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Author: Sharon Zhang

  • Democrats Eye Billionaire Tax With Potential Backing From “Centrists”

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks during a Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing at the Hart Senate Office Building on September 28, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Top Democrats are preparing a new tax plan that would levy a tax on billionaires as a part of their tax reform plan in the reconciliation bill.

    Senate Finance Committee Chair Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) is working on a proposal that would levy a tax on investment incomes of billionaires, as well as a 15 percent minimum corporate tax to ensure that companies pay federal income taxes. The billionaire tax is a far smaller proposal than previous wealth tax proposals and would only affect the roughly 745 billionaires in the U.S. Democrats hope that it could be a crucial revenue source for the Build Back Better Act.

    Importantly, the small tax proposal has the tentative support of Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona). Because of the two conservative Democrats — Sinema in particular — the party has been struggling to find ways to cover the cost of the reconciliation bill and appease Sinema and Manchin, who have fought hard to maintain the dismally low tax levels for corporations and the wealthy set by Republicans in 2017.

    Democratic leaders are confident that the billionaire tax proposal will make it into the final bill. “We probably will have a wealth tax,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) said on CNN over the weekend. The Finance Committee is expected to release a more detailed version of the proposal, which is expected to raise $500 billion for the bill, on Wednesday.

    Targeting billionaires may be a popular move among the caucus if only because of how narrow the tax would be. Indeed, the tax wouldn’t even be levied on the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, but only the richest — roughly 0.0002 percent of Americans. And it wouldn’t levy a tax on their wealth overall, as progressive lawmakers have previously proposed, but only on investment incomes. It is a small enough tax that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that she wouldn’t regard it as a wealth tax.

    However, economists still say that the tax would be a step in the right direction, setting precedent for other future similar taxes. Economist Gabriel Zucman, who worked with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) to craft her wealth tax proposal, told newsletter The.Ink that the tax would only apply to increases in the wealth — or what economists refer to as unrealized capital gains — rather than the entirety of the wealth.

    “Billionaires own $5 trillion in wealth today, of which about 60 percent (roughly $3 trillion) corresponds to unrealized gains,” Zucman explained. “So you can think of this tax as a big one-time wealth tax on 60 percent of the wealth of billionaires, plus an ongoing annual tax on their future gains.”

    Still, this will likely be insufficient to meet the demands of progressive advocates and lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who argues that billionaires shouldn’t exist while millions of Americans are struggling to pay bills and survive. A larger wealth tax could cover the entirety of the original reconciliation bill and more, rather than just a fraction of the paltry $1.9 trillion proposal before Congress now.

    Warren has previously introduced a tax on the ultra-wealthy that would create a 2 percent tax on wealth over $50 million, and a 3 percent tax on wealth over $1 billion. The tax would affect the top 0.05 percent of U.S. households. Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, another economist who helped work on the bill, say it could raise over $3 trillion over the next decade — enough to cover nearly the entire $3.5 trillion price tag for the original reconciliation bill. Warren has advocated for the inclusion of the tax in the reconciliation bill, saying “we need to pass a bill that ensures that billionaires and corporations are finally paying their fair share.”

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) has come out against the proposal even before it’s been released, saying that it would penalize people who have supposedly “invested wisely” while rewarding people who have “invested poorly.”

    This is a perverse way of viewing wealth, especially since billionaires do not earn their wealth in the same way as the working class does, leading leftist advocates to liken their wealth to theft from the government and workers. Investing is already a highly prohibitive activity, available largely only to the wealthy; recent data has shown that a record 89 percent of individually-owned stocks are owned by the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans.

    Billionaires have grown their wealth massively during the pandemic, while the working class suffered under poor conditions and meager pay. As of earlier this month, U.S. billionaires have expanded their collective wealth by $2.1 trillion just over the past 19 months, a 70 percent increase. Meanwhile, Federal Reserve data shows that the top 1 percent of Americans have now hoarded 27 percent of the nation’s finances, more wealth than the amount owned by the entire middle class.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ocasio-Cortez Calls to Expel Members Who Aided Jan. 6 Plot After Fiery Report

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) speaks during a news conference on March 18, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has called for members of Congress who aided far-right organizers behind the January 6 Capitol attack in their plot to be expelled.

    Ocaiso-Cortez’s call was prompted by a report by Rolling Stone which found that officials such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) allegedly aided attackers in planning the attack.

    According to two people who planned the attack, there were “dozens” of meetings between the eventual attackers and members of Congress before the attempted coup that led to the deaths of at least nine people. The organizers name Greene, Representatives Paul Gosar (R-Arizona), Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado), Mo Brooks (R-Alabama), Madison Cawthorn (R-North Carolina), Andy Biggs (R-Arizona) and Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) as members who aided in the attack.

    “Any member of Congress who helped plot a terrorist attack on our nation’s capitol must be expelled,” wrote Ocasio-Cortez. “This was a terror attack. 138 injured, almost 10 dead. Those responsible remain a danger to our democracy, our country, and human life in the vicinity of our Capitol and beyond.”

    Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) made a similar call, emphasizing that her resolution to investigate and potentially expel members of Congress who voted against the certification of the electoral results on January 6 was even more urgent now.

    “My resolution to investigate and expel the Members of Congress who helped incite the deadly insurrection on our Capitol is just waiting for a vote. It’s inexcusable to wait any longer,” Bush wrote. “Pass H.Res 25.” The resolution, introduced shortly after the attack, garnered 54 cosponsors.

    Ocasio-Cortez had previously described the terror of feeling like she was going to die on January 6 after a close encounter in her office. “It is not an exaggeration to say that many, many members of the House were nearly assassinated,” she said at the time, adding that members’ families were also present that day.

    Even before the attack, Ocasio-Cortez has said that she had to go into hiding because of her fear of fellow lawmakers and protesters around Washington, D.C. She called, then, on people like Senators Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who were key in supporting President Donald Trump’s completely false election narrative leading up to and after the election, to resign.

    Previous evidence and allegations have also pointed to the involvement of Congress members in aiding the attackers, but this is the first time such an extensive list of specific officials has been provided by planners themselves.

    “I remember Marjorie Taylor Greene specifically,” one of the planners told Rolling Stone. “I remember talking to probably close to a dozen other members at one point or another or their staffs.” They went on to name other lawmakers, saying, “we would talk to Boebert’s team, Cawthorn’s team, Gosar’s team like back to back to back to back.”

    The planners offer some details over what the members of Congress offered the attackers, including Gosar offering a “blanket pardon” in unrelated investigations to help incentivize them to plan the attack. “I was just going over the list of pardons and we just wanted to tell you guys how much we appreciate all the hard work you’ve been doing,” Gosar said, according to the source.

    “Our impression was that it was a done deal,” one of the organizers said, “that he’d spoken to the president about it in the Oval … in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support.”

    In return, the members of Congress also asked the organizers of the attack for finding supposed proof for the bunk conspiracy theory that there was election fraud afflicting the 2020 election.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Federal Reserve Officials Banned From Owning Individual Stock After Scandal

    Chair of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell appears before a Senate committee on September 28, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

    After revelations of several scandals involving potential insider trading within the Federal Reserve have emerged over the past weeks, the agency has banned its officials from trading individual stocks as it scrambles to mitigate a legitimacy crisis and distrust of the public.

    Policymakers and senior staff within the Fed are now barred from buying individual securities and will have to adhere to shorter reporting guidelines, according to a press release by the agency. Senior Fed officials will only be allowed to trade diversified assets like mutual funds.

    However, the kind of scandal that likely sparked the new rules would still be likely to take place. Last week, The American Prospect revealed that Fed Chair Jerome Powell sold between $1 million and $5 million from an index fund — a mutual fund that mirrors the performance of the market — just before a large market crash in October of last year. And with rules still allowing top officials to trade mutual funds, the type of trade that precipitated the rule change would still be legal.

    Progressive lawmakers and economists have called for Powell to be ousted from the Fed, saying that he’s weak on climate issues and regulation of the financial sector. Economist Gerald Epstein wrote for Truthout that Powell’s financial regime and de-regulation moves have likely exacerbated financial inequality and weakened economic growth that would support the working class.

    Criticizing the Fed’s pandemic policies that gave preference to bailing out markets over small governments and businesses, Epstein wrote: “In the absence of a strong commitment to financial regulation and the will to enforce it, this destructive cycle of speculative excesses, financial crises and bailouts is simply going to continue.”

    “These tough new rules raise the bar high in order to assure the public we serve that all of our senior officials maintain a single-minded focus on the public mission of the Federal Reserve,” Powell said in a statement last week.

    The Fed has also been embroiled in several other scandals. Last month, two regional Fed presidents were found to have traded significant amounts of stocks in 2020 as the markets were roiled by the pandemic. Dallas Fed President Robert S. Kaplan had made nearly two dozen stock trades worth $1 million or more. Boston Fed President Eric S. Rosengren bought and sold real-estate related securities, which are related to Fed policy. Both officials have since resigned.

    Then, earlier this month, reports showed that the Fed’s vice chair, Richard Clarida, had moved between $1 million and $5 million in stocks in February of 2020, the day before Powell announced potential policy overhauls for the pandemic. Clarida is still in his position.

    These scandals happened despite a warning circulated to Fed officials in late March of last year warning officials that active trading during the financial crisis would reflect poorly on the agency. Indeed, the New York Times has reported that most regional presidents and Fed governors didn’t trade in April.

    The latest Federal Reserve data has shown, meanwhile, that stock trading is a financial tool that is increasingly available only to the richest individuals in the U.S. Data last week showed that the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans own a record 89 percent of all individual stocks. This has aided the accumulation of wealth at the top during the pandemic, during which the top 1 percent gained more than $6.5 trillion in corporate equities and mutual fund assets.

    The Fed’s top officials, who have huge sway over financial markets in the country, are representative of some of these top wealthiest individuals in the country. The five appointed members of the Fed, including Powell and Clarida, are all millionaires. Powell, worth between $20 million and $55 million, is the richest Fed chair in history.

    After Clarida’s trade was reported, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) called for an insider trading probe at the Fed, saying that it shows “atrocious judgment” and erodes confidence in the Fed. She has been extremely critical of Powell as President Joe Biden considers reappointing the Fed president, calling him a “failed” leader and a “dangerous man” to lead the agency.

    Last week, after the new rules were announced, Warren said that the overhaul was merely the bare minimum. “Of course Fed officials shouldn’t trade individual stocks — it should be illegal,” she wrote. “But Fed officials must avoid actual and perceived financial conflicts, period. We need full transparency on the behavior that’s led us here [and] assurances these new policies will fix what’s broken.”

    “There can be no reform without accountability. That means disclosure of all trades to this point by Fed officials,” Warren continued. She called on the Inspector General and the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate the stock trades.

    Warren also called on the agency to release the warning handed to Fed officials last year “so that Congress and the public can evaluate the extent to which Fed officials may have known of the risks from their trading, and if they ignored calls by ethics officials to avoid this scandalous behavior,” she said.

    The scandals at the Fed have also prompted lawmakers to advocate for barring Congress and other top officials and lawmakers from being able to trade stocks. In response to the rules barring Fed officials from trading stocks, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) wrote, “Now let’s do members of Congress.”

    Earlier this year, Warren introduced legislation that would bar top officials from trading stocks, seeking to root out corruption within the federal government. The chances of passing such legislation through Congress, however, are slim to none as members from both sides of the aisle profit greatly from stock trading.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Chuck Schumer Endorses Socialist India Walton in Heated Buffalo Mayoral Race

    Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer speaks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol on June 15, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) has endorsed India Walton, the Democratic candidate for the mayor of Buffalo. Election day is on November 2, less than two weeks away.

    “Today, I endorse [India Walton], the Democratic nominee for Mayor of Buffalo. She’s a community leader, nurse, and mother with a clear progressive vision for her hometown,” wrote Schumer on Thursday. “Dems are at our best when we build a big tent and forge inclusive coalitions to fight for everyday people.”

    Though Walton, a socialist, won the Democratic primary for the position in June, the New York state’s Democratic Party establishment has aligned itself against her. Schumer’s endorsement stands in contrast to his state’s party, though it is standard for party leaders to endorse the party’s candidate in significant races.

    Schumer appeared to acknowledge shady tactics waged by the state party’s establishment in his endorsement. “India Walton won the Democratic primary fair and square and is the nominee,” he wrote. “Throughout my career, I have worked long, hard, and diligently to bring federal resources to Western New York and I look forward to doing that with India Walton for the betterment of the people of Buffalo.”

