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Author: Kenny Stancil

  • Border Wall Construction May Continue as Biden Is Pushed to Permanently Scrap It

    Construction crews work on a new section of the U.S.-Mexico border fencing at El Nido de Las Águilas, eastern Tijuana, Baja California State, Mexico, on January 20, 2021.

    Although President Joe Biden vowed on the campaign trail to stop the construction of the southern border wall promoted by his predecessor, the White House as of this week has not yet asked Congress to revoke the project’s funding, and a Cabinet member reportedly admitted that the administration may still authorize additional work to fortify some unfinished sections of the barrier, including installing surveillance technologies in certain areas.

    Biden on January 20 gave contractors seven days to halt construction on former President Donald Trump’s border wall and gave Customs and Border Protection (CBP) 60 days to develop a plan to reallocate the Department of Defense (DOD) funding that has been set aside for the multibillion-dollar project, roughly 450 miles of which was completed under Trump.

    “It shall be the policy of my administration that no more American taxpayer dollars be diverted to construct a border wall,” Biden said on his first day in office. “I am also directing a careful review of all resources appropriated or redirected to construct a southern border wall.”

    CBP missed its two-month deadline to submit a proposal to the Biden administration for diverting the Pentagon’s funds.

    Meanwhile, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) employees last week that “there are different projects that the chief of the Border Patrol has presented and the acting commissioner of CBP presented to me,” according to a Monday report by the Washington Times, which obtained notes of the meeting.

    “The president has communicated quite clearly his decision that the emergency that triggered the devotion of DOD funds to the construction of the border wall is ended. But that leaves room to make decisions as the administration, as part of the administration, in particular areas of the wall that need renovation, particular projects that need to be finished,” Mayorkas said, specifying “gaps,” “gates,” and places “where the wall has been completed but the technology has not been implemented.”

    The Independent reported Tuesday that “under the Impoundment Control Act, when Congress allocates money to a project, that project must be completed.”

    “The only exception to that law is if questions of efficiency arise or if a president submits a request to revoke the project,” the newspaper added. “Biden has not submitted a revocation request.”

    Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) on Wednesday denounced Biden — who voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006 when he was a senator — for failing to take the steps necessary to permanently terminate the project, tweeting: “It’s shameful and unacceptable for [the president] to continue the construction of Trump’s xenophobic and racist wall.”

    Earlier this week, Maxie Adler and Laiken Jordahl, both with the Center for Biological Diversity, shared videos depicting the border wall—which Adler said “has been lawlessly rammed through the borderlands, destroying Indigenous sacred sites, critical habitat, and harming communities,” only to be “cut through on a daily basis.”

    When pressed about the Washington Times report on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that “there is some limited construction that has been funded and allocated for, but it is otherwise paused.”

    “Wall construction remains paused, to the extent permitted by law,” she added. “So some has already been funded through congressional authorization and funding allocation. But… it’s paused while agencies are developing a plan for the president on the management of the federal funds.”

    In a video shared last week from east of Nogales, Arizona, Jordahl described the devastation wrought by the construction of the southern border wall and said: “It is painfully clear that we have to take action to repair all that Trump has destroyed.”

    “The Biden administration has put construction on pause, but they haven’t canceled these contracts, and they haven’t committed to restoring the land,” he said. “We are urging the administration to cancel these contracts for good, reinstate… protections for people and wildlife, and use those remaining billions of dollars to start restoring the land.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Urged to Withdraw All Trump Era Medicaid Work Requirements

    Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, speaks as President Trump listens on November 20, 2020, in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, D.C.

    While the White House in recent weeks has taken steps to overturn a Trump-era initiative enabling states to restrict Medicaid eligibility by imposing punitive work requirements, healthcare advocates on Monday urged President Joe Biden to rescind all Medicaid work requirement policies approved by his predecessor.

    In 2018, Seema Verma, then-director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under former President Donald Trump, issued guidance allowing states to apply for a waiver to significantly alter eligibility requirements for Medicaid, a Great Society-era program on which more than 72 million low-income adults, people with disabilities, and children rely for health insurance.

    Several Republican-led states quickly jumped at the offer to strip healthcare away from poor and vulnerable Americans, and the Trump administration ultimately approved policies to “take Medicaid coverage away from people who don’t comply with stringent work requirements” in 13 states, as Jennifer Wagner, director of Medicaid eligibility and enrollment at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), noted Monday in a blog post.

    While litigation and the coronavirus pandemic have put the implementation of work requirement policies “on hold,” Wagner stressed that “taking coverage away from enrollees or otherwise conditioning coverage on meeting a work requirement doesn’t further Medicaid’s purposes,” which exists to provide healthcare to the impoverished. “Accordingly,” she added, “the Biden administration should now withdraw all of the previous approvals.”

    The White House in February invalidated the previous administration’s guidance allowing states to apply for Medicaid eligibility restriction waivers and notified states that had already been given permission to impose work requirements that the policies would soon be reversed due to the detrimental impact of coverage loss on Medicaid recipients, particularly during the pandemic, as Common Dreams reported at the time.

    Last month, the Biden administration told Medicaid officials in New Hampshire and Arkansas — which was the first and only state to fully implement Medicaid work requirements, taking healthcare away from at least 18,000 people over a period of several months in 2018 — that approval for their work requirement policies had been rescinded.

