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Biden's Trillion-dollar Plan
After much drama last week, President Biden made it clear that his core legislative package - the American Jobs Plan, which would begin rebuilding our decrepit infrastructure and the American Family Plan, which would address essential needs - will pass together or not at all. Now Democrats are moving to negotiate the scope of the Family Plan so they can unify behind it.
Trump Has No Coherent Plan to Make Health Care Affordable
What is this year's midterm election about? President Trump wants it to be about him, stumping the country saying that he's on the ballot. Or that it's about immigrants, or Justice Brett Kavanaugh, or tax cuts, or about hurricanes, droughts and catastrophic climate change, or about an economy featuring low unemployment and stagnant wages. In fact, what is notable about the election amid all the mudslinging and name-calling is that voters are making it increasingly about health care.
As World Burns, Trump Adds Fuel to Fire
North Carolina has been hit with a storm of biblical ferocity. Florence has left at least 17 dead there, 500,000 without power, with flash flooding across the state from the coast to the western mountains. Landslides and infectious diseases are predicted to follow. North Carolina is not alone, of course.
We Don't Need the President's Thugs in Chicago
"Hitler had his Brown shirts and Mussolini had his Black shirts, now Donald Trump has his camouflage shirts." Thus began a statement signed by 15 distinguished interdenominational religious leaders in Chicago that I joined, including ministers, priests, and rabbis.
Death by Tax Cuts: The Republican Health Care Plan
Donald Trump hosted a celebration in the White House Rose Garden for House Republicans after they passed their party's health care plan by the thinnest of margins. They were celebrating what Trump called a "win," without any thought about consequences.
Time for Biden to invoke the 14th amendment
So it has come to this. House Republicans are about to force the U.S. government to default on paying its debts – obligations that the Congress voted to make. They bluster that they will blow up the economy, tank the dollar, and destroy America’s good faith and credit unless they get their way – even as they are bitterly divided about what “their way” means. The stakes are unfathomable – and so it is worth being clear about what is happening.
Who gets the gold and who gets the shaft?
Over the next few weeks, the manufactured crisis over the “debt ceiling” will reach its boiling point. But this is pure melodrama, badly overacted with the outcome already known. The real question is about our priorities – and about who gets the gold and who gets the shaft.
Jesse Jackson: Police Reform Won't Be Easy
As the worldwide demonstrations continue two weeks after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman, the question is whether outrage will lead to real reforms? Fundamental reforms would begin with ending the "qualified immunity" of police, curbing the militarization of police forces, transferring funds and functions to social agencies, imposing residency requirements and finally making lynching a hate crime.
Military prowess provides neither peace nor strength
“Peace through strength” is the lodestar, the guiding assumption, of United States policy since World War II. America maintains by far the strongest military force in the world. We literally police the world. But in the current world, we are discovering that military prowess provides neither peace nor strength. We have the smartest bombs in the world, but our children rank only 22nd in educational achievement. We need to think again about the true sources of peace and strength.
Coronavirus Draws Attention to the Cost of Racism
The media has just discovered that the coronavirus is far more deadly to blacks and Latinos than to whites. Twice as deadly in New York City, according to the New York Times. Seventy-two percent of the fatalities in Chicago are blacks who constitute about 30 percent of the population. The news is treated as a shocking revelation on the BBC, CNN and CBS and in newspapers across the country.
The 1619 Project
On Sunday, the New York Times unveiled "The 1619 Project," a journalistic series in the Sunday magazine that seeks to tell the "unvarnished truth" about slavery and its impact on America's history. In 1619, just 12 years after the founding of the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, the Jamestown colonists bought the first slaves, 20 to 30 enslaved Africans, from English pirates.
Voting Rights Now!
For African Americans, freedom, citizenship and the right to vote are inextricably linked. With the victory of the Union in the Civil War, the Civil Rights Amendments to the Constitution -- the 13th, 14th and 15th --were passed, freeing the slaves, requiring equal justice for all, and protecting the right to vote against discrimination. Those rights were trampled by segregation, an apartheid regime shamefully ratified by a reactionary Supreme Court. It took 100 years and the civil rights movement to end segregation and pass the Voting Rights Act once more enforcing the right to vote.
The Lie About Voter Fraud Is The Real Fraud
After President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey because of, as Trump admitted, the "Russian thing," he struck a new blow to American democracy: He created a commission on "election integrity," stemming from his fantastical claims of voter fraud in the 2016 election.
Simple justice: The Tulsa Massacre, Restitution and Reparations
On its 100th anniversary, the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma has finally come to national attention. The history of the massacre is now known. The damage inflicted clear. The question is what is to be done to repair the damage?
'Have you no sense of decency, sir?'
Texas is suffering from record high temperatures, with heat indexes topping a staggering 120 degrees.
President Biden’s State of the Union
Joe Biden’s State of the Union will feature good news. He has much to report – record job growth, record low unemployment, inflation down, and new efforts underway to rebuild our infrastructure, move to renewable energy and start to bring jobs back home.
Trump's Ridiculous Cuba Reversal
In his perverse fixation on overturning all things Obama, Donald Trump now turns his attention to Cuba, the island located 90 miles off our shores. Reports are that the President plans to travel to Florida to announce that he will reverse Obama's opening to Cuba, reinstate restrictions on the right of U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba and curtail business opportunities that Obama had opened up by executive order.
The Right to Vote Needs Constitutional Protection
Democracy is based on the power of the people choosing their leaders in a secret ballot. The right to vote is central to the legitimacy of any democratic system. Yet in the United States Constitution there is no federal right to vote. Voting rights are determined by the states. And in the states we witness a fierce struggle between those who seek to suppress the vote and those who seek to protect and extend it.
White Supremacist Violence Is Once More On the Rise
Every right we have fought for and won since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his monumental "I Have a Dream" speech 56 years ago this Wednesday is under unrelenting attack and in grave peril -- from the right to drink fresh water and to breathe clear air, to the right of workers to organize for better wages and safer conditions to the right to vote without interference from "enemies foreign and domestic" to the rights of women, children, the LGBTQ community and immigrants.
