SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
Rev. William Barber speaks during a rally in Washington, D.C. on June 12, 2019. (Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty )Images)
"Everything you hear tonight resonates with the call of our deepest moral values to establish justice and promote the general welfare, and our deepest religious values to love our neighbors and to lift from the bottom. And everything here, we are willing to fight and push for, because it is not about compromise. It is about deciding the future of this nation will be compromised if we don't do at least the things that are here in this people's agenda."
"Poverty, unemployment, racial injustice, homelessness--these are all policy choices, driven by structures that both Democrats and Republicans have refused to tackle."
--Rep. Pramila Jayapal
With those words on December 21, the Reverend William Barber II, the nation's most prominent progressive preacher, lent his moral authority to a sweeping agenda for governance as the Congressional Progressive Caucus unveiled its priorities for the first six months of the new year.
In a ninety-minute program livestreamed on Facebook, the caucus and the Poor People's Campaign teamed up to deliver a message that mixed Social Gospel sermonizing and rally-the-faithful appeals to the prospect of shifting the focus in Washington, D.C., during the first six months of Joe Biden's presidency.
The Progressive Caucus agenda is the product of more than three dozen participating activist groups, including the Poor People's Campaign, said caucus chair U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal, (Democrat of Washington). Jayapal called it an agenda "that puts people first, centering poor and working people of all races, who have been left out and left behind."
This agenda, the speakers noted, was necessary even before the advent of COVID-19, but it has been made still more so by the social and economic fault lines that the pandemic has exposed.
The seven-point platform is both a fundamental and ambitious list, ranging from specific policies to broad, aspirational goals:
Throughout the program, Jayapal acted as a sort of emcee while a mix of activists and Progressive Caucus members took turns endorsing the agenda and bolstering the underlying demands.
"The Progressive Caucus policies for COVID-19 will make sure that we have money in our pockets to stay at home, clear student debt payments, address medical debt," said Zillah Wesley of the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. "They will protect our essential workers, our frontline workers who are low wage. They will make sure that we care for each other for now and for our future and expand our health care system, we need this."
Eshawney Gaston, a North Carolina home health care worker and Fight for $15 activist, spoke of provisions relating to worker and union rights. "Pass the $15 minimum wage in the first 100 days," she said. "Make it easier for home health care workers, fast food workers, and all workers to form a union, because we need a voice on the job. Pass legislation that will protect the health and safety of frontline workers. And these are the top priorities for working people like me."
"This is the present that America and the world needs right now. For chains of inequality to be broken. And for all oppression to cease. And this agenda starts us on that journey."
--Reverend William Barber II
On health care, Kansas farmer, retired nurse, and Poor People's Campaign participant Mary Jane Shanklin spoke of her uninsured mother-in-law's death in 2012, after a broken leg required her to get treatment at a hospital in Wichita, a two hour drive from her home.
"When she came out of that hospital, she had three new diagnoses: hypertension, diabetes, and leukemia, and she died three months later. This is what poverty looks like here--this is the lack of the ability to pay for insurance or medical bills," said Shanklin, adding later that change is imperative "because the for-profit health care system we have now is inhumane, immoral, and it's failing us."
While reaching high, the agenda also suggests a spirit of working step-by-step toward more ambitious long-term goals. On health care, for example, the caucus doesn't shy from backing Medicare for All--but it also doesn't treat that as an all-or-nothing objective. Instead, the health care plank, said Shanklin, vows "to ensure health care for everyone by taking important steps to expand health care and make equitable investments into public health infrastructures, as we work toward Medicare for All."
Disability rights and health care activist Ady Barkan bluntly acknowledged political limitations, while seeking to inspire those listening with a vision of how partial measures could advance the ultimate goal.
"Of course, we wish we had the power to pass Medicare for all this year," Barkan said. "But we know that we are not there yet."
For that reason, he continued, the agenda emphasizes "big strides forward to getting more people to the health care they need and making structural changes that will help us reduce the power of the for-profit health care industry."