    While “Georgia, Indiana, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, and Utah have objected” to Biden’s efforts to dismantle Medicaid work requirements, Wagner reiterated that “the administration should nevertheless continue with its plan.”

    Wagner continued: “The Trump administration claimed that requiring work or other activities as a condition of coverage would ‘improve beneficiaries’ health,’ ignoring evidence from other programs suggesting these restrictions would significantly harm Medicaid enrollees. After states began implementing these policies, their experiences confirmed the harmful effects of work requirements.”

    Citing a new analysis from the Department of Health and Human Services, Wagner wrote that “these policies are deeply harmful to Medicaid enrollees and confirms that they don’t promote Medicaid’s objectives.”

    Referring to the 18,000 Arkansas residents who lost Medicaid coverage in 2018, Wagner said that “uninsurance rates among people subject to the work requirement rose, but their employment rates didn’t.”

    Arkansans “who lost coverage were more likely to have chronic conditions, and many had difficulty paying their medical bills and accessing healthcare and medications,” she continued. “Data from New Hampshire and Michigan also show a significant loss of coverage would have occurred if the states’ work requirement policies had been implemented, largely due to enrollees’ limited awareness of the policies and challenges in reporting compliance.”

    “The evidence of the detrimental impact of work requirements from Arkansas, New Hampshire, and Michigan demonstrates that other state policies would face the same challenges and harmful consequences,” she added. “All policies that take away coverage from people not meeting work requirements are marred by complex rules about who is exempt and what activities count, challenges communicating with enrollees, and burdensome paperwork and reporting requirements. These policies inevitably lead to eligible enrollees losing coverage — work requirements can’t be fixed.”

    According to Wagner, “There’s nothing left to demonstrate by letting more states take risks with Medicaid enrollees’ health. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services should withdraw all waiver authority for policies that take coverage away from people not meeting work requirements or otherwise condition coverage or benefits on meeting them and make clear that these policies won’t be allowed in Medicaid.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Administration Has Detained Migrant Minors in “Toxic Military Sites”

    An entrance to Fort Bliss as seen on June 25, 2018 in Fort Bliss, Texas.

    In a move that was condemned by environmental justice advocates on Friday, President Joe Biden’s administration earlier this week sent 500 unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors to Fort Bliss — a highly contaminated and potentially hazardous military base in El Paso, Texas — and is reportedly considering using additional toxic military sites as detention centers for migrant children in U.S. custody.

    “We are extremely concerned to hear of plans to detain immigrant children in Fort Bliss. Military bases filled with contaminated sites are no place for the healthy development of any child,” Melissa Legge, an attorney at Earthjustice, said in a statement.

    “We recognize that the humanitarian situation at the border needs to be addressed in humanity, compassion, and expediency,” Legge continued. “Part of that requires keeping children away from toxic military sites.”

    “While we are hopeful that the Biden administration will keep children safe, we remain vigilant and ready to continue protecting detained minors in toxic facilities,” she added. “Immigrant children under the care of the federal government should not be in cages, let alone toxic sites in military bases.”

    The Biden administration announced last week that facilities at Fort Bliss “would serve as temporary housing for up to 5,000 unaccompanied minors,” the El Paso Times reported Tuesday. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said “it will reserve the Fort Bliss accommodations for boys ages 13 to 17. Military personnel won’t staff the site or provide care for the children, who are in the custody and care of HHS.”

    There are 17,641 unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors in U.S. custody as of Tuesday, according to ABC News. Over 5,600 children are being held in overcrowded facilities run by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which falls under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), while more than 12,000 are under the supervision of HHS.

    Although DHS is supposed to transfer minors to the HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement within 72 hours — after which children are housed in one of more than 200 HHS-approved shelters in 22 states until they can be placed with a family member or another suitable sponsor — thousands have been stuck for far longer than legally allowed in squalid conditions.

    Last month, the White House came under fire for restricting media access to CBP’s detention facilities, which some journalists have described as “border jails.”

    As the El Paso Times noted, HHS characterized Fort Bliss as “an ’emergency intake site’ and a temporary measure to quickly remove the children from the custody of the Border Patrol.”

    Earthjustice argues that the Biden administration’s plan to use military bases — many of which the group says “are known to be riddled with toxic hazards from past military operations, spills, storage of toxic chemicals, unexploded ordnances, and firing ranges” — to expand its capacity to temporarily detain unaccompanied children is no solution.

    According to Earthjustice: “130 military bases and installations are considered priority Superfund sites by the Environmental Protection Agency. There are currently 651 Department of Defense and National Guard sites potentially contaminated by toxic chemicals known as PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. PFAS don’t easily break down, and they can persist in your body and in the environment for decades.”

    Several of the military sites being considered by the Biden administration “are contaminated with potentially hazardous pollutants and some are even located on or near Superfund sites,” Earthjustice said.

    The organization continued:

    Superfund sites under consideration for housing children in immigration custody include the Homestead Detention Facility in Homestead, Florida, Moffett Field in Mountain View, California, and Joint Base San Antonio in Texas. Many of the sites remain inadequately remediated and still contaminated. Without proper environmental reviews, there is no way to guarantee these sites are safe for children, potentially exposing them to toxic chemicals that could have lifelong health impacts.

