Chris Hedges's Blog, page 409

Bernie Sanders Lays Out Bold 10-Point Plan for Democrats

While affirming that he “strongly” disagrees with former Newt Gingrich, who led the GOP in the House in the mid-1990s, “on virtually every issue,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is calling on Democrats in Congress to rip a page of out the Georgia Republican’s playbook by creating—and aggressively pushing—a new progressive version of the Contract With America in order to galvanize the nation, offer real solutions to its most urgent problems, and go beyond being simply anti-Trump.

In stark contrast to Gingrich’s original version—”a radical right-wing agenda full of tax breaks for the wealthy, massive cuts to programs vital to working families, and racist and cruel bills to ‘reform’ welfare and our criminal-justice system”—Sanders argues in a Washington Post op-ed on Thursday that Democrats should instead forge a vision that “reflects the needs of working Americans — centered on economic, political, social, racial and environmental justice.”

Congress should represent the needs of all the American people, not just the 1%. With a sense of urgency, Democrats must have the courage to take on powerful special interests & fight for a progressive agenda that addresses the needs of working families. https://t.co/SyIvPFE264

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) November 22, 2018

While celebrating the “Blue Wave” in the midterms that saw Democrats reclaim control of the U.S. House and acheive major wins in state houses and governors’ mansions nationwide, Sanders writes that while it is clear a majority of the American people “rejected President Trump’s agenda benefiting the wealthy and the powerful, as well as his racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and religious bigotry,” it simply “is not good enough for Democrats to just be the anti-Trump party.”

If Democrats, he writes, “want to keep and expand their majority in the House, take back the Senate and win the White House, Democrats must show the American people that they will aggressively stand up and fight for the working families of this country — black, white, Latino, Asian American or Native American, men and women, gay or straight. This means addressing the crisis of a broken criminal-justice system and reforming inhumane immigration policies. But it also means fighting to expand a middle class that has been disappearing for more than 40 years, reducing inequality in both income and wealth — which has disproportionately hurt African Americans and Hispanics — and aggressively combating climate change, the most urgent threat facing our planet.”

Specifically, argues Sanders, the new Democratic majority in the House should spend its first 100 days next year passing an unmistakably bold legislative agenda that includes:

Increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour and indexing it to median wage growth thereafter. The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is a starvation wage that must be increased to a living wage — at least $15 an hour. This would give more than 40 million Americans a raise and would generate more than $100 billion in higher wages throughout the country.

A path toward Medicare-for-all. The Medicare-for-all bill widely supported in the Senate has a four-year phase-in period on the way to guaranteeing health care for every man, woman and child. Over the first year, it would lower the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 55, cover dental, hearing and vision care for seniors, provide health care to every young person in the United States and lower the cost of prescription drugs.

Bold action to combat climate change. The report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made it clear we have just 12 years to substantially cut the amount of carbon in our atmosphere, or our planet will suffer irreversible damage. Congress must pass legislation that shifts our energy system away from fossil fuels and toward energy efficiency and renewable energy. We can lead the planet in combating climate change and, in the process, create millions of good paying jobs.

Fixing our broken criminal-justice system. We must end the absurdity of the United States having more people in jail than any other country on Earth. We must invest in jobs and education for our young people, not more jails and incarceration.

Comprehensive immigration reform. The American people want to protect the young people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and to move toward comprehensive immigration reform for the more than 11 million people in our country who are undocumented. And that’s exactly what we should do.

Progressive tax reform. At a time of massive and growing inequality in both income and wealth, Congress must pass legislation which requires wealthy people and large corporations to begin paying their fair share of taxes. It is unacceptable that there are large, extremely profitable corporations in this country that do not pay a nickel in federal income taxes.

A $1 trillion infrastructure plan. Every day, Americans drive to work on potholed roads and crumbling bridges, and ride in overcrowded buses and subways. Children struggle to concentrate in overcrowded classrooms. Workers are unable to find affordable housing. The structures that most Americans don’t see are also in disrepair — from spotty broadband and an outdated electric grid, to toxic drinking water and dilapidated levees and dams. Congress should pass a $1 trillion infrastructure plan to address these needs while creating up to 15 million good-paying jobs in the process.

Lowering the price of prescription drugs. Americans pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs because, unlike other countries, the United States doesn’t directly regulate the price of medicine. The House should pass legislation to require Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices and allow patients, pharmacists and wholesalers to purchase low-cost prescription drugs from Canada and other countries. It should also pass legislation to make sure that Americans don’t pay more for prescription drugs than citizens do in other major countries.

Making public colleges and universities tuition-free and substantially reducing student debt. In a highly competitive global economy, we must have the best-educated workers in the world. Every young person in America, regardless of income, must have the opportunity to receive the education they need to get a decent job and make it into the middle class. The House should pass the College for All Act to make public colleges and universities tuition-free and substantially reduce student debt.

Expanding Social Security. When 1 out of 5 seniors is trying to get by on less than $13,500 a year, we must expand Social Security so that every American can retire with dignity and security. The House should pass legislation to expand Social Security benefits and extend its solvency for the next 60 years by requiring that the wealthiest Americans — those making more than $250,000 a year — pay their fair share of Social Security taxes.

The Thanksgiving op-ed from Sanders comes a week before the independent senator will deliver the keynote address at a “gathering” of national and international progressive leaders in his home state of Vermont.

The event, coordinated by The Sanders Institute, founded by Jane Sanders, “will convene 250 leading progressive minds to envision – and to actualize – a better future for our country and the world. Reaching across generations and embracing the inherent synergies across the progressive platform, participants will discuss and debate our nation’s most pressing issues and offer innovative solutions.”

Samsung Apologizes for Illnesses, Deaths Among Its Workers

SEOUL, South Korea — Samsung Electronics apologized Friday for illnesses and deaths of some of its workers, saying it failed to create a safe working environment at its computer chip and display factories.

The announcement by the South Korean technology giant came weeks after the company and a group representing ailing Samsung workers agreed to accept compensation terms suggested by a mediator and end a highly-publicized standoff that went on for more than a decade. The company’s apology was part of the settlement.

