President Joe Biden likes to say, “I’m a union guy.” Unfortunately, as Vice President from 2009 to 2017, his boss, Barack Obama wouldn’t let him be a “union guy.” Even with large Democratic majorities in Congress and control of the White House, worker needs went unmet.

Setting records for raising Wall Street campaign cash, Obama reneged on his 2008 promise to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.50 per hour by 2011. He reneged on a promise to the AFL-CIO to push for “card check” to facilitate workers wanting to form a union. He did nothing to preserve traditional earned worker pensions provided by corporations while bailing out Wall Street crooks whom he refused to prosecute.

Obama stubbornly blocked an eager Biden from going to speak at a massive workers’ rally in Madison, Wisconsin at the critical time when Democrats were challenging corporatist Governor Scott Walker’s anti-union “budget repair bill.”

One would think after eight years of biding his time, a liberated Joe Biden would be the most pro-union labor president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He probably is by default, due to the cowardliness of his predecessors who would have lost some of their own elections without union support.

“The problem with the PRO Act, like its legislative predecessors over the past 60 years, is its faint-hearted attempt to chip away at the unmentioned, gigantic, anti-union TAFT-HARTLEY ACT OF 1947—a devastating anti-organizing and union representation law.”

The question now is: Given the entrenched deprivations of workers and abandonment of labor to serf-labor countries abroad, is President Biden pro-union-labor enough, apart from the temporary Covid-19 relief? The answer has to be a qualified, NO.

He has dropped into limbo the long-overdue $15 federal minimum wage from his legislative priorities. He did give strong verbal support to the Amazon workers union-organizing drive at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. However, when the workers lost, Biden did not assail the extreme union busting tactics by Amazon that exploited weak labor protection laws. He has finally nominated the new head of OSHA – the under-funded, Trump-wrecked job safety agency that is in shambles.

What he has done is come out strongly for the Congressional Democrat’s latest version of labor law reform—the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act) that passed the House on March 9, 2021, with a 225-206 vote.

The problem with the PRO Act, like its legislative predecessors over the past 60 years, is its faint-hearted attempt to chip away at the unmentioned, gigantic, anti-union TAFT-HARTLEY ACT OF 1947—a devastating anti-organizing and union representation law.

The Taft-Hartley law was so extreme that its principal author, Senator Robert Taft (R-OH), offered to amend some of its sharpest claws in the late 1940s. His offer was rejected by outraged unions who wanted a more significant repeal. That, astonishingly, was the last major bellow by the large unions and the AFL-CIO against this stifling chokehold over the union movement. Union membership in the corporate sector is at 6.3 percent. Overall union membership regularly hits new lows.

Even mentioning the repeal of Taft-Hartley by unions and Democratic candidates has become taboo. When campaigning for president in Detroit at a labor hall in 2004, a retired UAW worker came up to me with tears in his eyes. He said, “I never thought I would hear getting rid of Taft-Hartley from a presidential candidate.”

On the 50^th and 60^th anniversaries of Taft-Hartley’s passage by a Republican Congress – that is 1997 and 2007 – I strenuously urged the AFL-CIO and the largest unions to hold public demonstrations of protest. (Does anybody think big business would have allowed such handcuffs without battling year after year for repeal?)

The union leaders wouldn’t inform the public of this pernicious law with a national event against this tragic curtailing of worker’s freedoms to band together and bargain together in major workplaces such as Amazon, Walmart, and McDonald’s. No other western country allows such draconian anti-labor restrictions.

Unions are waiting on the Democratic Party to lead while the Democrats are waiting upon big business. Biden should make ending the anti-worker, anti-union, and pro-employer union-busting, Taft-Hartley Act the battle cry for the Republic. The PRO Act doesn’t come close to this objective.

Taft-Hartley is a wide-ranging, intricate paradise for union-busting law firms, corporatist legislators, and atavistic judges. It authorized states to enact so-called “right to work” laws or more properly named “right to shirk” laws, allowing workers to keep benefits of union contracts but not pay union dues. This provision vastly decreases union membership and increases employer leverage to resist union organizing.

Taft-Hartley gives employers all kinds of ways to block union certification elections, harass workers with demands for obstructionist hearings on what is an “appropriate bargaining unit,” permits aggressive anti-union organizing, and outlaws the “closed shop” for union solidarity.

One of the most damaging provisions defines “employees” so as to exclude supervisors and independent contractors. This greatly diminished the pool of workers eligible to be unionized. For example, years ago AT&T widely expanded the number of “supervisors” to both deplete the union membership numbers and use their “supervisors” as management control tools.

Taft-Hartley has other pro-management provisions, including controls over pensions, disclosure of information, and workplace time for union purposes.

Once Taft-Hartley was on the books, its restrictions were strengthened by the courts and the National Labor Relations Board (whose last pro-corporate general counsel was just fired by Biden). With the expansion of the “gig economy,” by Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and other companies whose business model is built on having no employees, the challenge for American workers is nothing less than displacing anti-labor dictates with a comprehensive worker’s human rights law.

The PRO Act is decidedly not anywhere near Biden’s recent recognition that “Nearly 60 million Americans would join a union if they get a chance …. They know that without unions, they can run the table on workers – union and non-union alike.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Amidst the national fixation on the outcome of the trial of George Floyd’s murderer and political jockeying over the president’s mega infrastructure proposal, the significance of President Biden’s first new Cold War summit with a foreign leader was lost to most Americans. In politics, symbolism is often substance, and such was the case when the U.S. and Japanese heads of state convened to demonstrate their common military, economic, diplomatic and scientific front against China’s rising power and influence. 

Not lost on the Japanese public as it faces September elections were the photos and headlines trumpeting the honor given to Prime Minister Suga as the first foreign head of state to be welcomed to Washington, D.C. by President Biden.

“Conflict and war with China are not inevitable and must be avoided.”

When the two leaders met with the press to broadcast their “ironclad” commitments to the 70-year-old military alliance, which was forced on Japan in 1952 as a condition for ending the  post-war military occupation, Biden stressed the importance of the alliance to continued U.S. supremacy. 

“Our commitment to meet in person,” Biden said, “is indicative of the importance, the value we both place on this relationship. We’re going to work together to prove that democracies can still compete and win in the 21st century.” 

Biden continued, “Today Prime Minister Suga and I affirmed our ironclad support for the U.S.-Japanese alliance and for our shared security. We committed to working together to take on the challenges from China and on issues like the East China Sea, the South China Sea, as well as North Korea, to ensure a future of a free and open Indo Pacific.”

The two powers also underscored their agreement of “the importance of peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait between Japan and the United States, which was reaffirmed.”  This at a time when the Biden Administration is ramping up diplomatic and military support for Taipei, and China has responded with dangerously provocative intrusions of Taiwanese airspace by its warplanes.

Lost in the cliched rhetoric was that China’s economy, and thus its government’s stability, are dependent on international trade and thus to the unimpeded  transport of goods and resources across the Indian and South China Seas. Similarly, the reference to “democracies” left something wanting. Japan has been a functional one-party state for almost seven decades.  India, a key alliance partner, is increasingly an authoritarian Hindu nationalist state in which millions of Muslims have been disenfranchised.  And President Duterte in the Philippines presides over a murderous dictatorship, the leadership of which may soon be transferred to the dictator’s daughter.

The centrality of the alliance with Japan to maintaining United States power and privilege as the dominant—and in President Obama’s words “Pacific nation”—was signaled before Prime Minister Suga made his way to Washington. In March, as part of the Biden Administration’s diplomatic and military shows of force on the eve of Tony Blinken’s and Jake Sullivan’s confrontational quasi-summit with the Chinese counterparts in Anchorage, the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense Austin, made their first overseas travel to Tokyo to demonstrate alliance solidarity and thus its implicit threat to Beijing. 

Japan, which “hosts” more than 100 U.S. military bases and installations from Hokkaido in the north, to Okinawa in the South, has long been seen as the “keystone” of U.S. Asia-Pacific power and the “hub” of the “hub and spokes” Asia-Pacific alliance structure.  As former Prime Minister Nakasone once remarked, “Japan is an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the United States.” It served as a Cold War bastion against China and the Soviet Union, as the home of the U.S. 7th fleet, and as the jumping off point for U.S. forces during the Korean and Iraq Wars, and for military operations across the Western Pacific.

Yet, even as Japan’s national security policy is anchored by the United States nuclear umbrella, so-called extended nuclear deterrence, it too has become a regional power. Most people in the United States still think of Japan as a peaceful nation due to its U.S. imposed war renouncing Peace Constitution which even prohibits maintenance of a military force. But, in what passes for Japanese democracy, constitutional provisions and the law have consistently been bent to serve power politics.

Beginning with pressure from the Truman Administration during the Korean War, allied with nationalist and militarist Japanese forces, Tokyo has created a military by another name: the Japanese Self Defense Forces. It includes Asia’s most technologically advanced navy which has joined the U.S. in provocative “integrated operations” in the South China Sea. Its missiles, which can reach Mars, could certainly be targeted against Beijing and Shanghai. And despite the Japanese people’s “nuclear allergy” in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombings, the government maintains 47 tons of plutonium and is often described as being a screwdriver turn away from becoming a nuclear power.

 While working hand in hand with the United States in developing the Quad (the emerging U.S., Japanese, Australian and Indian alliance structure) to encircle and contain China, that alliance and its diplomatic, economic and military ties with Taiwan and ASEAN nations are designed to persist even in the event of a possible future U.S. withdrawal from the western Pacific.

Like every other nation, Japan is a country of competing interests which cannot be ignored. Powerful Japanese forces have vested interests in stable relations with China and press to limit  actions that could  undermine their wealth and influence. In 2019 Japanese firms and institutions had more than $130 billion invested in China. Potentially more important for Japanese economic stability in its era of stagnation is its $317 billion in annual trade with China.  

In addition, there is also the reality of Japanese disorientation. China’s rise and increasing military power, after a century of Japanese looking down on the weaker and long impoverished nation—including fifteen years of war and colonization of much of the Middle Kingdom—have come as a shock to Japanese society. Japan’s priorities lie maintaining stability, thus it has joined the U.S. to manage and contain China’s rise. In their meeting with the press, Prime Minister Suga stressed this commitment by saying, “we agreed to oppose any attempts to change the status quo by force or coercion in the East and South China Seas and the intimidation of others in the region.”  He also reaffirmed Japan’s commitment to maintain the status quo in Taiwan.

That said, protecting Japanese economic interests which are intimately tied to Suga’s Liberal Democratic Party, requires sensitive diplomatic balancing which will keep Suga and his mandarins busy in the months ahead. China protested that the U.S.-Japanese summitry went “far beyond the scope of normal development of bilateral relations” and sowed regional division. Japanese officials must now thread the diplomatic needle in the complex and difficult negotiations for Xi Xining’s planned 2022 visit to Tokyo to mark the 50th anniversary of the restoration of formal relations a decade and a half after Japan’s surrender and panicked withdrawal from the Asian mainland. 

Eager to avoid the consequences of offending Beijing, Japan is the only G-7 power not to have condemned or joined in sanctioning China for its repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang.  Despite the charge of Chinese “genocide” by both the Trump and Biden administrations for Beijing’s mass imprisonment and repression of Uighers, Biden and Blinken had to compromise in the wording of the joint statement for the sake of maintaining the alliance.  “Concern,” not outrage, was the wording used to describe their response to developments in Xinjiang.

In addition to the primacy given to showcasing the alliance and highlighting South and East China Sea and Taiwan military commitments a number of other commitments were made in the joint statement and in the press conference. Recognizing that scientific and technological  supremacy is central to the exercise of power in the 21st century, Biden and Suga committed to jointly invest $4.5 billion to boost their ability to surpass China in 5-G, AI, and quantum computing, and to reconstruct their semiconductor supply chains. They agreed to coordinate their approach to North Korea, with the hope of including South Korea in that coordination. And, while the fate of this summer’s Tokyo Olympics remains uncertain, and with them Prime Minister Suga’s hopes that successful games will boost his September reelection chances, President Biden offered his support for the pandemic threatened extravaganza.  

Next up, President Moon of South Korea will be making his alliance pilgrimage to Washington, D.C. in May. Heralding that summit’s success will not come as easily as it did for the theater with Prime Minister Suga. The Republic of Korea is more economically dependent on trade with China than is Japan. Resolving the nuclear crisis and taking steps toward reunification with North Korea are more important to President Moon than joining with the United States and Japan to contain Beijing.  The lure of  engagement with China’s economy and its potential role in facilitating negotiations with Pyongyang leave the U.S.-South Korean alliance less than “rock solid.”

The existential truth is that the U.S. and China are caught in the Thucydides Trap, the historic pattern of inevitable tension between rising and declining powers that have too often climaxed in catastrophic wars—two World Wars in the 20th century. Conflict and war with China are not inevitable and must be avoided.

Instead of seeking to contain China militarily, economically, technologically and diplomatically, we should be taking lessons from the establishment of detente with the Soviet Union during the last Cold War. Faced with the existential threats to humanity’s survival we should be focusing of cooperation with China to reverse climate change, defeat and prevent pandemics, and rid the world of the nuclear sword of Damocles. We know how to solve these greatest threats to humanity and would do well to honor the wisdom of the Russell-Einstein appeal, by remembering our humanity and forgetting the rest.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

U.S. President Joe Biden is set to crack many decades of U.S. government silence on Saturday by publicly and officially recognizing  that the systematic killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottomans during the First World War was—as historians, survivors, and their descendants have long known—a “genocide.”

In a phone call on Friday, Biden reportedly told Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that the announcement by the U.S. government—which the Turkish government has long, and successfully thus far, campaigned against—would come in an official declaration on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, commemorated each year on April 24.

“When it comes to the Armenian genocide, you can expect an announcement tomorrow,” Jalina Porter, a U.S. State Department spokesperson, told reporters Friday.

According to the Associated Press:

Officials said Biden wanted to speak with Erdogan before formally recognizing the events of 1915 to 1923 as genocide—something past U.S. presidents had avoided out of concern about damaging relations with Turkey.

Friday’s call between the two leaders was the first since Biden took office more than three months ago. The delay had become a worrying sign in Ankara; Erdogan had good rapport with former President Donald Trump and had been hoping for a reset despite past friction with Biden.

Upon earlier reports that Biden was preparing to make his announcement, Armenian National Committee of America executive director Aram Hamparian on Thursday said in a statement that his organization, which lobbied for nearly a century for public recognition by the U.S. government, would welcome the effective end of “the longest lasting foreign gag rule in American history.”

“This principled stand represents a powerful setback to Turkey’s century-long obstruction of justice for this crime,” Hamparian said, “and its ongoing hostility and aggression against the Armenian people.”

Recognition of the genocide, he added, “holds great meaning in terms of remembrance, but it is—at its heart—about the justice deserved and the security required for the survival of the Armenian nation—a landlocked, blockaded, genocide-survivor state.”

Salpi Ghazarian, director of the University of Southern California’s Institute of Armenian Studies, told the AP that the U.S. recognition of genocide would have resonance beyond Armenia and the diaspora.

“Within the United States and outside the United States, the American commitment to basic human values has been questioned now for decades,” Ghazarian said. “It is very important for people in the world to continue to have the hope and the faith that America’s aspirational values are still relevant, and that we can in fact to do several things at once. We can in fact carry on trade and other relations with countries while also calling out the fact that a government cannot get away with murdering its own citizens.”

