Why Big Money Supports Trump 

Fascism backed by Big Money is one of the most dangerous of all political alliances.

We saw it in 1930s Germany, when industrial giants bailed out a cash-strapped Nazi party right before Hitler’s election, thinking that Hitler would protect their money and power.

We are seeing something similar now. Earlier this year, the GOP was running out of money. So Trump turned to his wealthy backers for help. Many super-rich donors who once criticized Trump for stoking the violence of January 6 have since had a change of heart, deciding their profits are worth more than our democracy.

Trump has promised them that if elected, he’ll extend his 2017 tax cuts that went mainly to the wealthy beyond 2025 when they’re scheduled to expire, and hinting at even more.

He promised oil executives he would scrap regulations favoring electric vehicles and wind energy if they would give his campaign one billion dollars.

The Trump White House is for sale, and the wealthy are buying. 50 billionaire families gave at least $600 million in political donations as of May, with over two thirds going to support GOP candidates and conservative causes.

Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, who also controls and manipulates one of the world’s largest communications platforms, has committed to spending millions of dollars to elect Trump.

In previous videos, I’ve highlighted alarming similarities between fascist regimes of the past and Trumpism. The alignment of American billionaires with Trump’s anti-democracy movement is one of the most dangerous parallels.

The billionaires want the rest of us to fight each other so we don’t look up and see where all the wealth and power have gone, so we don’t join together and raise taxes on the super-rich to finance childcare, better schools, our health care system, and everything else we need.

They fear democracy because there are far more of us than there are of them.

We need to see through their fear tactics and vote in overwhelming numbers this November.

We can learn from history and spot the danger. We are not doomed to repeat it.

The recent, tragic story of Denise Prudhomme, a 60-year-old Wells Fargo employee who was found dead at her cubicle four days after she came into her office, challenges the prevailing narrative about the supposed social and collaborative benefits of in-person work. Prudhomme's death went unnoticed in an environment that is often portrayed as fostering better communication and team cohesion. This disturbing reality casts serious doubt on the claims made by many corporate leaders that bringing workers back to the office is essential for their well-being and collaboration. The story reveals a stark contrast between the idealized vision of in-office work and its practical shortcomings.

Corporate leaders frequently argue that remote work results in isolation and a loss of team spirit, emphasizing that the physical presence of employees is necessary to maintain a connected and innovative workplace. Yet, Prudhomme's case suggests otherwise. Despite being in the office, her presence—or rather, her tragic absence—went unnoticed for days. This raises a profound question: How can an employee die at her desk and remain undiscovered for so long in a place supposedly designed to enhance collaboration and human connection? Several employees noticed a foul odor but attributed it to faulty plumbing rather than the grim reality. This oversight reveals a significant disconnect between what companies claim about in-person work and what actually happens on the ground.

The death of Denise Prudhomme is a stark reminder that the supposed benefits of in-person work are often overstated or misunderstood.

Recent research adds another layer to this discussion. The Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (SWAA), led by Nick Bloom and his colleagues, shows that employees spend only about 80 minutes on in-person activities during a typical office day. The rest of their time is spent on tasks like video conferencing, emailing, and using communication tools—tasks that are equally manageable from home. These findings highlight the inefficiencies of in-office work, where the supposed benefits of collaboration are minimal, and the majority of the workday could be performed just as effectively outside the office.

The push for in-office work is often framed as an attempt to combat isolation and enhance teamwork, but the truth seems to lie elsewhere. Instead of being about employee welfare, it may be more about outdated managerial control and resistance to change, as found in recent research led by Professor Mark Ma from the University of Pittsburgh, alongside his graduate student Yuye Ding. This compulsion not only creates a toxic work environment but also perpetuates a lack of genuine engagement among employees. The death of Prudhomme, unnoticed by her colleagues, serves as a grim reminder of the consequences of such a culture.

The Wells Fargo incident also underscores the limitations of traditional office environments. Many workplaces are structured in ways that can be isolating. This reality challenges the narrative that in-office work fosters better mental health and social engagement. If the physical presence of employees was genuinely the solution to isolation, how could such a tragedy occur without anyone noticing for so long? It becomes evident that the drive to return employees to the office is not necessarily about their well-being or improved collaboration but often about control, visibility, and maintaining the status quo.

To genuinely improve workplace dynamics and employee satisfaction, companies should reconsider how they structure in-person workdays. By focusing on meaningful in-person engagements and allowing remote work for tasks that do not require physical presence, companies can reduce unnecessary commuting, increase productivity, and significantly improve employee well-being.

The death of Denise Prudhomme is a stark reminder that the supposed benefits of in-person work are often overstated or misunderstood. The reality of her unnoticed death in a supposedly collaborative office setting reveals the emptiness of corporate claims about the need for physical presence to foster better teamwork and social connections.

For progressives to win, we need a powerful multiracial coalition. That includes the people of color who disproportionately suffer poverty and structural violence, but it also includes the white people who make up the largest share of poor people in this country.

As the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II points out in his new book, White Poverty, there are more poor white people than any other racial group, and more effort should be put into pulling them into this coalition.

I'm a white man from a wealthy family—and a lawyer who took on tough civil rights cases and fought them as if my life depended on it. My goal from the beginning was to join those who are trying to make America a better place—a country where racism and sexism would slowly fade away and where the possibility of equal opportunity would shine through.

I see that road forward in Rev. Barber's new book, co-written with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.

White Poverty's great value is to teach and motivate both Black and white leaders to create a multiracial movement which demands legislation that benefits all poor people.

Talking to white people in all walks of life—from taxi drivers to restaurant workers as well as bankers and stockbrokers—has been very revealing. When I say I'm a civil rights lawyer, their voices often take on a certain unsympathetic tone—and many times they inject the "Black crime rate" into the conversation. Sometimes the person will shift the conversation to discuss Black children being raised by single women who use food stamps to put food on the table or who benefit from other welfare programs.

As Barber points out, there are "more than twice as many poor white people as there are poor Black people in this nation." But if I mention that, the person sometimes appears not to hear me, or lets me know in no uncertain terms that it's Black people themselves who are at fault for their poverty—and they should look to their own lives rather than blame whites. The government taxes "us," I'm often told, to give "them" a free ride.

When I hear this, I know there's something major missing.

De-racializing Poverty

I've been encouraged by the many articles, books, and memoirs that have been written about racial justice since the protests over George Floyd's murder, but few suggest an effective way forward.

For example, a new book by Kellie Carter Jackson, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (Seal Press, 2024), highlights how Black women fought back against racism, some with weapons, some without, but none took the path that Reverend Barber takes in White Poverty. Reverend Barber, by contrast, argues that Blacks and whites must join together to address their common needs.

Another prominent civil rights advocate, Heather McGhee, traveled across America to write The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World, 2021), which documents how some progressives were beginning to engage in cross-racial solidarity through collective action to achieve higher wages and benefits for working people.

As Barber points out, the political establishment invariably markets itself to the needs of "the middle class" and ignores the poor, and whites especially look the other way.

In effect, Barber's White Poverty builds upon McGhee's book. It's the work of a man of action to not only test cross-racial solidarity, but to put that theory into action. Barber lays it on the line in his very first sentence: "This is a book by a Black man about white poverty in America." That initial signal points to where he is headed.

As a lifelong civil rights lawyer, I find that his signal resonates. As Barber persuasively argues, the public and the country's legislatures—federal, state, and local—accept the myth that poverty is only a Black issue, as do the people I talk to daily. They view poverty through this lens to the detriment of Black and white people alike, as well as people of all other colors and races.

As Barber points out, the political establishment invariably markets itself to the needs of "the middle class" and ignores the poor, and whites especially look the other way. The same is true even in our country's religious establishments. Barber notes that "a Pew Research Center study of nearly 50,000 sermons found that neither the words 'poverty' nor 'poor' register as commonly used in American pulpits."