The agenda is "ambitious, it's bold, and it's achievable," said Barkan, who listed some of its goals: expanding Medicare by lowering the eligibility age to fifty and covering all children up to age twenty-five; allowing government health insurance programs to negotiate with drug companies directly over pricing; expanding public health funding--especially for providers that serve urban and rural communities as well as Indian health providers; and protecting access for health care--including reproductive health care for women, trans people, and others.
"By combining the energy of our movement activists with the savvy and the growing power of our champions inside of Congress, we can actually enact some of these proposals into law in the coming year," Barkan declared.
The Progressive Caucus message also sought to lay down a marker early, both with the broader Democratic leadership and with the Biden-Harris team. Progressives should rightfully take credit for helping rid the White House of Donald Trump and maintaining Democratic control of the House of Representatives, Jayapal said.
"Poverty, unemployment, racial injustice, homelessness--these are all policy choices, driven by structures that both Democrats and Republicans have refused to tackle," Jayapal said.
She explained Trump's victory in 2016 was "because people in both parties lost faith in the government to stand up for regular folks, instead of the biggest corporations and thousands of lobbyists that line our door every day in Congress, even before COVID-19 hit."
"An agenda that centers people will always win," Jayapal declared, citing the 2020 victories of incumbents in swing districts who ran on Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, and the passage of ballot measures--"even in states that voted for Donald Trump"--for a $15 minimum wage, decriminalizing marijuana, and instituting paid leave for workers.
"We have one shot to get it right in 2021," she added. "Thanks to the demands of this inside-outside movement, President-elect Biden ran on the most progressive policy platform of any President in recent history. He and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have a clear mandate to fight for us to respond to the root causes of suffering and to transform the structures of our country, so people can thrive, not just barely survive. Now it's time to deliver."
In enlisting Barber and the Reverend Liz Theoharis, the national co-chairs of the Poor People's Campaign, the event was one of the most unabashed mingling of faith and politics on the political left in recent memory. And, whether intended or not, it served as a rebuttal to the increasingly misplaced critique that Democrats and progressives are out of touch with "people of faith."
The event's appeals to faith, however, were also inclusive of non-Christian perspectives. At one point, Barber broke into a segment in which Apache Activist Vanessa Nosie was describing the copper mining project that threatens the Oak Flat sacred land in Arizona where she lives.
Barber urged the Congress members in the Progressive Caucus to push for House Democrats to zero out a pending budget line that he said would cover the paperwork to complete the transaction on the site. Canceling the item "could stop them from stealing the Apaches' holy land, which is as important to them as the Vatican in Rome and Jerusalem in Israel."
Indeed, as he has done since his days organizing the Moral Mondays political action events in North Carolina, Barber evoked a movement that welcomes and includes the strictly secular as well as the explicitly religious.
"I pray God's anointing of strength upon every member of the Progressive Caucus whether they're Christian or Jewish or Muslim or not even people of faith," Barber said toward the end of the event.
Still, appeals to faith traditions as liberation remained close to the surface. Early in the evening, Barber quoted from the most militant passage of the Christmas song, "O, Holy Night": "Chains shall God break for the slave is our brother, and in God's name all oppression shall cease."
Barber elaborated: "This is the present that America and the world needs right now. For chains of inequality to be broken. And for all oppression to cease. And this agenda starts us on that journey."
Dear Common Dreams reader, The U.S. is on a fast track to authoritarianism like nothing I've ever seen. Meanwhile, corporate news outlets are utterly capitulating to Trump, twisting their coverage to avoid drawing his ire while lining up to stuff cash in his pockets. That's why I believe that Common Dreams is doing the best and most consequential reporting that we've ever done. Our small but mighty team is a progressive reporting powerhouse, covering the news every day that the corporate media never will. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To inspire. And to ignite change for the common good. Now here's the key piece that I want all our readers to understand: None of this would be possible without your financial support. That's not just some fundraising cliche. It's the absolute and literal truth. We don't accept corporate advertising and never will. We don't have a paywall because we don't think people should be blocked from critical news based on their ability to pay. Everything we do is funded by the donations of readers like you. Will you donate now to help power the nonprofit, independent reporting of Common Dreams? Thank you for being a vital member of our community. Together, we can keep independent journalism alive when it’s needed most. - Craig Brown, Co-founder |
"Everything you hear tonight resonates with the call of our deepest moral values to establish justice and promote the general welfare, and our deepest religious values to love our neighbors and to lift from the bottom. And everything here, we are willing to fight and push for, because it is not about compromise. It is about deciding the future of this nation will be compromised if we don't do at least the things that are here in this people's agenda."