Writing in Newsweek on Friday, Danielle Tcholakian, an Armenian American journalist and essayist, wrote fiercely about the pain of growing up in a nation whose government has openly denied the reality of the atrocities perpetrated against her people and questioned what the declaration by Biden will mean at this point given the decades of self-interested and cynical U.S. foreign policy. She wrote:

It’s difficult to see recognition this late as courage, especially as our ally relationship with Turkey has grown tenuous. The only excuse left is the one that always rang false: The naive delusion that not using the word “genocide” will somehow result in Erdogan’s Turkey making any sort of effort at peaceful relations with Armenia. Armenia will never be safe as long as Erdogan is in charge of Turkey and Ilham Aliyev in charge of Azerbaijan. If America cares about Armenia’s safety, leaving it in the hands of malignant autocrats is a bizarre way of showing it.

Recognition alone, 106 years after the fact, will not mean much to me personally, if I’m being honest. It will be a good thing to have in the historic record, and our hope has long been that it will help clarify when a genocide is happening and the urgency of intervention. Even today, the situation in the Tigray region in Ethiopia could not be more dire.

According to Hamparian—who also cited the ongoing persecution by the Turkish government and Azerbaijan—the declaration will have limited meaning if it does not “translate into a fundamental reset in U.S. policy toward the region—one which ensures the security of Armenia and Artsakh, and lays the groundwork for a durable peace based upon a just resolution of the Armenian Genocide.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

U.S. President Joe Biden cracked many decades of U.S. government silence on Saturday by publicly and officially recognizing  that the systematic killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottomans during the First World War was—as historians, survivors, and their descendants have long known—a “genocide.”

In an official White House statement, Biden said, “Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring.”

In a phone call on Friday, Biden reportedly told Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that such an announcement—which the Turkish government has long, and successfully thus far, campaigned against—would be issued, as it ultimaely was, on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, commemorated each year on April 24 to mark what is called the “Meds Yaghern” by the Armenian people.

“We honor the victims of the Meds Yeghern so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history,” Biden said in his statement. “And we remember so that we remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.”

According to the Associated Press:

Officials said Biden wanted to speak with Erdogan before formally recognizing the events of 1915 to 1923 as genocide—something past U.S. presidents had avoided out of concern about damaging relations with Turkey.

Friday’s call between the two leaders was the first since Biden took office more than three months ago. The delay had become a worrying sign in Ankara; Erdogan had good rapport with former President Donald Trump and had been hoping for a reset despite past friction with Biden.

Upon earlier reports that Biden was preparing to make his announcement, Armenian National Committee of America executive director Aram Hamparian on Thursday said in a statement that his organization, which lobbied for nearly a century for public recognition by the U.S. government, would welcome the effective end of “the longest lasting foreign gag rule in American history.”

“This principled stand represents a powerful setback to Turkey’s century-long obstruction of justice for this crime,” Hamparian said, “and its ongoing hostility and aggression against the Armenian people.”

Recognition of the genocide, he added, “holds great meaning in terms of remembrance, but it is—at its heart—about the justice deserved and the security required for the survival of the Armenian nation—a landlocked, blockaded, genocide-survivor state.”

Salpi Ghazarian, director of the University of Southern California’s Institute of Armenian Studies, told the AP that the U.S. recognition of genocide would have resonance beyond Armenia and the diaspora.

“Within the United States and outside the United States, the American commitment to basic human values has been questioned now for decades,” Ghazarian said. “It is very important for people in the world to continue to have the hope and the faith that America’s aspirational values are still relevant, and that we can in fact to do several things at once. We can in fact carry on trade and other relations with countries while also calling out the fact that a government cannot get away with murdering its own citizens.”

Writing in Newsweek on Friday, Danielle Tcholakian, an Armenian American journalist and essayist, wrote fiercely about the pain of growing up in a nation whose government has openly denied the reality of the atrocities perpetrated against her people and questioned what the declaration by Biden will mean at this point given the decades of self-interested and cynical U.S. foreign policy. She wrote:

It’s difficult to see recognition this late as courage, especially as our ally relationship with Turkey has grown tenuous. The only excuse left is the one that always rang false: The naive delusion that not using the word “genocide” will somehow result in Erdogan’s Turkey making any sort of effort at peaceful relations with Armenia. Armenia will never be safe as long as Erdogan is in charge of Turkey and Ilham Aliyev in charge of Azerbaijan. If America cares about Armenia’s safety, leaving it in the hands of malignant autocrats is a bizarre way of showing it.

Recognition alone, 106 years after the fact, will not mean much to me personally, if I’m being honest. It will be a good thing to have in the historic record, and our hope has long been that it will help clarify when a genocide is happening and the urgency of intervention. Even today, the situation in the Tigray region in Ethiopia could not be more dire.

According to Hamparian—who also cited the ongoing persecution by the Turkish government and Azerbaijan—the declaration will have limited meaning if it does not “translate into a fundamental reset in U.S. policy toward the region—one which ensures the security of Armenia and Artsakh, and lays the groundwork for a durable peace based upon a just resolution of the Armenian Genocide.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Climate campaigners on Friday cautiously applauded California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s moves to cut off new hydraulic fracturing permits by 2024 and evaluate phasing out oil production by 2045, while also stressing that the timeline still needs to be accelerated.

“California is the highest-producing jurisdiction in the world so far to commit to a phaseout of oil extraction, and other major producers need to join the state in committing to move beyond oil and gas.”
—Collin Rees, OCI

The embattled Democratic governor of the world’s fifth-largest economy directed the state Department of Conservation’s Geologic Energy Management (CalGEM) Division to initiate regulatory action to stop new fracking permits and requested that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) analyze how to stop extracting oil statewide.

“It’s historic and globally significant that Gov. Newsom has committed California to phase out fossil fuel production and ban fracking, but we don’t have time for studies and delays,” said Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement.

“Californians living next to these dirty and dangerous drilling operations need protection from oil industry pollution today,” she added. “Every fracking and drilling permit issued does more damage to our health and climate.”

Food & Water Watch California director Alexandra Nagy agreed that the governor’s steps were significant and shared Siegel’s frustrations with Newsom’s refusal to immediately ban fracking by executive action.

“This announcement is a half-measure as it allows continued drilling and fracking for the next two-and-a-half years,” Nagy said. “Directing his regulatory agencies to do the work over two-and-a-half years that the governor can do today is more of the dodging we’ve seen from Newsom during his entire tenure.”

Since taking office in January 2019, he has approved 8,610 oil and gas well permits, according to Consumer Watchdog and FracTracker’s “Newsom Well Watch” website.

Reporting on Newsom’s announcement Friday, the Los Angeles Times noted that he’s long been under pressure to outlaw fracking:

In September, Newsom called on lawmakers to send him legislation banning the oil extraction practice. That pronouncement was greeted with skepticism by lawmakers who said barring the controversial practice would require more from Newsom than just words.

Sweeping legislation to ban fracking and other “enhanced oil recovery” methods, as well as to mandate health and safety buffer zones around oil and gas wells, failed in the state Senate last week. R.L. Miller, chair of the California Democratic Party’s environmental caucus, criticized Newsom for not doing more to support the bill, even though it went far beyond his request for solely a ban on fracking.

Climate, justice, labor, and public health groups in the state continue to call for not only cutting off new fossil fuel drilling permits immediately and phasing out existing extraction but also establishing a 2,500-foot health and safety buffer around oil wells that would—as Oil Change International (OCI) senior campaigner Collin Rees put it—”help Californians suffering from the deadly impacts of neighborhood drilling.”

“Newsom’s announcement shows the tide is turning swiftly against fossil fuel extraction,” Rees also said. “California is the highest-producing jurisdiction in the world so far to commit to a phaseout of oil extraction, and other major producers need to join the state in committing to move beyond oil and gas. Our climate emergency demands bold action, and time is of the essence.”

While demanding bolder and more urgent climate action, campaigners did welcome Newsom’s steps so far as inspirational for other elected officials.

“Stopping new permits for fracking and a plan for phasing out oil production are critical steps in the energy transition,” said Matt Krogh, U.S. Oil & Gas Campaign director at Stand.earth, “and the governor should be applauded for that vision.”

“This is a huge win for frontline communities and activists who have been fighting the oil industry in California, and an important statement for a world that must leave fossil fuels behind to have a chance at limiting climate change to 1.5 degrees,” he added, referring to the more ambitious temperature target of the 2015 Paris agreement.

Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media, said that “California’s announcement today is the future of climate action: a clear commitment to keep fossil fuels in the ground… This is exactly the type of commitment that we need to see from the Biden administration and other governments around the world.”

Henn, of course, added that “the challenge now is to speed up the timeline so that it meets the urgency that science and justice demand. Drilling for fossil fuels is just as dangerous today as it will be in 2045.”

The governor, whose state is bracing for another devastating wildfire season, said in a statement that “the climate crisis is real, and we continue to see the signs every day.”

“As we move to swiftly decarbonize our transportation sector and create a healthier future for our children,” Newsom added, “I’ve made it clear I don’t see a role for fracking in that future and, similarly, believe that California needs to move beyond oil.”

Greenpeace USA senior climate campaigner Amy Moas said Friday’s announcement “signals an important first step by Gov. Newsom towards climate and environmental justice” but falls short of what’s needed.

“California already faces the intensifying impacts of the climate crisis, which could get even worse just as the state aims to recover from the pandemic—and Gov. Newsom has a golden opportunity to lead the rest of the country in tackling the number one driver of the climate crisis,” she said.

“For Gov. Newsom to reclaim California’s title as an innovator and climate leader,” Moas added, “he must take bold steps to protect people and the planet from dangerous fossil fuel expansion: by committing to a 2,500-foot buffer zone to protect communities living near drilling, jump-starting investments in a just transition so no workers and communities are left behind by the decline of the fossil fuel industry, and beginning a bold phaseout of fossil fuels today. These are the kinds of solutions we urgently need to address fossil fuel racism, public health disparities, and give workers and communities a chance to live safe, secure, and healthy lives.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Pfizer is the corporation that has profited most from Covid-19 vaccines to date. Pfizer uses its power to aggressively defend and extend its patents.

The total sales for the Pfizer vaccine will likely exceed $30 billion in 2021 alone. Pfizer shares its profits with its partner company—which means they are expecting at least $15 billion this year, bumping their total revenue next year to around $60 billion—one quarter of which will be accounted for by the vaccine.

According to one financial journalist “That would make it the second-highest revenue-generating drug anytime, anywhere.”

Profiting from the pandemic

These sales will bring in a substantial profit for the company—particularly because the vaccine received nearly $6 billion from the American government’s contract for production and roll out costs. The German government supported the research, while official reports suggest Pfizer and its partner spent only around $1 billion in additional research costs last year.

Unlike other corporations Pfizer has explicitly said it will profit throughout the pandemic. It has sold very small quantities to the global distribution body Covax and African Union “at cost,” which it claims to be about $6.75 per dose. In fact, experts have suggested these types of vaccines could cost as little as 60 cents to $2 per dose to make. However, Pfizer is selling to most countries at $19.50 per dose, supposedly a special pandemic price, but clearly one which allows the corporation to make a large profit.

But a large profit isn’t enough for Pfizer, and it seems clear prices will rise steeply once they decide the pandemic is “over.” A senior executive has suggested $150-175 per dose would be more “normal” pricing for a vaccine of this sort.

Pfizer claims these astronomical prices are needed to recoup R&D costs. But a glance at their accounts last year shows that the corporation returned a whopping $8.4 billion to shareholders in dividends and reported a profit of $8.7 billion.

Pfizer has sold its vaccines largely to rich countries. They’ve sold more than three times the amount to high income countries (1.6 billion) as they have to the rest of the world (560 million), while tiny quantities have been sold to low income countries. The international distribution network Covax has managed to secure a mere 40 million.

A vast lobbying effort

Pfizer’s former CEO was instrumental in developing the global patent agreement—known as TRIPS—and intellectual property is a bedrock of Pfizer’s profits. Pfizer’s CEO led the charge to bypass the WHO’s technology sharing programme CTAP, labelling it “nonsense.” This has helped render this important tool ineffective to date.

In its most recent annual report the corporation seems proud of its role in pushing for even stronger patent law stating “Our industry advocacy [lobbying] efforts focus on seeking a fair and transparent business environment for foreign manufacturers, underscoring the importance of strong intellectual property systems.” They say that “While the global intellectual property environment has generally improved following WTO-TRIPS and bilateral/multilateral trade agreements, our growth and ability to bring new product innovation to patients depends on further progress in intellectual property protection [emphasis added].”

This lobbing clout is important. Pfizer and its lobbying body PhRMA were the top spending lobbyists in the US healthcare sector in the last 2 decades. They use the power lobbying gives them to promote and extend their rights of secrecy (‘data exclusivity’) over medical development and their monopoly protection which allows them to charge astronomical prices. They support the US government including higher levels of monopoly protection in new trade deals.

It’s not just Covid-19

Last year, we looked at Pfizer’s troubling history of profiteering. In one example, Pfizer and its British distributor hugely hiked the prices of anti-epilepsy drug phenytoin which 48,000 NHS patients relied upon. NHS expenditure on the drug rose from £2 million a year to £50 million in a single year, with the cost of 100mg packs rising from £2.83 to £67.50. Overall, UK wholesalers and pharmacies faced price hikes of between 2,300% and 2,600%.

In 2009, Pfizer was forced to pay $2.3 billion in a set of complex suits which included the company’s illegal marketing of arthritis drug Bextra, as well as giving kickbacks to doctors. A whistleblower claimed that sales staff were incentivised to sell Bextra to doctors for medical conditions for which the drug wasn’t approved and at doses up to eight times those recommended. “At Pfizer I was expected to increase profits at all costs, even when sales meant endangering lives. I couldn’t do that,” he stated.

MSF ran a campaign against the price of Pfizer’s pneumonia vaccines, which it claimed were 68 times more expensive in 2015 than in 2001. While Pfizer did reduce prices for the lowest income countries, MSF said the cost to vaccinate remained “roughly US$9 for each child to be vaccinated in the poorest countries, and as much as $80 per child for middle-income countries”. It claimed Pfizer and GSK have earned over $50 billion for the drug, but “Today, 55 million children around the world still do not have access to the pneumonia vaccine, largely due to high prices.”

What we can do

Pfizer’s obsession with maximising its profits during the pandemic is in keeping with its troubling record. But there is no reason big pharma companies should remain in the driving seat.

Governments have the power to put global public health first.

We are campaigning for the suspension of patents on all Covid-19 vaccines to help scale up the global vaccine effort and give the world the best chance of getting this disease under control.

This column first appeared on the Global Justice Now blog.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Pfizer is the corporation that has profited most from Covid-19 vaccines to date. Pfizer uses its power to aggressively defend and extend its patents.

The total sales for the Pfizer vaccine will likely exceed $30 billion in 2021 alone. Pfizer shares its profits with its partner company—which means they are expecting at least $15 billion this year, bumping their total revenue next year to around $60 billion—one quarter of which will be accounted for by the vaccine.

According to one financial journalist “That would make it the second-highest revenue-generating drug anytime, anywhere.”

