Enormously rich people tend to get bored easily, especially those on the younger side. Stocks and bonds, such a yawn. Wealthy Baby Boomers certainly do still get a kick out of watching their financial portfolios fatten. But their Millennial and Generation Z counterparts have an added expectation. The fortunes they’re investing, they’re expecting, will be filling their lives up with fun.

And what could be more fun than collecting classic cars! The ageless-auto “alternative asset class,” the Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index documents, has nearly tripled in value over the past decade. And investors in classic cars can even get to drive their investments!

Private equity fund managers, not surprisingly, are plugging themselves into this classic car frenzy. They’re doing their best to make investing in classic cars an effortless pleasure. Wealthy car collectors, thanks to their efforts, no longer need to bother checking under the hood of classic Bugattis and Ferraris. Private equity firms will arrange all that tiresome checking for them.

Billionaire and billionaire-wannabe fund execs are shelling out much more than ever before on candidates they’re counting on to keep our tax code rich people-friendly.

These private equity firms, notes auto analyst Benjamin Hunting, are buying up veritable fleets of fine autos they see as likely to appreciate strikingly over time, then offering deep pockets an opportunity to invest in these collections of classics. In return for providing this opportunity, private equity execs typically collect a 2% annual service fee and then claim 20% of the profits the sale of the cars eventually produces.

The classic car-loving investors, meanwhile, get to share the rest of the profits, on top of the joy rides some of the classic car funds invite them to take in their “alternative asset class” investment.

How secure as an investment do classic cars rate? An “elite automobile storage boutique” industry has emerged to make sure stashed-away collectible cars don’t get either scratched or stolen. One such outfit, the Vault in San Diego, uses biometric scans and personalized access cards “to guarantee that only owners, or their designated representatives, can get anywhere near luxury vehicles.”

Not all the Millennial and Gen Z super rich, of course, have taken the dive into classic car investing. Plenty of the wealthy in these age cohorts are flocking to other alternative investments, everything from fine wines and watches to sneakers and crypto. The overall “alternative asset” category, notes a new Bank of America study, has an amazing 94% of wealthy 43-and-unders interested in it.

This Bank of America Study of Wealthy Americans surveyed 1,000 deep-pocketed adults of all ages and found that 73% of those not yet 44 years old consider themselves “skeptical” of any investment strategy that has them investing only in traditional stocks and bonds.

The wealthy who took part in the new Bank of America survey are all sitting on at least $3 million in investable assets. The younger ones among them turn out to have less than half their investable millions invested in traditional stocks and bonds. Their older counterparts have three-quarters of their investable assets in these classic categories.

The younger rich, the Bank of America study goes on to show, have almost a third of their fortunes in crypto currencies and other alternative investments like classic cars. The older rich have just 6% of their wealth sitting in these alternate asset classes.

But both the younger and older rich do share one intense investment fixation: Both age cohorts want to pay as little as possible in taxes on the income their investments—in whatever category—end up creating.

Under current federal tax law, profits from the buying and selling of assets, traditional and alternative alike, face a significantly lower tax rate than paycheck income. The top combined federal tax rate on ordinary paycheck income now runs 40.8%. But income from capital gains—the income from buying and selling assets—only faces a top 23.8% overall tax rate.

Private equity fund managers have an even lusher loophole—the so-called “carried interest tax deduction”—they will go to any lobbying lengths to forever preserve. This loophole, note analysts at Americans for Financial Reform, “allows private equity and hedge fund executives—some of the richest people in the world—to substantially lower the amount they pay in taxes.”

The loophole lets these fund execs “claim large parts” of their compensation for services rendered “as investment gains.” Ending this carried interest loophole could raise billions in new revenue.

To make sure that this ending doesn’t happen, private equity and hedge fund execs spent $547 million on political campaign contributions in the 2020 presidential election year cycle.

In the current cycle, just 11 private equity billionaires all by themselves have so far pumped over $223 million in contributions to congressional and presidential candidates, an amount that more than doubles, notes the Center for Media and Democracy, what moguls from 147 private equity firms plowed into political campaigns back in the 2016 election cycle.

In other words, billionaire and billionaire-wannabe fund execs are shelling out much more than ever before on candidates they’re counting on to keep our tax code rich people-friendly. For America’s richest, no big deal. They can easily afford these gargantuan political campaign outlays. And they also consider these outlays money exceedingly well spent.

Takes money, as the rich like to say, to make money. The American way! We need to change it. One place to start: passing the pending Carried Interest Fairness Act, legislation that U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) has introduced to eliminate the tax loophole that only “wealthy money managers on Wall Street” could love.

As U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris steps into the spotlight to take over the Democratic ticket from President Biden, some on the left have so far withheld their support. Of central concern are her views on Palestine and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Will she stake out a different policy than Biden when it comes to indiscriminate Israeli warfare on Palestinians, which has so far received unconditional US aid and political support?

For better or worse, much of Harris’s positions on Palestine are presumed by proxy to Biden’s. Indeed, Biden administration officials themselves have stated there is no daylight between hers and Biden’s positions on Israel’s war in Gaza. When pressed at public events this past month – prior to her candidacy – Harris restated Biden’s position and endorsed a two-state solution.

But in March, she also came out publicly in favour of a ceasefire before Biden did, in what some assume was partially a test of her individual electoral and political salience.

Harris has certainly not been an avowed, true believer in Zionism the way Biden has historically been. As a US Senator, Harris opposed SB-1, an anti-Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) bill backed by the Zionist lobby, on constitutional free speech grounds.

Harris has also stopped short of ruling out consequences for Israeli forces when interviewed regarding Netanyahu’s order to invade Rafah, a city dedicated as a safe zone for hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians from throughout the Gaza Strip and which Biden called a “red line.”

Harris will likely have to move beyond statements of sympathy to gain the support of a base that has watched over 80% of all homes in Gaza destroyed, all hospitals bombed, and over a million at risk of starvation because Israel has used hunger as a weapon of war.

That “red line” of Rafah proved largely superficial for Biden, who continued to supply weapons unconditionally as Israeli forces invaded the city. Soon after, Biden even sent US troops to support a covert massacre that killed over 200 Palestinians while retrieving Israeli hostages, in direct contravention of the diplomatic ceasefire exchanges Biden has purported to support.

Harris has not criticized any of Biden’s or Israel’s choices in Gaza, but she has been more explicit about “the scale of human suffering” among Palestinians, saying she “will not be silent” and that a two-state solution must ensure Palestinians “can exercise their right to freedom, dignity, and self determination.”

At the same time, Harris has condemned protestors outside the war criminal Israeli PM Netanyahu’s address to Congress on the basis of a few individuals (among thousands) burning the US flag. She also met with Netanyahu less than a week before the extrajudicial assassinations of key figures in both Hamas and Hezbollah, leaving doubts about Israeli and US commitments to a ceasefire, and the U.S.’s role in enabling regional aggression from Israel.

Harris has not criticised any of Biden’s or Israel’s choices in Gaza, but she has been more explicit about 'the scale of human suffering'

We do not yet have a full picture of Harris’s personal foreign policy approach. Her management of the US-Mexico border did not reflect her statements in 2018 that she would consider abolishing ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a controversial agency established after 9/11 which has a record of sometimes cruel immigrant detention practices and family separation.

She has also signalled she would continue Biden’s asylum policy, which in fact borrows from Trump’s virtual moratorium on asylum. Some feel that record is evidence enough that California’s former “Top Cop” and lead prosecutor would favour military solutions over diplomacy across the board.

However, her personal team includes Philip Gordan as a national security advisor who served multiple Democratic administrations; Gordan supported the Iran Nuclear Deal which Trump dissolved and which Biden never renewed in favour of fostering Trump’s normalization and weapons agreements with Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Gordon generally believes that decades of US interventionism has often misjudged the costs, consequences, and sustainability of such forceful strategy.

Still, he has by no means strayed from traditional pro-Israel policies that prioritize the US-Israel relationship with the same failed policies: treating the blockade of Gaza as an acceptable steady-state policy, focusing on bolstering Israeli military support, and suggesting some concessions for Palestinians but no serious action to stop settlement expansion or end the military occupation – all of which have led to escalations as Palestinians seek self-determination.

Indeed, those same policies formed the backdrop to the rise of the far-right Israeli regime, the attack of October 7th, and the present genocide. Gordon has said himself that Harris’s support for Israel is “ironclad.” Such policies would warrant serious reconsideration if Harris were to embrace a peace agenda.

Gaza votes

How important will these positions be for victory in November’s election? Polling is likely to shift in the coming months as voters are more exposed to Harris’s campaign. But so far, polls have been clear that Harris has little room for error and indeed, was even less popular than Biden or Trump earlier this year. The “battleground states” that will determine the election, like Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, will likely be won by less than 50,000 votes – between 0.5 and 2 percentage points at most.

Meanwhile, polling on ‘Gaza votes’ shows that the issue has become a point of no return for many progressives in their already hesitant support for the Democratic nominee, particularly one that represents continuity with the current Biden administration.

Upwards of 1 in 5 Democratic or Independent voters in each of those battleground states said they were less likely to vote for Biden on account of Gaza – but the vast majority, over 60%, strongly support an immediate ceasefire and over half support conditioning aid to the Israeli military.

That polling is explicit in asking voters what minimum policy changes would be needed to secure their votes, finding that an immediate and permanent ceasefire and ending military aid to Israel would secure the votes of over a fifth of Democrats and Independents in each of those key states.

In the coming month, it will be crucial for Harris to show her cards when it comes to Palestine and the genocide in Gaza: will she back a total halt on weapons to the far-right Israeli regime to finally end the bloodshed that has taken the lives of over 186,000 Palestinians, most of them innocent women and children? Will she back strict conditions on aid to Israel to hold the regime accountable for war crimes, apartheid policies, and an ever-expanding military occupation and theft of Palestinian land?

Several groups yesterday celebrated successful pro-Palestinian advocacy efforts to ensure Harris did not select a staunchly pro-Israel running mate like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. Instead, she nominated midwestern Governor Tim Walz, with signals that Shapiro’s zionism was a liability.

On Palestine, Walz similarly supports a two-state solution and has even voted in favor of a Congressional resolution opposing UN efforts to label Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian land as illegal. But more recently, he signaled openness to the “uncommitted” anti-genocide protest movement and has comparatively better rhetoric regarding Palestinians. Harris’s choice has provided some assurances to leftist voters concerned about Gaza, but most advocates emphasize that it changes little to end the U.S.-enabled genocide and therefore, their votes.

If she fails to provide such assurances through either staff or policy promises, she risks alienating a key margin of voters in swing states in particular: those more than half a million who voted “uncommitted” or uninstructed in state primary elections, and who will easily extend their anger at unjust warfare to her, as accomplice to “Genocide Joe” Biden.

Harris will likely have to move beyond statements of sympathy to gain the support of a base that has watched over 80% of all homes in Gaza destroyed, all hospitals bombed, and over a million at risk of starvation because Israel has used hunger as a weapon of war. Many argue she will have to guarantee that no more bombs will be sent to Israel – to enforce compliance with an unconditional ceasefire.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump was “interviewed” this week on the X social media platform formerly known as Twitter. The interviewer was none other than X owner Elon Musk. Musk’s questions to Trump were so deferential that End Citizens United, an election watchdog group, quickly filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission, calling the two-hour-plus livestream “a flagrant corporate in-kind contribution that violated campaign finance laws.”

