This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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The USDA’s new pilot program “continues to put industry profits over protecting the safety of our food supply,” said one attorney.
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“The CBO score is not going to ‘cost out’ because CBO is not allowed by rule to say that giving the IRS a bunch of money will lead to better tax collection,” said one critic. “If you think that’s insane you’re right!”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Some fear that recent decisions in Oklahoma and California could set a precedent that has far-reaching negative implications for the legal strategy used by environmental and public health advocates.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“Unless President Biden defuses the Permian climate bomb exploding in my backyard,” said one opponent from El Paso, “we won’t prevent catastrophic climate change.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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The fact that heavily Trump counties had over three times more Covid-19 deaths in October than heavily Biden counties shows that “anti-science aggression on the right has had deadly consequences,” said one epidemiologist.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“Poverty doesn’t have to exist,” said U.S. Senate candidate Charles Booker. “The Kentucky New Deal is our vision to bring it to an end.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“It’s terrible for worker safety and public health that three conservative activist judges have suspended Biden’s… new rule requiring workers at companies with more than 100 workers to get vaccinated or tested.”
This content originally appeared on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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The U.S. House on Friday night passed a bipartisan physical infrastructure bill but didn’t bring the Build Back Better Act to the floor — sending just one half of President Joe Biden’s two-pronged economic agenda to the White House, with only a pledge that conservative House Democrats will vote for the party’s broader social infrastructure and climate package at a later date.
That wasn’t the plan on Friday morning. When the day started, Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said they wanted House Democrats to pass both parts of the president’s legislative agenda: the Build Back Better Act (BBB), which would invest $1.75 trillion over 10 years to strengthen climate action and the welfare state; and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (BIF), a fossil fuel-friendly proposal to upgrade the nation’s roads, bridges, and ports that was approved by the U.S. Senate in August.
Due to the intransigence of a few right-wing House Democrats who made last-minute demands for additional fiscal information that could take weeks to obtain, and the acquiescence of Pelosi and Biden, a planned floor vote on BBB was shelved and reduced to a “rule for consideration,” which was approved in a party-line vote of 221-213. Prior to that, BIF passed by a tally of 228-206, with 13 House Republicans joining most Democrats in supporting the measure.
Because it wasn’t accompanied by a real vote on BBB, six progressives — Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — voted against BIF.
“Passing the infrastructure bill without passing the Build Back Better Act first,” Omar said in a statement, “risks leaving behind child care, paid leave, healthcare, climate action, housing, education, and a roadmap to citizenship.”
For months, progressives have stressed — and Democratic leaders had agreed — that keeping both pieces of legislation linked and passing them in tandem was key to securing Biden’s entire agenda. Holding a floor vote on BIF and a mere procedural action on BBB, progressives argued Friday, was a betrayal of the two-track strategy that opens the door for right-wing party members who are content with the passage of BIF to further weaken, or completely abandon, the already heavily gutted BBB.
“We’re proud of the Squad for being courageous and standing up for what’s right tonight,” Varshini Prakash, executive director of Sunrise Movement, said in a statement. “It’s bullshit that President Biden and Speaker Pelosi rammed through a bill written by a bunch of corporations but feel fine to hold off on passing Biden’s own agenda, a popular bill that would actually combat climate change and help working people.”
“To be clear, the BIF is not a climate bill and the stakes of the climate crisis are too high to delay reconciliation any longer, or worse, let it die along with our futures,” added Prakash.
Mary Small, national advocacy director at the Indivisible Project, said in a statement that Bowman, Bush, Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib “demonstrated enormous political courage in their continued fight to hold the line for passage of the Build Back Better Act.”
“They understand better than anyone what’s at stake with this game-changing package of investments in children and families and our climate,” Small added. “Their votes showed that, unlike the corporate Democrats dead-set on derailing the heart of President Biden’s agenda on behalf of their corporate donors, they know what it means to serve the people they represent.”
Even though analyses of spending and revenue conducted by the U.S. Treasury Department, the White House, and the Joint Committee on Taxation have found that BBB is paid for and may actually reduce deficits, a small group of conservative House Democrats on Friday insisted on seeing an official score from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) before they would vote for BBB.
Given the razor-thin margins in Congress, Democrats can afford only three defections in the House and none in the Senate to pass BBB through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process. Meanwhile, it could take the CBO weeks to produce a score, and there is no guarantee that the holdouts will be satisfied with the results, which are notoriously arbitrary and unreliable, according to experts.
Never forget: The CBO Director, who is a Republican, estimated that a $15 an hour minimum wage would increase the on-budget deficit by nearly $77 billion while other major economists and academics told us that a $15 minimum wage would substantially REDUCE the deficit. Not good. https://t.co/IzgDKTCWet
— Warren Gunnels (@GunnelsWarren) November 6, 2021
Ironically, the CBO determined earlier this year that the $550 billion BIF adds $256 billion to the deficit. BIF supporters’ lack of concern about such a finding prompted critics to suggest that Friday’s request for a CBO score by several right-wing House Democrats, including Reps. Ed Case (Hawaii), Jared Golden (Maine), Stephanie Murphy (Fla.), Kathleen Rice (N.Y.), Kurt Schrader (Ore.), and Abigail Spanberger (Va.) was nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to tank the more ambitious portion of Biden’s agenda.
Welcome to “Who’s a Deficit Hawk Anyway?”, where the debt concerns are made up and the CBO scores don’t matter https://t.co/ytfqsm6W0w
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 5, 2021
Although those lawmakers’ constituents support BBB by large margins, powerful corporate interests opposed to the legislation have carried out a massive lobbying blitz against the bill’s key provisions and showered obstructionist politicians with cash.
Following the CBO curveball, Pelosi proposed bringing BIF to the floor for a vote and passing a rule to set up a future vote on BBB. The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) originally rejected this plan, which deviated from the Democratic Party’s well-established strategy of enacting the two bills simultaneously.
CPC Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said in a Friday afternoon statement that “if our six colleagues still want to wait for a CBO score, we would agree to give them that time—after which point we can vote on both bills together.” Roughly 20 CPC members reportedly told Jayapal during a closed-door meeting on Friday afternoon that they would vote against BIF if it was decoupled from BBB.