    Fort Bliss is no exception. Earthjustice, along with partners including Alianza Nacional de Campesinas and the National Hispanic Medical Association, released hundreds of documents of searchable documents and an expert analysis of previous plans for construction of a temporary detention center for children and families at Fort Bliss. These records document several problems with the project, including that the Army did not adequately investigate to determine what types of waste had been disposed of at the site, that the methods used for testing the soil samples were inadequate or never completed, and that samples taken after the supposed clean-up still had concerning levels of pollution. Additionally, illegal dumping on the site may continue to this day. As a result, there is now even greater uncertainty about the environmental hazards at the site and a greater need for thorough testing, analysis, and cleanup.

    “We are deeply concerned about the decision to open temporary detention facilities for minors at Fort Bliss and the potential health risks to the minors detained in tents there,” said Dr. Elena Rios, president of the National Hispanic Medical Association, a client in Earthjustice’s 2018 FOIA lawsuit regarding the base.

    “Based on what we found in our Fort Bliss investigation in 2018,” she added, “there are still present toxins from past landfills, which means children could be forcibly exposed to toxicity linked to cancer and development defects.”

    Despite the GOP’s dehumanizing and misleading narrative that a “border crisis” is afoot, there has not been an uncharacteristic “surge” in migrants entering the U.S. at the southern border, but rather a predictable bump in border crossings that typically happens at this time of year, augmented by the arrival of people who would have come in 2020 but could not due to the clampdown on immigration during the Covid-19 pandemic, as the Washington Post reported last week.

    An HHS statement on the transfer of migrant children to the military base in El Paso said that “the use of the Fort Bliss facility will have no impact on the Department of Defense’s ability to conduct its primary mission or on military readiness.”

    The deference to militarism is telling. According to Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), it is impossible to understand the arrival of asylum-seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border without taking into account the role played by U.S. imperialism.

    Earlier this week, as Common Dreams reported, the two progressive lawmakers made the case that the root causes of migration from Central America and Mexico to the U.S. can be found in decades of interventionist foreign policy, profit-maximizing trade and carceral policies, and the climate crisis — all driven by the pursuit of capitalist class interests.

    Citing the U.S. government’s “flagrant disregard for the health of those in custody,” Earthjustice called for “the immediate halt of any plans to place children in such unsafe facilities, the securing of safe and suitable housing for children while they are required to remain in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services, and the development of solutions that do not involve placing children on or near toxic sites, military sites, or in detention-like settings.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Calls for Removal of DeJoy as House Dems Move to Block Assault on USPS

    Sen. Bernie Sanders, Chairman of the Budget Committee, speaks during a U.S. Senate Budget Committee hearing regarding wages at large corporations on Capitol Hill, February 25, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Just days after Postmaster General Louis DeJoy unveiled a 10-year restructuring plan that would reduce Post Office hours, increase postage prices, and slow down first-class mail delivery, a group of House Democrats on Friday introduced legislation to prevent DeJoy from implementing a key aspect of his latest assault on the U.S. Postal Service.

    The bill — called the Delivering Envelopes Judiciously On-time Year-round Act, or DEJOY Act — would prohibit the USPS from “lengthening mail-delivery windows and require it to adhere to present service expectations,” as the Washington Post reported.

    Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), who introduced the DEJOY Act with six Democratic co-sponsors, told the Post that “going from 100% of first-class mail being delivered one to three days to only 70%, would be a nonstarter, in my opinion, with the American people.”

    Earlier this week, DeJoy — a Republican megadonor with no previous USPS experience whose scandal-plagued tenure as postmaster general began last June after he was picked for the role by a postal board controlled by appointees of former President Donald Trump — released a 58-page document (pdf) outlining a plan to avoid an estimated $160 billion in operating losses over the next decade through aggressive austerity measures.

    House Democrats have denounced DeJoy’s proposed service reductions and price hikes as “draconian” and “unacceptable.”

    One area of agreement between the postmaster general and congressional Democrats is their mutual support for repealing a 2006 law that requires USPS to prefund retiree benefits decades in advance — a mandate that postal advocates say is a key source of the agency’s financial woes.

    But DeJoy’s insistence on pairing the repeal with further cuts that would undermine the crucial institution’s ability to deliver medications, paychecks, and bills on time has led to growing calls for his ouster.

    In a letter to the postal board demanding the immediate termination of DeJoy, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) argued Thursday that the postmaster general’s “pathetic 10-year plan to weaken USPS demonstrates that he is a clear and present threat to the future of the Postal Service and the well-being of millions of Americans.”

    Duckworth continued: “The only question facing the USPS Board of Governors right now is whether PMG DeJoy is the best individual to lead the Postal Service moving forward. Based on the PMG’s performance to date, the answer is clear: no. Failure to remove PMG DeJoy will confirm my worst fears about each member of this Board of Governors. Namely, that you are unwilling to admit error and thus incapable of fixing a grave mistake.”

    The opening section of the new strategy document was co-authored by Ron Bloom, the Democratic chairman of the USPS Board of Governors, which suggests that the postal board backs the proposed changes even though they could worsen nationwide mail slowdowns caused by the operational overhaul DeJoy imposed last year as the coronavirus pandemic increased the demand for mail-in ballots.

    Soon after the DEJOY ACT was introduced on Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted: “No. We will not allow Trump’s handpicked Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to slow down mail delivery, cut hours at post offices, and sabotage the Postal Service. We will expand and strengthen it. It is way past time to fire Mr. DeJoy.”

