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The Blue Country Gazette is the successor to the Rim Country Gazette, reflecting our evolution to a nationwide political blog for readers who identify as "blue," liberals, progressives, and/or Democrats. Our mission is to provide distinctive coverage of issues during a time of extreme polarization in the U.S. We strive to provide side-stories and back-stories that provide additional insights and perspectives conventional coverage often doesn't include.
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
As a liberal, I've never felt so 'owned' before in my life than by this ivermectin stuff
Please, please, conservatives, I’m begging you: Stop triggering me. I’m just beside myself at this point. In fact, I’ve never been so mortified and humiliated in my life. Please, please, just stop.
Just let me crawl out from under my pillow for a second, because I have a confession to make. When I first heard that conservatives and anti-vaxxers were ingesting tubes of horse de-worming paste to ward off COVID-19 (in lieu of driving down to the Walgreen’s for a free vaccine), my first question was “Wait a minute, I thought that COVID-19 was just a hoax! Nothing but the flu! Why are they ingesting something like this if the whole thing is a hoax?”
That was the liberal in me talking, and I apologize. Really, I’m just an embarrassment to myself at this point.
When I heard about strong, real men (unlike myself) chugging down apple-flavored ivermectin, I was owned. I’m still owned. In fact, I feel like I’ll be owned for the rest of my life if this keeps up. So please, just stop!
On Monday, I read in The New York Times just how badly I’ve been owned by you nasty, mean Republicans.
For the past week, Dr. Gregory Yu, an emergency physician in San Antonio, has received the same daily requests from his patients, some vaccinated for Covid-19 and others unvaccinated: They ask him for ivermectin, a drug typically used to treat parasitic worms that has repeatedly failed in clinical trials to help people infected with the coronavirus. [...]
Prescriptions for ivermectin have seen a sharp rise in recent weeks, jumping to more than 88,000 per week in mid-August from a prepandemic baseline average of 3,600 per week, according to researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Eighty-eight thousand prescriptions a week? Oh, God, that must mean I’ve been owned over and over and over. It’s so demoralizing.
Oh, and the comments on that same article are even worse! Don’t these liberal New York Times readers have any shame?
The news that a bunch of Trump supporters and right wing anti-science conspiracy theorists are falling all over themselves to take de-worming medicine somehow seems quite fitting to me. I only wish it would actually work, but sadly I doubt that they will actually be de-wormed after they’re done taking it.
***
I don't know if Ivermectin is helping with covid but yesterday I came in second in the third race at Aqueduct.
***I guess the people taking ivermectin are taking "herd" immunity literally.
***
These people call those of us who follow public health guidelines "sheep", and yet they're the ones taking livestock dewormer. Hmm.
***
Perhaps Ivermectin works best if taken with a swig of Lysol or Clorox.
I want you all to know that I’m just in tears right now. I would never dream of writing such a comment.
So again, I’m being completely honest: I’ve never been so owned in my life. In fact, if enough of you you keep eating this stuff, I think you may end up owning all of the liberals in this country.
So whatever you do, please, please don’t do that. Speaking for all liberals, I can tell you we just couldn’t handle the humiliation.
Monday, August 30, 2021
There is one president I blame for Afghanistan. And it isn't Trump or Biden
Today, there will be stories comparing the fall of Afghanistan to the U.S. exit from Vietnam, and others by armchair quarterbacks of what should be done and what we should avoid. While the Twitter universe will focus on the actions of Donald J. Trump—like his decision to release 5,000 Taliban members just last year—the truth is it wasn’t the Trump administration that got us into this mess or made the problem a disaster. A large slice of the American population doesn’t even remember September 11th. In the twenty years since then, we’ve been in a constant, ongoing war with a significant cost to human lives and incalculable injury to Afghans and U.S. troops.