This event represents just one moment in a highly charged national presidential election, and highlights the increasing power of billionaires attempting to hijack the political process for their own ends.

Elon Musk is the wealthiest person on the planet. The Wall Street Journal has published some of the most revelatory reporting on his increased political activity, especially his newly revealed commitment to helping Trump win in November.

The Harris-Walz campaign is hoping that a reinvigorated base, with major support from organized labor, will propel them to victory in November.

The Journal’s Dana Mattioli and colleagues wrote an article published in mid-July, exposing Musk’s plans to donate a whopping $45 million per month to elect Trump, or $180 million in all. “Formed in June, America PAC is focused on registering voters and persuading constituents to vote early and request mail-in ballots in swing states,” they reported.

Mattioli’s latest article, headlined “Inside Elon Musk’s Hands-On Push to Win 800,000 Voters for Trump,” details Musk’s direct involvement in the super PAC’s operations. The article opens, “Beginning in the spring, Elon Musk quietly blocked out an hour on Fridays for a new pursuit: national politics.”

“As early as a few months ago, Elon Musk said he would not be contributing any money to either presidential candidate. What we’ve seen is a complete 180,” Dana Mattioli said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “Not only did he start this super PAC with lots of money to help Donald Trump win, he is really taking on the get-out-the-vote aspect of the Trump campaign. He also had a big endorsement for Donald Trump after the assassination attempt. So he’s become a very big political player this presidential cycle.”

She continued, “The super PAC is looking to get 800,000 low-propensity voters in swing states to the polls for Donald Trump. Elon also wants his workers in those states to register new voters to get them to the polls.”

But, as Mattioli’s latest reporting suggests, Musk’s personal involvement has sparked chaos at the super PAC. With only months until election day, key vendors were abruptly fired and replaced with others drawn largely from the failed presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Since the outcome of the U.S. presidential election hinges on just a handful of swing states, the infusion of so much cash with a focus on grassroots voter mobilization in those states could prove decisive. America PAC’s efforts are up against renewed enthusiasm in the Democratic Party and the presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

Democrats have their own billionaires contributing to PACs and super PACs. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and current Microsoft board member, has already given $10 million to help Harris. He has also stated that he hopes a future President Harris would fire Federal Trade Commission chairperson Lina Khan. A Biden-appointed regulator, Khan has aggressively pursued antitrust cases. As The Lever reports, antitrust action might hinder Microsoft’s acquisition of an AI company in which Hoffman is heavily invested.

Regardless of the sums that billionaires and millionaires drop into the process, whether transparently or as dark money, the election, ultimately, will be decided by voters. The Harris-Walz campaign is hoping that a reinvigorated base, with major support from organized labor, will propel them to victory in November.

One of the nation’s largest and most powerful unions, the United Auto Workers, has endorsed Harris and is actively organizing its membership to ensure her victory.

Following the Trump/Musk livestreamed conversation on X, the UAW filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, accusing Trump and Musk of “illegal attempts to threaten and intimidate workers.” Musk laughed as Trump praised his willingness to slash jobs:

DONALD TRUMP: “You’re the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in, and you just say, ‘You want to quit?’”
Elon Musk: “Yeah.”
DONALD TRUMP: “They go on strike. I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike. And you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.’ And you are the greatest.”

The UAW alleged the threat to fire striking workers was directed at Musk’s non-union workforce at Tesla. The UAW has more than a million members nationally, many in Michigan, a critical swing state. Come November, it may be the workers, not the billionaires, who get the last laugh.

The climate crisis is real, as are its solutions. In fact, the many solutions offer a plethora of side benefits, from good jobs and stronger economies to better health and greater equality.

The crisis itself is becoming increasingly costly and is meeting or exceeding predictions scientists and others have warned about for decades: more unpredictable and volatile weather events, flooding, droughts, intense wildfires, sea levels rising, ice sheets and glaciers melting, animals and plants going extinct, temperatures becoming unbearable in parts of the world, diseases spreading, and much more.

Despite the indisputable scientific evidence, as well as easily observable proof, many political representatives are still denying the crisis exists or that it’s serious enough to require action!

This denial from those elected to make difficult decisions about policies and governing delays much-needed change—and we have no time to lose.

A study by the Center for American Progress found that climate science deniers make up almost one- quarter of the United States Congress—100 in the House of Representatives and 23 in the Senate! The somewhat good news is that those numbers are going down, from 150 in the 116th Congress to 139 in the 117th to 123 today.

“The report defined climate deniers as those who say that the climate crisis is not real or not primarily caused by humans, or claim that climate science is not settled, that extreme weather is not caused by global warming or that planet-warming pollution is beneficial,” The Guardian reports. Many are parroting thoroughly debunked information.

The report also found that the fossil fuel industry has given these elected officials more than $52 million in campaign donations.

Noting that 2023 was the hottest year on record, with July hitting “the highest average global temperatures ever recorded” and the U.S. experiencing, “on average, a billion-dollar extreme weather event every three weeks,” the report states, “Americans cannot afford to ignore the realities of global climate change. Climate-fueled extreme weather events continue to cost American lives and billions of dollars year after year, and the intensity and frequency of these events will continue to increase without action to address the causes of climate change.”

The report points to the International Energy Agency’s call for “the need to rapidly transition to a clean energy economy,” and its finding “that achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, even with significant growth in energy demand, does not require any new fossil fuel investment.”

Although the U.S. presents one of the most egregious examples of political leaders putting their constituents, and everyone else, at great risk for the sake of money, it’s not the only country where climate science deniers of various degrees hold positions of power and responsibility.

Some provincial and federal politicians in Canada are campaigning against sound climate policies and enacting regulations and practices that favour gas, oil, and coal over renewable energy. Other countries, especially those that produce fossil fuels, have their share of politicians who deny the reality and/or severity of the climate crisis. The United Nations says the fossil fuel industry is running “a massive mis- and disinformation campaign” to stall climate policies, even though most people favour them.

This denial from those elected to make difficult decisions about policies and governing delays much-needed change—and we have no time to lose. Even the many policies and programs already in place are inadequate to prevent the crisis from worsening. We’ve pumped so much carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere—gases that remain and cause damage for many years—that every delay increases the likelihood of catastrophe.

We still live under a global economic system largely governed by fossil fuel interests. Along with industry efforts to maintain power and profits, there’s a global movement away from democratic systems—to instil cynicism and disillusionment with governance systems and processes that at least attempt to give some power to the people being governed. It’s a reason some elected officials, especially in the U.S., are banning books and attacking teachers, librarians, universities, and programs that encourage critical thinking and greater equality. Education is strength!

We need to stand up and hold onto the power we still have, and take back the power we’ve lost. That means being informed and getting involved in democratic processes, from voting and holding politicians to account to protesting and signing petitions—even running for office. Time is running out.

By Ralph Nader August 16, 2024 Twenty-four years ago, Business Week magazine conducted a poll of the American people on whether corporations have too much control over their lives. Over seventy percent of them said YES! Since 2000, big businesses and their CEOs have gotten bigger, richer, less taxed and exercised far more power over…

On this episode of The Final Countdown hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discuss Trump requesting delayed sentencing.    The show begins with a cartoonist for The Chicago Tribune Scott Stantis weighing in on Trump requesting a judge to delay his hush money sentencing.    Then, RT journalist Mohamed Gomaa joins the show to discuss the latest out of Gaza and the ongoing tensions between Israel and Iran. 

 

The show closes with former CIA officer and co-host of Political Misfits John Kiriakou joining to discuss Kim Dotcom facing extradition to the U.S. and the anniversary of the Afghanistan Withdrawal.        The post The Final Countdown – 8/16/24 – Trump Requests Delayed Sentencing, Kamala Harris Unveils Economic Policy  first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

As I’m sure you are aware, this is not a normal election.

It is not a normal election when we are running against someone who is a pathological liar.

It is not a normal election when we are running against someone who has been convicted of 34 felonies.

It is not a normal election when our opponent is a convicted sexual abuser and, as a private businessman, was involved in 4,000 lawsuits — indicating a total lack of trustworthiness.

But it’s even worse than that.

When Donald Trump claims that “nobody” showed up at a 10,000 person Harris-Walz rally in Michigan that was livestreamed and widely covered by the media, that it was all AI, and that Democrats cheat all of the time, there is a method to his madness.

Clearly, and dangerously, what Trump is doing is undermining American democracy and laying the groundwork for rejecting the election results if he loses.

There will be limited progress on these issues or any others that the working people of this country care about unless we continue to elect a growing number of progressives to Congress this November.

If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are “fake” and “fraudulent.”

It should be a secret to no one. Trump’s goal is to destroy faith in American institutions and the rule of law and move us toward an authoritarian society.

But it’s not just Trump’s dishonesty and authoritarianism that must be defeated.

We cannot elect someone who believes that, in the year 2024, women do not have the right to control their own bodies. For the sake of our kids and future generations we cannot elect someone who believes that climate change is a “hoax.”

This is why we must do everything we can to see that Trump is defeated and Kamala Harris is our next president.

But we must do more, much more.

Not only do we have to defeat Trump, but we must build a strong grassroots movement that can confront the extraordinary greed of the big money interests who have so much power over the economic and political life of our country. I know that it’s not fashionable to talk about in the corporate media or the halls of Congress, but we are rapidly moving toward an oligarchic form of society with unprecedented income and wealth inequality. We must change that. Our goal must be to end an absurd situation in which three people own more wealth than the bottom half of our society, and create a nation and government that works for all — not just the few.

Yes. We need to overturn the disastrous Supreme Court decision on Citizens United and move toward public funding of elections. Billionaires should not be able to buy elections.

Yes. We need to join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee healthcare to all as a human right, not a privilege. Every American should be able to see a doctor when they need to.

Yes. We need to raise the minimum wage to a living wage and make it easier for workers to join unions. Sixty percent of our people should not be living paycheck to paycheck.

Yes. We need to address the unprecedented level of income and wealth inequality and demand that the wealthy and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes. Working people should not be paying an effective tax rate higher than the 1%.

Yes. We need to build millions of units of low-income and affordable housing and cap rent increases. In America, 600,000 people should not be homeless.

Yes. We need to end the absurdity of having the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country, make a strong child tax credit permanent and invest heavily in childcare.

Yes. We need to increase Social Security benefits and extend the solvency of the program by lifting the cap on taxable income.

Yes. We must strengthen public education in America, pay teachers the salaries they deserve and make sure that every person, regardless of income, receives the higher education they need to pursue their dreams.

Bottom line. We are living in a pivotal moment in American history. In the next three months let us roll up our sleeves, come together and do the hard work that has to be done in order to defeat Trump and elect Kamala Harris as president.

And let us also understand that there will be limited progress on these issues or any others that the working people of this country care about unless we continue to elect a growing number of progressives to Congress this November.

Those are the things I have been working on this election. That’s why I have been on the road and done some great events in Minnesota, Maine, New York, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere — and that is what I will continue doing through Election Day.

