Dear friends,
The pope apologized yesterday for the abuse of Indigenous children.
Between 1881 and 1996, more than 150,000 Indigenous children were separated from their families and brought to residential schools. Many children were starved, beaten and sexually abused in a system that Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission called “cultural genocide”.
The issue was thrust to the fore with the discovery of suspected unmarked graves at or near former residential school sites last year.
Apologies matter. There is more that the Church can and should do: they should make reparations and return stolen artifacts, support extradition of clergy accused of abuse and release school records. A papal edict to void Church doctrine to justify colonial dispossession of Indigenous people would also be an important step. Apologizing is a first step.
Biden has linked the timing of his decision on student loan cancellation and the student loan payment pause, even though they are separate policies. Biden has three major decisions on student loans — and three important deadlines. This includes finality on wide-scale student loan cancellation, the student loan payment pause and the limited waiver for student loan forgiveness. . . . As reported Monday, Education Department instructed student loan servicers not to send student loan borrowers their student loan bill now.
The folks at the Debt Collective have an important lens for viewing the problem of debt:
Racial capitalism uses race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, disability, and other differences to divide and conquer us. We can only overcome oppression with solidarity and coalition-building. . . .All of our struggles are connected, and deep structural change requires different movements working on a wide range of issues that inform and strengthen one another.
Debt is not an equalizer; it intensifies pre-existing inequalities. Poor people, Indigenous and Black people, LGBTQI+ people, women, and other communities of color suffer disproportionately under the current system.
Check out the Debt Collective’s upcoming events.
The following quick actions are from the Student Debt Crisis Center, an advocacy group also working on this issue. Stories are powerful and it’s important for Biden to hear directly from Americans who are struggling under a broken system.
Call on the president to meet directly with people burdened by student loan debt.
Nothing will stop Republicans from criticizing Biden or blaming him for inflation, and his poll numbers have already tanked, so he may as well go big.
Sign this petition to call on the president to cancel all student debt.
I’m feeling weirdly optimistic about the midterms. Or rather, I have a feeling of possibility — that the conventional wisdom does not apply and that, in spite of genuine frustration with Democrats, there are a huge numbers of Americans who will turn out in November to vote against insurrection, criminality, and the rollback of rights authored by the Republican Party.
But first, we need to ensure that the primaries deliver candidates of quality. I’ve written a number of times about Congresswoman Cori Bush, and the importance of supporting her. A reader who grew up in Missouri directed me to the Intercept’s report that the PAC funding Bush’s main opposition, Steven Roberts, Jr., is funded by his daddy, Steven Roberts, Sr.
At first glance, Steven Roberts, Jr. is not a bad candidate. He currently serves in Missouri’s state senate and has sponsored legislation to require the creation of a use-of-force database.
Roberts secured a historic $5 million for refugee resettlement for St. Louis, a passion for him that came out of working for a Los Angeles legal clinic for asylum seekers. He also said a priority for him if elected would be to codify Roe v. Wade in order to ensure abortion rights, though he doesn’t have any official plans yet.
Roberts has repeatedly made the specious argument that by voting against the Build Back Better bill, Bush abandoned her party and showed that she is unable to compromise. He says she is more interested in protesting than governing.
Bush entered a protest vote because the authors had cut preschool and child care funds. Another of her protests got the Administration to extend the eviction moratorium.
In addition to her recent arrest at a protest for abortion rights,
Bush laid out a 23-point action plan for “protecting reproductive freedom” and she launched a new reproductive justice hub on her campaign website designed to serve as a one-stop for abortion care resources and an activism hub for Missourians and people across the country to understand their rights after the Supreme Court’s recent ruling.
Roberts, 34, was accused of rape by a fellow legislator in the Missouri state House, who died of a heart condition this spring. He also settled a lawsuit and paid damages to a woman who alleged that he groped her in 2015.
