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Amy Klobuchar Says She Wants to Protect Obamacare—But Has Worked to Undermine It

In the ongoing intra-Democratic Party debate over the way forward on healthcare, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) has staked out a centrist position, conforming with her finely honed image as a practical pragmatist. Calling the Medicare for All bill championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) a “bad idea,” Klobuchar has refused to co-sponsor it, positioning herself as an opponent of single-payer who prefers instead to “build on the work of the Affordable Care Act.”

In the October Democratic debate, Klobuchar told Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) that “we owe it to the American people to tell them where we’re going to send the invoice,” and urged Democrats not to “trash Obamacare.” She repeated that point in Tuesday night’s debate, saying that to be “practical and progressive … you have to show how you’re going to pay for it.” Deriding her more progressive rivals’ universalist policies as “things that sound good on a bumper sticker” and promises of a “free car,” Klobuchar insists Democrats “have an obligation as a party to be, yes, fiscally responsible,” and “be honest with [voters] about what we can pay for.” Unsurprisingly, Klobuchar has been a proponent of austere “pay-as-you-go” budgeting rules since her first Senate run in 2006, continuing to push the idea on the campaign trail in 2019.

As she makes this pitch, Klobuchar may well hope voters stay unaware of some of her past votes on Obamacare. Over the previous decade, Klobuchar has repeatedly joined forces with Republicans to repeal key Obamacare taxes specifically instituted to ensure the plan’s ongoing fiscal responsibility, sometimes against the wishes of former President Barack Obama. Some of these votes were viewed by both Republicans and the press as building momentum for the dismantling of Obamacare, typically due to pressure from business interests. And in an added irony, it was Sanders who typically voted against those same repeals.

Siding with big business

In 2011, Klobuchar helped lead the effort to successfully repeal an aspect of Obamacare for the very first time, barely a year after the bill was signed into law. Requiring businesses to report on a tax form any time they paid a vendor or independent contractor $600 or more a year, the measure was meant to raise $22 billion over ten years, key to Obama’s promise that healthcare reform would be fiscally responsible and reduce the deficit. Unfortunately, it also proved unpopular with business owners.

Repealing the measure was an 8-month-long effort—and Klobuchar led the way. Not only was she one of 12 Democrats to co-sponsor the bill that ultimately passed, but she and two other Democratic senators—Nebraska’s Ben Nelson and Washington’s Maria Cantwell—wrote then-Republican House Speaker John Boehner a letter urging him to have the Republican-controlled House repeal the provision so they could do the same in the Senate.

“We have heard from small business men and women in our states who have voiced concern that this provision is burdensome and unnecessary, and could potentially undermine our nation’s economic recovery,” Klobuchar, Nelson and Cantwell wrote to Boehner. They added that the provision’s repeal “would be an important and practical way to improve the Affordable Care Act.”

Klobuchar first voted for a repeal bill that would have plugged the resulting fiscal hole with unused federal funds. But the version that ultimately passed, with the votes of Klobuchar and 86 other senators, dealt with this funding gap instead by shifting the onus from business owners to ordinary taxpayers. As a result, low-and middle-income Americans who unexpectedly earned over a certain income threshold were forced to pay back more of the law’s health insurance subsidies than they had to previously. Sanders, meanwhile, voted against both bills.

Despite signing the bill into law in April 2011, the Obama White House was far from thrilled with this cost offset, declaring it had “serious concerns” about it, and charging in a March Statement of Administration Policy that it would “result in tax increases on certain middle-class families that incur unexpected tax liabilities.” In both the Senate and the House, where 112 of 188 Democrats voted against the measure, many Democrats—including even more conservative members like Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and Joe Crowley, who would be ousted from his seat by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seven years later—complained the measure constituted a tax increase on lower- and middle-income families.

