Author: Evan Rose

‘The Edge of Nature’: New Film Connects Crises of Covid, Climate, and Healthcare

A Sanders Institute screening changed how award-winning filmmaker Josh Fox saw his own documentary, which will be paired with musical performances in New York City this month.

Josh Fox’s The Edge of Nature is about more than where nature begins or ends. It’s a startling documentary that explores long Covid, PTSD, climate, genocide, survival, purpose, and healing during a time when questions of personal, public, and planetary health converged.

After contracting the virus during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the filmmaker known globally for Gasland—the 2010 Emmy Award-winning documentary that galvanized the movement against hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for fossil fuels—headed to a one-room cabin in the woods of Pennsylvania, armed with his camera.

Beginning June 14, Fox is set to couple the resulting film with a live musical performance, featuring a 12-person ensemble, for three weeks at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York City. He started the month at The Sanders Institute Gathering in Burlington, Vermont, previewing a part of the performance solo, with his banjo—signed by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Click here to buy tickets for the New York City performance of Josh Fox’s The Edge of Nature June 14-30.

The banjo and songs of Pete Seeger—whose influence Fox can trace back to the folk legend visiting his elementary school—are just part of the film’s soundtrack. There are also blue jays and coyotes. The rustle of the forest, filled with bears and beavers. The clicks of typewriter keys. Occasional gunshots in the distance. Radio reports about the intertwined public health and economic crises.

“A lot of the film is about these big lessons that we got during that time and that we have decided don’t count anymore. We reduced emissions for the very first time in history enough to meet the goals of [the Paris agreement],” Fox said in an interview with Common Dreams.

Scientists have used the term anthropause “to refer specifically to a considerable global slowing of modern human activities,” as over a dozen experts wrote in June 2020 in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Fox said: “That was a moment that we all remember. We healed as a planet. The skies got clearer. The water got better. Bird song increased in complexity.”

The detail about bird songs stayed with Dr. Jehan “Gigi” El-Bayoumi, a professor at Georgetown University School of Medicine who was in the Burlington audience, which included academics, advocates, and policymakers fighting for a better world, focused on issues including climate, inequality, healthcare, and housing.

After the conference, El-Bayoumi was walking outdoors with her mother and spotted a bird. She shared what she learned from Fox’s performance—which she described as “sheer brilliance,” adding that “if there’s anything that’s going to save humanity, it’s the arts.”

Filmmaker Josh Fox performs at The Sanders Institute Gathering in Burlington, Vermont in spring 2024. (Photo: © Will Allen 2024 / via the Sanders Institute)

Another member of the audience was Wendell Potter, a former insurance executive now at the Center for Health and Democracy. Watching the performance, he told Common Dreams, “I just was enthralled.”

Fox also spoke with Potter about suffering from long Covid and struggling to get the care he needed, especially with intermittent health insurance coverage. The filmmaker recalled that “Wendell came in and was just absolutely astounded I have no health insurance right now.”

Potter, who advocates for major healthcare reforms including Medicare for All, said that “what he shared with me is terrifying, but is something that so many people are facing day in and day out.”

While alarmed by Fox’s experiences battling for medical care, Potter “was inspired” by his performance and said, “I think he can play a big role in waking people up.”

Fox said that performing at the Gathering and speaking with people there, including Potter and El-Bayoumi, woke him up—and inspired him to make some additions to the forthcoming performances.

“Every time I do a performance, I learn,” he explained. “And I realized that some of the things that are implicit in the film… meaning I want people and audiences to feel and figure out on their own—at times, I think when we’re doing a performance of it, it needs to be explicit.”

“I made it from the fossil fuel, climate change angle,” Fox said of The Edge of Nature. “Getting to the Sanders Institute was this huge wake-up call. I was like, oh my God, I just made a movie about health.”

Since the conference, he has been working on some new lines for the performance. In terms of healthcare lessons from the pandemic, he hopes to highlight that “the vaccines came and made the whole thing a helluva lot less fatal and a lot less scary (for those of us who are educated and believe in science that is). And the vaccines were free for every American!”

“Of course, because we don’t have Medicare for All in this country, we still have to pay for cancer, and asthma, and heartbreak of psoriasis, and lupus, and Lyme, and diabetes, and glaucoma, and painful corns, and scabies, and rabies, flu, AIDS, and ME/CFS, every other ailment under the sun from Alzheimer’s to ADHD,” he now wants to say. “Medical debt once again being America’s leading cause of bankruptcy, insolvency, and despair.”

He also plans to point out that “hurricane season never used to be a thing in PA. It is now. But this deluge is only the beginning. Our climate system is tipping into uncharted territory. Industrial fossil fuel-based civilization’s emissions are trapping us in the planet’s fever dream.”