"Poverty, unemployment, racial injustice, homelessness--these are all policy choices, driven by structures that both Democrats and Republicans have refused to tackle."
--Rep. Pramila Jayapal
With those words on December 21, the Reverend William Barber II, the nation's most prominent progressive preacher, lent his moral authority to a sweeping agenda for governance as the Congressional Progressive Caucus unveiled its priorities for the first six months of the new year.
In a ninety-minute program livestreamed on Facebook, the caucus and the Poor People's Campaign teamed up to deliver a message that mixed Social Gospel sermonizing and rally-the-faithful appeals to the prospect of shifting the focus in Washington, D.C., during the first six months of Joe Biden's presidency.
The Progressive Caucus agenda is the product of more than three dozen participating activist groups, including the Poor People's Campaign, said caucus chair U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal, (Democrat of Washington). Jayapal called it an agenda "that puts people first, centering poor and working people of all races, who have been left out and left behind."
This agenda, the speakers noted, was necessary even before the advent of COVID-19, but it has been made still more so by the social and economic fault lines that the pandemic has exposed.
The seven-point platform is both a fundamental and ambitious list, ranging from specific policies to broad, aspirational goals:
Throughout the program, Jayapal acted as a sort of emcee while a mix of activists and Progressive Caucus members took turns endorsing the agenda and bolstering the underlying demands.
"The Progressive Caucus policies for COVID-19 will make sure that we have money in our pockets to stay at home, clear student debt payments, address medical debt," said Zillah Wesley of the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. "They will protect our essential workers, our frontline workers who are low wage. They will make sure that we care for each other for now and for our future and expand our health care system, we need this."
Eshawney Gaston, a North Carolina home health care worker and Fight for $15 activist, spoke of provisions relating to worker and union rights. "Pass the $15 minimum wage in the first 100 days," she said. "Make it easier for home health care workers, fast food workers, and all workers to form a union, because we need a voice on the job. Pass legislation that will protect the health and safety of frontline workers. And these are the top priorities for working people like me."
"This is the present that America and the world needs right now. For chains of inequality to be broken. And for all oppression to cease. And this agenda starts us on that journey."
--Reverend William Barber II
On health care, Kansas farmer, retired nurse, and Poor People's Campaign participant Mary Jane Shanklin spoke of her uninsured mother-in-law's death in 2012, after a broken leg required her to get treatment at a hospital in Wichita, a two hour drive from her home.
"When she came out of that hospital, she had three new diagnoses: hypertension, diabetes, and leukemia, and she died three months later. This is what poverty looks like here--this is the lack of the ability to pay for insurance or medical bills," said Shanklin, adding later that change is imperative "because the for-profit health care system we have now is inhumane, immoral, and it's failing us."
While reaching high, the agenda also suggests a spirit of working step-by-step toward more ambitious long-term goals. On health care, for example, the caucus doesn't shy from backing Medicare for All--but it also doesn't treat that as an all-or-nothing objective. Instead, the health care plank, said Shanklin, vows "to ensure health care for everyone by taking important steps to expand health care and make equitable investments into public health infrastructures, as we work toward Medicare for All."
Disability rights and health care activist Ady Barkan bluntly acknowledged political limitations, while seeking to inspire those listening with a vision of how partial measures could advance the ultimate goal.
"Of course, we wish we had the power to pass Medicare for all this year," Barkan said. "But we know that we are not there yet."