The Consumers Union did the same, expressing “fear that this proposal would have a chilling effect on many families' willingness to use the tax credits to purchase insurance,” and urging “the Senate to find a better way of paying for this change to the law without penalizing those families who can least afford it.” To soften the blow, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) put forward an amendment that would have put a brake on paying back the subsidies if they were found to increase insurance premiums or the number of uninsured individuals, which was defeated by the votes of Klobuchar and 57 other senators. (Sanders voted for it).

These lawmakers concerns’ were borne out in the years to come. Whether due to the government’s own accounting errors, or taxpayers who had relied on the subsidies suddenly receiving a bonus, raise, or moving from joblessness to employment, these healthcare customers now had to scramble and even dip into their savings to pay back unexpectedly hefty tax bills that could cost thousands of dollars, after having previously drawn on government subsidies.

“Oh my goodness, this is just not right,” one Sacramento resident told Kaiser Health News in 2015 after being put through this ordeal. “This is supposed to be a safety net healthcare and I am getting burned left and right by having used it.”

The result of Klobuchar’s vote was clear. The 1099 repeal she championed pulled the rug out from low- and middle-income Americans who were capriciously forced to pay unexpectedly high tax bills, while also denting the popularity of Obamacare among the voting public, making it more vulnerable to Republican attacks.

Protecting the medical device industry

In 2012, Klobuchar took aim at the 2.3% medical device excise tax, another revenue-raising measure included in the Affordable Care Act to ensure its fiscal responsibility. Her efforts were again driven by business interests, in this case, those of the medical device industry, which has a significant presence in Klobuchar’s home state of Minnesota where it employs around 30,000 people and is one of her primary campaign contributors.

Chief among them is the world’s largest medical device company, Medtronic, which enjoys a notably close relationship with Klobuchar. The company was Klobuchar’s third-largest contributor between 2011 and 2016, and in 2013, its director of corporate development told attendees at a medical device industry conference that the company was “working closely with Senator Klobuchar” on efforts to repeal the tax. In 2011, Klobuchar invited the company’s chairman and CEO, William Hawkins, to that year’s State of the Union address, a fact she touted on her official Senate website, where she stressed: “it is important that Washington hear from business leaders like Bill.”

In 2012, Klobuchar sent a letter along with her then-Senate counterpart Al Franken and 16 other Democrats urging then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to delay implementation of the tax as part of that year’s fiscal cliff negotiations—“in a fiscally responsible manner,” of course. The following year, she and the Minnesota House delegation backed repealing the tax outright, and voted for a symbolic budget amendment calling for an end to the tax. Only 20 senators voted against the amendment put forward by the virulently anti-Obamacare Republican Orrin Hatch, all of them Democrats, except for Sanders.

“Today’s action shows there is strong bipartisan support for repealing the medical device tax, with Democrats and Republicans uniting behind our effort,” Klobuchar said. “I will continue to work to get rid of this harmful tax so Minnesota’s medical device businesses can continue to create good jobs in our state and improve patients’ lives.” Her words were echoed by then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who called the vote “an important step in the right direction” and labeled Obamacare “a job-killer” that “slows the economy.”

Klobuchar wasn’t alone. Several Democrats who took a shot at the 2020 Democratic nomination voted the same way, including Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who dropped out in August 2019, and Elizabeth Warren, currently a frontrunner. Yet even the Washington Post editorial board—which closed out 2019 by extolling Klobuchar’s centrist, bipartisan vision and charging that Sanders and Warren’s progressive programs “would fail at the polls” and “carry extreme risks” if implemented—called it a “shortsighted vote” at the time.

Undermining universal healthcare

Though in the debate over healthcare, Klobuchar has tried to portray herself as the hard-nosed, fiscally responsible pragmatist trying to protect Obama’s legacy and looking out for the American middle class, her record tells a different story. Rather, Klobuchar has repeatedly gone to bat for business interests when it comes to Obamacare, in the process effectively raising taxes on working Americans, undermining the public standing of Obamacare and violating her own demands of fiscal responsibility.

