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Should he face far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in a head-to-head runoff as expected, leftist icon Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is expected to win by a margin of 54% to 32%.
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“This tax would help rein in Big Oil’s profiteering and put money directly in the pockets of consumers,” said Rep. Ro Khanna.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“We’re fighting for economic justice both inside and outside of the workplace, and canceling student loan debt is a necessary part of that.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“Why don’t poor people get meetings in the Oval Office instead of corporations?”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Honduran President Xiomara Castro is also skipping this week’s Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“The Hawaii Department of Transportation has been a flat tire in our transition to a decarbonized future for too long. With this lawsuit, these young people are helping steer the agency towards genuine climate justice in the Hawaiian Islands.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“War profiteers have blood on their hands and we are making it impossible for anyone to attend their weapons fair without directly confronting the violence and bloodshed they are complicit in.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“The members of Congress who signed this letter are making it clear that we must hold the Israeli government accountable for its blatant violations of Palestinians’ rights.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“In the 10-year period after the assault weapons ban lapsed, mass shooting deaths jumped 239%. Two-thirds of Americans support a ban. Why is it not included?”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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The U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing majority could soon “obliterate even the mildest of gun regulations in service of its gun lobby masters.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“Ohio Republicans have chosen to pass unconstitutional maps again and again and blatantly ignore the will of voters in order to protect their seats.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“Our investigation will continue undeterred because no one is above the law,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Sanders, an independent democratic socialist, and Graham, a far-right Trump ally, are set to square off in a televised debate on June 13.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“The issue is money in politics,” said Nina Turner after the nation’s latest mass killing of students and teachers. Right-wing lawmakers are “allowing children to die because of the gun lobby.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“We look forward to proceeding with our case and having our day in court to show how Exxon is breaking the law and to put an end to the deception once and for all,” said Massachusetts AG Maura Healey.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“Living in close proximity to oil and gas development is a threat to public health.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“It’s been 54 years since the sanitation worker’s march,” said Bishop William J. Barber II, “and right here in Memphis they still don’t have union rights.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Medicare “is under threat today from the constant efforts of private insurance companies and for-profit investors who want to privatize it and turn it into yet another shameful opportunity to make money,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“I can no longer work for a company that ignores all the alarms and dismisses the risks of climate change and ecological collapse.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Biden’s threat risks “helping to bring about a Taiwan conflict,” said one foreign policy scholar. “Self-injurious and entirely unforced.”
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A new analysis out Friday confirms that the number of U.S. households with kids that report not having enough food to eat has surged in the months since corporate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia joined Senate Republicans in refusing to extend the expanded Child Tax Credit benefit beyond mid-December.
Data from the Household Pulse Survey (HPS), a nationally representative internet survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, shows that from April 27 to May 9, 15% of households with children reported food insufficiency — defined as sometimes or often not having enough food to eat in the past week. In early August, the percentage of families with kids that reported struggling with hunger was roughly 9.5%.
Food has become more expensive in recent months as a handful of corporate grocery giants and meat, egg, and dairy conglomerates have raised prices while cutting frontline worker pay and raking in record profits amid the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. But Manchin and the GOP’s decision to allow the enhanced CTC benefit to expire at the end of last year is making it even harder for millions of families to make ends meet.
Right-wing lawmakers let the enlarged CTC lapse despite ample evidence that the popular measure improved the lives of children nationwide. In January, the first month since July 2021 that eligible families didn’t receive a monthly payment of up to $300 per child, 3.7 million kids were thrown into poverty.
In a guest blog post published Friday by the Economic Policy Insitute, Julia Raifman, assistant professor at Boston University School of Public Health, and Allison Bovell-Ammon, director of policy strategy for Children’s HealthWatch at Boston Medical Center, wrote:
In prior work using HPS data, we found that the advance CTC was associated with a 26% decrease in food insufficiency in households with children relative to households without children. Our findings were consistent with those of other researchers, who found that the advance CTC was associated with a 25% decline in poverty and improved dietary quality for children.
In a new pre-print using HPS data, we find expiration of the advance CTC was associated with a 12% increase in food insufficiency in households with children relative to households without children by February — and rates of food insufficiency continued to climb since February.
“While HPS data are not directly comparable to data collected prior to the pandemic,” Raifman and Bovell-Ammon noted, “rates of food insufficiency in March–April 2022 were about three to four times pre-pandemic levels.”
“Food insufficiency among families with children poses a short- and long-term moral and economic threat to the United States,” they wrote. “Even brief disruptions in access to food can have lasting consequences.”
The pair continued: “Not having enough to eat often disrupts children’s cognitive and emotional development and education. This was the case for a child who disclosed that the reason she was fidgeting and not paying attention in class was that she did not have enough food to eat. There may be lifelong ramifications of not having enough to eat in childhood, including increased likelihood of poor health outcomes and avoidable medical expenditures across the lifespan.”
