Author: Kenny Stancil

  • The GOP effort in the state, said one opponent, “is the latest example of the orchestrated and ongoing attack from bad actors across the country on our democratic institutions.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

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    This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Jan. 17, 2022. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

    Prosecutors investigating Flint’s contaminated water crisis were pursuing a racketeering case against public officials whose austerity-driven policies caused the health catastrophe, but after newly elected Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel took over in 2019, those charges were dropped.

    According to Flint City Council Chair Eric Mays, who closely followed the criminal probe before and after 2018, “Nessel let it go.”

    That’s according to investigative journalist Jordan Chariton and Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Charlie LeDuff’s explosive new story, which was published Monday in The Guardian and sparked fresh questions about holding perpetrators responsible for the ongoing calamity.

    The Flint water crisis began nearly eight years ago when an unelected emergency manager appointed by then-Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, made the cost-cutting decision to switch the city’s tap water source from Detroit’s municipal supply to the Flint River, whose highly corrosive water caused aging pipes to leak lead into thousands of homes.

    From 2016 to 2018, prosecutors working under Michigan’s Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette were reportedly preparing to use a federal anti-organized crime statute—the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act—against state and city officials who, along with JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, played a role in the poisoning of Flint. But after those investigators were dismissed and the probe resumed under a new team, the RICO case never materialized.

    Environmental justice defender Monica Lewis-Patrick said Monday that “water warriors NEED to know” why Nessel “dropped the RICO charges in the Flint water crisis.”

    When Republican Schuette was running for governor against then-Democratic candidate Gretchen Whitmer in 2018, Nessel, a Democrat, characterized the term-limited AG she was aiming to replace as “an opportunist who has used the crisis to further his political ambitions via a series of politically charged show trials” and vowed to revamp the investigation.

    Soon after winning and taking office, Nessel fired the lead prosecutors and investigators working on the Schuette-launched probe, and restarted the inquiry with a new team.

    “At that point,” Chariton and LeDuff reported, “the prosecution team assembled by Schuette had been working for nearly three years—and filed criminal charges against 15 Michigan state and Flint city officials, including four officials charged with financial fraud that prosecutors said triggered the water crisis.”

    “But when Nessel relaunched the investigation,” the pair wrote, “her office dropped charges against top state and city officials, citing flaws in the Schuette-era investigation. In 2021, Nessel’s office recharged several of those defendants—with a new round of indictments that included involuntary manslaughter, misconduct in office, obstruction of justice, extortion, and perjury. But gone were the financial fraud charges.”

    Last November, a federal judge approved a $626 million settlement for thousands of lead poisoning victims in Flint, but Chariton and LeDuff wrote Monday that “the disappearance of the financial fraud charges is significant because the bond deal that allowed the city of Flint to switch its water supply had been heavily investigated by the Schuette-era prosecution.”

    According to The Guardian:

    In 2014, Flint needed to borrow nearly $100m to join the proposed Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA), a new regional system that Flint would join as both a customer and part owner. But at the time, the city was broke and at its borrowing limit.

    A state-issued environmental order allowed the city to get around its debt limit and access $85m in funding, money earmarked for an “environmental calamity”—in this case, the cleanup of a local lime sludge pit. But the prosecution under Schuette alleged that the money supplied by this order for the cleanup was redirected for other purposes instead allowing Flint to issue tens of millions of dollars in bonds to join the KWA.

    The allegedly fraudulent environmental order also mandated that the city of Flint use the Flint River as its water source while the KWA pipeline was under construction. It outlined tens of millions of dollars in upgrades needed for the city’s water plant so that the plant could safely treat Flint River water for residents to drink. The problem: updates were nowhere near completed when the city switched its water supply to the Flint River in April 2014. In addition, a failure to add proper corrosion control chemicals into the Flint River water supply resulted in lead leaching off Flint’s older pipes and poisoning residents’ drinking water.

    Peter Hammer, a Wayne State law professor who authored an extensive civil rights report on the Flint water crisis, told The Guardian that he “never understood why the attorney general disrupted the initial investigation, dropped the initial charges, or set a different direction in her new charges that chart a course away from the issues of financing the KWA pipeline.”