Healthcare is perhaps the major issue of the Democratic primary. It has been cited by the largest share of Americans as the biggest issue facing the United States throughout 2019. A November Kaiser Family Foundation poll found 24% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents want to hear the candidates discuss the issue more than any other—twice that of the environment, the next top issue. And though it has weathered fierce attacks from business-friendly candidates like Klobuchar, Medicare for All has continued to garner majority support in public opinion polling.

Much of the mainstream media have already fallen for Klobuchar, who has received plaudits for debate performances, and is already being talked up as a potential hit with early state voters at this 11th hour. But the public should look past the branding and glowing press to her record, and decide if they truly like what they see.

Teen Climate Strikers Have Capitalists Shook
https://earther.gizmodo.com/teen-climate-strikers-have-capitalists-shook-1841018129 #climatechange #climatecrisis

In His Lies, Joe Biden Is Sounding a Lot Like Trump

One running theme of the bipartisan outrage at Donald Trump and his administration has been the constant stream of falsehoods emanating from the White House since he took office.

Ever since Kellyanne Conway defended the Trump administration’s use of “alternative facts” following the president’s inauguration, nary a week has gone by without a string of stories criticizing the president for his lies and mischaracterizations. The New York Times made a mosaic comprised of them, news outletskeep a running tally of them, and othersrankthem in end-of-year lists. The media, academics, institutions and other prominent individuals have charged that this “post-truth” politics is “dangerous,” rewiring our brains, leading to creeping fascism, and corroding, subverting, and otherwise threatening democracy.

And with former Vice President Joe Biden remaining a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, it’s safe to say that Trump’s mendacity is a large part of the reason many Democratic voters are putting their faith in Biden to unseat the president this year. Yet as Tuesday night’s debate showed, playing unabashedly fast and loose with the facts is one of the very things Biden shares with Trump.

Tuesday’s debate saw yet another instance of Biden being confronted about his role in leading the country to war in Iraq, and choosing to lie about it.

“It was a mistake to trust that they weren’t going to go to war,” he said in relation to his October 2002 vote to authorize the war. “They said they were not going to war … The world, in fact, voted to send inspectors in and they still went to war. From that point on, I was in the position of making the case that it was a big, big mistake and from that point on, I moved to bring those troops home.”

As fact-checkershavepointed outrepeatedly, and as I detailedmultiple times for In These Times, almost every part of this statement is a lie. Biden knew George W. Bush’s ultimate goal was regime change because he himself spoke openly about the need to remove dictator Saddam Hussein from power as early as February 2002. By June of that year, when asked about a leaked White House directive for the CIA to help capture and kill Saddam, Biden gave it his nod of approval on CBS’s “Face the Nation” and said that “if the covert action doesn't work, we'd better be prepared to move forward with another action, an overt action,” which the Associated Press reported as an endorsement of an invasion. That month, Biden’s aides told Roll Call that the then-senator had told Bush he supported regime change in Iraq.

The next month, Biden said on “Fox News Sunday” that Bush would have the authority to pre-emptively invade Iraq if it was revealed that Saddam was in league in al-Qaeda—“justifiably given the case being made,” as he put it. And after voting to authorize the invasion, Biden embarked on a world tour to drum up support for the impending war, traveling to neighboring Jordan, Israel, Qatar and even to Kurdish-run northern Iraq, speaking to the Kurd parliament and assuring them the United States would stand with them.

Once the Iraq war began, far from “making the case that it was a big, big mistake,” Biden remained perhaps its most implacable cheerleader, even as the rest of the Democratic Party rapidly turned against it. Biden insisted in July 2003 that he would “vote to do it again,” referring to the invasion of Iraq, told the Brookings Institution that “Iraq was a problem that had to be dealt with sooner rather than later,” and flatly replied “No” when asked if Howard Dean’s steadfastly anti-war views should become the consensus of the Democratic Party. Instead of moving to bring the troops home, in August, Biden called for an infusion of 20,000-50,000 more U.S. soldiers into the country.