A Multiracial Fusion Movement

Much of White Poverty concerns the history of how American racism came into being and how the myths evolved around it. Barber explains how the manipulation of these myths has preserved the power of white elites, who use their political and economic power to downgrade the needs of poor white people as well as Black people, while benefiting the wealthy.

To this reader then, White Poverty's great value is to teach and motivate both Black and white leaders to create a multiracial movement which demands legislation that benefits all poor people. As an additional benefit, White Poverty gives examples of Black and white movements fusing themselves together.

Not least, Barber has spent a huge amount of energy over the past seven years in building a multiracial Poor People's Campaign. Co-chaired by Rev. Barber along with Rev. Liz Theoharis of the Kairos Center, the Poor People's Campaign has thousands in the field to help poor white and poor Black communities understand each others' community needs and the advantages of working together to fight against "policy violence" and to turn out the vote.

This beautifully written book offers a road map to the powerful multiracial organizing that can turn this country around, lift up poor people, and deepen our democracy.

In the last election for governor in Kentucky, the campaign and its allies worked with both white and Black rural communities to get out the vote. The result was an upset in electing the state's present governor, Democrat Andy Beshear. In rural counties, an enlarged electorate turned out to vote and that tipped the election.

The Poor People's Campaign has built durable alliances with other organizations to advance its multiracial vision. It's currently collaborating with the AFL-CIO on voter engagement. It pursues legal challenges with Forward Justice. It coordinates actions with national Christian and Jewish organizations. With the Institute for Policy Studies, on whose board I serve, it has produced the data and the analysis to back up its bold agenda.

Barber is a man of the cloth who takes his religion seriously. As a result, the book is sprinkled with words from other religious figures who offer moral reasons for organizing poor people to struggle for their needs nonviolently but willing to cross police lines and stand up to authority.

In short, this beautifully written book offers a road map to the powerful multiracial organizing that can turn this country around, lift up poor people, and deepen our democracy.

The headlines emanating from Palestine-Israel, though ominous, should have been expected. The problem, of course, is that the Israeli government appears intent on making a desperately bad situation worse, and the administration of US President Joe Biden is acting as if doing what it’s been doing for the past three-and-a-half years is something other than pouring petrol on a raging fire.

The Israeli government continues to behave as if there are no consequences to its brutal behaviour. There is no let-up to its assault on Gaza as it routinely orders mass evacuations that force entire families to once again be uprooted. Bombings throughout Gaza have resulted in acute shortages of food, medicine and water. There are reports of children dying of malnutrition and now polio.

What the Israeli leadership cannot understand is that the anger and pain among the Palestinian people only create more resistance and new recruits for Hamas. For the past several months, the Israeli army has been confronting Hamas and other fighters in areas of Gaza’s northern and central regions that it claimed had been “cleared”. But as the US learnt in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, as long as the alien invader remains, no area is ever “cleared.”

Meanwhile, West Bank appears ready to explode. For several years now, the Israeli army and border police have been conducting deadly raids into Palestinian communities. Since the war in Gaza began, these have accelerated and become more lethal, accompanied by arial bombings.

To change this dynamic, the US must reverse course – and do so dramatically.

This isn’t all. Palestinians have long been plagued by extremist settler violence – burning, looting and even using deadly force. These rampages have been tolerated and often encouraged by Israeli military forces. This phenomenon has also grown in frequency and deadly intent.

To make matters worse, members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition have engaged in provocations, in word and deed, that have egged on the extremist settlers, generating greater anger or fear among the captive Palestinian people. Illegal outposts have been legitimized, provided military protection, government services and weapons, and, for all intents and purposes, annexed to Israel proper. One minister has led extremists to invade Haram Al Sharif, declaring his intention to build a synagogue on the grounds of Al Aqsa Mosque. Another member of the governing coalition has said that the goal of the government should be to remove the bulk of the Palestinians from the West Bank, to make it more governable.

All of these combined appear to have been a boon to Hamas’s recruiting, with the group reportedly picking up new members not only in the occupied lands, but also among the Palestinian refugee population in Lebanon.

While this dance of death plays out, the Biden team acts clueless. It is exhausting itself trying to negotiate a ceasefire, which it must know by now that the Netanyahu government has no interest in accepting. No matter how the US tinkers with the terms to make them acceptable to the Israeli side (thereby making them unacceptable not only to Hamas, but to Egypt as well), Mr Netanyahu, afraid of losing his government, continues to either say “No” or commit some new outrage as a delaying tactic.

US redlines continue to be crossed and US law continues to be violated, but the Biden administration’s response is to send weapons and threaten those in the international community who call for accountability. The net effect is that Israel’s sense of impunity is reinforced. Palestinian anger, coupled with Hamas’s standing among an embittered population, continues to grow. And the US stands increasingly condemned in the eyes of the world as an enabler of Israeli actions.

What supposedly began as a retaliation against the October 7 attacks has now evolved into a full-fledged assault that is spawning more resistance with no end in sight. No one on any side should assume that any sort of victory can be won. Both Israeli and Palestinian societies have become more polarized. The well of bitterness that has been dug will take more than a generation to fill.

The forces that should be held accountable for the war are Hamas, for its horrific October attacks, and Israel, for its abominable response. But fault also lies squarely on the back of the US. For too long and for too many administrations, Washington has enabled Israel’s illegal actions. As a result, it has emboldened Israel’s extremists and killed off Israel’s peace forces. At the same time, it has rendered Palestinian moderates irrelevant, while empowering Palestinian extremists who are increasingly seen as the only way forward. And all this time, Israelis get rewarded, while Palestinians are punished. Palestinians are asked to make the hard choices, while little is asked of the Israelis – and when Israel refuses, there are no consequences.

To change this dynamic, the US must reverse course – and do so dramatically. A long-overdue cut-off of US arms to Israel and recognition of the Palestinian right to self-determination would provide exactly the shock to the system that is needed. It would force an internal debate in Israel, empowering those who want peace. It might also serve to send a message to the Palestinian people that their plight and rights are understood.

These actions, especially if followed up with determination and concrete steps, won’t end the conflict tomorrow, but they would surely put the region on a more productive path towards peace than the one it is on now.

Some will say that it is unlikely that Mr Biden could ever take such a step. But if he can muster the same resolve it took to step aside for Vice President Kamala Harris to run in November’s presidential election, he can find the courage to do this as well. It won’t undo the damage that has been done, but it would pave the way for his successor to move more easily towards a Palestinian-Israeli peace.

Yes, long ago, I dreamt of being a novelist. Two ancient manuscripts packed away in a distant corner of my closet attest to that (ir)reality, as does one novel focused on the world of publishing (in which I’d been an editor) that made it into print, even if it was barely noticed. Still, from time to time, I’ve thought about trying to write fiction again.

These days, however, when I consider that possibility, I find myself smiling, however grimly. After all, how could you truly write fiction in a world—and I’m not just thinking of former U.S. President Donald Trump (though I most distinctly am thinking of him)—that seems ever more fictionalized? How could you write fiction in a country whose former president and presidential candidate used the word “I” 317 times in a single speech or, in another, spun a tale of near death in an almost-helicopter crash in which nothing he mentioned actually happened? He even—all too conveniently—put the wrong “Brown” (Kamala Harris’ pal Willie Brown instead of California governor Jerry Brown) in the copter that didn’t come close to going down with him on board. Oh, wait, maybe there actually was a helicopter with him and another cast of characters entirely that did at least come closer to going down! And just in case you hadn’t noticed, he’s already claiming, in a strikingly repetitive fashion, that President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential campaign and Kamala Harris’s nomination together represent nothing short of a “coup” in the Democratic Party: “This was an overthrow of a president. This was an overthrow… They deposed a president. It was a coup of a president. This was a coup.”

