WASHINGTON – After years of advocacy on behalf of a permanent, national paid family and medical leave benefit that would put the U.S. on par with nearly every other developed country in the world, the American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC) applauds steps being proposed by President Biden and the House Ways and Means Committee to move us closer to that goal.

On Tuesday, House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal (D-MA01), unveiled a new proposal called the “Building an Economy for Families Act,” including universal paid family and medical leave, which was described as a “vision for benefits” to open a fuller discussion.  The Committee’s proposal comes one day before President Biden is scheduled to unveil the next piece of his domestic legislative agenda, the American Families Act, following his American Jobs Act.

While the $1.9 trillion Jobs Act focused generally on infrastructure and climate, Biden’s Families Act is expected to include up to $1.8 trillion for paid leave, national childcare, pre-kindergarten and tuition-free community college.  The Families Act is set to be released ahead of the President’s Wednesday night address to Congress.

“With our partners in the Paid Leave for All coalition, ASBC looks forward to working with Congress and the White House to finally adopting this critical benefit,” said Thomas Oppel, ASBC Executive Vice President.  “We’ve made the case for years that this step would be good for business.  In fact, with Panorama, we released the first quantitative study 18 months ago that demonstrated generally positive economic returns for businesses who offered this benefit.”

Neal’s proposal would give all workers up to 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, with benefits scaled to provide higher benefits for lower income workers, in a program to be run by the Treasury Department.  Private employers could be partially reimbursed for their costs.

The Committee also proposed a “Child Care Information Network” for families to get the most up-to-date information on childcare options available to them, any subsidies that may be available and help figuring out how to apply.  And the proposal would also permanently extend three tax credits a child tax credit of up to $3,600 per child; an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit; and the Child and Dependent Care Credit of up to $8,000 for one child, $16,000 for two or more. These credits were approved temporarily as part of Biden’s American Rescue Plan, passed by Congress to address immediate impacts from the pandemic.

“For our economy to fully recover from this pandemic, we must finally acknowledge that workers have families, and caregiving responsibilities are real,” Neal said in a statement. “Through sensible, but bold investments, we can put workers’ minds at ease and ready our country to come roaring back. All while lifting millions out of poverty by permanently extending the hugely popular expansions that the Ways and Means Committee made to key tax credits in the American Rescue Plan.”

The American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC) partners with business organizations and companies to advocate for solutions and policies that support an equitable, sustainable, stakeholder economy. ASBC is a multi-issue, business organization advocating on behalf of all sectors, sizes, and geographies of industry. ASBC and its association members collectively represent over 250,000 businesses across our networks. ASBC is coalition-focused in our approach to solving the pervasive and systemic issues of climate and energy, infrastructure, circular economy, and creating an inclusive stakeholder economy, all seen through the lens of racial equity and justice. ASBC is changing the rules by which business is done so it is better for all people and the environment.

In 2020 ASBC and SVC created a strategic alliance to bring together a powerful combination of values-aligned entrepreneurs, business leaders, and investors of responsible companies’ innovative ideas and the ability to be key policy influencers in their own communities as well as at the federal, state and local levels.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal (WA-07), Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, issued the following statement today after President Biden announced he would raise the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $15 an hour:

“With today’s historic executive order, President Biden is following through on his campaign promise to millions of low-wage federal contract workers and the broader Fight for Fifteen movement for worker justice. We will no longer allow companies receiving our tax dollars to underpay and undervalue you. Many of these workers have been performing essential work during the pandemic without the benefit of a living wage. We are also pleased that this decision will eliminate the subminimum tipped wage and ensure that workers with disabilities receive fair compensation for their labor.

“Today’s announcement demonstrates Democrats’ commitment to providing working families with economic security and using every tool of government to tangibly improve the lives of the American people. While we celebrate this victory, the Progressive Caucus will not rest until we make the minimum wage a living wage for every worker across America and finally guarantee a voice on the job through the passage of the PRO Act. We once again call on President Biden and Senate Democrats to use every tool possible to increase the minimum wage to $15, give 32 million workers a raise, and lift one million people out of poverty. 

“I am particularly proud of the role that the Progressive Caucus played in paving the path for today’s decision. Eight years ago, under the leadership of former Chairs Keith Ellison and Raul Grijalva, the CPC was able to successfully convince President Obama to raise the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $10.10 an hour. That decision established the legal and political precedent for today’s executive order.”

Beginning in 2013, the CPC was the first group in Congress to urge President Obama to raise the minimum wage for federal contract workers.  From 2013 to 2015, the CPC supported a series of strikes by federal contract workers demanding a living wage and a voice on the job.  These efforts culminated in Obama-Biden Executive Order 13656, which required federal contract workers to receive $10.10 per hour, as well as the Fair Pay Safe Workplaces Executive Order, which denied federal contracts to employers with significant wage and workplace safety violations.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – On the eve of President Biden’s first address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, Sunrise Movement partnered with Justice Democrats, United We Dream, and Battle Born Collective to release a progress report on President Biden’s first 100 days in office. Sunrise’s Communications Director, Zina Precht-Rodriguez, issued the following statement to complement the 100 days report: 

“In November, voters delivered a climate mandate to President Biden that secured him and the Senate a last-shot chance at stopping the climate crisis. But while Biden still rides the wave of our “climate action equals jobs” rhetoric, the truth is, he hasn’t been relentless on passing popular climate legislation. Setting climate targets and adopting a Rooseveltian governing approach to crises is a precursor, but it isn’t enough. Now is the time for Biden to back up his progressive messaging with climate action that will actually stop the crisis at the scale that science and justice demand.” 

“Here are the facts. We need a $10 trillion of investment over the next decade to end the unemployment crisis and put millions of people to work in good, union jobs stopping the climate crisis. In order to do this, Biden must come out in full support of Ocasio-Cortez and Markey’s Civilian Climate Corps (CCC) for Jobs and Justice Act in his address tomorrow night. In addition to direct public employment through a CCC, Biden must do everything in his power to pass a Clean Energy Standard to advance environmental justice and support a bold transition to renewable energy as well as the PRO Act to ensure all jobs created are indeed good, union jobs where workers are protected and guaranteed the right to organize.

“Nearly 100 days into the Biden presidency, we cannot wait any longer for the administration and Congress to act on the mandate they were elected on. No more empty promises. Legislate like our lives depend on it.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Racism pays in America—especially if you’re the primetime host of a cable channel that panders to the country’s sizable population of white nationalists.

Fox News struck bigotry gold when it offered its 8 p.m. time slot to Tucker Carlson, who returned the favor by routinely fanning the flames of hatred against immigrants, Muslim and Jewish people, Black and Brown people, the LGBTQIA+ community and anyone else he considers threats to his supremacist world view.

But it’s not his regular viewers alone who pay Carlson’s $10-million salary. Nor is it advertisers, who—with the notable exception of the MyPillow guy—have left the program in droves, refusing to have their products featured adjacent to Carlson’s bile.

Legum suggests that cable companies could simply offer a package of cable channels that excludes Fox News—something I’ve referred to previously as a “hate-free bundle.”Carlson’s enormous paycheck comes out of the pockets of millions of people who never watch his show or anything else on Fox. And there’s very little they can do to customize their cable so it excludes media properties owned by the Murdoch family.

Earlier this week, investigative journalist Judd Legum wrote about this dilemma: While the vast majority of cable-TV subscribers don’t watch Fox News, all of them pay on average $1.72 a month to receive it as part of the standard bundle of channels offered by the likes of Comcast, Spectrum and Verizon. When you lump in Fox Corporation’s other cable properties, including Fox Business News, FS1 and FS2, this monthly payout exceeds $2 per subscriber.

For those keeping count, that’s $1.6 billion in 2020 revenue for Fox News alone—about 57 percent of the station’s total revenue.

Legum asks: “How can Americans who don’t watch Fox News and find Tucker Carlson’s conduct repugnant stop subsidizing his $10 million salary?”

It’s a legitimate question. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t as simple as it should be.

Hate-free bundles?

Legum suggests that cable companies could simply offer a package of cable channels that excludes Fox News—something I’ve referred to previously as a “hate-free bundle.” Subscribers could opt to exclude other purveyors of hate and disinformation (think One America and Newsmax). Pay-TV providers in turn would negotiate Fox carriage fees that are much lower than the wildly excessive amounts these companies now pay the Murdochs.

Muhlenberg College Media and Communications Professor John Sullivan says such an offering is common in stock trading, where “you can choose a ‘socially responsible’ mutual fund to avoid investing in stocks that include oil companies or do business with questionable regimes around the world.”

Why can’t we do the same with the cable channels we pay to receive? Subscribers could shave a couple of bucks off their monthly bills by refusing to help line Carlson’s pockets or fund the Murdochs’ hate-for-profit business model.

It’s not for lack of trying. In 2015, Verizon attempted to break the bundle by offering a discounted “skinny” package, with its FIOS customers selecting 10–17 channels in addition to must-carry local channels and public outlets.

But the plan quickly ran afoul of Big Media after Disney and ESPN sued Verizon, claiming that giving consumers choices in this way violated providers’ carriage agreement.

Now, the “Skinny Bundle” isn’t that skinny: Verizon allows subscribers to pick five channels, while the pay-TV giant loads on 120 additional channels (yes, including Fox News).

Subsidizing fascism

Following the Jan. 6 insurrection, Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney of California sent letters to each of the dominant pay-TV services asking why they were doing nothing in response to the hate and disinformation aired by some of their standard offerings of cable channels.

The lawmakers asked whether and why each service planned to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax and One America News when they revisited carriage-fee negotiations with the owners of these outlets.

Until companies like AT&T, Comcast, Spectrum and Verizon step up to break the bundle — or we see policy changes favoring consumer “a la carte” — cutting the cord is the only option for those who don’t want a cent of their monthly bills to subsidize hate and disinformation.

But that isn’t easy. Some who’ve chosen to receive TV “over the top” — via their high-speed internet connection — have customized their viewing options to exclude Fox News. But cutting the cord isn’t enough if you replace it with an over-the-top option that also bundles in Fox News; many of these options don’t offer a la carte.  

Regardless, the vast majority of people in the United States opt for pay-TV packages; cord-cutters are still in the minority.

Until they’re given more choice, viewers in the United States need to be clear with the companies that sell them their Pay-TV bundles: Paying the Murdochs for content is the modern-day equivalent of subsidizing fascism. “No rhetorical wiggle room should be allowed,” writes Oliver Willis of Media Matters for America. 

Long term, we need a serious reckoning with how we got the media system we have, where commercial media collude to exclude and harm Black and Brown communities.

We must repair the damage done and rebuild more diverse and democratic media. We can start by turning off the cash spigot that fuels big-media bigotry.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

During the four years of the Trump administration, I was one of those people, derisively labeled “tyrannophobes” by some on the left, who focused on Trump’s assaults on democracy and argued for putting the defense of liberal democracy first.

Most of those who criticized us surely recognized Trump’s many objectionable features. They simply refused to focus on them, because they thought that “liberal democracy” is itself a deeply flawed system that is complicit in many serious injustices, and that these injustices—whether attributable to “neoliberalism” or “capitalism” or “white supremacy” or “systemic racism” or “the anthropocene”—are more fundamental, and ought to be the principal focus of critique and activism.

To put it bluntly, at this moment the U.S. two-party system centers on the efforts of one party, the Republicans, to curtail liberal democracy, and of the other party, the Democrats, to defend it.

