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Author: Sharon Zhang

  • 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.

  • Warren Calls for Insider Trading Investigation at Fed After Scandal Emerges

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks during a press conference with fellow lawmakers at the U.S. Capitol on September 23, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    In wake of a stock trading scandal at the Federal Reserve, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) has called for an investigation into the agency’s officials to probe whether or not they were involved in insider trading.

    Warren called on the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to look into reports that the Fed’s Vice Chair Richard Clarida moved between $1 million and $5 million in stocks on February 27, 2020, the day before Fed Chair Jerome Powell made a statement about potential policy change in response to the pandemic. Though the Fed is launching an internal review of Clarida’s actions, Warren said that the SEC should also be involved.

    “The reports of this financial activity by Fed officials raise serious questions about possible conflicts of interest and reveal a disregard for the public trust,” Warren said in a scathing letter to the head of the SEC. “They also reflect atrocious judgement by these officials, and an attitude that personal profiteering is more important than the American people’s confidence in the Fed.”

    She went on to say that the SEC, which regulates the stock market and securities industry, should have a special interest in the trade. “Most importantly from the perspective of the SEC, if these trades were based on Fed officials’ knowledge of non-public, market moving information, they may have represented potentially illegal activity,” Warren wrote.

    The lawmaker asked SEC Chair Gary Gensler to investigate stock trading by all top Fed officials — not just Clarida — in order to discern whether insider trading took place.

    “It is not clear why Chair Powell did not stop these activities, which corrode the trust and effectiveness of the Fed,” she wrote.

    The past few months, Warren has advocated for a ban on officials trading stocks, a move she believes will combat corruption. Last month, she called on local Fed leaders to ban their staff from trading stocks — and earlier this year, she unveiled legislation that would ban federal officials and lawmakers, including members of Congress, from trading stocks altogether.

    “It is a no-brainer,” she said at the time, adding that barring stock trades would help increase public confidence in federal institutions.

    To Warren, the scandal is further evidence of the need for major changes in leadership at the Fed. On Tuesday, the Massachusetts lawmaker delivered a speech on the Senate floor criticizing the “culture of corruption” among Fed officials.

    “The responsibility to safeguard the integrity of the Federal Reserve rests squarely with [Powell],” Warren said. “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. And once there is a problem, a quick and aggressive response is critical. Chair Powell has failed at both tasks.”

    Though Powell is up for potential renomination by the Biden administration, Warren is one of his staunchest opponents in Congress and has been campaigning against his renomination. On Tuesday, she described him as a “go along to get along leader who doesn’t know or doesn’t care when, on his watch, people with great responsibility advance their own interests over the interests of our nation,” adding that he has amassed “failures” as a leader.

    Warren and progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) have pointed out Powell’s previous regulation failures in the past. The Trump-era appointee has been weak on climate and has watered down post-recession bank regulation policies, they said, which poses risks to the financial stability of the country’s working class.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sinema’s Approval Rating Plummets Among Democrats as She Allies With Lobbyists

    Sen. Kyrsten Sinema walks through the Senate at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on September 30, 2021.

    According to new polling from Morning Consult, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (D-Arizona) approval ratings have plummeted among Democrats in her state over the course of this year. The senator — whose relationship with conservative lobbyists is well-documented — has made headlines in recent weeks for being one of the key holdouts on the Democrats’ agenda in Congress.

    The poll of over 8,000 registered voters in Arizona found that only 46 percent of Democrats approved of Sinema’s job performance in July and September. This number is down 21 percent from early in 2021, when 67 percent of Democrats approved of her performance. The dip among Democrats has driven a six percent decrease in her approval from all voters, from 48 percent to 42 percent approval overall.

    While Sinema’s approval has dropped precipitously among Democrats and independents, it has risen among Republicans. While only 34 percent of Republicans expressed approval for Sinema in early 2021, 43 percent of Republican voters approved of her performance in the third quarter of the year. Her approval rating among Republicans is now almost evenly split, with 45 percent of those polled disapproving of her performance.

    The data suggests that Sinema can’t rely on Democratic support in her state if her approval ratings remain steady or drop before she’s up for reelection in 2024. While 28 percent of Democrats said that they “strongly” approved of Sinema earlier this year, only 14 percent now say the same thing.

    Though the shift has been less drastic, Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-West Virginia) approval rating is trending in a similar direction. In the first quarter of 2021, 59 percent of Democrats in West Virginia approved of Manchin’s job performance — now, only 48 percent approve. Among Republicans, his approval rating has jumped seven points, from 37 to 44 percent. His overall approval has remained relatively steady, going from 42 percent to 41 percent over the course of the year.

    The data suggests that Sinema and Manchin’s conservative standpoints are not popular with Democratic voters — and by cozying up to right-wing lobbyists and obstructing popular policy proposals, they’re not doing themselves any favors among the people who would ostensibly support them in their own states.

    As they continue their campaign to water down the Democratic agenda in Congress, both Manchin and Sinema have flaunted their ties to deep-pocketed lobbyists representing moneyed, conservative and climate-denying interests. Recently, Manchin has stonewalled on negotiations for the popular Build Back Better bill, concealing his demands for the bill from the public while parroting talking points from conservative lobbyists, who stand to benefit from his obstruction of the bill.

    Last week, during a critical time for negotiations on the reconciliation bill, Sinema held a fundraiser with conservative lobbyists, who donated thousands of dollars to support her campaign — despite the fact that she won’t be up for reelection for years. Her ties to corporations and the wealthy are deep: one of Sinema’s former aides is now a JPMorgan Chase lobbyist fighting against tax hikes that Sinema also opposes.

    Sinema and Manchin have been partners in obstruction throughout the year, first emerging as staunch supporters of the filibuster, even as their Democratic colleagues made calls for filibuster reform or abolition.

    Recently, activists followed Sinema into the bathroom at Arizona State University (ASU) in a desperate attempt to appeal to her on her reconciliation bill obstruction. Activists have described having trouble reaching the senator to discuss any issues with her at all, and have pointed out that she hasn’t held a town hall in three years. When it comes to lobbyists, however, Sinema’s door is always open.

    Sinema doesn’t have the support of her own Democratic Party back home either. Arizona Democrats recently threatened Sinema with a vote of no confidence if she continued to subvert Democratic interests, and former supporters who helped elect her to the Senate in 2018 are now looking to primary her in 2024.

    The Arizona senator appears unphased, however. After activists tried to get her attention at ASU, Sinema’s communications team told The Daily Beast: “We are not dignifying this behavior with a response.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Slams GOP For Obstructing Debt Limit in Wake of “Reckless” Trump Agenda

    President Joe Biden addresses the media after a meeting of the House Democratic Caucus on the infrastructure bill in the U.S. Capitol on October 1, 2021.

    On Monday, President Joe Biden slammed Republicans for obstructing attempts to prevent the financial disaster that would be caused by a U.S. debt default, calling their interference “disgraceful.” For weeks, Republicans have been insistent on causing a default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling.

    “Let’s be clear. Not only are Republicans refusing to do their job, but they’re threatening to use their power to prevent us from doing our job, saving the economy from a catastrophic event. I think quite frankly it’s hypocritical, dangerous and disgraceful,” said Biden. “Their obstruction and irresponsibility knows absolutely no bounds, especially as we’re clawing our way out of this pandemic.”

    Pointing out that Republican senators have been threatening to use the filibuster to block the debt ceiling raise, he urged GOP lawmakers to “get out of the way” if they want Democrats to fix the problem themselves. Yet Republicans are willfully obstructing nearly every path that Democrats could take to raise the debt ceiling with Democratic votes alone.

    Biden pointed out that it isn’t about his current agenda, but about paying off existing debts. “Raising the debt limit comes down to paying what we already owe,” he said. “It starts with a simple truth: the United States is a nation that has paid its bills and always has.”

    The president continued to say that previous debt limit raises have been a bipartisan effort because both parties recognized the importance of the U.S. paying its debts. “The reason we have to raise the debt limit is in part because of the reckless tax and spending policies under the previous [Donald] Trump administration. In four years, they incurred nearly $8 trillion — in four years, $8 trillion in additional debt,” he said. “That’s more than a quarter of the entire debt incurred now outstanding after more than 200 years.”

    Over the course of Trump’s presidency, Republicans voted to raise the debt limit three times. Now, the U.S. faces a crisis if the debt limit isn’t raised before the U.S. runs out of money to pay for its obligations, which Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says could come in just two weeks. Every day until the debt limit is raised, the so-called “X date” — the day the U.S. could default — grows closer.

    Economists warn that if Congress remains in deadlock and the U.S. defaults on its debts, the resulting economic downturn could be catastrophic, similar to that of the Great Recession in 2008. According to analysis by Moody’s Analytics, six million jobs could be lost and American families could have $15 trillion of their collective wealth yanked out from under them.

    The longer Republicans block Democrats from raising the debt ceiling leading up to a default, the more unstable the economy gets, Biden pointed out. Last week, investors began preparing for the possibility of a default, resulting in a market plunge.

    “As soon as this week, your savings and your pocketbook could be directly impacted by this Republican stunt,” the president said. “Republicans say they will not do their part to avoid this needless calamity. So be it. But they need to stop playing Russian roulette with the U.S. economy.”

    Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) has only doubled down on his party’s debt limit obstruction in recent days, even as the economy roils due to the possibility of a debt default.

    In a bizarre letter to Biden on Monday, he requested that the president ask Democrats to avoid a debt default. The minority leader continues to pin the blame on Democrats — even though he could change his mind about obstructing raising the debt limit at any time, preventing what could become a dire economic crisis.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ocasio-Cortez Rejects Means Testing, Saying It Leads to “Red Tape” and “Waste”

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leaves after a House Democratic Caucus meeting with President Joe Biden at the U.S. Capitol on October 1, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Conservative Democrats are insisting upon including means testing for key social programs in the Democrats’ Build Back Better Act — a practice Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) condemned on Sunday for creating unnecessary hurdles for people seeking government assistance.

    “Means testing = more bureaucracy, red tape, and waste,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “That’s why programs where means testing gets implemented are less popular, not more popular. It’s also why many people who are eligible for means-tested programs still don’t get healthcare or help at all — it’s too hard.”

    Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) has been leading the charge for applying means testing to programs in the reconciliation bill. In a July memo that was largely secret until recently, Manchin highlighted his demands for the bill, saying that social spending must be tempered with “means testing guardrails/formulas on new spending,” “targeted spending caps” and “no additional handouts.”

    Manchin has doubled down on his demands to limit social spending in recent weeks, publicly stating that he favors work requirements for some programs. “I cannot accept our economy or basically our society moving toward an entitlement mentality,” he said last week in a characteristically right-wing comment to reporters.

    Many of the programs in the reconciliation bill already have a form of means testing; the child tax credit, for instance, has a household salary cap. But Manchin wants to lower that cap, limiting the program that helped cut child poverty by half during the pandemic.

    Progressive advocates say that at best, means testing is a waste of time for poor families who rely on government programs to stay afloat. At worst, it can serve as a punishment for people experiencing poverty, or an outright barrier to accessing government aid.

    “For those unfamiliar with the phrase, ‘means testing’ is the art of limiting the possible,” wrote MSNBC’s Hayes Brown. The easiest way to ensure that low-income students have access to school lunch, Brown continued, is to use federal funding to provide free lunch for all students at public schools. When the government limits the free lunches to only the kids who need it, the process becomes far more complicated for families to navigate — requiring a series of complex steps “just to make sure some kid whose parents make a bit too much money or who qualifies but never filled out the form doesn’t get access to the school-provided lunch.”