Profiting from the pandemic

These sales will bring in a substantial profit for the company—particularly because the vaccine received nearly $6 billion from the American government’s contract for production and roll out costs. The German government supported the research, while official reports suggest Pfizer and its partner spent only around $1 billion in additional research costs last year.

Unlike other corporations Pfizer has explicitly said it will profit throughout the pandemic. It has sold very small quantities to the global distribution body Covax and African Union “at cost,” which it claims to be about $6.75 per dose. In fact, experts have suggested these types of vaccines could cost as little as 60 cents to $2 per dose to make. However, Pfizer is selling to most countries at $19.50 per dose, supposedly a special pandemic price, but clearly one which allows the corporation to make a large profit.

But a large profit isn’t enough for Pfizer, and it seems clear prices will rise steeply once they decide the pandemic is “over.” A senior executive has suggested $150-175 per dose would be more “normal” pricing for a vaccine of this sort.

Pfizer claims these astronomical prices are needed to recoup R&D costs. But a glance at their accounts last year shows that the corporation returned a whopping $8.4 billion to shareholders in dividends and reported a profit of $8.7 billion.

Pfizer has sold its vaccines largely to rich countries. They’ve sold more than three times the amount to high income countries (1.6 billion) as they have to the rest of the world (560 million), while tiny quantities have been sold to low income countries. The international distribution network Covax has managed to secure a mere 40 million.

A vast lobbying effort

Pfizer’s former CEO was instrumental in developing the global patent agreement—known as TRIPS—and intellectual property is a bedrock of Pfizer’s profits. Pfizer’s CEO led the charge to bypass the WHO’s technology sharing programme CTAP, labelling it “nonsense.” This has helped render this important tool ineffective to date.

In its most recent annual report the corporation seems proud of its role in pushing for even stronger patent law stating “Our industry advocacy [lobbying] efforts focus on seeking a fair and transparent business environment for foreign manufacturers, underscoring the importance of strong intellectual property systems.” They say that “While the global intellectual property environment has generally improved following WTO-TRIPS and bilateral/multilateral trade agreements, our growth and ability to bring new product innovation to patients depends on further progress in intellectual property protection [emphasis added].”

This lobbing clout is important. Pfizer and its lobbying body PhRMA were the top spending lobbyists in the US healthcare sector in the last 2 decades. They use the power lobbying gives them to promote and extend their rights of secrecy (‘data exclusivity’) over medical development and their monopoly protection which allows them to charge astronomical prices. They support the US government including higher levels of monopoly protection in new trade deals.

It’s not just Covid-19

Last year, we looked at Pfizer’s troubling history of profiteering. In one example, Pfizer and its British distributor hugely hiked the prices of anti-epilepsy drug phenytoin which 48,000 NHS patients relied upon. NHS expenditure on the drug rose from £2 million a year to £50 million in a single year, with the cost of 100mg packs rising from £2.83 to £67.50. Overall, UK wholesalers and pharmacies faced price hikes of between 2,300% and 2,600%.

In 2009, Pfizer was forced to pay $2.3 billion in a set of complex suits which included the company’s illegal marketing of arthritis drug Bextra, as well as giving kickbacks to doctors. A whistleblower claimed that sales staff were incentivised to sell Bextra to doctors for medical conditions for which the drug wasn’t approved and at doses up to eight times those recommended. “At Pfizer I was expected to increase profits at all costs, even when sales meant endangering lives. I couldn’t do that,” he stated.

MSF ran a campaign against the price of Pfizer’s pneumonia vaccines, which it claimed were 68 times more expensive in 2015 than in 2001. While Pfizer did reduce prices for the lowest income countries, MSF said the cost to vaccinate remained “roughly US$9 for each child to be vaccinated in the poorest countries, and as much as $80 per child for middle-income countries”. It claimed Pfizer and GSK have earned over $50 billion for the drug, but “Today, 55 million children around the world still do not have access to the pneumonia vaccine, largely due to high prices.”

What we can do

Pfizer’s obsession with maximising its profits during the pandemic is in keeping with its troubling record. But there is no reason big pharma companies should remain in the driving seat.

Governments have the power to put global public health first.

We are campaigning for the suspension of patents on all Covid-19 vaccines to help scale up the global vaccine effort and give the world the best chance of getting this disease under control.

This column first appeared on the Global Justice Now blog.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

SACRAMENTO – California Governor Gavin Newsom announced today that California, the world’s 5th largest economy, would stop issuing new fracking permits by 2024 and completely phase out oil and gas production by 2045. 

“It’s historic and globally significant that Gov. Newsom has committed California to phase out fossil fuel production and ban fracking, but we don’t have time for studies and delays. Californians living next to these dirty and dangerous drilling operations need protection from oil industry pollution today. Every fracking and drilling permit issued does more damage to our health and climate,”  said Kassie Siegel, Director of Climate Law Institute at Center for Biological Diversity. 

The announcement is a breakthrough for “keep it in the ground” campaigners who have been pushing for over a decade to get political leaders to set clear timelines for phasing out fossil fuel production. 

California is now the largest oil and gas producer in the world to commit to completely phase out production. The commitment is part of a growing wave of global action to keep fossil fuels in the ground. In December, Denmark announced it would immediately stop new oil and gas exploration and phase out all production by 2050. Costa Rica, Ireland, France, Spain, New Zealand, Portugal, and Belize, along with other subnational jurisdictions, are also at varying stages of banning oil and gas expansion.

Climate advocates hope that today’s announcement increases pressure on other oil producing countries, including the United States, to set clear deadlines for phasing out production. 

“California’s announcement today is the future of climate action: a clear commitment to keep fossil fuels in the ground,” said Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media. “This is exactly the type of commitment that we need to see from the Biden Administration and other governments around the world. The challenge now is to speed up the timeline so that it meets the urgency that science and justice demand. Drilling for fossil fuels is just as dangerous today as it will be in 2045.” 

California’s commitment comes on the heels of President Biden’s Leaders Summit on Climate, which faced criticism for not tackling the issue of fossil fuel production. Numerous reports have made clear that the only way to meet the 1.5 degrees target enshrined in the Paris Climate Agreement is to immediately stop new fossil fuel exploration and rapidly phase out production. 

“Keeping global temperatures within 1.5°C temp rise means phasing out oil, gas, and coal production yet today 40 world leaders representing the world’s largest producers and polluters failed to take the action needed. Commitments to reduce emissions, provide climate finance, and address adaptations were overshadowed by what was not promised: action to curb fossil fuel production,” said Catherine Abreu, Executive Director, Climate Action Network Canada. 

While climate justice advocates applauded California’s decision, they were quick to criticize the slow timelines for ending fracking permits and phasing out production.  

“The Governor’s acknowledgment today that ‘California needs to move beyond oil’ is exactly right, but we must move quicker, and a fracking ban is only one piece of the puzzle. We can’t risk another two decades of dangerous oil extraction, like cyclic steam injection and steam flooding, that threaten our communities’ water and air, and our state’s mosaic of natural resources,” said Tara Messing, Staff Attorney with the Environmental Defense Center.

Advocates in California will continue to pressure Governor Newsom to speed up the timeline for ending fracking and other forms of oil and gas production. Meanwhile, advocates across the United States and around the world will continue to increase pressure for more announcements like California’s: clear commitments to end fossil fuel production.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, Democrats on Friday reintroduced what they describe as “historic” legislation to tackle a national housing crisis in the U.S. exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

The American Housing and Economic Mobility Act (pdf), also introduced in the last congressional session and now backed by over two dozen advocacy groups, aims to make renting or buying a home more affordable and address decades of housing discrimination against communities of color.

“The cost of housing is squeezing American families in communities all across the country—rural, suburban, urban—whether they’re struggling to pay rent or trying to buy a home,” Warren (D-Mass.) said in a statement. “The legacy of government discrimination and negligence means that communities of color have been hit the hardest.”

“It’s time to stop nibbling around the edges,” she said, “and, instead, pass this big, bold proposal to solve our housing crisis and take steps to address the legacy of housing discrimination.”

Cleaver (D-Mo.) asserted that “the rising cost of housing is holding back working-class families throughout the United States, preventing them from climbing the economic ladder, building generational wealth, and achieving the American dream in the 21st century.”

“With the American Housing and Economic Mobility Act, we have an opportunity to rectify decades of discrimination and transform housing in America,” he said. “Timid and incremental investment in housing has failed to solve the affordable housing crisis. Substantial investment in affordable housing will ensure a more equitable economy where millions more families of all backgrounds have a safe place to rest their head at night.”

As Warren’s office summarized (pdf), the bill:

• Controls the cost of renting or buying a home by leveraging federal funding to build around three million new housing units—bringing down rents for lower-income and middle-class families by 10%, according to an independent analysis from Moody’s Analytics;
• Provides assistance to people hurt by federal housing policy failures;
• Reduces the cost of housing across America by creating incentives for local governments to eliminate unnecessary land-use restrictions that drive up costs;
• Holds financial institutions accountable for providing access to credit for all Americans;
• Promotes mobility by strengthening anti-discrimination laws and improving the housing voucher program; and
• Increases the amount of accessible housing.

Specific initiatives to assist those hurt by past policies include down payment grants for first-time homebuyers living in formerly redlined or officially segregated areas as well as extending eligibility for home loans guaranteed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to direct descendants of veterans who served between the enactment of the G.I. Bill and the Fair Housing Act but did not receive the benefit.

The lawmakers call for covering the cost of their multi-faceted proposal by increasing estate tax.

The other co-sponsors are Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), along with Reps. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Mich.), Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Jan Shakowsky (D-Ill.).

“Decades of discriminatory practices have harmed communities of color and their ability to access safe and affordable rental housing or access to a mortgage,” said Gillibrand. “The pandemic has exacerbated these challenges and Congress must do more to ensure Americans have access to affordable rental housing and the tools necessary to purchase a home.”

“I thank Sen. Warren for her leadership on this issue and I’m proud to join this legislation to enact fair housing laws, invest in affordable housing, and end discriminatory practices that have historically barred minority families from purchasing a home,” she added. “This legislation will reaffirm the commitment to fair housing for all Americans by making bold investments and improvements to these critical programs to level the playing field in the housing sector.”

Housing advocates and mayors (pdf) supporting the bill also applauded the Democrats for tackling the issue and celebrated the scope of the legislation.

“More than ever, we need bold solutions to ensure that people with the greatest needs have a stable, affordable home,” declared Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. She said the bill would “transform lives and communities by significantly expanding investments the national Housing Trust Fund to help millions of the lowest-income and most marginalized households who struggle to pay rent and the half a million people without a home at all.”

Referencing a broader proposal that President Joe Biden is expected to put forth next week, Yentel added that “Congress should enact this bill as part of the American Jobs Plan to ensure that everyone has the breadth of opportunities that come from having a stable, affordable place to call home.”

The bill’s reintroduction comes as people across the country are facing evictions or homelessness resulting from lost income related to the pandemic. Reuters reported Friday that “landlords have persisted in pursuing evictions across the United States, despite government measures meant to keep tenants in their homes,” including Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium.

Although there is not comprehensive national data, Reuters noted Princeton University Eviction Lab’s found that 318,091 households have faced eviction proceedings during the pandemic in 27 U.S. cities.

Meanwhile, Moody’s Analytics estimates that by next month, seven million renters across the country will owe a collective $40 billion in back rent, utilities, and fees.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, Democrats on Friday reintroduced what they describe as “historic” legislation to tackle a national housing crisis in the U.S. exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

The American Housing and Economic Mobility Act (pdf), also introduced in the last congressional session and now backed by over two dozen advocacy groups, aims to make renting or buying a home more affordable and address decades of housing discrimination against communities of color.

“The cost of housing is squeezing American families in communities all across the country—rural, suburban, urban—whether they’re struggling to pay rent or trying to buy a home,” Warren (D-Mass.) said in a statement. “The legacy of government discrimination and negligence means that communities of color have been hit the hardest.”

“It’s time to stop nibbling around the edges,” she said, “and, instead, pass this big, bold proposal to solve our housing crisis and take steps to address the legacy of housing discrimination.”

Cleaver (D-Mo.) asserted that “the rising cost of housing is holding back working-class families throughout the United States, preventing them from climbing the economic ladder, building generational wealth, and achieving the American dream in the 21st century.”

“With the American Housing and Economic Mobility Act, we have an opportunity to rectify decades of discrimination and transform housing in America,” he said. “Timid and incremental investment in housing has failed to solve the affordable housing crisis. Substantial investment in affordable housing will ensure a more equitable economy where millions more families of all backgrounds have a safe place to rest their head at night.”

As Warren’s office summarized (pdf), the bill:

• Controls the cost of renting or buying a home by leveraging federal funding to build around three million new housing units—bringing down rents for lower-income and middle-class families by 10%, according to an independent analysis from Moody’s Analytics;
• Provides assistance to people hurt by federal housing policy failures;
• Reduces the cost of housing across America by creating incentives for local governments to eliminate unnecessary land-use restrictions that drive up costs;
• Holds financial institutions accountable for providing access to credit for all Americans;
• Promotes mobility by strengthening anti-discrimination laws and improving the housing voucher program; and
• Increases the amount of accessible housing.

Specific initiatives to assist those hurt by past policies include down payment grants for first-time homebuyers living in formerly redlined or officially segregated areas as well as extending eligibility for home loans guaranteed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to direct descendants of veterans who served between the enactment of the G.I. Bill and the Fair Housing Act but did not receive the benefit.

The lawmakers call for covering the cost of their multi-faceted proposal by increasing estate tax.

The other co-sponsors are Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), along with Reps. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Mich.), Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Jan Shakowsky (D-Ill.).

“Decades of discriminatory practices have harmed communities of color and their ability to access safe and affordable rental housing or access to a mortgage,” said Gillibrand. “The pandemic has exacerbated these challenges and Congress must do more to ensure Americans have access to affordable rental housing and the tools necessary to purchase a home.”

“I thank Sen. Warren for her leadership on this issue and I’m proud to join this legislation to enact fair housing laws, invest in affordable housing, and end discriminatory practices that have historically barred minority families from purchasing a home,” she added. “This legislation will reaffirm the commitment to fair housing for all Americans by making bold investments and improvements to these critical programs to level the playing field in the housing sector.”

Housing advocates and mayors (pdf) supporting the bill also applauded the Democrats for tackling the issue and celebrated the scope of the legislation.

“More than ever, we need bold solutions to ensure that people with the greatest needs have a stable, affordable home,” declared Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. She said the bill would “transform lives and communities by significantly expanding investments the national Housing Trust Fund to help millions of the lowest-income and most marginalized households who struggle to pay rent and the half a million people without a home at all.”

Referencing a broader proposal that President Joe Biden is expected to put forth next week, Yentel added that “Congress should enact this bill as part of the American Jobs Plan to ensure that everyone has the breadth of opportunities that come from having a stable, affordable place to call home.”

The bill’s reintroduction comes as people across the country are facing evictions or homelessness resulting from lost income related to the pandemic. Reuters reported Friday that “landlords have persisted in pursuing evictions across the United States, despite government measures meant to keep tenants in their homes,” including Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium.

Although there is not comprehensive national data, Reuters noted Princeton University Eviction Lab’s found that 318,091 households have faced eviction proceedings during the pandemic in 27 U.S. cities.

