March, 08 2018, 04:00pm EDT
Sanders to Host Town Hall on Inequality with Elizabeth Warren, Michael Moore
WASHINGTON
Following the success of the Medicare for All Town Hall in January which drew 1.6 million live viewers, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) announced Thursday that he will be hosting a town hall focused on inequality in the United States on March 19 in partnership with The Guardian, NowThis, The Young Turks and Act.tv.
Sanders, along with filmmaker Michel Moore, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, economist Darrick Hamilton and other experts, will discuss poverty in America, the 40-year decline of the middle class, the growing power of corporate interests and how we an economy that works for all Americans.
"The issue of oligarchy and wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time, it is the great economic issue of our time and it is the great political issue of our time, yet it gets very little coverage from the corporate media," Sanders said. "I am excited to build on the success of our Medicare for All town hall and go outside the traditional media to talk about who owns America, why the middle class is declining, extreme poverty and how we create an economy that works for everybody, not just the 1 percent."
The event, titled "Inequality in America: The Rise of Oligarchy and Collapse of the Middle Class," will be held in front of a live audience at the Capitol Visitor Center's Congressional Auditorium in Washington from 7:00 to 8:20 p.m. and live streamed across the partners' social media channels.
"The political establishment has completely turned away from the middle class and abandoned the American blue collar workers in favor of the wealthy elite," said TYT host Ana Kasparian. "Tax cuts are only helping the top one percent and have become corporations' best and most loyal friend . Our government needs to create opportunity for all people and it's imperative that our elected officials make sure wages increase with the productivity of this country. I applaud Sen. Sanders' work in making this the issue of our time. I look forward to working with Michael Moore, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Darrick Hamilton and the many other esteemed guests to advance the conversation and create change."
"We need a government that works for all of us, not only the 1 percent. Likewise we are proud to partner in this town hall and amplify such a vital issue. Another world is possible, but we need a better media to make it," said Harry Waisbren, co-founder of Act.tv.
Guests interested in attending in person can find more information here.
PANELIST BIOS
Elizabeth Warren, Senator from Massachusetts
Elizabeth Warren has made her life's work the fight for middle class families. She is recognized as one of the nation's top experts on bankruptcy and the financial pressures facing middle class families, and the Boston Globe has called her "the plainspoken voice of people getting crushed by so many predatory lenders and under regulated banks."
Michael Moore, filmmaker and author
Michael Moore is an Academy-Award winning documentary filmmaker, activist, and author. Among many issues his work has examined globalization, gun ownership, health care, and domestic and foreign policy.
Darrick Hamilton, Professor of Economics and Urban Policy, The New School, New York City
Professor Darrick Hamilton teaches economic and urban policy at the New School in New York. Both his academic work and activism is aimed at promoting greater economic, political, and social inclusion. His work examines inequality and identity, racism, and socioeconomic outcomes.
Catherine Coleman Flowers, founder, Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise
Ms. Catherine Coleman Flowers is the founder of the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise Community Development Corporation. Ms. Flowers has called attention to the lack of environmental and climate justice in poor rural communities, including exposing how some communities live surrounded by raw open sewage. Last year she invited the UN's Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty to Alabama, and he characterized what he saw as "uncommon in the first world."
Cindy Estrada, Vice President of the United Auto Workers Union
Cindy Estrada is a longtime union organizer and social activist. She was first elected as vice president in 2010 and is the first Latina elected to serve as an International officer. Cindy developed a passion for the labor movement while listening to her grandparents and other family members talk about their experiences working on farms and inside the factories of Detroit. Their stories were the first of many that have guided Estrada in her dedication to empower workers and show them they deserve a seat at the table to raise and resolve workplace problems and improve their working conditions.
Professor Gordon Lafer, Political Scientist, University of Oregon
Dr. Gordon Lafer, a political economist, is a Professor at the University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center and a Research Associate with the Economic Policy Institute. He has spent many years working as a union organizer and has seen how people have been mistreated or ripped off by their employers. His most recent book is The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time (Cornell University Press, 2017).
LATEST NEWS
Trump-Appointed Judge: Administration Must Return Another Man Deported to El Salvador
Citing other courts' decisions in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Judge Stephanie Gallagher stressed that "standing by and taking no action is not facilitation."
Apr 24, 2025
A federal judge appointed by U.S. President Donald Trump during his first term directed his second administration on Wednesday to facilitate the return of a 20-year-old Venezuelan deported to El Salvador in breach of a settlement agreement—as the government continues to defy a similar order to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia home to Maryland.
Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran native who was supposed to be protected from deportation by an immigration judge's order, and this man, identified in court filings with the pseudonym Cristian, are among hundreds of migrants whom the Trump administration sent to El Salvador last month to be imprisoned in a notorious gang prison called the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).
As Maryland-based U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher explained in her Wednesday opinion, Cristian was deported while waiting on his asylum case to be decided by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) following a legal fight that resulted in a settlement agreement approved last November.
