April, 19 2017, 08:30am EDT
PCCC on GA-6 Election Results & Next Big Fight for Progressives
The following statement was released by Adam Green, co-founder, Progressive Change Campaign Committee:
"Jon Ossoff's first-place finish in ruby-red Georgia shows the huge opportunities for progressive candidates across the country -- from Tom Perriello for Governor in Virginia to Rob Quist for Congress in Montana. Ossoff showed what's possible when a campaign taps into the huge grassroots energy of the Resistance, and the PCCC will be funneling that energy into Perriello's campaign for governor with an official endorsement and grassroots fundraising this week."
WASHINGTON
The following statement was released by Adam Green, co-founder, Progressive Change Campaign Committee:
"Jon Ossoff's first-place finish in ruby-red Georgia shows the huge opportunities for progressive candidates across the country -- from Tom Perriello for Governor in Virginia to Rob Quist for Congress in Montana. Ossoff showed what's possible when a campaign taps into the huge grassroots energy of the Resistance, and the PCCC will be funneling that energy into Perriello's campaign for governor with an official endorsement and grassroots fundraising this week."
PCCC members have raised over $75,000 for Ossoff's campaign from over 3,000 small-dollar, grassroots donations, and the PCCC recruited over 400 volunteers to drive the huge voter turnout that was pivotal to tonight's big win.
This week, the PCCC will be endorsing Tom Perriello for Virginia governor and fundraising for his campaign from our million members (see email to members below). Earlier today, PCCC endorsed 6 other key 2017 Virginia races including Justin Fairfax for Lieutenant Governor, Danica Roem (VA-HD13), Chris Hurst (VA-HD12), Elizabeth Guzman (VA-HD31), Jennifer Carroll Foy (VA-HD02), and Schuyler VanValkenburg (VA-HD72).
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (BoldProgressives.org) is a million-member grassroots organization building power at the local, state and federal levels. It engages in electoral work and issue advocacy work -- fighting on democracy issues and for economic populist priorities like expanding Social Security, Medicare For All, a Green New Deal, student debt cancellation, and Wall Street reform. PCCC has been a proud supporter of Elizabeth Warren since her first run for Senate and was the first national political organization to endorse her for president in the 2020 election.
LATEST NEWS
Kushner Role in Paramount Scheme Shows US 'Devolving Into Caricature of Crony Capitalism'
"The Warner Bros. merger was already suspect, but now Trump’s family is getting in on the act," said one Democratic senator.
Dec 09, 2025
The revelation that Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump's son-in-law, is playing a key role in Paramount Skydance's hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery underscores the extent to which the current administration's open corruption "is fundamentally distorting economic and governmental policymaking at the direct expense of the interests of the American people," a watchdog group said Tuesday.
Kushner's private equity firm, Affinity Partner, is listed in a regulatory filing as one of the organizations financing Paramount's $108 billion bid for Warner Bros., which owns CNN. Ethics experts say Kushner's involvement represents another glaring conflict of interest on top of preexisting concerns about the bid, stemming from Trump's relationship with Paramount CEO David Ellison and his billionaire father, GOP megadonor Larry Ellison.
"America is devolving into a caricature of crony capitalism," Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, said in a statement Tuesday. "Factions aiming to shrink media competition are fighting over who can show the greatest fealty to Donald Trump. Paramount seems to have won the prize, bringing in presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner—whose investment vehicle is flush with Saudi funds, deposited only because of his personal relationship with Donald Trump—as a partner."
"A working antitrust policy would block the merger of Warner Bros. Discovery with one of the existing media goliaths. It would never be influenced by personal connections to the president," Weissman added. "This case underscores that the corruption pervading the Trump administration isn’t just about making Trump and his family and hangers-on ever richer. That corruption is fundamentally distorting economic and governmental policy making, at the direct expense of the interests of the American people.”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said that "the Warner Bros. merger was already suspect, but now Trump’s family is getting in on the act."
"Paramount already had deep ties to the White House," he added, "now Trump's family will directly profit if they win."
Asked Monday about Kushner's financing role, Trump said he has "never spoken to him about it."
Paramount, which the Trump administration reportedly favored to take over Warner Bros., announced its bid for the company days after the streaming behemoth Netflix and Warner Bros. leadership reached an $83 billion acquisition deal. The president immediately criticized the Netflix agreement and pledged to intervene in the federal review process.
"The blurred line between running the government and the family's business interests is expanding each day," Scott Amey, general counsel with the Project On Government Oversight, told Reuters.
Antitrust experts and advocates have argued that both of the proposed mergers are likely illegal and should be blocked.
