Barack Obama’s 2008 run, a classic identity play, emphasized the history-making potential of electing the nation’s first Black president. No one knew or cared much about Obama’s policy positions, and he didn’t bother to share them. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 bids were policy arguments focused around a succinct set of issues: student loan debt, the minimum wage and healthcare. The fact that he would have been the first Jewish president was scarcely noticed.

If I were one of the Democratic strategists advising Kamala Harris’ rump 2024 campaign for president, I would focus on an identity play emphasizing her race and gender over a run about a set of policies. Which is exactly what she’s doing. “The longer the Harris campaign can portray her as a cultural phenomenon,” The New York Times reported on July 31st, “the longer she can avoid articulating details of her policy agenda that could divide her support…For now, the Harris team intends to skip some of the traditional markers of a presidential bid. While Ms. Harris released a host of policy papers during her 2020 campaign—some of which she has since disavowed—this time she plans to cast herself as a policy extension of Mr. Biden’s administration.”

“I think we are three weeks from knowing whether she can ascend the Obama ladder to where it’s about her and not any specific policies she has,” Rick Davis, campaign manager for McCain in 2008, told the Times.

If Kamala Harris can get elected without making policy promises, good for her. But we, as individual voters, have different interests than she does.

“I’m with her,” a Hillary Clinton campaign slogan quickly adopted by Kamala Harris supporters, is exactly the opposite of what representative democracy is supposed to be about. She should be watching our backs. A politician ought to be there for us, fighting like hell to improve our lives.

Just as Harris is attempting to do now, Obama ran as a rock star, long on charisma and short on specifics. Progressives and other leftists who gave him their votes quickly learned that being young, Black and cool enough to enjoy weed is no guarantee that a candidate will govern any better or differently than a boring old white guy. As president, Obama did exactly what a Republican would have done. He refused to codify Roe v. Wade (he called abortion rights “not the highest legislative priority”), granted full immunity to Guantánamo torturers, sent tens of thousands of more troops to the losing wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, used assassination drones 10 times more than Bush and supported the military coup against the democratically-elected, left-leaning president of Honduras.

            Obama’s decision to bail out Wall Street but not Main Street after the 2008-09 subprime mortgage crisis prompted pissed-off progressives to form the Occupy Wall Street movement in late 2011. True to right-wing form, Obama had his Homeland Security department partner with Wall Street banks, real estate companies, local police and the FBI to ruthlessly crush hundreds of Occupy encampments in violent coordinated raids.

Obama is still a rock star. But he gravely wounded the Democratic Party. Obamaism led directly to the surprise success of Bernie Sanders’ insurgent 2016 campaign—and the intraparty schism that allowed Donald Trump’s surprise win.

            Let’s not get fooled again. If the left-leaning Democrats who comprise the majority of the party’s voters want to avoid getting conned into supporting another DINO like Obama, they must insist upon a clear and coherent policy agenda for a first Harris Administration. “She is not Trump” is not enough. Nor is “we need a Black woman president.” By those standards, we could have elected Condoleezza Rice.

            We don’t know nearly enough about Harris’s stances on the issues. The little we have learned so far on matters like Gaza (she supports Israel), universal healthcare (she’s against it) and the long-frozen minimum wage (she doesn’t talk about it) doesn’t give much reason for optimism from a leftist point of view.

            It’s been more than two weeks since she became the Democratic standardbearer. Yet she still refuses to give any press conferences—something every candidate and every president ought to do daily, 365 days a year—or interviews with reporters. Like the senile Biden, every word she utters in public is read off a Teleprompter.

If she won’t tell us what she thinks, and we don’t like what she says, she shouldn’t get our votes.

(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 Get Obama-ed Again first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Kamala Harris set up a virtual primary for the Democrats who wanted to join the party’s 2024 ticket as her vice-presidential running mate. She offered them all—governors and senators, progressives and centrists, East Coasters and Midwesterners, Southerners and Westerners—an opportunity to secure the nomination. And they all gave it their best.

So how did Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, arguably the least well-known and least politically connected of the finalists, come from the back of the field to win Harris’ confidence?

Democratic Party insiders and the political pundits who listen to them are struggling to figure out what just happened. But there is nothing complicated about the Walz surge.

“Their idea of freedom is to be in your exam room, your bedroom. You know, banning books, we’re banning hunger. These are Democratic policies.”

What Walz recognized—to a far greater extent than more centrist and cautious VP prospects such as Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro—was that Democrats wanted to add a happy warrior on the ticket with Harris, whose replacement of President Joe Biden as the party’s presidential nominee has given the Democrat’s 2024 prospects a significant boost in morale and in the polls.

Walz had no problem fitting the bill. His record and political instincts positioned him as a candidate who is capable of winning where Democrats need to prevail in the race against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance.

As a Democrat who had won six races in a rural, Republican-leaning congressional district in southern Minnesota and then two terms as the governor of a politically competitive Midwestern state, Walz knew exactly how to rally the party base and to reach out to the progressive-leaning independents who must be mobilized to defeat the Republican right.

Where other Democratic candidates and party strategists had struggled for years to figure out how to characterize Trump and the MAGA cabal that has taken over the Grand Old Party, Walz got to the point in his first interviews as a VP contender. “You know there's something wrong with people when they talk about freedom: freedom to be in your bedroom, freedom to be in your exam room, freedom to tell your kids what they can read,” Walz told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki. “That stuff is weird.”

The “weird” line went viral, as Democrats from across the ideological spectrum embraced what turned out to be a highly effective critique of Trump and Vance.

But there was much more to Walz’s appeal.

In a remarkable series of cable TV appearances in late July, at a point when the former teacher and National Guard master sergeant was still in the back of the pack of Democratic vice-presidential prospects, Walz made an argument for Harris and the party that was rooted in the rural values of regions where Democrats have struggled to compete in recent years.

“I grew up in a small town of 400 people. I have said I had 24 kids in my class—12 were cousins—graduating. That’s small-town America,” began Walz in one of his first MSNBC appearances during the VP race, turning the tables on Trump and Vance. “I said the thing that most irritates me and baffles me... is a failed real-estate guy from New York City that knows nothing about small towns and a guy who wrote a book that denigrates my neighbors and tells them that this is some type of cultural thing. I think the real message here is that the reason that rural America is struggling more—[with challenges such as the] outsourcing of jobs—is because of Republican policies and people like Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist who cares nothing about those institutions there.”

Then he dug into the issues that actually matter to the rural regions, small towns, and small cities where Democrats need to do better—areas where, if the party can hold its own in the way that it did when Barack Obama was its nominee in 2008 and 2012, it will win nearly every swing state. And, perhaps, a few states that weren’t thought to be competitive.

“If you’re in a town of 400, there are two institutions that are the most important to your town. That is the public school and a hospital or a clinic, if you have it,” Walz said to MSNBC. “Both of those things are being gutted by the Republicans. They’ve been telling us for six-and-a-half years they have a plan on healthcare, and that means taking away Medicare and Medicaid and reducing [Affordable Care Act] access. And they talk about privatizing public schools.”

Rejecting the tired, and massively disproven, Republican talking point that says the private sector will invariably do a better job than the public sector, Walz mocked the GOP line that says, “Oh, we’re gonna privatize this and take the money out of our public schools.” Then he said, “Let me be very clear: When you talk about private education, that means you gut the public schools, you send [public money] to people [who are] already sending their kids to those schools, and you got it. So I think the condemnation of these people [is that] they don’t know middle America. They don’t know who we are.”

That is a progressive populist message that’s rooted in the rhetoric of Democrats such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, who won rural Americans, and of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, who won enough rural, small town, and small city votes to tip the balance to their party in the elections of 1976, 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012.

It also reflects the record of a congressman from rural Minnesota who continuously won volatile elections from 2006 to 2016, and of the Democratic governor of a frequent battleground state who won big in 2018 and 2022.

Recalling his congressional wins, Walz now says, “I represented a district that Trump won by 18 points, but that got tougher and tougher.” But, instead of giving up, Walz says, “I think we need to take this populist message—the economy, the freedoms—[and say that]: These guys aren’t for freedoms. Their idea of freedom is to be in your exam room, your bedroom. You know, banning books, we’re banning hunger. These are Democratic policies. And I think the people in Missouri, [and] I would argue, the people in Montana, doing those types of things make a big difference. What is Donald Trump offering? You go to these rallies, he’s talking about Hannibal Lecter.”

And that, as Tim Walz put it, is weird.

It’s been two years since U.S. President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law. The bipartisan industrial policy statute aims to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the U.S., address supply chain shortages, compete with China, and create good jobs for American workers. Two years in, however, the law seems to be a better deal for the world’s most powerful companies than for working people.

By some metrics, the CHIPS Act is a roaring success. After awarding over $30 billion to 15 companies, the Commerce Department reports the incentives will create more than 115,000 jobs (78,000 construction jobs and 36,000 production jobs) and incentivize over $350 billion in private investment.

But a closer look suggests major challenges with the policy rollout.

The Commerce Department is still negotiating contracts with award recipients, so it’s not too late to place safeguards on these taxpayer billions to protect workers’ rights and guarantee environmental protections.

For a start, job creation has not been as advertised. Last week Intel Corporation, the U.S. chipmaker that was awarded the largest CHIPS Act subsidy, announced it was laying off 15% of its global workforce. That’s 15,000 jobs lost, far more than the 10,000 permanent jobs the company promised to create in exchange for $19.5 billion from taxpayers.

Intel is not alone in taking public cash and laying off workers. Two weeks after the government announced a $162 million award to Microchip Technology, the company announced furloughs for all employees for two weeks in March and another two weeks in June. This is standard practice in the semiconductor industry: Overwork technicians and machine operators to meet production deadlines, then shutter the factory for a few weeks, forcing employees to use vacation time or go into paid time off debt.

Even setting the furloughs aside, many jobs in the chip industry are hardly lucrative. Last month, workers at Analog Devices Inc. in Beaverton, Oregon began to speak publicly about their compensation. It’s a struggle to survive on their wages, they reported, which average about $21 an hour, and they go years without a raise, all while handling toxic chemicals that can cause cancer, miscarriage, and birth defects.

Unfortunately, the CHIPS Act seems to be subsidizing an industry that exacerbates economic inequality. At Micron Corporation, which expects to receive $6.1 billion federal dollars plus $6 billion from New York state, CEO Sanjay Mehrotra earned $25 million last year, 463 times the salary of the median Micron employee, half of whom earn less than $55,000 per year.

U.S. workers are increasingly interested in labor unions to raise wages and assert dignity, but the semiconductor industry remains staunchly anti-union. Several CHIPS Act recipients have signed agreements with construction unions, hiring union workers to build their new factories. But not one has agreed to remain neutral if permanent production workers decide to organize a union.

Instead of hiring workers or raising wages, some CHIPS Act recipients have other plans for their bundles of cash. A recent study by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund found that the first 11 CHIPS Act award recipients spent over $41 billion on stock buybacks in the past five years. Stock buybacks artificially inflate the value of corporate shares, enriching executives and shareholders while taking money from payroll, innovation, and productive activity. Although the CHIPS Act explicitly prohibits applicants from using CHIPS funds for this purpose, four recipients plan to spend $14 billion on share repurchases in the coming years.

