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"The shine has come off so-called 'free trade,' and Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is now proposing a bold overhaul of how the U.S. conducts its trade negotiations." (Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
For the two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, elite pundits worshiped free trade with a reverence bordering on the comical. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman declared in 2006, "I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade initiative [sic]. I didn't even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade." That was about the intellectual level of neoliberalism at its moment of peak political hegemony.
But things have changed a lot. The shine has come off so-called "free trade," and Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is now proposing a bold overhaul of how the U.S. conducts its trade negotiations. It's only a matter of time before the old trade paradigm dies an ignoble and well-deserved death.
Dan Drezner, an international politics professor at Tufts and a Brookings Institute fellow, provides a good view of the crumbling neoliberal consensus in a recent Washington Post column. He savages Warren's plan, calling it a "terrible, horrible, no good, very bad trade program" that "would actually be more protectionist in its effects than Trump's, something that I did not think was possible."
But Drezner is talking through his hat. For starters, it is ridiculous to characterize Warren's plan as protectionist. Its major focus is on changing the way trade deals are made, especially who is involved. As my colleague Jeff Spross details, she would replace the current wildly business-slanted negotiation process with one that is carried out in the open, and prioritizes "labor rights, human rights, environmental protection, combating climate change, heading off international tax avoidance." (As an aside, Paul Krugman is flagrantly incorrect to assert that the current "fast track" trade negotiation process, which largely cuts Congress out of the process in favor of corporate elites and the executive branch, was created by FDR. It's a product of President Nixon and the 1974 Trade Act.)
Critically, Warren would also include the welfare of other countries as part of the considerations. As she writes, "millions of people in our trading-partner countries don't gain the benefits of higher standards -- and companies can easily pad their profits by shifting American jobs to countries where they can pay workers next to nothing and pollute the air and water freely." Half the point here is to raise the living standards of U.S. trading partners -- unlike NAFTA, for example, which harmed both American workers through deindustrialization and Mexican ones by trapping them in a low-wage, non-union export paradigm. We can call Trump protectionist because he is trying to win a trade war by harming the rest of the world (though his efforts have been so haphazard and uncoordinated that it seems to be harming everyone, America included), but Warren is far more internationalist.
Drezner further argues that Warren's approach would "sabotage any set of negotiations" because conducting negotiations in public would "scare off partners who prefer to negotiate quietly before introducing a final draft." Involving Congress would just "stymie the ratification of any deal even further." The contempt for democracy here is palpable. By Drezner's lights, neither the voting rabble nor their elected representatives have any place in trade deals. Yet somehow the world economy survived -- indeed, performed considerably better -- in the years before fast track and secret deals larded up with corporate goodies were the trade policy norm.
Indeed, a great many of the stipulations in recent trade agreements have nothing whatsoever to do with trade as such, or even undermine it. Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) courts, which have been built into thousands of trade agreements over the years, are at bottom a rigged private legal system for international corporations where they can do things like sue nations for cutting into their profits with environmental regulation. Meanwhile, protections for patents and copyright are a bald infringement of trade -- a requirement foreign countries enforce America's government-granted monopolies on movies, drugs, and so on. Perhaps that is defensible sometimes, but not when it means stymieing Nelson Mandela's plan to import cheap HIV/AIDS drugs in order to protect the profits of American drug companies.
Conversely, it's easily possible that under a more egalitarian framework, trade might actually increase in some sectors. Requirements for better labor conditions would increase the income of the working class in foreign countries, and one thing those people would likely buy with that money is more U.S. imports. Incidentally, the U.S. does tons of trade with countries -- like those in the E.U., which constitutes our largest trading partner -- without a formal trade agreement.
But by far the largest holes in Drezner's analysis have to do with taxes and climate change. Both are gigantic problems -- as economist Gabriel Zucman has calculated, rich people around the world have squirrelled about $7.6 trillion away in offshore accounts to avoid taxation, while climate change threatens human society. Both require international coordination to fix, because both are inherently international problems. Warren would refuse trade deals with countries that won't coordinate their tax regimes (to prevent beggar-thy-neighbor tax havens), and levy a border carbon tax (to prevent companies from profiting by moving production to countries where greenhouse gas emissions aren't regulated). As Zucman writes, this is "long overdue."
