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Author: Sharon Zhang

  • Videos Show “Unfathomable Cruelty” of Border Patrol Against Haitians at Border

    White men on horses harass people exercising their human rights

    Horrifying videos emerged Monday of Border Patrol agents on horseback cracking their whips at migrants and chasing, grabbing and nearly trampling Haitians seeking asylum at the border, sparking outrage and scrutiny from immigration advocates and progressives.

    The migrants were crossing the Rio Grande river carrying food and water when they were confronted with violence by border agents. The Haitian migrants later retreated to an overcrowded camp where 10,000 people, many fleeing political instability and violence, are hoping to be granted asylum and protected status by the U.S.

    After the videos emerged on social media, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that it is looking into the videos and the brutal practices used by Border Patrol, which is under DHS. The agency, which regularly enacts violence as the overseer of the largest immigration detention system in the world, called the footage “extremely troubling.”

    Progressive lawmakers strongly condemned Border Patrol Monday.

    Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) called on the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees to investigate the agency, saying: “This is so sick and [Customs and Border Protection] will continue to commit human rights abuses if we don’t stop it now. Cracking a fucking whip on Haitians fleeing hardship shows you that this system simply can’t be reformed.”

    “These are human rights abuses, plain and simple,” wrote Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota). “Cruel, inhumane, and a violation of domestic and international law. This needs a course correction and the issuance of a clear directive on how to humanely process asylum seekers at our border.”

    Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-New York) called Border Patrol’s actions “unfathomable cruelty.”

    Advocates for Haitian immigrants also condemned the footage. “They should stop deportations,” Alix Desulme, a Haitian city council member in North Miami, told Al Jazeera. “It’s been a cry way before” the Biden administration began ramping up deportations, said Desulme.

    Indeed, Haitian migrants are attempting to escape perilous conditions in Haiti, undertaking often months-long treks by foot and truck to reach the border, where they hope to be accepted under humanitarian visas. The country has experienced massive political instability with the recent assassination of President Jovenel Moïse and a 7.2 magnitude earthquake that killed over 2,000 people, rendered nearly 130,000 homes uninhabitable and left about 684,000 people in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.

    The footage comes as the U.S. is deporting Haitians en masse, even as they face instability and potential death in Haiti.

    “If you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned. Your journey will not succeed, and you will be endangering your life and your family’s life,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Monday, justifying the agency’s use of a Donald Trump-era policy allowing for mass deportation during the pandemic.

    What Mayorkas ignores in his statement is that Haitian immigrants only take such desperate measures as risking deportation because their lives and the lives of their families are endangered in Haiti and Chile, where many Haitian immigrants face racism and hostility.

    “We don’t have money, we don’t have anything. We spent two months getting here on foot,” said Charles Edirame, a Haitian migrant who was traveling with his wife and daughter in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico. “In Haiti, we don’t have a president,” he told the El Paso Times “There was just an earthquake. How can I go back to Haiti? If I go back, I could die the next day.”

    Monday’s footage fueled further calls for the U.S. to stop deportations of migrants to Haiti. Some Haitians in the U.S. have Temporary Protected Status that keeps them from being deported because the government has determined that the country is unsafe to return to. But the program leaves them in limbo with few avenues to attain permanent residency or citizenship.

    Last week, over 50 Democrats signed a letter urging the Biden administration to immediately halt deportations to Haiti and provide entrance to the U.S. under humanitarian parole to Haitians at the border. Still, the administration is ramping up deportations, sending out hundreds of extra border agents to speed up the process.

    “It doesn’t matter if a Democrat or Republican is President, our immigration system is designed for cruelty towards and dehumanization of immigrants,” wrote Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) on Monday. “Immigration should not be a crime, and its criminalization is a relatively recent invention. This is a stain on our country.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Beto O’Rourke Planning Texas Governor Run as Greg Abbott’s Ratings Plummet

    Former Democratic presidential candidate and former representative Beto O'Rourke (D-Texas) speaks during a campaign rally on October 17, 2019 in Grand Prairie, Texas.

    Democrat and former representative Beto O’Rourke is planning to run for governor of Texas in 2022, according to political operatives in the state.

    O’Rourke would be a high-profile candidate in the race, which could give Democrats a shot against current Gov. Greg Abbott. O’Rourke has evidently been calling political allies in the state asking for advice and discussing the potential run, Axios first reported.

    As of now, O’Rourke faces a long fight. In a theoretical matchup between O’Rourke and Abbott, a poll for Dallas Morning News shows that about 37 percent would vote for O’Rourke, while 42 percent would vote for the incumbent governor. However, the gap is smaller than earlier this summer, when a July poll found O’Rourke at 33 percent and Abbott at 45 percent.

    The shrinking gap between the two politicians could be due to the fact that Abbott’s favorability ratings have been dropping in the state over the past months.

    A poll released over the weekend found that only 45 percent of Texans polled approve of Abbott’s job performance and 54 percent of poll respondents feel that the state is going in the wrong direction. Another poll from earlier this month, conducted before the state’s abortion ban went into effect, found similar results, with Abbott’s approval rating lower than ever.

    Abbott has taken a sharp pivot right over the past year, prioritizing radical policies like a near-total ban on abortion; massive voter suppression laws, and banning efforts to stem the spread of COVID-19, among other authoritarian laws targeting human rights..

    Under Abbott’s leadership, the state has been experiencing some of the worst COVID infection rates and deaths in the country. As Delta sweeps the U.S.,Texas is nearing all-time high infection rates, overwhelming hospitals to the point where the Republican governor had to call for pausing elective surgeries in the state — though he still refused to ease up on a mask mandate ban that he implemented.

    Meanwhile, O’Rourke faced sharp criticism from progressives throughout his campaign against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and his presidential run in 2020. Progressives have also panned him for his history of participating in policies that helped to drive out Latinx populations from El Paso, where he served on the city council between 2005 and 2011.

    During his higher-profile runs, O’Rourke was known for his wishy washy platform. When he ran in a crowded field, he failed to distinguish himself with his tepid policies like a plan that would provide Medicare for most, but not all.

    “O’Rourke lacks any platform whatsoever,” wrote The New Republic’s Alex Shephard in 2019. “He has no signature idea, and we know little about his political positions beyond the mushy centrism he exhibited in Congress.”

    It’s possible that O’Rourke may become more forceful in positioning himself against Abbott during this run, with a Democratic policy platform. At the very least, he has been highly critical of Abbott and his handling of the pandemic, calling on the Republican to resign in 2020.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Exxon-Tied Manchin Favors Climate Policies Pushed by the Oil and Gas Industry

    Joe Manchin scratches his eyebrow

    Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) could throw a major wrench into Democrats’ reconciliation bill as the person in charge of the bill’s climate provisions — and as a lawmaker with deep ties to the fossil fuel industry.

    On behalf of companies like Exxon, oil and gas lobbyists have descended upon Washington to oppose taxation and climate provisions in early drafts of the $3.5 trillion bill. In hopes of directly influencing Manchin, they have been calling him, writing to him and meeting with him.

    Manchin, in turn, is working to ensure that the bill’s climate proposals “protect and extend the use of coal and natural gas,” according to the New York Times. He has positioned himself largely against the Clean Electricity Performance Program, which would incentivize utility companies to use zero-emissions sources and is one of the largest climate proposals in the bill. The proposal “makes no sense at all,” Manchin said on CNN.

    This wouldn’t be the first time Manchin has welcomed fossil fuel companies’ influence into a bill he’s working on. Exxon lobbyists infamously bragged about the sway they had over the members of the Senate who wrote the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which Manchin worked on. The infrastructure bill ended up having very few climate provisions.

    “It wouldn’t offend me at all if you said, ‘Yes, it’s getting hotter and people need to run their air conditioning more.’ And Joe Manchin feels the same way,” Steve Roberts, president of the conservative-leaning West Virginia Chamber of Commerce, told the New York Times. “But we think we have to be realistic about the elimination of carbon emissions,” he added, arguing for Congress to slow down its already virtually nonexistent action against the climate crisis.

    Roberts discussed Manchin’s ties with the business community, detailing how the senator spent two days at the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s resort earlier this month. There, he fielded conversations with business owners in the state eager to talk to the senator about climate policy.

    Manchin, as the New York Times also points out, has direct financial interest in the health of the fossil fuel industry. He owns stock valued between $1 million and $5 million in coal broker Enersystems, Inc., which he helped found. Last year, according to Senate financial disclosures, the senator made $491,949 in dividends from that stock holding.

    Meanwhile, Manchin has been making a number of threats to severely weaken or kill the entire reconciliation package — not just its climate provisions.

    According to Axios, Manchin is saying that he wants to pause a vote on the bill until 2022. He has also previously said that he wants Democrats to “hit the pause button” on the bill. This would be a huge perversion of the Democrats’ timeline, which has long been to tie the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill together.

    It’s also unclear why Manchin is so insistent on delaying the bill; the main reason he’s given is the price tag, saying that he wants to shrink the bill to around a third of its size. Delaying the bill over the course of months, spurring further polarization and debate around the package, could be strategic for him. After all, this is what he and Republicans did to the infrastructure package, shrinking it to nearly an eighth of the size of Biden’s original proposal.

    The West Virginia Democrat is not alone. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) has also told President Joe Biden that she will vote against the bill containing a wide swath of his agenda if the bipartisan infrastructure bill is delayed past its scheduled House vote on September 27 or if it is rejected by the House. Each vote in the Senate is crucial for the reconciliation bill, which needs every Democrats’ support for simple majority approval.

    Evidently, Sinema has about 10 House Democrats on her side for this plan. “If they delay the vote — or it goes down — then I think you can kiss reconciliation goodbye,” Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Oregon) told Politico. “Reconciliation would be dead.”

    This is an extreme threat coming from the conservative Democrats, who have already largely gotten their way with the bipartisan infrastructure bill. If Sinema and the House Democrats make good on their promise, it would effectively kill both bills. Progressives have been threatening for months that if the reconciliation bill is shrunk or insufficient, they will vote down the infrastructure bill.

    Conservative Democrats have created a situation of mutually assured destruction on Congress’s only major climate bill. Whereas progressives are withholding their votes in the interest of social programs and climate action, conservative Democrats have yet to come up with a compelling reason as to why they are so willing to nuke Biden’s agenda for a flimsy bipartisan bill.

    Conservative Democrats further seem rather blasé about the climate and safety net expansion proposals in the bill. “Some moderates privately have decided that no infrastructure bill is better than one that’s paired with $3.5 trillion in spending,” Politico reported.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Administration Shuns IPCC Report in Argument to Expand Offshore Drilling

    President Joseph Robinette Biden gazes over wreckage

    As the Biden administration pushes forward with plans to expand offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, officials have argued that alarming research presented in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report isn’t sufficient to pause or reassess drilling plans.

    As first reported by The Daily Poster, the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management (BOEM) wrote in a recent document that the IPCC report “does not present sufficient cause” for the agency to take a second look at the administration’s plan to continue issuing leases for drilling.

    The Bureau instead opens the door to future fossil fuel development projects. “The report, as well as additional analysis of climate change, may be a significant consideration in the Department’s decisions regarding oil and gas leasing programs in the future,” officials wrote.

    Climate advocates were frustrated with the agency’s callous regard toward the IPCC report and the decision to march ahead with the leasing.“The honeymoon’s over,” between climate groups and the Biden administration, Friends of the Earth deputy legal director Hallie Templeton told The Daily Poster. “It’s now September, they’ve been in office for eight months. It’s time for them to show that they have priorities and are meaningfully going to move in the right direction.”

    In the BOEM’s document, the administration argues that officials must comply with a court order that requires them to lease about 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico for fossil fuel projects.The court order was a product of a lawsuit by states that are led by fossil fuel-funded Republicans; earlier this year, they sued the administration over an order that would have blocked the sale.