According to Manu Raju, chief congressional correspondent at CNN, progressives were left wondering: “Why is Pelosi putting the infrastructure bill on [the] floor and daring them to vote against it when there are 20 or so who won’t support it tonight? Why not put Build Back Better on [the] floor and dare 6 moderates to vote against it?”
Over the course of several hours, conservative House Democrats, led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), and the CPC, led by Jayapal, worked out a deal, at the behest of Biden.
progressive caucus evolution
1. Senate must pass Build Back Better before House votes on infrastructure bill
2. House must pass Build Back Better before House votes on infrastructure bill
3. House may pass infrastructure after centrists say they will support Build Back Better
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) November 6, 2021
CPC member Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) told The Hill that Biden was urging progressives to vote for BIF as well as the rule for consideration of BBB, “subject to some assurances and commitments that he was working to get.”
Those “assurances and commitments” came in the form of a statement from Case, Gottheimer, Murphy, Rice, and Schrader, which said: “We commit to voting for the Build Back Better Act, in its current form other than technical changes, as expeditiously as we receive fiscal information from the Congressional Budget Office—but in no event later than the week of November 15—consistent with the toplines for revenues and investments” projected by the White House.
The Intercept’s Ryan Grim argued that while “the focus is on progressives,” the few conservative lawmakers preventing both bills from passing on Friday were “doing it right in the open.”
Calling the corporate Democrats’ statement “foolishness,” former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner said that if they are committed to voting for BBB “no later than November 15, they can do it now.”
If the corporatist Dems can vote on BBB no later than November 15, they can do it now. The people who have the greatest needs are always placed on the back burner. This is foolishness.
— Nina Turner (@ninaturner) November 6, 2021
Other critics also raised questions about conservative Democrats’ endgame.
“A statement of support for BBB that is contingent on the CBO score could be more of an escape hatch… than a commitment to vote for BBB,” warned Adam Jentleson, a former congressional staffer and current executive director of the Battle Born Collective, a progressive communications firm.
Buyer beware! A statement of support for BBB that is contingent on the CBO score could be more of an escape hatch for mods than a commitment to vote for BBB.
— Adam Jentleson
(@AJentleson) November 6, 2021While progressives are being told to trust the obstructionists, who “have promised to vote for BBB when the CBO score comes in and says what everybody says it will say,” Grim noted, he questioned why those conservative Democrats are refusing to accept reputable budget estimates already provided by the White House and others.
“Progressives’ lack of trust in these few holdouts,” he added, “flows from the complete illogic of their public position, which raises questions about their actual position.”
Biden, for his part, said in a statement that he is “confident that during the week of November 15, the House will pass the Build Back Better Act.” But that still leaves the Senate, where the Democratic Party’s two biggest obstacles to social investments—right-wing Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.)—are waiting, with less incentive to support BBB now that BIF has been approved.
In a statement, Tlaib warned that “passing BIF gives up our leverage to get Build Back Better through the House and Senate, and I fear that we are missing our once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in the American people.”
Welp. Now I guess we just trust Gottheimer & Manchin do the right thing, because of how trustworthy they've been so far. https://t.co/9opEeGcy6H
— David Roberts (@drvolts) November 6, 2021
Paul Williams, a fellow at the Jain Family Institute, noted that “the issue of course is that there’s no guarantee the CBO will even have scores out for BBB by Nov. 15—the day BIF becomes law even with no signature, and thus very slim chance it even gets to the Senate by that date, and zero chance Senate makes its changes and passes by then.”
“With BIF passed, one could easily imagine a scenario where Manchin just walks—he would have what he came to get, a bipartisan bill,” Williams added. “Of course Biden could use [the] threat of [a] veto to send BIF back to Congress, but he only has 10 days—Nov. 15—to do so before it becomes law with no action.”
Indivisible pointed out that “if the White House and Democratic leadership had spent more time today moving the corporate conservative Democrats hell-bent on standing in the way of these critical and massively popular proposals instead of forcing progressives to support a position that puts it all at risk, we might be in a different place.”
Ahead of the vote, Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, suggested that Democrats “include a deeming resolution in which they vote for the BIF but hold it at Pelosi’s desk until the House passes BBB,” but such language was not introduced.
“Progressives again negotiated in good faith and again reiterated their commitment to passing the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework alongside the Build Back Better Act,” said Indivisible. “The reason we’re not celebrating a major victory tonight sits squarely with the conservative Democrats who sabotaged progress at every turn. They reminded us again that they work for their corporate donors and not the people they represent. We won’t soon forget.”
“We are counting on President Biden to follow through on his commitment to deliver the votes needed for final passage in the House and Senate, and on [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer (D-N.Y.) to put the Build Back Better Act on the Senate floor as soon as it is received from the House.”
Sunrise Movement, meanwhile, put this fight into the context of the United States’ fraying democracy.
“Progressives have made enough compromises. Our movement has fought hard to defend the president’s popular agenda and do what’s best for working people and our democracy,” said Prakash. “If Democrats fail to deliver on their elected promises, they risk everything in 2022 and 2024.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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“We can either intensify the crisis to the point of no return, or lay the foundations for a just world where everyone’s needs are met.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“Passing the infrastructure bill without passing the Build Back Better Act first,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar, “risks leaving behind child care, paid leave, healthcare, climate action, housing, education, and a roadmap to citizenship.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“Passing the bipartisan infrastructure bill before the Build Back Better Act means Democrats would be trusting Manchin and Sinema at their word to vote for it in the Senate,” said Nina Turner.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Following Terry McAuliffe’s Tuesday night loss in Virginia’s gubernatorial election and amid the White House’s ongoing failure to enact redistributive legislation due to obstruction from Republicans and right-wing Democrats in Congress, progressives are urging President Joe Biden to fully embrace and use his executive authority to challenge corporate power, which they say might give people a reason to vote for his party in next year’s midterms.
“The story of the midterm elections will be whether Biden chooses to spend the next 12 months focusing on speechifying pablum or substantive corporate accountability,” Jeff Hauser, the founder and director of the Revolving Door Project, wrote Wednesday in a blog post.