    Walton celebrated Schumer’s endorsement on Thursday. “I am honored to receive the endorsement of [Senator Schumer]. Together, we will beat back these Republican attacks and build the safe, healthy Buffalo we all need and deserve,” she wrote. She continued to highlight other high-profile endorsements like those of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York).

    If elected, Walton would be the first socialist mayor of a major city in the U.S. in 60 years.

    Perhaps because of this, Walton’s candidacy has been marked with strife due to the state’s party establishment. Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who took over after Andrew Cuomo resigned in disgrace, has not endorsed or otherwise vocally supported Walton, and important state Democrats like Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes and state Chairman Jay Jacobs have remained similarly unsupportive.

    Jacobs made headlines earlier this week after comparing a hypothetical endorsement of Walton to an endorsement of Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, one of the most detestable and racist living figures in American history. Jacobs later apologized for the comparison — though not until he faced considerable backlash.

    The party has made some other desperate moves in attempts to block a socialist mayorship. In August, Buffalo’s Common Council explored the possibility of getting rid of the mayoral position entirely after sensationalism and fear mongering took over prominent Democrats and some local media outlets.

    Further, incumbent Mayor Byron Brown has refused to concede his opposition. Despite a court ruling that his name couldn’t appear on the ballot as a third party candidate, Brown has been aggressively pursuing a write-in campaign, gathering the endorsements of powerful unions. As Walton has pointed out, some of Brown’s major financial backers are Republican-affiliated real estate developers and GOP dark money groups.

    Walton is still in a powerful position. She has gathered the support of several unions herself as well as the support of national progressive and socialist organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party and Run For Something. As a result of Brown’s write-in campaign, however, it is still unclear who will come out on top next month.

    Brown’s tenure has been marked by financial mismanagement and scandal involving government contractors with ties to the mayor’s campaign. The incumbent mayor has touted the support of local police officers, despite a failure, critics say, to reign in corruption and violence by the Buffalo Police department.

    Meanwhile, Walton has run on a campaign promising to address public safety by expanding non-police de-escalation resources, like involving social workers in mental health outreach and investments in restorative justice in place of imprisonment. She has also promised to invest in traditionally marginalized communities like the city’s East Side, which is majority Black.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Announces New Reconciliation Deal That Slashes Bill Nearly in Half

    President Joe Biden arrives for the Council of Chief State School Officers' 2020 and 2021 State and National Teachers of the Year at the White House in Washington, D.C., on October 18, 2021.

    President Joe Biden is trying to rally Democrats around a new reconciliation deal that would cut the topline of the Build Back Better Act by around half, and severely water down some of the bill’s key proposals.

    After months of negotiating with conservative Democrats, Biden told Democrats on Tuesday that he wanted to move forward with a bill worth between $1.75 trillion and $1.9 trillion — a huge cut from the $3.5 trillion presented by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) earlier this year, which was rallied behind by other Democrats. This is an even larger cut from the $6 trillion or $10 trillion that progressives had originally unveiled; instead, the number is closer to the price tag that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) demanded in secret.

    Though the new proposal is still in negotiations, this is the first instance of Biden standing behind a price tag other than $3.5 trillion over 10 years, which now seems unlikely to pass. The details of this proposal are discouraging for progressives hoping for a transformative climate and social spending bill, as negotiations with conservative Democrats have produced far-reaching cuts.

    Biden said that the child tax credit, among the bill’s most crucial proposals, would be cut down to only a one year extension, rather than the 10 year extension or permanent implementation that some Democrats were hoping for. Child-related proposals like childcare funding and universal pre-kindergarten are still included — the latter likely because Manchin’s state already has universal pre-K.

    Meanwhile, the paid family leave benefit may be cut from 12 weeks to four, meaning that parents would have merely a month to spend off of work with their newborn baby. Though this is marginally better than zero weeks of paid family leave, it’s a far cry from the two months or more that many other wealthy countries guarantee to their residents.

    Free community college has been cut out of the new package entirely. Sanders’s Medicare expansion, which sought to allow seniors to access dental, vision and hearing coverage, may be watered down to include dental only — and even that would be limited to a “pilot program” instead of universal rollout.

    Though other details have yet to be worked out, one contentious area is climate — an especially timely issue as the international climate summit, COP26, approaches at the end of this month. Without climate commitments in the reconciliation bill, the U.S. will have little to show for plans to reach the country’s emissions targets.

    The inclusion of climate proposals in the Build Back Better Act is critical because this may be the Democrats’ last chance to pass climate legislation before the 2022 midterm elections, which early projections show may be an uphill battle for Democrats. As increased climate disasters in past years have demonstrated, the climate crisis is rapidly accelerating, and the U.S. still has no federal policy in place aimed specifically at decreasing emissions.

    The biggest hurdles to passing climate policy are dual obstructionists Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona). Sinema has indicated a desire to cut $100 billion of climate proposals from the bill, while coal baron Manchin is insisting on gutting the Clean Energy Payment Program, the heart of the climate portion of the bill.

    The conservative Democrats have been the loudest voices against the anti-poverty, climate-crisis-combatting bill — likely because of their strong ties with Exxon and other influential lobbyist groups. But despite the fact that Manchin and Sinema stand alone among Senate members in their opposition to the bill’s proposals, they have succeeded in cutting the bill down enormously.

    As Sanders has pointed out numerous times, $3.5 trillion over 10 years — or only $350 billion a year — is already a compromise for progressive lawmakers. Yet Manchin and Sinema insist upon curbing social and climate spending — even though neither have raised any objections to the proposed $778 billion slated to go toward defense spending for 2022, just after the U.S. purportedly pulled out of its longest war.

    Progressive lawmakers have condemned Manchin’s hypocrisy. “He is going to lower the number every time a reporter asks,” tweeted Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) on Tuesday, in response to Manchin’s insistence that the bill be cut by $2 trillion. “It’s all a joke to him. He isn’t negotiating, he is killing the bill and it’s time we all recognized it. Sadly, his shameful tactics will cost his constituents much needed investments for themselves and families.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ilhan Omar Calls Manchin’s Demand to Limit Child Tax Credit a “Terrible Idea”

    Rep. Ilhan Omar leaves the U.S. Capitol on September 30, 2021.

    Progressive Democrats are rejecting Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-West Virginia) demand to apply means-testing to the child tax credit.

    The expanded child tax credit is projected to have cut child poverty in half when it was passed in the stimulus package earlier this year. Despite its powerful effects, however, Manchin has reportedly demanded severe limitations on the tax credit, telling the White House that it must come with a strict work requirement and a family income cap of $60,000. If two people in the family work, in other words, they would only qualify if they made only an average of $30,000 a year each, or roughly less than $15 an hour.

    Manchin’s plan would dramatically reduce eligibility for the credit, which is, in fact, already means tested. The American Rescue Plan gave families between $2,000 and $3,000 for each child, with couples making up to $150,000 or single parents making up to $112,500 getting the full credit.

    Progressive lawmakers have slammed Manchin’s plan. “I can’t believe I have to say this, but it is a terrible idea to cut the Child Tax Credit, one of the most popular policies with the American public,” wrote Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) on Tuesday.

    Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) alluded to the poverty-reducing effects of the child tax credit. Pointing out that child tax credits are in the mail or in bank accounts, Bowman said, “Poverty is a policy choice and we need permanent solutions to eradicate it and Build Back Better.”

    Moderate Democrats are also criticizing Manchin’s insistence on limiting the proposal. “If they want to bring down the eligibility for families making $200, $300, $350, $400K, I’m fine with that,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), according to Politico. “But the fact is this has been the most effective, quantifiable, provable answer to child poverty that we’ve done in a generation. Comparable to what the Affordable Care Act did. Why would we scale that back?’

    Brown, a longtime proponent of the tax credit, said that the proposal is “too important” to be subject to such a drastic cut as Manchin is suggesting, and added, “We’ve already compromised on this, we wanted 10-year permanence. And now we’re looking at 3 to 4 years.”

    Manchin and fellow conservative lawmaker Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) have, indeed, already forced Democrats to ponder severe cuts to the Build Back Better Act. Whereas the bill as it was presented by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) earlier this year had a 10-year timeline for all of its programs, the caucus is now looking at cutting tit for crucial programs in order to fit in the small budget that Sinema and Manchin will allow.

    The child tax credit has been an important tool to reduce poverty during the pandemic. Even in the first month of its implementation, over half of families who received the credit said it helped reduce financial anxiety, according to an August poll. Some families have reported that the tax credit has been life-changing, by freeing up funds for essentials like food, clothes or school supplies.

    “There is no reason to cut this life-changing program. In fact, we should be making it permanent, which is exactly what [the Congressional Progressive Caucus is] fighting to do,” wrote Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-New York).

    Other progressive lawmakers have pointed out that most means-testing programs don’t actually save money and only increase bureaucracy. “Means testing doesn’t actually save money. It only makes programs harder to administer, forces people to jump through hoops to get needed benefits and continues cycles of poverty,” wrote Rep. Andy Levin (D-Michigan) on Tuesday.

    Indeed, at best, means testing just makes it harder to implement programs designed to help the public. At worst it becomes so burdensome for the families in need of aid that many people aren’t able to participate in the program. Many are daunted or barred by piles of paperwork — and, as many people with disabilities have experienced, they may face surveillance.

    As Manchin has demanded more means testing for the tax credit and for the reconciliation bill in general, lawmakers have criticized the idea. In an op-ed by Jones and Rep. Katie Porter (D-California) in the Washington Post last week, the lawmakers pointed out that programs like Medicare and Social Security aren’t means tested, which is part of why they’re so successful and popular. “For Biden’s agenda to meet its potential, we must heed the lessons of the past. That means making our investments universal,” Jones and Porter wrote.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Texas GOP’s Electoral Map Gives White People Disproportionate Control Over State

    Texas State Representatives Mary Ann Perez, center, and Christina Morales, right, attend a news conference with members of the Texas House Democratic Caucus outside the U.S. Capitol on August 6, 2021.

    The Texas legislature passed a new congressional map on Monday that gives disproportionate favor to Republicans and marginalizes the influence of nonwhite voters.

    The map was passed by the Senate and the House largely on party lines, with nearly all Republicans voting in favor. Democrats have condemned the map, saying that the redistricting process was squeezed into the legislature’s special 30 day session, giving little time for discussion or public input. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is expected to sign the map into law, which will give Republicans disproportionate control over the state for the next decade.

    According to the Census Bureau, Texas’s population is about 41 percent white non-Latinx, nearly 40 percent Latinx, approximately 5 percent Asian and nearly 13 percent Black. Under the maps approved by the legislature, however, white people represent a majority in 60 percent of the congressional districts, as Mother Jones’s Ari Berman points out. Meanwhile, Latinx people represent a majority in only 18 percent of districts, and Black and Asian people do not represent a majority in any district.

    Though the Texas GOP’s redistricted maps were already discriminatory in 2010, this round is slated to disenfranchise nonwhite voters even more than before. Whereas Latinx residents represented a majority in eight districts over the past decade, there will only be seven such districts in the new maps, despite Latinx residents making up about half of Texas’s new residents over the last ten years.

    Due to the state’s population growth, Texas will be gaining two additional seats in the House. But, despite nearly all of the new population being people of color, the new map gives both seats to majority-white districts.

    The new maps also consolidate and empower the GOP in particular, in the year after Texas was briefly poised to go blue in the 2020 election. Under the new map, the number of safe Republican seats would double from 11 to 22, with nearly the entire state becoming deep red districts with some Democratic strongholds like Dallas, Houston and Austin.

    Democratic state lawmakers criticized the new map. “What we’re doing in passing this congressional map is a disservice to the people of Texas,” said Rep. Rafael Anchía before the vote. “What we’re doing is hurtful to millions of Texans — it’s shameful.”

    Texas Democrats had fled the state this summer in attempts to block the Republicans’ voter suppression package, but were forced to return and restore quorum in the legislature when Republicans threatened to arrest them.

    Several civil rights groups have sued Texas over the map. The plaintiffs, represented by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), say that the new maps violate the Voting Rights Act because they disenfranchise Latinx voters.

    “Violation of voting rights is not a partisan issue,” said Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel for MALDEF. “Still, Texas has a uniquely deplorable record in its consistent disregard of Latino population growth over half a century of redistricting.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Senate Quietly Adds $10 Billion to Pentagon Budget While Blocking Climate Action

    An Air Force F-35 Lightning II, F-16 Fighting Falcon, F-22 Raptor, A-10C Thunderbolt II and P-51 Mustang fly in formation during the 2018 Heritage Flight Training and certification course at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona, March 4, 2018.