    Climate advocates argue that the Biden administration has the power to decide whether or not to hold land sales for drilling. Earthjustice, on behalf of Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club, Healthy Gulf and the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit at the end of August arguing that given the urgency of the climate crisis, the lease sale cannot go forward.

    “This lease sale is deeply disappointing. The Biden administration has folded to the oil industry based on its campaign of disinformation and political pressure, ignoring the worsening climate emergency we face,” said Brettny Hardy, an Earthjustice attorney. “Our planet cannot handle more stress from oil and gas production and yet the Biden administration is plowing ahead with a lease sale that will have impacts for decades into the future.”

    Since Hurricane Ida slammed Louisiana and swept through the country to New York, causing floods and devastation along the way, President Biden has been touring areas hard-hit by the climate crisis. Climate researchers say that Ida was fueled largely by the climate crisis and rapidly rising water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.

    “Climate change poses an existential threat to our lives, to our economy, and the threat is here,” Biden said while on tour earlier this month. “We can stop it from getting worse.”

    Climate advocates say that Biden has thus far been all talk on climate, without the policy proposals or pressure on Congress to show for it. As one of his first actions in office, Biden signed an order to stop oil and gas leasing on federal lands — a move that was lauded by climate advocates.

    But since then, Biden has become softer on the chief architects of the climate crisis. “[Biden] can use his powers to stop supercharging the climate crisis with drilling, fracking, and disastrous projects like Line 3, or he can just keep repeating talking points, approving fossil fuel development, and listening to Joe Manchin, which makes him nothing more than a disaster tourist,” Kassie Siegel, Climate Law Institute director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told Rolling Stone.

    Just affirming the reality of the climate crisis isn’t enough, say climate advocates, who liken major policies that sideline the crisis to climate denial. In negotiations for the bipartisan infrastructure bill, Biden allowed conservative Democrats and Republicans to carve climate provisions out of the bill nearly entirely; and he has done little to try to whip people like Senator Manchin into shape on major roadblocks to climate action like the filibuster.

    The IPCC report, released last month, warned of increasingly dire consequences if the world continues on its current trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions. Other global energy bodies have warned that the world must stop pursuing new fossil fuel projects if we are to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Bernie Sanders Rips Into Big Pharma Profits, Says “Thousands Die Every Year”

    Sen. Bernie Sanders

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has sharply criticized conservative Democrats over their opposition to a proposal in the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that would allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

    “I think it’s totally absurd,” Sanders said to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. “The polling out there is just unbelievable: Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, an overwhelming majority of the American people understand that the pharmaceutical industry is ripping us off in an unconscionable way.”

    Sanders emphasized that drug pricing can be a matter of life and death.

    “Thousands of people die every year because they can’t afford the medicine that they need,” Sanders continued. “The question is whether we have the guts to stand up to what is an incredibly powerful lobby.”

    The pharmaceutical industry spends an enormous amount of money on lobbying each year, Sanders pointed out, and it has well over a thousand lobbyists pressuring lawmakers. Currently, some Americans are being charged $340 for a single vial of insulin that lasts 28 days — but on a 2019 trip to Canada, Sanders found that people who need insulin could be paying only a tenth of that price.

    Prescription drugs are indeed more expensive in the U.S. than they are in other countries. An April report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that prescription drugs are two to four times higher here than they are in comparably wealthy countries like Canada and France. For consumers paying out of pocket, some drugs go for as much as 10 times more in the U.S. than elsewhere, the report found.

    This is largely due to the pharmaceutical industry, which is one of the most powerful, most moneyed and most unchecked lobbies in the U.S. The industry exercises vast influence over both sides of the aisle in Congress — a fact that conservative Democrats made plain this week.

    Representatives Scott Peters (D-California), Kathleen Rice (D-New York) and Kurt Schrader (D-Oregon) joined Republicans in voting down the proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, jeopardizing a huge portion of the Democrats’ bill — including the $3.5 trillion price tag. Though the Senate could still choose to write the proposal back into the bill, the House committee vote lays bare the loyalties of the conservative Democrats in the party.

    Without the support of all 50 Democrats in the Senate, the entire bill will be endangered — and lawmakers like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), who has been especially loud in his opposition to the price, seem to relish that power.

    Lobbyists representing a wide swath of industries, including the pharmaceutical industry, are quietly pouring tens of millions of dollars into weakening the reconciliation bill. According to the most recent data from OpenSecrets, both Schrader’s and Peters’s top campaign donor is the pharmaceutical lobby.

    Sanders emphasized on Thursday that the entire reconciliation bill is vital to taking on power structures in the country.

    “We are taking on the entire ruling class of America. The entire oligarchy. We’re taking on the pharmaceutical industry, because they don’t want us to lower the cost of prescription drugs. We’re taking on the health care industry — they don’t want us to expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing aids and eyeglasses,” said Sanders. “We’re taking on the fossil fuel industry, obviously, because they want to continue to make profits by destroying the planet.”

    He also said that concerns about the cost of the bill are spurious in the face of impending and ongoing climate disaster.

    “How much is too much when you’re talking about saving the planet? How much? If the planet goes down in 50 years, gee whiz, how much should we have spent or not spent?” Sanders said. “The American people want us to address the crises facing working people and have the guts, finally, to stand up to the big money interests.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Buffalo Mayor Who Lost to Socialist India Walton Can’t Be on Ballot, Court Rules

    A woman is silhouetted by a spotlight as she speaks to a crowd of supporters from a stage

    A federal appellate court and federal appeals court both ruled Thursday that Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown can’t appear on the mayoral ballot in November. Brown has attempted to launch a third party campaign after losing the Democratic primary to socialist India Walton.

    The twin defeats mean that Brown officially cannot appear on the ballot, though he may still continue to urge supporters to write him in. Although Brown’s campaign had penned a petition to allow him to appear on the ballot, they turned in the petition months after the deadline to appear as a third party candidate had passed.

    “We are very glad the Fourth Department [appellate court] has upheld the rule of law. Buffalo voters deserve clear, transparent election laws,” said Walton in a statement. “If everyday Buffalonians are late on rent, parking fees, or school assignments, they face consequences. There is no reason the rules should not apply to my GOP-backed opponent as well.”

    Brown’s campaign had argued that not allowing his name to appear on the ballot was unconstitutional and would be violating voters’ right to choose.

    The Erie County board of elections argued in response that Brown’s challenge, if successful, would sow “chaos.” If Brown, the incumbent mayor, was allowed to file to appear on the ballot so far after the deadline had passed, then there would be no reason to not accept other late entries to the ballot — essentially nullifying the deadline.

    Brown and many of the establishment Democrats in the area have been fighting fiercely to keep Walton from winning the mayorship. After Walton won the mayoral primary in June, Brown refused to accept defeat, evoking Republican strategies to undermine the legitimacy of the election.

    Deep-pocketed corporate interests and donors pounced on Walton’s win, pouring money into Brown’s campaign and fearmongering about socialism.

    Meanwhile, establishment Democrats like longtime Brown ally and disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo aligned themselves against Walton. Democratic leaders on Buffalo’s Common Council went to extreme lengths, exploring the possibility of axing the mayorship entirely just to avoid having Walton become mayor.

    Meanwhile, Brown even courted Republicans and right-wing elements to sign the petition for his third party bid. Local news outlets also tried digging up skeletons in Walton’s closet, publishing negative claims without evidence.

    “Today is a great day,” Walton said in a video after the appellate court’s decision. “But we still have a ways to go. This is going to be a huge fight. They’re spending tons of money slandering me in ads.”

    Brown will likely still continue to run his write-in campaign, which he launched just days after he lost the primary against Walton.

    Walton has run on a campaign of transparency around public safety and divesting from police departments. If she wins in November, she will be the first socialist mayor of a major U.S. city in over 60 years.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Elizabeth Warren Calls for Ban on Federal Reserve Officials Trading Stocks

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) questions witnesses during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee confirmation hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on August 05, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

    After it was revealed that top Federal Reserve officials had made several large stock trades, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) has called for regional Fed banks to stop allowing Fed officials to trade stocks altogether.

    On Wednesday, Warren sent letters to 12 regional Fed presidents urging them to amend their ethics rules to bar themselves and their staff from trading stocks, calling it a matter of reinforcing public confidence in the agency.

    “Regional Fed leaders must ban the ownership and trading of individual stocks by senior officials, and impose strong and enforceable ethics and financial conflicts of interest rules for themselves and their staff to restore public trust,” Warren said. “Instating critical ethics rules will send a clear and necessary message to the American people about the importance of government ethics and the integrity of Fed officials.”

    The Fed announced Thursday that after outcry over recent Fed officials’ stock trades, the agency is now looking into changing its rules regarding stock trading per the direction of Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

    “Because the trust of the American people is essential for the Federal Reserve to effectively carry out our important mission, Chair Powell late last week directed board staff to take a fresh and comprehensive look at the ethics rules around permissible financial holdings and activities by senior Fed officials,” a spokesperson for the Federal Reserve said. “This review will assist in identifying ways to further tighten those rules and standards.”

    It was recently revealed that Dallas Fed President Robert S. Kaplan and Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren both bought and sold significant amounts of stocks and real estate-related assets last year as the global economy was being rocked by the pandemic. Rosengren had stakes in four real estate trusts.

    Kaplan, meanwhile, had made nearly two dozen stock trades of $1 million or more, including in companies like Johnson and Johnson and oil and gas companies that were directly involved in or affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of his oil and gas transactions were made at a time when the role of the industry was being questioned within the finance world.

    These trades appear to be legal, and were made outside of the window that would qualify them as insider trading. But even if they weren’t strictly illegal, the Fed still has wide sway over the stock market at large — and the trades raise questions about whether or not such officials should be allowed to trade stocks at all, considering they hold such positions of power and possess a wealth of insider knowledge.

    Kaplan and Rosengren have both pledged to sell their individual stock holdings by the end of this month. But Warren said that the practice should be banned altogether for people in positions of vast political power, asserting in her letters that “the American public should not have to rely on vague and unenforceable promises made amidst an ethics firestorm in order to have confidence that Fed officials are acting solely in the public interest, not based on their own financial interests.”

    “The controversy over asset trading by high-level Fed personnel highlights why it is necessary to ban ownership and trading of individual stocks by senior officials who are supposed to serve the public interest,” Warren continued. She asked the leaders of the Fed branches to impose a ban on stock trading within 60 days and send her a written plan to do so by mid-October.

    The Massachusetts lawmaker has been pushing for tighter rules around stock trades for politicians and federal officials overall. Earlier this year, she unveiled legislation that would bar members of Congress, the president, cabinet officials, judicial leaders, and anyone in a position of influencing financial regulation from trading stocks. The bill, she said, would fight corruption and increase public trust in Washington.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • United Airlines CEO Says Resignations in “Single Digits” After Vaccine Mandate

    United Airlines pilot Steve Lindland receives a COVID-19 vaccine from RN Sandra Manella at United's onsite clinic at O'Hare International Airport on March 09, 2021 in Chicago, Illinois.

    On Thursday, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said that after the company announced an employee vaccine requirement allowing few exemptions, only a “a handful” of people have quit — out of over 84,000 employees.

    Speaking on CNN of the company’s September 27 vaccination deadline, Kirby said that the resignations he knows of make up an exceedingly small portion of their workforce. “The [resignations] I’m aware of are in single digit numbers,” he said.

    Kirby acknowledged that the company will likely see more resignations by the deadline, but that there will ultimately be a very low number. United Airlines implemented their vaccine mandate in early August, giving their employees until the end of October to be fully vaccinated, present a medical or religious exemption, or potentially face termination. That deadline was bumped up to this month after the Pfizer vaccine was given full approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in late August.

