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07 June 21
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WE ARE ASKING FOR A 'FAIR SHAKE' ON DONATIONS. We never believed that all the readers would donate all the time, nor do we expect it. We absolutely understand that extenuating circumstances happen. But less than 1% of the subscribers donating? That's not right or fair. We have no choice but to stand up and protest that. RSN was in fact built entirely with public funding. It's worth preserving. Give us a hand once in a while. / Marc Ash • Founder, Reader Supported News
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RSN: Marc Ash | Welcome to Progressivism Joe, Get Ready to Fight
Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
Ash writes: "The cautionary mantra by progressives as your campaign for the presidency unfolded was, 'He's no Progressive.' A justifiable conclusion based on the totality of your body of work in public service. Clearly, now you've changed."
elcome to Progressivism Joe, Get Ready to Fight
The cautionary mantra by progressives as your campaign for the presidency unfolded was, “He’s no Progressive.” A justifiable conclusion based on the totality of your body of work in public service.
Clearly, now you’ve changed. Life forces us to pay a price for being alive and for you the price has been high. You have converted your pain into compassion for others, which was the best you could have done. You can’t be defined as a progressive yet, but you are really trying, and that counts for a lot.
The first thing you need to know about progressive activism is that it’s a thankless job. You don’t get rich, you rarely get a pat on the back, and the road goes up the wrong side of the mountain. But there’s never any doubt that you’re going in the right direction, and you always know it’s worth it to try.
Some Advice
Be uncompromising. Men and women who accomplish great things normally are. Sticking to your guns inspires dedicated support, and you’ll need plenty of that.
Things don’t change for the better because they should. Good changes come about as a result of determination and perseverance with a little luck thrown in. Stick with it and stay on it, always.
Maya Angelou famously said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” You know Mitch McConnell well. When he says, “100% of my focus is on stopping this new administration,” you can be certain that he means it. All retroactive posturing aside. The bipartisan thing is a bluff. At some point, you’re going to have to call it. Don’t wait too long.
Of Broken Eggs and Omelets
The agenda you have articulated has won you a surprising degree of public support across a wide political spectrum. That’s the most valuable political currency you can have. Let ‘er rip. Don’t hold back waiting for a cordial invitation from your detractors. It’s not coming.
2022 is coming. The conventional political wisdom is that “getting stuff done” leads to good outcomes in national elections. Perhaps. But giving the voters an agenda and a vision they can embrace with their hearts and minds matters a great deal too. Stay true to your vision. Eggs may get broken, but omelets will get made.
Stay the course. Kick ass. You’ll win.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Voters at a polling precinct. (photo: Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)
The Republicans' Wild Assault on Voting Rights in Texas and Arizona
Sue Halpern, The New Yorker
Halpern writes: "What began as thinly veiled attempts to keep Democrats from the polls has become a movement to undermine confidence in our democracy itself."
few hours after Michael Flynn, the retired three-star general and former national-security adviser and convicted felon, told a group of QAnon conspiracists who met in Dallas over Memorial Day weekend that the Biden Administration should be overthrown by force, Democratic legislators in the Texas statehouse, two hundred miles away in Austin, did something remarkable: they stopped their Republican colleagues from passing one of the most restrictive voting bills in the country. Flynn’s pronouncement and the Republicans’ efforts rely on repeating the same untruth: that the Presidency was stolen from Donald Trump by a cabal of Democrats, election officials, and poll workers who perpetrated election fraud. No matter that this claim has been litigated, relitigated, and debunked. Based on data collected by the conservative Heritage Foundation, the incidence of voter fraud in the two decades before last year’s election was about 0.00006 per cent of total ballots cast. It was negligible in 2020, too, as Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, acknowledged at the time.