Kinam Kim, president of Samsung’s device solutions division, said the company failed to “sufficiently manage health threats” at its semiconductor and liquid crystal display manufacturing lines. As detailed in Associated Press reporting over the past decade, dozens of employees who worked there have experienced grave illnesses such as leukemia and brain tumors.

“We offer our sincere apology to our workers who have suffered with illnesses and their families,” Kim said during a news conference in Seoul, which was also attended by activists and relatives of the workers.

But while cutting a deal and loosely admitting to lapses in safety standards, Samsung has yet to fully acknowledge its workplace environment as the direct cause of the illnesses.

The standoff began in 2007 when taxi driver Hwang Sang-gi refused to accept a settlement after his 23-year-old daughter died of leukemia after working at a Samsung factory. Hwang’s efforts to clarify the cause of Yu-mi’s death and hold Samsung responsible for problems related to working conditions galvanized a broader movement to hold businesses and the government accountable for safety lapses in the chip and display industries, which use huge amounts of chemicals.

“No apology would be enough when considering the deception and humiliation we experienced (from Samsung) over the past 11 years, the pain of suffering from occupational diseases, the pain of losing loved ones,” Hwang said at the news conference. “But I take today’s apology as a promise from Samsung Electronics,” to improve the safety of its workplaces, he said.

According to the settlement, Samsung will compensate for various illnesses of employees who have worked at its chip and LCD factories since 1984, including as much as 150 million won ($132,000) for leukemia. The compensation also covers miscarriages and congenital illnesses of the workers’ children such as child cancer.

Since 2008, dozens of workers have sought occupational safety compensation from the government. Few won compensation, mostly after years of court battles. Half the remaining claims were rejected and half remain under review.

Families of the victims often have depleted their savings and sold their homes to pay hospital bills. Some workers end up incapacitated and unable to work.

Trump Issues Thanksgiving Threat to Close U.S.-Mexico Border

PALM BEACH, Fla.—President Donald Trump made a Thanksgiving Day threat to close the U.S. border with Mexico for an undisclosed period of time if his administration determines that its southern ally has lost “control” on its side.

Trump also said he has given the thousands of active-duty troops he sent to the border before the Nov. 6 midterm elections the “OK” to use lethal force against migrants “if they have to.” And he said Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, whom he has faulted for not being tough enough on immigration, is “in there trying.”

“It’s a tough job,” he said.

The president would not discount the possibility of a partial government shutdown early in December over lawmakers’ refusal to allocate the billions of dollars he is demanding for a border wall, the central promise of his 2016 campaign.

“Could there be a shutdown? There certainly could, and it will be about border security, of which the wall is a part,” Trump said.

Trump made the comments in a wide-ranging question-and-answer session with reporters at his Florida golf club after he conveyed holiday wishes in a telephone call with select members of the American military serving around the globe.

That conversation grew from a presidential expression of gratitude for their commitment to protecting the country and its interest and touched on a variety of political topics, including immigration policy, the economy and Trump’s displeasure with court rulings against administration initiatives.

In his remarks afterward to reporters, Trump moved quickly from issue to issue, from the border and his public dispute with Chief Justice John Roberts to relations with China, a possible staff and Cabinet shake-up and his defense of acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker.

Trump’s border threat came days after a federal judge put the administration’s asylum policy on hold. Under that new policy, Trump declared no one could apply for asylum except at an official border entry point. Some ports of entry are already facing huge backups, with people waiting for weeks.

The U.S. government shut down one port of entry, San Ysidro, in California, for several hours early Monday morning to bolster security amid concerns about a potential influx of migrant caravan members. Most of the lanes were reopened before the morning rush.

Trump repeated Nielsen’s claim, made earlier this week when she visited a San Diego Pacific Coast beach to see newly installed razor wire wrapped around a towering border wall that cuts across the sand, that there were as many as 500 criminals and gang members in the group heading northward. Nielsen refused to answer questions about how they were identified or what crimes they had committed.

Trump asserted that there are “fistfights all over the streets” in Tijuana, Mexico, and that “these are not like normal, innocent people.”

“These are people you talk to them and they start a fistfight,” he said. “I don’t want that in this country.”

The people of Tijuana “opened up with wide arms” to welcome the caravan, Trump said, and “now they’re going crazy to get them out … because bad things are happening.”

He said if U.S. officials “find that it’s incontrollable, if we find that it gets to a level where we are going to lose control or where people are going to start getting hurt, we will close entry into the country for a period of time until we can get it under control. The whole border.”

In that case, Mexico would take an economic hit, he said, citing an inability to ship cars into the U.S. for sale.

“We’re either going to have a border or we’re not,” Trump said.

The School Privatization Agenda Has Taken a Hit

The blue wave that swept the nation in the recent midterm elections was also a broad rejection of recent trends to privatize public education through school voucher programs and privately operated charter schools. From New York to California, new candidates ran and won on platforms opposed to privatization, big-money backers of charter schools suffered humiliating losses, and voters trounced efforts to expand voucher programs that drain public schools of the funding they need.

This spring’s teacher walkouts that made news across the country can take some credit for propelling the anti-privatization message to voters and prompting educators to take their support for public schools to the ballot box. But opposition to the privatization industry was also strong in states that did not experience teacher walkouts, and public education advocates are vowing to take their cause to state capitals and Congress to curb the flow of public money to unaccountable, privately operated education providers.

Stopping the Charter School Siege

One of the biggest defeats for the school privatization industry was in California where former charter school executive Marshall Tuck went down to his opponent, little-known Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, in the race for state superintendent of education.

Tuck got $36 million from charter industry advocates—including $11 million combined from real estate developer Bill Bloomfield, Gap co-founder Doris Fisher, and venture capitalist Arthur Rock—but still lost. It was his second run for the position after getting millions from many of the same backers four years ago to take on then-incumbent superintendent Tom Torlakson. This year’s race was much closer, but Tuck lost again despite outspending, by more than two to one, Thurmond, who got backing from the state teachers’ unions.

Both candidates are Democrats, as a result of being the top-two vote getters in California’s open primary system, but the party endorsed Thurmond, and prominent party officials, including U.S. Senator Kamala Harris, also supported him. However, the real differential in the contest was Tuck’s strong advocacy for charter schools versus Thurmond’s more cautious approach to slow down the rapid expansion of charters in the state and to make the schools more transparent and accountable.

