Democracy Forward Long Island

Insiders Secretly Turn on MAGA-Curious CBS Boss Over ’60 Minutes’ Mayhem As Bari Weiss torches a television institution, Paramount executives are quietly fuming, and some want her gone.

🌈 ✨ 🗳️ HAPPY JUNE 🏳️‍🌈💖🏳️‍⚧️

There are so many ways to get involved & informed this month. Check the link in our bio & the activists calendar 🗓️ for more & sign up links for everything.

I am deeply honored to receive the endorsement of Suffolk County Legislator Rebecca Sanin who represents LD 16.

“Chris Gallant understands what it means to serve. He’s spent his life putting his community and country first. With his experience as a veteran, National Guardsman, firefighter, and union leader, I know in Congress Chris will deliver results, strengthen our communities, and always put people before politics.”

I’m grateful for Rebecca’s support and for her shared commitment to fighting for working families, protecting our communities, and delivering real results for Long Island. Together, we’re building a campaign focused on service, integrity, and putting people over politics.

We’re rallying before the legislative session ends to urge Governor Hochul and the Legislature to return to Albany and finish the job by passing the New York for All Act (S2235/A3506).

Ending formal agreements is an important step, but it is not enough. New Yorkers still need clear protections that fully prohibit local and state law enforcement collaboration with ICE and CBP in all its forms.

Join us in outside the Nassau Executive Building TONIGHT (5/29)

1550 Franklin Ave., Mineola, NY 11501 and raise your voice:

NO LOOPHOLES
NO COLLUSION WITH ICE
PASS NY4ALL NOW

Bring signs. Bring friends. Bring your voice.

Together, we can demand real protections for immigrant New Yorkers and their families.

A core principle behind all Indivisible events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values.

📣🗣️ We’re closing out May with a packed schedule 🗓️ 👀

Don’t forget to click the 🔗 in our bio ➡️ head to the activists calendar for sign up links & more details 🩵

📣 We’re back with more ✨LI CIVICS 101 ✨This time we’re talking town government 🗣️

Do you know who your Town Supervisor is? 👀

Keep swiping to learn more 🩵

In response to calls to pass the NY universal health care bill I have some serious concerns and questions. Let me start by saying I love the idea of creating universal coverage - and was disappointed when it didn’t happen under Obama Care. Having worked with government for decades I am an incrementalist - building on what works especially when it comes to innovating giant publicly operated systems like health care.

First, where is the updated, detailed economic analysis? Rand Corporation conducted one a decade ago that it was woefully underwhelming and full of bogus and wishful assumptions. Let’s see and review the new one, please. The original one cited the elimination of administrative fees as a major cost saving step but how is that possible since someone still needs to process claims, payments, and audit required to manage the administration of care for 20 million people. (Think for a minute about your recent experience at the DMV…hmm, how did that go?)

The administrative, technological and logistical burdens shift from private sector to government which will then likely outsource the job back to private sector since hiring and training thousands of new employees will be expensive, slow and challenging.

And about all those OECD countries that have “universal care” - they are all moving to hybrid (public/private insurance) systems because people don’t want to wait months or longer for elective procedures and the public systems are no longer affordable. And they cannot raise taxes further to pay for increasing costs. And by the way, the oft cited better health outcomes in other countries has less to do with health (disease) care and more to do with allocating a larger share/ratio of investment on socal and human services programs relative to medical expenditures. I see no mention of addressing poverty, behavioral health, mental health, disability, housing, nutrition, child care etc. in the publicity of the proposed universal system.

I am all for single payer - but let’s build incrementally - learning from Medicare which has proven it is effective and efficient.

Finally - please cite ONE example of a town, city, county, or state in the uS that has effectively created a universal system and operated it effectively and we can have a conversation.

And as Trump said (which was probably none of the few truthful statements) “who knew health care was so complicated?” It is. Don’t underestimate the enormous challenges of building and maintaining something that can serve 20 million people. New York doesn’t have a good track record.

In a little more than a year, Lee Zeldin has transformed the E.P.A. from an agency devoted to protecting human health and the environment into one that, more or less openly, sides with polluters. He has packed the E.P.A.’s upper echelons with former industry lobbyists, scrubbed entire databases of information from its website, and dissolved whole departments. Under his leadership, the agency has ditched a long list of rules that industries had objected to, including regulations aimed at cutting Americans’ exposure to arsenic, a known carcinogen; mercury, a potent neurotoxin; and PM2.5, a form of very fine soot that has been shown to cause asthma and lung disease. The E.P.A. has not only abandoned its own efforts to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions; it has stepped in to prevent states from taking action. It has come out officially, if astonishingly, as pro-coal.

Much of the damage that Zeldin has done is, as one former E.P.A. official told Elizabeth Kolbert, “generational.” Since Zeldin took over, the agency’s staff has been cut by 25 per cent; 700 of the people who left held doctoral degrees. The institutional knowledge that these experts took with them isn’t coming back. And the additional pollutants that get spewed into the air and water aren’t going away. According to one report, the E.P.A.’s recent policy changes will send some 1.5 billion extra tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 2030 and some 12 billion extra tons by 2040.

This extra carbon dioxide will still be contributing to hotter temperatures and higher sea levels centuries from now. Forever chemicals will last, if not actually forever, certainly for the foreseeable future. “It is impossible at this point to say how many premature deaths Zeldin’s deregulatory campaign will lead to, but the numbers could easily run to the tens of thousands,” Kolbert writes. Read her report on what Zeldin has done to the E.P.A.—and what it could do to our planet: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/nJZoHP