Drezner doesn't mention tax avoidance once, and the sum total of his climate change comments reads as follows: "don't get me started on her border adjustment tax for carbon." Yes, it sure would be inconvenient if he had to get started explaining why Warren's eminently sensible approach to the biggest problem facing America and the world is no good!
At any rate, this isn't the first time we've had this same debate. Indeed, as John Maynard Keynes wrote in a 1933 essay, for most of the 19th century free trade was also an object of gormless fetish worship, with similarly poor results. And as Spross points out, Warren has some distance to go to fully flesh out what to do regarding the dollar's status as reserve currency, which lets America run a continual trade deficit but also saps domestic production. But it's a strong start -- if we just shake off the last remnants of neoliberal brain poisoning, we can figure out the rest of it.
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For the two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, elite pundits worshiped free trade with a reverence bordering on the comical. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman declared in 2006, "I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade initiative [sic]. I didn't even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade." That was about the intellectual level of neoliberalism at its moment of peak political hegemony.
But things have changed a lot. The shine has come off so-called "free trade," and Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is now proposing a bold overhaul of how the U.S. conducts its trade negotiations. It's only a matter of time before the old trade paradigm dies an ignoble and well-deserved death.
Dan Drezner, an international politics professor at Tufts and a Brookings Institute fellow, provides a good view of the crumbling neoliberal consensus in a recent Washington Post column. He savages Warren's plan, calling it a "terrible, horrible, no good, very bad trade program" that "would actually be more protectionist in its effects than Trump's, something that I did not think was possible."
But Drezner is talking through his hat. For starters, it is ridiculous to characterize Warren's plan as protectionist. Its major focus is on changing the way trade deals are made, especially who is involved. As my colleague Jeff Spross details, she would replace the current wildly business-slanted negotiation process with one that is carried out in the open, and prioritizes "labor rights, human rights, environmental protection, combating climate change, heading off international tax avoidance." (As an aside, Paul Krugman is flagrantly incorrect to assert that the current "fast track" trade negotiation process, which largely cuts Congress out of the process in favor of corporate elites and the executive branch, was created by FDR. It's a product of President Nixon and the 1974 Trade Act.)
Critically, Warren would also include the welfare of other countries as part of the considerations. As she writes, "millions of people in our trading-partner countries don't gain the benefits of higher standards -- and companies can easily pad their profits by shifting American jobs to countries where they can pay workers next to nothing and pollute the air and water freely." Half the point here is to raise the living standards of U.S. trading partners -- unlike NAFTA, for example, which harmed both American workers through deindustrialization and Mexican ones by trapping them in a low-wage, non-union export paradigm. We can call Trump protectionist because he is trying to win a trade war by harming the rest of the world (though his efforts have been so haphazard and uncoordinated that it seems to be harming everyone, America included), but Warren is far more internationalist.
Drezner further argues that Warren's approach would "sabotage any set of negotiations" because conducting negotiations in public would "scare off partners who prefer to negotiate quietly before introducing a final draft." Involving Congress would just "stymie the ratification of any deal even further." The contempt for democracy here is palpable. By Drezner's lights, neither the voting rabble nor their elected representatives have any place in trade deals. Yet somehow the world economy survived -- indeed, performed considerably better -- in the years before fast track and secret deals larded up with corporate goodies were the trade policy norm.
Indeed, a great many of the stipulations in recent trade agreements have nothing whatsoever to do with trade as such, or even undermine it. Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) courts, which have been built into thousands of trade agreements over the years, are at bottom a rigged private legal system for international corporations where they can do things like sue nations for cutting into their profits with environmental regulation. Meanwhile, protections for patents and copyright are a bald infringement of trade -- a requirement foreign countries enforce America's government-granted monopolies on movies, drugs, and so on. Perhaps that is defensible sometimes, but not when it means stymieing Nelson Mandela's plan to import cheap HIV/AIDS drugs in order to protect the profits of American drug companies.
