William Jacob Parsons was arrested recently in North Carolina on charges of appearing at a FEMA office carrying a semi-automatic handgun and making threats against employees.

According to the Washington Post:

Parsons said he was motivated by social media reports claiming that FEMA was withholding supplies from hurricane victims in western North Carolina. Such false claims are part of a wave of misinformation that has hampered hurricane recovery efforts across the Southeast. ‘I viewed it as if our people are sitting here on American soil, and they’re refusing to aid our people,’ Parsons told FOX8.

A ”wave.” The phenomenon sounds beyond human control, like the waves caused by the hurricane itself.

Only a few paragraphs down does the story mention that there is a politics here: “As the country digs out, false claims about the storms have divided the Republican Party. While Donald Trump and his allies have spread the falsehoods, other GOP lawmakers and officials have sought to counter these rumors without directly criticizing the former president.” It turns out that it was Trump and his allies who caused this “wave.” Even here, the reporter needs to emphasize that “other GOP lawmakers and officials have sought to counter these rumors without directly criticizing the former president.” What is not said: these officials, like Republican office holders throughout the country, continue to support Donald Trump as he runs a campaign centered on lies, threats, and promises to use coercive force to deal with immigrants, suspected criminals, and various “enemies from within”—the same types he described only a few months ago as “the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

Focusing on the lone wolf rather than the rabid wolf pack led and incited by Trump, and exaggerating the extent to which anyone in the GOP is constraining him in any way, this piece exemplifies the widespread tendency of so many journalists and commentators to downplay the threat that Trump’s rhetoric and his promises poses to so many people—federal workers, election workers, Haitians, anyone suspected of a crime, and pretty much all people on the left.

Robert Pape is a highly respected political scientist at the University of Chicago, and the Chicago Project on Security and Threats that he founded and directs is a major source of data on political violence. In recent weeks he has weighed in on the current U.S. political situation, in a Foreign Affairs essay entitled “Our Own Worst Enemies: The Violent Style in American Politics,” and in a New York Times op-ed entitled “I Study Political Violence. I’m Worried About the Election.” Unfortunately, Pape furnishes the downplaying of Trumpist violence with a patina of “scientific” credibility.

Pape begins by noting that “As we approach the presidential election next month, our election sites and officials may be in considerable physical danger.” He proceeds to note the most obvious source of concern: “Over the past four years, an alarming number of election officials and workers nationwide have been intimidated or threatened by people who appear to believe the widespread lies about voter fraud and rigged voting machines that supposedly helped steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump.”

But as the empirical scientist of politics that he is, he seeks to go beyond the obvious. And the point of his interventions is to share the “worrisome evidence” of his center’s survey research: “we found disturbingly high levels of support for political violence. Notably, this attitude was bipartisan. Nearly 6 percent of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the ‘use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.’ A little over 8 percent agreed or strongly agreed that ‘the use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.’ These results reflect a relatively stable pattern over the past year.”

The upshot is clear: both sides of the political divide display troubling support for violence, and we are, as his essay says, “our own worst enemies.” His recommendation: Republican and Democratic Governors, especially in swing states, should make a joint public statement condemning violence, and dedicate resources to election security, so that both election officials and the broad public can feel safe and confident about the election.

The closing words of Pape’s op-ed underscore that the source of his urgent worry is even-handed and not partisan:

If we had not recently witnessed some of the worst election-related violence in modern American history — the Jan. 6 riot, the attempted kidnapping of Speaker Nancy Pelosi before the 2022 midterms and the two attempted assassinations of Mr. Trump — it might make sense to take more modest precautions. But the past four years have shown that we live in a dangerous new world.

Unfortunately Pape, the prisoner of his data, downplays the Trumpist danger no less egregiously than the many journalists who lack his scientific authority. And the problem is not in his data. It is in the lack of political judgment that he brings to it.

For it is quite obvious that not a single instance of violence that he references has anything to do with the left.

The January 6 insurrection, the attacks on Pelosi (and violent threats against many others, from AOC to General Mark Milley and Georgia Republican Brad Raffensperger), the threats to election officials—all of these things, like the threat to FEMA, come from the right and are indeed directly promoted and incited by Donald Trump. Even the two assassination attempts on Trump had nothing to do with the left—though Trump and Vance continue to lie about this. The first accused assassin was a registered Republican with obvious mental problems. The second was a disgruntled former Trump supporter who actually wrote a book explaining his disillusionment and calling for Trump’s assassination. Both assailants were products of the cult of violence produced by Trump (in a recent Atlantic piece, “The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator,” David Frum points out that Trump was the victim of his own rhetoric).

There is no obvious reason to doubt Pape’s survey results. There are people on the left who hate Trump as much as people on the right hate Democrats, and many of those on the left might be as willing to say “yes” to a survey question about violence as those on the right.

But all of the threats and the actual violence that Pape notes, and that are so obviously so very dangerous right now, have come from the right.

Not a single Democratic leader has done anything to justify or incite violence or question the legitimacy of the electoral system or describe J-6 insurrectionists as “us” and police as the “they” who had weapons at the Capitol. Only one of the two major parties has unreservedly supported a candidate whose entire campaign has centered on vindicating the insurrection and promising to “eradicate” an opposition that he describes as “vermin,” going so far as to propose using federal troops to repress them. Retired Generals Mark Milley and John Kelly—both former Trump appointees, and neither a member of Democratic Socialist of America– have publicly declared that Donald Trump is a fascist. A fascist. Has any serious military official outside of the deranged Michael Flynn said anything like this about Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or any Democrat? No. Because no Democrat is a fascist.

There may be some symmetry in the way “extremists” on both sides of our polarized politics poll as “sympathetic to violence.”

But as serious political scientists have long known, filling out questionnaires is one thing, and politics is another. Only on the Trumpist right is there an organized campaign to demonize opponents and to incite and justify violence, and only on the Trumpist right are there many thousands of armed individuals—some organized as “patriot” paramilitary groups, some as lone wolves—who have acted on the incitement to violence. Is there a single election official, anywhere, who fears that there are leftist activists who threaten them because they believe that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats, liberals, progressives and Marxists, and that “we need to take our country back” from the “lunatic communists?”

“There is violence on both sides,” or “we are our own worst enemies”—such rhetoric is stupid and grievously misleading as we approach a truly watershed election in which, to use the words of Trump critic, conservative Republican jurist J. Michael Luttig, democracy itself is “on a knife’s edge.”

There is no symmetry when it comes to the danger of political violence.

We are not our own worst enemies. Trump is the worst enemy of every one of us—from Liz Cheney to Bernie Sanders– who cares about constitutional democracy, and he makes no bones about saying so. He is retribution. He is vengeance.

Trumpism is the source of the violence that threatens to engulf us.

And the solution is simple: Stop Trump!

We have no time to waste.

Over the years, the Democratic Party’s blunders, arrogance and dependence on commercial campaign money and corporate-conflicted political/media consultants have put the two-party duopoly races for the Presidency, the Senate and the House next week into razor-thin elections.

The polls show Democrats in neck-and-neck races with the worst GOP since its creation in 1854. The GOP is led by a delusionary, daily lying, violence-inciting, bigoted, misogynist, serial election denier, convicted felon, and wannabe dictator, Donald Trump, who can’t process information but has openly boasted that he knows more than everybody.

The Party of the Donkey deteriorated years ago and opened the door to unnecessary close cliff-hanger elections. The Dems wrote off nearly half of the country (the red states) to the Republicans. This abandonment included the prairie states (North and South Dakota) and the mountain states that used to have many Democratic Senators. Now they have only three Senators from seven states.

The next Democratic party blunder was not to support the National Popular Vote drive to overcome the Electoral College. (See: nationalpopularvote.com). This is the anachronism that cost the Democrats two presidential losses — one in 2000 and one in 2016 — even though the Democratic presidential candidate handily won the national popular vote.

Third, the Democratic Party decided to robustly compete with the GOP and dial for the same business campaign cash in return for relenting from progressive policies.

Fourth, the Dems lost the gerrymandering drive in 2010 when they were caught napping against a vigorous GOP drive to control key state legislatures like Pennsylvania and get more GOP members in the House of Representatives.

What should the Dems do for the people in the next four days? Bernie Sanders is the most popular elected politician in the country. Why? Because Sanders, two-time presidential candidate, wants social safety net policies that are well received by working families where they live, work, and raise their families. He has urged Kamala Harris to authentically campaign to raise the federal minimum wage frozen at $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour for over 25 million workers, raise Social Security benefits, frozen for over 50 years for over 60 million elderly, and raise taxes on the undertaxed wealthy and big corporations (for a hike supported by 85% of the people.) These three measures also appeal to many self-described conservative voters.

So, what does Harris do? She does not campaign with the popular Bernie. She advertises heavily and campaigns instead with Liz Cheney who supported the war criminals Dick Cheney and G.W. Bush in their criminal invasion and sociocide of Iraq taking over one million innocent Iraqi lives and leaving that country in ruins. Liz Cheney, an avowed Republican opponent of Trump, is also a confirmed corporatist. Forgetting Sanders and heralding Cheney is not the way to turn out low-wage voters who make up a good portion of the expected 85 million eligible non-voters in next Tuesday’s election.

Unable to adjust, the Democratic Party keeps pouring billions of dollars into the same mediocre ads showing Trump to be unfit for office. These repetitive video spots by now have reached diminishing returns, as a vote-getter. Almost everyone has already made up their mind on Trump’s deficiencies.

The ads should shift quickly to overcoming an astonishing amnesia by a majority of voters who think they were better off economically under Trump’s term than under Biden’s. They have forgotten Trump’s closing down any efforts to secure full Medicare for All, enact higher minimum wages, and initiate enforcement efforts against corporate crooks squeezing money from the American people. All the while he was early mocking the oncoming Covid-19 pandemic and calling intense climate catastrophes “a hoax.” His deadly delays regarding Covid led to the preventable loss of some 300,000 American lives and worsened the associated recession. The Democratic Party ads have been largely AWOL on this abysmal record while focusing expensively on Trump personally.

Instead of aligning with worker unions and progressive civic groups working to benefit all people, Harris ogles up to big business bosses, thereby jettisoning media and video opportunities to be with pro-party groups with millions of members.

Harris has learned little from Hillary Clinton’s disastrous loss to Trump in 2016. She continues to be supportive of the U.S. Empire and, despite more dulcet tones, is aligned with Bibi-Biden’s massive weapons and diplomatic engagement with mega-terrorist Netanyahu’s genocide of the Palestinians and now the Lebanese.

She cannot even get herself to propose immediate peace negotiations over the Russian/Ukrainian war bogged down month after month with large casualties on both sides. These stands would separate her a little from Biden which would help identify her as her own person.

Vice President Hubert Humphrey, running for the presidency in 1968, declined to break with President Johnson on the Vietnam War. Analysts believe that cost him in the tight race against Richard Nixon because many Democratic voters stayed home.

There is still time to highlight Bernie Sanders’ protections for the people. There is still time to recognize the millions of midnight shift workers who do not see a candidate and would welcome recognition by Democratic candidates – local, state, and national. (See: winningamerica.net/midnightcampaigning).

There is still time to pledge compliance with six federal laws being violated by unconditional weapons shipments to Israel’s war in Palestine. Backed by majority public opinion, she should strongly DEMAND an immediate ceasefire, entry of U.S. humanitarian aid trucks to the starving, dying innocent people of Gaza, and a cessation of the Palestinian Holocaust by the Israeli regime that has already taken at least 400,000 Palestinian lives, mostly children, women and elderly.

If Harris doesn’t advance these policies, she’ll be telling people that she will just be an extension of the Biden presidency. These actions may not be enough to bring out the stay-at-home voters who in the past had voted for the Democratic candidate, but they have a higher probability than just staying the cursed course.

The recent BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia should mark the end of the Neocon delusions encapsulated in the subtitle of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 book, The Global Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. Since the 1990s, the goal of American foreign policy has been “primacy,” aka global hegemony. The U.S. methods of choice have been wars, regime change operations, and unilateral coercive measures (economic sanctions). Kazan brought together 35 countries with more than half the world population that reject the U.S. bullying and that are not cowed by U.S. claims of hegemony.

In the Kazan Declaration, the countries underscored “the emergence of new centres of power, policy decision-making and economic growth, which can pave the way for a more equitable, just, democratic and balanced multipolar world order.” They emphasized "the need to adapt the current architecture of international relations to better reflect the contemporary realities,” while declaring their “commitment to multilateralism and upholding the international law, including the Purposes and Principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations (UN) as its indispensable cornerstone.” They took particular aim at the sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, holding that “Such measures undermine the UN Charter, the multilateral trading system, the sustainable development and environmental agreements.”

Time has run out on the neocon delusions, and the U.S. wars of choice.

The neocon quest for global hegemony has deep historical roots in America’s belief in its exceptionalism. In 1630, John Winthrop invoked the Gospels in describing the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “City on the Hill,” declaring grandiosely that “The eyes of all people are upon us.” In the 19th century, America was guided by Manifest Destiny, to conquer North America by displacing or exterminating the native peoples. In the course of World War II, Americans embraced the idea of the “American Century,” that after the war the U.S. would lead the world.

