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</figure>The state House representative could add to progressive gains this cycle.
Pennsylvania House Rep. Summer Lee could become the latest addition to the Squad if she wins her Democratic primary on Tuesday.
Lee, one of six challengers backed by the Justice Democrats, a progressive PAC, is running to fill an open seat in Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District vacated by Rep. Mike Doyle. It’s a safe Democratic seat that includes Pittsburgh and the surrounding suburbs, and it’s poised to be a key pickup for progressives, should Lee win her race this week.
Lee is currently up against four other candidates in the race, including attorney Steve Irwin, who’s backed by Doyle and many establishment Democrats in the area. Lee, meanwhile, has the support of local progressives as well as national leaders like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
There’s little publicly available polling on the race, but a recent poll from Emily’s List, which endorsed Lee, has her leading the field (many voters in the survey, however, were still undecided). If Lee were to win, her victory would help progressive Democrats continue to build power in Congress: In 2020, candidates including Reps. Cori Bush (D-MO) and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) won their races, bolstering the party’s left flank.
Given Austin city council member Greg Casar’s primary win in Texas’ 35th Congressional District, a safe seat for Democrats, a Lee win would give House progressives at least two new members. And with increased numbers comes increased sway over policy, or, if the GOP retakes the House, greater ability to shape how Democrats respond to a Republican majority.
Gains in the progressives’ bloc in 2020 enabled the group to have more leverage over what policies to focus on and the timing of key votes this term. For example, progressives initially delayed a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill in order to push consideration of social spending legislation. In 2022, progressives are eyeing more victories in places like Pennsylvania, Texas, and New York — all of which could help them strengthen their hand even further.
Lee is a progressive in the mold of many Squad members: She backs more ambitious policies including Medicare-for-all, a Green New Deal, and packing the Supreme Court. She has emphasized, too, her own experiences with issues like air pollution, and the need for systemic change in order to promote environmental justice.
Irwin, Lee’s main competitor, has taken a more moderate stance and stressed his commitment to working with Democratic leadership and building broad coalitions to pass policy. The difference has been evident on subjects like climate: While Lee has focused on promoting a transition to renewable energy, for example, Irwin was the only candidate in a recent debate to talk about the ongoing role of natural gas.
“In a lot of ways, that race ends up reflecting many of the same clashes that are visible in the rest of the Democratic Party,” said Allegheny College political science professor Tarah Williams. “There’s a big conversation between the two campaigns about how much compromise needs to happen in order to get policy achieved.”
Recent tension in the race has centered on millions in outside spending on political ads, including those paid for by AIPAC’s super PAC, a pro-Israel group backing Irwin. The AIPAC- affiliated group has expressed concern that Lee wasn’t supportive enough of Israel, something she has pushed back on, while defending past remarks she’s made about the country’s treatment of Palestinians.
The ads, which have been widely criticized by local leaders as well as Sanders, question Lee’s backing of President Joe Biden. Notably, however, they leave out the fact that Lee campaigned for Biden in the general election.
In addition to being the only woman and elected official running in this primary, Lee would be the first Black woman to represent Pennsylvania in Congress if elected. Her candidacy builds on a burgeoning progressive movement that she has helped foster in western Pennsylvania.
“There is a movement there in Allegheny County to move on from the old guard of leadership that’s been there for decades,” says Justice Democrats’ spokesperson Usamah Andrabi.
A Lee victory would help grow progressive power in Congress, adding to recent wins in this cycle and last.
In addition to Casar’s win, progressive immigration attorney Jessica Cisneros was able to force Rep. Henry Cuellar into a runoff for Texas’ 28th Congressional District. Justice Democrats have also backed organizers Kina Collins in Illinois’ Seventh District, Rana Abdelhamid in New York’s 12th District, and Odessa Kelly in Tennessee’s Seventh District in upcoming primaries.
Six new staunch progressives could seriously strengthen progressives’ influence in Congress. This term, progressives were able to have more sway given Democrats’ narrow majority in the House. They’ve used that power to push for more expansive stimulus checks and to bargain for more aggressive prescription drug legislation.