For that reason, he continued, the agenda emphasizes "big strides forward to getting more people to the health care they need and making structural changes that will help us reduce the power of the for-profit health care industry."
The agenda is "ambitious, it's bold, and it's achievable," said Barkan, who listed some of its goals: expanding Medicare by lowering the eligibility age to fifty and covering all children up to age twenty-five; allowing government health insurance programs to negotiate with drug companies directly over pricing; expanding public health funding--especially for providers that serve urban and rural communities as well as Indian health providers; and protecting access for health care--including reproductive health care for women, trans people, and others.
"By combining the energy of our movement activists with the savvy and the growing power of our champions inside of Congress, we can actually enact some of these proposals into law in the coming year," Barkan declared.
The Progressive Caucus message also sought to lay down a marker early, both with the broader Democratic leadership and with the Biden-Harris team. Progressives should rightfully take credit for helping rid the White House of Donald Trump and maintaining Democratic control of the House of Representatives, Jayapal said.
"Poverty, unemployment, racial injustice, homelessness--these are all policy choices, driven by structures that both Democrats and Republicans have refused to tackle," Jayapal said.
She explained Trump's victory in 2016 was "because people in both parties lost faith in the government to stand up for regular folks, instead of the biggest corporations and thousands of lobbyists that line our door every day in Congress, even before COVID-19 hit."
"An agenda that centers people will always win," Jayapal declared, citing the 2020 victories of incumbents in swing districts who ran on Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, and the passage of ballot measures--"even in states that voted for Donald Trump"--for a $15 minimum wage, decriminalizing marijuana, and instituting paid leave for workers.
"We have one shot to get it right in 2021," she added. "Thanks to the demands of this inside-outside movement, President-elect Biden ran on the most progressive policy platform of any President in recent history. He and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have a clear mandate to fight for us to respond to the root causes of suffering and to transform the structures of our country, so people can thrive, not just barely survive. Now it's time to deliver."
In enlisting Barber and the Reverend Liz Theoharis, the national co-chairs of the Poor People's Campaign, the event was one of the most unabashed mingling of faith and politics on the political left in recent memory. And, whether intended or not, it served as a rebuttal to the increasingly misplaced critique that Democrats and progressives are out of touch with "people of faith."
The event's appeals to faith, however, were also inclusive of non-Christian perspectives. At one point, Barber broke into a segment in which Apache Activist Vanessa Nosie was describing the copper mining project that threatens the Oak Flat sacred land in Arizona where she lives.
Barber urged the Congress members in the Progressive Caucus to push for House Democrats to zero out a pending budget line that he said would cover the paperwork to complete the transaction on the site. Canceling the item "could stop them from stealing the Apaches' holy land, which is as important to them as the Vatican in Rome and Jerusalem in Israel."
Indeed, as he has done since his days organizing the Moral Mondays political action events in North Carolina, Barber evoked a movement that welcomes and includes the strictly secular as well as the explicitly religious.
"I pray God's anointing of strength upon every member of the Progressive Caucus whether they're Christian or Jewish or Muslim or not even people of faith," Barber said toward the end of the event.
Still, appeals to faith traditions as liberation remained close to the surface. Early in the evening, Barber quoted from the most militant passage of the Christmas song, "O, Holy Night": "Chains shall God break for the slave is our brother, and in God's name all oppression shall cease."
Barber elaborated: "This is the present that America and the world needs right now. For chains of inequality to be broken. And for all oppression to cease. And this agenda starts us on that journey."
"Everything you hear tonight resonates with the call of our deepest moral values to establish justice and promote the general welfare, and our deepest religious values to love our neighbors and to lift from the bottom. And everything here, we are willing to fight and push for, because it is not about compromise. It is about deciding the future of this nation will be compromised if we don't do at least the things that are here in this people's agenda."
"Poverty, unemployment, racial injustice, homelessness--these are all policy choices, driven by structures that both Democrats and Republicans have refused to tackle."