“So unless you have a ticket to Jeff Bezos’ floating Floridian totalitarian salad spinner in the sky, then you are gonna be stuck down here, in their greenhouse gas chamber. And the billionaire colonizers will keep dreaming of Mars,” he will warn. “While down here what’s worse than genocide will occur. Omnicide. The murder of all.”

 

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Fox plans to have climate experts and advocates in New York City this month for post-performance discussions.

Like Gasland, he also plans to take The Edge of Nature—which has already won the Best Environmental Film Award at the 2023 Byron Bay International Film Festival in Australia—and its musical performance on tour, so audiences beyond NYC can experience it.

“We’re going to try to have this piece make an impact,” Fox told Common Dreams. “This is obviously an election year. This film was entirely made in Pennsylvania, so we’re hoping to take it throughout PA, maybe New Hampshire, Vermont, New York.”

“Sometimes that’s in a huge arts center,” he said. “And sometimes that’s somebody’s Unitarian church set up and we have 50 people, or it’s somebody’s backyard or somebody’s barn—set up the screen outside on a hillside… Those are some of the most fun. So we don’t make a distinction between what is a legit theater and what is somebody’s barn… it’s all just people.”

Reflecting on the Gasland years, Fox noted that “the reason why we succeeded so many places with the anti-fracking campaign… is because we were talking about public health. Fracking was the scary chemicals across your fenceline that was going to harm your children.”

With future performances, Fox said, “what I would love to see—and it’s such a no-brainer—is the Medicare for All and climate change/Green New Deal movements coming into the same space.”

“And by the way, the Green New Deal is a kind of Medicare for All. Getting rid of the fossil fuel industry is a kind of Medicare for All, because you’re simply eliminating all of those illnesses that it causes,” he said. “It is a great moment to potentially campaign for both… to break out of our silos.”

“We get very siloed in the activist world,” he added. “I get siloed in climate and fracking and environmental space. Others are siloed in Medicare for All. So this film is a chance for us to try to work across those two lines.”

‘We Can Get There’: Medicare for All Advocates See Resurgence in National Movement

“More and more people are waking up to realize, we do not want private insurance companies to be in control of our healthcare system,” said one advocate who attended the latest Sanders Institute Gathering.

Americans spend twice as much per capita as what people in other wealthy countries pay for healthcare, with “significantly lower” life expectancy to show for it.

Medical debt pushes more than half a million people in the U.S. into bankruptcy each year.

More than a third of healthcare expenses go not to actual medical care, but to administrative costs.

But despite the well-known state of the U.S. healthcare system and a current political climate in which the fight for Medicare for All has been relatively “quiet,” as one advocate said, Dr. Deborah Richter believes the Gathering showed a resurgence in the movement for a government-funded healthcare system is on its way.

Growing bipartisan anger over a lack of transparency about healthcare prices, private insurers’ denial of claims, and the huge profits raked in by insurance companies while an estimated 98 million American adults skip or delay medical appointments to avoid an unaffordable bill are all pushing people to demand change, according to Richter, who gave a presentation about efforts to bring government-funded healthcare to Vermont.

“Walter Cronkite once said that the U.S. healthcare system is neither healthy nor caring, nor a system,” said Richter in the talk, which like the rest of the three-day conference was livestreamed. “And decades later, it’s still true. But I think that’s the bad news. The good news is that it is possible to cover every single Vermonter, every single American with comprehensive coverage without spending a penny more than we’re spending currently.”

The system that costs Americans twice the amount which people in other wealthy countries pay for healthcare is spending money not on caring for people, but on administration, said Richter, showing a chart that compared Duke University Hospital Medical Center, a facility with 957 beds and 1,600 billing clerks, with a Canadian hospital with 1,200 beds and just seven billing clerks.

Since 1970, she said, the U.S. has seen more than a 4,000% increase in the number of healthcare administrators, while the number of doctors has risen just 200%.

The discrepancy has helped lead to a system in which insurers are increasingly denying claims to maximize their own profits.

“I’m hearing from people who were pretty much Republicans and more conservative in their views complaining about Medicare, complaining about the fact that Medicare doesn’t cover things,” Richter told Common Dreams after her talk, pointing particularly to Medicare Advantage, which is billed as an alternative to traditional Medicare that provides greater benefits, but whose participating private insurers frequently deny claims and overcharge the government, costing taxpayers $140 billion annually.

Richter, a primary care physician who chairs Vermont Health Care for All, said she frequently hears from patients “about having to jump through all kinds of hoops in order to get a procedure or a prescription or whatever. And you’re hearing that from pretty much everybody now… Those are all the kindling that we need to get this movement ignited again.”

“It’s the silver lining to having things just crumbling before your eyes,” she added.

In Vermont and across the country, the crumbling healthcare system is one in which primary care doctors are leaving their profession in droves—fed up with the bureaucracy put in place by for-profit insurance companies that force them to get approval to provide certain services.