In short, far from creating jobs or spurring innovation, some of our CHIPS Act dollars seem to be going directly into the already fat pockets of corporate execs.

Communities with new CHIPS Act-funded factories have additional concerns about their new neighbors. Chip making requires vast quantities of water: TSMC in drought-stricken Phoenix, Arizona, expects to use over 17 million gallons a day. The anticipated energy demand of the four largest CHIPS Act recipients is also massive, more than twice the amount used annually in Seattle, though companies try to conceal this by purchasing bogus “renewable energy certificates” to inflate their green energy claims.

And chipmaking employs thousands of chemicals, many known to be poisonous, with no requirement that companies inform the public about the toxins emitted in their air and water. Santa Clara County, where the semiconductor industry was born in the last century, has more toxic Superfund sites than any other county nationwide, a distinction we should strive not to repeat as we restore chipmaking.

As the CHIPS Act reaches its terrible twos, then, it’s time to reconsider the path it’s toddling on. The Commerce Department is still negotiating contracts with award recipients, so it’s not too late to place safeguards on these taxpayer billions to protect workers’ rights and guarantee environmental protections. The coalition I work with, CHIPS Communities United, calls on the Biden-Harris administration to ensure the statute benefits workers and neighboring communities, not just CEOs and shareholders.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, have proclaimed, “We’re not going back!” Seniors and our families agree. We are definitely not going back on Social Security, Medicare, or drug prices. Rather, we are going forward. Forward to expanded Social Security, expanded Medicare, and lower drug prices.

We’re not going back to half of all seniors with below-poverty incomes. Before Social Security, people worked as long as they could, but the fast pace of many jobs “wears out its workers with great rapidity,” a commentator noted in 1912. “The young, the vigorous, the adaptable, the supple of limb, the alert of mind, are in demand,” he explained. “Middle age is old age.”

Once a job was lost, an older worker could seldom find a new one. Parents, as they aged, routinely moved in with their adult children. Those who had no children or whose children were unable or unwilling to support them wound up in the poorhouse. Literally. The poorhouse was not some ancient Dickensian invention; it was a very real means of subsistence for elderly people in the world before Social Security.

We are going forward. Forward to expanded Social Security, expanded Medicare, and lower drug prices.

When Social Security became law, every state but New Mexico had poorhouses. The vast majority of the residents were elderly. Most of the “inmates,” as they were generally labeled, entered the poorhouse late in life, having been independent wage earners until that point. In 1910, a Massachusetts Commission found that 92 percent of the residents entered after age 60.

The poorhouse was a fate to be dreaded. Even in as progressive a state as New York, the conditions were abysmal. In 1930, the New York State Commission on Old Age Security found that “worthy people are thrown together with whatever dregs of society happen to need the institution’s shelter at the moment…Privacy, even in the most intimate affairs of life, is impossible; married couples are quite generally separated; and all the inmates are regimented as though in a prison or penal colony.”

A return to that may seem impossible, but it is not. If Social Security did not exist today, more than forty percent of those aged 65 and over would once again have below-poverty incomes.

We’re not going back! Before Social Security, the death of one parent frequently meant the breakup of a family. Orphanages housed children with a living parent who had been unable to afford them, when the other parent died. People who became disabled and could no longer work routinely could be found begging in the street.

Those families now have guaranteed monthly benefits, thanks to Social Security, which lifts almost a million children and more than 5.3 million adults between the ages of 18 and 65 out of poverty. And our Social Security system lessens the depth of poverty for millions more.

Republicans want to take us back. They want to end Medicare as we know it.

But Republican politicians want to take us back. They have put out plans that not only would cut Social Security, but end it as we know it. We cannot let them take us back.

Instead of going backwards, we can and must go forward. Vice President Kamala Harris and her Democratic Party have plans to expand Social Security for seniors, for those with disabilities and for families experiencing the death of a provider.

In fact, when Harris was in the Senate, she was an original cosponsor of the Social Security Expansion Act, and when her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, was in the House of Representatives, he was an original cosponsor of the Social Security 2100 Act. Both bills expand benefits across-the-board, update the cost of living adjustment, so benefits don’t erode over time, expand benefits in other important ways, and ensure that those benefits can be paid on time and in full for the foreseeable future, by requiring the uber-wealthy to pay their fair share.

— (@)

And we’re not going back to a time without guaranteed government-provided health insurance for seniors and people with disabilities. Before President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law in 1965, most seniors were not able to find health insurance at any cost. For those who could, the coverage was inadequate and the cost was exhorbitant.

We can and must go forward. Harris and her Democratic colleagues want to expand Medicare. The essential benefits of vision, hearing and dental services must be added and the need for supplemental insurance must be eliminated. And Medicare should be extended to children and all ages in between.

We’re not going back to Big Pharma ripping off Medicare beneficiaries. For years, politicians promised to rein in Big Pharma and empower Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices. The Biden-Harris administration got it done.

If you too are determined to not go back on these important freedoms, the choice in November is clear.

Republicans want to take us back. They want to end Medicare as we know it. They want to replace it with vouchers, forcing seniors to fend for themselves in a hostile marketplace. Additionally, they have promised to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act and let Big Pharma charge whatever outrageously high prescription drug prices they decide. We’re not going back to Medicare beneficiaries paying more than $35 per month out-of-pocket for insulin. We’re not going back to Medicare beneficiaries paying more than $2,000 out-of-pocket per year for Medicare Part D prescription drug spending.

Instead, we will go forward to a future of even lower prices for even more prescription drugs. And that future must include providing those lower prices for all Americans.

We’re not going back to a world without the Affordable Care Act. We’re not going back to a world without Medicaid expansion, without coverage for “pre-existing conditions.”

That is just some of what is at stake in November.

We’re not going back to a world where Republicans hand out tax breaks to billionaires. We want to protect Social Security and expand benefits, paid for by requiring billionaires and other uber-wealthy to pay their fair share.

Social Security Works is proud to stand with Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Walz in the fight for freedom. The freedom to retire with dignity and independence. The freedom to get the medical care we need. The freedom to get the drugs our doctors prescribe.

If you too are determined to not go back on these important freedoms, the choice in November is clear. Let’s unite and usher in a future that takes us forward together.

Political cartoonists and analysts Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) take on the week in politics.

Kamala Harris’ pick of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her vice presidential running mate has been greeted with praise from Democratic-aligned media as well as the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. As Harris pulles even or slightly ahead of Trump, Scott asks whether Harris’ honeymoon can last and, if so, for how long. The ins and outs of a reshaped presidential campaign and how the immediate race looks is the focus of this week’s discussion.

Watch the Video Version: here.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 159: Now It’s Harris-Walz. What’s Next? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

This week marks the anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is no better time, especially in the middle of a presidential race, to call attention to where we are with such weapons today. Unfortunately, while risks from nuclear weapons largely fell from public consciousness after the end of the Cold War, the current strategic environment has made such risks all too real again. Russia’s prolonged war with Ukraine, China’s assertiveness as it emerges as a great power, the continuing volatility of the Middle East, and rapid cyber and AI developments—all raise the risk of nuclear war.

Addressing the risks is even harder today. During the Cold War, nuclear deterrence and its central feature August 2022 study by leading scientists forecast that a major nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia would lead to 5 billion deaths as a result of a nuclear winter that blots out sunlight and destroys growing seasons throughout much of the globe.

To which nuclear proponents argue that we’d just use low-yield nuclear weapons with limited climatic and other effects. Yet such minimizations of the effects of nuclear weapons are unsupported and unrealistic. Political and military leaders have long recognized that uses of low-yield nuclear weapons among nuclear powers would likely—indeed, almost inevitably—lead to escalated uses of high-yield nuclear weapons. This is self-assured destruction (SAD), the reality that use of nuclear weapons against another nuclear state would likely wreak destruction on the initial attacking state as well as its target.

We don’t need to examine international law to know that no one state may destroy human life and civilization—or even threaten to do so—for some perceived advantage from such a threat.

And, in any event, our posture is to use high, not low-yield nuclear weapons. Of our approximately 1,800 deployed nuclear weapons, only some 100 are low-yield. Even then, they are “dial-a-yield,”—capable of high as well as low yields.

And here’s the ultimate irony: We largely no longer need nuclear weapons. We have developed such superiority in our conventional forces that we’re able to address many, if not most, of our potential military needs with such weapons. The accuracy of contemporary delivery vehicles, whereby we can or will soon be able to hit essentially any target anywhere in the world within an hour or less, removes many needs that might have been believed in the past to require nuclear weapons.

It is not hyperbole to say the use of nuclear weapons between nuclear powers, certainly between the U.S. and Russia, would pose existential risks to human life and civilization. We don’t need to examine international law to know that no one state may destroy human life and civilization—or even threaten to do so—for some perceived advantage from such a threat. Certainly, nuclear weapons are every bit as indiscriminate, immoral, and illegal as chemical and biological weapons—and far more self-destructive on the using state and less likely to yield any net military advantage.

We need to revive our belief in the human potential for rationality and our moral and legal judgment across states and cultures. If we can regain such consciousness, we’ll likely be able—through effort, diplomacy, and example—to move the world toward fundamental changes in defense policies and practices. No doubt leaders of other countries share such a desire to survive and preserve human life and civilization.

We must require our political and military leaders to reformulate our nuclear polices. Moving the world toward mutual security will be hard in the current environment, but continuing our current policies is the height of folly and truly MAD.

After U.S. President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, Democratic Party leaders praised Biden for “defending democracy” and boasted: “He is one of the most consequential presidents in American history.” But when you ask people in the streets, many will give you the opposite response.

They point to his stance on two main things: Imperialist wars and immigration. Biden’s policy, as well as that of the Democratic leadership, has been no different from that of the Republican Party.

The Democratic leadership’s continued support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza is no departure from past policies. American engagement in imperialist wars have long interfered in the democratic practices of other nations (like former President Donald Trump’s meddling in Venezuela), provoked unjust wars, destroyed the livelihoods and homes of people in those countries, and driven their exodus to other countries, including the U.S.

The Democratic Party is in crisis. We should seize this opportunity to demand that Vice President Kamala Harris, or any other Democratic candidate, change gears.

When those dispossessed and displaced migrate here, the U.S. law treats them as criminals without the right to work and gain a livelihood. Although the Democratic Party claims to be pro-immigrant and the Republican Party claims to be anti-immigrant, both parties agree on criminalizing immigrants and maintaining this underground labor class without the right to organize. This pits immigrants against the rest of the working class; undermines organizing of any kind for unionized and non-unionized workers; and leads to the decline of working conditions, long hours, and low wages for all workers, citizens and immigrants alike. Meanwhile, sweatshop bosses, developers, and big corporations reap greater profits.