Hauser’s commentary came in the wake of McAuliffe’s defeat to “failed Carlyle private equity mogul-turned-Trump dog whistler Glenn Youngkin,” which progressives attributed to the conservative Democratic candidate’s utter lack of a pro-working class economic agenda — warning that unless they start campaigning on and delivering material gains for the vast majority, Democrats can expect similar outcomes nationwide one year from now.
“Why is a hysterical, imagined version of ‘critical race theory’ the main villain discussed in Virginia and elsewhere?” asked Hauser, who pointed out that “Glenn Youngkin’s firm, the Carlyle Group, fired thousands of unionized workers for profit.” While “a non-compromised nominee would have been able to hammer Youngkin on the ways his greed devastated real people and connected that critique to issues in Virginia,” McAuliffe, a Carlyle investor, was unwilling to do so.
Turning to Biden, Hauser wrote that “as their poll numbers slump,” the president and his administration “have mostly whimpered that they are the victims of circumstance.”
“These immensely powerful men too often make excuses by pretending to be helpless, primarily because they are afraid of making powerful enemies — most especially, corporations and the ultra-wealthy,” argued Hauser. “But if they and other Democrats refuse to fight for the people, the people will seek fighters elsewhere.”
Re-up from yesterday: Biden should focus on what he controls (THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH!) rather than bemoan what he does not. https://t.co/WkmO4fVM5x
— Jeff Hauser (@jeffhauser) November 4, 2021
Hauser proceeded to provide examples of how Biden’s executive branch could “enforce laws limiting corporate misbehavior — which would also be overdue good politics.”
For instance, asked Hauser, “if the Biden administration is so worried about supply chain disruptions, why isn’t it tackling the ultimate cause of the problem — corporate greed?”
“Profiteering companies embraced just-in-time logistics and swallowed any redundancies into bloated monopolies,” he added. “Why isn’t the Biden administration attacking firms which cared more about their dividends than their actual operations? Why isn’t the administration dusting off little-used statutory powers to mitigate and resolve these disruptions? Why is there no ‘Supply Chain Profiteering Task Force’ identifying the obstacles to normalcy in American transportation?”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has argued that it’s necessary to “put the pandemic behind us” in order to address supply chain issues, but Hauser criticized Buttigieg for refusing to immediately “us[e] federal law to fight for consumers and against profiteers.”
Moreover, Hauser asked, “how can we ‘put the pandemic behind us’ in a world that remains largely unvaccinated thanks to Big Pharma greed?”
As Public Citizen has stressed for months, the Biden administration could, with an investment of just $25 billion dollars — around 3% of what the U.S. spends on its military each year — establish regional manufacturing hubs around the world to produce eight billion coronavirus vaccine doses in less than a year.
However, as of late August, Biden had spent less than 0.01% of the $16 billion in Covid-19 pandemic response funds provided by Congress to expand global vaccine manufacturing, according to PrEP4All.
While Moderna, which is raking in billions of dollars in profits thanks to its monopolization of publicly funded knowledge, has refused to share its vaccine recipe, the federal government owns a patent covering a key spike-protein technology used in the jabs, which gives it the legal authority to distribute the ingredient list and manufacturing instructions.
“Why hasn’t the administration fought tooth and nail to actually end the intellectual property restrictions which strangle our global vaccine supply for the sake of blood-stained profits?” asked Hauser.
As progressives welcome the reintroduction of drug price reform into the Build Back Better Act — while lamenting the fact that the new version is a hollowed-out shell of the overwhelmingly popular proposal to allow Medicare to secure a wide array of affordable medications through direct negotiations with pharmaceutical corporations — Hauser stressed that the White House is missing opportunities to tackle Big Pharma’s deadly price gouging in ways that circumvent opposition from industry-funded lawmakers, including Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WVa.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.).
“Forget Manchin, Sinema, and narrow congressional majorities,” he wrote. “The executive branch has extraordinary powers to rein in that industry. Why hasn’t Biden used them?”
Last Thursday, in an attempt to appease a few conservative Democratic obstructionists, Biden unveiled a heavily gutted Build Back Better framework that proposes cutting the previously agreed-upon 10-year spending level in half, from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion, by removing or watering down several popular provisions.
Just one day earlier, Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said that “the challenge that we face in this really unusual moment in American history is whether we have the courage to stand with the American people and take on very powerful special interests.”
“If we fail — in my view, if the American people do not believe that government can work for them and is dominated by powerful special interests, the very fabric of American democracy is in danger,” he added.
According to journalist David Dayen, even though “Biden didn’t get everything he claimed to want” in the budget reconciliation package, there is still a lot that he can accomplish through executive action. “His hands aren’t tied here,” said Dayen, who shared The American Prospect’s “Executive Action Tracker,” which monitors 77 significant policies Biden can implement without relying on legislation from Congress.
Biden didn’t get everything he claimed to want. He can get much of it (in particular lower drug prices) through executive action. His hands aren’t tied here.https://t.co/A7PLcCudlY
— David Dayen (@ddayen) October 28, 2021
And in a recent interview with Common Dreams, former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, the national co-chair of Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, said that the voters who elected Biden “are going to want to see something that changes their lives.”
Turner argued that the president should use his executive power “in a deeper way” to fight for voting rights, and she recommended that progressives demand that Biden cancel $1.9 trillion worth of student loan debt in exchange for supporting his favored bills.
Hauser, meanwhile, said Wednesday that “America is in a populist moment. If Democrats won’t harness that then the right wing will, substituting their bigoted fantasies for the actual forces which make life worse for Americans.”
Hauser’s warning echoed a recent argument made by The Daily Poster’s David Sirota and Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney, who co-authored a piece in Rolling Stone to mark the start of their new podcast series Meltdown, which explores how the Democratic Party’s refusal to deliver real help to millions of people in the aftermath of the Great Recession “fueled the ascent of [former President] Donald Trump — and… continues to fuel the MAGA movement today.”
When responding to the Great Depression, the pair wrote, former President Franklin Roosevelt “cast his progressive economic initiatives as both a weapon to fight the economic crisis and a shield against right-wing authoritarianism.”
“Democrats still have time to wake up, realize the existential threat before them, channel Roosevelt, and enact policies that immediately help people in order to avert an even bigger meltdown than the one in 2016,” Sirota and Gibney argued. “But time is running out.”