With insurers placing more value on surgeries and other procedures than on the preventative healthcare management provided by primary care doctors, physicians are spending their days “having to deal with prior authorizations and having to deal with paperwork to justify that you deserve to be paid for the services you render,” said Richter. “When you’re seeing 16 to 20 patients a day, and each one of those has its own enormous bureaucracy, you can imagine how you end up taking your computer home to do your charts. Medical students are not blind to this and are not choosing [primary care], and that’s become a catastrophe.”

At a panel discussion on healthcare for senior citizens and the hospital system, Medicare for All advocate Wendell Potter recalled that while he was working in the for-profit health insurance industry, an executive told him the greatest threat to the business was the possibility that employers—who pay for insurance plans for roughly half of insured Americans—would begin to see that the industry does little to ensure people get the healthcare for which they pay an average of $477 per month in premiums.

“Someone asked [the executive], ‘What keeps you up at night?’ And he said disintermediation,” said Potter, who worked in communications for health insurance giants Humana and Cigna before leaving the industry to advocate for Medicare for All. “He said that employers in particular would begin to wake up and question the value proposition of big insurance companies as the middleman. But they as middleman take more and more and more of the dollars that we spend on healthcare.”

Another panel focused on price transparency in healthcare, a cause which Sanders (I-Vt.) has championed along with Medicare for All to reduce patients’ costs within the current system.

Along with Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) earlier this year, Sanders introduced the Healthcare Prices Revealed and Information to Consumers Explained (PRICE) Transparency Act 2.0 (S. 3548), which would require all negotiated rates and cash prices between healthcare plans and providers to be accessible to patients.

Healthcare price transparency has officially been the law of the land since 2021, explained Cynthia Fisher, founder and chair of Patient Rights Advocate, at the Gathering. But many hospitals refused to comply with the price transparency rule finalized by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under the Trump administration—even suing to block the rule and appealing when they lost the case.

More than three years later, Fisher’s organization still sees medical bills “beyond the negotiated rates that are in place now today,” she told Common Dreams. Only 35% of hospitals post all of their pricing data for patients to see online, she said, and “the insurance industry has made the files very difficult for anybody to read and parse through.”

Under the for-profit healthcare system, Fisher said, patients become victims of the equivalent of “extortion” as they are forced to arrange medical procedures without knowing how much they’ll cost out of pocket or how much another hospital might charge for the same care.

“Every time we get care we have to pay by first signing a blank check,” said Fisher. “We’re signing away our rights to know those prices upfront… And we’re signing away our rights to say… that we are responsible to pay whatever they choose to charge us.”

Fisher told the story of one patient in Colorado who was provided only with an estimate of the cost before she got a hysterectomy, with her insurer telling her she was likely to pay a $500 copay and the procedure would cost an estimated $5,000 total.

“What happened in reality was the insurance company denied the claim and the doctor charged $9,000 out-of-network and the hospital had a lien on her home,” said Fisher, “because she couldn’t pay the $74,000 bill.”

Patient Rights Advocate helped the patient find the hospital pricing file and found that the procedure “was indeed closer to $5,000. And indeed it should have been covered,” Fisher explained. “It took us, with her, about four or five months to get that lien off of her house. But [transparent] prices empowered her, they saved her, they protected her, and it’s happening across the country.”

The group has started a project called Power to the Patients, partnering with famous musicians as well as artists to make sure Americans know they have the right to know how much their healthcare will cost ahead of time.

Artist Shepherd Ferry designed a mural for the group that has now been painted by local artists in nearly 50 cities across the U.S., including Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York.

With 54% of American adults delaying medical care to avoid the cost, said Kevin Morra, co-founder of Power to the Patients, millions of people across the country have come to believe that “healthcare is not for them.”

“They can’t afford it. They don’t want to be in a critical moment where they decide, ‘Do I pay my rent or do I pay this medical bill?'” Morra said at the Gathering. “People are making a decision, a deliberate decision to not seek medical care, to not take these nondiscretionary procedures. And when nondiscretionary becomes discretionary, we all have a real infrastructural issue in this country.”

During the question and answer session at the panel on healthcare for senior citizens, healthcare providers and patients alike raised their hands and shared personal stories about the “demoralizing” nature of fighting to have medications and procedures covered by insurance companies, with doctors “stripped of [their] professionalism” and patients forced to prove to companies that they’re required to cover certain services.

Potter agreed with Richter that Medicare for All advocates are “regrouping,” particularly around the issues of improving traditional Medicare by including dental and vision coverage and protecting the program “from creeping, almost galloping, privatization by big insurance companies” through Medicare Advantage.

“More and more people are waking up to realize, we do not want private insurance companies to be in control of our healthcare system,” said Potter. “Private companies have grown massively over the last several years and they control so much of their access to care.”

From the audience, Ellen Oxfeld of Vermont Health Care for All rallied other attendees of the Gathering.