Those who refused to reify liberal democracy and insisted on naming its flaws were of course right—and indeed many of us so-called “tyrannophobes” had never been loath to name these flaws. But the disparagement of committed liberal democrats for their focus on defeating Trumpism was neither right nor fair.

And as Trump became increasingly authoritarian, it became increasingly difficult to chalk up anti-Trumpism to some kind of neurotic obsession or “phobia.” Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign, which ramped up long before the November election, surely underscored the danger of Trumpism. Its natural consequence—the Republican effort to prevent Biden’s inauguration, culminating in the January 6 assault on the Capitol– further underscored the danger. But perhaps the most dangerous consequence of Trumpism is less melodramatic—the effort of Republicans that is currently under way to use their control of statehouses across the country to legislatively restrict democratic contestation. This, combined with Trumpist success in stacking the courts with right-wing jurists, clearly poses dangers that are hard to deny.

Four recently-published New York Times pieces clarify what is at stake.

Three of them deal with efforts to restrict voting that have been much in the news, especially in connection with recent legislation in Georgia that seriously curtails voter access:

Richard Hasen, “Republicans Aren’t Done Messing with Elections,” New York Times (April 23, 2021).

Elizabeth Williamson, “Voting Rights Standoff Stalls Trump-Inspired Ethics Measures,” New York Times (April 24, 2020).

Nick Corasaniti, “Texas Republicans Targeting Voting Access Find Their Bullseye: Cities,” New York Times (April 24, 2021).

The fourth piece deals not with voting rights but with freedom of association and assembly and the right to protest: Reid Epstein and Patricia Mazzei, “GOP Bills Target Protesters (and Absolve Motorists Who Hit Them),” New York Times (April 21, 2021). [An excellent overview of these efforts is provided by New York University’s First Amendment Watch.]

These Republican efforts are very serious, and I fully agree with Joe Lowndes:

“These new bills are deeply antidemocratic in a broader sense. Like the new legislation in Georgia curtailing the franchise, laws that severely punish political protest are meant to repress democratic expression as such. And the establishment of state authority over the municipal right to control budgets in regard to law enforcement strikes at local self-determination, something Republicans pretend to love. These facts alone should alert people to the dangers of a party committed to the path of authoritarianism.”

The seriousness of these efforts lies behind three important pieces of legislation that the Democratic party is currently seeking to advance.

One, the much-discussed John Lewis Voting Rights Act (H.R. 4), seeks to clarify and restore the preclearance requirements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that were struck down by the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holden decision.

The second, more-discussed For the People Act (H.R. 1), is an omnibus piece of legislation that involves campaign finance reform, uniform standards for Congressional redistricting,  and uniform and enforceable standards of election administration and voter access.

While these two pieces of legislation are designed to dramatically improve the quality of democratic representation, the third piece of legislation, the Protecting Our Democracy Act (H.R. 8363), sponsored by Adam Schiff and still in committee, is designed to provide institutional checks on the kinds of abuses of presidential power—self-dealing, refusal of transparency, punishment of whistleblowers, etc.—that were unapologetically practiced by Trump.

All three pieces of legislation represent serious efforts to strengthen the means of democratic representation, such as they are, in the U.S. political system. All three are strongly supported by Democrats. And all three are strongly opposed by Republicans.

To put it bluntly, at this moment the U.S. two-party system centers on the efforts of one party, the Republicans, to curtail liberal democracy, and of the other party, the Democrats, to defend it.

While it is common on the left to target “neoliberalism” and abstractly to denounce “capitalist democracy” as a form of “oligarchy,” I know very few people on the U.S. left who are actually indifferent to this situation.

Most understand that the Republican efforts target Black and progressive voters, and Black Lives Matter and progressive activism; that they are designed to secure Republican control over the institutions of state and national government; and that they are dangerous.

Most support the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For the People Act.

Most regard Stacey Abrams as a hero, and cheer when she disses Republican Senators while testifying in support of voting rights before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Most applaud Rev. William Barber III—leader of the Poor People’s Campaign–when he declares, in an op-ed co-authored with Bernice King, that “We Must Reclaim Voting Rights as a Moral Issue.”

Most share the appropriate indignation expressed last week by Luke Savage, who reported in Jacobin on how “Behind Closed Doors, Republican Plutocrats Conspiring Against Democracy Let the Mask Slip.”  And most agree with Scott Remer’s insistence, in the pages of In These Times, that “Democrats Need to Radically Expand American Democracy—And Fast.”

In these formulations, the “democracy” that is being attacked by the Right, and that must be defended and expanded by the left, is not “socialist democracy” or “radical democracy” or “participatory democracy” or “authentic democracy”—all ideas that have meaning in other contexts.  It is actually existing, flawed, and fragile liberal democracy. It is the very imperfect political system described decades ago by political scientist Robert Dahl as “polyarchy”: a system that refuses any party or group a monopoly on political power; is egalitarian in its distribution of voting rights; and is liberal in its protection of civil liberties, freedom of association, and the rights of political contestation and competition.

To fight against voter restrictions is to insist on the ethical and political value of voting rights equality.

To fight against efforts to give disproportionate weight to Republican voters and constituencies is to insist on the ethical and political value of fair political representation, however mediated, imperfect, and alienating such representation might be.

To fight against efforts to punish and disenfranchise protesters is to insist on the ethical and political value of civil liberties, and of the First Amendment that buttresses them.

Of course, to defend these democratic principles does not signify that these things fully embody social justice or genuine political community. It signifies only the understanding that these things are important means of achieving social justice and political community.

If we don’t defend this democracy, then we will lose it.

Universal suffrage and institutions of fair representation and rights of political contestation do not “solve” the problems or eliminate the injustices associated with capitalism or neoliberalism or racism or sexism or heteronormativity or climate-destroying anthropomorphic arrogance. But it is hard to see how these problems can be solved and these injustices can be repaired without working through and then “democratizing” these liberal democratic institutions. And harder still to see how any effort that rejects these institutions can be trusted to remain even minimally democratic.

Back in mid-March, Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate Majority Leader, delivered a surprisingly good speech about the defense of democracy on the Senate floor. Explaining his intention to pass H.R. 1 and H. R. 4 in the Senate, he concluded by stating that “If our democracy doesn’t work, then we have no hope — no hope — of solving any of our other problems.”

Schumer is no John Dewey nor even a John Lewis. There is no reason to imagine that his conception of democracy “working” and “solving our problems” runs very deep or extends very far. Most people on the left will define the problems we face more radically, and work with a much more expansive conception of democratic politics than the “normal politics” practiced, and extolled, by Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.

At the same time, whatever you think about capitalism or racism or climate catastrophe or of Pelosi or Schumer or Biden, to take the proper measure of what the Republican party is now trying to do is to agree with Schumer: in a sense both minimal and crucial, the liberal democracy that we have is now in grave danger, and whatever else we hope to accomplish through politics, and whatever else we are currently doing politically, we must now defend the democracy we have.

For if we don’t defend this democracy, then we will lose it.

Republicans understand this. They understand that liberal democracy is a potential means of serious challenges to the privileges and inequalities they seek to defend. And so they are currently putting liberal democracy first—in their cross hairs. Attacking and weakening liberal democracy is their primary “policy agenda,” and indeed little else seems now to concern them.

It is important to take them at their words, and their deeds, and to respond in kind.

Support for the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and the Protecting Our Democracy Act will not solve the deeper problems plaguing our world. But without measures such as these, our problems will only get worse, and our means of addressing them collectively will only become weaker.

Putting liberal democracy first has thus never been more important than it is right now.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Rights group United We Dream warned Tuesday that unless he takes immediate steps to improve his administration’s treatment of immigrants, President Joe Biden is at serious risk of repeating the destructive failures of former President Barack Obama, who deported roughly three million people during his eight years in office.

Despite Biden’s characterization of Obama’s mass deportations as a “mistake” and pledge to usher in a more humane immigration system, United We Dream estimates that the administration has deported just over 300,000 people since January—largely using a Trump-era policy called Title 42.

“Biden and the Department of Homeland Security must be reminded that their inaction to protect vulnerable immigrant communities seeking refuge in the U.S. is not only putting lives on the line; it upholds a white nationalist immigration system.”
—Cynthia Garcia, United We Dream

The policy was first issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last March—at the start of the coronavirus pandemic—and has been kept in place by the Biden administration. As Human Rights Watch (HRW) explained earlier this month, “The Title 42 expulsion policy has effectively closed the U.S. border to nearly all asylum seekers based on the misapplication of an obscure, 75-year-old public health law.”

“That law, the Public Health Service Act of 1944, was designed to confer quarantine authority to health authorities that would apply to everyone, including U.S. citizens, arriving from a foreign country,” HRW noted. “Quarantine authority was never meant to be used to determine which noncitizens could or couldn’t be expelled or removed from the U.S.”

In a statement on Monday, Cynthia Garcia of United We Dream stressed that “Title 42 was designed under one of the most anti-immigrant administrations in modern history.”

“President Biden and the Department of Homeland Security must be reminded that their inaction to protect vulnerable immigrant communities seeking refuge in the U.S. is not only putting lives on the line; it upholds a white nationalist immigration system that seeks to expel and keep Black and brown immigrants out at any cost,” said Garcia, who voiced dismay at the Biden administration’s deportation of vulnerable Haitians and others.

According to a report (pdf) released late last month by the Haitian Bridge Alliance and other advocacy groups, the Biden administration used Title 42 to deport more Haitians during its first weeks in power than the Trump administration did in all of Fiscal Year 2020.

“Reflecting on his time as vice president, President Biden acknowledged that the Obama administration was wrong in deporting over 2.5 million people and vowed to never make that mistake again when he took office,” Garcia continued. “President Biden is well on track to repeat history. Now, he must make a choice: repeat the mistakes of the Obama administration or do everything in his power to end the cruelty of detentions, expulsions, and deportations and show that he is a president of his word.”

National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA), a coalition of more than 40 immigrant and refugee rights organizations, echoed United We Dream’s concerns about continued mass deportations during the first 100 days of the Biden administration.

While pointing to positive steps Biden has taken since January—such as ending Trump’s Muslim ban and pushing for a path to citizenship for Dreamers—NPNA noted that “there are many changes that the Biden administration can pursue with little to no congressional action, including ending the use of Title 42 expulsions, redesignating [Temporary Protected Status] for Haiti and other countries [that] are set to expire, and increasing the number of refugees that the U.S. will resettle as part of the presidential determination.”

“These are literally life or death decisions that will impact millions of lives,” the group said. “The administration can also take action to expand access to citizenship and justice and to bolster due process protections through an increase of legal representation for those in detention and removal proceedings.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Despite President Biden’s promise to stop deportations, his administration has deported over 300,000 people since late January and largely under a Trump-era policy known as Title 42. As President Biden approaches his first 100 days in office this week, immigrant youth demand he follows through with his commitments to end further trauma and injustice inflicted upon our communities by stopping all deportations, delivering citizenship for millions this year, and signing the Breathe Act into law. 

Cynthia Garcia, National Campaigns Manager for Community Protection of United We Dream, said:

“The onus is on President Biden to step up at this moment and stop ICE and CBP from carrying out any more deportations. President Biden and the Department of Homeland Security must be reminded that their inaction to protect vulnerable immigrant communities seeking refuge in the U.S. is not only putting lives on the line; it upholds a white nationalist immigration system that seeks to expel and keep Black and brown immigrants out at any cost. 

