"Millions of viewers will no longer be subsidizing this hateful content with their monthly pay-TV bills," said one campaigner.
Facing a wave of grassroots pressure, one of the largest television providers in the U.S. reportedly plans to drop the far-right, rabidly pro-Trump One America News Network, an outlet that has come under fire for disseminating falsehoods about the 2020 election results, the coronavirus pandemic, and other major issues. Continue reading →
"The filibuster is a meaningless Senate rule. It's a remnant of slavery used to block civil rights for generations."
On what would have been Martin Luther King Jr.’s 93rd birthday, voting rights advocates and progressive lawmakers rallied in Arizona on Saturday to target the first-term Democratic senator blocking legislation aimed at strengthening ballot access amid growing GOP-led suppression efforts. Continue reading →
WASHINGTON—Recalling the 1930s, when the “Nine Old Men” scrapped key New Deal legislation, the GOP-named U.S. Supreme Court majority may again show its implementation of the right-wing pro-corporate agenda, this time by nullifying OSHA’s anti-coronavirus Emergency Temporary Standard. Continue reading →
"We're old enough to remember a whole month ago when both Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin voted to make an exception to the filibuster for the debt ceiling," Public Citizen sardonically noted.
As conservative U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin on Thursday joined his right-wing Democratic colleague Kyrsten Sinema in announcing his opposition to abolishing the Senate filibuster, progressive observers excoriated the pair—who recently supported a filibuster carve-out to raise the debt ceiling—for obstructing their party’s landmark voting rights legislation. Continue reading →
WASHINGTON—One year after the deadly Trump coup attempt, President Joe Biden stood at the U.S. Capitol last Thursday morning and indicted the former White House occupant and his supporters in the Republican Party as part of an ongoing conspiracy against democracy. Continue reading →
A bizarre event took place in northern India between December 17 and December 19, 2021. It was a “religious parliament” (Dharma Sansad) with the theme, “The Future of the Sanatan Dharma in Islamic India: Problem and Solutions.” The event took place in Haridwar, a city in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. The speakers—each of them dressed in saffron robes, which are usually worn by Hindu monks—took to the stage during the Dharma Sansad and spoke in a startlingly dangerous and provocative fashion. Sadhvi Annapurna, the general secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha, a right-wing Hindu nationalist outfit in India, was the most forthright in spelling out the agenda of hatred against the Muslim community that marked the tone for this event. “Nothing is possible without weapons,” she said. “If you want to eliminate their [the Muslim] population, then we are ready to kill them.” Continue reading →
"It is unconscionable," said one advocate welcoming the announcement, "for Medicare premiums to increase this dramatically because of one corporation's greed."
As the head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced Monday that he was ordering a review of a planned 15% hike in the Medicare Part B premium for 2022, healthcare reform advocates stressed the need for Congress to pass a Build Back Better bill with a provision allowing the federal government to negotiate the price of prescription drugs. Continue reading →
"Sen. Joe Manchin—who is a multimillionaire—doesn't think his poor constituents can be trusted with a little help."
As 36 million families across the U.S. appeared unlikely to receive any further child tax credit payments after the New Year following Sen. Joe Manchin’s refusal to support the Build Back Better Act, progressives on Monday were outraged over reports that the threat to the payments stems from the right-wing senator’s belief that parents might use the money for drugs or other uses he deems unnecessary. Continue reading →
WASHINGTON—Documents and e-mails which Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, provided to the House panel probing the January 6th insurrection and invasion of the U.S. Capitol—an invasion to produce a pro-Trump coup—show Trump’s involvement in planning the strategy to try to overturn his 2020 defeat and keep himself in the Oval Office, if not planning the insurrection itself. Continue reading →
It is hugely significant that even one café out of thousands in the iconic Starbucks coffee chain has beaten back the company’s union-busting tactics to choose collective power in the workplace.
