A View FromThe Left- WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

This week, more than 1,500 groups sent a letter to Congress calling for a budget that invests in our health, jobs, and future - not one that slashes vital services while increasing tax cuts for the rich.
Help us show Congress their constituents agree.  View the Letter

Trump's Worst Collusion Isn't With Russia - It's With Corporations

The top priority in Congress right now is to move a health bill that would gut Medicaid and throw at least 22 million Americans off their insurance — while loosening regulations on insurance companies and cutting taxes on the wealthiest by over $346 billion.  As few as 12 percent of Americanssupport that bill, but the allegiance of its supporters isn’t to voters — it’s plainly to the wealthy donors who’d get those tax cuts.  Meanwhile,majorities of Americans in every single congressional district support efforts to curb local pollution, limit carbon emissions, and transition to wind and solar. And majorities in every single state back the Paris climate agreement.  Yet even as scientists warn large parts of the planet could soon become uninhabitable, the fossil fuel-backed Trump administration has put a climate denier in charge of the EPA, pulled the U.S. out of Paris, and signed legislation to let coal companies dump toxic ash in local waterways…  If Trump’s people did work with Russia to undermine our vote, they should absolutely be held accountable. But the politicians leading the charge don’t have a snowball’s chance of redeeming our democracy unless they’re willing to take on the corporate conspirators much closer to home.   More

What Happened to America’s Wealth? The Rich Hid It.

Government officials will tell us “there’s no money” to repair or properly maintain our tired infrastructure. Nor do we want to raise taxes, they say.  But what if billions of dollars in tax revenue have gone missing?  New research suggests that the super-rich are hiding their money at alarming rates. A study by economists Annette Alstadsaeter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman reports that households with wealth over $40 million evade 25 to 30 percent of personal income and wealth taxes…  First, we’re missing billions in taxes each year. That’s partly why our roads and transit systems are falling apart.  Second, wealth inequality may be even worse than we thought. Economic surveys estimate that roughly 85 percent of income and wealth gains in the last decade have gone to the wealthiest one-tenth of the top 1 percent. That’s bad enough. But what if the concentration is even greater?   More

Elizabeth Warren shows how she will take on Trump for Affordable Housing

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) plans to take to the streets of Washington on Wednesday to add to pressure from mayors for President Trump to protect federal investment in affordable housing.  Warren is headlining a protest march against Trump's proposal to slash $6.2 billion from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, less than two weeks after a dozen mayors signed on to a letter warning that the proposed budget cuts could shut down public housing units. Warren, who for years has railed against Wall Street and an economic system rigged against the poor and working class, will address low-income tenants and housing activists from across the nation. “I want to make sure that affordable housing is front and center on our agenda of items to be protected,” Warren said in an interview Tuesday evening. “We can’t just let this one fly below the radar screen.”  More

Bernie Sanders Holds Highest Approval Rating at Home, Mitch McConnell Is Dead Last

The longest-serving independent in Congressional history holds a 75 percent approval rating among his constituents and only a 21 percent disapproval rating, according to the poll. That gives Sanders the highest approval rating in the Senate. In second place is Sen. Brian Schatz, D.-Hawaii, with 69 percent of his constituents approving of his job. Senators Mazie Hirono (D.-Hawaii), John Hoeven (R.-N.D.) and Patrick Leahy (D.-Vt.), rounded out the top five.  Sanders was also named the most popular politician in the entire country in a March 2017 Fox News poll. In that poll, he held a 61 percent approval rating among those polled across the whole country…  The senators least liked by their constituents included Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R.-Ky., who ranked dead last, with a disapproval rating of 48 percent.   More

When Will Climate Change Make the Earth Too Hot For Humans?  Sooner than you Think!

The present tense of climate change — the destruction we’ve already baked into our future — is horrifying enough. Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade. Two degrees of warming used to be considered the threshold of catastrophe: tens of millions of climate refugees unleashed upon an unprepared world. Now two degrees is our goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts give us only slim odds of hitting it. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues serial reports, often called the “gold standard” of climate research; the most recent one projects us to hit four degrees of warming by the beginning of the next century, should we stay the present course. But that’s just a median projection. The upper end of the probability curve runs as high as eight degrees…  The last time the planet was even four degrees warmer, Peter Brannen points out in The Ends of the World, his new history of the planet’s major extinction events, the oceans were hundreds of feet higher.   More

JESSE JACKSON: Facing the New Assault on Civil Rights

The Trump administration has launched an unprecedented rollback of civil rights and voting rights. Those who care about building a more perfect union face harsh headwinds. We’ve gone from an administration seeking to fulfill these rights to one seeking to repeal these rights…  The rollback is government wide. The Labor Department has announced plans to disband the division that polices discrimination among federal contractors as a “cost cutting measure.” The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate the environmental justice program that focuses on the environmental threats to minority communities. The Education Department is decimating staffing of its Office of Civil Rights. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has revoked guidance on a rule that allows transgender people to stay in sex-segregated shelters matching their gender identity.  More

Negative Campaign Against Arabs and Muslims Has Consequences

While, as president, Donald Trump has worked to cultivate a relationship with Arab leaders, the antipathy towards Arabs and Muslims that he and his party have cultivated in recent years continues to have a worrisome impact on American public opinion and policy.  Recent polling conducted three weeks after Trump’s summits in Saudi Arabia, establishes the persistence of a deep and disturbing partisan divide in American attitudes toward Arabs and Muslims. On many questions, the views of Democrats and Republicans are exactly the opposite of one another, with Republican attitudes toward the two communities being extremely negative and the views of Democrats being overwhelming positive…  This situation is of deep concern to Arab Americans and American Muslims. We have, in the past, experienced discrimination, been victims of hate crimes, and endured painful political exclusion. It is clear that sustained hostile campaigns either by hardline supporters of Israel or, now, by some leading Republicans have taken a toll on our communities. They must be combated until our political discourse is freed from the scourge of hate, negative stereotyping, and scapegoating.   More