“The left gets very splintered,” said Oxfeld. “And I think Medicare for All is one issue that can unify all of us. I know it’s not happening tomorrow, but… everybody in this room has a healthcare story, and those stories are about the problems with having a crazy for-profit system with these middlemen that are completely unnecessary, and that raise our cause.”

“We can get there, is what I’m going to say,” she added.

‘Time to Go for the Jugular’: Climate Movement Has New Plan to Destroy Big Oil

“We have an opportunity for 18 months to organize, to take out the oil and gas industry,” said one environmental leader during a Sanders Institute event in Vermont.

Jun 03, 2024

“Now is the time to go for the jugular. Now is the time to kill the fossil fuel industry, because we don’t have another chance at survival after this.”

That’s what Jamie Minden, senior director of global organizing for the youth-led group Zero Hour, told the audience Saturday during The Sanders Institute Gathering, in Burlington, Vermont. The three-day event featured panel discussions on various topics and a few screenings, including the trailer for The Welcome Table, Josh Fox’s forthcoming documentary about climate refugees.

“In order to win, we need to go on the offensive,” said Minden, “because defense has not been working.”

Playing offense against the incredibly powerful and well-funded fossil fuel industry requires growing the movement and seizing political opportunities to implement lifesaving policies, according to experts and organizers who participated in a series of panels focused on the climate crisis.

One of those opportunities that campaigners are already gearing up for is the January 2025 expiration of tax cuts signed into law in December 2017 by then-President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the November election.

Speaking alongside Minden on the livestreamed panel, Friends of the Earth (FOE) president Erich Pica described the looming fight as a “Tax Super Bowl” that will take place shortly before the next president is sworn in. The climate movement is organizing aggressively to show just how much U.S. consumers and taxpayers are being ripped off by the greed of the fossil fuel giants that enjoy massive federal subsidies and enormous tax breaks despite the “eye-popping” profits they post year after year.

“We know that there will be a tax bill that, if it is not passed, will end up increasing taxes on all individual Americans. And so we have an opportunity for 18 months to organize, to take out the oil and gas industry,” Pica said.

Trump in April made a reported quid pro quo offer to fossil fuel executives: Pour just $1 billion into his current campaign, and he will repeal climate policies implemented under Democratic President Joe Biden, who is seeking reelection.

Pica pointed out that Big Oil—which has benefited from federal tax breaks since the Revenue Act of 1913—could profit handsomely by taking Trump up on his offer, if the Republican returns to the White House. In an analysis published last month, FOE Action found that the industry fueling the climate emergency could see an estimated $110 billion in tax breaks alone if Republicans get their way.

Throughout the weekend, multiple panelists highlighted the End Polluter Welfare Act recently reintroduced by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—whose wife Jane O’Meara Sanders and son Dave Driscoll co-founded the Sanders Institute. The legislation aims to close tax loopholes and end corporate handouts to the fossil fuel industry, and the sponsors estimate it would save American taxpayers up to $170 billion over a decade.

Some panelists argued that the moment is now, but the movement must expand beyond what Rev. Lennox Yearwood, president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus, said is, “at this time, a siloed, segregated, progressive climate movement.”

Americans are not only “dying because of the climate crisis” but also paying fossil fuel companies “to kill us,” Yearwood told the audience. “Their business plan literally means a death sentence for our communities.”

“The issue on taxation,” he explained, “allows us to once again broaden our movement, allows us to go to Republicans, go to Democrats, to go to Independents, and go across this country… and say simply: ‘Your tax dollars are going to go to those who are rich and are killing our communities. Do you want that?'”

On the Gathering’s opening night, which was also livestreamedSierra Club executive director Ben Jealous, also a Sanders Institute fellow, spoke about recently visiting a plant where workers make solar panels in the district of far-right Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a major Trump ally.

While touring the Hanwha Qcells solar facility in Dalton, Jealous asked about a wall of drawings and paintings. He learned that they were created for Earth Day last year by children of the employees, who were asked to portray “how they see their parents working at this factory.”

“In maybe the most, arguably the most conservative congressional district in America,” workers’ children “portrayed their parents as heroes saving the planet,” he said. “The kids in that district get that we need solar panels, get that we got to work together to save this planet. There’s reason to be hopeful.”

The plant’s South Korean company has been able to grow because of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that congressional Democrats passed and Biden signed in 2022. While members of the climate movement have long framed the law as a flawed but still historic package in terms of tackling the planetary emergency, with the general election mere months away, speakers at the Gathering stressed the need to showcase such progress to voters nationwide.

“We really do have to take those moments when something happens and claim it. And partly that means in this election being willing to say how important that IRA was,” said panelist and Sanders Institute fellow Bill McKibben, who founded Third Act, which organizes elders for climate advocacy.

“Was it perfect? Not even close… but it was in some other sense, remarkable,” he continued. “We’ve got to actually talk about that enough that people understand it. And truthfully, we don’t… Certainly, the Democratic Party does not a good job of talking about those things in those ways.”