Matt Stoller, research director at the American Economic Liberties Project, said Monday that either merger "would further deepen the media consolidation crisis that is eroding our creative economy and freedom of expression."
"Paramount specifically would be well-positioned to manipulate the news to please the president, which David Ellison made clear it intends to do in an interview earlier today," said Stoller. "There is a reason that policymakers and workers in Hollywood have come out against each iteration of this deal. Rather than allowing further consolidation in the industry, policymakers must reregulate the market with prohibitions on vertical integration.”
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'Victory for Everyone Who Pays an Electricity Bill': Judge Tosses Trump Ban on New Wind Energy Projects
"Get out of the way of the expansion of renewable energy," one clean power advocate told the Trump administration.
Dec 09, 2025
Clean energy advocates have scored at least a temporary victory after a federal judge on Monday threw out President Donald Trump's executive order that banned new wind power projects in the US.
As reported by CNBC, Judge Patti Saris of the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts tossed Trump's executive order in its entirety after finding it "arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law," and arguing that the federal government did not provide a reasoned explanation for enacting such a policy.
The executive order, which Trump signed in January, halted all permits and leases for both offshore and onshore wind power projects.
A group of 17 states, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, sued the Trump administration earlier this year to overturn the executive order, which they labeled "an existential threat to the wind industry" in the US.
In a social media post, James hailed the judge's ruling and called the decision "a big victory in our fight to keep tackling the climate crisis and protect one of our best sources of clean, reliable, and affordable energy."
Nancy Pyne, senior adviser for Sierra Club, declared the ruling "a victory for everyone who pays an electricity bill, is part of the clean energy workforce, and breathes air."
"Americans need cheaper and more reliable energy that does not come at the expense of our health and futures," Pyne added. "We are glad to see this illegal order get vacated, and we will continue to advocate for more wind energy projects across the country to lower the cost of energy and create stable, union jobs in our communities."
Kit Kennedy, managing director for power at Natural Resources Defense Council, also emphasized the benefits to US consumers of allowing more wind-power projects to move forward.
"From the beginning of its time in office, the Trump administration put a halt to the wind energy projects that are needed to keep utility bills in check and the grid reliable," Kennedy said. "In the months since, this action has been a devastating blow to workers, electricity customers, and the reliability of the power grid."
Kennedy added that the Trump administration should accept the judge's verdict and "get out of the way of the expansion of renewable energy."
The Trump administration has the option to appeal the judge's order, although it did not respond to questions from the New York Times on Monday about whether it had plans to do so.
Trump's war against wind power comes at a time when rising electric bills, caused in large part by increased demand from energy-devouring artificial intelligence data centers, have become a hot-button political issue.
A recent report from researchers at The Century Foundation and financial abuse watchdog Protect Borrowers found that the average overdue balance on utility bills has surged by 32% over the last three years, going from $597 in 2022 to $789 in 2025. The report also estimated that roughly 1 out of every 20 US households has utility debt that is “so severe it was sent to collections or in arrears."
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Senate Report Shares Stories of US Citizens Assaulted, Unconstitutionally Detained by DHS
"Masked ICE and CPB agents chillingly seizing Americans isn't the nation we know and cherish," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal. "Totalitarian tactics have no place in our democracy."
Dec 09, 2025
Despite US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's claim that "no American citizens have been arrested or detained" as part of the Trump administration's violent and widely condemned immigration operations, ProPublica has tracked more than 170 cases, and a Senate report released Tuesday shares the stories of 22 of them.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, released Unchecked Authority: Examining the Trump Administration's Extrajudicial Immigration Detentions of US Citizens ahead of a public forum with House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Ranking Member Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and five Americans unconstitutionally detained by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents.
"While the second Trump administration has been marked by brazen lawlessness in many areas, the daily drumbeat of shocking stories detailing the behavior of federal immigration officials has been particularly chilling," the report states.
"The subcommittee's findings add to a growing body of evidence that the Trump administration is seeking to build a nationwide paramilitary force with vast resources that lawlessly detains citizens based on its own whims—an effort which has a number of unfortunate and obvious historical parallels," the publication continues.
"They couldn't even agree who had authority over me because none of them did. I was never arrested. Never charged. Never given an explanation. Never given an apology."
The report also notes that the testimonies included "represent only a subset of the likely hundreds of American citizens who have been unlawfully detained," and "also do not account for the many green-card holders, visa recipients, and others who have been captured and whose immigration status may cause them to be subject to even more severe treatment and harsher conditions than the appalling experiences of the Americans documented herein."