The majority of Americans struggle to pay for healthcare from private insurance companies or from their own pockets. In order to get Medicaid, many workers earn less money and let unscrupulous bosses steal more wages! Even though there has been widespread support for universal healthcare, Democratic Party leadership turned their backs on past promises to deliver a public option for healthcare. Surely, the billions the U.S. government has spent on wars abroad could provide healthcare for all Americans. However, the Democratic Party continues to promote the unpopular Obamacare which allows insurance companies to make a lot of money, further losing the support of the working class.

If elected, Trump will fascistize the government by expanding presidential powers and bringing the U.S. government under his authority, while carrying out the “largest deportation effort in the history of this country” and weakening the civil rights and the rights to organize for all Americans. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, the only party who can defeat Trump in this election, offers empty talk about “defending democracy” and “uniting Americans” while pushing policies that fail to address the needs of Americans, further sowing divisions, and pushing more people into the arms of Trump and fascism.

The Democratic Party is in crisis. We should seize this opportunity to demand that Vice President Kamala Harris, or any other Democratic candidate, change gears. If we really want to defeat Trump and prevent the country’s march toward fascism, we should demand the Democratic nominee adopt a platform that unites the working class: stop interventions and wars against other countries; abolish the provision of the Immigration Reform and Control Act that criminalizes immigrants, ensure equal rights for all workers; and improve people’s livelihood by guaranteeing universal healthcare. Let’s bring citizen and immigrant workers together to rally for these demands that will benefit all of us and will give us a fighting chance to improve the working and living conditions for all of us far beyond the elections.

Most people probably aren't thinking about the Federal Reserve's policy decisions on a daily basis. However, they feel the impact of them every day. High interest rates mean that paying down a credit card becomes more expensive, purchasing a home or a car feels out of reach, and the likelihood of losing your job goes up.

For months, the data have been hinting that the Fed's 23-year-high interest rates were starting to take a toll. U.S. household debt has surged to an all-time high, and delinquency is increasingly in the cards. And last Friday, the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3%, and both employment and wage growth slowed down.

It is clear that the Federal Reserve made a massive mistake in not cutting rates in July. The Fed must call an emergency meeting and cut rates by at least 75 basis points immediately. Failing to do so risks inflicting even more pain on the same people who have borne the brunt of inflation since the pandemic.

Interest rates remain unaccountably high, continuing to put pressure on the well-being of the everyday people who keep our economy going.

Chair Powell has repeatedly expressed commitment to a (completely arbitrary) 2% inflation target. And by all accounts, we are at that target: the three-month annualized Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation, is just 1.5 percent. But interest rates remain unaccountably high, continuing to put pressure on the well-being of the everyday people who keep our economy going.

The Fed's high interest rates are counterproductive, making a large rate cut now ever more urgent. Take housing, for example. The Fed's high interest rates put upward pressure on housing prices. High mortgage rates put homeownership out of reach for prospective buyers, pushing them back into the rental market, and driving up rents. High interest rates also make financing new housing construction more expensive, which means that builders don't build as many new homes. This is especially galling in the midst of a long-standing housing shortage of as many as 7 million homes.

High interest rates also make it more expensive for people to pay down their debts, increasing the likelihood of delinquency. A recent New York Fed report found that early delinquencies on auto loans and credit card debt began rising for low-income borrowers in 2022 and now exceed pre-pandemic levels, and credit card and auto loan balances are the highest they have been since the 2008 financial crisis. This is not just concerning for individuals and households, who face long-term scarring from these periods of financial stress, but also for the economy as a whole.

High interest rates aren't just getting in the way of building more houses and driving people into financial crisis, they're also blunting the impact of historic efforts to tackle climate change. Interest rates are more than double what they were when the Inflation Reduction Act passed. The IRA’s tax credits and subsidies require debt-financed private investment, which companies are eager to pursue. But many of these capital-intensive industries cannot withstand the burden of high rates. In offshore wind, for example, an estimated 60% of cost increases are squarely to blame on high interest rates.

The truth of the matter is that the Fed's sky-high interest rates aren't just making people's lives more difficult and stymieing much-needed investments. Using interest rates to tackle today's inflation also fails to tackle the root causes of the problem.

Today's inflation started because a pandemic collided with a broken supply chain built to maximize profits for the big corporations that designed it over any semblance of resilience and functionality. Those same corporations then hid behind the cover of inflation to jack up prices on consumers, raking in record profits along the way. Research from my organization, Groundwork Collaborative, found that from April to September 2023, corporate profits drove over 50% of inflation.

The Fed's sky-high interest rates aren't just making people's lives more difficult and stymieing much-needed investments. Using interest rates to tackle today's inflation also fails to tackle the root causes of the problem.

Powell himself has admitted that interest rate hikes can't tackle the supply-side issues at the root of today's inflation. And now the data are clear that he is taking the economy to the brink, despite low inflation and rising unemployment.

Making people walk an economic tightrope is not the path forward to a healthy economy. The Fed has a dual mandate to maintain stable prices and full employment. It's time for the Fed to take that mandate seriously and make a large and immediate emergency rate cut.

Under the doctrine of lesser-evilism, a vote for minor party is effectively a vote for a major party but a vote for a major party is never anything other than a vote for a major party.

The post A Vote for Cats Is a Vote for Dogs Is a Vote for Trump first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discuss current events nationwide, including J.D. Vance’s accusations against Tim Walz.    The show begins with political consultant John Davis joining to discuss Kamala Harris’s new running mate Tim Walz, and J.D. Vance’s press conference. He also gives a deep-dive analysis of how Trump and Harris are polling.  Then, citizen journalist and Revolutionary Blackout Network founder Nick Cruse shares his perspective on former Missouri Representative Cori Bush’s loss in the Congressional primary.   The second hour starts with political analyst, host of ‘Pasta-2-Go’, and ‘The Convo Couch’ Craig ‘Pasta’ Jardula weighing in on X owner Elon Musk suing his former advertisers.    The show closes with international relations and security analyst Jeremy Kuzmarov sharing his analysis on the latest out of Gaza, including updates on the ceasefire deal, and Iran’s anticipated retaliation against Israel.   The post The Final Countdown – 8/8/24 – J.D. Vance Calls Walz’s Military Service into Question first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The corporate media report on elections—especially the biggie coming up—as though they were sporting events. If you win, hurray! You get the gold cup or whatever. The election process is a matter of shrewd strategy combined with, uh, likability.

Thus, as per The New York Times: “Tim Walz is going to bring big Midwestern dad energy to the presidential campaign.”

That sort of thing—whatever that means. And I note this with a shrug of acceptance. OK, yeah, I get it. Elections are very much a matter of strategy and tactics, combined often enough with sheer trivia (Nixon should have shaved before that first debate with Kennedy). But nonetheless, considering that the future of humanity is essentially at stake in the American election, a scream of desperation keeps rising up from somewhere deep in my soul. Are we going to continue playing war with the world? Ignoring climate change?

Excuse me. but the way we choose to address the immediate future... matters.

It matters enormously. So as I read about the burgeoning Kamala Harris campaign, as she prepares to face off against Donald Trump, the question that assaults me the most deeply is not so much whether she can win, but whether she will run with transcendent values—values beyond the pro-war centrism of Joe Biden and the mainstream Democrats. Strategy matters, but values matter first.

A few months ago, when Biden was still the looming Democratic nominee, I was thrashing in anguished uncertainty, stuck “having” to vote for the lesser-evil guy who, among whatever else, refused to stop funding and supporting the Israeli genocide on Gaza. I wrote: “I may go lesser-evil when I vote in November, but right now I remain uncertain. I’m still waiting to see Biden’s courage emerge, as he stands up to further militarism.”

Well, his courage emerged in the form of dropping out—and suddenly Harris penetrated the country’s collective awareness. Wow, a female, Black presidential candidate. Big excitement. Horns started honking.

But what does she stand for? What values will she run on? The first serious indication of this was her choice of VP running mate. Yeah, it’ll have to be a white guy to “balance” the ticket, but beyond that—just a basic pro-war Dem? The likely choice seemed to be Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a guy very much in favor of continuing to arm Israel and help it “finish the job” in Gaza. He had, for instance, infamously compared campus protesters of U.S. support to the Ku Klux Klan.

But something shifted. She chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz instead—who is described, my God, as a “pragmatic progressive.” His social positions and legislative acts include: supporting LGBTQ rights; increasing social spending (for such things as education, housing, childcare, renewable energy); driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants; background checks for gun purchases; legalizing marijuana...

Walz’s political stance, Peter Bloom writes, “seeks to position traditionally left-leaning policies as common-sense solutions that align with the values and needs of the majority of Americans.”

OK, sounds great, but what about... dare I even ask? What about militarism? Ross Barkan put it this way in The New York Times: “On policy matters, in particular the Israel-Hamas war, Mr. Walz assuages, momentarily at least, the restive progressive wing of the Democratic Party.”

He’s assuaging the restive lefties? That hardly sounds reassuring. It sounds more like political game-playing then deeply held values emerging into policy. But I continued digging, beyond the corporate media, trying to understand who Walz really is and whether I share any of his actual values. I was surprised. Is it possible—when it comes to an issue as profound and future-significant as war and peace—that the Harris campaign will be running beyond “we’re the lesser evil”?

As Sanjana Karanth pointed out at HuffPost, Walz expressed “empathy and understanding” toward the Minnesota Democratic voters who cast their ballots for “uncommitted”—as protests against Biden’s support for Israeli militarism.

Speaking to CNN in March, she noted, Walz said: “The situation in Gaza is intolerable” and supported the search for a cease-fire. This is what the uncommitted voters are asking for “and that’s what they should be doing.”

Karanth also pointed out that the Institute for Middle East Understanding was enthusiastic, at least tentatively, about Harris choosing Walz as her running mate. After his selection, the organization issued this statement:

Today was another sign that our collective power can create a historic shift in the Democratic Party: away from militarism and impunity for Israel’s war crimes, and toward peace, justice and equality for all people—including the Palestinian people. Too many lives have already been lost, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza now face not just bombing but starvation and disease. While we welcome Vice President Harris’ choice, we will continue to push on the Harris-Walz campaign to commit to real and substantive policy change to reflect the will of the American people and to save countless lives.

Will Harris and Walz transcend lesser-evilism? Are they offering voters a real choice—on the deeply embedded issue of militarism? We must demand—demand!—that this be so.

With elections less than 100 days away and voter ire about homelessness at a fever pitch, San Francisco Mayor London Breed and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have unleashed “very aggressive” sweeps of homeless settlements across San Francisco—despite widespread evidence that the so-called “encampment resolutions” cause extensive harm and do not lead to shelter or housing for homeless people.

At 11:00 am on Monday July 29, a Haight District resident witnessed Department of Public Works trucks on Hayes Street “piled high with belongings,” preparing to roust a homeless settlement. The witness, who requested anonymity, said they “tried to warn another camper one block away but no one was ‘home’ in the tent,” which DPW teams soon removed and discarded in trash trucks.

“This event will surely break him,” the resident told us via Facebook messages. “He has been among us for one month trying to keep it together.” Just two weeks earlier, “he left his tent overnight to visit a friend. The friend overdosed and died… After all he’d been through, he was trying to keep the sidewalk clean and tidy.”