What happened? How did we get here? Afghanistan wasn’t really on the target list for the U.S. post the attack on the twin towers, for those who forget. No, we were after specific terrorists, and then the field kept expanding. Without any provable link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, U.S. troops swept into the country and began a military adventure without end.
I tend to work by the “you break it, you bought it” rule. George W. Bush broke this one — and he bought it. The Bush administration treated lives and the truth haphazardly, and as time went on, that problem compounded. It began with a big lie — that there was a huge connection in the middle east, and it continued to expand. In 2009, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace pointed out that by the time the George W. Bush administration ended, one thing was certain: the Taliban had spread throughout the country, had built a shadow government, and was unlikely to be defeated as their strength was becoming baked into the culture.
On-the-ground observations and reliable evidence suggest that the Taliban have an efficient leadership, are learning from their mistakes, and are quick to exploit the weaknesses of their adversaries. They are building a parallel administration, have nationwide logistics, and already manage an impressive intelligence network.
As this continued, the support for the U.S. continued to fall.
Civilian casualties from IC military strikes and arbitrary arrests by the IC have been highly alienating. The cases of torture on Bagram Air Base during the first years of the war and reports of mistreatment of prisoners are widely known to the population. The 600 prisoners detained at Bagram Air Base are still off limits for the ICRC and subject to indefinite detention without charge. Even if they are Afghan citizens (as almost all are) Afghan laws do not apply.Popular support for the U.S. presence among the Pashtuns is very low. In fact, the IC has transitioned from “guest” to “enemy” (mehman to dushman)in Afghan cultural categories.
Special Forces operations, even if technically successful, are generally a political disaster. In Logar province, where theTaliban are strong, Special Forces have allegedly killed innocent people
We spent more than 1 TRILLION dollars on a war that killed nearly half a million humans that we are aware of.
Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democratic member of the Senate subcommittee on foreign operations, told the Guardian that prisoners in Afghanistan "were subjected to cruel and degrading treatment, and some died from it".
"These abuses were part of a wider pattern stemming from a White House attitude that 'anything goes' in the war against terrorism, even if it crosses the line of illegality."
Syed Nabi Siddiqi, a former police officer, said he was beaten and stripped. "They took off my uniform. I showed them my identity card from the government... Then they asked me which of those animals - they made the noise of goats, sheep, dogs, cows - have you had sexual activities with?"
The Abu Ghraib scandal was put aside by Americans who forgot—or missed the news by being born too late—but it became part of how the Afghanistan people viewed us.
In 2004, when the Abu Ghraib scandal first emerged, former President Bush responded saying that, “Under the dictator, prisons like Abu Ghraib were symbols of death and torture. That same prison became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonoured our country and disregarded our values …”
Bush’s statement unveils a particular logic of the war on terror that continues to justify abuses to the present – moral equivalencies, and in particular, the US’s perceived moral superiority of itself in the way it fights war. That’s why prisoner abuse under Saddam was torture, but under the US it is simply “disgraceful conduct”. That’s also why Bush can talk about “our values”, despite knowing that a series of torture memos essentially provided the rationale to abuse prisoners – that anything short of organ failure or death would, according to his administration’s new definition of torture, fall short of it.
The 9/11 Commission told us that the funding for terrorism wasn’t coming from poor Afghan communities, something we could have guessed easily. Going after banks and oil barons wasn’t as fun as deploying a ton of troops.
I will not be able to forget September 11th, 2001. I was a manager at a job in my first few months. I had family in the military who (I believe) at that point was serving in the Pentagon—it’s hard to keep track of every assignment my brother had—and that day, several people I knew in my life who were in the military would find everything change.
When my brother first went to the Middle East, he was a young(er) man. Now, he has children who are in the military. This war has become generational, and the losses are generational as well.
The U.S. history in Afghanistan is not defined by today.