    The 2022 budget for the Defense Department adds an extra $10 billion on top of the already colossal $715 billion that the Pentagon requested, according to a version of the bill that Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) unveiled on Monday.

    With amendments and other funding, this brings the total of 2022 appropriations for the Pentagon and defense-related spending to a whopping $778 billion — 5 percent more than the amount that was appropriated for the 2021 fiscal year. Last month, the House passed a $768 billion budget for defense.

    The $10 billion tacked onto the bill with little fanfare from lawmakers or the media. But even just a relatively small amount added to the defense budget is a significant amount in other contexts.

    Over ten years, the addition would total to $100 billion — the same amount of funding for vital climate programs that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) wants to cut from the Build Back Better Act, or about two-thirds of the cost of the climate program that deficit hawk Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) also wants to cut.

    Though the defense budget is already unfathomably large, Republicans aren’t satisfied with the Pentagon budget’s growth, Roll Call reports. Republicans like Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) have asked for equal increases to defense and nondefense spending; and with increases to programs like child care and preventing violence against women, the Republicans say that the increase to the defense budget should be closer to the 14 percent that they say has increased in the nondefense spending.

    This is a somewhat absurd request considering the huge amount of money already being added to the defense budget annually — especially in a year when the country purportedly pulled out of its longest war. Last year, Congress authorized about $740 billion for the Pentagon, meaning that this years’ additions alone would total about $38 billion if passed into law. If the $38 billion were locked in for the next decade, it would total about 10 percent of the proposed spending for the reconciliation bill, just in increases to the defense budget.

    While the reconciliation bill — which would provide funding to mitigate the climate crisis and support middle- and lower-class families in the U.S. — has been a subject of bitter debate over the past months, the defense budget — which helps fund defense contractor profits — typically enjoys bipartisan support.

    Sinema and Manchin, for instance, have complained repeatedly about the reconciliation bill’s price tag, totalling $3.5 trillion over ten years and completely offset by taxes on corporations and the wealthy, amongst other proposals.

    But they’ve been quiet about the defense budget, which would cost more than double what the reconciliation bill would cost if it were extrapolated over ten years. Further, over the past decade, Manchin has approved $9.1 trillion for the defense budget, most of which goes towards the Pentagon, an agency that has never passed an audit.

    The conservative Democrats’ double standard on spending also works toward their apparent quest to block any legislation to mitigate the climate crisis. Manchin and Sinema are fighting hard on behalf of fossil fuel lobbyists to cut climate portions of the reconciliation bill, which advocates say is the Democrats’ last chance of passing meaningful climate legislation before the 2022 midterms.

    Meanwhile, Sinema and Manchin remain supportive of spending for the Pentagon, which emits a huge amount of greenhouse gases. A study in 2019 showed that, annually, carbon emissions from the military-industrial complex in the U.S. averages to about the amount of emissions put out by the Netherlands every year.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Fed Chair Jerome Powell Sold Over $1 Million in Stocks Right Before Crash

    Jerome Powell

    Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of stock just before a large stock market crash last year, according to new disclosure filings reviewed by The American Prospect.

    Powell’s massive sale came on October 1, 2020. As the month went on, the Dow Jones Industrial average dropped nearly 6 percent, or by 1,600 points — the largest drop since March of 2020. COVID was beginning to spike in October after a short lull in cases in the summer and early fall.

    Powell had communicated with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin four times on the day of the sale, The American Prospect found. Five days later, he said in a speech that, if the second stimulus bill being considered by Congress at the time were to fail, the consequent exacerbation of inequality “would be tragic, especially in light of our country’s progress on these issues in the years leading up to the pandemic.”

    The same day as Powell’s speech, Donald Trump tweeted that he told Republicans to stop negotiating the stimulus package, saying that they should delay its passage until after he won the election — which, of course, never happened. The Dow, which was up at the time, fell 376 points after Trump’s tweet.

    The day after the tweet, on October 7, the minutes of a crucial Fed policy meeting that was held in mid-September were released. The meeting addressed uncertainty around the financial markets and discussed issues that could threaten the markets.

    The embattled Fed chair is worth between $20 million and $55 million, according to his financial disclosure from last year. Though it’s unclear if his October stock trade broke any laws, Powell’s trade is only one of many Fed scandals over the past few months. Lawmakers and legal experts have said that such sales can erode the public’s trust in the government, regardless of the legality.

    As Fed chair, Powell not only has an enormous amount of insider knowledge about the financial markets in the U.S. but also has sway over the laws governing those markets. He has faced scrutiny from lawmakers like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), who has called him a “dangerous man” because of his record with being soft on banks.

    The Fed has faced an onslaught of criticism in the wake of other scandals involving stock trades by important Fed officials. In September, local Fed presidents of two major cities were revealed to have traded significant amounts of stocks and real estate-related assets last year, as the markets were being riled by the pandemic. The Dallas Fed President Robert S. Kaplan made nearly two dozen stock trades worth $1 million or more during that time, including in companies directly affected by the pandemic like Johnson and Johnson and oil and gas companies.

    This month, another scandal rocked the Fed: on February 27, 2020, the agency’s vice chair, Richard Clarida, moved between $1 million and $5 million in stocks. The day after, Powell made a statement about policy changes that the agency was planning to put in place for the pandemic.

    Though the Fed said it was launching an internal review of Clarida’s trades, Warren called for more, writing in a letter to the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission that all top Fed officials should be investigated for potential insider trading. She has previously introduced legislation to ban members of Congress, judges and top government officials, including Fed officials, from being able to trade stocks at all.

    Warren and progressive lawmakers have criticized Powell and recommended against his reappointment, which is being considered by the Biden administration. Earlier this month, Warren slammed Powell over the Fed scandals that emerged in September and early October. “Setting the right culture at the Fed and making sure safeguards are in place to prevent self-dealing and to protect the public’s confidence should be the minimum standard any Federal Reserve chair should meet,” she said, adding that Powell has “failed” at preventing a “culture of corruption.”

    In August, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) urged Biden to find a new Fed chair, saying that Powell hasn’t taken enough steps to address the climate crisis and the risk that it poses to the financial sector. “At a time when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is warning of the potential catastrophic and irreversible damage inflicted by a changing climate, we need a leader at the helm that will take bold and decisive action to eliminate climate risk,” they wrote.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Manchin Obstructs Climate Progress as His Family Is Hit by “Unbelievable” Storms

    Manchin talks to reporters

    West Virginia conservative Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin is obstructing a key climate proposal in the Build Back Better Act, sparking outrage among progressives and climate advocates who say that this is the Democrats’ last chance to meet emissions targets set by international agreements and President Joe Biden. Meanwhile, Manchin’s cousin-in-law has said that the senator’s opposition to climate progress will affect his own family.

    According to the New York Times, it’s likely that the clean electricity program known as the Clean Energy Performance Program, or CEPP, will be cut from the bill due to Manchin’s opposition. Manchin chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and is in charge of crafting the climate portion of the bill.

    Manchin has been hinting at wanting to water down the CEPP during negotiations, but killing it outright is a new position from the senator, one that lines up with his status as a coal baron and with the campaign his fossil fuel lobbyist friends have waged against climate action.

    The CEPP would drive down emissions over the next decades by rewarding utilities for using clean energy sources like wind and solar and punishing utilities that don’t meet certain benchmarks. It would lead to an emissions reduction of about 82 percent of 2005 levels by the end of the decade, on track with Biden’s emissions reduction goals. It would also be the nation’s first federal policy aimed specifically at reducing greenhouse emissions.

    Because the CEPP falls under reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority to pass the Senate, it is likely the Democrats’ only chance at passing meaningful climate legislation before the 2022 midterm elections — when early projections say that Democrats could lose control of Congress.

    As the New York Times reported on Sunday, Manchin’s obstruction could directly affect his own family. Manchin’s hometown of Farmington has been affected by overwhelming rains and flooding over the past years. The storms are likely worsening due to the climate crisis, which can create more precipitation in places like Farmington, a small town surrounded by a creek on three sides.

    “These last few years here in West Virginia, we’ve had unbelievable amounts of rain,” Jim Hall, who is married to Manchin’s cousin, told the New York Times. “We’ve seriously considered not staying.” Hall recalled a 2017 flood when he and his wife had to be rescued from inside their home. He also spoke about having to help his neighbors — Manchin’s sister and brother-in-law — clear out their basement to prepare for storms.

    That Manchin’s radical and climate-denying obstruction could harm his own family is ironic considering he often cites workers in his home state as a reason to oppose climate legislation. But coal actually plays a relatively small role in his state’s economy, and it’s unlikely that he actually cares about coal workers, since he has rejected a plan to subsidize coal workers’ incomes while they shift away from the dying industry.

    The climate crisis will also affect other residents in West Virginia, many of whom don’t have the resources to move when climate disasters hit their neighborhoods. While West Virginia officials are struggling to protect residents from the worsening effects of the climate crisis, Manchin is collecting lobbyist funds.

    Progressive lawmakers have expressed frustration over Manchin’s obstruction of the CEPP. “We cannot advance legislation that makes the climate crisis worse,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) on Twitter. “The Exxon-designed ‘bipartisan’ infrastructure plan worsens emissions, but pairing it w/clean energy in Build Back Better neutralizes BIF’s harm and lets us tackle the climate crisis. We cannot afford to gut it.”

    Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) also spoke out against Manchin and conservative Democrats, saying, “The most frustrating challenge in Congress right now is the fact that some would rather do nothing.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Cori Bush Slams GOP Governor for Threat to Prosecute Reporter: “Shame on You”

    Gov. Mike Parson listens to a media question during a press conference on May 29, 2019 in Jefferson City, Missouri.

    Republican Missouri Gov. Mike Parson has become the subject of widespread criticism for accusing a journalist of hacking after the journalist pointed out a data vulnerability on the state government’s website.

    On Thursday, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter wrote that over 100,000 educators’ Social Security numbers (SSN) were easily viewable through the HTML source code on a website run by the state’s education department. The reporter notified the government, giving them time to address the vulnerability and scan other government-run websites for similar issues before publishing the story.

    Not long after the article was published, Parson accused the reporter of being a “hacker” without evidence and promised to seek criminal prosecution. “This administration is standing up against any and all perpetrators who attempt to steal personal information and harm Missourians,” Parson said at a press conference.

    Parson continued to imply that the Post-Dispatch journalist had some sort of ulterior motive, claiming the reporter was “acting against the state agency to compromise teachers’ personal information in an attempt to embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet.” Ironically, his threats to the journalist are bringing far more attention to the story than it would have gotten otherwise.

    As many reporters and people familiar with basic computer functions have pointed out, the journalist didn’t participate in anything close to resembling hacking. Rather, he accessed information that is public on every webpage: the source code, which can be accessed easily via the “view source” functionality. By pointing out the flaw in the website, he likely helped avert disaster for the state’s educators’ by protecting their personal information — not vice versa, as Parson erroneously claimed.

    This type of data vulnerability is a well-known mistake, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis told the Post-Dispatch. The professor added that it was “mind boggling” to see it still happening on a government website, even though this type of cybersecurity error has been around for at least a decade.

    Lawmakers and journalist organizations were dismayed at the governor’s direct attack on a member of the press.

    “Let’s make this clear: It was [Governor Parson] who failed to secure teachers’ SSNs. There’s no ‘hacking’ here. There’s an effort to criminalize journalists,” wrote Rep. Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri. “Shame on you, Governor.”

    “Using journalists as political scapegoats by casting routine research as ‘hacking’ is a poor attempt to divert public attention from the government’s own security failing,” Katherine Jacobsen, the U.S program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) told The Washington Post, adding that Parson’s threats were “absurd.”

    Though many people pointed out the simplicity of the data vulnerability to the governor after his threats on Thursday, Parson only doubled down on his statements in tweets later that day. “We want to be clear, this DESE hack was more than a simple ‘right click,’” he lied. “This data was not freely available, and by the actors own admission, the data had to be taken through eight separate steps in order to generate a SSN.”

    Parson’s statements are easily debunked; according to the original article, “the newspaper found that teachers’ Social Security numbers were contained in the HTML source code of the pages involved.” Not only is it unclear what “steps” Parson is talking about, the source code of websites is freely available — one can even view it on a smartphone browser.

    Though Parson’s motivations are undetermined, the threats are part of disturbing and ongoing attempts by Republicans to discredit the media at large, years after Donald Trump coined the term “fake news.”

    “Trump’s most effective ploy has been to destroy the credibility of the press,” CPJ wrote in a 2020 report.