Senate Bill 7 was stymied at the last minute, when Democrats in the Texas House walked out, depriving Republicans of a quorum. The legislation is full of what are becoming standard suppression tactics—most of which burden people of color, who in 2020 overwhelmingly voted Democratic—and includes measures that would, for example, allow a judge to overturn an election result simply if a challenger claimed, without any proof, that fraudulent votes changed the outcome. Sarah Labowitz, of the A.C.L.U. of Texas, called the bill “ruthless.” Texas was already the most difficult state in which to cast a ballot, according to a recent study by Northern Illinois University. In 2020, voter turnout there was among the lowest in the nation. Even so, with nonwhites making up more than sixty per cent of the population under twenty, Texas is on its way to becoming a swing state. S.B. 7 is intended to insure that it doesn’t. Governor Greg Abbott has promised to call a special session of the legislature to reintroduce it.
Since January, Republican lawmakers in forty-eight states have introduced nearly four hundred restrictive voting bills. What distinguishes these efforts is that they target not only voters but also poll workers and election officials. The Texas bill makes it a criminal offense for an election official to obstruct the view of poll watchers, who are typically partisan volunteers, and grants those observers the right to record videos of voters at polling places. In Iowa, officials could be fined ten thousand dollars for “technical infractions,” such as failing to sufficiently purge voters from the rolls. In Florida, workers who leave drop boxes unattended, however briefly, can be fined twenty-five thousand dollars. In Georgia, poll watchers can challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of voters.
Even before the pandemic, sixty-five per cent of jurisdictions in the country were having trouble attracting poll workers. The threat of sizable fines and criminal prosecution will only make that task harder, and that’s clearly the point. Polls can’t operate without poll workers. Voters can’t vote if there are no polling places, or if they can’t stand in hours-long lines at the sites that are open—not to mention if other means of casting a ballot, such as by mail, have been outlawed.
What began as thinly veiled attempts to keep Democrats from voting has become a movement to undermine confidence in our democracy itself. How else to understand the “recount” under way in Maricopa County, Arizona (which gave Joe Biden the state), six months after the election was certified? Despite an audit in February that showed no malfeasance, Republicans in the Arizona Senate took possession of the county’s more than two million ballots and turned them over to a private Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, which has no election-audit experience. The firm’s C.E.O. had reportedly tweeted that he was “tired of hearing people say there was no fraud.” It’s unclear who is paying for the recount, which was supposed to have concluded last month. According to the Arizona Republic, recruiters for the project were “reaching out to traditionally conservative groups.” At least one of the recounters was at the January 6th Stop the Steal rally outside the U.S. Capitol. Some have been examining ballots for bamboo fibres, which would purportedly prove that counterfeit ballots for Biden were sent from South Korea. The official chain of custody has been broken for the voting machines, too, which could enable actual fraud, and may force the county to replace them.
It’s easy to joke about conspiracy hunters searching for bits of bamboo. But the fact is that more than half of Republicans still believe that Trump won, and a quarter of all Americans think that the election was rigged. Republicans in at least four other states—New Hampshire, Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania—are now considering recounts. Soon, Trump will begin to hold rallies again and will use them to amplify his Big Lie lie; he has reportedly suggested that he could be back in the White House in August, after the recounts are completed. The real, and imminent, danger is that all the noise will make it easier for a cohort of Americans to welcome the dissolution of the political system, which appears to be the ultimate goal of the current Republican efforts.
Last Tuesday, in a speech commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Tulsa massacre, Biden vowed to “fight like heck” to preserve voting rights, and he deputized Vice-President Kamala Harris to lead the charge. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, said that he would bring the For the People Act to a vote this month. Among other provisions, the act mandates automatic voter registration, prohibits voter intimidation, and reduces the influence of dark money in elections. If it became law, and survived the inevitable legal challenges, it could stop much of the Republican pillage, and perhaps prove the most pivotal piece of legislation in a generation.
Nearly seventy per cent of Americans favor measures in the bill, but it’s unlikely to gain the support of Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative West Virginia Democrat, let alone of enough Republicans to clear the sixty-vote hurdle imposed by the filibuster. So far, to Biden’s evident annoyance, Manchin and another Democratic senator, Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, oppose eliminating the filibuster. It’s up to Democratic leaders to impress upon their colleagues that their legacies, and that of their party, are now entwined with the survival of American democracy.
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A meeting of finance ministers from across the G7 nations ahead of the G7 leaders' summit, at Lancaster House in London, Britain June 4, 2021. (photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire/Pool/Reuters)
G7 Reaches "Historic Agreement" on Global Tax Reform
Oriana Gonzalez, Axios
Gonzalez writes:
he Group of Seven nations on Saturday reached a historic deal to reform the global tax system, agreeing that corporations around the world should pay at least a 15% tax on earnings.
The state of play: The global tax minimum was proposed by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen last month, per CNN. The new reforms will affect the world's largest firms with profit margins of at least 10%, U.K. Finance Minister Rishi Sunak explained.
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- The deal also ends national digital service taxes, which had the support of several European countries, but which U.S. officials said would unfairly target American technology giants, per Reuters.
- Yellen said that both Amazon and Facebook will be covered under the arrangement: "It will include large profitable firms and those firms, I believe, will qualify by almost any definition."
- G7 finance ministers also agreed to tackle environmental crime "with a new task force on nature-related financial disclosures to mirror the work of the Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosures," Bloomberg writes.
What they're saying: "G7 finance ministers today, after years of discussions, have reached a historic agreement to reform the global tax system, to make it fit for the global digital age — and crucially to make sure that it’s fair so that the right companies pay the right tax in the right places," Sunak said.
- "That global minimum tax would end the race-to-the-bottom in corporate taxation, and ensure fairness for the middle class and working people in the U.S. and around the world," Yellen said.
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People wait in line to receive food at a food bank in Brooklyn, New York. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
A Lifeline for the Unemployed Is About to End in Half of US. Here's What's at Stake
Scott Horsley, NPR
Horsley writes: "The United States is about to embark on a big national experiment with 4 million unemployed workers serving as guinea pigs. And it all centers on $300 a week."
The payment was intended as a lifeline for millions of Americans who lost their jobs during the pandemic: an extra $300 a week on top of regular unemployment benefits.
But now 25 Republican governors say the payments must end, with four states acting as early as this week. With vaccines rolling out and the economy reopening fast, they believe the payments are discouraging people from looking for work, leaving businesses begging and job openings unfilled.
Half the states — all led by Republicans — are cutting off enhanced unemployment benefits in the coming weeks in hopes of pushing people back to work. The other 25 states will keep paying out the enhanced benefits through early September as Congress intended.
The actions are raising the ire of many Democratic lawmakers. They believe there's no concrete evidence to suggest the enhanced benefits are preventing people from returning to work.
We'll soon find out more.
Unemployed workers in Mississippi will be among the first to lose benefits — later this week. That's bad news for people like Nicole Jones.
The Jackson, Miss., resident lost her job at a Head Start center when the pandemic struck last year. Since then, the extra $300 payments have helped keep her family afloat.
"I have a mortgage. I have a car note. I have light bill, gas bill, water bill, internet bill," Jones says. "I think it's really unfair that they are taking that away from households that are not able to get back to work right now."
Jones is wary of going back to Head Start and possibly catching the coronavirus and passing it on to her children. Mississippi has the nation's lowest COVID-19 vaccination rate.
"They're not looking at the fact that a lot of people are not able to go back to work because of health issues," Jones says.
She has so far declined to be vaccinated herself but said she might get the shot by the end of this year.
At 6.2% in April, Mississippi's unemployment rate is higher than the national average. But as far as Republican Gov. Tate Reeves is concerned, the pandemic is over, and it's time to put people back to work.
"If you go around anywhere in our state and you talk to small-business owners, you talk to large-business owners, you talk to employees, you talk to consumers — what you hear repeatedly is that it's very difficult to find people to work," Reeves told reporters last month.
Alaska, Iowa and Missouri will also end the benefits this week with other states to follow through mid-July.
Many employers from restaurants to factories say that enhanced unemployment benefits have made it harder for them to find workers, although restaurants added another 186,000 workers in May and factories added 23,000.
Aleetha Dixon, who lost her job working at trade shows last year and is caring for a disabled son, said the problem is not that the benefits are too high, but that competing wages are too low.
"I've never been one that's run away from work," said Dixon, who lives in Dallas. "They need to start discussing raising the minimum wage."
Unemployment benefits have offered a lifeline, Dixon said, only to have Texas officials snatch it away.
"We're talking about people who don't have to worry about their lights getting cut off," she said of those who decided to end the benefits. "They don't have to worry about being put out of their home because they can't pay rent. They don't have to worry about is their child going to be able to eat a full meal the next day."
Economists are divided over how the premature end to benefits might affect hiring in the months to come. The job search website Indeed did see an increase in traffic from states that announced an early cut to benefits, but it was modest — about 5% — and faded quickly.
It's also unclear what kind of impact on consumer spending the end of the $300 a week payment will have. Those who lose the enhanced benefit will have less to spend in their communities, though that could be made up if they rejoin the workforce.
In Arizona, the state government is preserving some enhanced benefits for unemployed residents through early September but plans to stop offering the extra $300 a week. That will leave Amy Cabrera with just $214 a week to live on.
"I couldn't even tell you what else I could possibly cut out," said Cabrera, who lives outside Phoenix. "I mean, I don't go anywhere. I don't do anything. I actually took on a roommate, and I'm 46 years old. That's not an easy task to bring on some stranger into your house when you're used to living the way you live."
Cabrera, who used to work as an auditor for a meeting and travel company, says while fast food and convenience store jobs are abundant, she's hoping to find something in an office.
So far, she's had only one interview. At 6.7% in April, Arizona's unemployment rate is well above the national average.
"I think the only thing that really aggravates me is people who think we're living high on the hog collecting government funding and I'm out getting my nails done and traveling the world or something," Cabrera said. "Trust me, I would rather have my job back and living back the way I was supposed to be or the way I was."
Cabrera will now be among the more than 4 million workers expected to have their benefits cut prematurely this summer. And like them, she will soon face a decision on what to do.
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Vic Stemberger, whose father's imprisonment in Spain has has shined a discomfiting light on a little-known operation run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, holds a photo of his parents at his family's home in Centreville, Va., May 25, 2021. (photo: Anna Moneymaker/NYT)
A Little-Known ICE Program Was Devised to Capture Drug Lords. Did It Snare Duped Seniors Instead?
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, The New York Times
Kanno-Youngs writes: "Operation Cocoon aimed to disrupt international drug trafficking rings, but critics say it has left unwitting elderly 'mules' in foreign prisons."
fter two decades in the military, after earning two master’s degrees and navigating a successful career as a corporate coach, Victor Stemberger seemed ready for a peaceful retirement. But he had a new venture in the works.
Mr. Stemberger, of Virginia, had a $10 million inheritance waiting for him, according to men claiming to be affiliated with the Nigerian Ministry of Finance. Through a dizzying web of more than 160 emails over the course of a year, Mr. Stemberger, then 76, somehow grew convinced.
The final step to collect his millions was a good-will gesture: He needed to embark on a whirlwind tour to several countries, stopping first in São Paulo, Brazil, to pick up a small package of gifts for government officials.
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Police detain a demonstrator during a protest in Bogota, Colombia. (photo: Ivan Valencia/AP)
Colombia: President Duque Disguises State Terrorism With Police Reform
teleSUR
Excerpt: "After one month of ignoring police brutality reports, Colombia's President Ivan Duque on Sunday announced that his country will undergo a police reform."
Colombia's president vowed to strengthen the education and training of ESMAD agents in the use of force, human rights, and police procedures.
fter one month of ignoring police brutality reports, Colombia's President Ivan Duque on Sunday announced that his country will undergo a police reform to put an end to human rights violations.
"We will modernize the Defense Ministry and transform the Mobile Anti-Riot Squadron (ESMAD) and the National Police," Duque said during a police officer promotion ceremony in Bogota.
The Duque administration hopes to achieve police excellence by drafting a new "Disciplinary Statute", restructuring the institution's General Inspectorate, and creating a new system for receiving complaints.