California has become the source of “a never-ending stream of charter scandals,” observes Valerie Strauss, an education blogger for the Washington Post. Strauss points to research conducted by Carol Burris, the executive director of the Network for Public Education, that finds the state with the largest number of charters also has one of the highest incidents of charter school scandals due to the state’s mostly hands-off attitude toward regulating these schools.

Other studies have found that charter schools gouge California school districts for millions in precious education funds, which forces public schools to cut back on services, increase class sizes, fire teachers, and take other cost-cutting steps that harm students and push public schools toward financial ruin.

“Public education in California is under siege,” writes education historian Diane Ravitch on her personal blog, but Thurmond’s victory will undoubtedly slow the onslaught down.

Voting Down Voucher Expansions

Another big blow the midterms dealt to school privatization efforts was in Arizona, where voters said no, by nearly two to one, to a ballot initiative that would have expanded a state-supported voucher program.

The initiative, Proposition 305, was on the ballot due to a relentless grassroots effort by teachers, parents, and public school activists to overturn new legislation that opened up the state’s education savings account program, called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, to all of the state’s 1.1 million students. The program gives parents a debit card loaded with 90 percent of the amount of money the state would typically send a district for enrolling a student. In exchange for the money, parents must agree not to enroll their children in a public school—essentially giving up their children’s right to a free public education.

The program has few regulations, and a recent audit by the state found that parents misspent $700,000 in taxpayer money through the program, using their debit cards to purchase personal items like cosmetics, clothing, and travel. Only a small amount of the money has been recovered. As a result of the vouchers, over $141 million leaves the public school system with little accountability, which actually raises the costs of education to the state by an additional $62 million each year—roughly $4,700 per student.

With the overwhelming defeat of Prop 305, “the public rejected the siphoning of public money to private schools,” says Beth Lewis in an email. Lewis, an Arizona classroom teacher, cofounded and helps lead Save Our Schools Arizona (SOS-AZ), a grassroots organization originally formed to oppose the new law to expand the voucher program.

“The resounding defeat of Prop 305 shows voters have learned about education funding and rampant privatization efforts in the state, and they reject it,” says Sharon Kirsch in an email. Kirsch, a university professor, also helps lead SOS-AZ.

Relying on a network of volunteers—made up mostly of retired educators, parents, and community activists—SOS-AZ gathered 111,540 signatures to put Prop 305 on the ballot. Money from organizations supported by the Koch brothers’ poured into the state to urge voters to vote “yes” on Prop 305, but the grassroots effort led by Lewis, Kirsch, and others won.

“We successfully stopped universal voucher expansion,” says Kirsch, in “a direct repudiation of Betsy DeVos and other billionaires’ privatization schemes that have decimated our public schools for decades.”

A Bottom-Up Rebellion Against Privatization

Lewis and Kirsch credit this spring’s statewide teacher walkouts that happened in Arizona, and elsewhere, with helping to create the impetus for defeating school vouchers.

The movement, that eventually became called #RedforEd, “had an enormous impact on the elections,” says Lewis. “Arizonans woke up … and chose to vote against” vouchers.

“The walkouts resulted in educating tens of thousands of teachers across our state,” says Kirsch. In defeating Prop 305, “the people have spoken: Enough of these privatization schemes pushed by out-of-state billionaires,” she says.

Arizona wasn’t the only state where teacher walkouts helped generate strong opposition to privatization.

In Kentucky, grassroots public school activists animated by teacher walkouts earlier this year, “specifically targeted the 52 legislators who voted to pass the state’s first charter school bill in 2017,” writes Gay Adelmann in an email. Adelmann is a public school parent in Louisville and current president of Save Our Schools Kentucky. She recently ran for state Senate in the Democratic Party, losing in the primary with 44 percent of the vote as a first-time candidate with little funding.

While only a handful of the charter supporters in the state legislature went down, according to Adelmann, there were important wins for charter opponents, including special education teacher Tina Bojanowski, who unseated two-term Republican incumbent Phil Moffett, who helped author the state’s first charter school legislation.

“It will take more than one election cycle to feel the results of [the teacher movement],” says Adelmann, “but the shift to oppose charters is happening.”

Midwestern State Vote Against DeVos Agenda

The shift to oppose school privatization is not confined to the teacher walkout states.

In gubernatorial races across the Midwest, Democrats ran and won with strong oppositional messages against school privatization.

In Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer won a governor’s seat formerly occupied by Rick Snyder after campaigning to “end the [Betsy] DeVos agenda in Michigan,” close for-profit charter schools in the state, and propose additional oversights for charters.

In Minnesota, Democratic challenger for an open governor’s seat Tim Walz, a former public high school geography teacher and football coach, pledged to block any proposed voucher programs. He won decisively.

In Illinois, Democratic challenger J.B. Pritzker defeated incumbent Republican Governor Bruce Rauner, while pledging to end the state’s education tax credit voucher program, which already diverts public tax dollars to pay for private school tuition for 5,600 students.

The state’s tax credit scholarship program, like all other such programs, is a money-laundering scheme. Whereas vouchers distribute public education funds directly to parents, education tax credit programs use a third party—often called a school tuition organization (STO)—that is set up as a nonprofit by the state or by financial groups connected to the private school industry. Tax credits are issued by the state to private individuals, businesses, or corporations that make donations to the STO. The money from the STO is distributed to selected parents to use for private school tuition, instead of going to public schools that rely on that funding. The STO takes its cut of every dollar passed through its program, and few records are kept about how the money is actually spent and what the academic results are for students who participate.

The Illinois tax credit program is especially deceptive in its stated intentions to rescue struggling students from “failed schools.” It allows parents to get around the state law prohibiting taxpayer money to go to religious schools. And because individuals who donate can take a $75 tax credit for every $100 donated and get up to $1 million in tax credits, the program is a huge giveaway to the wealthy.

Parents who take advantage of the tuition money can make as much as $98,400 and still participate in the program, and many parents taking advantage of the program already had their children in private schools.