Our task is clear. In the next 81 days let us do all that we can to help the Harris-Walz ticket win a major victory. And, on the day following that win, let us continue our struggle to transform our country and create the kind of nation we know we can become.

We’ve recently learned about Project 2025, the GOP’s scheme to let corporate agents take over our government. But there’s also a less visible effort by some donors to also make Democrats install corporate-subservient officials to expand their monopoly power.

High-finance finaglers of Wall Street and Silicon Valley are quietly demanding that Kamala Harris commit to appointing their designated toadies to oversee America’s so-called “free-enterprise” structure. Their primary target is the Federal Trade Commission, a little-known agency meant to protect and extend economic competition.

The FTC is now headed by Lina Khan, a tenacious opponent of anti-consumer, anti-worker mergers and takeovers. She rightly recognizes that the “free” in free enterprise is not an adjective but a verb, requiring aggressive public action to free up the enterprise of people who are now routinely shut out of the market by monopolistic giants.

If we really want free markets, Khan says, then let’s free them.

Oh, how the money vultures screeched! “She’s a dope,” raged takeover bully Barry Diller in a dopey fury.

Since many of the monopolistic titans who are offended by Khan’s otherwise very popular progressive populism are from the high-dollar donor class, they have undue clout. Thus they are bluntly demanding Khan’s head as their price for financially backing Harris’s presidential run. Commissioner Khan, they exclaim, simply does not understand “the way the Washington game is played.

Oh yes she does — and she’s flat out rejecting it. Khan is the first real antitrust champion America has had in years. But will leading Democrats have the guts and integrity to defend her? Or will the business-as-usual powers be ushered back in?

The answer to that will be an early measure of Harris’s commitment to economic democracy.

During his four years as President of the United States, Donald Trump was remarkably active and often successful in sabotaging the health and safety of the nation’s workers.

Trump, as the AFL-CIO noted, targeted Medicare and Medicaid for $1 trillion in funding cuts, eroded the Affordable Care Act (thereby increasing the number of Americans lacking health insurance coverage by 7 million), and “made workplaces more dangerous by rolling back critical federal safety regulations.” Trump’s administration not only refused to publicly disclose fatality and injury data reported to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), but slashed the number of federal workplace safety inspectors and inspections to the lowest level in that agency’s 48-year history. According to one estimate, with these depleted numbers, it would take 165 years to inspect every worksite in the United States.

Furthermore, the administration repealed rules requiring employers to keep and report accurate injury records, proposed eliminating the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, and cut workplace safety research and training programs. The Trump administration also proposed revoking child labor protections, weakened the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s enforcement of mine safety, and reversed a ban on chlorpyrifos, a toxic pesticide that causes acute reactions among farmworkers and neurological damage to children.

In April 2019, the Trump Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service put into place a rule to allow an unlimited increase in the line speeds for hog slaughter. In an industry already notorious for endangering workers―with more than 4,700 occupational injuries and more than 2,700 occupational illnesses per year―this was a sure-fire recipe for undercutting worker safety. Even so, the Trump administration completely ignored the impact on workers’ safety and health before issuing the rule.

Downplaying workplace hazards, the administration scrapped new rules on styrene, combustible dust, infectious diseases, and silica dust―a mineral that can cause silicosis, an incurable and often fatal lung disease carrying an increased risk of lung cancer. Eager to reduce business expenditures, it also canceled a requirement for training shipyard and construction workers to avoid exposure to beryllium, a known carcinogen. In addition, the administration delayed and proposed a rollback of the Environmental Protection Agency’s chemical risk management rule, thus increasing health dangers for workers, the public, and first responders.

The grim fate of millions of American workers―crushed by dangerous machinery, riddled with carcinogenic chemicals, or gasping their last breaths with Covid-19―apparently did not matter enough to Donald Trump, as President, to safeguard their health and safety.

The Trump administration’s callous disregard for the health and safety of workers became particularly apparent during 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic swept through American workplaces. Trump refused to issue binding rules requiring businesses to institute safety measures to protect nurses, bus drivers, meatpacking and poultry workers, and other particularly vulnerable workers. Quite the contrary, in April 2020 Trump issued an executive order to require the nation’s meat production plants to stay open. This fact, plus an April 2020 authorization by Trump’s Department of Agriculture for 15 large poultry plants to increase their line speed, led by September to the sickness of more than 40,000 meat and poultry workers and to the deaths of hundreds.

Other groups of workers were also hard-hit by the absence of key Trump administration health and safety measures during the pandemic, including its failure to use the Defense Production Act to expand production of personal protective equipment for endangered workers. According to National Nurses United, by September 2020 more than 250,000 health care workers had come down with the Covid-19 virus and at least 1,700 of them had died from it. In addition, according to Purdue University’s Food and Agriculture Vulnerability Index, 147,000 agricultural workers had contracted Covid.

By that fall, although more than a thousand meatpacking, food-processing, and farming facilities had reported cases of Covid-19, Trump’s OSHA had managed to cite only two of them for violations of health and safety regulations. JBS (the biggest meat-processing company in the world, with annual revenues of over $51 billion) was ordered to pay a fine of just $15,615, while Smithfield (owned by the WH Group, the largest pork company in the world, with more than $25 billion in annual revenue) was ordered to pay only $13,494 (about $10 per worker sick with Covid). Both companies refused to pay the fines. Meanwhile, Trump’s OSHA remained ineffective and rudderless, with an acting director yet to be named.

Even in the ostensibly “good” years before the onset of the pandemic, the absence of adequate health and safety measures contributed to an appalling number of work-related deaths in the United States. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the annual number of worker deaths on the job rose between 2016 (the last year of the Obama administration) and 2019 (the last pre-Covid year of the Trump administration) to 5,333. In addition, an estimated 95,000 American workers died in 2019 from occupational diseases.

Moreover, occupational deaths during the Trump era were dwarfed by occupational injuries and illnesses. As the AFL-CIO reported: “In 2019, nearly 3.5 million workers across all industries, including state and local government, had work-related injuries and illnesses that were reported by employers.” Furthermore, added the union federation, “due to limitations in the current injury reporting system and widespread underreporting of workplace injuries, this number understates the problem. The true toll is estimated to be two to three times greater—or 7.0 million to 10.5 million injuries and illnesses a year.”

The grim fate of millions of American workers―crushed by dangerous machinery, riddled with carcinogenic chemicals, or gasping their last breaths with Covid-19―apparently did not matter enough to Donald Trump, as President, to safeguard their health and safety. But it might be of greater concern to Americans when they go to the polls this November.

This year’s presidential race has unfolded like a made-for-TV drama, with twists and turns aplenty. But no matter who wins the White House or Congress, a giant tax fight awaits them next year — when a number of the 2017 tax cuts for the rich and businesses expire.

Part of that fight will be about closing loopholes the very wealthy use to pay lower tax rates than teachers or custodians. But let’s not forget the Wall Street high rollers who gamble in our markets, putting everyone’s investments at risk.

One proposal that could make waves is a Wall Street tax — also called financial transaction tax, or FTT — on stock, bond, and derivative trades. Think of it as a small sales tax for Wall Street trades, like the taxes the rest of us pay when we buy shampoo or shoes.

My organization, Public Citizen, was one of over a hundred that signed a recent letter to Congress calling for meaningful tax reform that fairly generates more revenue and creates more inclusive economic growth.

And I’m here to say an FTT would check all of those boxes and more.

Just a 0.1 percent tax — that’s 10 cents on every $100 of stocks, bonds, and derivatives trades — would generate an estimated $752 billion over 10 years. That would be more than enough to cover free universal preschool, free community college, and national paid family and medical leave — combined.

In addition to a boon for revenue, an FTT would also be a win for tax fairness, since the bulk of it would be paid by the very wealthy, who own and trade the vast majority of stocks.

FTTs are a tried and true solution that many other nations have used to generate significant revenues from the very wealthy and put them into public programs for all — which is why the FTT is often called the “Robin Hood tax.” It could do the same thing in the United States, reinvesting those revenues into creating a more level playing field.

Another benefit? An FTT would tame high-frequency trading, where computer programs ping-pong trades in the blink of an eye, which allows them to get in front of slower moving traders and eke out a miniscule profit on each trade. Because of the volume of trading these firms engage in, all of those tiny profits stack up to huge paydays.

These high-frequency trading algorithms tend to follow each other, somewhat like lemmings throwing themselves off a cliff. That can wreak havoc in the market, as it did during the 2010 Flash Crash when $1 trillion was lost in the U.S. markets in a matter of minutes.

Even a tiny tax on all those trades would make that computer-driven, high-frequency trading less desirable — which would make our markets safer.

Given that it’s a win-win idea, many prominent voices favor taxing Wall Street trades. Former Treasury Department officials like Robert Rubin, Antonio Weiss, Kim Clausing, and Natasha Sarin support taxing financial transactions. Jared Bernstein, who chairs the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers, also supports FTTs.

With these financial all-stars backing the proposal — and even some conservative voices weighing in in favor of taxing Wall Street trades — FTTs deserve their time in center stage during the upcoming 2025 tax fight.

On October 25, Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin told Arutz Sheva-Israel National News that “Muslims are not afraid of us anymore.”

It might sound odd that Feiglin saw the element of fear as critical to Israel’s well-being if not its very survival.

In actuality, the fear element is directly linked to Israel’s behavior and fundamental to its political discourse.

Historically, Israel has carried out massacres with a specific political strategy in mind: to instill the desired fear to drive Palestinians off their land. Deir Yassin, Tantara and the over 70 documented massacres during the Palestinian Nakba, or Catastrophe, are cases in point.

Israel has also utilized torture, rape and other forms of sexual assault to achieve similar ends in the past, to exact information or to break down the will of prisoners.

UN-affiliated experts said in a report published on August 5 that "these practices are intended to punish Palestinians for resisting occupation and seek to destroy them individually and collectively."

Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza has manifested all these horrific strategies in ways unprecedented in the past, both in terms of widespread application and frequency.

The Israeli army uses torture as a centralized strategy.

In a report entitled ‘Welcome to Hell’, published on August 5, the Israeli rights group, B’tselem, said that Israel’s detention “facilities, in which every inmate is deliberately subjected to harsh, relentless pain and suffering operate as de-facto torture camps”.

A few days later, the Palestinian rights group, Addameer, published its own report, “documented cases of torture, sexual violence, and degrading treatment”, along with the “systematic abuses and human rights violations committed against detainees from Gaza.”

If incidents of rape, sexual assaults and other forms of torture are marked on a map, they would cover a large geographical area, in Gaza, in the West Bank, and Israel itself—mostly notably in the notorious Sde Teiman Camp.

Considering the size and locations of the Israeli army, well-documented evidence of rape and torture demonstrates that such tactics are not linked to a specific branch of the military. This means that the Israeli army uses torture as a centralized strategy.

Such a strategy has been associated with the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister. His aggressive statements, for example, that Palestinian prisoners should be “shot in the head instead of being given more food”, are perfectly aligned with his equally violent actions: the starvation policy of prisoners, the normalization of torture and the defense of rape.