Perhaps what we need for 2024 and beyond, on a planet going down big time (even if in slow motion), is an altogether new word—something like “catastropian”?—that would be H.G. Wells or George Orwell multiplied by 10 (or maybe I mean 100).

And if that doesn’t tell you something about the state of the country whose leaders, when the Soviet Union disappeared in 1992, hailed the U.S. as the world’s “lone superpower” and acted accordingly, what does? Honestly (speaking of fiction), if I were now able to time-travel back to that moment and tell those leaders that, less than a quarter-century later, this country would elect a president whose only public accomplishment before entering the Oval Office was to host and be the leading character (and I do mean character!) on a TV show called The Apprentice, who would have believed me? If I could now tell them that, having been in the Oval Office once, and making so many of the rest of us his apprentices for four years, he couldn’t stop trying to return, neither they, nor anyone else then alive (including, I suspect, Donald Trump), would have thought it possible. In fact, such a description of American politics would have been off the charts, even for, say, dystopian fiction.

A Distinctly -Topian World

And speaking of -topias, my more-or-less namesake (since my first name is Thomas and my middle name Moore), Sir Thomas More, produced the first Utopia, inventing that very word as the title for his 1516 novel about a fictional island in the then-barely-known or even imagined New World. And almost half a millennium later, while an editor at Pantheon Books I would put out—or more accurately, stumble upon and reintroduce to our strange world—Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 utopian masterpiece Herland. Still, if either More or Gilman were alive today, I doubt they would be writing utopian anythings. Even the word “dystopian” might no longer seem strong enough for this grim world of ours. Perhaps what we need for 2024 and beyond, on a planet going down big time (even if in slow motion), is an altogether new word—something like “catastropian”?—that would be H.G. Wells or George Orwell multiplied by 10 (or maybe I mean 100) and not faintly in the same universe with More or Gilman.

Our world is now, in fact, mega-dystopian in so many ways it’s almost hard to fathom and I’m not just thinking of the nearly 50,000 people believed to have died in Europe alone last year from the megafires, droughts, and devastating heatwaves of climate change. Nor am I thinking of the more than 40,000 Palestinians (and still counting) slaughtered in Gaza over the last 10 (yes, 10!) months in a war that never seems to end on—again, if this were fiction you wouldn’t believe it—a strip of land only 25 miles long and 4 to 7 miles wide. And worse yet, it’s painfully clear that, instead of facing our catastrophian future of ever more disastrous planetary overheating, humanity continues to find itself distracted in a distinctly metatopian fashion by all too many other nightmares that show not the slightest sign of ending. (And if, in this paragraph, I made up a word or two to fit this new world of ours, I hope you’ll forgive me.)

The last 10 Julys have been the 10 hottest ever and climate change was barely mentioned at the Democratic convention, while the Trumpublicans continued to attack Harris and other Democrats for their “war on American energy.”

Admittedly, the one thing we’re missing to fully transform an already thoroughly dystopian planet (other than the arrival of devastatingly hostile extraterrestrials in UFOs) is an actual world war. Still, three major conflicts continue to roll (rattle or roil?) on this planet of ours, one in Ukraine (and now Russia, too), one in Gaza (that’s increasingly threatening to spread across the Middle East), and one in Sudan, all of them murderous and none of them showing the slightest sign of going away—more or less ever. Each of them accounts for staggering numbers of humans being slaughtered or disappearing in who knows what horrific ways, even as such wars pour yet more devastating greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, helping ensure that this planet continues to become too hot to handle. (And mind you, the U.S. military alone emits more hydrocarbons than whole countries like Portugal or Denmark!)

I mean, tell me all of that doesn’t add up to a truly big-time, if slow-rolling, version of dystopia or possibly worse. In fact, if, once upon a time, you had been able to put all of this into a dystopian novel, I guarantee you that no one would have found it faintly credible (even as an imagined future). Consider, for instance, a significant power in the Middle East (backed financially and militarily, weapon by endless weapon, by the once mightiest nation on Planet Earth) fighting an unending war with almost any imaginable kind of weaponry short of an atomic bomb against a modest-sized guerrilla force on a tiny strip of land holding a population of about 2.1 million people, essentially destroying more or less everything in sight and still not winning. (Put that in a novel and you’d be laughed out of the dystopian living room!)

And that’s just to start describing the grim fantasy world of present-day reality where, more than 500 years later, even the faintest sense of utopia is all too literally missing in action.

Hey, and while you’re at it, imagine Russia’s leader on a planet where the Cold War is ancient history, deciding to invade Ukraine and fight a never-ending, wildly destructive conflict there, year after endless year, while my country (as if it were indeed still in a Cold War world) backed the Ukrainians to the tune of something like $117 billion (yes, billion!), much of it in the form of advanced weaponry, while no one seems even faintly interested in launching negotiations for peace of any sort. (Whew! That was a long sentence!)

A Mad, Mad Planet

In the context of all this, consider Donald Trump’s latest run for the presidency a sign sent from… well, I won’t even try to guess where… that this country, which its leaders not so long ago considered the only power of significance (and then at least the greatest power) on Planet Earth, is going down, down, down all too fast, fast, fast. Now, don’t misconstrue me on this. The U.S. still “invests” more in its military than the next nine countries combined and well over a trillion dollars annually in what it calls “national defense.” And given that, isn’t it strange how few Americans consider it, yes, strange that this country hasn’t won a war of significance since World War II? And that may, in fact, be one reason it’s visibly heading for hell in a handbasket, even if Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz do pull out this election.

Of course, if they do, given Donald Trump and the increasingly mega-dystopian nature of the United States, don’t be surprised to see it begin, in its own fashion, to come apart at the [you fill this one in] ___-topian seams. After all, an estimated one of every 20 Americans now owns at least a single AR-15 rifle (which is about as close as you can get to a machine gun without actually having one) and, no surprise here, mass shootings in this country in recent years averaged more than 600 annually.

Ours is now a world that indeed does increasingly threaten to leave fiction in the dust and give dystopian a whole new meaning.

Now, assuming Donald Trump doesn’t, in fact, win election 2024, just for a moment try to imagine this country next November. It’s a given, of course, that, should he lose, Trump and his crew will denounce that loss as fraudulent and dispute it big time. (He’s already saying the 2024 election will be “rigged” against him.) With that in mind, imagine the “lone superpower” of Planet Earth a mere three decades ago as it now begins to come apart at the seams. And mind you, were he to win the election, assume that he would be almost guaranteed to use the Insurrection Act to dispatch the American military to the streets of Washington, D.C., and other “Democratic” cities to suppress anyone demonstrating against his victory and the Trumptopia to come.

Were Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to win and not be instantly challenged by a country coming apart at the seams, their administration would undoubtedly continue supporting the wars in Gaza and Ukraine (and largely ignoring the one in Sudan). In her convention acceptance speech, in fact, Harris plugged the sort of militarized foreign policy that’s been ours forever and a day. (“I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.”) Still, she and Walz wouldn’t be set on quite literally heating the planet to the boiling point in the fashion of Donald Trump and his Big Oil buddies. (Though mind you, even without Trump, my country has set absolute global records in recent years for producing oil and exporting natural gas.)

And I haven’t even mentioned that only recently California, ablaze, had its hottest month in recorded history or that the good news on Planet Earth was that, unlike the previous 13 months, July may not—no, not!—have set a new monthly global record for heat, but merely come in a remarkably close second to the worst July (of 2023) in human history. Mind you, the last 10 Julys have been the 10 hottest ever and climate change was barely mentioned at the Democratic convention, while the Trumpublicans continued to attack Harris and other Democrats for their “war on American energy.”

How You-Topian Can We Get?