If Republicans retake House control, as they’re widely expected to, progressive power would be somewhat diminished, as Democrats would no longer control the agenda. However, they’d likely play a key role in leading Democrats’ anti-GOP messaging, and helping to counter investigations of the Biden administration as well. In the past, progressives were among the first to begin pushing for Trump’s impeachment and among the most vocal opponents of policies like family separations.
With greater numbers, progressives would be able to mount even stronger rhetorical campaigns to push back against a GOP-controlled House. They’d also be able to put more pressure on party leaders to take these types of stances.
New progressives like Lee could also bolster the subgroup of more liberal members within the Progressive Caucus, known as the Squad. Currently, the Squad includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush. If all six Justice Democrat candidates win this cycle, its size could double, giving them more sway as a bloc within a bloc.
With the exception of Cisneros, the challengers are also in safe Democratic districts, meaning they could have a long-term impact on the ideology and priorities of the Democratic Party if reelected. “The bigger the bloc, the bigger the potential you have to have weight in the Democratic Party, the stronger your negotiating power,” says Leah Greenberg, a co-executive director of progressive advocacy group Indivisible.
In the past, members of the Squad have broken from the broader Progressive Caucus membership. When a vote was held on a bipartisan infrastructure bill last year that decoupled it from a vote on a larger social spending bill that included a tax cut for families with children and funding to fight climate change, for instance, all six lawmakers voted against it. Progressives hope that in similar situations in the future, those six lawmakers will have even more company.
“I think about all the communities in Pennsylvania that have not seen the type of representation that I’m looking to bring and to offer — folks who will value and really lift up poor working folks, and Black and brown folks, and I recognize there’s a cohort of people who’ve already been fighting for that,” Lee said in an MSNBC interview. “And it would be an honor to join that.”
The billionaire and public health leader answers five of Recode’s questions about pandemic prevention and economic disparities.
The WHO estimates that the Covid-19 pandemic has killed almost 15 million people worldwide — not just from the virus, but as an indirect result of the crisis, such as being unable to get other kinds of medical care because hospital systems were overburdened. But it didn’t have to be so catastrophic. Experts say its impacts were exacerbated by a number of factors: The world was ill-prepared for a pandemic, many countries were slow to develop and provide access to Covid-19 tests, and economic inequality made everything worse.
Low- and middle-income countries are still struggling to access lifesaving vaccines, putting these populations at continued risk of contracting the virus. In the US, one preprint paper found that working-class Americans were five times more likely to die from Covid-19 than college-educated Americans. Overall, the pandemic has also widened global income inequality, in part because rich countries have been able to provide more economic relief to their residents while poorer nations have had far fewer tools to recover.
Two years after Covid-19 was declared a pandemic, Bill Gates has written How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, a book that outlines how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation co-founder and global health expert believes the world should prepare for future health crises — including how we can tackle the enduring problem of economic inequality that puts already-vulnerable people at even greater risk. In the US, poverty rates fell in 2021 due to pandemic relief spending like stimulus checks and the expanded child tax credit. But since then, poverty has risen again, with child poverty rates sharply rising after the expiration of the expanded child tax credit, which gave many parents a monthly cash benefit from July to December of 2021.
Here are five ideas Gates explored with Recode over email about how to factor in economic inequality when preparing for the next pandemic. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
In your book, you mention how people are wary of the great influence wealthy philanthropists have today — while also acknowledging that many governments didn’t adequately step up when the pandemic hit.
How can we ensure that the government is able to step up next time? Do you see it as mostly a matter of funding the right agencies (and would that require higher taxes)? Is it a matter of political will? Is it something else?
I’m hopeful that after the past two years — with millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars of economic impact — every country now understands that they need to be more prepared at a government level. Philanthropy can help test new ideas and mobilize resources faster than the government, but pandemic prevention needs to be funded and supported for the long term, and it requires global collaboration. The world can’t and shouldn’t rely on philanthropy to lead that.
In my book, I write that governments need to prepare for outbreaks and prevent pandemics the way they fund preventative measures and practice for fires and earthquakes. To end preventable diseases and prevent emerging diseases from becoming pandemics, governments will need to increase their investments in R&D for vaccines and therapeutics, integrated disease monitoring, and well-funded multilateral organizations, like the World Health Organization (WHO). They’ll also need to make bigger investments to improve primary health care in all countries.