    The low number of resignations lends credence to the idea that vaccine mandates are effective at ensuring that large swaths of people are inoculated against COVID-19.

    The company announced this week that 90 percent of its workforce is vaccinated — and, of the remaining 10 percent, many have simply yet to upload their proof of vaccination. The company is also seeking to relocate unvaccinated customer-facing employees to less public jobs, or place those employees on unpaid leave, Kirby added.

    Labor unions are split on vaccine mandates and occupational punishments that come with them; some unions like the American Federation of Teachers have encouraged their workers to get vaccinated, but are hesitant to support mandates that could cost workers their jobs. Public health experts say that mandates like the one that President Joe Biden handed down recently are necessary if the country is looking to end the pandemic.

    A recent survey suggested that a vast majority of remaining unvaccinated people — currently about 24 percent of adults in the U.S. — would rather quit than get their shots, if they aren’t able to obtain an exemption. But the survey also posed a completely hypothetical question which, as The Washington Post noted, could plausibly have skewed the results.

    The question “invites people to claim an attractive, principled stand that, in many cases, might not ultimately hold up. Most of the remaining unvaccinated have staked out this position and firmly declined to get vaccinated for the better part of a year,” wrote The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake. “If they’re suddenly asked whether they would submit to doing something they didn’t previously want to do, of course many of them are going to say they would fight it.”

    In reality, the risk of losing one’s job in a time of great economic uncertainty may outweigh the supposed reward of avoiding the shot, especially when an increasing number of employers and even recreational services like bars and concert organizers are mandating COVID vaccination.

    Moreover, data gathered over the past months has shown that, despite breakthrough cases, the vast majority of people who are dying and being hospitalized due to COVID are unvaccinated, meaning that getting vaccinated — for most, a relatively unobtrusive process — could prevent one’s own death.

    More forceful messaging on vaccines from employers and the government also appears to be changing people’s minds about whether or not to get the shot. Recent polling from Axios/Ispos found that vaccine hesitancy is slowly dropping, with fewer adults than ever claiming that they won’t get vaccinated. Forty-three percent of the people now say that they would get the shot if their employers mandated vaccinations, versus only 33 percent saying the same last month.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Tlaib and Pressley File Bill to Force Fed to Divest Banks from Fossil Fuels

    (L-R) Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) attend a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol on March 11, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

    On Wednesday, progressive lawmakers introduced a bill that would mandate the Federal Reserve to force large banks and financial institutions to stop funding fossil fuel projects in order to help bring the country in line with greenhouse gas emissions reductions goals.

    The Fossil Free Finance Act was introduced by Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) and Mondaire Jones (D-New York). Under the bill, the Fed would ensure that banks with more than $50 billion in assets are aligning their financing projects with emissions targets. It would prohibit financing of new or expanded fossil fuel projects after next year and prohibit financing of all fossil fuel projects after 2030.

    With the goal of aligning greenhouse gas emissions with the U.S.’s commitments under the Paris Agreement, the bill also prohibits financing of greenhouse gas emissions generally, calling for a 50 percent reduction in financed emissions by 2030 and a 100 percent reduction by 2050. The banks and financial institutions would be required to report to Congress on their progress.

    “Our planet is burning. Over the last five years, financial institutions under the Federal Reserve’s supervision provided trillions in direct fossil fuel financing — and each new project brings us closer to the brink,” said Tlaib. “The Federal Reserve’s role is not to surrender our planet to corporate polluters and shepherd our financial system to its destruction. The Federal Reserve’s role is to act.”

    The bill is cosponsored by 14 Democrats in the House, including progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York). It’s also been endorsed by a handful of climate organizations like Sunrise Movement, Sierra Club, 350.org and Public Citizen.

    “Wall Street banks have made it clear that, without strong federal oversight and regulation, they plan to continue pouring money into the fossil fuels that are driving the climate crisis and pushing us toward another financial crisis,” said Sierra Club’s Fossil-Free Finance campaign manager Ben Cushing. “The Federal Reserve has long failed to use its existing tools to adequately rein in Wall Street’s risky fossil fuel investments.”

    Fossil fuel financing has come under intense scrutiny from climate advocates over the past years. A March report found that the world’s largest 60 banks, including institutions like JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo have shelled out $3.8 trillion in financing for fossil fuel projects since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015. The report also revealed that in spite of COVID’s impact on cutting fossil fuel use, funding has been increasing steadily over the past years.

    Climate advocates draw parallels between subsidies from the government and financing from banks for fossil fuel projects, which for the most part are not even a profitable investment, and bailouts for the fossil fuel industry. Recent research suggests that fossil fuels are only dominant because of the massive bailouts provided to the industry by the government.

    The Federal Reserve has been complicit in the propping up of the fossil fuel industry. Last year, under Chairman Jerome Powell, the Fed changed its lending rules so that it could accommodate the bloated, failing fossil fuel industry as COVID exposed just how fragile the industry is. Progressives have launched a campaign to oust Powell, citing his softness on Wall Street and unwillingness to address financing that exacerbates the climate crisis.

    Defunding fossil fuel projects is crucial to mitigating further climate disasters, researchers and advocates say. Even traditionally conservative institutions are beginning to recognize this: the International Energy Agency (IEA) was previously hesitant to call out fossil fuel financing as a major contributor to the climate crisis, which governments and financial institutions seized on as an excuse to continue funding fossil fuel projects.

    But in May, the IEA released a bombshell report saying that governments and corporations must stop pursuing new fossil fuel projects nearly immediately if the world is to set itself on track to attain net zero emissions by 2050.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • AOC Unveils Bill to Extend Unemployment Checks That Kept Millions From Poverty

    Rep. Alexandria Occasio-Cortez

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has unveiled a bill to extend additional unemployment aid after lawmakers allowed the program to expire on Labor Day, leaving millions of unemployed people in the lurch.

    The bill would extend the benefits that were first introduced during stimulus talks last year until February 1 of next year and would make payments retroactive to September 6, when the benefits expired.

    “I’ve been very disappointed on both sides of the aisle that we’ve just allowed pandemic unemployment assistance to completely lapse, when we are clearly not fully recovered from the cost effects of the pandemic,” Ocasio-Cortez said during a town hall Tuesday. “I simply just could not allow us to let this happen without at least trying.”

    The checks, which sent hundreds of dollars to unemployed people each week, were critical in keeping people afloat during the pandemic. A Census Bureau report released Tuesday found that the unemployment checks kept 5.5 million Americans out of poverty in 2020, with the stimulus checks lifting another 11.7 million out of poverty.

    Democrats and progressive groups have been pushing for an extension of the unemployment aid. In August, over 100 House Democrats sent a letter to House leaders urging them to take up a bill to reinstate the $600 unemployment checks that were being sent out last year.

    “We owe it to people waiting to get back to work across the country not only to extend unemployment benefits to help them pay their bills, but to tie these benefits to economic conditions so workers are not held hostage by another cliff like this one,” the lawmakers wrote.

    In April, 38 Democrats and progressives wrote a letter to President Joe Biden calling on him to include permanent unemployment benefits in his infrastructure package, but that call was left unheeded. Meanwhile,the reconciliation bill focuses on job creation but does little to help unemployed workers directly. When the checks expired early this month, there was negligible action from Democratic leadership, who were preoccupied with details surrounding the bipartisan infrastructure and reconciliation bills. People like Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) were mum about the issue, allowing the benefits to expire for the estimated 7.5 million people who were receiving them.

    Republicans have been staunchly against the additional unemployment aid, despite the aid’s vast impact on poverty reduction and economic recovery and growth.

    “The negative economic impacts of these incentive effects have always been exaggerated,” the Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens wrote in June, “but these effects become truly trivial during times when the economy’s growth is clearly constrained.” Bivens argued that unemployment benefits are massively helpful to the economy, with every dollar spent on unemployment aid returning to the economy by up to double the amount. According to his report, the only reason the economy hasn’t seen further growth as a result of unemployment aid being distributed, is that the checks were relatively stingy and small.

    Still, Republicans and some conservative Democrats have latched onto a false narrative about unemployment aid. Governors in 26 states, all but one of whom are Republicans, cut off the unemployment checks early this summer, promoting the fallacious claim that there was a worker shortage. However, data from the Labor Department demonstrated that cutting off the unemployment aid didn’t accelerate the rate of employment; if anything, it created a slight lag.

    “Allowing unemployment benefits to expire does not force people back to work,” Ocasio-Cortez said Tuesday. Referring to the bill, she continued, “Even if the majority of the caucus is not on board, we are going to do our best to make that effort.”

    Ocasio-Cortez will likely face opposition from the usual conservative Democrats like West Virginia’s Sen. Joe Manchin. Manchin in August told Business Insider that he wouldn’t support extending unemployment benefits. “I’m done with extensions,” he said. “The economy is coming back.”

    While Manchin is correct in one way — the economy has been booming for the wealthy — he’s incorrect on one crucial point: Growth for the middle class is still stalling, and poverty only decreased last year because of government aid in the form of stimulus payments, social security and unemployment checks.

    Now that benefits from the stimulus packages are expiring, the future is uncertain. Economists predict it will take years for the economy to fully recover from the pandemic. Meanwhile, the pandemic is still very much ongoing, with infection numbers in the U.S. reaching new peaks and death counts ticking upward each day.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Elizabeth Warren Calls for Breaking Up “Ungovernable” Scandal-Ridden Wells Fargo

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) sent a letter to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell this week asking the agency to break up Wells Fargo, which has been involved in several questionable and unethical dealings over the past years.

    “I write to urge the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (the Fed) to take immediate action in response to the repeated, ongoing, and inexcusable failure of Wells Fargo & Company (Wells Fargo) to eliminate abusive and unlawful practices that have cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars,” Warren wrote.

    The lawmaker wants the Fed to revoke the bank’s financial holding company license, which would split the company’s banking services like loans and bank accounts from its other financial services, like managing investment funds.

    By Warren’s count, the company has been embroiled in eight major scandals, starting in 2016 when it was exposed for making 1.5 million fake accounts and 500,000 fake credit cards in customers’ names without their permission in order to boost sales. The company agreed to pay out a paltry $142 million in a class action lawsuit over the wrongdoing.

    Since then, Wells Fargo has been engulfed in a plethora of scandals large and small, including sending out erroneous messages in 2018 telling customers that they needed to purchase auto insurance. The bank has been ordered to pay over $5 billion in fines to make up for its missteps over the past years, according to Warren’s letter.

    Last week, the bank was fined $250 million by the Treasury Department for not moving fast enough to compensate customers affected by their 2018 scandal, in which the bank was found to be mismanaging auto and home loans. As Warren pointed out in her letter, Wells Fargo failed to adequately protect consumers from foreclosure — and now, they have failed to compensate for that failure.

    “Wells Fargo has been caught again cheating consumers — this time cheating them by not following through on promises they made and agreements they signed to be able to reimburse consumers for the last time they cheated them,” Warren said on MSNBC Wednesday. “So my question is, if you’re not going to break up Wells Fargo this time, tell me when you are.”

    The Massachusetts senator also implied that there could be more misconduct that has yet to be uncovered.

    All of the scandals “have all been about cheating the American public,” Warren said. “When you cheat the American public that much, it’s time for the regulators to step in, it’s time for the Fed to step in and say, ‘You no longer get to be a giant bank holding company that can not only cheat consumers but affect our economy overall. You gotta be taken back to your component parts where you don’t pose that kind of risk.’”