Fiction? You must be kidding. Don’t even think about creating imaginary worlds on a planet where reality is becoming the biggest fiction of all and our mega-, catastrophic-, dys-, miss-, piss-topian moment could leave anything the human mind might conjure up all too literally in the dust of history.

So, yes, put that novel you’re writing in a drawer. Ours is now a world that indeed does increasingly threaten to leave fiction in the dust and give dystopian a whole new meaning. In short, you and I are living in a reality that looks ever more sadly fictional.

And it’s up to each of us to—think of this, five centuries later, as Thomas More updated, perhaps even as you-topian—do what we can to bring this planet of ours under some kind of control for, if not us, then our poor children and grandchildren.

The recovery of six further dead hostages has set off a tidal wave of fury in Israel.

Demonstrations, not seen since the protests over judicial reform, are shaking the country.

Israelis are calling it an uprising.

Tens of thousands of Israelis have walked out of their jobs in a general strike. Both the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, and the security establishment are in open conflict with their prime minister.

Opposition leaders Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid called for people to go onto the streets. And they have. The main highways around Tel Aviv are blocked.

However the hostages died—Hamas initially indicated they were killed by Israeli gunfire, the Israeli army says they were executed at close range just before an attempt was made to free them—the blame for their deaths has settled firmly on Benjamin Netanyahu and the ultra-right-wing clique that props up his government.

Four of the six hostages were on Hamas’ "humanitarian" list of captives and would have been released in the first stage of a hostage deal had Netanyahu not refused to withdraw from the Philadelphi corridor separating Egypt from Gaza.

This is not speculation.

Undermining a possible deal

Israeli security chiefs who repeatedly warned Netanyahu about what would happen to the remaining hostages if he continued to scupper a deal are saying so themselves.

Three days ago, a regular cabinet security briefing turned into a shouting match between Gallant and Netanyahu, Axios reported.

The hostages' deaths could be the tipping point that forces Netanyahu to U-turn in negotiations which remain deadlocked

Gallant reportedly told the meeting: "We have to choose between Philadelphi and the hostages. We can't have both. If we vote, we might find out that either the hostages will die or we will have to backtrack to release them."

Gallant, Israeli army Chief of Staff General Herzi Halevi and Mossad Director David Barnea, the head of the Israeli negotiating team, all confronted Netanyahu and his proposal to vote on a resolution to maintain full Israeli control along the border with Egypt that they said would undermine a possible deal with Hamas.

"We warned Netanyahu and the cabinet ministers about this exact scenario but they wouldn't listen," a senior Israeli official told Axios. The vote went ahead with the majority in favour.

However the hostages met their deaths, what the families of the hostages clearly understood is that this group of hostages were alive shortly before the army’s attempt to rescue them.

"A deal for the return of the hostages has been on the table for over two months. If it weren't for his [Netanyahu’s] thwarting, the excuses and the spins, the hostages whose deaths we learned of this morning would probably be alive," the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said in a statement.

The deaths of the hostages have also reverberated across the US, in the same way that the Hamas attack on 7 October did.

Not least because the parents of one of the dead, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a US citizen, spoke on stage at the Democratic National Convention as thousands in the audience chanted "Bring them back".

In response, the outgoing US President Joe Biden vowed to "make Hamas pay" for these deaths and the party’s presidential nominee Kamala Harris said that Hamas must be eliminated.

Both know that the responsibility for the hostages' deaths lies with them too.

The Brutal truth

Biden clearly and unequivocally called for a permanent ceasefire four months ago. The UN passed a resolution for a comprehensive three-stage ceasefire in June.

It is Biden’s first duty as commander in chief to make sure a key security ally in the Middle East abides by US policy, especially an ally as dependent on the supply of US arms as Israel is.

The brutal truth of these killings is that if Biden had been prepared to enforce his own policy with an arms embargo, a ceasefire would now be in place and many of the remaining hostages, Americans and Britons among them, would be freed.

If anyone should be looking at himself in the mirror at Goldberg-Polin’s death, it should be Biden.

For Harris to meekly follow in these footsteps is folly. She should remember what her own generals have said about the impossibility of defeating Hamas in Gaza.

It could nevertheless be that these deaths are the tipping point that forces Netanyahu to U-turn in negotiations, which still remain deadlocked.

The US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told the families of the US hostages held in Gaza that the US will present Israel and Hamas with a take-it-or-leave-it final offer on a ceasefire deal.

This has been said many times before, and one reason why US officials have lost all credibility with independent negotiators Egypt and Qatar.

However, if what results is a phased Israeli withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor, and Netanyahu buckles under the domestic and international pressure, he knows full well he will be tipped into another crisis.

End of Ashkenazi control

It's not just the likelihood that Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, and Itamar Ben Gvir, the national security minister, the two of the most extreme in his government, will walk out as they have repeatedly threatened to do.

Netanyahu knows that Israel is split down the middle. He has more than half of the country demanding he "finish the job" that David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, failed to complete.

This uprising, like the demonstrations against the judicial reforms last year, is one of the last throws of the dice for the liberal Ashkenazi elite

This uprising, like the demonstrations against the judicial reforms last year, is one of the last throws of the dice for the liberal Ashkenazi elite.

They sense they are losing control of the country they built. They have already lost control of the army and the police force to the settlers. Not much is left in their exclusive hands and there has been an exodus of Israelis and money to Europe over the last year to prove it.

Netanyahu is not solely acting out of personal political survival. He, too, senses Israel is on the cusp of a right-wing revolution. That is why every political instinct tells him the stakes are so high. If it happens, it will be totally at odds with a Democrat US presidency.

Unravelling in real time

Biden should also be looking himself in the mirror at what is happening in the Occupied West Bank.

Unable, for a variety of reasons not least military preparedness, to open a second front against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Netanyahu has turned his attention on the three towns in the north of the West Bank in a full-scale military operation called "Operation Summer Camps" designed to force a population transfer.

As night follows day, attacks have begun on Israeli troops all over the West Bank and particularly in the southern Hebron area.

Biden and Harris should take note of who shot three Israeli policemen dead in response to the army operation in the north.

The shooter was a member of Fatah and a former Palestinian presidential security guard. Furthermore, Muhannad al-Asood, a resident of Idhna in Hebron, who was born in Jordan and was a citizen of the country, returned to his native West Bank in 1998 with his family after obtaining family reunification.

Asood’s personal history carries a clear warning for the consequences of how Palestinians in the West Bank will react to the opening of a second front of this war in the occupied territories, using much the same weapons and techniques in Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas as they did in Gaza.

Asood was not a member of Hamas or Islamic Jihad or part of any known local resistance group. He made an individual decision that resistance was the only answer to Israel’s military offensive.

There are hundreds of thousands of armed, unaffiliated Palestinians like him in the West Bank and Jordan who are coming to the same conclusion.

Furthermore, tensions between Jordan and Israel are mounting exponentially.

The launch of the offensive was accompanied by a war of words between Israel's foreign minister, Israel Katz, and his Jordanian counterpart, Ayman Safadi.

Katz not only told Jenin’s residents to leave in a "temporary" evacuation. He repeatedly accused Jordan of the build-up of arms in the camps, claiming it was unable to control its own territory.

"Iran is building Islamic terror infrastructure in Judea and Samaria, flooding refugee camps with funds and weapons smuggled through Jordan, aiming to establish an eastern terror front against Israel. This process also threatens the stability of the Jordanian regime. The world must wake up and stop the Iranian octopus before it's too late," Katz tweeted on X.

All lies, his Jordanian counterpart retorted.

Safadi wrote: "We reject the claims of the extremist racist ministers who fabricate threats to justify the killing of Palestinians and the destruction of their capabilities. The Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, the Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people, and the Israeli escalation in the region constitute the greatest threat to security and peace.

"We will oppose with all our capabilities any attempt to displace the Palestinian people inside or outside the occupied territories."