    Journalist and author John Nichols warned earlier this week in The Nation that “if President Biden does not take the necessary steps to begin the process of removing DeJoy from his position, the postmaster general’s austerity agenda threatens to ruin the USPS at a point in its 246-year history when the service is every bit as essential as it has ever been.”

    Because President Joe Biden does not have the authority to remove DeJoy himself, dozens of House Democrats are urging Biden to immediately terminate all six sitting members of the postal board and quickly replace them with officials willing to fire the postmaster general and protect the USPS as a vital public good.

    Although the president has the power to remove members of the postal board “for cause,” he has thus far declined to take such a sweeping step, opting instead to nominate officials to fill the board’s three existing vacancies. If Biden’s nominees are confirmed by the Senate, Democrats on the board could have the votes needed to oust DeJoy and save the USPS.

    Critics say that time-consuming option is not good enough. Earlier this week, Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-N.J.) — who in January became the first member of Congress to call on Biden to replace every sitting member of the postal board with officials who support removing the postmaster general — criticized the postal board “for their silence and complicity” and reiterated that Biden must fire every member, which would make it possible to get rid of DeJoy “before he destroys the entire USPS for good.”

    “The board has remained silent in the face of catastrophic and unacceptable failures at a moment when the American people are relying on the Postal Service the most,” more than 50 House Democrats wrote in a letter to Biden last week. “It is time to remove all governors and start over with a board vested with the expertise and acumen this nation needs in its Postal Service leadership.”

    As journalist Mindy Isser pointed out Friday in Jacobin, “The post office has been under attack for decades, with Republicans and centrist Democrats repeatedly trying to make the public service function like a private business. But DeJoy’s leadership could be the nail in the coffin, if Joe Biden doesn’t act swiftly.”

    “The only way to begin to defend the post office,” she added, “is to fire DeJoy.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Democrats Take the First Steps to Make Biden’s Infrastructure Bill a Climate Bill – The newly unveiled BUILD GREEN Infrastructure and Jobs Act would create good-paying union jobs while reducing carbon emissions and upgrading the country’s crumbling infrastructure.

    Four congressional Democrats on Friday unveiled the BUILD GREEN Infrastructure and Jobs Act, a bill that would invest $500 billion over 10 years in state, local, and tribal projects to galvanize the transition to all electric public transportation—reducing climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions and health-threatening air pollution while expanding clean mass transit and creating up to one million new jobs.

    Modeled after the Department of Transportation’s BUILD grant program, the bill (pdf) to provide grant funding to green the nation’s public transportation infrastructure while creating good-paying jobs in the process was introduced by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) as well as Reps. Andrew Levin (D-Mich.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

    “The climate crisis is an existential threat to our planet,” Warren acknowledged in a press release, “but it’s also a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, create a million good new jobs, and unleash the best of American innovation.”

    The BUILD GREEN Act, she added, “will make the big federal investments necessary to transform our country’s transportation system, confront the racial and economic inequality embedded in our fossil fuel economy, and achieve the ambitious targets for 100% clean energy in America.”

    That assessment was shared by Markey, who said that “we cannot build back better without building back greener.” Markey called the bill “our opportunity to invest in a clean energy revolution across our country, transform our transportation sector to be climate-smart, and create millions of good-paying union jobs at the same time.”

    “We can work together,” he added, “to leverage investment in climate action, reduce emissions, and support environmental justice communities through bold infrastructure projects, all while tackling our climate crisis.”

    Co-sponsors of the proposed legislation (pdf)—which is supported by almost three in five Americans, according to a new poll (pdf) conducted by Data for Progress—include Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), among others.

    Alluding to the recent crisis in Texas caused by the collision of a deregulated, fossil-fuel dependent energy system and a climate change-driven winter storm, Ocasio-Cortez said that “we must stop spending billions of taxpayer money on infrastructure systems only for them to fail at the most crucial moment.”

    “The BUILD GREEN Act,” Ocasio-Cortez continued, “helps ensure that our federal dollars are being invested in infrastructure that can sustain the impact of climate change and better prepares our communities for extreme weather events.”

    “In most of the country,” she added, “subways, buses, and other public transit are practically inaccessible or completely overburdened,” meaning that “this bill would make a dramatic, material difference in the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people.”

    Calling the electrification of personal vehicles and mass transit a “central pillar” of the Green New Deal resolution introduced in 2019 by Ocasio-Cortez and Markey, Levin said that “the answer to both the climate crisis and the crisis of wealth inequality is to empower working people with the sustainable investments necessary to rebuild the communities devastated by decades of pollution and corporate trade policy.”

    He added that the bill “will deliver the transformational change demanded by the American people while ensuring that we build the green economy of the 21st century here at home with good-paying, union jobs.”