The resident explained, “Neighbors on my block of Hayes and Clayton have been trying to help stabilize these folks get to a better place. It speaks volumes that they are camped literally in front of our homes and multi-unit buildings and that most of us are NOT calling the cops or 311 but rolling up our sleeves…Today’s raid was cruel and pointless and a group of about 35 human beings just “followed orders.”

“Pushing people block to block and neighborhood to neighborhood does not solve homelessness.”

In another “encampment resolution” this week, advocates witnessed a homeless woman being removed from a spot on Division Street under a freeway overpass. She had moved her carts with belongings and bedding outside the announced sweep zone, but DPW “followed her outside the sweep zone” and began seizing her belongings, according to Lukas Illa, human rights organizer with the Coalition on Homelessness, who witnessed the encounter.

“DPW workers seized her cart and mattresses,” Illa told us. “She was crying, saying, ‘This is the only thing protecting me from the concrete, please…’ But they removed her mattress and took it away.”

Illa added: “I’ve watched a woman jump into a [trash] crusher to get her purse, and their phone fell out. People have 30 minutes to pack up their entire lives. If they can’t pack it up, they have to watch things like personal memorabilia, family photo albums, medications, get crushed and destroyed.”

The ramped-up sweeps, ordered by Newsom and Breed after the Supreme Court’s June 28 Grants Pass decision, brought condemnation from national homeless advocacy groups. The National Health Care for the Homeless Council said it is “appalled” by Newsom’s executive order, which “authorizes statewide encampment sweeps of unhoused people while making no requirements for connecting people to permanent housing. Thousands of low-income Californians are now subject to even greater rates of harassment, arrests, and fines—simply because they have nowhere else to go.”

The human effects of the sweeps are extensive and well-documented, the council has found.

A 2023 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded, “Involuntary displacement of people experiencing homelessness may substantially increase drug-related morbidity and mortality” by removing people from both their communities and outreach workers. Using simulated models of 23 U.S. cities and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers estimated “between 974 and 2,175 additional overdose deaths per 10,000 people experiencing homelessness” over a 10-year period.

Another study in 2023 found that sweeps “always resulted in the loss of the personal property,” and “occurred across seasons, hazardous weather, and without offers of alternative shelter.” In interviews and surveys, sweeps were noted to be physically, psychologically, and socially destructive,” leaving homeless people “feeling anger, loss, and hopelessness,” and further marginalization. Coalition Director Jennifer Friedenbach told us via email, “Sweeps are killing people and sweeps exacerbate homelessness. We need effective solutions such as filling the almost 800 vacant permanent housing units and rental assistance to keep San Franciscans in their homes.”

The reality, according to Friedenbach: “Previous evictions of people living in encampments have failed to reduce the number of people forced to sleep outside in our state nor in our city. Displacing, destabilizing, and dispossessing people without real offers of permanent housing makes homelessness worse.”

Despite the concerns, the city’s Healthy Streets Operation Center, which coordinates San Francisco’s homelessness initiatives, “plans to clear almost 100 tents and structures” this week, Mission Local reported.

According to SFPD Public Information Officer Robert Rueca, the sweeps have resulted in nine arrests since July 29, including some on warrants and for “illegal lodging.” So far, “No one has been booked into county jail just for illegal lodging,” Rueca told us via email. “A subject with the sole charge of illegal lodging is cited and released from the scene, which is still technically an arrest.” In the four months since April of this year, SFPD encampment sweeps have led to 162 arrests, according to Rueca.

The San Francisco Chronicle documented one such arrest, when police detained and cited 48-year-old Ramon Castillo and “discarded most of his belongings.”

A photo is shown from a November 14, 2022 action at city hall by Stolen Belonging and the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. (Photo: Steve Rhodes)

It’s unclear exactly how much city funding and staff are being devoted to the sweeps. According to Department of Public Works spokesperson Rachel Gordon, “On a typical day we have 14 to 16 people focused on encampment cleaning operations.” In a text, Gordon added, “Our crews work very hard every day to clean the City’s streets and public spaces… As a department, we are part of the city’s ongoing multi-faceted encampment-response operation that includes offers of shelter and services.”

Even while promoting stepped-up sweeps, the Mayor’s Office insisted in a statement this week, “San Francisco is already doing what the governor is calling for. Our city encampment teams and street outreach staff have been going out every day to bring people indoors, and to clean and clear encampments. This is why we are seeing a five year low in the city’s tent count on our streets.”

Breed has simultaneously claimed that high percentages of homeless people refuse shelter and that “nearly 500 encampment operations” in 2023 helped more than 1,500 people into shelter. Advocates dispute these claims, pointing to city Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing data showing long daily waiting lists for shelter beds.

While HSOC claims there are 300 shelter beds available for homeless people displaced by the sweeps, Friedenbach told us that’s misleading. “Every day, beds in the system turn over and every day they are filled. But many are set aside for different groups,” and are not actually available for people removed from their encampments.

Illa noted that even when city HOT team or other outreach workers may offer shelter beds, they “do not have access to the city shelter beds list, they do not even know what’s available. They’re offering things that do not exist.” Even for those who do refuse a shelter offer, “There are a million reasons why people don’t want to separate from their dog or their partner or give up their belongings for one or two nights in a shelter.”

According to Friedenbach, “We have hundreds of public housing units sitting vacant, yet our local officials are choosing to confiscate people’s property, their survival gear, their medications, their last items they are holding onto after losing everything; instead, why not offer them a place to live?”

Prior to the ramped-up sweeps, Mayor Breed cut funding and staffing for The City’s Homeless Outreach Team services, The SF Standard reported. While some funds were moved to the nonprofit Urban Alchemy’s “HEART” project, advocates insist city HOT Team workers “are more qualified… to move people into shelter and housing.” The Standard wrote: “Additionally, the advocates allege that HEART’s data paint a questionable picture about its effectiveness.”

Two mayoral candidates blasted the sweeps.

Board of supervisors president Aaron Peskin stated, “Policies to address homelessness must be humane, lawful and effective—not implemented just because someone’s job is on the line.” Peskin’s statement added, “In an effort to get reelected, Mayor Breed and former Mayor Mark Farrell are advocating for failed policies from the past that simply sweep our homeless problem from one neighborhood to another, without any long-term solutions.” Peskin advocated policies “to fight evictions, increase the amount of rent-controlled options, construct at least 2,000 shelter beds, and create affordable housing. We also need to establish supportive housing units that are equipped to handle mental and behavioral health issues.”

Candidate Daniel Lurie also criticized Mayor Breed for the sweeps, posting on X: “Mayor Breed has had six years to build the beds and clear encampments. Instead, she spent it making excuses and finally, in an election year, this is what she came up with? A rushed sweep with no real solution to actually keep people off the streets. Our city needs leadership that chases results, not headlines. Pushing the encampments from one block to another didn’t work when Mark Farrell tried it as temporary mayor, and it’s not working now. We must build the shelter beds, create paths to services, and expand Homeward Bound.”

Supervisor Dean Preston also strongly criticized the sweeps for undermining solutions to homelessness: “None of us are okay with a system where people are sleeping on our streets or in their cars. The Grants Pass decision, and now the governor and Mayor’s reaction to it, will make the situation worse. Pushing people block to block and neighborhood to neighborhood does not solve homelessness. In fact it makes it worse for everyone. Housing people with the support they need solves homelessness.”

In October of 1874, Arthur Latham Perry, a Williams College professor and one of the most prominent economists of his day journeyed west of the Missouri River for the first time in his life. The occasion of his trip was an invitation to address the Nebraska State Fair and its audience of farmers. Perry began his speech by noting that for every 150 farmers in America, there was one lawyer. He went on to say “I can count you one hundred of these lawyers, who have exerted more practical influence in the states and in the nation” than all of America’s farmers combined. “There is no objection to raise to lawyers; they are a useful class of men,” Perry continued, “but there is decided objection to allowing a mere handful of them, representing a mere handful of clients, to shape and mold the policy of” an entire nation.

I happened to be reading Perry’s speech as part of research for a book the day before Vice President Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate. For a mainstream media obsessed with firsts it was surprising that lost in the news of the choice and the horse-race handicapping that inevitably followed was the number of impressive firsts Walz represents. Tim Walz, unlike Vice-President Harris, President Biden, Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine, Barack Obama, John Kerry, John Edwards, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Michael Dukakis, Lloyd Bentsen, Walter Mondale, and Geraldine Ferraro is in fact, not a lawyer. Not since Jimmy Carter led the ticket in 1980 have Democrats not nominated a lawyer for national office.

Before Walz was chosen the last thirteen people to grace the Democratic ticket were lawyers. High statistical analysis is all the rage in American political entertainment these days, so let’s play with some numbers. Lawyers make up roughly .4% of the American population. Given those odds if you were to draw from a hat lawyers and non-lawyers the chances of coming up with lawyers thirteen times in a row would be one time every 670,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 attempts. Or to put it in more colloquial terms, for every time you expect that outcome to occur, you might also expect to win the Powerball jackpot at least three times and probably four.

If you were to draw from a hat lawyers and non-lawyers the chances of coming up with lawyers thirteen times in a row would be one time every 670,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 attempts.

Walz’s not being a lawyer—from here on we will refer to this as his alawyerness—is not unrelated from another “first” and statistical anomaly in American politics that Walz represents. He is a union member, the first as far as I can tell, to ever grace a Democratic Party ticket. Union membership has of course risen and fallen dramatically in the last hundred years, with a high of nearly 36% of American workers in 1953 falling to a record low of only 10% last year. I’ll leave the truly sophisticated statistical analysis to a soothsaying Nate (to be named later). Nevertheless, we probably could have expected a union member to have joined the Democratic ticket at least five or six times since 1924. Indeed, given that the national party has been much more closely associated with the interests of organized labor during the last century, one could extrapolate an even higher likelihood.

Statistical absurdities aside, there’s a lot contained in these two firsts about Walz and the history of the national Democratic Party ticket. There are stories to be told about why the political party that is at least a bit more devoted to the interests of working Americans would repeatedly put lawyers at the top of its ticket when Americans trust people like nurses and teachers at least three times as much. Stories to be told about why law school is a pathway to political prominence when union shop stewardship or agricultural cooperative leadership are not. Stories about the kinds of people who set their sights on politics from a young age versus those who come to politics out of their workplaces and communities. Stories about the different interests those different kinds of people tend to represent. Stories about the milieus elite private university graduates tend to inhabit and those that public school and state college graduates tend to inhabit. Stories about what kinds of policies the Democratic Party might pursue if its most prominent leaders were nurses, bus drivers, social workers, pipefitters, firefighters, sanitation workers, farmers, teachers, coaches, and union members. And there are lots of stories to be told about the influence of money versus real democratic constituencies in Democratic Party politics.

We probably could have expected a union member to have joined the Democratic ticket at least five or six times since 1924.

Now, as Perry told those Nebraska farmers many decades ago, nothing against lawyers. But Walz’s alawyerness and his union membership, his career as a teacher, coach, and national guardsman, suggest a path forward for everyday Democrats who hope to build a real majority to enact public goods like universal childcare, family leave, health care, and high-quality, well-funded education while also protecting reproductive rights, voting rights, and guaranteeing every working American a wage on which they and their families can live on with a modicum of security.