Indeed, Biden held his pro-war attitude all the way through 2004 and that year’s presidential election. At the Democratic convention, he told the Pennsylvania delegation that Bush’s only “mistakes” were sending too few troops into Iraq and the administration’s poor planning for reconstruction, warning the delegation not to focus too much on Bush’s blunders lest Democrats “begin sounding like we’re rooting for failure.” As Democratic candidate John Kerry’s foreign policy advisor, Biden vowed to both party members and those watching at home that Kerry would “not hesitate to unleash the unparalleled power of our military—on any nation or group that does us harm—without asking anyone’s permission.”

As Bernie Sanders’ campaign assailed Biden for his role in the war ahead of Tuesday’s debate, Kerry, who has endorsed Biden and is now a campaign surrogate, returned the favor, lying about Biden’s record. Kerry has said that the October 2002 vote “didn’t mean you were in favor when the administration made the decision of actually going to war.”

This statement doesn’t square with Biden’s March 2003 vote for a Senate resolution backing Bush’s decision to go to war, or Biden’s words just days before the invasion: “I support the president. Diplomacy over avoiding war is dead,” and “Let loose the dogs of war. I’m confident we will win.” Nor does it square with Biden’s March 9, 2003 op-ed for the Wilmington, Delaware News Journal, which began: “I happen to think we will go to war with Iraq. And I happen to think the military phase will go relatively well. It’s a war that is justified.” Nevertheless, Kerry has insisted that “Bernie is regrettably distorting Joe’s record,” and that “Joe spoke out and criticized, Joe was against what they were doing.”

This pattern of dishonesty is nothing new. Biden has come under criticism during the campaign for repeatedly telling a moving war story that never actually happened, at one point telling his audience it was “the God’s truth” and they had his “word as a Biden.” Last year, his campaign made headlines when several passages from Biden’s climate plan turned out to be plagiarized. The candidate has also revived an old lie for this election, telling crowds that he had “come out of the civil rights movement,” and that he had “got involved in the civil rights movement as a kid.”

What’s notable about this particular lie is that it was one of the things that had ended Biden’s election hopes back in 1987. Though that presidential campaign had largely gone down in flames over a separate plagiarism scandal, it had also died a death by a thousand cuts over a series of other revelations calling into question Biden’s honesty.

One of these revelations concerned Biden’s frequent allusions to his supposed civil rights and anti-war activism, deployed particularly—though not exclusively—during his years opposing busing. In one Senate hearing, he told the former president of San Francisco State College that he had been a student demonstrator, and he had said during the campaign that “we marched to change attitudes” during the 1960s.

Reporters soon poked holes in the story, and Biden was forced to admit that “I was never an activist,” and that “the civil rights movement was an awakening for me, not as a consequence of my participation but as a consequence of my being made aware of what was happening.” Bobbie Greene McCarthy, a friend of Biden, told the media Biden had been “for a long time pretty much a supporter” of the Vietnam War, and Biden admitted that “by the time the war movement was at its peak, I was married. I was in law school. I wore sports coats,” and so not involved in such activism. He was, he explained, “a middle-class guy” and “not big on flak jackets and tie-dye shirts.”

In other words, both in Tuesday’s debate and beyond, Biden has exhibited the same kind of disregard for the truth as Trump. And this is far from the only characteristic they share.

Many liberals have despaired at the way Trump’s insults and coarselanguage have disrespected the office of the presidency, and more generally dragged political discourse into the gutter. Yet in December 2019, a crowd of Biden supporters clapped and cheered as the former vice president responded to a critical question from a voter about his son’s dealings in Ukraine by challenging the man to a push-up contest and an IQ test, before calling him fat. (The campaign later tried to claim Biden had said, “Look, facts”).

Democrats have rightly criticized Trump’s flouting of the rule of law, particularly his calls for his former White House counsel to ignore a Congressional subpoena. Yet Biden initially said he would similarly defy a Republican subpoena to attend Trump’s Senate impeachment trial. Much outrage has greeted the way Trump and his family have profited from his presidency. Yet Biden’s family has long profited from his political career, from his earliest days in the Senate to his final days in the White House. This mixing of family business-dealing and politics ultimately helped embroil Biden in a long-running scandal of his own.