A larger conflagration

Now in its fifth day, the stage is set once more for an operation in the occupied West Bank which could last as long as Gaza and which the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is powerless to stop.

Palestinian teenagers are fighting back. Wael Mishah and Tariq Daoud were born after Oslo. They did not see the First or Second Intifadas.

Even with the obvious reluctance of Hezbollah and Iran to get involved, all the ingredients are there for a much larger conflagration

Both had been released during a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas in November. On his release Mishah talked of the plight of children being beaten and abused in Israeli prisons.

Mishah’s short journey was preordained. "He went from being a prisoner to being wanted, to confronting [the occupation], then a martyr," his mother said.

He was killed by a drone at dawn on 15 August as he fought an Israeli raid on Nablus. There are thousands more like him who are being driven to battle.

Another fighter killed by Israel was the commander of the Tulkarm Battalion, Mohamed Jaber, known as Abu Shuja’a. He was described by Israel as its most wanted militant but he was only 26 years old, and born four years after Oslo. Abu Shuja’a was a refugee in Nur Shams Camp who came originally from Haifa. Killing him will inspire many more to join as he himself was inspired by others.

Even with the obvious reluctance of Hezbollah and Iran to get involved, all the ingredients are there for a much larger conflagration.

An Israel in the grip of an ultra nationalist , religious, settler insurgency; a US president who allows his signature policy to be flouted by his chief ally, even at the risk of losing a crucial election ; resistance that will not surrender; Palestinians in Gaza who will not flee; Palestinians in the West Bank who are now stepping up to the front line; Jordan, the second country to recognise Israel, feeling under existential threat.

For Biden or Harris, the message is so clear, it is flashing in neon lights: the regional costs of not standing up to Netanyahu could rapidly outweigh the domestic benefits of being dragged along by him.

Since the presidential campaign shake-up in July, the national conversation about manhood has been abuzz with talk of a “new” masculinity, embodied by good, decent men like Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff. What’s actually new, though, is what’s now coming into focus: the consequences of 50 years of men's hard work to redefine manhood.

Masculinity has too often been narrowly characterized as poisonous misogyny, and many men seen as patriarchal MAGA heads. The rest of us, apparently, just stand by mute, unwilling to challenge the bigots and bullies. That’s a lie. All men— including even “white dudes”—have been taking back the narrative.

While it’s refreshing to hear the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee, Gov. Walz, and second gentlemen, Mr. Emhoff, cited as models of this “new” masculinity, it’s far from new. Men have been successfully crafting strategies to break out of the man box since the mid-1970s.

"It’s time for men to take a leap of faith and trust that our lives will be enriched in ways we can’t imagine if we loosen our grip and share the reins or, Goddess forbid, hand them over to women..."

Nearly everyone is aware of the bad news about “toxic” masculinity—from men like Andrew Tate to groups like the Proud Boys. Few, though, know the good news: men’s efforts to redefine manhood.

Time for a little history.

For 50 years, a growing number of men of all races and ethnicities in North America and around the world have followed women in working to prevent domestic and sexual violence and protect reproductive rights, while also working to redefine and transform traditional ideas about manhood, fatherhood, and brotherhood.

The antisexist men’s movement incorporates a range of men and men’s experiences: from boys on the journey to manhood and fathering/mentoring to male survivors and men of color; from GBTQI+ men to men overcoming violence; from men’s health to men’s experience with feminism. Woven together, over the decades we’ve created a multilayered tapestry of one of the most important social change movements you may never have heard of.

There are men—and women—around the world, working day in and day out for gender equality. Globally, the campaign is united under the banner of the MenEngage Alliance, a network of more than 1,000 members in 88 countries. In North America, organizations like Equimundo, Next Gen Men, Fathering Together, A Call to Men, and Men4Choice, have for years been transforming our idealistic aspirations into concrete action.

There certainly are men who feel marginalized, deeply resentful of women’s gains. Andrew Yarrow’s Man Out: Men on the Sidelines of American Life empathizes with them; men who are distressed about their place in contemporary society. They’re highly susceptible to being seduced by traditional manhood, characterized by Trump and Vance’s unhinged bluster.

By contrast, Doug Emhoff and Tim Walz represent men able to integrate being both steady and strong and tender and vulnerable. As a high school teacher, Mr. Walz, for example, was able to simultaneously coach football and advise a gay straight alliance.

Today, more men understand that we can’t ignore the power we hold in society. Not a power we earned, but one we received at birth simply by arriving on the planet in male-identified bodies. Relinquishing our grip on the twin symbols of that power—privilege and entitlement—is not easy. Men fear both losing control and having less; fear the unknown wondering, “What will my life look like if I am not in charge?” It’s time for men to take a leap of faith and trust that our lives will be enriched in ways we can’t imagine if we loosen our grip and share the reins or, Goddess forbid, hand them over to women, perhaps beginning in November with Kamala Harris.

Men are rejecting a fixed definition of masculinity, replacing it with an emotionally rich expression of masculinities. We are navigating our lives with both our eyes and our hearts open, beginning to see the contours of a manhood that celebrates rather than dreads men’s tears and uncertainties. Men are now able to negotiate the gender landscape on surer footing, better able to bear witness to women’s lives, understand women’s realities—and our own.

Masculinity based on domination and emotional rigidity has failed men. Men have been working for five decades to replace those traits with compassion and vulnerability. That’s the masculinity inspiring men not just to move forward, but to unambiguously declare, “We’re not going back.”

As we celebrate Labor Day, 2024, there is some very good news.

Public approval of labor unions, at 70%, is higher today than it has been in decades. Over the last year major unions like the UAW have won some highly publicized strikes, while many other unions have negotiated trail-blazing contracts for their members. Young people at Starbucks and on college campuses are now more involved in labor organizing than ever before. And, for the first time in American history, a president of the United States, Joe Biden, walked a picket line with striking workers.

It is not an accident as to why we are now seeing more militancy and growth in the labor movement. The working people of our country are increasingly aware of the unprecedented level of corporate greed and power we are now experiencing, and the outrageous level of income and wealth inequality that exists. They understand that never before in American history have so few had so much, while so many continue to struggle. And they are fighting back. They know that workers in unions can negotiate contracts that give them better wages, working conditions and benefits than non-union workers. They appreciate that when you’re in a union you have some power against the arbitrary decisions corporate bosses.

On this Labor Day, let us redouble our efforts to grow trade unionism in America and create the kind of grassroots movement we need to take on the power of the Oligarchy.

Working people today are more than aware that, over the last 50 years, there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. They are disgusted that, despite huge increases in worker productivity, real inflation-accounted for wages for the average American worker are lower now than they were over 50 years ago as 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. They are insulted that CEOs of major corporations make almost 350 times as much as their average employee. They are concerned that the American dream is ending and that their kids may have an even lower standard of living than they do. And they worry that with the rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence and robotics, they have no power as to what will happen to their jobs as the economy undergoes major transformations.

The average American worker also understands that his/her political power has been significantly diminished as billionaires pour huge amounts of money into both political parties as they undermine our democracy. It is no great secret as to who now has the clout in Congress. It is the billionaires, the corporate CEOs, the campaign donors and their well-connected lobbyists.

Bottom line: The average American worker is sick and tired of status quo economics and politics. He/she knows that in the richest country on earth we can and should have an economy and political system that works for all, and not just the wealthy few, and that a strong union movement is the vehicle for bringing about the changes that we need.

On this Labor Day, as we reaffirm our support for the trade union movement and for labor solidarity throughout the world, as we continue to fight the day to day struggles against corporate greed, it’s important that we not lose sight of our vision for the future and what kind of country we want to become. Here, in my view, are just a few components of the agenda we need to fight for.

We must establish a vibrant democratic political system. One person, one vote. We must end the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision and the billionaire funding of campaigns through super-PACs. We need to move to the public funding of elections and give political power back to ordinary Americans.