But Ben-Gvir did not institute these tortuous policies. They have predated him by decades and were used against generations of Palestinian prisoners, who are granted few rights compared to those enshrined by international law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention.

But why does Israel torture Palestinians on such a large scale?

Israeli wars against Palestinians are predicated on two elements: a material and a psychological one. The former has manifested itself in the ongoing genocide, the killing and wounding of tens of thousands and the near destruction of Gaza.

The psychological factor, however, is intended to break the will of the Palestinian people.

Law for Palestine, a legal advocacy group published a database of over 500 instances of Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, inciting genocide in Gaza.

Most of these references seem to be centered on dehumanizing the Palestinians. For example, the October 11 statement by Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog, that "there are no innocent civilians in Gaza", was part of the collective death sentence that made the extermination of Palestinians morally justifiable in the eyes of Israelis.

Netanyahu's own ominous biblical reference, where he called on Israeli soldiers to seek revenge from Palestinians, stating "Remember what Amalek has done to you", was also a blank check for mass murder.

While choosing not to see Palestinians as humans, as innocent, as worthy of life and security, Israel has granted its army carte blanche to do as it saw fit to those, in the words of Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, "human animals".

The mass killing, starvation and widespread rape and torture of Palestinians are a natural outcome of these shocking dialectics. But the overall purpose of Israel is not simply to exact revenge, though the latter has been quite important to Israel's desire for national recovery.

By trying to break the will of the Palestinians through torture, humiliation and rape, Israel wants to restore a different kind of deterrence, which it lost on October 7.

Failing to restore military or strategic deterrence, Tel Aviv is invested in psychological deterrence, as in restoring the element of fear that was breached on October 7.

Raping prisoners, leaking videos of the gruesome acts, and carrying out the same horrific deed, again and again, are all part of the Israeli strategy—that of restoring fear.

But Israel will fail, simply because Palestinians have already succeeded in demolishing Israel's 76-year matrix of physical domination and mental torture.

The Israeli war on Gaza has proven to be the most destructive and bloody of all Israeli wars. Yet, Palestinian resilience continues to grow stronger, because Palestinians are not passive, but active participants in the shaping of their own future.

If popular resistance is indeed the process of the restoration of the self, Palestinians in Gaza are proving that, despite their unspeakable pain and agony, they are emerging as a whole, ready to clinch their freedom, no matter the cost.

Perhaps we should be grateful that it took President Biden over four years to fully abandon his campaign pledge to end arms sales to Saudi Arabia, eroding the promise bit by bit before finally announcing at the end of the day on Friday, August 9, that the administration would resume sales of offensive air-to-ground munitions to the Kingdom.

In reality, the ban was merely the last vestige of a long-abandoned policy to isolate and sanction Saudi Arabia for its various, gruesome atrocities and abuses both at home and abroad. In its place, the Biden administration’s courtiers doubled down on their embrace of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman (MBS), offering up a never-ending basket of concessions and goodies, as the golden ticket for continued U.S. primacy in the Middle East, come what may to everyone and everything else.

What follows will be their rush to the finish line, bestowing on the prince the biggest prize of all — an unprecedented U.S. security guarantee — before the clock runs out on Joe Biden’s presidency.

Cutting off the biggest U.S. weapons purchaser in the world carried well-understood costs of its own, upsetting not only U.S. defense companies deprived of the Saudi cash cow, but also encouraging MBS to retaliate by flaunting closer ties with China and Russia. And so just a few months into the first year of the Biden administration, his national security team walked back the arms embargo, clarifying that they only intended to block “offensive” weapons, not “defensive” ones.

Queries from members of Congress about the distinction between these terms went unanswered. Soon, billions in weapons were flowing, paving the way for a further mending of relations with the Saudi ruler, culminating in the now infamous July 2022 Biden/MBS “fist bump” in Jeddah.

Once the Biden team announced that it too would follow Trump’s lead to make adding Saudi Arabia to the Abraham Accords its number one Middle East foreign policy priority, any lingering concerns about rewarding the Kingdom with new military support despite its widespread horrors in Yemen and at home, or fueling its further belligerence in the region, were swept under the desert sands.

Coupled with national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s open admission of his secondary priorities — cheap oil and keeping China out of the region — the only answer to MBS’s “jump” was to ask “how high?” MBS turned to a hardball game of reverse leverage, not only refusing to open his oil spigot to relieve global oil prices ahead of the 2022 November primaries despite Biden’s pleas, but prominently hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping in a multiday red carpet affair, announcing China would build a civilian nuclear plant and support missile development in the country, and refusing to sanction Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

And so it was time for the Biden team to bow to MBS’s wishes. The first major concession was to grant the Crown Prince immunity from U.S. prosecution, squashing several lawsuits against him for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the attempted murder of Saad Aljabri, and the targeted harassment and attacks against Al-Jazeera journalist Ghada Oueiss. The next was for the Biden team to secure the ultimate prize in the Saudi bucket list: a NATO Article 5 treaty level U.S. security guarantee for the Kingdom. Efforts by the Biden team to woo the Crown Prince with a mere aerial security umbrella was not sufficient to persuade him; only a bilateral, treaty level guarantee would work, he made clear.

The Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, and the nine months of relentless Israeli bombardment and starvation of Gaza’s civilian population that it precipitated, upended these plans. A humiliated Sullivan, who only days before the cataclysmic assault pronounced that the Middle East was “quieter today than it has been in two decades now” and boasted that “the amount of time that I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11 is significantly reduced,” was forced to shelve the plans for a Saudi/Israeli peace agreement.

Even MBS could not dare to openly endorse Israel in the face of near universal Saudi sympathy for Palestinian suffering.

While a largely AIPAC-funded Congress would likely have supported a U.S. security guarantee for Saudi Arabia in exchange for its joining the Abraham Accords, without this, ratification of a treaty level commitment would be a very hard sell. The Biden team is now considering the idea of delinking the security guarantee, as well as poaching China’s development of the civilian nuclear plant, from normalization with Israel in a “less for less” deal.

Under a proposed “Strategic Alliance Agreement” the U.S. would commit to helping defend Saudi Arabia if it were attacked, in exchange for Saudi granting Washington access to Saudi territory and airspace, prohibiting China from building bases in the Kingdom or pursuing security cooperation with it, and signing a parallel “Defense Cooperation Agreement,” to boost weapons sales, intelligence sharing and strategic planning on terrorism and Iran.

Such a move strips away the cover of “regional peace for Israel” as the motivation for the Saudi security guarantee, more nakedly exposing the underlying motivations driving the Biden team: a stale but cemented worldview that U.S. interests require military hegemony in the Middle East, alongside cheap oil and defense industry profits. It’s hard to discount the siren call of personal profiteering for Biden officials, who will no doubt consider multi-million payouts from the UAE and Saudi, even if they’re not as lucrative as the billions in take-home by Trump officials Stephen Mnuchin and Jared Kushner. (Recall also that Secretary Blinken’s WestExec Advisors, whose client list Secretary Blinken has never disclosed, is now partly owned by Teneo, a firm that works for the MBS controlled Saudi public investment fund.)

It appears that the decades of costs in arming and defending dictatorships in the Middle East — from the mass slaughters of civilians and perpetual war-footings, encouraging destabilizing bellicosity, entrapping our country in zero-sum military conflicts, and undermining U.S. global standing as a credible force for human rights and democracy — remain entirely lost on the Democratic leadership.

With the clock ticking on the expiration of the Biden term as the Gaza war rages on, it’s doubtful that the administration will be able to deliver any expansion of the Abraham Accords or a security agreement for MBS. It’s not even clear MBS will accept these rewards, saving them for the next round of haggling with a new administration. For now, we’ll just have to hope that “Mr. Bonesaw” will show more sense than the Biden administration and avoid any new wars in the region.

Kamala Harris, a candidate who has yet to share her policy positions, has selected Tim Walz, an obscure Midwestern governor Democrats are being told is progressive.

The post Blind Faith in Harris/Walz first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

           Anyone who has experience haggling at a flea market has intuited the basics of negotiating. If a seller offers the item you want at a fire-sale price that you’re unlikely to find elsewhere, smile, pay the asking price and walk away before they change their mind. If the requested price is many times higher than you’re willing to pay, just walk away. Stratospheric pricing pretty much eliminates the odds that you’ll be able to come to terms. Your time is better spend haggling with a different vendor. In other cases, offer a low-ball rate and work toward middle ground.

            In politics, liberals tend to negotiate against themselves. Rather than pushing for radical change, Democrats begin with an incrementalist approach that factors in their conservative opponents’ counteroffer and begins from there. Since the Right is aggressive, they push back to the point that the resulting change is a smaller improvement that, in many cases, is so tiny as to be a rounding error. Obama’s opening gambit in the healthcare reform debate illustrates this phenomenon.

            We know what we wound up with: Obamacare, originally developed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, is a free-market scheme that prioritizes insurance-company profits, relies on economies of scale and assumes robust competition will reduce costs. (In practice, the healthcare business is de facto monopolized to the extent that there is little downward pressure on prices. The industry is disincentivized to participate in the public sector to the point that only a small fraction of the health plans available individually and via private employers can be purchased in the ACA’s online marketplace.)

            The point is how the ACA as we know it came to pass. Obama, wielding considerable political capital at the start of his first term, decided to make healthcare reform his first major legislative priority. The public, long struggling under high costs for medical care and prescription pharmaceuticals, was supportive across party lines.

            Right out of the gate, Obama negotiated against himself. Though he had promised during this campaign that the ACA would include a “public option,” i.e. the right to join what Bernie Sanders called Medicare For All, he agreed to drop it from the bill because, Democrats explained, they were short one vote in the Senate. Joe Lieberman, a right-wing independent senator from Connecticut, home to many of the nation’s major insurers, threatened to scuttle the measure via a filibuster parliamentary maneuver.

            Rather than force Lieberman and his Republican allies to go on the record as having rejected a popular bill on a major issue, Obama dropped the public option. Obama noted the public option “has become a source of ideological contention between the left and right.” Anyway, he lied, “I didn’t campaign on the public option.” Good news: the ACA passed. But the lack of a public option was so unpopular (88% of Democrats wanted one) that it was a significant factor behind Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign in 2016. Instead of a towering achievement, Obamacare is widely viewed as a disappointment. The vast majority of Americans say its failure left the problem unsolved.

            Shortly before he left office, Obama suggested that Congress add a public option to the ACA. This is what happens when you negotiate against yourself.

            The 38% of Americans who oppose capitalism—socialists, communists, left libertarians and others to the Left of the Democratic Party—should take careful note of the Democrats’ repeated refusals to seek big changes and the subsequent failures that have followed as a result. Unlike the Democrats, who negotiate in Congress against Republicans who share their basic political values and assumptions on the relationship between workers and their labor, militarism and social priorities, we on the actual Left are fighting to overturn the system entirely.

            Our goal is Revolution. But we are completely, for the time being, disorganized. There is no viable leftist political party with a revolutionary orientation, no well-funded highly distributed media outlet to disseminate news and opinion with our point of view. We have, not even in the so-called progressive “Squad” in the House of Representatives, zero elected representatives who seek to abolish capitalism and prioritize the needs and desires of the people. Absent these basic organizational structures or an as-yet-undeveloped Internet-driven organizational strategy that short circuits traditional grassroots organizing and agitation strategies, emancipation by revolution will continue to elude us.

