Block Capital One’s Merger With Discover
Capital One recently proposed merging with Discover. If the deal passes government scrutiny, the company would become the largest credit-card issuer in the country, making it yet another too-big-to-fail bank. This deal is about more than the danger posed by another big bank. Allowing a giant bank to run its own network to process billions […]
Sen. Elizabeth Warren: Roe v. Wade Wasn’t Overturned by Accident. Now We Need to Fight Back
Today should have been the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Instead, too many people can’t get the medical care they need where they need it when they need it. Students who are desperate for help get the runaround. Poor women face impossible hurdles. Children who have survived rape and become pregnant are frightened and […]
Elizabeth Warren: America—It’s Time to Tell the Government We’re Sick of Big Pharma’s Racket
This year, nearly 300,000 Americans were diagnosed with prostate cancer. That’s 300,000 daddies, brothers, and best friends who got hit with sledgehammer news that they have cancer. Then came the second sledgehammer—the cost of treatment. A drug called Xtandi could save their lives, but the price runs up to $190,000 a year. It’s a familiar […]
Washington Post: How to fix our rigged tax system
Now that the Senate has passed a budget resolution, we’re one step closer to realizing President Biden’s transformational agenda: a once-in-a-generation investment in child care and Medicare, combating climate change and other efforts that would actually make our government work for families. The other half of the package — how to pay for these investments — is equally important.
The already huge gap between the 0.1 percent and everyone else is just getting wider. Billionaire wealth surged by $1.8 trillion from the early days of the pandemic through last month. The 400 richest Americans had more total wealth, as of 2019, than all 10 million Black American households, plus a quarter of Latino households, combined. Yet the ultrarich pay only 3.2 percent of that wealth in taxes, while 99 percent of families pay 7.2 percent. And scores of giant U.S. corporations pay zero.
I’ve proposed measures that would raise more than $5 trillion in revenue — far more than we need to enact the Biden plan. Though not every Democrat agrees with every one of my ideas, Biden campaigned aggressively on a suite of progressive tax policies, and voters embraced these changes at the ballot box. No matter how loudly Washington lobbyists bleat otherwise, progressive tax policies are wildly popular. Americans understand that our tax system has been rigged to reward the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else. So let’s fix it.
Read full article here.
Boston Globe: Elizabeth Warren on why we need universal child care now
In early April 2020, just as wave after wave of coronavirus cases were hitting the United States and hospitals in hot spots were worried about being overrun with sick and dying people, I set up a conference call with a big group of Massachusetts nurses. They were working long hours, there were no known COVID-19 treatments, and they were watching their patients die alone. I’d also heard terrible stories about the shortage of face masks and other protective gear. Let’s be clear: If nurses can’t do their jobs, then the whole health care system breaks down and all of America is at risk.
I thanked the nurses and said I agreed with everyone in our country who had been calling them “heroes.” There were some polite responses, and then I asked the obvious question: What do you need so you can do your jobs? The first answer: child care. Another chimed in, saying, Yeah, we need child care. And then the dam broke, with the nurses talking over each other. The always-tricky and always-stressful task of arranging child care had become so much harder exactly at the moment when the need for these parents to be in the workforce was at its most desperate.
Their employers saw the problem as well. And the same was true for other employers who were trying to keep their people on the front lines so that, say, grocery stores could stay open or bus lines would run. One in five of those who couldn’t work cited child care as the reason. Without adequate child care, an economy that was already under great strain faced the very real possibility of breaking down entirely.
…
Read full article here.
CNN: Caregivers are essential workers. It’s time we recognize them as such
We all want the same things in life: health, security and promising futures for our families. The Covid-19 pandemic has made it clear how caregivers — including child care, home care and nursing home workers — are essential to achieving this vision. But families struggle to afford care, while care jobs remain undervalued, understaffed, underprotected and underpaid. It’s time for Congress and President Joe Biden to make real change.
Caregivers have taken on some of the worst burdens of the pandemic. Home care workers like Joyce Barnes in Virginia described to the Washington Post last April how she was given paper towels and rubber bands to wear as masks and was expected to buy her own hand sanitizer to use at work. Child care workers like Rosa Carreño in California witnessed a system on the verge of collapse with thousands of fellow providers closing their doors as the costs of care during the pandemic, including the additional staff needed to support distance learning, piled up.
The vast majority of direct care workers — a group that includes personal care aides, home health aides and nursing assistants who work in private homes, nursing homes and other settings — are women (86%) and people of color (59%). The under-valuing of caregiving work is directly linked to racism and sexism, so it’s not surprising that caregiving is consistently — and wrongly — devalued as “unskilled” and “women’s work.”
…
Read full article here.
USA Today: No president should have unilateral power to use nuclear weapons: Sen. Warren and Sec. Perry
Two weeks after he incited an insurrection against the Congress and the Constitution he swore an oath to defend, former President Donald Trump retained full authority to use the most deadly weapons ever created. As disturbing as it may be, this authority is a central feature of our nation’s nuclear decision-making structure — and it is long past time for reform. There is no question that we must place firm limits on presidential nuclear powers, first by enacting a formal policy not to use nuclear weapons first and then by making any decision to use nuclear weapons subject to the approval of Congress.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plea to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Jan. 8 to somehow find “available precautions” to prevent Trump from using his sole authority (the president does not need approval or concurrence from anyone else prior to ordering a nuclear launch, and the military is required to follow that order) to launch was remarkable and shocking, but it was not a first. Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger reportedly took steps in the last days of Richard Nixon’s presidency to prevent him from abusing his nuclear authority when Nixon was drinking heavily and facing impeachment.
…
Read the full article on USA Today here.
CNBC: Forgiving Student Debt Will Help Senior Citizens, Too
The people elected two leaders — President Biden and Vice President Harris — who committed to boosting our economy by cancelling billions of dollars in student loan debt. That commitment affects more older Americans than you might think.
Data for Progress: Here’s how Biden can Leverage U.S. Purchasing Power to Take on Climate Change
The climate crisis threatens our nation’s health, economy, and security. Its effects are not far off into the future or purely theoretical. The crisis is here, happening in front of our eyes and hurting low-income communities and communities of color the most. It is happening because of choices too often dictated by the fossil fuel industry and their allies. But just as our society’s choices have led to the crisis, our choices moving forward can provide solutions.
The incoming Biden administration understands that we need to mobilize the federal government and the international community to tackle the climate crisis. They have committed to an all-of-government approach to take bold, decisive action to build a new clean energy economy. One of the most critical solutions to tackling this crisis will be leveraging the federal government’s enormous purchasing power. Every year, the federal government spends hundreds of billions of dollars on goods and services, and President-elect Biden has committed to using this procurement authority to reduce emissions and drive towards a more sustainable federal government. While Congress must work quickly to invest in more clean energy research and deployment and enact strong emissions standards, government purchasing is a powerful tool that President-elect Biden can use under existing authority.
…
Read the full article here.
CNN: End the silence about what Covid-19 is doing to America’s prisons
The Covid-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc in our nation’s prisons and jails. We know it’s bad, but because comprehensive data isn’t being collected, we don’t know exactly how bad it is.