The U.S. delusions of grandeur were supercharged with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. With America’s Cold War nemesis gone, the ascendant American neoconservatives conceived of a new world order in which the U.S. was the sole superpower and the policeman of the world. Their foreign policy instruments of choice were wars and regime-change operations to overthrow governments they disliked.

Following 9/11, the neocons planned to overthrow seven governments in the Islamic world, starting with Iraq, and then moving on to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. According to Wesley Clark, former Supreme Commander of NATO, the neocons expected the U.S. to prevail in these wars in 5 years. Yet now, more than 20 years on, the neocon-instigated wars continue while the U.S. has achieved absolutely none of its hegemonic objectives.

The neocons reasoned back in the 1990s that no country or group of countries would ever dare to stand up to U.S. power. Brzezinski, for example, argued in The Grand Chessboard that Russia would have no choice but to submit to the U.S.-led expansion of NATO and the geopolitical dictates of the U.S. and Europe, since there was no realistic prospect of Russia successfully forming an anti-hegemonic coalition with China, Iran and others. As Brzezinski put it:

“Russia’s only real geostrategic option—the option that could give Russia a realistic international role and also maximize the opportunity of transforming and socially modernizing itself—is Europe. And not just any Europe, but the transatlantic Europe of the enlarging EU and NATO.” (emphasis added, Kindle edition, p. 118)

Brzezinski was decisively wrong, and his misjudgment helped to lead to the disaster of the war in Ukraine. Russia did not simply succumb to the U.S. plan to expand NATO to Ukraine, as Brzezinski assumed it would. Russia said a firm no, and was prepared to wage war to stop the U.S. plans. As a result of the neocon miscalculations vis-à-vis Ukraine, Russia is now prevailing on the battlefield, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dead.

Nor—and this is the plain message from Kazan—did U.S. sanctions and diplomatic pressures isolate Russian in the least. In response to pervasive U.S. bullying, an anti-hegemonic counterweight has emerged. Simply put, the majority of the world does not want or accept U.S. hegemony, and is prepared to face it down rather than submit to its dictates. Nor does the U.S. anymore possess the economic, financial, or military power to enforce its will, if it ever did.

The countries that assembled in Kazan represent a clear majority of the world’s population. The nine BRICS members (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa as the original five, plus Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates), in addition to the delegations of 27 aspiring members, constitute 57 percent of the world’s population and 47 percent of the world’s output (measured at purchasing-power adjusted prices). The U.S., by contrast, constitutes 4.1 percent of the world population and 15 percent of world output. Add in the U.S. allies, and the population share of the U.S.-led alliance is around 15 percent of the global population.

The BRICS will gain in relative economic weight, technological prowess, and military strength in the years ahead. The combined GDP of the BRICS countries is growing at around 5 percent per annum, while the combined GDP of the U.S. and its allies in Europe and the Asia-Pacific is growing at around 2 percent per annum.

Even with their growing clout, however, the BRICS can’t replace the U.S. as a new global hegemon. They simply lack the military, financial, and technological power to defeat the U.S. or even to threaten its vital interests. The BRICS are in practice calling for a new and realistic multipolarity, not an alternative hegemony in which they are in charge.

American strategists should heed the ultimately positive message coming from Kazan. Not only has the neocon quest for global hegemony failed, it has been a costly disaster for the US and the world, leading to bloody and pointless wars, economic shocks, mass displacements of populations, and rising threats of nuclear confrontation. A more inclusive and equitable multipolar world order offers a promising path out of the current morass, one that can benefit the U.S. and its allies as well as the nations that met in Kazan.

The rise of the BRICS is therefore not merely a rebuke to the U.S., but also a potential opening for a far more peaceful and secure world order. The multipolar world order envisioned by the BRICS can be a boon for all countries, including the United States. Time has run out on the neocon delusions, and the U.S. wars of choice. The moment has arrived for a renewed diplomacy to end the conflicts raging around the world.

In 1968, I was a full-time anti-Vietnam War organizer and voted for a third-party candidate. I now regret that protest vote, which has led me to think differently this time around.

I certainly sympathize with many progressives who intend to either sit out this election or vote for the Green Party’s Jill Stein or Cornel West. Kamala Harris’s continuing support for Israel’s war on Gaza and now Lebanon is abhorrent to anyone opposing war. For the past year the Biden-Harris administration has functioned as a willing ally and enabler of Israel’s genocide. Though not a self-proclaimed Zionist like the president, Harris parrots Israel’s talking points and lies about the war on Gaza. At the Democratic convention, she didn’t even permit a Palestinian representative to speak for five minutes from the platform.

But come election day, I won’t be casting a protest vote as I did in 1968 — even though I see so many parallels with the choice we faced then.

Like Harris, that year’s Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, served as vice president, standing loyally by as Lyndon Johnson sent more than a half-million U.S. troops to Vietnam, hundreds of whom were dying every week in 1968. Far from distinguishing himself from the war hawks, Humphrey made speeches supporting the U.S. and its South Vietnamese allies as thousands of American soldiers were killed and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were slaughtered.

When it comes to radically transforming the two major political parties it’s going to take a lot more than one election cycle.

Adding to this outrage, Humphrey was nominated at the infamous Democratic convention in Chicago where the local cops brutally assaulted antiwar demonstrators in what was later described as a “police riot.” I was one of those protesters and was jailed for my efforts. Many antiwarriors demonstrated against Humphrey during the subsequent campaign, often chanting “Dump the Hump.” So, when election day came, I just couldn’t bring myself to vote for someone I considered a war criminal and cast my ballot for comedian Dick Gregory, who was running on a third-party ticket.

What I did not consider, however, was Humphrey’s opponent — Richard Nixon. At the time, I considered the parties as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Both seemed indistinguishable on Vietnam. And both reflected the same Cold War anticommunist mentality that underlay the American imperialist project and the growing military-industrial state.

I ignored, however, the profound differences between the two candidates on a host of other issues. For example, Nixon’s campaign revolved around what he called a Southern strategy. By using thinly disguised racist “law-and-order” rhetoric, he hoped to peel away white Southern and Northern white working-class voters from the Democrats. Ronald Reagan and later Republican administrations have solidified their appeal to white voters to effectively roll back the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement, especially on voting rights.

Today, the differences between the two parties are even more stark on a wide variety of issues – from women’s and LGBTQ+ rights to the climate and consumer protections to electoral integrity. The evidence can be found in Project 2025, the Republican blueprint for a new Trump presidency. Or in what Trump proclaims at his rallies. Earlier this month, he declared that he intends to use the military against protesters whom he considers “the enemy within.”

This kind of authoritarian rule is happening around the world, including Erdogan’s Turkey, Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia. There is very little to protect it from happening here. We certainly can’t rely on the current Supreme Court.

In the face of such a prospect, shouldn’t we do whatever is possible to forestall an autocratic regime? I no longer see casting a symbolic protest ballot — or sitting on the sidelines — as an act of conscience. Real acts of conscience imply taking a risk and being willing to accept the consequences.

Still, some might argue that it’s worth voting for the Green Party’s Jill Stein to send a message to the Democrats that they can’t literally get away with murder in Gaza. But would it convey that message?

In 2016, when Stein last ran for president, she received more votes than Trump’s margin of victory in three key states: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In this election, that could be enough to help him retake the White House. Trump’s solution to the Gaza war: Netanyahu should “finish the job.” Is that something that would help the Palestinians?

More than anything, they need us to continue challenging the U.S.-Israeli genocide by street actions, by supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, and by educating our fellow citizens about the reality of the Zionist settler-colonial project. When it comes to radically transforming the two major political parties it’s going to take a lot more than one election cycle. It will require building powerful movements that address systemic issues like racism, poverty, ecological devastation, and war and militarism.

In the final days of clashing election campaigns, a U.S. senator rides a groundswell of support as the world falters during a global nuclear crisis.

In our novel, first drafted years ago, the character is Senator Elaine Adams, an African American woman from Chicago’s south side, the leading Democrat in a presidential campaign against a swaggering autocratic Republican who revels in name-calling and vulgar nicknames—“Insane Elaine” in our story. We called him President Richard Waller.

While the comparisons with former President Donald Trump and his “lunatic Harris” insults may ring a bell, this is not what worries us, as authors of this fictitious story.

At this very moment, over 3,000 “accountable” nuclear warheads are currently deployed by the U.S. and Russia on land-based and submarine-launched ballistic missiles and bomber bases, according to the Federation of American Scientists. This number comes from the New START agreement, signed in 2010 by U.S. and Russia Presidents, Obama and Medvedev. Key word: Accountable. Over 12,000 nuclear weapons are spread across the globe, per official estimates.

We thought we wrote fiction, but we are now terrified about the unfolding crisis of our nuclear weapons policy—and a growing but misguided call for a renewed arms race that will continue to push our civilization to the brink—of survival.

But this last nuclear agreement, like a bridge burning on both ends of diplomacy, expires in the spring of 2026, thanks to the Trump administration’s refusal to accept an extension. The next President of the United States will be in charge of both modernizing our nuclear arsenal and renegotiating it with Russia, China and six other nuclear countries.

Freeze that frame with this image at a global arms conference: The next President of the United States will ultimately decide our fate as the “Doomsday Clock” remains at 90 seconds before midnight. UN chief Antonio Guterres added his own metaphor this summer, that humanity is now on the “knife’s edge” of nuclear annihilation.

This election has forced us, a film director and a cultural historian, to come from behind the camera and between library stacks to put our storyline on the table with an unabashed message. In a world in the midst of indiscriminate warfare from the Ukraine to Sudan to the Middle East, in an age of super sophisticated high-tech weaponry, including laser weapons and nuclear-tipped hypersonic missiles, we need a President who doesn’t declare, as Trump did on the cusp of his presidency in 2016, “let it be an arms race.” Or worse: A repeat of a Trump administration that gutted or abandoned virtually every arms control treaty, while viciously attacking the one treaty that attempts to save humanity from itself: the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

We thought we wrote fiction, but we are now terrified about the unfolding crisis of our nuclear weapons policy—and a growing but misguided call for a renewed arms race that will continue to push our civilization to the brink—of survival. Let us not forget why the Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded this year to the organization of survivors of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nihon Hidankyo, for their efforts “to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.”

A crisis is never a crisis until it is validated by disaster. In our research, that theme permeated the storylines, as it has with movies by Andrew Davis for the past thirty years. When the New York Times reviewed the film Under Siege for “blending art and action,” he reminded them that his intent was to raise “provocative questions” about nuclear arms.

Today we write about hypersonic missiles, which are being deployed by Russia in Ukraine, that travel 5-25 times the speed of sound. These missiles now have the capacity of being equipped with nuclear warheads. Likewise, laser weapons, seemingly out of “Star Wars,” are being deployed in the Middle East.

A crisis is never a crisis until it is validated by disaster.

This is not fiction: The illusory age of fail-safe systems has come to an end. Miscalculations have always been part of the nuclear past, and yet fate has remained on the side of humanity. The explosion of a B-52 bomber carrying two nuclear bombs came one switch away from detonating in North Carolina in 1961. Three decades later, Russian president Boris Yeltsin activated the nuclear briefcase, only to pull back when the perceived threat was discovered to be a Norwegian rocket studying the northern lights.

In our novel, we posit the rise of a new president, in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster. We bring the story back to Chicago, and we ask this provocative question: If the Atomic Age truly began in the afternoon of December 2, 1942, at the University of Chicago with Enrico Fermi’s team, who created the first controlled chain reaction in a secret location under the old Stagg Field stadium stands, could a new age of a world without nuclear weapons unleash its own chain reaction of peace here at McCormick Place in Chicago?

In 1955, author William Faulkner confronted his native South to "speak now against the day" of segregation; to not wait until the evitable questions over denial arose in another generation: “Why didn’t someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time!”

The nuclear bomb has come full circle. It’s time to elect a president who will bring disarmament to the global agenda—and put an end to this new nuclear arms race.

Picture this: shimmery sunlight dancing on water. Deep blue crests over seafoam green before dissipating as waves meet the shore. The Chicago skyline gazes from a distance.

Running along Lake Michigan is one of my favorite pastimes at Northwestern University. We pride ourselves on having not one, but two beaches on campus that showcase the lake. The body of water is so wide it feels more like an ocean. The sound of the waves crashing onto the sand reminds me of the beaches back home in the San Francisco Bay Area.

But in the heart of the Great Lakes—where Lake Michigan meets Lake Huron—America’s most dangerous crude oil pipeline threatens 700 miles of coastline and our climate future.

By incorporating pipeline shutdowns in her climate platform, Harris can send a clear message that our future doesn’t rely on fossil fuels and that people can raise their families and thrive in the Great Lakes region.

Growing up in the Bay Area showed me that addressing the climate crisis is my generation’s mission. When I was a junior in high school in 2020, California experienced the worst wildfire in state history. Orange haze blanketed everything. With the air quality index skyrocketing, I did not dare go outside. Friends had to evacuate their homes, and a teacher of mine saw their house burn down. I knew I wanted a career focused on the environment when I realized our wildfires would grow worse every year without action.

Coming here for college, I was excited to explore a new part of the country and catch a break from the wildfire season. People tout the Midwest as a haven from the climate crisis, but environmental issues are aplenty here as well.

