“It’s dangerous because one billionaire decides how millions of people will have an opportunity to communicate with each other,” Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat and prominent progressive, told reporters on Capitol Hill Monday evening, hours after Musk agreed to buy the social media platform for $44 billion.

Regulation of technology giants is essential, Warren said, “because it’s about concentration of power. And concentration of power means less competition, and ultimately means just one or a handful of people are deciding who talks, who gets heard and who gets shut down.”

Members of both parties have long demanded greater supervision of the technology giants, and the Biden administration has been considering antitrust action. A bipartisan bill advanced by Senators Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, is intended to curb the dominance of Apple Inc., Amazon Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

“There is some power that the administration could use, but Congress should act to strengthen it,” Warren said. “Tech is creating a whole new set of conflicts that Congress needs to attack directly.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/warren-calls-for-tougher-tech-regulation-after-musk-twitter-deal

Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) on Thursday explained her reasoning behind voting against the House bill to ban Russian oil, saying that it “fails to address the underlying problem.”

Bush, one of 17 lawmakers who voted against the bill to ban Russian oil, said in a statement that she opposed the House bill because “it fails to address the underlying problem of imposing sanctions that are not accompanied with a clear diplomatic process for de-escalation, incentives for a ceasefire, and a condition of withdrawal of Russian military forces in Ukraine.”

The first-term Democrat from Missouri added that the push for a statutory ban is “being used to justify even more dangerous drilling at home and increased imports from other authoritarian governments like Saudi Arabia.”

She added that the approach to banning Russian oil “categorically makes our communities less safe” and “does nothing to jumpstart our transition to renewable energy.”

I’ve spent the last several months trying to settle on a straightforward explanation for why Joe Manchin decided to attack, denude and ultimately destroy the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda on the cusp of what already looks to be a brutal midterm season for the Democrats.

Manchin loves his coal, sure, so the clean energy provisions at the core of the Build Back Better Act (BBB) were poison to his own personal fortune. He’s a Democrat from a bright red state, and so must cleave at least somewhat to the economic fictions that sustain the right. Given the large chunk of hell he’s carved out for himself, however, these hardly seem like enough to justify the mayhem he has unleashed within his own party.

…and then it hit me in the middle of the night like an arcing splash of ice water dropped on my bed. I sat bolt upright in the gibbering dark and announced to the startled cat coiled at my feet: “My God! He’s running for president!”

Put yourself in Manchin’s shoes. Your own seat is secure until 2024, so there is no need to run for anything next year. Over the long process of murdering the BBB Act, you raked in millions in campaign “donations” from the energy lobby and other right-leaning interests, which means you’re flush enough to fund a national campaign.

Americans are now more likely to be socially liberal than conservative for the first time since Gallup started polling the question in 2001, the pollster reported Thursday, reflecting a broader trend of Americans becoming increasingly liberal on social issues over the past decade—though a far higher share of Americans still hold fiscally conservative views.

According to Gallup’s poll, which was conducted May 3-18 among 1,016 U.S. adults, 34% of adults now identify as socially liberal and 30% as socially conservative, though the largest share of respondents (35%) hold moderate views.

While there have been a few times in the past in which an equal share of respondents have held socially liberal and conservative views, in 2015 and 2018, typically more have identified as socially conservative, with 36% identifying as conservative in 2019 versus 28% as liberal.

While younger Americans are far more likely to identify as socially liberal than older adults, all age groups have become increasingly socially liberal over the past 20 years. Adults ages 18-34 were largely split on social issues in 2001 and are now “substantially” more liberal in 2021, Gallup reports, while 35- to 54-year-olds have gone from “modestly conservative” to “slightly more liberal than conservative.” Those ages 55 and up have become “slightly less” socially conservative, though a majority still hold conservative views. Gallup also notes declines in socially conservative views have been “roughly equal” between white Americans and non-white Americans, though white Americans are still more likely to be both socially and economically conservative..

For the first time, Woods and the heads of three other major petroleum companies were questioned under oath at a congressional hearing into the industry’s long campaign to discredit and deny the evidence that burning fossil fuels drove global heating. When pressed to make specific pledges or to stop lobbying against climate initiatives, all four executives declined.

They also come after an Exxon lobbyist was caught on tape discussing efforts to influence several members of congress on the reconciliation bill, including saying he talks to Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) office every week.

Manchin, a key Senate swing vote, later denied having weekly meetings with the lobbyist.

His opposition has resulted in at least one key climate program being cut from Democrats' spending package, which would have incentivized energy companies to move away from fossil fuel use.

BUFFALO, N.Y.—In her victory speech, India Walton—the community organizer and first-time candidate who’d just beaten four-term incumbent Byron Brown in the city’s June 22 Democratic primary for mayor—referred lovingly to her 500 or so campaign volunteers as her “band of revolutionaries.
”That may sound trite. It’s not. It’s probably not possible to understand how disruptive Walton’s win has been unless you’re from here. But I’ll try.

Walton is a community organizer, former head of a community land trust, a registered nurse, a labor activist, and a single mother of four who earned her GED while pregnant with twins. This was her first race for political office.

York State Senate to the mayor’s office on the second floor of Buffalo’s beautiful art deco City Hall. The massive building went up in 1932 at the origin point of the city’s original radial street plan when the city’s power elite believed—or professed to believe—that Buffalo’s rapid growth over the previous 50 years would continue unabated, that this would be a city of a million people by 1950.

That’s not what happened. Disinvestment had in fact already begun in the 1920s, and, after an economic bump from World War II, the city’s industrial economy continued to decline, finally cratering in the 1970s.
Buffalo has been a client of the state and federal governments ever since. State aid provides one-third of the city’s revenue; federal money flows through the city bureaucracy to fund a network of anti-poverty nonprofits.