In class action litigation launched in 2019, Gallagher detailed, a group of people who entered the U.S. as unaccompanied minors, including Cristian, "sought to enforce its members' rights to have their asylum applications adjudicated on the merits by USCIS while they remained physically present in the United States."
Trump has used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to fast-track the expulsion of alleged gang members—and, as Gallagher noted, his administration argued "that removal of Cristian did not violate the settlement agreement because 'his designation as an alien enemy pursuant to the AEA results in him ceasing to be a member' of the class."
However, the judge concluded that "allegations that class members, like Cristian, are subject to the AEA do not exclude those individuals from the class under the plain terms of the settlement agreement."
Gallagher further found that "under the plain terms of the settlement agreement and fundamental tenets of contract law, removal from the United States of a class member, including but not limited to Cristian, without a final determination on the merits by USCIS on the class member's pending asylum application violates the settlement agreement."
Thus, she wrote, "Cristian, and any other class member who has been removed in violation of the settlement agreement, must be returned to the United States to await adjudication of his asylum application on the merits by USCIS."
According to ABC News, which first reported on Gallagher's decision:
Counsel for the class of migrants also alleged in court filings that another Venezuelan man, identified as an 18-year-old named Javier in the court records, was in imminent danger of being deported earlier this month.
Judge Gallagher determined that Javier was covered by the settlement agreement and entered a temporary restraining order prohibiting the government from removing him from the United States.
Citing Abrego Garcia's legal battle—which is being handled by Maryland-based U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, an appointee of former President Barack Obama—Gallagher acknowledged that her Wednesday decision regarding Cristain "puts this case squarely into the procedural morass that has been playing out very publicly, across many levels of the federal judiciary."
"Discovery is underway regarding the government's efforts to comply with court orders (including from the United States Supreme Court) to 'facilitate' Mr. Abrego Garcia's return to the United States," the judge continued. "This court is mindful of the Supreme Court's reminder to afford the 'deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.'"
"However, this court is also guided by, and fully agrees with, the definition of 'facilitate' espoused by Judge Xinis and the United States Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Abrego Garcia," she stressed. "Standing by and taking no action is not facilitation."
Xinis on Wednesday postponed discovery in the Abrego Garcia case for a week, with the agreement of both his legal team and the government, following a sealed filing from the Trump administration earlier in the day.
Meanwhile, Abrego Garcia's wife and her three children—all U.S. citizens—have
moved to a safe house after multiple Trump administration social media accounts posted paperwork with their home address on X.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'How Authoritarians Reshape Society': Critics Denounce Trump Order Targeting College Accreditation
"Threats to remove accreditors from their roles are transparent attempts to consolidate more power in the hands of the Trump administration in order to stifle teaching and research," said the American Association of University Professors.
Apr 24, 2025
Critics and education voices were quick to criticize several executive orders signed by U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday which target college accreditation, endeavor to foster artificial intelligence "competency" in K-12 schools, and more—the latest move in the president's quest to reshape American education.
With his order focused on the accreditation procedure, Trump is aiming to shake up the process that determines whether colleges and universities provide a quality education. For higher education institutions to access federal grants, loans, and other federal funds, they must be accredited, and for students to access federal loans and grants, they must attend an accredited school.
Accreditors "have remained improperly focused on compelling adoption of discriminatory ideology," according to the executive order. Per an accompanying White House fact sheet, the order directs Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to suspend or terminate an accreditor's federal recognition in order to hold it accountable if it violates federal civil rights law.
The order itself states that "requiring institutions seeking accreditation to engage in unlawful discrimination in accreditation-related activity under the guise of 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' initiatives" would constitute a violation of federal civil rights law.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a nonprofit membership association, said Wednesday that the order focused on accreditation is yet "another attempt to dictate what is taught, learned, said, and done by college students and instructors."
"Threats to remove accreditors from their roles are transparent attempts to consolidate more power in the hands of the Trump administration in order to stifle teaching and research. These attacks are aimed at removing educational decision-making from educators and reshaping higher education to fit an authoritarian political agenda," AAUP continued.
Max Flugrath, the communications director for the free and fair elections group Fair Fight Action, echoed this sentiment on Wednesday, writing on X: "This is how authoritarians reshape society: control what we're allowed to learn."
In the past, Trump has called reshaping college accreditation his "secret weapon."
"Revoking accreditation is an existential threat for these universities," Andrew Gillen, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, toldThe Wall Street Journal, evoking how changes to the accreditation process could be broadly felt. "If you lose Pell grants and lose student loans, for most colleges that means you're done."
Prior to Wednesday's actions, higher education was already a key focus for the Trump administration.
The Trump administration has announced investigations into several colleges over their handling of alleged anti-semitism, detained multiple noncitizens who have participated in the pro-Palestine student movement, and targeted funding at multiple universities.
President of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, highlighted that Trump's executive orders focused on K-12 run counter to its own professed goal of ceding federal control over education. David Axelrod, who was once a senior adviser to former President Barack Obama, made this same point.