He also promised to strengthen the education and training of ESMAD agents in the use of force, human rights, citizen attention, and police procedures.
"We will apply protocols for the legitimate use of force and we will draft a bill for the use and trade of non-lethal weapons in Colombia," Duque announced to contain the protests that broke out against his mandate on April 28.
Finally, police officers' uniforms will no longer be green but blue, and the Defense Ministry will be renamed the National Defense and Citizen Security Ministry.
Duque made this announcement amid escalating police brutality in the country, where at least 47 people died at the hands of an officer from April 28 to May 31.
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'Forests serve many purposes.' (image: Malte Mueller/Getty Images)
The Ever-Clearer Link Between Deforestation and Public Health
Sarah Sax, YES! Magazine
Sax writes: "Efforts to decolonize forest protection have been stalling for years. COVID-19 might give the movement the urgency it needs."
n November 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was heading toward a deadly third wave in the U.S., the environmental organization Mighty Earth launched a new campaign against major soy- and cattle-traders in the Amazon, calling for them to halt deforestation and protect tropical forests. But this campaign didn’t use the usual picture the world has come to associate with deforestation: a pristine tropical forest canopy on one side and patch of denuded land or smoldering trees on the other. Instead, the campaign contrasted the image of a burning forest with another the world has since become intimately familiar with: a man wearing a protective gown and blue surgical mask. Their message? Protect forests to prevent pandemics.
COVID-19 has brought the potential risks associated with rampant deforestation quite literally to our doorsteps. Although scientists are still figuring out exactly how COVID-19 emerged, an abundance of evidence shows that land-use change, especially deforestation in tropical regions, is the key driver increasing the transmission of deadly pathogens from animals to humans. More and more environmental organizations, such as the World Wildlife Fund, are framing the need to halt deforestation through the lens of public health. It’s a shift that risk psychologists say could make the risks associated with rampant deforestation much more personal, and in the long run, could potentially help pass policies to limit deforestation globally.
“People need to feel like this affects their own lives to care about it,” says Colin Carlson, a global change biologist who studies emerging diseases at the Center for Global Health Science & Security at Georgetown University. Humans have experienced a host of zoonotic outbreaks connected to deforestation and habitat loss, including HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and Zika virus, but, Carlson says, “nothing has brought the connections between environmental and human health to the front of mind like COVID-19 has.”
Forests for Health
Forests serve many purposes: They store carbon, regulate weather, hold more biodiversity than any other land-based ecosystem, and provide shelter and food to hundreds of millions of people. But they are being chopped down at an alarming rate—a soccer field worth of primary rainforest every 6 seconds. Demand for forest products, especially from places like China, the EU, and North America, is turning forests into everything from toilet paper to energy, including wood pellets to meet “renewable energy” requirements in Europe and charcoal for cooking in sub-Saharan Africa. But the biggest threat to forests comes from food production, either directly, by cutting down trees to make room for cattle, or indirectly, by clearing land to grow soy to feed livestock.
For decades, environmentalists have been trying to conserve forests in a few ways: by touting their importance as “the lungs of the world;” by trying to quantify the carbon in them to monetize their preservation; and by showing us pictures of orangutans losing their homes because of our desire for Nutella. And while the past decade has seen slightly less forest loss, deforestation is still rapidly expanding around the world, and very few of the commitments corporations and governments have made to halt deforestation are on target.
One reason so many of these campaigns may not have succeeded is that they don’t fulfill any characteristics that make people generally feel like an activity is risky, according to Wändi Bruine de Bruin, provost professor of public policy, psychology, and behavioral science at the University of Southern California, who studies how people perceive risk.
People’s sense of risk is heightened when something is happening to them individually, “here, now, and without uncertainty,” she says. This has historically been one reason it has been hard to convey the risk of other threats like climate change to the public. “In the past, climate change was often perceived by non-experts as something that would happen in the future, with uncertainty, and to other people,” Bruine de Bruin says. “Those three things are associated with just not being very worried about it. But it’s changing because a majority of people in most countries are now seeing that climate change is affecting them now, and where they live.”