--Rep. Pramila Jayapal
With those words on December 21, the Reverend William Barber II, the nation's most prominent progressive preacher, lent his moral authority to a sweeping agenda for governance as the Congressional Progressive Caucus unveiled its priorities for the first six months of the new year.
In a ninety-minute program livestreamed on Facebook, the caucus and the Poor People's Campaign teamed up to deliver a message that mixed Social Gospel sermonizing and rally-the-faithful appeals to the prospect of shifting the focus in Washington, D.C., during the first six months of Joe Biden's presidency.
The Progressive Caucus agenda is the product of more than three dozen participating activist groups, including the Poor People's Campaign, said caucus chair U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal, (Democrat of Washington). Jayapal called it an agenda "that puts people first, centering poor and working people of all races, who have been left out and left behind."
This agenda, the speakers noted, was necessary even before the advent of COVID-19, but it has been made still more so by the social and economic fault lines that the pandemic has exposed.
The seven-point platform is both a fundamental and ambitious list, ranging from specific policies to broad, aspirational goals:
Throughout the program, Jayapal acted as a sort of emcee while a mix of activists and Progressive Caucus members took turns endorsing the agenda and bolstering the underlying demands.
"The Progressive Caucus policies for COVID-19 will make sure that we have money in our pockets to stay at home, clear student debt payments, address medical debt," said Zillah Wesley of the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. "They will protect our essential workers, our frontline workers who are low wage. They will make sure that we care for each other for now and for our future and expand our health care system, we need this."
Eshawney Gaston, a North Carolina home health care worker and Fight for $15 activist, spoke of provisions relating to worker and union rights. "Pass the $15 minimum wage in the first 100 days," she said. "Make it easier for home health care workers, fast food workers, and all workers to form a union, because we need a voice on the job. Pass legislation that will protect the health and safety of frontline workers. And these are the top priorities for working people like me."
"This is the present that America and the world needs right now. For chains of inequality to be broken. And for all oppression to cease. And this agenda starts us on that journey."
--Reverend William Barber II
On health care, Kansas farmer, retired nurse, and Poor People's Campaign participant Mary Jane Shanklin spoke of her uninsured mother-in-law's death in 2012, after a broken leg required her to get treatment at a hospital in Wichita, a two hour drive from her home.
"When she came out of that hospital, she had three new diagnoses: hypertension, diabetes, and leukemia, and she died three months later. This is what poverty looks like here--this is the lack of the ability to pay for insurance or medical bills," said Shanklin, adding later that change is imperative "because the for-profit health care system we have now is inhumane, immoral, and it's failing us."
While reaching high, the agenda also suggests a spirit of working step-by-step toward more ambitious long-term goals. On health care, for example, the caucus doesn't shy from backing Medicare for All--but it also doesn't treat that as an all-or-nothing objective. Instead, the health care plank, said Shanklin, vows "to ensure health care for everyone by taking important steps to expand health care and make equitable investments into public health infrastructures, as we work toward Medicare for All."
Disability rights and health care activist Ady Barkan bluntly acknowledged political limitations, while seeking to inspire those listening with a vision of how partial measures could advance the ultimate goal.
"Of course, we wish we had the power to pass Medicare for all this year," Barkan said. "But we know that we are not there yet."
For that reason, he continued, the agenda emphasizes "big strides forward to getting more people to the health care they need and making structural changes that will help us reduce the power of the for-profit health care industry."
The agenda is "ambitious, it's bold, and it's achievable," said Barkan, who listed some of its goals: expanding Medicare by lowering the eligibility age to fifty and covering all children up to age twenty-five; allowing government health insurance programs to negotiate with drug companies directly over pricing; expanding public health funding--especially for providers that serve urban and rural communities as well as Indian health providers; and protecting access for health care--including reproductive health care for women, trans people, and others.
"By combining the energy of our movement activists with the savvy and the growing power of our champions inside of Congress, we can actually enact some of these proposals into law in the coming year," Barkan declared.