In response to a critic who said that the article overlooked the extent to which Manchin and Sinema are responsible for undermining Biden’s agenda, Sirota also identified several ways in which the president has failed to use his existing executive authority, and others have detailed how much further Roosevelt’s executive branch went to stave off catastrophe.
Joe Biden hasn’t used his existing executive authority to (among many other things) lower drug prices, crack down on union busters, cancel student debt, or more widely distribute government-subsidized vaccines. This is in our article and notably absent from your dishonest tweet. https://t.co/NJJKMsslBi
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) October 28, 2021
According to Hauser, “Actual politics requires taking action against actual villains to solve problems, not the shrugging and cowering which elites persuade themselves is ‘savvy.’”
“There is no direct public policy response to the fantasies that the right-wing media ecosystem pushes,” he added, “but an active executive branch can generate an interesting counternarrative surrounding a president’s war on corporate corruption.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The industry is expected to break its lobbying record after spending tens of millions of dollars to undermine a popular proposal to reduce prescription drug costs.
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 Nov. 4, 2021. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Following Terry McAuliffe’s Tuesday night loss in Virginia’s gubernatorial election and amid the White House’s ongoing failure to enact redistributive legislation due to obstruction from Republicans and right-wing Democrats in Congress, progressives are urging President Joe Biden to fully embrace and use his executive authority to challenge corporate power, which they say might give people a reason to vote for his party in next year’s midterms.
“If… Democrats refuse to fight for the people, the people will seek fighters elsewhere.”
“The story of the midterm elections will be whether Biden chooses to spend the next 12 months focusing on speechifying pablum or substantive corporate accountability,” Jeff Hauser, the founder and director of the Revolving Door Project, wrote Wednesday in a blog post.
Hauser’s commentary came in the wake of McAuliffe’s defeat to “failed Carlyle private equity mogul-turned-Trump dog whistler Glenn Youngkin,” which progressives attributed to the conservative Democratic candidate’s utter lack of a pro-working class economic agenda—warning that unless they start campaigning on and delivering material gains for the vast majority, Democrats can expect similar outcomes nationwide one year from now.
“Why is a hysterical, imagined version of ‘critical race theory’ the main villain discussed in Virginia and elsewhere?” asked Hauser, who pointed out that “Glenn Youngkin’s firm, the Carlyle Group, fired thousands of unionized workers for profit.” While “a non-compromised nominee would have been able to hammer Youngkin on the ways his greed devastated real people and connected that critique to issues in Virginia,” McAuliffe, a Carlyle investor, was unwilling to do so.
Turning to Biden, Hauser wrote that “as their poll numbers slump,” the president and his administration “have mostly whimpered that they are the victims of circumstance.”
“These immensely powerful men too often make excuses by pretending to be helpless, primarily because they are afraid of making powerful enemies—most especially, corporations and the ultra-wealthy,” argued Hauser. “But if they and other Democrats refuse to fight for the people, the people will seek fighters elsewhere.”
Hauser proceeded to provide examples of how Biden’s executive branch could “enforce laws limiting corporate misbehavior—which would also be overdue good politics.”
For instance, asked Hauser, “if the Biden administration is so worried about supply chain disruptions, why isn’t it tackling the ultimate cause of the problem—corporate greed?”
“Profiteering companies embraced just-in-time logistics and swallowed any redundancies into bloated monopolies,” he added. “Why isn’t the Biden administration attacking firms which cared more about their dividends than their actual operations? Why isn’t the administration dusting off little-used statutory powers to mitigate and resolve these disruptions? Why is there no ‘Supply Chain Profiteering Task Force’ identifying the obstacles to normalcy in American transportation?”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has argued that it’s necessary to “put the pandemic behind us” in order to address supply chain issues, but Hauser criticized Buttigieg for refusing to immediately “us[e] federal law to fight for consumers and against profiteers.”
Moreover, Hauser asked, “how can we ‘put the pandemic behind us’ in a world that remains largely unvaccinated thanks to Big Pharma greed?”
“Actual politics requires taking action against actual villains to solve problems, not… shrugging and cowering.”
As Public Citizen has stressed for months, the Biden administration could, with an investment of just $25 billion dollars—around 3% of what the US spends on its military each year—establish regional manufacturing hubs around the world to produce eight billion coronavirus vaccine doses in less than a year.
However, as of late August, Biden had spent less than 0.01% of the $16 billion in COVID-19 pandemic response funds provided by Congress to expand global vaccine manufacturing, according to PrEP4All.
While Moderna, which is raking in billions of dollars in profits thanks to its monopolization of publicly funded knowledge, has refused to share its vaccine recipe, the federal government owns a patent covering a key spike-protein technology used in the jabs, which gives it the legal authority to distribute the ingredient list and manufacturing instructions.
“Why hasn’t the administration fought tooth and nail to actually end the intellectual property restrictions which strangle our global vaccine supply for the sake of blood-stained profits?” asked Hauser.
As progressives welcome the reintroduction of drug price reform into the Build Back Better Act—while lamenting the fact that the new version is a hollowed-out shell of the overwhelmingly popular proposal to allow Medicare to secure a wide array of affordable medications through direct negotiations with pharmaceutical corporations—Hauser stressed that the White House is missing opportunities to tackle Big Pharma’s deadly price gouging in ways that circumvent opposition from industry-funded lawmakers, including Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WVa.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.).
“Forget Manchin, Sinema, and narrow congressional majorities,” he wrote. “The executive branch has extraordinary powers to rein in that industry. Why hasn’t Biden used them?”
Last Thursday, in an attempt to appease a few conservative Democratic obstructionists, Biden unveiled a heavily gutted Build Back Better framework that proposes cutting the previously agreed-upon 10-year spending level in half, from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion, by removing or watering down several popular provisions.
Just one day earlier, Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said that “the challenge that we face in this really unusual moment in American history is whether we have the courage to stand with the American people and take on very powerful special interests.”
“If we fail—in my view, if the American people do not believe that government can work for them and is dominated by powerful special interests, the very fabric of American democracy is in danger,” he added.