Democrats had setbacks in the Midwest too, especially in Ohio where a strong candidate for governor, Richard Cordray, made the state’s scandalous charter school industry an issue in his race but ended up losing to a vulnerable Republican who mostly ignored the scandals.

But the largely uncontested playing field charter school and school voucher proponents have enjoyed in nearly two decades of elections is now thick with formidable opponents.

A Charter Turnaround in the Empire State

In what is perhaps the most startling of charter school turnarounds, midterm elections in New York took down a longstanding coalition of Republicans and Democrats in the state Senate who colluded with charter advocate Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo to expand these schools and keep them relatively regulation-free.

As New York City public school art teacher and citizen journalist Jake Jacobs reports for the Progressive, a faction of eight Democratic state senators calling themselves the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC) had for years shared power and donors with Senate Republicans to work with Governor Cuomo in maintaining a “favored status” for charter schools in the state.

In September primaries, six grassroots-backed Democratic candidates ousted IDC members, and then, in turn, handily beat their Republican opponents in November. Despite being vastly outspent by the Republicans, the insurgent Democrats pressed their cases to stop charter schools from taking over space in public school buildings and to block attempts to lift the cap on the numbers of charters that can operate in the state. Most supported a moratorium on new charter schools proposed by the NAACP.

Because of victories by these insurgent Democrats, who will insist on more scrutiny of charter schools, Jacobs foresees “a new landscape” in the state legislature “where evidence and research matter more than Albany’s rampant ‘pay-for-play’ arrangements” that have given charters the upper hand.

We Have Only Just Begun

Similarly, in red states where teacher rebellions have begun to turn the tables on the school privatization industry, public school advocates are seeing a transformed political landscape where resistance is not only possible but winnable.

After midterm elections in Arizona, “we will have the most balanced state legislature since the 1980s,” says Beth Lewis, “with roughly half of the legislators having declared full support for fully funded public schools.”

She writes, “As leader of Save Our Schools Arizona, I will work with other groups to ensure that we stop all efforts to privatize our schools and ensure that we achieve an excellent public school in every Arizona neighborhood. I will not stop until this goal is realized.”

“With the #RedforEd movement last spring and the resounding defeat of Prop 305, Arizona now has tens of thousands of teachers paying attention,” says Sharon Kirsch. “These teachers learned about education funding and rampant privatization efforts in Arizona, they’ve met and canvased for pro-public education candidates, and they’ve found their voice to demand that our legislators prioritize public education. We have only just begun.”

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute .

Will Democrats Back a ‘Green New Deal’?

News related to climate change is rarely good. More often than not, it engenders a sense of doom and helplessness among the public. But lately there has been a glimmer of hope on the horizon for climate justice, and it bears the name Sunrise Movement.

Even before the midterm elections took place, activists in the youth-based climate justice organization had planned a sit-in at the Washington, D.C., offices of California representative and longtime Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. A week after the election, the approximately 200 people that crowded into Pelosi’s office were visited by newly elected New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Addressing the climate activists, Ocasio-Cortez said, “My journey here started at Standing Rock,” referring to the powerful indigenous-led rebellion to stop the Dakota Access pipeline project in 2017. Immediately afterward, Ocasio-Cortez pledged to introduce legislation to create a “Select Committee on a Green New Deal,” as one of her first actions in Congress.

William Lawrence, a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, explained to me in an interview that the movement is motivated by the existential threat of the climate crisis. “We have hundreds of millions of lives worldwide that are at stake because of the threat of runaway climate change,” he said. The solutions out of this crisis are known and achievable: “We need to overhaul our energy system, our food system and our transit system,” Lawrence explained. In his opinion, “The only way to do that in time is for the government to take an active role in the economy to shape and guide the transition. That’s exactly how we got ourselves out of the Great Depression.”

But lawmakers are still undecided on a plan of action. Pelosi, feeling the pressure from grassroots activists and new colleagues like Ocasio-Cortez, made the call for reviving a defunct committee called the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, which was established the last time Democrats controlled the House.

While that committee’s mandate would not go nearly as far as the one Ocasio-Cortez has proposed, other Democrats, like New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, dismissed Pelosi’s position, saying a select committee was “not necessary.” His opposition highlights a strongly regressive streak within the Democratic Party that feels compelled to maintain the status quo in the face of the climate devastation that is already happening all around us.

Establishment Democrats now have two powerful forces working to push them in the right direction on climate: a strong grassroots movement intent on holding politicians’ feet to the fire, and a bold new crop of aggressive young Democratic Socialists like Ocasio-Cortez, who have been elected to office. It is the perfect storm of forces needed now more than ever to push a strong climate agenda.

Coming off a violent hurricane season on the U.S. East Coast, this fall brought record-breaking fires to the nation’s West Coast, underscoring the urgency of climate catastrophe. The death toll from the worst fire in California’s recorded history—the Camp Fire in Butte County—has now reached 83, with more than 600 still missing. Meanwhile, rain is expected this week in the northern part of the state, which could bring relief to the dry areas but could also trigger dangerous mudslides and flash flooding in areas stripped bare of brush and vegetation. Scientists are in clear agreement that climate change is behind this unprecedented fire season.

But President Trump barely acknowledged climate change during his weekend visit to the impacted areas. In addition to (embarrassingly) forgetting the name of the devastated town of Paradise—he referred to it as “” before being corrected—Trump lectured state officials about the importance of raking and cleaning forest vegetation. His interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, went even further, saying in an interview with the extremist right-wing outlet Breitbart that the fires were the fault of “environmental radicals.”

Rather than confront Republicans like Trump and Zinke (Lawrence dismissed the GOP as “An organized alliance between fossil-fuel billionaires and white supremacists”), the Northern California chapter of the Sunrise Movement showed up outside the offices of Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee, a strong progressive figure and veteran lawmaker. They wore masks to protect their lungs from the toxic air that blanketed the areas surrounding the Camp Fire, and they called upon Lee to support the resolution that Ocasio-Cortez plans to introduce. So far, Lee has not responded.

Lawrence said the activists were sending a message to Lee, saying, “We love you, we respect you, you have been a progressive champion for many years on so many issues, but that doesn’t mean you get a pass on this.”