Meanwhile, Moody’s Analytics estimates that by next month, seven million renters across the country will owe a collective $40 billion in back rent, utilities, and fees.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

As California’s latest attempt to enact single-payer universal healthcare was placed on hold this week, progressive campaigners vowed to carry on the fight, while pressing embattled Gov. Gavin Newsom to fulfill his campaign promise to implement a Medicare for All-style system in the nation’s most populous state.  

“It’s not a coincidence that Bernie Sanders won the California Democratic primary with this as a leading issue, and those voters are crucial to the governor’s prospects in the recall.”
—Michael Lighty,
Healthy California Now

On Wednesday evening, state Assembly Member Ash Kalra (D-27) announced he would withdraw Assembly Bill 1400—the California Guaranteed Healthcare for All Act (CalCare)—from consideration this year so that lawmakers could work out how to fund the ambitious measure before possibly reviving it next year. 

A.B. 1400—introduced in February by Kalra and Assembly Members Alex Lee (D-25) and Miguel Santiago (D-53), and sponsored by the California Nurses Association (CNA)—would establish a single-payer healthcare system for all Californians, regardless of income, immigration, or any other status, while expanding healthcare coverage to include nearly three million uninsured Golden State residents. It would also offer generous benefits including dental visits, prescription drug coverage, and long-term care. 

Upon its introduction, Kalra said the bill “represents the belief that healthcare is truly a human right” and “will set us on a real path towards a single-payer system and affirms the policy that would save lives, decrease suffering, and improve public health in California.”

Around 70% of Californians—and a similar percentage of people across the United States—support Medicare for All. A.B. 1400 enjoys the backing of grassroots progressive groups including Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), RootsAction, the new Daybreak PAC, as well as influential figures including single-payer campaigner Ady Barkan, National Nurses United executive director Bonnie Castillo, and actor and activist Rosario Dawson. 

Undaunted by the shelving of A.B. 1400, the single-payer advocacy group Healthy California Now called Kalra’s move “a golden opportunity for single-payer advocates to unite behind a faster path to Medicare for All, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom.” 

While seemingly a setback, Healthy California Now organizer Michael Lighty said the tabling of A.B. 1400 could actually accelerate the push for California single-payer healthcare.

“In order to do to a Medicare for All-type system in any state requires federal and legislative approval,” Lighty told Common Dreams. “The governor is the linchpin. He can initiate discussions with the federal government that will lead to adoption of single-payer plan, and he can motivate the legislature to act. The shelving of A.B. 1400 is actually the fastest way to jump-start this process.”

Newsom—a Democrat who oversaw the implementation of the city’s Healthy San Francisco program for uninsured residents when he was the city’s mayor—campaigned for governor claiming a “firm and absolute commitment” to implementing universal healthcare in California. 

“We will absolutely get it done,” he pledged in September 2017, just months after moderate Democrats including Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-63) joined with their corporate donors and GOP colleagues to scupper a previous single-payer bill, even as they paid lip service to universal care. 

With the darkening cloud of a recall campaign looming ominously over Newsom’s every move, the governor is treading cautiously. Progressives—who have thrown their support behind Newsom in the recall fight—say he must do more to deserve their backing. 

“Our support isn’t free,” warned Lee, the A.B. 1400 co-author, in a Politico interview earlier this month. “We should hold accountable our elected officials who say they support healthcare for all.” 

Lee added that Newsom has a “duty to energize his progressive base.” 

Lighty told Common Dreams that “the recall effort provides a political rationale for the governor to lead on single-payer because the progressive voters he needs to win the recall are motivated by this issue.”

“It’s not a coincidence that Bernie Sanders won the California Democratic primary with this as a leading issue, and those voters are crucial to the governor’s prospects in the recall,” he added, referring to the independent U.S. senator from Vermont’s 2020 presidential run.

Progressive campaigners vowed to keep pushing for single-payer and to keep holding Newsom’s feet to the fire. On Monday, activists led by the DSA will head to Sacramento, where they will stage a die-in at the state Capitol. 

The Sacramento die-in will follow car rallies across the Golden State last week, where demonstrators called on state lawmakers to support CalCare.

Speaking at one of the rallies, UNITE HERE Local 11 co-president Ada Briceno said that the coronavirus pandemic “demonstrates the need for California law, more than ever, to provide healthcare for millions who lost health coverage [through] job losses in the state.” 

LA Progressive reports Briceno was joined by CNA activist Stephanie Roberson, who said that “how organized we are as a movement throughout the state will determine our success.”

“We nurses see patients unable to afford lifesaving care and private companies refuse to pay,” said Roberson. “We need to prioritize nurses and patients over profits.”  

“The fastest, most direct path to Medicare for All has always gone through the governor,” Healthy California Now president Cindy Young said on Friday. “Now is the time for advocates to unite and tell Gov. Newsom to lead the way on Medicare for All.” 

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

International rescue organizations on Friday condemned the inaction of European and Libyan authorities after at least 120 asylum-seekers were believed to have drowned off the coast of Libya.

The volunteer rescue hotline Alarm Phone alerted humanitarian group SOS Méditerranée on Tuesday, saying three boats were in distress in the Mediterranean Sea.

Alarm Phone said it had been in contact about the boat on Wednesday with European migration authorities, who told the group to speak with Libyan officials. 

“States abandon their responsibility to coordinate search and rescue operations, leaving private actors and civil society to fill the deadly void they leave behind.”
—SOS Méditerranée

“The Libyan coastguard, however, refused to launch or coordinate a rescue operation, leaving the 130 people out in a rough sea for a whole night,” it said.

After conducting an hourslong search, SOS Méditerranée found dozens of bodies in the sea near a capsized vessel, which they found northeast of Tripoli.

The deaths of the refugees, Alarm Phone wrote on social media, “prove the need for safe corridors of migration and the abolition of violent border guards and institutions.”

“The people could have been rescued but all authorities knowingly left them to die at sea,” Alarm Phone told The Guardian.

The deaths of the more than 120 asylum-seekers are just the latest losses in a crisis that has killed more than 350 people in the stretch of sea that the boat was traveling in this week, according to SOS Méditerranée.

Authorities have seized a number of NGO rescue boats in the past year, keeping them in Italian ports. Prosecutors have also opened investigations into the humanitarian groups. 

Nicholas Romaniuk, a search and rescue coordinator for SOS Méditerranée, told Al Jazeera in 2019 that European authorities have “complete disregard” for the lives of asylum-seekers traveling through the Mediterranean by way of Libya, often on vessels launched by human smugglers. 

“These boats are not made for sea. They are then loaded with men, women, and children and sent out at sea without any life-saving appliances,” said Romaniuk. “If anything happens, it’s almost certain these people will die. It hasn’t seemed to matter to the European authorities. No matter how much I stress to them, and repeatedly, that there are people in danger and I can’t get through to the Libyans, the answer has always been to keep trying them again.”

Following the deaths of the refugees this week, SOS Méditerranée accused European and Libyan authorities of “deliberate inaction.”

“States abandon their responsibility to coordinate search and rescue operations, leaving private actors and civil society to fill the deadly void they leave behind,” the group said.

Eugenio Ambrosi, chief of staff of the International Organization for Migration, also condemned officials.

“These are the human consequences of policies which fail to uphold international law and the most basic of humanitarian imperatives,” Ambrosi said.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Today California Governor Gavin Newsom once more declined to use his executive power to ban fracking, opting instead to direct CALGem to phase out new fracking permits by January 2024 and phase out oil extraction by 2045. These measures fall far short of demands, failing to address more than 242,000 state-regulated wells already in operation. The move underscores Newsom’s efforts to rebuild his reputation as a climate leader after a fracking ban died in the legislature, lacking his support. 

“While it is significant that for the first time Governor Newsom is acknowledging the need to ban fracking and his authority to do it, this announcement is a half measure as it allows continued drilling and fracking for the next two and a half years. It comes after years of pressure and dedicated organizing by thousands of Californians who want a just transition away from fracking now,” said Food & Water Watch California Director Alexandra Nagy. “Directing his regulatory agencies to do the work over two and a half years that the governor can do today is more of the dodging we’ve seen from Newsom during his entire tenure. Phasing out oil drilling is absolutely necessary, but 2045 is a long way off. Until then, Newsom leaves Californians on the frontlines to pay for the oil industry’s scars on the landscape and damage to community health. He needs to use the authority the law has given him to stop issuing all new oil and gas permits, ban fracking completely and phase out oil drilling now starting with a 2,500 foot health and safety buffer between wells and sensitive sites. Newsom needs to protect our water supplies as we head into a destructive drought and guard our frontline communities from further harm.”

In 2020, Newsom approved 83 fracking permits for 608 individual fracking events, according to state regulators at CalGEM. This was out of 3,745 total permits for oil and gas wells in 2020. In total Governor Newsom has approved 8,129 drilling permits since taking office. 85 percent of those living within 2,500 feet of an oil well are Hispanic or non-white. 90 percent of California’s fracked land is owned by the state and unaffected by President Biden’s January executive order pausing the issuance of leases on federal land.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

SACRAMENTO – Healthy California Now, California’s leading coalition of advocates for a state single-payer, Medicare for All healthcare system, is urging single-payer advocates to call on Gov. Newsom to take the lead in making California the nation’s first Medicare for All state.

With Thursday’s announcement that Assemblymember Ash Kalra, D-San Jose, is shelving his single-payer bill (AB 1400), there is a golden opportunity for single-payer advocates to unite behind a faster path to Medicare For All, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“Leadership from the Governor has always been the critical missing piece in establishing a single-payer system that would eliminate insurance co-pays and deductibles and provide all Californians with health care as a human right,” said Cindy Young, President of Healthy California Now.

Young added: “The fastest track to achieve Medicare for All is for Gov. Newsom to start working with the Biden administration right now to develop a detailed Medicare for All plan and win permission to fund it with federal dollars. Once that is done, he should work with state legislators to pass it into law.”

There is recent precedent for this approach. On his first day in office, Gov. Newsom wrote to then President Trump asking him to “empower States like mine to design and implement truly transformative solutions for securing affordable health care for all.” With Xavier Becerra, California’s former attorney general and a single-payer supporter, now Biden’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, it’s time for the governor to renew that request.

Gov. Newsom and Secretary Becerra have the authority to initiate discussions on waivers to repurpose federal health dollars for a new California Medicare for All system. Newsom also has the authority to focus the work of the Healthy California Commission, which is tasked with laying the groundwork for Medicare for All in the state, to initiate a public process involving all stakeholders to flesh out the details for creating and financing a Medicare for All system that best meets the needs of all Californians.

“The fastest, most direct path for Californians to win Medicare for All has always gone through the Governor,” Young said. “Now is the time for single-payer health care advocates to unite and tell Gov. Newsom we need him to lead the way on Medicare for All.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – 40 world leaders gathered to participate in the Biden Administration’s first step onto the international climate stage. The Leaders Summit on Climate took place on April 22nd/ 23rd. The summit saw global leaders making big promises on carbon emission reduction, but the biggest red flag from climate activists is the overall lack of explicit commitments to stop financing fossil fuel projects, one of the key areas that can speed up the transition away from fossil fuel energy. 

Agnes Hall, Global Campaigns Director at 350.org said 

“There can be no meaningful climate action if world leaders don’t make a decisive move to keep all fossil fuels in the ground. It’s one thing to make climate goals, but governments simply can’t afford to keep on funding the flames by pouring money into subsidizing coal, oil, and gas. The Biden Summit is a critical meeting of world leaders ahead of COP26 this November. Talk of “net-zero” emissions won’t cut it: we demand more from our world leaders than the false promises, false solutions, and empty negotiations we heard at Biden’s Climate Summit. The task now is to hold politicians to their lofty words,  and to do that the global climate movement needs to keep up the pressure on our governments at home as well as on the international stage to take urgent action now to reduce carbon emissions and ensure a Just Recovery from the global COVID-19, economic and climate crises by creating a sustainable, fossil-free world ”. 

Pacific  350.org Pacific Managing Director Joseph Sikulu issued the following statement:

“In a world recovering from COVID-19 and the climate crisis, governments need to quickly divest from the fossil fuel industry and begin investing in a just recovery for all. Countries with high emissions, such as the United States and Australia, must stop subsidizing oil, gas and coal and direct their investments toward clean and just renewable energy so that we can limit Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees.

To date, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has not announced a concrete plan to reduce emissions. Instead, he thinks that fossil fuel companies can solve the climate crisis, which is a massive irony. The Summit is an excellent opportunity for him and other leaders to look on the leadership of the Marshall Islands – the only Pacific island nation present. Australia must recognize that they have few options: either catch up by COP26 or remain a climate laggard who contributes to climate disaster.”

Japan – 350.org Japan Finance Campaigner Eri Watanabe issued the following statement:

“This goal is highly insufficient if we want to achieve the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting the warming of the Earth to 1.5 degrees. I strongly urge the Japanese government to set a more ambitious target with a minimum of a 62% reduction from 2013’s emissions. This is based on research published by Climate Action Tracker.

This target may be higher than previously at a 26% reduction, but if we look closely – this is a numbers game1. Compared to the United Kingdom’s and European Union’s targets, which are 78% in 2035 and 55% in 2030 respectively compared to emission levels in 1990, Japan’s target is much lower.

When the Paris Agreement was signed, we agreed that there were “common but differentiated responsibilities” across the world. As the world’s fifth-highest emitting country with a large number of historic emissions, Japan owes the world a carbon debt. This makes it necessary for our country to reduce as much carbon emissions as possible — or more than half of 2010’s emissions in order to be a solution to the climate crisis. We must start urgently setting bold and ambitious targets, and strengthening the measures necessary to achieve them. 

One of the policies urgently needed is a rapid phase-out of coal infrastructure. Another to direct Japanese banks to rule out fossil finance. Japan is the biggest lender to the global coal industry, and they must cut the flow of money to reduce their emissions.

Only if Japan government walks the talk, can they show climate leadership.”

Bangladesh  350.org Organizer Shibayan said:

“We are heartened by the Chair’s response and his ambitious goals of targeting a 100% renewable transition by 2050. For Bangladesh to have a just recovery from the twin crises of COVID-19 and climate change, this transition away from coal must exclude gas, and bring about a Green New Deal focusing on clean and just energy such as solar and wind. At the upcoming Leaders Summit for Climate, we hope to see countries that have built their wealth based on fossil fuels such as the US working hand in hand with the most affected countries such as Bangladesh. World leaders must start cooperating and sharing resources to combat the climate crisis. They need to act now, while there is still time.”

Africa  Landry Ninteretse, the Africa Director of 350.org said:

“During the virtual summit, the world’s major economies will share their efforts to reduce emissions during this critical decade to keep a limit to warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius within reach.

1.5 degrees is our global beacon for climate action. The safety and wellbeing of millions of Africans depend on keeping below it. But it is slipping from our grasp and we need to urgently halve global emissions by 2030, which means that we need to limit fossil fuel consumption and stop new developments such as the EACOP and Mozambique LNG projects that threaten this climate ambition.

Fixing the climate crisis requires more than simply cutting carbon; we need bold action that prioritizes alternative sources of energy that meet the needs of the people and accelerate investments in real climate solutions with the aim of driving a fast and sustainable transition away from fossil fuels.”