His daddy donated $16,000 to the PAC supporting his campaign. I’m challenging us to raise at least $1600 this week for Congresswoman Cori Bush. That’s a little over $10 per reader.
Support Congresswoman Cori Bush for reelection. She’s the superior candidate, she needs us, and we need her.
I haven’t weighed in yet on the race for NY-10, in part because the top two candidates — AssemblymemberYuh-Line Niou and Councilmember Carlina Rivera — are both pretty great.
The race for District 11 in New York is more consequential because Max Rose is almost sure to lose again to Nicole Malliotakis.
Brittany Ramos DeBarros might have a shot. She criticizes the strategy of hewing to the center lane because she knows that that policies like Medicare for all are popular with voters across the political spectrum.
DeBarros, a retired U.S. Army captain and a veteran of the Afghanistan war, said the “most powerful” political sentiment she’s seen while campaigning and door-knocking on Staten Island is “anti-establishment” sentiment.
“It’s not left ideology, it’s not right ideology,” DeBarros said. “It’s top versus bottom. We are workers. This is worker country.”
DeBarros said that the story of former GOP President Donald Trump’s popularity here “is incomplete without the story of the fact that Bernie Sanders won the South Shore, the part of the Island considered the reddest part of the Island” in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.
Support Brittany Ramos DeBarros for Congress. You can also volunteer with her campaign remotely or in person!
Last week, a bipartisan group in the Senate (!) hammered out a new Electoral Count Act, designed to update the original legislation from 1887 and address the ambiguity in the original law. Obviously, the last electoral count went awry, to say the least.
The new bill defines the role of the Vice President as “ministerial,” clarifying that the VP does not have the authority to reject results certified by the states. In addition the law states that legislators at the state level can’t overturn a state’s popular vote.
The second section is the Presidential Transition Improvement Act, which would guarantee transition funding to both candidates in the event that there’s uncertainty about the election.
I wanted a professional opinion of the bill, and Jamelle Bouie came through:
I don’t know whether the bill can actually pass the Senate, but it is a good bill. It blocks many of the most immediate threats to presidential elections and closes most avenues for postelection subversion under the current system.
Bouie goes on to note that the electoral college system is anti-democratic, and that this bill won’t fix that.
The fact that an entire national election can turn on a few thousand votes in a handful of states is a powerful incentive to restrict the votes of your opponents and meddle with the process all the way down to the precinct level. The fact that the loser of the national popular vote can become the winner of a national election is an additional incentive to subvert the voting process and impede access to the ballot box. And the fact that a legislature could, before the election itself, simply allocate electors to the candidate of its choice without any input from the public is an ongoing and ever-present threat to electoral democracy.
Bouie was not arguing for inaction. The Electoral Count bill has nine Republican co-sponsors in the Senate, thus far. Let’s get this done.
Let your Senators know that you support the Electoral Count Act. This action is ready-made. I rolled in a reminder to enforce the provision of the 14th Amendment to prevent public officials from future government service when they have violated their oath to support the Constitution.
NYC filed an appeal in the case blocking noncitizen voting. There was going to be an appeal no matter what, and advocates were gearing up, but it is important for the city to go to bat for Local Law 11.
The legislation was passed to extend voting rights in elections for city-wide offices, City Council, and borough president and requires the city Board of Elections to facilitate voter registration for noncitizen voters. There are nearly one million New Yorkers who would be newly eligible to vote and the Campaign Finance Board survey found that
84% of respondents said they would certainly or most likely vote when eligible.
A judge has temporarily blocked NYC from cutting the schools budget. The case must play out, but apparently two points were persuasive enough to win an injunction: a violation of state law — no prior approval from the DOE’s oversight board — and the claim that cuts will cause “irreparable harm to students and teachers.” There is a hearing scheduled for next week.
My last bit of good news is personal. I am finally feeling better! Thank you for the well wishes. I’m posting on Wednesday instead of Tuesday because I was doing things yesterday. Errands have never been so exciting.
with love,
L