At a rally with union workers in London on Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sander (I-Vermont) praised local train workers for recent strike actions and encouraged rally goers to band together to defeat the greed of the British and global ruling class.

“What is going on today in the U.K. is no different than what is going on in the United States of America. Same bloody thing,” Sanders said in his speech to the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT). “What you are seeing is people on the top who are phenomenally rich are becoming richer, you’re seeing a middle class continue to shrink and you’re seeing millions and millions of people living in abject poverty.”

“In the year 2022, we cannot allow that to happen, whether it’s the U.K. or the United States, working people all over the globe have got to stand together and tell the oligarchs they cannot have it all,” he said.

The speech came at a rally put on amid months of strikes waged by London Underground and Overground public transportation workers, who have staged multiple strikes this year as RMT members fight against low wage raises and proposed cuts to jobs. RMT has rejected several offers from transportation officials, saying that workers’ pensions and pay are under attack.

Sanders praised the workers for their efforts, saying that they are part of a growing labor movement that has the potential to take on oppressive power structures being perpetuated by billionaires.

“What are you looking at globally is a small number of billionaires who have enormous power over the economic life of the people and the political life of the people. And our challenge is to bring people together to stand up to the demagogues who want to divide us up by the color of our skin or where we were born or our sexual orientation,” Sanders said.

In the quest to take on this power, the working class must “think big, not small,” Sanders said, pointing out the vast inequities that are being forced on the working class today. For instance, despite huge advances in technology and productivity, wages are lower today than they were almost 50 years ago, with redistribution of wealth going toward the top, he pointed out.

Workers are having to work multiple jobs to afford to keep their families afloat, forced to pay for ballooning costs of child care and suffering under the growing costs of higher education.

Sanders said that the solidarity between the labor movement and the progressive movement in the U.S. is a promising sign that workers are ready to take on corporate power.

“There is no success, no justice, without struggle,” he said, paraphrasing Frederick Douglass. “They are never going to give it to you. You think the oligarchs are going to say, ‘hey, you made a good case. We’re gonna raise wages for your workers, thanks for informing us what’s going on’?… That ain’t the way it works.”

“The only way justice ever comes about, the only way working people ever make success is when we stand up, we take them on, and we win,” Sanders concluded. “That’s what this struggle is about.”

In the wake of the White House’s announcement that the Biden administration is canceling up to $20,000 of student debt for borrowers, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) reminded followers over the weekend that Congress could fund a plan to cancel all student debt by simply undoing the unpopular and costly tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy that Republicans passed in 2017.

In an Instagram post on Saturday, Ocasio-Cortez encouraged followers to keep fighting for further student debt relief, pointing out that politicians often give huge subsidies to the 1 percent and corporate tax dodgers with little hesitation.

“We can keep pushing. Remember that the Biden administration didn’t want to do this *at all.* It was YOUR pushing, YOUR pressure, YOUR organizing that got them to this point,” she wrote. “They have forgiven far, far more debt for business owners in the form of PPP who didn’t need to meet ANY sort of income requirements or means testing for almost $1 TRILLION in forgiveness.”

She added that the price tag for the 2017 Donald Trump-backed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was higher than the amount of student debt owed by all borrowers in the U.S., according to the Federal Reserve.

“Mind you, forgiving ALL student debt in the US is about $1.7 trillion — you could undo the 2017 tax cuts for the 1 percent and forgive all student loans plus have money left over to contribute to universal childcare, tuition free college, homelessness, etc.,” the lawmaker said.

Indeed, the statutory cost of the Trump tax cuts was a towering $1.9 trillion, though that figure ballooned to well over $2 trillion after the cuts were passed. The massive tax reform bill slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent while also giving colossal tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy, allowing them to avoid paying tens of billions of dollars in taxes.

Progressive lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) have tried to restore the pre-Trump corporate tax rate — which is already quite low compared to historic U.S. corporate tax policies — but have faced resistance from conservative Democrats like Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona), who have close ties to corporate and right-wing lobbyists.

Debt activists and progressives have also advocated for the cancellation of all student debt. Such a move would not only be a major investment in the middle and lower classes, they say — it would also be a step toward shrinking the racial wealth gap, and would give justice to borrowers who advocates argue were given predatory loans by the federal government.