Title 42 was designed under one of the most anti-immigrant administrations in modern history. Time and again, the Trump administration found every opportunity to ostracize and harm Black and brown immigrant communities, from implementing the Muslim ban to carrying out thousands of forced family separations. The continued mass deportations of Black and brown communities, especially Black immigrants from Haiti, that are happening under Biden’s watch are these same white nationalist policies at work. 

Reflecting on his time as Vice President, President Biden acknowledged that the Obama administration was wrong in deporting over 2.5 million people and vowed to never make that mistake again when he took office. President Biden is well on track to repeat history. Now, he must make a choice: repeat the mistakes of the Obama administration or do everything in his power to end the cruelty of detentions, expulsions, and deportations and show that he is a President of his word.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The percentage of people with favorable views of the United States has increased in at least a dozen countries since former President Donald Trump left office, according to a new poll released Tuesday.

“President Joe Biden inherited a tarnished American image abroad when he took office on Jan. 20 following four years of President Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ foreign policies and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that called into question the status of the world’s oldest continuous democracy,” noted Morning Consult, which conducted the survey tracking international sentiment. 

“Nearly 100 days later as the United States and the world meets a symbolic milestone of Biden’s presidency, the Oval Office’s current occupant is overseeing a sizable improvement to the American brand across many allied countries,” the pollsters added.

According to the latest surveys of adults in 14 other nations, favorable views of the U.S. have increased by an average of nine points in the wake of Trump’s departure from the White House.

U.S. popularity has improved the most in Germany, where there has been a 47-point net gain in favorability following Biden’s inauguration. Since Jan. 20, the percentage of Germans with a favorable view of the U.S. has increased from 24% to 46%, a 22-point swing. Meanwhile, 37% of Germans now hold an unfavorable view of the U.S., down 25 points from the pre-Biden mark of 62%.

Similar positive changes in foreign countries’ perceptions of the U.S. have been observed in Japan (+39), France (+37), Canada (+32), and the United Kingdom (+30), with smaller gains seen in Spain (+26), Italy (+23), Australia (+21), Mexico (+15), Brazil (+10), and Russia (+6).

Christian Welzel, a political researcher at the Center for the Study of Democracy at Leuphana University Lüneburg in Germany, attributed the boost in U.S. popularity to Biden’s return to the Paris climate agreement, even if, as progressives have pointed out, the U.S. president’s climate pledges are inadequate in light of the country’s historic responsibility for the climate emergency.

South Korea’s opinions about the U.S. have declined slightly in the Biden era, with the favorability rating of 47% remaining steady but unfavorability growing from 37% to 39%.

The largest decrease in U.S. popularity has occurred in China, which is perhaps unsurprising given Biden’s embrace of what some have called a new Cold War designed to contain China’s growing economic and military power. Before Biden’s inauguration, 21% of people in China held a favorable view of the U.S. and 65% held an unfavorable view. Since Jan. 20, favorability has shrunk to 17% while unfavorability has risen to 74%.

Notably, not a single African country was surveyed, even though people living there might have interesting things to say about a Biden administration whose stances on global public health policy and refugee admissions—which progressive critics have dubbed “America First Lite”—directly impact them.

So far, only 1.3% of Africa’s 1.3 billion people has been inoculated against Covid-19. Current projections suggest that most people living on the continent, as well as the residents of impoverished countries in Latin America and Asia, won’t receive shots until 2023 at the earliest, which is why nearly every country in the Global South supports a proposal at the World Trade Organization to suspend vaccine patents for the duration of the pandemic.

Last week, a representative from South Africa criticized rich countries, including the U.S., for siding with Big Pharma in their quest to use intellectual property rights to maintain their profitable monopoly control over vaccine production—no matter how many human beings die as a result of an artificially low supply of doses.

Although wealthy nations’ obstruction of the motion for a vaccine patent waiver is deadly, not every country victimized by the U.S.-led opposition to the proposal seems to have taken it out on Biden.

A large majority of people in India—which co-introduced the patent waiver proposal last October and is now in the midst of a hellish Covid-19 outbreak—still view the U.S. in a positive light despite Washington’s steadfast commitment to a privatized intellectual property regime.

Since Jan. 20, the percentage of people in India who hold a favorable view of the U.S. increased from 77% to 79%, while the percentage with an unfavorable view has declined from 11% to 10%.

In fact, India is the only country surveyed that has a higher opinion of the U.S. than Americans themselves. Seventy-eight percent of people in the U.S. now hold a positive view of their country, up from 73% before Biden’s inauguration. Meanwhile, the national unfavorability rating has decreased from 22% to 17% since Jan. 20.

“International opinion of the United States, in many nations, is genuinely contingent on American actions,” said David Farber, a historian at the University of Kansas. “People in many nations around the world are, I think, hopeful, that the election of Joe Biden marks a rejection of Trump’s ‘America First’ bullying and go-it-alone international policies and a return to a more collaborative, pro-democracy approach to international affairs.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren was among lawmakers and tax policy experts who welcomed reporting Tuesday that President Joe Biden will propose boosting the Internal Revenue Service’s budget by $80 billion in the coming decade and increasing the agency’s power to crack down on rich individuals and large corporations for tax evasion.

“Republicans have starved the IRS so it can’t go after wealthy tax cheats,” said Warren (D-Mass.), who called for investing $100 billion in the IRS as part of the wealth tax bill she introduced last month with Reps. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). “This $80 billion announcement from President Biden is a good first step.”

Biden’s IRS proposal, reported on Tuesday by the New York Times and the Washington Post, is part of the tax changes related to his forthcoming American Families Plan, which is expected to include provisions on child care, universal prekindergarten, paid family and sick leave, free community college, and tax credits for those in poverty.

The tax plan to pay for those initiatives includes the extra funds and enforcement authority for the IRS, which according to the Times “will accompany new disclosure requirements for people who own businesses that are not organized as corporations and for other wealthy people who could be hiding income from the government.”

Citing unnamed sources within the Biden administration, both newspapers noted that officials expect the improving IRS enforcement and auditing—particularly on wealthy Americans and companies—could raise at least $700 billion over 10 years. The Times clarified that the internal estimates about the impact of stepping up audits and enforcement don’t include “any additional revenue from people or companies choosing to pay more taxes after previously avoiding them.”

Appearing before the Senate Finance Committee earlier this month, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig estimated that tax cheats—mostly the rich and major corporations—deprive the federal government of as much as $1 trillion annually. The agency gets “outgunned,” he said, and needs additional resources to close the tax gap.

Biden’s proposal to give the agency more money and authority would come after more than a decade of struggling with budget cuts. The Post pointed out that “the IRS lost roughly 18,000 full-time positions after 2010, due primarily to cuts pushed by Republicans in Congress under President Barack Obama, with the number of auditors falling to lows unseen since the 1950s.”

In a letter to congressional leaders late last year, House Democrats called for increasing the IRS’ capacity to go after “wealthy tax cheats” like former President Donald Trump—who, according to the Times, paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017—rather than focusing on lower-income taxpayers “just because it is cheaper and easier.”

Though not a signatory on that letter, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) has similarly called for improving IRS targeting of rich people and companies dodging taxes. His Stop Corporations and Higher Earners from Avoiding Taxes and Enforce Rules Strictly (CHEATERS) Act, introduced in February, would provide $100 billion to the IRS 10 years—$70 billion for enforcement, $20 billion for taxpayer services, and $10 billion for IT and operations support.

Business Insider reported earlier this year that “Khanna’s bill could prove less controversial than proposals from other Democratic lawmakers to increase tax revenue from the ultrawealthy, such as [Warren’s] two-cent wealth tax, which proposes a 2% tax on every dollar for families with a net worth of more than $50 million.”

Warren tweeted Tuesday that she will introduce another bill “for dedicated, mandatory funding for the IRS to enforce the tax laws already on the books for the ultra-rich and giant corporations,” adding that “the IRS should have more resources to do its job and make the wealthy pay their fair share.”

As she recently told Politcio:

I have proposed nearly doubling the funding for the IRS but also making a chunk of their funding mandatory and targeted toward high-income individuals and corporations. The problem is not only that IRS funding has been cut, it’s that when funding goes up and down and up and down and up and down, the IRS doesn’t have the resources to build out a more expert group that has the skill set to go after the really sophisticated tax dodgers. So the mandatory funding would mean the IRS could commit to hiring and training a team of experts who can focus on giant corporations that hide their money overseas or manipulate their income reports, and the team will be far more effective at enforcing current law.

“There are other areas where I believe we should change the law to expand revenue—a wealth tax, a book-profits tax—but this is simply about enforcement to make sure corporations and rich people pay the taxes that are already due,” Warren added. “I see it as kind of three legs on a stool: We need to close up some of the loopholes on the corporate side, we need to put a wealth tax in place, and we need serious enforcement.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren was among lawmakers and tax policy experts who welcomed reporting Tuesday that President Joe Biden will propose boosting the Internal Revenue Service’s budget by $80 billion in the coming decade and increasing the agency’s power to crack down on rich individuals and large corporations for tax evasion.

“Republicans have starved the IRS so it can’t go after wealthy tax cheats,” said Warren (D-Mass.), who called for investing $100 billion in the IRS as part of the wealth tax bill she introduced last month with Reps. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). “This $80 billion announcement from President Biden is a good first step.”

Biden’s IRS proposal, reported on Tuesday by the New York Times and the Washington Post, is part of the tax changes related to his forthcoming American Families Plan, which is expected to include provisions on child care, universal prekindergarten, paid family and sick leave, free community college, and tax credits for those in poverty.

The tax plan to pay for those initiatives includes the extra funds and enforcement authority for the IRS, which according to the Times “will accompany new disclosure requirements for people who own businesses that are not organized as corporations and for other wealthy people who could be hiding income from the government.”

Citing unnamed sources within the Biden administration, both newspapers noted that officials expect improving IRS enforcement and auditing—particularly on wealthy Americans and companies—could raise at least $700 billion over 10 years. The Times clarified that the internal estimates about the impact of stepping up audits and enforcement don’t include “any additional revenue from people or companies choosing to pay more taxes after previously avoiding them.”

Appearing before the Senate Finance Committee earlier this month, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig estimated that tax cheats—mostly the rich and major corporations—deprive the federal government of as much as $1 trillion annually. The agency gets “outgunned,” he said, and needs additional resources to close the tax gap.

Biden’s proposal to give the agency more money and authority would come after more than a decade of struggling with budget cuts. The Post pointed out that “the IRS lost roughly 18,000 full-time positions after 2010, due primarily to cuts pushed by Republicans in Congress under President Barack Obama, with the number of auditors falling to lows unseen since the 1950s.”

In a letter to congressional leaders late last year, House Democrats called for increasing the IRS’ capacity to go after “wealthy tax cheats” like former President Donald Trump—who, according to the Times, paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017—rather than focusing on lower-income taxpayers “just because it is cheaper and easier.”

Though not a signatory on that letter, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) has similarly called for improving IRS targeting of rich people and companies dodging taxes. His Stop Corporations and Higher Earners from Avoiding Taxes and Enforce Rules Strictly (CHEATERS) Act, introduced in February, would provide $100 billion to the IRS over 10 years—$70 billion for enforcement, $20 billion for taxpayer services, and $10 billion for IT and operations support.

Business Insider reported earlier this year that “Khanna’s bill could prove less controversial than proposals from other Democratic lawmakers to increase tax revenue from the ultrawealthy, such as [Warren’s] two-cent wealth tax, which proposes a 2% tax on every dollar for families with a net worth of more than $50 million.”

