Dear friends,
On Saturday, I taught a class to newly-arrived immigrants. Two of my students were Emma and her mother, Milagros. Emma starts school tomorrow. I tried to inoculate her with courage and some useful phrases.
The class was supposed to be for adults only, but it did not occur to me to ask Emma to leave. In fact, it didn’t occur to me until today that I might have considered it, given the overflow crowd for the first day of class.
Two years ago, the Biden Administration rejected the idea of turning away asylum seekers who had not sought asylum in countries on their way to the US. But now, this bad idea is back under consideration.
According to the Coalition on Human Needs, there have been more than 10,000 reports of violent attacks against migrants and asylum seekers who were kept from entering the US or expelled to Mexico due to Title 42 in the two years since Biden took office.
This is the last day to comment, and I am posting late. Please make time to do this.
Make a public comment to let the Biden Administration know that asylum is a human right and that you oppose a ban on asylum-seekers. Your comment must include original language, so this is not a quick action.
In 1992, a day before classes started in September, I was informed that instead of teaching Government, I would be teaching Economics. I was pretty sure I was in trouble. I had studied history and art history, and had struggled through a single macroeconomics course in college.
Lacking access to the internet — which was not yet in wide use by regular folks — I decided to focus on the health care proposals of the major candidates for president, in the hope of making economic concepts accessible to my students (and me).
Health care is not just a major economic issue, of course. As we are living through a public health crisis and seeing life expectancy in the US fall because of our national addictions — to guns, opioids, and cars — it is hard to see why it would have made more sense to teach supply and demand curves.
Americans are dying and suffering at rates that are demonstrably unnecessary.
[U]niversal, better coordinated health care, strong health and safety protections, broad access to education, and more investments help kids get off to a healthy start.
Safety protections should not wait until disaster strikes, and slower moving dangers to health are too often ignored. More than 50 years ago, the American Gas Association prepared a draft report on natural gas and the environment that included a section on “Indoor Air Quality Control.”
They knew the dangers that are confirmed in recent studies: gas stoves contribute heavily to childhood asthma and even stoves that are turned off leak planet-warming methane and carcinogenic benzene.
Send a public comment to the US Department of Energy to strengthen regulations for gas stoves. Please personalize it!
Note that six people — 3 children and 3 adults — were killed in a school shooting today in Nashville, Tennessee. Americans have become inured to these tragedies when the body count is in the single digits; consider the aggregate data. I hope Emma isn’t seeing this news today.
Petition Congress to ban assault weapons now. This quick action is from Move On.
Life is a project, not a test, and most of us continue to struggle to maintain or regain good health, pay for our health care, and plan for our future.
Please tell Governor Hochul that home care is health care! This quick action is from NY Caring Majority.
These days, when I want to understand big economic concepts — why is there so much inflation? why are banks failing? — I frequently rely on two wonderful teachers: Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Whiteboard, Katie Porter.
Warren was outspoken in 2018 when the regulatory protections of the Dodd-Frank Act were under attack by Congress. She warned legislators that
“banks would load up on risk to boost their profits and collapse, threatening our entire economy – and that is precisely what happened.”
Warren and Porter have introduced legislation, the Secure Viable Banking Act, which would put midsize banks like Silicon Valley Bank back under strict Federal Reserve oversight and subject them to the stress tests that were put in place after the 2008 financial crisis.
Republicans have been trying to paint the problems with Silicon Valley Bank and several other midsize banks as an issue of enforcement rather than regulation. This binary thinking is tiresome and unimaginative. It is entirely possible that both the rollback of regulations in 2018 and a lack of effective oversight contributed to the failures.
Congresswoman Maxine Waters, ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, credits the Biden Administration for the quick action of financial regulators’ to shutter SVB and secure deposits. She expressed concern about the astonishingly high rate of uninsured deposits at SVB; 94% exceeded the $250,000 FDIC limit.
“And of course, I’m looking to see whether or not all of the oversight agencies ... really did miss the opportunity to see what was happening and to know what was going on with the balance sheet and to be able to correct things before they got to the point of collapse,” Waters said.
Sign the petition to Congress to restore regulatory guardrails for midsize banks. This is a quick action. If your delegation includes Republicans, please point out that enforcement AND regulation matter.
These days, we are the subjects of national and global stress tests. It’s Monday. Have courage!
with love,
L