Ocasio-Cortez further explained that the benefits of President Joe Biden’s student debt cancellation plan don’t extend just to borrowers, but to society at large.

“Maybe student loan forgiveness doesn’t impact you. That doesn’t make it bad,” she said, pointing out that many people pay for programs like first time homeowner benefits and Medicare without directly benefiting from them. “We can do good things and reject the scarcity mindset that says doing something good for someone else comes at the cost of something for ourselves.”

She went on to say that if American society isn’t prepared to support student debt cancellation, it’s unlikely that it will be able to face other systemic problems like the climate crisis.

“In light of the ecological, economic, and social challenges we face, our society’s ability to triumph and prevail actually depends on our capacity for SELFLESSNESS over SELFISHNESS,” she wrote. “Because when crisis finds us (and it always does), it requires us to rely on others, and that will be difficult to nonexistent if you spent your life fighting against our capacity to help one another in many other different ways even if we don’t immediately benefit in the short run.”

In the wake of a tumultuous few months that have seen the revocation of federal abortion rights and the passage of a major climate and fossil fuel bill, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is encouraging progressives to keep fighting, despite the enormous and seemingly insurmountable challenges facing the country.

In an interview with Teen Vogue published on Thursday, Sanders told young progressives that political transformation and social justice only come after long periods of struggle in which ordinary people put in the work to fight for revolutionary change.

The country is creeping toward corporate oligarchy, he said, citing major corruption in the political system and a dominant corporate media structure that “often deflects attention away from the real issues facing working people.” But these threats only make it more important for people to speak out and resist.

“Real, underline, politics is not instant gratification,” Sanders said. “Anybody who knows anything about history, going way back from the struggle of the abolitionists, struggle to end slavery, struggle for women’s rights, the struggle for workers’ rights, these are not easy struggles and they don’t happen overnight.”

In order to fight unprecedented wealth accumulation, violent right-wing bigotry, a worsening climate crisis, and more, progressives need tenacity and perseverance to succeed, the senator said.

“It is absolutely imperative that people continue to be engaged and stand up for economic justice, social justice, racial justice, environmental justice. You can’t back down. Now is not the time to give up, now is more than ever the time to be involved,” said Sanders. “The overall struggle that we are engaged in is not complicated. It is to struggle for justice in the deepest sense of the word.”

The Vermont senator had a similar message for progressives shortly after far right Supreme Court justices issued their decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, saying in a livestream that the problems the country is facing are too urgent and dangerous for progressives to wallow in despair.

Sanders also pointed out in the interview that progressives are notching wins across the country, despite corporate media outlets pushing the opposite narrative. Progressives aren’t just winning electorally, with triumphs for candidates like Jamie McLeod-Skinner in Oregon and Summer Lee in Pennsylvania; they’re also waging an extraordinarily successful labor movement, paving the way for a new generation of workers to have a voice in the workplace.

“At a time when working families are falling further and further behind, I think more and more workers see unions and the opportunity to engage in collective bargaining as a means by which they can earn decent wages and decent benefits,” he said.

Through efforts like the union campaigns at Starbucks and Amazon, workers are taking on some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world, including CEOs Howard Schultz and Jeff Bezos. “We are seeing now maybe an unprecedented wave of union organizing,” Sanders said, “which, to me, is very, very important, because we’re not going to rebuild the middle class in this country unless we have a strong union movement.”

President Joe Biden has signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law, which will usher in a historic investment into combating the climate crisis, set an unprecedented corporate minimum tax and, for the first time, allow Medicare to negotiate the prices of certain drugs.

The climate community had been pushing the Biden administration for many months to finally take action: If it weren’t for climate activists’ relentless advocacy over the past decades, the IRA may have never come to pass. The bill’s nearly $370 billion for climate spending has been heralded as groundbreaking for the climate movement.

But activists aren’t taking this time to rest; after all, the bill contains “poison pills” to expand fossil fuel exploration that climate experts say will fail to prevent the worst effects of the climate crisis. Instead, activists are mobilizing to demand more — and they say that whatever Biden does next may determine the course of the climate crisis.