    The Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development and Generating Renewable Energy to Electrify the Nation’s (BUILD GREEN) Infrastructure and Jobs Act would:

    • jumpstart the transition to all electric public transportation, expand clean mass transit to underserved communities, and help modernize our crumbling infrastructure by covering up to 85% of costs for eligible state, local, and tribal projects, with an option for the Secretary of Transportation to cover 100% of costs;
    • reduce carbon emissions by an estimated 21.5 million metric tons of CO2 annually or the equivalent of taking 4.5 million combustion engine cars off the road;
    • prevent an estimated 4,200 deaths annually by reducing significant sources of local air pollution that cause adverse health effects like asthma, and avert $100 billion annually in healthcare costs;
    • start to correct decades of health disparities and environmental injustice by dedicating at least 40% of all funding to projects in frontline, vulnerable, and disadvantaged communities; and
    • create up to one million good new jobs with strong labor protections.

    In its evaluation of the economic and environmental impacts of the bill, which it called “a vital component of tackling the climate crisis,” Data for Progress estimated that electrifying the nation’s public transportation systems, installing electric vehicle charging infrastructure nationwide, and expanding associated renewable energy generation capacity would save lives and money.

    The proposed legislation is endorsed by a slew of progressive advocacy groups, including Data for Progress as well as Sunrise Movement, League of Conservation Voters, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, 350.org, Greenpeace, Public Citizen, Friends of the Earth, Center for Progressive Reform, GreenLatinos, Rewiring America, New Consensus, Zero Hour, and WE ACT for Environmental Justice.

    Given that “transportation represents about 29% of U.S. emissions,” said Natalie Mebane, U.S. policy director at 350.org, “we can make huge progress in lowering our greenhouse gas emissions by electrifying the transportation sector and ensuring that it is powered by 100% clean energy.”

    A recent assessment of President Joe Biden’s climate plans found his transportation policies to be inadequate if the U.S. is to reach his administration’s goal of net-zero emissions by 2050.

    Mebane added that “this bill will create close to one million jobs at a time when we need a just economic recovery immediately” in the wake of the devastating Covid-19 pandemic and corresponding economic crisis.

    Robert R.M. Verchick, president of the board of directors of the Center for Progressive Reform and professor of environmental law at Loyola University, New Orleans, said that “the transportation networks we build today shape the possibilities for tomorrow.”

    “If we want our children and grandchildren to thrive in their schools and in their jobs, they will need ways to get there,” said Verchick. “If we want neighborhoods free of smog and industrial racket, we will need clean and efficient ways of moving around. Few investments we make today will have as profound an impact on the opportunities available to future generations as our infrastructure choices.”

    The BUILD GREEN Act was unveiled just two weeks after Sunrise Movement launched its “Good Jobs for All” campaign to put the country on a path toward a Green New Deal; that happened not long after Pressley introduced the Federal Job Guarantee Resolution, which seeks to make “meaningful, dignified work” at a livable wage an enforceable legal right.

    Earlier this week, hundreds of local officials across the nation called on the Biden administration and Congress to deliver a bold infrastructure plan that improves the health of communities across the country.

    Sanders, for his part, said Thursday that if Republicans try to obstruct progress on green jobs and infrastructure, Democrats “must use our majority to get it done.”

    This story was first published at Common Dreams.

    This post was originally published on In These Times.

  • Biden Can Save Lives From COVID by Supporting Intellectual Property Rules Waiver

    A nurse shows the AstraZeneca vaccine used at the "Covid Express" vaccination centre at Son Dureta Hospital in Palma, Spain, on February 27, 2021.

    Calling it a moral imperative as well as an urgent public health and economic necessity, over 400 progressive groups on Friday urged U.S. President Joe Biden to save hundreds of thousands of lives by joining more than 100 nations in supporting an emergency waiver of the World Trade Organization’s intellectual property rules, which are currently blocking the rapid production and equitable global distribution of Covid-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines.

    At a press conference joined by Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a coalition of health, labor, human rights, faith, and other groups released a letter (pdf) signed by hundreds of prominent organizations calling on the Biden administration to reverse the Trump administration’s “dangerous and self-defeating” obstruction of an effort to bring the coronavirus disaster to a swift end by temporarily suspending Big Pharma’s exclusive rights over tests, treatments, and vaccines — life-saving tools developed with public subsidies.

    “As a global community, we must come together and use every tool at our disposal to stop this pandemic,” Blumenauer said. “Unfortunately, we have seen intellectual property rules and corporate greed have disastrous impacts for public health during past epidemics, and we need to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”

    “Working to ensure that trade rules do not stunt the developing world’s access to vaccines, treatments, and diagnostic tests is a clear step,” he added. “It’s the right thing to do not only for our country, but for the entire world.”

    The WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) requires countries to give pharmaceutical corporations lengthy monopoly control over the knowledge and technology used to produce medicines, even though governments and taxpayers have contributed billions of dollars to quickly develop multiple coronavirus vaccines as well as diagnostic and therapeutic tools.

    India and South Africa in October 2020 introduced a proposal (pdf) calling on the WTO to exempt member nations from enforcing pandemic-related patent protections. The TRIPS waiver is backed by more than 100 countries, but a small group of powerful states in the Global North — led by the U.S., U.K., and Canada — is actively and successfully impeding the will of a supermajority of the world.

    While former President Donald Trump was at the forefront of objecting to the TRIPS waiver, Biden, despite having had the opportunity to do so at two recent WTO committee meetings, has not yet ended U.S. opposition to India and South Africa’s proposal — even though current trends indicate that the world’s poorest countries will be forced to wait until 2024 for mass inoculation, causing needless suffering and death, and generating more than $9 trillion in economic losses.