As the presidential election date gets closer with states in the Midwest crucial for the Harris-Walz ticket to pick up, looming threats to our Great Lakes should gain wider attention, all because of North America’s most dangerous fossil fuel pipeline. The Great Lakes hold one-fifth of the world’s available fresh water supply, but under it lurks an oil pipeline called Line 5, operated by Canadian oil corporation Enbridge, which could ruin millions of people’s drinking water, mar Lake Michigan’s beauty, and devastate our communities.

Right in the heart of the Great Lakes, the Line 5 oil pipeline is accelerating our climate crisis as we speak. Seventy-one years ago, Enbridge built Line 5 right through Michigan and Wisconsin and in some of the most sensitive areas in the Great Lakes as a shortcut to reach Ontario, Canada. A spill from Line 5 could reach the Lake Michigan shoreline where myself and hundreds of thousands of people live and walk by everyday.

Enbridge has a sordid history when it comes to pipeline infrastructure. They are responsible for one of the largest inland oil spills in United States history from another pipeline they operate in Michigan. They didn’t shut the valve for 17 hours, and remediation efforts took five years. A similar spill from Line 5 would significantly threaten the Great Lakes and the people who call this region home. When burned, the oil in Line 5 contributes more greenhouse gas emissions than the three most polluting coal-fired power plants in the country combined

With a major election this year, young voters across Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota will be a crucial voting bloc. For many of us—myself included—it’s going to be our first time voting in a presidential election. Taking action for the environment is at the forefront of my generation’s concerns, which means that delivering a tangible victory to protect our climate and Great Lakes is absolutely necessary. Enbridge’s Line 5 must be shut down and decommissioned. While a Harris-Walz administration can deliver by making this action happen, U.S. President Joe Biden can do so now by revoking this outdated pipeline’s permit.

The Great Lakes aren’t just the source of drinking water for over 40 million people. They’re our identity, creating a major reason why many of us live in the Midwest to begin with. When governments are putting more energy toward keeping fossil fuel pipelines in the Great Lakes than preserving the water we drink from, swim in, and fish from, it gives the impression that our natural resources aren’t worth saving. We cannot afford to be complacent in a time of crisis, and we must do better.

Indigenous Tribes, environmental groups, small businesses, and local residents across the Great Lakes have been fighting Enbridge’s Line 5 for over a decade because of the severe risks it poses to our air, land, water, and health. Enbridge has been operating illegally in Michigan since Gov. Gretchen Whitmer took action to stop the pipeline in 2020. And since 2012, Enbridge has been trespassing on the Bad River Band’s reservation in Wisconsin.

People are taking action against Line 5 by signing petitions, attending rallies in the U.S. and Canada, writing to their legislators, and emailing administration officials like U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg for a shutdown. Volunteers have organized local businesses, faith communities, and Native Nations to attend teach-ins and community events and share information on Line 5’s dangers.

With Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket now, shutting down Line 5 should be a key issue in her policy platform. Gov. Whitmer won reelection handily after calling for a shutdown order, which shows that moving away from fossil fuels and decommissioning unsafe pipelines can be a winning electoral issue. Prioritizing a Line 5 shutdown could show that Harris can be one of the most pro-environment presidents in American history—her track record from California and her time in the Senate suggests that she prioritizes environmental policies like this. Shutting down the pipeline can set the stage for a new climate champion government.

A Line 5 shutdown is an achievable, easy win with real advantages. If climate is on the agenda for young voters in key Midwest states, Line 5 should be on the list of the vice president’s campaign priorities. By incorporating pipeline shutdowns in her climate platform, Harris can send a clear message that our future doesn’t rely on fossil fuels and that people can raise their families and thrive in the Great Lakes region. Young voters from the Midwest, like me, are firmly uniting behind one key message: Shut down Line 5.

Today is Michigan. Yesterday was Wisconsin. Tomorrow is Ohio. I’ve been traveling on the road with Protect Our Care on a big blue bus for six weeks with an important message. The Affordable Care Act saved my life, and we're not going back.

Back in 2017, I walked into a doctor's office with a cough, and walked out with a cancer diagnosis. I thought I was a healthy 40-year-old small-business owner, but was stunned to learn I had stage 4 Hodgkin lymphoma. Thankfully my insurance covered the treatments that have me in remission today.

White-knuckle days of chemotherapy and nights of after effects for a grueling six months, then many weeks of radiation followed. Surviving and recovering should have been my sole focus. But instead I had to drag myself through treatments, then to rallies and press conferences: begging former U.S. President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress not to strip away the insurance I needed to save my life.

Nearly a decade after Donald Trump promised us a healthcare plan, he only has "concepts of a plan". Neither doctors nor hospitals accept concepts in lieu of payment.

The day after my first chemotherapy session, while I was on the couch trying not to die, MAGA Republicans in the U.S. House egged on by Trump voted to repeal Obamacare. And then threw a party to celebrate.

We cannot go back.

So we're rolling forward on the Care Force One bus: traveling the country and sharing our healthcare stories, and coming to a city near you in these final days.

We will not go back to the terror that 135 million Americans with preexisting conditions felt in 2017 under the first year of Trump's rule, knowing that we could lose access to care at any moment without the protections of the ACA. Will we not go back to annual or lifetime limits on care. Being denied an insurance policy because of our past medical history. Kids under 26 relying on insurance through their parents' plans could lose it. Over 10 million of us (including me) had insurance directly through the health insurance marketplace. And over 15 million of us had insurance through Medicaid expansion in our states—also a part of the ACA.

Since the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, America has made further healthcare advances—including the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 solely thanks to President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Democrats in Congress. This law caps insulin copays for people on Medicare at $35 a month, provides subsidies for health insurance for middle class families, and finally allows Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices.

Checking the news every morning back during Trump's first term led to a sense of dread at whatever cruel back-of-the-envelope plan that Trump or Republicans would produce that day. These "plans" never expanded our healthcare or made it better, just threw vulnerable Americans to the wolves to pay for tax breaks to rich people. We cannot go back to that chaos and terror.

Nearly a decade after Donald Trump promised us a healthcare plan, he only has "concepts of a plan". Neither doctors nor hospitals accept concepts in lieu of payment.

His running mate JD Vance spilled the beans: The "concepts" include letting insurers cover only young and healthy people, and sending everyone else back to high-risk pools, which were notoriously underfunded and unable to protect people who need it most. And now Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) promises "No Obamacare."

It's like they don't understand the basic idea of insurance: everybody in one risk pool together, so that costs don't spiral out of control for the people who need it. If you stop covering people as soon as they get sick, of course insurance gets cheaper. This is like only offering blizzard damage insurance to Floridians, or hurricane damage insurance to Midwesterners–it's missing the entire point.

Republicans want to repeal and replace the Inflation Reduction Act now too.

We've seen the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 healthcare agenda, and it's not pretty. In the absence of plans of his own, will Trump and the entire Republican party just follow their playbook? That's what it was designed for, a detailed blueprint for the next Republican president starting on Day 1.

Whereas the Kamala Harris healthcare agenda would build on the gains of the Affordable Care Act and Inflation Reduction Act. Her administration would expand health coverage to more Americans, and lower drug prices for everyone.

We know what the candidates want to do and who their priorities are for. The choice is yours to make this fall: do we go forward, or do we go back?

Paulo Paulino Guajajara looks down and off to one side, the Amazon forest lush and dense behind him.

His voice thickens; he clears his throat. “My mother, she’s unwell. She told me to stop doing this work,” he says, and presses the heel of his hand against his eye to stop a tear.

He looks into the camera, “I told her I’m not scared, that she should let me fight. Because I have a son. And he will need the forest.”

Lobo once said, “Even if they kill me, I won’t stop fighting.”

Paulo, an Indigenous Amazon Guardian, was shot dead five years ago today (November 1, 2019) in the forest he loved—the Arariboia Indigenous Territory, in the Amazon’s northeast.

I was on the other side of the camera when he spoke of his mother’s fears. He wanted the world to know his people, his land, were under threat. He knew illegal loggers were paying gunmen to kill Guardians like him, but he continued to track them, leaving his infant son, wife, and his mother at home.

The Guardians are Guajajara people who protect Indigenous land. They confront illegal loggers, force them to leave, then destroy their camps. They do it to protect their families and for the Awá people, their neighbours who share the territory and some of whom shun all outside contact. Paulo admired the Awá. They are completely self-sufficient in their forest, but cannot survive without it.

Paulo and I met in 2017 when we recorded his video. In 2019 I went on a Guardian patrol as a researcher with Survival International, the global movement for Indigenous and tribal peoples’ rights. It was on that journey, deep in the rainforest, that Paulo and I became friends—and he asked me to call him by his Guardian name, Lobo (‘Wolf’ in English). The group assigns a name that reflects a Guardian’s personality and his place. It binds them together, protects their anonymity.

The Guardians gathered in a clearing to prepare for our patrol. They brought several motorbikes and a quad bike. About 15 men chatted casually as they honed their machetes, checked motorbike chains, and calculated how much petrol to take. They wrapped and stowed a big piece of meat—food for the journey. One man drew a map in the earth with a stick and pointed to the illegal logging camp—the object of our patrol. Well-worn bulletproof vests were distributed, then we got on the bikes and headed into the forest.

Lobo was quiet and focused, pitching in with an easy smile. He insisted I travel with him and his cousin on the more comfortable quad bike. As we rode dirt trails into the thickening forest, he taught me words in Tenetehar, his Indigenous language. He pointed and said, “foot,” “hand,” “elbow.” I repeated, worked to get my mouth around the unfamiliar syllables. Later, I proudly spoke the words he’d taught me, and the Guardians guffawed. I was saying, “ blue foot,” “fat elbow,” “laughing hand.” Lobo just grinned.

We gathered around a fire that night, kept small to prevent detection. The meat was cooked, and Lobo offered it to me on a skewer. He drew his machete, elegantly ran it down the meat’s edge, and urged me to pull away a thin, sinewy slice. It was a welcome treat, dipped in crunchy cassava farinha.

Lobo admired a woolly hat I’d brought from London, so I gave it to him. He cut eye holes and wore it pulled down over his face to keep his identity secret and protect him from the hired assassins. The group spread out and settled on the cold forest floor, wrapped in darkness and sound—the buzz of cicadas and trills of crickets, descants over the rumbling bass line of amorous bullfrogs.

The next day we travelled on foot. The Guardians inspected every snapped twig—evidence loggers were nearby. They examined tire tracks, noting their age and direction of travel. Tension rose as we got closer. We passed a pile of stacked logs and arrived at the camp—an oval-shaped clearing where blue and black tarps sheltered cooking and seating areas.

But the loggers had fled. We ate their breakfast—eggs and a pot of pumpkin they’d left cooking on their fire. And when we discovered a barrel of fresh water, Lobo insisted that I be the first to bathe.

He was angry though, disgusted at the loggers’ intrusion, the theft of trees, the destruction of the forest. And he was frustrated they’d escaped. “I want to burn and destroy this camp,” Lobo said, holding his lighter to a tarpaulin’s edge. “We don’t want anything of theirs in our territory.”

Lobo was out hunting when he was ambushed—shot and killed. Beside him, his friend and fellow Guardian Tainaky Tenetehar was also hit. The impact bent Tainaky over in pain. Straining with every part of his body, he straightened up and ran as blood poured from his right shoulder. Lobo lay dead on the forest floor, still wearing the hat that could not protect him.

Lobo was the sixth Guardian killed by loggers in the Arariboia forest. News of his death went round the world. Despite that, none of the killers have been caught or tried. And on this fifth anniversary of his killing, everything Lobo sought to protect is in greater peril—particularly the uncontacted Awá. They are among more than 150 uncontacted Indigenous peoples around the world—the most self-sufficient and most vulnerable peoples on the planet. Survival International is fighting to stop miners, loggers, ranchers, other extractive industries, and criminals stealing their territory and resources. The loggers are still there, while the Brazilian government fails the Awá by not upholding its own and international laws that require their land be protected for their exclusive use.

When I think of Lobo, I remember his easy laugh, the grin that spread slowly across his face. He always carried a pen drive loaded with his tunes. That smile grew ever wider when his favourite came on: Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” He would close his eyes and hum along.

Lobo once said, “Even if they kill me, I won’t stop fighting.”

His fight continues; for there is a little boy growing up without his marvellous father. And he still needs the forest.

Freedom is a blazing centerpiece of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. She tagged it nine times in her closing argument at the Ellipse in front of the White House this week. The contrast is fascism, which Donald Trump’s former top advisors warn us that he embodies, from Joint Chiefs of Staff chair General Mark Milley to White House chief of staff General Mark Kelly.

Her main focus on freedom is women’s constitutional reproductive rights, as decimated by the Supreme Court in its 2022 Dobbs decision, and the resultant threats to IVF (recently upheld by the Supreme Court!), contraception and marriage equality.

But she’s also passionate about freedom from gun violence, freedom to marry, freedom to enjoy clean air and water, freedom from climate pollution, and freedom to vote, as laid out in her convention speech.

Nearly a century after FDR took office at a fearful time with a joyous promise of “nothing to fear but fear itself,” Trump seeks the same office with a dark promise of everything to fear...

Our ancestors—President Franklin Roosevelt and his longest-serving cabinet members—in addition to winning the worldwide war against fascism, created the New Deal, which broke new ground in guaranteeing fundamental freedoms to help Americans recover from the devastation of the Great Depression.

To us, both fascism and freedom are on the ballot this November.

As for freedoms, let’s start with freedom for seniors to retire with a measure of economic security and dignity, as guaranteed by Social Security (which Trump has called a “Ponzi scheme” and promised to privatize or cut, and to terminate its basic funding source, the payroll tax, and Trump’s top benefactor Elon Musk now proposes to destroy).

As for FDR’s freedom for workers to organize and collectively bargain, to be guaranteed a livable minimum wage and unemployment insurance—it’s the opposite of Trump’s historically anti-union, anti-worker record—recently praising the firing of striking workers.

Freedom to have decent health care? Trump says the ACA “sucks” and should be “terminated,” and his plan to terminate the payroll tax would be devastating for Medicare.

Freedom from fascism? It was temporarily vanquished in 1945, but is now bizarrely resurgent, both abroad and in America. Vice President Henry Wallace presciently warned us about “American Fascism” in 1944 – predicting Trump to a “T.”

FDR valued freedom above all else. In 1941, he proposed the most expansive vision of freedom ever, encompassing freedom not only of religion and expression, but also freedom from want, and from fear. During the war, he framed the struggle as essential to lasting peace and security at home and abroad. He paved the way for freedoms yet to come.

Only later came the freedom to vote regardless of one’s skin color, the freedom for women to open a bank account, and the freedom to marry without regard to one’s skin color or gender. And for half a century, the freedom for women to make their own reproductive-health choices was an established constitutional right until Trump’s Supreme Court appointees suddenly decided to kill it.

The first woman presidential cabinet member, Frances Perkins, is shown greeting President Franklin D. Roosevelt upon his return to the White House from the 1943 Tehran Conference. Frances Perkins was US Secretary of Labor under Roosevelt from 1933 to 1945, longer than any other cabinet member has held the post. She died of a stroke at midtown Hospital on May 14, 1965.

Vice President Kamala Harris is picking up the mantle of freedom this election—all the freedoms we expect from good government to empower Americans to pursue individual happiness in life.

Sadly, convicted felon Donald Trump only cares about one person’s freedom: his own. A disgraced and convicted felon terrified of going to prison, he seeks the power to quash all criminal proceedings against himself. He proposes to weaponize the Justice Department, and even the military, against American citizens who displease him—“the enemy within”, expressly including domestic “Marxists and communists and fascists” like Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Trump's ignorance of the role of our Armed Forces is mind-blowingly dangerous. They are trained to kill, not to suppress dissent or enforce U.S. criminal laws.

Nearly a century after FDR took office at a fearful time with a joyous promise of “nothing to fear but fear itself,” Trump seeks the same office with a dark promise of everything to fear—from immigrants and crime, to a rigged justice system, our professional civil service, the news media, windmills, Haitians eating your pets, Obamacare, vaccines, and America’s untrustworthy elections. His pals at Project 2025 have helpfully fleshed out the details.

On the other hand, Kamala Harris joyously challenges us to “show each other—the world—who we are. And what we stand for. Freedom. Opportunity. Compassion. Dignity. Fairness. And endless possibilities.”

Every freedom that touches us personally is on the line on November 5—most fundamentally, freedom from fascism and the freedom to vote to protect our freedoms. Our revered ancestors are screaming at us from their graves.

The scariest thing at Trump’s quasi-fascist Madison Square Garden rally was not the vulgar and offensive rhetoric by surrogates like unfunny comic Killer Tony’s comments about Puerto Rico being a “floating island of garbage” and Black Americans carving watermelons for Halloween, as disgusting as they were.

No, it was Trump’s threat that he and GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson have “a little secret” to upend the results of the election. As Rep. Dan Goldman warned, Trump and Johnson may try to go to the House and throw out the certification of the electoral vote and turn it over to the Republican House majority who would hand the election to Trump.

Here’s how it could go down: MAGA operatives in swing states could challenge the allocation of electoral votes with the goal of making it impossible for one or more counties or states to certify the electoral vote on time, block both candidates from receiving the necessary minimum of 270 electoral votes, and throw it into the House for a so-called “contingent election” where each state gets one vote and Republicans are likely to have the edge with a majority of 26 state delegations unless Democrats flip this in the upcoming election.

Faithless Electors

Although most states award their electoral votes to the candidate who received the most popular votes in their state, the Constitution does not require them to do so. According to Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, each state has the right to decide how to appoint its electors. In many states, this would allow one or more electors (so-called “faithless electors”) to cast their vote for a candidate other than the one who received the most popular votes in their state. This has happened nearly 100 times in history, although so far it has not changed the ultimate results. It could be different this time.

According to various state laws in 15 states, a faithless elector’s vote isn’t counted and a replacement is named. But in 19 states, their votes would count. Some of these states have enforcement mechanisms, but others, including Pennsylvania, do not.

In July 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Chiafalo v Washington that a State may "penalize an elector for breaking his pledge and voting for someone other than the presidential candidate who won his State's popular vote." But it doesn’t require them to do so.

Let’s say Harris carries all the safely Blue states plus only the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. That would give her 270 electoral votes to Trump’s 268, the bare minimum for her to win. But let’s say there’s a faithless elector from one of the states that permit it, or a court challenge voids some electoral votes as discussed below. Then neither candidate would have an electoral college majority, which would throw the choice of the next president to the House of Representatives. Each state gets one vote and unless this election changes it, Republicans hold a majority of the states. So the House Republicans hands the election to Trump.

Court Cases that could flip the electoral vote from Harris to Trump

Meanwhile, there are several court cases that could flip the electoral college, particularly if the election is so close that it comes down to Pennsylvania.

In Republican National Committee v. Wetzel, the ultra-right wing 5th Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled that a state may not legally count a ballot mailed before election day that arrives for counting afterwards. As Mark Joseph Stern argued in Slate: “18 states and Washington, D.C., accept late-arriving ballots; the 5thCircuit’s reasoning would render all these laws illegitimate and void, nullifying hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of ballots.” SCOTUS could affirm or overturn the 5th Circuit. Although there’s probably no time to do so before election day, if it affirms the 5th Circuit between the election and the final certification of the electoral vote by Congress, it could disqualify the votes of countless Harris voters.

Meanwhile, in Genser v. Butler County Board of Elections the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that voters whose mail-in ballots contained a technical error (they were not placed in a second “security envelope”) would be permitted to submit a second provisional ballot that could be counted.

The Republican Party filed a motion for the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene and bar provisional ballots from being counted. If SCOTUS rules in their favor, it could disqualify thousands of Pennsylvania votes. Remember that in 2000, Bush defeated Gore by only 537 votes in Florida, when SCOTUS stopped the vote count.

With a 6-3 extreme right majority, SCOTUS could again hand the election to the Republican, Donald Trump.

Vote for a Democratic House

The only way to guarantee that the Trump/Rogers “secret plan” is to flip a couple of House delegation majorities from Red to Blue. That’s why it’s vitally important for Harris voters to vote in every state and cast their vote for the Democratic House candidate.

There is an outstanding plan for the next Presidential administration to fix our housing crisis. This plan would go a long way toward helping the nine million households behind on their rent and nearly 700,000 people living unhoused. But the plan does not come from either of the two major presidential candidates.

It is not that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are ignoring housing. They are well aware that three-quarters of swing-state voters say that housing costs are the biggest economic stressor in their lives, and that young voters rank housing costs as their number one issue. So both candidates have housing plans.

Of the two, Harris’s is far better, of course. Trump, who has a long and sordid history of discrimination and unlawful behavior as a landlord, mostly uses the housing crisis as a platform for demonizing immigrants, pledging that his plan of mass deportation will reduce housing demand and costs.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan for another Trump presidency proposes catastrophic housing ideas like privatizing public housing, gutting the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and undermining fair housing protections.

Harris’s plan features proposals to increase the supply of housing through expanded and new tax credits and relaxing regulations on home building. Harris also proposes down payment assistance to first-time homebuyers and limiting tax breaks now enjoyed by corporate landlords.

That’s all OK, as far as it goes. The problem is that it doesn’t go very far.

Every week, my students and I represent low-income tenants being forced from their homes in Indianapolis eviction courts. Building more market-rate housing, especially since most of that new building is focused on higher-end housing, doesn’t help them at all. They are facing eviction because low wages, disability, family crises, child care obligations, etc. mean they already can't afford market rate housing.

This is true across the country. “The most effective housing assistance for low-income households is not found in building more units but in helping low-income households afford the units that already exist,” Alex Schwartz, New School professor and author of the seminal Housing Policy in the United States, and Kirk McClure, professor emeritus in urban planning at the University of Kansas, have written. Alan Mallach, senior fellow at the Center for Community Progress and the National Housing Institute, agrees, bluntly titling one of his articles, “Rents Will Only Go So Low, No Matter How Much We Build.”

The good news is that there is a serious, detailed plan that our next president and Congress can implement to address the needs of our clients and the millions of others like them. It comes from the tenants themselves. Specifically, the plan is provided by the national Tenant Union Federation, which includes local unions like Bozeman Tenants United, the Louisville Tenants Union, and KC Tenants, the latter of which is currently engaged in an historic rent strike.

As Tara Raghuveer, Tenant Union Federation director says, “We can build, build, build as much as we want, but without federal rent caps and protections for tenants, people will continue to be priced out of their homes and the economy will continue to suffer.”

Social movement historians would not be surprised that tenants are taking the lead. Time and again, the most impactful reforms are the ones pushed not by elected officials but by those directly affected by the targeted injustice.

So the tenant union proposal for the next presidential administration, a twelve-page, 59-footnote Tenant Policy Agenda supported by three dozen other housing advocacy organizations, includes:

• Building and preserving twelve million units of permanently affordable housing
• Rent caps imposed as a condition of landlords receiving federal financing
• A Tenant Bill of Rights to guarantee both safe and healthy housing conditions and tenants’ rights to organize
• Reinvestment in existing public housing and the Section 8 voucher program

These needed housing reforms won’t be cheap, but the Tenant Union Federation rightly points out that we already use our tax code to generously reward corporate landlords, speculative homebuying practices, and uber-wealthy home purchasers. The next iteration of Washington leaders can change that. “Congress should ensure that the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share while raising significant revenue for robust public investments in permanently affordable, decommodified, climate resilient housing,” the Agenda states.

One hundred million people in the U.S. live in renting households. We can tell you first-hand that many of them are struggling right now. For now, the most complete and compelling plan to address that struggle is coming from the tenants. But hopefully the plan will be embraced by the next president.

“Tenants need a fighter in the White House who will champion tenants’ rights and usher in a new era of housing stability,” the Tenant Union Federation agenda states. “With record homelessness, unaffordability and coordinated rent gouging rampant in the rental market, it’s high time for the most pro-tenant administration in American history.”

On October 24th, a U.S. presidential candidate told an interviewer, “Our day one agenda… also includes picking up the phone and telling Bibi Netanyahu that the war is over, because it’s basically our proxy war. We control the armaments, the funding, the diplomatic cover, the intelligence, etc., so we can end this in the blink of an eye with a single phone call, which is what Ronald Reagan did when Israel had gone into Lebanon and was massacring thousands of people. So we can do that right now. That’s day one.”

Tragically, the candidate who said that was not Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, but Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Most Americans have been persuaded that Stein cannot win the election, and many believe that voting for her in swing states will help elect Trump by siphoning voters from Harris.

There are many other “third-party” candidates for president, and many of them have good policy proposals for ending the genocidal U.S.-Israeli massacre in Gaza. As the website for Claudia de la Cruz, the presidential candidate for the Party of Socialism and Liberation, explains, “Our tax dollars should be used to meet people's needs -- not pay for the bullets, bombs and missiles used in the massacre in Gaza.”

Whoever wins this election, we must find a way to put peace back on this country’s national agenda, and to make our collective voices heard

Many of the principles and policy proposals of “third-party” and independent candidates are more in line with the views of most Americans than those of Harris or Trump. This is hardly surprising given the widely recognized corruption of the U.S. political system. While Trump cynically flip-flops to appeal to both sides on many questions, and Harris generally avoids committing to policy specifics at all, especially regarding foreign policy, most Americans understand that they are both more beholden to the billionaires and corporate interests who fund their campaigns than to the well-being of working Americans or the future of the planet.

Michael Moore has published a flier titled “This Is America,” which shows that large majorities of Americans support “liberal” positions on 18 different issues, from a ceasefire in Gaza to Medicare For All to getting money out of politics.

Moore implies that this should be reassuring to Democrats and Harris supporters, and it would be if she was running on those positions. But, for the most part, she isn’t. On the other hand, many third party and independent candidates for president are running on those positions, but the anti-democratic U.S. political system ensures that they can’t win, even when most Americans agree with them.

War and militarism are the most deadly and destructive forces in human society, with real world, everyday, physical impacts that kill or maim people and destroy their homes, communities and entire countries. So it is deeply disturbing that the political system in the United States has been corrupted into bipartisan subservience to a military-industrial complex (or MICIMATT, to use a contemporary term) that wields precisely the “unwarranted influence” that President Eisenhower warned us against 64 years ago, and uses its influence to drag us into wars that wreak death and destruction in country after country.