We need to pass the PRO Act and end the ability of companies to illegally intimidate and fire workers who want to join a union. Corporate interests spend an estimated $400 million a year on anti-union consultants who do everything possible, legal and illegal, to fight the right of workers to join unions.

We need to end starvation wages in America and raise the $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage to a living wage. People should not have to work two or three jobs just to pay the bills for their families.

We need trade policies that benefit workers in the U.S. and abroad, not just the CEOs and stockholders of major conglomerates. We need to rebuild our manufacturing sector and create good paying jobs here.

We need to join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee health care to all people as a human right through a Medicare for All, single payer system. No one should go bankrupt because of a hospital stay. Everyone in America, regardless of income, should have the right to see a doctor.

We must finally guarantee paid family and medical leave to every worker in America. New moms and dads should be able to spend the first few months after delivery with their newborn child. Family members should be able to care for a loved-one who is sick without having to worry about missing a paycheck.

Like health care, education and job training must be considered a human right from childcare to graduate school. At a time when, in a highly competitive global economy, we need the best-educated workforce in the world, no one should be forced to go deeply in debt to get the education and training they need to be productive members of our society.

At a time when 50% of older workers have nothing in the bank for retirement, and 25% of seniors are trying to live on $15,000 a year or less, we must re-establish Defined Benefit Pension plans and increase Social Security benefits. Workers are entitled to a secure and dignified retirement.

And finally, we must address the unprecedented and outrageous level of income and wealth inequality that currently exists. No. It is not acceptable that three multibillionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society. It is not acceptable that many billionaires pay an effective tax rate that is lower than truck drivers or nurses. We need a progressive tax system that demands that the wealthiest people in our country finally start paying their fair share of taxes.

Let’s be clear. None of these progressive concepts are “radical.” While they are opposed by the Big Money interests and marginalized by the corporate media and the political establishment, they are strongly supported by a majority of the American people. Most of these ideas, in one form or another, are already in place in other wealthy countries around the world.

So, on this Labor Day, let us redouble our efforts to grow trade unionism in America and create the kind of grassroots movement we need to take on the power of the Oligarchy. Let us, in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, create an economy that provides a decent standard of living for all, and not just massive and obscene income and wealth inequality.

In about two months the season of national absurdity will conclude with the last episode of "End of Times Election Blues." It is rumored that a 15 second commercial spot on the show will cost more than the GDP of the poorest twenty five nations on earth. Don't trouble yourself to fact-check this—hyperbole often leads to higher truths.

The election itself will be anticlimactic—fascism has preceded its formal institution by (you choose the answer) months, years or decades. Nonetheless, people will be sweating, shaking and dying in front of their election night TVs and ambulances will be hauling away the dead. The voters have been stripped of their agency—reduced to passive spectators whose public lives effectively end at the moment they cast their ballots. Imagine fireflies or spawning salmon who die almost immediately following the conclusion of the mating/egg laying cycle. Once you check your ballot you've blown your wad—you no longer exist. In a voter's afterlife agency gives way to naked anxiety.

One might argue that people don't have to spawn and die like a row of delicatessen fish—they could rise up and throw off their proverbial chains. But that suggestion trivializes the entire narrative. We collectively leap into the abyss of fascism because our powers of comprehension have been viciously eroded—not a being among us has failed to watch a million hours of brain strangling advertisements. When the last tentacles of Alzheimer's have quietly extinguished the light switch of my memories, I will still be singing, "Winston Tastes Good Like a Cigarette Should."

We—the disassembled, the lobotomized, the blinded—have a mandate to collective rage that no other generations ever owned. We are some of the last living beings on a long and noble planet that has been blooming and renewing for a half a billion years. The question is this: how badly can we be wounded and still have the capacity to rebel? And what does rebellion mean? I believe that the cornerstone of resistance proceeds from a single question—how fucked are we if no force intercedes to prevent the current political momentum of the U.S. from continuing. Newton said it best—a body in motion remains in motion until acted upon by another force. The election cycle, I believe, should be seen as a mass blessing for Newtonian principles—we vote to ratify our place in the corporate orbit, our approval of capitalist momentum.

The question is this: how badly can we be wounded and still have the capacity to rebel?

U.S. political parties fear losing your vote—they confidently understand that you no longer figure in their plans once officials take office. They are brazenly sure that you have no power, no determination, and no capacity to organize. There will always be a zealous minority that take to the streets to oppose war and ecocide (which operate in tandem), but these forces of unified resistance have not recreated the historical levels of defiance that we experienced in the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements in the '60s and early '70s.

War and climate overheating belong to an entirely different order of moral commitment than that of the Vietnam/Civil Rights era. Bystanders in the '60s watched their fellow citizens mutilated, beaten, lynched, attacked by dogs—they endured having their own children shipped back in body bags, or staggering home with broken or missing limbs. Corporate and government malice had a visceral immediacy that we do not directly experience today.

War has morphed into a more remote and sustainable accoutrement to empire in its current iteration—proxy wars and bombing civilian populations inflict massive suffering with relatively little carnage endured by U.S. forces. The Afghan War claimed less than 3,000 American lives compared to the almost 60,000 U.S. fatalities in Vietnam. War, that once pitted half of Europe against the other half, now has been largely confined to the global south.

If far away wars no longer galvanize popular U.S. resistance, climate overheating encompasses concepts and issues that fail to move the popular imagination. While the public grasp of climate issues reflects the confusion engendered by ruling class design, the needed mitigation staggers the imagination. It is one thing to give Black citizens voting rights and to integrate a small number of schools, and yet another to completely revamp our political and economic systems. Climate has inflicted a gaping wound that threatens to bleed out in a manner of finality unprecedented in human history. There are no band aids for climate in the way that one can apply adhesive to placate those troubled by social injustice.

The plot for the final act in the history of the biosphere seems pretty obvious—either people engage in unprecedented acts of civil disobedience, or we all die.

The U.S. has never taken real steps to repair the damage from slavery and Jim Crow—the fact that median family wealth is 10 times higher for white families compared to Black families proves that social justice in America involves little more than performative slight-of-hand. We have substituted tokenism and identity politics for racial equality. Theatrical gestures may fool many members of the public, but Mother Nature doesn't give a rat's ass how many solar panels decorate your neighborhood roofs. If oil, coal, and gas go up in smoke to manufacture meaningless widgets and toys, we will die in the flames of our own capitalist fever dreams.

We have a critical election in which we will choose whether to elect a fully fascist administration to drive us into the downtown district of hell on the expressway, or we can elect a regime to buoy us up with slogans while chauffeuring us pleasantly to the exact same hell.

The choice is not who to vote for, but what do you (we) do after the votes are counted and we reelect capitalism with the 99 percent approval rating that a North Korean strongman expects. If Trump is elected we risk being shot protesting or shipped to one of the concentration camps he has vowed to build. If Harris is elected we are likely to be seduced by the mass psychotic delusion that will have us believing that the environment is in good hands while your tax dollars go steadfastly to building the "most lethal" fighting force in human history.

The plot for the final act in the history of the biosphere seems pretty obvious—either people engage in unprecedented acts of civil disobedience, or we all die. We now have an important electoral choice—we either elect a regime that will intimidate those committed to civil disobedience with threats and violence, or we elect a regime that will disarm public ire with bullshit and reassurances. The choice is a non-choice. The real choice comes after the election.

In front of the Federal Trade Commission building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., where I used to work, stands a giant sculpture of a runaway horse being reined in. It’s called “Man Controlling Trade.” The allegorical sculpture by Michael Lantz is one of a pair installed in 1942, part of a New Deal-era program administered by the Section of Painting and Sculpture of the Treasury Department to commission works of art for federal buildings.

