IF YOU ENJOY SR AND FIND IT USEFUL WOULD YOU PLEASE DONATE
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.
David Badash, Senior Editor - New Civil Rights Movement
Stephan:
If you are on Social Security. Medicare, Medicaid, or a fertile woman and you vote for Republicans this is what they tell us they are going to do to degrade your wellbeing. There is no secret plan, it is all very explicit, and yet I know millions of Americans are going to vote for this, and then whine about what is happening to them. You can click through https://hern.house.gov/uploadedfiles/final_budget_including_letter_web_version.pdf to read the Republican plan itself.
TCP Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson
The Republican Study Committee has released its proposed 2025 budget which would take an ax to major elements of the social safety net, healthcare system, and civil rights, while affecting nearly every American, either now or in the future.
Calling it “Fiscal Sanity to Save America,” the budget proposal from the far-right MAGA-affiliated group of about 170 House Republicans would effectively create a national abortion ban and ban on in-vitro fertilization procedures (IVF) by creating legal protections for human embryos starting at “the moment of fertilization.” It mentions the word “abortion” 77 times.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is a member and former chairman of the Republican Study Committee.
“The House GOP Study Committee (largest House GOP bloc) released a budget endorsing the Life at Conception Act, which would provide 14th amendment legal protections at every stage of life,” explained Joseph Zeballos-Roig, Semafor’s domestic policy and politics reporter. “Amounts to near-total ban on abortions with no IVF exceptions.”
Here is some potentially good, but complicated news about what is going on in Arizona about women having the right to control their own bodies. I bring this to your attention because I think it is a precursor to what is going to happen at the state level across the country.
Pro-abortion rights demonstrators rally in Scottsdale, Arizona on April 15, 2024. Credit: Frederic J. Brown / AFP / Getty
Arizona lawmakers on Wednesday voted to repeal the state’s Civil War-era abortion ban.
The legislation, which is expected to be soon signed into law by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, will preserve access to the procedure for millions of women. But there’s a potential political downside for Democrats, who had been using the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision last month upholding the law to foment outrage and boost turnout heading into the November election.
“Would it be easier if Republicans just stuck to their guns and didn’t repeal this thing and went down with their ship? Sure,” said Matt Grodsky, a Democratic strategist in Arizona.
President Joe Biden and Democrats down the ballot have spent the last several weeks highlighting the law, which prohibits abortion starting at conception except to save the life of the mother, as the latest example of the chaos and uncertainty that the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade nearly two years ago has caused. […]
The people of the 3rd District of Colorado should be ashamed of themselves for electing an ignorant slattern like Lauren Boebert, and it is a measure of the nasty incompetence of the Republican Representatives in the House that they followed her lead.
A quarter of a million wolves once roamed from coast to coast before European colonizers embarked on campaigns of eradication that persisted into the 20th century all but wiped them out in the lower-48 states Credit: Kena Betancur
The Republican-majority US House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill that would remove endangered species protections for the gray wolf across much of the country, sparking outrage among conservationists.
Sponsored by Representative Lauren Boebert, a right-wing firebrand from Colorado, the bill passed narrowly along party lines (209-205) and now heads to the Senate.
The White House on Monday announced its strong opposition to the measure, indicating a likely veto from President Joe Biden if it reaches his desk.
In October 2020, former president Donald Trump removed gray wolves from their protected species status, which was put in place in the 1970s after their near extinction in the continental United States.
These protections were restored by a federal judge in February 2022, but not before the lapse in safeguards led to devastating losses: more than 200 were killed […]
America’s grotesque wealth inequality is one of the major trends destroying our social wellbeing, and threatening our democracy. This is one of the reasons low income people are thinking about voting for Trump, or not voting at all. This trend has been coming in since the Reagan administration when the Republican Party rigged the entire tax system to favor the rich. Every Republican administration since then has just made it worse. Yet American voters don’t seem to understand this.
The number of households that live above the poverty line but are barely scrapping by is ticking higher.
Currently, nearly 40 million families are defined as ALICE, which stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed.
High inflation and higher interest rates have taken a hefty toll, and there is little relief in sight.
Over time, higher costs and sluggish wage growth have left more Americans financially vulnerable, with many known as “ALICEs.”
Nearly 40 million families, or 29% of the population, fall in the category of ALICE — Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed — according to United Way’s United for ALICE program, which first coined the term to refer to households earning above the poverty line but less than what’s needed to get by.