George W. Bush started us on a war without a plan, without any goal, and without an exit strategy at all. A commitment to a war without end. We spiraled out of control, from Abu Ghraib to unknown terrors. George W. Bush started this war. His administration fueled it repeatedly. It endorsed a policy of torture. It grew terrorists as it went. How things could have been different. Imagine, for just one second, if instead of bombs and troops, we had engaged bank seizures and put the funders in jails around the globe. Neh. Just too difficult.
"...prisoners in Afghanistan "were subjected to cruel and degrading treatment, and some died from it".
Sunday, August 29, 2021
The Real Socialism in America Isn't What You Think
Robert Reich. (photo: Getty)
27 August 21
ou may have heard Republicans in Congress rail about how the Democrats’ agenda is chock-full of scary “socialist” policies.
We do have socialism in this country — but it’s not Democrats’ policies. The real socialism is corporate welfare.
Thousands of big American corporations rake in billions each year in government subsidies, bailouts, and tax loopholes – all funded on the taxpayer dime, and all contributing to higher stock prices for the richest 1 percent who own half of the stock market, as well as CEOs and other top executives who are paid largely in shares of stock.
Big Tech, Big Oil, Big Pharma, defense contractors, and big banks are the biggest beneficiaries of corporate welfare.
How? Follow the money. These corporations and their trade groups spend hundreds of millions each year on lobbying and campaign contributions. Their influence-peddling pays off. The return on these political investments is huge. It’s institutionalized bribery.
An even more insidious example is corporations that don’t pay their workers a living wage. As a result, their workers have to rely on programs like Medicaid, public housing, food stamps and other safety nets. Which means you and I and other taxpayers indirectly subsidize these corporations, allowing them to enjoy even higher profits and share prices for their wealthy investors and executives.
Not only does corporate welfare take money away from us as taxpayers. It also harms smaller businesses that have a harder time competing with big businesses that get these subsidies. Everyone loses except those at the top.
It’s more socialism for the rich, harsh capitalism for the rest.
It should be ended.
"It’s more socialism for the rich, harsh capitalism for the rest. It should be ended."
Saturday, August 28, 2021
The Donald's wall is falling down...falling down...falling down...
The previous president once described his stupid and racist border fencing as “virtually impenetrable.” No one told that to Mother Nature. A viral photo shared by Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center founder and wildlife preservationist Kate Scott shows portions of fencing built by the previous president along the Arizona-Mexico border in shambles following a recent monsoon.
“Trump's brand new $15 billion #BorderWall is being ripped apart by monsoon floods,” Center for Biological Diversity borderland campaigner Laiken Jordahl responded to the image. While the photo tweeted by Scott shows at least four partitions knocked out of their hinges, Gizmodo reports that Cuenca de Los Ojo director José Manuel Pérez Cantú said six were damaged.
“The damage took place near San Bernardino Ranch, a historic site that sits between Douglas, Arizona, and the San Bernardino Wildlife Refuge,” Gizmodo reported. “Douglas has seen nearly double its average monsoon season rainfall so far, including a blast that came through on Monday and unleashed flooding on the Arizona-Sonora border. The National Weather Service data shows 2.15 inches (5.5 centimeters) of rain fell, which in turn funneled into washes and drove flooding.”
“This is what happens when @DHSgov waives all environmental laws & ignores basic science to put up a political prop,” Jordahl continued in his tweet. He wrote in The New York Times last year that a law passed by Congress in 2005 “included a provision that allows the secretary of homeland security to waive laws that the secretary deems an impediment to building walls and roads along U.S. borders.” But this provision allowing administrations to waive law has been a bipartisan effort when it comes to the border. “All of the border walls built or replaced during the Obama-Biden administration relied upon the waivers of federal laws issued under the Bush administration,” South Texas College Assistant Professor Scott Nicol wrote last year.
Still, the previous administration took a sordid pleasure in its destruction of the borderlands. Following President Biden’s win, the previous administration rushed to dynamite mountains, knowing full well it wouldn’t have time to build. In the end, we’ve left with very-penetrable “impenetrable” fencing that has fallen to both storms and $100 saws from your local hardware store—and no, it doesn’t make a difference who’s built the damn thing.