    Means testing doesn’t just bar some people from accessing needed assistance — it can also further depress program recipients’ finances. For instance, asset limits associated with the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program have been shown to push recipients deeper into poverty, partly because the limits have not been updated for decades.

    Ocasio-Cortez pointed out over the weekend that placing income and work limits on government programs isn’t even effective by conservative lawmakers’ own standards. “Even if you’re a person that fully believes in means testing, the US doesn’t even measure poverty accurately to use for a means test,” she wrote. “The U.S. measures poverty at 3x the cost of min food diet, assumes worker has stay at home spouse for childcare, and doesn’t factor cost of living.”

    “This means there are likely a LOT more poor people in the US than we admit. Policymakers know this, so they try to compensate by drafting some federal policies at 150 percent of the federal poverty line, etc. But when the measure is SO nonsensical, even 150 percent of poverty line has little basis,” she continued, highlighting a bill she introduced in 2019 that would reformulate poverty line calculations.

    Means testing has caused schisms between Democrats, partially because of debates over who qualifies as poor and who doesn’t. When conservative Democrats make it complicated for the people most in need to access resources, it can also erode public confidence in social programs.

    Lawmakers like Manchin aren’t necessarily worried about what’s popular, however. Means testing is favored by deep-pocketed lobbyists who oppose social spending, largely because social programs that cast a wider net lead to more taxes on wealthy people and corporations. Time and time again, Manchin has demonstrated his loyalty to lobbyists and pushed for shrinking the reconciliation bill — and he is willing to make it harder for the public to access popular proposals to do so.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Warren Introduces Bill to Protect Bank Customers, Small Banks From Consolidation

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on September 28, 2021.

    On Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) introduced a bill that would reform the way the government authorizes bank mergers. The proposal is an effort to stop the endless “rubber stamping” of bank consolidation, which Warren argues comes at the expense of customers and small banks.

    The Bank Merger Review Modernization Act, introduced with Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Illinois), would strengthen rules for the authorization process for bank mergers, in hopes of ensuring that future mergers serve the public. The act creates protections to make the process more transparent and to evaluate the financial risks that may emerge from a merger.

    “In recent years, our banking sector has become more and more dominated by the largest banks. Community banks are being gobbled up by larger competitors or forced to shut down because they can’t compete on a level playing field,” Warren explained in a statement. “This results in more concentration, higher costs for consumers, and increased systemic risk to our financial system.”

    The bill “would ensure that regulators do their jobs by stopping mergers that deprive communities of the banking services they need and help prevent another financial crisis,” Warren continued.

    As the lawmakers point out, between 2006 and 2017, the Federal Reserve approved 3,819 bank mergers, not rejecting a single application. The last time the Department of Justice challenged a bank merger was 1985, and regulators haven’t formally denied a merger in 15 years. Because of Fed’s and other federal regulators’ lax enforcement of merger guidelines, the number of banks has declined rapidly over the past few decades, going from over 18,000 banks in the mid-to-late 20th century to less than 5,000 now.

    The bill, which García and Warren previously introduced in 2019, is part of a larger Democratic effort to crack down on big banks and anticompetitive business practices across the country. Indeed, the bill would require federal regulators to examine the potential anticompetitive effects of a bank merger on banking services like mortgage and business lending.

    At a hearing in August, Warren pointed out that Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) regulators aren’t required to reject a merger if it would create a bank that’s larger than the government can regulate. Regulators also aren’t required to reject mergers if they would reduce competitiveness and result in higher costs for consumers, or if the banks attempting to merge haven’t received high scores on their service to the community.

    “Merger review has become the definition of a rubber stamp,” she said. “Regulators have no credibility on mergers.”

    She and García are especially concerned with how bank mergers affect the public. Research suggests that bank mergers often increase costs for consumers while simultaneously reducing the availability of bank services. Mergers can also lead to financial instability for the country at large, and the lawmakers say that the current era of deregulation hearkens back to the “Too Big to Fail” mentality that led to the 2008 Great Recession.

    The bill aims to ensure that future bank mergers would have positive effects for the communities they serve. It would only allow mergers between banks with high rankings via the Community Reinvestment Act, which was enacted in the 1970s to score how banks are serving low- and middle-income communities.

    “This bill is a long overdue step to ensure that bank mergers are good for the public,” said Jesse Van Tol, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. “For decades, federal bank merger law has recognized that there must be a public benefit in terms of increased access to affordable credit. This bill finally spells out what banks must do to meet that requirement. Mergers should not be approved by regulators if the only benefit is a bigger and more profitable bank.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Big Pharma Makes More Off of US Sales Than Rest of the World Combined

    Pills, pharmaceuticals falling

    A new analysis by Public Citizen found that the U.S. is spending nearly double what the rest of the world spends combined for key drugs. The report offers further evidence that the country is in dire need of pharmaceutical drug price reformation, which progressives are fighting for through the Build Back Better Act.

    The report finds that, for the 20 top-selling drugs worldwide, U.S. sales totaled $101.1 billion, while sales of the same drugs to the rest of the world totaled almost $57 billion in 2020. For 11 of the drugs, revenue in the U.S. was double that of the rest of the world combined. And for 11 of the 13 pharmaceutical companies that sell these drugs, U.S. profits made up most of their revenue.

    For some of the drugs, the analysis found an egregious revenue difference. For Biktarvy, an HIV medication produced by Gilead Sciences, the U.S. sales revenue was five times the rest of the worlds’ revenue; for AbbVie’s Humira, which treats autoimmune diseases, four times greater; and three times greater for drugs like Type 2 diabetes medication Trulicity.

    “Americans spend far too much on prescription drugs,” reads the report. “This analysis of the billions more in revenue that pharmaceutical corporations make from the U.S. compared to the rest of the world offers a glimpse of how much these businesses benefit from the American health care system overpaying for drugs.”

    Though drug prices across countries remain opaque, studies have shown that people in the U.S. consume a comparable amount of prescription drugs to people in other countries. This suggests that Public Citizen’s findings aren’t due to higher unit sales of drugs in the U.S., but rather higher prices.

    Previous research have produced similar findings. Earlier this year, a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the U.S. is paying two to four times as much on average for the same 20 name brand drugs in places like Australia and France. The GAO found this was true even in Canada, where the government’s universal health care system doesn’t include coverage of prescription drugs. The study was commissioned by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who believes that allowing the government to negotiate drug prices in the U.S. is “long overdue.”

    Public Citizen’s analysis comes at a time when Congress is fighting over a proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices. Democrats estimate that the plan could save the government about $450 billion over the next 10 years. More importantly, it’s not just an abstract plan that would have roundabout effects on the public: the plan could save lives.

    Recent polling has found that 18 million Americans, or about 7 percent of the U.S. adult population, say that they recently couldn’t afford to purchase a needed drug for themselves or for someone in their household. The poll, which was conducted by Gallup, also found that 10 percent of American adults report skipping doses to save money.

    Though it is difficult to quantify how many people have died from not being able to afford needed drugs, a 2019 study found that over 13 percent of Americans knew someone who had died in the previous five years after not being able to afford treating a health condition. A study conducted last year found that high out-of-pocket drug costs are expected to cause 1.1 million premature deaths for seniors on Medicare, costing the program an extra $177.4 billion.

    To mitigate this crisis, Public Citizen says that Congress should pass the proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. “Granting Medicare the authority to push back against pharmaceutical company profiteering would mean an end to decades of overpaying for medicines – and the beginning of billions in cost-savings that could be used to improve and expand Medicare, including by increasing access to treatments as well as to dental, hearing and visual care,” the report reads.

    Progressive lawmakers have been fighting to include the proposal in the Build Back Better Act. “Thousands of people die every year because they can’t afford the medicine that they need,” Sanders said on CNN last month. “The question is whether we have the guts to stand up to what is an incredibly powerful lobby.”

    The pharmaceutical industry lobby has vast influence over U.S. politics; this year alone, the pharmaceutical/health products industry has spent $171 million lobbying lawmakers. Last year, the industry spent over $300 million on lobbying.The industry has been influencing conservative Democrats to fight against proposals to lower drug prices, and recently pushed representatives to remove the drug price negotiation proposal from the Build Back Better bill.

    The right-wing Democrats removed the proposal despite recent polling by Data for Progress showing that a majority of Republican, Independent and Democratic voters are in support of the drug price negotiation plan, with 73 percent of all voters supporting the proposal and only 18 percent opposing.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ocasio-Cortez Slams Manchin for Opposing $3.5T Bill But Approving Defense Budget

    Congressional Progressive Caucus members Rep. Cori Bush and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talk to reporters outside the U.S. Capitol on September 30, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) called out Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and other so-called deficit hawks for wanting to limit federal spending — except when it comes to the sky high defense budgets that Congress authorizes yearly.

    Manchin has been a leading campaigner against the size of the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion bill, which would be paid out over the course of 10 years. This week, he said that he will only support a bill of less than half that size at $1.5 trillion. But he continually supports Congress’s defense funding, voting to grant roughly $9.1 trillion to the Pentagon over the last ten years, according to The Week. In other words, the amount of money he would tolerate for social spending is only a sixth of what he’s authorized for the bloated defense budget over the same time period.

    Ocasio-Cortez condemned the hypocrisy of Manchin’s position on Wednesday, saying, “Ever notice how ‘deficit hawks’ vote for record-high defense spending, yet claim bills that help people & challenge lobbyists are ‘too much?’”

    She also pointed out that Congress is slated to authorize nearly $770 billion for the Pentagon next year while the Build Back Better Act would cost only $350 billion a year. “Guess which got rubber stamped & which gets deemed a ‘spending problem,’” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) also called out the hypocrisy this week. “It was okay for the Republicans to use reconciliation to provide some $2 trillion, unpaid for, in tax breaks for the wealthiest people in this country. That was fine,” he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “But when progressives are fighting to provide dental and hearing care to seniors on Medicare, address the climate crisis and expand child care support for families, so-called deficit hawks say, ‘oh, that’s terrible, we can’t afford it,’” Sanders said.

    “The military budget is now going to be somewhere around $770, $780 billion. Over a 10 year period, that is more than double what the reconciliation bill will be. And yet I hear very little discussion about throwing money at the military industrial complex,” Sanders continued.

    The future and size of the reconciliation bill is still unclear, but progressives scored a win for the package on Thursday by holding the line against conservative Democrats who want to decouple the social spending and climate bill and the roads-and-highways infrastructure bill. The progressive House representatives have now successfully moved a vote on the infrastructure bill twice, insisting that the Build Back Better Act passes the Senate before they will vote for the infrastructure bill.

    Though it is hypocritical of Manchin to pick and choose where he decides to care about federal spending, he appears to be employing a longstanding Republican strategy to care about the federal budget only when it comes to Democratic priorities. The West Virginia senator is likely driven by a desire to appease the right-wing groups and deep-pocketed lobbyists who support him — and to pad his own bank account.

    Manchin has demonstrated this time and again over the past months, cohorting with wealthy Wall Street donors and basking in praise from conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He’s also parroted conservative lobbyists’ talking points on the reconciliation bill, asking Politico’s Burgess Everett, “Why do you think we worked so hard to separate [the infrastructure and reconciliation bills]?” Earlier this year, the Chamber of Commerce praised conservative Democrats in the House for attempting to decouple the bills.

    As Ocasio-Cortez pointed out at a rally on Thursday, Manchin and his deep-pocketed allies have nothing to worry about when government programs like the ones included in the reconciliation bill are cut.