    “As an expert in intellectual property law and access to life-saving medicines, I can assure the Biden administration that intellectual property barriers are real, and they’re blocking millions of people around the world from accessing life-saving Covid-19 vaccines,” Brook Baker, senior policy analyst at Health GAP and professor of law at Northeastern University, said during the press conference. “By obstructing the TRIPS waiver proposal, President Biden is breaking his promise to share Covid-19 vaccine technologies with the world.”

    During an interview with healthcare activist Ady Barkan in July 2020, Biden committed to sharing technology and access to any Covid-19 vaccine produced in the U.S., saying “it’s the only humane thing in the world to do.” As Common Dreams has reported, health justice campaigners have argued that rejoining and contributing funding to the World Health Organization-backed COVAX program, while welcome, is insufficient.

    Ahead of the WTO’s upcoming General Council meetings next Monday and Tuesday, the coalition’s letter implored Biden to “deliver on that promise” by supporting the TRIPS waiver. During his testimony, Baker said the Biden administration must “send a message to Big Pharma that it’s unacceptable to write off the lives of 90% of people in low- and middle-income countries.”

    Describing the fight against the pandemic as “a race against time,” Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, asked during the press conference: “What is the possible upside of the U.S. blocking this WTO waiver supported by most countries given there is manufacturing capacity around the globe to greatly increase supplies of vaccines, tests, and treatments if formulas and technologies are shared?”

    Akshaya Kumar, director of crisis advocacy at Human Rights Watch, pointed out that “instead of arguing about how to ration better, we could be rationing less.”

    “Sharing the recipe for vaccines by pooling intellectual property and issuing global, open, and non-exclusive licenses,” Kumar added, “could help scale up manufacturing and expand the number of vaccine doses made.”

    Deploying a metaphor to make the same point, Abby Maxman, president of Oxfam America, said that “rather than slicing the existing pie of vaccines even more finely, we need to share the recipe so that we have enough for everyone. We need a people’s vaccine. A vaccine that is free to everyone around the world, that is fairly distributed based on need and not on nationality or ability to pay.”

    All of the speakers stressed the need for urgency in combating “vaccine apartheid.” As Schakowsky noted, “The new Covid-19 variants, which show more resistance to vaccines, prove that further delay in immunity around the world will lead to faster and stronger mutations.”

    “Equitable access is essential,” she added. “Our globalized economy cannot recover if only parts of the world are vaccinated and have protection against the virus. We must make vaccines available everywhere if we are going to crush the virus anywhere.”

    Decrying the “vast chasm of inequality” created by giving “just a handful of giant pharmaceutical corporations… monopoly control over the live-saving technologies we all need,” Maxman noted that the U.S., with only 4% of the world’s population, has purchased almost half of Pfizer’s total expected supply in 2021.

    Last week, as Common Dreams reported, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres lamented the fact that 10 countries had gobbled up 75% of the world’s Covid-19 vaccines while people in more than 130 countries had yet to receive a single dose. The U.N. chief warned that this “wildly uneven and unfair” allocation of vaccines threatened to prolong a pandemic that has claimed the lives of more than 2.5 million people around the world.

    Medical anthropologist Paul Farmer, a co-founder of Partners in Health, made it clear that “the world does not have time to wait for the usual, slow, and unequal distribution of treatments, diagnostics, and vaccines.”

    “We can take a lesson from the global AIDS movements and make sure patent laws don’t block access to life-saving therapies for the poor,” Farmer added. “It’s a similar story for vaccines, which in the case of Covid-19, we’re so lucky to have and in such short order. Moderna has waived these rights, and others should follow suit as we deploy one of the mainstays required to end this pandemic.”

    Echoing Farmer’s call to learn from past epidemics, Yuanqiong Hu, policy co-coordinator of the Access Campaign at Doctors Without Borders, said that “governments must not squander this historic opportunity and avoid repeating the painful lessons of the early years of the HIV/AIDS response.”

    The TRIPS waiver, Hu added, “would give countries more ways to tackle the legal barriers to maximizing production and supply of medical products needed for Covid-19 treatment and prevention. Defending monopoly protection is the antithesis to the current call for Covid-19 medicines and vaccines to be treated as global public goods.”

    Drawing attention to the public nature of Covid-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines, Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, emphasized that “the U.S. government has invested over $13 billion in taxpayer funds to create vaccines, and other developed nations have invested as well.”

    Instead of hoarding vaccines and causing unnecessary suffering and preventable deaths, Campbell said, “rich nations have an obligation to share with the global community. That is the only way to protect the vulnerable here and abroad.”

    “The United States must stop blocking the WTO TRIPS waiver in order to share the vaccine with the developing world and to prevent the killing of our vulnerable siblings in the developing world,” Campbell added. “If we don’t get the waiver, we in the United States, I believe, will have blood on our hands, and we cannot allow that to happen. Let’s change this.”

    Watch:

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ocasio-Cortez Backs Probe of Cuomo’s Mishandling of Nursing Home COVID Deaths

    Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks to the media at the Houston Food Bank on February 20, 2021, in Houston, Texas.

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday joined a chorus of state and local officials demanding a probe of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s catastrophic response to the coronavirus pandemic in the Empire State’s nursing homes.

    “I… stand with our local officials calling for a full investigation of the Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing homes during Covid-19,” the prominent Democratic lawmaker, who represents New York’s 14th Congressional District, said in a statement released Friday.