ProPublica and The Texas Tribune wrote last year that privately-funded fencing near Mission, Texas was on the verge of collapse. A University of Texas at El Paso engineering professor who reviewed engineering reports said builders were “cutting corners everywhere. It’s not a Lamborghini, it’s a $500 used car.” This was the scheme that landed white nationalist Steve Bannon felony charges. The former president ultimately pardoned him.
President Biden has made the right moves by halting wall construction, returning billions swindled by the previous administration, and canceling wall contracts. The administration has also said it would be using appropriated funds “to address urgent life, safety, and environmental issues” stemming from wall construction.
“The damage the border wall has inflicted in just the past year is incalculable,” Jordahl continued in The Times. “Much of it will last forever. No amount of money could repay the O’odham and all Indigenous people of the borderlands for the sacred sites, cultural history, and natural heritage that’s been destroyed. To right these wrongs, we must start somewhere. Tearing down the wall would be a good start.” Nicol agreed in his piece, writing the administration “should tear down walls that rip apart endangered species habitat. They should tear down walls that cut through border communities, casting prison-bar shadows on a child’s bedroom window.”
And while it’s not words she’s using, Mother Nature is also clearly stating that border walls just don’t work.
Friday, August 27, 2021
An open letter to the Republican warmongers criticizing Joe Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal
(Editor's note: Apologies to any offended by Mr. Pennyfarthing's language, but the message is right on an we respect freedom of speech.)
Dear Insufferable Pricks,
First of all, I love being lectured and talked down to by the same feral fuckwits who eagerly promoted both of Peewee Bush’s Big Adventures. Twenty years ago, my fellow liberal dupes and I screamed to the rafters to anyone who would listen that invading and occupying two largely hostile countries for God knows what real reason (WMD was a lie, and Osama bin Laden escaped at Tora Bora two fucking decades ago) was a terrible idea, and yet we bumblefucked our way around Iraq and Afghanistan for so fucking long, Rupert Murdoch’s droopy-ass balls were still just halfway to the ground when all this nonsense started.
We’ve been kicking the Afghanistan can down the road ever since, and someone—in this case Joe Biden—finally said enough is enough. Fuck you for second-guessing how he did it. If the serrated knife you plunged into our soft, seamy underbelly hurts coming out, that’s nothing compared to how it felt going in. Remember that, Liz Cheney? What about you, Lindsey Graham, you semi-flaccid Jiminy Cricket-looking war chub? You want to impeach Joe Biden—your ex-best friend—for dragging all you starfucking, Pentagon-fluffing war worshippers out of your toddler sandbox and into the harsh klieg lights of reality? Do your worst, you feckless, fifth-string Pep Boy.
And, hey, Fox News, you gently used vomit trough of bad faith, bad ideas, and painfully chafed assholes. I seem to recall you chirping nonstop 20-odd years ago about the wars we simply needed to wage to protect our homeland and our “honor.” Where are those clips now? In the Smithsonian next to a George W. Bush painting of his Scots terrier earnestly humping a series of increasingly churlish barn cats? Did Geraldo lock all that footage in Al Capone’s vault? I seriously want to know.
George W. Bush. Remember that guy? Oh, of course not. He was only your conquering hero for, what, seven and a half fucking years? Did something happen to make him fall out of favor? I can’t imagine. Good God, you people. Your takes have aged worse than Mitch McConnell’s glowering meatloaf of a face. Nevertheless, you persist.
Of course, now you’re all trying to pretend that the always-super-competent Donald Trump would have gotten us out of Afghanistan with no muss and no fuss. Yeah, that’s likely. Mr. Art of the Squeal couldn’t negotiate his way out of a wet sack of hamster farts. What was all that North Korea shit? Kim Jong-un wrangled concessions out of us in exchange for a pouch of magic beans, and then Trump—risibly—tried to pretend Kim had been brought to heel. Well, if he’s a trained puppy, he’s a puppy with lots of shiny new missiles and nukes. Another yuuuuuge fail for Bone Spurious the Yellow.