 Canada Amara Possian, Canada Campaigns Director with 350.org

The problem with Justin Trudeau’s new climate pledge can be summed up in two words – fossil fuels. Neither Trudeau’s new climate plan, nor his budget, nor this new climate promise include a plan to tackle soaring emissions from tar sands, fracking and other fossil fuel expansion that makes Canada the only G7 country whose emissions have gone up since signing the Paris Agreement. Canada needs to cut our emissions at least 60% by 2030 and pass legislation like a Just Transition Act to make sure we meet our Paris commitment and leave no one behind.  

Since Justin Trudeau won’t act at the pace and scale of the climate emergency, we need the NDP and the Greens to form a Climate Emergency Alliance ahead of the next election to push Canada to set ambitious targets and follow-through with the policies to meet them. It’s not too late for Canada to do what’s necessary, but we can’t afford four more years of Trudeau’s status quo”. 

US Natalie Mebane, Policy Director of 350.org.

“On Day 1 in office, Biden canceled Keystone XL. Now he must follow through on his promises and do the same with Line 3, the Dakota Access pipeline, and all new fossil fuel projects. A 50% emissions reduction falls short of the United States’ fair share and should be seen as the floor, not the ceiling. Ambitious climate action requires keeping all fossil fuels in the ground. Biden must show the world that the U.S. is serious about tackling the climate crisis at scale, centering communities most impacted, and creating millions of good, green jobs in the process.” 

Brazil: Ilan Zugman, Latin America Managing Director of 350.org, based in Curitiba, 

“Bolsonaro lied when he said that Brazil is at the forefront of the climate efforts. It may have been true someday, but not in his government, which has been consistently attacking the policies and state agencies necessary to stop deforestation and lead the energy transition. He talked much about the past achievements of Brazil and too little about the future, not to mention that in the present, his environmental record is a disaster.”

“In the days before the Climate Summit, there was an impressive flow of open letters and social media campaigns in Brazil asking President Biden not to close any agreement with President Bolsonaro without hearing the Brazilian civil society first, and it seems to have worked. There is a very justified concern, based on the current attitude of the Brazilian government towards the environment, that no matter what the Bolsonaro government promises, it will be just empty words, and that an agreement with the US would end up endorsing the destruction of the Amazon and other biomes.”

“Brazil has the potential to be a global leader in the efforts to solve the climate crisis, and in fact it has been a very important voice in this conversation for many years, since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. However, the Bolsonaro government shrank Brazil’s ability to take climate action, by dismantling major policies against deforestation in the Amazon and threatening conservation in Indigenous Lands and Protected Areas. The key to take Brazil back to its leading role in the climate efforts is to empower and support the civil society, especially Indigenous leaders, and strengthen community-based solutions as opposed to ignoring or even encouraging the irresponsible expansion of mining and agribusiness, as President Bolsonaro has been doing”, said Ilan Zugman, Latin America Managing Director of 350.org. 

Argentina Ignacio Zavaleta, 350.org Campaigner 

“What stood out in President Fernández’s speech was the fact that he did not mention any change in the government’s policies of investment in the expansion of oil and gas extraction in the Vaca Muerta area. Taxpayers’ money has been subsidizing a highly ineffective and environmental harmful operation, which benefits a few foreign companies and brings no development to the country or even the region where it is based. These billion dollars wasted every year in fossil fuels should be redirected to policies of energy transition, that are able to create more jobs in a moment when Argentinians desperately need it”, said Ignacio Zavaleta, 350.org Campaigner in Argentina.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The United States is back. Back in the Paris Agreement, and back to faithfully promoting the interests of destructive industries and their allies at the global level under the guise of environmentalism. On Earth Day—a day that has been increasingly co-opted by corporations—President Biden is hosting a “Leaders’ Summit on the Climate.” But who are these “leaders?” 

On Earth Day—a day that has been increasingly co-opted by corporations—President Biden is hosting a “Leaders’ Summit on the Climate.” But who are these “leaders?”

The Biden Administration’s dubious definition is clear from the fact that a key initiative to be announced at the summit is a bilateral agreement between Biden and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. The deal would include significant financial support for Brazil’s “efforts” to reduce illegal deforestation.

If there were ever a prize for the most environmentally destructive president in history, Bolsonaro would stand a good chance to win. In just two years, he has succeeded in increasing deforestation rates in Brazil by 47 percent, triggering the destruction of 11,088 square kilometers of forests in his country in 2020 alone, primarily by allowing and even incentivizing his friends and allies in the industrial livestock sector and other industries to clear as much forest as they want.

Of course, it is basically up to Bolsonaro and his administration to decide what deforestation is legal or illegal—no matter the fact that Heads of State agreed in 2015 in the Sustainable Development Goals that all deforestation should be halted, and thus declared illegal, by 2020.

It is no wonder Brazilian Indigenous peoples, civil society organizations, feminist groups, and social movements are cynical about the proposed deal between the United States and Brazil. In a widely supported letter published on April 6, they denounced the proposed agreement, claiming it is unacceptable to give financial support to a “leader” who is not only destroying his own country, but has also been recommended by Indigenous peoples in Brazil to be prosecuted before the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Bolsonaro is not the only industry ally the United States is touting as an “environmental leader.” The Biden Administration has shown its commitment to protecting business as usual in climate policy by actively promoting carbon offset mechanisms that would allow some of the dirtiest industries in the country to buy cheap carbon offsets for their emissions under the euphemistic term “nature-based solutions.”

Such “solutions” often boil down to monoculture tree plantations, which have been embraced by companies like Shell and Texaco as a way to profit from pulp or bioenergy sales while pretending to “plant trees” for clients who want to greenwash their petroleum emissions.

These carbon offset mechanisms would allow some of the dirtiest industries to make money selling offset credits based on the use of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, and weed killers that avoid tilling (euphemistically called soil carbon sequestration or even “regenerative agriculture”) or, for example, the use of biogas produced by intensive livestock farming.

The emissions caused by the production of soy feedstock for the intensive livestock industry, a key cause of deforestation in countries like Brazil, are conveniently forgotten in these scenarios. Also forgotten are the devastating impacts on women, Indigenous peoples, and others who’ve borne the brunt of industrial farming, which is associated with massive health impacts due to agrochemicals, land grabbing, and rural depopulation.

Another “leader” who will undoubtedly show up at the U.S. Leaders’ Summit is Bill Gates, a passionate promoter of GMOs and other techno-fixes to address the impacts of agro-industry on the climate. Through a series of strategic investments in different U.N. institutions, the former Microsoft CEO and his foundation have positioned themselves as the main benefactor and influencer of a wide variety of interlinked global processes.

The winners in this scheme would be destroyers like Bolsonaro and Gates, who seek profit at the expense of some of the most precious forests on the planet.

The U.N. Food Systems Summit is probably the most controversial of these processes. The idea for the summit came from the business-dominated World Economic Forum. And its pro-business agenda was given a human face with the appointment of Agnes Kalibata, the president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, as special envoy of the conference.

The alliance is an initiative backed by the Gates Foundation to promote GMOs and other techno-fixes for agricultural challenges in Africa. Gates himself has invested heavily in companies like Monsanto/Bayer that stand to profit from such “nature-based solutions.”

With the U.N. Food Systems Summit planned for September 2021, the conditions are right for a corporate-driven agenda to push business-friendly “nature-based solutions” onto the “leaders” gathered at these summits. The winners in this scheme would be destroyers like Bolsonaro and Gates, who seek profit at the expense of some of the most precious forests on the planet.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Calling the issue a matter of “common sense and morality,” Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday—backed by millions of Americans demanding the same—urged U.S. President Joe Biden to support an international effort to suspend coronavirus-related patent protections that are artificially limiting vaccine supply and depriving poor nations of access to life-saving shots.

“We must do everything humanly possible to crush this global pandemic and save millions of people who are in danger of needlessly dying,” the Vermont senator said during a virtual event hosted by Public Citizen and joined by other lawmakers and public health advocates.

“At this point the only thing standing in the way of the Biden administration is their willingness to stand up to the greed of the pharmaceutical industry.”
—Ben Levenson, People’s Action

“Ending this pandemic requires collaboration, solidarity, and empathy. It requires a different mindset… the mindset that tells the pharmaceutical industry that saving perhaps millions of lives is more important than protecting their already excessive profits,” Sanders continued, echoing experts’ warnings about the emergence and spread of vaccine-resistant mutations. “To me, this is not a huge debate, this is common human morality.”

The Friday event was held to mark the delivery of two million petition signatures calling on Biden to endorse the patent waiver, which the U.S. and other rich nations have blocked repeatedly since India and South Africa first introduced the proposal at the World Trade Organization (WTO) last October.

Matthew Rose of Health GAP, one of the advocacy groups behind the petition drive, said during the virtual gathering Friday that “it’s time the Biden administration stopped dragging their heels and got on board with the millions of people supporting the… waiver, which will save lives and help end the Covid-19 pandemic.”

According to a Data for Progress survey released last week, 60% of U.S. voters want Biden to support the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waiver, which is backed by more than 100 WTO member nations. The proposal would lift a key legal barrier preventing generic manufacturers around the world from replicating vaccine formulas.

“This event and the success of these petitions shows that not only is the TRIPS waiver the right thing to do to end the pandemic everywhere and stop vaccine apartheid, but that it is overwhelming popular,” said Ben Levenson of People’s Action. “At this point the only thing standing in the way of the Biden administration is their willingness to stand up to the greed of the pharmaceutical industry.”

Watch the full event:

The virtual event came as global coronavirus infection numbers continue to surge in large part due to exploding case counts in India, Brazil, and other countries that have struggled to vaccinate their populations amid inadequate supply and deeply unequal distribution.

“The answer is right in front of our eyes, a waiver at the WTO to allow countries to be able to produce their own pharmaceuticals… We need to do this now.”
—Rep. Jan Schakowksy

In a New York Times op-ed on Friday, the head of the World Health Organization estimated that people in low-income countries have received just 0.3% of the total number of coronavirus vaccines administered across the globe. People in high- and upper-middle-income countries, meanwhile, have received 81% of total doses.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who is leading the effort to build support for the waiver among U.S. House lawmakers, said during Friday’s livestream that “this is an international pandemic, and time is running out.”

“The answer is right in front of our eyes, a waiver at the WTO to allow countries to be able to produce their own pharmaceuticals, vaccines to help people who are sick, to really save the day,” said Schakowsky. “We need to do this now.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Cold and mushy Brussels sprouts—previously frozen, then heated, then cold again—were the worst, but they weren’t the only bits of food I pushed around my plate in my youth that I had to finally gag down before I could leave the table.

“Don’t you realize there are starving kids in Africa?” my parents would chastise.

My unrepentant thinking at the time went something along the lines of Then why don’t we pack it up and send it to them? I would gladly share this food with starving people.

Here in the United States, it is estimated that we waste approximately 40% of all food produced for human consumption.

It is estimated that we waste approximately 50% more food than we did when I was contemplating my plate as a youth in the ’60s and ’70s. Shockingly, it is estimated that 1/3 of all the food produced on the planet never makes it into a mouth. Much of this loss in developing countries happens due to harvest, processing, and storage issues. In higher-income countries, much of the loss occurs at the consumer level.

Here in the United States, it is estimated that we waste approximately 40% of all food produced for human consumption. As a country, we comprise only 4% of the world’s population, but we rank near the top in food waste. Not unrelated, and always important to emphasize, we also are responsible for 15% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, second only to China.

Food waste occurs in all sectors, from farm to table. Naively, I had assumed there must be more waste and food loss in the farming, processing, retail, and institutional sectors than in our homes. However, though calculations and methodologies vary by organization, all data agree that my assumptions were categorically wrong. The Natural Resources Defense Council’s detailed 2017 report, Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of It’s Food From Farm to Fork to Landfill, estimates that households are responsible for 43% of wasted food in the U.S., the most significant piece of the pie. A staggering and sobering statistic.

Yet, the mountains of data showing the profound negative impact of food waste combined with the fact that we consumers in our homes create the largest portion of it could also be seen as hopeful.

Hopeful!? Why?

Because we don’t have to wait for anyone else to argue and legislate. We can immediately begin (those of us who haven’t already become Zero-Waste Masters) to address food waste, right now, today, in our own homes. And doing so will have an enormous impact.

What We Are Wasting, in Addition to the Food

Our refrigerators, which typically hold perishables, are most often ground zero of food waste in our homes. There are the greens turning to gelatinous goo in the bottom of the crisper, the leftover vegetarian chili we are tired of and don’t have room for in the freezer (and besides, pizza sounds good tonight), the dried out tortillas, the celery that is turning brown, the excess apples turning to mush, and so on.

“Guess it’s time to clean the fridge out,” I mutter resignedly to myself when there’s no room for leftovers or new groceries, or when I can’t see or reach what might still be good at the back, or when the green goo starts leaking out the door, or after the hubby has to duct tape the bulging door closed before he leaves for work so it will stay shut.

For better or worse, I’ve been in charge of the fridge for some 38 years now. And I’ve always felt bad about the food I’ve tossed and for the hard-earned money that had gone to pay for it. But my thinking never really went much farther than that. Until it did.

I thought I was mindful of my ecological footprint, but when I finally examined my foodprint and the enormous negative impact my poor planning and waste were having on the environment and planet I thought I was trying to save? I was appalled and embarrassed.

To better understand the enormity of what I had been wasting—besides food, hard-earned money, and all my other personal resources used to obtain, store, and cook the food (if I got that far)—I made a list. And while it is not exhaustive, I find it beyond compelling. And, notably, when the food produced is meat, especially beef, all of the wasted resources increase significantly.

When I waste food, I’m also wasting:

• The land the food was grown or raised on
• The precious freshwater used to irrigate the land and hydrate livestock
• The fuel required for farming
• The many resources used to produce, harvest, package, and transport seeds, animal feed, fertilizers, soil amendments, and all of the other resources required for farming
• The many resources that went into dealing with weeds, pests, and fungus (in the U.S., we annually drop 1.1 billion pounds of pesticides on crops, 23% of the global total)
• All of the resources used to plant, harvest, or procure the food
• All of the resources that went into processing the food
• All of the resources that went into packaging the food, sometimes multiple times
• All of the waste that packaging creates
• All of the resources required to transport the food, often multiple times
• All of the resources necessary to store the food, often at multiple facilities
• The labor needed at every level, and the resources used by that labor in the course of their work

Then, there is the incredibly colossal amount of greenhouse gases and polluted air and water generated at every step between farm and fork. It’s one thing, and another story, when these gases and pollution occur due to producing food that nourishes, but when the food ends up wasted? Because of me? It’s calamitous.

And it just keeps getting worse. Unless we compost at home, there are all of the costs, environmental and otherwise, associated with having our food waste transported away from our homes—including what we pay to have it hauled, the fossil fuel required for the transport, and the pollution and greenhouse gasses created by the transportation.

This then brings us to the landfill, where the food waste problem is exponentially exacerbated. The EPA estimates that 66% of the wasted food we in the residential sector dump into the municipal solid waste stream is landfilled. Our food waste that is now trapped (sealed, without oxygen) inside landfills begins producing methane, a gas 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide within the first 20 years of its release and 28 times stronger than CO2 over the course of 100 years. In just the United States alone, the greenhouse gasses produced by our wasted food rotting in landfills are estimated to equal the emissions of 37 million cars.

On the global scale, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, if food waste were a country, it would only trail China and the U.S in greenhouse gas emissions.

And What About Hunger and Food Insecurity?

Globally, nearly 800 million people experienced severe food insecurity in 2019, and another 1.25 billion experienced moderate food insecurity. Sadly, with the COVID-19 pandemic, it is expected these numbers have risen. An alarming new United Nations report warns: “Over 34 million people are grappling with emergency levels of acute hunger, meaning they are one step away from starvation.”

In the United States, 35.2 million individuals experienced food insecurity in 2019. The numbers here, due to the pandemic, have also worsened.

Of course, there are numerous contributing factors to hunger and food insecurity, including political conflict, climate crises, economic downturns, and pandemics. However, contrary to the common perception that world hunger exists because there isn’t enough food, it’s important to note that we already produce enough food to feed everyone, including the estimated two billion hungry and food-insecure.

To emphasize, nearly one-quarter of the world’s population do not have routine access to healthy food even though we produce enough to feed them.

In 2015, the United Nations established 17 crucial sustainable development goals (SDG) in their 2030 Agenda For Sustainable Development. By tackling food waste, we can quickly begin to address SDG #2, which aims to achieve zero hunger; SDG # 12.3, which targets halving food waste at the retail and consumer levels; and SDG #13, which implores us to take urgent action to combat climate change.

In September of the same year, the USDA and EPA also set the year 2030 for halving food waste in the U.S., and the FDA is working in conjunction with them to educate the public.

While these are valuable and essential goals, I have to agree with climate activist Greta Thunberg when she said in an interview recently with the Financial Times, “We need to stop focusing on dates and numbers and actually accept and acknowledge the fact that we need to reduce our emissions right now. We can talk about 2030 or 2040 as much as we want. But it is what we are doing now that really matters.”

Tackling food waste in our own homes is one simple thing that we can do now that really matters. These efforts will not only free up resources that can go a long way toward helping feed the world’s hungry and food-insecure, they will also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions on the planet.

What We Can Do In Our Kitchens, Communities, and Backyards

The USDA and EPA have collaborated on establishing a helpful six-component food waste recovery hierarchy, with the most preferred option at the top and least preferred at the bottom. Three of them are especially helpful for us at the residential level.

Source Reduction is step one, stopping food waste before it happens. It is the number one thing we can do to help abate food waste. Simple practices include:

• Eating what we have. We simply look inside our fridge and pantry and see what most needs to be eaten and plan a meal based on that. If unsure what to make, we can check the index of a favorite cookbook or do an internet search with the terms. For example, I have those squash from last summer, the sweet potato, and also some greens that all need to be eaten. Pasta sounds good tonight so I did an internet search—”squash, sweet potato, greens, pasta”—and I found a recipe that I’ll use as my inspiration.
• Better planning. The same thing above applies to menu planning and shopping. We look in our refrigerator and pantry first and then plan menus and shopping based on what needs to be eaten. Also necessary is making a list and doing our best to stick to it. And resisting buying more than we need, especially produce, even if it’s those avocados that are on sale.
• Shopping for just a few main meals at a time—especially when it comes to buying perishables. Too often, there are more leftovers than expected, or our neighbors invite us to that impromptu potluck, or we impulsively grab takeout on our way home. Planning for fewer meals helps avoid over-shopping and ending up with highly perishable items we can’t get to. Alternatively, keeping carrots, celery, onions, and potatoes on hand—vegetables that keep longer than many other items—allows for quickly transforming some basics into a wide variety of dishes when the menu plan runs dry before the next shopping date.
• Being resourceful. If we have most items needed for that pizza but don’t have any sauce, we can use pasta sauce. Or grind up whatever greens we may have on hand with some garlic, nuts, and olive oil for some quick pesto magic. If we don’t have a recipe ingredient, we can ask if it’s essential, and if so, check online for a substitute. For example, if you’re missing an egg for that birthday cake, you can substitute two tablespoons of mayonnaise.
• Making friends with the freezer. Yes, the freezer is a great place for the chili that we tire of by the third night, but it’s also a great place to keep other things. For example, we can keep a container for stale or excess bread (including the heels) for when we need to make croutons, breadcrumbs, soups, or one of my favorite “clean out the fridge” kind of recipes—vegetable strata. Bread is only one thing, but speaking of it reminds me of one enterprising food waste warrior who is turning stale and excess bread into beer!
• Labeling the food. We all think we’ll remember, right? But if it’s not marked, there’s a good chance that it’ll get tossed (even though it might still be good) when we can’t recall what it is or when we made it. I now mark containers with wine glass markers before putting them into the fridge or freezer. It’s also a good idea to keep a memo pad attached to the fridge, making a note of what went in and when.
• Trusting our senses. Studies find that a good portion of the food we toss is thrown out too soon because we misunderstand dates. Until I set out to educate myself about food waste, I had the misconception that food might make me or my family sick if it was outdated. But then I learned that, aside from infant formula, the dates marked on the foods we buy—”best if used by,” “sell by,” “best before,” “enjoy by,” and expiration dates—are not only confusing but not yet federally regulated. Currently, these recommendations are merely suggestions about when a product is at its freshest. I also learned that eating food that is a little past its prime doesn’t typically make us sick. Food-borne illness comes from pathogens and contamination, not from the natural decaying process. By learning to trust our sense of sight, smell, touch, and taste, we can avoid tossing food that is still safe to eat. Save the Food is one place to start when looking for food-saving tips and recipes for using foods that are past their prime. I just left this writing briefly to whip up a delicious chocolate mousse using overripe avocados (from that sale I warned against) that were on my counter.
• Embracing ugly produce. Tons of perfectly good produce goes uneaten every year in the U.S. simply because of unrealistic retail and consumer expectations regarding appearance. Many non-profit organizations and for-profit entrepreneurs are now working to save this food from rotting in the fields or getting sent to the landfill. Households can also help by requesting that their local grocer stock imperfect produce, and then they can support this request with their dollars. I have been guilty of sorting through produce to find perfect specimens, but after learning how much waste this creates and knowing that appearance does not affect taste or nutritional value, I am much more conscious about showing more love to the ugly produce. (Marketing research has shown that using the term “ugly” helps imperfect produce receive a little more positive attention!)

When we master all of these things and learn to work with and eat what we have, we’ll not only save a lot of money and trips to the grocery store, we’ll also be helping to save the planet and the resources necessary to help feed the hungry.

Feeding the Hungry is step two on the hierarchy and involves the recovery of good food from all sectors and sharing it with food-insecure populations. Exactly what I wanted to do when I was a kid! Not that I would be able to take my actual plate to a nearby food pantry now, but numerous organizations, including K-12 schools and universities, are doing extraordinary work to help recover good food from all sectors—farms, production facilities, institutions, restaurants, retail stores, dumpsters, and our homes—to those who need it, rather than it being sent to the landfill.

Also, food-sharing apps are helping recover food from all sectors, including households with excess food in their kitchens and gardens. These apps currently appear to be most popular and successful across the pond, but technologies that help us share excess food are promising. If you want to share your excess, and organizations and apps aren’t currently functional in your community, you can check with your local food pantries and shelters to see if they will take your excess perishables and garden produce.

Composting is step five, recognizing that food scraps and food waste are invaluable resources in the food cycle. Composting can be done in a variety of ways at one’s residence, through municipal programs offered in some communities, or through hiring a private food scrap hauler who will come by regularly for a very reasonable fee and collect scraps and get them to a nearby farm or facility that can process them into feed or compost.

I’ve only recently begun educating myself more fully on the stupendous ramifications of wasting food, but I have been composting for a while and am passionate about the “dig and drop” method, which is a variation of trench composting, also known as the “Lazy Man’s Method.” (My parents always did accuse me of being lazy.) Every day, I drop my kitchen scraps into a large enamelware canning pot (though anything with a lid will work) that sits outside my back door, and then once every week or two, I simply dig a hole and drop the contents of the pot into the hole, layering in “browns” (leaves, sawdust, paper, tissues, egg cartons, torn up cardboard) as I go. I next back-fill with six to eight inches of dirt and then tamp lightly, leaving the shovel where I left off to mark it for the next dig.

When the garden is bare in the winter, I crisscross back and forth across the garden space. In the summer, I dig in the rows between plants. I’m amazed at how quickly the scraps degrade, all with minimal effort from me. Worms have become plentiful, the clay and granite subsoil is improving dramatically, plantings (present or future) benefit from the organic nutrition, and I’m not sending any food to the landfill! There are no smells with this method, no turning a pile or bin, no critter problems, and nothing has yet to bother my pot that I collect the compost in (even when I used to keep it on the front porch, 20 feet from our neighborhood bears, when I paid to have it picked up).

The last “option” in the Food Waste Recovery Hierarchy is the landfill—an option of last resort that signifies we have failed the first five preferred options (which also include feeding animals, and turning wasted food into biofuel and bioproducts).

In the U.S., six states and several municipalities have already passed laws to keep food out of landfills. Eventually—much like widespread recycling of metals, paper, cardboard, and glass—this will likely become the norm rather than the exception.

Vermont’s statewide food scrap ban went into effect just last year. Their program stands out as an excellent model regarding outreach, education, and support, with an easy to navigate website chock-full of information for helping residents comply with the new law. Local governments must provide food scrap collection to businesses, institutions, and apartments with four or more units. Beyond that, residents may ask their local solid waste hauler if they collect food scraps, or they can take them for free to a local drop-off facility, or they can pay a private food scrap hauler to pick them up. Private food scrap hauling has grown from only 20 haulers statewide when the law went into effect to more than 50 now.

Vermont’s new law has been a score for farmers, the planet, and the hungry. Food scraps kept out of the landfill end up at area farms and are either used for animal feed or they are composted to help in the generation of new food, greenhouse gasses are being minimized, and food donation (feeding hungry people) in the state has nearly tripled since the law was passed.

Shift Happens

Merriam-Webster defines a paradigm shift as “an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way.” In a relatively short period of time, we have witnessed many paradigm shifts—from the simple and trivial to the complex and momentous. From how we use apps to book travel, for example, to the now widespread support of same-sex marriage.

Another shift is also underway with our relationship to food, food waste, food justice, and understanding how each impacts world hunger and climate change.

Seemingly small actions have enormous consequences. There are 129 million households here in the United States, and most of us are responsible for the largest chunk of wasted food in a country that wastes, per capita, more than almost every other country in the world. Because of this, we also embody enormous potential. Together, we can create the shift needed for humanity’s food security, a healthier planet, and the future of both.

It turns out my parents were on to something after all. Let’s eat our food.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union, and the ACLU of Massachusetts today filed a petition for a writ of certiorari, asking the Supreme Court to hear a challenge to the Department of Homeland Security’s policy and practice of warrantless and suspicionless searches of travelers’ electronic devices at U.S. airports and other ports of entry.

The lawsuit, Merchant v. Mayorkas, was filed in September 2017 on behalf of several travelers whose cell phones, laptops, and other electronic devices were searched without warrants at the U.S. border. In November 2019, a federal district court in Boston ruled that border agencies’ policies on electronic device searches violate the Fourth Amendment, and required border officers to have reasonable suspicion of digital contraband before they can search a traveler’s device. A three-judge panel at the First Circuit reversed this decision in February 2021.

“Border officers every day make an end-run around the Constitution by searching travelers’ electronic devices without a warrant or any suspicion of wrongdoing,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Sophia Cope. “The U.S. government has granted itself unfettered authority to rummage through our digital lives just because we travel internationally. This egregious violation of privacy happens with no justification under constitutional law and no demonstrable benefit. The Supreme Court must put a stop to it.”

“This case raises pressing questions about the Fourth Amendment’s protections in the digital age,” said Esha Bhandari, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “When border officers search our phones and laptops, they can access massive amounts of sensitive personal information, such as private photographs, health information, and communications with partners, family, and friends—including discussions between lawyers and their clients, and between journalists and their sources. We are asking the Supreme Court to ensure that we don’t lose our privacy rights when we travel.”

Every year, a growing number of international travelers are subject to warrantless and suspicionless searches of their personal electronic devices at the U.S. border. These searches are often conducted for reasons that have nothing to do with stopping the importation of contraband or determining a traveler’s admissibility. Border officers claim the authority to search devices for a host of reasons, including enforcement of tax, financial, consumer protection, and environmental laws—all without suspicion of wrongdoing. Border officers also search travelers’ devices if they are interested in information about someone other than the traveler—like a business partner, family member, or a journalist’s source.

The petitioners in this case—all U.S. citizens—include a military veteran, journalists, an artist, a NASA engineer, and a business owner. Several are Muslims and people of color, and none were accused of any wrongdoing in connection with their device searches.

“It’s been frustrating to be subjected to this power-grab by the government,” said Diane Zorri, a college professor, former U.S. Air Force captain, and a plaintiff in the case. “My devices are mine, and the government should need a good reason before rifling through my phone and my computer. I’m proud to be part of this case to help protect travelers’ rights.”

The certiorari petition asks the Supreme Court to overturn the First Circuit’s decision and hold that the Fourth Amendment requires border officers to obtain a warrant based on probable before searching electronic devices, or at the least have reasonable suspicion that the device contains digital contraband.

For more information about Merchant v. Mayorkas go to:
https://www.eff.org/cases/alasaad-v-duke
https://www.aclu.org/cases/alasaad-v-wolf-challenge-warrantless-phone-and-laptop-searches-us-border

For the full petition for writ of certiorari:

https://www.eff.org/document/petition-writ-certiorari-3

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – On April 22-23 President Biden hosted more than 40 world leaders for a virtual climate summit. Biden announced a new US target to halve fossil fuel emissions by 2030 and eliminate them by 2050, and pledged to double annual public climate finance for developing countries by 2024. He also unveiled an international climate finance strategy prepared by Treasury.

Eric LeCompte the Executive Director of religious development group Jubilee USA Network, releases the following statement on President Biden’s Leaders Summit on Climate:

“The summit encourages greater climate action at upcoming G7, G20 and UN meetings.

“Biden’s summit is important because it included leaders from countries of all sizes and regions. We can only address climate change together and Biden is bringing a broad range of participants together. 

“The summit included business and labor groups, climate activists and the Pope.

“The guest list conveyed, better than any amount of words, the intention to listen to all and build broad-based support to tackle the climate crisis.

“Treasury vowed to align international financial policies with climate objectives.

“Treasury Secretary Yellen sees that developing countries can succeed on the climate agenda if we also focus on global pandemic response and development.

“For many countries the ability to invest on sustainable, resilient, low-emission infrastructure hinges upon decisive solutions to their dire debt situations.”

Read Jubilee USA’s release on White House and Treasury climate commitments at the Leaders Summit on Climate here.

Read President Biden’s speech at the Leaders Summit on Climate here.

Read Secretary Yellen’s speech at the Leaders Summit on Climate here.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Twitter announced Thursday in a tweet, a pledge to join the Science Based Targets Initiative and adopt a clearly defined pathway for reducing its greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris Agreement’s net-zero goal. With this commitment, Twitter follows other large tech companies including Facebook, Microsoft, and Salesforce. 

While previously setting a goal of reaching carbon neutrality for its data centers by 2022, the company had not committed to reducing the full scope of its greenhouse gas emissions. By adopting Science Based Targets, Twitter will have a maximum of two years to set targets for its Scope 1, 2, and 3 greenhouse gas emissions, without relying on carbon offsets. 