    During his presidency, Trump reportedly asked then-Federal Bureau of Investigations Director James Comey to prosecute journalists who reported on leaks. He also repeatedly attacked the media for portraying him in a negative light and embarrassing his administration.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ocasio-Cortez Slams GOP for Lying About Effects of Unemployment Insurance

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) speaks to reporters before a House Democratic caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol on October 01, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) criticized a Republican colleague on Thursday, pointing out that the GOP’s stance on unemployment insurance is not only misguided but factually incorrect.

    Her criticism was in response to a statement by Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee), who tweeted, “4.3 million workers quit their jobs. We need to quit paying folks not to work.” His tweet refers to recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that a record number of people quit their jobs in August. But most people who quit their jobs aren’t eligible to collect unemployment benefits — and the unemployment insurance program that Burchett is likely referring to has already ended.

    “Y’all already [ended unemployment insurance] over a month ago despite everyone having data that ending [unemployment insurance] doesn’t push people back to work,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response. “Conservatives love to act like they’re ‘fiscally savvy’ yet remain puzzled as to why people can’t work a job whose pay won’t even cover the childcare costs to work.”

    Despite Burchett’s declaration that “paying folks not to work” decreases employment rates, the past few months have borne evidence that the opposite is true: Unemployment insurance has actually improved employment rates. This summer, 26 states ended extra unemployment aid early; those states went on to experience slower employment growth than the states that kept the program through the beginning of September

    The pandemic has been challenging for working parents — particularly for women, who often bear a disproportionate burden when it comes to childcare. Reports have found that 1 in 4 women are considering quitting or reducing their hours in order to help take care of their children.

    Meanwhile, paying for childcare is becoming increasingly inaccessible. Last month, the Treasury Department wrote that the current system of low wages and skyrocketing childcare costs is unsustainable. The average family with a child under 5 must spend around 13 percent of their family’s income on childcare, the Treasury found — an amount well past the 7 percent of a family’s income that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) deems affordable for childcare.

    Ocasio-Cortez went on to explain that the GOP’s refusal to understand why workers are quitting in droves is contradictory to their stated beliefs about the way the economy works.

    “Quitting being [unemployment insurance] ineligible aside, the idea that laziness is why people stay home contradicts the ‘free market ideals’ these folks pretend to champion,” she wrote. “Markets apply to labor, too. If supply is low and demand high, price goes up. People seem to accept that for everything but wages.”

    Workers, especially those with frontline jobs, have indeed cited low wages as a reason to consider quitting their jobs during the pandemic. A report in May found that of the 53 percent of restaurant workers surveyed who said they have considered quitting, 76 percent cited low wages and tips as a top reason why.

    The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has also pointed out that the conservative “worker shortage” myth is likely more attributable to labor market dynamics.

    “When restaurant owners can’t find workers to fill openings at wages that aren’t meaningfully higher than they were before the pandemic — even though the jobs are inherently more stressful and potentially dangerous because workers now have to deal with anti-maskers and ongoing health concerns — that’s not a labor shortage, that’s the market functioning,” EPI wrote in May. “The wages for a harder, riskier job should be higher.”

    Ocasio-Cortez concluded by pointing out that the reasoning behind people’s employment decisions often isn’t as simple as the GOP implies. “And by the way, free time is VALUABLE,” she said. “People pay for time routinely, whether it’s in delivery, services, etc. It’s not lazy to stay home with family — it can lower costs. 700k+ people in the US have died of COVID so far. Do people think that has no impact on labor supply/capacity?”

    Last month, Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill that would extend unemployment benefits until February of next year and would make payments retroactive to September, when the benefits expired. Though lawmakers neglected to reinstate the federal unemployment program, the Census Bureau found that the program kept 5.5 million people from experiencing poverty in 2020.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Leaked Email Shows Verizon Pushing Employees to Oppose Corporate Tax Hike

    The Verizon logo is seen on its building at 375 Pearl Street, New York City.

    Telecommunications giant Verizon has been urging its employees to oppose the corporate tax hike being considered by Democrats in Congress, according to a leaked email obtained by The Intercept.

    An internal email sent to employees tells workers that “your voice is critical” and that “We need you to lend your voice to the fight.” The email features a link that leads to a form letter to send to the employees’ representative in Congress.

    The email goes on to claim that “American companies like ours would be seriously disadvantaged” if they were forced to pay a higher tax rate — even though Verizon has been one of the most egregious corporate tax dodgers of the last decades, often paying a negative effective tax rate.

    Even before Republicans recklessly slashed taxes for corporations in 2017 from a statutory rate of 35 percent to a dismal 21 percent, Verizon was incredibly effective at skirting taxes. According to an Americans for Tax Fairness report, between 2008 and 2012, Verizon made $19.3 billion in profits but paid no taxes — instead, it claimed $535 million in refunds.

    Democrats are currently considering a conservative corporate tax raise to 26.5 percent, a far cry from the pre-2017 rate. Still, Verizon told employees that, “With the support of this grassroots network, Verizon is going to be on the front lines of this fight.” Of course, the fight isn’t grassroots, but rather fought on behalf of and by huge corporations and lobbyists.

    The email repeats a questionable claim that, if the corporate tax hike goes through, then employees would be most affected. “Recent studies have identified that as much as 70 to 85% of the corporate tax is borne by wage earners,” the email reads.

    The source of this statistic is unknown, but The Intercept traces it back to Trump administration talking points. Former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin cited a similar statistic in an interview on Fox News in 2017, saying that 70 percent of corporate taxes fall on workers’ shoulders, whereas the administration estimated that that figure was 75 to 85 percent.

    Economists have disputed this theory, and professional fact checkers have found that there is no consensus among economists on who bears the tax burden when corporate taxes are raised. Many of the sources arguing that workers ultimately pay for most of the taxes, however, are conservative.

    Perhaps more importantly, Republicans promised that money would trickle down when they slashed the corporate tax rate in 2017, but workers have yet to see those benefits. Meanwhile, the corporate tax hike currently in question would go toward government assistance programs like extending the child tax credit that cut child poverty in half.

    “I was pretty shocked they would actually send us something like that,” a Verizon employee told The Intercept. “I think it’s pretty pathetic that they threatened employees by saying we would be most affected.”

    The company also cites its participation in the Reforming America’s Taxes Equitably, or RATE, Coalition in its efforts to keep the corporate tax rate low. RATE consists of 35 large corporations including Disney, AT&T and Boeing. The group has been active in a huge corporate lobbying campaign against the reconciliation bill, specifically opposing the corporate tax hike. RATE members have contributed $200,000 to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona), who is fighting against raising corporate taxes. A tax hike, RATE has argued, would decrease the U.S.’s competitiveness globally and would harm workers.

    Economists say that the competitiveness argument is nothing but a distraction by Republicans. “We find [corporate tax cut proponents’] central argument — that U.S. corporations face high corporate taxes — to be empirically false,” wrote the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in a 2017 report that was written before the 2017 tax cuts were signed into law.

    “We find that even if the effective corporate tax rate were higher (if loopholes were closed), economic theory and data do not support the idea that cutting these rates would encourage further investment in the U.S. or benefit Americans in general,” EPI continued. “We find that such cuts would primarily benefit a small number of high-income capital owners while increasing the regressivity of the tax system overall.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Poll: Kyrsten Sinema Would Lose to Progressive Challengers If Primary Were Now

    Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema speaking with supporters at a neighborhood canvas hosted by the Arizona Education Association at Provision Coffee Arcadia in Phoenix, Arizona, on October 24, 2018.

    New polling by Data for Progress suggests that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) would lose her primary to progressive challengers if it were held now instead of 2024. The senator’s approval ratings have been falling fast as she’s currently at the center of tense budget negotiations in Washington as she and fellow conservative Democrats block her party’s agenda in Congress.

    The poll asked 467 likely Democratic primary voters in Arizona who they would vote for among a slate of potential progressive challengers like Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona), an early favorite to run against Sinema in 2024.

    Sinema’s best chance at winning the primary would require running against multiple challengers, Data for Progress wrote — and even in that scenario, the poll finds she would lose. With five potential candidates including Gallego and Sinema, Gallego would come out on top with 23 percent of the vote and Sinema would be in second place with 19 percent. The other hypothetical candidates like Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Arizona) trail not too far behind.

    Further, in head-to-head polls, Sinema loses to every candidate. Gallego beats her 62 percent to 23 percent in a head to head poll, and she gets at most 26 percent of the vote against other hypothetical candidates.

    The polling shows that Sinema is “likely to face an uphill battle” when she faces reelection in 2024, said Gustavo Sanchez, Principal and data analyst for Data for Progress. The data suggests that “Independents and non-registered Democrats do not plan to turn out in the primary to save her,” Sanchez continued. “Taken together, it is increasingly clear that Sinema will face a near-impossible path to victory in her upcoming Democratic primary.”

    Sinema’s job approval is dismal among those polled. Only 25 percent of likely Democratic primary voters approve of her performance, while 70 percent disapprove — a 45-point margin. Nearly half of those polled say that they strongly disapprove of her performance. Other Democratic officials like Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) and President Joe Biden, meanwhile, have 85 percent approval.

    These findings echo a Morning Consult poll from earlier this month that found Sinema’s approval among Democrats in her state had fallen 21 points over the course of the year. Earlier this year, 67 percent of Democrats in the state approved of her job performance; in July and September, that dropped to 46 percent.

    The conservative Democratic senator has centered herself in negotiations for the Build Back Better Act, which Democrats and progressives hope will include proposals such as the poverty-reducing child tax credit and the massively popular prescription drug price negotiation plan. Sinema, however, has allied herself with conservative, deep-pocketed lobbyists and has been fighting to shrink the bill and cut out programs that progressives say are crucial to helping to reduce growing inequality in the U.S.

    Sinema has kept her demands from the public, but what little is known about her position on the bill have frustrated members of her party. The Arizona senator is against allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, for instance, even though it’s one of the key proposals of the bill, providing the dual benefit of raising revenue for the government and providing a service to the public.

    If Sinema were to support the Build Back Better Act in its entirety, meanwhile, Data for Progress’s poll finds that she could face better chances against potential primary challengers.

    94 percent of likely voters polled said that they would be more likely to support a candidate who was in favor of lowering prescription drug prices. A similarly high portion of likely voters said that they would support a candidate if they wanted to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy, expand Medicare and incentivize clean energy, provisions that Sinema either outright opposes or would likely align herself against.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 10,000 John Deere Workers Walk Off Job as Strike Wave Sweeps US

    John Deere sign

    The largest strike in the U.S. since 2019 began early Thursday morning as over 10,000 United Auto Workers (UAW) union members walked off the job at manufacturing company John Deere.

    Warehouse workers from 14 John Deere locations in Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Colorado and Georgia began striking at midnight Thursday. Last month, workers voted 99 percent in favor of a strike; and on Sunday, workers rejected a contract proposal from John Deere, which saw its profits soar during the pandemic.

    Employees are frustrated about a host of issues and have rejected several contract offers from John Deere already. They report low wages and long hours, with some workers saying that they’ve been forced to work 10 to 12 hour days Monday through Saturday. The company had laid off and demoted workers before the pandemic and were seemingly unprepared to handle the consumer demand that would surge during the pandemic.

    “These are skilled, tedious jobs that UAW members take pride in every day,” said Mitchell Smith, director of UAW Region 8, which covers 103 locals in Southern and Southwestern states. “Strikes are never easy on workers or their families but John Deere workers believe they deserve a better share of the pie, a safer workplace, and adequate benefits.”

    Workers are paid a minimum of $19.14 an hour, while the company has reported record profits of $4.7 billion in the first three quarters of 2021 and has paid out hundreds of millions in dividends to its shareholders.

    “A lot of what’s been going on in the country over the last couple of years has definitely made people more aware of the disparity between corporate and income inequality. Just massive amounts of corporate greed,” David Schmelzer, a quality control inspector in Illinois and former chairman of UAW Local 79, told The Guardian. “The majority of people want a bigger share of the success of this company, the success that we’ve been a major part of.”

    John Deere workers are unhappy with a concession made in contract negotiations in the 1990s, when the company created two tiers of employees so that workers hired after 1997 would receive worse benefits. Only workers hired before 1997 get full pension and health care benefits when they retire; newer hires only get a third of the previous pension and no health care in retirement.

    Now, the company is trying to create a third tier that eliminates pension completely, which has outraged workers.

    “There is much more anger. We are tired. We are tired of making pennies. Tired of spending more time in the building than with our family. We have given them so much of our life,” one worker told Labor Notes reporter Jonah Furman. “We have some in their 70s still working for the healthcare. We don’t want a two tier. They are trying to create a three tier. We will not sell out our younger brothers and sisters.”