    “Better than nothing? Isn’t something better than nothing?” she said, paraphrasing the words of some of her right-wing Democratic colleagues. “That might be an easy thing for some of you all to say. Because when a bill passes that is underfunded, that only gives a crumb, you get that crumb. Because when you only give some and not all, then some people get nothing.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Manchin Goes After Abortion Rights in Latest Reconciliation Bill Opposition

    Sen. Joe Manchin speaks to reporters outside of the U.S. Capitol on September 30, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    On Wednesday, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) told far-right publication The National Review that he wants the anti-abortion Hyde Amendment to be included in the Democrats’ Build Back Better Act. The statement comes as the lawmaker is making a series of demands that contradict the Democratic agenda for the reconciliation bill.

    “We’re not taking the Hyde amendment off. Hyde’s going to be on,” Manchin told the publication, when asked about Democrats’ plan to expand Medicaid. “It has to be. It has to be. That’s dead on arrival if that’s gone.”

    The Hyde Amendment is a 45-year-old legislative provision that bars federal funds for programs like Medicaid from being used to pay for abortions. Reproductive rights activists have long decried the ban for being discriminatory and restricting abortion access, as it makes it harder for nonwhite and low-income people to receive an abortion.

    Though the Hyde Amendment has been included in every congressional funding bill on a bipartisan basis since 1976, Democrats have recently reconsidered its inclusion. In July, the House passed a bill to fund the Department of Health and Human Services, among other agencies. This bill excluded both the Hyde Amendment and the Helms Amendment, which bars U.S. funds from being used to support abortion services in other countries. The Senate has yet to take up the legislation.

    However, Manchin has continually been at the forefront of fights for the inclusion of the Hyde amendment in legislation. He backed an amendment to include the anti-choice ban when the Senate authorized the reconciliation bill, and in July sent a letter to the Senate and Senate Appropriations Committee leaders asking for the inclusion of the ban in this year’s funding bills.

    The lawmaker has been on a rampage to water down the reconciliation bill, taking particular aim at climate proposals in the bill. His insistence over the Hyde Amendment could result in further antagonism from progressives in Congress, who are already bristling over his abstract, conservative demands for the bill during its most critical week thus far.

    Manchin’s announcement comes at a particularly fraught time for abortion rights in the U.S. Progressives and Democrats have been scrambling to enshrine abortion rights protections into law as the Supreme Court threatens overturning Roe v. Wade after conservative justices’ decision to uphold a near-total ban on abortions in Texas.

    On Thursday, progressive Representatives Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), Cori Bush (D-Missouri) and Barbara Lee (D-California) gave powerful testimony about their own experiences with abortion in front of the House Oversight Committee. The committee was examining threats to abortion rights in wake of the Texas law.

    Bush testified about her decision to have an abortion after being raped as a teenager and becoming pregnant. “I was 18. I was broke, and I felt so alone. I blamed myself for what had happened to me,” she said. “How could I make this pregnancy work? How could I, at 18 years old and barely scraping by, support a child on my own?”

    Lee spoke of traveling out of the country to surreptitiously receive an abortion before abortion rights were protected by Roe v. Wade. “I was one of the lucky ones, Madam Chair,” she said, noting that many people are forced to have unsafe abortions.

    “The Hyde Amendment from its inception was racist and discriminatory and aimed at people with low incomes and people of color,” Lee continued later in her testimony. She pointed to stories like that of Rosie Jimenez, the first person to die after Hyde was passed. Jimenez couldn’t afford the fee to go to a licensed OB-GYN for an abortion and got an infection from the unlicensed abortion that she received instead.

    Though the Hyde Amendment allows for narrow exceptions like cases of rape, incest or a pregnancy that would cause death, abortion rights advocates say that the ban too often results in dangerous cases like Jimenez’s. Advocates also say that the ban forces some people to make difficult financial choices like forgoing utility payments to afford the medical procedure. Because of the racial and financial disparities that the Hyde Amendment enforces, progressives say that the ban further entrenches oppressive government forces.

    “Bans on abortion coverage are driven by the same forces motivating state-sanctioned violence and even voting restrictions,” Destiny Lopez wrote for Truthout in August. “Each aims to control the lives of Black, Brown and other people of color, especially folks struggling financially.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In Anti-Reconciliation Blitz, Exxon Spent $275,000 on Facebook Ads in One Week

    ExxonMobil's Fife Ethylene Plant where "unplanned flaring" following a malfunction has caused concern amongst local residents, on April 23, 2019, in Cowdenbeath, Scotland.

    Oil giant ExxonMobil is pouring millions into Facebook advertisement purchases in a wider lobbying effort against the Democrats’ reconciliation bill, which is slated to include a corporate tax raise and proposals to address the climate crisis.

    As of Thursday, Exxon spent $275,000 on Facebook ads just this past week. These ads include a campaign against Democrats’ tax reform proposals to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy. CNBC reports that Exxon has spent $2 million on Facebook ads over the past 90 days.

    Though the extent of the issues Exxon is targeting is unclear, CNBC reports that at least six of the anti-reconciliation bill ads ran from Friday to Monday. One of the ads said, “Tell Congress no tax hikes,” and brought users to a page encouraging them to contact their elected officials to “let them know you oppose the proposed tax increases on American businesses.”

    The text of the Build Back Better Act hasn’t yet been finalized, but drafts of the bill have included a corporate tax hike from 21 percent to 26.5 percent. This incredibly modest hike falls short of the 28 percent statutory rate that President Joe Biden had proposed in the spring, and even further from the 35 percent rate in effect before Republicans slashed taxes for corporations and the rich in 2017.

    Furthermore, it’s dishonest to imply that the tax increases will affect businesses uniformly. In August, the Treasury Department said the tax increases won’t affect 97 percent of small businesses, meaning that the tax raise will mostly only affect larger businesses and corporations like Exxon.

    The fossil fuel industry has long been the recipient of extra tax breaks, on top of corporate tax breaks they have likely benefited from.Though climate advocates and progressives like Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) have fought against these tax breaks, the fossil fuel industry is slated to receive fossil fuel subsidies in the reconciliation bill — many of which they have been receiving for years.

    Still, the oil and gas industry isn’t satisfied with the massive amount of support they already receive from the government.

    The American Petroleum Institute (API) and the American Gas Association have also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook ads targeting climate provisions in the reconciliation bill. API broke its single-day total for Facebook ad buys with a $10,800 purchase in early August — and, since then has spent $423,000 on ads, according to a report by InfluenceMap. The American Gas Association has spent $18,000 on similar efforts. In total, these ads have been viewed 23.2 million times.

    The API is also targeting specific members of Congress on Facebook, running hundreds of ads encouraging people to either voice their support for elected officials like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) for “being a champion of AMERICAN MADE ENERGY” or calling their representatives to voice their displeasure for being “ready to risk YOUR job by hiking taxes on U.S. ENERGY PRODUCERS.” Which jobs will be affected by a marginally higher tax rate, however, is unclear.

    The fossil fuel industry has rallied together to lobby against climate action in Washington over the past year. After President Joe Biden announced a climate plan on his campaign trail last year, fossil fuel companies and trade groups launched a $10 million ad campaign just for Facebook, promoting the idea that natural gas should play a role in the country’s future.

    The fossil fuel lobby against the Build Back Better Act is part of a larger campaign by corporations and conservative groups to scale back various aspects of the bill, including tax reforms and Medicare expansion. Tens of millions of dollars have been poured into the lobbying effort against the act, and lobbyists representing corporations like Exxon and Pfizer are targeting Capitol Hill to sway lawmakers against key parts of the package.

    The lobbyists’ influence appears to be working. Manchin, who is in charge of writing climate policies in the bill as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is making efforts to carve many of the bill’s most powerful climate policies out of the bill. Instead, he’s working to ensure that the bill protects the use of natural gas and coal, as well as other policies favored by the fossil fuel industry.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Slams Pundits, Implores “Tell Me Where We Should Cut” Reconciliation

    Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a rally in front of PhRMAs Washington office to protest high prescription drug prices on September 21, 2021.

    Fed up with political pundits asking him where he would shrink the reconciliation bill, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) published an op-ed on Wednesday highlighting popular policies that he views as crucial to the package and to the American public. In it, he implored pundits to tell him where they think the bill should be cut.

    “For whatever reason, there are pundits out there who say we should compromise even more and cut back on addressing the long-neglected problems facing working families as well as climate change. Really?” Sanders wrote for USA Today. “Please tell me where we should cut.”

    He asked if pundits think that lawmakers should cut the massively popular expansion of child care and Medicare, child tax credits and affordable housing funds — and then demanded to know if the U.S should “continue being the only major country on Earth not to guarantee paid family and medical leave.”

    The Vermont lawmaker, who is leading the fight in the Senate against conservative Democrats’ lobbyist-fueled interests, went on: “When the planet gets hotter, with unprecedented forest fires, drought, floods, extreme weather, and acidification of the oceans, when scientists tell us that we only have a few years to avoid irreparable harm to our planet, should we really continue to ignore this global crisis?”

    Pundits have repeatedly asked Sanders what he thinks should be cut from the Build Back Better Act — even though he has insisted for months that he’s “already negotiated” the topline spending of the bill, which moderates cut down from $6 trillion earlier this year.

    As progressives fight for the $3.5 trillion figure, corporate media outlets have been instrumental in making the price tag seem larger than it is. In reality, the $3.5 trillion is spread out over 10 years, meaning that the average of $350 billion spent per year is less than half of the funding that Congress authorizes yearly for the Pentagon — which conservative Democrats, Republicans and the media rarely question.

    This coverage has empowered lawmakers like Sen. Roy Blunt, a Republican from Missouri, to attack the bill on the grounds of the price tag. On Tuesday, Blunt tweeted a misleading claim that “the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion tax-and-spend spree is 67 percent higher than the $2.1 trillion spent by all 50 states combined in 2019.” But this simply isn’t true when the time frame is taken into account — compared to the $2.1 trillion in state spending, the reconciliation bill would cost only a sixth of that amount a year on average.

    The Intercept points out the reconciliation bill is small in comparison to the size of the economy. Compared to Congressional Budget Office projections of the next 10 years, the bill would only make up 1.2 percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

    Sanders has also made this point. “You should stick around [me] for a day. You hear all kinds of folks coming up to me: ‘Bernie, we need to do more on child care, we need to do more on pre-k, we need to do more on affordable housing, we need to do more.’ The truth is, 3.5 trillion is not enough,” he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper earlier this month. $3.5 trillion is “barely more than one percent” of the projected GDP, Sanders noted.

    Further, the senator has emphasized that the bill won’t add to the national debt and will be fully funded. He called out the conservative lobby in his op-ed, stressing that the tax reform proposals are crucial to the bill.

    “This reconciliation bill is being opposed by every Republican in Congress as well as the drug companies, the insurance companies, the fossil fuel industry and the billionaire class. They want to maintain the status quo in which the rich get richer while ordinary Americans continue to struggle to make ends meet,” Sanders wrote. Instead, he said, now is the time for Congress to stand up to those interests.

    Though Sanders faces forceful opposition from conservative Democratic senators, he has recently backed progressives in the House who are vowing to withhold their votes for the bipartisan infrastructure bill until the reconciliation bill is passed.

    “I strongly urge my House colleagues to vote against the bipartisan infrastructure bill until Congress passes a strong reconciliation bill,” he wrote, adding that progressives will have no leverage left if they don’t stick to their plan.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) joined Sanders in his support of House progressives on Tuesday. “The agreement has been we’re going to move it all together,” she said on MSNBC. “The House progressives have been terrific on this. They’ve said ‘we had an agreement and we expect everyone to stick with the agreement.’”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republicans Show They’d Rather Risk Recession Than Allow Democrats to Pass Bills

    Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer conducts a news conference after the Senate Democrats Policy luncheon in the U.S. Capitol on September 28, 2021.

    Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) blocked Democrats’ latest attempt to stave off economic disaster on Tuesday — and the more options Republicans shoot down to avoid a shutdown and debt default, the more the already fragile economy is at risk.

    McConnell rejected a call from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) on Tuesday for unanimous consent from the Senate to allow Democrats to pass a debt ceiling raise with a simple majority. If lawmakers don’t reach a solution on the debt limit and government funding by Thursday, the government will shut down and the U.S. would come closer to defaulting on its loans, a situation that economists say could be nothing short of disastrous.

    Instead of several workarounds that Democrats could employ, McConnell is insistent that they bend to his party’s will and work a debt ceiling raise into their reconciliation bill. But Democrats have made clear that it would be difficult — if not impossible — to go through Senate procedure quickly enough to pass the reconciliation bill before the country is slated to default. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says a default will happen on October 18 if Congress doesn’t take action.

    “To do this through reconciliation requires ping-ponging separate bills back from the Senate and the House.” Schumer said on Wednesday, according to NBC’s Frank Thorp. “Individual senators could move to delay and delay and delay. It is very risky and could well lead us to default, even if only one senator wanted.” Schumer went on to call the strategy “uncharted waters.”

    McConnell’s decision to shoot down yet another debt ceiling option makes the GOP’s motivations even more clear: Republicans would rather risk economic disaster than allow Democrats to pass their legislative agenda.

    “There is no chance, no chance the Republican conference will go out of our way to help Democrats conserve their time and energy, so they can resume ramming through partisan socialism as fast as possible,” the minority leader said on Tuesday. Despite McConnell’s fear mongering, the provisions of the Build Back Better Act do not include suddenly implementing socialism.

    However, other Republicans have been falling in line with McConnell’s dangerous obstruction. “Schumer is in the process of surrendering completely,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), per HuffPost’s Igor Bobic. “I expect that Schumer when he’s done with his political games he will do what we pointed out at the beginning, which is raise the debt ceiling using Democratic votes on reconciliation.”

    GOP lawmakers know that the reconciliation bill is in no position to pass the Senate, as it has no Republican support and conservative Democrats are working to water down the bill as much as possible. But the party leadership doesn’t actually want Democrats to pass the reconciliation bill and raise the debt ceiling — instead, they want to gut the reconciliation bill and ruin the Democrats’ chances at passing their agenda.

    “We plan to use the rules to slow down a lot of really bad policy,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said, according to a Forbes report. Referring to the possibility that Democrats will have to go through reconciliation to pass the debt ceiling, he continued: “I don’t mind seeing them burn up some floor time on reconciliation.”

    In what is an extreme and reckless show of obstructionism, McConnell and fellow Republicans are putting the economy’s health at massive risk. Unless Democrats are able to pass a temporary measure to fund the government — one of their only options left — the U.S. will likely have to default on its loans, a scenario that Yellen says would be unprecedented.

    A default would have catastrophic consequences for the economy. A Moody’s Analytics analysis last week found that a default could trigger a recession mirroring the Great Recession of 2008, costing six million jobs and yanking $15 trillion worth of household wealth out of the hands of the public. Even sans default, economists say that a short government shutdown, which becomes more likely every time Republicans shoot down another solution, would have generational consequences.

    It’s ironic for Republicans to accuse Democrats of playing political games when they are risking a recession just to block Democrats from passing a bill that would have major benefits to the working class — and then pinning all of the blame on Democrats.

    If Democrats do go the reconciliation route — which is unlikely given Schumer’s objections, but possible given the desperation of the situation — some writers and economists are saying that Democrats should use the opportunity to nullify the debt limit entirely. This would eliminate the possibility of politicians using it as a political pawn and would simply make the government run smoother, advocates say.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “Who’s at the Table?”: Cori Bush Says Bill Negotiations Need More Representation

    Rep. Cori Bush speaks about the end of the eviction moratorium at the U.S. Capitol on August 3, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) has said that Black people aren’t being given an equal voice in Washington when it comes to major proposals like the infrastructure and reconciliation bills, noting that those who continually get a seat at the table aren’t necessarily representing Black constituents’ interests.

    Bush, who represents a district with a 49 percent Black population, said to CNN’s Ryan Nobles in a short interview: “Who’s at the table? I would love to see somebody who represents a predominantly Black district be at the table. I would love to see someone who represents more diversity at the table. I would love to see more Black women at the table.”

    As Congress and the White House are caught in near-deadlocked negotiations over the Democrats’ reconciliation bill, major decisions are coming down to the whims of conservative Democrats like Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) in the Senate and people like Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-New Jersey) in the House. All of these lawmakers are white.

    “When I look at who is representing us, when I think about how often Kyrsten Sinema gets to go to the table, to the White House, and she does not represent the communities that I represent — can she speak and advocate? Absolutely. But she’s not doing that,” Bush said. “It has to be people over property. It has to be people over corporations. And that’s not what we have right now, and so I’m absolutely, absolutely disgusted.”

    As a representative from 2013 to 2019, Sinema represented Arizona’s 9th district, which is 55 percent white, 27 percent Latinx and seven percent Black. These demographics reflect Arizona’s population at large, which is 54 percent white.

    However, as Bush pointed out, it’s not just about the communities these lawmakers represent, but how they represent them. Sinema has demonstrated a flippancy toward what her constituents think of her, and advocates in her state say that she has made it difficult for constituents to contact her. When debate over filibuster reform or abolition reached a fever pitch this summer, progressives noted that 61 percent of people in Arizona would prefer action in Congress over the filibuster, but Sinema held steadfast to her devotion to the archaic practice.

    It seems that Sinema pays no mind to her party back home as well. The Arizona Democratic Party State Committee has warned the senator that it will hold a vote of no confidence if she continues obstructing the Democratic agenda, which could mean that she would lose the support of her own state’s Democrats when she is up for election in 2024.

    Instead, Sinema appears to be beholden to one group above all others: deep-pocketed corporate lobbyists. On Tuesday, she held a fundraiser with business groups that are all fiercely opposed to her own party’s agenda. That same day, she met with President Joe Biden. The details of the meeting haven’t been made public, but she has been insistent that the Democrats’ Build Back Better Act must be pared down, and that she will not accept tax raises that partially undo Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

    It’s a similar story for Manchin, who is continually given a powerful role in negotiations despite standing for different values than much of the Democratic caucus. Manchin’s home state is a staggering 92 percent white. But in deep red parts of West Virginia, voters understand the importance of provisions in the Build Back Better Act like the child tax credit extension, Medicare expansion and a plethora of other proposals to expand the social safety net.

    Manchin claims to support bipartisanship — but bills like the reconciliation package that he wants to cut are bipartisan, garnering support from both Democratic and Republican voters in his state. Further, the vast majority of Democratic voters don’t want to cut items from the reconciliation bill, so he has no reason to break with people loyal to his own party.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • For the First Time, Most Americans Say Global Warming Is Currently Harming US

    Hundreds protest to raise awareness of climate change while marching down to the Battery Park of Manhattan in New York City on September 24, 2021.

    More Americans than ever are worried about global warming, according to data that stretches back to 2008 from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. The increase is reflective of growing concern over the climate crisis as Americans experienced climate disaster after climate disaster this summer.

    The survey shows that, for the first time, a majority of Americans think that people in the U.S. are “being harmed right now” by global warming, with 55 percent of the 1,006 people surveyed responding as such. Furthermore, the amount of people who report being worried about global warming is at an all-time high, with 35 percent of respondents saying they’re “very worried” and 35 percent saying they’re “somewhat worried.”

    Previously, worry about global warming has fluctuated. The last time worry about global warming neared current levels was in December of 2018, according to YPCCC and George Mason, with 69 percent of people polled saying that they were worried about the issue. The share of Americans who believed the U.S. was experiencing ongoing harm from global warming also neared a majority in 2018, but fell short of 50 percent.

    The amount of people acknowledging the reality of global warming is also reaching a high, the recent survey data showed. That portion of the population has increased six points since March of 2021 to 76 percent in September, when the survey was conducted. During that time, the share of people saying that they’re “very worried” about global warming saw a 10 point increase as well. The researchers note that this data demonstrates how views on the climate crisis in the U.S. have “shifted significantly” in the past six months alone.

    The steady increase in concern over global warming is a continuation of a pattern that YPCCC and George Mason researchers have tracked over the years. In March, they found that the share of people who are “alarmed” about climate change has more than doubled over the past five years, reaching 24 percent.

    The new data comes as the U.S. emerges from a summer of deadly climate disasters. Heat waves scorched the Pacific Northwest, where many residents don’t have air conditioning. Wildfires blazed across a dozen states, with record wildfires like the Dixie Fire burning in California for months.

    In August, Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana, where the storm was so powerful that it reversed the flow of the Mississippi River, and a natural gas plant failure left New Orleans without electricity. At least 82 people died, and hundreds lost their homes.

    The disasters were so widespread that a September analysis by The Washington Post found that nearly 1 in 3 Americans lived in a county that experienced a weather disaster over the summer. That same analysis found that 64 percent of Americans lived somewhere that experienced a multiday heat wave, which climate researchers warn are the most deadly kind of climate event.

    Climate scientists say that none of the major climate catastrophes this summer would have been nearly as bad if not for the climate crisis, which continues largely unabated across the globe. A new study out this week shows that the effects of the climate crisis will only worsen in the future: on average, a child born this year will face seven times as many heat waves and twice as many wildfires as their grandparents did, the study found.

    Congress is in talks over provisions to address the climate crisis in the reconciliation and infrastructure bills, but conservative Democrats are fighting hard against the bills’ most sweeping climate proposals, with fossil fuel lobbyists all but dictating what proposals the lawmakers support.

    Meanwhile, climate advocates still face an uphill battle in Washington. Despite big promises on climate from President Joe Biden, the White House recently shunned a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in a document justifying more offshore oil drilling. Activists are ramping up pressure on Biden before the United Nations climate talks in November, saying that the Biden administration has thus far fallen short on action that is needed to curb the worst effects of the climate crisis.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP Threatens Economic Disaster by Refusing to Raise Debt Limit Before Shutdown

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is seen during a senate vote in the U.S. Capitol on September 22, 2021.

    On Monday, Senate Republicans voted against raising the U.S.’s debt limit, rejecting a measure that would have avoided a government shutdown and provided billions for disaster aid and Afghan refugees. If Congress continues its deadlock, economists project that the looming shutdown and debt default could lead to an economic crash.

    Though some Republicans had considered voting for the debt limit raise to help the U.S. avoid a default, ultimately, they all aligned against the measure. If Democrats can’t work out a funding solution by Thursday, the government will shut down Friday morning in the midst of the pandemic. Economists warn that even a short shutdown could upend global markets, creating spiked interest rates on Treasury bonds in the long term.

    Further, if the U.S. defaults on its debts, a situation which Republicans have been threatening to create, the resulting economic downturn could be disastrous and even trigger a recession if left unchecked for long enough. Economists estimate that the “X date” — the day that the government would run out of funding and be forced to choose between defaulting on its debts or paying out crucial social programs — could come as early as mid-October.

    Even if a default never happens, the possibility of it happening could alarm markets just as the economy is making a nascent recovery from the pandemic. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned Democratic leaders that a default, which would be unprecedented, must be avoided.

    Democrats now have limited options when it comes to avoiding a shutdown. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) has said that putting the debt ceiling hike into the reconciliation bill, which can pass via a simple majority in the Senate, is a “non-starter.” Some sources say the process would take at least 10 days, and Durbin has claimed it could eat up weeks.