But hey, the guy whose pandemic response looked like Grimace hate-fucking Mayor McCheese on an escalator; who for four years told us his fantastic health care plan was just two weeks away; and who couldn’t get an infrastructure bill off the launchpad in spite of a widespread bipartisan consensus that we needed more and better infrastructure was going to snap his fingers and shit a workable plan out of his yawning asshole of a maw sometime before May—even though there’s no evidence he had any evacuation plan in place or had even bothered to work on one. Yup. If only Donald Trump had been president instead of Biden. Right? Right?!
And I’m supposed to believe that the guy who abandoned our Kurdish allies after one salty phone call from a fellow dictator was going to move heaven and earth to get our Afghan allies to safety? Uh huh. So why did he all but shut down visa processing for those same Afghans? Seems counterproductive somehow.
As for our fellow citizens in Afghanistan (including the soldiers who tragically died in a terrorist suicide bombing while we were evacuating tens of thousands of friendlies), what was Trump’s plan for getting them home after the Taliban—puffed up and encouraged by the ultimately toothless peace agreement he signed, the 5,000 ferocious Taliban fighters he released, the swift drawdown of troops he initiated, and his clueless, self-serving tweets about getting all our soldiers home by Christmas—basically handed Biden a ticking time bomb? Americans in Afghanistan were told on May 15 to get out of the country ASAP and were urgently told to do so on Aug. 7. We’re to believe Donald Trump would have donned his all-seeing Cerebro helmet and uncovered actionable intelligence suggesting we needed to get our people out far sooner? Try again, poseurs.
Oh, and are we supposed to just ignore the fact that Trump bragged to a rally crowd in June that he’d backed Biden into a corner and made it impossible to reverse his own poorly planned pullout?
The Afghan army collapsed—after we poured untold billions of dollars into training it to defend the jerry-rigged Afghanistan government—in an eye blink. Yet we’re supposed to accept that Donald Trump, in sticking to the May 1 deadline he negotiated, would have somehow prevented the outcome the Taliban had slowly and meticulously engineered since signing our erstwhile ocher overlord’s February 2020 surrender agreement—an agreement that Trump’s own former national security adviser H.R. McMaster ultimately blamed for the “collapse” of anti-Taliban forces? Was he gonna stop them with a tweet? Oh, yeah. The ferocious, battle-hardened Taliban doesn’t fear much, but they tremble in the face of unnecessary capitalization—that I’m fucking sure of. So maybe y’all are right. I guess we’ll never really know.
As for our modern mewling MAGA monkeys, I’m willing to bet at least 99.9% of you Trumpies who are lining up to crucify Biden were scarfing freedom fries and scraping the French flags off your Grey Goose bottles 18-plus years ago, so you can all STFU, too. You credulous, mouth-breathing lie sponges are so easily propagandized you’ll eat horse paste instead of taking a safe, effective, and lifesaving vaccine. This should go without saying, but horse-paste eaters don’t get to criticize other people’s judgment. I don’t know much, but I sure as shit know that.
Speaking of the virus, how many Americans have needlessly died in the past five minutes because Donald Trump didn’t want to smear his makeup with a mask and Ron DeSantis decided his glide path to the White House should be greased with the fresh, pestilent buttock tallow of Florida Man, Florida Woman, Florida Kid, and Florida Grandmama? I knew most of these assholes were pro-war, but I didn’t know they’d be so actively and eagerly pro-virus. Until these glad-handing ghouls can explain the hefty butcher’s bill they keep running up, maybe they should keep the names of these brave fallen soldiers out of their filthy, lying mouths.
