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Now is a very different time than ever before in the Medicare For All movement and it's reflected in the pace of the campaign. (Photo: NNU)
It was an unexpected teaching moment for Fox News -- a lesson that all the fear mongering in your playbook doesn't carry quite so far when you confront a mass movement for transformative change that will dramatically improve people's lives.
In a town hall April 15 with Sen. Bernie Sanders, Fox host Bret Baier threw out an anticipated gotcha question for the audience Fox likely presumed were Fox viewers.
How many people "get their insurance from work, private insurance," he asked. Most hands went up. How many, Baier then asked, "are willing to transition to what the Senator says a government run system?"
To no doubt his shock, nearly all the hands stayed up, accompanied by wild cheers - for the Medicare for All proposal the Fox network, and the President who is their number one cheerleader, have spent months demonizing.
Indeed, "only in the Fox News bubble," writes Washington Post columnist Helaine Olen, "would anyone be surprised by the popularity of Medicare-for-all -- polls routinely find more than half of Americans say they support it."
At a time when as many as 40 percent of Americans are struggling with how to pay their health care bills while also facing high costs for housing and other basic needs, the sign posts of support for Medicare for All are everywhere.
This week, 30,000 grocery workers at 240 New England Stop & Shop workers are on strike, with a key issue employer demands for brutal health care cuts - Stop & Shop wants to shift healthcare premium costs of $890 per week per employee onto the workers, the most senior of whom are making about $13 an hour.
The grocery workers are following in the footsteps of a wave of teacher strikes, in which health care costs have been a major driver, and other worker-management clashes.
And more and more working people, as reflected in the polls cited by Olen, and the response at the Fox town hall, are insisting on a health care system based on patient need, not ability to pay - Medicare for all.
The Fox town hall took place at an events center in Bethlehem that was built on the former Bethlehem Steel's steel stacks - a metaphor for the graveyard of post-industrial America in rural Pennsylvania- the end game of the neoliberal agenda.
I come from the Lehigh Valley, PA, as did no doubt many of those in the Fox audience. I have family who lost jobs when Bethlehem Steel shut down and retiree health and pensions when Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt. I have a neighbor who lost his job and committed suicide after.
I have family who are teachers who haven't had a raise in a decade because of health care takeaways. The people in that town hall are very well known to me, mostly white, mostly poor and working class, and all uniformly suffering when it comes to healthcare, including those on Medicare in its current form.
What Fox executives, despite months of stoking panic about "socialized medicine," may have realized to their horror Monday is that not only have they badly underestimated how much people are suffering, but also how willing people are to radically change the broken system that is hurting them. I watched that teaching moment five times, the whole room raised their hands for Medicare for all.
National Nurses United has been steadily leading a grassroots movement for Medicare for all in which tens of thousands of volunteers across the U.S. have engaged in the work rarely seen by media networks and corporate executives - knocking on doors, phone banking, handing out flyers at farmer's markets and neighborhood meetings, and recruiting more volunteers.
During a February National Week of Action, leading up to the introduction of the House Medicare for All bill, HR 1384, introduced by Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Debbie Dingel with 108 House co-sponsors, three barnstorms - organizing meetings at which volunteers are brought together and work planned out - were held in Lehigh Valley towns, Bethlehem, Easton, and Allentown. One outcome of those barnstorms was the decision of local Rep. Susan Wild to sign on to HR 1384 as a co-sponsor.
Support for the bill is blossoming, as seen in thre reception for the Senate Medicare for all bill, S 1129, introduced in early April by Sen. Sanders, with the support of other Democratic Presidential candidates, including Senators Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillebrand, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren.
Our campaign, the Nurses Campaign for Medicare For All, is winning and I know that it is because we are leading a grassroots-based movement for healthcare justice in this country acting in solidarity with our brothers and sisters internationally including our friends at Momentum in the UK.
Now is a very different time than ever before in the Medicare For All movement and it's reflected in the pace of the campaign but now we have to step it up even more.
The beauty of the distributed organizing model is that it scales up easily to meet this demand. The beauty of this campaign is that people everywhere are ready to pitch in and do the hard work it takes to literally knock every door to organize the demand for Medicare For All.
In addition to canvassing and phone banking, volunteers are also scheduling visits with their legislators, writing letters and calling their local media, and urging their local elected officials to pass resolutions endorsing the Medicare for All bills. Seattle, Oakland, and Boston city councils, and San Francisco Supervisors have in the past few weeks passed resolutions, among a number of others.