            In the meantime, we must lay the groundwork for revolutionary foment. We must, within the constructs and limitations of the current capitalist system, expose the true nature of a government that claims to be by and for the people but is in truth nothing but a Ponzi scheme that extracts wealth upward from the poor and the working class up to the tiny few at the top point of the pyramid. We can and must accomplish this by exposing the system’s internal, self-evident contradictions.

            This begins by asking why the powers that be repeatedly and continuously find billions of dollars for all manner of destructive nonsense—foreign wars, corrupt defense contractors, tax breaks to for-profit corporations—repeatedly and continuously inform us that there is never enough money to satisfy basic human needs.

            We know, when we demand that everyone have enough to eat, that the political elites will refuse or ignore us. We expect, when we demand that everyone be housed, that we will be told to stuff it. We understand, when we demand that a day of work should be paid fairly, that we are asking for something that they will never agree to—indeed, that they cannot because it would destroy them and their self-perceived identity in the power structure.

            We make demands, not because we believe they will be achieved under this fake parliamentary-style democracy, but because they will be unreasonably refused, without just cause. We want people to hear us ask, and hear them say no, over and over in order to expose them and the fundamental nature of their system.

            We are not, therefore, negotiating. We are demanding. Those who demand should appear reasonable. But we must also be ambitious. Our demands should be aggressive enough that we would genuinely be satisfied were we to achieve them and never so modest that there is a chance the ruling classes would ever seriously consider them. 

            Nothing less than a perfect world will do.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

 

The post Don’t Negotiate Against Yourselves, Lefties first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On this episode of The Final Countdown hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discuss a variety of topics, including Trump’s economic policy speech.
  The show begins with commentator and economist Mitch Roschelle discussing the latest inflation and unemployment numbers in the U.S. He also discusses Trump’s economic policy speech. 
  Then, army infantry veteran and counselor-at-law Tyler Nixon shares his legal expertise on Hunter Biden’s latest legal troubles.    Later,  RT journalist Nebojsa Malic joins the show to discuss the latest out of Ukraine and Germany’s arrest warrant for the Nord Stream explosion suspects.     The post The Final Countdown – 8/15/24 – Trump Blasts Kamala Over State of U.S. Economy  first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Donald Trump is all too literally the candidate from hell and, yes, he’s threatening to take the United States and the world to — no place else! — hell and back. He’s the greatest danger to this planet imaginable. And I’m not even thinking about what else he’d do, were he to win election 2024 and return to the Oval Office, having reassured his religious voters that, should they opt for him this November, they’ll never have to do so again. (“Get out and vote, just this time… You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”)

Forget all of that, including the racism, the madness, the urge to transform this country into the all-American equivalent of an autocracy. Forget every last bit of it — even if, yes, that’s one hell of a lot to forget! Instead, focus on just one thing: Donald Trump and his crew, including that gem J.D. Vance, who attacked what he called “the Green New Scam” at the Republican convention, are determined to fossil-fuelize our future in a fashion never before seen, not at least under these circumstances.

And unfortunately, Donald Trump is anything but alone. (Do you hear me, Vladimir Putin?) In fact, according to a recent Guardian report, almost one-quarter of this country’s congressional representatives (100 members of the House and 23 senators) deny the very existence of climate change — and be shocked, very shocked, but every last one of them is a Republican! In what now passes for the mainstream, The Donald and his vice-presidential buddy, the very opposite of “cat ladies,” are extreme but all too common examples of the urge to heat this planet to the boiling point or beyond. Admittedly, the competition is fierce. After all, whatever steps President Joe Biden took in relation to climate change — and he did take them and they will make a difference — American oil production and oil and natural gas exports all set staggering new global records during his term in office.

Believe me, under the circumstances, I’m not just using “hell” figuratively.

Still, there’s no question about one thing: Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and crew are determined to fully reject that Green New Scam (as Republicans now love to call it), which means the two of them are intent on making you, me, and everyone else on this planet sweat, sweat, sweat. I say that given the fact that, only recently, humanity experienced the hottest day ever recorded and the very next day set an even more feverish daily global record. And that, mind you, was after 13 straight months each of which (including two Junes) set new heat records for human history (and probably far beyond it), and all of that, in turn (if you don’t mind the longest, hottest sentence imaginable), came after 2023 set a global record as the hottest year ever — and count on this: I’m undoubtedly leaving all sorts of things out.

Yikes, I’m already sweating!

A Green New Scam President?

Given the recent withdrawal of 81-year-old Joe Biden from the presidential race, 78-year-old Donald Trump is now the oldest American presidential candidate ever (yes, ever!), so why should he give a damn about how hot our future could become? Admittedly, there are his kids and grandkids to consider, but it’s not clear that, even when it comes to them (and despite his recent family-ization of the Republican convention), he gives a damn about anyone other than… yes, Donald Trump. Based on the last few years of him, I doubt it. In the most literal sense possible, as far as he’s concerned, he’s always the man of the moment. Any moment. And if the moment isn’t his, then to hell with it and everything else!

And believe me, under the circumstances, I’m not just using “hell” figuratively.

After all, this planet and this country are both growing hotter all too quickly. This was already one hell of a summer in the United States. State after state, city after city simply broiled, while records were regularly set across the globe. (Hey, Las Vegas hit a new city high of 120 degrees Fahrenheit in July and, in breaking local heat records, it was anything but atypical.) After all, June, as I mentioned, was the 13th straight hottest month of its kind ever. And while later in the summer, we might get a slight break from such record-setting temperatures, the future looks all too grim. While you’re at it, consider yourself lucky that you don’t live in someplace like Dubai, where on one recent anything-but-atypical July day the temperature hit 113 and the heat index 144. In fact, the Washington Post now suggests that the Persian Gulf region may be the “most likely to regularly exceed life-threatening heat thresholds during the next 30 to 50 years.”

Of course, only this summer, Donald Trump held a rally in Phoenix, Arizona, where the temperature hit… go ahead, just for hell of it, take a guess!

Yes, 113 degrees! Eleven of his listeners were treated right there for heat exhaustion on “stretchers hooked to IV bags,” while The Donald continued to “rail against wind turbines and electric vehicles.” And mind you, unlike the acts of the assassin whose bullet hit Trump’s ear at that rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the former president’s statements in Arizona blasting any efforts to deal with this overheating globe of ours weren’t considered acts of violence.

And I’m not even including Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation greenhouse-gas nightmare of a document prepared for the possible second term of the president who called climate change “a great hoax” and once said sarcastically, “The oceans are going to rise 1/100th of an inch in the next 300 years and it’s going to kill everybody,” while insisting “that windmills cause cancer and that electric cars are ‘bad’ for the environment.” After all, despite the fact that so many of Project 2025’s creators at that “notorious rightwing climate-denying think tank” were former Trumpian officials and J.D. Vance is closely tied to it, the former president has claimed it has absolutely nothing to do with him. Still, here’s the Trumpian essence of it all: he’s always been a fossil-fuelizer of the first order; the oil and gas industry has backed his presidential runs big-time; and he seems desperately eager to do it all (and more) again. As he so classically put the matter during this election campaign: on day one back in the Oval Office, he’s going to act like a “dictator“ and, above all, institute a “drill, baby, drill” regime for the next four years (and undoubtedly beyond). He and his key officials the second time around are going to do their damnedest, in other words, to encourage the long-term, full-scale overheating of this planet.

Given the apocalyptic nature of that, don’t you find it strange that Trump’s climate-change views and his ultimate support for the fossil fuel industry above all else (except himself) haven’t gotten more attention in this election season?

The plans that he and J.D. Vance have when it comes to fossil fuels should make anyone’s hair stand on end (even someone as bald as me). After all, he’s already promised that, above all else, when he next enters the Oval Office, his main goal will be to “drill, baby, drill.” You can’t be more blunt than that when it comes to encouraging the fossil-fuel companies from whom you recently demanded a fortune in election funding.

And that’s obviously just the beginning. He and his crew have promised to wipe out anything the Biden administration did aimed at dealing with climate change and fossil fuels while nixing any steps taken to support the creation of clean energy. Instead, he would “develop the liquid gold that is right under our feet” and “unleash domestic energy production like never before.” From obliterating wind power projects (“I hate wind“) to promoting oil and natural gas drilling from the Gulf of Mexico to the Alaskan Arctic, there’s no end to what he and his cronies have in mind. He and his “team” may even be ready to systematically dismantle, if not obliterate the Environmental Protection Agency (which, in case you’ve forgotten, was created in 1970 by a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who did little else right). Donald Trump’s next presidency, in other words, will clearly force the U.S. government to literally worship at the foot (or the oil rig) of the fossil-fuel companies.

The Slow-Motion Equivalent of a Nuclear War

To put all of this in some grim perspective, the British outfit Carbon Brief estimated that, by 2030, a Trump presidency would add approximately four billion more tons of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere than another Biden administration (or, assumedly, one run by Kamala Harris). And all of that means that a country and a world already overheating at a record pace would do so in an even more dramatically grim fashion.

The startling thing is that, on this distinctly overheating planet of ours, a person whose platform is essentially an oil or natural gas-drilling rig should have the faintest chance of being elected president. It’s not all that complicated really. Leaving aside any other issue, voting for Donald Trump in our already rapidly warming world would be — all too literally — a suicidal act.

And keep in mind that, even before Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office a second time (should he win in November), the news daily has gotten ever worse. As a start, we’re talking about a country that, in the Biden years and despite the money that he and his crew began investing in climate-change-mitigating activities, set its sixth consecutive yearly record in 2023 for producing oil (more than any other country on the planet) and another for exporting oil and natural gas, while the giant U.S. oil companies continued to garner record profits.

Of course, climate change is hardly the only danger on planet Earth right now. There’s the potentially explosive set of horrors underway in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East that could erupt into something far worse at any moment. (Ominously enough, the U.S. only recently dispatched yet more warships and planes to the region.) And there are other dangers, including the possibility of a future war with China, a potential nuclear face-off with Russia, or even (should Donald Trump lose the election this year), a rise in violence in this country, if not some possible version of a civil war here at home.

But put in proper perspective, climate change should be seen as the slow-motion equivalent of a nuclear war on this planet, one that — not in a day, a week, a month, or a year — but over the decades to come, could make our world ever less livable, ever less ours. While a full-scale nuclear exchange could almost instantly create a “nuclear winter” that might result in up to five billion of us dying of hunger, climate change could devastate this planet in a similarly horrific fashion, just over the (very) long term.

So, consider a vote for Donald Trump a vote for nothing less than destroying the Earth as a livable environment for… well, all of those to come. And given the apocalyptic nature of that, don’t you find it strange that Trump’s climate-change views and his ultimate support for the fossil fuel industry above all else (except himself) haven’t gotten more attention in this election season?