Conversely, it's easily possible that under a more egalitarian framework, trade might actually increase in some sectors. Requirements for better labor conditions would increase the income of the working class in foreign countries, and one thing those people would likely buy with that money is more U.S. imports. Incidentally, the U.S. does tons of trade with countries -- like those in the E.U., which constitutes our largest trading partner -- without a formal trade agreement.
But by far the largest holes in Drezner's analysis have to do with taxes and climate change. Both are gigantic problems -- as economist Gabriel Zucman has calculated, rich people around the world have squirrelled about $7.6 trillion away in offshore accounts to avoid taxation, while climate change threatens human society. Both require international coordination to fix, because both are inherently international problems. Warren would refuse trade deals with countries that won't coordinate their tax regimes (to prevent beggar-thy-neighbor tax havens), and levy a border carbon tax (to prevent companies from profiting by moving production to countries where greenhouse gas emissions aren't regulated). As Zucman writes, this is "long overdue."
Drezner doesn't mention tax avoidance once, and the sum total of his climate change comments reads as follows: "don't get me started on her border adjustment tax for carbon." Yes, it sure would be inconvenient if he had to get started explaining why Warren's eminently sensible approach to the biggest problem facing America and the world is no good!
At any rate, this isn't the first time we've had this same debate. Indeed, as John Maynard Keynes wrote in a 1933 essay, for most of the 19th century free trade was also an object of gormless fetish worship, with similarly poor results. And as Spross points out, Warren has some distance to go to fully flesh out what to do regarding the dollar's status as reserve currency, which lets America run a continual trade deficit but also saps domestic production. But it's a strong start -- if we just shake off the last remnants of neoliberal brain poisoning, we can figure out the rest of it.
For the two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, elite pundits worshiped free trade with a reverence bordering on the comical. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman declared in 2006, "I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade initiative [sic]. I didn't even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade." That was about the intellectual level of neoliberalism at its moment of peak political hegemony.
But things have changed a lot. The shine has come off so-called "free trade," and Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is now proposing a bold overhaul of how the U.S. conducts its trade negotiations. It's only a matter of time before the old trade paradigm dies an ignoble and well-deserved death.
Dan Drezner, an international politics professor at Tufts and a Brookings Institute fellow, provides a good view of the crumbling neoliberal consensus in a recent Washington Post column. He savages Warren's plan, calling it a "terrible, horrible, no good, very bad trade program" that "would actually be more protectionist in its effects than Trump's, something that I did not think was possible."
But Drezner is talking through his hat. For starters, it is ridiculous to characterize Warren's plan as protectionist. Its major focus is on changing the way trade deals are made, especially who is involved. As my colleague Jeff Spross details, she would replace the current wildly business-slanted negotiation process with one that is carried out in the open, and prioritizes "labor rights, human rights, environmental protection, combating climate change, heading off international tax avoidance." (As an aside, Paul Krugman is flagrantly incorrect to assert that the current "fast track" trade negotiation process, which largely cuts Congress out of the process in favor of corporate elites and the executive branch, was created by FDR. It's a product of President Nixon and the 1974 Trade Act.)
Critically, Warren would also include the welfare of other countries as part of the considerations. As she writes, "millions of people in our trading-partner countries don't gain the benefits of higher standards -- and companies can easily pad their profits by shifting American jobs to countries where they can pay workers next to nothing and pollute the air and water freely." Half the point here is to raise the living standards of U.S. trading partners -- unlike NAFTA, for example, which harmed both American workers through deindustrialization and Mexican ones by trapping them in a low-wage, non-union export paradigm. We can call Trump protectionist because he is trying to win a trade war by harming the rest of the world (though his efforts have been so haphazard and uncoordinated that it seems to be harming everyone, America included), but Warren is far more internationalist.
