November, 23 2020, 11:00pm EDT
People's Action Statement on John Kerry Appointment as Climate Czar
People's Action Climate Justice Campaign Director Kaniela Ing released the following statement today after President-Elect Joe Biden appointed Secretary John Kerry as Climate Czar:
"Climate change is a global crisis that will require revolutionary cooperation, but over the past four years, Trump and his climate-denying cronies have soured key relationships and humiliated us on the world stage. Secretary John Kerry understands this and is qualified and prepared to tackle the climate crisis with us.
WASHINGTON
People's Action Climate Justice Campaign Director Kaniela Ing released the following statement today after President-Elect Joe Biden appointed Secretary John Kerry as Climate Czar:
"Climate change is a global crisis that will require revolutionary cooperation, but over the past four years, Trump and his climate-denying cronies have soured key relationships and humiliated us on the world stage. Secretary John Kerry understands this and is qualified and prepared to tackle the climate crisis with us.
"I served on the Climate Power 2020 national advisory board with Secretary John Kerry, and he has shown us that he truly cares about climate change. He played a key role in defeating Trump and committing Biden to a historic $2 trillion climate plan, built upon massive public support for bold climate action. As Climate Czar, John Kerry should leverage his international experience, reestablish the United States globally as a moral leader, and fulfill the climate mandate our people demand and need."
People's Action builds the power of poor and working people, in rural, suburban, and urban areas to win change through issue campaigns and elections.
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'Indefensible': Trump Budget Law Subsidizes Private Jet Owners While Taking Healthcare From Millions
A provision of the budget law that President Donald Trump signed last week will leave taxpayers to "pick up the tab for the private jet industry and billionaire high flyers."
Jul 07, 2025
The Republican budget measure that U.S. President Donald Trump signed into law late last week contains a provision that analysts say will allow private jet owners to write off the full cost of their aircraft in the first year of purchase, a boon to the ultra-rich that comes as millions of people are set to lose healthcare under the same legislation.
FlyUSA, a private aviation provider, gushed in a blog post that with final passage of the unpopular budget reconciliation package, "business jet ownership has never looked more fiscally attractive or more fun to explain to your accountant."
The law, crafted by congressional Republicans and approved with only GOP support, permanently restores a major corporate tax break known as 100% bonus depreciation, which allows businesses to deduct the costs of certain assets in the first year of purchase rather than writing them off over time.
Forbes noted that the bonus depreciation policy "applies to a slew of qualified, physical business expenses which depreciate over time, such as machinery and company cars, but the policy is often associated with big-ticket luxury items, such as private aircraft, and its institution last decade led to a boom in jet sales."
"Trump and congressional Republicans have certainly delivered for the billionaire class."
Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies, called bonus depreciation "a massive tax break for billionaires and centi-millionaires that use the most polluting form of transportation on the planet."
"A corporation purchasing a $50 million private jet could potentially deduct the entire $50 million from their taxes in the year of the purchase, rather than spreading the deduction over many years," Collins wrote. "This amounts to a massive taxpayer subsidy, as ordinary taxpayers pick up the tab for the private jet industry and billionaire high flyers."
"Subsidizing more private jets on a warming planet is reckless and indefensible," he added.
The National Business Aviation Association, a lobbying group for the private aviation industry, celebrated passage of the Republican legislation, specifically welcoming the bonus depreciation policy as "effective for incentivizing aircraft purchase." (The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy argues that "depreciation tax breaks have never been shown to encourage more capital investment.")
Meanwhile, communities across the United States are bracing for the law's deep cuts to Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance, which are expected to impose damaging strains on state budgets and strip food benefits and health coverage from millions of low-income Americans.
"Trump and congressional Republicans have certainly delivered for the billionaire class," said Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen. "This is certainly one of the cruelest bills in American history, backtracking on the country's painfully slow history of expanding healthcare coverage and, equally remarkably, taking food away from the hungry."
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Deadly flooding caused by torrential rain in central Texas late last week called attention to U.S. President Donald Trump's full-scale assault on the climate research and monitoring agencies tasked with studying and predicting such weather catastrophes, as well as his ongoing attacks on disaster preparedness and relief.
Though local National Weather Service (NWS) forecasters did issue warnings in the lead-up to Friday's flooding—which killed at least 82 people, including dozens of children—key roles were reportedly vacant ahead of the downpour, prompting scrutiny of the Trump administration's mass firings and budget cuts, in addition to years of neglect and failures by Republicans at the state level.
Asked whether he believes the federal government should hire back terminated meteorologists in the wake of the Texas flooding, Trump responded in the negative and falsely claimed that "very talented people" at NWS "didn't see" the disaster coming.