The Progressive Caucus message also sought to lay down a marker early, both with the broader Democratic leadership and with the Biden-Harris team. Progressives should rightfully take credit for helping rid the White House of Donald Trump and maintaining Democratic control of the House of Representatives, Jayapal said.
"Poverty, unemployment, racial injustice, homelessness--these are all policy choices, driven by structures that both Democrats and Republicans have refused to tackle," Jayapal said.
She explained Trump's victory in 2016 was "because people in both parties lost faith in the government to stand up for regular folks, instead of the biggest corporations and thousands of lobbyists that line our door every day in Congress, even before COVID-19 hit."
"An agenda that centers people will always win," Jayapal declared, citing the 2020 victories of incumbents in swing districts who ran on Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, and the passage of ballot measures--"even in states that voted for Donald Trump"--for a $15 minimum wage, decriminalizing marijuana, and instituting paid leave for workers.
"We have one shot to get it right in 2021," she added. "Thanks to the demands of this inside-outside movement, President-elect Biden ran on the most progressive policy platform of any President in recent history. He and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have a clear mandate to fight for us to respond to the root causes of suffering and to transform the structures of our country, so people can thrive, not just barely survive. Now it's time to deliver."
In enlisting Barber and the Reverend Liz Theoharis, the national co-chairs of the Poor People's Campaign, the event was one of the most unabashed mingling of faith and politics on the political left in recent memory. And, whether intended or not, it served as a rebuttal to the increasingly misplaced critique that Democrats and progressives are out of touch with "people of faith."
The event's appeals to faith, however, were also inclusive of non-Christian perspectives. At one point, Barber broke into a segment in which Apache Activist Vanessa Nosie was describing the copper mining project that threatens the Oak Flat sacred land in Arizona where she lives.
Barber urged the Congress members in the Progressive Caucus to push for House Democrats to zero out a pending budget line that he said would cover the paperwork to complete the transaction on the site. Canceling the item "could stop them from stealing the Apaches' holy land, which is as important to them as the Vatican in Rome and Jerusalem in Israel."
Indeed, as he has done since his days organizing the Moral Mondays political action events in North Carolina, Barber evoked a movement that welcomes and includes the strictly secular as well as the explicitly religious.
"I pray God's anointing of strength upon every member of the Progressive Caucus whether they're Christian or Jewish or Muslim or not even people of faith," Barber said toward the end of the event.
Still, appeals to faith traditions as liberation remained close to the surface. Early in the evening, Barber quoted from the most militant passage of the Christmas song, "O, Holy Night": "Chains shall God break for the slave is our brother, and in God's name all oppression shall cease."
Barber elaborated: "This is the present that America and the world needs right now. For chains of inequality to be broken. And for all oppression to cease. And this agenda starts us on that journey."
"They're now using the failed War on Drugs to justify their egregious violation of international law," the Minnesota progressive said of the Trump administration.
Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Delia Ramirez on Thursday strongly condemned the Trump administration's deadly attack on a boat allegedly trafficking cocaine off the coast of Venezuela as "lawless and reckless," while urging the White House to respect lawmakers' "clear constitutional authority on matters of war and peace."
"Congress has not declared war on Venezuela, or Tren de Aragua, and the mere designation of a group as a terrorist organization does not give any president carte blanche," said Omar (D-Minn.), referring to President Donald Trump's day one executive order designating drug cartels including the Venezuela-based group as foreign terrorist organizations.
Trump—who reportedly signed a secret order directing the Pentagon to use military force to combat cartels abroad—said that Tuesday's US strike in international waters killed 11 people. The attack sparked fears of renewed US aggression in a region that has endured well over 100 US interventions over the past 200 years, and against a country that has suffered US meddling since the late 19th century.
"It appears that US forces that were recently sent to the region in an escalatory and provocative manner were under no threat from the boat they attacked," Omar cotended. "There is no conceivable legal justification for this use of force. Unless compelling evidence emerges that they were acting in self-defense, that makes the strike a clear violation of international law."