That figure doesn’t include the 37.9 million Americans who live in poverty, comprising 11.5% of the total population, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
As a result of the rigging of the U.S. tax system by Republicans America has seen the rise of the oligarch, mostly fascist men who are actively and openly trying to take control of the government and end democracy. The story of the Bradley Impact Fund, recounted in this report, is one of the ways they are doing this. The only thing that will solve what I see as a major crisis trend, is a complete restructuring of the tax system. Will it happen? Only if you vote for Democrats and, then, contact the people you vote for demanding they redo the tax structure.
In early 2021, Stephen Miller—former White House senior adviser to Donald Trump and architect of the 45th president’s hopeful second-term mass deportation agenda—announced his next venture: America First Legal (AFL).
Paraded as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU,” AFL fights for Trumpist values in the legal system. And the group is prolific: In its three years of existence, AFL has taken on more than 100 legal actions—between lawsuits filed, complaints lodged with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and court briefs written, according to the Washington Post.
While it has notably played a major role in stopping debt relief for Black farmers, Miller’s organization has been perhaps most famous for its aggressive publicity strategy of “lawfare.”
AFL targets so-called “woke” corporate and government programs, alleging employment discrimination against white, heterosexual men. It has challenged Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in higher education and supposed “radical transgender ideology” in school districts. Typically, after filing a suit or complaint, Miller makes the rounds of the right-wing media circuit and fundraises off the attention. “Bogus suits,” securities law expert Benjamin Edwards explained in the Daily Beast, seem designed for a nonlegal goal: to issue “press releases” so AFL can […]
This is what the TCP Republican Party has in mind to end American democracy and turn the country into a christofascist pseudo-democracy like Orban’s Hungary. If you vote for a single Republican this is what you are voting for.
Steve Bannon leaves federal court in Washington DC on 15 November 2021. Credit: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty
Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chair and White House strategist, believed before the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on Congress that a “Maga movement” of Trump supporters “could rule for a hundred years”.
“Outside the uniparty,” the Washington Post reporter Isaac Arnsdorf writes in a new book, referring to Bannon’s term for the political establishment, “as Bannon saw it, there was the progressive wing of the Democratic party, which he considered a relatively small slice of the electorate. And the rest, the vast majority of the country, was Maga.
“Bannon believed the Maga movement, if it could break out of being suppressed and marginalised by the establishment, represented a dominant coalition that could rule for a hundred years.”
Arnsdorf’s book, Finish What We Started: The Maga Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy, will be published next week. The Post published an excerpt on Thursday.
A businessman who became a driver of far-right thought through his stewardship of Breitbart News, Bannon was Trump’s campaign […]
Good news. Here is an example of restructuring the tax system not only in the U.S. but other rich nations as well could help humanity prepare to deal with climate change. It seems to obvious, but the strangle hold the rich have on the U.S. and other developed nation governments makes its problematic. Once again, it is all about how each of us votes.
Steam rises from cooling towers at the Neurath (L and R) and Niederaussem (C) coal-fired power plants at Neurath, Germany on April 22, 2022. According to data from 2020, Neurath is Europe’s second biggest emitter of CO2 while Niederaussem is the fourth biggest. Credit: Sean / Gallup /Getty
According to the new Climate Damages Tax report, introducing a fossil fuel tax on companies in the richest countries in the world could generate hundreds of billions to aid the most vulnerable nations in coping with the climate crisis.
The impacts of climate change disproportionately affect poorer nations that have contributed to it the least.
“Climate change is a war. A category five hurricane releases energy equivalent to 10,000 times the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Those countries on the path of hurricanes and cyclones and submerging coasts are on the front line,” wrote Avinash Persaud, special envoy on investment and finances to the prime minister of Barbados, in the preface to the report. “Climate change is not a freak of […]
This is what greed for profit above all other considerations looks like, and it pretty much defines the carbon industries. We are not going to be able to deal effectively with climate change as long as corporations like the two reported on in this article are allowed to continue as they do now. Unfortunately, neither the EPA, the states or the Congress is really willing to take on corporate greed, since it finances so many politicians.
These days the Pecos River barely fills its dry, sandy bed where it crosses West Texas, but the river could be poised to flow again — with treated oilfield wastewater.
Companies are racing to figure out what to do with the tremendous volume of noxious water that comes up from underground during oil and gas drilling in the Permian Basin, but a growing cohort of companies say they’ve developed a means to purify that fluid and release it in the Pecos and other watersheds.
“This is new ground for all of us and we know it’s got to be done the right way,” said Robert Crain, executive vice president of Texas Pacific Water Resources, a company seeking to discharge treated water. “We’re not the only folks that […]