Anyone who lived through the last blistering year should realize that global heat of an unprecedented sort isn’t anywhere near a high point but, given the fossil fuels still pouring into the atmosphere (including staggering amounts of methane, a gas that heats the planet faster than any other), at something closer to a low point. And under the circumstances, Donald (“drill, baby, drill”) Trump should be considered, not figuratively but all too literally, the presidential candidate from… yes, hell. Voting for him would be voting for, in historical (and Christian) terms, the devil and that’s not just an image but potentially an all-too-literal reality.

As president, Donald Trump would undoubtedly prove to be a first-class global heat machine and voting for him would be the slow-motion equivalent of putting an atomic weapon in the Oval Office. Quite a prospect, don’t you think?

In 2000, I received a call from Lewis Lapham, the storied editor of the venerable, Harper’s Magazine (launched in 1850) requesting an in-person interview during my Green Party presidential campaign. Accustomed to reporters clinging to the single question about “being a spoiler” and my usual rebuttals (“focus on the spoiled political system”), I was pleased by Mr. Lapham’s interest in our broad and deep agenda, modes of campaigning, and the historical context of Third Parties breaking important new ground. He returned to New York and wrote a cover story on our campaign at the time of a near blackout of our candidacy by the mainstream media.

After a remarkably productive career as a reporter, editor, author, and essayist (his writing was likened to the biting satires of Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken), Lewis Lapham passed away last month in Rome at the age of 89.

Lapham, born to a wealthy, political family in San Francisco, came to see the world as an interwoven tapestry of history, culture, power structures, hypocrisies, and the foibles and possibilities of the humans who dominate Planet Earth. His “renaissance” approach made Harper’s an exciting, challenging magazine during his tenure from the 1980s until 2006. He waded into each edition with an essay that reflected agonizing concentration. He once told me that he always had great difficulty writing, which may explain how finely tuned were his many varied literary contributions. Thought-provoking pieces were handwritten amid a swirl of non-stop cigarette smoking.

A defiant opponent of the Bush/Cheney criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003, he argued for the impeachment of Bush in 2006.

Seeing him as a national treasure, I offered to secure 1,000 subscriptions to Harper’s if he would stop smoking his several packs a day. Choose between the expansion of his readership or stay as an addicted victim of the notorious tobacco industry.

NBC’s “Today Show” got wind of this exchange and put us both on the air. I made my case, but, though his usual courteous self, he wouldn’t budge. Nicotine won the day. In the succeeding years, we would exchange telephone calls to assess the outrages of the day.

Lapham was not content with opening minds to “beautiful and strange” imaginations for the world; he waded into controversies. A defiant opponent of the Bush/Cheney criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003, he argued for the impeachment of Bush in 2006. Still, he offered the pages of Harper’s to conservatives such as William Buckley of the National Review and introduced new writers who were denied an audience by other editors. He encouraged the search for eye-opening, factual one-liners (e.g., the famous Harper’s Index) that conveyed points of grotesque inversions of society’s priorities, corporate greed, governmental wrongdoing, and more.

In 2007, still pursuing his belief that the reading public had to be provided with contrasting viewpoints, the contributions of the wise minds from the ancient classics to the present-day sagacities, Lapham started Lapham’s Quarterly—a truly unique publication.

Running about 225 pages, the Quarterly included many pictures, artwork, and other visuals in color to go along with the prose and the meticulous footnoting all brought together by his small, energetic staff of historical retrievers and synthesizers. Each publication came with an opening essay by Lapham, who was always striving to make the whole greater than the sum of its insightful parts.

Every June, until the Quarterly was temporarily suspended in late 2023, Lapham would have a large celebratory fund-raising dinner in New York City. Celebrities from many fields spoke briefly; there was entertainment and the reserved Founder stayed pretty much in the background, though undoubtedly musing about the emerging scenes.

Taking a cue from Lapham’s famous concision, here is a list of some of the thematic titles of the Quarterly that each had only one word or two words such as: “Luck,” “States of Mind,” “Night,” “Water,” “Democracy,” “Trade,” “Music,” “Fear,” “Discovery,” “Home,” “Flesh,” “Swindle & Fraud,” “Crimes & Punishments,” “Fashion,” “Philanthropy,” “Time,” “Youth,” “States of War,” “About Money,” “Medicine,” “Revolutions,” “Spies,” “Animals,” “Death,” “Rule of Law,” and “Happiness.” Each volume was framed by Lapham’s interpretative, introductory essay. His expansive range knew no bounds.

He won numerous major awards for his magazine writing and was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame in 2007. His last book, a collection of his columns, was titled Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy (2016) which denounced both President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush along with a “plutocracy of the superrich, by the superrich, and for the superrich.” Lapham also created television programs and documentaries.

There was, however, a tragedy surrounding Lapham’s career—he worked within an aliterate, ahistorical corporate and commercial culture.

Given the contemporary crises and approaching omnicides, both the Quarterly and Harper’s should have large circulations with pulsating readers. Alas, though supported and managed admirably by Rick MacArthur, Harper’s emits profound cries in the wilderness. (See Harper’s at: harpers.org). The Quarterly struggled even more than Harper’s to put forces into motion. Instagram, TikTok, Internet gaming, gambling, and gossip command the short attention span of the younger generation, with luminous exceptions.

Lapham’s Quarterly is, however, a classic series, that can nourish and motivate children of the future with the structured knowledge, experience, and observations related in its picturesque volumes. That is, if the young adopt the belief that “Readers think and Thinkers read,” as a prelude to their democratic civic engagement for a just world. (See Lapham’s Quarterly at: www.laphamsquarterly.org).

Donald Trump and JD Vance, like most politicians from both parties, love to invoke the American Dream.

When billionaire Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency in 2015, he said:

“Sadly, the American Dream is dead. But if I get elected president, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before and we will make America great again.”

When multimillionaire hedge fund manager JD Vance accepted his nomination for vice president at the RNC, he similarly said:

“Some people tell me I’ve lived the American dream, and of course they’re right. And I’m so grateful for it.”

But when Republicans talk about the American Dream, what do they mean? And how does their view of the American Dream differ from that of Democrats?

My next book (The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class―and How to Rescue Our Future) is about this topic and now, as we head into this year’s pivotal election, is a great opportunity to explore what both parties mean when they invoke this touchstone of the American psyche.

When Democrats invoke the American Dream, they mean something very specific, pioneered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They understand that a middle class is not a “normal” thing that naturally evolves in nations; the first more-than-half-of-us American middle class came about post-1940s as a result of specific policies put into place by FDR. Thus, Democrats argue, the American Dream includes the opportunity or ability to:

— Move into the middle class with a good union job so a single wage-earner can support a family
— Buy a home for a reasonable price where the mortgage doesn’t exceed a third of post-tax household income
— Live safely without fear that your home will be broken into or your child can be shot at school or on the playground
— Have decent healthcare that won’t bankrupt you if somebody gets sick
— Every few years get a new car and cover the cost of maintenance and gas or electricity
— Put your kids through school and college
— Take an annual family vacation
— Save enough (or have a pension) for a comfortable retirement, augmented by Social Security, and
— Pay reasonable taxes to fund programs that support the existence of a middle class.

When Republicans — particularly billionaires and multimillionaires like Trump and Vance — invoke the American Dream, they largely ignore the middle class. Instead, that phrase to them means the ability to:

— Get rich beyond the dreams of King Midas
— Own multiple mansions from Florida to Colorado to Switzerland (and Trump added Venezuela on his Monday night call with Musk)
— Cavort with nubile young women and investment bankers on your very own superyacht or Lolita Express private jet
— Have private concierge doctors and nurses on call at all times
— Employ private security to guard your mansions and wield weapons of war to keep you safe from the masses
— Buy judges for the Supreme Court to get decisions that make your life easier
— Legally bribe judges and politicians at every level from the county commissioners to Congress and the president, and
— Avoid paying taxes so successfully that the average American billionaire today pays less than 8 percent in income taxes.

We see this difference in the two parties’ understanding of the phrase “American Dream” most clearly when we look at the policy positions of the two parties. Here’s a partial list.

Unionization:

— Democrats want every American working for a medium- or large-size company to have the right to form or join a union. Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt first put this right into law with the 1935 Wagner Act (National Labor Relations Act) and Democrats have defended unionization rights ever since. Every other developed country in the world has imitated that initial effort; most European nations have over 70 percent unionization. Blue states regularly exceed 20 percent unionization.

— Republicans, on the other hand, pushed the cruel Taft-Hartley Act through Congress over the veto of President Harry Truman in 1947, allowing states to opt out of many of the provisions of the Wagner Act. In a genius act of marketing, they call states that choose to use the provisions of Taft-Hartley “Right to Work” (For Less) states. When Trump and Musk were talking Monday night, Trump — who has never allowed his employees to unionize — congratulated Musk on keeping unions out of Tesla and Twitter/X, as PBS noted: “I look at what you do. You walk in and say, ‘You want to quit?’ I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone.’” Musk said, “Yeah,” and laughed while Trump was talking. Many Red states have union membership levels below 5 percent.

Housing:

— Democrats believe housing should be a right rather than a privilege, and to that end have supported public housing, housing vouchers, and government subsidies and tax breaks to developers who put up low-income housing. They are increasingly calling out the relatively new Wall Street practice of buying up millions of single-family homes and flipping them into rentals, provoking an epidemic of homelessness.

— Republicans think the thing they ironically call the “free market” (a marketplace owned by the richest people and corporations, who are then “free” to set the rules for the rest of us) should decide who gets housing and what it costs. They have opposed all federal and state support for housing for over 100 years, and most recently threatened to shut down the government if they didn’t get “steep spending cuts to domestic programs, including HUD’s and USDA’s vital affordable housing and homelessness programs.”

Healthcare:

— Democrats believe healthcare should be a right rather than a privilege and have worked to extend universal, affordable healthcare to all Americans ever since President Harry Truman first proposed a national single-payer system in the 1940s. Universal healthcare programs have been proposed by Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, and Obama.

— Republicans have fought tooth-and-nail against every healthcare proposal Democrats have put forward, and continue to try to destroy the existing systems Democrats succeeded in putting into law. George W. Bush got Medicare privatized with the “Medicare Advantage” scam and almost a dozen Republican-controlled Red states continue to refuse to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, even though they’d only have to pick up 10 percent of the cost. They say it’s the principle of the thing: people won’t value healthcare unless they have “skin in the game” by paying for it themselves.

Education:

— Democrats have embraced free public schools for over a century and today are fighting to expand and better fund the nation’s public school system. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz got free breakfast and lunch for all public-school students in his state, and argues that program should go national. Democrats also believe public colleges and universities should be free or affordable to all students.

— Republican governors are working hard to dismantle their public schools systems, offering taxpayer-paid vouchers for students to attend private, for-profit or religious schools instead. They regularly trash-talk teachers, calling them “groomers” and other epithets, and former Republican Congressman and Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten “the most dangerous person in the world.”

Women’s Rights:

— Democrats trust women to make decisions about their own bodies, to have full agency in the business world, and to decide for themselves if they want to divorce an abusive husband. They support the right to abortion and birth control, while encouraging women to participate in the Democratic Party; more than twice as many women serve in Congress as Democrats than as Republicans. The Party’s presidential nominee this year is a woman, as in 2016 (and Hillary got 3 million more votes than Trump that year).