    Democrats could also present the debt ceiling as a standalone bill to avoid a shutdown, in which case Republicans would have to either support it or choose not to filibuster it, though both options are unlikely. Some experts say that the Biden administration could take steps to nullify the debt ceiling entirely — a nuclear option that some economic experts favor. Still, the options for Democrats are sparse, and with the uncertainty of the “X date,” the risk of defaulting grows closer each day.

    Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) is leading his caucus in playing political brinkmanship over the debt limit, at once saying that he opposes a debt default while still imploring Republicans to oppose the measure that would prevent one anyway.

    “It’s an unhinged position to take,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York). “There is no scenario in God’s green earth where it should be worth risking millions of jobs, trillions in household wealth, people’s Social Security checks, veterans’ benefits and another recession just to score short-term, meaningless political points.”

    Though there are few apparent and immediate benefits to McConnell’s dangerous debt limit threat — other than, perhaps, trying to block the reconciliation bill — former President Donald Trump noted that the GOP would be “foolish” to not use the debt ceiling as a tool to get ahead. “The only powerful tool that Republicans have to negotiate with is the Debt Ceiling, and they would be both foolish and unpatriotic not to use it now,” Trump said.

    On this, Trump isn’t entirely wrong — refusing to raise the debt ceiling gives Republicans the power to manipulate Democrats and spout whatever message they want about Democratic leadership, especially when it comes to policies that they describe as Democrats’ “tax-and-spend” agenda.

    But this game is potentially destructive, and political writers and lawmakers have noted that the recklessness on display by Republicans — just so they can hold more tools to attack Democrats — is both cynical and shameless.

    “It’s time to call the Republicans out over this: Are you kidding me on the debt ceiling?” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) on MSNBC last week. “What are we trying to raise the debt ceiling for now? To cover the debts that were incurred during the Trump administration. And the Republicans want to turn around and play political games with that? They want to threaten to blow up our entire economy — and actually, the world economy — over that?”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sinema Will Hold Fundraiser With Groups Lobbying Against Reconciliation Bill

    Sen. Kyrsten Sinema speaks briefly to reporters as she boards an elevator following votes at the U.S. Capitol on September 20, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a conservative Democrat from Arizona, is slated to hold a fundraiser courting lobbyist groups that are vehemently opposed to the Democrats’ Build Back Better Act, which aims to widen the country’s social safety net and address climate disruption.

    The National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors and its PAC, the National Grocers Association, lobbyists for roofers and electrical contractors, and a conservative-leaning group called S-Corp Political Action Committee used Sinema’s political logo to invite association members to a fundraiser on Tuesday, according to the New York Times. The fundraiser will last 45 minutes, during which group members will write checks for between $1,000 and $5,800 addressed to the senator’s campaign.

    Several of the groups are publicly opposed to the reconciliation bill. The National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors is part of a coalition of business groups that was formed earlier this year to oppose President Joe Biden’s infrastructure, climate and social safety net proposals. The association recently launched a $1 million ad campaign to block the Build Back Better bill.

    Though economists say that the reconciliation bill will help lead the country in the direction of a strong economic recovery from the pandemic, lobbyists from the groups behind the fundraiser claim that it would be harmful to the economy — likely because they are opposed to parts of the bill that would levy taxes on corporations and the wealthy, which could take away from corporate bonuses and help begin to close the widening wealth gap.

    “Many American job creators are just beginning to recover from a crippling pandemic and now Democratic leaders in Congress want to impose record tax hikes to pay for trillions of dollars in new wasteful Washington spending,” said National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors CEO Eric Hoplin in a statement on Monday, ignoring the fact that a large aim of the reconciliation bill is to create jobs and that the tax hikes are extremely modest compared to historical rates.

    In a blog post earlier this month, S-Corp called a Senate Ways and Means Committee draft of the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill “nothing short of a declaration of war.”

    The group claims to be concerned about the businesses that will be affected by new taxes, as well as the jobs those businesses create, although the Treasury Department finds that 97 percent of small companies won’t be subject to the tax rate increases. Notably, however, there is no blog post on S-Corp’s website about recent reports on Republican maneuvering to throw the country into a debt default that could cause an economic downturn rivaling that of the Great Recession, potentially costing 6 million jobs.

    Meanwhile, Sinema has echoed lobbyist talking points surrounding the reconciliation bill, digging in on her opposition to the $3.5 trillion price tag. She is reportedly telling colleagues that she will not support any sort of tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy, which lobbyists have been railing against. Her fundraiser comes during a critical week for the reconciliation bill in Congress — and for lobbyists who have spent tens of millions to kill parts of the package.

    Sinema’s lobbyist ties have also been made evident by her opposition to a major funding plan that would allow the government to negotiate for lower prescription drug prices. Though she campaigned on lowering prescription drug prices in 2018, she has come out against the plan that is estimated to raise between $540 billion and $700 billion over the next decade.

    Reporting has found that Sinema has received over half a million dollars from the pharmaceutical industry in her career, including over $120,000 between 2019 and 2020 — even though she’s not up for re-election until 2024.

    The Arizona lawmaker, known for her dramatic rightward shift since rising through the political ranks, has demonstrated a pattern of saying things on the campaign trail that aren’t necessarily sincere. According to The Intercept, referring to her stories about growing up with financial hardships, Sinema told colleagues at the time: “Yeah, voters love that stupid shit. They eat it up.”

    Reporting reveals that Sinema’s particular fervor for fundraising distinguishes her from other Democrats. In campaign fundraising, “few outmatch Sinema’s zeal for fundraisers and phone banking,” wrote The Intercept’s Daniel Boguslaw. “According to multiple Democrats who served with Sinema in the House, she was the only member who seemed to actively love being in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee call center, claiming a couch for her sole personal use and complaining to other members when they had to leave to vote.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pramila Jayapal, Ilhan Omar Slam Lobby Against Build Back Better Bill in Op-Ed

    Rep. Ilhan Omar listens during a news conference on September 22, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    In a new CNN op-ed published on Monday, progressive lawmakers in the House explain their caucus’s vote-withholding strategy to get the Build Back Better bill passed, emphasizing the necessity of the provisions within the package.

    Representatives Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), Katie Porter (D-California) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) wrote in the article that President Joe Biden’s “build back better” message touting equity and investments in the future is “our shared vision — the vision the American people voted for.”

    They go on to outline why members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus want both the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Build Back Better Act to pass simultaneously. Due to the machinations of conservative Democrats in the House who are determined to cut or kill the Build Back Better bill, progressives have had to strategize, withholding their votes for the bipartisan infrastructure bill if the reconciliation package isn’t passed first.

    “We must deliver for American families,” they write. “Our Progressive Caucus members will put our votes on the line to send the entirety of the Build Back Better agenda to President Biden’s desk.”

    Without the passage of the Build Back Better plan, the progressives say that the American public would only receive a “fraction” of Democrats’ agenda. “We hear remarkable consistency in our communities’ concerns,” they wrote, outlining widespread issues like climate disaster, unaffordable child care, crumbling public housing infrastructure, the criminalization of immigrants and exorbitant drug prices.

    The Build Back Better bill addresses these concerns and incorporates many of the proposals that Biden had introduced this fall. But due to lobbyists, dark money and the Democratic Party’s right wingers, the bill — and Democrats’ chances of passing their own agenda — is in danger. And despite progressive and Democratic leadership’s commitment to passing the bills together, conservative Democrats are threatening the bipartisan infrastructure bill as well.

    The lawmakers emphasized that the progressive caucus supports the passage of both bills and pushed back on conservative Democrats’ notion that the party should delay talks for the reconciliation bill.

    “Let us be clear: our caucus supports the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. We see the harms that crumbling roads, structurally deficient bridges, and lead-poisoned water have on our communities,” they wrote. “But equally necessary are the child care, elder care, health care, housing, education and climate actions currently included in the Build Back Better Act. Without both the infrastructure bill and the budget bill, our economic recovery will be slow, unstable, and weak.”

    Part of why progressives and Democrats are facing such resistance to the reconciliation bill is because of an “all-out” lobbyist effort, Jayapal, Porter and Omar point out. The conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce has launched six-figure ad campaigns, while the pharmaceutical industry has spent millions just to cut down efforts to rein in absurdly high drug prices.

    These lobbyists appear to have already influenced members of the Democratic party. Three democratic representatives, some with documented cash flow from the pharmaceutical industry, have shot down House plans to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices — a policy that progressives note is desperately needed in the U.S.

    Though the future of the Build Back Better bill is fraught with uncertainty, the progressive strategy appears to be working for now. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) has delayed a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill despite efforts from conservative Democrats, led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-New Jersey), to force a vote by September 27.

    Though the vote-withholding strategy has come largely from House progressives, last week 11 senators issued a statement supporting the representatives’ efforts.

    “We voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill with the clear commitment that the two pieces of the package would move together along a dual track. Abandoning the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act and passing the infrastructure bill first would be in violation of that agreement,” the lawmakers, including Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Jeff Merkely (D-Oregon), wrote.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • RNC Official Reveals GOP Plan to Ramp Up Election Lawsuits in 2022

    Election challengers demand to enter to observe the absentee ballots counting but were dined after the room reached capacity during the 2020 general election in Detroit, Michigan, on November 4, 2020.

    In Michigan on Friday, a top Republican National Committee (RNC) official informed Republican leaders of the party’s plan to continue destabilizing elections with lawsuits and other efforts in the upcoming midterm elections.

    As first reported by the Detroit Free Press, Josh Findlay, the election integrity director for the RNC, said that the GOP is planning to massively increase the use of poll watchers, who Republicans have been empowering through state-level bills. The party is also planning to majorly step up litigation efforts, like Donald Trump attempted to do in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

    At the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference in Michigan, Findlay said that the GOP failed in 2020 by not preparing litigation ahead of time. By the time Trump and his campaign filed lawsuits on Election Day, it was too late to affect the results, he said.

    Findlay also said that the GOP strategy of unleashing a flood of Republican poll watchers on ballot counting locations, like the party did in Detroit, caused chaos that was later used against them in court. But the GOP is readying itself for the next election: In 2022, “when we go into Election Day, we’ll know exactly what to look for,” he said.

    In a backlash to the 2020 election, Republicans have been working to expand the powers of partisan poll watchers and enact voter suppression laws across the country. Poll watchers sent on behalf of parties or candidates typically face strict rules on how close they can get to polling locations and what parts of the voting process they can observe or access.

    Bills by GOP legislators like one recently passed in Texas empower such partisan figures; the Texas law makes it a misdemeanor for an election official to reject a poll watcher and allows poll watchers to sue election officials who obstruct them. Though the law requires them to sign an oath to not harass voters, voting experts say that expanding partisan poll watchers’ access across the country could lead to harassment and intimidation.

    “It is telling that after the most secure and successful election in modern times, the GOP continues its attempt to undermine the rights of voters,” Sylvia Albert, Director of Voting and Elections at Common Cause, told Truthout. “The GOP has a long history of using poll watchers to intimidate voters, and now are attempting to protect this form of intimidation by tying the hands of election officials.”

    Poll watchers were an important strategy for Trump in 2020, with the then-president asking the Proud Boys, a far right extremist group, to “stand back and stand by.” He also encouraged people to “go into the polls and watch very carefully” during the election.

    The election lawsuits are another looming threat. Though Republicans lost all of the lawsuits they filed over the 2020 election, the GOP is making moves to take control of election boards and manipulate election laws that could help their chances. In Georgia, where Republicans recently passed a massive voter suppression bill, GOP lawmakers have been taking steps to take over the election board in Fulton County, where Atlanta is located.

