Policies
Encouraging immigrants to become citizens is an American tradition, one so old that it goes back to the earliest moments of U.S. history. For the signers of the Declaration of Independence, “obstructing the Laws for the Naturalization of Foreigners” comprised one of the core grievances justifying the American colonists’ break with Britain. #migrantswelcome
Space is vast. Yet Earth orbits are becoming increasingly littered with debris
A shocking article in the Daily Caller this week blew the lid on what it’s really like among all those “public servants” working in the Federal bureaucracy: about 85 percent of them do nothing at all related to their jobs. With thousands of “workers” furloughed, the government offices are actually working better than ever. Is there a lesson in this somewhere? Ron Paul discusses this topic with Daniel McAdams. #governmentshutdown
It is a common misconception that democracies do not start wars of aggression or carry out terrorist attacks. The historical facts for the period from 1945 to today show a completely different reality: time and again, democratic states in Europe and North America have participated in wars of aggression and terrorist attacks in the past 70 years. There are so many cases that I am not able to list all of them here. As examples, I have selected three events from different decades….
In the six months since he stepped in to oversee the Environmental Protection Agency following Scott Pruitt’s resignation last summer, Andrew Wheeler has gutted fuel efficiency standards, rolled back carbon emissions rules for coal plants, and moved to allow more mercury emissions—and President Donald Trump made his approval known Wednesday as he nominated Wheeler to officially head the agency. “The only thing Wheeler is going to protect at the EPA is the profits of polluters,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), in a statement. “I’m sure corporate board rooms will celebrate this nomination. But for anyone who drinks water, breathes air, or cares about wildlife, this will be nothing but awful.” #environment
I live in Vienna, Austria, where the 5G rollout is suddenly upon us. Within the last five weeks, pre-5G has been officially announced at Vienna airport and 5G at the Rathausplatz, the main square in Vienna, which attracts tens of thousands of visitors to its Christmas market each December and skating rink each January, which are special treats for children. Along with birds and insects, children are the most vulnerable to 5G depredation because of their little bodies.[8] Friends and acquaintances and their children in Vienna are already reporting the classic symptoms of EMR poisoning…
Hope for 2019: While our #democracy is fragile needs the force of law and the will of the people to protect it, Americans have been rising to and meeting that challenge.
Public production of essential medicines is an idea whose time has come. A new bill introduced by Warren and Schakowsky is representative of growing sentiment both throughout the country and on Capitol Hill that business as usual in the pharmaceutical sector benefits neither public health nor democracy. Putting public manufacturing for the public good on the table as a real option represents an important advance towards a system that priorities human need over corporate profit. #pharma
The Senate on Thursday overwhelmingly passed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) resolution to end U.S. military support for Saudi Arabia’s years-long assault on Yemen and #yemeni children by a bipartisan vote of 56-41. #YemenCantWait
As the U.S. Senate prepared Wednesday to vote on a resolution to cut military support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, House Republicans in their last days in power moved to undermine efforts to end U.S. complicity in the assault that’s dragged on for more than three years in the impoverished country. #YemenCantWait
Following four weeks of “Yellow Vest” protests which have erupted into violence at times, French President Emmanuel Macron indicated Monday that his government can no longer ignore the demands of hundreds of thousands of citizens—announcing a minimum wage increase and a cancellation of a tax on retirees, but still refusing to relent on one of his most widely-criticized tax reforms. #yellowvest
A new study published Thursday in The Lancet, one of the world’s preeminent medical journals, makes clear the increasingly familiar attacks used by right-wingers worldwide to dehumanize migrants and refugees by describing them as disease-infested is a xenophobic slur rooted in racism and hate, not facts or the science of public health. In fact, immigrants do more to improve the health of their new country than to harm it.
“Medicare for All promises a system that is fairer, more efficient, and vastly less expensive than America’s bloated, monopolized, over-priced and under-performing private health insurance system,” argued Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs. “It’s easy to pay for something that costs less,” said Robert Pollin, economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. #medicareforall
Kicking off the inaugural Sanders Institute conference in Burlington, Vermont this weekend—billed as “A Gathering of Minds to Envision the World We Want”—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) gave a keynote address to a crowd of influential progressives from around the world Thursday evening. In keeping with the Gathering’s mission “to revitalize our democracy,” Sanders’ address encompassed a progressive vision for the future—one in which economic, social, racial, and political power is distributed amongst the people who keep the world’s economies running, rather than accumulated by the wealthiest few.
In a historic vote that could “mark the beginning of the end of American complicity” in Saudi Arabia’s mass atrocities in Yemen, the Senate on Wednesday voted to advance Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) Yemen War Powers resolution by an overwhelming margin of 63-37.