A Biden nomination and (and presumptive victory in November) is still viewed by many Democratic voters as a way to rescue the country from the dishonesty of Trumpism. But it may be time to ask if it would instead simply usher in another version of it.

Air pollution from oil and gas production sites visible from space

US and European satellites help scientists measure nitrogen dioxide from drilling, production and flaring.

Joe Biden Thinks Coal Miners Should Learn to Code. A Real Just Transition Demands Far More.

As of 2016, there were only 50,000 coal miners in the United States, and yet they occupy so much of our political imagination and conversation around jobs, unions and climate change. During the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump ran on bringing coal jobs back to the United States, and Joe Biden said on December 30 that miners should learn to code, as those are the “jobs of the future.” His comments, made to a crowd in Derry, New Hampshire, were reportedly met with silence. 

While coal miners aren’t the only workers in our society, coal miners’ voices do matter, and we can’t leave anyone behind. And it’s clear that they are hurting, a point illustrated by the coal miners currently blocking a train carrying coal in eastern Kentucky, demanding back pay from Quest Energy.

Analyzing DNA in soil could be an effective way of tracking animals

Genetic material left behind by animals can provide critical clues to aid conservation and research. New research shows studying DNA in soil samples can be more effective, efficient and affordable than traditional tracking methods, such as camera traps, for assessing biodiversity.

Opening up DNA to delete disease

Protein editorial assistants are clearing the way for cut-and-paste DNA editors, like CRISPR, to access previously inaccessible genes of interest. Opening up these areas of the genetic code is critical to improving CRISPR efficiency and moving toward futuristic, genetic-based assaults on disease.

Other Countries Using Drones to Kill Our President? That’ll Never Happen

Nothing embodies the law of unintended consequences more than weapons systems. When drones were first introduced as possible battlefield tools, contractors said that there was nothing to worry about in terms of them being converted into weapons systems. They would only be used for surveillance. Now we’re using them to kill top government officials.

Without real investment in low income neighborhoods and rural markets, the so-called 5G revolution will only affect the upper half of the income scale, says EFF's @EFFFalcon.
https://theoutline.com/post/8528/what-is-the-5g-revolution?zd=1&zi=ygkue55s

No need to dig too deep to find gold!

Why are some porphyry deposits rich in copper while others contain gold? A researcher investigated how the metals are accumulated over the time duration of a mineralizing event and discover that the depth of the deposits influences the quantity of metals produced and that over 95% of the gold is lost to the atmosphere. The deeper a deposit is, the more copper there will be, while gold-rich deposits are closer to the surface.

Terrible rulings in the Oracle v. Google case threaten to lock developers into a licensing scheme for the functional aspects of software. EFF filed a brief in the case urging the Supreme Court to correctly apply copyright law and reverse the rulings. https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-asks-supreme-court-reverse-dangerous-rulings-about-api-copyrightability-and-fair

Meteorite contains the oldest material on Earth: 7-billion-year-old stardust

Scientists have discovered the oldest solid material on Earth: 7-billion-year-old stardust trapped inside a meteorite. This stardust provides evidence for a 'baby boom' of new stars that formed 7 billion years ago, contrary to thinking that star formation happens at a steady, constant rate.

Living robots built using frog cells

Scientists repurposed living frog cells -- and assembled them into entirely new life-forms. These tiny 'xenobots' can move toward a target and heal themselves after being cut. These novel living machines are neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. They're a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism.

In Iowa, Rashida Tlaib and the Sunrise Movement Push the Green New Deal—and Bernie Sanders

IOWA CITY—National progressive leader and “Squad” member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) barnstormed through Iowa over the weekend with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), just three weeks before the state’s first-in-the-nation caucus on February 3.

Together, Sanders and Tlaib turned out hundreds of people to a town hall meeting in Davenport on Saturday and 900 to a Sunday rally in Iowa City centered on combating climate change.