No major social reform in U.S. history - whether abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, banning child labor, union rights, Social Security, ending legal segregation laws, and Medicare itself - have won without a mass movement paving the ground and demanding it.
We're in a different moment for Medicare for All. And it's because the movement is growing. Need more proof? Ask Bret Baier and Fox News.
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It was an unexpected teaching moment for Fox News -- a lesson that all the fear mongering in your playbook doesn't carry quite so far when you confront a mass movement for transformative change that will dramatically improve people's lives.
In a town hall April 15 with Sen. Bernie Sanders, Fox host Bret Baier threw out an anticipated gotcha question for the audience Fox likely presumed were Fox viewers.
How many people "get their insurance from work, private insurance," he asked. Most hands went up. How many, Baier then asked, "are willing to transition to what the Senator says a government run system?"
To no doubt his shock, nearly all the hands stayed up, accompanied by wild cheers - for the Medicare for All proposal the Fox network, and the President who is their number one cheerleader, have spent months demonizing.
Indeed, "only in the Fox News bubble," writes Washington Post columnist Helaine Olen, "would anyone be surprised by the popularity of Medicare-for-all -- polls routinely find more than half of Americans say they support it."
At a time when as many as 40 percent of Americans are struggling with how to pay their health care bills while also facing high costs for housing and other basic needs, the sign posts of support for Medicare for All are everywhere.
This week, 30,000 grocery workers at 240 New England Stop & Shop workers are on strike, with a key issue employer demands for brutal health care cuts - Stop & Shop wants to shift healthcare premium costs of $890 per week per employee onto the workers, the most senior of whom are making about $13 an hour.
The grocery workers are following in the footsteps of a wave of teacher strikes, in which health care costs have been a major driver, and other worker-management clashes.
And more and more working people, as reflected in the polls cited by Olen, and the response at the Fox town hall, are insisting on a health care system based on patient need, not ability to pay - Medicare for all.
The Fox town hall took place at an events center in Bethlehem that was built on the former Bethlehem Steel's steel stacks - a metaphor for the graveyard of post-industrial America in rural Pennsylvania- the end game of the neoliberal agenda.
I come from the Lehigh Valley, PA, as did no doubt many of those in the Fox audience. I have family who lost jobs when Bethlehem Steel shut down and retiree health and pensions when Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt. I have a neighbor who lost his job and committed suicide after.
I have family who are teachers who haven't had a raise in a decade because of health care takeaways. The people in that town hall are very well known to me, mostly white, mostly poor and working class, and all uniformly suffering when it comes to healthcare, including those on Medicare in its current form.
What Fox executives, despite months of stoking panic about "socialized medicine," may have realized to their horror Monday is that not only have they badly underestimated how much people are suffering, but also how willing people are to radically change the broken system that is hurting them. I watched that teaching moment five times, the whole room raised their hands for Medicare for all.
National Nurses United has been steadily leading a grassroots movement for Medicare for all in which tens of thousands of volunteers across the U.S. have engaged in the work rarely seen by media networks and corporate executives - knocking on doors, phone banking, handing out flyers at farmer's markets and neighborhood meetings, and recruiting more volunteers.
During a February National Week of Action, leading up to the introduction of the House Medicare for All bill, HR 1384, introduced by Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Debbie Dingel with 108 House co-sponsors, three barnstorms - organizing meetings at which volunteers are brought together and work planned out - were held in Lehigh Valley towns, Bethlehem, Easton, and Allentown. One outcome of those barnstorms was the decision of local Rep. Susan Wild to sign on to HR 1384 as a co-sponsor.
Support for the bill is blossoming, as seen in thre reception for the Senate Medicare for all bill, S 1129, introduced in early April by Sen. Sanders, with the support of other Democratic Presidential candidates, including Senators Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillebrand, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren.
Our campaign, the Nurses Campaign for Medicare For All, is winning and I know that it is because we are leading a grassroots-based movement for healthcare justice in this country acting in solidarity with our brothers and sisters internationally including our friends at Momentum in the UK.
Now is a very different time than ever before in the Medicare For All movement and it's reflected in the pace of the campaign but now we have to step it up even more.