According to journalist David Dayen, even though “Biden didn’t get everything he claimed to want” in the budget reconciliation package, there is still a lot that he can accomplish through executive action. “His hands aren’t tied here,” said Dayen, who shared The American Prospect‘s “Executive Action Tracker,” which monitors 77 significant policies Biden can implement without relying on legislation from Congress.
And in a recent interview with Common Dreams, former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, the national co-chair of Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, said that the voters who elected Biden “are going to want to see something that changes their lives.”
Turner argued that the president should use his executive power “in a deeper way” to fight for voting rights, and she recommended that progressives demand that Biden cancel $1.9 trillion worth of student loan debt in exchange for supporting his favored bills.
Hauser, meanwhile, said Wednesday that “America is in a populist moment. If Democrats won’t harness that then the right wing will, substituting their bigoted fantasies for the actual forces which make life worse for Americans.”
Hauser’s warning echoed a recent argument made by The Daily Poster‘s David Sirota and Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney, who co-authored a piece in Rolling Stone to mark the start of their new podcast series Meltdown, which explores how the Democratic Party’s refusal to deliver real help to millions of people in the aftermath of the Great Recession “fueled the ascent of [former President] Donald Trump—and… continues to fuel the MAGA movement today.”
When responding to the Great Depression, the pair wrote, former President Franklin Roosevelt “cast his progressive economic initiatives as both a weapon to fight the economic crisis and a shield against right-wing authoritarianism.”
“Democrats still have time to wake up, realize the existential threat before them, channel Roosevelt, and enact policies that immediately help people in order to avert an even bigger meltdown than the one in 2016,” Sirota and Gibney argued. “But time is running out.”
In response to a critic who said that the article overlooked the extent to which Manchin and Sinema are responsible for undermining Biden’s agenda, Sirota also identified several ways in which the president has failed to use his existing executive authority, and others have detailed how much further Roosevelt’s executive branch went to stave off catastrophe.
According to Hauser, “Actual politics requires taking action against actual villains to solve problems, not the shrugging and cowering which elites persuade themselves is ‘savvy.’”
“There is no direct public policy response to the fantasies that the right-wing media ecosystem pushes,” he added, “but an active executive branch can generate an interesting counternarrative surrounding a president’s war on corporate corruption.”
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
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“The story of the midterm elections will be whether Biden chooses to spend the next 12 months focusing on speechifying pablum or substantive corporate accountability.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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According to the Pentagon’s assessment, the military “followed all rules and then killed an entire family,” said one critic. “Might the rules, or the whole drone project, need a review?”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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As redistricting kicks into full gear and GOP-controlled states follow Texas’ anti-democratic playbook this week by advancing congressional and state legislative maps that would disenfranchise communities of color and cement Republican power for at least a decade, voting rights advocates are once again urging Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill to swiftly pass federal legislation to reverse partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression laws.
“Democrats… could soon be powerless to stop the GOP’s takeover of the U.S. House and state Capitols for the next decade.”
“Time is really running out for [Democrats] to pass voting rights legislation to reverse extreme gerrymandering,” journalist and author Ari Berman said Wednesday.
Berman was reacting to a proposed congressional map unveiled Wednesday morning by Ohio House Republicans that “could give the GOP a 13-2 advantage among representatives to the U.S. House despite voter-approved changes to prevent gerrymandering,” as Jessie Balmert of The Columbus Dispatch reported.
Although former President Donald Trump won Ohio with just over half of the vote in the 2020 election, 86% of the state’s 15 U.S. House seats could soon be occupied by Republicans thanks to partisan gerrymandering.
According to Balmert, Ohio House Democrats didn’t see a copy of their GOP colleagues’ proposed map until 10:42 a.m., just 18 minutes before the committee meeting started, prompting Michael Li, a voting rights expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, to say, “This is not how redistricting is supposed to work.”
Other critics say that Ohio’s entire redistricting process—not only the House GOP’s failure to give Democrats in the chamber ample review time—has been marred by a lack of fairness and transparency.
After the Ohio House Government Oversight Committee and the Senate Local Government and Elections Committee announced that they will hold hearings Thursday on bills that are simply placeholders and do not present actual maps—scheduling the two public meetings within half an hour of one another—advocates demanded that the Ohio General Assembly provide citizens with meaningful opportunities to participate.
“The congressional maps that state lawmakers draw will impact Ohioans’ voting power for the next decade,” Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, said Wednesday in a statement. “The public deserves to have a seat at the table.”
“Despite voters’ repeated pleas and public demonstrations for more opportunities to participate, state leaders have intentionally made it difficult for even the most informed voters to weigh in,” Turcer continued. “Field hearings were focused only on state legislative mapmaking. The state Legislature held no public hearings in September and the Ohio Redistricting Commission convened only once.”
As The Hill reported on Monday:
A new bipartisan commission tasked with redrawing Ohio’s political boundaries every decade surrendered its authority to draw congressional districts without even considering a proposal, punting the decision to a state legislature overwhelmingly controlled by Republicans.
The commission, created three years ago with the support of more than 70% of Ohio voters, held just one meeting to consider congressional district boundaries.
“The congressional redistricting process is really just getting started,” Turcer added. “It is time for the state Legislature to make a dramatic change by publicizing a plan for public hearings for the month of November. Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved the new rules for congressional mapmaking and we expect a much more transparent and participatory process.”
Ohio is far from alone. On Monday, the Republican-led redistricting committee in the North Carolina Senate greenlit its proposed congressional map, and state senators voted along party lines to approve it the next day.
Princeton University’s Gerrymandering Project gave North Carolina’s proposed congressional map an “F” grade, due to the fact that it produces a “significant Republican advantage.” As Berman noted, the map could result in the GOP taking roughly three-quarters of the state’s 14 U.S. House seats even though Trump won the state with less than half of the vote last year.
The News & Observer reported Wednesday that “if all goes according to the plan lawmakers set in motion earlier this week, the maps could be official as soon as Thursday. If they become law as expected, they will be used in every election from 2022 through 2030—unless a lawsuit succeeds in forcing them to be redrawn, as has happened numerous times in North Carolina dating back to the 1980s.”
