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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.
I had the most informative email exchange this morning with a MAGAt, a man I have never met, who wrote to tell me I was being very unfair and biased against Trump. I was making him out to be a criminal. I responded by saying to him This is a man who is a convicted rapist, who has multiple fraudster convictions and is under indictment for 44 federal and 44 state felonies, including treason, and an attempted coup. What would you call him? He responded by saying it was all a scheme by Biden and the Democrats to make Trump look bad so that he, Biden, would win the election. I spent some time looking at conservative websites, and watching the Fox propaganda operation, and I realized that the Trump trials are another example of the Great Schism Trend. We have become two quite different countries, and I don’t quite see how we are going to go on. But I don’t see how to come apart either.
By the way, I also got an email from a reporter who has been in the courtroom who told me that apparently, because Trump is reported to wear diapers and doesn’t have control over either his bladder or his bowels, the smell in the courtroom is appalling. I did a Google on this and found a number of confirmatory reports from reliable sources. As much as I loathe Donald Trump it made me feel sorry for him. It must be extraordinarily stressful to try to maintain a facade of wellbeing when you are this disabled. Psychologically, ethically, and physically this man should never be president again, and yet millions of voters, as this article describes, just don’t get or care to get the reality of Trump.
Donald Trump appears in court with his attorneys Emil Bove, left, and Todd Blanche during his trial on 25 April in New York City. Credit: Getty
In one America, he cuts a diminished, humbled figure during coverage that runs from morn till night. “He seems considerably older and he seems annoyed, resigned, maybe angry,” said broadcaster Rachel Maddow after seeing Donald Trump up close in court. “He seems like a man who is miserable to be here.”
But in the other America – that of Fox News, far-right podcasts and the Make America Great Again (Maga) base – the trial of the former president over a case involving a hush-money payment to an adult film performer is playing out very differently.
Here, anger at what is seen as political persecution meets with another emotion: sublime indifference. Barely a handful of Trump supporters bother to protest each day outside the court in New York, a Democratic stronghold. The trial receives less prominence in conservative media, which prefers to devote airtime to other national news including protests on university campuses against the war in Gaza.
As this article describes, in the Southern Red states the Republicans are doing everything they can to undercut and stop unionization. It is part of The Great Schism Trend that is transforming the United States into two quite different countries. It surprises me that many hourly workers vote Republican because the Republican Party for decades has done everything it could to undermine unions. Many workers don’t seem to comprehend that the two things that created the middle class in America are the post-World War II veterans’ housing and education programs, and before and during that time the rise of the unions. If you look at the social outcome data it is very clear that if you work for an hourly wage and you want to improve your and your family’s wellbeing you want to join a union. If you live in a Red state though that may not be possible.
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, right, speaks as local organizers raise their fists at a UAW vote watch party on April 19, 2024 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Credit: Elijah Nouvelage / Getty
Since six Southern Republican governors last week showed “how scared they are” of the United Auto Workers’ U.S. organizing drive, Tennessee Volkswagen employees have voted to join the UAW while GOP policymakers across the region have ramped up attacks on unions.
The UAW launched “the largest organizing drive in modern American history” after securing improved contracts last year with a strike targeting the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis. The ongoing campaign led to the “landslide” victory in Chattanooga last week, which union president Shawn Fain pointed to as proof that “you can’t win in the South” isn’t true.
The Tennessee win “is breaking the brains of Republicans in that region. They’re truly astonished that workers might not trust their corporate overlords with their working conditions, pay, health, and retirement,” Thom Hartmann wrote in […]
Materialism and greed are destroying the earth’s matrix of life, and plastic pollution is a major factor in this. Just 56 companies are responsible for over 50% of the branded plastic items that are creating this pollution, led by the Coca-Cola Corporation. Think about that for a minute. A minuscule number of corporations are impacting the wellbeing of over 8 billion people, as well as trillions of other beings, and they are doing it for one reason, greed. Profit is literally more important to them than life itself. What can you do about this? Don’t buy, drink, eat or use anything that is plastic until corporations start using only plastic that degrades biologically. Recycling is not enough, because much of it never gets collected and recycled. The vulnerability of greed is people stop buying what a company is offering for sale that involves plastics. If they know enough people are not buying their products for that reason their greed will force them to change.
