

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.


Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
Jeff Brown, Executive Director
Email: jeff@ridebuzz.org
Phone: 978-394-3740
Ridebuzz.org is helping activists carpool to Washington DC for what is planned to be the largest climate rally ever held in the US: The Forward on Climate Rally is going to be a historic event -organized by the Sierra Club, 350.org, and the Hip Hop Caucus, and backed by more than 120 partner organizations to encourage President Obama to take immediate action on the environment. Ridebuzz is an official Climate Rally Partner, and is providing ridesharing to boost Rally turnout - helping supporters carpool to DC from more than 120
Ridebuzz.org is helping activists carpool to Washington DC for what is planned to be the largest climate rally ever held in the US: The Forward on Climate Rally is going to be a historic event -organized by the Sierra Club, 350.org, and the Hip Hop Caucus, and backed by more than 120 partner organizations to encourage President Obama to take immediate action on the environment. Ridebuzz is an official Climate Rally Partner, and is providing ridesharing to boost Rally turnout - helping supporters carpool to DC from more than 120 partner organizations nationwide - to help make the rally a huge success!
Considering the tremendous scale of this rally, transportation logistics can be a challenge, and connecting would-be-goers with ride options is critical to a strong showing of support. To help with transportation, a Ridebuzz.org Event Group is helping attendees organize their own carpools(aka rideshares) from all over the country to boost turnout. The Ridebuzz.org website helps people find and share rides - sharing travels costs and cutting travel emissions. Buses going to DC have also been organized, and are being posted to Ridebuzz.org and the Official Forward on Climate website. People interested in attending the Rally and planning transportation are encouraged to post their rides offered and needed here:
What: The largest climate rally in U.S. history. Event website: Forward on Climate
When: February 17, 2013, Noon - 4:00 p.m. (please arrive by 11:30 a.m.)
Where: The National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Gather at the northeast corner of the Washington Monument
(Closest Metro subway stations: Federal Triangle and Smithsonian)
Ridebuzz.org Founder, Jeff Brown noted that "Washington, D.C. is a long haul for many people coming from around the country, and the option to find and share a ride can make the difference as to whether someone attends or not. Sharing rides helps travelers share on fuel costs and reduce emissions as compared to driving alone. And for a long trip, traveling with others is a great chance to meet people that share some of the same values concerning the environment. It's going to be a fun and important trip!"
"If the administration were serious about curbing waste and inefficiency, it would start by reducing the diversion of public funds to these corporate intermediaries," argues a new paper.
US President Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress took a sledgehammer to Medicaid over the summer, justifying the unprecedented cuts by falsely claiming the program that provides health coverage to tens of millions of low-income Americans is overrun with waste and abuse.
But a new paper published Friday in the journal Health Affairs argues that if the administration actually wanted to target waste, fraud, and abuse, it would have been much better off taking aim at Medicare Advantage (MA) and Medicaid privatization.
The paper's authors estimate that overpayments to MA plans—which are funded by the government and run by for-profit insurers—and private Medicaid managed care will likely cost US taxpayers a total of $1.92 trillion over the next 10 years.
"Ending that waste would inflict losses on private insurers' shareholders and executives (the CEO of the largest MA firm made $26.3 million last year). But patients, not just government coffers, might gain," wrote Adam Gaffney, Danny McCormick, Steffie Woolhandler, and David Himmelstein.
"Even Congress' trillion-dollar cuts to Medicaid and food assistance amount to little more than half of the potential savings from de-privatizing Medicaid and Medicare," they added. "Reclaiming those funds would require reversing the decades-long trend of outsourcing to profit-seeking intermediaries and restoring Medicare and Medicaid as efficiently administered public programs."
Far from aggressively taking on Medicare Advantage fraud, the Trump administration handed MA plans a major gift earlier this year by approving an average federal payment increase of roughly 5.1%—more than double the 2.2% increase proposed by the Biden administration in January.
The authors of the new paper noted that the huge raise for MA plans, which are notorious for denying necessary care in pursuit of ever-larger profits, will add $25 billion in waste to the US healthcare system next year alone.
"If the administration were serious about curbing waste and inefficiency," they wrote, "it would start by reducing the diversion of public funds to these corporate intermediaries."
"We must dismantle the corporate architecture of impunity and kick these big polluters out of policymaking," said one campaigner. "Our future cannot be written by those who profit from its destruction."
Big polluters led by the fossil fuel industry—which knowingly caused the climate crisis—are expanding their outsize presence and influence at the key event meant to tackle the planetary emergency, a report published ahead of this month's United Nations Climate Change Conference in Brazil revealed.
The report, published Friday by the Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO) coalition, notes that "over 5,350 fossil fuel lobbyists have attended UN climate negotiations in just four years, with 90 of the corporations they represent responsible for nearly 60% of all global oil and gas production."
The analysis sounds the alarm on the "staggering scale of fossil fuel industry presence at the very negotiations that must urgently phase out their products" in order to meet the goal of keeping global temperature rise below 1.5°C as promised in the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement.
The world is failing to deliver upon that promise, and according to the report, "the primary reason for this failure is no secret—big polluters continue to be granted outsized presence, access, and influence at the very negotiations meant to address the crisis they knowingly caused."
"COP30 is set to proceed with effectively zero protections against interference in place."
"Among the world's largest fossil fuel corporations, Shell sent a total of 37 lobbyists to COP26-COP29, BP sent 36, ExxonMobil sent 32, and Chevron sent 20," according to KBPO. "These figures do not account for additional lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry's associated trade groups."