    John Deere has said in a statement that they are “committed” to reaching an agreement with union members. “We will keep working day and night to understand our employees’ priorities and resolve this strike, while also keeping our operations running for the benefit of all those we serve,” said John Deere vice president of labor relations Brad Morris. The company has prepared salaried workers to cross the picket line.

    The strike comes as a wave of strikes appears to be sweeping the country. Between John Deere, Kellogg’s, Kaiser Permanente and film and television workers, over 100,000 workers are striking or have threatened strikes in recent weeks. August also saw a record number of resignations, with 4.3 million workers quitting their jobs, many of them retail or hospitality workers. With job creation slowing, workers are flexing their power as the labor movement appears to be reawakening in the U.S.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Top 1 Percent in US Now Have More Wealth Than Entire Middle Class Combined

    Piggy banks, with only one stuffed with cash

    New data from the Federal Reserve shows that the top 1 percent of wealthy individuals in the U.S. now have more wealth than the entire middle class combined.

    As of this summer, the middle 60 percent of American earners, which economists typically categorize as the middle class, now own only 26.6 percent of the national wealth, Bloomberg reported. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent control 27 percent of the nation’s collective wealth. This is the first time the richest Americans have had more wealth than the middle class since the Fed began recording such data in 1989.

    The past decades have seen growing accumulation of wealth for the richest Americans, coupled with steadily declining wealth for the middle class. In 1989, the top 1 percent controlled 17.2 percent of the nation’s wealth, whereas the middle 60 percent controlled 36.4 percent.

    The top 1 percent is made up of 1.3 million households making more than about $500,000 a year — a small fraction of the over 120 million households in the U.S. The 77.5 million middle class families make between about $27,000 and $141,000 a year.

    The middle 60 percent have seen declining shares in key financial areas like real estate and corporate equities over past decades. In 1991, the middle class owned 44.3 percent of real estate; they now own 38 percent. That same year, the middle 60 percent owned 21 percent of corporate equities, a number that has now plummeted to only 12 percent.

    The pandemic has only exacerbated these gaps. While middle and working class families have struggled over the past year and a half, kept afloat partially by Congress’s stimulus bills, billionaires continued to accumulate tremendous amounts of wealth.

    As of August, billionaires in the U.S. have gotten 62 percent richer during the pandemic, accumulating a whopping $1.8 trillion of wealth. This is nearly half of the entire wealth of the bottom 20 percent of earners in the U.S. — accumulated in just 18 months.

    Bloomberg notes that part of the reason for the rising wealth gap, especially within the past months, could be due to the inflated housing market, which has led to skyrocketing rents while boosting the wealth of property owners. The middle class also holds a growing portion of consumer debt.

    In order to stem the upwards flow of wealth, lawmakers and progressive advocates have been fighting for higher taxes on the wealthy. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and other progressives have called for the implementation of a wealth tax, and Warren introduced a proposal earlier this year that would levy a 2 percent tax on wealth over $50 million and a 3 percent tax on wealth over $1 trillion. Progressive lawmakers have also called for levying enough taxes on the wealthiest Americans so that there are no billionaires left in the U.S.

    Meanwhile, Congress continues to uphold a tax code that often allows the country’s richest individuals to avoid paying taxes altogether. In 2007 and 2011, Jeff Bezos didn’t pay any federal income taxes, according to ProPublica. Bezos is the wealthiest man in the world, sometimes sharing the title with Elon Musk, who has also circumnavigated paying income taxes.

    Last month, the Treasury Department found that the top 1 percent of wealthiest people avoid paying more than $160 billion in taxes every year. “Today’s tax code contains two sets of rules,” the Treasury wrote in that report — one for the rich, and one for everyone else.

    Progressive lawmakers recently took steps to address systems that allow the tax code to become skewed toward the wealthy in the first place. Last week, Warren and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) sent letters to top accounting firms in a probe into the revolving door between those firms and agencies like the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). “Americans are sick and tired of these corrupt schemes,” Warren and Jayapal wrote.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Fossil Fuel CEOs Will Testify About Role in Climate Denial Before Congress

    Rep. Ro Khanna speaks at an “End Fossil Fuel” rally near the U.S. Capitol on June 29, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Later this month, six CEOS from major fossil fuel companies and trade associations will testify before Congress at a hearing about the industry’s role in spreading climate denial, reports The Washington Post.

    This will be the first time oil and gas CEOs testify about the industry’s decades-long disinformation campaigns before Congress. Top executives at ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and Shell, as well as the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are slated to testify.

    “In the history of Congress, the fossil fuel executives have never come before the committee … to explain climate disinformation and address the climate crisis. That will change,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California), chair of the Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Environment, told The Washington Post.

    The industry leaders were invited by Khanna and House Oversight Chair Carolyn B. Maloney (D-New York), who sent letters asking them to testify last month.

    “We are deeply concerned that the fossil fuel industry has reaped massive profits for decades while contributing to climate change that is devastating American communities, costing taxpayers billions of dollars, and ravaging the natural world,” wrote Khanna and Maloney. “We are also concerned that to protect those profits, the industry has reportedly led a coordinated effort to spread disinformation to mislead the public and prevent crucial action to address climate change.”

    Oil and gas CEOs have previously declined invitations from progressive lawmakers to testify before Congress; it appears they are only complying now because Khanna threatened them with subpoenas. In their letters, Khanna and Maloney called on Congress to curb disinformation from the fossil fuel industry, echoing demands that climate activists and researchers have been making for years.

    Many fossil fuel companies have been studying climate disruption internally for decades and even had chances to pivot their products to renewable or no-carbon alternatives. Instead, they doubled down on spreading climate denial — and padding their own pockets.

    Though documents show that Exxon has known about climate disruption since the 1970s, the company has denied its existence and lied to the public for years, all while playing a major role in undermining climate regulation. A huge amount of climate denial is driven by the fossil fuel industry, even as climate denial morphs into different forms over time. This is particularly true for disinformation that comes from lawmakers in Washington, many of whom have close ties with lobbyists from the oil and gas industry.

    Climate researchers have called on Congress to tackle the fossil fuel industry’s continued efforts to obstruct climate action. In a House Oversight subcommittee hearing last year, Congress heard from a scientist involved in the fossil fuel industry’s internal climate communications for the first time.

    “In reality, today’s climate chaos is big oil’s legacy, not ours,” wrote Harvard University climate researchers Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes last year. “Unlike the rest of us, the fossil fuel industry saw this climate chaos coming, then literally and figuratively added fuel to the fire, doubling down on a business model incompatible with the science of stopping global warming; buying political inaction; and building a global climate denial and delay machine that has confused the public and fomented distrust of science, media and government.”

    Climate activists and state and local governments have filed lawsuits to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable, arguing that they have run deceitful climate denial campaigns and have lied to the public about the climate crisis. However, most of these lawsuits are pending, and many others have been thrown out.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Manchin and Sinema Obstruct Reconciliation With No Proposal of Their Own

    Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin wait for an elevator in the U.S. Capitol on September 30, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    After months of negotiations, Democratic leaders are signalling that the topline of the Build Back Better Act will have to come down — an outcome that conservative Democrats like Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia have relentlessly campaigned for. But Democrats now face a challenge: They can’t figure out what Sinema and Manchin want.

    Sinema has been particularly opaque, stonewalling her colleagues about her wish list for the reconciliation bill and only sharing details with the White House, per Politico. “I’m not going to share with you or with [Senate Majority Leader Sen. Chuck] Schumer or with [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi,” she reportedly told a fellow Democratic senator.

    “I have already told the White House what I am willing to do and what I’m not willing to do. I’m not mysterious. It’s not that I can’t make up my mind. I communicated it to them in detail. They just don’t like what they’re hearing,” she continued.

    But despite Sinema’s insistence that she has been transparent, she has concealed nearly all of her demands from both Congress and the public.

    Sinema’s stance against allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices is particularly concerning, as the measure is a key provision of the bill that Democrats are relying on to raise revenue. Though the proposal has the potential to save the government $800 billion, it’s unlikely that Democrats would be able to convince Sinema to support a drug pricing reform plan that would raise even $200 billion, according to Politico.

    While Manchin has shared more of his demands with his colleagues, he too has been vague and indecisive. Last week, reporters uncovered a memo that he sent back in July about wanting to cut the bill, but it offered little detail other than a topline of $1.5 trillion over ten years — a $2 trillion cut — and a call for “no additional handouts.”

    On the latter point, Manchin has been clear: he doesn’t want the U.S. to become a so-called “entitlement society,” as he told the press last week. On Wednesday, Politico reported that Manchin has rejected a proposal to subsidize coal workers’ incomes to help them transition into other fields. The West Virginia senator disparaged the measure as “welfare.”

    Progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) have taken umbrage with Manchin’s welfare-related comments. Last week, Sanders hosted a short press conference to condemn Manchin for implying that allowing seniors to access vision, dental and hearing care are “entitlements,” and bad for American society at large. Sanders also noted that it’s “long overdue” for Manchin to say “with specificity” what he wants for the bill.

    Part of the problem appears to be that Manchin and Sinema can’t agree what should be cut — an especially challenging obstacle when most of the Democratic caucus don’t want to cut anything from the bill, according to progressive lawmakers. Though Sinema is opposed to the massively popular drug pricing reform plan, Manchin is in favor of it — with his own caveats.

    Manchin has been insistent on including his own plan to tax prescription opioids, which would likely end up harming patients who need the drugs. Sinema’s allies at the massive pharmaceutical lobbyist group PhRMA oppose both Manchin’s plan and the prescription drug pricing plan.

    While Sinema is reportedly in favor of carbon pollution pricing programs, Manchin is opposed to them.

    “Manchin and Sinema want very different things, both in terms of revenue and programs,” a source close to the White House told Politico.

    The discrepancies between Manchin and Sinema seem to reflect which lobbyists they have benefited from the most. Sinema, who is allied with Big Pharma, has received $750,000 from the pharmaceutical and medical devices industry throughout her political career. Manchin, on the other hand, has close ties to Exxon, whose lobbyists have bragged about their regular access to him.

    Progressive groups and lawmakers have slammed the conservative Democrats for their attempts to force the party to choose between social programs. Though progressives are fighting to keep the entire $3.5 trillion bill, in the likely case that the topline has to come down, they’d rather shorten the timeline for the proposals than have to cut any of them from the bill altogether.

    On Tuesday, Sanders emphasized that he views the proposal to expand Medicare as “not negotiable,” saying, “I do understand that the healthcare industry does not like this idea, but maybe, just maybe, we stand with the American people.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Progressives Fight for Climate, Social Spending as Right-Wing Democrats Cut Bill

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gestures as she speaks at a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on October 12, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    As progressives fight to maintain climate and social programs in the Build Back Better Act, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) is indicating that the price tag of $3.5 trillion over ten years will have to shrink, forecasting another fight ahead: what to cut from the bill.

    As conservative Democrats force the caucus to bend to their will, the bill may be facing $1 trillion or even $2 trillion worth of cuts. In a press release on Monday, Pelosi said that she believes entire programs will have to be cut from the bill. “Overwhelmingly, the guidance I am receiving from Members is to do fewer things well,” she wrote in a Dear Colleague statement.

    Pelosi may not be committed to that position, however. On Tuesday, CNN’s Manu Raju reported that Pelosi suggested the caucus may look at shortening programs instead.

    This is the position that progressives in the House are taking. In the case that the bill does have to shrink, progressives are saying that they would rather shorten the timeline for implementation and have programs expire earlier in the decade than the bill currently calls for — presumably then putting them to a vote again when they expire. According to Politico, President Joe Biden is also open to this idea.

    On Tuesday, progressive lawmakers emphasized the importance of retaining all of the proposals in the bill. “We can’t leave working people, families, and our communities behind. We can’t leave childcare, paid leave, health care, housing, climate action, education, and a roadmap to citizenship behind. We can’t leave President Biden’s necessary agenda behind,” wrote Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington).

    “Our mandate right now: deliver change for working families, and don’t leave anyone behind. That can’t be accomplished if we pit programs or communities against each other. We must not be forced into housing vs. climate, or child care vs. elder care,” wrote the Congressional Progressive Caucus on Twitter, in response to Pelosi’s potential heel turn. “This is the right approach.”

    Conservative Democrats in the caucus are indeed pitting programs against each other. Last week, in lieu of telling the public and Congress which proposals he wants to cut from the bill, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) told progressives that they must choose one of three family-related proposals: the child tax credit extension, paid family leave or child care funding.