One of the first targets of climate activists’ docket is a “dirty” side deal made by Democratic leaders with coal baron Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) in order to get him to support climate provisions in the IRA. The deal would fast track the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a fracked gas pipeline that would run through West Virginia and Virginia.

The project is a priority of Manchin but would be a major contributor to the climate crisis, and it is estimated to emit the equivalent of over 19 million passenger vehicles or 26 coal plants of greenhouse gasses a year. Activists say that the pipeline would be particularly harmful to Appalachian communities along the path of the project which face the risk of explosions, leaks and other safety hazards.

“Here in Appalachia, we are done being a sacrifice zone,” said Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights Coalition organizer Grace Tuttle, in a statement provided to Truthout. “Far too many corrupt people in power have thrown us under the bus for their own political gain and profit. No more.”

People vs. Fossil Fuels, a coalition of over 1,200 climate and advocacy groups, added that activists “will not allow our relatives in Appalachia to be sacrificed at the altar of corporate greed.”

Indeed, the deal is so fossil fuel-friendly that a draft bill text for the Mountain Valley Pipeline and other polluting projects that’s been circulating among lawmakers carries the watermark of “API” — which is believed to belong to the powerful American Petroleum Institute.

Activist groups are planning to flood D.C. in September to urge Biden and Congress to kill the pipeline deal, Stop the Oil Profiteering campaign spokesperson Cassidy DiPaola told Truthout, saying that activists will be waging an “all hands on deck” campaign to protect frontline communities that will be affected by the pipeline.

Some Democratic and progressive lawmakers have spoken out against the deal and called for it to come to a separate vote. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) told The American Prospect on Tuesday that progressives are vowing to vote against the pipeline, saying that “we sure as hell don’t owe Joe Manchin anything now.” It’s unclear if the pipeline has enough support to pass Congress.

Advocates are also planning to urge Biden to use his executive power to expand clean energy beyond the funding in the IRA. Crucially, they say that funding for these projects could come out of the budget of the world’s largest institutional greenhouse gas emitter: the Pentagon.

The Pentagon’s massive budget is the ideal source for climate funding, advocates say, considering the fact that lawmakers view it as must-pass budgetary legislation each year. The U.S. spends trillions of dollars on the “defense” agency, which regularly loses absurd amounts of funding through poor accounting practices — all while fueling humanitarian crises and violence across the globe.

According to a 2021 report prepared by the National Priorities Project and the Institute for Policy Studies, the U.S. could have decarbonized its entire electric grid several times over with the amount of money the country’s spent on militarization over the past two decades. Since 9/11, the U.S. has spent $21 trillion on domestic and foreign militarization, while it would take only $4.5 trillion to decarbonize the grid. Transitioning away from fossil fuels, unlike endless military spending, could also have the dual benefit of saving billions, if not trillions, of dollars a year.

Climate advocates say that Biden could have the power to redirect defense funds for climate priorities if he declares a climate emergency, which advocates and lawmakers have been urging Biden to do since he took office. There are also a host of actions he could take to limit fossil fuel expansion like prohibiting U.S. funding from funding fossil fuel projects overseas.

“Resting on renewable incentives alone won’t get Biden or the world where we need to go,” said Jean Su, energy justice director and attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. “The fight for a livable planet depends on Biden leading the all-of-government approach he promised, starting with using the powerful climate tools granted him under the law.”

With over 200 unionized stores and dozens of pending union elections, Starbucks has requested that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) suspend all union elections within the company, a move that the union says is “absurd.”

In a letter that Starbucks sent on Monday, which is cosigned by a legal counsel from notorious union-busting firm Littler Mendelson, the company alleges that the NLRB colluded to give organizers privileged information about a union election at a store in Overland Park, Kansas, and allowed employees at that store to vote in person at NLRB offices during a mail-in ballot election. The company says that it’s gotten this information through an internal NLRB source.

The company asks that the hearing on challenged ballots from the store’s election, which is slated for Tuesday, be delayed. They are also requesting that elections be halted temporarily until the NLRB investigates the allegations, that the staffers who allegedly helped the union be disciplined, and that all ongoing and future elections be conducted in person. The company argues that this has happened in regions beyond that of the Overland Park store.

Starbucks Workers United condemned the letter, saying that it is yet another instance of the company attempting to quell the union campaign.