That path has nothing to do with Walz’s “folksy” charm or any other of the countless adjectives that national commentators use to describe him. Adjectives that give away just how exotic his alawyerness and union membership are to those who assume that law school and elite universities provide a birthright to political leadership in the 21st Century Democratic Party. Walz’s newfound prominence and the statistical anomaly that his appearance on the Democratic Party ticket represents should serve as a reminder.

The reminder should be that what the late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone used to call the democratic wing of the Democratic Party is made up not of lawyers, hedge fund managers, tech gurus, and media elites, but rather of people who come to politics from their everyday experiences and concerns in their workplaces and communities and who—statistically speaking of course-- can meaningfully represent the interest of their fellow workers and neighbors.

In war, there are no winners—and in a war between the U.S. and China, the entire world would lose.

That’s not just considering the massive loss of life that would occur, but also the reverberating effects of war that would sink millions into economic devastation, destroy the environment, and lead to widespread displacement and human rights atrocities.

The potential use of nuclear weapons is often disregarded as a side note, but it shouldn’t be. According to experts, conflict between the U.S. and China could easily escalate into nuclear war—and a nuclear winter isn’t much further away.

Everywhere we look, our government speaks of war with China as if it is an inevitable and warranted endeavor. It’s not. War never is.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Charles Q. Brown disagrees. He says he is “fully confident” that the U.S. would defeat China if war were to break out over Taiwan, even though the Commission on the National Defense Strategy predicts extreme losses on the U.S. side. Just last week he announced, “It’s going to take all the nation if we go to conflict with the PRC, and I’m confident, if we’re challenged, we will be there.”

“I play to win,” he continued, after acknowledging that “these will be major conflicts akin to what we saw in World War II, and so we’ve got to come to grips with that.” Born in 1962, Gen. Brown knows nothing of the horrors of WWII. For him, it’s words in a textbook—a game to “play.” For others, it will be lost limbs and terror.

The U.S. has been in near constant conflict since its inception, and our more recent wars paint an obvious vision of ineptitude. The only things Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan accomplished were widespread death and destruction. Violence does not end just because war does, but hangs over communities like a specter, negatively affecting the health and economic well-being of nations, as well as contributing to environmental harm.

While our government has been edging us toward war with China for some time, it’s not often we hear the words spoken so starkly. Gen. Brown’s point is clear: The U.S. is preparing for war, and they’re not holding back.

Last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin brought $500 million to the Philippines to boost their military capabilities. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was negotiating a deal to move U.S. operational control of Japanese forces from Hawaii to Japan.

Make no mistake: This is not another small play of some faraway war game. This is a big deal.

Having operational control over Japan’s military means our government doesn’t need to send as many American soldiers across the ocean to engage in battle. They’ll have full command and control of thousands of Japanese troops to do with as they please. The U.S. already has operational control over South Korea’s military, meaning that if war broke out, all ROK troops would be placed under U.S. command as well.

This isn’t just about war strategy—it’s about public perception. The American people are far more likely to support a war when they aren’t losing loved ones left and right. That might be the only lesson our government learned from Vietnam, and Iraq only solidified it. Drones and special forces won’t cut it in a war with China, which is why the U.S. is working overtime to solidify military partnerships across the Asia Pacific.

Modern U.S. war waging often occurs through the use of proxy states and funding the troops of another country as long as they act in U.S. interests. They’ll call it military strategy, but at the very root of it, you’ll find a dark feeling of indifference toward the citizens of other nations. Our government could not care less what happens to innocent people in Japan, South Korea, or the Philippines—as long as U.S. global hegemony is preserved, they will let them die.

Meanwhile, opposition has been growing within. In South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines, protests are on the rise, calling for an end to U.S. imperialism. The people don’t want to be cannon fodder between the U.S. and China, which is exactly what will happen if the situation escalates into war.

At a Foreign Relations Committee hearing last week on strategic warfare with China (the seventh so far), Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell stressed the importance of AUKUS and other trilateral partnerships when dealing with China. “This will be never-ending,” Campbell told the committee, emphasizing that the Asia Pacific “requires the most capable naval and advanced long-range air capabilities that the United States has ever needed before.”

Well, alliances are being made and billions of tax dollars continue to fund hyper-militarization of the region. Gen. Brown even commented that he is accelerating the effort of stockpiling weapons, ammunition, and other supplies in the Asia Pacific in preparation for war.

Just a few months ago, a trilateral summit between Japan, the Philippines, and the United States deepened their military alliance in the region. U.S. President Joe Biden reaffirmed the U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty, which states the U.S. will respond to any attack on the island nation. AUKUS, which Secretary Campbell repeatedly stressed the importance of, is a defense alliance between the U.S., the U.K., and Australia in the Asia Pacific region. Criticized by China for its “cold war mentality,” the strategic partnership is not unlike those that led us into global wars during the 20th century.

Everywhere we look, our government speaks of war with China as if it is an inevitable and warranted endeavor. It’s not. War never is.

And yet, the media will continue to follow our politicians like lap dogs and feed the narrative that war with China is unavoidable—even though China itself has repeatedly denounced any potential escalation into conflict. At this point, it rests on the shoulders of the people to say otherwise.

It’s time for the American public to take a stand against the normalization of conflict and the preparation for war with China. It’s time to tell our government that war with China is not only unacceptable, but global suicide. We now stare this unwinnable conflict in the face, and there’s no time to look away. The time for action is now.

Every Saturday night throughout summer, young people gather in Bristol’s historic Castle Park to sit on blankets under the cherry blossom trees, eating ice cream and drinking from cans as reggae, dub, and drum n bass rattle through tinny speakers. The music competes with the squawks of the city’s seagulls, the roar of traffic leaving the Galleries mall, and the strumming of a guitar. Teenagers try out circus skills, while bikes whizz along the river toward the bars and clubs of Old Market.

This weekend, the scene was very different.

Gangs of far-right race rioters stormed the park, passing its commemorative plaque to the city’s anti-fascists who fought in Spain in the 1930s. They were joined by those pulled into the far right via a toxic mix of anti-vax, anti-LGBTQ, QAnon conspiracy theories. Punches were thrown at a Black passerby. Counterprotesters insisted that fascists and racists were not welcome here, before moving south to the river to form a human barrier around a hotel housing migrant people, which the mob attempted to attack.

In many ways, the far right is grooming the general public to believe the violence and disorder of the past week—and any future violence—is an inevitable consequence of political failings around immigration. Worse, it is a result of the failure of democracy.

The scenes in Bristol were repeated across the country. In Rotherham and Tamworth, people who had fled violence and persecution in their own countries hid in hotel rooms as the buildings were set on fire. Asian men were dragged from their cabs to shouts of “kill him,” while Syrian shopkeepers, determined to build a new life away from dictatorship and civil war, watched in despair as their businesses were trashed. By Sunday night, more than 90 people had been arrested, but the violence did not stop, spreading to city after city, to Liverpool and Belfast and Plymouth and London and beyond.

The inciting incident was ostensibly the tragic killings of three girls, and the stabbing of other women and girls, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport. British-born teenager Axel Rudakubana has been charged with murder and attempted murder.

The horrific deaths of the three children had nothing to do with the terrorising of asylum-seeking people and children in hotels, the destruction of Black and Brown people’s businesses, or the attacks on mosques. The street violence that has gripped much of England and Northern Ireland since 30 July instead tells a story of who the modern far right are, how they organise, what they believe, and the coalition of hard-right politicians, commentators, and influencers who have empowered this hateful movement to inflict widespread violence against families fleeing fear.

Who Is the Modern Far Right?

The early days of the violence were met with suggestions from the new Labour government that the English Defence League (EDL) could be designated as a “proscribed group”—one that is forbidden under U.K. law due to terrorist connections.

But the suggestion fails to understand two crucial issues. The first, is that the EDL does not really exist. Its co-founder and most famous member, far-right activist and convicted criminal Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) left in 2013, claiming he had concerns over the "dangers of far-right extremism," after which the group’s membership dwindled until it ultimately became defunct a few years later.

The second is that the modern far right is no longer made up of organisations with clear hierarchical structures. Instead, it is an international and online-networked movement. It organises around a shared ideology spread by a core of theorists, leaders, and influencers who use their power to put out statements designed to trigger others to commit violence. In this, the influencers commit what is known as “stochastic” or “random violence,” while of course making sure they are not the ones throwing the punches and smashing the glass themselves, and can claim plausible deniability when it comes to incitement.

The networked nature of the modern far right means that rather than coalescing around a physical leader, they instead organise around a shared ideology and aim: the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which can be defeated via a race war.

The movement breaks out into the real world with violent, racist outbursts and attacks. That violence is filmed and live streamed across its network, with each action used to tell a story that will inspire new followers and, crucially, influence nonmembers by creating an atmosphere of insecurity and fear.

Following the killings in Southport, an online conspiracy claimed the killer was a Muslim man who had arrived into the U.K. illegally on a small boat last year. The lie brought together the two tropes driving the modern far right: Islamophobic claims that Muslim men pose a threat to women and girls and manufactured outrage over “fighting age men” arriving in the U.K. on small boats to live off the taxpayer.

While the false claims about the Southport killings were specific to that incident, the disinformation being shared was built on years of far-right influencers engaged in rhetorical violence against primarily Muslim migrant people. Numerous posts from Robinson’s Telegram channel, for example, discuss how migrant men who “inevitably go on to rape and murder” are “invading” the U.K. and “taken in and housed in hotels at taxpayer expense.” Governments and NGOs are even accused by him of “using little girls to encourage fighting age men to come to the U.K. who see nothing wrong in diddling kids.”

These messages have gathered pace over the past four years as the former Conservative government ramped up messaging to “stop the boats” and accused migrant people of abusing the system while being “child rapists" and "threats to national security.” In the same time period, growing anti-immigrant rhetoric and a failing policy to house asylum-seeking people in hotels has repeatedly triggered real-life violence and intimidation, mainly outside the hotels housing families.

“Citizen journalists” who made their names as “migrant hunters” such as Amanda Smith (who uses the social media avatar Yorkshire Rose) and Alan Leggett (Active Patriot), as well as groups including Britain First and Patriotic Alternative, have increasingly targeted hotels, live streaming their “visits” in footage that shows activists intimidating residents. Smith wrote how “women and girls are frightened to walk around the area of the [Rotherham] hotel at night,” pushing the message that migrant men are a threat to white women. Even children are positioned as a threat: One Britain First post said that a child in a hotel waving at their cameras was mocking them.

When it was revealed that the individual charged with the Southport murders was a British-born teenager, the far-right narrative shifted to maintain its Islamophobic focus. Robinson and others shared disinformation about Muslim men stabbing people in Stoke-on-Trent, giving a new inciting reason for the riots, despite Staffordshire Police confirming there have been no such stabbings. Footage of the so-called “Muslim Defence League” portrayed British towns as under attack.