The beauty of the distributed organizing model is that it scales up easily to meet this demand. The beauty of this campaign is that people everywhere are ready to pitch in and do the hard work it takes to literally knock every door to organize the demand for Medicare For All.
In addition to canvassing and phone banking, volunteers are also scheduling visits with their legislators, writing letters and calling their local media, and urging their local elected officials to pass resolutions endorsing the Medicare for All bills. Seattle, Oakland, and Boston city councils, and San Francisco Supervisors have in the past few weeks passed resolutions, among a number of others.
No major social reform in U.S. history - whether abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, banning child labor, union rights, Social Security, ending legal segregation laws, and Medicare itself - have won without a mass movement paving the ground and demanding it.
We're in a different moment for Medicare for All. And it's because the movement is growing. Need more proof? Ask Bret Baier and Fox News.
It was an unexpected teaching moment for Fox News -- a lesson that all the fear mongering in your playbook doesn't carry quite so far when you confront a mass movement for transformative change that will dramatically improve people's lives.
In a town hall April 15 with Sen. Bernie Sanders, Fox host Bret Baier threw out an anticipated gotcha question for the audience Fox likely presumed were Fox viewers.
How many people "get their insurance from work, private insurance," he asked. Most hands went up. How many, Baier then asked, "are willing to transition to what the Senator says a government run system?"
To no doubt his shock, nearly all the hands stayed up, accompanied by wild cheers - for the Medicare for All proposal the Fox network, and the President who is their number one cheerleader, have spent months demonizing.
Indeed, "only in the Fox News bubble," writes Washington Post columnist Helaine Olen, "would anyone be surprised by the popularity of Medicare-for-all -- polls routinely find more than half of Americans say they support it."
At a time when as many as 40 percent of Americans are struggling with how to pay their health care bills while also facing high costs for housing and other basic needs, the sign posts of support for Medicare for All are everywhere.
This week, 30,000 grocery workers at 240 New England Stop & Shop workers are on strike, with a key issue employer demands for brutal health care cuts - Stop & Shop wants to shift healthcare premium costs of $890 per week per employee onto the workers, the most senior of whom are making about $13 an hour.
The grocery workers are following in the footsteps of a wave of teacher strikes, in which health care costs have been a major driver, and other worker-management clashes.
And more and more working people, as reflected in the polls cited by Olen, and the response at the Fox town hall, are insisting on a health care system based on patient need, not ability to pay - Medicare for all.
The Fox town hall took place at an events center in Bethlehem that was built on the former Bethlehem Steel's steel stacks - a metaphor for the graveyard of post-industrial America in rural Pennsylvania- the end game of the neoliberal agenda.
I come from the Lehigh Valley, PA, as did no doubt many of those in the Fox audience. I have family who lost jobs when Bethlehem Steel shut down and retiree health and pensions when Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt. I have a neighbor who lost his job and committed suicide after.
I have family who are teachers who haven't had a raise in a decade because of health care takeaways. The people in that town hall are very well known to me, mostly white, mostly poor and working class, and all uniformly suffering when it comes to healthcare, including those on Medicare in its current form.
What Fox executives, despite months of stoking panic about "socialized medicine," may have realized to their horror Monday is that not only have they badly underestimated how much people are suffering, but also how willing people are to radically change the broken system that is hurting them. I watched that teaching moment five times, the whole room raised their hands for Medicare for all.
National Nurses United has been steadily leading a grassroots movement for Medicare for all in which tens of thousands of volunteers across the U.S. have engaged in the work rarely seen by media networks and corporate executives - knocking on doors, phone banking, handing out flyers at farmer's markets and neighborhood meetings, and recruiting more volunteers.
During a February National Week of Action, leading up to the introduction of the House Medicare for All bill, HR 1384, introduced by Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Debbie Dingel with 108 House co-sponsors, three barnstorms - organizing meetings at which volunteers are brought together and work planned out - were held in Lehigh Valley towns, Bethlehem, Easton, and Allentown. One outcome of those barnstorms was the decision of local Rep. Susan Wild to sign on to HR 1384 as a co-sponsor.
Support for the bill is blossoming, as seen in thre reception for the Senate Medicare for all bill, S 1129, introduced in early April by Sen. Sanders, with the support of other Democratic Presidential candidates, including Senators Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillebrand, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren.