What activists with the Sunrise Movement are cleverly doing is demanding that their elected representatives, including Pelosi, Pallone and Lee, answer the question: “What Is Your Plan?” “Not only do they not have a plan,” said Lawrence, “but they don’t have a plan to make a plan.”

Angry about Pallone’s recent stance that no action is needed to establish any sort of select committee to address climate change, Sunrise Movement activists paid him a visit, too. According to Lawrence, Pallone attempted to cast himself as their ally, citing his statements in support of climate action and his 2009 vote for a “cap and trade program.” But Lawrence pointed out that Pallone “has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from fossil fuel companies.”

Lawrence and his fellow activists are demanding that Democrats back a “Green New Deal”—a proposal whose very name invokes the important government jobs program that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law to help end the Great Depression. The idea is one whose time has come. Rampant poverty and climate change are arguably the two most important challenges facing the U.S. today. A Green New Deal would address both crises together. At this moment, Congress has no plan to solve either income inequality or global warming. Indeed, Trump and the GOP’s deregulatory agenda is exacerbating these problems through actions like last year’s tax-reform bonanza for the wealthy and ending the Paris Agreement. Our elected officials are literally erasing our children’s future.

This is not a pie-in-the-sky movement. Lawrence said he is realistic: “We know that we are not going to pass anything until 2021 when we have Trump out of office, and hopefully we have a more favorable breakdown in the Senate.” With regard to recent developments, he insisted, “But now that the Democrats hold the House, it is absolutely imperative that they make a plan that will be ready to go in 2021.” The climate—and our species—depend on it.

Thank the Media in Part for Our Looming Climate Catastrophe

Climate change took a backseat to other issues in this year’s midterm elections, and humanity may end up paying the price. The majority of climate change-related ballot measures failed, many climate deniers in the Republican party won or kept their seats, and even Democratic winners were not pressed on their commitment to climate change legislation during their campaigns. In their minimal and skewed coverage of climate change issues, the media deserve a share of the blame for these losses.

The biggest failure was the defeat of Initiative I-1631 in Washington state by a margin of 56 percent to 44 percent. The ballot measure would have imposed a fee on emitters of greenhouse gasses, reinvesting the projected $1 billion annual revenues into renewable energy solutions, including clean energy projects, green jobs, and transition assistance to communities in “pollution and health action areas” affected by climate change. While I-1631 was derisively called a carbon tax by opponents, it would more accurately be described as a carbon fee—with revenues reserved for the aforementioned programs, rather than going to the general state revenue pot.

The initiative would have accomplished the first step of what many climate scientists and activists say is one of the most effective actions for mitigating climate change: putting a price on carbon dioxide. Prices on carbon ranging from $50–100 per ton have been put forth by the World Bank as reasonable for achieving the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, while a figure of $220 per ton has been found to more accurately represent the actual social costs of carbon. While I-1631 would have priced carbon at only $15 per ton in 2020, with annual increases that would top it out at $55 per ton, it would nonetheless have been the first explicit and substantial statewide carbon pricing initiative in the United States.

Carbon-pricing initiatives are obviously a major threat to profits of big fossil fuel companies, who in the past have helped kill more comprehensive carbon-pricing initiatives in Washington state, like 2016’s I-732 ballot measure and Gov. Jay Inslee’s attempt to push legislation through the state’s Democratic senate earlier this year. To defeat I-1631 in the most recent election, the fossil fuel groups enlisted corporate media that were all too willing to join in their opposition campaign.

Media Matters (11/2/18) detailed how oil companies like BP, Phillips 66 and Koch Industries gave over $31 million to industry trade groups like Western States Petroleum Association to shoot down the measure. I-1631’s diverse coalition of advocates raised half that amount. The fossil fuel company’s “No on 1631” campaign also spent $1.1 million on countless Facebook ads and $6.2 million on dozens of local television ads.

The companies benefited from a slew of op-eds and editorials urging voters to vote no on I-1631, including pieces in national newspapers like USA Today (11/4/18) and Wall Street Journal (10/21/18) and local dailies like the Seattle Times (9/21/18, 10/20/18, 10/25/18), Spokane Spokesman Review (10/23/18) and Everett Herald (10/14/18), along with dozens of other opinion pieces in local newspapers. Some of the authors had fossil fuel industry ties.

Other climate initiatives throughout the US also went down, and fossil fuel groups benefited from a plethora of negative articles and ads against the ballot measures. In Arizona, Proposition 127 was voted down by a margin of 69 to 31 percent. The ballot measure would have required power companies to derive half their electricity from renewable energy like solar and wind by 2030, expanding the state’s current law requiring 15 percent renewables by 2025.

The proposition campaign was the most expensive in Arizona history. Billionaire Tom Steyer and other groups spent over $23 million in support of 127, but opponents topped that with $30 million from Arizonans for Affordable Energy, funded by the owners of the state’s largest power provider, the Arizona Public Service Company (APS), and others in the state utility industry.

As Media Matters (10/31/18) pointed out, the initiative’s defeat was assisted by a torrent of negative coverage in national right-wing outlets like the Wall Street Journal (10/19/18), Washington Free Beacon (8/22/18), Washington Examiner (9/21/18) and Daily Caller (8/22/18, 10/17/18, 10/25/18, 10/31/18, etc.), who used combinations of APS-funded studies and scaremongering about Steyer, who, being a Jewish billionaire like his fellow right-wing boogeyman George Soros, is a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Compare this outcome with Nevada: like Arizona, it is a state with high solar potential and high risk of being rendered uninhabitable by rising temperatures. Sixty percent of Nevada voters passed Question 6, a measure that, like Arizona’s Proposition 127, mandates that utility companies get half their energy from renewable sources. Nevada was spared a negative media blitz against Question 6, most likely because the state’s energy monopoly stayed neutral on the measure.