Also pointing to the Georgia solar plant, McKibben added that “one of the things that’s really brilliant about the IRA is that the bulk of the money is going to red state America to do this work, which is not something that we’re used to anymore in our country… people being willing to do anything other than support their own supporters. And it’s a remarkable possibility for a kind of political healing going forward.”

No matter the outcomes of the upcoming U.S. congressional and presidential elections, climate campaigners are committed to the fight against fossil fuels. As Pica put it, “I think we have to wage the fight regardless.”

“The oil and gas industry has been operating with impunity for over a hundred years,” the FOE leader said. “They’re crushing our politics, they’re polluting the climate, and they’re getting away with it.”

“We discovered during the Inflation Reduction Act fight, when there was a real effort to repeal the oil and gas subsidies, that they expended a lot of political capital to keep those subsidies in place,” he noted. “The fact that we can wage a campaign that forces the oil and gas industry to expend political capital to maintain their largesse from the federal government, regardless of if we win or we lose, is a winning strategy for us.”

“‘Cause that means they’re not trying to repeal the stuff in the Inflation Reduction Act. That means that they’re not trying to work on reducing… their corporate taxes,” he explained. Like Minden, Pica wants the climate movement to make the fossil fuel industry finally play defense.

The End Polluter Welfare Act “is the organizing vehicle,” Pica said. “We’ve gotta get support behind it. We’ve gotta get members of Congress on it. We’ve gotta get community activists out there in the streets.”

The organizers battling Big Oil underscored the urgency, emphasizing that not only are the Trump tax cuts set to expire soon, but also communities across the country and around the world are already enduring the effects of a hotter planet—including rising sea levels, more destructive storms, extreme temperatures, devastating floods, and raging wildfires.

“A hundred years from now really matters. But also what’s going on today and in the next five years really matters,” said Minden. “I think within the next five years… our world’s gonna be pretty unrecognizable in many ways.”

The 21-year-old climate campaigner told the Gathering’s audience—full of academics, advocates, policymakers, and more—that “whether you’re here working in healthcare or income inequality or labor, the reality is that this issue is about to become a part of your work, if it’s not already.”

“I know we all have our own fights. I know everyone here is working on things that are really, really important. But if we don’t all go out on this fight, if we don’t all go out on climate, we’re gonna get taken out,” she warned. “It’s a matter of survival.”

Defunding Public Health? One County Tried. It Didn’t Go Well.

In This Episode of America Dissected: Ottawa County, Michigan made national news last year after a MAGA take over of its County Commission. Their first major act? To try to defund their public health department. Abdul reflects on the impending risk of this across the country. Then he sits down with Adeline Hambley and Marcia Mansaray, the leaders of the Ottawa County Health Department to learn what happened — and what they did next.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

Why Are Corporate Profits Soaring? Because You’re Getting Fleeced

The near-record profits of large corporations are coming, in part, out of the paychecks of average Americans — who are still struggling to get by.

I apologize for beginning this letter to you with a graph. But this is a very important one. It shows corporate profits after taxes, from 1946 through the third quarter of 2023 (the most recent data available).

Notice something?

Corporate profits are near a record high.

Inflation is dropping, but prices aren’t coming down because corporations have enough monopoly power to keep prices high. (Or they’re shrinking the size of the products you’re buying without lowering their prices — a variant of the same thing.)

This is one of the biggest reasons the American public is not crediting Biden with a great economy. Most people aren’t feeling it.

Here’s just one example that will make you fizz: Pepsi.

In 2021, PepsiCo, which makes all sorts of drinks and snacks, announced it was “forced” to raise prices due to “higher costs.” Forced? Really? The company reported $11 billion in profit that year.

In 2023 PepsiCo’s chief financial officer said that even though inflation was dropping, its prices would not. Pepsi hiked its prices by double digitsand announced plans to keep them high in 2024.

How can they get away with this?

Well, if Pepsi were challenged by tougher competition, consumers would just buy something cheaper. But PepsiCo’s only major soda competitor is Coca-Cola, which — surprise, surprise — announced similar price hikes at about the same time as Pepsi, and also kept its prices high in 2023.

The CEO of Coca-Cola claimed that the company had “earned the right” to push price hikes because its sodas are popular. Popular? The only thing that’s popular these days seems to be corporate price gouging.

We’re seeing this pattern across much of the economy — especially with groceries.

The rate of inflation is down. The rate of inflation measures how quickly prices are rising: Prices are now rising far more slowly than in the past couple of years.

And while supply chain disruptions really did make it more expensive to produce a lot of goods, the cost to produce them now is rising even more slowly than prices.

But consumer prices are still elevated — allowing most corporations to keep their profit margins near a record high.

They can get away with overcharging you because they have monopoly power — or they have so few competitors that they can easily coordinate price increases with them and avoid price decreases.