    Wells Fargo has been subject to major federal regulation before. In 2018, the Fed implemented a harsh punishment on the bank: The agency, under then-Fed chair Janet Yellen, placed a cap on the bank’s overall finances, not allowing them to grow past that cap until it fixed its many questionable banking practices. The cap was lifted slightly this year to help Wells Fargo lend to small businesses that are struggling due to the pandemic.

    Even with the cap implemented three years ago, the company has continually found itself mired in scandals. “It is clear that even with such a cap in place, Wells Fargo is simply ungovernable,” Warren wrote in her letter.

    “I am concerned that Wells Fargo’s senior executives are focused on expanding risky investment banking activities instead of remediating consumer harms and improving lax internal controls,” she said, pointing out that executives are seeking to compete with other banks while still failing to uphold its accountability to consumers.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 1 in 500 Americans Has Died From COVID, New Analysis Shows

    A man kneels to place a white flag on the ground

    As COVID cases spike yet again in the U.S., the country has reached another somber milestone in its fight against the pandemic. Since the first reported case in the U.S., 1 in 500 Americans has died from COVID-19.

    According to analysis by CNN, and citing data from Johns Hopkins University, as of Tuesday night, there have been 663,913 deaths due to COVID in the U.S. The U.S.’s population is approximately 331 million, according to the Census Bureau. The milestone comes just weeks after the country hit a new peak in COVID hospitalizations, with over 100,000 hospitalized over a two-week average at the end of August.

    COVID infections and deaths were on the rise since the beginning of July, after a period when cases appeared to be tapering off early in the summer. According to the New York Times’s COVID tracker, over the past two weeks, infections and deaths across the country have been trending very slightly downward again on average. But as cases are still on the rise in states like Ohio and Minnesota, public health officials are warning against complacency, saying that cases and deaths could begin to rise again at any point.

    Vaccination rates have largely plateaued since the original rush to get shots in arms in the spring. Across all age groups, including those that aren’t eligible to be vaccinated, only 54 percent of the country is fully vaccinated. Among those eligible, 63 percent are fully vaccinated, according to the New York Times’s vaccine tracker.

    As children return to in-person schooling, and since those under 12 years of age still can’t be vaccinated against COVID, children have made up a large share of the current infections across the country. Data released by the American Academy of Pediatrics last week showed that, in the week ending September 9, 28.9 percent of reported cases in the U.S. were among children. This means that children were disproportionately represented in COVID cases; according to the Census Bureau, children make up about 22.2 percent of the U.S. population.

    However, there is hope that the case numbers may fall soon as new vaccine mandates go into place and as vaccine manufacturers prepare to expand age eligibility.

    The CEO of Pfizer has said that the company will submit trial data on vaccinations in children between the ages of 5 and 12 to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as early as the end of this month, and it plans to release trial data on children between 6 months and 5 years old in late October. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Monday that she hopes vaccines for children under 12 will be approved by the end of the year.

    While approval for COVID vaccines for children is pending, new mandates may have a more immediate effect in suppressing cases. President Joe Biden announced a new executive order last week that will require all federal workers and federal contractors to be vaccinated, with no options to opt-out. The order also mandates that companies with over 100 employees must require vaccinations for their employees, or else they must be subjected to weekly testing.

    With full FDA approval for the Pfizer vaccine last month, vaccine hesitancy also appears to be lightening up slightly. A poll released in late August found that only 20 percent of adults say that they won’t get vaccinated, down from 34 percent in March and 23 percent earlier that month. Experts also say that vaccine mandates are effective in getting more people vaccinated, so the new mandate from Biden may soon begin to have an effect.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “Poverty Is a Policy Choice”: Stimulus, Unemployment Aid Slashed Poverty in 2020

    A person holds a sign reading "FIGHT POVERTY, NOT THE POOR" during an outdoor, pre-covid protest

    Accounting for government aid programs, poverty fell in 2020 to the lowest rate on record since the Census Bureau began keeping records in 2009. The dip, which happened in spite of declining median household incomes last year, shows that the direct aid from the stimulus packages was incredibly effective at reducing poverty.

    While the official poverty rate rose due in part to a 2.9 percent decrease in median household incomes, the supplemental poverty rate fell from 11.8 percent in 2019 to 9.1 percent in 2020. The supplemental poverty rate takes into account more government aid than the official rate, including things like food stamps, housing assistance and the stimulus checks.

    The stimulus packages passed in 2020 helped significantly in the overall poverty reduction, the Census found. The $1,200 stimulus checks alone lifted 11.7 million people out of poverty. Supplemental unemployment aid — $600 a week for much of 2020, thanks in large part to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) — protected an additional 5.5 million people from experiencing poverty.

    Without the stimulus payments, the Census Bureau wrote, the poverty rate would have been 12.7 percent rather than 9.1 percent. While the additional government aid helped lift millions out of poverty, Social Security still had the largest impact in 2020, lifting 26.5 million out of poverty.

    The government aid worked in reducing poverty across the board: People of all ages, races, ethnicities and education levels saw a reduction, The Washington Post reports. Households headed by single moms and Black and Latinx people saw the largest declines.

    The data shows the powerful impact of direct aid from the government, which was able to reverse some of the harmful effects of the pandemic on the economy, such as mass layoffs.

    “What the data tells us is clear: when government responds to the needs of the working class, millions of families are lifted out of poverty,” Sanders wrote on Twitter in response to the Census report. “We must not stop here. We must pass the $3.5T reconciliation bill and invest in working families.”

    To many progressives, reports such as these showing that aid in stimulus packages like last years’ bills and this year’s American Rescue Plan reduce poverty are proof positive that lawmakers should implement further direct aid measures.

    “For the record, poverty dropped last year despite the pandemic — because of government aid. Lesson: Poverty is a policy choice,” former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote on Twitter.

    Experts at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) echoed Reich’s tweet, writing “The poverty rate reduction highlights how much poverty the nation and its policymakers tolerate is a choice.” EPI recommended immediately reinstating the supplemental unemployment checks, which ended nationally on Labor Day but were cut off prematurely by 26 states, nearly all of them with Republican governors.

    Republicans piled onto the unemployment checks this year, blaming them for a so-called “worker shortage” that didn’t actually exist. But states that cut off the unemployment checks early didn’t find a significant increase in employment — in fact, data from the Department of Labor found that the states that stopped the unemployment checks had slightly slower job growth.

    Data from Tuesday’s Census Bureau suggests that employment can have a limited effect on reducing poverty in comparison to direct relief programs. However, Republicans and conservative Democrats, have shown little interest in pursuing poverty reduction as a goal.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Warren Says Reconciliation Bill Should Include Wealth Tax

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren

    This week, House Democrats unveiled their plan to hike taxes on wealthy people and corporations to help offset the costs of the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. However, progressive lawmakers noted an omission to the tax reform plan: a wealth tax.

    The reconciliation plan, which can pass through the Senate with a simple majority vote bypassing the filibuster, is one of the Democrats’ only chances to pass ambitious tax bills like a wealth tax or more moderate reforms, like undoing the Donald Trump tax cuts of 2017. Considering the widespread tax evasion and surging wealth among the most prosperous Americans, progressives and some Democrats say that the reconciliation bill is a chance to seize the Democratic majority and pass ambitious tax reform.

    As it is, there are few, if any, tax proposals in the plan that target the ultra-wealthy, which Finance Chair Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) told the New York Times is a missed opportunity. “It would be a monumental mistake for Congress to pass a bill that really exempts billionaires,” Wyden said.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) echoed that sentiment on Tuesday. “I agree with Chairman [Wyden]: we need to pass a bill that ensures that billionaires and corporations are finally paying their fair share,” she said on Twitter.“A wealth tax and my Real Corporate Profits Tax are two ways to get that done.”

    Warren has previously proposed a tax on the ultra-wealthy that would levy a 2 percent tax on wealth between $50 million and $1 billion, and a 3 percent tax on wealth over $1 billion. In her Real Corporate Profits Tax Act, she has also proposed creating a tax on profits that companies report to shareholders, rather than profits reported to the government, which companies typically deflate in order to dodge taxes.

    Warren wrote last month that her wealth tax, corporate profits tax and funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) could fund the entirety of the reconciliation bill. But it’s not necessarily just about revenue-raising for her and progressive lawmakers; it’s also about making corporations and the wealthy pay their “fair share,” as progressives have been advocating for.

    The White House has joined those calls, though President Joe Biden’s threshold for wealth redistribution is far smaller than that of Warren and progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).

    As it stands, the Democrats’ plan includes moderate tax hikes on the upper class, including an increase on the marginal top tax rate for people making over $435,000,from 37 percent to 39.6 percent. The plan also adds a 3 percent surtax for incomes higher than $5 million.

    Aside from ending a high estate tax exemption threshold set by Trump, however, there is little in the way of taxing anything other than incomes. That means the tax plans wouldn’t capture the enormous wealth from things like stock trading and bonuses that the richest Americans accrue while often collecting a low salary: for instance, Jeff Bezos’s base salary is just over $80,000, but he receives billions of dollars a year from other sources.

    Advocates have criticized the tax plan, not only for leaving out a wealth tax but also for the proposals it does include. The tax hikes fall short of what Biden had proposed in the spring, and even further away from what progressives and some Democrats have been advocating for.

    The plan includes a corporate tax hike as President Joe Biden proposed earlier this year, but it’s an even smaller proposal than Biden’s modest original hike. Instead of raising the corporate tax rate from 21 to 28 percent, as Biden proposed– or 35 percent, which was the rate before Republicans slashed it in 2017 — Democrats are offering a 26.5 percent rate. Meanwhile, the plan’s capital gains tax hike, from 20 to 25 percent, is far smaller than the near doubling of the capital gains tax that Biden had proposed.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “Send It Back” — Squad Tells Senate to Reject Rahm Emanuel’s Ambassadorship

    Jamaal Bowman

    Rahm Emanuel’s nomination for ambassadorship to Japan was sent to the Senate on Monday, sparking frustration among progressives who have been advocating for his nomination to be rejected.

    “You can value Black life, or you can confirm Rahm Emanuel to an ambassadorship. Pick one,” wrote Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) on Twitter.

    “The Senate should send it back,” wrote Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-New York).

    Progressives have been fierce in their opposition to the former Chicago mayor, White House chief of staff and representative. Emanuel is most infamous for covering up the police-perpetrated murder of Laquan McDonald in 2014. McDonald, a Black 17-year-old, was shot by a police officer 16 times. Emanuel delayed releasing footage of the murder, which happened just ahead of a contested re-election campaign for the then-mayor.

    Despite his record, President Joe Biden was considering Emanuel for a cabinet position last year, and now has nominated him to an ambassadorship position, much to progressives’ chagrin.

    “Rahm Emanuel should be disqualified from any public office for covering up the murder of Laquan McDonald. The Senate needs to do the right thing and block his nomination,” tweeted Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) Monday.

    On Tuesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) joined the pushback, saying “This continues to be one of the most bizarre campaigns / uses of energy in Washington. Once again, Senate should vote NO on confirming Rahm Emanuel.”

    Ocasio-Cortez shared an article from Rolling Stone asserting that Emanuel shouldn’t be in any position of power within the government. Not only did Emanuel help cover up the murder of McDonald, wrote Ryan Bort, but he also oversaw the closing of half of the mental health clinics in the city and tried to sabotage Chicago teachers who were striking for better work conditions.

    “Biden’s decision to nominate Emanuel to serve as the ambassador to Japan puts Senate Democrats in the uncomfortable position of deciding whether to defy Biden or vote for Emanuel,” wrote Bort. “One extremely easy way Biden could have avoided what will be a highly scrutinized nomination process for a typically uncontroversial diplomatic appointment would have been to simply refrain from trying to make a high-profile ambassador out of a controversy-ridden former mayor who covered up the murder of a 17-year-old child.”