Plastic bottles littering a beach in Norway. Credit: Bo Eide / Flickr
A new study on plastic pollution in 84 countries has linked half of branded plastic pollution to only 56 firms, with about 24% of the branded plastic waste analyzed connected to only five companies, including The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Danone and Altria.
A team of researchers analyzed plastic pollution data from the Break Free From Plastic Brand Audit. The data spanned a total of 1,576 brand audit events over five years, from 2018 to 2022.
The analysis revealed about 52% of the 1,873,634 plastic items in the study were unbranded, which could be because sunlight, water or other environmental factors caused fading on labels.
“We found over 50% of plastic items were unbranded, highlighting the need for better transparency about production and labeling of plastic products and packaging to enhance traceability and accountability,” the authors wrote in the study, which was published in the journal Science Advances. “We suggest creation of an international, open-access database into which companies are obliged […]
Diana Ramirez-Simon, Dani Anguiano, Isabeau Doucet and agencies, Reporters and news agencies - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
When I read this report what I thought about was: Have we become this debased and sad a country that we can’t even house the almost a million people who have nowhere to live, nowhere to sleep, except outdoors on the ground? And you will notice once again that Republican politicians are the ones trying to punish these people without doing anything to help them or improve American society’s wellbeing.
With Fruitdale Elementary School in the background, a homeless man adjusts his shoe at Fruitdale Park in Grants Pass, Oregon, Credit: Jenny Kane / AP
The debate over how US cities can respond to America’s spiraling homelessness crisis reached the supreme court this week, as justices heard arguments over the constitutionality of local laws used against unhoused people sleeping outside.
The justices on Monday considered a challenge to rulings from a California-based appeals court that found punishing people for sleeping outside when shelter space is lacking amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
The case stems from a 2019 camping ban enacted by city officials in Grants Pass, a small mountain town in Oregon where rents are rising and where there is just one overnight shelter for adults. Debra Blake, who had lost her job a decade earlier and was unhoused, was cited for illegal camping. After being convicted and fined, she soon joined other unhoused residents in suing the city.
The city has passed three ordinances that target sleeping and camping in public streets, alleyways and parks. Under those laws, violators can face […]
David Badash, Senior Editor - New Civil Rights Movement
Stephan:
What I have taken away this week from the coverage of the Supreme Court is how corrupt, fascist, and anti-women, the male clique of the Supreme Court has become. These are not justices interested in the law and the wellbeing of American society. These men are political hacks who believe they themselves are above the law, and have the power to determine what the law means and how it should be enforced.
Corrupt christofascist Associate Justice Samuel Alito
The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case centered on the question, can the federal government require states with strict abortion bans to allow physicians to perform abortions in emergency situations, specifically when the woman’s health, but not her life, is in danger?
The 1986 federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), signed into law by Republican President Ronald Reagan, says it can. The State of Idaho on Wednesday argued it cannot.
U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, The Washington Post’s Kim Bellware reported, “made a clear delineation between Idaho law and what EMTALA provides.”
“In Idaho, doctors have to shut their eyes to everything except death,” Prelogar said, according to Bellware. “Whereas under EMTALA, you’re supposed to be thinking about things like, ‘Is she about to lose her fertility? Is her uterus going to become incredibly scarred because of the bleeding? Is she about to undergo the possibility of kidney failure?’ ”
Attorney Imani Gandy, an award-winning journalist and Editor-at-Large for Rewire News Group, highlighted an […]
South Dakota has a population in 2024 of just 858,469, less than a third of the population of Seattle, Washington, and they chose the loathsome TCP/Republican Kristi Noem, who recently garnered a lot of attention for shooting a puppy she said she “hated”, to be their governor. She also thinks women or girls who are raped or the victims of incest should be compelled to carry the baby to term. Tells you a lot about the people of South Dakota, I am sorry to say. I wouldn’t want to be a fertile woman or a pubescent girl living in that state. And I suspect OB/GYN physicians will be leaving the state for fear of being put in prison and losing their medical licenses. Just another Red State story, notable mostly because the governor is, herself, a woman. The Great Schism Trend particularly on the abortion issue is really splitting us into two countries.