Drezner further argues that Warren's approach would "sabotage any set of negotiations" because conducting negotiations in public would "scare off partners who prefer to negotiate quietly before introducing a final draft." Involving Congress would just "stymie the ratification of any deal even further." The contempt for democracy here is palpable. By Drezner's lights, neither the voting rabble nor their elected representatives have any place in trade deals. Yet somehow the world economy survived -- indeed, performed considerably better -- in the years before fast track and secret deals larded up with corporate goodies were the trade policy norm.
Indeed, a great many of the stipulations in recent trade agreements have nothing whatsoever to do with trade as such, or even undermine it. Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) courts, which have been built into thousands of trade agreements over the years, are at bottom a rigged private legal system for international corporations where they can do things like sue nations for cutting into their profits with environmental regulation. Meanwhile, protections for patents and copyright are a bald infringement of trade -- a requirement foreign countries enforce America's government-granted monopolies on movies, drugs, and so on. Perhaps that is defensible sometimes, but not when it means stymieing Nelson Mandela's plan to import cheap HIV/AIDS drugs in order to protect the profits of American drug companies.
Conversely, it's easily possible that under a more egalitarian framework, trade might actually increase in some sectors. Requirements for better labor conditions would increase the income of the working class in foreign countries, and one thing those people would likely buy with that money is more U.S. imports. Incidentally, the U.S. does tons of trade with countries -- like those in the E.U., which constitutes our largest trading partner -- without a formal trade agreement.
But by far the largest holes in Drezner's analysis have to do with taxes and climate change. Both are gigantic problems -- as economist Gabriel Zucman has calculated, rich people around the world have squirrelled about $7.6 trillion away in offshore accounts to avoid taxation, while climate change threatens human society. Both require international coordination to fix, because both are inherently international problems. Warren would refuse trade deals with countries that won't coordinate their tax regimes (to prevent beggar-thy-neighbor tax havens), and levy a border carbon tax (to prevent companies from profiting by moving production to countries where greenhouse gas emissions aren't regulated). As Zucman writes, this is "long overdue."
Drezner doesn't mention tax avoidance once, and the sum total of his climate change comments reads as follows: "don't get me started on her border adjustment tax for carbon." Yes, it sure would be inconvenient if he had to get started explaining why Warren's eminently sensible approach to the biggest problem facing America and the world is no good!
At any rate, this isn't the first time we've had this same debate. Indeed, as John Maynard Keynes wrote in a 1933 essay, for most of the 19th century free trade was also an object of gormless fetish worship, with similarly poor results. And as Spross points out, Warren has some distance to go to fully flesh out what to do regarding the dollar's status as reserve currency, which lets America run a continual trade deficit but also saps domestic production. But it's a strong start -- if we just shake off the last remnants of neoliberal brain poisoning, we can figure out the rest of it.
"Mr. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is making it impossible for us to regulate these life-threatening emissions," one activist said.
As smoke from Canadian wildfires triggered an air quality alert for New York City and Long Island on Sunday, activists with Climate Defiance disrupted a speech by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin in the Hamptons.
The disruption came four days after reports emerged that Zeldin's EPA was set to repeal the 2009 "endangerment finding" that greenhouse gas emissions "threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations." It is this finding that has given the EPA the authority to regulate climate emissions under the Clean Air Act.
"We are in a climate crisis largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels," the first activist to disrupt the speech said, according to video footage shared by Climate Defiance. "And Mr. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is making it impossible for us to regulate these life-threatening emissions."
Zeldin's speech took place at the Global Breakfast Forum, held at The Hamptons Synagogue.
"What are you going to say to your children when the Hamptons are underwater?"
Several of the young Jewish activists who disrupted the speech referenced their faith.
"The Torah commands us to be stewards of the Earth, not the oil industry," one activist said.
The audience largely responded with boos and jeers, and one attacked two of the activists with a chair, according to Climate Defiance video footage.