Warren tweeted Tuesday that she will introduce another bill “for dedicated, mandatory funding for the IRS to enforce the tax laws already on the books for the ultra-rich and giant corporations,” adding that “the IRS should have more resources to do its job and make the wealthy pay their fair share.”

As she recently told Politcio:

I have proposed nearly doubling the funding for the IRS but also making a chunk of their funding mandatory and targeted toward high-income individuals and corporations. The problem is not only that IRS funding has been cut, it’s that when funding goes up and down and up and down and up and down, the IRS doesn’t have the resources to build out a more expert group that has the skill set to go after the really sophisticated tax dodgers. So the mandatory funding would mean the IRS could commit to hiring and training a team of experts who can focus on giant corporations that hide their money overseas or manipulate their income reports, and the team will be far more effective at enforcing current law.

“There are other areas where I believe we should change the law to expand revenue—a wealth tax, a book-profits tax—but this is simply about enforcement to make sure corporations and rich people pay the taxes that are already due,” Warren added. “I see it as kind of three legs on a stool: We need to close up some of the loopholes on the corporate side, we need to put a wealth tax in place, and we need serious enforcement.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The United States needs more than a jobs program; we need a massive careers mobilization. Livable wages with benefits. On-the-job training supported by local unions. Sweat equity that builds toward racial, moral, and political equality. Work that rebuilds the economy and arrests the climate crisis.

We need a 21st-century Civilian Climate Corps.

A bill I introduced last week would establish a new Civilian Climate Corps, which would supercharge the already successful national service programs run through the Corporation for National Service and would employ 1.5 million Americans diverse in race, gender, and age.

America needs to get back to work, and we can do that while confronting the intersecting crises of the coronavirus pandemic, racial injustice, economic inequality, and climate change. Solutions must have the scale and scope of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. But this time, frontline communities and communities of color must be at the center. They have too long been left out of or, worse, excluded from the country’s discussions about jobs, infrastructure, and prosperity.

A bill I introduced last week would establish a new Civilian Climate Corps, which would supercharge the already successful national service programs run through the Corporation for National Service and would employ 1.5 million Americans diverse in race, gender, and age. Over the next five years, corps members would complete federally funded projects that help communities respond to climate change. For example, corps members may work to help weatherize and electrify housing in low income communities, or be part of a team preparing for and installing a community solar facility, receiving relevant training and credentials along the way. Natural climate resiliency improvements, like shoreline and wetlands restoration that protect against rising seas, or environmental remediation that protects from historic pollution would also be part of corps work, with crucial benefits to communities in Massachusetts and beyond. From Groundworks Lawrence to AmeriCorps Cape Cod to the Southwest Boston Community Development Corporation and programs all across the country, corps members would be part of the country’s transition to a clean economy.

Young people know that the environments many of them grew up in—in urban, suburban, tribal, and rural areas—have been degraded by pollution, mismanagement, and injustice. Last year alone the United States sustained $95 billion in damages from weather-related disasters, and over the last five years, more than $600 billion in damages. These costs are skyrocketing over the last decade, far outstripping what states, cities, and communities are accustomed to for the last half century.

The Civilian Climate Corps would both administer a large national service program and provide grants and capacity building to add to and scale the existing network of over 130 local and state service and conservation corps with more than 20,000 corps members. This unique combination of a federal program and partnerships with community organizations, all under the same umbrella, would leverage the network and local expertise of new and existing programs, while at the same time rapidly developing a large number of service projects, in a best-of-both-worlds approach.

We cannot make the mistake of FDR’s New Deal and Civilian Conservation Corps, which excluded groups other than young white men from program benefits.

Corp members would also receive education and training in coordination with local institutions, including labor unions, to usher them into good-paying jobs, especially good union jobs. They would have access to financial grants of $25,000 per year of service, up to $50,000, to either pay down student loan debt or pay for higher education. They would earn at least $15 per hour, receive full medical coverage, and have access to other services such as child care. The corps would also coordinate closely with local groups to help develop career pathways and union opportunities in new green sectors. Civilian Climate Corps service would be accessible for any American, regardless of circumstance, with a desire to help build a new economy that is sustainable and equitable.

Just as in the 1930s, the nation is facing generational crises that require society—and economy-wide transformation. But we cannot make the mistake of FDR’s New Deal and Civilian Conservation Corps, which excluded groups other than young white men from program benefits. That’s why this new Civilian Climate Corps would provide 50 percent of investments to environmental justice communities, and require that 50 percent of corps members come from those communities. The 21st century Civilian Climate Corps will center equity and justice.

In his American Jobs Plan, President Biden called on Congress to provide $10 billion to help establish a Civilian Climate Corps as part of the proposed $2 trillion infrastructure package. This is a good starting point to support the work already being done, but for a transformational service mobilization to truly meet the scope and scale this crisis requires, I have proposed an effort over 10 times that scale. A new, modern, equitable climate corps that puts Americans to work reducing carbon emissions, building our clean energy backbone, implementing conservation projects, and creating healthier and more resilient communities means we will build back better and we will build back greener.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Today, at Wells Fargo’s virtual annual shareholder meeting, the bank faced questions about its massive fossil fuel financing and lack of a credible climate-aligned transition plan, but top shareholders like Vanguard and BlackRock appeared to maintain the status quo by voting to re-elect Board Chairman Charles Noski.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Today, President Biden is issuing an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay a $15 minimum wage to all of their employees by 2022, up from the current required minimum of $10.95 per hour. In response to this order, which will also continue to index the wage to inflation and would, critically, eliminate the tipped minimum wage for federal contract workers, Morris Pearl, former managing director at Blackrock, Inc., Chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, and co-author of Tax the Rich!, issued the following statement:

“Today’s executive order is an important step in the right direction, but it’s nowhere near enough. The Biden administration should be commended for ensuring hundreds of thousands of contract workers will finally earn a liveable wage, but it cannot rest while there are tens of millions of Americans who are not earning enough to be a part of our economy or our society. A national $15 minimum wage must remain a top legislative priority for the Biden administration and Congressional Democrats. We look forward to continuing to work with the Biden administration as it fights to pass a $15 federal minimum wage through the US Senate, using every means necessary.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – This morning, the White House that President Biden would issue an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay a $15 minimum wage to hundreds of thousands of workers who are working on federal contracts. 

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – A batch of bills that passed in the Florida legislature yesterday represent what may be the most aggressive move in the country to curtail the transition away from fossil fuels.

Following a national trend of ‘preemption’ laws intended to stop local governments from passing bans on new gas service, the main bill (SB 1128/HB 919) seeks to prohibit local efforts to restrict or prohibit specific “types or fuel sources of energy production.” While the intent began as an effort to curtail ‘gas bans,’ the legislation expanded to void existing local efforts to promote clean, renewable energy—including local ordinances that promote 100 percent renewable goals.

Another bill (SB 856/ HB 839) would “prohibit the siting, development, or redevelopment of fuel retailers and the related transportation infrastructure and from requiring fuel retailers to install or invest in a particular fueling infrastructure” — which is interpreted as a means to prevent the installation charging stations for electric cars. A third bill (SB 896/ HB 539) seeks to re-classify landfill gas and factory farm biogas as a form of renewable energy. Additionally, a last minute amendment added to that bill includes another preemption measure that stops city and county leaders from having any say over the sighting of utility-scale solar projects—a practice that historically has allowed predatory corporate targeting of environmental justice communities.

The legislation moved forward one week after Governor Ron DeSantis signed a new ‘anti-riot’ law that would drastically curtail First Amendment rights. A lawsuit has already been filed against the new law.

In response to the legislation, Food & Water Watch Southern Region Deputy Director Michelle Allen released this statement:

“As rising sea levels and climate change supercharged extreme weather increasingly and directly impact Floridians, it is shameful that the legislature would preempt local governments from attempting to do something about this problem. If Governor DeSantis signs these bills, it will show his rhetoric about the environment to be nothing more than hot air — something we will be experiencing much more in the years to come.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Nina Turner on Tuesday scored another high-profile endorsement in her bid to represent Ohio’s 11th congressional district, with Rep. Pramila Jayapal backing the progressive firebrand’s campaign and hailing her platform as precisely what’s needed to tackle the nation’s myriad crises.

Speaking to HuffPost, Jayapal (D-Wash.)—the chair of the nearly 100-member Congressional Progressive Caucus—said Turner is “a phenomenal, bold, progressive candidate who has been doing the work for a very long time.”

“In many ways, she has had a not dissimilar path to mine. She’s been an activist on the outside,” added Jayapal, who worked as a civil rights organizer prior to her career in electoral politics. “She’s served in an elected office to really try to bring about change, and she’s campaigning and has been tirelessly campaigning, first for [Sen.] Bernie Sanders and now for her own race on the exact progressive platform that we believe is necessary.”

In a statement, Jayapal pointed specifically to Turner’s “relentless commitment to centering working families, communities of color, and immigrants by supporting Medicare for All, College for All, a $15 minimum wage, and the Green New Deal.”

“I’ve seen Nina’s work up close,” Jayapal said, “and I am proud to endorse her.”

Turner, who is running to fill the seat vacated by now-Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge, welcomed Jayapal’s endorsement on Twitter, writing that the Washington Democrat’s “leadership and bold vision are a testament to the strength of the progressive movement in Congress.”

Since launching her campaign in December, Turner has won the endorsements of a number of prominent progressive advocacy groups and lawmakers, including Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and Justice Democrats.

Earlier this month, as Common Dreams reported, Turner’s campaign announced that it had brought in nearly $2.2 million in donations since December, far outraising her Democratic competitors. The campaign said donations have averaged $28 and have come from more than 77,000 individuals from all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

“When I think about the money invested in this campaign, I know that every $3, $11, or even $27 is money that folks could have been spending on other things they need, whether that’s a tank of gas or a meal,” Turner said during a media call announcing the figures. “Our campaign does not take lightly these donations, and the sacrifices that people are making to turbo-boost this campaign.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Calling a planned petrochemical manufacturing complex in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” a “textbook case of environmental racism,” 175 organizations from around the world sent a letter to financial institutions Tuesday urging them not to fund, underwrite, or invest in the project, which could cost up to $12 billion. 

 “Formosa Plastics will destroy our land, our homes, and the lives of our community. We’re saying enough is enough, and we’re standing up for a better, cleaner future for ourselves and our children.”
—Sharon Lavigne, 
RISE St. James

The letter—led by the faith-based grassroots group RISE St. James—says that Taiwan-based Formosa Plastics Group’s 2,400-acre Sunshine Project, which is slated to be built in a vulnerable floodplain amid intensifying climate-driven hurricanes and tropical storms,”presents an unnecessary burden for our already-polluted community.”

“We are fighting to protect ourselves from Formosa Plastics’ disastrous environmental and human-rights record in the United States and around the world,” the letter states.

Residents of St. James Parish—nearly half of whom are Black—and environmental advocates strongly oppose the plant, which, if built as planned, will release carcinogenic chemicals and, according to one environmental watchdog, produce 13.6 million tons of planet-heating emissions annually.

Formosa Plastics has also come under fire for failing to follow through on a promise to alter the plant’s layout to lessen the exposure of nearby residents and schoolchildren to toxins, and for its failure to notify the community of the discovery of a burial ground for enslaved Black people. 

St. James Parish sits in the middle of an 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge known as Cancer Alley or Death Alley due to its nearly 150 oil refineries and plastics and chemical plants.

According to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the cancer risk in predominantly Black areas of St. James Parish is as high as 105 per million, compared with 60 to 75 cases per million in majority white areas. The EPA’s Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators database reported an 800% cancer hazard increase due to petrochemical facilities in the parish between 2007 and 2018. 