"As a result, they maintain a carefully orchestrated stranglehold on climate action, which consequently continues to fall way short of the strong and just global response we know we urgently need," the report states.
KBPO warned: "Despite the scale of fossil fuel industry presence revealed by this data, COP30 is set to proceed with effectively zero protections against interference in place. Ahead of COP30 happening in Belém from November 10-21, more than 225 organizations and networks around the world wrote to the COP30 presidency asking them to commit to a polluter-free COP by ensuring no fossil fuel ties or sponsorship and by advancing an Accountability Framework that protects the integrity and legitimacy of the [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change].
"In response," the report's authors lamented, "little to no meaningful action has been taken to protect these talks from the fossil fuel industry and other big polluters."
KBPO partner Fiona Hauke of Urgewald, an environmental and human rights advocacy group based in Germany, said in a statement Friday that “over the last three years, oil and gas companies that lobbied at COP have spent more than $35 billion each year looking for new oil and gas fields, exacerbating the problem the nations of the world had gathered to solve."
“These companies have defended their fossil interests by watering down climate action for years," Hauke added. "As we head towards COP30, we demand transparency and accountability: Keep polluters out of climate talks and make them pay for a just energy transition.”
Nerisha Baldevu, a KBPO member from groundWork/Friends of the Earth South Africa, asserted: "Corporate power is at the root of the climate crisis. Fossil, mining, and agribusiness giants are seizing our global institutions and turning climate negotiations into trade expos for polluters."
"For climate justice, we must dismantle the corporate architecture of impunity and kick these big polluters out of policymaking," Baldevu stressed. "Our future cannot be written by those who profit from its destruction."
The latest boat strike comes as new reporting revealed the identities of some of the administration's victims, including an impoverished fisherman and an out-of-work bus driver.
A top global human rights expert said Friday that President Donald Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, "must be arrested and prosecuted" as the death toll in their military campaign in the Caribbean and Pacific, which has gone on for two months without congressional authorization, reached 70 people.
"It is illegal to treat drug suspects as combatants to be shot when there is no armed conflict," said former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth. "Repetition doesn't change criminality."
Roth spoke out hours after Hegseth posted footage of the Department of Defense's latest strike in the Caribbean, which brought the number of vessels bombed to 18. The White House has said the boats were all operated by "narco-terrorists," but has provided no evidence publicly that they contained drugs or drug traffickers.
The Trump administration has also informed Congress that the US is engaged in an "armed conflict" with Latin American drug cartels, but Congress has not voted to authorize military action in the Caribbean or Pacific. The White House has claimed it does not need lawmakers' approval to carry out the attacks.
On Thursday, Senate Republicans, who control the chamber, voted down a bipartisan war powers resolution that would have required Trump to seek congressional authorization to continue the boat bombings and to take further military action in Venezuela, where the president has insisted drug cartels are producing fentanyl and trafficking it to the US.
Federal agencies and the United Nations have found Venezuela plays virtually no role in the trafficking of fentanyl—a fact that Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed in September when a reporter asked him about it—and is not a major producer of cocaine, though some cocaine is trafficked through the country after being produced in Colombia.
The footage Hegseth released on the social media platform X on Thursday was purported to show “a vessel operated by a designated terrorist organization" that was "trafficking narcotics in the Caribbean." Three people were killed in the strike.
"To all narco-terrorists who threaten our homeland: if you want to stay alive, stop trafficking drugs. If you keep trafficking deadly drugs—we will kill you," said Hegseth, who calls the DOD Trump's preferred Department of War, even though congressional approval is needed to officially change a federal agency's name.
As with previously released footage of some of the boat bombings, part of the boat that was struck was not visible in the surveillance video.
Latin American officials and the families of some victims have insisted that the people killed have not been involved in the trafficking of drugs. Venezuela's ambassador to the UN, Samuel Moncada, is among those who have called the bombings "extrajudicial executions" of people who have never been proven to be a threat to the US.
The latest boat strike came as the Associated Press published an investigation into the identities of at least four people who have been killed in the bombings.
The victims, the AP reported, have included Robert Sánchez, a 42-year-old fisherman who made about $100 a month and hoped to eventually purchase his own fishing boat. Economic pressures in the impoverished Sucre state where Sánchez lived pushed him to help cocaine traffickers navigate the Caribbean.
Another man, Juan Carlos “El Guaramero” Fuentes, was struggling to feed his family after he lost work as a transit bus driver, which he had been for several years before his bus broke down. He turned to smuggling to make ends meet, and was one of many novices hired by high-level cocaine traffickers, who typically stay ashore while the impoverished "drug runners" travel through the Caribbean by boat.
One relative of a person killed in one of the boat bombings told the AP that the US government “should have stopped" their family member's vessel instead of striking it and killing those on board.
In the past, the US has treated drug trafficking as a crime to be dealt with by law enforcement agencies, with the US Coast Guard sometimes helping to intercept boats in the Caribbean if they were suspected of carrying drugs and arresting those on board, affording them a day in court.
"You save more lives when you stop a vessel and arrest those aboard, alive, if they're actually trafficking drugs," said Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America on Thursday. "Instead of drowned bodies, you get useful intel about their criminal structures, their support networks, their finances, and future vessels."
The AP's reporting confirmed, said Isacson, that the Trump administration's boat strikes "are the equivalent of straight-up massacring 16-year-old drug dealers on US street corners."
"It satisfies some people's anger and bloodlust," said Isacson, "but hitting the poorest and most replaceable link in the chain does nothing to affect drug supplies."