“By joining its peers in committing to set a Science Based Target, Twitter has taken a crucial and necessary step in the global transition to a net-zero economy,” said Lila Holzman, senior energy program manager at As You Sow. “We hope to see Twitter prioritize climate by swiftly embarking on an ambitious target setting process.”

Investors are increasingly seeking ambitious climate action from companies to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. As You Sow filed a shareholder resolution with Twitter on behalf of Amalgamated Bank this year asking it to disclose plans to align its climate impacts and strategies with the Climate Action 100+ (CA100+) Net-Zero Benchmark. The CA100+ initiative, which includes nearly 600 investors representing more than $54 trillion in assets, released the Net-Zero Benchmark last year setting clear metrics to demonstrate company alignment with net-zero goals, including target-setting, a decarbonization plan, and aligned corporate governance and executive compensation, among other key elements. 

“Twitter is joining the conversation on climate with a strong commitment to science,” said Ivan Frishberg, director of impact policy at Amalgamated Bank. “This week’s net-zero commitments from the finance sector and President Biden’s emission reduction announcement for the U.S. show that Twitter is not alone, and that we are now seeing the potential of every part of the economy rallying together to drastically reduce emissions.”

For more information on As You Sow’s work on climate change, click here.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

A leading National Institutes of Health scientist who helped develop a key technology used in Pfizer and Moderna’s coronavirus vaccines said this week that the U.S. government’s ownership of the patent for the invention gives the Biden administration significant leverage to compel pharmaceutical companies to help boost global production.

Dr. Barney Graham, deputy director of the NIH’s Vaccine Research Center, told the Financial Times in an interview this week that “virtually everything that comes out of the government’s research labs is a non-exclusive licensing agreement so that it doesn’t get blocked by any particular company.”

“Virtually everything that comes out of the government’s research labs is a non-exclusive licensing agreement so that it doesn’t get blocked by any particular company.”
—Dr. Barney Graham, National Institutes of Health

Part of the team of scientists that in 2016 conceived the spike-protein technology being utilized in the highly effective mRNA vaccines, Graham told FT that “one of the reasons” he joined NIH was “to be able to use the leverage of the public funding to solve public health issues.”

While Pfizer’s partner BioNTech has licensed the technology from the U.S. government and is paying royalties, Moderna has not—and the Biden administration has not attempted to enforce the patent.

According to researchers at New York University School of Law, Moderna—whose vaccine was developed with a massive infusion of public funding—could be on the hook for more than a billion dollars in compensation should the U.S. decide to sue the pharmaceutical giant, which has thus far sold most of its doses to rich countries.

But the researchers argue in a new report (pdf) that instead of taking Moderna to court for patent infringement, the U.S. government should “use the threat of litigation of the ‘070 patent to bring Moderna back to the negotiation table and convince Moderna to share its own patents, trade secrets, and other intellectual property on [its vaccine] with the U.S. government and with vaccine manufacturers around the world.”

Going that route, the researchers say, would help “accelerate scale-up of global mRNA vaccine manufacturing, vaccinate the world, and bring the Covid-19 pandemic to a conclusive end.”

As Graham put it in his interview with FT, “It’s really up to… the political will and the use of public dollars to ask: are we going to use our technologies to solve these problems, and to solve them with global coordination, and with the recognition that we are all in this together?”

Pressure on the Biden administration to use U.S. ownership of the so-called ‘070 patent to pressure Moderna into sharing its technical know-how comes amid a much broader fight at the World Trade Organization to temporarily waive coronavirus-related patent protections, a move advocates say is necessary to ramp up vaccine production and ensure access in developing nations.

“These vaccines were funded by public money and are desperately needed worldwide if we are to end this pandemic,” Heidi Chow, senior campaigns and policy manager at advocacy group Global Justice Now, said earlier this week. “It’s morally bankrupt for rich country leaders to allow a small group of corporations to keep the vaccine technology and know-how under lock and key while selling their limited doses to the highest bidder.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

California’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group shared its immediate reaction to the news that Republican reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner announced her bid for governor on Friday. 

After Jenner declared, “I’m in” on Friday in a statement, the group shot back on social media: “We’re out.”

Jenner said she had filed initial paperwork to run against Gov. Gavin Newsom, who may face a recall election this year after GOP forces criticized his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Equality California made clear on social media that it “can’t wait to elect a trans governor of California,” but that the group isn’t willing to back a candidate who has supported former President Donald Trump, who pushed a blatantly anti-trans agenda.

While Jenner criticized Trump for his attacks on the rights of transgender students and adults who want to serve in the military, she maintains ties to the former president, Equality California said.

“Californians—and trans Californians, in particular—understand all too well the risk of electing another reality TV star who cares more about fame and money than civil rights, healthcare, and the safety of our communities,” the group said, signaling its support for Newsom.

Last year, Newsom signed two bills co-sponsored by Equality California, requiring healthcare providers to collect LGBTQ+ health data for communicable diseases and requiring that incarcerated transgender people be housed according to their gender identity, not their sex assigned at birth. 

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – On day two of President Biden’s climate summit, Biden has doubled down on climate change being an opportunity to create jobs, saying “Climate change is more than a threat… It also presents one of the largest job creation opportunities in history.” In response to this, Sunrise Movement Political Director, Evan Weber, released the following statement:

“Sunrise Movement has been asserting for years that combating climate change can and should create millions of good, fulfilling jobs, fully transforming our economy and our society in the process. Not only that, but on Tuesday, Senator Ed Markey and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, along with Sunrise Movement, presented Biden with a historic bill that describes the very opportunity he is hopeful for: the Civilian Climate Corps for Jobs and Justice Act. 

“This visionary policy would create a government jobs program putting a new generation of Americans to work combatting the climate crisis, while forging a new era of civic collaboration in this country. Biden can’t fight the climate crisis with empty promises. He must deliver by passing Senator Markey’s Civilian Climate Corps Act through his infrastructure package.”

Sunrise Movement first brought the idea of a Civilian Climate Corps to Biden during the Biden-Sanders climate task force last summer and has fought for its adoption ever since. Since then, Biden has adopted the idea of a Civilian Climate Corps, but his current proposal is nowhere near the magnitude FDR employed: Roosevelt’s original CCC employed around 300,000 young Americans per year at a time when the US population was ~40% what it is now. Biden’s proposed CCC would invest $10 billion over 10 years, equating to about 10-20,000 jobs a year.

This also comes just days after climate champions Senator Ed Markey and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reintroduced the Green New Deal, alongside the Civilian Climate Corps for Jobs and Justice Act. Their proposed Civilian Climate Corps is supported by dozens of racial, economic, climate justice, and labor groups and would employ a diverse group of 1.5 million Americans within five years to complete clean energy, climate resilience, environmental remediation, conservation, and sustainable infrastructure projects, while providing education, training, and career pathways in good union jobs. The CCC will provide a $15 minimum wage, ensure mandatory health and educational benefits for participants, and foregrounds racial justice and Tribal sovereignty protections. This is a concrete first step towards the longer-term vision of the Green New Deal.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Citing the U.S. State Department’s own highly critical assessment of Egypt’s rights record, a coalition of 14 leading NGOs on Thursday implored Secretary of State Antony Blinken not to waive human rights conditions on aid to the North African country’s military regime.

“This is a genuine opportunity for the administration to put human rights at the center of the relationship.”
—Human rights groups’ letter

In an open letter to Blinken, groups including Amnesty International USA, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, and Reporters Without Borders “strongly urge” the Biden administration “not to use the national security waiver on the $300 million in foreign military financing to Egypt… that is conditioned on meeting several human rights standards.”

While the letter commends the State Department for expressing concerns about Egypt’s human rights violations and praises Blinken for telling Egyptian Foreign Minister Shoukry that human rights “would be central to the U.S.-Egypt bilateral relationship,” it notes that the department’s latest annual human rights report for the country “identified a litany of serious violations of human rights by Egyptian authorities.”

“These include consistent attacks on the freedom of expression, violations of the rule of law, extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances, widespread use of arbitrary detention, and politically motivated reprisals against individuals located outside the country,” the letter states. 

“In response to such abuses, since 2014 Congress has conditioned a portion of the $1.3 billion of annual military aid to Egypt,” it continues. “Unable to certify improvements in Egypt’s abysmal human rights record, the two previous administrations have used a national security waiver provided by Congress each year to release the conditioned portion of military aid.”

The letter asserts that “by using the waiver, the United States signals that the Egyptian government will not be held accountable for its human rights abuses and that it can continue to violate human rights standards without consequence.”

“During his campaign for president, then-candidate Joe Biden promised ‘no more blank checks for [Donald] Trump’s favorite dictator,’” it added, a reference to the moniker reportedly bestowed upon Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi by the former U.S. president. 

Despite Biden’s tough talk, the State Department earlier this year said it was seeking to sell $200 million worth of Raytheon missiles to Egypt. The announcement of the proposed sale came on the same day that the Biden administration published a statement condemning arbitrary detention in Egypt and just days after relatives of a prominent Egyptian American dissident were arbitrarily jailed. 

“Overriding the human rights conditions would, on the contrary, continue the pattern of providing ‘blank checks’ to the Egyptian government,” the letter argues. “This is a genuine opportunity for the administration to put human rights at the center of the relationship.”

The letter concludes that by refusing to waive human rights conditions on military aid to Egypt, “the United States will send a clear message that it is serious about its commitment to supporting human rights abroad, that it will follow through on its promises, and that respect for human rights is inextricably linked to U.S. national security.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

In a letter Friday to U.S. President Joe Biden and congressional leaders, four dozen advocacy groups called for including bold drug pricing reforms in the American Families Plan and using the estimated $450 billion in savings over a decade to invest in popular expansions to Medicare.

“Allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices and then reinvesting those savings back into the program to expand services further strengthens our path towards universal coverage for all.”
—Mary Small, Indivisible

Specifically, the letter (pdf) proposes adding dental, vision, and hearing benefits to Medicare, lowering the eligibility age for the federal health insurance program to 50—which would expand coverage to about 63 million people—and creating an out-of-pocket cap for medical expenses.

“The time has come to deliver for America’s seniors, people with disabilities, and people approaching retirement,” write the business, consumer safety, faith, labor, public health, and racial justice groups.

The letter—addressed to the president, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)—comes before Biden is expected to unveil his American Families Plan ahead of a speech to Congress next Thursday.

As the letter explains:

The United States spends far more than any other country for pharmaceuticals, and the largest purchaser in the world is the Medicare Part D program. High U.S. drug spending is driven by excessive prices charged by prescription drug corporations, which lead to treatment rationing and preventable negative health outcomes, including death. Enacting a robust system of direct government drug price negotiation and price spike protections that provides relief to patients regardless of medical condition, insurance provider, or status will save lives and prevent suffering and financial hardship for families across the nation.

“Advancing the strongest reform possible is not only the right thing to do in its own right, but stronger reform also has potential to provide greater savings for reinvestment,” the letter continues. “Conversely, any weakening of drug pricing reform would reduce savings. Bold drug pricing reform will support building a healthier America, as well as produce hundreds of billions of dollars in savings to reinvest in bolstering coverage.”

A majority of people with Medicare are enrolled in Medicare Part D plan, an optional prescription drug benefit provided through private insurers. In February, the Congressional Budget Office put out a report commissioned by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) confirming that Medicare Part D pays far more for medications than any other U.S. government health program.

Sanders said at the time that “negotiating directly with pharmaceutical companies will substantially reduce the price of prescription drugs, and it is a national embarrassment that the secretary of Health and Human Services is prohibited from doing that on behalf of the more than 40 million Americans who get their prescription drug coverage from Medicare Part D.”

Representatives from groups behind the new letter echoed that message on Friday.

“Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices down saves money for the federal government,” said Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works. “We must pump those savings back into Medicare to expand eligibility and add benefits that equalize Medicare with private insurance.”

“Far too many Americans have lost their insurance or put off needed care due to the Covid-19 crisis.”
—Eagan Kemp, Public Citizen

The letter, and other advocates, also emphasized how the ongoing coronavirus pandemic—which has killed more than 570,000 people nationwide—has boosted the need for increasing access to Medicare.

“With the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic still being felt in our communities, now is a crucial moment to expand public healthcare coverage and deliver savings on prescription drug prices to the American people,” said Mary Small, legislative director for Indivisible. “Lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 50 will be an essential step towards reducing the racial health inequities by increasing coverage to communities of color and low-income folks.”

Small added that “allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices and then reinvesting those savings back into the program to expand services further strengthens our path towards universal coverage for all.”

Expanding access to and improving Medicare is also popular across political party lines, according to polling results (pdf) released with the letter Friday. Data for Progress found that 86% of likely U.S. voters—including 82% of Republicans—support adding dental, hearing, and vision benefits to the program.

The survey, conducted in mid-April, also found that 59% of all voters—including three-quarters of Democrats, a majority of Independents, and nearly half of Republicans—support dropping the Medicare eligibility age to 55.

“Lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 50, capping out-of-pocket costs, and expanding benefits to include dental, hearing, and vision would improve access to care for millions of America,” said Public Citizen healthcare policy advocate Eagan Kemp.

“Far too many Americans have lost their insurance or put off needed care due to the Covid-19 crisis,” Kemp added. “The Biden administration and Congress have a chance to deliver important progress at a crucial time.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted economies around the world and altered people’s lives, with women bearing the brunt. Between February and April 2020 approximately 12 million women lost their employment—more than half of job losses in the United States. As with previous economic shocks, women of color and low-income women are hit the hardest. The blow to their economic stability can have cascading effects on women’s reproductive desires and access to health care. 

Our team at the University of California, San Francisco reached out to women via social media to document their experiences and the barriers they face. We found that women are facing economic struggles that have upended their ideas about pregnancy and parenting, but the same barriers that put them in this precarious position make it hard for them to get the health care they need to prevent pregnancy. At every step, they’re falling, and the safety net is not catching them.

Inability to afford food, transportation, and/or housing was associated with a reduction in desire to be pregnant.

The disproportionate impact on people of color that we have seen throughout this pandemic is apparent in our study. Women who identified as Hispanic/Latina and Black/African American were more likely to experience inability to afford food, transportation, and/or housing during the pandemic than women who identified as White. Latinas have twice the odds of experiencing food insecurity. Many of the women experienced financial stress and need to work outside of home despite having higher risk of and being worried about contracting COVID-19. Food insecurity was a critical concern. One woman with dietary restrictions illustrated how difficult it was to meet her dietary needs during the pandemic. She told us she had to travel “over 50 miles round trip to charities that would work with me and allow me to pick through supplies…they specifically shopped for me.”

Inability to afford food, transportation, and/or housing was associated with a reduction in desire to be pregnant. Even people who did not express that they were worried about bring a child to the world indicated that they wanted to wait until the pandemic ended to be pregnant. Many women who had less desire to be pregnant prior to the pandemic also expressed that pandemic made them sure that they never wanted to be pregnant in the future. One woman shared that: “I was ~90% sure I did not want to have children prior to the pandemic, but seeing everything going on with quarantining, inability of school/childcare, loss of jobs, plus the health risks of a pandemic have solidified any doubt in my mind that I might have wanted to have children. “Many women expressed anxiety around current pregnancies. One woman wrote, “It has been rough being in a state lockdown so close to giving birth on top of depression and anxiety. I have felt so terrified and still do about the current state of everything and it has made me feel so guilty for bringing children into the world in such a scary time.” 