    “Her decisions mean that some of the most important questions relating to the crisis—the political and economic forces driving the KWA pipeline—are not being addressed,” said Hammer. “This adds a new tragedy for the people of Flint who deserve to know the root causes of their suffering and to hold any financial wrongdoing accountable.”

    Responding to the new reporting, progressive podcast host Krystal Ball tweeted that “political corruption poisoned Flint and political corruption shielded the wrongdoers from accountability.”

    According to Flint City Council Chair Eric Mays, who closely followed the criminal probe before and after 2018, “Nessel let it go.”

    “Was it a lack of political or legal will? I cannot say,” Mays told The Guardian. “But it bothers me to this day her team hasn’t addressed it.”

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • “Renewable energy is starting to do to natural gas what natural gas did to coal.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “The damage done by rampant overproduction of virgin plastics and their lifecycle is irreversible—this is a threat to human civilization and the planet’s basic ability to maintain a habitable environment.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “Political corruption poisoned Flint and political corruption shielded the wrongdoers from accountability,” said one critic following new revelations.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • According to new reporting, the effort to rein in price-gouging is facing pushback from Democratic and Republican members of Congress alike.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • Coal mining truck in Kentucky

    A coalition of environmental groups slammed President Joe Biden on Friday for refusing to immediately reinstate the federal moratorium on coal leasing on public lands that was discarded more than four years ago by the Trump administration.

    While the U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) says that it is assessing its coal leasing program, the agency responsible for managing public lands has not taken steps to prevent new leases from being sold before a comprehensive environmental review is completed.

    Instead, the Biden administration continued to process applications for new coal leases throughout 2021, helping spark a 14% increase in coal consumption nationwide, which climate scientists say contributed to the ongoing, life-threatening surge in greenhouse gas emissions and global temperatures.

    Although the tribal and conservation organizations suing the DOI stress that nothing meaningful has been done to mitigate air, water, and climate damages caused by the federal coal leasing program, the U.S. Department of Justice asked a federal court not to rule on alleged legal violations in a filing submitted on Thursday.

    “The Biden administration cannot have it both ways on coal,” Jenny Harbine, managing attorney for Earthjustice’s Northern Rockies office, said Friday in a statement. “While they seem to recognize that it is indefensible to continue to allow coal leasing on public lands, they are also refusing to do the bare minimum by reinstating the Obama-era coal leasing moratorium.”

    As the coal industry and the states of Montana and Wyoming defend former President Donald Trump’s coal policy in court, the Biden administration is helping to prolong it through inaction, Indigenous rights and environmental advocates argue.

    Biden, who vowed on the campaign trail that he would halt fossil fuel extraction on public lands, “came into office promising to be a climate champion,” said Harbine. “But six years after [former] President [Barack] Obama paused our nation’s coal leasing we are now taking steps in the wrong direction.”

    After the DOI reversed the Obama-era moratorium in 2017, Earthjustice and a coalition of conservation groups, states, and the Northern Cheyenne Tribe won a legal challenge to that policy in 2019.

    The court ordered the DOI’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to conduct an environmental review, under the National Environmental Policy Act, before ending the coal leasing moratorium, the coalition explained.

    However, the groups added:

    The Trump-era BLM’s analysis refused to consider the full impact of that choice, instead analyzing only the impact of allowing six coal leases to move forward, including the Alton coal mine expansion in Utah, which a federal judge in Utah determined was approved illegally by the Trump administration. The BLM’s truncated environmental analysis applies to only six federal coal leases, so the groups went back to court in 2020 to challenge it.

    Last year, the Biden administration chose to maintain the Trump-era policy ending the coal leasing moratorium. In May of 2021, tribal and environmental groups filed an opening brief challenging the Biden administration’s decision to defend continued coal leasing on public lands.

    In a filing just last week, the Biden administration’s BLM defended two Trump-era resource management plans that failed to comply with a court order to account for impacts from burning publicly-owned coal, including on public health, and to consider alternatives that limit coal leasing in the Powder River Basin — the largest coal-producing region in the country.

    Michael Saul, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that “it’s appalling that the Biden administration is refusing to confront Trump’s reckless policy of federal coal leasing despite mounting, undeniable evidence of catastrophic climate change and rising fossil fuel emissions.”

    According to Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s Lands Protection Program, “The Biden administration is again missing an easy opportunity to back up its climate rhetoric by limiting the federal coal leasing program, which accounts for 11% of all U.S. climate pollution.”

    While Biden has promised that the U.S. government will take the climate crisis seriously, Jeremy Nichols, director of WildEarth Guardian’s Climate and Energy Program, said that “it seems as if he has no intention of following through with this promise.”

    “Coal is killing our climate, yet the Biden administration is defending it,” Nichols added.

    Saul emphasized that the president’s inaction “will worsen the climate emergency and the extinction crisis and lessen the chance that we’ll leave a livable planet to future generations.”

    “How can Biden explain this to his grandchildren?” he asked.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “Coal is killing our climate, yet the Biden administration is defending it” in federal court, one environmental advocate lamented.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

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    This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Jan. 14, 2022. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

    Two Democratic senators on Wednesday unveiled legislation that would prevent congressional lawmakers and their immediate families from trading stocks while in office, as new polling shows that an overwhelming majority of voters across the political spectrum support such a reform—something that Republicans putting forward competing proposals are trying to capitalize on.

    “Members of Congress should not be playing the stock market while we make federal policy,” Ossoff said in a statement.

    The Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act, introduced by Sens. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ), would amend the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 to require members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children to place certain investments into blind trusts or divest them—ensuring they don’t profit from privileged information obtained on Capitol Hill.

    “Members of Congress should not be playing the stock market while we make federal policy,” Ossoff said in a statement.

    Emphasizing that “elected leaders have access to valuable information that impacts policy, the economy, and entire industries,” Kelly said that if passed, the Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act “will put an end to corrupt insider trading and ensure that leaders in Congress focus on delivering results for their constituents, not their stock portfolios.”

    Members who violate the legislation’s rules would be fined their entire congressional salary.

    With their new bill, Ossoff and Kelly are defying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). As Sludge reported Wednesday:

    Pelosi made headlines last year with the multimillion dollar stock trades of her husband, investor Paul Pelosi, who among other plays exercised call options on Google stock in June that locked in $5.3 million in gains. Not done, the Pelosis purchased millions more in call options from December 17-21, just days after she defended the practice of stock trading by members of Congress in a press conference.

    Pelosi’s argument—based on an easily debunked claim that the 2012 STOCK Act’s financial transaction disclosure requirements prevent insider trading among members of Congress—was condemned by government watchdog groups and progressives, who warned that her opposition to regulating the practice could have negative political repercussions for the Democratic Party.

    Referencing recent polling, Ossoff said Wednesday that “3/4 of Americans agree” that lawmakers and their immediate family members should not be allowed to buy and sell stock while in office given conflicts of interest.

    The popularity of barring members of Congress from trading stocks has not been lost on Republicans. 

    As Common Dreams reported earlier this week, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is considering enacting such a ban if the GOP wins control of the House in the upcoming midterms.

    And on Wednesday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) unveiled his own, less stringent proposal to rein in Congress’ insider trading problem.

    Business Insider, which obtained a copy of Hawley’s bill, reported that the Missouri Republican’s legislation excludes dependent children—even though they may have access to the same nonpublic information as their lawmaking parent—and “would require violators to forfeit any profits gained from stock-trading directly to the U.S. Treasury.”

    Perdue and Loeffler were two of several lawmakers accused of using information obtained during early briefings about the threat posed by the coronavirus to buy and sell stocks.

    According to a survey conducted last month by the Trafalgar Group on behalf of the Convention of State Action, a conservative advocacy organization, roughly 76% of voters say that members of Congress and their spouses have an unfair advantage and should not be allowed to trade stocks while in office. That includes over 78% of Republicans and nearly 80% of Independents.

    As Common Dreams reported in April 2020, Republican and Democratic members of Congress made nearly 1,500 stock transactions worth up to $158 million in the weeks leading up to, and following the onset of, the COVID-19 pandemic—in many cases purchasing stocks in companies that might see a boost during the crisis and dumping stocks that seemed likely to decrease in value.

    Ossoff and Hawley are not the first lawmakers to introduce bills to combat insider trading among members of Congress, though the new legislation reflects growing momentum to tackle the issue. Ossoff acknowledged that his proposal is similar to the bipartisan TRUST in Congress Act, unveiled last year by Reps. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) and Chip Roy (R-TX).

    Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), meanwhile, noted on Wednesday night that she and Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, first introduced in 2018 and reportedly slated to be reintroduced this year, would ban “members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, federal judges, and other officials from owning and trading stock or serving on corporate boards.”

    Insider trading scandals played a major role in Ossoff and Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D-GA) victories over then-incumbent Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler during last year’s pivotal runoff elections in Georgia.

    Perdue and Loeffler were two of several lawmakers accused of using information obtained during early briefings about the threat posed by the coronavirus to buy and sell stocks.

    After Ossoff publicly condemned Perdue, calling him a “crook” who sought to profit from the COVID-19 pandemic while downplaying its severity and undermining his constituents’ access to healthcare, his Republican opponent refused to share a stage with him.

    Ossoff fulfilled his pledge to put his own stock portfolio into a blind trust last year, making him and Kelly two of just 10 sitting members of Congress to do so.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • “There is mounting evidence from the courts and in particular from juries that the public is taking the climate crisis… far more seriously than government and business.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “Most companies and financial institutions with the greatest ability to halt deforestation are doing little or nothing.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • The legislation is among a number of proposals to rein in lawmakers’ stock transactions.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “The legislative process in Washington has gotten so dysfunctional that it doesn’t even make much sense at all anymore,” Sen. Joe Manchin said in 2011. “We have become paralyzed by the filibuster.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “Facebook has bulldozed competition to dominate the market,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren. “We need to break up Big Tech and hold Facebook accountable for any violations of antitrust law.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “It’s not enough to go back to the Obama-era status quo.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “Ocean warming keeps breaking records, which is a reminder that the world needs action to combat climate change.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • The challengers say they have “reasonable suspicion that Rep. Cawthorn aided the insurrection, thereby disqualifying him from federal office.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “With ‘friends’ like these, the working class in this country barely needs enemies.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “They have no remorse and do not deserve any leniency,” Arbery’s mother said of her son’s killers.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “Courts are not politically accountable,” said liberal Justice Elena Kagan. “Courts have no epidemiological expertise. Why in the world would courts decide this question?”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • The Netherlands’ decision came despite an external review debunking Israel’s politically motivated claim that the Union of Agricultural Work Committees is a “terrorist organization.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “If the Senate doesn’t act now, we are guaranteeing that there will be more election chaos in 2022.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “We outlived and outmaneuvered the old mayor, city manager, and city attorney, who were all intent on policing us and the homeless out of existence,” said the local chapter of Food Not Bombs.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “At a time of massive income and wealth inequality working people, with great courage, are standing together against corporate greed,” said Sanders. “Their struggle is our collective struggle.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “Quarter after quarter our impressive grassroots fundraising has made clear that John has unrivaled and deeply enthusiastic grassroots support across the commonwealth,” said an adviser to the Fetterman campaign.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • With infections spreading like wildfire and pediatric hospitalizations for Covid-19 at an all-time high, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona admitted that there will be “bumps in the road” as schools attempt to reopen this week.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • The Department Of Health and Human Services, located in the Hubert H. Humphrey Building as seen on April 11, 2015, in Washington, D.C.

    As Medicare officials grapple with whether to cover Aduhelm — an Alzheimer’s medication approved by federal regulators despite a lack of evidence that the exorbitantly priced and potentially dangerous drug helps patients — many doctors are urging them not to.

    Medicare plans to issue a preliminary decision this month on whether the federal health insurance program for U.S. residents 65 and older will cover Aduhelm, a monoclonal antibody also known by its scientific name, aducanumab, The New York Times reported Friday. Following a public comment period, the high-stakes coverage decision is expected to be finalized by mid-April.

    “Please, please, please, do not cover this medicine,” Dr. James Castle, an Illinois neurologist who treats Alzheimer’s patients, wrote last July in the comment section of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) website. “Send a strong and clear message to the pharmaceutical industry that they need to show proof of both efficacy and safety before releasing their medicines on the market.”

    The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has faced sharp criticism for approving Aduhelm in June even though clinical trials exposed serious safety risks — 41% of patients experienced brain bleeding or swelling — and failed to demonstrate that the drug benefits Alzheimer’s patients. Three advisers resigned in protest.

    “Hopefully the planned investigation of the FDA will get to the bottom of why this medicine was ever cleared by the FDA,” Castle added, referring to FDA acting commissioner Janet Woodcock’s request for an independent probe into the agency’s review of Aduhelm, which followed an exposé showing “inappropriately close collaboration” between FDA officials and drugmaker Biogen.

    Regulators in the European Union on December 16 recommended against authorizing Aduhelm, and Canada’s leading Alzheimer’s research groups said last year that approving it “cannot be justified,” meaning that Medicare’s forthcoming decision could determine the drug’s fate.

    The Times reported:

    Roughly 80% of potential Aduhelm patients are old enough to receive Medicare, making the program’s coverage decision crucial. Private insurers often follow Medicare’s lead.

    Medicare almost always pays for FDA-approved drugs, at least for the medical conditions designated on their label, health policy experts said. But with Aduhelm, Medicare officials have undertaken a monthslong review that could result in no coverage, full coverage, or limited coverage.

    James Chambers, a researcher at the Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health at Tufts Medical Center, called the deliberations by CMS “truly unprecedented.”

    Sean Tunis, a former official with CMS who is now a senior fellow at the Tufts Medical Center, said that if Medicare denies coverage for Aduhelm, “it will be the first time ever that CMS has declined to pay for a drug that was approved by the FDA for its on-label indication.”

    The looming coverage decision will also affect the financial well-being of Medicare and millions of seniors.

    In November, officials at CMS announced that one of the largest-ever increases in Medicare Part B premiums would be implemented in 2022 — due in large part to the possibility of covering Aduhelm, whose price tag at the time was $56,000 per year.

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) implored President Joe Biden to intervene to prevent the rate hike. In a December 3 letter to the White House, Sanders wrote that “the notion that one pharmaceutical company can raise the price of one drug so much that it could negatively impact 57 million senior citizens and the future of Medicare is beyond absurd. With Democrats in control of the White House, the House, and the Senate, we cannot let that happen.”

    Amid weak sales and on the same day that 18 scientists released a statement that slammed the FDA’s approval of Aduhelm as “indefensible in both scientific and clinical terms” and called for its immediate withdrawal from the market, Biogen on December 20 slashed the drug’s price.

    The company is now charging $28,200 for an annual supply of infusions, which are administered monthly and necessitate regular MRI scans to monitor for potentially devastating side effects.

    Following Biogen’s announcement, David Mitchell, the founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs, argued that “the 50% price cut for Aduhelm demonstrates how arbitrary drug prices are.” He added that there should be a corresponding roll back in Medicare’s planned premium increase.

    And yet, despite Aduhelm’s reduced price and even though Medicare’s coverage of the drug remains uncertain, the Medicare Part B premium hike went into effect on Saturday, after Biden refused to heed Sanders’ advice to “take executive action to reinstate and expand the reasonable pricing clause that was established in 1989 by the National Institutes of Health requiring drug makers to charge reasonable prices for prescription drugs and treatments that receive federal funding.”

    As the Times noted on Friday, Aduhelm’s “new price is still much higher than many analysts have said is warranted.” The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, an independent non-profit organization, has estimated that the drug should have a price tag no higher than $3,000 to $8,400 per year.

    “The total cost to Medicare would depend on the terms it sets and how many patients decide to use Aduhelm,” the newspaper added. “About 1.5 million Americans may be eligible because they have mild Alzheimer’s-related dementia.”

    Chambers told the Times that “while it of course depends on Aduhelm’s utilization, it seems that even at $28,000 a year, Aduhelm would still be one of Medicare’s biggest drug expenses.”

    In a recent joint statement, the American Academy of Neurology, American Neurological Association, and Child Neurology Society said that if Medicare decides to cover Aduhelm, which typically means paying 80% of its cost, “many beneficiaries would pay thousands of dollars of out-of-pocket costs for a drug with substantial risks and without proven clinical benefit.”

    The Times explained that “in evaluating Aduhelm, Medicare officials are supposed to decide if it is a ‘reasonable and necessary’ treatment.”

    According to Tunis, that phrase typically “means adequate evidence of improved health outcomes.”

    “If you go strictly by what the language is, this doesn’t meet Medicare’s ‘reasonable and necessary’ criteria because the FDA themselves says there’s no direct evidence of improved cognition,” he told the newspaper.

    According to the Times, “Tunis, who also works as a consultant, including advising Biogen, before Aduhelm was approved, about Medicare’s various options for coverage… added that the FDA’s requirement that Biogen conduct another trial (which will take years while Aduhelm is available to patients) ‘implies that the cognitive benefits have not yet been shown.’”

    Michael Greicius, medical director of the Stanford Center for Memory Disorders and a co-author of an open letter signed by 180 Alzheimer’s doctors, told the Times that “I’m still quietly hoping that January is going to roll around and they’re going to say: ‘Look, we’re not going to cover this. The evidence is too poor.’”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Georgia Republican, however, can still access and tweet from her official congressional account.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • If Medicare decides to cover up to 80% of Aduhelm’s cost, “many beneficiaries would pay thousands of dollars of out-of-pocket costs for a drug with substantial risks and without proven clinical benefit.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stands for the national anthem during a welcome ceremony for Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak at the Pentagon October 6, 2021, in Arlington, Virginia.

    President Joe Biden signed a record-shattering military budget earlier this week, and a new analysis published Thursday predicted that if recent contracting trends continue, the Pentagon will funnel $407 billion worth of public funds to private weapons makers this fiscal year — more than the federal government spent when sending $1,400 relief checks to most Americans in 2021.

    Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, found that “from fiscal year (FY) 2002 to FY2021, 55% of all Pentagon spending went to private sector military contractors.”

    “If the privatization of funds rate over the last 20 years holds,” Semler noted, “it means [the] military industry will get about $407 billion from Biden’s first military budget — $16 billion more than the $391 billion those $1,400 stimulus checks cost the government earlier this year.”

    The National Defense Authorization Act for FY2022 was passed with broad bipartisan support earlier this month in the House, where the margin was 363-70, and in the Senate, where the vote was 88-11. By signing the bill into law on Monday, Biden approved a record-high $778 billion military budget.

    Even though U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan in August, Republicans and Democrats awash in weapons industry cash refused to support popular amendments to reduce Pentagon spending.

    In fact, lawmakers in the House and the Senate added $25 billion — which happens to be the amount of funding that progressive advocacy group Public Citizen says is necessary to ramp up vaccine manufacturing to inoculate the world against Covid-19 — on top of the already gargantuan $753 billion military budget requested by Biden back in May.

    Semler’s calculations are based on the Pentagon’s $740 billion “base” budget — that is, the money allocated strictly to the Defense Department and not the additional $38 billion worth of “nuclear funding from the Energy Department or funding from elsewhere, even though that stuff is rightly considered military spending, too,” he pointed out.

    “Military spending involves a massive redistribution of wealth from the public to private sector,” wrote Semler. “There are over 700 lobbyists representing for-profit military contractors in D.C., and this redistribution of wealth is why they’re there.”

    In a Jacobin essay published Thursday, Semler argued that Biden is doubling down on the “New Cold War” framework embraced by former President Donald Trump, whose administration claimed that the best way for the U.S. to prevent an armed confrontation with China and Russia “is to be prepared to win one.”

    According to Semler:

    The difference between Trump’s arms race and Biden’s was supposed to be that the latter would bring a commensurate rise in social outlays. Biden campaigned on spending $7 trillion over a decade—or $700 billion per year, on average—for civil infrastructure, transportation, climate, healthcare, education, and other social programs.

    Once in office, Biden’s plan was to beat the drum on China, triggering a rally ’round the flag effect that would convince Congress—conservatives included—to budget for both military and economic competition. As a Democratic congressional aide told Vox in the first months of the Biden presidency, “[t]he best way to enact a progressive agenda is to use China [as a] threat.”

    “The Biden administration has done its best to put that theory into action,” Semler argued. “But Biden’s Cold Warrior experiment has failed.”

    “While military spending is shooting up as expected — Biden’s budget allocates nearly $40 billion more than the Trump administration, $170 billion more than Obama’s last budget, and 5% more than he campaigned on — less than 8% of the funding Biden sought for his domestic agenda has come through,” he continued.

    “Adjusted on a per-year average,” Semler added, “Biden has only delivered $55 billion of the $700 billion he promised for human and physical infrastructure for fiscal year 2022.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.