The claim that white Britain is under attack by Muslim men is then used to incite the far-right’s ultimate goal: a genocidal civil war, otherwise known as Day X.

The Ideology

The networked nature of the modern far right means that rather than coalescing around a physical leader, they instead organise around a shared ideology and aim: the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which can be defeated via a race war.

The theory baselessly claims that white people in the Global North are being “replaced” by migrant people from the Global South, aided by feminists repressing the birth rate via abortion and contraception. All of this is supposedly being orchestrated by “cultural Marxists,” a catch-all term that includes liberal elites, feminists, Black Lives Matter activists, LGBTQ+ people, and Jewish people.

This so-called replacement is commonly referred to as a “white genocide.” To defeat this so-called genocide, the far right wants to incite a civil war—sometimes referred to as Day X or boogaloo—that would result in pure ethno-states. It’s for this reason that the owner of X (formerly Twitter), Elon Musk, warned that “civil war is inevitable” in the U.K., in the wake of the riots. While it is far from inevitable, it is the desired outcome of the global far right, who are looking for an inciting incident to trigger Day X.

To prevent white genocide, men are told that it is their duty to defend their family—and to defend whiteness—through violence.

When white men in England are dragging Asian men out of cars with shouts of “kill them,” and when white gangs are setting fire to hotels housing families from various countries across the Global South, they are rehearsing the actions they would take during the thing they fantasise about: genocide. When white men attack mosques, they are rehearsing a cultural genocide.

The central replacement/white genocide theory is supplemented by secondary conspiracies designed to provoke anxieties that children are in danger, and that parental authority is being usurped by outside, hostile “others.”

Those attending the riots had signs written with “save the children” and “save our children.” The same slogans also appear at anti-vax protests and anti-drag queen protests. While seemingly a benign slogan—who doesn’t want to save children?—the message now evokes the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory claiming liberal elites are trafficking and torturing children in Satanic rituals in order to harvest “adrenochrome.”

The demand to “save the children” feeds directly into the overarching Great Replacement conspiracy theory. A hostile “other,” the message reads, is coming to take your children away. Children are the frontline against replacement. To prevent white genocide, men are told that it is their duty to defend their family—and to defend whiteness—through violence.

Strategy

The desired outcome of this violence is to create insecurity, fear, and anxiety in the general population, which in turn leads to a collapse in faith in democracy and society.

That this is happening now, less than a month into a Labour government, is important to note. Labour has already cancelled the Rwanda scheme and implemented a statutory instrument to start processing asylum claims that were in a backlog as a result of rule changes in the Illegal Migration Act. Though the party, which has a long history of courting anti-immigrant support, is also acting “tough” on immigration, with raids on businesses and deportation flights to Vietnam and Timor-Leste, Labour is the traditional enemy of the far right. It is associated with progressive values, multiculturalism, and “woke.” For the far right to achieve its aims, it has to destroy the electorate’s trust in the Labour Party, in government—and in democracy.

In many ways, the far right is grooming the general public to believe the violence and disorder of the past week—and any future violence—is an inevitable consequence of political failings around immigration. Worse, it is a result of the failure of democracy.

Sowing fear, anxiety, and distrust in societal norms allows for the far right to achieve its ultimate aim: to replace democracy with a strong-man, authoritarian leader who can rule on a war footing.

That’s why, following U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s intervention on Sunday night, where he condemned “far-right thuggery,” social media filled up with messages that he was a “traitor to his country,” a “Soros puppet” (an antisemitic trope) running a “radical government.”

Former actor and failed politician Laurence Fox called Starmer a “traitor,” writing that he is on the “side” of “immigrant barbarians” who rape “British girls.” He finished the tweet with the threat of violence: “Fine. Then it’s war.” His tweet echoes Musk’s “civil war is inevitable.”

Following the Southport riot, Reform U.K. Member of Parliament Nigel Farage put out a video where he claimed the violence was a reaction to “fear, discomfort, to unease… I am worried, not just about the events in Southport, but about societal decline that is happening in our country… this prime minister does not have a clue… we need to start getting tough… Because what you’ve seen on the streets of Hartlepool, of London, of Southport, is nothing to what could happen over the next few weeks.”

In his video, Farage hints to the far-right trope of Western decline—an offshoot of the Great Replacement theory. He argues that the government is failing to protect its people. More importantly, he suggests that if the government fails to get "a clue," it will get worse. The violence, fear, and disorder will increase. And then what happens? What happens when violence leads to people no longer trusting the state?

This is part of the modern far right’s strategy: If the state cannot protect us from inevitable violence, it says, the far-right strongman can. Sowing fear, anxiety, and distrust in societal norms allows for the far right to achieve its ultimate aim: to replace democracy with a strong-man, authoritarian leader who can rule on a war footing.

This is the lesson of the 1930s. It’s one we cannot afford to forget in the 2020s.

The U.S. Border Patrol turns 100 this year, marking a century of hunting people; stoking vigilante violence; and erecting physical, technological, and bureaucratic barriers—many lethal—against human beings in need. But walls have never been the solution. Indeed, they are the reason cruelty, chaos, and corruption prevail at our crossroads, especially along the U.S. frontier with Mexico. Patrols and checkpoints, gateways and guns, militarization—in lieu of humanitarian mobilization—these represent the real crisis at our borders today: the hardening of the human heart, a world in which empathy has seemingly expired.

Border barriers respond to only one question: How do we stop them?

Our starting point should be: Why are so many people on the run?

Over the last 40 years, a deterrence-to-detention-to-deportation pipeline that daily flouts legal due process has grown up all around us, hiding in plain sight just outside our privileged view.

History matters, and this history is no exception because much of what we’re dealing with today was Made in the USA. It is the legacy of climate breakdown, driven largely by our stubborn dependence on fossil fuels. It is the consequence of U.S. economic imperatives that incentivize corporations to migrate south in search of low wages, little taxation, and no environmental controls. It is the heritage of a foreign policy perspective wherein Latin America and the Caribbean exist for U.S. enrichment.

From the Banana Wars to the Dirty Wars, through the so-called Wars on Drugs and Terror, the U.S. role in rendering whole regions unlivable, thus forcing human displacement, is little discussed. While there is significant and excellent academic scholarship documenting this reality, it is kept swept under the rug, out of sight and out of mind, as if the powers that be don’t want us to know.

So here’s what you should know.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the power and wealth accumulated by the Cold War iron triangle at the intersection of bureaucracy, industry, and self-interest was threatened. So the military-industrial complex pivoted to managing and maintaining borders worldwide. A border-industrial complex was born, and the betrayal of the international refugee protection regime began.

There were about a dozen walls around the world when Berlin’s came down. There are now close to 90 built or in the works. And while erected much as their medieval counterparts had been—to divide and exclude—modern walls are no longer exclusively physical. They extend to the outer limits of linked surveillance systems and troop movements. As a result, the U.S. southern border of 2024 stretches as far as Colombia; Fortress Europe can be felt throughout North Africa, deep into the Sahara Desert.

Though the militarization of the U.S. southern border began well before the shattering events of September 11, 2001, that event propelled the border-industrial complex into overdrive, with the wealthiest and most privileged nations already primed to turn their backs on post-WWII human rights commitments. Favoring a security-first paradigm, 21st-century profiteers and demagogues are now making bank—or political hay—in thwarting the movement of humans fleeing hunger, horror, and harm.

The foot soldiers in this cruel war against the world’s most vulnerable people—those who’ve been forced to leave home because home has become too dangerous to stay—include the U.S. Border Patrol.

A sub-agency of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection since 2003, the U.S. Border Patrol became official 100 years ago, on May 28, 1924. The first appointed agent, Jefferson Davis Milton, was the son of a Confederate governor and enslaver. Offspring of an era when Slave Patrols carried out the dictates not of law, but of plantation “justice,” Milton became a Texas Ranger in the late 1870s, when still a teen. Tasked with the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples, the recapture of formerly enslaved Black people, and the suppression of Mexican-origin property holders who took issue with white colonial settlers moving in and moving them off their land, the Texas Rangers of Milton’s day relied on the same raw, physical violence and brutality bequeathed to them by their Slave Patrol forebears.

Then came the 1875 Page Act, Congress’ second-ever legislation restricting immigration. It sought to check the numbers of Chinese laborers lured to the U.S., first by the discovery of California gold, then by the construction of the transcontinental railroad. The subsequent Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it harder for expelled Chinese to get back into the U.S.; and impossible for new Chinese arrivals to gain entry at all.

Of course, Congress needed an armed guard to enforce this legislation as well as an office to maintain the force. So, in 1904, the first U.S. immigration police force was born: the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors. It was made up of former Slave Patrollers, Klansmen, and Texas Rangers, like Milton. The human link between yesteryear’s slave and today’s border patrols, Milton brought to the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors the same “shoot first and ask questions later” attitude he learned as a ranger. From 1924, he passed that culture of impunity to his new Border Patrol recruits just as U.S. lawyer, conservationist, and hardened eugenicist, Madison Grant, became a household name with his 1916 publication, The Passing of the Great Race. Claimed by Hitler as “my Bible,” the book is the bedrock of the Fox News/Breitbart/MAGA-party “Great Replacement Theory” today.

The fear-mongering Madison’s book kicked up in the 1920s might have been the country’s first Culture War. It certainly played an active role in Congress passing the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, with humans still referred to as “aliens,” even in the modern era. The follow-up Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Act; authorized the creation of the Border Patrol; further tightened the quotas; and stiffened punishments for what was now called “illegal” entry," criminalizing the act of crossing the line “without inspection” by a border official. The National Origins Act would remain in place until the 1960s, as would the blatant exploitation of Mexican laborers.

Mexicans had moved throughout the borderlands without issue for centuries. They helped to expand and grow the U.S. economy; they turned California’s Imperial Valley into some of the most productive land on Earth. From 1924, when the U.S. southern border was closed and Mexican migration thwarted, treaties had to be negotiated when labor was needed to keep crops from dying in the furrows and factory assembly lines from failing to meet their projected yields. A political compromise was forged between Congress and the southwestern land barons: They could have their cheap labor as long as it was kept temporary and marginalized. This is when the Border Patrol went from merely hunting people to herding folks for the captains of U.S. corporate agriculture, too.

Fast-forward to the 2010s. When whole families as well as unaccompanied children began to arrive at the U.S. southern border—fleeing violence, starvation, climate breakdown, and other repercussions of U.S. political interference, military operations, and economic exploitation—that might have caused us to consider the human costs of our global adventurism; it should have triggered a humanitarian response at our southern border and a rethink of our outmoded immigration and asylum systems. But it didn’t.

Instead, the model of “prevention through deterrence”—unleashed 10 months after NAFTA became official in January 1994 and built on thwarting human migration through the cruelest of means—hardened. Over the last 40 years, a deterrence-to-detention-to-deportation pipeline that daily flouts legal due process has grown up all around us, hiding in plain sight just outside our privileged view. It is now the global behemoth that many decry as “broken” but which is working just fine for the demagogues and profiteers that benefit from it. In their world, where the outsider is to be feared and our so-called “security” reigns paramount, the 20th-century promise of the universality of human rights no longer applies.