The Sunshine Project has drawn the attention and condemnation of environmental and racial justice groups, United Nations human rights experts, progressive lawmakers, and others. Last month, Democratic U.S. Reps. Raúl Grijalva (Ariz.) and Donald McEachin (Va.) urged President Joe Biden to deliver on his campaign promises to reduce pollution in frontline communities by blocking the project. 

Signatories of the RISE St. James letter urged banks and asset managers to avoid financing, underwriting, or investing in Formosa Plastics projects, and to divest from the “serial environmental offender.” 

The letter continues: 

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, Formosa Plastics’ plan to construct a facility that would double or triple the toxic levels of cancer-causing pollutants in communities in St. James Parish represents a stunning, potentially devastating increase in our community’s environmental burden. In addition to elevating residents’ risk of cancer, asthma, and other serious diseases, this increase in toxic air pollution places residents at a higher risk from respiratory infections including a higher risk of death from Covid-19.

Study after study has demonstrated inextricable links between air pollution exposure and Covid-19 death rates. As of July 2020, three out of Louisiana’s five parishes with the highest Covid-19 death rates were located in Cancer Alley, including St. James Parish, with averages up to 3.8 times the state’s median. Our community simply cannot afford more air pollution—our survival depends on it.

It notes that Formosa Plastics has been hit with over $650 million in fines and penalties for violations at more than a dozen facilities around the world, including a 2016 spill of cyanide and other deadly chemicals that devastated marine life and livelihoods along a 125-mile stretch of  the central Vietnamese coast—the country’s worst-ever environmental catastrophe.

“High-profile disasters have caused at least two dozen deaths, dozens more injuries, and tens of thousands of disrupted lives and livelihoods from evacuations, shelter in place orders, and long-lasting damage to ecosystems that communities depend on,” Tuesday’s letter states. 

The letter urges its recipients to follow the examples of financiers and entities like Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund that have divested from or rejected investment in Formosa Plastics. 

“Formosa Plastics is not welcome by the local people of St. James,” the letter declares. “We want clean air, water, and soil. It is incumbent on any responsible corporation to listen to our community and cease all business relationships with Formosa Plastics Group and its constituent entities, to avoid any association with the severe and unjust impacts its operations would have on us.”

Sharon Lavigne, founder and president of RISE St. James, said in a statement that “Formosa Plastics will destroy our land, our homes, and the lives of our community. We’re saying enough is enough, and we’re standing up for a better, cleaner future for ourselves and our children.”

“Banks shouldn’t finance this level of pollution,” she added, “and if they want to show that they can be responsible then they need to say no to Formosa.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

New Covid-19 variants are spreading quickly. An outbreak anywhere could lead to a more deadly or infectious strain hopping around the globe.

More than 100 countries support a temporary waiver of some World Trade Organization rules that guarantee pharmaceutical firms monopoly control over how much medicine is produced, yet the United States remains opposed.

So why, after three months of making great progress on domestic vaccination, has President Biden not ended a self-defeating policy from the Trump administration that hinders a global initiative to increase access to Covid-19 vaccines and treatments? More than 100 countries support a temporary waiver of some World Trade Organization rules that guarantee pharmaceutical firms monopoly control over how much medicine is produced, yet the United States remains opposed.

Had WTO members agreed to waive aspects of its agreement on trade-related intellectual property for covid-related medicines when some countries proposed it last October, poor nations might not wait until 2024 for vaccines, as projected.

Waiving intellectual property rights so developing countries could produce more vaccines would make a big difference in reaching global herd immunity. Otherwise, the pandemic will rage largely unmitigated among a significant share of the world’s population, resulting in increased deaths and a greater risk that a vaccine-resistant variant puts the world back on lockdown.

Pharmaceutical corporations claim the problem is not intellectual property barriers, but that companies in developing nations don’t have the skill to manufacture Covid-19 vaccines based on new technologies. This is self-serving and wrong.

Firms in the Global South are already making Covid-19 vaccines. For example, South Africa’s Aspen Pharmacare has produced hundreds of millions of doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, even though only a fraction of those went to South Africans. Other drug corporations simply refuse to work with qualified manufacturers in developing countries, effectively blocking more production.

These companies are focused not on global access but on sales in profitable markets. This underscores why the “third way” proposal from WTO Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, in which she promotes more of the same old, industry-controlled voluntary deals, is a distraction and not a remedy.

Not one vaccine originator has shared technologies with poor countries through the World Health Organization’s voluntary Covid-19 Technology Access Pool. The global Covax program, which aims to vaccinate 20 percent of developing countries’ most vulnerable populations, has delivered about 38 million doses to 100 countries; meanwhile, the United States administers 3 million doses daily.

There is no way to beat Covid-19 without increasing vaccine production capacity. And some production must be in the Global South for a host of reasons, including that prompt suppression of new variants is how we avoid more deaths and quarantines.

A waiver would immediately increase government leverage over vaccine makers that refuse to license the technology. Firms could choose to either expand production by negotiating with governments, alternative suppliers and global initiatives, or risk governments circumventing them and forcing the transfer of technology.

A waiver would also provide legal certainty for governments and investors that are inclined to repurpose existing pharmaceutical manufacturing or build new facilities but are fearful of intellectual property liability. And it could boost production of covid-19 treatments unavailable in much of the world, as well as diagnostic tests and vaccine supply chain products.

The principle that all countries should have access to intellectual property related to medicines has already been accepted by the international community. In the early 2000s, as millions without access to treatments died of AIDS, WTO members clarified that countries have “flexibilities” to issue compulsory licenses for medicines. The United States itself threatened to do this for ciprofloxacin, a treatment for anthrax, during the 2001 scare. If there were ever a moment to invoke this principle, it is now.

Unfortunately, the drug companies have consistently done whatever they can to preserve their monopoly control. Even today, as they battle the waiver and argue that existing compulsory licensing rights are sufficient, they lobby the U.S. government to sanction countries that use that tool.

Governments transferred more than $110 billion to pharmaceutical firms to finance research and production, so companies face little risk while earning billions on vaccine sales.

These corporations have also undermined this option by building “thickets” of intellectual property barriers. They fortify their monopolies by registering exclusive rights to industrial designs and undisclosed data, such as trade secrets and test data, in addition to numerous patents and copyrights for each medicine. Each element would require a license, and the WTO’s flexibilities might not even encompass all of them.

Making matters more difficult, “product-by-product” and “country-by-country” compulsory licensing is nigh impossible to coordinate across countries for medicines with complex global supply chains, such as covid-19 vaccines.

Even more absurd is the argument from pharmaceutical companies that temporarily waiving their monopolies for Covid-19 medicines would undermine their ability to respond to the next health crisis. Governments transferred more than $110 billion to pharmaceutical firms to finance research and production, so companies face little risk while earning billions on vaccine sales. The market for covid-19 vaccines is literally the entire world, so any successful vaccine maker stands to profit handsomely even with technology transfer.

Any delay in ensuring the greatest availability of vaccines and therapeutics is morally wrong and foolish—both in terms of public health and the economy. The waiver is a critical first step.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

At the age of 22, Marielle Bacason experienced something that would change her life forever. In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines with record ferocity, killing thousands of people and affecting millions of others.

Winds of up to 315kmph (197mph) destroyed everything in their path. When the superstorm finally subsided, Bacason said, “You could not distinguish the roads and dead bodies of people and animals everywhere. We feared for our safety every day, especially during the night. We just wanted to leave Tacloban … I was traumatised.”

Air pollution from coal, oil, and gas killed 8.7 million people globally in 2018 alone, and the climate crisis already has an annual death toll of more than 100,000—a fast–climbing figure—with some organisations saying 100 million people will die by 2030 and billions more will be displaced.

Bacason did not just leave, she took action. She joined other brave survivors, local activists, workers, and fisherfolk to assert their fundamental rights before the Commission on Human Rights of The Philippines. The Commission announced that 47 big companies, including Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Total, could be found legally and morally liable for human rights harms to Filipinos resulting from climate change.

Despite widespread acknowledgement that burning fossil fuels is the main cause of the climate emergency, governments are yet to take real action against the industry even while the future of the planet, and all who live on it, hangs in the balance.

Air pollution from coal, oil, and gas killed 8.7 million people globally in 2018 alone, and the climate crisis already has an annual death toll of more than 100,000—a fast–climbing figure—with some organisations saying 100 million people will die by 2030 and billions more will be displaced. Perhaps it is a testament to the extreme greed (or extreme cowardice) of those in power that they continue to allow dirty energy corporations to fuel a crisis that even they and their loved ones will not escape.

In fact, none of us will be safe unless the global economy shifts to run on renewable energy – fast. It is not enough for wealthy countries to run on clean power if they continue to produce and export fuels that crash the climate when they are burned elsewhere. Profiting from emissions made elsewhere may make for a handy accounting trick, but the consequences of those carbon emissions will be felt by all of us, with countries in the Global South shouldering the greatest burden.

With US President Joe Biden now occupying the White House – on the eve of a climate summit hosting 17 of the world’s largest carbon emitters – many across the planet hope that we might see action on climate from the United States commensurate with what science and justice demand. As one of the world’s most influential countries and most egregious climate polluters, the US has an opportunity and responsibility to make significant contributions to a safe and stable world. To truly claim the mantle of climate leader, President Biden must seize the moment to commit to phasing out the climate emergency’s main driver: the fossil fuel industry.

If the US is serious about addressing the climate crisis, it needs to reinstate the crude oil export ban.

Biden can do two things right now to kick off a fossil fuel phaseout. First, take executive action, and put pressure on Congress, to eliminate billions in taxpayer handouts going to oil, gas and coal companies from the federal government each year. Public money that could be freed up to invest in domestic recovery by creating jobs in upgrading public infrastructure, or a just transition led by workers and affected communities, and to support vaccines globally. Those funds could also begin to support climate-vulnerable countries so they can adapt to a heating world and transition to clean energy, instead of propping up a failing and deadly industry.

Second, if the US is serious about addressing the climate crisis, it needs to reinstate the crude oil export ban. When Democrats permanently traded it away for temporary renewable energy tax credits in the last decade, it was one of the biggest handouts yet to the oil and gas industry. A Greenpeace and Oil Change International report recently found that reinstating the US crude oil export ban could lead to reductions in global carbon emissions of as much as 73 to 165 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent each year. The oil export ban should be brought back and expanded to cover any fuel that puts the future of life on Earth in peril.

The fossil fuel economy is not just obsolete: it trades in inequality and exploitation. Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) and marginalised communities worldwide have endured a disproportionate burden of toxic pollution and climate impacts, while a small cartel of fossil fuel executives, backed by their governments and impermeable finance systems, rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in profits.

Since 2016, 60 of the world’s largest banks have pumped more than $3.8 trillion into the fossil fuel industry, despite the signing of the Paris climate accords in 2015. This has led to fossil fuel financing being higher in 2020 than in 2016. And the big oil, coal and gas bosses are cashing in: their CEOs’ compensation, often in excess of $10m, is linked to the continued extraction of fossil fuels, exploration of new fields and the promotion of strong market demand through advertising, lobbying and government subsidies. Governments need to stand up and say, “No more.” People and the planet must come before profit.