    Ocasio-Cortez added that remarks made earlier this month by Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa, Cuomo’s top aide, “warrant a full investigation.”

    In a video conference call with state Democratic legislators last week, DeRosa admitted that the administration withheld data on coronavirus deaths in nursing homes because Cuomo, a Democrat, feared the full picture would “be used against us” in a federal investigation by then-President Donald Trump’s Justice Department.

    DeRosa’s remarks came two weeks after New York Attorney General Letitia James, also a Democrat, released a report accusing the Cuomo administration of undercounting Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes by as much as 50%. As Axios reported, Cuomo shrugged off James’ allegations, saying: “Who cares [if they] died in the hospital, died in a nursing home? They died.”

    Cuomo, who in October 2020 published a self-congratulatory book about his response to the pandemic, “has dismissed claims of wrongdoing,” The Guardian reported Friday. The governor said “information was not produced fast enough, which created ‘a void. And conspiracy theories and politics and rumors fill that void and you can’t allow inaccurate information to go unanswered.’”

    As Common Dreams reported Thursday, Cuomo has publicly lashed out at—and reportedly threatened to “destroy”—state Assemblyman Ron Kim, one of the few Democratic lawmakers willing to criticize the powerful governor months ago over his disastrous approach to nursing homes during the pandemic.

    In July of last year, Kim demanded the creation of an independent, bipartisan panel to investigate the Cuomo administration’s handling of long-term care facilities during the coronavirus crisis. The assemblyman also called on the governor to be fully transparent about the Covid-19 death toll in New York’s nursing homes, which he and other lawmakers believed was being significantly undercounted by the state government.

    As Common Dreams reported in May 2020, Cuomo was widely criticized for taking two months to revoke the New York state health department’s directive, issued last March, requiring nursing homes to accept still-recovering Covid-19 patients despite the lethal risk they posed to other vulnerable residents in long-term care facilities.

    DeRosa’s comments have not only vindicated Kim and other early critics but also led to allegations of a cover-up and growing scrutiny of the administration.

    The Cuomo administration now finds itself at the center a full-fledged investigation by the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York, the Albany Times-Union reported Wednesday.

    In addition, Democratic leaders of the New York State Senate are beginning efforts to repeal Cuomo’s “unilateral emergency powers granted during the pandemic, setting up a remarkable rebuke for the governor from members of his own party,” the New York Times reported Wednesday.

    Ocasio-Cortez’s intervention puts even more pressure on Cuomo.

    “Thousands of vulnerable New Yorkers lost their lives in nursing homes throughout the pandemic,” the progressive congresswoman said. “Their loved ones and the public deserve answers and transparency from their elected leadership.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Texas Teen Was Forced to Use College Savings to Prevent Mom’s Eviction

    A young woman in glasses and a purple shirt

    After Alondra Carmona, a high school senior in Houston, recently exhausted all of her college savings to prevent her unemployed mother from being evicted, one media outlet on Tuesday tried to portray it as an “act of kindness,” but progressives are emphasizing that the all-too-common story is an indictment of a deeply unequal society reliant on private charity as a result of policymakers’ failure to guarantee livable incomes, affordable housing and higher education, and more.

    “In February of 2020, my mom broke her ankle and was not able to work,” Carmona explained in a GoFundMe ad she created to support her family. “Come March, the coronavirus started, which added to the financial problems we already had. Today, I found out that my mom has not had a job for 3 months and hid it from us. She owes two months of rent and will most likely get evicted in March.”

    “All of my college savings will go to paying the rent that we are behind on,” wrote Carmona. “As much as I dream of going to Barnard College, it is not looking promising right now. I am turning to this as a last resort because Barnard will not be able to change my financial aid package.”

    While the performance of Carmona’s online fundraising page suggests there may be a happy ending in this particular instance for the Barnard-bound aspiring scientist, critics slammed ABC News 7 for framing the story as a heartwarming tale of generosity rather than an opportunity to reflect on society’s failure to meet people’s needs — especially, but not only, during a pandemic.

    Critics asserted that Carmona’s effort — though undoubtedly selfless — is a devastating expression of how ordinary people, left behind by a government that caters to the wealthy while workers fend for themselves in a market-fundamentalist rat-race, are forced to suffer and beg privately — typically not as successfully — amid worsening inequality made even more intense by the coronavirus crisis.

    “This is a heartbreaking story and one our nation should be ashamed of,” said Julián Castro. The former Housing and Urban Development secretary also pointed out that if the federal government refuses to deliver adequate rent relief to Americans who “owe $70 billion in back rent that they won’t be able to pay… there will be millions of stories like these.”

    Alan MacLeod, a sociologist and journalist, in 2019 published an article denouncing corporate media outlets for spinning “horrifying stories as… perseverance porn.”

    “Any of these stories could have been used to explore the pressing social and economic realities of being poor in the United States, and having to work for things considered fundamental rights in other countries,” the media critic wrote in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. “But instead they are presented as uplifting features, something only possible if we unquestionably accept the political and economic system.”