If Pepsi and Coca-Cola had lots of competitors, they wouldn’t be able to raise prices so high because someone would make cheaper substitutes, and consumers would buy those instead. But Pepsi and Coke own mostof the substitutes!

This isn’t happening just with Coke and Pepsi.

Take meat products. At the end of 2023, Americans were paying at least 30 percent more for beef, pork, and poultry products than they were in 2020.

Why? Near-monopoly power!

Just four companies now control processing of 80 percent of beef, nearly 70 percent of pork, and almost 60 percent of poultry. So of course it’s easy for them to coordinate price increases.

And this goes well beyond the grocery store. In 75 percent of U.S. industries, fewer companies now control more of their markets than they did 20 years ago.

So what should be done?

First, antitrust laws must be enforced.

Kudos to the Biden administration for using antitrust more aggressively than any administration in the last 40 years. It’s taken action against alleged price fixing in the meat industry — which has been a problem for decades.

It’s suing Amazon for using its dominance to artificially jack up prices — one of the biggest anti-monopoly lawsuits in a generation.

It successfully sued to block the merger of JetBlue and Spirit Airlines, which would have made consolidation in the airline industry even worse.

But given how concentrated American industry has become, there’s still a long way to go.

Secondly, big corporations must not be allowed to use their power to gouge consumers.

Senator Elizabeth Warren and others recently unveiled the latest version of their Price Gouging Prevention Act.

“Giant corporations are using supply chain shocks as a cover to excessively raise prices and sometimes charging the same price but shrinking how much consumers actually get,” Warren charges.

The bill would empower the FTC (which would also get $1 billion in additional funding) and state attorneys general to stop companies from charging “grossly excessive” prices, regardless of where alleged price gouging took place in a supply chain.

(The legislation would also protect small businesses — those earning less than $100 million — from litigation if they had to raise prices in good faith during crises.)

The bill would also require public companies to disclose more about their costs and pricing strategies.

I don’t have any illusions that this bill will find its way into law soon. Democrats hold a slim majority in the Senate, and not all Democrats support it. Meanwhile, Republicans and their business backers are dead set against it — and are eager to blame continued high prices on Biden, not on corporations.

But this bill is just as necessary as aggressive antitrust enforcement — and an example of what could and will be done if Democrats sweep the 2024 elections.

The near-record profits of large corporations are coming, in part, out of the paychecks of average Americans — who are still struggling to get by.

Biden and the Democrats must say this loudly and clearly, and tell the public what they are doing — and will do — to stop it.

Protesters Disrupt Bernie Sanders’ Discussion Of The Personal In The Political

United States Senator Bernie Sanders sat down with Irish Times journalist Fintan O’Toole on Friday evening to discuss the personal aspects of his political life, his journey from Vermont to Washington and the vision underpinning his work. A partnership with the Ireland.New York Project (I.NY), Catapult and the Sanders Institute, the event was held in the Exam Hall in Trinity College in anticipation of the release of Sanders’ new book, entitled It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism.

As a long queue of guests formed through and beyond Front Square on Friday evening, protestors gathered outside the Exam Hall asking those attending the event to question the Senator about the current situation in Gaza. Protesters’ chants included “Bernie Sanders you can’t hide, you’re denying genocide”, and urged those queueing to attend the National Demonstration, starting at the Garden of Remembrance in Parnell Square at 1pm on Saturday.

The event began with a speech from Sanders, wherein the Senator expressed his desire to see better relationships between the United States and Ireland. Sanders spoke of the “joys and sorrows of being a United States Senator”, a job which, in his view, has “increasingly more sorrows than joys”.

Sanders further expressed his desire to shed light on the structural issues facing the United States and the world, stressing that “the more important an issue is the less it is discussed”. He stated that the United States and the global economy are moving rapidly towards an oligarchic form of society: “today on this planet, the top 1 per cent own more wealth than the bottom 90 per cent”. This means that the working class is falling further behind as the growth of oligarchy accelerates.

Sanders also noted that “the status quo is working phenomenally well for the people on top”. Crediting this increasingly apparent disparity to the growth of right-wing extremism, Sanders lamented this “distrust in democracy”.

Speaking to the growing urgency of climate change, the Senator mentioned that his home state of Vermont experienced its “worst natural disaster in a hundred years”, with devastating flooding. Sanders noted that “the challenge is that America and Ireland alone cannot solve the climate crisis, every country in the world is going to have to transform their energy system”.

Sanders also touched on the growth of artificial intelligence which, in his view, “gives an unprecedented opportunity to make life a lot better for ordinary people”. The challenge rests in the question of who will benefit from this explosion of technology.

Sanders had to cancel a number of events to vote against a US national security bill in the Senate, which allocates around $14 billion in military aid to Israel. Although the bill passed by 70 votes to 29, Sanders acknowledged that it was “not an easy vote”. While the bill provided support to Ukraine and provisions for humanitarian aid, Saunders explicitly opposed the direct funding of Netanyahu’s government.