The idea that government should rein in the wild forces of capitalism was by 1942 well established. America had gone through a catastrophic Great Depression that revealed the need for stronger regulation of business and finance. The nation had also begun to mobilize the economy to fight World War II.

America then understood that stable prices and good wages depended on government taming corporate greed for the common good. This wasn’t socialism or communism. It was democratic, progressive capitalism. It was a means of saving both capitalism and democracy.

“Man Controlling Trade” by Michael Lantz

Last week, in a court in Oregon, the Federal Trade Commission began to rein in two giant runaway grocery chains — Kroger and Albertsons — that want to merge into the biggest grocery combination in history and gallop away with your money and many workers’ wages.

It’s the first time anti-monopoly law has been used both to tame consumer prices and help workers gain better wages. The case illustrates how the Biden-Harris administration is seeking to restructure the economy for the common good — and what the Harris-Walz administration will, hopefully, have the opportunity to do even more of.

Three arguments undergird the FTC’s case:

(1) Grocery prices are already through the roof, in part because there’s not sufficient competition in most local grocery markets to force chains to lower their prices. Kroger and Albertsons are the two biggest grocery chains in America. If they’re allowed to merge, the combined company, plus Walmart, will control 70 percent of the grocery market in over 150 cities. That means even higher prices.

(2) The proposed $24.6 billion merger would not only put 5,000 American grocery stores under one corporation. It would put 41 retail grocery brands and 4,000 pharmacies under the same corporation. It would signal to every other industry they can make big profits by further monopolizing.

(3) If allowed to combine, Kroger and Albertsons would also put their combined 700,000 workers under one corporation. These workers would then have to bargain with just one take-it-or-leave-it giant grocery chain. This would erode their bargaining power, leading to lower wages, worse benefits, and weaker worker protections.

This last point — the relationship between corporate concentration and lower wages and benefits — is almost never raised in antitrust litigation yet it’s hugely important for understanding the current structure of the American economy and why so many American workers justifiably feel shafted.

**

Since the late 19th century, the U.S. government has been deciding the extent to which corporations can join together to gain market power, and workers can join together in labor unions to gain bargaining power. This balance of power has had as much effect on prices and wages as supply and demand — in fact, it undergirds supply and demand.

In 1890 and then again in 1914, the United States enacted anti-monopoly laws. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were fierce trust-busters. In 1935, FDR signed into law the National Labor Relations Act, which allowed workers to form labor unions and required employers to negotiate in good faith with those unions.

By 1950, big business and big labor were in rough balance. That balance of power was central to the growth of both the American economy and the American middle class. It fostered a basic bargain: As corporations became more profitable, their workers did, too.

Sources: Historic Statistics of the United States, Unionstats.com.

Over the last 40 years, though, union power has dropped precipitously while corporate power has soared. The result has been near-record levels of inequality (see chart, above).

In 1955, over a third of all workers in the private sector were unionized, which gave them considerable bargaining power to get higher wages. (Employers whose workers weren’t unionized often offered their workers almost the same wages and benefits as those in the unionized sector, to fend off unionization.)

Now, only 6 percent of private sector workers are unionized.

Meanwhile, over just the last two decades, more than 75 percent of U.S. industries have become more concentrated.

Four beef packers now control over 80 percent of their market, domestic air travel is now dominated by four airlines, and many Americans have only one choice of reliable broadband provider. Just four companies — Walmart, Costco, Kroger, and Albertsons — dominate the grocery industry.

When few workers are unionized, wages remain stagnant or decline. Without adequate competition, prices and corporate profits rise. The result: Wealth is siphoned off from workers and consumers to large corporations and shareholders.

In the late 1970s, I worked at the Federal Trade Commission, which actively fought anti-competitive mergers and monopolies. But the Reagan administration eased up on them. Reagan also encouraged attacks on unions, as exemplified by his firing of striking air traffic controllers (who, in truth, had no right to strike).

The Biden administration has made priorities of both cracking down on corporate concentration and strengthening labor unions.

Lina Khan, chair of the FTC, and Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general for the antitrust division of the Justice Department, have been aggressively fighting corporate power. Jennifer Abruzzo, general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, has been aggressively protecting workers’ organizing rights.

But there is far, far more to do. Last week, Khan, Kanter, Abruzzo, and Labor Secretary Julie Su signed a memo of agreement, enabling them to coordinate their efforts even more.

But they also need more resources to do their important work. Inequality is out of control. Big corporations are more profitable than ever. CEO pay is bonkers. (Kroger paid its CEO $15 million last year, which was 502 times what the typical Kroger employee earned. If the merger goes through, Albertsons’ CEO would receive $43 million, on top of his $15.1 million compensation.)

Yet most workers are still receiving a small portion of the economic gains. According to the latest estimates, the median household income is $74,580.

Both sides of the economic equation — corporate power and worker power — must be addressed. The Biden-Harris administration has made a good start at reining in corporate power and strengthening worker power. Stopping the Kroger-Albertsons merger is an important step along the way.

Here’s hoping the Harris-Walz administration will take many more such steps.

Happy Labor Day.

Ronald Silver II, a sanitation worker in Baltimore, won’t be spending this Labor Day weekend with his family. On August 2, during a sweltering 100°F heatwave, Silver died while working a shift in a city garbage truck.

His death was preventable. In July, following worker complaints, Baltimore’s Inspector General (IG) reviewed conditions in the city’s Department of Public Works. Employees, the IG found, “do not have adequate access to water, ice, or fans to combat intense summer heat,” as reported by The Baltimore Sun.

This problem goes far beyond Baltimore. Every year, tens of millions of U.S. workers in both indoor and outdoor settings face the dangers of extreme heat.

As our planet continues to warm, our workplaces will become even hotter.

Climate change means rising global temperatures and also increased humidity, which interferes with the evaporation of sweat, the body’s natural cooling mechanism. And because temperatures are also now higher at night, it’s more difficult for workers to recover by resting up and cooling down after long hours.

The consequences are severe. Heat exhaustion and heat stroke, which develop with little warning, are becoming more common. Baltimore’s medical examiner found that Silver died from hyperthermia, the most severe form of heat stroke, which can lead to multiple, fatal organ failures.

Public Citizen projects that extreme heat kills about 2,000 workers annually, and another 170,000 suffer heat-related injuries and illnesses. These numbers are certainly an underestimate, as heat may contribute to heart attacks or respiratory failures that are not always recorded as heat-related.

As we observe Labor Day, a holiday intended to honor American workers, it’s clear that we need basic heat protections. Currently, no federal standard exists, and only five states—California, Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington—have statewide heat safety requirements. In the remaining 45 states, which account for 80% of the U.S. population, workers are out of luck.

Despite the danger, some employers continue to resist the implementation of a heat standard, arguing that it would be burdensome or costly. However, this shortsighted stance is actually bad for business.

According to one scientific estimate, lost productivity due to heat-related illness, for outdoor workers alone, costs the U.S. economy more than $90 billion a year. Most importantly, protecting workers from extreme heat not only boosts productivity, it saves lives. Ignoring basic safety measures devalues the very people who drive our economy.

Here’s the good news: Workers are looking out for themselves.

First, a process is underway to create a federal heat standard. That’s because the Biden administration is responding to demands for a heat standard, spurred by a petition from unions, public health groups, and safety advocates—including my organization, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH). A proposed nationwide standard, which requires employers to provide training on how to recognize heat illness as well as delivering access to rest, water, and shade, was introduced in July and will soon be open for public comment.

Getting new federal regulations in place takes a while, and will face inevitable legal challenges from employers. Workers are not willing to risk getting sick or dying during more summers of grueling heat.

That’s why labor and safety groups are also successfully advocating for new local and state heat safety rules. In California, a new standard now protects 1.4 million indoor workers, who were previously excluded. The Arizona Heat Coalition has secured local ordinances in Phoenix, Tucson, and Pima County, mandating access to rest, shade, and water for contractors. This includes workers at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport, where temperatures can exceed 110°F.