However, the Climate Defiance activists emphasized that Zeldin and the pro-fossil fuel Trump administration were the forces that would ultimately disrupt life and community in the Hamptons.
"History is going to remember you as a monster," one yelled out to Zeldin.
Another said: "Lee Zeldin, you have taken half of a million dollars from fossil fuels. What are you going to say to your children when the Hamptons are underwater?"
The disrupters also referenced Project 2025 and the broader Trump administration. According to the Project 2025 Tracker, Zeldin's EPA has achieved 57% of the Heritage Foundation road map's objectives.
"Lee Zeldin is carrying out the plans of Project 2025 and fossil fuels to a T," one said. "Your orange overlord does not care about any of you. All of you will be suffering from the rising seas and the worsening climate crisis."
A member of Extinction Rebellion NYC, who assisted with the protest, said in a statement: "Heritage has long been helmed by fossil fuel interests like Koch Industries, which has done some of the heaviest lifting to make sure nothing is done on climate change in the U.S. The majority of these wishes have been executed by Zeldin himself, and through Trump, who asked for $1 billion from oil companies in a dinner at Mar-a-Lago during his campaign. His Big, Beautiful Bill is a wish list directly penned in Project 2025. And when we hit 4°C of warming this century, we will know the true cost of these deadly practices."
Protesters also referenced the repeal of the endangerment finding, climate-fueled extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy, and the smoke pollution clouding the region as Zeldin spoke.
"There is smoke in the air for another summer," one said. "This is only going to get worse and worse."
Both New York City Emergency Management and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation issued Air Quality Health Advisories through 11:59 pm Eastern Time on Sunday as smoke poured into the region from Canadian wildfires. Air quality was listed as "unhealthy for sensitive groups," and at 11:00 am Eastern Time on Sunday, New York City had the eighth worst air quality of any city on Earth.
The smoke recalled the thick orange haze that blanketed New York and other parts of the Northeast during the record-breaking Canadian wildfire season of 2023. The climate crisis makes wildfires more frequent and extreme.
"There is nothing humane or tactical about letting a trickle of aid in after a man-made famine has started while continuing to bomb starving men, women, and children, even in so-called safe zones," one advocate said.
The Israeli military began instituting tactical pauses in its assault on certain sections of Gaza on Sunday, as part of a plan to allow what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as "minimal humanitarian supplies" to enter the besieged enclave.
Several humanitarian organizations and political leaders described the Israeli approach as vastly insufficient at best and a dangerous distraction at worst, as Palestinians in Gaza continue to die of starvation that experts say has been deliberately imposed on them by the U.S.-backed Israeli military.
"Deadly airdrops and a trickle of trucks won't undo months of engineered starvation in Gaza," Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam policy lead for the Occupied Palestinian territory, said in a statement on Sunday. "What's needed is the immediate opening of all crossings for full, unhindered, and safe aid delivery across all of Gaza and a permanent cease-fire. Anything less risks being little more than a tactical gesture."
Israel announced a plan to institute a daily 10-hour "tactical pause" in fighting from 10:00 am to 8:00 pm local time in the populated Gaza localities of Gaza City, Deir al-Balah, and Muwasi, as The Associated Press explained.
"These actions are not pauses—they are part of an ongoing genocide that the world must act to stop."
However, on Sunday—the first day of the supposed pause—Israeli attacks killed a total of 62 people, Al Jazeera reported, including 34 who were seeking humanitarian relief. Another six people died of hunger, bringing the total death toll from starvation and malnutrition to 133, including 87 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
"The Israeli government's so-called 'tactical pauses' are a cruel and transparent farce," said Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) national deputy director Edward Ahmed Mitchell in a statement on Sunday. "There is nothing humane or tactical about letting a trickle of aid in after a man-made famine has started while continuing to bomb starving men, women, and children, even in so-called safe zones. These actions are not pauses—they are part of an ongoing genocide that the world must act to stop."
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, meanwhile, called the pause "essential, but long overdue."