    The RNC is working to appoint election integrity directors, Findlay said, and has already installed them in nine states. Others could be appointed soon ahead of the 2022 election. It’s unclear what these RNC officials would be doing, but it’s likely that they would be in tune with efforts to advance Republican voter suppression and election destabilization across the country.

    Voting rights advocates are filing lawsuit after lawsuit to combat overly partisan gerrymandering efforts, which Republicans disproportionately wield. But election experts and advocates say that lawsuits aren’t enough.

    “The optimal way to go is for Congress to pass HR1,” Marc Elias, an elections and voting rights lawyer and founder of Democracy Docket, told the Associated Press in May. “We turn to the courts not as our first choice but as our last.”

    Indeed, voting rights advocates have aligned themselves behind federal voting rights legislation, including H.R. 1, or the For the People Act, and more recently, the Freedom to Vote Act, a modified version of the Democrats’ marquee bill. But it faces Republican opposition and has exceedingly slim chances of passing the 60-vote filibuster rule in the Senate.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Liz Cheney Claims to Support LGBTQ Community, But She Voted Against Equality Act

    Rep. Liz Cheney arrives to speak to reporters outside of the U.S. Capitol on July 21, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    In an interview with “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) claimed to have turned a page on her previous homophobia, saying that she now supports LGBTQ people — but just months ago, she voted against legislation that would expand LGBTQ protections.

    Cheney said “I was wrong” about her opposition to gay marriage in the 2010s, a departure from her previous position on the matter. In 2013, she stated that she believed in the “traditional definition of marriage.” As the Los Angeles Times said in 2014, the statements, made while Cheney was running for the Wyoming senate, very publicly “sold out” her sister, who is gay. Cheney alluded to her homophobia again in 2016, saying “my views on [gay marriage] are clear.”

    Cheney held these discriminatory beliefs despite the fact that her sister is gay and married her partner in 2012 — and the fact that her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, came out in support of marriage equality around the same time.

    She also said on “60 Minutes” that she wants to work to ensure transgender people in the U.S. are safe.

    “This is an issue that we have to recognize, you know, as human beings — that we need to work against discrimination of all kinds in our country, in our state,” she said.

    But Cheney voted against a federal law that would prohibit discrimination against transgender people just months ago.

    In February, Cheney voted no in a House vote on the Equality Act, a landmark piece of legislation that would enshrine and expand rights for LGBTQ people. The bill would add protections against discrimination in areas like housing, health care and education, expanding upon last year’s Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia decision.

    The Equality Act passed the House 224 to 206. Cheney’s no vote fell in line with the vast majority of the rest of the GOP, though three Republicans broke with the party and voted yes. The bill hasn’t yet been taken up in the Senate, where it would likely fail due to GOP opposition and longstanding anti-LGBTQ sentiments.

    Though her claims that she now supports the LGBTQ community are dubious, Cheney has gotten positive spin from the press anyway. On Monday, large news outlets like The Washington Post and NBC blared headlines touting her supposed support of gay marriage.

    Progressives pointed out Cheney’s hypocrisy in tweets on Sunday. “In February, Liz Cheney voted against the Equality Act, which would finally enshrine protections for the LGBTQ+ community in federal antidiscrimination law,” said Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-New York).

    Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) criticized “60 Minutes” host Lesley Stahl for not pressing Cheney on the issue. Some interviewers “would had a follow up and asked why she voted against the Equality Act,” Omar said, “but instead [Cheney] gets to talk all about [transgender] folks deserving safety and everyone having equality without a reckoning on her voting record.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 83 Percent of Rental Assistance Still Undisbursed as Millions May Face Eviction

    People hold up a signs as they gather outside of a New York City Marshall's office calling for a stop to evictions on August 31, 2021 in New York City.

    According to the latest data from the Treasury Department, more than 83 percent of the rental assistance allocated to states by Congress has still not been distributed to vulnerable renters.

    Congress authorized $46.5 billion in rental assistance funds through the most recent stimulus packages from December and March. Officials disbursed more assistance in August than in previous months, but as of the end of August, only $7.7 billion had been distributed total.

    If jurisdictions continue their sluggish rollout of the program and don’t ramp up their distribution, they could lose their funding by the end of the month.

    Though many local and state governments had no infrastructure to distribute rental funds when they were first authorized last year, the Treasury Department notes that 119 state and local jurisdictions have been able to distribute over half of their allocated funds so far.

    Distributing the funds has become incredibly urgent not just for governments, but for the nearly 10 million renters who report being behind on rent payments. Late last month, conservative justices on the Supreme Court shot down the eviction moratorium enacted by the Biden administration, putting millions of renters at risk as the pandemic surges on.

    Housing advocates have warned of an eviction “cliff” after the eviction moratorium is over, and experts have predicted that hundreds of thousands renters — if not over a million — could be evicted in the next few months.

    Meanwhile, self-reported data reveals that millions of households could be facing the prospect of eviction; a Census Bureau survey from last month showed that about 3.6 million renters say they are either “likely” or “very likely” to face eviction, with the crisis being especially pronounced in the Southeastern United States.

    According to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, the eviction moratorium saved 1.55 million households from being evicted during the pandemic.

    Evictions are not only harmful to a person and their family’s financial security, but also to their mental health, work, relationships and education. Being evicted is a major disruption in renters’ lives and harms their chances long term of securing other housing; once someone is evicted once, they are often evicted again in the future, fueling a vicious cycle.

    Researchers have noted that the eviction crisis brought on by the depressed COVID economy will hurt Black communities the most. Among factors that contribute to landlords evicting a tenant, studies have found that the tenant’s race often plays a disproportionate role.

    This week, progressive lawmakers introduced legislation to reinstate the federal eviction moratorium. The bill introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) would empower the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to implement federal eviction moratoriums during a public health crisis. It would also compel the agency to immediately implement a moratorium that would expire 60 days after the current public health emergency is declared over.

    “Nobody is safe until we’re all safe,” Bush said when introducing the bill. “An eviction moratorium is the difference between life and death for all of us.”

    The bill has the support of 39 cosponsors in the House and five in the Senate. But it faces an uphill battle as Democratic leadership failed to pass an eviction moratorium extension this summer and as real estate groups pour millions of dollars into stopping moratorium efforts.

    Meanwhile, housing advocates have called for direct cash relief for renters, arguing that the rental assistance program is bogged down by bureaucracy and red tape and that eviction moratoriums aren’t always effective at stopping evictions. Though the eviction rate was lowered by the moratorium, the Eviction Lab found that landlords have still evicted hundreds of thousands of tenants during the pandemic.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden EPA Announces New Rule to Reduce Use of HFCs, a Potent Greenhouse Gas

    EPA Administrator Michael Regan speaks in the Brady Briefing Room during the daily White House briefing on May 12, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Under President Joe Biden, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued a new rule that would sharply reduce the country’s use of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which are widely used for refrigeration and air conditioning.

    The rule would cut the production and consumption of HFCs by 85 percent over the next 15 years. The regulation comes just before the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow in November, and is meant to demonstrate the U.S.’s progress on cutting emissions.

    HFCs are an incredibly potent greenhouse gas that can be up to thousands of times more powerful than carbon dioxide when it comes to warming the atmosphere. The White House says that the new ruling will eliminate the equivalent of 4.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions by mid-century, or about three years of emissions from the U.S.’s electricity sector. A global shift away from HFCs would allow the planet to avoid 0.5 degrees Celsius of warming, according to the EPA.

    The ruling also directs companies to capture and destroy HFC-23, a chemical with over 14,000 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide, starting in October of next year.

    By causing a shift to more climate friendly cooling alternatives, the EPA estimates that the drawdown of HFCs will ultimately save $272.7 billion between 2022 and 2050, and will benefit vulnerable populations the most.

    “Today EPA is taking a significant step forward to advance President Biden’s bold agenda to tackle the climate crisis,” said EPA administrator Michael Regan in a statement. “Cutting these climate ‘super pollutants’ protects our environment, strengthens our economy, and demonstrates that America is back when it comes to leading the world in addressing climate change and curbing global warming in the years ahead.”

    Progressive lawmaker Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) applauded the ruling, saying “HFCs are superheating our planet, exacerbating extreme weather events, and threatening the physical and economic health of our communities…. We must use this action as a springboard and continue to push for the ambitious solutions we need to combat the climate crisis by passing the budget reconciliation bill.”

    The ruling was brought on by a directive from Congress last year, which included the HFC drawdown plan in the end-of-year COVID stimulus package. At the time, environmental advocates celebrated the guidance on HFCs, but criticized the bill for being largely insufficient in its climate goals.

    “While we welcome investment in hydrofluorocarbon phase out, we’re disappointed that this funds toxic and dangerous energy technologies like nuclear, and invests in inadequate solutions like carbon capture and storage,” said 350.org associate policy director Natalie Mebane in December. “While fossil fuel companies ride out billions in bail-outs, millions of people across America face evictions and unemployment,” Mebane continued, calling for a just recovery to the climate crisis and pandemic.

    Since then, Congress and the White House have done little to address greenhouse gas emissions. The recent infrastructure and reconciliation bills are intended to be Democrats’ large climate bills, but progressive and Democratic lawmakers are up against conservative Democrats and a fossil fuel lobby that is fighting to keep climate proposals out of the bills.

    Indeed, part of the reason why the push to limit HFCs was successful is because it had industry support. Though the sales of products containing HFCs generate hundreds of billions each year, chemical manufacturers have also been producing climate-friendly alternatives.

    Still, the HFC ruling is a big deal, climate advocates say. Earlier this year, Project Drawdown special project director Paul West wrote that the EPA ruling, which was announced in the spring but finalized Thursday, “will likely be a drop in the bucket for consumers but a huge step forward on global climate action. The move is a critical step toward the Biden administration’s larger goal of reducing 55 percent of emissions by 2035.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Democrats File Bill to Abolish “Flagrantly” Wasteful Trump-Formed Space Force

    Rep. Jared Huffman (D-California) is seen outside of the Capitol on Wednesday, September 22, 2021.

    On Wednesday, California Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman filed a bill to abolish the U.S. Space Force, which he describes as “flagrantly” wasteful.

    The Space Force was established by former President Donald Trump in 2019. Though it is the smallest branch of the Armed Forces, it’s been widely slammed by progressives for having 16,000 personnel and costing billions of dollars a year.

    Huffman’s No Militarization of Space Act would axe the Space Force completely. “The long-standing neutrality of space has fostered a competitive, non-militarized age of exploration every nation and generation has valued since the first days of space travel. But since its creation under the former Trump administration, the Space Force has threatened longstanding peace and flagrantly wasted billions of taxpayer dollars,” Huffman said in a statement.

    “Our mission must be to support the American people, not spend billions on the militarization of space,” Huffman continued, saying that money going toward the Space Force would be better spent fighting the climate crisis, COVID-19 and inequality in the U.S. Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), Mark Pocan (D-Wisconsin), Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Illinois) and Maxine Waters (D-California) joined Huffman in introducing the bill.

    Before President Joe Biden was inaugurated, progressive lawmakers wrote a letter to the incoming administration asking officials to eliminate the Space Force, criticizing its formation for being unnecessary and for further militarizing the U.S, which is already immersed in a culture of endless war.

    “Maybe, just maybe, we should make sure our people are not dying because they lack health insurance before we start spending billions to militarize outer space,” wrote Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) in 2018.

    The Space Force is tasked with gathering military intelligence from space and monitoring and transmitting GPS signals from satellites — but although the force has now been in existence for over a year, its function is not exactly clear as yet.

    In 2018, retired astronaut Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) pointed out that the U.S. already had an arm of the military serving the same purpose as the Space Force: the Air Force Space Command, which was reorganized and reformed into its own branch.