Our campaign, the Nurses Campaign for Medicare For All, is winning and I know that it is because we are leading a grassroots-based movement for healthcare justice in this country acting in solidarity with our brothers and sisters internationally including our friends at Momentum in the UK.
Now is a very different time than ever before in the Medicare For All movement and it's reflected in the pace of the campaign but now we have to step it up even more.
The beauty of the distributed organizing model is that it scales up easily to meet this demand. The beauty of this campaign is that people everywhere are ready to pitch in and do the hard work it takes to literally knock every door to organize the demand for Medicare For All.
In addition to canvassing and phone banking, volunteers are also scheduling visits with their legislators, writing letters and calling their local media, and urging their local elected officials to pass resolutions endorsing the Medicare for All bills. Seattle, Oakland, and Boston city councils, and San Francisco Supervisors have in the past few weeks passed resolutions, among a number of others.
No major social reform in U.S. history - whether abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, banning child labor, union rights, Social Security, ending legal segregation laws, and Medicare itself - have won without a mass movement paving the ground and demanding it.
We're in a different moment for Medicare for All. And it's because the movement is growing. Need more proof? Ask Bret Baier and Fox News.
Judge Rossie Alston Jr. ruled the plaintiffs had failed to prove the groups provided "ongoing, continuous, systematic, and material support for Hamas and its affiliates."
A federal judge appointed in 2019 by US President Donald Trump has dismissed a lawsuit filed against pro-Palestinian organizations that alleged they were fronts for the terrorist organization Hamas.
In a ruling issued on Friday, Judge Rossie Alston Jr. of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia found that the plaintiffs who filed the case against the pro-Palestine groups had not sufficiently demonstrated a clear link between the groups and Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
The plaintiffs in the case—consisting of seven Americans and two Israelis—were all victims of the Hamas attack that killed an estimated 1,200 people, including more than 700 Israeli civilians.
They alleged that the pro-Palestinian groups—including National Students for Justice in Palestine, WESPAC Foundation, and Americans for Justice in Palestine Educational Foundation—provided material support to Hamas that directly led to injuries they suffered as a result of the October 7 attack.
This alleged support for Hamas, the plaintiffs argued, violated both the Anti-Terrorism Act and the Alien Tort Statute.
However, after examining all the evidence presented by the plaintiffs, Alston found they had not proven their claim that the organizations in question provide "ongoing, continuous, systematic, and material support for Hamas and its affiliates."
Specifically, Alston said that the claims made by the plaintiffs "are all very general and conclusory and do not specifically relate to the injuries" that they suffered in the Hamas attack.
"Although plaintiffs conclude that defendants have aided and abetted Hamas by providing it with 'material support despite knowledge of Hamas' terrorist activity both before, during, and after its October 7 terrorist attack,' plaintiffs do not allege that any planning, preparation, funding, or execution of the October 7, 2023 attack or any violations of international law by Hamas occurred in the United States," Alston emphasized. "None of the direct attackers are alleged to be citizens of the United States."
Alston was unconvinced by the plaintiffs' claims that the pro-Palestinian organizations "act as Hamas' public relations division, recruiting domestic foot soldiers to disseminate Hamas’s propaganda," and he similarly dismissed them as "vague and conclusory."
He then said that the plaintiffs did not establish that these "public relations" activities purportedly done on behalf of Hamas had "aided and abetted Hamas in carrying out the specific October 7, 2023 attack (or subsequent or continuing Hamas violations) that caused the Israeli Plaintiffs' injuries."
Alston concluded by dismissing the plaintiffs' case without prejudice, meaning they are free to file an amended lawsuit against the plaintiffs within 30 days of the judge's ruling.
"Putin got one hell of a photo op out of Trump," wrote one critic.
US President Donald Trump on Saturday morning tried to put his best spin on a Friday summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin that yielded neither a cease-fire agreement nor a comprehensive peace deal to end the war in Ukraine.
Writing on his Truth Social page, the president took a victory lap over the summit despite coming home completely empty-handed when he flew back from Alaska on Friday night.
"A great and very successful day in Alaska!" Trump began. "The meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia went very well, as did a late night phone call with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine, and various European Leaders, including the highly respected Secretary General of NATO."
Trump then pivoted to saying that he was fine with not obtaining a cease-fire agreement, even though he said just days before that he'd impose "severe consequences" on Russia if it did not agree to one.