Decolonizing Forest Management
Once associated with melting ice sheets and polar bears, today’s iconic images of climate change are more likely to be photos of people rowing boats in Houston after Hurricane Harvey and people’s homes in California burned to the ground by wildfires. That shift in public perception has also been mirrored by another shift; whereas decades ago climate policy was relegated to the sidelines, it has now become a central policy point.
But “deforestation is a couple of decades behind, in terms of actually being perceived as a risk to my well-being here,” says Rachael Garrett, an environmental systems scientist who studies tropical deforestation and conservation policy at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. Instead, the risks of deforestation are talked about in even more abstract ways, such as the loss of carbon or biodiversity.
Ignoring the connection between humans and forests is part of the legacy of colonialism that depicted forests as wild expanses of terra incognita, devoid of people and imagined as empty landscapes. For example, when 16th century European cartographers sent maps of the Amazon back to Europe, they failed to mark any human settlements on the maps, despite noting in their own travel diaries the abundance of communities and peoples they encountered there.
The continued erasure of Indigenous and traditional peoples from such landscapes has led to some “very alarming narratives around tree planting, which is very popular right now,” Garrett says. “I mean, talk about colonial. It’s like, ‘Here’s some money in the Global North. Let’s plant some trees in the Global South. Who cares how people are using the land right now?’ ”
Garrett is one of a growing number of scientists calling for greater inclusion and attention to the Indigenous and local communities who live in and manage forests, in no small part because they do it much better job of it than anybody else, as study after study shows.
Now COVID-19 has brought to the forefront the potential risks associated with unchecked deforestation. About three-quarters of new or emerging diseases that infect humans originate in animals, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And as one of the world’s biggest reservoirs of biodiversity, tropical forests are major potential hotspots for such pathogens. One in every three outbreaks of new and emerging diseases, such as the Nipah virus, Zika, and Ebola, are linked to deforestation.
For policy aimed at halting deforestation, the COVID-19 pandemic could give policy-in-the-making the urgency it needs.
“It could be very relevant for the ongoing discussions on what import countries do,” Garrett says, referring to the current EU and UK attempts to pass policies regulating “imported” deforestation, which is defined as products linked to deforestation and destruction of natural habitats in other countries. In 2021, a British supermarket chain announced it will stock the first mass market soy-free chicken as part of the supermarket’s plans to eliminate deforestation from its supply chains. (Soy is one of the biggest drivers of tropical deforestation). In the U.S., both New York and California have introduced legislation that would close loopholes on imported deforestation.
Governance Failures
The movement could get an even bigger boost if governments start to connect pandemics, deforestation, and national security.
“It was pretty pivotal when the U.S. military acknowledged the national security risks of climate change,” Garrett says. “I think COVID-19 gives that sort of opportunity as well—deforestation in a distant region can still be a national security risk independently, not just through climate change, but directly through disease transmission and pandemics. I think that is a very potentially powerful message.”
But some scientists are also wary of overemphasizing the role of deforestation in creating pandemics without also recognizing the colossal failures of the global and national health systems that allowed for a disease spillover to become a global pandemic in the first place. “Deforestation definitely means more pandemics,” Carlson says. “Also, governance failures mean more pandemics. And in this case, they caused COVID-19 much more tangibly than deforestation or climate change or anything else did.”
Instead, Carlson hopes that COVID-19 might shift our view of deforestation not just by making us aware of the connection between deforestation and emerging diseases, but also by shoring up the connection among forest health, human health, and equity. The idea is being taken up by emerging paradigms such as planetary health. “If we don’t get better at stopping outbreaks, if we don’t build better governance systems and better health care systems, yes, there will be more pandemics as we continue to destroy natural lands and destroy forests,” he says. “But all of that assumes that we continue to live in a world that is vulnerable to that, and we could easily not.”
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ernie Sanders ran for president promising a political revolution. When he did not secure the Democratic nomination, the unapologetic progressive immediately threw in as a supporter of a more moderate Democrat, Joe Biden, and became an ardent advocate for his former rival.