"The Trump administration really does want to be in the business of education after all. It just wants to pick and choose who it helps and who it hurts, rather than build on six decades of bipartisan efforts to improve public education," Weingarten said.
One order is aimed at bringing AI technology into schools to prepare students to be "responsible participants in the workforce of the future" and rolls back guidance issued under Obama and former President Joe Biden that compelled schools to take racial equity into account when disciplining students.
On the discipline order, "we need a commonsense approach and to give teachers authority, but this fails to create a safe and welcoming environment," said Weingarten. "It simply ignores a history where Black and brown students were disproportionately suspended or expelled from school rather than provided the opportunity to thrive."
On the artificial intelligence order, Wingarten said that it's "a transparent attempt to open up schools to unaccountable tech companies, with wholly inadequate safeguards to protect our kids."
Among the other executive actions issued on Wednesday, Trump signed an order to enhance the capacity of Historically Black Colleges and Universities to deliver "high-quality education," and an order aimed at modernizing workforce programs to prepare workers for desirable trade jobs, like through bolstering apprenticeship programs.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Study Estimates Fossil Fuel Giants Have Inflicted $28 Trillion in Climate Damage Worldwide
As people around the world cope with the worsening effects of planetary heating, "the veil of plausible deniability doesn't exist anymore scientifically" for fossil fuel giants.
Apr 24, 2025
As planetary heating has fueled increasingly damaging hurricanes, wildfires, and dangerous heatwaves, fossil fuel giants have long been shielded by plausible deniability: Despite scientists' consensus that oil, gas, and coal extraction are polluting the planet and causing global temperatures to rise, they couldn't prove that specific corporations were to blame for worsening climate destruction.
A study published on Wednesday could change that.
Using modeling techniques that have been utilized for more than a decade to explain how climate change is fueling weather disasters, researchers at Dartmouth College estimated that 111 of the world's largest fossil fuel companies have caused $28 trillion in heat-related climate damages so far—slightly less than the value of all goods and services produced in the United States last year.
"The global economy would be $28 trillion richer," reads the study, "were it not for the extreme heat caused by the emissions from the 111 carbon majors considered here."
The study, published in Nature, found that more than half of that amount—which doesn't include damages from hurricanes and other extreme climate events—could be attributed to just 10 oil, coal, and gas companies including Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Russia's state-owned Gazprom, and Saudi Aramco.
"Everybody's asking the same question: What can we actually claim about who has caused this?" Dartmouth climate scientist Justin Mankin, co-author of the study, told Euronews.
The researchers pursued that question as climate advocates pushed policymakers to adopt the "polluters pay principle": the idea that companies that produce pollution should pay for the damages it causes. Earlier this year, a California Democratic lawmaker introduced legislation that would allow homeowners and businesses to recoup losses caused by climate disasters like the wildfires that devastated parts of the Los Angeles area.
"The global economy would be $28 trillion richer were it not for the extreme heat caused by the emissions from the 111 carbon majors considered here."
New York and Vermont have enacted laws that would hold fossil fuel companies accountable for greenhouse gas emissions and require them to pay for climate damages and adaptation, and other states are considering similar proposals—with oil and gas companies fighting back in court.
Mankin told Euronews that Dartmouth's new research shows that "the veil of plausible deniability doesn't exist anymore scientifically."
In the past, he said, carbon emitters could ask, "Who's to say that it's my molecule of CO2 that's contributed to these damages versus any other one?"
"We can actually trace harms back to major emitters," he said.
The research team examined the final emissions of the products produced by the 111 largest fossil fuel giants and used 1,000 distinct computer simulations to determine how those emissions impacted changes in the Earth's global average surface temperature, comparing the results to a simulation in which each company's emissions did not exist.
Epidemiologist Ali Khan said the method represented "great improvements in attribution" as at least 68 lawsuits have been filed globally demanding that polluters pay for damages. About half of those lawsuits have been filed in the United States.
"So far, attorneys and litigants have often named defendants as part of the initial legal process, under the assumption that knowing a defendant's emissions is sufficient to make a claim," reads the study. "Science can help claimants assess potential defendants in a transparent and low-cost way."
The researchers determined that Chevron's oil and gas extraction has raised the Earth's temperature by 0.025°C. The company is to blame for an estimated $1.98 trillion in climate damage, behind only Saudi Aramco, which is liable for an estimated $2.05 trillion, and Gazprom, which is responsible for $2 trillion.
Kevin Reed, a professor at Stony Brook University's School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, toldThe Washington Post that Dartmouth's research into climate damage attribution is "the real deal."
"This is the first time I've seen this done in a really comprehensive way that isn't just for one specific event," Reed said.
The European Green Party cataloged a number of steps that policymakers could take if $28 trillion had been saved by forcing companies to end their climate-wrecking emissions.
Financing 100% renewable energy would cost just $4 trillion, while guaranteeing universal housing and energy efficiency would cost $3 trillion, said the political party.
"Polluters," said the European Greens, "need to start paying for the damage they are causing to our planet."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular