Continuing his promotion of issues and solutions that are too often ignored by corporate media outlets, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is turning once again to the internet and social media to air a town hall dedicated to the climate crisis and renewable energy.

On Monday, December 3, Sanders will host a town hall featuring climate scientists and young climate action advocates to discuss progressive proposals that would help to curb the human-driven warming of the globe that’s been blamed for helping fuel the wildfires currently engulfing parts of California, increasingly destructive hurricanes, and rising sea levels.

“We need millions of people all over this country to stand up and demand fundamental changes in our energy policy in order to protect our kids and our grandchildren and the planet,” Sanders told the Huffington Post.

Like his previous town halls on Medicare for All and income inequality, the senator’s special program on the climate crisis has been made necessary by the dearth of coverage the country’s most-watched news networks give the issue on a daily basis—even as the world’s top climate experts have confirmed what is already obvious to anyone paying attention to the changes in the climate in recent years: that humans are already experiencing major effects of the climate crisis and that fossil fuel emissions must be sharply reduced immediately to save the planet.

As Common Dreams has reported, only seven percent of cable news reports discussed the climate crisis when reporting on record high temperatures in the first half of 2018, and only 10 out of 50 major newspapers reported on climate change at all in that time.

“This is an issue of huge consequence and you would think that ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox would be talking about this every day, having the debate, ‘What do we do? Where do we go?'” Sanders told the Huffington Post. “Clearly you aren’t seeing that debate.”

RoseAnn DeMoro, former executive director of National Nurses United, expressed approval of Sanders’ commitment to telling Americans the truth about the climate crisis.

The town hall will be shown on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube starting at 7:00pm EST on the 3rd. Speakers will include Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, one of the young people who filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government arguing that officials have actively endangered Americans by ignoring the climate crisis; 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben; and actress and activist Shailene Woodley.

The town hall comes as popular progressives including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, who will represent districts in New York and Michigan when the new congressional term begins in January, have called on Democratic leaders to embrace a Green New Deal.

The proposal would pour money into green infrastructure, giving millions of Americans jobs as it remakes the U.S. energy sector as one that makes use of renewable sources like solar and wind power instead of depleting the ozone layer oil and gas extraction.

While only 38 percent of American voters rank the climate as one of their top concerns according to a Yale University survey, that same poll suggested that Democratic voters are likely craving news coverage and a political conversation that gives serious consideration to the issue and proposals like the Green New Deal and other proposals backed by Sanders, like one that would shift the United States to 100 percent clean energy by 2050.

Democrats ranked the environment and the climate among the most important political issues that drive them to the polls, behind healthcare and gun legislation.

“The fact that [climate change] is that high among the base of one of our two major political parties is remarkable, because that was not the case even five years ago,” Anthony Leiserowitz, a senior research scientist at Yale, told the Huffington Post.

Sanders’ previous town halls gathered large audiences, with 1.6 million watching his discussion of Medicare for All and 1.7 million tuning in for his program on income inequality.  

After racking up 17 federal investigations into suspected ethics violations and facing likely questioning by a House panel over his conduct in office, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is set to resign from the Trump administration at the end of the year.

President Donald Trump announced Zinke’s impending departure in a tweet Saturday morning, saying that a replacement would be announced next week.

Ethics watchdogs and climate action groups alike applauded the announcement, as Zinke’s close ties to the fossil fuel industry were cause for great concern about his lack of interest in fulfilling the stated mission of the Interior Department, instead giving favorable treatment to oil and gas companies.

“Zinke’s days of plundering our lands and enriching himself and his friends are over,” said Nicole Ghio, a program manager at Friends of the Earth (FOE). “With an average of nearly one federal investigation opened into his conduct in office per month, Zinke’s highly questionable ethics have finally caught up with him. Now, he is just another name on Trump’s list of disgraced cabinet officials, which the Republican-led Congress has failed to hold accountable.”

“Ryan Zinke’s tenure at the Department of Interior was a disaster for public lands of historic proportions,” said Chris Saeger, executive director of the Western Values Project. “The public and Congress should continue their commitment to vigilant oversight over the ongoing ethical abuses at Interior in order to repair its reputation.”

Zinke’s departure may help him avoid the questioning that Rep. Raul Griljalva (D-Ariz.) planned to subject him to in January when he takes the helm of the House Natural Resources Committee, over a land deal that was backed by a Halliburton executive in Zinke’s hometown of Whitefish, Montana.

As Wisconsin Republicans and outgoing Gov. Scott Walker bend over backwards to downplay the scope of their plan to strip crucial authority from Democratic governor-elect Tony Evers, the details of the GOP’s batch of bills—which the state legislature is expected to vote on as early as Tuesday night—show that Wisconsinites are entirely justified in calling the plan an outrageous attack on democracy… and even a full-blown “coup.”

“People are outraged. I’m not sure where that’s coming from right now,” said Wisconsin’s Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, who apparently expects the public to believe that he has no idea why thousands of his angry constituents braved the freezing weather Monday night to protest the GOP plan.

Walker—who has vowed to sign the legislation if it reaches his desk—feigned similar confusion, telling reporters, “For all the talk about reining in power, it really doesn’t.”

Reminding the world that he is, as one critic put it, “a reckless advocate of military force,” the Wall Street Journal revealed on Sunday that President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton “asked the Pentagon to provide the White House with military options to strike Iran last year, generating concern at the Pentagon and State Department.”

“It is imperative that this Congress investigate Bolton’s request for war options and pass legislation placing additional legal and political constraints on the administration’s ability to start a new war of choice with Iran that could haunt America and the region for generations.”
—Jamal Abdi, NIAC

“It definitely rattled people,” a former U.S. official said of the request, which Bolton supposedly made after militants aligned with Iran fired mortars into the diplomatic quarter of Baghdad, Iraq that contains the U.S. Embassy in early September. “People were shocked. It was mind-boggling how cavalier they were about hitting Iran.”

“The Pentagon complied with the National Security Council’s request to develop options for striking Iran,” the Journal reported, citing unnamed officials. “But it isn’t clear if the proposals were provided to the White House, whether Mr. Trump knew of the request, or whether serious plans for a U.S. strike against Iran took shape at that time.”

The Journal‘s report, which comes just days after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered an “arrogant tirade” of a speech vilifying Iran, sparked immediate alarm among critics of the Trump administration’s biggest warmongers—who, over the past several months, have been accused of fomenting unrest in Iran and laying the groundwork for war.

Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, called the news “a reminder that when it comes to Iran, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo are batshit insane.”

Trita Parsi, founder of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), tweeted, “Make no mistake: Bolton is the greatest threat to the security of the United States!” Parsi, an expert on U.S.-Iranian relations and longtime critic of Bolton, called for his immediate ouster over the request detailed in Journal‘s report.

As Democratic Ways and Means chairman Rep. Richard Neal (Mass.) continues to deliberately slow-walk efforts to obtain President Donald Trump’s tax returns to avoid appearing “too partisan,” a coalition of progressive groups launched a campaign on Thursday to pressure Neal to stop the delays, listen to the overwhelming majority of the American public, and request Trump’s tax returns “immediately.”

“The American people have a right to know about how the commander-in-chief’s actions in the White House have been influenced by his foreign business entanglements.”
—Sean Eldridge, Stand Up America

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“Democrats pledged to obtain Donald Trump’s tax returns as part of their oversight agenda, and we will hold them accountable for that promise,” said Maura Quint, executive director of Tax March, one of the groups leading the pressure campaign. “There is no need to slow-walk this. We have played this game for years, and Donald Trump will not willingly release his tax returns. The only solution is for Chairman Neal to request his tax returns immediately.”

Also organized by Indivisible and Stand Up for America, the grassroots push comes as Neal is facing backlash for hesitating to take the first step of obtaining the president’s personal and business tax returns: sending a request to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

To help expedite this process, the progressive coalition sent Neal a pre-formatted request that is ready to deliver to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig.

As the groups launched their pressure campaign on Thursday, Neal signaled to reporters that he has no plans to heed grassroots demands to speed up the process.

“This has to be part of a carefully prepared and documented legal case, and it’s not subject to just whim and the emotion of the moment,” Neal said. “You can’t step on your tongue. We’re in this precarious period of time where the American people aren’t quite sure what to believe about many, many issues, and this rush for clicks is inconsistent with the way that I’ve served.”

But in a statement on Thursday, Sean Eldridge—president of Stand Up America—pointed out that “Chairman Neal has had two whole years of the Trump presidency to prepare for this moment.”

“Enough with the delays,” Eldridge said. “The American people have a right to know about how the commander-in-chief’s actions in the White House have been influenced by his foreign business entanglements, including his secret negotiations with the Kremlin, and how his corrupt tax plan put money in his own pocket.”

In addition to their pre-formatted letter, the groups are also working to drive calls and emails to Neal and other members of the Ways and Means Committee with the goal of pressuring lawmakers to speed up the process of obtaining the tax returns that Trump has refused to release voluntarily, flouting a 40-year presidential tradition.

“As the newly appointed Chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, it is your constitutional duty and responsibility to conduct effective oversight of President Donald Trump and his administration,” the groups wrote in a letter to Neal. “Thus, on behalf of our organizations, respective members, and the more 125,000 Americans who took to the streets across the country to demand transparency from President Trump, we believe that it is vital that Congress performs its duties of oversight and obtain President Trump’s personal and business tax returns immediately.”

“This request is not about partisan politics, but is rooted in an attempt to understand how President Trump’s numerous conflicts of interests and significant financial entanglements are influencing the policies of this administration,” they continued. “This is also not a request that can be relegated to the back-burner—it is necessary to restore democratic norms of transparency and accountability.”

In the second video featuring Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to make headlines in less than 24 hours, the first-term congresswoman called for major systemic changes to address the climate crisis and suggested taxing ultra wealthy Americans around 70 percent to help pay for it—declaring, “if that’s what radical means, call me a radical.”

The preview of Anderson Cooper’s forthcoming interview with Ocasio-Cortez, which is set to air at 7pm ET Sunday on CBS‘s “60 Minutes,” quickly caught the attention of both advocates and critics of implementing a progressive taxation scheme that, as she put, could force the rich “to start paying their fair share in taxes.”

Watch:

According to CBS News, in the interview Ocasio-Cortez charges that hiking taxes on the very rich could help pay for the Green New Deal—an increasingly popular proposal among the American public and Democrats in Congress that would pair efforts to curb anthropogenic global warming with policies to create a more just economy.

A foundational goal of the Green New Deal championed by Ocasio-Cortez is fully eliminating fossil fuels and carbon emissions within the next 12 years, in line with recent demands from international climate scientists. “It’s going to require a lot of rapid change that we don’t even conceive as possible right now,” she told Cooper, but “what is the problem with trying to push our technological capacities to the furthest extent possible?”

As Ocasio-Cortez pointed out:

After Cooper suggested that such a plan is considered “radical” in the context of the current U.S. political system, she responded: “I think that it only has ever been radicals that have changed this country. Abraham Lincoln made the radical decision to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the radical decision to embark on establishing programs like Social Security. That is radical.”

Expanding on her remarks in a tweet that included the video on Friday morning, she added: “Sometimes we take for granted exactly how radical ideas like Social Security, the VA, and public schooling really are: that we will care for our elders, provide healthcare, and educate *all* children in America free of cost at the point of service.”

In a Twitter thread, Michael Linden, a Roosevelt Institute fellow who also serves as managing director of policy and research at the Hub Project, welcomed Ocasio-Cortez’s tax suggestions, breaking down why she is “on very solid ground here,” as “there is a lot of evidence that from an economic and fiscal perspective, we’d be way better off with top rates approaching 70 [percent].”

“The basic question we should ask: Will the investment financed by the higher tax rates generate more good than the lower rate would?” Linden posed. His conclusion? Yes, raising taxes on the rich would have a net positive impact. As he put it, “There will be many on the right and in the media who will mock @AOC for calling for tax rates at 60 or 70, but they’re the ones who are economically illiterate. They’re basing their view on an outdated and ideological understanding of taxation, not on the best research.”

Responding to Politico‘s reporting on the video, John Iadarola of The Young Turks offered an alternative headline on Twitter, acknowledging that Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal is the “same top tax rate U.S. had for literally decades during a time of unprecedented, historic growth.”

Others responded to Cooper’s apparent surprise at the congresswoman’s so-called radical suggestions by noting that he is the son of fashion designer and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, a descendant of railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. While Cooper has said, “I don’t believe in inheriting money,” Town & Country reported in 2017 that independent of his family fortune, he makes “$11 million a year and is worth about $100 million.”

As for the other video that provoked recent headlines—which shows Ocasio-Cortez dancing on a rooftop as a Boston University student, borrowing moves from the famous ’80s film The Breakfast Club—the congresswoman responded early Friday afternoon to the failed right-wing effort to embarrass her:

This post has been updated with comment from John Iadarola, Kate Aronoff, and Adam Johnson.