The iconic American coffee chain, Starbucks, employs hundreds of thousands of people in nearly 9,000 cafés nationwide. And yet, the news that a handful of Starbucks employees at one café in Buffalo, New York, recently voted to join Workers United—an affiliate of SEIU—made headlines nationally. The New York Times called it a “big symbolic win for labor,” while the Washington Post hailed it as a “watershed union vote.” Social media feeds were replete with joyous posts celebrating the vote. The café, located on Elmwood Avenue, was the only one out of three union-voting Starbucks locations in Buffalo that successfully chose to unionize. Continue reading →
These are policy choices," said one economic justice group. "We don't have to choose this. All of this is 100% unnecessary and avoidable."
Progressives are spelling out for the Democratic Party the disastrous implications that are likely to come with the government’s possible failure to extend the enhanced child tax credit right as the White House plans to require tens of millions of people to restart their federal student loan payments—warning that the 2022 midterms could be “brutal” if the party imposes new financial burdens on working families. Continue reading →
"While EPA fiddles, grave harm to bees and other pollinators continues," said one advocacy group.
After waiting nearly five years for the Environmental Protection Agency to respond to a petition calling for the closing of a regulatory loophole which has proven deadly for honey bee colonies—spelling disaster for farmers’ crops, food security, and biodiversity—two advocacy groups are suing the agency and demanding officials take immediate action to end the use of harmful pesticides known as neonics. Continue reading →
The U.S. military is famous for being the single largest consumer of petroleum products in the world and the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Its carbon emissions exceed those released by “more than 100 countries combined.” Continue reading →
Economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich called the revelations from the new reporting "beyond horrific."
Multiple employees of the Mayfield, Kentucky, candle factory that was leveled by a devastating tornado late Friday said that supervisors threatened firings if workers left their shifts early amid warnings of the impending storm, according to new reporting by NBC News. Continue reading →
If the internet were a country, it would be the sixth biggest user of electricity.
The paradox of combating climate change is that the extent of the emergency extends far beyond the actions taken by individuals to mitigate the climate crisis, yet collective action is what is most required to address this issue. There are so many examples of this dilemma—from recycling to how power is being generated, to what people should consume. In each case, broad-based action is required to shift the dial, and while it might seem insurmountable, every little bit counts. A great example of this sentiment in action can be found in the growing field of eco-friendly web design. Continue reading →
"We'd hoped that the horrific anti-wildlife tactics so often employed during the Trump era had ended, but it appears we were wrong," said one conservationist.
Conservation advocates accused the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of “deep rot within the agency” Monday as they condemned the Biden administration’s plan to weaken or eliminate protections for several endangered species—a step that officials appear to be taking without any consideration for the threats the climate crisis poses to the animals. Continue reading →
On November 25, 2021, an article appeared in Uganda’s national newspaper the Daily Monitor with the headline: “Uganda surrenders airport for China cash.” The article pointed to “toxic clauses” in the loan agreement signed by the Ugandan government with the Export-Import (Exim) Bank of China on March 31, 2015. The loan—worth $207 million at 2 percent interest—was for the expansion of the Entebbe International Airport—a project under the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Work on the expansion of the airport began in May 2016. Continue reading →
BUFFALO, N.Y.—Starbucks Workers United broke a significant barrier on December 9 with the first-ever worker win at the big retail coffee chain. Workers at the Elmwood store in Buffalo voted 19-8 to unionize with Starbucks Workers United, the National Labor Relations Board officer announced. The union also won 15-9 at a second store, but there are seven challenged ballots, and the NLRB will have to decide whether and how many of them to count. Continue reading →
WASHINGTON—The Postal Workers are pushing Congress to approve comprehensive postal reform before the end of this year, but it appears that even the Democratic-run House isn’t listening. Continue reading →
"Americans looking for someone to blame for the pain they experience at the pump need look no further than the wealthy oil and gas company executives who choose to line their own pockets."