Apart from brief wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait, all now many decades ago, the U.S. military has not won a war since 1945. It systematically fails on its own terms, while its nakedly lethal and destructive power only fills graveyards and leaves countries in ruins. Far from being an effective vehicle to project American power, unleashing the brutality of the U.S. war machine has become the fastest, surest way to further undermine America’s international standing in the eyes of our neighbors.

After so many wars under so many administrations of both parties, neither Republicans nor Democrats can claim to be a “lesser evil” on questions of war and peace, let alone a “peace party.”

As with so many of America’s problems, from the expansion of corporate and oligarchic power to the generational decline in living standards, the combined impact of decades of Democratic and Republican government is more dangerous, more lasting and more intractable than the policies of any single administration. On no question is this more obvious than on questions of war and peace.

For decades, there was a small but growing progressive wing in the Democratic Party that voted against record military spending and opposed U.S. wars, occupations and coups. But when Bernie Sanders ran for president and millions of grassroots Democrats rallied around his progressive agenda, the Party leaders and their corporate, plutocratic backers fought back more aggressively to defeat Bernie and the progressives than they ever fought to win elections against the Republicans, or to oppose the war on Iraq or tax cuts for the wealthy.

This year, flush with blood money from the Israel lobby, pro-Israel Democrats defeated two of the most progressive, public-spirited Democratic members of Congress, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman.

On the Republican side, in response to the U.S. wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, the libertarian Republican member of Congress Ron Paul led a small group of Republicans to join progressive Democrats in an informal bipartisan peace caucus in Congress. In recent years though, the number of members of either party willing to take any kind of stand for peace has shrunk dramatically. So while there are now over 100 Congressional caucuses, from the Candy Caucus to the Pickleball Caucus, there is still not one for peace.

After the neocons who provided the ideological fuel for Bush’s catastrophic wars reconvened around Hillary Clinton in 2016, President Trump tried to “make America’s military great again” by appointing retired generals to his cabinet and characteristically staking out positions all over the map, from a call to kill the families of “terrorists” to a National Defense Strategy naming Russia and China as the “central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security,” to casting himself as a peacemaker by trying to negotiate a peace treaty with North Korea.

Trump is now running against Biden’s war in Ukraine and trying to have it both ways on Gaza, with undying support for Israel and a promise to end the war immediately. Some Palestinian-Americans are supporting Trump for not being the VP for Genocide Joe, just as other people support Harris for not being Trump.

But most Americans know little about Trump’s actual war policy as president. The unique value of a leader like Trump to the military-industrial complex is that he draws attention to himself and diverts attention away from U.S. atrocities overseas.

In 2017, Trump’s first year in office, he oversaw the climax of Obama’s war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, which probably killed as many civilians as Israel has massacred in Gaza. In that year alone, the U.S. and its allies dropped over 60,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan,Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Somalia. That was the heaviest bombing since the first Gulf War in 1991, and double the destruction of the “Shock & Awe” bombing of Iraq in 2003.

Most chillingly, the Iraqi forces who defeated the last remnants of ISIS in Mosul’s Old City were ordered to kill all the survivors, fulfilling Trump’s threat to “take out their families.” "We killed them all," an Iraqi soldier told Middle East Eye. "Daesh, men, women and children. We killed everyone." If anyone is counting on Trump to save the people of Gaza from Netanyahu and Biden’s genocide, that should be a reality check.

In other areas, Trump’s back-pedaling on Obama’s diplomatic achievements with Iran and Cuba have led to new crises for both those countries on the eve of this election. By moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, bribing Arab despots with ‘Abraham’ deals, and encouraging Netanyahu’s Greater Israel ambitions, Trump primed the powder-keg for the genocide in Gaza and the new crisis in the Middle East under Biden.

On the other side, Harris shares responsibility for genocide, arguably the most serious international crime in the book. To make matters worse, she has connived in a grotesque scheme to provide cover for the genocide by pretending to be working for a ceasefire that, as Jill Stein and many others have said, the U.S. could enforce “in the blink of an eye, with a single phone call” if it really wanted to. As for the future, Harris has only committed to making the U.S. military even more “lethal.”

The movement for a Free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza has failed to win the support of the Republican or Democratic presidential campaigns. But this is not a failure on the part of the Palestinian-Americans we have listened to and worked with, who have engaged in brilliant organizing, gradually raised public awareness and won over more Americans to their cause. They are leading the most successful anti-war organizing campaign in America since the Iraq War.

The refusal of Trump or Harris to listen to the calls of Americans whose families are being massacred in Gaza, and now in Lebanon too, is a failure on the part of the corrupt, anti-democratic political system of which Trump and Harris are figureheads, not a failure of activism or organizing.

Whomever each of us votes for in the presidential election, the campaign to end the genocide in Gaza will continue, and we must grow stronger and smarter and more inclusive until politicians cannot ignore us, no matter how much money the Israel lobby and other corrupt interests throw at them, or at their political opponents.

Whomever we vote for, the elephant in the room will still be U.S. militarism and the violence and chaos it inflicts on the world. Whether Trump or Harris is president, the result will be more of the same, unless we do something to change it. As legendary Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu famously said, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”

No American should be condemned for voting for a candidate of their choice, however successfully the Democrats and Republicans have marginalized the very concept of multi-party democracy that the U.S. claims to support in other countries. Whoever wins this election, we must find a way to put peace back on this country’s national agenda, and to make our collective voices heard in ways that cannot be drowned out by oligarchs with big bags of cash.

Every parent voting in the November 5 U.S. election should ask themselves: How will this presidential election affect my child’s health?

Concern is rising about the avalanche of toxic chemicals in our kids’ food and environment—and recently these issues gained more attention amid Bobby Kennedy, Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign for former U.S. President Donald Trump.

While RFK, Jr. speaks of the need to end “corporate capture” over government policy (indeed a serious problem), enforcement of food and drug safety protections plummeted under Trump.

Regardless of one’s political stance, people are right to be concerned about the proliferation of harmful chemicals linked to serious health impacts, from cancer to ADHD. But, there’s a big elephant in this room: Project 2025, the right-wing policy platform crafted by many top former Trump administration officials for the deeply conservative Heritage Foundation. While Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, evidence shows the right-wing platform will guide Trump’s policies if he’s elected in November.

The Heritage Foundation agrees, claiming that “during Trump’s last term, he embraced two-thirds of their policy proposals within his first year in office.” In 2022, Trump said of the Heritage Foundation’s plans: "They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do."

Project 2025 would threaten our children’s health, our food safety, and the environment in many disturbing ways. The right-wing Republican platform takes a wrecking ball to crucial protections from toxic pesticides and other harmful chemicals, and undermines consumer food safety, and access to child nutrition and clean air and water.

While RFK, Jr. speaks of the need to end “corporate capture” over government policy (indeed a serious problem), enforcement of food and drug safety protections plummeted under Trump, who appointed an unprecedented number of industry lobbyists and executives to key high-level positions, worsening this corporate capture.

Endangering Food Safety

The food we consume every day is often laden with toxic chemicals that harm our health, particularly for children who are developing their minds and bodies. Project 2025 would make our food supply more unsafe and unhealthy by giving Big Food, Big Ag, and Big Chemical corporations free rein to maximize profits and cut regulatory corners at the expense of our kids’ well-being.

By aggressively deregulating pesticides and chemicals, Project 2025 would allow far more toxics in our food supply, air, and water, putting our children in harm’s way. This would include rolling back vital, hard-won protections from highly toxic pesticides like dacthal (linked to irreversible harm to unborn babies’ developing brains) and PFAS, aka, “forever chemicals”—linked to kidney or testicular cancer, and damage to the liver and immune system—which the Biden-Harris administration recently addressed.

While Kennedy stresses the need for consumer protections and labeling of GMO products, Trump gutted these protections in his first term, prompting a lawsuit by farmers and conservationists.

Project 2025 dangerously calls for removing federal inspection for meat and poultry processing plants, leaving required inspections up to the states, which vary widely and often provide meager protections for consumer health and safety. When we’re seeing massive recalls of tainted chicken and outbreaks of E-coli illnesses from fast food, the last thing consumers need is less protection from our federal government.

This Trump-allied policy blueprint also urges the undermining or even outright elimination of the USDA’s science-backed Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA), which have been improved in recent years to address diet-related health crises. These vital guidelines are intended to ensure that the billions of taxpayer dollars spent on federally supported feeding programs, like school meals, align with scientific nutritional guidance.

Also troubling is the Project 2025 plan to further deregulate GMOs in our food supply, including removing hard-won GMO labeling requirements that protect our right to know what’s in our food. Slashing consumer protections on GMOs and food labeling should worry everyone, particularly supporters of RFK, Jr.’s “MAHA” campaign for Trump. While Kennedy stresses the need for consumer protections and labeling of GMO products, Trump gutted these protections in his first term, prompting a lawsuit by farmers and conservationists.

Slashing Child Nutrition and Healthcare

Equally disastrous are Project 2025’s plans to slash government food assistance to low-income and working-class people through SNAP (once known as “food stamps”) and the Women, Infants, and Children program (WIC), which provides critical nutrition for millions of children. This Republican plan also seeks to eliminate the Head Start program, which served 833,000 children in 2022, and universal free school meals that provide food security to millions of children.

Cutting school meals for kids in need would cause serious harm. As First Focus on Children explains, Project 2025’s cuts to food assistance “would significantly increase hunger for millions of children, spike nutrition-related diseases, and eliminate the safety regulations on baby formula.” If implemented by Trump, Project 2025 would eliminate healthy school meals for 20 million American children in lower-income schools.

Eliminating and Gutting Environmental Protections

Regulations protecting clean air and water are critical to our health. Project 2025 would harm our kids’ health by demolishing vital environmental protections that help keep our water and air clean, and diminish our exposure to toxic pesticides and chemicals. Project 2025’s calls for gutting the EPA including eliminating legal and regulatory enforcement and compliance offices, curtailing environmental review, and diminishing scientific credentials for EPA science advisors. Project 2025 also aims to severely weaken the Endangered Species Act and reduce the influence of EPA science on whether pesticides are approved for use—opening the door to many more toxic pesticides that could harm our health and environment.

According to former Acting Deputy EPA Administrator Stan Meiburg, “Project 2025 is just full of recommendations that would essentially eviscerate EPA. They would turn it into a shell of what its true mission is.”

In stark contrast, Vice President Kamala Harris has consistently acted to protect our kids’ health.

These policies reflect the same agenda implemented by the first Trump administration, which rolled back more than 100 environmental protections. Numerous reports confirm that the Trump administration pressured EPA officials to back away from environmental regulation and enforcement—allegedly retaliating against EPA scientists who warned about harm from chemicals. As ProPublica reported, “If Trump fulfills even some of the promises made in Project 2025, job security for the whistleblowers—and all EPA scientists—will become much more tenuous.” Mirroring this Trump agenda, Project 2025 “specifically calls for new chemicals to be approved quickly and proposes that all employees whose work touches on policy in federal agencies would become at-will workers, allowing them to be fired more easily.”

For anyone hoping that a Trump administration might “Make America Healthy Again,” as RFK, Jr. has insisted, evidence makes clear that Trump’s entire record completely contradicts these important goals. As president, Trump expanded Americans’ exposures to toxic pesticides and chemicals and gutted our consumer health protections. Meanwhile, the Republican Party platform doesn’t say one word (not even one) about protecting our health from pesticides and other toxic chemicals. Trump’s past and future plans are a continuation of decades-long efforts by Republicans to weaken and often eradicate vital environmental protections.

In stark contrast, Vice President Kamala Harris has consistently acted to protect our kids’ health. After Trump reversed a hard-won ban on the highly toxic pesticide chlorpyrifos, Biden-Harris restored that ban to protect our health. Biden-Harris issued the first-ever drinking water standard for “forever chemicals,” investing more than $1 billion to protect Americans from these deadly chemicals.

When we vote for our children’s health and our own, the choice is crystal clear: Trump and Project 2025 would give corporations free rein to poison our environment and our food. Vice President Harris will strengthen and expand vital protections for our kids, and for all of us.

This piece was first published by Friends of the Earth Action.

Coming up for a vote in early November is a resolution advanced by the Ireland and New Zealand delegations to the United Nations to commission a critical new scientific study on the effects of nuclear war. The study, which would be the first under U.N. auspices in more than 30 years, would be run by an independent scientific panel of 21 members and would examine the physical effects and societal consequences of a nuclear war on local, regional, and planetary scales. It would be comprehensive in its scope, including the climate, environmental, and radiological effects of nuclear war and how these would impact public health, global social and economic systems, agriculture, and ecosystems over periods of days, weeks, and decades.

Our Understanding of the Effects of Nuclear War Needs to Be Updated

That nuclear war would be catastrophic and potentially kill hundreds of millions of people has been well known for decades. But we have reason to believe that our current knowledge is incomplete, and some of it is out of date. Since the last time the U.N. commissioned such a report—its 1988 Study on the Climatic and Other Global Effects of Nuclear War—the world population has grown and changed in distribution, economies have become more interdependent, and the environment more fragile. New scientific information has yielded insights, including updates to our understanding of, and ability to model, the atmosphere, and the studies of the long-term effects of radiation on affected populations have yielded new information. Some of this technical work has been presented in the four Conferences on the Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons.