    A press release on the Huffman bill says that the formation of a separate Space Force “creat[ed] bureaucratic confusion and further waste.” The branch received $15.4 billion in funding for the fiscal year 2021, though it was taken from the Air Force budget. The bill directs the Space Force to be reabsorbed into the Air Force.

    Critics worry that the Space Force’s existence as its own separate entity will eventually lead to further funding for the Defense Department. “Militarizing space is an unconscionable waste of billions of tax dollars, and it risks extending the worst mistakes of history to the final frontier by inviting conflict and escalation,” said Sean Vitka, senior policy counsel for Demand Progress. “Americans don’t want more wasteful military spending, which means Congress should pass the No Militarization of Space Act before the Space Force budget inevitably skyrockets.”

    Political experts have speculated that it is unlikely Biden will support getting rid of the military branch, which has bipartisan approval. Meanwhile, Congress this week is set to authorize the largest budget the Pentagon has ever seen.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Diplomat to Haiti Resigns, Citing “Inhumane” Deportations

    Protesters join together in front of a USCIS Building to denounce the expulsion of Haitian refugees from Del Rio, Texas, on September 22, 2021 in Miami, Florida.

    The U.S.’s special envoy to Haiti has resigned, condemning the Biden administration in his resignation letter as officials double down on deporting and criminalizing Haitian migrants seeking safety and stability in the U.S.

    “I will not be associated with the United States inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the dangers posed by armed gangs in control of daily life,” wrote former envoy Daniel Foote in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday.

    “Our policy approach to Haiti remains deeply flawed, and my recommendations have been ignored and dismissed, when not edited to project a narrative different from my own,” Foote continued. Foote had served as a diplomat to Haiti since the beginning of July.

    President Joe Biden has been deporting hundreds of Haitians to a country that was ravaged by a 7.2 magnitude earthquake this summer and has been mired in widespread political unrest and violence since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse last July. The estimated 10,000 to 15,000 mostly Haitian asylum seekers waiting to cross the border into the U.S. describe fleeing desperate conditions in Haiti, some even expressing a real fear that they may die if they return.

    Foote moreover criticizes the administration for its decision to support Ariel Henry, the current prime minister of the country. “[W]hat our Haitian friends really want, and need, is the opportunity to chart their own course, without international puppeteering and favored candidates,” Foote wrote. “The hubris that makes us believe we should pick the winner — again — is impressive.”

    Haitian advocates have also condemned the administration’s imperialism. Haitian activist Monique Clesca recently told Democracy Now! that the U.S. State Department has no business choosing who should be the leader of Haiti. “It is offensive. It should not be done. It is unacceptable,” Clesca said.

    Progressive lawmakers and immigration advocates have scorched the administration for its violence toward Haitian migrants both in the country and at the border, where they are met with cruelty by U.S. border agents. This week, pictures and videos emerged showing Border Patrol agents on horseback, threatening to trample and whip Haitian adults and children carrying supplies across the Rio Grande.

    “Babies under the age of three have been on those flights. Families fleeing a humanitarian crisis, seeking a better life in the United States, have been rounded up like cattle. Whipped, handcuffed and detained. Sent back to a country where many families have nothing left,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) this week. “This is abhorrent…. Haitian lives are Black lives, and if we truly believe that Black lives matter, then we must reverse course.”

    Democrats, progressives and activists have urged Biden to stop the deportations, including senior Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York).

    However, the administration has only redoubled its efforts to detain and deport Haitians thus far. On Sunday, after the U.S ordered three deportation flights to Haiti, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas offered a harsh defense of the practice, saying, “If you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned.”

    Meanwhile, the Biden administration is fighting in court to keep Title 42 in place, a policy invoked by Donald Trump, which allows for swift deportations during a public health emergency while giving little to no chance for asylum.

    The administration is also seeking to hire contractors to run a migrant jail at the Guantánamo Bay naval base this week, with an emphasis on guards who speak Spanish and Haitian Creole. Though the Department of Homeland Security has said that the administration is not planning to send Haitian asylum seekers from the U.S.’s southern border to Guantánamo Bay, the facility has been the site of brutality toward Haitians in the past.

    In the 1990s, the George H.W. Bush administration sent as many as 12,000 Haitians to Guantánamo Bay after the U.S. facilitated a violent coup d’etat in Haiti under the direction of then-Attorney General William Barr. The administration singled out HIV-positive Haitians for imprisonment, creating the world’s first HIV detention camp. Haitian immigrants were held there for a year and a half before their imprisonment was eventually ruled unconstitutional.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ocasio-Cortez Slams Congress for “Senselessly” Boosting Defense Budget Each Year

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) speaks to a reporter on Capitol Hill on Thursday, July 29, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

    While presenting an amendment for a 10 percent cut to the Pentagon’s colossal budget, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) sharply criticized the agency for wastefulness, saying that the billions spent on defense each year should be spent boosting social and climate programs instead.

    “During a time when our country is withdrawing from foreign wars, when COVID-19 and its fallout is one of the greatest threats that we face, when record levels of unemployment, housing and healthcare crises are among us, the United States should be reducing its military spending by at least 10% and prioritize the very needs of our communities here at home,” said Ocasio-Cortez on the House floor on Wednesday.

    She said that the cut, which would come out to about $77 billion, could come at no cost to the services that the U.S. offers military families, while still freeing up funds to address areas of dire need. The New York lawmaker offered the amendment on behalf of Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wisconsin).

    Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that a large portion of the Department of Defense’s budget goes toward defense contractors. “It is not the readiness [of the country to respond militarily] that cutting our defense budget threatens. It is the profit margins of defense contractors,” she said, adding that defense contractors are continually “gouging the public and draining our resources,” while padding their own pockets.

    Indeed, defense contractors receive a huge portion of the Pentagon’s budget — by some counts, more than half of the over $700 billion that is allocated to Defense each year. Many defense contractors are often paying settlements or appearing in court for fraud, and frequently giving their executives large bonuses, as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) pointed out earlier this year.

    It would be easy to discern which areas to cut the $77 billion from, Ocasio-Cortez explained — cutting spending on decades-old, obsolete weapons alone could recoup more than enough. The Pentagon could eliminate another $18 billion if it stopped its September practice of going on spending sprees to justify their budget directly before Congress authorizes it for the next year.

    “We have increased our military spending year after year, senselessly and needlessly, and now again, during a time when we have ended an almost two decade war, there is no reason for us to be increasing our military spending and our defense budget when we are not funding childcare, healthcare, housing priorities, and the climate crisis here at home,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

    She went on to say that authorizing the Pentagon’s bloated budget comes at the expense of the public.

    “We ask Americans and people in this country, year after year, to engage in the magical thinking that defense spending comes at no real cost. It does. It comes at the cost of our security,” she said. “The degradation and erosion of our social systems here domestically is a threat as well. “

    Ocasio-Cortez is offering another amendment with Pocan and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California) that would cut about $24 billion of the Pentagon budget that was recently added on by conservative Democrats and Republicans in the House Armed Services Committee. Congress is slated to vote this week on defense budget authorization.

    Progressives have long been critical of the U.S.’s bloated defense budget, which represents about half of the U.S.’s yearly discretionary spending. Much of the massive amount of defense spending goes unaccounted for — and the Defense Department is the only agency that has never passed an audit, despite the fact that agencies have been subject to audits for over 30 years.

    The $770 billion with amendments and additions that Congress is slated to pass this year is an increase over previous years’ budgets. Progressives contend this budget is especially nonsensical when the U.S. has just exited one of its longest wars — and when just a fraction of the $14 trillion that the Pentagon has spent in the past 20 years could cover the entirety of Democratic priorities like the ones contained in the Build Back Better Act that conservative Democrats are fighting so fiercely to weaken or kill.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna Urge Axing Fossil Fuel Subsidies From Reconciliation

    Rep. Pramila Jayapal

    On Wednesday, Congressional Progressive Caucus leaders sent a letter urging top Democrats to repeal fossil fuel subsidies that are currently included in Democrats’ Build Back Better Plan, saying that the tax breaks only serve to pad the pockets of fossil fuel industry elites.

    The letter was spearheaded by Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and Deputy Whip Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California), who say that House leaders should axe tax breaks like one that allows oil and gas companies to write off drilling costs, and another that allows them to use “Last In, First Out” accounting methods to reduce the taxable value of their assets.

    Climate advocates and energy experts say such subsidies play a large role in keeping the fossil fuel industry afloat. According to a new report by Friends of the Earth, Oxfam America and BailoutWatch, the Democrats’ tax plan leaves $35 billion in subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. “We were dismayed to see that the current version of the Build Back Better Act in the House is missing most of the domestic fossil fuel subsidies repeal passed by the Senate Finance Committee earlier this year,” the progressives wrote in their letter. “There is no reason that the fossil fuel industry deserves special privileges over other businesses.”

    The Congressional Progressive Caucus leadership went on to point out that fossil fuel “giveaways” don’t go toward helping energy production or stability, but toward padding the fossil fuel companies’ profits. Indeed, they cite a study from earlier this year that found that in 2019, 96 percent of the value over minimum rate of return created by 16 fossil fuel subsidies went directly to excess profits.

    At the end of August, just as Congress was beginning to draft the Build Back Better Act, over 50 House representatives sent a letter urging Democratic leaders to include the repeal of fossil fuel subsidies in the bill.

    “We should not fall for the industry myth that these subsidies are necessary for good job creation,” the lawmakers wrote. “Despite the fact that big fossil fuel companies claimed $8.2 billion in 2020 from the CARES Act pandemic relief bill, the industry still laid off 16 percent of its workforce.”

    On the campaign trail, President Joe Biden pledged to end fossil fuel subsidies and pressure other world powers to do the same. “I don’t think the federal government should give handouts to Big Oil,” he said earlier this year when signing an executive order directing agencies to repeal the subsidies.

    In the president’s original tax plan, which the Build Back Better Act is based on, Biden proposed eliminating a small raft of subsidies, but climate advocates slammed the plan for being insufficient. He has thus far remained mum about the Democrats’ current tax plan and the subsidies contained in it.

    Climate advocates say that fossil fuel subsidies must end in order to fend off the ever worsening climate crisis. Funding the fossil fuel industry only increases the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels, keeping the industry artificially dominant as the industry is generally on the decline otherwise, the report finds.

    Many climate advocates say that in fact, it is the fossil fuel industry that should be paying the government and the public for destruction wrought by climate disasters. The continued use of fossil fuels will have far more expensive consequences than any action taken to mitigate the climate crisis now, advocates and progressives say.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Barbara Lee Offers Amendment to Reduce Pentagon Budget by $25 Billion

    Rep. Barbara Lee

    With several budget-related votes in Congress coming up this week, progressive lawmakers are aiming to cut down proposed additions to defense spending and pare down the Pentagon’s ever-increasing budget.

    Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California) is offering an amendment that would reduce defense spending by about $24 billion. Over a dozen moderate Democrats in the House had joined Republicans in voting to add $24 billion to the Pentagon’s already bloated budget — bringing it up to about $778 billion.

    Lee’s amendment, backed by Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Mark Pocan (D-Wisconsin), would undo the addition. If passed, the amendment would bring the Pentagon’s budget back down to what President Joe Biden had proposed in the spring.

    On Twitter, Lee emphasized that the money slated to be given to the Pentagon could go toward funding social programs instead. She aims to “cut defense spending by at least $25 billion to reinvest in the needs of the people,” she wrote. “Let’s get this done.”

    Pocan is also offering an amendment that would reduce defense spending by 10 percent overall, excluding funding for health care and personnel. He argues that the Pentagon’s spending isn’t justified, especially as the country faces multiple domestic crises.