While rising gasoline prices have adversely affected millions of working people in the U.S., the world’s biggest fossil fuel corporations have benefited immensely, raking in a combined $174 billion in profits during the first nine months of this year. Continue reading →
“This is who they are,” said the Minnesota Democrat. “And we have to be able to stand up to them. And we have to push them to reckon with the fact their party right now is normalizing anti-Muslim bigotry.” Continue reading →
With a second union vote at its Alabama warehouse coming at a time of rising worker disaffection, Amazon is clearly worried that American workers will go the way of Europe: toward collective bargaining for their labor rights.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has just ruled that a historic union vote held earlier this year among Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) was not valid. The highly publicized vote, which took place over several weeks in February and March 2021, resulted in a resounding defeat for the union, with more than 70 percent of those voting choosing against union membership. Continue reading →
WASHINGTON—Declaring they would never give up the fight for reproductive choice and legal abortion, approximately 1,000 pro-choice advocates literally ringed the Supreme Court building to publicize their cause, hours after the six right-wing justices on the nine-member Court indicated they were ready to end abortion rights in much if not all of the country, starting with upholding the restrictive Mississippi law. Continue reading →
More than 1,500 physicians warn that the experiment threatens "the future of Medicare as we know it."
A Trump-era pilot program that could result in the complete privatization of traditional Medicare in a matter of years is moving ahead under the Biden administration, a development that—despite its potentially massive implications for patients across the U.S.—has received scant attention from the national press or Congress. Continue reading →
"The more sway mega-corporations have over our economy, the more power they have to gouge customers, squeeze Main Street, and exploit workers."
Amid mounting data showing that people are paying more for food at grocery stores around the United States, a new analysis out Wednesday reveals how corporate power is “the real culprit behind rising prices at the checkout line.” Continue reading →
On October 21, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz announced the issuance of a military order designating six prominent Palestinian human rights groups as ‘terrorist organizations’. Gantz claimed that they are secretly linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a socialist political group that Israel considers, along with most Palestinian political parties, ‘a terrorist organization.’ Continue reading →
In 2011, FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg, an Obama nominee, lamented that the government could not find enough experts who were not funded by drug makers to serve on advisory committees and recommended that the FDA’s conflict of interest rules be loosened. Continue reading →
Almost 50 years have passed since Pinochet took power, so what exactly is Australia afraid of?
The U.S. has declassified thousands of documents relating to its involvement in the ousting of Chile’s socialist President Salvador Allende and the installing of dictator Augusto Pinochet. Australia, on the other hand, continues to guard its classified documents on the pretext of security, drawing a discrepancy between its purported democratic principles and obstructing the public’s right to knowledge. As a country which welcomed Chileans fleeing the horrors of Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, as well as harbouring Chilean agents—the most notable case being that of Adriana Rivas—Australia’s political and moral obligation should not be played down. Continue reading →
Most Cubans seem more concerned with getting their economy fired up than toppling their leaders. Even if they blame their government for mismanagement, corruption and a system that stifles private enterprise, few fail to recognize the enormous impact of U.S. sanctions.
HAVANA—“If you build it, they will come,” said Kevin Costner in the Field of Dreams. In Cuba, they didn’t come. Dissidents on the island, with their U.S. backers, had been working feverishly for months to turn the unprecedented July 11 protests into a crescendo of government opposition on November 15. They built a formidable structure, with sophisticated social media (including an abundance of fake news), piles of cash from Cuban Americans and the U.S. government, and declarations of support from a bipartisan Congress and all the way up to the White House. Continue reading →
WASHINGTON—As Congress returned to D.C. the week of Nov. 15, the continuing war over President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda—an agenda that would enact the large expansion of the social safety net the U.S. has needed for years—heated up. Continue reading →
On September 20, letters began to arrive at eight Cuban municipal or provincial government headquarters announcing the holding of “peaceful” marches on November 15 by a group called Archipiélago. The motivation for these marches was a call for change. The letter was not a formal request to occupy the busiest streets of some cities in Cuba, but rather a notification by the group that they would do so and they also demanded that the authorities provide them with security for these marches. By virtue of Cuban laws and obsessive American support for the marches, the Cuban government denied permission for holding the protests. Continue reading →
"This man should not serve in Congress," said Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). "Fantasizing about violently attacking your colleagues has no place in our political discourse and society."
Far-right Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona is drawing widespread condemnation for sharing an edited animated video depicting him killing Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, conduct that lawmakers and others said warrants his immediate removal from office. Continue reading →