“This is Starbucks yet again attempting to distract attention away from their unprecedented anti-union campaign, including firing over 75 union leaders across the country, while simultaneously trying to halt all union elections,” the union wrote in a statement. Union leader Michelle Eisen said that the fact that Starbucks would request that elections be delayed while claiming to stand up for voting rights is “hypocrisy at its finest.”

“Unfortunately, it’s now in vogue for the losers of some elections nationwide to attempt to reverse elections by any means they think are necessary, and Starbucks is taking a page out of that book,” the union added, noting that it was “odd” for Starbucks to send its letter just one day before the Kansas hearing is set to begin.

Indeed, labor experts say that the goal of the letter is to delay elections, which would give the company more time to dissuade workers from voting “yes,” throw the NLRB’s legitimacy into question, and potentially sow suspicion between workers.

Spokesperson Kayla Blado says that the NLRB will be “carefully and objectively” reviewing Starbucks’s challenge, adding that the “agency has well-established processes to raise challenges regarding the handling of both election matters and unfair labor practice cases.”

Though Starbucks claims in its letter that union elections have been skewed against the company due to misconduct, the union has decried what it says are the many illegal union-busting practices that the company has waged against workers since the start of their campaign last year. The company has fired over 75 pro-union workers and discriminatorily given wage raises to all stores except for unionizing ones — moves that the union says are illegal.

As a result, there are currently 284 unfair labor practice charges against Starbucks; the NLRB, which is in the process of prosecuting the company, has issued 16 complaints against Starbucks in total. These complaints include findings by the agency that the company violated federal labor laws more than 200 times during the union’s initial push in Buffalo and 500 times in total.

On the other hand, there are two open filings with the NLRB against Starbucks Workers United, and earlier this month, the NLRB dismissed Starbucks’ allegation that union organizers in Phoenix had blocked store entrances and made threats during a rally this spring.

Meanwhile, the company appears to be delaying bargaining with already unionized stores for their first contracts. Of the 221 stores that have won their elections so far, only three stores have had their first bargaining sessions with the company, the union says.

Conservative Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona) announced on Thursday that she will support the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) after Democratic leaders agreed to take out proposals to raise taxes on businesses and the wealthy in order to fund the bill.

Sinema said in a statement that, after the Senate parliamentarian reviews the budget package, she will “move forward” with the bill. With Sinema’s support, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) says that the Senate now has all 50 Democrats on board to pass the bill via a simple majority vote, with Vice President Kamala Harris’s vote being the 51st.

Sinema’s opposition was likely the last roadblock Democrats needed to clear after they announced the bill last week following negotiations with conservative Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia). Among the many large concessions made to appease Manchin are fossil fuel industry giveaways and the exclusion of a host of proposals to support middle- and lower-income Americans. In order to get Sinema’s support, Democrats also had to nix plans to close a tax loophole that allows the wealthy to dodge millions of dollars in taxes.

The carried interest loophole, which allows private equity investors and hedge fund managers to pay a lower tax rate on their incomes due to lower taxes on capital gains, was slated to raise $14 billion in funds over the next decade.

But lobbyists have long lobbied against proposals to close the loophole, and many of those same lobbyists have targeted Sinema in particular on the IRA, taking out ads in Arizona to sway the lawmaker against the proposal. Instead of the carried interest proposal, Democrats have added a 1 percent excise tax on companies’ stock buyback plans to raise funds, according to CNN.

Sinema had also raised concerns about the 15 percent corporate minimum tax proposal, which is the main revenue raiser in the bill. In fact, lobbyists said that she had directly asked business groups in private calls if the proposal was “written in a way that’s bad” for the businesses. But nixing the minimum tax would weaken Manchin’s goal of reducing the deficit, and it’s unclear if the proposal is still in the bill.

More proposals may be taken out after the Senate parliamentarian reviews the budget reconciliation bill, in which all of the proposals must have an impact on the nation’s budget. It’s unclear if the parliamentarian will rule against any parts of the bill.

Currently, the bill contains about $433 billion in new spending, $369 billion of which will be directed toward climate initiatives that it is estimated will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by the end of the decade. But the bill also includes major giveaways to the fossil fuel industry — giveaways so significant that executives at major oil and gas companies like Exxon have thrown their support behind the package.