"This announcement alone cannot alleviate the needs of those desperately suffering in Gaza," Lammy said, as The Guardian reported. "We need a cease-fire that can end the war, for hostages to be released, and aid to enter Gaza by land unhindered."
The United Nations' World Food Program posted on social media that it welcomed the news of the pause, as well as the creation of more humanitarian corridors for aid, and that it had enough food supplies either in or en route to the area to feed the entire population of Gaza for nearly three months.
"A man-made hunger can only be addressed by political will."
Since the border crossings opened on May 27 following nearly three months of total siege, WFP has only been able to bring in 22,000 tons of food aid, about a third of the over 62,000 tons of food aid needed to feed the population of Gaza each month.
While it welcomed the pause, WFP did add that "an agreed cease-fire is the only way for humanitarian assistance to reach the entire civilian population in Gaza with critical food supplies in a consistent, predictable, orderly, and safe manner—wherever they are across the Gaza Strip."
Joe English, emergency communications specialist for UNICEF, emphasized that the limited pauses proposed by Israel were not the ideal conditions for treating serious malnutrition.
"This is a short turnaround in terms of the notice that we have, and so we cannot work miracles," English told CNN.
English explained that, while UNICEF can treat malnutrition, children who are malnourished require a course of treatments over an extended period of time in order to fully recover, something only truly possible with a cease-fire, which would allow the U.N. to reestablish the 400 aid distribution points it had set up across Gaza before the last cease-fire ended in March.
"We have to be able to reach people and also to reach people where they are," he said. "We can't be expecting people to continue to traverse many miles, often on foot, through militarized areas, to get access to aid."
In addition to bringing in food aid through trucks, Israel, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates all began air-dropping aid over the weekend. However, this method has been widely criticized by humanitarian experts as ineffective and even dangerous.
"The planes are insulting for us. We are a people who deserve dignity."
"Airdrops will not reverse the deepening starvation. They are expensive, inefficient, and can even kill starving civilians. It is a distraction and screensmoke," U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini wrote on social media on Saturday.
"A man-made hunger can only be addressed by political will. Lift the siege, open the gates, and guarantee safe movements and dignified access to people in need," Lazzarini wrote.
Palestinians in Gaza also complained about the air drops.
"From 6:00 am until now we didn't eat or drink. We didn't get aid from the trucks. After that, they said that planes will airdrop aid, so we waited for that as well," Massad Ghaban told Reuters. "The planes are insulting for us. We are a people who deserve dignity."
In a reminder of what is at stake in effectively delivering aid to Gaza, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Sunday that "malnutrition is on a dangerous trajectory in the Gaza Strip, marked by a spike in deaths in July."
WHO continued:
Of 74 malnutrition-related deaths in 2025, 63 occurred in July—including 24 children under 5, a child over 5, and 38 adults. Most of these people were declared dead on arrival at health facilities or died shortly after, their bodies showing clear signs of severe wasting. The crisis remains entirely preventable. Deliberate blocking and delay of large-scale food, health, and humanitarian aid has cost many lives.
WHO said that the search for lifesaving aid was itself deadly: "Families are being forced to risk their lives for a handful of food, often under dangerous and chaotic conditions. Since 27 May, more than 1,060 people have been killed and 7,200 injured while trying to access food."
Israeli solders have reported that they had been ordered to fire on Palestinian civilians seeking aid.
In the face of Israel's atrocities, CAIR's Mitchell called for decisive action: "No more statements. Our government, Western nations, and Arab Muslim nations must act immediately to end the genocide, allow unfettered humanitarian aid into Gaza, secure the release of all captives and political prisoners, and hold Israeli leaders accountable for war crimes. Every moment of inaction contributes to the unimaginable suffering of everyone in Gaza."
"All across the country we showed that when our families stick together, we are powerful," one organizer said.
Tens of thousands of people in more than 225 towns and cities across the U.S. came out on Saturday as part of the Families First National Day of Action to protest Trump administration and Republican policies that defund the safety net while funneling unprecedented amounts of cash toward immigration enforcement.
The day of action came around three weeks after the U.S. House passed and President Donald Trump signed a budget bill that would strip 17 million of Americans of their health insurance and 2 million of their food aid while making Immigration and Customs Enforcement the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history.
"Yesterday marked the 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And we are just days away from the 60th anniversary of Medicaid and Medicare at the end of this month. These policies represent a promise we made to each other: that no matter the ups and downs of life, our ability to take care of our families, from one generation to the next, should be supported," Ai-jen Poo, executive director of Caring Across Generations and president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, told Common Dreams on Sunday.
"But a big ugly budget bill just passed," Poo continued, "that breaks that promise by making historic cuts to programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP, by using our tax dollars to stoke fear and rip families apart simply due to their immigration status. This is not what families want, and those who passed it must know that the vast majority of us want our tax dollars to go to healthcare and food, a safety net for families, supporting public funds for families, health, food, and the economic security for all of us, not billionaires."
"To show our power and resolve for a better future we came out in the thousands all across the country."
Families First is a coalition made up of over 75 organizations including Caring Across Generations, National Domestic Workers Alliance, MoveOn, Community Change Action, MomsRising, Planned Parenthood, People's Action Institute, Family Values @ Work, Families Over Billionaires, Fair Share America, Working Families Power, and labor unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; American Federation of Teachers; and the National Education Association.
"To show our power and resolve for a better future we came out in the thousands all across the country, hosting over 225 events where we peacefully protested, to show the intergenerational face of those of us prepared to hold the ones who passed this bill accountable every day, and to take action. From spelling out the word 'familia' on the beach in California, taking a Medicaid Motorcade through the state of Indiana, to a rally in D.C. on the National Mall at the seat of power," Poo said.
Here are some highlights from Saturday's day of action.
On the National Mall across from the U.S. Capitol building, organizers capped a 60-hour vigil opposing Medicaid cuts with a rally at 12:00 pm ET.
Jennifer Wells, the director of economic justice at Community Change, spoke at the rally on the important role that Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) played in her life.
"I'm here both as an advocate and organizer and as someone who has lived the realities we're fighting to change, as a person who has been directly shaped by the programs that are currently under attack," Wells said. "I was a Medicaid kid, I was a SNAP kid. These programs kept me and my mom and my brother healthy, alive, and moving forward when we had nothing to fall back on."
Families gathered in Newark's Military Park to protest the budget cuts.
"Congress is helping the rich get richer while cutting healthcare, education, and support for working families," New Jersey Citizen Action wrote on social media. "We're making sure everyone knows who's responsible. We're fighting for a country where every child is cared for, no one goes hungry, and we all have access to the healthcare we need to live."
The Indiana Rural Summit planned a "Motorcade for Medicaid" to drive by rural hospitals across the state.
"We're using the event as a touchpoint to demonstrate the importance and value of local hospitals that are at risk of closing because they have historically relied on Medicaid for financial viability," organizer Michelle Higgs told The Republic. "We want to amplify the voices of those who are impacted, whether they're disabled, have a chronic illness, or are elderly."
Union members took to the streets from Miami, Florida to Seattle, Washington.
SEIU members marched in cities including Tampa; Orlando; Miami; Washington, D.C.; Allentown, Pennsylvania; New York City, Boston; and Las Vegas. Meanwhile, hundreds of union workers protested in downtown Seattle.
In Connecticut, SEIU members marched to the Brennan Rogers Magnet School, which closed due to a state funding shortfall.
"Cleaners, healthcare workers, construction workers, we are the ones that make this country run and we ask for no special privileges in return. but we are under attack," Ciro Gutierrez, a 32BJSEIU Connecticut commercial member, said.
Reflecting on the day of action, Poo concluded: "All across the country we showed that when our families stick together, we are powerful. When we share our stories, we break through. When we stand side by side—from small towns to big cities—we can't be ignored. And we won't be divided."