Omar continued:
They're now using the failed War on Drugs to justify their egregious violation of international law. The US posture towards the eradication of drugs has caused immeasurable damage across our hemisphere. It has led to massive forced displacement, environmental devastation, violence, and human rights violations. What it has not done is any damage whatsoever to narcotrafficking or to the cartels. It has been a dramatic, profound failure at every level. In Latin America, even right-wing presidents acknowledge this is true.
The congresswoman's remarks came on the same day that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated a pair of Ecuadorean drug gangs as terrorist organizations while visiting the South American nation. This, after Rubio said that US attacks on suspected drug traffickers "will happen again."
"Trump and Rubio's apparent solution" to the failed drug war, said Omar, is "to make it even more militarized," an effort that "is doomed to fail."
"Worse, it risks spiraling into the exact type of endless, pointless conflict that Trump supposedly opposes," she added.
Echoing critics including former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth, who called Tuesday's strike a "summary execution," Ramirez (D-Ill.) said Thursday on social media that "Trump and the Pentagon executed 11 people in the Caribbean, 1,500 miles away from the United States, without a legal rationale."
"From Iran to Venezuela, to DC, LA, and Chicago, Trump continues to abuse our military power, undermine the rule of law, and erode our constitutional boundaries in political spectacles," Ramirez added, referring to the president's ordering of strikes on Iran and National Guard deployments to Los Angeles, the nation's capital, and likely beyond.
"Presidents don't bomb first and ask questions later," Ramirez added. "Wannabe dictators do that."
"The fact that a facility embedded in so much pain is allowed to reopen is absolutely disheartening!" said Florida Immigrant Coalition's deputy director.
Two judges appointed to the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit by President Donald Trump issued a Thursday decision that allows a newly established but already notorious immigrant detention center in Florida, dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, to stay open.
Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida sought "to halt the unlawful construction" of the site. Last month, Judge Kathleen Williams—appointed by former President Barack Obama to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida—ordered the closure of the facility within 60 days.
However, on Thursday, Circuit Judges Elizabeth Branch and Barbara Lagoa blocked Williams' decision, concluding that "the balance of the harms and our consideration of the public interest favor a stay of the preliminary injunction."
Judge Adalberto Jordan, an Obama appointee, issued a brief but scathing dissent. He wrote that the majority "essentially ignores the burden borne by the defendants, pays only lip service to the abuse of discretion standard, engages in its own factfinding, declines to consider the district court's determination on irreparable harm, and performs its own balancing of the equities."
The 11th Circuit's ruling was cheered by the US Department of Homeland Security, Republican Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, and Gov. Ron DeSantis, who declared in a video that "Alligator Alcatraz is, in fact, like we've always said, open for business."
Uthmeier's communications director, Jeremy Redfern, collected responses to the initial ruling by state and federal Democrats, and urged them to weigh in on social media. Florida state Sen. Shevrin "Shev" Jones (D-34) did, stressing that "cruelty is still cruelty."
In a Thursday statement, Florida Immigrant Coalition deputy director Renata Bozzetto said that "the 11th Circuit is allowing atrocities to happen by reversing the injunction that helped to paralyze something that has been functioning as an extrajudicial site in our own state! The Everglades Detention Camp isn't just an environmental threat; it is also a huge human rights crisis."
"Housing thousands of men in tents in the middle of a fragile ecosystem puts immense strain on Florida's source environment, but even more troublesome, it disregards human rights and our constitutional commitments," Bozzetto continued. "This is a place where hundreds of our neighbors were illegally held, were made invisible within government systems, and were subjected to inhumane heat and unbearable treatment. The fact that a facility embedded in so much pain is allowed to reopen is absolutely disheartening! The only just solution is to shut this facility down and ensure that no facility like this opens in our state!"
"Lastly, it is imperative that we as a nation uphold the balance of powers that this country was founded on," she added. "That is what makes this country special! Calling judges who rule against you 'activists' flies in the face of our democracy. It is a huge tell that AG Uthmeier expressed this as a 'win for President Trump's agenda,' as if the courts were to serve as political weapons. This demonstrates the clear partisan games they are playing with people's lives and with our democracy."