Requirements for leaving fossil fuels in the ground, a necessity for halting the advance of climate change, was also shot down by voters. In Colorado, Proposition 112 (which would have essentially banned fracking by requiring 2,500 foot setbacks for oil and gas drilling operations from schools, homes and waterways) was voted down by a margin of 57 to 43 percent. Oil- and gas-funded industry group Protect Colorado, among others, spent $36 million to oppose the measure, even sponsoring another ballot measure (which also failed) that would have compensated fossil fuel firms for “lost income” from the fracking ban. By comparison, the Proposition 112 supporters, Colorado Rising, spent a meager $800,000.

Despite the public’s apparent support of the measure prior to the election, Proposition 112 received strikingly unified opposition from the state’s newspapers: The measure was attacked and dismissed by the editorial boards of the Denver Post (10/10/18), Colorado Springs Gazette (10/1/18) and Aurora Sentinel (10/1/18), while other anti-112 op-eds appeared in numerous other local papers in the state. Media Matters (11/5/18) noted that none of the newspapers that took a position on 112 mentioned climate change in their editorials, save the pro-112 Boulder Daily Camera (10/2/18).

There were a couple of bright spots for climate in the midterms. Sixty-eight percent of Florida voters chose to ban offshore drilling. Numerous Republican climate deniers like Dana Rohrbacher, Mike Coffman, Jason Lewis, Erik Paulson, Claudia Tenney, John Culberson, Steve Knight and Barbara Comstock lost their House seats.

Democratic control of the House and some key governorships and state houses are potentially positive developments for taking on climate change at the federal and state levels. Some progressive candidates campaigned (and won) on bold climate change-focused platforms advocating for a Green New Deal. Some newcomers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are already demanding climate action legislative proposals from Democratic leadership.

However, the Democratic Party mostly steered clear of campaigning on climate change during the midterms. While some Democrats receive large campaign contributions from fossil fuel interests, the party’s reluctance to tackle climate change head-on could also be related to apparent lack of voter interest in the subject. While a majority of US voters tend to support climate change policies like carbon pricing, solar subsidies and renewable energy standards, climate change is shockingly low on voters’ list of policy priorities, far below issues like healthcare, gun policy or immigration. A potential reason climate is so low on the totem pole is the fact that climate change is routinely ignored by the media.

Despite the fossil fuel–fueled media blitz in some states, climate change figured little in most pre-election media coverage. Media Matters (11/6/18) found that of 78 major gubernatorial and Senate debates analyzed in the run-up to the November vote, only 23 featured a climate change question. Colorado gubernatorial winner Jared Polis even mentioned that voters asked him more about climate change than reporters did, while the New York Times, Politico and the LA Times seemed surprised that some Democrats were even running ads related to climate issues.

This dissonance on climate issues seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Major cable news networks mentioned climate change a whopping two times during their coverage of the historically deadly 2017 hurricane season, and frequently devoted more airtime to pressing issues like Roseanne Barr’s tweets.

MSNBC host Chris Hayes once noted that climate change is a “palpable ratings killer.” This may or may not be true, but if outlets actually took their duty of public accountability seriously, they would empower journalists and television producers to incorporate climate change into stories that warrant it.

While major newspapers like the New York Times often do solid reporting on climate, cable news networks hardly ever dedicate segments to climate change, and when they do, they are usually within a presidential context. In 2017, almost all of cable news networks’ mere 260 minutes of coverage on climate change revolved around Donald Trump—mostly on his announcement that the US would pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement. In their reporting, those networks often did not even challenge Trump’s frequent claim that climate change is a hoax, a failure that has long plagued the major networks. Climate deniers still even get guest spots on networks like PBS and CBS, who actually do better than the other major networks in covering climate change.

Keeping the planet healthy for habitation and saving the world from untold amounts of strife, struggle and conflict as a result of climate change is without a doubt the greatest challenge that the human race has faced thus far. There are many financial interests that run counter to tackling this monumental problem. All told, the fossil fuel industry spent over $100 million opposing climate change ballot initiatives in this year’s midterms, mostly successfully. The media played an active role as middleman in the fossil fuel companies’ propaganda-to-voter pipeline, while failing to do the reporting that might counter that propaganda, and encourage voters to see climate change as the urgent crisis that it is.

It’s hard to remain a neutral party on a sinking ship. The media continue to choose to ignore the severity of climate change in their reporting, while at the same time giving fossil fuel fat cats a megaphone to whip up opposition to solving it.

EU and U.K. Map Out Relations After Brexit

BRUSSELS — The European Union and Britain have agreed a draft declaration on their future relations after Brexit, European Council President Donald Tusk said Thursday, a development that paves the way for an EU summit this weekend to rubber-stamp the deal.

The 26-page draft declaration was agreed upon at a technical level by negotiators and endorsed Thursday by the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, which is overseeing Brexit negotiations.

“The (EU) Commission President has informed me that it has been agreed at negotiators’ level and agreed in principle at political level,” Tusk said in a tweet.

Tusk, who chairs meetings of EU leaders, said he has sent the draft political declaration to Britain’s 27 European partners and that it till requires “the endorsement of the leaders.”

EU heads of state and government are due to meet in Brussels on Sunday to approve the declaration and a separate divorce deal. British Prime Minister Theresa May is set to return to Brussels on Saturday for more talks on the eve of the summit, including with Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

Representatives from all 28 EU countries are due to meet Friday to prepare for the summit, which is seen as a pivotal moment in the Brexit process.

May is facing widespread opposition in the British Parliament over the divorce agreement, which was agreed last week. That 585-page legal treaty deals with the terms of Britain’s departure, including what the country owes the EU.

Britain officially leaves the EU — the first country ever to do so — on March 29, 2019, but a withdrawal agreement needs to be sealed soon to leave enough time for the European Parliament and the U.K. parliament to endorse it.

As opposed to the withdrawal agreement, the draft declaration on future ties is a political, not a legal, text.

“This declaration establishes the parameters of an ambitious, broad, deep and flexible partnership across trade and economic cooperation, law enforcement and criminal justice, foreign policy, security and defense and wider areas of cooperation,” according to the document.

It also talks about the close ties that have been cemented after 45 years of Britain’s membership of the EU as well as “the sizes of the two economies and their geographic proximity, which have led to complex and integrated supply chains.”

It notes that the “parties envisage having a trading relationship on goods that is as close as possible, with a view to facilitating the ease of legitimate trade.”