It is also clear that additional research continues to be needed to fill important knowledge gaps. New studies are being published and commissioned and research gaps are being identified. There have been recently updated studies published of the radiological fallout impacts of atmospheric nuclear detonations and of ground bursts, and the U.S. National Academies is currently conducting an Independent Study on Potential Environmental Effects of Nuclear War to try to improve our understanding of the risks and effects of nuclear winter, which recent research suggests could kill hundreds of millions or billions of people. In a 2022 report, the U.S. National Academies urged the development of a research program to better understand the effects of low-dose ionizing radiation using recent advances in epidemiology, biological understanding of disease occurrence, and computational and analytical technologies, and it has also become clear that our understanding of how radiation affects women and children differently than men is incomplete.

As long as countries possess nuclear weapons, nuclear war is a possibility.

There is little current, detailed information available about how even a limited nuclear war could affect social and economic systems, including how damage to industry, energy production, and financial systems would affect human well-being and what subsequent migration, conflict, and disease would result. Studies in the 1980s indicated that a relatively limited nuclear war could cause a U.S. economic collapse, which would take many years to recover from, and larger-scale attacks could cause damage from which recovery might not be possible.

A 2023 study by the U.S. National Academies on Risk Analysis Methods for Nuclear War and Nuclear Terrorism, tasked to look at the likelihood and consequences of different nuclear war scenarios, found the information about the consequences incomplete. Given this, the study advised, “There is a need to improve the understanding of less-well-understood physical effects of nuclear weapons (such as fires; damage in modern urban environments; electromagnetic pulse effects; and climatic effects, such as nuclear winter), as well as the assessment and estimation of psychological, societal, and political consequences of nuclear weapons use.”

Why Would a U.N.-Commissioned Study Be Important?

As long as countries possess nuclear weapons, nuclear war is a possibility. Nuclear war does not respect national boundaries, and countries not party to the conflict may be affected, potentially catastrophically. The global community deserves a rigorous, science-based understanding of these possible consequences. This lack of understanding is not limited to the public. The nuclear war consequence models maintained by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for the U.S. Department of Defense provide an incomplete picture, according to the 2023 National Academies study, which found these assessments to be “focused on prompt effects and military objectives. This results in a partial accounting of the consequences leading to a limited understanding of the breadth of the outcomes.”

This new U.N. study needs to be legitimate, transparent, inclusive, and accountable. The global community expects this type of authoritative scientific assessment on global existential threats from its international bodies; an example is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that was created to provide governments and the public with regular scientific assessments on climate change, risks posed, and solutions.

What Role Should Scientists Play in Nuclear Weapons Policy?

Scientists have regularly provided critical information and perspectives that have served to sound the alarm on the dangers of the use of nuclear weapons. They’ve done so from the very first moments of the nuclear age, when Manhattan Project scientists wrote the Franck report foretelling the nuclear arms race and signed a Leo Szilard-spearheaded petition to forego the first use of a nuclear bomb. Later, scientists working independently from governments went on to publicly illuminate the dangerous effects of radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear explosions on unsuspecting people, and used those findings to create momentum for the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, which kept tests below ground. Scientists have been warning us since the 1980s about nuclear winter—the scenario in which soot from firestorms set off by nuclear war could be lofted into the stratosphere and persist for years, disrupting the climate and thus agriculture on global scales, inducing widespread famine.

In April of this year, the national science academies of the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) weighed in, issuing a statement for the first time on nuclear weapons. They declared that “it is imperative to highlight the known consequences of nuclear warfare,” adding that there is strong scientific evidence that “depending on the scale of use of nuclear weapons, there is the potential for the destruction of entire ecosystems and extinction of species, due to the direct impact of explosions and fires and altered climatic conditions. In the worst cases this could be on the scale of a mass extinction.”

The academies further urged the scientific community “to continue to develop and communicate the scientific evidence base that shows the catastrophic effects of nuclear warfare on human populations and other species with which we share our planet.”

The United States Should Support This Resolution—and Urge Other Nations to Follow Suit

Given that the United States relies on a strategy of nuclear deterrence, which seeks to obtain security by threatening nuclear war, it seems obvious that this country should want to fully understand the risks it is running.

Nuclear-armed states do not run these risks alone. The rest of the world can be affected by nuclear war via radioactive fallout, environmental changes such as nuclear winter, and disruption of the global economic system. Almost any nuclear war would be a global problem.

As a country with a strong global leadership role, the United States should co-sponsor this resolution and encourage its allies to do the same. The United States should also provide technical advice and offer the participation of its most knowledgeable scientists, while supporting the participation of scientists from a wide range of other nations and communities to ensure their perspectives are included in the scoping and execution of the study.

Last week, I traveled to Puerto Rico for the opening of a much-needed Social Security office in San Juan. There, I spoke at a forum marking the opening alongside Martin O’Malley, the Commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA) appointed by the Biden-Harris administration.

After the previous office closed due to a private landlord evicting SSA, Puerto Ricans living in San Juan were forced to travel hours just to claim their earned Social Security benefits. Back in March, I first visited Puerto Rico, at the invitation of Puerto Rico Senator at Large William E. Villafañe, for a roundtable discussion and community meeting calling on the Biden-Harris administration to open a new office.

— (@)

The administration listened to the people of Puerto Rico. Commissioner O’Malley and his team expedited the timeline for opening the new office, originally several years, to only five months. And O’Malley personally traveled to Puerto Rico to mark the opening of the new office.

At the forum, O’Malley called for an end to unequal treatment of Puerto Ricans, including a grievous injustice — their ineligibility for Supplemental Security Income (SSI), an anti-poverty program administered by the Social Security Administration.

— (@)

A few days after the forum, Donald Trump held a rally at Madison Square Garden. His opening speaker, so-called comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, took the opportunity to call Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.” Hinchcliffe said the quiet part out loud: Trump and the people around him have no respect for Puerto Ricans, and don’t consider them real Americans.

In contrast, the opening of San Juan’s new Social Security office shows that the Biden-Harris administration is listening to Puerto Ricans. When O’Malley decided to prioritize reopening the office, he didn’t know that Puerto Rico was about to be all over the news. He just knew it was the right thing to do.

— (@)

O’Malley’s term as Commissioner of Social Security ends in January. It’s highly likely that if elected President, Kamala Harris would reappoint him. Donald Trump would not. Instead, he’s likely to reinstate Andrew Saul (the commissioner during Trump’s first term, who used his position to attack Social Security’s workforce and make it harder for people with disabilities to get their earned benefits) or another handpicked crony.

This is what’s on the ballot next Tuesday, not just policy and personnel, but decency and respect. Donald Trump has spent days whining “it was only a joke.” What Trump forgets is that for it to be a joke, it has to be funny.

And there is nothing funny at all about calling Puerto Rico, the Isla del Encanto, a “floating island of garbage.”

Like millions of Americans, we watched in horror on January 6, 2021 as a riotous, Confederate-flag-wielding mob ransacked the U.S. Capitol, assaulted police officers, and strode the halls of Congress chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!” and “Where’s Nancy?” The rioters’ goals were not just violence and mayhem; they did their best to overturn a free and fair election. It was an insurrection, and they almost succeeded.

In early 2021, with the Capitol still in shambles, we began writing a comic book series that would imagine a dystopian world in which that was the case.

Shockingly, or perhaps not, we’ve seen many elements that we only imagined becoming reality in recent months. And it should be a stark reminder to Americans everywhere that our democracy remains fragile.

The message is clear and straight out of the playbook: Violence in the name of an autocrat is, in fact, patriotic heroism. The leader is the law.

Issue #1 of 1/6: The Graphic Novel, which debuted in January of 2023, featured a fictional, government-sponsored rally honoring “patriots” who raided the Capitol on January 6 and an Iwo Jima-style monument to J6 “martyrs.” In reality, a gala honoring insurrectionists was scheduled at former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Bedminster golf club earlier this year, albeit later canceled. And evidence unsealed this month from the federal case against Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election nearly mirrored conversations we imagined in Issue #2 that took place from the Oval Office.

Many other elements of our series (which we won’t spoil here) have also come to pass in recent months.

To be clear, we’re neither soothsayers nor futurists. But between the Republican National Committee announcing it has recruited thousands of “poll watchers,” Georgia officials already planning how to undermine election results, and the FBI warning of election-related domestic terrorism, it is clear efforts to undermine our right to vote are already in progress.

We must stay vigilant to these efforts, so that our fiction does not further become reality.

In researching the book, we spoke with dozens of journalists, scholars, eyewitnesses, and at least one participant in the insurrection. It quickly became clear not only how close we came to a successful coup d’état, but that Trump consistently follows what many experts call an “Authoritarian Playbook,” employed by tyrants and dictators around the world.

The playbook includes attacking the press, scapegoating and demonizing vulnerable groups, trafficking in conspiracy theories, fostering a loyal cult of personality, and encouraging violence by acolytes and followers. We incorporated each of these themes into our series, thinking that we were writing a speculative cautionary tale for the future.

What seemed like science fiction now feels more like a prediction. Trump has deepened his hatred of the free press, even insulting the right-leaning Wall Street Journal this month. He has made ridiculous claims about immigrants eating pets, one of many false conspiracy theories he’s trafficked.

He also doubled down on the insurrection this month, calling it an event with “love and peace” and insisting there was a “peaceful transfer of power.” Meanwhile, both he and his vice presidential pick JD Vance have refused to admit that the former president lost the 2020 election, and have dodged questions as to whether they would seek to challenge this year’s election, even if every governor certifies the results.

Perhaps most ominously, Trump has said he would pardon some or all of the 1,400 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol, calling them “hostages,” “political prisoners,” and “unbelievable patriots.” They include over 200 who pleaded guilty to assaulting federal officers, obstructing law enforcement, committing seditious conspiracy, and other felonies. Hundreds more have been convicted or pleaded guilty to other crimes.

The message is clear and straight out of the playbook: Violence in the name of an autocrat is, in fact, patriotic heroism. The leader is the law.

In much of our series, the former president is depicted in shadow as others do his bidding. That’s because our research made clear to us that, whoever wins the presidential election in November, the threat of authoritarianism in America will be with us for years to come.

But our series also carries hope and surprising optimism, fueled by those same conversations with experts and observers. Voting, it turns out, is necessary but not sufficient to preserve democracy. Fending off tyranny also requires broad and diverse civil resistance, strategic organizing and communications, disrupting and persuading business and other elites, and solidarity in the face of repression.

Art, artists, and creative expression are also essential, which brings us back to comic books. From Captain America socking Hitler in the jaw months before the U.S. entered World War II to Wonder Woman fighting misogyny and repression, to Black Panther fighting the KKK, comics have long been used to oppose hate and oppression. We hope that our series will continue that tradition. And that it’s not too late.

In 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican from Arizona, captured his party's presidential nomination and unabashedly conducted an extremist, right-wing campaign. He opposed civil rights legislation and New Deal social welfare programs. He implied a willingness to use nuclear weapons, saying he would give U.S. field commanders and the NATO Supreme Commander the freedom to launch them without presidential approval.

As Goldwater famously said in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

The Johnson campaign exploited Goldwater’s extremism with what may be the most effective and chilling TV ad of all time.

If you watch the famous campaign ad, you’ll see a very young girl standing in a field, pulling petals off a daisy while counting them out one by one. Then, we hear the voice of a military commander (with a strong southern accent) doing a similar countdown that ends in a nuclear explosion which takes over the screen. The ad finishes with a voice-over, Lyndon Johnson offering a few pious words about love and peace. Johnson is never seen. Goldwater is never mentioned.

Lyndon Johnson crushed Goldwater 61.1 percent to 38.5, winning 486 electoral votes to 52.

This year’s election also features a self-declared extremist. Yet today, the presidential race is a toss-up. Trump’s extremism promotes lies about immigrants eating pets and the poisoning of our blood. Trump calls Democrats the enemy within and he praises those who stormed the capital on January 6th. And in total violation of the history of American electioneering, he continues to argue that the 2020 election was stolen from him. A vast majority of Republicans agree with him. Goldwater and his party of 1964 look like centrists in comparison.

Given Trump’s blatant extremism, how can the election be so close? Why isn’t Harris 20 points ahead? What is so different between now and 1964?

Hillary Clinton, in 2016, provided an explanation, shared by many, that about half of all Trump voters are bigots:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.

Voters are willing to elect Trump, the ultra-extremist, because he voices their fears about the rise of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ communities. More than anything, they and Trump want to make America white again!

If that theory is correct, we’d expect white working-class voters to be very illiberal on those issues and to have become even more so over the last several decades. We tested that theory in my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, tracking 23 divisive social issues questions found in long-term voter surveys. It turns out that in 13 of the questions, the responses shifted in a more liberal direction over the years, and none of the 23 became more illiberal. Here are two stunning examples:

“Should gay or lesbian couples be legally permitted to adopt children?”

Said Yes in 2000: 38.2%
Said Yes in 2020: 76.0%

“Should legal status be granted to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least 3 years and have not been convicted of any felony crimes?”

Said Yes in 2010: 32.1%
Said Yes in 2020: 61.8%

If the deplorable argument is wanting, as our research suggests, what is a better explanation for the enormous support Trump is receiving?

A disclaimer is in order. It’s impossible to address all the factors in one short article. But this question shouldn’t be ignored, so here goes.