    Conservative Democrats have also been demonstrating a willingness to cut programs with little regard for the consequences. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) is reportedly saying that she wants to cut $100 billion worth of climate proposals from the bill, even as the nation faces a potentially record-breaking year in terms of climate disasters. The reconciliation package is the only major contemporary climate bill that could pass Congress.

    In a progressive caucus call on Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) emphasized that the cuts will represent an even bigger compromise than the one that progressives have already made. Noting that the current price tag — $3.5 trillion over a decade — was already a compromise, “we are not going to negotiate with ourselves,” Sanders said.

    He called on Sinema and Manchin to be more specific about their demands for the bill, and has recently voiced frustration that the two senators are blocking the rest of the Democratic caucus’s desires in the Senate. “Is there a possibility — a horrible possibility, which would be so terrible for this country — that because two people refuse to do what 96 percent of the caucus wants, that nothing will happen? There is that possibility,” he said in a press conference on Friday.

    Progressive lawmakers have pointed out that many of the bill’s biggest selling points are popular among the public. They say this lends credence to the idea that the bill is good optics for the Democratic Party, which early projections show will face a tough midterm election in 2022. Highlighting the polling numbers, Sanders wrote, “Good policy is good politics. Let’s do it.”

    Some policy experts have cast doubt on the idea that allowing the programs to expire earlier would be effective for progressives, since allowing the programs to expire could endanger people who may rely on the financial assistance. Progressive lawmakers may be hedging their bets that programs like paid family leave and child care spending would be popular enough that they could pass through Congress easily when they come up for a vote later.

    Meanwhile, some analyses indicate that choosing one program over another may end up causing more harm than good. On Tuesday, NBC reported that if Congress only implements universal pre-kindergarten and not child care spending — as Manchin reportedly wants to do — it could actually drive up prices for private day care, causing competition and potentially squeezing some smaller daycares out of business.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Restaurant, Hospitality Workers Quit in Droves in August as COVID Surged

    A man wearing a face mask walks past a sign "Now Hiring" in front of a store on May 14, 2020, in Arlington, Virginia.

    New data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows that the number of people quitting their jobs has surged to record highs, with retail and hospitality workers driving the surge. The data suggests that an increasing number of workers are unwilling to risk contracting COVID for the sake of their low-paying jobs.

    The number of resignations, or “quits,” surged to 4.3 million in August — the highest number since agencies began collecting such data in December of 2000. New data also reveals that job creation has continued to slow in recent months, sinking to disappointing lows in September, when extra unemployment benefits from the stimulus package ended.

    The industry that saw the largest proportion of quits was the hospitality industry, particularly the food service industry. Retail workers also quit at higher rates than workers in other industries. The rise in quits coincided with the surge of COVID cases across the U.S. over the past few months, hitting highs in August and early September.

    The possibility that resignations are tied to a rise in COVID cases is further supported by regional data. People in the South and Midwest — regions that were hit with higher rates of COVID infections and deaths over the past few months — quit at higher rates than those in the Northeast, where COVID infections were less widespread.

    Economists usually interpret a high number of quits to be a positive sign for the job market, assuming that people leave positions with confidence that they’ll find another job soon. But this may not hold true as COVID continues to rock the already-fragile economy.

    This summer, employers and conservative lawmakers predicted that ending unemployment insurance in September would drive people to work, but the opposite proved true. In the 26 states that ended extra unemployment benefits early — most of which were led by conservative governors — employment rates actually slowed to about half the rate of states that kept the benefits until September.

    Economic studies have drawn similar conclusions: When people don’t have enough money to get by, as is currently the case for a huge portion of the U.S., they spend more time managing scant resources and less time job searching, economists say. Unemployment can also have long-term effects on people’s personal finances, leading to lower lifetime earnings.

    According to a post by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) last month, lawmakers hoping to increase employment rates should focus on strengthening social programs that could ease these worries for workers. “Policymakers should prioritize efforts to bolster job growth, protect those still unable to find suitable work, and build a more equitable economy than what existed before the pandemic,” EPI wrote, adding that states should invigorate programs like education.

    Though it’s unclear exactly why retail and hospitality workers are currently quitting at such high rates, personal and familial concerns may be playing a role. A report earlier this year by One Fair Wage found that restaurant workers were likely to quit over COVID concerns and low wages. The report also found that COVID creates risks for workers who are unlikely to get health insurance from their jobs — and that workers are experiencing increased harassment during the pandemic, which is worsening their job satisfaction.

    Employment may also be impacted by family-related responsibilities. In May and June, a Harvard Business Review survey found that during the pandemic, 20 percent of working parents had to reduce their hours or quit their jobs entirely to help with childcare. All the while, childcare facilities have reported being understaffed, and parents have experienced burnout and exhaustion as the pandemic stretches on — now worrying about rising COVID infections in children as schools have reopened.

    While conservatives circulate spurious talking points about people not wanting to work, they are fighting tooth and nail against Democratic proposals that could save or create jobs. Their recent opposition to raising the debt ceiling could cost 6 million jobs if the U.S. defaults on its debts. And the GOP and conservative Democrats have been rallying against the relatively inexpensive reconciliation bill, which could create over 4 million jobs annually.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Poll Finds 88 Percent Support Sanders’s Plan to Lower Prescription Drug Prices

    Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a pen and pad news conference at the U.S. Capitol on October 8, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    On Sunday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) shared new polling that reveals overwhelming support for key elements of the Democrats’ Build Back Better Act, including the senator’s proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices.

    A poll of over 2,000 adults, conducted by CBS earlier this month, found that 88 percent of people surveyed support lowering prescription drug prices and 84 percent support expanding Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing. A proposal for guaranteed paid family and medical leave is also popular, with 73 percent of those polled expressing their support.

    The poll revealed majority support for several other major provisions in the bill, such as free community college, universal pre-kindergarten and tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy.

    Sanders shared the polling results on Twitter, saying, “Maybe, just maybe, Congress might want to serve the needs of the American people, and not wealthy campaign contributors.” Several of the bill’s most popular provisions — including lowering drug prices and expanding Medicare — are provisions that Sanders has been fighting for over the past few months.

    The CBS poll also highlighted that many people don’t feel they are knowledgeable about the specifics of the Build Back Better Act at all. Only 10 percent of respondents said that they knew “a lot of specific things” about the bill, whereas 29 percent said they didn’t know any specific details, and that they didn’t have a general sense of the bill’s content.

    When asked whether they had heard more about the bill’s cost or about the policies included, 26 percent of respondents said they had heard more about the cost, while only 10 percent said they had heard more about the policies. 34 percent said they had heard both being discussed equally.

    The poll also found that the most popular policies included in the bill were among the least well known. While 59 percent of respondents said they had heard about the bill’s price tag and 58 percent knew that it included tax hikes on the wealthy, only 40 percent said they had heard of the Medicare expansion and drug price negotiation proposals.

    Sanders said that the fact that people are relatively unfamiliar with the bill’s contents is the fault of corporate news outlets. “Americans don’t know what’s in the Build Back Better plan because the corporate media doesn’t discuss it,” he said on Sunday. “Let’s stop the beltway gossip and start talking about lowering prescription drug costs, expanding Medicare, childcare and housing – and combatting [sic] climate change.”

    Progressives have expressed frustration over corporate media’s coverage of the bill, especially when it comes to the bill’s $3.5 trillion price tag. Though the cost of the bill has received widespread coverage, progressive lawmakers and journalists have pointed out that the bill’s cost isn’t actually a lot of money, especially when considered in context with other government spending.

    The bill would cost about $350 billion a year on average, which would be less than half of the amount of spending that Congress is slated to approve for the Pentagon. Sanders has also pointed out that it would be only about 1 percent of the nation’s projected Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over the next decade. Further, progressives and Democrats have emphasized that the cost of the bill is estimated to be offset completely by the proposed tax hikes, drug price negotiation and expansion of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

    Despite the fact that most of its major proposals enjoy majority support from the public, conservative Democrats have been attacking the bill from every angle. In September, a group of Democrats in the House shot down the Medicare expansion and drug price negotiation proposals — and Democrats in the Senate are worried that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) may not be on board with the prescription drug proposals either. Of course, many of the Democrats opposed to these provisions have enjoyed generous campaign donations from the pharmaceutical industry.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Omar, Ocasio-Cortez Give Biden Deadline on Student Debt Cancelation Memo

    From left, Representatives Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley attend a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol on March 11, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    After months of silence on student loan forgiveness from the White House, progressive lawmakers, led by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), have written a letter giving President Joe Biden a two-week deadline to release a memo on student debt cancelation.

    “Decades ago, Congress voted to authorize the executive branch to cancel federal student loans. Federal student debt can be canceled with the ‘flick of your pen.’ This authority is already being put to use, as it is currently being used to cancel the interest owed on all federally-held student loans,” the lawmakers wrote, referring to the student loan payment pause implemented during the pandemic. “Now it is time for you to honor your campaign pledge and use this authority to cancel all student debt.”

    In April, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said in an interview that the president had asked the Department of Education to prepare a memo on the legal feasibility of canceling student debt through the executive branch alone. When asked whether the president was exploring canceling up to $50,000 in loans per borrower, Klain did not confirm or deny the amount. “Hopefully, we’ll see that in the next few weeks,” he said.

    Six months have passed since that interview, the progressives noted — but the memo has still yet to materialize.

    “With over six months having passed since that interview and only four months of pandemic forbearance left, borrowers are anxiously awaiting the administration’s actions,” the lawmakers wrote. “The time has come to release the memo and cancel student debt.”

    They then gave Biden a deadline to release the memo by October 22, or two weeks from Friday.

    The letter, which was first obtained by Politico, is signed by members of the progressive “Squad,” including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Cori Bush (D-Missouri) and Jamaal Bowman (D-New York). Their statement comes as the Education Department overhauls the student loan forgiveness program for public workers, which has long been plagued by bureaucracy and red tape.

    Due to the pandemic, student debt repayment has been paused through January of next year. But the Education Department says that August’s extension of the pause will be the last one.

    The letter warns of the financial turmoil on the horizon when debt payments resume. “The resumption of payments on federally-held student loans weighs heavily on tens of millions of borrowers,” the lawmakers wrote. “Forty-five million student debtors collectively owe $1.8 trillion of student debt, a sum almost equivalent to the $1.9 trillion the world’s billionaires made in 2020 alone. While the rich have gotten richer, the economic harm of the pandemic has not subsided for ordinary Americans.”

    The unreleased memo is supposed to include the Biden administration’s view on the legality of the issue — but legal scholars have said that the president has the broad authority to cancel student loans, progressives have pointed out. Law experts at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School wrote last month that legal frameworks allow for Biden to implement loan forgiveness; other legal experts are either confident that it’s possible, or say that even if the law is murky, Biden should try it anyway because Congress hasn’t taken action.

    On the campaign trail, Biden promised to cancel $10,000 of student debt for borrowers. Lawmakers like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) have called for up to $50,000 in cancellations, which would relieve many borrowers of their loans altogether.

    Advocates for student loan forgiveness argue that making sweeping debt cancelations would have a tremendously positive impact on the economy, which is especially critical during the pandemic. Some economists have said that if all student loan debt were forgiven, it would be equivalent to giving around $3,000 each year to the approximately 42 million student loan borrowers. Warren has pointed out that canceling $50,000 in loans per borrower would result in a higher Gross Domestic Product (GDP), as well as higher homeownership and job creation rates.

    Student debt forgiveness would also have a vastly transformative impact on borrowers’ lives. Borrowers say they would be able to save money for emergencies, retirement or housing, and that they would spend more on household needs like food, appliances or entertainment.

    The lawmakers pointed out that student loan debt “significantly reinforces inequality” — and therefore enacting debt forgiveness would also be a means of advancing racial justice.

    “Two thirds of all student debt is held by women, with Black women the most burdened of all. Twenty years after starting college the average white student owes 6 percent of what they originally borrowed, around $1,000, while the average Black student still owes 95 percent, around $18,500,” they wrote. “Canceling all student debt would narrow the racial wealth gap among young Americans by more than half.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ocasio-Cortez Slams Manchin for Demanding Cuts to Child-Related Programs

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez listens to testimony in Rayburn Building at the U.S. Capitol on July 20, 2021.

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has condemned conservative Democrats for fighting to cut social programs in the reconciliation bill while preserving tax cuts for climate-denying industries and corporations.

    On Thursday, Axios revealed that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) has been demanding that progressives choose only one of three family-related proposals to include in the Build Back Better Bill: either the extended child tax credit, paid family leave or funding for child care.