Despite Manchin’s baseless and dehumanizing claim that parents would use federal cash to buy drugs, Raifman and Bovell-Ammon pointed out that several analyses “indicate families with low incomes overwhelmingly used advance CTC payments on basic needs for children, including food, rent, utilities, clothing, and educational costs. There is also no evidence suggesting a reduction in employment among parents in families receiving CTC payments.”
It’s not too late, Raifman and Bovell-Ammon stressed, for Manchin and the GOP to change course.
“As Congress turns its attention to the next reconciliation package, there is an opportunity to reinstate the expanded CTC monthly payments,” the pair wrote. “Amidst continued inflation, rising food insufficiency in households with children, and the Covid-19 pandemic continuing to affect work, health, and the economy, continuation of the advance CTC payments could help children avoid food insufficiency, with immediate and lifelong personal and societal benefits.”
“The most recent wave of HPS data,” Raifman and Bovell-Ammon noted, “show that food insufficiency is concentrated in the lowest-income households with children.”
“Implementing an expanded CTC without exclusions due to work or immigration status will best reach children in families with the greatest need, to the benefit of all children and society,” they added. “While some policymakers have considered work requirements to receive CTC benefits, such requirements carry an administrative burden for states and families that often prevents those who most need benefits from receiving them and results in negative outcomes.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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“Even brief disruptions in access to food can have lasting consequences,” wrote the authors of a new analysis of worsening hunger among U.S. families.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Leading public health experts plan to discuss the ongoing outbreak as the number of confirmed cases in the U.K. more than doubled on Friday to 20.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“Reading stories that reflect the diversity of our world builds empathy and respect for everyone’s humanity.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“It’s completely inappropriate” for Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney to be in charge of the House Democrats’ campaign arm “if he’s going to challenge another member,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Sunrise NYC denounced Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney’s plan to run against progressive Rep. Mondaire Jones “and potentially sacrifice the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives in the process.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Climate scientists and concerned citizens are sounding the alarm as daily, weekly, and monthly records for atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to be shattered while the fossil fuel-powered capitalist economic system responsible for skyrocketing greenhouse gas pollution plows ahead.
New data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that the weekly average CO² concentration at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii reached 421.13 parts per million (ppm) from May 8 to May 14—the highest in recorded history and up from 418.34 ppm one year ago and 397.38 ppm one decade ago.
“We simply do not know a planet like this,” meteorologist Eric Holthaus said Monday. “We are in a climate emergency.”
According to NOAA, the daily average CO² concentration at Mauna Loa hit 422.04 ppm on May 14, just slightly below the agency’s all-time record of 422.06 ppm observed on April 26. Researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, meanwhile, measured 421.68 ppm of CO² at Mauna Loa on May 13, which they consider the daily record as of Monday.
Those record-breaking daily and weekly measurements came after the monthly average CO² concentration at Mauna Loa surpassed 420 ppm for the first time in human history, with NOAA observing 420.23 ppm in April compared with Scripps at 420.02 ppm.
Pieter Tans, a senior scientist at NOAA, recently told Axios that “it is likely May will be higher still.”
“The window to act on climate change is closing,” American Clean Power warned recently on social media. “Accelerating the transition to clean energy will help reduce emissions and secure a healthier future for all.”
Twenty years ago, the highest monthly average CO² concentration was 375.93 ppm, according to NOAA. In 1958, the first year scientists began collecting data at Mauna Loa, it was 317.51 ppm.
Climate scientist James Hansen, who alerted congressional lawmakers to the life-threatening dangers of the climate crisis in 1988, has long called for reducing atmospheric CO² to below 350 ppm, and there is now a scientific consensus that the livability of the planet decreases beyond such a concentration.
Nevertheless, the annual rate of increase in CO² levels over the past six decades is now roughly 100 times faster than earlier increases that occurred naturally thousands of years ago.
“The world effectively has made no serious progress compared to what is required,” Tans said earlier this month. “We really need to focus on decreasing emissions and we haven’t had much success globally because the rate of increase of CO² remains as high as it has been in the last decade.”
“CO² has a longevity of hundreds to thousands of years,” he noted, “so we are really making a very long-term climate commitment.”
Speaking with the Financial Times recently, Tans added that “we are going in the wrong direction, at maximum speed.”
California-based activist Joe Sanberg put it even more bluntly last week.
“It’s shocking that we’re staring down the barrel of the greatest existential crisis humanity has ever faced and we still haven’t passed a Green New Deal,” Sanberg tweeted. “Time is running out. Either we drive the fossil fuel industry into extinction—or the human race.”
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
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“This is why we keep saying Trump is a clear and present danger to democracy.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“We have an infant hunger crisis looming,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley, “and a whole of government response is required.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Tuesday’s flurry of progressive victories, said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, demonstrates the growing strength of the left’s electoral movement.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.