    Progressives have been criticizing Biden for nominating Emanuel since the pick was announced in August. Earlier this month, Ocasio-Cortez put out a statement saying that Emanuel’s alleged coverup “alone should be flatly disqualifying for any position of public trust, let alone representing the United States as an ambassador.”

    Aside from the alleged coverup, Emanuel oversaw a number of policies as mayor and White House chief of staff that have garnered criticism from progressives. As Truthout’s Kelly Hayes wrote in 2018, Emanuel’s neoliberalism perpetuated the financial instability and privatization of public services in Chicago, leading to crises of violence, particularly police violence — ultimately creating “two Chicagos, one for the haves and one for the have-nots.”

    Earlier this year, Truthout’s Will Pitt pointed out that Emanuel also has an “abysmal” record in the White House and House of Representatives, staunchly supporting efforts like wars in Iraq and Iran, earning a reputation as a warmonger. “And Biden is sending this person to be our ambassador to Japan,” Pitt wrote. “This appointment puts Emanuel front and center to one of the most perilous diplomatic and military situations on Earth.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ocasio-Cortez Says $3.5T Bill Is an Opportunity to Provide Immigrants Refuge

    Alexandria Occasio-Cortez

    On Monday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez urged for the Democrats’ reconciliation package to include citizenship pathways for immigrants like Dreamers and those in the U.S. under humanitarian visas.

    Noting that “countless” constituents who have Temporary Protected Status (TPS) have reached out to her, Ocasio-Cortez said, “I have the privilege of calling these individuals constituents entirely thanks to their courage and determination in risking their lives to escape treacherous conditions of environmental disasters, violence and corruption back home.”

    TPS holders are allowed to stay in the U.S. as long as the countries that they immigrate from are deemed too unsafe to return to. There are an estimated over 400,000 TPS holders in the U.S., many of whom are from El Salvador after earthquakes devastated the country’s economy 20 years ago.

    Though many TPS holders have been living in the U.S. for decades, their path to citizenship is limited, meaning that they could face deportation if the U.S. deems it safe for them to return to the countries they immigrated from. In June, the Supreme Court handed a major blow to TPS holders and immigrant advocates when it ruled that TPS holders are not all in the country lawfully, severely limiting their ability to apply for permanent residency, or a green card.

    As Ocasio-Cortez noted, more than 40,800 TPS holders live in New York. “Today, the U.S. is their only refuge and their only home,” she said. “They have lived in the U.S. for decades, becoming part of the backbone of our local and national economies. While TPS has allowed them to stay in the U.S., it has also put their lives perpetually in limbo, as TPS holders must wait every few months to find out if the program has been renewed.”

    The congresswoman also pointed out that the reconciliation process is a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity to create more citizenship pathways for immigrants — which she argues is the least the U.S. can do, considering the role the country has played in creating political instability in many of these countries and in accelerating climate disasters.

    Democrats have proposed including pathways to citizenship for Dreamers, TPS holders and essential workers like farmworkers. This week, the immigration proposals face scrutiny from the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate parliamentarian, who recommends whether or not a particular provision fits within the budget reconciliation process. A proposal must have a significant impact on the U.S. budget in order to be deemed fit for reconciliation.

    Democrats presented their argument for including the immigration proposals to the parliamentarian last week, and a decision could come as soon as this week. The parliamentarian’s decision isn’t final, however. Democratic leadership could still decide to ignore her recommendation, which they chose not to do in the spring, when Congress was considering Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vermont) $15 federal minimum wage proposal.

    Advocates have argued that immigration reform is “a perfect fit” for the reconciliation process. As Marshall Fitz wrote for Roll Call, “Irrefutably, enabling immigrants to earn permanent residence has a clear and significant budgetary impact, primarily by allowing a new class of people to become eligible for public benefits and services.”

    Fitz pointed out that the Congressional Budget Office found that the Dream and Promise Act, which would allow Dreamers and TPS holders to be granted permanent residency, would add an estimated $1.5 trillion to the U.S. gross domestic product over the next decade and would create over 400,000 jobs.

    Advocates also say that the U.S. has a moral obligation to widen citizenship pathways. TPS holders are subject to the political whims of the president and party in office, which leaves them in limbo without permanent residence status. The Trump administration removed several countries from the TPS list, taking away protections for about 98 percent of TPS holders. President Joe Biden has reversed that decision — but although he’s promised to expand citizenship pathways for TPS holders, Dreamers and immigrant farmworkers, he hasn’t taken further action to codify that promise.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Barrett Says Supreme Court Isn’t Full of “Partisan Hacks” as It Guts “Roe”

    Amy Coney Barrett

    In a Sunday speech at the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, named for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), only weeks after conservatives gutted abortion rights in Texas, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett decried the view that the highest court in the land is politicized.

    “My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” Barrett said, per the Louisville Courier Journal, at a celebration of the McConnell Center’s 30th anniversary. “The media, along with hot takes on Twitter, report the results and decisions…. That makes the decision seem results-oriented. It leaves the reader to judge whether the court was right or wrong, based on whether she liked the results of the decision.”

    When asked about the “shadow docket,” under which the Supreme Court has issued decisions under a relative veil of secrecy, and the abortion decision that political experts say could be a harbinger of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Barrett said it would be “inappropriate” to comment on the Supreme Court’s decision regarding the Texas law, as other similar cases may soon be coming before the court.

    Early this month, the Supreme Court refused to block a Texas law that effectively overturns Roe v. Wade in the state and has had a chilling effect on virtually all abortions in the state. The decision, handed down by conservative justices in the court, was widely panned as dangerous and cruel.

    The speech decrying the public view of the court as being politicized is ironic considering that Barrett’s nomination and confirmation were themselves highly politicized events, and the Republicans behind the whole process are arguably the very people responsible for creating that impression among the public. Additionally, it is not lost on the public that the justices nominated by Trump and the GOP explicitly for their ideological bent have largely lived up to that expectation.

    Just weeks after Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September of last year and one week before the 2020 presidential election, the majority-Republican Senate confirmed Barrett to the highest court in the land along a 52-48 near-party line vote.

    Democrats at the time pointed out the politicization of the process that was an important step for eroding public trust in the court. The Supreme Court typically enjoys majority support from the public, but according to a July poll, that support has dipped to under 50 percent.

    The extremely short timeline for Barrett’s confirmation is underscored by the fact that Republicans, led by McConnell, had waged a historic campaign to block as many of President Barack Obama’s judicial appointments as possible.

    The most infamous case was Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in March of 2016. McConnell blocked the appointment, arguing that the nomination was too close to the election in November, nearly seven months away.

    In reality, McConnell was trying to pack the Supreme Court and the lower courts of the land. When Donald Trump took office months later, Republicans rushed the confirmation of conservative justice Neil Gorsuch, ushering in a new era of conservatism on the Supreme Court. Trump then went on to appoint nearly as many federal appeals court judges in four years as Obama did over his eight years in office.

    Barrett’s speech is also ironic considering her extreme far-right stances that, according to some legal experts, position her as the most right-wing justice on the court. Fueled by conservative dark money interests, Barrett refused to acknowledge whether voter suppression was illegal during her confirmation hearing and had previously signed a statement calling Roe “barbaric.”

    “Not ‘partisan hacks’? Then explain 80-0 partisan 5-4 record for big donors,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Oregon) wrote on Twitter, referencing the 80 cases backed by moneyed conservative interests that were decided by the five conservative justices in the court, with all liberal justices dissenting.

    “[E]xplain judicially conservative principles rolled over to get those wins for donors who put you on the Court,” Whitehouse said. Referring to the so-called “shadow docket” decisions, he continued, “Explain why the Citizens United majority never enforced its supposed ‘transparency’ principle, for starters.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Says He Will Push Senate on Filibuster Reform Over Voting Rights

    Joe Biden points while glaring through his aviator sunglasses

    In a push to protect voting rights, President Joe Biden is planning to pressure conservative Democrats in the Senate to support filibuster reform in order to pass voting rights legislation.

    According to three people briefed on the situation, per Rolling Stone, Biden has told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) that he will speak to holdouts in the Senate, hoping to carve out a filibuster exception for voting rights.

    “Chuck, you tell me when you need me to start making phone calls,” Biden reportedly told Senator Schumer.

    The White House has been campaigning for voting rights legislation to stem the Republican-led, conspiracy-theory-laden tide of voter suppression laws sweeping the country. “The president and vice president have been very clear that this is a crucial priority and senior White House staff across many departments are constantly working on it,” a White House official told Rolling Stone.

    Up until now, Biden has not supported efforts to reform or eliminate the filibuster, which are Democrats’ only options to pass legislation like the John Lewis Voting Rights Act or the For the People Act.

    In fact, Biden has opposed filibuster abolition for months, despite the fact that it stands in the way of nearly his entire agenda. He said in July that ending the filibuster would “throw the entire Congress into chaos,” leading to gridlock.

    But the Senate is already gridlocked. It has taken months for the legislature to negotiate the infrastructure bill, a previously bipartisan proposal that’s now been split into two highly politicized bills that have fractured support within Biden’s own party.

    Biden’s delay in supporting filibuster reform has frustrated Democrats and progressives alike. Even moderate Democrats like House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-South Carolina) have been pushing for a filibuster exception when it comes to voting rights, illustrating the urgency felt within much of the Democratic Party to pass such legislation.

    The voter suppression situation in particular is increasingly dire. As of July, 18 states have passed 30 laws to restrict the right to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Even more voter suppression bills have passed since then, with Texas Republicans jamming through their voter suppression package earlier this month, even after Democrats desperately pulled out all stops to block it.

    With much of the Democratic party supporting filibuster abolition or reform, Democrats hope Biden’s support will, at the very least, help unite the party in recognizing the importance of passing voting rights legislation.

    “I think there’s a clear recognition the president will have a role to play in bringing this over the finish line, and if in order to do that, we need [filibuster] rules reform, then so be it,” Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Maryland), an original co-author of the For the People Act, told Rolling Stone. “I think Joe Biden with his long history and experience in the Senate can see that.”

    Biden is likely to face resistance from the filibuster holdouts, however. Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) have been firm in their opposition to any filibuster reform, even though the controversial Senate rule is blocking much of the Democratic agenda — and Republicans could very easily retake the majority in Congress in 2022 without adequate checks on the rampant voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering occurring at the state level.

    Though Sinema and Manchin are the most vocal opponents of filibuster abolition or reform, their views reflect those of a small group of Democratic senators. And with conservative Democrats in both chambers of Congress ready to block Biden’s agenda, the president has his work cut out for him.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Katie Porter Pans Manchin for “Fiscally Irresponsible” Opposition to $3.5T Bill

    Rep. Katie Porter speaks to someone

    Rep. Katie Porter (D-California) condemned conservative Democrats’ opposition to the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill “fiscally irresponsible” on MSNBC on Thursday.

    Porter’s comments came as other Democrats, progressives and the White House have emphasized that the bill is already fully funded and contains a myriad of vital proposals for the American public.

    Speaking to MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, Porter called out Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) in particular for his spurious criticisms of the bill’s $3.5 trillion price tag. Manchin has been one of the loudest voices opposing the reconciliation package — as well the rest of the Democratic agenda.

    “I think it’s dead-on fiscally irresponsible for Senator Manchin to refuse to raise revenue and at the same time out of the other side of his mouth — maybe the side of his mouth that he uses to talk to his corporate donors — complain that we can’t pay for the things that American families desperately need,” Porter said.

    Manchin wrote an op-ed last week announcing his opposition to the price tag, citing worries about the national debt. Those concerns are spurious, however, when the Democrats’ revenue raisers for the bill are taken into account. As the rest of the Democratic caucus and the White House has pointed out continually over the past months, the infrastructure bill contains tax reforms that pay for the entire bill.