"This is an absolute lie," replied meteorologist and climate journalist Eric Holthaus. "Worse, this is the person responsible for making those kids less safe and he's trying to deny the damage he caused."
Holthaus wrote Sunday that Trump's staffing cuts "have particularly hit the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Environmental Modeling Center, which aims to improve the skill of these types of difficult forecasts."
"Though it's unclear to what extent staffing shortages across the NWS complicated the advance notice that local officials had of an impending flooding disaster," he added, "it's clear that this was a complex, compound tragedy of a type that climate warming is making more frequent."
"Republicans have fired meteorologists, cut emergency disaster aid, and given an extra $18 billion to the fossil fuel corporations causing this crisis."
Under the guise of "government efficiency," the Trump administration has taken an axe to staff at federal climate agencies and is trying to go even further with its budget for the coming fiscal year. The Washington Post noted Sunday that "a budget document the Trump administration recently submitted to Congress calls for zeroing out climate research funding for 2026, something officials had hinted at in previous proposals but is now in lawmakers' hands."
"But even just the specter of President Donald Trump's budget proposals has prompted scientists to limit research activities in advance of further cuts," the Post noted. "Trump's efforts to freeze climate research spending and slash the government's scientific workforce have for months prompted warnings of rippling consequences in years ahead. For many climate scientists, the consequences are already here."
Since the start of his second term, Trump has dismissed the hundreds of scientists and experts who were working on the National Climate Assessment, moved to slash NOAA's workforce, and announced a halt to climate disaster tracking, among other changes—all while working to accelerate fossil fuel extraction and use that is supercharging extreme weather events. One NOAA veteran warned that Trump's cuts could drag the agency back to "the technical and proficiency levels we had in the 1950s."
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Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, said over the weekend that "Republicans have fired meteorologists, cut emergency disaster aid, and given an extra $18 billion to the fossil fuel corporations causing this crisis."
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Stateless Palestinian Woman Details 'Very Traumatizing' Abuse Suffered in ICE Detention
Trump administration immigration officials reportedly dismissed Ward Sakeik's ordeal as a "sob story."
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A newlywed Palestinian woman from Texas released from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention earlier this week says she was shackled for long periods, denied food and water, and subjected to other human rights abuses during nearly five months in ICE custody—all because she is a stateless person.
Ward Sakeik, 22, was born in Saudi Arabia to Palestinian parents from Gaza. Because Saudi Arabia does not grant birthright citizenship to the children of foreign nationals, Sakeik was officially stateless when her family legally emigrated to the United States when she was 8 years old.
“I was moved around like cattle.”
Ward Sakeik, US college graduate and homeowner, speaks out following 140 days in ICE hellhole pic.twitter.com/bNTgs7362h
— World Socialist Web Site (@WSWS_Updates) July 5, 2025
Sakeik's parents subsequently applied for—and were denied—asylum in the U.S. but were allowed to remain legally in the country pending routine check-ins with ICE.
After graduating high school and the University of Texas, Arlington, starting a wedding photography business, marrying a U.S. citizen, and beginning the process of obtaining a green card, Sakeik and her husband went on their honeymoon in the U.S. Virgin Islands. She was detained shortly after arriving back in the United States after Customs and Border Protection agents flagged her for flying over international waters—a move that Department of Homeland Security officials said violated immigration policy.
"After a few hours from returning from our honeymoon, I was put in a gray tracksuit and shackles," Sakeik said at a press conference following her release. "I was handcuffed for 16 hours without any water or food on the bus. I have moved around like cattle. And the U.S. government attempted to dump me in a part of the world where I don't know where I'm going and what I'm doing or anything."
"We were not given any water or food, and we could smell the driver eating Chick-fil-A," she continued. "We would ask for water, bang on the door for food, and he would just turn up the radio and act like he wasn't listening to us."
Sakeik said unhygienic conditions at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas—where an ICE officer was shot in the neck during a Friday evening attack—caused widespread illness among detainees.
"The restrooms are also very, very, very unhygienic," she said. "The beds have rust everywhere. They're not properly maintained. And cockroaches, grasshoppers, spiders, you name it, are all over the facility. Girls would get bit."
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Eric Lee, an attorney for Sakeik, told CNN that immigration officials dismissed Sakeik's account as a "sob story."
"I guess what we would ask the American people is, 'Who are they gonna believe, their lying eyes or the statements of the people who are responsible for carrying out what are really crimes against humanity here in the United States?'" Lee added.
Sakeik said she now plans to advocate on behalf of women and girls imprisoned by ICE.
"I... want the world to know that the women who do come here come here for a better life, but they're criminalized for that," she said. "They are dehumanized, and they're stripped away from their rights. We have been treated as a 'less-than' just simply for wanting a better life."
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