    MacLeod continued:

    What these articles highlight so clearly is not only the grim, inhuman, and unnecessary conditions so many Americans are forced to live under, but the degree to which mainstream corporate journalists have completely internalized them as unremarkable, inevitable facts of life, rather than the consequences of decades of neoliberal policies that have robbed Americans of dignity and basic human rights. Because corporate media wholly accept and promote neoliberal, free-market doctrine, they are unable to see how what they see as “awesome” is actually a manifestation of late-capitalist dystopia.

    As philosopher Ben Burgis argued in Jacobin in May 2020, rather than forcing people to convince strangers to help them on crowdfunding sites, the U.S. needs a strong welfare state funded through redistributive taxation to ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met.

    “The scale of the current crisis casts the absurdity of relying on GoFundMe for these social needs into sharp relief,” wrote Burgis. “It’s as if we were living on an island about to be wiped out by a volcano and we were relying on a multitude of individual fundraisers, each jostling for attention, to purchase each individual boat or plane to be used in the evacuation.”

    “But it’s even worse,” he added. “The fact that anyone has ever needed to use GoFundMe to pay for things like rent or healthcare is a symptom of a social sickness far older than Covid-19.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republicans Have Already Introduced Over 100 Voter Suppression Bills This Year

    On the first day of early voting for the January 5th US Senate runoff long lines of Georgia voters form on a drizzly and chilly morning at Ponce De Leone Library in Atlanta, Georgia, on December 14, 2020.

    Since former President Donald Trump failed to reverse the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, Republicans in more than two dozen states have introduced over 100 bills to restrict voting access, an alarming development that voting rights advocates have pointed to as yet another reason for Democrats to abolish the filibuster, an anti-democratic tool currently allowing the GOP minority to block the enactment of a suite of popular pro-democracy reforms.

    Mother Jones journalist Ari Berman on Thursday reported on the GOP’s ongoing nationwide push to make voting more difficult — particularly for communities of color and other Democratic-leaning constituencies — and in some cases to empower state legislatures to overturn election results. He called state-level Republicans’ efforts “a huge scandal that should be getting as much attention as Trump’s plot to overturn the election.”

    Republicans across the country, Berman said, are “weaponizing Trump’s lies” about fraud in an attempt to roll back voting rights after last year’s historic turnout and expansion of mail-in ballots.

    “Democrats have a clear choice,” Berman continued. “They can get rid of the filibuster to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For the People Act to stop GOP voter suppression, or they can allow the GOP to undermine democracy for the next decade.”

    “The stakes,” Berman added, “couldn’t be higher.” That’s because, according to an analysis conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice in late January, Republicans at the state level have introduced three times as many bills to chip away at voting rights compared to the same point last year.

    Already this year, 106 bills have been introduced in 28 states — including 17 under complete GOP control, where passage is more likely — to undermine access to the franchise. According to the Brennan Center’s report, “These proposals primarily seek to: (1) limit mail voting access; (2) impose stricter voter ID requirements; (3) limit successful pro-voter registration policies; and (4) enable more aggressive voter roll purges.”

    “These bills,” the report argues, “are an unmistakable response to the unfounded and dangerous lies about fraud that followed the 2020 election.”

    And this week, as CNN reported on Friday, “lawmakers in the Republican-controlled Georgia Senate added more. They include proposals that would eliminate no-excuse absentee voting for many state residents and end automatic voter registration when obtaining a driver’s license.”

    According to Berman, the nine bills that Georgia Republicans introduced on February 1 would amount to “one of the worst voter suppression laws ever passed.”

    Not to be outdone, Arizona Republicans have since the start of 2021 introduced 34 bills to make voting harder, including reducing the number of polling places in Maricopa County from 100 to 15.

    Georgia and Arizona are not alone; similar reactionary proposals are being pushed by Republicans in more than two dozen additional states.

    The spike in anti-democracy bills represents an intensification of an existing trend rather than a new development. As Common Dreams reported last November, Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) admitted shortly after the election that making voting more accessible hurts the GOP’s electoral prospects.

    “If we don’t do something about voting by mail, we’re going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country,” Graham told Fox News host Sean Hannity.

    The GOP has been trying to undercut efforts to expand voting access for years. “A decade ago,” Berman wrote, “Republicans passed new voter ID laws and other efforts to curtail voting rights when they took power in the states following [former President] Barack Obama’s election.”

    But now, he added, “Republicans are taking their assault on voting rights to the next level.” Like the Brennan Center, Berman attributed the surge in anti-democracy legislation to Trump’s failed bid to subvert the will of the people in last year’s election.

    According to Berman, the GOP is “trying to accomplish through legislation what Trump couldn’t with litigation. All in all, these efforts amount to the most concerted attempts to roll back voting rights since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.”

    Meanwhile, at the federal level, Democratic lawmakers are pushing to expand ballot access.

    CNN reported that “the voting bills in Congress — which Democrats have said are an early priority — would establish at least 15 days of early voting in federal elections, allow for automatic voter registration, restore voting rights to former felons, and bar states from prohibiting mail-in and curbside voting — along with a slew of other changes to election and campaign-finance laws.”

    As Common Dreams reported last month, Democratic leaders have said the For the People Act, a far-reaching package of democracy reforms, is a legislative priority. But GOP opposition to the bill renders passage unlikely unless lawmakers kill the filibuster.

    The Brennan Center’s Wendy Weiser told CNN that “you have an absolutely necessary piece of legislation to restore our democracy. The filibuster absolutely shouldn’t stand in the way of accomplishing it.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.