Another proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate a limited number of prescription drug prices made it into the bill, which is a mere shadow of last year’s Build Back Better Act. At its smallest, that bill was worth $1.75 trillion, and included a wide range of proposals that are now off the table, like guaranteed paid family leave.

Republicans are colluding to get the drug price proposal nixed by the parliamentarian — and, though the parliamentarian’s opinion is merely a suggestion and there is no legal mandate to follow it, Democrats had allowed a proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 to be nixed from their bill last year after the parliamentarian ruled against it.

Schumer announced on Thursday that the Senate will be taking the first steps to pass the bill when the chamber reconvenes on Sunday. If it passes with all 50 Democratic votes, the chamber will begin a “vote-a-rama,” an often cumbersome process during which lawmakers can introduce an unlimited number of amendments to the bill. The bill will then go to the House.

Some such amendments will come from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont). Because Democrats have made significant concessions to Manchin and his corporate and fossil fuel donors, the bill is now much weaker than what progressives had originally wanted last year. As such, Sanders announced on Wednesday that he would be introducing provisions to remove proposals to expand the oil and gas industry from the bill and to expand Medicare and the drug price plan, and encouraged others to introduce amendments to strengthen the package.

The Biden administration has told student loan servicers not to send out billing statements to borrowers ahead of the scheduled end date of the current payment pause, signaling that officials may be preparing to extend the student loan payment pause yet again.

The current student loan payment pause ends on August 31, meaning that borrowers will have to start repaying student loans for the first time since March 2020 in September, or face default if the pause expires. Servicers typically send out billing notices about a month before the payment is starting.

President Joe Biden had last extended the pause in April, after months of pressure from debt activists and progressive lawmakers on student debt cancellation. The administration had also told servicers to hold off on sending billing notices ahead of that announcement.

The Education Department says that, this time around, it “will communicate directly with borrowers about the end of the payment pause when a decision is made.” But Biden is not expected to make a decision until as late as the end of August — which has frustrated student loan activists, who say that only a few days’ notice until the potential restart of payments is not enough time.

If Biden extends the payment pause again, it would come at a critical time for the Democratic Party, ahead of this fall’s midterm elections. Polls have found that Biden is losing ground among student loan borrowers, as his administration has waffled on his campaign promise to cancel up to $10,000 of debt per borrower. Meanwhile, the payment pause and debt cancellation poll well with voters, with a majority of voters favoring both ideas.

Experts have said for years that Biden can use his executive power to cancel student loans without Congress, but Education Department officials have been hotly debating the issue of student debt for over a year and have yet to come to a conclusion on the matter.

On Tuesday, lawmakers again encouraged Biden to cancel student debt on Twitter. “President Biden can use the same power he’s used to pause student loan payments to cancel student debt for 45 million Americans,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) said. “And he must.”

In April, Biden hinted in a meeting with fellow lawmakers that he may soon be taking steps to cancel student debt. The administration said that it was exploring up to $10,000 of cancellation per borrower with an income cap of $125,000 a year, disappointing debt cancellation advocates and baffling Education Department officials, who say that the agency doesn’t have the data to determine borrowers’ incomes.

Now, months later, the administration has resumed its silence on the issue of broad cancellation, despite continuous pressure from lawmakers and activists to announce a sweeping plan without an income cap.

Opponents of the income cap point to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which has been plagued with major issues. The program, which recently underwent an overhaul, is supposed to forgive loans for borrowers who have paid their loans on time and have worked in a public sector job, but the program rejected 99 percent of applicants during the first year of its implementation between 2018 and 2019.

The public service program requires borrowers to jump through a set of complicated hoops, including filing paperwork — much like an income-capped cancellation program might also require, borrowers say.

Furthermore, advocates say that the administration’s reason for imposing a cap is moot. Conservatives falsely argue that student loan cancellation would only benefit the richest borrowers, but research has shown that $10,000 of broad cancellation overwhelmingly benefits low-income and Black borrowers and would go a long way to close income gaps. The benefit only further scales with more cancellation; up to $50,000 of debt cancellation, as lawmakers have proposed, only comes with further benefits for the borrowers most in need.