But when home becomes too dangerous to stay, people move. We always have, and we always will—part of the human story since the dawn of time.

That is why deterring humans with walls has never worked, except to inflict misery and to kill. And why the 100-year birthday of a federal agency tasked with people-hunting and herding; prone to stoking vigilante violence; and intent on erecting physical, technological, and bureaucratic barriers—many lethal—against human beings in need is nothing to celebrate.

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discuss top news around the world, including Israel awaiting Iran’s response.   The show begins with former Barack Obama campaign director Robin Biro joining to discuss Kamala Harris’s choice of Tim Walz as a VP.    Then, former director at the National Transportation Safety Board Jamie Finch shares his expertise on Boeing officials testifying about the 737 Max dysfunction.    The second hour starts with RT journalist Nebojsa Malic weighing in on the latest out of the U.K., including the Prime Minister’s response to the riots. 

The show closes with Independent journalist, U.S. Navy veteran, and Host of DD Geopolitics Sarah Bils joining the show to discuss Hamas naming a new leader following Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination in Iran. 

    The post The Final Countdown – 8/7/24 – Israel Awaits Iran’s Response, Ceasefire Talks in Final Stage first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive $2 trillion multiyear plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines. A large chunk of that funding will go to major nuclear weapons contractors like Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. And they will do everything in their power to keep that money flowing.

This January, a review of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program under the Nunn-McCurdy Act — a congressional provision designed to rein in cost overruns of Pentagon weapons programs — found that the missile, the crown jewel of the nuclear overhaul plan involving 450 missile-holding silos spread across five states, is already 81% over its original budget. It is now estimated that it will cost a total of nearly $141 billion to develop and purchase, a figure only likely to rise in the future.

That Pentagon review had the option of canceling the Sentinel program because of such a staggering cost increase. Instead, it doubled down on the program, asserting that it would be an essential element of any future nuclear deterrent and must continue, even if the funding for other defense programs has to be cut to make way for it. In justifying the decision, Deputy Defense Secretary William LaPlante stated: “We are fully aware of the costs, but we are also aware of the risks of not modernizing our nuclear forces and not addressing the very real threats we confront.”

Cost is indeed one significant issue, but the biggest risk to the rest of us comes from continuing to build and deploy ICBMs, rather than delaying or shelving the Sentinel program. As former Secretary of Defense William Perry has noted, ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” because they “could trigger an accidental nuclear war.” As he explained, a president warned (accurately or not) of an enemy nuclear attack would have only minutes to decide whether to launch such ICBMs and conceivably devastate the planet.

Cost is indeed one significant issue, but the biggest risk to the rest of us comes from continuing to build and deploy ICBMs, rather than delaying or shelving the Sentinel program.

Possessing such potentially world-ending systems only increases the possibility of an unintended nuclear conflict prompted by a false alarm. And as Norman Solomon and the late Daniel Ellsberg once wrote, “If reducing the dangers of nuclear war is a goal, the top priority should be to remove the triad’s ground-based leg — not modernize it.”

This is no small matter. It is believed that a large-scale nuclear exchange could result in more than five billion of us humans dying, once the possibility of a “nuclear winter” and the potential destruction of agriculture across much of the planet is taken into account, according to an analysis by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

In short, the need to reduce nuclear risks by eliminating such ICBMs could not be more urgent. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock” — an estimate of how close the world may be at any moment to a nuclear conflict — is now set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s been since that tracker was first created in 1947. And just this June, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a mutual defense agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, a potential first step toward a drive by Moscow to help Pyongyang expand its nuclear arsenal further. And of the nine countries now possessing nuclear weapons, it’s hardly the only one other than the U.S. in an expansionist phase.

Considering the rising tide of nuclear escalation globally, is it really the right time for this country to invest a fortune of taxpayer dollars in a new generation of devastating “use them or lose them” weapons? The American public has long said no, according to a 2020 poll by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, which showed that 61% of us actually support phasing out ICBM systems like the Sentinel.

The Pentagon’s misguided plan to keep such ICBMs in the U.S arsenal for decades to come is only reinforced by the political power of members of Congress and the companies that benefit financially from the current buildup.

Who Decides? The Role of the ICBM Lobby

A prime example of the power of the nuclear weapons lobby is the Senate ICBM Coalition. That group is composed of senators from four states — Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming — that either house major ICBM bases or host significant work on the Sentinel. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the members of that coalition have received more than $3 million in donations from firms involved in the production of the Sentinel over the past four election cycles. Nor were they alone. ICBM contractors made contributions to 92 of the 100 senators and 413 of the 435 house members in 2024. Some received hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The nuclear lobby paid special attention to members of the armed services committees in the House and Senate. For example, Mike Turner, a House Republican from Ohio, has been a relentless advocate of “modernizing” the nuclear arsenal. In a June 2024 talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which itself has received well over a million dollars in funding from nuclear weapons producers, he called for systematically upgrading the nuclear arsenal for decades to come, while chiding any of his congressional colleagues not taking such an aggressive stance on the subject.

Although Turner vigorously touts the need for a costly nuclear buildup, he fails to mention that, with $305,000 in donations, he’s been the fourth-highest recipient of funding from the ICBM lobby over the four elections between 2018 and 2024. Little wonder that he pushes for new nuclear weapons and staunchly opposes extending the New START arms reduction treaty.

In another example of contractor influence, veteran Texas representative Kay Granger secured the largest total of contributions from the ICBM lobby of any House member. With $675,000 in missile contractor contributions in hand, Granger went to bat for the lobby, lending a feminist veneer to nuclear “modernization” by giving a speech on her experience as a woman in politics at Northrop Grumman’s Women’s conference. And we’re sure you won’t be surprised that Granger has anything but a strong track record when it comes to keeping the Pentagon and arms makers accountable for waste, fraud, and abuse in weapons programs. Her X account is, in fact, littered with posts heaping praise on Lockheed Martin and its overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft.

Other recipients of ICBM contractor funding, like Alabama Congressman Mike Rogers, have lamented the might of the “far-left disarmament community,” and the undue influence of “anti-nuclear zealots” on our politics. Missing from the statements his office puts together and the speeches his staffers write for him, however, is any mention of the $471,000 in funding he’s received so far from ICBM producers. You won’t be surprised, we’re sure, to discover that Rogers has pledged to seek a provision in the forthcoming National Defense Authorization Act to support the Pentagon’s plan to continue the Sentinel program.

Lobbying Dollars and the Revolving Door

The flood of campaign contributions from ICBM contractors is reinforced by their staggering investments in lobbying. In any given year, the arms industry as a whole employs between 800 and 1,000 lobbyists, well more than one for every member of Congress. Most of those lobbyists hired by ICBM contractors come through the “revolving door” from careers in the Pentagon, Congress, or the Executive Branch. That means they come with the necessary tools for success in Washington: an understanding of the appropriations cycle and close relations with decision-makers on the Hill.

During the last four election cycles, ICBM contractors spent upwards of $226 million on 275 extremely well-paid lobbyists. For example, Bud Cramer, a former Democratic congressman from Alabama who once sat on the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, netted $640,000 in fees from Northrop Grumman over a span of six years. He was also a cofounder of the Blue Dog Democrats, an influential conservative faction within the Democratic Party. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that Cramer’s former chief of staff, Jefferies Murray, also lobbies for Northrop Grumman.

While some lobbyists work for one contractor, others have shared allegiances. For example, during his tenure as a lobbyist, former Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Trent Lott received more than $600,000 for his efforts for Raytheon, Textron Inc., and United Technologies (before United Technologies and Raytheon merged to form RX Technologies). Former Virginia Congressman Jim Moran similarly received $640,000 from Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics.

Playing the Jobs Card

The argument of last resort for the Sentinel and similar questionable weapons programs is that they create well-paying jobs in key states and districts. Northrop Grumman has played the jobs card effectively with respect to the Sentinel, claiming it will create 10,000 jobs in its development phase alone, including about 2,250 in the state of Utah, where the hub for the program is located.

As a start, however, those 10,000 jobs will help a miniscule fraction of the 167-million-member American workforce. Moreover, Northrop Grumman claims facilities tied to the program will be set up in 32 states. If 2,250 of those jobs end up in Utah, that leaves 7,750 more jobs spread across 31 states — an average of about 250 jobs per state, essentially a rounding error compared to total employment in most localities.

Nor has Northrop Grumman provided any documentation for the number of jobs the Sentinel program will allegedly create. Journalist Taylor Barnes of ReThink Media was rebuffed in her efforts to get a copy of the agreement between Northrop Grumman and the state of Utah that reportedly indicates how many Sentinel-related jobs the company needs to create to get the full subsidy offered to put its primary facility in Utah.

Choosing to fund those ICBMs instead is, in fact, a job killer, not a job creator.

A statement by a Utah official justifying that lack of transparency suggested Northrop Grumman was operating in “a competitive defense industry” and that revealing details of the agreement might somehow harm the company. But any modest financial harm Northrop Grumman might suffer, were those details revealed, pales in comparison with the immense risks and costs of the Sentinel program itself.

There are two major flaws in the jobs argument with respect to the future production of nuclear weapons. First, military spending should be based on security considerations, not pork-barrel politics. Second, as Heidi Peltier of the Costs of War Project has effectively demonstrated, virtually any other expenditure of funds currently devoted to Pentagon programs would create between 9% and 250% more jobs than weapons spending does. If Congress were instead to put such funds into addressing climate change, dealing with future disease epidemics, poverty, or homelessness — all serious threats to public safety — the American economy would gain hundreds of thousands of jobs. Choosing to fund those ICBMs instead is, in fact, a job killer, not a job creator.

Unwarranted Influence in the Nuclear Age

Advocates for eliminating ICBMs from the American arsenal make a strong case. (If only they were better heard!) For example, former Representative John Tierney of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation offered this blunt indictment of ICBMs:

“Not only are intercontinental ballistic missiles redundant, but they are prone to a high risk of accidental use…They do not make us any safer. Their only value is to the defense contractors who line their fat pockets with large cost overruns at the expense of our taxpayers. It has got to stop.”

The late Daniel Ellsberg made a similar point in a February 2018 interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

“You would not have these arsenals, in the U.S. or elsewhere, if it were not the case that it was highly profitable to the military-industrial complex, to the aerospace industry, to the electronics industry, and to the weapons design labs to keep modernizing these weapons, improving accuracy, improving launch time, all that. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower talked about is a very powerful influence. We’ve talked about unwarranted influence. We’ve had that for more than half a century.”

Given how the politics of Pentagon spending normally work, that nuclear weapons policy is being so heavily influenced by individuals and organizations profiting from an ongoing arms race should be anything but surprising. Still, in the case of such weaponry, the stakes are so high that critical decisions shouldn’t be determined by parochial politics. The influence of such special interest groups and corporate weapons-makers over life-and-death issues should be considered both a moral outrage and perhaps the ultimate security risk.

