NEWS
James Talarico urges Paul Quinn graduates to be ‘cornerstones’ for change
Democratic Senate hopeful uses commencement speech at historic Black college to emphasize faith, service as he continues to court Black voters.
SPEECH
There’s something broken in America.
Our economy is broken. Our politics are broken. Even our relationships with each other feel broken.
That’s because the most powerful people in the world want it that way.
The biggest divide in this country is not left vs. right. It’s top vs. bottom. Billionaires want us looking left and right at each other instead of looking up at them.
The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and power. So their cable news networks and their social media algorithms tear us apart.
They divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion so we don’t notice they’re defunding our schools, gutting our healthcare, and cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends. It’s the oldest strategy in the world: divide and conquer.
But we will not be conquered.
We’re underdogs in this fight. We’re going up against these billionaire mega-donors and their puppet politicians. We’re going up against a rigged system. And we’re going up against a lot of money.
But I’m a former middle school teacher — I don’t scare easily. And Texans don’t scare easily.
My granddad was a Baptist preacher in South Texas. He taught me that we follow a barefoot rabbi who gave us two commandments: love God and love neighbor.
Because there is no love of God without love of neighbor. Every single person bears the image of the sacred; every single person is holy — not just the neighbors who look like me or pray like me or vote like me.
Those billionaires want to keep us from seeing all that we have in common. They want to keep us from realizing there’s far more that unites us than divides us.
Because once we do, we’ll come together — across party, across race, across gender, across religion — to fix what’s broken in our country and take back power for ourselves and our communities.
2,000 years ago, when the powerful few rigged the system, that barefoot rabbi walked into the seat of power and flipped over the tables of injustice. To those who love our country, to those who love our neighbors:
It’s time to start flipping tables.
James is an eighth-generation Texan, former middle school teacher, and Presbyterian seminarian. As a state representative, he’s led the fight against the billionaire mega-donors and puppet politicians who have taken over Texas.
Now, he’s running for U.S. Senate to take his fight against corruption to Washington and win power back for working people.
Before I was a politician, I was a public school teacher. I taught sixth grade Language Arts at Rhodes Middle School on the westside of San Antonio.
The westside is a beautiful, historic Mexican-American neighborhood. It’s also one of the poorest zip codes in Texas. Every day, my students struggled heroically to overcome poverty and systems designed to hold them back.
Growing up, I saw that same fight in my mother — a preacher’s daughter from Laredo who left home at 19 and met my birth father, whose drinking problem sometimes led to violence.
One night he became abusive again, but that night my mother’s love rose to meet it. She packed all our stuff into her little Ford Escort and took me to the hotel where she worked. The manager let us stay in one of the rooms until we found a small apartment of our own in East Austin.
Like my students, my mom was a fighter. And she passed that fighting spirit along to me.
I first ran for the Texas House in 2018 to fight for my constituents — people like my mom and my students. It was a district no one thought we could win, but together we flipped a district Donald Trump had won just two years earlier
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As a legislator, I’ve passed major legislation to fund our neighborhood schools, expand job opportunities for young adults, and lower the cost of child care, housing, and prescription drugs.
I’ve led the fight against the billionaire mega-donors that have rigged the system against working Texas families. And I’m the only member of the Texas Legislature who has never taken corporate PAC money.
Now, as those same billionaire mega-donors take over the federal government, we need more fighters in Washington who will take power back for working people.
That’s what my mom showed me on the eastside of Austin. That’s what my students showed me on the westside of San Antonio. And together, that is what Texans will show the country in 2026.
“NY Fed report says Americans pay for almost all of Trump's tariffs”
“Americans are shouldering almost all of President Donald Trump’s import tax surge, a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said on Thursday.
The bank said 90% of the tariffs imposed by the president on imported goods are borne by American consumers and companies. The report pushes back against the Trump administration’s argument that the levies are paid by foreigners.
The report evaluated how tariffs impacted the economy last year, when the average of the taxes went from 2.6% to 13%. The report noted that the average level shifted over the course of the year and was at its highest in April and May, when Trump pumped up tariffs on Chinese goods to 125% before lowering them back to a still heady 113%.”
“The authors based their analysis on how tariffs worked in the first Trump term. When faced with these types of taxes, “our past work found that foreign exporters did not lower their prices at all, so the full incidence of the tariffs was borne by the U.S. That is, there was 100% pass-through from tariffs into import prices.”
The paper said that between January and August of last year Americans took 94% of the hit from Trump’s tariffs. During September and October, that ebbed to 92%, settling to 86% in November.”
This is what happens when conservative enablers determine our leaders in government, a never-ending cycle of self destruction. You have family owned farms that has been operating for multiple decades and handed over to several generations contemplating bankruptcy, to local distributors and manufacturing, especially to ordinary Americans who are buying basic essentials coming from overseas.
These companies simply add these tariffs imposed on them to the cost of their products, and Americans end up paying for these tariffs.
Welcome to PLANET GREED: Securing Tax Cuts for Billionaires While Cutting Pensions of Federal Workers, Priorities of Today's Conservatives
It took intense lobbying from President Donald Trump, an all-nighter, and a vote on a bill for which many people did not yet have a clear grasp of the final changes, but House Republicans got it done this week. They passed their version of the “one big, beautiful bill,” a behemoth that pairs tax cuts with new provisions that will push people off Medicaid and food assistance.
Low-income Americans will feel the effect of changes to aid programs, while the wealthy will see most of the windfall from tax cuts, according to multiple assessments.
Democrats argue the trade-off is cruel, but Republicans say it’s necessary to deliver on Trump’s economic agenda and to root out waste and fraud, protecting the programs for those who need them.
What the House passed is an opening bid as the process now shifts to the US Senate, which must pass its own version of a tax and spending bill.
Senators will be gauging the public reaction to the House bill and what critics have said is a reverse transfer of wealth, much of which will be put on the nation’s credit card in the form of deficit spending.
Here’s a look at how the “one big, beautiful bill” takes benefits from lower-income Americans in order to cut taxes, primarily for the wealthy.
CBO’s initial estimates found that the package’s tax measures would increase the deficit by $3.8 trillion over a decade, while other provisions would cut nearly $1 trillion in federal support for Medicaid and food stamps over that period.
Medicaid, which provides health insurance to low-income Americans, would face the largest cuts in the package, with CBO projecting a nearly $700 billion reduction in federal spending. Meanwhile, food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, would face a $267 billion cut in federal support.
The national debt is more than $37 trillion. How much would this bill add to that incredible figure?