Let’s start with trust in government. In 1964, an amazing 77 percent of Americans agreed that “they trust the government to do what is right just about always/most of the time.” In 2024 it was 22 percent.

That means the incumbent President in 1964, Lyndon Johnson, was viewed as the leader of a government that protected it’s people. Kamala Harris, as the current incumbent Vice-President, is mostly viewed as a leader of a government that is not protecting the average person. Harris is perceived as part of the establishment, the elites who have benefited during the years of runaway inequality, while Trump is perceived as its wrecking ball.

But that displeasure with government today suggests another set of explanations, including the collapse of unionization and the rise of job insecurity facing working people over the past four decades. More than 29 percent of the total U.S. workforce were union members in 1964. Add in their families and at last half of all Americans had close union connections. Today, 94 percent of all private sector workers are not in unions.

As a result, nearly all workers have had little or no protection against the mass layoffs that have regularly afflicted the country since the 1970s, even when the economy is prospering. During the Johnson years, the union ecosystem was so dense that Democratic politicians had no choice but to appeal to the interests of working people. They had to be the party of workers whether they liked it or not.

But starting with Bill Clinton, unions became small enough to ignore. Appealing to and appeasing Wall Street and corporate interests became central to the Democratic Party’s path to power. They wrongly believed that workers had no place else to turn.

And white workers, in particular, fled the Democrats. The research for my book strongly suggests that the main culprit was mass layoffs and the failure of the Democrats to address them.

Take Mingo County, West Virginia, with a population 25,000. It had 3,300 coal mining jobs in 1996. In that year Bill Clinton received 69.7 percent of the vote. By 2020, Mingo County had lost 3,000 of those coal mining jobs, and Joe Biden received only 13.9 percent.

Is this cherry-picking one country to make a point? No. For Wall Street’s War on Workers, we tested all the counties in the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Our findings showed that as the county mass layoff rate went up, the Democratic vote declined. In short, the Democrats are being blamed for failing to protect working-class people from the destruction of their jobs. While working people may not know all the details about stock buybacks and leveraged buyouts, they know that Wall Street has been walking all over them and the Democrats have done little to stop them.

In discussing with my colleagues why this election is so different than 1964, one noted that the problem may be that Harris didn’t have enough time to mount a full campaign. But another jumped in and said, maybe she had too much time. Say what?

“She’s a corporate Democrat,” my colleague responded, meaning that the more Harris campaigns the more she sends that corporate-friendly signal to working-class voters. When they say she isn’t specific enough about her plans, they’re also saying she isn’t speaking directly enough to them about their issues.

The transformation of the Democratic Party from the party of the working class to the party of prosperous elites can’t be ignored or wished away. It is one reason why this election is so close and why an extremist may capture the electoral college. If Trump wins, he will surely wield his axe against government, and that is certain to negatively impact the most vulnerable among us.

It doesn’t have to be this way. My research and that of the Center for Working Class Politics show that a strong progressive populist message is very attractive to working people, especially in the Blue Wall states. It’s a damn shame that so many Democratic politicians can’t see the writing on the wall.

If you’re like many of my friends, I know what you’re thinking: OMG, how is it even possible that half the country is going to vote for that guy? And there’s a slightly less common corollary to that: I mean, really, who are these people who say that they’re undecided? Who doesn’t know enough to know which way they’re going to vote?

Well, it turns out that I’ve met a fair number of those undecided voters in person, going door to door canvassing in eastern Pennsylvania, where, it’s fair to say, the 2024 election may be decided. They’re real people, with perfectly real everyday concerns. They have families living in pleasant suburbs in and around Easton, Bethlehem, and Allentown, their neatly tended lawns a mix of grass, crabgrass, and dandelions, and older model SUVs, minivans, and pickup trucks in their driveways. And I’d dare you to knock on one of their doors and, when someone answers, say, “So, who the hell are you?”

I get it: they’re easy to demonize, especially if you’re a liberal or leftist news junkie living on the Upper West Side of New York or in Takoma Park, Maryland, or Cambridge, Massachusetts; you read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, or Politico; and your Monday nights are built around watching Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart. I’m not surprised if, like Anne Enright, the novelist from University College Dublin, writing for “On the Election” in the New York Review of Books, you vent your pent-up frustration over undecideds who are “lonely and sometimes pathetically grandiose.” It upsets Enright to be “watching twelve billion election dollars chase down a few thousand anxious minds in Pennsylvania.” Can’t they just make up those minds of theirs?

To my mind, the forehead-slapping awe at those undecided in this presidential election took its purest form in a commentary by comedian and satirist Lewis Black on a recent episode of The Daily Show:

“We still have no idea who the fuck is gonna win! And that’s all thanks to one very special group of morons… Oh yes, undecided voters: the same people you see at the ice cream shop asking for 12 mini spoon samples. It’s a $3 cone, asshole! How is anyone still undecided in this election? … This election still comes down to winning over a few dozen Pennsylvanians with carbon monoxide poisoning. Now, don’t get me wrong. Maybe these undecided voters aren’t stupid. Maybe they have a good reason for being idiots.”

But one Sunday afternoon, while crisscrossing several blocks in a neighborhood of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, knocking on perhaps 40 front doors over several hours, I had the opportunity to talk to a number of those very undecideds. Out of the 40 homes curated from lists of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents — those who had, in fact, voted in recent elections — about half of them were home and came to the door. And of those 20, maybe half a dozen told me that they hadn’t yet decided who they were going to vote for or if they planned to vote at all.

As a start, it turns out, a number of them haven’t really been following the news. According to research by the campaigns, many of them work two jobs. They don’t get the Times or the Post. Many, in fact, don’t even get the local paper. They know who’s running, but while they seemingly know a fair amount about Donald Trump, they know a lot less about Kamala Harris. They didn’t watch the two conventions on TV or even get around to watching the presidential debate between Harris and Trump. And, by the way, that puts them among the majority of Americans: an estimated 67 million people watched that event on September 10th, while 158 million people voted in 2020 and an additional 81 million eligible voters who didn’t cast a ballot back then missed it or skipped it.

My sense, from the voters I talked to — totally unscientific, yes, but backed up by some polling and research — is that voters who say they’re undecided have largely tuned out politics in these years. Maybe that’s because they’ve long come to believe that all politicians are corrupt or feckless; or maybe it’s because they’ve been around long enough to have concluded that “things never change” and that their own lives are only marginally affected by whoever’s in office; maybe it’s because with kids, a job (or two), caring for older parents or relatives with special needs, and struggling to make ends meet, they just don’t have space in their lives for “the news”; or maybe they just didn’t care to share their thoughts with a stranger at their door. Whatever the reasoning, not a single undecided voter I spoke to rejected the message I was carrying or pushed back hard against the idea that maybe Harris deserves a genuine look.

And they’re still up for grabs. The lead story in the October 22nd New York Times was headlined: “Battle is Fierce for Sliver of Pie: Undecided Votes.” Its subhead: “Election Could Hinge on People Who Aren’t ‘Super Political.’”

Harris Chipping Away at Undecideds?

So, how many are there? With the polls showing a razor-thin difference between Harris and Trump among those who have indeed made up their minds, it’s hard to pin down exactly how many people may still be undecided. By some measure, since early summer, things may have been moving toward the Democrats when evaluating undecided voters. According to a PBS News/NPR/Marist poll and analysis, before President Biden quit the race the number of undecideds was just 3%. But when he quit, that number jumped to 9%, reflecting the fact that Harris was an unknown quantity to many Americans. According to PBS, that number shrank after the September debate, as potential voters, women in particular, learned more about Harris, especially over the abortion rights issue. The New York Times reported that the Trump campaign has found that the number of undecideds has fallen from around 10% in August to perhaps 5% today.

And according to Newsweek, citing an Emerson College survey of undecided voters, in recent weeks those voters have been breaking Harris’s way by an almost 2-1 margin. “Emerson College polling, conducted between October 14 and 16,” that magazine reported, “shows that among undecided voters who chose who they would vote for in the past week or month, 60 percent opted for the Democratic vice president, while 36 percent opted for Republican former President Donald Trump.”

It’s impossible, of course, to determine precisely how many voters are actually undecided. Some surveys put the number at about 13%, others at just 3% or so. A Times/Siena survey found that, in the “swing states” alone, the undecideds are 3.7%, or 1.2 million potential voters. Whatever their numbers, in an election in which polls have consistently recorded essentially a swing-state dead heat between Harris and Trump, even that tiny number might be enough to tilt the final result. However, undecided voters could also simply decide to sit out the election (as many analysts suggest they might do) or, if their votes split evenly, have no effect at all on the final tally.

In addition to partisan voters, and those enthusiastic about one candidate or the other, there are those characterized as “swing voters,” “low-information voters,” or simply infrequent voters. All of those categories can reasonably be imagined as “persuadable,” though the cost-benefit ratio involved in efforts to reach them and get them to the polls could be prohibitive. A pair of professors and election specialists, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Stephen Henriques, writing for Time, argue that so-called swing voters — “who do lean towards one candidate but are open to voting for the alternative” — will be critical on November 5th. And surprisingly enough, swing voters (including undecideds) may add up to as much as 15% of the current electorate, according to a Times/Siena poll that the two authors cite.

Unfortunately, Harris may not be helping herself, given how she’s running her campaign. At its start, she benefited enormously from a skyrocketing burst of enthusiasm triggered by President Biden’s decision to drop out. His age, seeming infirmity, and catastrophically bad debate performance against Trump cast a pall of depression over many Democratic organizations and activists, and it seemed Trump then had a path toward a clear victory. But Harris’s emergence, her emphasis on “joy” and optimism (and Tim Walz’s effective use of the term “weird” to describe the GOP ticket) touched off a swell of — yes! — optimism. According to Forbes, when Biden was the Democratic candidate, just 30% of Democrats claimed to be enthusiastic about voting in November versus 59% of Trump supporters. By early September, however, 68% of Harris supporters expressed enthusiasm against just 60% of Trump backers.

Since then, however, some have argued that her campaign has been lackluster, her speeches too carefully scripted and vetted, too cautious and repetitive, dampening some of the enthusiasm that erupted over the summer. As Robert Kuttner wrote in “Harris and the Enthusiasm Gap” for The American Prospect, “Interviews and focus groups keep quoting undecided or Trump-leaning voters as saying that they don’t really know what Harris stands for. Could that be because her own message is blurred?”

Still, Harris has maintained a slight but consistent lead over Trump in national polls ever since the Democratic convention and has lately scheduled a burst of interviews on 60 Minutes, Fox News, “The View,” Stephen Colbert’s late show, the popular women’s podcast “Call Her Daddy,” Univision, and a CNN town hall.

The Turnout Imperative

By all accounts, the Democratic ground game — canvassing, phone banking, text banking, postcard writing, local candidate rallies, tables at local events, and more — has been far superior to the GOP’s. Even when taking into account efforts like Elon Musk’s supposed army of paid volunteers, Harris’s on-the-ground efforts are three times the size of Trump’s, according to the Washington Post: “She boasts more staff, more volunteers, a larger surrogate operation, more digital advertising, a more sophisticated smartphone-based organizing program and extra money for extraneous bells and whistles typically reserved for corporate product launches and professional sports championships.”

In eastern Pennsylvania, as I saw, local and out-of-state unions are going all-out in canvassing, voter registration, and GOTV drives. When I visited Democratic headquarters in Easton, Pennsylvania, in early October, its large meeting hall was filled with what looked like a hundred union volunteers in matching T-shirts from Local 1199 SEIU (Service Employees International Union), who had traveled to Easton from Newark, New Jersey.

That area, part of Northampton County, just north of the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia, is a mostly working-class region of 320,000 people, increasingly diverse and still bearing the mark of a fading heavy manufacturing base. (Billy Joel’s 1982 anthem, “Allentown” — like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” — is an ode to what Allentown once was and what it was becoming: “Well, we’re living here in Allentown/And they’re closing all the factories down/Out in Bethlehem they’re killing time/Filling out forms, standing in line.”) For the Harris campaign, it’s a vital area.

In a feature story on the 2024 campaigns in Northampton County, the Washington Post noted that the county has voted for the winner in almost every election for a century:

“The battle over voters in Northampton County reflects some of the biggest themes and tensions running through the presidential contest all across America less than three weeks from Election Day. Strategists view Pennsylvania as perhaps the most important swing state on the map this year and believe its 19 electoral college votes could be the tipping point. Northampton is an unusual cross-section of the country — one of 26 ‘pivot’ counties nationwide that backed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.”

If you’re not from one of the swing states, much of the presidential campaign has undoubtedly gone largely unnoticed, since electioneering and campaign ads are targeted and often particularly designed for the states, cities, and communities that are most in play. If you live in a place like Allentown or Bethlehem, on the other hand, you’ve been inundated. “I’m a Pennsylvania native and have been through many election cycles in a state that is no stranger to high-profile competitive campaigns, but I haven’t seen anything like what is playing out here this fall,” Christopher Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, told the Times. “I share a laugh with my mailman when he drops off our mail because of the size of the pile of mailers he brings each day, and I’m getting used to evenings and weekends full of knocks on my door.”

The Harris campaign, especially, has gone high tech and there are a host of phone apps and websites that have emerged in recent election cycles to apply technology to local campaigning. Many of them, like Reach, allow canvassers and campaigners to chat with each other, keep track of voter conversations and results from door-knocking and phone banking, while updating information as it’s collected, and maintaining a file on which voters are interested, say, in volunteering or making a donation.