"It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Cease-fire Agreement, which often times do not hold up," Trump said. "President Zelenskyy will be coming to DC, the Oval Office, on Monday afternoon. If all works out, we will then schedule a meeting with President Putin. Potentially, millions of people's lives will be saved."
While Trump did his best to put a happy face on the summit, many critics contended it was nothing short of a debacle for the US president.
Writing in The New Yorker, Susan Glasser argued that the entire summit with Putin was a "self-own of embarrassing proportions," given that he literally rolled out the red carpet for his Russian counterpart and did not achieve any success in bringing the war to a close.
"Putin got one hell of a photo op out of Trump, and still more time on the clock to prosecute his war against the 'brotherly' Ukrainian people, as he had the chutzpah to call them during his remarks in Alaska," she wrote. "The most enduring images from Anchorage, it seems, will be its grotesque displays of bonhomie between the dictator and his longtime American admirer."
She also noted that Trump appeared to shift the entire burden of ending the war onto Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and he even said after the Putin summit that "it's really up to President Zelenskyy to get it done."
This led Glasser to comment that "if there's one unwavering Law of Trump, this is it: Whatever happens, it is never, ever, his fault."
Glasser wasn't the only critic to offer a scathing assessment of the summit. The Economist blasted Trump in an editorial about the meeting, which it labeled a "gift" to Putin. The magazine also contrasted the way that Trump treated Putin during his visit to American soil with the way that he treated Zelenskyy during an Oval Office meeting earlier this year.
"The honors for Mr. Putin were in sharp contrast to the public humiliation that Mr. Trump and his advisers inflicted on Mr. Zelenskyy during his first visit to the White House earlier this year," they wrote. "Since then relations with Ukraine have improved, but Mr. Trump has often been quick to blame it for being invaded; and he has proved strangely indulgent with Mr. Putin."
Michael McFaul, an American ambassador to Russia under former President Barack Obama, was struck by just how much effort went into holding a summit that accomplished nothing.
"Summits usually have deliverables," he told The Atlantic. "This meeting had none... I hope that they made some progress towards next steps in the peace process. But there is no evidence of that yet."
Mamdani won the House minority leader's district by double digits in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary, prompting one critic to ask, "Do those voters not matter?"
Zohran Mamdani is the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, but Democratic U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries—whose district Mamdani won by double digits—is still refusing to endorse him, "blue-no-matter-who" mantra be damned.
Criticism of Jeffries (D-N.Y.) mounted Friday after he sidestepped questions about whether he agreed with the democratic socialist Mamdani's proposed policies—including a rent freeze, universal public transportation, and free supermarkets—during an interview on CNBC's "Squawk Box" earlier this week.
"He's going to have to demonstrate to a broader electorate—including in many of the neighborhoods that I represent in Brooklyn—that his ideas can actually be put into reality," Jeffries said in comments that drew praise from scandal-ridden incumbent Democratic Mayor Eric Adams, who opted to run independently. Another Democrat, disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, is also running on his own.
"Shit like this does more to undermine faith in the institution of the Democratic Party than anything Mamdani might ever say or do," Amanda Litman, co-founder and executive director of Run For Something—a political action group that recruits young, diverse progressives to run for down-ballot offices—said on social media in response to Jeffries' refusal to endorse Mamdani.
"He won the primary! Handily!!" Litman added. "Does that electorate not count? Do those voters not matter?"
Writer and professor Roxane Gay noted on Bluesky that "Jeffries is an establishment Democrat. He will always work for the establishment. He is not a disruptor or innovator or individual thinker. Within that framework, his gutless behavior toward Mamdani or any progressive candidate makes a lot of sense."
City College of New York professor Angus Johnston said on the social network Bluesky that "even if Jeffries does eventually endorse Mamdani, the only response available to Mamdani next year if someone asks him whether he's endorsing Jeffries is three seconds of incredulous laughter."
Jeffries has repeatedly refused to endorse Mamdani, a staunch supporter of Palestinian liberation and vocal opponent of Israel's genocidal annihilation of Gaza. The minority leader—whose all-time top campaign donor is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, according to AIPAC Tracker—has especially criticized Mamdani's use of the phrase "globalize the intifada," a call for universal justice and liberation.
Mamdani's stance doesn't seem to have harmed his support among New York's Jewish voters, who according to recent polling prefer him over any other mayoral candidate by a double-digit margin.