So here’s a bit of friendly advice: Unless you spoke out against these wars 20 years ago—or, like Biden, lobbied to end our Afghanistan campaign 12 years ago—you can stick your conveniently timed tirades up your worthless ruddy assholes.
Thanks for coming to my FED (Up) Talk. And if you’re a warhawk Republican, be sure to fuck right off on your way out the door. I’m done listening to you.
Thursday, August 26, 2021
Supreme Court radicals provide all the proof that Biden and Democrats need to reform it
The radical and unlawful Supreme Court decision handed down Tuesday on immigration makes reforming that court all the more urgent, before they can do more damage to an increasingly fragile system of government.
In their unsigned order, the Supreme Court's far-right majority declared that they have control over foreign policy, and that they can direct the executive branch to reinstate the policy of the former administration (the one that they like better). The decision was issued from the "shadow docket," where the extremist majority of the court has been conducting some of its most dangerous work, unsigned and without any public transparency or arguments, or any need to explain the decision.
In this ruling, the court overthrew longstanding precedent that kept the court away from what has been seen as the executive branch's domain: foreign policy. For decades the Supreme Court shied away from "the danger of unwarranted judicial interference in the conduct of foreign policy." Now the court is saying that a federal judge in Texas appointed by Donald Trump has the power to direct President Joe Biden's foreign policy with Mexico in negotiating the immigration policy.
What's more, the order "makes no sense," as Ian Millhiser explains. "It is not at all clear what the Biden administration is supposed to do in order to comply with the Court’s decision in Biden v. Texas. That decision suggests that the Department of Homeland Security committed some legal violation when it rescinded a Trump-era immigration policy, but it does not identify what that violation is," he writes. "And it forces the administration to engage in sensitive negotiations with at least one foreign government without specifying what it needs to secure in those negotiations."
All of that is bad, and it is very much an outgrowth of the Court's use of the shadow docket: No one has to sign their name to the order and they don't have to provide legal justifications and weight of precedent that they must address in decisions resulting from regular process. They increasingly are choosing to take these hot-button political cases—religious exemptions to COVID restrictions, the pandemic eviction moratorium, this immigration case—on an "emergency" basis that allows them to circumvent full proceedings.
This is a really radical decision from an activist court that is acting in an entirely political way
"It is time for Congress to curtail the power of a judiciary out of control," Norman Ornstein, emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, tweeted. "Congress has the power to limit the courts' jurisdiction beyond the original jurisdiction in the Constitution."
That's one necessary reform, and interestingly, is the approach the House of Representatives is taking on voting rights. After finishing work to advance the infrastructure bills Tuesday, the House passed H.R. 4, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. In addition to restoring the parts of the Voting Rights Act the conservatives have excised, the legislation directed the court to put greater weight on the "public's interest in expanding access to the right to the vote," than the state's power to restrict that vote. The legislation "repeals the court's own rules for deciding election-related cases—which strongly favor states' ability to suppress votes—replacing them with voter-friendly directives that would force the justices to safeguard equal suffrage."
Furthermore, H.R. 4 prohibits the court from using the shadow docket to issue emergency orders that reverse lower court decisions protecting voters. The 2020 election provides examples of the court doing just that, tossing lower court decisions that allowed great flexibility for voters to cast their ballots because of the pandemic, using vote-by-mail, or curbside voting, or drop boxes, and extending voting hours.
To pass those reforms and to take on more (like restricting the court's reach in executive matters), the Senate first has to get rid of the filibuster, at the very least for issues related to voting rights. That's the first essential reform. The next is directly reforming the composition of the Supreme Court, preferably through expansion.
There really is no time to spare. The six conservatives on the court just keep demonstrating that they are at war with President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress. They are asserting power where the Constitution does not grant it, and it’s time the other two branches fight back.
