have noticed what I see as an alarming trend in Congress, an unprecedented number of Congressional members are either not running in November, or like Republican Representative Ken Buck of Colorado are just quitting and walking away. Why is this happening? In my view it is a byproduct of the conversion of the Republican Party to the Trump Christofascist Party (TCP), and the growing failure of both houses of the Congress to function effectively as a result.
Republicans attempt to win the votes required to elect Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) as House speaker on Oct. 25. Credit: Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post
Despite all the congressional gridlock these days, lawmakers have succeeded in one surprising area of productivity: driving their colleagues into resignation.
On Friday, Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) will resign outright, becoming the sixth member of the House in the 118th Congress to quit, with no other public office lined up. The onetime renegade conservative, who’s drifted ideologically away from his far-right friends, summed up the feelings of the quitters.
“This place just keeps going downhill, and I don’t need to spend my time here,” Buck told reporters.
The data for congressional resignations is somewhat murky, but it’s clear that over the last four decades, at least, the House hasn’t seen this many people just quit public service in the middle of their term.
It started last May when Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.) resigned after more than 12 years in office to lead the Rhode Island Foundation, and soon after Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) resigned to start a lobbying firm. Earlier this year Rep. Brian Higgins (D-N.Y.) quit to go […]
The lack of literacy and numeracy in American adults is becoming an increasing problem undermining maintaining U.S. democracy. If you can’t read and comprehend a standard newspaper report, or if you can’t understand basic statements about the economy, you can’t really understand why democracy is so important to our society. Authoritarianism, where someone like criminal Trump claims to know how to fix everything, if you put him in power seems a simpler easier solution to the country’s problems than the reality of the actual complexities. As the Trump christofascists (TCP) try to dismantle public fact-based education, this problem is just going to get worse. It is yet another failure on the part of the U.S. Congress, and Red state legislatures as well, I am sorry to say, both the Trump and Biden administrations and corporate media.
The SchwartzReport tracks emerging trends that will affect the world, particularly the United States. For EXPLORE it focuses on matters of health in the broadest sense of that term, including medical issues, changes in the biosphere, technology, and policy considerations, all of which will shape our culture and our lives. Something very insidious is going on in our world today. Something that is directly eating away American democracy. I am speaking here of adult illiteracy, dropping education levels amongst children, and the weaponization of misinformation trends that collectively have combined to create an alternate reality with alternate facts. When the Founders created the First Amendment in 1791 they understood the power of misinformation. Someone spreading a false rumor in a bar, a printer distributing flyers filled with misinformation. A charismatic speaker spewing lies to a crowd in a square. The amendment’s wording itself reveals their thinking. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”1
The idea of an internet containing social media read each day by tens of millions, who carry around a […]