The natural place for government funding to go is the WHO, since it was created to coordinate global response to health issues. Philanthropy can’t be a voting member of the WHO. It’s up to each member country to decide that the WHO needs to focus on pandemic prevention. But right now, the WHO is not funded to do a lot of work on pandemics. It doesn’t have a significant full- time staff. It doesn’t require countries to go through drills. That needs to change if the world wants to get serious about making Covid the last pandemic.
Do you think there will always be a need and a space for private philanthropy to coexist with governments? What, if anything, about the relationship between the private and public sectors needs to change? How do we get there? Who needs to change it?
Governments play the most critical role in protecting people from infectious diseases and other serious health risks. But I do believe there’s a role for philanthropy to play — for example, we can fund initiatives that governments or the private sector can’t or won’t. Most global health issues, like malaria, need to be solved outside of traditional market-based systems, because they’re never going to be profitable for the private sector. During the Covid pandemic, global collaboration between scientists, philanthropists, and global health institutions (like the ACT Accelerator) developed, tested, and deployed safe and effective vaccines faster than ever before. That’s a great example of how the three sectors can work together to solve these big problems.
How might public policies need to change so we’re better prepared for the next pandemic, and what role do you see billionaires/other wealthy philanthropists playing in that?
One of the biggest tragedies that the world learned through Covid is that governments have not invested enough in the tools they need to effectively prepare for a pandemic. Countries need to step up and develop policies and invest more in enhancing disease monitoring, funding R&D, and strengthening health systems. What I’m trying to do, and the foundation is doing, is to help catalyze new ideas, particularly ones that will help give equitable access to lifesaving tools for people in lower- income countries, who are often left behind as new health innovations come to market. We also play a role in drawing in the private sector by helping companies secure financing to produce tests, therapeutics, and vaccines for low- and middle-income countries.
The public discourse around Covid-19 has been extremely polarized and politicized. What’s your takeaway on the role misinformation versus good, reliable information plays in public health outcomes?
I’m concerned about the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories about public health because it’s causing people to question their own doctors and to question science. It’s understandable that people are looking for easy answers because it’s been a very scary two years. And I think most people are worried about their own health and the health of their families and loved ones. They’re coming from the right place, but they’re being pulled in by false information.
How big a role would you say economic inequality plays in disease outcome? It has impeded vaccine and drug access in low- to middle-income countries, but we’ve seen even within the US that Black and brown communities were some of the hardest hit by Covid-19.
How do we make sure economic inequality isn’t such a major factor in surviving the next pandemic?
Melinda and I started the Gates Foundation more than two decades ago because we were horrified by the inequity in health around the world. There has been phenomenal progress since then, but even today, a child born in Nigeria is about 28 times more likely to die before her 5th birthday than a child born in the United States.
When Covid emerged, these existing health inequities helped it become a global catastrophe. In my book, I suggest a plan that includes three key measures. First, we need to enhance disease monitoring by developing early warning systems that catch new viruses and outbreaks coordinated across borders, and the world needs to stand up the GERM team, a paid, full-time group committed to pandemic prevention. [Editor’s note: The Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization team is a permanent disease outbreak watchdog group that Gates’s book proposes we create.]
Second, we need to invest more in R&D for next-generation vaccines and effective treatments, and ensure manufacturing capacity in every region of the world. And we have to strengthen global health systems by investing in primary health care, especially in low- and middle-income countries, but also within low-income communities in wealthy countries.
There are programs that focus on equitable health outcomes, like the Global Fund and Global Polio Eradication Initiative, Gavi, the Global Financing Facility, and CEPI. Fully funding those organizations would make a big impact in health equity around the world. [Editor’s note: These are all global health programs that the Gates Foundation has funded. The Global Fund is a public-private partnership that finances the fight against AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative is a WHO-led public-private partnership that seeks to immunize all children at risk for polio. Gavi is a public-private partnership that strives to improve vaccine access in low-income countries. The Global Financing Facility is a World Bank-led public-private partnership that focuses on promoting the health and nutrition of women and children. And CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, is a public-private partnership that invests in vaccine research.]
Opposition see incremental change as putting “old wine in a new bottle.”
Sri Lanka’s president has appointed a new prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, a familiar face in the role, as the country’s economic crisis balloons into a full-blown political disaster and violent conflagration between security forces, supporters of the current president, and protesters demanding radical political and economic change.
Wickremesinghe returns to office after five previous stints as the country’s prime minister; he’s replacing former Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, who, along with his brother President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, have overseen the country’s economic collapse. Mahinda resigned last week amid increasingly violent protests, during which nine people were killed and more than three hundred injured, according to Reuters.
As Vox’s Natasha Ishak explained in April, Sri Lanka’s economy is in shambles largely due to the country’s default on about $50 billion worth of foreign loans, for the first time in its history as an independent nation. The past three years have seen successive hits to Sri Lanka’s foreign tourism sector — a series of church bombings in 2019, the Covid-19 pandemic, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — which previously brought in about $4.4 billion annually and was a leading economic driver. Those crises, exacerbated by the Rajapaksa’s financial mismanagement, have led to a critical lack of goods including milk, fuel, food, and medicine, and extended power power cuts — leading, in turn, to widespread protests and spiraling into political chaos.
The Rajapaksas are a political dynasty in Sri Lanka, and their reach in the government has been significant; in addition to Mahinda and Gotabaya, their brother served until April 4 as the finance minister. Gotabaya, the president, fired his younger brother, Basil, and replaced other cabinet officials at the time, but protesters and politicians alike weren’t impressed; Udaya Gammanpila, head of the Pivithuru Hela Urumaya party, wrote on Twitter that the switch-up was reminiscent of “old wine in a new bottle,” according to Reuters.
Of course, Sri Lanka’s economic problems didn’t start with the current Rajapaksa government, as the International Crisis Group’s Alan Keenan explained in an April piece:
“Sri Lanka’s economic disaster has deep roots: the country has long lived beyond its means — borrowing too much and taxing too little — and produced below its potential. But the Rajapaksa administration’s gross negligence on economic matters since it came to power in November 2019 has significantly aggravated the island’s chronic problems.”
However, the dynasty has been a big part of the problem since Mahinda was first elected president in 2005, as a 2018 piece from the New York Times describes. Over the past decade, the country took out a number of loans, including about $5 billion from China. Through its so-called Belt and Road initiative, China has invested in a number of infrastructure projects in more than 100 countries around the world; ostensibly, such projects would both create jobs and in Sri Lanka’s case, provide a port on a bustling trade route. However, as Ishak pointed out in her piece, the Hambantota port project was eventually turned over to China as collateral when the Sri Lankan government was unable to pay back or renegotiate the loans — or successfully complete the project, due, at least in part, to rampant corruption.
Gotabaya was elected president in 2019, and the Rajapaksa dynasty was again in charge; that meant more ambitious infrastructure projects, despite increasing foreign debt and dwindling foreign currency reserves to import essential goods, due to the lack of foreign income from tourism and other sectors. Gotabaya also slashed taxes when he came to power, inhibiting the government’s ability to purchase foreign currency reserves. On top of it all, a 2021 ban on imported chemical fertilizers, which was intended to save those foreign currency reserves decimated the agricultural sector.
What has resulted, Keenan writes, is “Sri Lanka’s worst economic crisis in nearly 75 years of independence.” The protests, he wrote in April, “have now morphed into a nationwide uprising,” despite the Rajapaksa government’s “reputation for political repression.” Protesters even forced Mahinda to flee his estate, Temple Trees, and tender his resignation on Monday after they attempted to breach the compound.
After halfhearted attempts to form a new government in April and amid increasing threats to his rule, Gotabaya appointed Wickremesinghe to take over his brother’s office; he was sworn in on Thursday and first served as prime minister in 1993, under President DB Wijetunga.