The two stops were the first public appearances in Iowa for Rep. Tlaib, a Palestinian-American lawyer, mother, Muslim and first-term congresswoman from Detroit.

“Social justice is love and we are going to create an incredible new America that is about all of us,” Tlaib said at St. Ambrose Catholic University in Davenport. “I’m so happy to be here on behalf of our future president of the United States, Bernie Sanders.” 

Sanders returned the praise, telling the Davenport crowd that, unlike the Trump administration, his campaign stands for “a government of love and kindness, not hate and divisiveness”—and that he shared these values with Tlaib “and the other members of the so-called Squad.” 

“I know these guys and they are out there every day standing up for the working families of this country,” Sanders said.
According to the Sierra Club, “A Green New Deal is a big, bold transformation of the economy to tackle the twin crises of inequality and climate change.” It’s notable that Sanders and his backers are mobilizing around the plan in Iowa, as such an approach for a novel idea could help increase public support. 

A Data for Progress survey released January 10 found that Iowa voters support a progressive agenda, with 78% of likely caucus-goers saying they strongly or somewhat support Medicare For All, and 83% of likely caucus-goers saying the same of the Green New Deal.

Tlaib made the urgency of the Green New Deal personal during both of her Iowa stops, relating the need for change to the plight of thousands of children and families in her west Detroit district, where working people of color face disproportionately high rates of air and water pollution, asthma and cancer.
“If you really want to see what doing nothing truly looks like, come to my district,” she said in Iowa City. “Rows and rows and rows of homes have these little white crosses in front of them, representing cancer, survivors of cancer.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a Sanders campaign co-chair, also spoke at the Iowa City climate rally. He pointedly criticized the ongoing wars in the Middle East while promoting Sanders' lifetime of opposition to imperialism, as well as his support for climate initiatives.

“I was just in Clinton, Iowa and you know what they told me there?” Rep. Khanna asked in Iowa City. 

“They have the highest cancer rate in the state because of the sulfur dioxide emissions. Do you know what Bernie’s Green New Deal means? It means people in Clinton, Iowa shouldn’t have to worry about whether their kids will grow up with cancer. That’s what the Green New Deal is about.”

Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, said that Sanders’ first presidential campaign in 2016 emboldened a new generation of young people to stand up and take action for climate justice. 

Ms. Prakash’s speech in Iowa City was also her first public statement since the Sunrise Movement endorsed Sanders for president a few days earlier. She said in Iowa: “Eighty percent of our members endorsed Bernie Sanders because he stands for a Green New Deal… the kind of Green New Deal that ensures black, brown, and indigenous people benefit from a new, sustainable economy, and that the historic injustices that have been perpetrated onto these communities are repaired.”

Other issues addressed at the Sunday rally included Medicare for All, student debt cancellation, free college tuition, a moratorium on deportations, ending wars in the Middle East, combating police brutality, legalizing marijuana, restoring felon voting rights, creating millions of affordable new homes, raising the minimum wage and repealing the Taft-Hartley Act.

Many of these ambitious policy prescriptions could also be part of a strong Green New Deal framework that advances environmental, economic and racial justice all at once. For example, affordable housing could be tackled under a Green New Deal by building 12 million new, environmentally sustainable and affordable homes, as put forward by People Action’s Homes Guarantee. Similarly, a Medicare for All bill could include green retrofitting of hospitals and clinics. Such proposals would also help create millions of jobs.
“We are fighting to save the planet,” Sanders said in Iowa City. “We have already seen the real damage of climate change here in Iowa, where record-breaking rainfalls have led to floods, millions of dollars in damages, and the delayed planting of hundreds of acres of farmland.”

A unifying theme of the rally that Sanders, Tlaib, Prakash and Khanna all touched upon was the idea that the only true vehicle for social change is a mass movement of millions of working people, coming together to take collective action. This “Organizer-In-Chief” mantra of co-governance with social movements is one of the distinguishing characteristics of Sanders’ 2020 campaign.