While Alligator Alcatraz has drawn widespread criticism for the conditions in which detainees are held, the suit is based on the government's failure to follow a law that requires an environmental review, given the facility's proximity to surrounding wetlands.
In response to the ruling, Elise Bennett, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The Associated Press that "this is a heartbreaking blow to America's Everglades and every living creature there, but the case isn't even close to over."
The report found that seven of America's biggest healthcare companies have collectively dodged $34 billion in taxes as a result of Trump's 2017 tax law while making patient care worse.
President Donald Trump's tax policies have allowed the healthcare industry to rake in "sick profits" by avoiding tens of billions of dollars in taxes and lowering the quality of care for patients, according to a report out Wednesday.
The report, by the advocacy groups Americans for Tax Fairness and Community Catalyst, found that "seven of America's biggest healthcare corporations have dodged over $34 billion in collective taxes since the enactment of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law that Republicans recently succeeded in extending."
The study examined four health insurance companies—Centene, Cigna, Elevance (formerly Anthem), and Humana; two for-profit hospital chains—HCA Holdings and Universal Health Services; and the CVS Healthcare pharmacy conglomerate.
It found that these companies' average profits increased by 75%, from around $21 billion before the tax bill to about $35 billion afterward, and yet their federal tax rate was about the same.
This was primarily due to the 2017 law's slashing of the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, a change that was cheered on by the healthcare industry and continued with this year's GOP tax legislation. The legislation also loosened many tax loopholes and made it easier to move profits to offshore tax shelters.
The report found that Cigna, for instance, saved an estimated $181 million in taxes on the $2.5 billion it held in offshore accounts before the law took effect.
The law's supporters, including those in the healthcare industry, argued that lowering corporate taxes would allow companies to increase wages and provide better services to patients. But the report found that "healthcare corporations failed to use their tax savings to lower costs for customers or meaningfully boost worker pay."
Instead, they used those windfalls primarily to increase shareholder payouts through stock buybacks and dividends and to give fat bonuses to their top executives.
Stock buybacks increased by 42% after the law passed, with Centene purchasing an astonishing average of 20 times more of its own shares in the years following its enactment than in the years before. During the first seven years of the law, dividends for shareholders increased by 133% to an average of $5.6 billion.
Pay for the seven companies' half-dozen top executives increased by a combined $100 million, 42%, on average. This is compared to the $14,000 pay increase that the average employee at these companies received over the same period, which is a much more modest increase of 24%.
And contrary to claims that lower taxes would allow companies to improve coverage or patient care, the opposite has occurred.
While data is scarce, the rate of denied insurance claims is believed to have risen since the law went into effect.
The four major insurers' Medicare Advantage plans were found to frequently deny claims improperly. In the case of Centene, 93% of its denials for prior authorizations were overturned once patients appealed them, which indicates that they may have been improper. The others were not much better: 86% of Cigna's denials were overturned, along with 71% for Elevance/Anthem, and 65% for Humana.
The report said that such high rates of denials being overturned raise "questions about whether Medicare Advantage plans are complying with their coverage obligations or just reflexively saying 'no' in the hopes there will be no appeal."
Salespeople for the Cigna-owned company EviCore, which insurers hire to review claims, have even boasted that they help companies reduce their costs by increasing denials by 15%, part of a model that ProPublica has called the "denials for dollars business." Their investigation in 2024 found that insurers have used EviCore to evaluate whether to pay for coverage for over 100 million people.
And while paying tens of millions to their executives, both HCA and Universal Health Services—which each saved around $5.5 billion from Trump's tax law—have been repeatedly accused of overbilling patients while treating them in horrendous conditions.
"Congress should demand both more in tax revenue and better patient care from these highly profitable corporations," Americans for Tax Fairness said in a statement. "Healthcare corporation profitability should not come before quality of patient care. In healthcare, more than almost any other industry, the search for ever higher earnings threatens the wellbeing and lives of the American people."