While the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 ruled 5-3 that the maps drawn by North Carolina Republicans in 2011 misused racial data and amounted to unconstitutional racial gerrymandering in two congressional districts, the right-wing justices just two years later condoned partisan gerrymandering, arguing that the practice is beyond its purview.
“President Biden has said that we’re facing the ‘most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.’ It’s time to act like it.”
Given that Black U.S. voters overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates, it can be difficult to disentangle racial gerrymandering from partisan gerrymandering, which is why progressives warned that the high court’s refusal to outlaw the latter could effectively legalize the former.
Republican mapmakers, meanwhile, have been perfecting techniques to secure political advantages without running afoul of the 14th Amendment’s “one person, one vote” protections and other anti-discrimination laws.
While a North Carolina state court in 2019 invalidated GOP-drawn congressional districts before the 2020 election—ruling that the map violated the state constitution—the Supreme Court’s decision just months earlier put the onus on members of Congress to take action to prevent gerrymandering.
For months, progressives have been clamoring for congressional Democrats to repeal the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster rule and pass pro-democracy reforms.
Before Texas’ GOP-controlled Legislature approved its heavily gerrymandered maps last month, Berman warned that the Lone Star State’s plan represented “an ominous sign of things to come in other Southern battleground states.”
“Republicans need just five seats to take back the House,” he added, “and could accomplish this through gerrymandering in Texas, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina.”
In early August, before the U.S. Census Bureau released the latest decennial data used by state governments for redistricting, progressives—already dismayed by the right-wing assault on ballot access—sounded the alarm about the impending gerrymandering bonanza and urged congressional Democrats to prevent Republicans from carrying out an anti-democratic power grab that would have long-lasting consequences for human rights and the climate crisis.
Senate Democrats failed to abolish the filibuster and join their House counterparts in passing the For the People Act—a popular and far-reaching bill that would require independent redistricting commissions and also includes anti-corruption provisions as well as measures to neutralize the GOP’s nationwide flurry of voter suppression laws and bills—prior to that mid-August deadline.
Although Democratic lawmakers did introduce the Freedom to Vote Act, a compromise bill endorsed by conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), in September, Senate Republicans obstructed the legislation last month, intensifying long-standing calls to end the filibuster.
And on Wednesday, all but one Republican senator blocked debate on the recently reintroduced John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, filibustering pro-democracy legislation for the third time this year.
Just hours before that happened, Stand Up America founder and president Sean Eldridge was arrested alongside members of Martin Luther King Jr.’s family and other activists who engaged in civil disobedience outside the White House to demand that President Joe Biden publicly call on Senate Democrats to eliminate the filibuster and pass federal voting rights legislation.
“It is an honor to stand in solidarity with the King family and all of the civil rights leaders who put their bodies on the line today to demand action to protect the precious right to vote,” Eldridge said in a statement.
“President Biden has said that we’re facing the ‘most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War,’” Eldridge continued. “It’s time to act like it. We don’t need more handwringing, more delays, or more excuses. We need action on voting rights now.”
“It’s time for President Biden to loudly call on the Senate to end the Jim Crow filibuster and protect the freedom to vote,” he added.
Last month, Li said that if Senate Democrats reform or scrap the filibuster and pass the Freedom to Vote Act, racial and partisan gerrymandering of the sort being pushed by right-wing lawmakers in multiple states would be outlawed.
With Republican lawmakers’ proposed redistricting maps set to become law in just a matter of days or weeks, Berman stressed last month, “Democrats are running out of time to pass it or devise a strategy for overcoming a GOP filibuster—and could soon be powerless to stop the GOP’s takeover of the U.S. House and state Capitols for the next decade.”
This content originally appeared on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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As U.S. President Joe Biden professed Washington’s alleged commitment to decarbonization during the ongoing COP26 climate summit, the White House on Tuesday authorized more fossil fuel pollution — advancing its plan to sell oil and gas leases on public lands even after concluding that the resultant emissions could generate billions of dollars in social and ecological damage.
Environmental advocates denounced the Biden administration’s decision, which came the same day the U.S. rejoined the so-called High Ambition Coalition, as “scientifically ignorant and legally indefensible.”
“While President Biden is talking a good talk on climate action, the reality is his administration is actively working to fan the flames of the climate crisis by selling more public lands for fracking,” Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy program director for WildEarth Guardians, said in a statement. “This isn’t just hypocritical, it’s outright deceitful and it truly calls into question whether the Biden administration’s climate agenda is nothing but broken promises.”
“The truth is, we can’t frack our way to a safe climate,” said Nichols. “With all eyes on Glasgow this week, the Biden administration seems to be turning its back on reality and throwing climate leadership into the toilet.”
Last Friday, the U.S. Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which oversees 245 million acres of public land spanning 12 western states, announced that “its state offices will issue for the first time environmental assessments that factor in the social cost” of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions stemming from proposed oil and gas lease sales planned for early 2022, Reuters reported. The news outlet added that “these reports could lead to some leases being removed from consideration or deferred depending on the public comments received.”
However, BLM officials said that “there’s little they can do to prevent the cumulative climate change impacts from burning the fuels,” the Associated Press reported Tuesday. “That’s because they can’t discern the significance of emissions from government-owned fuel reserves versus other sources, officials wrote in newly released documents.”
Although BLM “plans to defer almost 600 square miles of leases in Wyoming and five square miles in Montana… over concerns that drilling could harm wildlife,” AP noted, the agency’s refusal “to cite the costs of climate change as a reason to limit leases” means that it plans to move forward with sales scheduled for early next year in Colorado, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and other states.
The news outlet pointed out that “similar determinations that U.S. fossil fuel lease sales should not be restricted over global warming concerns were made under former Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama.”
“This seems to be business as usual,” Nichols told AP. “It flies in the face of scientists finding that any more fossil fuel production is unacceptable and countries need to find ways to limit production.”
Last month, the International Energy Agency reiterated its message that expanding fossil fuel extraction is incompatible with limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels by the end of the century and that the production of clean energy must be scaled up immediately.
According to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the worldwide transition to renewable energy is far behind schedule — with fossil fuel use projected to increase this decade even as annual reductions in coal, oil, and gas production are necessary to avert the worst consequences of the climate emergency.