Having only recently started touching on the Holocaust and his family connections to it, O’Toole asked: “How much was that a shadow over your own consciousness?” Sanders told the journalist that “it made me do my best to fight against all forms of racism and bigotry that exist”. He continued, noting that “it pains me very much to see demagogues like Trump try and divide people up”.

Saunders also credits his working-class upbringing for providing him with an understanding of the effect of money and a lack of money on your life. He explained that “life expectancy is declining in the US right now”, with the rise of “diseases of despair”, notably drugs, alcoholism and suicide, while medical costs are a major factor in bankruptcy rates.

Sanders tells O’Toole about his involvement in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement in the Vietnam War, a “devastating war” for his generation, he draws connections to the current political climate. He asserts, “This so-called bipartisan policy has been wrong and wrong”, citing American involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan and Chile and criticising the country’s $900 billion military budget.

As the protestors’ sirens and chants gradually make their way into the hall, O’Toole asks about the Senator’s lack of interest in “protest for protest’s sake”. Sanders explains that “politics is more complicated than protesting, change never takes place without years of struggle”.

Sanders fundamentally maintains that the “political system is corrupt in the US”, adding that “it takes a huge amount of money to get elected”. It is from this basis that he defines himself as “proudly independent”, while being the longest-serving independent in American congressional history. In his analysis of the state of American politics, Sanders feels that both the Republicans and the Democrats have been corrupted by “big money”, albeit from different sources. The House of Representatives is “dysfunctional”, in his view, whilst the public is “politically divided”.

O’Toole drove the conversation to the “trap of the two-party system”, asking how the Senator morally navigated the choice of “critically support[ing] Biden”. Sanders acknowledged that “it’s a difficult path to walk down”, recalling his decision not to run in 2016: “I did not want to see Trump get elected by splitting the vote”. Despite having worked together on the American Rescue Plan during the pandemic, Sanders remains critical of President Biden. Sanders stressed that he is “working hard to change his [Biden’s] stance on Israel”.

Looking towards the upcoming presidential election in November this year, Sanders pledges that “I will do my best to defeat Trump, understanding that Biden has not by any means done what I want him to do”. Nevertheless, the Senator stresses that, “Trump is not a typical candidate, it is a debate over whether the US remains a functioning democracy”.

Following two audience questions, posed by O’Toole, a protester stood and questioned why Sanders would not call for a ceasefire in Palestine. The woman then strode through the central aisle further questioning the Senator, prompting O’Toole to call on her to calm down, saying “let him answer the question”.

Although the Senator initially said “I’m not going to answer the question because I don’t like people disrupting me”, he continued, arguing that “I’ve led the effort in the Senate to try and end this war”. He continued, explaining that “I’ve talked about my views on Gaza and I’ve done everything I can”. Sanders tells O’Toole that what is happening is “a horror”, saying that he has “nightmares every night”. He further states that “my dream would be if tomorrow the president woke up to what the people actually want”.

Joe Biden Just Did The Rarest Thing In US politics: He Stood Up To The Oil Industry

Ten days ago Joe Biden did something remarkable, and almost without precedent – he actually said no to big oil.

His administration halted the granting of new permits for building liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals, something Washington had been handing out like M&Ms on Halloween for nearly a decade. It’s a provisional “no” – Department of Energy experts will spend the coming months figuring out a new formula for granting the licenses that takes the latest science and economics into account – but you can tell what a big deal it is because of the howls of rage coming from the petroleum industry and its gaggle of politicians.

And you can tell something else too: just how threadbare their arguments have become over time. Biden has called their bluff, and it’s beautiful to watch.

To give you an idea, politicians beholden to the industry are using this week and next to hold hearings about natural gas in Congress. Joe Manchin – who has received more lobbying money from big oil than anyone else in Congress, and is the founder of a coal brokerage business – is convening a session in the Senate on Thursday, but on Tuesday the House began the action with a hearing before a subcommittee of the House committee on energy and commerce.

One “expert” summoned by the panel, Toby Rice, owns the company that produces more natural gas than any other in the country. And he immediately deployed the sleight of hand that his ilk have used over and over again. I’ll try and slow it down enough that you can see the hand dealing from the bottom of the deck.

The fracking revolution, Rice said, “has powered our economy and prevented us from being reliant on foreign sources of natural gas – all the while driving over 60% of the emissions reduction the United States experienced since the turn of the century by displacing coal-fired power generation”.

The key word here is “emissions”, by which Rice means carbon dioxide. And indeed fracked gas, when burned in a power plant, produces fewer emissions than coal. But there’s another major greenhouse gas – methane – and that’s basically what “natural gas” consists of. When it leaks from a well or a pipeline, it’s 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, molecule per molecule, at trapping heat.