On June 8, when Cary Lopez Alvarado—a 23-year-old born and raised in Los Angeles County, California—was taking lunch to her husband, who was providing maintenance services on private property, masked immigration agents targeted him and her cousin in a work truck. Lopez Alvarado, who was pregnant, approached and took a video of the scene, where agents tried to pry open the vehicle's doors and threatened to break a window.
According to the report:
Cary tried again to tell the agents to stop, but, before she could finish her sentence, the officer put his hands on her and shoved her into the side of the truck. Two other agents immediately rushed over to further detain her. Cary knelt and clutched her mid-section to shield her baby from the assault. "I wasn't resisting at all," Cary recalled. "I can't fight back; I'm pregnant." The officers yanked her up and placed handcuffs around her wrists, all the while shoving her stomach against the truck. Her cousin attempted to intervene; "Be careful. Don't you see she’s pregnant?" he pleaded. At this point, Cary became dizzy from the altercation. When she regained awareness, she saw three agents on top of her cousin and several more in the process of throwing her husband on the ground. Then, the agents began kicking the back of the unoccupied work truck. A viral photo shows Cary, handcuffed and heavily pregnant, being led by a masked agent into a car.
The document also details the experience of Dayanne Figueroa, a first-generation Mexican American and working mom to a 6-year-old in Chicago, Illinois. When she was driving down a residential street to work on the morning of October 10, an unmarked, silver Dodge Durango SUV with blacked-out windows rammed into the side of her car. She reached for her phone to call local police, "but within seconds, two masked men in camouflage leapt out of the Durango and ran over to Dayanne's black Mercedes-Benz; one raised a gun in Dayanne's direction, and the other had an assault rifle strapped around his shoulder," the report says.
"Moments later, a third armed and masked agent appeared. Two of the men ripped open Dayanne's car door and grabbed her," the report continues, noting that bystanders recorded videos. "Two agents forcibly dragged her out of her car by her legs, ripping both shoes off, slamming her to the concrete, and digging their knees into her body to restrain her, directly over the site of her recent surgery. The agents flipped over Dayanne—who stands at 4 feet 11 inches and weighs 120 pounds—and put her in handcuffs, cinching them so tight that Dayanne has since suffered nerve damage to her wrists. Three agents carried Dayanne to an unmarked, red SUV and threw her inside, while a fourth agent reached into her car and grabbed her laptop, purse, and cellphone."
They initially took her to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Broadview, where federal agents have violently responded to protesters and held immigrants in "horrific and inhumane conditions." She was then brought to a Federal Bureau of Investigation facility in another Chicago suburb, Lombard, where she started urinating blood. That afternoon, she was eventually released to paramedics. Figueroa recalled that "they couldn't even agree who had authority over me because none of them did. I was never arrested. Never charged. Never given an explanation. Never given an apology."
While Figueroa's young child was not part of her encounter with federal agents, the report stresses that when children are involved in ICE and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents' interactions, "they are treated with reckless disregard."
For example, a now-6-year-old Massachusetts girl on the autism spectrum, called M. in the report, "was separated from her parents by ICE agents in an apparent attempt to lure her parents to leave private property so they could be apprehended" in September.
"M. was violently ill upon being returned to her family and had to be treated in the emergency room, miss school for a week, and has continued to struggle with nightmares," according to the document. It also notes that "her father has a pending asylum case and her mother has a pending request to obtain a legal status."
UPDATE: Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Chair Sen. Blumenthal releases "Unchecked Authority" report with firsthand accounts from 22 US citizens "who were physically assaulted, pepper sprayed, denied medical treatment, and detained—sometimes for days—by federal immigration agents"
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— Tyler McBrien (@tylermcbrien.com) December 9, 2025 at 8:57 AM
In a Tuesday statement announcing the report, Blumenthal said that "Americans should have a hard time recognizing our great nation in these stomach-turning, heartbreaking stories of brutal assaults on our fellow citizens."
"Masked ICE and CPB agents chillingly seizing Americans isn't the nation we know and cherish," he added. "Totalitarian tactics have no place in our democracy. I hope that elevating stories of abhorrent abuse will reinforce our resolve to preserve democratic rights."
Tuesday's public forum at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, is scheduled for 3:00 pm local time and set to feature testimony from Figueroa and four others, including Wilmer Chavarria, a school superintendent from Vermont, and Javier Ramirez, a Californian who was assaulted by DHS agents and denied adequate treatment for diabetes while being held for four days.
The other two participants are also from California: George Retes is a US Army veteran who missed his daughter's birthday after being violently arrested and detained during a raid at his job site, and Andrea Velez was falsely charged with assaulting an officer during an immigration raid she encountered on her way to work in Los Angeles.
"I served my country. I wore the uniform," Retes has warned. "If it can happen to me, it can happen to any one of us."
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