    “This package adds nothing to the debt,” said White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain on CNN this week. “It is fully paid for by raising taxes on wealthy people” and corporations, he said.

    As progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have pointed out, Manchin’s true motivations for opposing the package may be more sinister than he’s portraying in public. The West Virginia senator has known ties to Wall Street and corporate influences, including Exxon lobbyists. His group of bipartisan senators, which also have known lobbyist ties, was responsible for cutting the major tax proposals and funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from the infrastructure bill.

    “The very same people who are complaining that we can’t afford to make investments in regular American families are the same ones who are trying to shield the tax cheats of this country. So they can’t have it both ways,” Porter said Thursday.

    “I’d like to see Senator Joe Manchin come out in favor of fully funding the IRS, in favor of having a fair global corporate tax system. And once we’ve raised that revenue, then I’m willing to talk to him about what we need to do to create a budget bill that meets his goal and his definition of being fiscally responsible,” she continued.

    Porter also pointed out that, aside from moderate raises to both the top marginal tax rate on the wealthiest Americans and a corporate tax hike, there are also other Democratic proposals to raise revenue that lawmakers have introduced over the past months.

    “If something costs A, then you have two options. You can negotiate down from A, or you can find the money,” Porter said. “There are a huge number of corporations that are paying zero taxes,” she said. Porter pointed to proposals like Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Massachusetts) Real Corporate Profits Tax Act, which would tax companies based on profits reported to their shareholders rather than profits reported to the government, could help raise $700 billion to pay for the bill.

    “I have the will to do it,” Porter continued. “The question is, does Senator Manchin? Or is he more concerned about his corporate donors, including large corporations, the oil and gas companies, the big pharmaceutical companies, and others, who are getting away with paying nothing in our current tax system.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pressley Urges $30B for Public Transit After “Inadequate” Infrastructure Bill

    Rep. Ayanna Pressley

    Representatives led by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) are urging party leaders to include additional funding for public transportation on top of the “wholly inadequate” investment allotted in the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

    In the letter, Pressley and Democratic colleagues, including 61 cosigners, urge Democratic leaders to add $30 billion for public transportation to the $3.5 trillion bill. This would be in addition to the $39 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure bill that the lawmakers point out is $71 billion less than President Joe Biden’s original proposal.

    The amount allocated in the infrastructure bill is “wholly inadequate to meet current needs,” the lawmakers write. “The urgency of the climate crisis and the need for a robust economic recovery demand more.”

    Now is the time to make such an investment, the lawmakers argue. The reconciliation bill, which is also known as the “Build Back Better” bill, is a “once in a generation opportunity to build a sustainable and prosperous future for our country,” the lawmakers write.

    The letter sent Thursday is addressed to Democratic leadership and House Committee Transportation & Infrastructure Chair Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) and Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), and is led by Representatives Pressley, Jesús G. “Chuy” Garcia (D-Illinois) and Henry C. “Hank” Johnson Jr.

    Pointing out recent climate disasters like this summer’s heat waves and Tropical Storm Ida, which exposed gaping weaknesses in New York City’s public transit infrastructure, the Democrats say that the climate crisis heightens the need for public transportation investments.

    “While we support additional funding for electric vehicles, studies are clear that electric vehicles alone will not allow the United States to meet its climate goals in transportation. We must expand the use of other modes of transportation, especially public transit,” they write.

    “A significant expansion of public transit in both urban and rural areas is needed, especially in fast-growing areas like the Southeastern United States, and this goal can only be achieved through additional robust funding provided through the reconciliation legislation,” the Democrats continue.

    Indeed, climate researchers say that simply replacing gas cars with electric cars won’t decarbonize to the extent that’s necessary to significantly mitigate the climate crisis. Transportation is responsible for the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

    It’s resource intensive to manufacture and ship electric vehicles, especially the batteries. With the current pace of research and development on electric vehicles, experts say it may be many years before they’re as sustainable to manufacture in terms of emissions.

    Massive investment in public transportation will be necessary to make the option more enticing than cars. Green New Deal proponents say that an eventual massive climate bill or a Green New Deal specifically for public transportation could not only help draw down emissions, but also help with equity issues around transportation.

    “Safe, affordable and reliable public transportation is a public good and should be invested in as such,” Pressley said in a statement. “[P]olicymakers have a moral responsibility to prioritize robust investments that will help make our public transit systems more accessible and sustainable for generations to come.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 93 Groups Urge Congress to “Stand Up” Against Lobbyists on $3.5 Trillion Bill

    A protester holds a sign reading "NO CUTS TO CLIMATE, CARE AND JUSTICE!" during a demonstration

    As deep-pocketed lobbyists representing companies like Exxon mount a campaign to get Congress to gut the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, a coalition of 93 progressive and advocacy organizations are fighting back, urging lawmakers to keep the bill strong in the face of corporate pressure.

    The groups, led by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Economic Policy Institute, sent a letter to lawmakers telling them to keep provisions like tax hikes on the wealthy and corporations in the bill — provisions that the corporate lobby is particularly vehemently opposed to. They also encourage lawmakers to keep climate and social provisions in the bill.

    “Congress must step up and do the right thing and live up to its Constitutional and moral commitments to establish justice and the general welfare,” the groups write. “Now is not the time to let deep-pocketed corporate lobbyists stand in the way of vital public investments in an economy that works for all of us.”

    Among signatories of the letter are powerful labor groups like the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO); progressive groups like the Working Families Party; and climate groups like Sierra Club and the Sunrise Movement.

    The letter highlights proposals included in the Democrats’ original framework for the bill, arguing that it is crucial that lawmakers preserve the bill as it was first proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Democrats in the Senate. Climate provisions like funding for clean energy and electrifying public transportation, Medicare expansions, and support for parents like paid family leave and the child tax credit expansion are crucial to help working families stay afloat, they write.

    “Such investments would be a major boost to all working families, but especially to the tens of millions of poor and low-income people — disproportionately people of color — who have borne the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic and recession and have not yet recovered,” reads the letter.

    The letter writers also emphasize the importance of proposed tax hikes on the rich and corporations to help fund the bill but, more importantly, helping to bar the wealthy from paying less than their “fair share” in taxes — a message that Democrats and President Joe Biden himself have emphasized.

    The reconciliation bill, as the letter points out, enjoys significant favorability among the public. Polling by Hart Research Associates in July found 73 percent of voters support the reconciliation plan, called the Build Back Better plan. Recent polling by Data for Progress, meanwhile, found majority support for many of the bill’s major proposals like funding for care workers and modernizing the electricity grid.

    The coalition’s message comes as powerful lobbyists have descended upon Washington looking to get many of the bill’s largest provisions cut from the package. Lobbyists from across industries — entertainment, fossil fuels, big banks, major retailers, and drug manufacturers — are banding together to oppose the bill, pouring tens of millions into the effort. Conservative groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are lobbying specifically against the tax hikes; other targets are likely climate provisions, Medicare expansion and drug price negotiation, and paid family leave.

    The lobbyists already likely have the ear of several conservative Democrats in Congress, some of whom banded up with lobbyists in gutting climate provisions from the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), in fact, has already noted his opposition to potential climate proposals that would draw down fossil fuels in the U.S., and has been a leading proponent of gutting the package.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • AOC Pans Greg Abbott’s Pledge to End Rape in Texas: “GOP Laws HELP Abusers”

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has panned Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for his disingenuous claims about preventing sexual assault made while defending the state’s dangerous abortion ban this week.

    As Texas’s abortion ban has faced fierce criticism from a multitude of angles over the past weeks, Abbott has doubled down on a dubious defense: he will supposedly work to end sexual assault in the state by “eliminat[ing] all rapists,” incarcerating them instead.

    Aside from the obvious paradox of this statement — how could the government punish an assailant before they assault someone? — critics have pointed out that the sentiment isn’t actually genuine. Abbott doesn’t want to end sexual assault, critics say, and if he did, he would take actual steps to address rape culture.

    “If Gov. Abbott is as ‘anti-rape’ as he claims, why doesn’t he just lead the Texas state legislature to pass a law for $10k bounties on people who engage in or aid sexual assault?” wrote Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter — a likely dig at the “bounty hunter” aspect of the new anti-abortion law the governor just signed. “Or is he opposed to that because it’s a slippery slope of vigilantism where men could be unjustly targeted?”

    The so-called “bounty hunter” system that allows any private citizen to sue anyone who aids a person in getting an abortion and win a reward of $10,000 or more is exceptionally cruel, as critics have pointed out. It not only creates a massive chilling effect on abortion providers in the state, but also encourages harassment and sets a dangerous precedent of vigilantism, as Ocasio-Cortez pointed out.

    Bounty hunting as a practice has a grim, dark history in the U.S., having been used to abduct Black people into slavery and, in modern times, used to terrorize people who cannot afford to pay off bail bonds. Companies that bounty hunt make millions while causing untold suffering to their targets and their families.

    As critics of the abortion ban have pointed out, Texas’s abortion ban will likely disproportionately affect non-white, LGBTQ and poor people, who may lack the resources to travel out of state to obtain an abortion. The disproportionate effect of the law hearkens back, then, to bounty hunting’s racist and discriminatory roots.

    Such a system for enforcing any law only enhances the carceral state. Though the Texas law doesn’t directly incriminate abortion providers or people who aid someone seeking an abortion, it creates punitive measures for these individuals. It adds to, rather than eliminates, rape culture, which is one of the reasons a person may seek an abortion in the first place.

    Abortions should not be subject to punitive measures to begin with, and the negative stigma around what is clearly a medical procedure created by anti-choice groups is part of what has led the U.S. down this sordid path. The Texas abortion ban is extremely restrictive, not allowing even victims of rape or incest to be exempted from the law, which makes it particularly inhumane. Not that there should be any shame — or for that matter, a prohibitive law — associated with seeking an abortion for any reason in the first place, abortion rights activists point out.

    “Still thinking about how Gov. Abbott’s message to survivors terrified of the bounties now on their heads is ‘I will end rape.’ No, he won’t. He and the GOP just gave abusers & coercive partners a powerful new tool to intimidate victims,” wrote Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday. “These GOP laws HELP abusers, not stop them.”

    “By allowing any person to financially destroy pregnant people on a whim, they knowingly handed over the keys of manipulation & control to people most likely to use it,” she continued. “Don’t let them feign ignorance about this. They know exactly what they’re doing. This is about fear & control.”

    The New York lawmaker also wrote that the real reason Republicans are seeking to outlaw abortion is their desire to take away people’s body autonomy.

    “Sexual assault is an abuse of power that attempts to seize sexual control over another person’s body,” wrote Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter. “Anti-choice laws are also an abuse of power that attempts to seize sexual control over people’s bodies en masse. And that’s one way rape culture informs anti-choice legislation.”

    “It’s not a coincidence that Texas is where GOP are testing new ways to retake sexual control via legislation,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “Texas had ‘anti-sodomy’ laws in place until 2003 (!) that made non-PIV sex illegal until the Supreme Court overturned it on the basis of Roe v. Wade’s right to privacy.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Florida Judge Shoots Down Ron DeSantis’s Mask Ban for Second Time in 2 Weeks

    Ron DeSantis

    A Florida judge ruled on Wednesday that the state must stop enforcing Gov. Ron DeSantis’s ban on mask mandates as the state attempts to make their case that the ban should stay in place.

    Leon County Circuit Judge John C. Cooper said that the state’s argument for the ban was flimsy, emphasizing that masks are important in stopping the spread of the virus. “We’re not in normal times. We are in a pandemic,” he said. In issuing the ban, he said, the state was overstepping its authority.