    “Pouring billions more into the Pentagon’s budget won’t tackle real and present dangers to our national security like COVID and climate change,” Pocan wrote on Twitter. “Why not cut just 10 percent of this bloated budget and reinvest in fighting our greatest threats?”

    In a letter to House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith last month, Pocan urged him to shoot down amendments that would add to Biden’s original defense budget proposal, questioning the need to increase defense spending just as the U.S. is exiting one of the nation’s most expensive wars.

    “At a time when the United States is withdrawing from wars abroad, we should be committed to cutting our defense spending now more than ever,” Pocan said.

    Progressives have waged a similar effort to cut Pentagon spending before. In 2020, Pocan, Lee and Senators Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) campaigned to reduce Pentagon spending by 10 percent, but the effort was shot down. However, with moderate Democrats and Republicans standing firmly against spending cuts, it’s unlikely that Lee and Pocan’s proposals will end up impacting the final budget.

    Since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon has spent over $14 trillion — nearly twice the spending rate as the Democrats’ Build Back Better bill would cost over the next decade. Between one third and one half of that towering defense figure has been given to private contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon, who in turn spend millions lobbying Congress to influence defense spending.

    Sanders panned defense contractors and the Department of Defense earlier this year, accusing the Pentagon of waste, cost overruns and fraud. He also pointed out that the Pentagon is the only agency that has never passed an independent audit of its finances — despite being trusted with nearly half of the U.S.’s discretionary spending.

    The Pentagon currently spends about $740 billion a year, a massive amount of money that The Nation points out works out to be about $1 million a minute.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Schumer Hints at Filibuster Workaround If Republicans Stonewall Voting Rights

    Chuck Schumer points at somebody

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) warned Republicans on Tuesday that if they unite against an upcoming voting rights bill and reject its passage, he and the chamber will explore a workaround to the filibuster to pass the bill through a simple majority.

    “We’re going to take action to make sure we protect our democracy and fight against the disease of voter suppression, partisan gerrymandering and election subversion that is metastasizing at the state level,” Schumer said, per Reuters.

    Earlier this month, a group of Democratic senators released the Freedom to Vote Act, a modified version of the For the People Act, which the House passed in March. Though the new voting rights bill is weaker in some ways than the For the People Act, the compromise bill still contains many of the pillars of the For the People Act — and crucially, has the support of conservative Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

    Manchin has been trying to whip up at least 10 Republican votes for the bill so that it can pass under the 60-vote filibuster rule. But it’s incredibly unlikely that any Republicans would be swayed to support voting rights legislation that would allow more people to vote, which they believe puts them at a disadvantage.

    Democrats and progressives have spent the past few months pushing for filibuster reform or abolition. Filibuster abolitionists have said that the arcane rule is obstructing a wide swath of Democratic priorities; reformists have focused on the voting rights bill, arguing that voting rights are important enough to carve out an exception for.

    The urgency of the matter has pushed President Joe Biden to support filibuster reform for voting rights — and Biden has reportedly been talking with Schumer to coordinate a strategy to align Democrats with the cause.

    Biden has previously held out on supporting filibuster reform, saying in July that Republicans “know better” than to pare down voting rights across the country. The same month, the White House even suggested that Democrats could “out-organize” voter suppression — a suggestion that was widely panned by progressive lawmakers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York).

    The fight over the filibuster has underscored every fight in the Senate over the last nine months. Faced with several existential issues like the encroaching fascism of the Republican party and the rapidly worsening climate crisis, Democrats have a small window of opportunity to pass vital legislation before the 2022 midterms, when early projections predict that Republicans could retake the majority in the House and potentially the Senate.

    However, the voting rights legislation is particularly timely because of the Republican state-level campaign to restrict access to the ballot across the country. Since the beginning of this year, several Republican-governed states have collectively passed 30 laws that make it harder to vote, according to a July report from the Brennan Center for Justice.

    Since then, states like Texas have passed more such restrictive laws, many of them would disproportionately make it harder for Black and Brown communities to cast a ballot. These voter suppression laws restrict mail-in and early voting in particular, two things that Donald Trump targeted as president.

    Without legislation like the Freedom to Vote Act, Democrats could be permanently facing uphill battles in elections in many states. Voting rights advocates say passing sweeping voting rights legislation is crucial for saving democracy in the U.S, and to ensuring that Republicans can’t rig every election going forward and passing other laws to disenfranchise the will of voters when they lose elections.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Report: McConnell’s Refusal to Raise Debt Ceiling Could Cost 6 Million Jobs

    Mitch McConnell

    If Republicans make good on their threats to allow the U.S. to default on loan payments after refusing to raise the debt ceiling, economists warn in no uncertain terms that a subsequent economic downturn could be disastrous and “cataclysmic” if Congress reaches a debt impasse.

    A new analysis by Moody’s Analytics found that if Republicans shoot down an attempt to raise the debt ceiling and lawmakers enter an extended period in which they can’t agree on how to avert a government shutdown, it could trigger economic conditions similar to the Great Recession in 2008.

    Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi and assistant director Bernard Yaros wrote that this scenario would lead to the loss of nearly 6 million jobs in the U.S. It would also cause unemployment to surge from about 5 percent to 9 percent and household wealth to plummet by $15 trillion. Even after the government reopened, it would have permanent consequences like spiking mortgage and other borrowing rates, they warn in the report.

    “This economic scenario is cataclysmic,” Yaros and Zandi said. “[T]he downturn would be comparable to that suffered during the financial crisis.”

    Even a short government shutdown could “upend” global markets and the economy, which is still fragile from the pandemic — and even if the debt default and shutdown are swiftly resolved, the resulting higher interest rates on Treasury bonds would still have lasting, generational effects, Yaros and Zandi wrote.

    The report’s authors are critical of the entire process to raise the debt limit. “The original intent of the debt limit was to be a forcing mechanism on lawmakers to remain fiscally disciplined. It has failed at this,” the report reads. “Instead, it has become highly disruptive to the fiscal process.”

    Currently, if lawmakers fail to raise the debt limit, the Treasury Department wouldn’t be able to pay debts. The agency would be forced to either default on the debts, which Moody’s estimates would come due around October 20, or pay the $20 billion it owes that day to Social Security recipients. If the shutdown continued further, the Treasury would be forced to make other similar decisions.

    Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has also warned of high stakes if the U.S. has to default, which she says would be unprecedented. “Doing so would likely precipitate a historic financial crisis that would compound the damage of the continuing public health emergency,” she wrote Sunday.

    The shutdown and default is an easily avoidable scenario in theory. Congress could simply come together and raise the debt ceiling, as it has done many times before, often under Republican leadership. In fact, under Donald Trump, Republicans added nearly $8 trillion to the national debt, the third largest addition to the national debt of any president.

    However, now that a Democrat is in charge, Republicans have transformed back into deficit hawks. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) is saying that he opposes allowing the U.S. to default, but is aligning Republicans to refuse to vote to raise the debt ceiling — which is essentially voting to allow the U.S. to default.

    Bizarrely, McConnell pins the blame for this on Democrats. But Democrats, who have not indicated that they want a default to happen, have been scrambling to prevent that scenario. Only the GOP has said that they will vote to allow a default.

    “McConnell seemingly could not care less” about creating financial chaos, wrote Truthout’s William Rivers Pitt. “His interest appears entirely political and utterly without shame: He wants his people to go into the 2022 midterms with ‘tax-and-spend liberals’ on every tongue. The same Republicans who aided the Trump administration’s wild financial giveaways to corporations and the wealthy now intend to use the economy itself against President Biden’s legislative attempt to address climate change and expand the social safety net, and all as a means of regaining the majority.”

    If Republicans follow through with this plan, it would not be their first time throwing the country into financial chaos for political gain and obstruction. Under President Barack Obama, they caused major fights over the debt limit in 2011 and again in 2013, which created long-term negative consequences for the economy, the report’s authors noted.

    “[T]he heightened uncertainty at the time reduced business investment and hiring and weighed heavily on GDP growth. If not for this uncertainty, by mid-2015, real GDP would have been $180 billion, or more than 1%, higher; there would have been 1.2 million more jobs; and the unemployment rate would have been 0.7 percentage point lower,” wrote Yaros and Zandi. “That is, if not for the political logjams in Washington over the debt limit after the financial crisis, the post-crisis economic recovery would have been meaningfully stronger.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Cori Bush Introduces Bill to Circumvent Supreme Court Ban on Eviction Moratorium

    Rep. Cori Bush speaks at a podium

    On Monday, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) introduced a bill that would reimplement the eviction moratorium over the course of the pandemic and give the federal government the authority to implement similar policies in the future.

    The Keeping Renters Safe Act of 2021 would direct the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to put in place a new eviction moratorium that would last through the duration of the pandemic plus 60 days. It would also amend laws to clarify that HHS, which oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has the authority to implement eviction moratoriums during public health emergencies.

    In a press conference on the bill, Bush, Warren, and other progressive lawmakers stressed that this measure would not only prevent the millions of people who are behind on their rent from facing the instability and violence of evictions, but also help stem the spread of COVID-19.

    “Today we return to the Capitol steps with renewed courage and determination to introduce life saving legislation. The Keeping Renters Safe Act will keep renters safe from eviction and curb the spread of COVID-19,” Bush said at a press conference.

    The bill has the support of 39 cosponsors in the House and five cosponsors in the Senate, including progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont). It has also been endorsed by 81 organizations, including housing justice organizations like the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

    Even when people who are evicted don’t face imminent homelessness, they are still forced into a state of emotional upheaval and potential financial ruin, Bush said. “When I move in — do I have a pillow? Do I have blankets? Now I have to purchase all of those things over again. It’s a disruption of your peace that continues on and on and on. It’s trauma,” she said. “So I will give my entire heart to ensure that no one, not one more person has to go through that.”

    “Nobody is safe until we’re all safe,” Bush continued. “An eviction moratorium is the difference between life and death for all of us.”

    The Missouri lawmaker highlighted a protest she led last month, in which she and other progressive lawmakers slept outside Congress to demonstrate the hardship that many renters could soon face.

    The Biden administration had allowed the CDC’s eviction moratorium to expire because of a Supreme Court decision that officials said barred them from renewing it. Following the direct actions of Representative Bush and housing activists, the White House reimplemented a slightly different eviction moratorium, but that, too, was shot down by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.

    Without an eviction moratorium in place, hundreds of thousands of renters — if not over a million– could face eviction and potential homelessness in the coming months. Congress authorized $46.5 billion in rental assistance last year, but as of last month, only about 11 percent of it had been disbursed, leaving the millions of renters who have defaulted on their rent in the lurch.

    The lawmakers also pointed out that the eviction moratorium is necessary to keep families safe from COVID.

    “We are in a COVID crisis. We are in an eviction crisis. And the eviction crisis is making the COVID crisis worse,” said Warren. “Thanks to an extremist Supreme Court, evictions are now on the rise. We can avoid further exacerbating this crisis if Congress can step up now and pass legislation that keeps families in their homes through the duration of this emergency. Implementing a new eviction moratorium will save lives.”

    Some states either never implemented an eviction moratorium or ended theirs early, a move that research from this summer found caused over 433,000 excess COVID cases and more than 10,000 additional deaths that might not have occurred if the states had all barred evictions.

    “This is 100 percent preventable. Because eviction is a policy choice,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts), who called the bill “life-saving legislation.”

    “We have lost more than 10,000 people that could be with us only if they had remained safely housed. Our loved ones, our neighbors, our friends,” said Pressley. “Renters don’t deserve less just because they can’t afford more.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.