And so much is leaking that – when you combine those emissions with the carbon that still comes from burning gas – America’s total contribution to global warming has probably not gone down at all over the last two decades. Far from being a boon, natural gas has been a trap, one that the industry now wants to catch the rest of the globe in.

What’s more – as new research this fall showed – when you put fracked gas on a boat and send it on a long ocean cruise, so much leaks out that it’s far worse than coal. If the White House had kept granting all the permits that industry wanted, within a decade US natural gas would be producing more greenhouse gas emissions than everything that happens on the continent of Europe. It’s the biggest fossil fuel expansion project on Earth.

That’s half the problem with Rice’s argument. The other half is, it’s not coal that Rice’s gas mostly undercuts. We now live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun; there’s no reason not to go straight from coal to renewable energy, with no intermediate stop at gas. The idea that it’s a “bridge fuel” is a decade out of date, but it’s an argument that big oil wants to extend four or five decades into the future, because that’s how long this new infrastructure is supposed to last.

If Rice’s arguments were deceptive, the other industry witness was simply sad. Eric Cormier represented the Chamber Southwest Louisiana, where most of this infrastructure is located. It’s his neighbors – environmental justice crusaders like Roishetta Ozane and James Hiatt – who have led this fight, pointing out the damage that these installations are doing to the air and water. Cormier, though, said LNG development was necessary because the region had taken such an economic hit from Hurricanes Laura and Delta, which had caused $17bn in damages, damaged 44,000 homes, and dropped the population by about 7%.

He’s not wrong about the damage – Lake Charles, the big city in the region, is arguably the blue tarp capital of the planet. But think about his argument for even a second: the climate crisis is causing such grievous loss along the coast of Louisiana that … we need to make the climate crisis worse to pay for all the damage.

What? If any place on Earth should viscerally feel the urgent need to get off fossil fuels, the disappearing Louisiana coast would be it. But if you’re the Chamber SWLA, short-term profit is the only metric you understand.

This brand of greenwashing has been going on for years, of course. But big oil is having an ever-harder time making their argument, especially after a new economic survey published last week showed that continuing to build out the LNG export infrastructure would raise energy costs for Americans by 9 to 14%. And polling shows pretty conclusively that Americans don’t want to frack their country to send cheap gas to China.

That won’t stop the industry from shouting. At this point, bypassed by new renewable technology, their only real hope is political gamesmanship. But it’s getting far easier for enlightened leaders to stand up to them. In December, in Dubai, the world signed a pledge to “transition away” from fossil fuels. Last month, in Washington, Joe Biden started to show that he meant it.

Statement On Retirement Of Mary Kay Henry

WASHINGTON — U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal (WA-07) released the following statement regarding the announcement that Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) will step down from her role in May 2024:

“Mary Kay Henry is a visionary, game changing organizer and powerful voice for justice and progress and has been for the nearly 14 years she’s led SEIU. Her role in leading our country forward cannot be overstated. She has led and inspired so many with her strong moral compass and her articulated vision for incorporating inclusivity and intersectionality into unions, workplaces, and communities across the country. Her years of service have had a direct impact on so many workers’ lives and I thank her for her leadership.

“I have had the honor and pleasure of working with her on the Biden-Sanders Unity Taskforce on Healthcare in 2020, where I served as Co-Chair, and we worked to collectively endorse a plan for long-term care that meets the needs of our country and the workforce. During our push for Build Back Better and critical investments in the care economy, Mary Kay was a top leader in ensuring we pushed for the most progressive policy to be included, as the Progressive Caucus held the line to ensure passage of Build Back Better in the House. On immigration, as the leader of a union made up of millions of immigrant workers, Mary Kay has never wavered in the moral necessity of passing humane immigration reform and never throwing immigrants under the political bus. I have been grateful to call her a close friend, advisor, and partner in building progressive power since coming to Congress. Her work has changed lives and laid the foundation for a better tomorrow.”

Mary Kay Henry has served since 2010 as the International President of SEIU and under her leadership the union led the charge to include a historic federal investment in home-based care and child care and to raise the wages of child care and in-home care workers in the Build Back Better Act, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 2021.

Sanders To Introduce Amendment To End U.S. Complicity In Netanyahu’s War On The Palestinian People

WASHINGTON, Feb. 2 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today released the following statement announcing his plan to introduce an amendment to the foreign aid supplemental package that would remove $10.1 billion in offensive weaponry funding for Netanyahu’s right-wing government. The amendment preserves funding for defensive systems that will protect Israeli civilians against incoming missile and rocket attacks. Sanders’ statement is as follows:

“27,000 dead – two-thirds of them women and children.

67,000 wounded.

1.8 million displaced from their homes.

70% of housing units damaged or destroyed.

And now, hundreds of thousands of children facing starvation.

This is unacceptable. The United States cannot be complicit in this humanitarian disaster.

That is why I will be offering an amendment to the supplemental bill to ensure zero funding for the continuation of Netanyahu’s illegal, immoral war against the Palestinian people.”