Isn’t it finally time for the executive branch and Congress to start assessing the need for ICBMs on their merits, rather than on contractor lobbying, weapons company funding, and the sort of strategic thinking that was already outmoded by the end of the 1950s? For that to happen, our representatives would need to hear from their constituents loud and clear.

The few weeks of speculation are over. Kamala Harris has selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her VP running mate.

All six of the leading candidates had strengths and weaknesses that have been endlessly discussed. Whoever Harris selected, some of her supporters were bound to be disappointed. I believe that nothing is more important in U.S. politics at this moment than defeating both Trump and Trumpism. And so I have been prepared to write in support of whoever was the nominee. All the same, I honestly think that Walz is the best choice, and I am both relieved and heartened that it is he that Harris has chosen.

Walz is a Minnesota progressive (think Walter Mondale with a touch of Paul Wellstone) who can help carry Minnesota and Wisconsin (states in his media market) and Michigan, and he is the kind of plain-spoken, no-bullshit guy that will play well throughout the “heartland”—and will be able to call bullshit, figuratively and literally, on J.D. Vance and his “hillbilly elegies.”

While Josh Shapiro, like Harris, has had a “typical” career trajectory from law school to politics, Walz served for 24 years in the Army National Guard and is the highest-ranking enlisted soldier to ever serve in the U.S. Congress—where he served for 12 years as a major supporter of veteran’s affairs. He is a former high school teacher and football coach who received his college degree—a B.S.—from Chadron State College in Nebraska (where, you ask? Exactly the point). He is a hunter and gun owner. In other words, he is the farthest thing from a “coastal liberal” that it is possible to be.

Walz is very strong on social and economic issues, which is why he has been the favored choice of Bernie Sanders and other progressives. He has been described as a “Minnesota social democrat,” and this is accurate. But so too was Walter Monday and Hubert Humphrey before him—neither a Bernie Sanders-type. Walz might well be the person in this race whose profile is closest to—Joe Biden. And he promises to do for Harris’s campaign what Biden did for Barack Obama’s in 2008.

Walz is very strong on social and economic issues, which is why he has been the favored choice of Bernie Sanders and other progressives.

Shapiro is a very successful Democratic governor who promised to carry Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes (it is worth noting that Minnesota and Wisconsin each have 10 electoral votes, and Michigan another 15). He is a more “centrist” politician than Walz, and he was supported by many donor-types because of his more neoliberal views on economics (especially school choice), and also by many pro-Zionist groups because of his positions on the Israel/Gaza war and on campus protest. And he is probably more closely associated with the Biden administration’s feckless handling of the Middle East crisis than any other candidate. But these policy positions also threatened to alienate many of the base democratic constituencies—young people, Arab-Americans, many of the BLM-linked civil rights groups—whose mobilization will be crucial in November. (And the notion that progressive opposition to Shapiro because of his positions on the Gaza war and campus protest is antisemitic is bullshit, though it draws on tropes that right-wing Zionists have been deploying ever since October 7.).

Shapiro’s profile as a Democratic rising star is indeed rather close to Harris’s—and indeed in the end it might have been his ambition and his strong personality that caused Harris to look elsewhere for a partner. The notion that Harris is a “leftist” who needs to be balanced by Shapiro’s centrism is risible, and it is worth reminding those making this claim that when she campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019-2020, she was very much in the middle of a race whose two most dynamic candidates, for some time, were Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. At that time, she was being attacked from the left for not being radical enough (I published a piece on this back in February 2019 entitled “Kamala Harris Is Not a Red-Baiter, She’s Just Not a Socialist, Like Most Americans.”) The Trump campaign will lie about her “leftism.” But the proper antidote to such lies is simply the effective promulgation of the truth.

In short, Walz “balances” Harris on the ticket better than Shapiro ever could.

And if Shapiro and Fetterman–who hate each other, another interesting dynamic that might have played a role in Harris’s choice of Walz–are the Pennsylvania power-houses they each claim to be, then they should be able to deliver their state to the Democrats anyway (I assume that at some point the support of “Scranton Joe” might also play a role).

Harris has made a fantastic choice, even if it will disappoint some of the neocons who have realigned with the Democratic Party.

In yesterday’s The Bulwark, Bill Kristol—full disclosure, a friend with whom I have collaborated—argued strenuously that Shapiro is the only strong VP candidate, and that Harris’s failure to name him would be the “first unforced error of her campaign,” potentially stalling her momentum and also making her look weak “after the campaign against him from the left.” Kristol was not wrong to note Shapiro’s strengths. But, as I indicate above, these strengths are exaggerated, and come with serious weaknesses; indeed Kristol admits that “Harris could still win without Shapiro.”

Harris has made a fantastic choice, even if it will disappoint some of the neocons who have realigned with the Democratic Party.

Kristol exaggerates the extent to which there has been a “campaign against” Shapiro as opposed to an honest debate about who would be best. For as he himself notes, most Harris supporters have said that they would support whoever Harris picks. The differences between the VP candidates were not great, and all were and are firmly in the general orbit of Harris—who is of course the person who matters most.

The Democratic Party is a big tent party that has become even bigger since Trump forced many former Republicans out of the GOP. “Never Trump” Republicans are now an important part of the “common front” against the MAGA movement, as the Harris campaign has clearly acknowledged with its launching of “Republicans for Harris.” And centrist Democrats—of which there are a great many—are a core constituency of the party. But the progressive wing of the Democratic party is equally central; it has been pivotal for the Biden administration’s economic agenda and for its legislative success; and the successful mobilization of its supporters is essential to a Harris victory in November. Harris has demonstrated her savvy, and her leadership skills, by refusing to play against her own party’s left, and by choosing a running mate—Walz—who is, in all honesty, capable of appealing to the party’s diverse constituencies, while being as mainstream and middle America as they come.

But the main reason why Harris’s choice of Walz is the right choice is much simpler: because it was Harris’s choice to make, and she has made it.

In a matter of weeks, she has gone from being the running mate of a depressed and failing Biden campaign to being the dynamic leader of her own presidential campaign. She has been able to bridge divides within her party, to mobilize the entire range of Democratic constituencies behind her candidacy, and to generate an unprecedented amount of fundraising and volunteer enthusiasm.

For whatever combination of personal and political reasons, she has chosen Tim Walz.

It is now incumbent on everyone who believes that a Trump victory would be a disaster for social justice and democracy to support the Harris-Walz ticket and to do the work necessary to bring it a resounding victory in November.

Representative Cori Bush, a progressive black woman from St. Louis, Missouri who is a member of “the Squad” in the U.S. House and has been a powerful voice in Congress for poor people, women’s rights, healthcare, housing–and Palestine—just lost her primary because pro-Israel lobby groups flooded the race with outside funding. Her loss is a tremendous blow to progressives and to the U.S. electoral process itself.

This is the pro-Israel lobby’s second “win” of the season. The first was the June defeat of progressive, black congressman from Westchester County, N.Y., Jamaal Bowman, who was a forceful critic of Israel’s attacks on Gaza. AIPAC and its mis-named super PAC, the United Democracy Project, barged into Westchester County to anoint an opponent—white, pro-Israel Westchester County Executive George Latimer—and then shower him with cash.

The ads against Bowman were not about Israel. Instead, AIPAC smeared the congressman’s character and criticized him as a “hot head” who was not a reliable member of the Democratic team. In the words of President of the Arab American Institute Jim Zogby, the race became “the angry, frightening young black man versus the calm, thoughtful older white guy.”

By throwing $17 million into the race, pro-Israel groups turned Bowman’s primary into the most expensive one in U.S. history. When Bowman was defeated, AIPAC declared the outcome showed that the pro-Israel position is “both good policy and good politics.” On the contrary, what it really showed was that pro-Israel groups can buy elections and send a frightening message to all elected officials that if they criticize Israel, even during a genocide, they may well pay with their careers.

AIPAC hides the Israel issue and then claims the “win” is a victory for Israel.

Buoyed by its success, AIPAC then took on Cori Bush, marching into her district determined to defeat a black woman who was one of the most unique voices in all of congress. Once a unhoused single mother of two, and a survivor of gun violence, domestic violence and sexual assault, Bush became a nurse and a pastor, and in the wake of the killing of the unarmed black man Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014, she became an activist on the frontlines of the movement to save black lives. After protesting in the streets for 400 days, she jumped into the political arena. In 2020 made a successful run for Congress, becoming the first black representative from Missouri.

In Bush’s two terms in Congress, she demonstrated leadership on many fronts, including reproductive justice and abortion rights. At a House of Representatives committee hearing in 2021, Bush was one of three congresswomen to share her abortion story publicly. And after the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, she introduced a host of bills, including the Reproductive Health Care Accessibility Act, the Protecting Access to Medication Abortion Act, the Reproductive Health Travel Fund Act, and the Protect Sexual and Reproductive Health Act.

She also championed housing rights. When the Covid-19 moratorium on evictions was about to expire, she grabbed her sleeping bag and lawn chair, and organized a “sleep in” on the steps of the U.S. Capitol that resulted in an extension of the moratorium on evictions.

Foreign policy was not her focus, but in the wake of the Hamas attack on October 9, 2023 and Israel’s subsequent bombing of civilians in Gaza, Bush felt compelled to speak out. Just nine days after the October 7 Hamas attack, she had the courage to introduce a ceasefire resolution in the House. She was one of only nine House members who opposed a resolution supporting Israel. She boycotted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress, calling him a “war criminal.”

As a result of defending Palestinians, she found herself in AIPAC’s crosshairs. “Cori Bush has been one of the most hostile critics of Israel since she came to Congress in 2021 and has actively worked to undermine mainstream Democratic support for the U.S.-Israel relationship, “ AIPAC claimed.

AIPAC’s super PAC spent nearly $9 million, much of it coming from Republican mega-donors, to buy ads smearing Bush and shoring up contender Wesley Bell, a St. Louis County Prosecutor. The attacks were vicious, including ads that darkened Bush’s skin and manipulated her racial features. They also distorted her domestic voting record, condemning her for not supporting Biden’s Infrastructure Bill instead of explaining that her vote was part of a strategy to gain leverage for key social programs in the Build Back Better Act.

Curiously, in the cases of both Bowman and Bush, the attack ads did not even mention Israel. But if Israel is AIPAC’s singular focus, why did the ads avoid the issue? That’s because most Americans, especially in those liberal Democrat districts, agree with their positions. Most Americans want a ceasefire and disapprove of Israel’s military actions in Gaza. As Jewish Voice for Peace executive director Stephanie Fox said during a call to rally support for the Congresswoman Bush, “She has been a life raft for our values and principles in Congress and she has been under attack because far right extremist groups like AIPAC are scared.”

Jim Zogby of the Arab American Institute agrees. “Pro-Israel groups are running scared,” he said. “They are losing the public debate over policy—especially among Democrats. Most Democrats are deeply opposed to Israeli policies in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian lands. Majorities want a ceasefire and an end to settlements. And they want to stop further arms shipments to Israel.” So AIPAC hides the Israel issue and then claims the “win” is a victory for Israel.

If we are going to stop U.S. support for Israel’s genocide, prevent the Middle East from erupting in flames and reclaim our elections here at home, we have to stop AIPAC.