It should not only be up to those most affected by the climate crisis, like Bacason, to fight for our collective future. We need leaders, like President Biden, to use their power to do what is not only necessary but is ethical and urgent. It is time to transition to a world beyond fossil fuels – because our lives depend on it.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

When Reese Erlich died in early April, we lost a global reporter who led by example. During five decades as a progressive journalist, Reese created and traveled an independent path while avoiding the comfortable ruts dug by corporate media. When people in the United States read or heard his reporting from more than 50 countries, he offered windows on the world that were not tinted red-white-and-blue. Often, he illuminated grim consequences of U.S. foreign policy.

The first memorable conversation I had with Reese was somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean on the way to Iraq in September 2002—as it turned out, six months before the U.S. invasion. He was one of the few journalists covering a small delegation, including Congressman Nick Rahall and former Senator James Abourezk, which the Institute for Public Accuracy sponsored in an attempt to establish U.S.-Iraqi dialogue and avert the looming invasion.

Reese critiqued the basic flaws in U.S. media coverage then beating the war drums, and he also wrote about the “professional” atmosphere that led U.S. journalists to conform.

As the organizer of the trip, I was on edge, and I asked Reese for his assessment. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of the Middle East, he provided cogent insights and talked about what was at stake.

After filing stories from various parts of Iraq, Reese returned home to California and we worked together to write alternating chapters of a book that came out two months before the invasion—”Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You.” (The book is posted online.) Reese’s eyewitness reporting and analysis were crucial to the book.

Reese critiqued the basic flaws in U.S. media coverage then beating the war drums, and he also wrote about the “professional” atmosphere that led U.S. journalists to conform.

As President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair methodically lied the U.S. and Britain into a war on Iraq, Reese pointed out: “The Bush and Blair administrations are fighting a two-front war: one against Iraq, another for public opinion at home. The major media are as much a battleground as the fortifications in Baghdad. And, for the most part, Bush and Blair have stalwart media soldiers manning the barricades at home.”

In a chapter titled “Media Coverage: A View from the Ground,” Reese wrote:

The U.S. is supposed to have the best and freest media in the world, but in my experience, having reported from dozens of countries, the higher up you go in the journalistic feeding chain, the less free the reporting. . . . The journalist’s best education is on the job. In addition to journalistic skills, young reporters also learn about acceptable parameters of reporting. There’s little formal censorship in the U.S. media. But you learn who are acceptable or unacceptable sources. Most corporate officials and politicians are acceptable, the higher up the better.

Reese summed up: “Money, prestige, career options, ideological predilections—combined with the down sides of filing stories unpopular with the government—all cast their influence on foreign correspondents. You don’t win a Pulitzer for challenging the basic assumptions of empire.”

While Reese won prizes, including a Peabody Award, he did something far more important—skillfully and consistently challenging “the basic assumptions of empire.”

Reese did so with balance and accuracy as a freelancer reporting for such outlets as the Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times Syndicate, Dallas Morning News and Chicago Tribune.

I saw Reese at work in Iran in 2005 and Afghanistan in 2009. He was meticulous and good-natured even when the journey became exhausting and stressful. Unusual stories were usual for him. It was all in a day’s work when Reese lined up an interview with a grandson of the Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Khomeini or got us to a women’s rights protest at Tehran University, or when he located an out-of-the-way refugee camp in Kabul where we could interview victims of the war.

Along with his radio reports and articles, Reese went in-depth as the author of “Inside Syria,” “The Iran Agenda Today,” “Dateline Havana,” and “Conversations with Terrorists.” Reese’s firsthand reporting, multilayered knowledge and wry humor enrich those books. Meanwhile, he reached many people via interviews and public appearances, even when he was fighting cancer in his last months (as when he spoke about U.S.-Iranian relations and the Iran nuclear deal in February).

During recent years, Reese’s “Foreign Correspondent” column for The Progressive magazine appeared in kindred online outlets like Common Dreams and the San Francisco-based 48 Hills. His last article—”This May Be This Foreign Correspondent’s Final Column“—embodies the honesty and deep humanity that made Reese such a wonderful journalist.

Reese Erlich’s work and spirit live on.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – 175 organizations today called on 30 leading banks and financiers not to fund the construction of Formosa Plastics’  $12 billion “Sunshine Project” petrochemical plant in St. James, Louisiana.

Signatories to the letter from RISE St. James include residents and community groups, major U.S. civil society organizations, and international groups concerned about toxic air pollution caused by the proposed plastics plant. They criticized the environmental racism of siting the plant in Cancer Alley, a predominantly Black community already suffering from exposure to industrial air pollution.

“Formosa Plastics will destroy our land, our homes, and the lives of our community. We’re saying enough is enough, and we’re standing up for a better, cleaner future for ourselves and our children. Banks shouldn’t finance this level of pollution, and if they want to show that they can be responsible then they need to say no to Formosa,” said Sharon Lavigne, founder and president of RISE St. James.

The plant would also exacerbate climate change with annual greenhouse gas emissions of over 13.5 million tons. The Formosa Plastics plant would be the largest new source of greenhouse gases of any oil, gas, or chemical infrastructure project in the United States. According to the company’s own literature, the facility would double the toxic air pollution in St. James Parish. Formosa Plastics’ proposed project “pollutes too much for Taiwan,” according to a Bloomberg report about how it wouldn’t be allowed in Formosa’s home country.

Instead it will be located within an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that is widely known as Cancer Alley or Death Alley due to the number of petrochemical facilities that populate the area. The region is also predominantly inhabited by historic Black neighborhoods, including St. James Parish. In the 10-mile radius around St. James alone, there are twelve toxic petrochemical facilities.

In March 2021, United Nations human rights experts raised serious concerns over further industrialization of Cancer Alley, specifically citing concern over Formosa’s proposed plant and calling it “environmental racism” and a human rights violation.

A recent investment report on the plant’s financial viability concluded that it is offering “the wrong products, at the wrong time, at the wrong price, in the wrong place, and with the wrong financial calculus.” Formosa also faces ongoing legal challenges and unanimous opposition from the New Orleans City council as well as residents and social justice advocates.

Click here to read the full letter and list of signatories calling on the leading financiers of the plant to pull their agreement to fund.

Organizations who signed the letter provided the following statements:

“Banks and asset managers investing in Formosa’s ‘Sunshine Project’ are not only taking a huge financial risk, but they would also do untold harm to their reputation if they back a project that is becoming a bellwether for how seriously investors take environmental racism,” said Maaike Beenes, climate campaigner at BankTrack, an international organization monitoring fossil fuel finance, environmental and human rights concerns raised by the activities of private sector commercial banks.

“Banks and financiers should not fund Formosa, and should cut their support for all entities and initiatives that undermine human rights. Our experience shows that Formosa is a bad neighbor, decimating the local environment, provoking recurrent explosions, polluting our air and water, and damaging our health. We want to help the people of St. James to avoid the same problems,” said Yuanher Robin Hwang, head of the Self-help Association to Seek Full Compensation from the Sixth Naphtha Cracker, an organization seeking damages for premature deaths, cancer and air pollution caused by Taiwan’s largest petrochemicals complex, which is owned by Formosa Plastics group.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Corporate personhood “rights” are once again being weaponized to financially punish and intimidate a local community that took a stand for the Rights of Nature and future generations. On April 23, 2021, Nottingham Water Alliance (NWA), which campaigned to adopt a Freedom from Chemical Trespass Ordinance, filed a brief opposing a corporation’s demand for over $50,000 in attorney fees from the taxpayers of Nottingham.

“These desperate tactics deny liberty and justice to the people of Nottingham. We should be free to protect the health and safety of our whole community. These tactics will not stop this movement. It’s time for state constitutional change,” says Peter White of NWA.

In Nottingham, a resident plaintiff and his corporate shield, G&F Goods, LLC, filed a lawsuit against the Ordinance, arguing it unconstitutionally discriminates against corporations. (The courts decided to protect corporate privileges and overturn the law.) Threats to freshwater systems and climate disruption prompted residents to popularly adopt the Ordinance at their 2019 town hall meeting. It secures rights of ecosystems “to naturally exist, flourish, regenerate, evolve, and be restored” and rights of townspeople to a “climate system capable of sustaining human societies.”

The Town, which has refused to defend the direct democracy vote of the people, opposes the demand for attorney fees and said the whole “case was entirely unnecessary.” “A day late and a dollar short to wait until a motion for attorney fees is filed to make such a statement. The Town could have filed a motion to dismiss from the very beginning and instead, town officials capitulated to a single dissenter and denied the local NWA the opportunity to defend the Ordinance when the Town knew they were not going to defend it themselves,” says CELDF’s Michelle Sanborn.

Court documents are available upon request.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Dozens of congressional Democrats and Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday urged top Biden officials to release unredacted copies of multi-billion-dollar coronavirus vaccine contracts that the Trump administration negotiated in secret with major pharmaceutical companies last year—and refused to divulge to lawmakers.

In a letter (pdf) to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, 50 lawmakers from the House and Senate argue that public knowledge of the specific terms of the vaccine contracts “has become all the more important as manufacturers talk of boosters and seasonal immunizations, while considering ‘post-pandemic’ price increases.”

“Taxpayers should know how their funds were spent and what secret deals were reached.”
—Rep. Lloyd Doggett

“Taxpayers are serving as the angel investors in Covid-19 vaccine and therapeutic development, assuming the costs and risk,” the letter reads. “It is imperative that they also receive a stake in the outcome as well as complete transparency on how billions of tax dollars have been spent and what terms were agreed to and may still be renegotiated.”

As NPR reported in September, the Trump administration worked to dodge the “regulatory oversight and transparency of traditional federal contracting mechanisms” by issuing massive vaccine contracts to Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and other major drugmakers “through a nongovernment intermediary.”

“Instead of entering into contracts directly with vaccine makers, more than $6 billion in Operation Warp Speed funding has been routed through a defense contract management firm called Advanced Technologies International, Inc.,” NPR noted. “ATI then awarded contracts to companies working on Covid-19 vaccines.”

Further fueling concerns over the Trump administration’s handling of the contracting process was a whistleblower complaint filed last May by Dr. Rick Bright, the former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which awarded huge contracts for vaccines and therapeutics to Johnson & Johnson and other pharma giants.

Bright—who said his removal last April was retaliation for his criticism of the White House’s pandemic response—alleged in the complaint that he faced pressure from higher-ups at Trump’s HHS to “ignore expert recommendations and instead to award lucrative contracts based on political connections and cronyism.”

“We don’t know the rewards or the incentives that the companies are getting, which might drive some companies to take additional risk or maybe do things inappropriately,” Bright said in an October interview. “There’s no reason to hide what’s in those agreements at all. For the government to set these contracts up in this way and block that type of transparency leads me to think that there’s something interesting in there they don’t want discovered.”

In their letter on Monday, the lawmakers demanded that the Biden administration disclose unredacted copies of all contracts, research and development agreements, and any other “arrangements entered into by the United States or any subcontractor, including Advanced Technologies International, Inc. (ATI), related to Covid-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and any other medical countermeasures.”

To substantiate their fears of impending price hikes on vaccines and coronavirus therapeutics, the lawmakers point to a Pfizer executive’s recent comment predicting “a significant opportunity for our vaccine… from a pricing perspective” should Covid-19 become endemic—as many experts anticipate.

“Despite taxpayers fully underwriting Moderna’s vaccine, significantly paying for Johnson & Johnson’s research, and conducting some of the underlying research that contributed to Pfizer vaccines, all three companies are apparently planning to raise prices as quickly as possible,” the lawmakers write. “In our exercise of congressional oversight, we seek access to these agreements to understand what protections are in place for taxpayer investments and what terms may need to be renegotiated.”

Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas.), chair of the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee and leader of the new letter, said in a statement that “while pleased with vaccine advances, taxpayers who financed development deserve full disclosure of the same type of information a private investor would demand.”

“In so many ways, the vaccines are our shot—our shot to contain the virus and our shot, developed and manufactured with at least $19 billion taxpayer dollars and over $2 billion more for therapeutics,” said Doggett. “Taxpayers should know how their funds were spent and what secret deals were reached.”

Read the full letter:

Dear Secretary Becerra and Secretary Austin,

The Trump administration remained nonresponsive to congressional requests to review the unredacted contracts negotiated for Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics.  When limited contract information has been belatedly released, key provisions concerning pricing terms, required deliverables and timelines, termination clauses, and patent right information has been redacted.  We write to request that you release unredacted copies of all agreements regarding all of these and any other medical countermeasures entered into by the United States, or its subcontractors.  Taxpayers are serving as the angel investors in Covid-19 vaccine and therapeutic development, assuming the costs and risk.  It is imperative that they also receive a stake in the outcome as well as complete transparency on how billions of tax dollars have been spent and what terms were agreed to and may still be renegotiated.  This information has become all the more important as manufacturers talk of boosters and seasonal immunizations, while considering “post-pandemic” price increases.

On March 11th, Pfizer Chief Financial Officer Frank D’Amelio noted at the Barclays Global Healthcare Conference that Pfizer sees “a significant opportunity…from a pricing perspective” to increase prices should COVID-19 become endemic, as many scientists predict.  Similarly, Moderna President Stephen Hoge told the same conference “Post-pandemic, as we get into those what I will call seasonal epidemics that you would expect to happen with a SARS-CoV-2 virus, we would expect more normal pricing based on value.” Johnson & Johnson Executive Vice President Joseph Wolk told the Raymond James Institutional Investors Conference they expect “pricing that’s much more in line with a commercial opportunity.”

Despite taxpayers fully underwriting Moderna’s vaccine, significantly paying for Johnson & Johnson’s research, and conducting some of the underlying research that contributed to Pfizer vaccines, all three companies are apparently planning to raise prices as quickly as possible.  In our exercise of congressional oversight, we seek access to these agreements to understand what protections are in place for taxpayer investments and what terms may need to be renegotiated.

During a September 16th press briefing, retired Lt. Gen. Paul Ostrowski, former Director of Supply, Production, and Distribution for Operation Warp Speed, asserted these secret contracts “entail information that allows us to all know that we paid a fair and reasonable price for each one of these vaccines as we went forward.” To assure this commitment is being met, we respectfully request that you provide the following information:

1. Unredacted copies of all contracts, cooperative research and development agreements, grants, funding agreements, procurement agreements, manufacturing agreements, licensing arrangements, other transactions, and any other arrangements entered into by the United States or any subcontractor, including Advanced Technologies International, Inc. (ATI), related to Covid-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and any other medical countermeasures.
2. Patents and patent applications for a Covid-19 vaccine, therapeutic, or other medical countermeasure with U.S. government coinventors, or on which there is disclosure of U.S. government interest.  Please include the numbers and expiration dates of such patents and the numbers and filing dates of such patent applications.
3. Any guidance, memos, email communications, written communications, transcripts, or other documentation regarding how federal investments shall be taken into consideration in making pricing determinations in funding and procurement agreements. 
4. The estimated cost to produce a dose of each Covid-19 vaccine and therapeutic candidate receiving federal research, development, or manufacturing support, and itemized breakdowns of the amounts of funding each manufacturer has asserted they have invested in the research, development, and manufacturing.  Please include any steps you have taken, or plan to take, to verify the amounts each company has asserted they invested.
5. Any compensation, including royalty fees, each Covid-19 vaccine and therapeutic candidate is receiving from the U.S. government for the licensing and production of their product.
6. Any compensation subcontractors of the United States, including ATI, are receiving for administrative and management work related to Covid-19 vaccine and therapeutic development, manufacturing, and distribution.  Please include any bonuses or other compensation any subcontractors may receive upon FDA emergency use authorization or approval of a Covid-19 vaccine, therapeutic, or other medical countermeasure as well as any royalty or licensing fees, or other monetary or non-monetary stake in any of these products.

In the event that you believe that any contractual provision restricts your ability to publicly disclose any of the information requested, please identify the specific applicable language. Further, for any information that you may contend is not subject to public disclosure, please provide it under appropriate seal for our Congressional oversight review.

We appreciate your immediate attention to these important questions to provide full transparency on how taxpayer dollars have been spent.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Greenpeace USA delivered a taxpayer-funded “150 billion dollar check” to American Petroleum Institute Headquarters to call for an end to fossil fuel subsidies and demand Congress pass the End Polluter Welfare Act.

The American Petroleum Institute is the largest oil and trade association whose members include polluting companies such as BP, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell. As a collective, these companies have deceived the public about the impacts burning coal, oil, and gas has on our climate and have benefitted from fossil fuel subsidies for decades yet still claim to receive “no special treatment from the federal government.” Last week, an API executive testified at a House Oversight hearing defending oil and gas industries subsidies.

The skit featured activists dressed like President Biden, Senator Chuck Schumer and Speaker of the House Nancy intercepting the check delivery, demonstrating the role Congress and the White House can play in eliminating fossil fuel subsidies.

“Congress must put a stop to shady fossil fuel subsidy deals and shift its investment to a clean, just energy system that supports communities transitioning away from oil, gas, and coal by passing the End Polluter Welfare Act as part of the American Jobs Plan,”  said Greenpeace USA Senior Climate Campaigner John Noël.

The check delivery took place days after Greenpeace activists staged a satirical game show calling for an end to fossil fuel subsidies at the US Capitol. “The Big Oil Cash Grab” featured “fossil fuel industry CEOs” as contestants as they grabbed “taxpayer-funded handouts” from inside a cash booth.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday plans to sign an executive order raising the minimum wage for workers under federal contracts to $15 an hour by next March, a move that will significantly increase the pay of hundreds of thousands of low-wage employees.

Under the new order, federal contractors will be required by March 30, 2022 to pay their workers at least $15 an hour, up from current wage floor of $10.95. Additionally, Biden plans to phase out the $7.65 tipped minimum wage for federal contract workers by 2024.

According to fact sheet released by the White House, the president’s order will also “continue to index the minimum wage to an inflation measure so that every year after 2022 it will be automatically adjusted to reflect changes in the cost of living.”

“The executive order ensures that hundreds of thousands of workers no longer have to work full time and still live in poverty,” the White House said. “It will improve the economic security of families and make progress toward reversing decades of income inequality.”

For months, progressive lawmakers and economists have been pressuring Biden to use his executive authority to quickly raise the pay of federal contract employees, who often perform low-wage work ranging from cleaning government buildings to operating concessions at national parks.

“We need to raise the minimum wage to $15—and the Biden-Harris administration can do that on Day One for all federal contractors,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted in December.

Writing for The American Prospect last year, Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) noted that the impact of raising the minimum wage for federal contract workers would be “substantial.” EPI has estimated that hiking the wage floor to $15 for federal contractors would result in direct raises for at least 240,000 employees.

“The current federal contracting system leaves many of these contract workers facing low wages and poor working conditions,” Shierholz wrote. “The contracting system prioritizes low prices for contracts for routine services in which labor costs make up the majority of the cost of the contract. This provides an incentive for contractors to cut corners with respect to worker pay and workplace safety.”

Biden’s executive order comes as progressives in Congress are attempting to chart a path forward for legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, something the president does not have the authority to do unilaterally.

“We need to pass a $15 minimum wage,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, tweeted last week. “Not $10. Not $11.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The Seattle City Council late Monday passed a resolution calling on President Joe Biden to immediately end U.S. stonewalling of an international effort to suspend vaccine patents as Covid-19 cases surge worldwide, intensifying anger at rich nations as they hoard doses and undercut global inoculation campaigns.

“Profit-driven billionaires and big pharmaceutical companies, with the blessing of the Biden administration, are blocking many countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa from producing generic versions of the Covid-19 vaccine.”
—Kshama Sawant, Seattle City Councilmember

Led by socialist Councilmember Kshama Sawant and passed by a 7-to-1 vote, the resolution (pdf) adds the Seattle City Council to a diverse list (pdf) of hundreds of civil society organizations, unions, and advocacy groups pushing Biden to support the patent waiver, which India and South Africa first introduced at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in October.

“I congratulate our movement on winning today’s City Council resolution, urging the Biden administration to put human lives before billionaire profit, and remove the WTO patent restrictions to allow all billions of people to have access to the life-saving vaccine,” Sawant said in a statement Monday. “This resolution demonstrates our movement’s rejection of the status quo of profit-driven vaccine apartheid and vaccine nationalism, and our fight for vaccine internationalism, for a People’s Vaccine!”

The resolution’s passage comes as activists and U.S. lawmakers continue to pressure the Biden administration to change its position as the WTO prepares to consider the patent waiver proposal once again at a formal meeting next month. The pharmaceutical industry, meanwhile, is aggressively lobbying the Biden White House to maintain its opposition to the measure.

If approved, the temporary waiver would enable generic manufacturers to replicate vaccine formulas, a step proponents say is necessary to bring production into line with global needs.

“The rapid and widespread global dissemination of vaccinations is at the center of every strategy by public health professionals to stop the spread of the virus. Yet, the global situation is dire, with stunningly inequitable vaccination access,” Sawant noted Monday. “On average, 1 in 4 people in high-income countries have received a coronavirus vaccine, compared with just 1 in more than 500 in low-income countries.”

“Profit-driven billionaires and big pharmaceutical companies, with the blessing of the Biden administration, are blocking many countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa from producing generic versions of the Covid-19 vaccine,” Sawant continued. “If we don’t fight to change this, starting with the necessary first step of removing the WTO patent restrictions, public health experts say it will literally be years before people in the Global South get the vaccine.”

On Monday, the Biden administration committed to sharing up to 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine with other countries once the shot passes federal safety reviews. The White House’s announcement came amid reports that the U.S. could have as many as 300 million extra vaccine doses by the end of July as some developing nations struggle to obtain and administer a single dose.

“The U.S. government urgently should launch a program to make eight billion additional Covid vaccine doses within a year’s time, share vaccine recipes with the world, and end the pandemic.”
—Peter Maybarduk, Public Citizen

While calling the Biden administration’s pledge “a welcome and positive step,” Peter Maybarduk of Public Citizen said in a statement that 60 million doses “amount to several drops in the bucket compared to global need.”

“Low- and middle-income countries will need eight billion doses to achieve 80% herd immunity through vaccination. If the U.S. were to ship all 60 million doses to India today, it would be enough to vaccinate just 2% of India’s population,” Maybarduk said. “The U.S. government urgently should launch a program to make eight billion additional Covid vaccine doses within a year’s time, share vaccine recipes with the world, and end the pandemic.”

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach issued a similar call in the pages of the Washington Post on Monday, writing that “any delay in ensuring the greatest availability of vaccines and therapeutics is morally wrong and foolish—both in terms of public health and the economy.”

“Waiving intellectual property rights so developing countries could produce more vaccines would make a big difference in reaching global herd immunity,” Stiglitz and Wallach argued. “Otherwise, the pandemic will rage largely unmitigated among a significant share of the world’s population, resulting in increased deaths and a greater risk that a vaccine-resistant variant puts the world back on lockdown.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The Seattle City Council late Monday passed a resolution calling on President Joe Biden to immediately end U.S. stonewalling of an international effort to suspend vaccine patents as Covid-19 cases surge worldwide, intensifying anger at rich nations as they hoard doses and undercut global inoculation campaigns.