— Republicans want women barefoot, pregnant, and confined to the bedroom and kitchen. They’ve outlawed abortion in every Red state as a way of disempowering women, have proposed multiple state laws outlawing or restricting birth control, and openly advocate enforcement of the Comstock Act, which would outlaw all drugs and surgical instruments that could be used for an abortion. JD Vance argued divorce laws should make it hard for women in abusive relationships to separate from their husbands. Several Republicans and their billionaire funders have gone so far as to argue that America began going downhill when women got the vote in 1920. A jury of his peers found that their Party’s nominee had raped E. Jean Carroll, and over 20 other women, including one 13 years old, have also accused Trump of rape or sexual assault.

Crime and Guns:

— Democrats understand that unemployment and poverty are major contributors to crime; when cities are thriving and unemployment is low, so are crime rates. Crime rates go up when factories move overseas and unemployment explodes. Therefore, they want to bring our factories home (which has happened for the first time since the 1980s under President Biden) and help people get good pay and benefits. They also know that the more guns — particularly weapons of war — are on America’s streets, the more frequently we’ll have shootings and gun deaths.

— Republicans claim that crime is the result of moral failings and a lack of strict discipline in the home, also arguing that single-parent families help cause crime. They say that the best way to reduce shootings is to have more guns in circulation, an idiotic argument whose logical extension leads them to propose arming teachers. That they take massive amounts of cash from the weapons industry may play a role in their thinking.

Retirement:

— Democrats brought Social Security into being in 1935 and have defended it against Republican attacks ever since. They argue that if millionaires and billionaires paid the same percentage of their income in Social Security taxes as working class people, the system would be solvent for the next 70 years and benefits could increase substantially.

— Republicans have fought against Social Security ever since 1935, calling it “socialism” and a “Ponzi scheme.” Privatizing Social Security was a cornerstone of George W. Bush’s candidacy when he first ran for Congress and he tried valiantly in 2005 to turn the system over to the nation’s biggest banks. He failed, but did succeed in partially privatizing Medicare. Reagan cut Social Security benefits (prior to the 1980s, people could retire on it safely), raised the retirement age to 67, and made Social Security benefits taxable. Republican-aligned business leaders famously gutted or bankrupted most of the nation’s employer-based pension systems.

Corruption:

— Democrats see holding public office as an opportunity to serve their communities and the nation. They disagree with the ruling by five Republicans on the Supreme Court that giving money to politicians in exchange for favorable legislation is merely “free speech,” and the recent ruling by six Republicans on the Court that paying politicians for giving them lucrative government contracts is merely a form of “tipping” rather than bribery. They want to see Citizens United, which legalized political bribery by the morbidly rich and giant corporations, overturned.

— Republicans defend Citizens United and are happy to exchange legislation and regulation for campaign contributions, free vacations, and other gifts and benefits. Donald Trump has been explicit about this, recently telling a group of fossil fuel barons that if they’d pony up a billion dollars for his campaign he’d change the laws and federal subsidies to favor them. Clarence Thomas has taken over $4 million in naked bribes from billionaires and the Republicans in Congress defend him while his peers on the Court appear to also have their hands out.

Taxes:

— Democrats pioneered a 90 percent top income tax rate on the morbidly rich: Democratic President Woodrow Wilson put that into place in the nineteen-teens; Republican President Warren Harding dropped it to 25 percent kicking off the Roaring 20s when the rich became fabulously rich while working people lost income; and then Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt raised it back up to 90 percent in the 1930s and 1940s. The main benefit of this high tax rate was that it encouraged business owners to keep money in their companies (rather than have it taxed at 90 percent) and pay their workers well. It literally built the middle glass. When Reagan gutted the top income tax rate in the 1980s, wealth at the top exploded and worker wages began 40 years of stagnation.

— Republicans see taxation not as a way of funding the operation of government but as a form of theft from hard-working billionaires and multimillionaires. The tax cuts of Reagan, Bush, and Trump collectively have sucked out of our federal coffers the vast majority of the nation’s current $34 trillion national debt.

And this doesn’t even begin to address other fundamental issues where the two parties are vastly different like climate change, foreign policy, religion in government, minority rights, or democracy.

So far, the American Dream is still alive, although it’s been under 40 years of assault by Republicans and neoliberals. President Biden returned the Democratic Party to its pre-1992 embrace of Keynesian economics, using the power of government to rebuild both our national infrastructure and our middle class.

This election provides the greatest contrast in philosophy since 1980 and will determine the fate and future of the American Dream.

Will it survive? That’ll depend on how many of us show up to vote this fall.

After the Democrat in the White House decided not to run for reelection, the vice president got the party’s presidential nod—and continued to back the administration’s policies for an unpopular war. As the election neared, the candidate had to decide whether to keep supporting the war or speak out for a change.

Hubert Humphrey faced that choice in 1968. Kamala Harris faces it now.

Despite the differences in eras and circumstances, key dynamics are eerily similar. The history of how Vice President Humphrey navigated the political terrain of the war in Vietnam has ominous parallels with how Vice President Harris has been dealing with the war in Gaza.

From Landslide to Chaos

For millions of liberals, during the first half of the 1960s, Hubert Humphrey was the nation’s most heroic politician. As the Senate majority whip, he deftly championed landmark bills for civil rights and social programs. By the time President Lyndon B. Johnson put him on the Democratic ticket in 1964, progressive momentum was in high gear.

LBJ defeated ultra-conservative Barry Goldwater in a landslide. As vice president, Humphrey assisted Johnson to follow up on the 1964 Civil Rights Act with the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a huge set of antipoverty measures while enacting broad social programs in realms of education, health care, nutrition, housing and the environment. Midway through the summer of 1965, Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law.

The chaos and bitterness in Chicago underscored how the vice president’s deference to the war president had weakened the party while undermining the chances for victory.

Meanwhile, escalation of the U.S. war on Vietnam was taking off. And, as Martin Luther King Jr. soon pointed out, “When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, social programs must inevitably suffer. We can talk about guns and butter all we want to, but when the guns are there with all of its emphasis you don’t even get good oleo [margarine]. These are facts of life.”

At first, Vice President Humphrey wrote slightly dovish memos to Johnson, who angrily rejected the advice and retaliated by excluding him from key meetings. Banished to the doghouse, Humphrey licked his wounds and changed his approach. By early 1966, he was deferring to Johnson’s war views in private and advocating for the Vietnam War in public.

As the war escalated, so did the vice president’s zeal to extol it as a fight for freedom and democracy. “By 1967 he had become a hawk on Vietnam,” biographer Arnold Offner noted. Beneath the lofty rhetoric was cold calculation.

“Humphrey’s passage from dove to hawk on Vietnam was not the result of one-sided White House briefings or of his ability, as one journalist had noted, to see silver linings in the stormiest clouds,” Offner wrote. “His change of position derived from a case of willful mind over matter, from his strong anti-Communism combined with political expediency driven by ambition, namely desire to remain in Johnson’s good graces and perhaps succeed him whenever his presidency ended.”

That desire to be in the president’s good graces did not dissipate after Johnson suddenly announced in a televised address on March 31, 1968 that he would not seek reelection. Four weeks later, Humphrey launched a presidential campaign that pitted him against two antiwar candidates, Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy.

From the outset, Humphrey was plagued by his fear of antagonizing Johnson if he were to depart from a pro-war script. The United States had “nothing to apologize for,” Humphrey said. He didn’t run in any primaries and was not willing to debate McCarthy or Kennedy.

Humphrey mouthed the same old rhetoric to rationalize the administration’s policies for the war in Vietnam. Several high-level supporters—including Iowa’s Governor Harold Hughes, Vermont’s Governor Philip Hoff, and the venerable former New York governor and ambassador Averell Harriman—advised him to resign the vice presidency and thus free himself from entanglement with Johnson. But to Humphrey, such a step was unthinkable.

And so, Hubert Humphrey rode in the caboose of the war train all summer. In late August, the day before the Democratic National Convention got underway in Chicago, he told viewers of the CBS program Face the Nation that the administration’s policies in Vietnam were “basically sound.”

The convention nominated him while, outside, tear gas filled the air during what a report from a special federal commission later called a police riot that meted out violence to antiwar demonstrators as well as some journalists. Inside the turbulent convention, dissenting delegates were outshouted, outvoted and suppressed by the pro-Humphrey forces.

The chaos and bitterness in Chicago underscored how the vice president’s deference to the war president had weakened the party while undermining the chances for victory. In polls, Humphrey trailed the Republican candidate Richard Nixon by double digits.

And yet, like a true warhorse, the VP could not bring himself to break from the president’s steely insistence on maintaining the U.S. government’s horrific violence in Vietnam. The Democratic ticket of Humphrey and Maine’s senator Edmund Muskie was in a tailspin, propelled downward by Humphrey’s refusal to break ranks with Johnson.

It wasn’t until Sept. 30 that Humphrey took a meaningful step. His campaign bought 30 minutes of national TV air time on NBC, and he used it to deliver a speech that finally created a bit of daylight between him and Johnson’s war. Humphrey said that as president he’d be willing to halt the bombing of North Vietnam. The speech revived his campaign, which nearly closed the gap with Nixon in October. But it was too little, too late.

Trying to Square a Circle of Mass Murder With the 'Politics of Joy'?

Like Hubert Humphrey six decades ago, Kamala Harris has remained in step with the man responsible for changing her title from senator to vice president. She has toed President Biden’s war line, while at times voicing sympathy for the victims of the Gaza war that’s made possible by policies that she supports. Her words of compassion have yet to translate into opposing the pipeline of weapons and ammunition to the Israeli military as it keeps slaughtering Palestinian civilians.

As the Democratic standard-bearer during carnage in Gaza, Harris has been trying to square a circle of mass murder, expressing empathy for victims while staying within bounds of U.S. government policies. Last week, Harris had her national security adviser declare that “she does not support an arms embargo on Israel.”

Like Hubert Humphrey six decades ago, Kamala Harris has remained in step with the man responsible for changing her title from senator to vice president

If maintained, that stance will continue to be a moral catastrophe—while increasing the chances that Harris will lose to Donald Trump. In effect, so far, Harris has opted to stay aligned with power brokers, big donors and conventional political wisdom instead of aligning with most voters. A CBS News/YouGov poll in June found that Americans opposed sending “weapons and supplies to Israel” by 61 to 39 percent.

Last week, Harris described herself and running-mate Tim Walz as “joyful warriors.” Many outlets have heralded their joyride along the campaign trail. The Associated Press reported that “Harris is pushing joy.” A New York Times headline proclaimed that “joy is fueling her campaign.” The brand of the Harris campaign is fast becoming “the politics of joy.”

Such branding will be a sharp contrast to the outcries from thousands of protesters in Chicago outside the Democratic National Convention next week, as they denounce U.S. complicity with the methodical killing of so many children, women and other civilians in Gaza.

Campaigning for joy while supporting horrendous warfare is nothing new. Fifty-six years before Vice President Harris called herself a “joyful warrior,” Vice President Humphrey declared that he stood for the “politics of joy” when announcing his run for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination.

At that point, the Pentagon was several years into its massive killing spree in Vietnam, as Humphrey kicked off his campaign by saying: “here we are the spirit of dedication, here we are the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, politics of purpose, politics of joy; and that’s the way it’s going to be, all the way, too, from here on out.”

If Kamala Harris loses to Trump after sticking with her support for arming the slaughter in Gaza, historians will likely echo words from biographer Offner, who wrote that after the 1968 election Humphrey “asked himself repeatedly whether he should have distanced himself sooner from President Johnson on the war. The answer was all too obvious.”

The U.S. Supreme Court recently issued decisions in four cases that could profoundly weaken the administrative state, foreshadowing widespread dysfunction for federal agencies and the vast regulatory regimes they oversee, including federal protections safeguarding public health and the environment.

The U.S. federal government has more than 439 agencies and subagencies, each with its own sphere of responsibility and expertise. These agencies are responsible for implementing, applying, and enforcing a wide array of regulations across areas such as air quality, clean drinking water, education, energy, financial markets, food safety, and healthcare—regulations that greatly impact American lives.

These Supreme Court decisions will undoubtedly be used to restrict the ability of federal agencies to interpret, apply, and enforce the laws and regulations crucial to the real-life, day-to-day implementation of our federal government’s most important functions.

Supreme Court Decisions Impacting Federal Agencies

The Supreme Court issued four decisions this past term (2023-2024) that challenge the authority of federal agencies:

• Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo: Overturned the longstanding Chevron doctrine, which gave deference to federal agencies. Courts will no longer be required to defer to the specialized technical expertise of federal agencies and their reasonable interpretation of ambiguous statutory terms or unclear definitions provided by Congress.
• SEC v. Jarkesy: Ruled that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) must provide defendants with a jury trial in enforcement actions seeking civil penalties, limiting the agency’s anti-fraud enforcement capabilities.
• Corner Post v. Federal Reserve: Extends the statute of limitations for challenges to agency actions, leading to prolonged legal uncertainty, even for decades-old regulations.
• Ohio v. EPA: Halted enforcement of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) “Good Neighbor” rule—which aimed to implement ozone air pollution standards—because the agency had not provided an adequate explanation of its plan. This case signals the Supreme Court’s willingness to hinder federal agency efforts to regulate pollution on a nationwide basis.

Chevron Deference and Its Demise

The advent of the doctrine of Chevron deference, established in 1984 through Chevron. v. NRDC, and its demise in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo both concern environmental regulation.

Chevron v. NRDC addressed the EPA’s interpretation and application of a regulation promulgated under the Clean Air Act. The Supreme Court upheld the EPA’s interpretation of an ambiguous provision of the law and, in doing so, held that courts must defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of ambiguous statutory terms—enter “Chevron deference.” For the past 40 years, Chevron deference has been the cornerstone of administrative law, and Chevron v. NRDC has been cited no less than 18,000 times in other court decisions.

Without Chevron deference, the Supreme Court will have the final say over policy questions and, in the words of Justice Kagan, becomes the country’s self-appointed “administrative czar.”

The Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo abruptly ended Chevron deference, significantly shifting power from federal agencies to the judiciary. The case concerned the regulation of the commercial fishing of overfished Atlantic herring pursuant to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. The Supreme Court considered the narrow question of whether commercial fishers of Atlantic herring can be made to shoulder the cost of hosting government fisheries monitors on board their vessels.

In its decision, the Supreme Court ruled that courts—not agencies—are to determine all questions of law, including the single best interpretation of ambiguous terms, even if those terms are scientific and technical. Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent warned that the majority decision would leave courts to determine questions far outside their expertise, including issues of environmental protection, such as how to define a “distinct population segment” of endangered “vertebrate fish or wildlife” pursuant to the Endangered Species Act.

Shifts in Power and Ongoing Impact

The removal of Chevron deference fundamentally shifts power from Congress and the executive to the judicial branch. By upsetting the long-held equilibrium stewarded by the Chevron doctrine, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo will restrict the federal government’s operations and hinder environmental regulation.

Presidents depend on the administrative state to apply their policy preferences, and Congress enacts statutes with the understanding that agencies will utilize their experience and expertise to reasonably interpret ambiguities. Without Chevron deference, the Supreme Court will have the final say over policy questions and, in the words of Justice Kagan, becomes the country’s self-appointed “administrative czar.”

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo is already having a profound impact: As of August 5, 2024, 59 courts have cited the decision, and litigants in 120 other cases have cited it in court filings. The decision is being used to stymie ESG investment regulation, reopen federal waters after an emergency closure to protect North Atlantic right whales, contest solar power facility certifications as a qualifying source of alternative energy, challenge requirements for water heaters to meet efficiency standards, and defend against the use of a tire manufacturing chemical whose runoff caused a “taking” of protected fish species.

Not only does Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo present a serious obstacle to the application and interpretation of federal environmental protection rules, but, together with SEC v. Jarkesy, it will also limit the ability of agencies to enforce those rules.

Climate Disclosure Rules and ESG Investing after Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and SEC v. Jarkesy

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and SEC v. Jarkesy will influence the ongoing challenge to the SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules, currently pending before the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. The SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules—albeit insipid—require larger companies to disclose material Scope 1 (direct) and Scope 2 (indirect) emissions information. These rules have been challenged by 25 states, two Big Oil trade groups, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The primary basis for the challenge to the rules is that it represents an unauthorized expansion of the SEC’s statutory rulemaking authority, making it ultra vires (beyond its legal powers). In overturning Chevron deference, the Supreme Court held that rulemaking agencies, such as the SEC, must demonstrate unambiguous congressional authority to create a rule, increasing the burden on these administrative agencies to prove they have the authority to implement such regulations. This poses a problem for the SEC, which adopted the Climate Disclosure Rules under the investor protection legislation of the Securities Act and the Securities Exchange Act. The SEC must demonstrate that it has unambiguous statutory authority to make climate-related regulations under these laws.

The EPA is one such agency that, until SEC v. Jarkesy, could impose civil penalties in administrative proceedings when environmental protection regulations have been violated, but it now faces limitations due to the decision.

Even if the Eighth Circuit upholds the Climate Disclosure Rules, their enforcement faces additional obstacles due to SEC v. Jarkesy. Failure to disclose material Scope 1 or 2 emissions could violate the Climate Disclosure Rules and potentially constitute securities fraud under SEC Rule 10b-5. The SEC can seek civil penalties for securities fraud, and since the Dodd-Frank Act, it could do so in the agency’s administrative courts.

In the SEC v. Jarkesy case, the SEC brought an enforcement action against investment adviser George Jarkesy, Jr. for securities fraud, resulting in a civil penalty of $300,000 and a disgorgement of $685,000 imposed by an administrative law judge. However, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Constitution’s Seventh Amendment entitles defendants to jury trials for any statutory claim that is legal in nature—even those brought by the government—and impacts the defendants’ private rights. The SEC v. Jarkesy decision significantly limits the SEC’s ability to combat securities fraud involving misleading and deceptive climate disclosures by removing the option of administrative proceedings and requiring enforcement actions be litigated through the lengthy and expensive jury trial process.

The decision seriously undermines the ability of not just the SEC to bring enforcement actions, but, as noted by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent, SEC v. Jarkesy will also restrict the enforcement capabilities of over two dozen other federal agencies that can impose civil penalties in administrative proceedings. The EPA is one such agency that, until SEC v. Jarkesy, could impose civil penalties in administrative proceedings when environmental protection regulations have been violated, but it now faces limitations due to the decision.

The Last Nail in the Coffin? An Extended Statute of Limitations for Challenging Agency Rules

The Administrative Procedure Act provides that a party has six years to challenge an agency regulation, and it was typically presumed that the six-year limitation began to run when the agency issued the regulation. However, in Corner Post v. Federal Reserve, the Supreme Court held that the limitation period starts when the party challenging the rule is actually injured by it. Accordingly, instead of the clock starting at publication, it starts at a different time for each potential litigant.

This decision means that longstanding agency regulations may now be subject to challenges by parties who have only recently been impacted by the rule. The Corner Post v. Federal Reserve decision dramatically expands the universe of existing regulations vulnerable to legal challenges by eliminating existing time restrictions on when court challenges to regulations can be brought.

Corner Post v. Federal Reserve will precipitate legal uncertainty and undermine the predictability of the law and agency regulations.

Good Neighbors No More: Ohio v. EPA

While the focus has been on the above mentioned cases, another decision has received less attention but is just as significant for federal environmental regulation. Ohio v. EPA inhibits the EPA’s ability to regulate air pollution on a national basis.

Under the Clean Air Act’s “good neighbor” rule, the EPA required 23 states—under a single implementation plan—to reduce air pollution traveling to downwind states, thereby requiring big polluters in upwind states to reduce emissions.

In Ohio v. EPA, the Court provided a preview of the post-Chevron difficulties courts will confront in grappling with technical questions best left to agency experts.

The court’s majority recognized the harm that increased ozone levels can cause, including triggering and exacerbating health problems and damaging vegetation, but held that the plan was likely “arbitrary or capricious” because the EPA had not “offered a ‘satisfactory explanation for its action[,] including a rational connection between the facts found and the choice made.’” According to the majority, the EPA failed to explain how the plan’s cost thresholds and emission limits were impacted by the number of states included in the plan.

The court split five-four. Justice Amy Coney Barrett—a reliable member of the court’s conservative clique—dissented and observed:

Given the number of companies included and the timelines for review, the court’s injunction leaves large swaths of upwind states free to keep contributing significantly to their downwind neighbors’ ozone problems for the next several years…

An application for a stay was granted, pending the final determination of the merits of the case. Significantly, Justice Barrett noted that Ohio v. EPA is “fact-intensive and highly technical” and—somewhat at odds with the majority opinion she joined in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo—that the court “should proceed all the more cautiously in cases like this one with voluminous, technical records and thorny legal questions.”

Indeed, in Ohio v. EPA, the court provided a preview of the post-Chevron difficulties courts will confront in grappling with technical questions best left to agency experts. Justice Neil Gorsuch, the author of the majority opinion, demonstrated that judges are not best placed to determine highly technical non-legal questions: He was clearly confused about the pollutant in question. The original opinion referred to “nitrous oxide” (laughing gas) five times instead of “nitrogen oxide,” an air pollutant that the EPA’s policy aimed to reduce. After the error gained traction on social media, the court issued a corrected opinion.

Uncertainly for U.S. Environmental Regulations

The Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and SEC v. Jarkesy decisions mean that federal agencies will not receive deference in interpreting their enabling legislation and no longer have the ability to enforce those regulations before administrative law judges. After Corner Post v. Federal Reserve, it is unclear when—or if—agency regulations will be free from potential legal challenges. And, in Ohio v. EPA, the Supreme Court inhibited the EPA’s ability to regulate air pollution on a national basis.

These recent Supreme Court decisions represent a seismic shift in the regulatory landscape and pose a particular threat to the federal government’s environmental protection regime. By limiting the power of federal agencies and extending the statute of limitations for challenging agency actions, these rulings introduce significant uncertainty and could provide an avenue for winding back environmental regulations that are already on the books. The full impact of these decisions will unfold over time, but their immediate effect is a substantial weakening of federal regulatory power and a suite of new tools for those seeking to challenge federal regulation.