The actual legal text will have to be negotiated after Brexit on March 29, and that could well be even more complicated than what has come so far.

In a speech in Berlin before Tusk’s announcement, German Chancellor Angela Merkel underlined that “Britain should remain a partner, remain a friend.”

Though Britain “should have very close economic relations with us,” Merkel did underscore the difficulties that may arise in any attempt to keep services seamless.

“We have to say honestly that, in the services sector, we don’t have a great deal of experience with international free trade agreements,” she said.

“But we want to see that as a future relationship.”

The European Commission, which has supervised Brexit negotiations, refused to comment directly on the declaration.

Spokesman Margaritis Schinas said any running commentary could “have a negative impact as negotiations are now going into their last stretch.”

He did confirm that “work is continuing” to resolve differences between London and Madrid over Gibraltar, the tiny territory at the tip of the Iberian Peninsula that was ceded to Britain in 1713 but is still claimed by Spain.

“There are ideas, contacts are ongoing,” Schinas said, without providing further details.

Last year’s EU guidelines on the Brexit negotiations effectively gave Spain veto powers over future relations between the bloc and the British overseas territory, and the Spanish government says it will vote against the Brexit deal if Gibraltar’s future isn’t considered a bilateral issue between Madrid and London.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said Tuesday that his government “cannot accept” Gibraltar’s future being determined by negotiations at the EU level.

May has said that “we will not exclude Gibraltar from our negotiations on the future relationship.”

Spain’s EU Affairs State Secretary, Luis Marco Aguiriano, has said there is still time to “legally clarify” the agreement before Sunday.

In London, May is due to address lawmakers later Thursday and hold talks with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency until the end of the year.

Kurz told the Austria Press Agency that his trip to London is designed to help May build support for the deal and that he hopes to get a “realistic picture” about May’s chances of getting Parliament’s backing.

Robert Reich: Break Up Facebook (and Amazon and Google and Apple)

The New York Times revealed last week that Facebook executives withheld evidence of Russian activity on the Facebook platform far longer than previously disclosed. They also employed a political opposition research firm to discredit critics.

There’s a larger story here.

America’s Gilded Age of the late 19th century began with a raft of innovations — railroads, steel production, oil extraction — but culminated in mammoth trusts owned by “robber barons” who used their wealth and power to drive out competitors and corrupt American politics.

We’re now in a second Gilded Age — ushered in by semiconductors, software and the internet — that has spawned a handful of giant high-tech companies.

Facebook and Google dominate advertising. They’re the first stops for many Americans seeking news. Apple dominates smartphones and laptop computers. Amazon is now the first stop for a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything.

This consolidation at the heart of the American economy creates two big problems.

First, it stifles innovation. Contrary to the conventional view of a U.S. economy bubbling with inventive small companies, the rate at which new job-creating businesses have formed in the United States has been halved since 2004, according to the census.

A major culprit: Big tech’s sweeping patents, data, growing networks, and dominant platforms have become formidable barriers to new entrants.

The second problem is political. These enormous concentrations of economic power generate political clout that’s easily abused, as the New York Times investigation of Facebook reveals. How long will it be before Facebook uses its own data and platform against critics? Or before potential critics are silenced even by the possibility?

America responded to the Gilded Age’s abuses of corporate power with antitrust laws that allowed the government to break up the largest concentrations.

President Teddy Roosevelt went after the Northern Securities Company, a giant railroad trust financed by J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, the nation’s two most powerful businessmen. The U.S. Supreme Court backed Roosevelt and ordered the company dismantled.

In 1911, President William Howard Taft broke up Rockefeller’s sprawling Standard Oil empire.

It is time to use antitrust again. We should break up the high-tech behemoths, or at least require that they make their proprietary technology and data publicly available and share their platforms with smaller competitors.

There would be little cost to the economy, because these giant firms rely on innovation rather than economies of scale — and, as noted, they’re likely to be impeding innovation overall.

Is this politically feasible? Unlike the Teddy Roosevelt Republicans, Trump and his enablers in Congress have shown little appetite for antitrust enforcement.

But Democrats have shown no greater appetite — especially when it comes to Big Tech.

In 2012, the staff of the Federal Trade Commission’s bureau of competition submitted to the commissioners a 160-page analysis of Google’s dominance in the search and related advertising markets, and recommended suing Google for conduct that “has resulted — and will result — in real harm to consumers and to innovation.” But the commissioners, most of them Democratic appointees, chose not to pursue the case.

The Democrats’ new “better deal” platform, which they unveiled a few months before the midterm elections, included a proposal to attack corporate monopolies in industries as wide-ranging as airlines, eyeglasses and beer. But, notably, the proposal didn’t mention Big Tech.

Maybe the Democrats are reluctant to attack Big Tech because the industry has directed so much political funding to Democrats. In the 2018 midterms, the largest recipient of Big Tech’s largesse, ActBlue, a fundraising platform for progressive candidates, collected nearly $1 billion, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

As the Times investigation of Facebook makes clear, political power can’t be separated from economic power. Both are prone to abuse.

One of the original goals of antitrust law was to prevent such abuses.

“The enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of unexampled capital, boldly marching, not for economical conquests only, but for political power,” warned Edward G. Ryan, chief justice of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, in 1873.

Antitrust law was viewed as a means of preventing giant corporations from undermining democracy.

“If we will not endure a king as a political power,” thundered Ohio Sen. John Sherman, the sponsor of the nation’s first antitrust law in 1890, “we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale” of what the nation produced.

We are now in a second Gilded Age, similar to the first when Congress enacted Sherman’s law. As then, giant firms at the center of the American economy are distorting the market and our politics.

We must resurrect antitrust.

Jamal Khashoggi and Saudi Arabia’s Dismemberment of Yemen

“Saudi Arabia must face the damage from the past three-plus years of war in Yemen.” These words opened the last column by Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi published while he was still alive. Three weeks later, on Oct. 2, Khashoggi walked into the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, and was never seen again. Khashoggi was instructed to go there by the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., the brother of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to pick up documents allowing him to remarry. It was a ruse. Immediately after entering, Khashoggi was grabbed by a 15-member Saudi “kill team,” tortured, killed and dismembered.