Wednesday, August 25, 2021
Bernie Blasts Into Trump Country
Senator Bernie Sanders. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
25 August 21
he
great political challenge our country faces is whether Progressives are
able to bring working people — Black, White, Latino, Native American
and Asian American — together around an agenda that works for all
or whether Trumpism will be successful in dividing us up around issues
relating to racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. Will we be
successful in implementing policies based on hope, love and justice, or
will Republicans prevail with messages of fear, hatred and resentment?
The future of the country depends on how those questions are answered.
Later this week I will, as Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, be holding two town meetings in congressional districts that Donald Trump won, and won big. On August 27 I will be in West Lafayette, Indiana, and on August 29 I will be in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Not only did Trump win both of those states, but Indiana and Iowa have Republican governors, Republican-dominated state legislatures and all four senators from the two states are Republicans. In other words, these are very red states.
Why am I making these trips? The answer is simple. I want voters in red states, blue states and purple states to understand that Congress will soon be voting on the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working families since the New Deal and the Great Depression, and that not one Republican will vote for it. Not one. A few years ago, these very same Republicans were comfortable in voting for massive tax breaks for the rich. They were comfortable in voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act and throw over 30 million Americans off the health care they had. But now, when it comes to supporting legislation that addresses the long-neglected needs of low- and moderate-income families, they are nowhere to be found.
Further, I want Democrats, Republicans and Independents to fully understand what is in this $3.5 trillion Reconciliation Bill, how it will improve life for tens of millions of Americans and why it is so important that it be passed. I want them to understand that in a compassionate, democratic society we can have a government that works for all, and not just the wealthy few and powerful campaign contributors. I want them to understand that we can take a giant step forward in addressing such structural crises as income and wealth inequality, climate change, health care, education and housing and, in the process, create millions of good-paying jobs.
Yes. We are going to end the days of billionaires not paying their fair share of taxes by closing loopholes, while also raising the individual tax rate on the wealthiest Americans and the corporate tax rate for the most profitable companies in our country.
Yes. We will take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, which charges U.S. residents the highest prices in the world by far for prescription drugs. Under our proposal, Medicare will finally be allowed to negotiate prescription drug prices with the industry.
Yes. We will end the absurdity of the U.S. having the highest levels of childhood poverty of almost any major nation by extending the Child Tax Credit so families continue to receive monthly direct payments of up to $300 a child. We will radically improve our dysfunctional child care system so that no working family pays more than 7% of its pretax income on child care, and we will provide universal pre-K to every 3- and 4-year-old.
Yes. We will expand higher education and job-training opportunities for students by making community college tuition-free for all Americans.
Yes. We will end the international disgrace of the U.S. being the only industrialized country not to guarantee paid family and medical leave.
Yes. We will expand Medicare for seniors to cover dental needs as well as hearing aids and glasses. We will also make sure that we have enough doctors, nurses and dentists in underserved areas, while expanding Medicaid to provide health care to the uninsured.
Yes. We will give hundreds of thousands of seniors and people with disabilities the ability to get the care they need in their own homes instead of being forced into nursing homes.
Yes. We will address homelessness and the national housing crisis by making an unprecedented investment in affordable housing.
Yes. We will provide undocumented people living in the U.S. with a pathway to citizenship, including Dreamers and the essential workers who courageously kept our economy running in the middle of a deadly pandemic.
And yes. We will finally begin the process of combating climate change by shifting our energy system away from fossil fuels and toward energy efficiency and sustainable energy. This effort will include a nationwide clean-energy standard that moves our transportation system, electrical generation, buildings and agriculture toward clean energy. We will also create a Civilian Climate Corps, which will hire hundreds of thousands of young people to protect our natural resources and fight against climate change.
When Republicans had the majority, they used the reconciliation process to pass enormous tax breaks for the billionaire class and large corporations. We are using reconciliation in a different way — by helping ordinary Americans and creating a government that works for all, not just the few.
We are in this together.
Cartoon: Ironies of Afghanistan
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