    “Ah yes, the Conservative Democrat position: ‘You can either feed your kid, recover from your c-section, or have childcare so you can go to work — but not all three. All three makes you entitled and lazy,’” wrote Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter. “But fossil fuel money, keeping Rx prices high, and not taxing Wall Street are ‘non-negotiable.’”

    Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) also chimed in, writing: “Responsible governing isn’t about pitting women, children, and families against each other. We have the resources to uplift everyone and leave no one behind. It’s absurd to say that we don’t.”

    In a video on Thursday, Bowman noted that as an educator, much of his career has been spent working with children and families, many of whom were low-income. “I cannot understand for the life of me how we are compromising on issues like lifting 50 percent of children out of poverty, like universal child care and like paid family leave,” he said, pointing out that these policies impact marginalized communities the most. “How are we going to compromise on lifting 50 percent of children out of poverty?”

    “Stop with the nonsense,” Bowman continued, condemning tax shelters and tax codes that are skewed towards the wealthy.

    On Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) criticized Manchin for being vague and purposefully opaque about his demands for the reconciliation bill. Though Manchin has said that he will only accept a reconciliation bill that’s less than half of the bill’s current size, he hasn’t specified which programs he would choose to cut, even to fellow senators.

    “Senator Manchin, as I understand it, talked about, today, about not wanting to see our country become an ‘entitlement society.’ I am not exactly sure what he means by that,” Sanders remarked in the Capitol, adding that it’s “long overdue” for Manchin to tell Democrats and the public exactly what he wants to negotiate out of the bill.

    Instead, Manchin has imposed the responsibility of cutting the bill onto progressives — the only ones in Congress fighting to preserve the $3.5 trillion bill in its entirety, while conservative Democrats, Republicans and massive corporate lobbying efforts have relentlessly campaigned to make cuts.

    By forcing the responsibility onto progressives to cut popular policies, Manchin is also shifting the blame. Sanders has previously implied that conservative Democrats may be keeping their demands for the reconciliation bill vague so they can avoid the potential negative press that would come with publicly sharing which programs they would cut.

    Instead, lawmakers like Manchin attack the bill’s price tag, borrowing from the longtime Republican and right-wing libertarian strategy to attack any form of government spending as justification to cut social programs. Corporate media enables this strategy by emphasizing the price tag — without mentioning details like new research that suggests Manchin’s slashes at the topline of the bill could kill 2 million jobs.

    In response, progressives have been shifting the focus away from the price tag and putting the $3.5 trillion — which will be spent over the course of 10 years — into context. Though Manchin is fighting hard to shrink the Build Back Better Act, he has approved about $9.1 trillion to the Pentagon over the last 10 years, progressives pointed out last week. Meanwhile, Sanders has broadcasted that, in the context of economic projections over the next 10 years, the bill would only be about 1.2 percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • New Report Reveals Trump Urged DOJ to Overturn Election at Least 9 Times

    President Donald Trump talks with others in the Oval Office at the White House on November 13, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

    A report released on Thursday by the Senate Judiciary Committee provides further insight into former President Donald Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election — a plan which involved members of his administration and at least one member of Congress.

    In a nearly 400 page document, the committee reveals that Trump called and met with senior Department of Justice (DOJ) leaders at least nine times in his attempts to pressure them into declaring the election “corrupt,” a move that the report calls a gross abuse of power.

    “In attempting to enlist DOJ for personal, political purposes in an effort to maintain his hold on the White House, Trump grossly abused the power of the presidency,” reads one of the report’s key conclusions. “He also arguably violated the criminal provisions of the Hatch Act, which prevent any person — including the President — from commanding federal government employees to engage in political activity.”

    The report, which is based on witness interviews with top DOJ officials, found that part of Trump’s strategy was putting repeated pressure on the DOJ in an attempt to get allies within the department.

    After numerous conversations between then-acting Attorney General Jeffery Rosen and Trump officials like then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Trump became frustrated with the results. “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election,” he said on January 3.

    The former president then enlisted the help of DOJ lawyer Jeffrey Clark, a Trump ally who has peddled false election conspiracy theories, to help him oust Rosen. The plan — though it never came to fruition — was to replace Rosen with Clark just days before the certification of the election results on January 6.

    It wasn’t just DOJ officials that Trump teamed up with, however. As first highlighted by Politico, Trump also enlisted the help of Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pennsylvania), a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus, to call DOJ officials with supposed evidence of fraud to make it seem like there was support from Congress to overturn the election. Perry also recommended that Clark be elevated within the Justice Department.

    Perry wasn’t the only Freedom Caucus member who played a role in Trump’s plans; the report also details a call between Trump and Rosen on December 27, 2020, in which Trump highlighted officials who were helping him strategize on the election.

    One of the officials he mentioned was Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who attended a meeting on December 21, 2020, where Trump and House Freedom Caucus members strategized their plan for January 6. In the call, Trump also mentioned Perry, who helped lead objections to the certification of the election results in the House, and Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Pennsylvania), who had spent thousands of dollars of campaign money on bus rentals to send people to Washington on January 6.

    Rosen and Richard Donoghue, the DOJ’s second in command, told the Judiciary Committee that they remember pushing back against Trump, saying that the agency was simply doing its job and wouldn’t “just flip a switch and change the election.”

    After DOJ officials learned of the plan to replace Rosen with Clark, Donoghue and two White House lawyers threatened to resign in a meeting with Trump, which appeared to get the president to retire the idea.

    The report also details a litany of conspiratorial claims that Trump allies presented as supposed “proof” that the election was being stolen, even though there has never been any evidence to suggest that fraud took place. For instance, Meadows and other Trump sympathizers sent DOJ officials a number of false assertions about Dominion voting machines switching votes en masse from Trump to Biden.

    Though the Judiciary Committee says that it’s too early in the investigation process to recommend potential criminal claims, Judiciary Chair Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) has asked the D.C. Bar to investigate Clark for potential misconduct.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Implores Whether Manchin Thinks Seniors Having Teeth Is an “Entitlement”

    Sen. Bernie Sanders departs a press conference at the U.S. Capitol on October 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    After months of opposition to the Build Back Better Act by conservative Democrats in Congress, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) voiced his frustration with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), taking particular umbrage with Manchin’s recent comments about the U.S. becoming an “entitlement society.”

    In 15 minutes of remarks in the Capitol on Wednesday, Sanders condemned the West Virginia senator for his comment on entitlement, adding that Manchin hasn’t been negotiating fairly.

    “Senator Manchin, as I understand it, talked about, today, about not wanting to see our country become an ‘entitlement society.’ I am not exactly sure what he means by that,” Sanders said. “Does that mean that we end the $300 direct payments for working class parents which have cut childhood poverty in this country as a result of the American Rescue Plan in half? Is protecting working families and cutting childhood poverty an ‘entitlement?’”

    He then asked a series of questions surrounding Manchin’s opposition to provisions in the reconciliation bill, which include guaranteed paid family and medical leave, affordable housing, addressing the climate crisis and expanding Medicare coverage.

    “At a time when millions of seniors in Vermont, in West Virginia, all across this country, have teeth in their mouths that are rotting — when they can’t afford hearing aids in order to communicate with their grandchildren, and when they can’t afford a pair of glasses in order to read a newspaper — does Senator Manchin really believe that seniors are not entitled to digest their food, and that they’re not entitled to hear and see properly?” Sanders demanded. “Is that really too much to ask in the richest country on Earth — that elderly people have teeth in their mouths and can see and can hear?”

    Sanders concluded by saying that it’s “long overdue for [Manchin] to tell us with specificity — not generalities, we’re beyond generalities — with specificity what he wants and what he does not want.”

    Manchin has been far from straightforward about his demands for the reconciliation bill, concealing critical elements like his desired price tag from the public and even from fellow senators. Though he has gradually revealed measures that he would support — including the inclusion of the anti-choice Hyde Amendment, which would further restrict abortion access, particularly for nonwhite and low-income people– he has been consistent in his opposition to the bill at large.

    Sanders voiced his dissatisfaction with Manchin’s negotiating tactics on MSNBC, saying that there is “growing frustration” in Congress and among the public over the prolonged movement of the bill. “It’s not a 50-50 deal,” he said, pointing out that Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) are the only lawmakers in the Senate opposed to the bill, forcing their convservative proposals to be given disproportionate consideration.

    On Wednesday, Sanders claimed that Manchin and Sinema are more closely aligned with the lobbyists who are opposing the bill than with their own party. “Let me tell you who is vigorously opposed to this legislation, and I think it’s important that the American people understand that,” he said. “Because this is the corruption of American politics.” He then pointed out that the pharmaceutical, health insurance and fossil fuel industries are pouring millions of dollars into lobbying against the Build Back Better Act.

    Billionaires are also antagonistic toward the bill, which would raise taxes for corporations and the wealthy. “They love the idea that some of the wealthiest people in this country and the largest corporations in a given year do not pay a nickel in federal income tax,” the Vermont senator said. “They’re fighting to preserve that absurdity.”

    At this juncture, Sanders continued, it’s important to negotiate in good faith and move in lockstep with the rest of the Democratic caucus. Though he himself could draw a hard line with support for Medicare for All, he chooses not to — because he knows that he wouldn’t have the backing of the rest of the caucus.

    “I could in five minutes go to Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader and say, ‘Chuck, I can’t support this bill unless you have a Medicare for All provision.’ But I am not going to do that because I know… it would be irresponsible,” Sanders said. “So my concern with Mr. Manchin is not so much what his views are — I disagree with them. But it is that it is wrong, it is really not playing fair, that one or two people think that they should be able to stop [the Democratic agenda.]”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Judge Shoots Down Texas Abortion Ban in Legal Challenge by Biden Administration

    Protesters take part in the Women's March and Rally for Abortion Justice at the State Capitol in Austin, Texas, on October 2, 2021.

    A federal judge has blocked enforcement of the near-total Texas abortion ban that went into effect last month, which has been condemned by reproductive rights advocates as dangerous and outright cruel.

    In a 113-page decision, the U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman denounced the ban as “flagrantly unconstitutional,” siding with President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, which brought the suit. “From the moment S.B. 8 went into effect,” Pitman wrote, people “have been unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their own lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution.”

    S.B. 8 is the most restrictive abortion ban in the country; legal experts say it doesn’t just undermine rights protected by Roe v. Wade, but also international law. The law bans abortion so early on in the pregnancy that most people don’t even know they’re pregnant, and doesn’t allow exceptions for cases of rape or incest.

    S.B. 8 also places the onus of enforcement on private citizens rather than the state, an especially cruel move that incentivizes bounty hunters to seek out abortion providers, or anyone else who may have aided a person in ending their pregnancy, by rewarding them with a minimum of $10,000 from the state.

    Attorney General Merrick Garland hailed Wednesday’s decision, calling it a “victory” for Texans and “for the rule of law.”

    “It is the foremost responsibility of the Department of Justice to defend the Constitution,” he said. “We will continue to protect constitutional rights against all who would seek to undermine them.”

    Abortion rights advocates also praised the ruling. “The relief granted by the court today is overdue, and we are grateful that the Department of Justice moved quickly to seek it,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood. “While this fight is far from over, we are hopeful that the court’s order blocking S.B. 8 will allow Texas abortion providers to resume services as soon as possible.”

    However, the ban may soon go back into effect, as Texas officials swiftly filed an appeal to the decision. They are planning to seek an emergency stay from the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has previously upheld the ban.

    Since the law took effect in September, abortion clinics have experienced a massive chilling effect on their services. “Exactly what we feared would happen has come to pass,” said Melaney Linton, president of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, in a court filing.

    In his decision, Pitman pointed out that the abortion ban is not only causing fear and uncertainty in Texas — it’s also overburdening abortion clinics in other states.

    “Texas residents forced to leave the state must also contend with the abortion restrictions and backlogs in other states,” the judge wrote. “The Court finds credible the evidence showing that the inundation of Texas patients overburdens abortion services in other states, many of which are already stretched to the breaking.”

    Pitman then shared the story of an abortion provider in Oklahoma. Before S. B. 8, patients from Texas represented only about a quarter of her patient load. Now, Texans represent about two-thirds of her overall patients, and she has had to delay abortions because of increased demand.

    Oklahoma Planned Parenthood facilities have described the surge of patients from Texas as “unprecedented,” and they fear that delayed abortions will end up driving people away from having the procedure altogether.

    Reproductive rights advocates fear that more abortion restrictions may be on the horizon. In December, the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments by the state of Mississippi in a case that seeks to challenge Roe v. Wade. If the Court ruling sides with the state, abortion rights may be endangered in states ruled by conservative lawmakers.