When canvassing myself in Bethlehem, I used Minivan, another popular phone app from NGP, which describes itself as “the leading technology provider to Democratic and progressive political campaigns and organizations, nonprofits, municipalities and other groups.” Through it, activists can “access an integrated platform of the best fundraising, compliance, field, organizing, digital and social networking products.” Even for the uninitiated (like me) Minivan is simple to use. After visiting a voter on a neighborhood walking tour, it’s easy to report whether that voter is home or away, record notes on your conversation, and enter other data that’s instantly synced into the system for follow-up.

Reach, Minivan, and other systems (including the progressive donation site ActBlue) can be accessed through Mobilize.us, which claims to have connected 5.5 million volunteers to local political actions nationwide. (That, too, for a novice like me, was blessedly easy to use.) Saying that it provides “the most powerful tools for organizing,” Mobilize.us can link any volunteer with “single-shift events,” recurring events, virtual events (like Zoom programs), in-person events (like rallies, speeches, and debates), and phone call campaigns to legislative offices.

In Pennsylvania, as in many parts of the country, voting is already underway. It’s far too early to make sense of what’s known so far, but it’s at least encouraging for Harris partisans that, of the more than one million mail-in ballots already returned, 62% came from Democrats and just 29% from Republicans. Even in Northampton County, hardly a Democratic Party bulwark, mail-in ballots are running about two to one in favor of the Democrats. And canvassers like me, the phalanx from 1199 SEIU, made sure that every voter we spoke to knew how to cast their votes early or by mail.

At this point, of course, it’s just fingers crossed and keep ringing those doorbells until November 5th, since the one thing none of us can afford is a Project 2025 version of a Trump presidency.

One day after a warm up speaker at Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s closing campaign rally in New York City on Sunday night called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” the island’s largest circulation newspaper El Nuevo Día October 28 endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for President.

The first paragraph of the editorial observed, “This is what Donald Trump and the Republican Party thinks of Puerto Ricans?” Signed by the signed by the editor M. Ferre Rangel, the editorial concluded, “We ask that every Puerto Rican that can vote please represent those of us who cannot vote. Vote for Kamala Harris.”

The racist slur by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe quickly reverberated across the U.S., especially in Puerto Rico and to states with large Puerto Rican populations, including critical Pennsylvania where an estimated 470,000 out of 600,000 registered Latino voters are of Puerto Rican descent. That fear prompted a feeble effort of damage control by the Trump campaign, which claimed the hateful comment did not “reflect the views of Trump or the campaign.” But notably there was no apology by Trump, or from the campaign about the multiple other racist jibes by various speakers targeting Latinos in general, African Americans, Jews, and, of course, Harris.

Ironically, the hate rally also came the same day Harris, campaigning in Philadelphia, presented a new policy platform for Puerto Rico, premised on economic development and improved disaster relief. She also reminded everyone of Trump of having "abandoned and insulted" the island during Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Indeed, as the New York Times reported Tuesday, the memories of Trump’s long, and ineffectual delay of aid to the island from a super storm that caused thousands of deaths and massive devastation, were quickly noted by those on the island, including his insulting image of tossing paper towels to a crowd at his one stop in San Juan two weeks after Maria made landfall.

“Well, this isn’t the first time. Three thousand Puerto Ricans died because he weaponized the aid. Because he didn’t think our lives were worth saving, and because of his inability to do his job,” said former San Juan, Puerto Rico Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz.

“You have to understand the context of how hurtful this is by understanding the botched and deadly response to Hurricane Maria,” said U.S. Rep. Darren Soto, a Florida Democrat of Puerto Rican descent. Even the chairman of Puerto Rico’s Republican Party said that he would withhold his support from Mr. Trump unless he apologized.

Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm on September 20, 2017, with a huge storm surge, very heavy rains, and wind gusts over 100 miles per hour. The hurricane's power was magnified nearly five times by climate change, a preview of what the nation would see again this year with Hurricane’s Helene and Milton.

As the federal response by the Trump administration was glacially slow, hospitals were rapidly overwhelmed, struggled to meet medical needs, clinics and doctor’s offices failed to re-open, patients with chronic illnesses did not have access to needed medications, and concerns emerged about the potential of cholera and other epidemics.

Where Trump failed, nurses and labor responded. Within days, National Nurses United’s Registered Nurse Response Network played a leading role in a 300-member AFL-CIO sponsored humanitarian mission, working with the Puerto Rican Federation of Labor and the San Juan mayor’s office. It launched on October 3, 2017, with NNU dispatching 50 volunteer RNs, the first of several delegations to provide medical aid in local hospitals, nursing homes, and other sites based on the immediate need for island residents.

Two weeks in, RNs reported that many people had yet to receive any food, water, and other supplies from FEMA or any other agency. Others stood in line for hours in blistering heat waiting for desperately needed water and food. They cited houses with roofs blown off and soaked interiors with dangerous black mold growing that creates respiratory distress and illness, and a breakout of leptospirosis, a dangerous bacterial disease that had already claimed lives.

“Our nurses have seen firsthand, on the ground, even in the past few days, that FEMA aid, which was far too slow and inadequate to begin with, is still necessary to save lives,” stated Cathy Kennedy, RN, lead volunteer for RNRN’s deployment in 2017, which dispatched nurses across the island.

“What nurses witness daily,” said NNU executive director Bonnie Castillo at the time “is the harsh reality of a woefully inadequate government response and the brutal, inhumane impact on the Puerto Rican people. People are still without food and water. That poses an enormous humanitarian threat in terms of disease, life, and death and who succumbs first.”

“When we arrived we were really the first responders there,” recalled Kennedy, now a co-president of NNU. “Puerto Rico is part of the United States. We never saw such a lack of basic necessities. The power grid was down. There was no access to get the medications people needed for their blood pressure, their diabetes medication, they couldn’t even keep vials of insulin because there was no refrigeration. Everybody felt like they were thrown away and treated like second class citizens.

“They were really happy to see all of the nurses and doctors, and said we were the first ones to come to their homes. A lot of our work was getting water, food, and some meds to them. We were not only the first responders, we also worked to show people how to navigate FEMA. It was unconscionable,” remembered Kennedy, contrasting Trump’s response to how quickly the Biden/Harris administration was responding to provide assistance following Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

NNU volunteers documented their experiences. In Rio Grande, outside San Juan, “we set up a clinic at a FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) site. People lined up for blocks. But FEMA was only handing out papers which need to be filled out in order that they might receive some reimbursement eventually,” reported Erin Carerra, RN.

RN volunteers in 2017, recently back from Puerto Rico hurricane relief efforts, briefed members of Congress and Senator Bernie Sanders on the public health crisis that was taking place on the island due to an inadequate response by the Trump administration.(Photo: National Nurses United)

“We did home visits with public health liaisons who identify those in need and help them do basic blood pressure checks, blood sugar checks, refill their meds, etc. They have already had chronic diseases going on and now their environment is full of hazardous materials and sanitation is so poor. They could not get a hold of their doctors due to closure of many clinics in the area,” said RN Hau Cheng.

With another RNRN team, RN Kent Savary described how “they went to a man’s home. He had no roof, all his belonging were soaking wet due to the rain and no tarp. He is living in a garage beneath where he's in a 3x3 area. It’s an impoverished area with no access to clean water. There’s black mold built up in most of the houses on the second floor, which can cause upper respiratory infections, renal failure, and scarring of the lungs. There is a lack of relief communication and no FEMA in sight. Nebulizers are needed for asthma patients, but there is nowhere to plug in. FEMA is demanding folks apply online or via their cellphone app and provide bank account info by November 30 or they get no aid. Most people don't have cell phones, cell service, power or laptops.”

By late October 2017, NNU was alerting the press to the disastrous conditions. "Our people are being left to suffer, and the nurses hope that our elected officials work to change this before people die," said Kennedy, who had recently returned from the island.

“People were so desperate for water they started drinking it from the river, where rodents had died during the storms," Kennedy reported, citing concern about the spread of water born leptospirosis. "People are going to get sicker. What the nurses have uncovered, is that there’s still standing water. There’s black mold. There are homes that have no roofs. These are people’s homes, and they want to stay in their homes. And their health is at risk."

On October 26, 2017, RNRN volunteers back from Puerto Rico joined a Capitol Hill press conference with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Nydia Velázquez and other members of Congress to call for increased aid to confront the ongoing humanitarian and health care crisis in Puerto Rico.

“It pains us to know that for many Puerto Ricans, the volunteers on this deployment provided the only aid they received—and were a temporary buffer between life and death. If our volunteer nurses can provide this aid, how has our government, with all of its resources, been unable to do the same?” asked Kennedy. “While we are so proud of our nurses for stepping up to help, even sourcing food and water for desperate Puerto Ricans, using the nurses’ own resources. Their service begs a question: Where is our government?” asked Castillo.

A NNU report in later October of 2017 noted that one million people lacked access to running water in those weeks following the storm. The report also cataloged a daily shortfall of 1.8 million meals, devastated healthcare infrastructure and disease outbreaks, and concluded that “the response to the crisis in Puerto Rico from the U.S. federal government has been unacceptable for the wealthiest country in the world.”

Four years later, in another press conference citing the still disastrous recovery, Rep. Velazquez reported that “Puerto Ricans are experiencing blackouts almost daily” and “thousands of homes (still covered) with blue tarps. This is happening in America.”

“And it was painful,” said Cruz this week following the insults against Puerto Ricans once again from Trump, “because you think, ‘My God, it’s not like this person hasn’t showed who he is to the world.”

“Racism has always been present, but they feel emboldened (under Trump) about them and us,” says Kennedy today. “It’s very divisive, disrespectful language that shows hate. I went into nursing to provide care and compassion. When you have someone running for President who has such disregard for people other than himself, we can’t have that. I struggle to understand why anyone would vote for him.”

A recent UCLA study found that 2 million people with felony convictions have the right to vote, but misinformation and lack of clarity can prevent them from exercising this right. Similar trends are pervasive in other marginalized communities – such as those experiencing homelessness and recent immigrants – which is why social workers are uniquely positioned to help empower citizens to vote this election cycle. As the 2024 presidential and state elections approach, doing so is more important than ever.

Many of the individuals we work with are politically and socially disenfranchised, and thus turn out to the polls in much lower numbers. However, low voter turnout in these communities reinforces a cycle of neglect, as elected officials are less inclined to allocate resources to areas that don’t engage in the political process. It also means that their voice isn’t heard, even when issues that directly impact them are on the line.

Social workers can help break this cycle by showing clients how their personal struggles are linked to policy decisions. For example, as few as 10% of unhoused individuals vote in elections, while this year alone more than 2,000 bills about housing and homelessness were introduced in 48 of 50 states—not to mention the other economic and social policies enacted that affect the state of homelessness and welfare of unhoused individuals. In essence, the clients that we work with are often disproportionately affected by the outcomes of elections—and deserve a voice.

Voting is one of the most direct ways individuals can influence policies on education, healthcare, housing and social services. Research from the University of Connecticut shows that higher voter turnout leads to better health, education and economic outcomes, particularly for low-income populations. When communities vote, they compel elected officials to pay attention. Social workers, as trusted advocates, can help bridge the gap between disempowered individuals and the political system that governs their lives.

Voting is one of the most direct ways individuals can influence policies on education, healthcare, housing and social services.

Doing so means first becoming more informed about the voting process ourselves. For many of the people we serve, voting feels daunting. Some don’t know if they are eligible, how to register, or where to vote. Social workers can demystify the process by providing clear, factual information about registration, poll locations, absentee ballots and early voting. Our role is to ensure our clients know these rules and are prepared to vote.

Armed with information, we can better help clients identify registration deadlines, voting locations and nonpartisan resources on candidates and issues. By integrating voter education into our practice, we can impact voter turnout in communities often overlooked by policymakers.

Beyond registration, social workers can help clients make informed decisions at the ballot box. We can help identify the issues that matter most to them: For instance, many of our clients are directly affected by policy decisions on food assistance, education reform, healthcare access, and criminal justice. Whatever the topic, we can help them find reliable, nonpartisan information about candidates, and encourage thoughtful participation in the election. This isn’t about endorsing any candidate – it’s about ensuring our clients have the information they need to vote for the candidates and policies that align with their best interests.

Voting is more than a civic duty. It is a form of empowerment. When people vote, they have a say in decisions that affect their lives, from local issues like school funding to national debates on healthcare and immigration. For those who have been marginalized or feel disconnected from society, this ability to effect change can be incredibly empowering.

With the 2024 elections nearing, social workers have a crucial role to play in creating a stronger and more inclusive democracy. Many of the people we serve are from marginalized and traditionally underserved communities, and feel disconnected from not just politics, but their civic community. They may have been taught their voice doesn’t matter, and thus believe that voting won’t have an impact—and doesn’t have the power to change their lives. This is where social workers can make a difference.

We have an opportunity to educate and encourage participation in a system that directly affects the well-being of our clients and communities. Our work doesn’t stop with addressing the immediate needs of our clients—it extends to advocating for systemic change that can improve the lives of entire communities. And few actions are as powerful in shaping systems as casting a vote.