An audio recording of the gruesome murder, reportedly captured by the Turkish government, left little doubt about his fate. Turkey gave the recording to Saudi Arabia, the U.S., Germany, France and the U.K. When asked by Fox News if he had listened to it, President Donald Trump said, “It’s a suffering tape … There’s no reason for me to hear it.”

The CIA did listen to it, and, in conjunction with other intelligence, reportedly concluded with high confidence that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally ordered Khashoggi’s murder. Facing increasing bipartisan pressure to sanction Saudi Arabia, Trump issued a rambling statement this week, “It could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!” It’s not that Trump doesn’t know the truth. He simply declared this week, “America first!”

Trump says he’s protecting U.S. jobs by securing $110 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. William Hartung of the Center for International Policy writes that the $110 billion figure “is wildly exaggerated … most of [the deals] were either [from] the Obama administration, or are projections … that are unlikely to ever occur.” He notes a State Department figure putting the actual total at $14.5 billion, and that many of any potential jobs created would actually be in Saudi Arabia itself, not in the U.S.

Regardless of the dollar amount of any promised weapons deal, Donald Trump has made it very clear: Spend enough money with the U.S., and you can get away with murder. It shouldn’t be a surprising position for a man who said, on the campaign trail, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

Khashoggi may achieve through death what he sought in life. As he wrote in his column: “The longer this cruel war lasts in Yemen, the more permanent the damage will be. … The crown prince must bring an end to the violence.” Instead of heeding his words, the crown prince had the journalist killed.

Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Middle East, has been subjected to a brutal bombing campaign since 2015. By one recent estimate, 57,000 Yemenis have been killed. The U.S.-backed Saudi and UAE bombing has provoked widespread food shortages, with 14 million of the country’s population of 22 million on the verge of famine. Save The Children estimates that 85,000 children have starved to death since 2015.

The destruction of water, sanitation, hospitals and other health facilities has caused the largest cholera outbreak in modern history, with at least 1.2 million cases reported in the last 18 months. The United Nations estimates that a child dies of preventable causes in Yemen every 10 minutes. Yemen’s currency has now collapsed, driving up prices of food, fuel and other medicines that manage to get through the port city of Hodeidah, which Saudi Arabia has subjected to relentless bombing.

The U.S. Constitution grants Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. California Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna recently attempted to force a House debate on the U.S. role in Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, but was thwarted by House Republican leaders. In January, when Democrats take control of the House, Khanna will be joined by many new progressive members, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the first two Muslim women ever elected to Congress.

Under Democratic control, a War Powers Resolution debate is likely to pass the House. And, despite continuing Republican control of the Senate, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi may sway enough Republican senators to join Democrats in voting to block further U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s destruction of Yemen, and to suspend arms sales to the kingdom, essentially shutting down the bombing.

Such a rejection of war would be a truly fitting, if overdue, tribute to the memory of Jamal Khashoggi, and a chance at life for the surviving population of Yemen.

Rains Cause New Threat, Problems in Wildfire Region

CHICO, Calif. — Amy Sheppard packs her belongings into a plastic garbage bag as rain drips around her, readying to move on from a field by a Walmart where thousands of evacuees had taken refuge from a deadly Northern California wildfire.

Sheppard, 38, her sister and niece, who is 1, are looking to move into a dry hotel after camping in the field for four days. They lost their home in Magalia and the jewelry-maker tears up as she thinks about what’s next.

“This rain is making it so hard,” she said.

Rain falling Wednesday in some areas of Northern California could help crews fighting a deadly wildfire. But it could also raise the risk of flash floods, complicate efforts to recover remains and make life even more difficult for people like Sheppard who have nowhere to go.

Heavier rain is expected later in the day in the Paradise burn area, which is about 140 miles (225 kilometers) north of San Francisco, where the Camp Fire has killed at least 83 people, including two victims who were found Wednesday in burned homes. The blaze also destroyed more than 13,000 homes.

“The rain is really a double-edged sword for this fire,” said Rick Carhart, a spokesman with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. He said searchers have “been able to sift through this really fine ash and when rain gets onto that really fine ash, it turns it into sort of a muddy muck and makes it a lot more difficult.”

Farther south, residents of communities charred by a Los Angeles-area fire stacked sandbags as they prepared for possible downpours that threaten to unleash runoff from hillsides left barren by flames.

Residents were mindful of a disaster that struck less than a year ago when a downpour on a fresh burn scar sent home-smashing debris flows through Montecito, killing 21 people and leaving two missing.

The 151-square-mile (391-square-kilometer) Woolsey Fire in the Los Angeles area was almost entirely contained after three people were killed and more than 1,600 structures destroyed.

In Northern California, the wildfire that started two weeks ago has torched an area in Butte County about the size of Chicago — nearly 240 square miles (622 square kilometers) — and was 85 percent contained.

A spokesman for the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services says state officials will start removing hazardous waste from the burn area “beginning next week.”

“This will take several months,” Eric Lamoureux said. “That ash is still toxic.”

Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made a surprise visit to weary firefighters on Wednesday, providing encouragement and helping serve breakfast.

“I wanted to let you know how much I appreciate all the work that you do,” he told firefighters during a brief speech.

The 71-year-old actor also slammed President Donald Trump for blaming the wildfire on poor forest management. He told firefighters, “you are tough to not only fight the fires, but you are tough to listen to all this crap.”

Officials said 563 people were still unaccounted for. A spokeswoman for ANDE, the company doing rapid DNA tests on remains, said Wednesday the family members of missing people who live outside the state can give a DNA swab at their local sheriff’s office to be sent to California.

The National Weather Service issued a flash flood watch for Paradise and nearby communities and for those areas charred by wildfires earlier this year in Lake, Shasta, Trinity and Mendocino counties.

Butte County officials said all students will be able to return to school on Dec. 3.

“We’re on it,” said Deputy Superintendent Butte County Office of Education Mary Sakuma.

___

Associated Press journalists Haven Daley in Chico, Olga R. Rodriguez in San Francisco, and Christopher Weber and John Antczak in Los Angeles contributed to this report.