    Last month, in response to the Texas law, House Democrats passed a bill that would guarantee abortion rights across the country. But the bill faces long odds of passing in a Senate deadlocked by the filibuster.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In Historic First, WHO Approves Vaccine to Prevent Malaria

    A nurse takes a vaccine from a bottle to administrate it to a child at Ewim Polyclinic on April 30, 2019. Ewim Polyclinic was the first in Ghana to roll out the malaria vaccine Mosquirix.

    On Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) endorsed the use of the first ever vaccine to prevent malaria, a move that could save tens of thousands of lives each year.

    According to the WHO, there were an estimated 229 million cases of malaria in 2019, killing over 400,000 people worldwide. Children are especially vulnerable to the disease, which is most present in sub-Saharan Africa; children under the age of five accounted for two thirds of the deaths that year.

    Various studies have shown limited efficacy rates for the vaccine, with clinical trials showing that the vaccine prevents only about 30 percent of severe malaria cases among children. However, a study in August found that layering the vaccine with antimalarial drugs led to a 70 percent reduction in hospitalizations and deaths.

    WHO researchers expect the vaccine’s rollout to have a positive impact. A study last year projected that, if vaccination rollout was prioritized by local governments, it would prevent 5.3 million cases and 24,000 deaths in children a year.

    WHO General Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus hailed the recommendation as a “historic moment,” thanking participants in a pilot program in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, as well as GlaxoSmithKlein, the company that developed the vaccine, which is known as RTS,S. “The long-awaited malaria vaccine for children is a breakthrough for science, child health and malaria control,” he said in a statement.

    Tedros emphasized in a press conference on Wednesday that the vaccine rollout will not be enough on its own, and that other mitigation measures will be necessary. “Using this vaccine in addition to existing tools to prevent malaria could save tens of thousands of young lives each year,” Tedros said.

    The vaccine is given out in four doses, starting in children about five or six months old and ending around two years old. Over 800,000 children have already been vaccinated through the program, and Tedros notes that the program has seen success.

    Advocates hope that the vaccine’s approval by the WHO will help speed along the development of other potential vaccines. RTS,S, which has been under development for decades, has been the most successful vaccine against malaria thus far. It is not only the first antimalarial vaccine but also the first anti-parasite vaccine to be developed.

    Malaria is an especially pernicious disease, and in some regions, children have malaria episodes six times a year on average. Often, cases can cause unbearable pain, and in cases where the person survives, the parasite alters the human body to attract more mosquitos, making patients more susceptible to future episodes. More infections can lead to a host of other illnesses like anemia and cognitive impairment.

    Ninety-five percent of malaria cases occurred in 29 countries in 2019, and just over half of those cases were in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Mozambique or Niger. Though the incidence rate of the disease has been declining, the decline in cases and deaths have not been on par with the WHO’s long-term strategy to fight the disease.

    In previous decades, the global North and other wealthier regions have been able to eliminate malaria without use of a vaccine, using infrastructure and housing improvements and removing breeding sites for mosquitos. According to the Gates Foundation, eradicating malaria entirely would cost between $90 billion and $120 billion.

    The U.S. has been involved in such efforts through the President’s Malaria Initiative, started by George W. Bush in 2005, but international efforts to help with disease prevention have been criticized for being inefficient and underfunded.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republicans Lie That It’s Democrats’ — Not Trump’s — Debts That Need to Be Paid

    Sen. Ted Cruz speaks during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on September 14, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    As Democrats scramble to raise the debt ceiling before the U.S. defaults, Republicans like Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) have been misleading the public about who incurred the debts in the first place. More and more transparently, the GOP is revealing that their goal is to cause financial disaster — and to blame it on Democrats.

    Republicans are planning to block yet another Democratic attempt to raise the debt ceiling on Wednesday. Over the past few weeks, they’ve left Democrats with few options for avoiding a default, which has led President Joe Biden to suggest that his party’s leaders carve out a filibuster exception just for the debt limit.

    Even though a debt default could spell financial chaos for the country, potentially sapping trillions of dollars of household wealth from American families, Republicans have refused to budge — and even though the debts that need to be paid were incurred during the Trump administration, they are claiming the debt is the Democrats’ fault for wanting to pass their widely popular social and climate spending plan.

    “They basically want us to be aiders and abettors to their reckless spending and tax policies, and we just aren’t going to do it,” Cornyn told The Washington Post this week.

    The debt ceiling has nothing to do with the Democratic agenda and everything to do with Donald Trump’s policies — particularly the 2017 tax reform plan, in which Republicans gifted massive tax breaks to corporations and the rich with no plan to fill in the deficit that would create. Trump built up nearly $8 trillion in debt over just four years, which economists say will take years to pay off.

    Cruz also lied about the Democrats’ responsibility for the debt last month on Fox, claiming that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) “doesn’t want to raise the debt ceiling using Democrats because he wants to rack up trillions in new spending, trillions in new taxes, and he wants to shift political blame…. He wants to get 10 Republicans to vote for the Democrats’ massively irresponsible spending,” in order to bypass the filibuster on the debt ceiling. The Texas senator has been dead set on blocking attempts to raise the debt ceiling over the past few weeks, hinging his opposition on this misleading claim.

    The debt ceiling raise has nothing to do with the Democrats’ reconciliation bill, which is fully funded by moderate tax increases on corporations and the wealthy. However, the GOP is trying its hardest to tie the two things together.

    Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and other Republican lawmakers have been demanding that Democrats raise the debt ceiling through the reconciliation bill, in aims of weakening or sinking the reconciliation bill altogether. Democrats have refused to pass the debt ceiling through reconciliation, saying that it would take too long to avoid a default and that there are other options for resolving the issue.

    Republicans have yet to stray from this strategy, even as the default date grows closer– and they’ve shown callous indifference to the fact that their obstruction has the potential to spell economic disaster. If a debt default happens because of their demands, “then too bad,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-North Dakota) told The Washington Post. “It’s just really, really unfortunate that [Democrats are] that irresponsible.”

    The GOP is also reluctant to support a filibuster carveout for the debt ceiling. McConnell said that he “can’t imagine” doing that if he were in charge. After Biden suggested the filibuster carveout on Wednesday, McConnell told Senate Republicans that he is planning to offer a temporary debt ceiling extension or an expedited reconciliation process instead.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Elizabeth Warren Probes “Corrupt” Link Between Tax System and Private Sector

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren holds a news conference with Rep. Pramila Jayapal to announce legislation at the U.S. Capitol on March 1, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) are demanding information on “corrupt schemes” to pad accounting firms’ profits involving the Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and other government agencies.

    The lawmakers have sent letters to five top accounting firms asking them to detail their revolving door relationships with the government. The request comes after a September New York Times report exposing how staff and executives at accounting firms like PwC take jobs within the Treasury Department and other agencies to help write tax codes that will benefit their former companies — and then return to those companies with raises or promotions.

    The New York Times uncovered 35 examples of this practice during the last four presidential administrations, calling it a “remarkably effective behind-the-scenes system to promote [accounting firms’] interests in Washington.” Even veterans of the accounting industry admit that the revolving door is a major reason why the wealthy are able to benefit from and exploit the U.S. tax code.

    “Accounting giants are abusing the public trust and taking advantage of the revolving door between public service and private profit,” Jayapal and Warren wrote in letters to Deloitte, PwC, EY, KPMG and RSM.

    The lawmakers continued by citing Warren’s Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act. “Americans are sick and tired of these corrupt schemes,” they went on. “The decades-long scam in which large accounting firms have abused the revolving door between the government and the private sector to help their wealthy clients avoid paying their fair share of taxes demonstrates precisely why this legislation is necessary.”

    The Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act would draw stricter lines between the private and public sector. It bars private companies from immediately hiring people who have just left a government position, and prohibits them from incentivizing executives to enter the public sector by giving them large compensation packages, or so-called “golden parachutes.” The bill would also establish a separate government office to monitor ethics and corruption within the government.

    The lawmakers then asked the companies to disclose if, since 2001, they have had employees take positions within the Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) or elsewhere in the government, and then return to the company afterward. They also requested details of that employment, including what positions they took, their clients and their compensation over time.

    In at least 16 of the cases that the New York Times uncovered in September, the former government officials were promoted to partner and rewarded with double their salaries when they returned to their private sector firms.

    The lawmakers drew a direct line between the revolving door practices and the tax code. “Massive accounting firms have spent decades unethically abusing the revolving door between government and the private sector to help wealthy clients avoid paying their fair share of taxes. It’s corruption,” wrote Jayapal on Twitter.

    “The unethical revolving door of personnel between [the Treasury Department] and the biggest accounting firms has to end,” said Warren. “Americans should trust that our policies work for them, not the richest corporations.”

    A report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy earlier this year found that 55 large corporations, including FedEx, Nike and American Electric Power, paid $0 in federal income taxes in 2020. In fact, the effective tax rate was in the negatives for many of these companies, partially thanks to the 2017 tax cuts implemented by former President Donald Trump and the GOP.

    Recent plans to tax corporations by lawmakers like Warren have been met with the cold shoulder by conservatives in Congress, however. Many of them — like Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) — enjoy close relationships with deep-pocketed lobbyists. And despite the fact that major accounting firms like Deloitte and PwC have a revolving door relationship with the government, which skews tax policy in their favor, they still spend hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars on lobbying.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Top State Department Official Resigns, Saying Haitian Deportations Violate Law

    State Department legal advisor Harold Koh testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the War Powers Act on June 28, 2011, in Washington, D.C.

    A top official at the State Department has left his post, citing the Biden administration’s continued use of Title 42, a Trump-era statute that enables the government to deny asylum seekers at the border. This marks the second high-profile departure from the Biden administration over the president’s policies on Haitian asylum seekers.

    In a scathing memo obtained by Politico, former senior adviser and legal appointee Harold Koh referred to the administration’s use of Title 42 as “inhumane.” He also expressed the belief that the deportation of Haitians is illegal under domestic laws and in violation of the United Nations (UN) Refugee Convention.

    “I believe this Administration’s current implementation of the Title 42 authority continues to violate our legal obligation not to expel or return (“refouler”) individuals who fear persecution, death, or torture, especially migrants fleeing from Haiti,” Koh wrote in the memo. “Lawful, more humane alternatives plainly exist, and there are approaching opportunities in the near future to substitute those alternatives in place of the current, badly flawed policy.”

    Since February, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has deported 700,000 people to countries including Mexico, Guatemala and Haiti, Koh said. He continued by citing disturbing reports that “some migrants were not even told where they were being taken when placed on deportation flights, learning only when they landed that they had been returned to their home country or place of possible persecution or torture” — what he says constitutes the “exact act of refoulement” that is forbidden by domestic and international laws.

    In September, Title 42 made headlines when pictures and videos were released showing Border Patrol agents on horseback, cracking their whips at Haitian asylum seekers. Migrants have been fleeing desperate conditions in Haiti, which was plunged into political unrest after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July and devastated by a deadly 7.2 magnitude earthquake in August.

    Despite the potential violence that some Haitians face if they return to Haiti, the Biden administration has been deporting en masse. About 4,600 Haitians have been deported since mid-September — and the U.S. government’s hostile treatment of Haitian migrants has forced asylum seekers to reconsider their entry into the U.S., despite promises from Democrats that Haitians would be granted protected status in the country.

    Koh called the deportations “particularly unjustifiable” when considering the Temporary Protected Status that Haitians were supposedly given by the Biden administration earlier this year. Pointing out UN statistics indicating that millions of Haitians are in dire need of humanitarian aid, he asked: “If Haiti is undeniably a humanitarian disaster area, the question should be: at this moment, why is this Administration returning Haitians at all?”

    Koh concluded by asking for all Title 42 flights to be stopped.

    His departure follows that of Daniel Foote, a former special envoy to Haiti who resigned last month, also citing the Biden administration’s cruelty toward Haitians. “I will not be associated with the United States inhumane, counterproductive decision [to deport Haitians],” Foote wrote.

    Even in the face of progressive outrage and pleas from refugees and advocates around the world, the Biden administration has shown little intention of revising its tyrannical immigration policies. Despite President Joe Biden’s raising of the refugee cap, refugee admissions have fallen to a record low this year. According to the Associated Press, a total of 11,445 refugees were allowed into the U.S. during the budget year that started in October of 2020 and ended last week — a small fraction of the 62,500 cap that Biden set earlier this year.

    Biden has also been ramping up immigrant detention and imprisonment. The number of immigrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has gone up by 70 percent under Biden, with relative silence from Democratic lawmakers who expressed outrage about immigrant families in cages under Trump.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.