Wickremesinghe is the product of families long active in civil service and the political class, stretching back even before independence, as Al Jazeera reports. Trained as a lawyer, Wickremesinghe is now the head of Sri Lanka’s United National Party, and has held several government posts, including deputy foreign minister and minister of industries. In that post, Wickremesinghe brought in foreign investors — perhaps a crucial selling point for his present appointment, as his relationships with India and Western countries could help in negotiating Sri Lanka out of its current economic turmoil.
However, as the BBC points out, Wickremesinghe has never served a complete term as prime minister, and is perceived as being quite close to the Rajapaksa clan despite being in the opposition party — even, some critics say, protecting them when they lost power in
In the face of compounded economic crises, violent protests, and entrenched government corruption, the future of the Sri Lankan government is murky at best. As of right now, protesters are demanding that the remaining Rajapaksa family members — including Gotabaya, the president, whose office entrance protesters have been occupying for the past month — be removed from government. Many also see Wickremesinghe’s appointment as a slap in the face and emblematic of Gotabaya’s longstanding refusal to admit to his government’s role in the crisis.
According to Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, the executive director of the Center for Policy Alternatives, a think tank based in Colombo, Wickremesinghe has a massive task ahead of him if he is to steer the country out of its present crisis.
“Mr. Wickremesinghe has to focus on both the political and economic dimensions of our crisis of governance,” he told Vox via email. “Neglect of the political dimensions will undermine the economic.”
Chief among the issues that Wickremesinghe needs to address is securing assistance from the International Monetary Fund to purchase basic goods, Saravanamuttu said. The IMF can issue Rapid Financing Instruments, or RFI, to countries in need of immediate assistance due to natural disaster or other forces outside of its control, but Sri Lanka’s circumstances don’t fall under the typical remit of an RFI. Finance Minister Ali Sabry, who replaced Basil Rajapaksa, formally requested assistance from the IMF in April, and has been working with the IMF to attempt to broker some sort of agreement; however, as he said in an address to Parliament earlier in May, any agreement will be based on the restructuring of the nation’s debt and would take six months to put in motion.
But the economic and political crises are so deeply intertwined that, Saravanamuttu said, solving one wouldn’t ease the other; both issues have to be addressed for Sri Lanka to recover. “[Wickremesinghe] has to ensure that we get the bridging finance and the agreement with the IMF as well as clip the powers of the executive presidency and set a date for Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign and for the office of the executive presidency to be abolished,” he said. Wickremesinghe is, according to the Associated Press, meeting with diplomats from Japan, the US, the European Union, Germany, China, and India to float the idea of an aid consortium to help bail the country out quickly, but the political dimensions have yet to be substantially addressed.
As of now, Gotabaya has expressed no intention to resign his post and retains the broad executive powers instituted under his rule in October 2020; this includes the power to make an array of important appointments and to dissolve the parliament any time after the halfway point of its five-year term. Although Gotabaya has floated the idea of curtailing those powers and on Wednesday reiterated his intention to do so in a speech to the nation, that has yet to move forward. As of Saturday, he retains his office and appointed four new cabinet ministers, all belonging to his Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna party, in a bid for stability until a new cabinet can be formed. A strict nationwide curfew, imposed on Monday, continues, as do orders for security services to shoot on site anyone deemed to be participating in acts of vandalism or arson.
But protesters, both in the streets and online, are still demanding Gotabaya’s resignation, which Saravanamuttu said is crucial for the country’s future.
“The demands of the people are for the president to go and failure to address this will be to the detriment of the country.”
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You could accurately say that you suck a mean dick
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But it sure smells like a foot
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“Oh, that’s just the way my mother always did it. You’ll have to ask her.” “Granny”, asks Susie the next time her grandmother visits. “Why do you and mommy always cut the ends off the sausages before you put them in the skillet?” “Oh, that’s just the way my mother always did it. “You’ll have to ask her.” “Great Granny”, asks Susie the next time they visit her slightly senile grandmother in the nursing home. “Why do you, Granny and Mommy always cut the ends off the sausages before you put them in the skillet?” “Oh for fuck sake”, yells Great Granny. “Are they still using that small goddamn frying pan??!!”
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Turns off the Playstation and goes to bed.
Too soon?
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I can feel it.
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