TCP Republican Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Credit: CBS/screen grab
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R), a possible vice presidential candidate, called rape and incest exceptions for abortion a “tragedy.”
While speaking to Dana Bash on CNN Sunday, Noem was asked if she supported her state’s law, which does not provide exceptions for rape, much like Arizona’s Civil War-era anti-abortion law.
“Our law today allows an exception to save the life of the mother, but the people in South Dakota will decide what their laws look like,” Noem explained.
“What do you think it should look like?” Bash pressed, but Noem dodged the question, saying she would enforce her state’s laws.
The CNN host pushed again for an answer.
“Do you think there should be exceptions for rape and incest, for example?” Bash asked.
“That’s what’s different, Dana, is that I’ve constantly looked, and we rely in South Dakota on the fact that I’m pro-life and we have a law that says that there is an exception for the […]
Jamelle Bouie asks, “Trump has asked the Supreme Court if he is, in effect, a king. And at least four members of the court, among them the so-called originalists, have said, in essence, that they’ll have to think about it.” I agree with what he has said. What I heard yesterday is the christofascist clique on the court actually do support the president as a king above the law. You also hear his attorneys spouting a Benjamin Franklin quote again and again. Anyone who actually knows anything about Franklin;s views knows that Franklin himself would be appalled at the misusage of this fragment of his statement they are using out of context.
Donald Trump’s claim that he has absolute immunity for criminal acts taken in office as president is an insult to reason, an assault on common sense and a perversion of the fundamental maxim of American democracy: that no man is above the law.
More astonishing than the former president’s claim to immunity, however, is the fact that the Supreme Court took the case in the first place. It’s not just that there’s an obvious response — no, the president is not immune to criminal prosecution for illegal actions committed with the imprimatur of executive power, whether private or “official” (a distinction that does not exist in the Constitution) — but that the court has delayed, perhaps indefinitely, the former president’s reckoning with the criminal legal system of the United States.
In delaying the trial, the Supreme Court may well have denied the public its right to know whether a former president, now vying to be the next president, is guilty of trying to subvert the sacred process of presidential succession: the peaceful transfer of power from one faction to another that is the essence of representative democracy. It is a process so vital, and so precious, that its first […]
Yet another Great Schism Trend sad story about a declining Red State. Alabama already has a semi-literate population and awful social outcome data on everything from childcare to racism, and they are about to make things worse. They are attacking not just their public and school libraries, they are also threatening librarians. The result: greater illiteracy, greater ignorance, fewer librarians. Welcome to Alabama.
Jemison Library – City of Jemison Alabama Credit: Jemison Library
MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA — Alabama lawmakers on Thursday advanced legislation that could see librarians prosecuted under the state’s obscenity law for providing “harmful” materials to minors, the latest in a wave of bills in Republican-led states targeting library content and decisions.
The Alabama House of Representatives voted 72-28 for the bill that now moves to the Alabama Senate. The legislation comes amid a soaring number of book challenges — often centered on LGBTQ content — and efforts in a number of states to ban drag queen story readings.
“This is an effort to protect children. It is not a Democrat bill. It’s not a Republican bill. It’s a people bill to try to protect children,” Republican Rep. Arnold Mooney, the bill’s sponsor, said during debate.
The Alabama bill removes the existing exemption for public libraries in the state’s obscenity law. It also expands the definition of prohibited sexual conduct to include any “sexual or gender oriented conduct” at K-12 public schools or public libraries that “exposes minors to […]