If countries — starting with the rich polluters most responsible for exacerbating extreme weather — fail to rapidly and drastically slash GHG emissions, UNEP warned, the planet is on pace for a “catastrophic” 2.7°C of heating this century.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that roughly 25% of the nation’s total carbon dioxide emissions can be attributed to fossil fuel extraction on public lands, and according to the U.S. Interior Department, the social costs of burning oil and gas obtained by drilling and fracking on government-owned parcels — including rising sea levels, extreme weather disasters, and adverse public health effects — range from $357 million to over $4 billion.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s proposal to open up 734,000 acres, or more than 1,000 square miles, of public lands to fossil fuel extraction could unleash up to 246 million tons of GHG pollution — equivalent to the annual emissions of 62 coal-fired power plants.
That’s why, as Common Dreams has reported, critics have called the president’s plan “insane policy in light of the climate crisis,” and a coalition of nine environmental groups has filed formal objections with the BLM.
WildEarth Guardians, a member of that coalition, noted Tuesday that BLM’s move — which violates Biden’s 2020 campaign promise to ban federal sales of new oil and gas leases — “comes even as millions of Americans have called for an end to fossil fuel production,” which culminated in a recent week of action, during which Indigenous rights and climate justice advocates engaged in civil disobedience outside the White House.
BLM’s decision to proceed with its planned lease sales coincided with Tuesday’s unveiling of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s new rules to reduce methane emissions. The EPA’s proposed strategy for curbing the potent GHG is inadequate, warned progressive critics, including Food & Water Watch policy director Mitch Jones, who said that “the best regulation against methane emissions is to ban fracking.”
As WildEarth Guardians explained, “the Biden administration’s plans to sell more public lands for fracking also come on the heels of numerous court rulings holding Bureau of Land Management oil and gas leasing to be illegal, including a ruling last month out of Colorado.”
In January, Biden issued an executive order suspending new oil and gas leasing in order to give administration officials time to conduct a comprehensive review of the “potential climate and other impacts associated with oil and gas activities on public lands or in offshore waters.”
However, the Interior Department began taking steps to resurrect its oil and gas leasing program in August. That move came in response to a June court ruling by a Trump-appointed federal judge who sided with a group of Republican attorneys general that sued the Biden administration in March over its temporary pause on new lease sales for public lands and waters.
Progressive critics have argued that the federal judge’s injunction does not require the Interior Department to resume oil and gas leasing. Biden administration officials, experts say, still have the regulatory authority to limit new lease sales.
“The Bureau of Land Management is lying to the American public, claiming they’ve been compelled by a court to sell public lands for fracking,” said Nichols. “The fact is they have absolutely no legal basis to move forward with more oil and gas leasing.”
Earlier this year, WildEarth Guardians, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Western Environmental Law Center challenged federal oil and gas leasing by filing suit over the sale of more than one million acres of public lands for fracking in Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.
“Frankly, we’re sick of going to court to defend the climate, but if President Biden continues to reject the law, the science, and the public, then we’ll have no choice,” Nichols added. “We hope the administration reconsiders these latest plans to sell public lands for fracking, but we will not hesitate to fight back to protect our planet and our future.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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A new database reveals “widespread contamination from toxic substances such as arsenic, lead, and the ‘forever chemicals’ known as PFAS in the drinking water of tens of millions of households.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“With all eyes on Glasgow this week, the Biden administration seems to be turning its back on reality and throwing climate leadership into the toilet,” said one critic.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“Leaders of the G20, we are drowning and our only hope is the life-ring you are holding,” said Surangel Whipps Jr., president of the Pacific island nation. “You must act now. We must act together.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“A Billionaires Income Tax is not only an overdue tax reform, but also… smart politics.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“The U.S. is running backwards,” said one critic.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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A broad coalition of nearly 300 U.S.-based social justice groups on Friday urged the Biden administration to “immediately and unequivocally” condemn the Israeli government’s recent decision to classify a half-dozen Palestinian human rights groups as “terrorist organizations.”
“These actions by the Israeli government are a clear attack on human rights,” says the coalition in its letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “As such, we urge you to issue a swift rejection of this unprecedented attack on Palestinian human rights organizations and the attempt by the Israeli government to shut down, delegitimize, isolate, and chill a growing human rights movement.”
Last week, as Common Dreams reported, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s punitive designation targeted six groups — Addameer, AlHaq, the Bisan Center for Research and Development, Defense for Children International – Palestine, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees.
Under the apartheid regime’s Counter-Terrorism Law of 2016, “these human rights organizations now face possible mass arrest and being shut down by the Israeli government, and anyone identifying with the groups can also be subject to imprisonment,” the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), one of the groups that spearheaded Friday’s letter, warned in a statement.
Israel’s move was quickly rebuked by progressive lawmakers, including U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), and advocates from CCR, Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International, and 21 Israel-based groups.
In their letter to Blinken, the coalition points out that “smearing the promotion and defense of human rights as ‘terrorist’ activity is a dangerous, well-worn tactic of authoritarian regimes and a shameful political maneuver to undermine the vital work of these organizations.”
Describing the six recently criminalized groups as “trusted partners in our collective work to secure human rights for all,” the coalition notes that they “form part of the bedrock of Palestinian civil society that has been protecting and advancing Palestinian human rights for decades across the full spectrum of issues of global concern, including children’s rights, prisoners’ rights, women’s rights, socio-economic rights, the rights of farmworkers, and justice and accountability for international crimes.”
Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), said in a statement that “Israel’s authoritarian attack on these six leading Palestinian human rights organizations is designed to stop their work exposing Israel’s government for what it is: a separate-and-unequal apartheid regime engaging in ongoing settler-colonial violence against the Palestinian people.”
288 US orgs are calling the Biden admin to immediately & unequivocally condemn Israel’s criminalization of 6 Palestinian human rights orgs. Their letter: https://t.co/c9Gh56b8o9 @POTUS, pick a side: Palestinian human rights or Israeli apartheid?#StandWithThe6 pic.twitter.com/TMs6Ksv52w
— The CCR (@theCCR) October 29, 2021
The letter cites last week’s joint statement from HRW and Amnesty, which said that “for decades, Israeli authorities have systematically sought to muzzle human rights monitoring and punish those who criticize its repressive rule over Palestinians.”
