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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.
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 “recruit […]
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 chair […]
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 nature. […]
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 are […]
Under the Biden administration, and the Trump administration before that, and the Obama administration before that the Department of Agriculture which is the submissive servant of Big Agriculture, as it is called, has been destroying the earth’s matrix of life in America so you can eat steaks. It is a horrible policy mistake that has been going on for a generation and it is leaving the U.S. in a growing crisis as our ecosystem is torn apart by greedy agriculture corporations and individuals. What can you do? Stop eating mammals.
A red fox killed with a cyanide bomb. A gray wolf gunned down from an airplane. A jackrabbit caught in a neck snare. These are just a few of the 1.45 million animals poisoned, shot, and trapped last year by the euphemistically named Wildlife Services, a little-known but particularly brutal program of the US Department of Agriculture.
The program kills wildlife for many reasons, including poisoning birds to prevent them from striking airplanes and destroying beavers that sneak onto golf courses. But one of the primary purposes of the mostly taxpayer-funded $286 million program is to serve as the meat and dairy industries’ on-call pest control service.
“We were the hired gun of the livestock industry,” said Carter Niemeyer, who worked in Wildlife Services and related programs from 1975 to 2006. Niemeyer specialized in killing and trapping predators like coyotes and wolves that were suspected of killing farmed cattle and sheep.
Wildlife Services has also killed hundreds of endangered gray wolves, threatened grizzly bears, and highly endangered Mexican gray wolves, often at the behest of […]
I have been looking at how The Great Schism Trend is affecting cities in the U.S. as the climate changes. The first thing that stands out is how poorly many urban centers in Red states are preparing for what is happening. The second thing that stood out for me was how poorly America is doing overall. You would think this would be a major topic of concern in Congress, but it is not. I do think the Biden administration is making a serious effort but it will only work if the House authorizes the money, and the House under TCP/Republican control is more a playground for spoiled ignorant brats than a real legislative body interested in fostering wellbeing. Then I started doing research on what is happening in Europe since it has been severely impacted by the increase in temperatures, and the population of Europe is overwhelmingly in cities. Here is what I found. They are taking it seriously, and using nature based strategies. Good news for them.
Credit: Laurent Cipriani / AP
Cities are home to a majority of Europe’s population and are particularly vulnerable to the consequences of climate change.
Europe’s cities are facing the impacts of climate change ever more regularly and severely. After 2023’s record summer heat, flooding and heatwaves, the need to invest in resilience has never been clearer.
A new report from the European Environment Agency (EEA) has taken stock of adaption across Europe’s urban centres, looking at what actions cities are taking and what is already working.
It finds that almost all European cities are using nature-based solutions as their tool of choice to improve resilience. Of the 19,000 climate action plans surveyed, 91 per cent included options like maintaining parks, urban forests or green roofs and facilitating natural water retention.
Not only are they “effective for cooling and water retention”, the report says, they also provide other benefits like more recreational spaces or a reduction in pollution.
Despite the uptake in nature-based solutions, however, […]
One of the things that stands out for me about states governed by Republicans is the sheer nastiness of their governance. Take the authorization of government murder of prisoners. Only five states — Texas, Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Alabama — authorize such killings and, of course, they are all Red states. As this report describes this government authorized murder is so traumatic that the employees who have to carry it out are traumatized and complaining about it.
An arm restraint on the gurney in the execution chamber of the Oklahoma state penitentiary in 2014. Credit: Sue Ogrocki / AP
The relentless pursuit of “non-stop executions” by a rump of US death penalty states is exposing prison staff to extreme levels of psychological and physical stress, according to traumatized corrections officers who are appealing for help.
Though capital punishment is generally on the wane in America, with only five states carrying out executions last year, those states that remain active are showing a renewed determination. In some states, the pace of judicial killings is now so intense that prison guards are kept in an almost permanent state of readiness, with mock executions staged on a rolling basis.
Pursuit of ‘non-stop executions’ causing psychological distress to corrections staff as states urged to widen gap between executions
The relentless pursuit of “non-stop executions” by a rump of US death penalty states is exposing prison staff to extreme levels of psychological and physical stress, according to traumatized corrections officers who are appealing for help.
Though capital punishment is generally on the wane in America, with only