The theory that issue organizing and electoral politics can be mutually beneficial isn’t just lofty campaign rhetoric—it’s actually being tested on the ground in Iowa. 

While Sanders has helped popularize policies like free college tuition, Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, the community organizations he counts on as allies in Iowa and around the country have been on the forefront of these issue campaigns.

It was the Sunrise Movement’s dramatic sit-ins at Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s office in Washington D.C. in November and December 2018 that helped launch the Green New Deal framework into the public debate. 

The group began working in Iowa and New Hampshire soon after, according to local organizers. They currently have six paid staff working out of the statewide headquarters of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (Iowa CCI) in Des Moines.  

“We’re running a field program of base building, getting out the vote, and direct action,” Sayles Kasten, the Iowa state director of Sunrise Movement, told In These Times. 

The climate canvassers spend most of their time organizing at local “hubs” on college campuses with Iowa Student Action, another CCI-affiliated group that also works on free college tuition and debt cancellation, Kasten said. 

According to organizers, Iowa CCI has more than 15 paid staff and 5,000 dues-paying members. The community organization was an early endorser of Sanders in 2016 and has held dozens of community meetings, panel discussions, workshops and direct actions around Medicare for All. They began doing the same type of work around a Green New Deal last year.

Ms. Prakash, the Sunrise Movement executive director, was a featured speaker at Iowa CCI’s 2019 convention last summer, a role Sanders played in 2017. At least three of Sanders’ top Iowa campaign staff are CCI alumni. 

The group’s presidential forum in September was attended by more than 2,000 people, including four of the top-polling candidates. The event focused on grassroots storytelling about issues facing working people such as immigration, racial profiling, affordable housing, healthcare, factory farming and the environment.
The Sunrise Movement says they hope to move 10,000 Iowans to caucus for climate justice this year, enough to potentially swing the election, based on Sunrise’s Iowa caucus turnout model which predicts 200,000 people will participate.

Sanders is currently leading a number of polls in Iowa and New Hampshire—the first two earlyvoting states—but whether he and his community allies can succeed in actually expanding the electorate remains to be seen. Because candidates spend so much time and money in these states, what happens there is seen as a bellwether test nationally.
No candidate in the modern era of presidential politics has won their party’s nomination without winning either Iowa or New Hampshire (except in 1992 when Iowan Tom Harkin ran for president, which caused other candidates like eventual nominee Bill Clinton to skip Iowa entirely). Winning both states back-to-back can give a candidate considerable momentum going into Super Tuesday. 

Regardless of the results in 2020, however, climate organizers plan to continue their efforts in the streets.

Climate protests organized by a coalition of environmental justice organizations, including the Sunrise Movement and the Youth Climate Strike, are scheduled for January 31 and February 1 in Des Moines and in cities across the country. 

The Youth Climate Strike and its allies have organized high school walkouts all across the state, brought Swedish environmental activist and Time magazine’s Person of the Year Greta Thunberg to Iowa last October, and co-sponsored a climate summit in Coralville last November that was headlined by Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).

“If Sanders wins the nomination, it’s going to be on the back of the largest grassroots movement in my lifetime and that in itself is going to be paradigm-shifting,” Mr. Kasten, the Iowa state director for Sunrise Movement, told In These Times. 

“But we know that no matter who is in Washington, we still need a Green New Deal. That’s why in 2021 young people will climate strike—we hope on the level of the Women’s March—no matter who is sitting in the White House. To us, it doesn’t matter who is in power, we’re still going to need to have status quo-shifting climate policy.”

Humanity's footprint is squashing world's wildlife

Using the most comprehensive dataset on the 'human footprint,' which maps the accumulated impact of human activities on the land's surface, researchers found intense human pressures across the range of a staggering 20,529 terrestrial vertebrate species.

Chemists find new way to break down old tires into material for new ones

A team of chemists has discovered an innovative way to break down and dissolve the rubber used in automobile tires, a process which could lead to new recycling methods that have so far proven to be expensive, difficult and largely inefficient.