“Palestinian human rights defenders have always borne the brunt of the repression,” HRW and Amnesty noted, warning that Gantz’s “appalling and unjust” attempt to outlaw certain groups is “an alarming escalation that threatens to shut down the work of Palestine’s most prominent civil society organizations.”
HRW and Amnesty attributed Israel’s brazen authoritarianism to “the decadeslong failure of the international community to challenge grave Israeli human rights abuses and impose meaningful consequences for them.”
Stefanie Fox, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, concurred. Fox argued Friday that “the Israeli government is openly attacking prominent Palestinian human rights organizations and threatening human rights defenders with mass arrest… because for decades, the Israeli apartheid government has faced little to no accountability for its repressive actions.”
Calling Israel’s “outrageous” decision to ostracize Palestinian civil society organizations “an attack… on the international human rights movement,” HRW and Amnesty stressed last week that “how the international community responds will be a true test of its resolve to protect human rights defenders.”
The coalition, for its part, has answered by arguing that international responses to Israel’s ongoing human rights violations have been “inadequate” and “should change.”
“A threat against the Palestinian human rights movement is a threat against movements for social justice everywhere,” the letter states, “and in order to protect human rights and human rights defenders, all states must be held accountable for taking such manifestly unjust actions.”
“As groups committed to social justice, civil rights, and universal human rights,” the letter continues, “we have seen first hand the ways that the charge of ‘terrorist’ and the so-called ‘war on terror’ threatens not only international human rights defenders, but also social movements and marginalized communities here in the U.S.: Indigenous, Black, brown, Muslim, and Arab activists and communities have similarly faced silencing, intimidation, criminalization, and surveillance under such baseless charges.”
Although the U.S. government “has long offered unconditional support to the Israeli government,” the letter adds, “our movements and organizations will always stand first and foremost with the rights and safety of people.”
To that end, signatories demanded that Blinken take the following steps:
- Affirm that the Biden administration’s commitment to human rights has universal applicability;
- Issue a public statement that rejects the Israeli government’s false accusations levied against Palestinian civil society organizations;
- Publicly condemn and rebuke Israel for this authoritarian action, and call on Israeli authorities to immediately reverse their decision and end all efforts aimed at delegitimizing and criminalizing Palestinian human rights defenders; and
- Support Palestinians seeking the protection and promotion of fundamental human rights, justice, and accountability, including at the International Criminal Court.
In addition to CCR, the letter was initiated by USCPR, Jewish Voice for Peace Action, and Adalah Justice Project. It garnered support from a wide array of groups, including CodePink, Just Foreign Policy, and Oxfam America.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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“A threat against the Palestinian human rights movement is a threat against movements for social justice everywhere,” nearly 300 U.S.-based civil society groups told Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“Democrats ran on lowering drug prices. Seniors and working families across the country are counting on them to keep that promise,” said one group.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“We need to stop asking, ‘How much does a bold Build Back Better agenda cost?’ and instead ask, ‘How much does it cost not to Build Back Better?’” said Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Although right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin publicly attacked a proposed billionaires’ tax almost as soon as it was unveiled, one journalist argued Wednesday that blaming the West Virginia coal baron for shooting down the popular provision is an oversimplification that lets other conservative Democrats—including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who reportedly criticized the measure behind closed doors—off the hook.
Just hours after Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) introduced his plan to make a few hundred super-rich tax dodgers pay a fairer share, Manchin threw cold water on the idea, calling it divisive to raise hundreds of billions of dollars to fund expanded public benefits and climate action by “targeting” those with $1 billion in assets or $100 million in annual income for three straight years. That led House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-Mass.) to declare that congressional support for the proposal is insufficient.
Given that he has done so much to weaken the Build Back Better Act, many believe Manchin alone is responsible for killing the billionaires’ tax, but Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent made the case that this emerging narrative ignores the role played by other corporate Democrats.
For example, Pelosi, a multimillionaire from California, “sharply faulted the proposal at a caucus meeting earlier this week, according to a Democratic aide who overheard the remarks,” wrote Sargent. “This aide told me Pelosi pronounced it a PR stunt that wouldn’t accomplish anything.”
“Pelosi absolutely destroyed it,” said the aide.
According to Sargent:
Another senior Democratic aide rejected this idea, saying that Pelosi’s criticism was confined to the fact that at the time there was no bill text for the proposal. Democrats coalesced around it only in recent days.
“The speaker expressed frustration Monday that there was no text and therefore impossible to score,” this aide told me. “The thrust of her comments were about it being too late in the process not to have a codified proposal.”
As Common Dreams has reported, the combined net worth of the nation’s 745 billionaires skyrocketed by $2.1 trillion over the past year and a half, as millions were devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic and its economic repercussions. Taxing billionaires’ unrealized stock gains emerged as a potential revenue-raiser after right-wing Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.)—swimming in campaign cash from Wall Street—single-handedly blew up her party’s plan to hike taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals.
Sinema and other Big Pharma-bankrolled Democrats, including Sen. Bob Menendez (N.J.) and Reps. Kathleen Rice (N.Y.), Scott Peters (Calif.), and Kurt Schrader (Ore.), have also undermined a proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug costs, which would have protected Americans from deadly price-gouging and saved the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars per year—leaving the party scrambling to figure out how to pay for its increasingly anemic reconciliation bill.
Regarding the billionaires’ tax, Sargent argued that “other Democrats are waiting in the cloakroom to kill it with no fingerprints.”
Neal, for instance, “has questioned whether it will hold up in court. That would dovetail with Pelosi’s private opposition, and both of them working together suggest there may be plenty of other House Democrats privately opposed.”
Moreover, “other Senate Democrats appear to oppose the proposal but don’t want to say so openly,” Sargent added. “After all, it’s not easy to come down on the side of protecting the wealth of billionaires.”
This content originally appeared on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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“Maybe, instead of spending a fortune to arm the borders, we should help the world transition to clean energy so people don’t have to leave their homes.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“If Democrats want to avoid… midterm losses,” said one critic, they can’t “bow to Joe Manchin’s burn-the-planet demands.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.