Given how important it was to women to not become pregnant during the pandemic, it is concerning that nearly one in six women reported difficulties accessing contraceptives. The women with the hardest time getting birth control were the same ones who have seen decreased income, food insecurity and inability to access food, transportation, and housing during the pandemic. Some women reported that the problem was that they lost their job, and with it their health insurance. They also faced barriers to a doctor’s appointment – whether it was difficulty in getting an appointment or feeling hesitant to go to a clinic during the pandemic.

Women gave credit to organizations and social networks for filling in the gap that a well-rounded social safety net should fill. Local food banks and community assistance played an important role in easing food insecurity. Family planning clinics provided healthcare during the pandemic. But those stopgaps are no substitute for a robust social safety net that ensures people can survive a national crisis, like this pandemic. The small amount of aid from the federal government still left many people behind. One woman shared, “Financial stress has never been a part of my marriage…Due to the CARES ACT and provisions for who was eligible for relief, we weren’t eligible for any relief. Stress is at an all-time high and we’ve had to frequent food banks and Catholic charities to pay our rent.”

People’s needs for health care increase when they face a dire unemployment situation, and we need a healthcare system that can step up to that challenge. However, under the current health system, barriers to healthcare were heightened when women needed the care the most. These women’s stories shine a spotlight on the need for comprehensive coverage of healthcare that is not tied to employment.  The social safety nets (or the lack thereof) that have failed these women, like food transfer and cash transfer, must expand.

We owe it to these women to not forget the lessons of this pandemic. We must build a better system than the one we had before our lives were upended by COVID-19.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The Oklahoma chapter of the ACLU is vowing to fight the state’s Republican leadership following Gov. Kevin Stitt’s signing of a law that will grant immunity to drivers who unintentionally hurt or kill protesters—while holding demonstrators accountable for threatening public safety instead. 

“The ACLU of Oklahoma along with organizers on the ground are in a fight to end the systemic violence inflicted on our Black and Brown communities, and our government’s escalating attacks on protests against racism and police brutality should concern everyone,” said Nicole McAfee, the group’s director of policy and advocacy.

“We are in serious conversations with partners on our next steps to protect Oklahomans’ right to free speech,” she added. “The power of protest belongs with the people, and we will not tolerate these attempts to silence Oklahomans.”

Stitt signed the legislation, H.B. 1674, into law on Wednesday—the same day he signed H.B. 1643, which makes it a crime to post anything online that includes personally identifying information about a law enforcement officer. Examples could include photos of police officers wearing name badges, according to local ABC News affiliate KOCO-TV.

“They are targeting groups of protesters who are just wanting to use their freedom of speech, passing bills that will intimidate them.” —Adriana Laws, Collegiate Freedom and Justice Coalition

The governor aims to stop “people from using their First Amendment rights,” the Collegiate Freedom and Justice Coalition said.

“[The state’s GOP lawmakers] are targeting groups of protesters who are just wanting to use their freedom of speech, passing bills that will intimidate them,” CFJC founder Adriana Laws told The Guardian, “passing bills that decriminalize the murder of protesters, which is absolutely insane.”

While classifying the obstruction of a highway or street as a misdemeanor that could carry a sentence of up to a year in jail and fines as high as $5,000, H.B. 1674 will protect drivers “who unintentionally causes injury or death” from being held criminally or civilly liable if authorities believe the driver was “fleeing from a riot.”

“This is America,” tweeted former labor secretary Robert Reich, expressing disbelief regarding the new law, which is one of several anti-protest measures proposed and passed by Republican state lawmakers in the past year.

A law granting drivers immunity for hurting or killing protesters was also recently passed in Iowa, while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis boasted that he signed “the strongest anti-looting, anti-rioting, pro-law-enforcement piece of legislation in the country” this week—a law which critics warned could result in felony charges for protesters if a demonstration becomes disorderly or violent, even for protesters who don’t participate in the violence. 

“This is consistent with the general trend of legislators’ responding to powerful and persuasive protests by seeking to silence them rather than engaging with the message of the protests,” Vera Eidelman, a lawyer at the ACLU, told the New York Times Wednesday. “If anything, the lesson from the last year, and decades, is not that we need to give more tools to police and prosecutors, it’s that they abuse the tools they already have.”

In Oklahoma, author and activist Rebecca Nagle tweeted, Republicans appear to simply be making official their intent to give favorable treatment to those who harm protesters while punishing people for exercising their First Amendment rights.

“I was at a Black Lives Matter march last summer in Tulsa where a truck drove through the crowd, struck several people, and in the commotion a man was pushed over a bridge and paralyzed,” Nagle tweeted. “The driver was never charged—without this law in place.”

USA Today reported that demonstrators had been hit more than 100 times by drivers last summer as racial justice protests spread across the country. 

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

WASHINGTON – Today, 48 organizations led by Indivisible, Social Security Works, and Public Citizen released a letter calling President Joe Biden to include bold drug pricing reforms in his forthcoming American Families Plan and use the savings to expand and improve Medicare. Drug pricing reform will produce upwards of $450 billion in savings over 10 years. The organizations are calling on Biden to use these savings to reinvest in Medicare by:

• Adding dental, vision, and hearing benefits to Medicare;
• Lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 50;
• and Creating an out-of-pocket cap for medical expenses.

Alongside the letter, the organizations released new polling from Data for Progress showing wide support across party lines for expanding and improving Medicare. The poll found that 86 percent of Americans, including 82 percent of Republicans, support adding dental, hearing, and vision benefits to Medicare. It also found that three-quarters of Democrats, a majority of independents, and nearly half of Republicans support lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 55.

“Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices down saves money for the federal government, which is the largest buyer of prescription drugs in the world,” said Alex Lawson, Executive Director of Social Security Works. “We must pump those savings back into Medicare to expand eligibility and add benefits that equalize Medicare with private insurance.”

“Lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 50, capping out-of-pocket costs, and expanding benefits to include dental, hearing, and vision would improve access to care for millions of Americans. Far too many Americans have lost their insurance or put off needed care due to the COVID-19 crisis,” said Eagan Kemp, Health Care Policy Advocate for Public Citizen. “The Biden Administration and Congress have a chance to deliver important progress at a crucial time.”

“With the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic still being felt in our communities, now is a crucial moment to expand public health care coverage and deliver savings on prescription drug prices to the American people. Lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 50 will be an essential step towards reducing the racial health inequities by increasing coverage to communities of color and low-income folks,” said Mary Small, Legislative Director for Indivisible.  “Allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices and then reinvesting those savings back into the program to expand services further strengthens our path towards universal coverage for all.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Carved out of the rainforest, the Trans-Amazonia Highway, is a 2.500 mile-road that connects seven northern states in Brazil. The audacious project was started in 1972 during the country’s Military Dictatorship (1964-1985) with two objectives: development and security of the “unoccupied” region. In order to bring companies and large-scale farmers there, the government offered large portions of land, tax exemption incentives and attractive financing. The move culminated with the expulsion of thousands of small farmers and entire tribes of indigenous peoples, solidifying a long history of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.

On April 22, Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro spoke at the U.S. Climate Summit affirming his nation’s commitment “to eliminate illegal deforestation by 2030,” and he “anticipates Brazil’s goal of zero emissions to 2050.” He was one of 40 world leaders present. During his remarks, he also said Brazil is “on the forefront in combating climate change,” and that his administration is “complying with the measures to combat deforestation and preserve the Amazon.”

Not everyone is buying into the far-right leader’s sudden change of heart, and some suspect it is a distraction from the political fallout over his pandemic-related missteps and nascent charges of disassembling Brazil’s environmental infrastructure.

Juliana de Paula Batista, a staff attorney with Instituto Socioambiental—(ISA) an organization working on social-environmental issues and indigenous communities’ rights in Brazil, is one of the skeptics. “It doesn’t make sense for Bolsonaro to promise [Biden] something that is beyond his government when as the President, he has the ability to take direct and concrete actions to stop deforestation, but instead he’s actually encouraging it,” for economic development, she told me during a phone conversation.

In fact, since taking office in 2019 Bolsonaro, aided by his administration, has dismantled environmental protection agencies, weakened enforcement systems, given amnesty to violators, ignored illegal logging, backed deforestation bills, cozied up to mining executives, endangered indigenous lives, and attacked non-governmental organizations. His actions are so egregious that some see him as conducting an “ecocide.”

Now that these activities, along with mounting political pressures at home and from abroad, could cost Bolsonaro the presidency next year, he appears to have toned down his efforts, at least on paper.

In 2008, Germany and Norway created the Amazon Fund, an investment mechanism whose goal was to prevent, monitor and combat deforestation in the Brazilian rainforest. The fund also promoted sustainable “forest management and economic activities from the use of native vegetation” by small family farmers and indigenous tribes in the region. But the almost $540 million reserve (R$ 3 billion) has been paralyzed since 2019. That’s because Brazil’s Environmental Minister Ricardo Salles changed its operation’s guidelines and disbanded the technical and advisory committees, which caused a diplomatic impasse. Since then the region saw  the highest level of deforestation in 12 years, according to the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), or a 9.5% hike, going from 2.5 million acres in 2019 to 2.7 million acres in 2020. Seeing the spike in deforestation and fires, Norway and Germany have stopped contributing to the fund.

In March 2021, during the Inter-American Development Bank’s (IADB) annual meeting, IADB  announced a $1 billion fund to develop sustainable projects in the Amazon, to stimulate the “bioeconomy” and combat deforestation in the region. IADB finances economic and social development projects in Latin America and the Caribbean. Bolsonaro, who was present at the gathering, reiterated his stated pledge to develop the Amazon. “That’s is why we’re working to create jobs, products and services that use the forest resources in a sustainable way,” he affirmed. The Brazilian government hasn’t given details of what such “sustainable projects” and “bioeconomy” would look like under this new proposed capital. Given this administration’s work to open up the region for more commercial development, including mining and large-scale farming, this plan should be taken with a grain of salt.

For those concerned with Brazil’s rainforest, its native inhabitants, or even broader issues like climate change and the environment, it ought to be clear that Bolsonaro and his cronies have been extremely dangerous for the Amazon.

In the meantime, Salles has been lobbying for foreign aid for this fund in order to “curb Amazon deforestation by 30-40%,” he said. Critics have pointed out though that the Amazon Fund, which was created for the same purposes, is still frozen. Sveinung Rotevatn, the Norwegian Environmental Minister, said in an interview that a reduction in deforestation depends on “political will, not financing.” Norway is still waiting for a drop in deforestation to reactivate the Amazon Fund.

The climate summit marks the U.S. rejoining the world on climate talks ahead of the United Nations COP-26 meeting in Glasgow later this year. At the opening of the summit, Biden advanced his pro-environment agenda by committing “to cut greenhouse emissions in half by 2030.” Several world leaders welcomed the U.S. back to the negotiating table after a four-year hiatus. Bolsonaro’s participation, according to his critics, is a mere “smoke screen” to obfuscate his political troubles at home.

Last week, Brazil’s Supreme Court (STF) allowed the Senate to start an investigation into Bolsonaro and his administration’s response to the pandemic, which has claimed more than 380,000  lives, and infected more than 14 million people. In fact, over course of the pandemic, just like President Donald Trump did in the U.S., Brazil’s president downplayed the severity of the COVID-19 virus, undermined science and health-driven directives for national shutdowns, and ignored the use of masks and social distancing measures to contain the spread of the virus. He has also promoted the use of unproven drugs—or as Brazilians call it, ‘Kit Covid’—to treat and prevent the disease and failed to arrange much-needed vaccine resources. He has just confirmed his fourth Health Minister since the start of the pandemic, a cardiologist who said he would follow Bolsonaro’s orders—hardly a reassuring move. The previous three ministers were sacked for either sharing science-backed information with the population, for standing up to the President, or for not having any medical experience – the third minister is a Divisional General of the Brazilian Army. 

Many also saw Bolsonaro’s appearance as disingenuous. The Trump-sycophant did not acknowledge Biden’s Presidential victory until almost a month after the U.S. elections were certified. Last year he rejected Biden’s $20 billion offer to protect the Amazon, tweeting he “does not accept bribes or coward threats toward our territorial and economic integrity.”

In an attempt to curry favor with the Biden Administration and just a few days before the climate gathering, Bolsonaro sent the U.S. leader a letter promising to end deforestation if Brazil was “fairly compensated for the environmental services [our] citizens provide for the planet,” a statement he repeated at the summit. In reaction to Bolsonaro’s letter, U.S. Senators, environmental groups, indigenous peoples and coalitions of civil and political parties have denounced his greenwashing attempt.

On April 16, 15 U.S. Senate Democrats penned a document urging him to set constraints on aid for Brazil. Questioning Bolsonaro’s credibility, they wrote, “[any] U.S. assistance to Brazil should be conditioned in two critical areas: reducing deforestation and ending impunity for environmental crimes and acts of intimidation and violence against forest defenders.”

Climate Observatory, a coalition of 198 Brazilian environmental groups called Bolsonaro the “worst enemy” of the Amazon, tweeting, “Would you pay Donald Trump to protect the Amazon?” And the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB) shared a video from Chief Raoni Metuktire of the Amazon’s Kayapó tribe who warned Biden that Bolsonaro “wants to allow our forest to be destroyed by encouraging invasion of our land.”

Another coalition of 33 civil societies entities and leaders from left-leaning parties that form the Permanent National Forum in Defense of the Amazon also asked Biden and Bolsonaro for transparency in negotiations about the Amazon. In the statement, signed by dozens of its members, the signatories declared, “We’re favorable to international cooperation, but we disagree with agreements done behind closed doors with the Brazilian government and without the participation of the Forum, National Congress and indigenous people from Amazonia (state).”

Fearful of a closed-door deal without guarantees for the environment, APIB released a video last week telling Biden: “do not let this man negotiate the future of the Amazon.” It also pleaded, “if you want to help the Amazon, talk to the people that live and keep the forest alive.” It was a direct message referring to three bilateral meetings between agents from the two countries to discuss environmental issues and the $1 billion fund backed by the IADB. These virtual gatherings, which occurred within the last two months, excluded indigenous people.

When called out over the exclusion, the Biden Administration attempted to do damage control. The day after the video was released the U.S. Ambassador to Brazil Todd Chapman received a delegation of indigenous people from APIB and Funai, Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency, which has been allied with Bolsonaro. The groups met with Jonathan Pershing – Climate and Policy Advisor for the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate change, under John Kerry’s supervision. Biden had asked the ambassador to facilitate the conversation after APIB expressed a desire to have a direct channel of communication with the U.S. to discuss topics related to Brazil’s Amazon. Initially only APIB was supposed to be present. However, after the U.S. delegation mentioned the gathering to Funai, the agency designated several indigenous people – all of whom are connected to agribusiness and mining operations responsible for deforestation in the Amazon, to bring “counter proposals” to the table. In other words, indigenous concerns have once more been steamrolled.

For those concerned with Brazil’s rainforest, its native inhabitants, or even broader issues like climate change and the environment, it ought to be clear that Bolsonaro and his cronies have been extremely dangerous for the Amazon. It is imperative for world leaders to understand the depth, cost and extent of Bolsonaro’s ‘ecocide’ during these last two years and not fall for his lies.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.