    “We have a variant that’s more infectious and more dangerous to children than the one we had last year,” Cooper said, siding with parents who challenged the ban. “We’re in a non-disputed pandemic situation with threats to young children who, at least based on the evidence, have no way to avoid this unless to stay home and isolate themselves. I think everybody agrees that’s not good for them.” The state swiftly filed an appeal against Cooper’s decision.

    This is the second time that Cooper has ruled against the mandate. The first time was two weeks ago, when the judge said that the order defies the state’s constitution, which guarantees a right to safe schools. The state had filed an appeal against the ruling, allowing the mask mandate ban to go on temporarily until Wednesday’s ruling shot it down again, with Cooper saying that he does not believe the state’s appeal will be successful.

    Now that a court has shot down the appeal, it can’t be enforced, pending the decision of the state’s appeal. That means, according to NPR, that the state’s efforts to defund and fine school districts defying the mask mandate ban are also on hold for now.

    The case next goes in front of the Tallahassee 1st District Court of Appeals. DeSantis, unlike Cooper, is confident that the state’s appeal will be successful. “What we’ve found is in the trial courts in Tallahassee, state and federal, we typically lose if there’s a political component to it, but then in the appeals court we almost always win,” DeSantis said Wednesday.

    “I don’t know why the masks have politics around it,” the governor also said. But mask-wearing has been politicized by DeSantis’s own party; early in the pandemic, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began recommending that people wear masks to prevent the spread of the virus, it was Republicans who ridiculed and bucked that recommendation.

    Donald Trump was one of the first prominent Republicans to come out against wearing a mask, despite the gravity of the burgeoning pandemic and the scientific evidence that masks were effective at preventing spread of the virus. Since then, it has always been the Republicans spreading disinformation about masks and the severity of the pandemic.

    DeSantis himself has participated wholeheartedly in the politicization of masks. In his executive order barring mask mandates, he wrote that “forcing students to wear masks lacks a well-grounded scientific justification.” But his office cherry-picked evidence for that claim, citing a preliminary study from Brown University that even the study’s authors wrote did not offer conclusive evidence. Meanwhile, DeSantis has ignored several other studies showing that masking is effective in protecting children in schools.

    Partly as a result of DeSantis’s mask ban, pediatric COVID cases have been surging in the state. In August, Florida had the highest pediatric case rate of any other state in the country. The surge overwhelmed children’s hospitals, and children as young as two weeks old have died due to COVID.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Nearly 1 in 3 Americans Lived in Areas Affected by Weather Disaster This Summer

    Firefighters fight a wildfire

    Nearly one third of all Americans live in a county that experienced a weather disaster this summer, according to an analysis from The Washington Post. The data starkly shows the intensification of the climate crisis in recent years and the urgent need for action to prevent further disaster.

    Over 32 percent of Americans lived in a county or state declared a disaster area by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), according to the analysis of federal disaster declarations. The publication also found that 64 percent of Americans live in an area that experienced a multiday heat wave over the past months.

    The analysis reveals a concerning trend regarding the impacts of the climate crisis on the U.S. The share of Americans living in a weather-disaster-afflicted county or state has increased steadily since 2018, when it was only 5 percent. Even 2020, which was a landmark year for climate disasters, saw a smaller share of Americans — 28 percent — affected by natural disasters where they lived.

    This summer, however, has indeed been particularly disaster-prone. Intense heat waves hit the Pacific Northwest in June, shattering records in the area where a large share of residents don’t have air conditioning; nearly 200 people in Washington and Oregon died. In July, heat waves hit elsewhere in the West, where Death Valley experienced the hottest temperature in recorded history. July ended up being the hottest month in Earth’s recorded history.

    Wildfires raged — and in some cases, are still raging. They not only choked out communities in Idaho and California, but also as far east as New York, where smoke had traveled from across the country. And, as climate crises converged, Hurricane Ida tore through Louisiana before heading into New York, leaving floods, blackouts and destruction in its wake.

    The overlapping disasters demonstrated that the climate crisis isn’t a far-off crisis; it’s here and now. All of these weather events were either caused directly by or intensified drastically by the climate crisis. They show no sign of stopping, as carbon dioxide concentrations increase year by year and fossil fuels continue to dominate the energy industry.

    The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned of dire consequences if the world stays on its current track. The average temperature could rise past 4 degrees Celsius or more over the next few decades on the trajectory we’re on now, causing unprecedented damage.

    Concerningly, even if the world’s powers stopped emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, the IPCC wrote that a certain amount of warming is already locked in. If corporations, financial institutions and governments agreed to begin drawing down emissions immediately — a more realistic but still incredibly improbable scenario — it would still be logistically difficult to stop the world from reaching 2 degrees Celsius of warming, much less the 1.5 degrees Celsius agreed upon in the Paris agreement.

    Yet even some Democrats in Washington are recalcitrant about barring new fossil fuel projects that even traditionally conservative groups have deemed necessary. Certain legislators, like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) maintain deep ties with fossil fuel lobbyists. Backed and funded by the lobbyists, conservative Democrats and Republicans have repeatedly blocked climate legislation, moves that are tantamount to climate denial.

    “What we are doing with global warming is making ourselves play a game that is rigged more and more against us because of our own actions,” climate scientist Claudia Tebaldi told The Washington Post.

    The U.S.’s best chance at passing significant climate legislation is currently sitting before Congress in the form of the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. Climate groups are urging lawmakers to include hundreds of billions of dollars worth of climate mitigation measures like clean energy tax credits and stopping fossil fuel subsidies — measures that would cost less than the climate crisis is currently costing and will cost over the next decades.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Treasury Finds Wealthiest 1 Percent Dodge Over $160 Billion in Taxes Yearly

    Elon Musk

    The wealthiest 1 percent of people in the U.S. avoid paying a huge amount of the taxes they would normally owe every year, according to a new report from the Treasury Department.

    The report found that the top 1 percent avoid paying over $160 billion in taxes every year, or about 28 percent of all taxes dodged yearly. The Treasury, citing a study of data from 2019 that calculates $163 billion in lost tax revenue, said “Ongoing work by IRS researchers and outside academics suggest[s] the concentration of the tax gap is even more skewed toward the top of the income distribution.”

    While the agency notes that it’s difficult to estimate the tax loss from the highest tax brackets, the data shows that the bulk of the $163 billion figure stems from the wealthiest 0.5 percent of Americans who, according to the Treasury Department, dodge $120 billion in taxes annually.

    Overall, the amount of taxes that don’t get paid every year by all taxpayers is equal to the entirety of the amount in income taxes paid by the bottom 90 percent of earners, the agency found. More importantly, the top 10 percent of earners are responsible for nearly 53 percent of the gap in taxes owed but not paid yearly.

    “A well-functioning tax system requires that everyone pays the taxes they owe,” wrote Natasha Sarin, the Treasury Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy. “The tax gap can be a major source of inequity. Today’s tax code contains two sets of rules: one for regular wage and salary workers who report virtually all the income they earn; and another for wealthy taxpayers, who are often able to avoid a large share of the taxes they owe.”

    The report comes as Democrats and the White House have mounted a push to increase tax compliance with extra funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has previously said that the U.S. has missed out on over $7 trillion in uncollected taxes over a decade.

    If the U.S. were able to capture the $163 billion in unpaid taxes from the top 1 percent every year for the next 10 years, even without hiking taxes for the wealthy, it could pay for nearly half of the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill.

    The Biden administration has spent the last months emphasizing ways to close the “tax gap,” or the proportion of income taxes paid by lower- and middle-income earners versus that paid by the wealthy and corporations. In the spring, Joe Biden unveiled a plan to essentially double the IRS’s enforcement arm in order to capture income taxes skipped by corporations and the wealthy. The plan, according to the May announcement, would give the agency $80 billion in funding over a decade and raise at least $780 billion over the next decade.

    “The United States collects less tax revenue as a percentage of GDP than at most points in recent history, in part because owed but uncollected taxes are so significant,” wrote Sarin. “These unpaid taxes mean policymakers must choose between rising deficits, lower spending on important priorities, or further tax increase to compensate for lost revenue—which will only be borne by compliant taxpayers.”

    Sarin also pointed out that the IRS simply lacks the resources to chase after all of the lost taxes. And, without the ability to sniff out the complicated tax-cheating methods used by the wealthy, the IRS’s audit rates for the wealthy have seriously declined over the years, whereas the audit rate for low-income recipients of the Earned Income Tax Credit has not been greatly affected.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) has also previously suggested an IRS crackdown on wealthy tax cheats — one that goes further than the Biden plan. Her plan would give the agency $31.5 billion yearly, more than twice its budget for 2021. This plan could raise $1.75 trillion over the next decade, Warren has said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Exxon-Tied Manchin Is Again Holding $3.5T Bill Hostage Over Climate Proposals

    Joe Manchin

    As Democrats and progressives have been working on crafting the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) has taken a hard stance against the size of the bill. Now he says that he won’t accept a bill larger than $1.5 trillion — and would prefer a price tag as small as $1 trillion instead.

    According to Axios, Manchin has told the White House about his specific concerns with the bill. Last week, he wrote in an op-ed that he thinks Democrats and progressives should hit “pause” on the bill and consider “significantly reducing the size of any possible reconciliation bill.”

    Manchin evidently has concerns about the scope of some programs like universal preschool, the child tax credit extension, child care tax credits and free community college. Similar to the way he cut down the amount for unemployment checks during stimulus bill negotiations and lowered the income ceiling for people qualifying to receive a stimulus check, the senator thinks that these vital social programs in the reconciliation bill should be subject to means testing.

    He is also concerned about the proposal, originally from President Joe Biden, to spend $400 billion to support caretakers, including people who take care of the elderly and people with disabilities. Manchin has said that he doesn’t want to add to the deficit, and evidently doesn’t believe his colleagues who say that the bill will pay for itself.

    It’s unclear at this point what other proposals in the bill the West Virginia conservative Democrat is concerned about. With such a disparate price tag from what has been the established size of the bill after prolonged negotiations with centrists, it is fair to assume that Manchin would like much more cut out of the bill.

    The senator has said before that he finds climate proposals in the bill “disturbing,” for instance. Echoing the talking points of fossil fuel lobbyists, Manchin says he doesn’t support a drastic reduction in fossil fuel use, which climate science shows is necessary to avoid the worsening impacts of the climate crisis. As it stands, the reconciliation bill is the only bill with major climate proposals that stands a chance of passing into law.

    Though Manchin says he is concerned that the bill won’t be fully paid for, he was also part of the bipartisan group of senators that cut nearly every pay-for from the infrastructure package this summer. That package ended up being a fraction of the size that Biden had originally proposed, and didn’t include the original relatively modest taxes on the rich and corporations.

    The senator’s objections to the reconciliation bill may be influenced by the massive amount of lobbying that conservative groups are putting into opposing the effort. Groups and corporations representing a wide swath of interests, including Exxon, Pfizer, Disney, and the conservative lobbyist group U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are launching an offensive against the bill. Manchin has documented ties to deep-pocketed lobbyists, including those from Exxon.

    Groups like the Chamber of Commerce are trying specifically to eliminate or drastically cut down any tax increases on the rich and corporations. According to The New York Times, while Congress is considering a tax increase on corporations, it is only a very modest one from the current 21 percent to 25 percent, and not a return to the 35 percent that it was before the Republican tax cuts of 2017.

    As the Senate has begun drafting the bill, other points of contention have started to make an appearance. Some Democrats, reports CNN, are insistent on repealing the state and local tax deduction (SALT) cap, which experts say would largely benefit the wealthiest individuals in the U.S.

    Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vermont) Medicare expansion, meanwhile, is viewed as costly by some members of the House, according to CNN — even though his proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices could save the government $500 billion over the next 10 years.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Greg Abbott’s Approval Rating Hits All-Time Low as COVID Rages Across Texas

    Texas Governor Greg Abbott speaks during a press conference on June 8, 2021 in Austin, Texas.

