SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
Climate activists with the Sunrise Movement on Friday in the office of Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.). (Photo: Sunrise Movement)
Occupying Office of Another Key Democrat, Climate Activists Say "Best Chance at Survival" for Humanity Is Green New Deal
The Sunrise Movement urges Rep. Frank Pallone (N.J.) to back proposal from Ocasio-Cortez, refuse fossil fuel money
Nov 15, 2018
Days after it targeted the Democratic leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, the youth-led Sunrise Movement sustained its pressure on the party Friday morning as roughly three dozen climate activists with the group occupied the Washington, D.C. office of Rep. Frank Pallone (N.J.) to demand he back a "Green New Deal" as they called such a plan humanity's "best chance at survival."
"Our generation is done waiting," said one protester named Ben, a 21-year-old. "If not now, when?"
In addition to supporting Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's proposed Select Committee for a Green New Deal--an idea backed by other newly-elected Democrats including Ilhan Omar but deemed "not necessary" by Pallone, the group sporting t-shirts demanding their rights to "good jobs and a livable future" also urged the incoming chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee to sign on to the "No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge."
"Our generation needs proof that you will fight with us," added Ben.
Pallone listened to the activists, and said that while he "largely agrees with" the agenda of the Green New Deal, he disagreed with the legislative process of the select committee.
"You've been in office for 25 years, longer than I've been alive, and you have not supported a #GreenNewDeal which addressed the scope of the crisis," said another activist identified as Beverly. She told Pallone to back the proposed committee, and added, "it's our best chance at survival."
\u201c\u201cNo one should live in fear of losing their home or their family to climate change. Any Democrat that doesn\u2019t support a #GreenNewDeal does not deserve leadership\u201d Georgette shares the fear of Hurricane Florence. This is a fight for our lives. Which side are you on @FrankPallone?\u201d— Sunrise Movement \ud83c\udf05 (@Sunrise Movement \ud83c\udf05) 1542383376
\u201cRep @FrankPallone says he backs our futures BUT he won\u2019t pledge to take #NoFossilFuelMoney and won\u2019t back @Ocasio2018\u2019s committee for a #GreenNewDeal - what! Which side are you on Pallone? Join us on Sat to learn how to take action and break this stalemate https://t.co/oaAKJEeTZY\u201d— Sunrise Movement \ud83c\udf05 (@Sunrise Movement \ud83c\udf05) 1542382331
Friday's action--which drew support from Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.)--comes the same week dozens of Sunrise Movement activists staged a sit-in at Pelosi's Washington, D.C. office to demand that party leadership get behind the Green New Deal.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez herself joined that protest and told the group, "I just want to let you all know how proud I am of each and every single one of you for putting yourselves and your bodies and everything on the line to make sure that we save our planet, our generation, and our future."
Her plan of action, however, is getting push-back from establishment Democrats. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), for example, warned about going "too extreme," while Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) declared it "technologically impossible" that "in five years or 10 years we're not going to consume any more fossil fuels."
But 19-year-old Sunrise Movement activist Olivia stressed the urgency of climate action. She said before departing Pallone's office: "We do not have time for committees to talk and research. We have the solutions and we need a Green New Deal now. Frank Pallone needs to stand with us or step aside."
Praising the direct action and echoing the fact that there's no time to spare, Anna Galland, executive director of civic action at MoveOn.org, tweeted that the Sunrise activists are "beautifully modeling the ferocious urgency we need."
An Unconstitutional Rampage
Trump and Musk are on an unconstitutional rampage, aiming for virtually every corner of the federal government. These two right-wing billionaires are targeting nurses, scientists, teachers, daycare providers, judges, veterans, air traffic controllers, and nuclear safety inspectors. No one is safe. The food stamps program, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are next. It’s an unprecedented disaster and a five-alarm fire, but there will be a reckoning. The people did not vote for this. The American people do not want this dystopian hellscape that hides behind claims of “efficiency.” Still, in reality, it is all a giveaway to corporate interests and the libertarian dreams of far-right oligarchs like Musk. Common Dreams is playing a vital role by reporting day and night on this orgy of corruption and greed, as well as what everyday people can do to organize and fight back. As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover issues the corporate media never will, but we can only continue with our readers’ support. |
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
alexandria ocasio-cortezdemocratic partygreen new dealhurricane florenceilhan omarpeople powerpeter defaziopolitics
Days after it targeted the Democratic leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, the youth-led Sunrise Movement sustained its pressure on the party Friday morning as roughly three dozen climate activists with the group occupied the Washington, D.C. office of Rep. Frank Pallone (N.J.) to demand he back a "Green New Deal" as they called such a plan humanity's "best chance at survival."
"Our generation is done waiting," said one protester named Ben, a 21-year-old. "If not now, when?"
In addition to supporting Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's proposed Select Committee for a Green New Deal--an idea backed by other newly-elected Democrats including Ilhan Omar but deemed "not necessary" by Pallone, the group sporting t-shirts demanding their rights to "good jobs and a livable future" also urged the incoming chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee to sign on to the "No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge."
"Our generation needs proof that you will fight with us," added Ben.
Pallone listened to the activists, and said that while he "largely agrees with" the agenda of the Green New Deal, he disagreed with the legislative process of the select committee.
"You've been in office for 25 years, longer than I've been alive, and you have not supported a #GreenNewDeal which addressed the scope of the crisis," said another activist identified as Beverly. She told Pallone to back the proposed committee, and added, "it's our best chance at survival."
\u201c\u201cNo one should live in fear of losing their home or their family to climate change. Any Democrat that doesn\u2019t support a #GreenNewDeal does not deserve leadership\u201d Georgette shares the fear of Hurricane Florence. This is a fight for our lives. Which side are you on @FrankPallone?\u201d— Sunrise Movement \ud83c\udf05 (@Sunrise Movement \ud83c\udf05) 1542383376
\u201cRep @FrankPallone says he backs our futures BUT he won\u2019t pledge to take #NoFossilFuelMoney and won\u2019t back @Ocasio2018\u2019s committee for a #GreenNewDeal - what! Which side are you on Pallone? Join us on Sat to learn how to take action and break this stalemate https://t.co/oaAKJEeTZY\u201d— Sunrise Movement \ud83c\udf05 (@Sunrise Movement \ud83c\udf05) 1542382331
Friday's action--which drew support from Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.)--comes the same week dozens of Sunrise Movement activists staged a sit-in at Pelosi's Washington, D.C. office to demand that party leadership get behind the Green New Deal.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez herself joined that protest and told the group, "I just want to let you all know how proud I am of each and every single one of you for putting yourselves and your bodies and everything on the line to make sure that we save our planet, our generation, and our future."
Her plan of action, however, is getting push-back from establishment Democrats. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), for example, warned about going "too extreme," while Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) declared it "technologically impossible" that "in five years or 10 years we're not going to consume any more fossil fuels."
But 19-year-old Sunrise Movement activist Olivia stressed the urgency of climate action. She said before departing Pallone's office: "We do not have time for committees to talk and research. We have the solutions and we need a Green New Deal now. Frank Pallone needs to stand with us or step aside."
Praising the direct action and echoing the fact that there's no time to spare, Anna Galland, executive director of civic action at MoveOn.org, tweeted that the Sunrise activists are "beautifully modeling the ferocious urgency we need."
Days after it targeted the Democratic leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, the youth-led Sunrise Movement sustained its pressure on the party Friday morning as roughly three dozen climate activists with the group occupied the Washington, D.C. office of Rep. Frank Pallone (N.J.) to demand he back a "Green New Deal" as they called such a plan humanity's "best chance at survival."
"Our generation is done waiting," said one protester named Ben, a 21-year-old. "If not now, when?"
In addition to supporting Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's proposed Select Committee for a Green New Deal--an idea backed by other newly-elected Democrats including Ilhan Omar but deemed "not necessary" by Pallone, the group sporting t-shirts demanding their rights to "good jobs and a livable future" also urged the incoming chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee to sign on to the "No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge."
"Our generation needs proof that you will fight with us," added Ben.
Pallone listened to the activists, and said that while he "largely agrees with" the agenda of the Green New Deal, he disagreed with the legislative process of the select committee.
"You've been in office for 25 years, longer than I've been alive, and you have not supported a #GreenNewDeal which addressed the scope of the crisis," said another activist identified as Beverly. She told Pallone to back the proposed committee, and added, "it's our best chance at survival."
\u201c\u201cNo one should live in fear of losing their home or their family to climate change. Any Democrat that doesn\u2019t support a #GreenNewDeal does not deserve leadership\u201d Georgette shares the fear of Hurricane Florence. This is a fight for our lives. Which side are you on @FrankPallone?\u201d— Sunrise Movement \ud83c\udf05 (@Sunrise Movement \ud83c\udf05) 1542383376
\u201cRep @FrankPallone says he backs our futures BUT he won\u2019t pledge to take #NoFossilFuelMoney and won\u2019t back @Ocasio2018\u2019s committee for a #GreenNewDeal - what! Which side are you on Pallone? Join us on Sat to learn how to take action and break this stalemate https://t.co/oaAKJEeTZY\u201d— Sunrise Movement \ud83c\udf05 (@Sunrise Movement \ud83c\udf05) 1542382331
Friday's action--which drew support from Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.)--comes the same week dozens of Sunrise Movement activists staged a sit-in at Pelosi's Washington, D.C. office to demand that party leadership get behind the Green New Deal.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez herself joined that protest and told the group, "I just want to let you all know how proud I am of each and every single one of you for putting yourselves and your bodies and everything on the line to make sure that we save our planet, our generation, and our future."
Her plan of action, however, is getting push-back from establishment Democrats. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), for example, warned about going "too extreme," while Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) declared it "technologically impossible" that "in five years or 10 years we're not going to consume any more fossil fuels."
But 19-year-old Sunrise Movement activist Olivia stressed the urgency of climate action. She said before departing Pallone's office: "We do not have time for committees to talk and research. We have the solutions and we need a Green New Deal now. Frank Pallone needs to stand with us or step aside."
Praising the direct action and echoing the fact that there's no time to spare, Anna Galland, executive director of civic action at MoveOn.org, tweeted that the Sunrise activists are "beautifully modeling the ferocious urgency we need."
We've had enough. The 1% own and operate the corporate media. They are doing everything they can to defend the status quo, squash dissent and protect the wealthy and the powerful. The Common Dreams media model is different. We cover the news that matters to the 99%. Our mission? To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. How? Nonprofit. Independent. Reader-supported. Free to read. Free to republish. Free to share. With no advertising. No paywalls. No selling of your data. Thousands of small donations fund our newsroom and allow us to continue publishing. Can you chip in? We can't do it without you. Thank you.
LATEST NEWS
'We're Turning Into a Dictatorship': Trump Tariffs Seen as Ploy to Further Consolidate Power
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy called President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs "a political weapon designed to collapse our democracy."
Apr 07, 2025
Analysts puzzling over the bizarre formula the Trump administration used to calculate its country-by-country tariff rates are wasting their time, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy said in a response to the American president that has gone viral in recent days as global markets continue to nosedive.
"It's not economic policy, it's not trade policy," Murphy (D-Conn.) said in remarks recorded after Trump announced the sweeping tariffs last week. "It's a political weapon designed to collapse our democracy."
While President Donald Trump's universal tariffs on imports make no sense as an effort to rectify the failures of the status quo trade regime and bring back offshored U.S. jobs, they are comprehensible when viewed as "a tool to try to compel pledges of loyalty, this time from companies and industries in the United States," Murphy argued.
"You have to understand that everything Donald Trump is doing is in service of staying in power forever—either him or his family or his handpicked successors," the Democratic senator continued. "He's trying to destroy our democracy."
Murphy contended that the president designed the tariffs to be so widespread that corporations across private industry would have to come to the White House and "make an agreement with Trump in which he gives them tariff relief in exchange for a pledge of political loyalty."
"What could that pledge look like?" Murphy continued. "Well, maybe they agree to champion his economic policy publicly. Maybe they agree to make contributions to his political campaign. Maybe they agree to police their employees to make sure that nobody that works for that company works for the political opposition."
Politico reported late last week that businesses across corporate America "fear Trump's wrath" and are thus declining to criticize the president's tariff policies even as they wreak havoc worldwide and threaten to spark a devastating recession.
"There is zero incentive for any company or brand to be remotely critical of this administration," one unnamed public affairs operative told Politico. "It destroys your ability to work with the White House and advance your policies, period."
"While the United States has plenty of real problems to deal with, Trump is ignoring them to manufacture the fake emergencies he needs to further enlarge and centralize his power."
Murphy is hardly alone in seeing Trump's tariffs as an instrument of power consolidation.
Robert Reich, the former U.S. labor secretary, wrote Monday that "we're turning into a dictatorship" as Trump conjures "fake national emergencies" to jack up tariffs, deport people en masse without due process, gut efforts to combat the climate crisis, and dismantle large swaths of the federal government.
"As Trump declares emergency after emergency to justify his reign of terror, he's simultaneously eliminating America's capacity to respond to real emergencies," Reich wrote. "Make no mistake about what’s really going on here. While the United States has plenty of real problems to deal with, Trump is ignoring them to manufacture the fake emergencies he needs to further enlarge and centralize his power."
One analyst, Zack Beauchamp of Vox, argued the tariffs are more a symptom of the decline of U.S. democracy rather than a cause of it.
"Trump's tariffs will, if fully implemented, be remembered as their own cautionary tale. While he campaigned on them, he wouldn't have been able to implement the entire tariff package had he gone through the normal constitutionally prescribed procedure for raising taxes," Beauchamp wrote. "The fact that America isn't functioning like a normal democracy, with public deliberation and multiple checks on executive authority, is what allowed Trump to act on his idiosyncratic ideas in the manner of a Mao or Putin."
"It's still possible that Trump steps back from the brink," he added. "But even if he does, and the worst outcome is avoided, the lesson should be clear: The long decay of America's democratic system means that we are all living under an axe. And if this isn't the moment it falls, there will surely be another."
Trump Calls Tariff Madness a 'Beautiful Thing to Behold' as Global Markets Crater
"If the 4.8% fall in S&P 500 futures at the Asian opening isn't reversed, then it's on course for its worst three-day selloff since the Black Monday crash of October 1987."
Apr 07, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump late Sunday openly embraced the global chaos sparked by his sweeping tariffs, careening headlong into a potentially catastrophic trade war as worldwide financial markets plummeted and American retirees began to panic.
In a post on his social media platform, Trump declared that his tariffs are "already in effect, and a beautiful thing to behold."
"Some day people will realize that Tariffs, for the United States of America, are a very beautiful thing!" Trump wrote as recent retirees and people near retirement expressed fear and astonishment at the swift damage the president's policy decisions have done to their investment accounts.
One retiree, a 68-year-old former occupational health worker in New Jersey, told NBC News that she is "just kind of stunned, and with so much money in the market, we just sort of have to hope we have enough time to recover."
"What we've been doing is trying to enjoy the time that we have, but you want to be able to make it last," the retiree, identified as Paula, said on Friday. "I have no confidence here."
Trump's post doubling down on his tariff regime came as Asian markets cratered and U.S. stock futures opened bright red, signaling that Monday will bring another broad sell-off in equities. One of Trump's top economic advisers claimed in a Sunday interview that the president is not intentionally crashing the stock market, even as Trump—returning from a weekend golf outing in Florida—characterized the tariffs as "medicine."
"I don't want anything to go down," the president said. "But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something."
Bloomberg's John Authers wrote early Sunday that "if the 4.8% fall in S&P 500 futures at the Asian opening isn't reversed, then it's on course for its worst three-day selloff since the Black Monday crash of October 1987."
Though the stock market and the economy are not synonymous, economist Josh Bivens recently noted that they are currently "mirroring each other: Stock market weakness is reflecting broader economic weakness."
"While the stock market isn't the economy, the stock market declines we have seen in recent weeks are genuinely worrying," wrote Bivens, the chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute. "They are a symptom of much larger dysfunctional macroeconomic policy that will likely soon start showing up in higher unemployment and slower wage growth for the vast majority."
'Totally Lawless': Judge Orders Trump to Return Man Sent to El Salvador Prison in 'Error'
"This was an illegal act," said U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis.
Apr 06, 2025
A federal court judge on Sunday declared the Trump administration's refusal to return a man they sent to an El Salvadoran prison in "error" as "totally lawless" behavior and ordered the Department of Homeland Security to repatriate the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, within 24 hours.
In a 22-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis doubled down on an order issued Friday, which Department of Justice lawyers representing the administration said was an affront to his executive authority.
"This was an illegal act," Xinis said of DHS Secretary Krisi Noem's attack on Abrego Garcia's rights, including his deportation and imprisonment.
"Defendants seized Abrego Garcia without any lawful authority; held him in three separate domestic detention centers without legal basis; failed to present him to any immigration judge or officer; and forcibly transported him to El Salvador in direct contravention of [immigration law]," the decision states.
Once imprisoned in El Salvador, the order continues, "U.S. officials secured his detention in a facility that, by design, deprives its detainees of adequate food, water, and shelter, fosters routine violence; and places him with his persecutors."
Trump's DOJ appealed Friday's order to 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Virginia, but that court has not yet ruled on the request to stay the order from Xinis, which says Abrego Garcia should be returned to the United States no later than Monday.
Most Popular
We cover the issues the corporate media never will.
Please support our journalism.