“Profit-driven billionaires and big pharmaceutical companies, with the blessing of the Biden administration, are blocking many countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa from producing generic versions of the Covid-19 vaccine.”
—Kshama Sawant, Seattle City Councilmember

Led by socialist Councilmember Kshama Sawant and passed by a 7-to-1 vote, the resolution (pdf) adds the Seattle City Council to a diverse list (pdf) of hundreds of civil society organizations, unions, and advocacy groups pushing Biden to support the patent waiver, which India and South Africa first introduced at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in October.

“I congratulate our movement on winning today’s City Council resolution, urging the Biden administration to put human lives before billionaire profit, and remove the WTO patent restrictions to allow all billions of people to have access to the life-saving vaccine,” Sawant said in a statement Monday. “This resolution demonstrates our movement’s rejection of the status quo of profit-driven vaccine apartheid and vaccine nationalism, and our fight for vaccine internationalism, for a People’s Vaccine!”

The resolution’s passage comes as activists and U.S. lawmakers continue to pressure the Biden administration to change its position as the WTO prepares to consider the patent waiver proposal once again at a formal meeting next month. The pharmaceutical industry, meanwhile, is aggressively lobbying the Biden White House to maintain its opposition to the measure.

If approved, the temporary waiver would enable generic manufacturers to replicate vaccine formulas, a step proponents say is necessary to bring production into line with global needs.

“The rapid and widespread global dissemination of vaccinations is at the center of every strategy by public health professionals to stop the spread of the virus. Yet, the global situation is dire, with stunningly inequitable vaccination access,” Sawant noted Monday. “On average, 1 in 4 people in high-income countries have received a coronavirus vaccine, compared with just 1 in more than 500 in low-income countries.”

“Profit-driven billionaires and big pharmaceutical companies, with the blessing of the Biden administration, are blocking many countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa from producing generic versions of the Covid-19 vaccine,” Sawant continued. “If we don’t fight to change this, starting with the necessary first step of removing the WTO patent restrictions, public health experts say it will literally be years before people in the Global South get the vaccine.”

On Monday, the Biden administration committed to sharing up to 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine with other countries once the shot passes federal safety reviews. The White House’s announcement came amid reports that the U.S. could have as many as 300 million extra vaccine doses by the end of July as some developing nations struggle to obtain and administer a single dose.

“The U.S. government urgently should launch a program to make eight billion additional Covid vaccine doses within a year’s time, share vaccine recipes with the world, and end the pandemic.”
—Peter Maybarduk, Public Citizen

While calling the Biden administration’s pledge “a welcome and positive step,” Peter Maybarduk of Public Citizen said in a statement that 60 million doses “amount to several drops in the bucket compared to global need.”

“Low- and middle-income countries will need eight billion doses to achieve 80% herd immunity through vaccination. If the U.S. were to ship all 60 million doses to India today, it would be enough to vaccinate just 2% of India’s population,” Maybarduk said. “The U.S. government urgently should launch a program to make eight billion additional Covid vaccine doses within a year’s time, share vaccine recipes with the world, and end the pandemic.”

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach issued a similar call in the pages of the Washington Post on Monday, writing that “any delay in ensuring the greatest availability of vaccines and therapeutics is morally wrong and foolish—both in terms of public health and the economy.”

“Waiving intellectual property rights so developing countries could produce more vaccines would make a big difference in reaching global herd immunity,” Stiglitz and Wallach argued. “Otherwise, the pandemic will rage largely unmitigated among a significant share of the world’s population, resulting in increased deaths and a greater risk that a vaccine-resistant variant puts the world back on lockdown.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Reproductive rights advocates on Monday excoriated Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt after the Republican signed into law a trio of anti-choice bills they say are among the nation’s most draconian. 

Declaring he was keeping his “promise to sign all pro-life legislation,” Stitt approved the following bills, which will take effect on November 1: 

• H.B. 2241 (pdf) bans the termination of pregnancies when there is what the law calls “a detectable fetal heartbeat”—which is scientifically problematic language—except when the life of the pregnant person is in danger, “or to avert serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” There are no exceptions in cases of rape or incest. Violators of the law are “guilty of homicide.”
• H.B. 1102 (pdf) includes the performance of an abortion under the state’s “unprofessional conduct” statute, except in cases where the pregnant person’s life is endangered. Penalties include, but are not limited to, suspension of offending physicians’ medical licenses for at least one year.
• H.B. 1904 (pdf) mandates that physicians who perform abortions must be board certified in obstetrics and gynecology. Violators are subject to between one and three years of imprisonment. 

Gloria Pedro, regional manager of public policy and organizing for Arkansas and Oklahoma at Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes, told CNN that the fetal heartbeat law bans abortions before people may even know that they’re pregnant.

“Aside from being unconstitutional, it’s incredibly unfair and patronizing to women,” she said. “We’ve seen bans like this fail time and time again, so it’s a real waste of taxpayers’ money and it just shows that the Legislature has their priorities wrong in the middle of a pandemic.”

“When they should be working on expanding healthcare for Oklahomans, they are trying to deny healthcare and it’s just cruel and unnecessary,” Pedro said of state GOP lawmakers and Stitt. 

“We are currently considering all our legal options to ensure that these laws do not take effect and abortion remains accessible for Oklahomans.”
—Elisabeth Smith, 
Center for Reproductive Rights

Elisabeth Smith, chief counsel for state policy at the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights, told the Associated Press that “these extreme bills are designed to cut off abortion access for people in Oklahoma—a state that already has more abortion restrictions than almost any other state.”

“We are currently considering all our legal options to ensure that these laws do not take effect and abortion remains accessible for Oklahomans,” she added. 

Other Oklahoma anti-choice bills awaiting Stitt’s signature include S.B. 918 (pdf), a so-called “trigger bill” that would ban abortion in the state if the U.S. Supreme Court were to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling enshrining abortion as a constitutional right.

According to Planned Parenthood Action Fund, more than 200 anti-choice bills were progressing in states as of February 2021, as GOP-controlled legislatures are emboldened by the conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court and anticipating what they believe is a coming reckoning over the fate of Roe v. Wade. 

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Bolstering recent calls for federal legislation to protect and expand voting rights, the GOP-controlled Florida state Senate marked Confederate Memorial Day on Monday by advancing a bill that—similar to a law enacted by Georgia Republicans last month—critics are condemning as “Jim Crow 2.0.”

“Instead of upholding the fundamental right to vote, certain Florida senators have decided to become accomplices to the nationwide voter suppression scheme underway by passing this undemocratic bill,” said Kara Gross, legislative director and senior policy counsel of the ACLU of Florida, in a statement. “They are suppressing the right to vote by obstructing access to vote-by-mail.”

Members of the upper chamber passed Senate Bill 90 in a 23-17 vote. The bill would limit ballot drop boxes, require residents to submit vote-by-mail requests for each election cycle, impose more identification requirements for absentee ballots, and criminalize giving food and water to voters waiting in line.

NBC News reports the Florida House is “working on a similar, but not identical, legislation. That measure, for example, was stripped of language limiting the handing out of food and water to voters, although the bill’s sponsor suggested it could still bar the practice if the people doing so are trying to influence a voter’s decision.”

While states nationwide have seen an increase in absentee voting during the coronavirus pandemic, Gross noted that “in 2020, about 4.8 million voters in Florida cast their ballots by mail. More than 1.5 million Floridians used a secure drop box to safely and conveniently return their ballot. Nothing about Florida’s elections has shown a need for this law.”

“In fact, legislators should be encouraged that Floridians turned out in record numbers to participate in their democracy,” she said. “It should prompt our legislators to seek ways to improve voter access by streamlining voter signature-matching procedures and ensuring uniformity across all counties, or encouraging more equitable polling places. Supervisors of elections have made it clear that this bill will create unnecessary hurdles to administering elections in Florida. Yet, certain senators are choosing to pass initiatives, like S.B. 90, that would make it harder for Floridians to vote.”

“We call on Floridians to tell their state representatives to stop this bill,” Gross added. “We call on corporations to demand legislators stand up for voting rights. We call on all legislators to break down—not erect—barriers to Floridians’ fundamental right to vote. Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy and the fundamental right upon which all our civil liberties rest. It must not be compromised.”

According to NBC, during a debate before the vote Monday, Florida state Senate Democrats framed the legislation as a result of former President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him as well as an continuation of the Jim Crow South, blasting the bill as “Georgia light.”

“This bill is just a vindictive way of trying to punish people for an election that some people just didn’t like at the national level,” said state Sen. Audrey Gibson (D-6). “Not one indication of fraud, just a lot of folks decided that they were fed up and they wanted to vote.”

During a committee hearing about the legislation last week, state Sen. Perry Thurston (D-33) said that “the people who are the descendants of the people of who were affected by Jim Crow, they know that during that time the people didn’t say that these Jim Crow laws are designed to keep you in place.”

“They didn’t say these Jim Crow laws are designed to stop you from voting,” Thurston continued. “Nobody came out and said poll taxes are designed to do this. When you look at that history, then you have to say well I’m going to analyze this legislation under those lights.”

As Slate‘s Jeremy Stahl pointed out Monday:

The state is one of five in the country that still officially observes as a holiday the April 26, 1865 surrender at Bennett Place, North Carolina, of the last large field army of the Confederate forces that fought to destroy the United States and maintain slavery.

…It’s Florida’s long history of white supremacy—celebrated by Confederate Memorial Day, which state legislators tried and failed to eliminate earlier this year—that voting rights advocates say the measure hearkens back to.

Reporting on the bill last week, the New York Times noted that because the Florida Legislature’s current session is nearly over, any legislation would have to be passed by both chambers before May 1.

The development in Florida comes amid a widespread attack on voting rights by Republicans in state legislatures across the country. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, this year GOP lawmakers in 47 states have introduced at least 361 bills with restrictive voting provisions.

Republicans’ voter suppression efforts at the state level have fueled demands for the Democrat-controlled Congress to urgently pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—and to abolish the filibuster if Senate Republicans try to stand in the way.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Today, the Census Bureau released apportionment data, which determines the number of representatives in the House of Representatives for each state and the Electoral College. Undoubtedly, this census endured unprecedented challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted, delayed, or canceled virtually every census operation. This was exacerbated by the political interference from the previous administration, including attempts to add an untested, eleventh-hour citizenship question to the census form and unconstitutionally exclude noncitizens from the apportionment totals.

Statement from Kathay Feng, National Redistricting and Representation Director, Common Cause:

No matter which states gain or lose population or congressional seats, it is important to acknowledge the unprecedented effort from coalitions of advocates, students, teachers, small businesses, and local and state governments across all 50 states to ensure everyone, especially those from historically marginalized communities, was counted in the 2020 Census. Accurate census data is the first step to ensuring that everyone is fairly represented by their elected officials.

The population shifts that we see in the apportionment data release are driven primarily by growth in Black, Latinx, Asian American Pacific Islander, and other communities of color. Following apportionment, all states go through the process of redistricting congressional districts. Our top priority is ensuring that states that are adding congressional seats recognize the population growth fueled by communities of color in the upcoming redistricting process. 

Apportionment is a civic process not a partisan horse race. Legislators and redistricting commissions must put communities, particularly those who have traditionally been excluded, in the center of the conversation. Only then, can we build toward a 21st Century America that is representative of the people, cultures, and ideas that make America vibrant and give us all hope for our shared future.

To view this statement online, click here.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.