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s approval rating has dropped over the past months as he has led Republicans in the state to pursue and pass a number of restrictive and discriminatory laws over the summer.

    Polling done just before the abortion ban in the state took effect by the Texas Politics Project, run by the University of Texas at Austin, finds that Abbott’s approval rating went from a net even 44 percent approval and disaspproval in June, to a net negative in the group’s most recent poll. Now, 41 percent of people polled approve of the GOP governor’s job performance, while 50 percent disapprove.

    Abbot’s approval rating dropped with people across the partisan spectrum: from 8 percent to 6 percent among Democrats, 77 percent to 73 percent among Republicans and 41 percent to 30 percent among independents. According to the Texas Politics Project, Abbott’s approval rating is now the lowest it has been since he took office in 2015.

    Overall, the poll found that a majority of those polled think that Texas is going in the wrong direction. While only 35 percent of those polled believe the state is going in the right direction, 52 percent believe it’s on the wrong track.

    Part of the reason for Abbott’s declining approval rating and the pessimism over the state’s direction may be due to the pandemic, said the executive director of the Texas Politics Project. “This is really an eye-opener for us,” Jim Henson told KXAN.

    The poll found that Texans generally disapprove of Abbott’s handling of the pandemic, with his approval ratings on the issue reaching the lowest levels since the beginning of the pandemic in April 2020. Only 39 percent of those polled approved of how Abbott has handled the COVID pandemic in his state, while 53 percent disapproved.

    Over the past months, the Delta variant of COVID-19 has surged across Texas. Case rates in Texas and across the country appear to be flattening, but the state has some of the highest rates for infections and deaths. Texas also has a relatively low vaccination rate, with only 48 percent of adults fully vaccinated to date.

    Part of the reason for the high case counts, especially in recent weeks, is Abbott’s insistence in not taking the necessary measures to stop the spread of the virus. In fact, he has moved against the recommendations of public health experts and ordered a ban on mask mandates from government entities, which has almost certainly contributed to a surge in cases among children as schools have returned to in-person classes.

    The mask mandate ban is also unpopular, according to the Texas Politics Project poll. Forty-one percent of those polled support it, while 45 percent are opposed.

    Though the poll was conducted before the state’s abortion ban went into effect, Texas Republicans have been working for months to suppress voters and implement other radical right-wing measures across the state.

    Republicans’ recent voter suppression bill, for instance, makes it harder for Black and brown people and people with disabilities to vote. The GOP has also been working on a number of bigoted anti-trans laws aimed at making it harder for transgender children and adults to survive in the state.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • More States Are Considering Implementing Abortion Bans Similar to Texas’s

    Pro-choice abortion activists protest during a demonstration outside the Supreme Court in Washington on March 4, 2020.

    After conservative justices in the Supreme Court upheld Texas Republicans’ draconian abortion ban this week, GOP lawmakers in other states are already considering similar infringements on reproductive rights, despite the ban’s unpopularity.

    Republican officials in Arkansas, South Dakota and Florida are looking into how Texas’s “bounty hunter” method of enforcing the ban could be used to bar people from accessing the vital health care procedure in their states.

    The Florida Senate president, Republican Wilton Simpson, told local media outlet WFLA that the state GOP is working on a bill already that would ban abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy — essentially a near-total ban like that of Texas.

    One Republican lawmaker in Arkansas has already filed a 6-week abortion ban similar to Texas’s; and, in South Dakota, GOP Gov. Kristi Noem said Thursday that she’s directing people in her administration to ensure that her state also has “the strongest” anti-choice laws possible.

    As Axios writes, there are about a dozen other states that have tried to implement similar abortion laws recently but have had their efforts shot down by the courts. North Dakota, Iowa, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia recently tried passing restrictive laws that were shot down by courts. Other states like Ohio had laws that were temporarily blocked by courts.

    Conservative justices in the Supreme Court could soon overturn Roe v. Wade across the country, which, if it occurs, would surely spark a wave of anti-abortion policies across states that haven’t already tried to pass such bills. It’s unclear whether the Supreme Court will issue a sweeping overturn of the decades-old abortion rights precedent, but the Texas decision blatantly guts it.

    Critics say that the abortion ban — which effectively within Texas denies the reproductive freedoms that Roe v. Wade sought to protect, without expressly seeking to overturn the ruling — is cruel not only because it rescinds people’s rights, but also because of its “private right of action” enforcement mechanism. The law allows any private citizen to sue someone who aids a pregnant person in getting an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy — or well before the vast majority of people even know that they’re pregnant.

    If the defendant is found to have aided the abortion in any way, they will be ordered to pay court fees and $10,000 or more to the plaintiff. This will have a vast chilling effect on abortions in the state, as health care providers, abortion clinics and any family members or even Uber drivers who assist the pregnant person in obtaining an abortion could get sued, creating an atmosphere of terror around the procedure in the state.

    Banning abortion is incredibly dangerous, and in countries that have adopted such bans, many people die from trying to obtain an abortion illegally. Texas’s law is incredibly strict, with no exceptions for rape and incest and very few exceptions for medical emergencies. If other states adopt similar policies, they could also severely endanger the life of pregnant people both during and after the pregnancy.

    But Republicans may run into roadblocks when trying to implement such policies. The “bounty hunter” method of enforcing abortion and the abortion ban in general will likely end up being challenged in courts by pro-choice groups. On top of that, the GOP hasn’t even been publicizing what is an ostensible win for its anti-choice agenda — perhaps because abortion bans are unpopular, and near-total abortion bans even more so.

    Democrats in the House have said they’re working on passing a bill to guarantee abortion access for all across the country. But the bill faces essentially zero odds of passing the Senate, so long as the filibuster and its defenders stay in place.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ocasio-Cortez Slams Manchin for $3.5T Bill Opposition, Points Out Exxon Ties

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) is seen on the House steps of the Capitol during a vigil lead by Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) to call on President Biden and Congress to renew the expiring eviction moratorium on August 03, 2021.

    Progressives berated Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) for willfully ignoring the disastrous effects of the climate crisis on the U.S. after he urged Democrats to “hit the pause button” on the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation package and argued for “a strategic pause” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Thursday.

    “By placing a strategic pause on this budgetary proposal, by significantly reducing the size of any possible reconciliation bill to only what America can afford and needs to spend, we can and will build a better and stronger nation for all our families,” Manchin wrote.

    “If only you could just ‘hit the pause button’ on our climate crisis,” tweeted Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) in response.

    “I wish that I could hit your mute button but here we are,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts).

    “[M]aybe we hit the ‘cancel’ button on this so-called ‘bipartisan’ charade of an Exxon lobbyist drafted infrastructure bill unless we actually pass a law that helps people’s lives with healthcare expansion, childcare, climate action, etc,” wrote Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) on Twitter.

    Critics of Manchin pointed out that climate disasters in the past week like Hurricane Ida have killed at least 43 people so far and caused major flooding in New York City.

    In the WSJ op-ed, Manchin wrote that the federal government shouldn’t be spending $3.5 trillion because a smaller bill, containing a wide slate of social and climate proposals, would actually help the public more.

    The West Virginia senator also ignored the fact that Democratic leadership has promised that the bill will be fully paid for. He claimed, instead, that Democrats are ignoring the national debt and that it’s irresponsible for the government to spend more than it has on the stimulus bills — the bills that kept middle- and lower-class families afloat during an unprecedented economic crisis and pandemic.

    With this position, Manchin stands directly against President Joe Biden, fracturing the party at a time when unity is sorely needed to pass key parts of the Democrats’ agenda. Manchin is also standing directly against the dozens of progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) who have said that they will not accept a smaller reconciliation deal.

    Progressives have said that they will vote against the bipartisan infrastructure bill that contains very little funding for climate and social programs if conservative Democrats water down the reconciliation bill, as they’re threatening to do.

    Manchin has continually stood against Democratic priorities like voting rights and addressing the climate crisis over the past months, earning a poor reputation among progressives and Democrats alike. Instead, he seems to align closer to deep-pocketed lobbyists, many conservative-leaning, with whom he has created strong relationships.

    Manchin helped to carve climate proposals out of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, in fact, leaving only measly funding for electric vehicles. He also keeps a close relationship with fossil fuel lobbyists and wealthy Wall Street figures who are lobbying against many of the climate, taxation and social proposals in the mix with the reconciliation bill.

    “Manchin has weekly huddles with Exxon and is one of many senators who gives lobbyists their pen to write so-called ‘bipartisan’ fossil fuel bills,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “It’s killing people. Our people. At least 12 last night. Sick of this ‘bipartisan’ corruption that masquerades as clear-eyed moderation.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • It’s Not Just Abortion: Texas GOP Quietly Rolled Back Other Rights on Sept. 1

    People display signs during the Georgetown to Austin March for Democracy rally on July 31, 2021 in Austin, Texas.

    While the big news from Texas this week was about the Supreme Court upholding the state’s ban on essentially all abortions in the state, a number of other restrictive laws that advance a far right Republican agenda also went into effect the same day.

    A total of 666 new laws were rolled out on Wednesday. Many of them, if they had been implemented individually, would have raised the alarm for Democrats and progressives. One law, for instance, criminalizes homelessness by disallowing people without homes from camping in a public location, making the act a misdemeanor with a $500 fine. Another law will make it illegal for people to hire workers for sex, which critics say will only exacerbate dangerous conditions for sex workers.

    Many of the laws that went into effect on September 1 were a direct backlash against the Movement for Black Lives that gained momentum across the country over the past year, along with the general movement for racial justice. One bill will create financial penalties for medium to large municipalities that decline their police departments’ budgets yearly.

    Another bill that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed in June bans the teaching of critical race theory in K-12 schools. The scholarly theory, deliberately misinterpreted and politicized by the GOP, is not taught in grade schools. However, the intent of the law is to discourage educators from teaching American history without a white supremacist lens or talking about race in school. It bars teachers from giving “deference” to either side of a conflict while teaching about historical events.

    One bill, which again appears to be a backlash against last year’s mass uprisings for racial justice, makes it a felony for protestors to block a road while protesting. This will lead to harsher penalties for left-wing protesters who already face disproportionate punishment and violence from police when they demonstrate.

    A law that bans establishments from requiring a COVID-19 vaccine before entry also went into effect on Wednesday after having been signed by Abbott earlier this year. The punishment for requiring vaccinations is especially harsh on businesses: a business could be denied state contracts or even lose their license if they are found requiring customers to be vaccinated.

    And then, of course, Texas also implemented a law that essentially overturns Roe v. Wade in the state, outlawing abortions at a point so early in the pregnancy that most people don’t even realize that they are pregnant. It will do untold damage to the millions of people in the state that it affects — especially low-income people who don’t have the wherewithal to go out of state to seek abortion care

    Texas Republicans are working on yet more restrictive laws to come, many of them advancing a radical authoritarian agenda.

    Abbott called the current special legislative session just so Republicans could pass a number of radical bills that the legislature wasn’t able to pass during the regular session. One is a bill aimed at making it harder for non-white people and people with disabilities to vote. The legislature passed the bill Tuesday, and Abbott has pledged to sign it.

    Unsatisfied with just one bill scaring teachers from talking about race in schools, Republican legislators in the special session are advancing yet another supposed critical race theory bill that would remove required civil rights teachings from the curriculum, including writings from Martin Luther King, Jr. and lessons about slavery, white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan being “morally wrong.”

    Republicans are also hoping to pass a slate of hateful anti-trans bills that would limit health care access for transgender youth, bar them from participating in sports, and more. The Texas GOP is following a wave of anti-trans laws being passed by Republicans across the country.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.