Meanwhile, in Maryland, a proposed statewide heat safety standard, developed with input from National COSH advisors, has been published and will likely be in effect by next summer. Safety expert Jordan Barab notes that if such a standard had been in place this summer, Ronald Silver might still be alive: “He would have had access to water and rest breaks. If he had gotten sick anyway, his trained co-workers would have immediately recognized the signs of heat illness and implemented the emergency response program.”

As our planet continues to warm, our workplaces will become even hotter. Here’s a prediction that’s more reliable than any weather report: Workers will continue to turn up the heat, demanding action to save lives from employers and elected officials.

Labor Day Release – September 2, 2024 Trump’s callous disregard for workers’ well-being knows no bounds – even children would not be safe under a second Trump presidency. Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump administration, calls for teenagers to be trained on dangerous machinery. At the state level, Republicans are already weakening child…

The rise of Uber and Lyft to ubiquity over the last decade has been astonishing—over 3 billion trips were taken using the platforms in 2023. Throughout that meteoric expansion to nearly every inch of the globe, the companies have waved away concerns that the drivers keeping the platforms going are being underpaid for their labor.

Anecdotal cases of drivers working grueling hours for a pittance abound, but Uber and Lyft have been able to shrug them off through a combination of industry-funded studies and wage secrecy. However, a few independent analyses have managed to puncture the narrative that the gig economy pays well.

A new study from the U.C. Berkeley Labor Center is one of the strongest examples of that so far. Researchers analyzed 52,370 trips by 1,088 drivers on six rideshare and delivery apps across five major metro areas and found that they earned well below the minimum wage in all five.

The gig companies are promoting Proposition 22-like policies in other states. Our research demonstrates clearly that such policies can be expected to leave drivers with sub-minimum earnings.

The study is particularly notable for the results it extracted about California, where in 2020 gig companies poured tens of millions into Proposition 22, legislation which allowed the industry to continue to classify their workers as independent contractors rather than employees.

The companies promised that exempting drivers and delivery workers would preserve the “flexibility” of gig work while ensuring that they would make over the minimum wage.

Four years later, that promise seems broken. Rideshare passenger drivers, the study found, take home $7.12 per hour in median net hourly earnings before tips—a fraction of California’s $16 minimum wage. When you account for the employee benefits and taxes that drivers have to pay for themselves, the number is even lower.

The lesson for other states and cities considering similar exceptions to labor law for gig companies? Don’t take rideshare companies at their word when it comes to worker pay.

I discussed this report with one of its authors, Ken Jacobs, co-chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

First of all, congratulations on this major report! Can you tell me a little about how you collected this trip data? What kind of roadblocks do rideshare companies put up to knowing how much workers get paid?

The data comes from a third party app called Gridwise. Drivers use it to track mileage and earnings. We analyzed data for over 1,000 drivers and more than 50,000 trips over a two week period in January 2022 in five metro areas: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, and Boston.

The data allowed us to analyze how much drivers earned per hour and shift across the main passenger and delivery services. I have looked at lots of screenshots from the company apps. The companies don’t make it easy for drivers to calculate their net earnings.

This study split apart passenger and delivery drivers—were there any notable differences in the pay for those distinct groups?

The biggest difference was the share of income that comes through tips. Tips account for a little more than half of the gross income of delivery drivers, but only 10% for passenger drivers. Overall we found that the typical passenger driver earned the equivalent of a $5.97 an hour wage before tips in California, and $7.63 an hour after tips.

Delivery drivers earned about $5 an hour in California without tips and $11.43 an hour with tips. In the three metro’s outside of California, non-tip income—base pay, incentives and bonuses—barely covered expenses. Drivers were essentially working for tips.

Can you explain a little more about how gig companies and this study calculate pay differently, especially when it comes to time between trips and expenses?

When the gig companies talk about how much drivers earn they usually put out figures for gross pay per hour and they don’t include the time a driver is waiting for a request or returning after dropping off a passenger or delivery. That is work time! It is an essential part of the job.

A recent study looked at data from 5.3 million San Francisco rideshare trips to see what drivers did between trips—they found that drivers were mostly heading back to hub areas where they had a greater chance to find a passenger or were cruising while waiting to get the next ride. They were working. When the companies talk about expenses, they don’t include costs associated with any of those miles.

The Gridwise date allows us to account for drivers’ full time and miles for each shift. For expenses, we use the IRS mileage rate for the time period under study of 58.5 cents a mile. This reflects the full cost of owning and operating a vehicle.

Proposition 22, the initiative put on the California ballot by the gig companies, set an initial mileage rate of only 30 cents a mile. The companies justify this by saying that most drivers work very few hours. What they don’t tell you is that most trips are done by drivers who work 20 hours a week or more and for whom gig driving accounts for the greatest use of their vehicle.

We also account for the fact that gig companies do not pay the employer side of payroll taxes or provide other mandatory benefits to drivers.

Your report mentions that concentration in the rideshare and delivery industries may be contributing to low pay, could you tease that out for me?

There are two major gig passenger companies, and four for food and grocery delivery. That gives them significant power to set pay in the industry. They are also able employ what UC Irvine law professor Veena Dubal calls “algorithmic discrimination.” They can see what trips or deliveries drivers have been willing to take for how much money in the past, and can individualize what they offer each driver for the same ride. They do the same in setting what they charge passengers.

How did pay in California compare to the other metro areas you analyzed?

The typical passenger driver earned around $3 less an hour in California than in the other three metros before tips. If we include tips it was around $3.50 less.

For delivery drivers it was the other way around. The typical delivery driver earned $4.50 more an hour in California than the other three metros before tips; $3 more with tips.

What does that say about the ways that Prop 22 affected the industry?

Proposition 22 was sold to voters as setting a higher minimum wage for drivers. In the case of passenger drivers, it had very little effect. Delivery drivers were much more likely to receive Proposition 22 payments and did have higher earnings than their counterparts outside of California. In both cases driver earnings were still well below the state minimum wage. The gig companies are promoting Proposition 22-like policies in other states. Our research demonstrates clearly that such policies can be expected to leave drivers with sub-minimum earnings.

The California Supreme Court recently upheld Prop 22 against a constitutional challenge—how should we expect that situation to evolve?

With the court’s recent decision upholding Proposition 22, we can expect gig companies to continue to pay subminimum wage in the state. The courts did leave open the possibility for the legislature to grant collective bargaining rights to gig workers. Massachusetts will be voting on a gig worker collective bargaining initiative this November. The results of that vote may shape what happens next in California.

On Labor Day, we celebrate the contributions of workers. The best way to honor those contributions is to increase their compensation. A key part of their pay is deferred compensation in the form of Social Security. Working families earn their Social Security when they work and collect benefits when their work stops as the result of old age, disability, or death, leaving dependents.

It is well past time to expand those earned Social Security benefits. Congress has not increased them in over half a century.

Whether to expand or cut Social Security is a matter of values, not affordability. That value choice is on the ballot this November. The two major parties have very different values when it comes to Social Security.

Democrats recognize that expanding Social Security is a solution.

It is a solution to the nation’s retirement income crisis, where too many workers will never be able to retire without drastic reductions in their standards of living. As traditional pensions continue to disappear, replaced (if they are) by riskier, less reliable, inadequate 401(k)s, Social Security is more vital to American workers’ economic security than ever.

To advance his goal of undermining Social Security, Donald Trump grabbed the questionable power to go after its dedicated revenue unilaterally—something without precedent.

Social Security is strikingly superior to its private-sector counterparts. It is extremely efficient, secure, nearly universal, excellent for both long-term and mobile workers, and fair. Its one shortcoming is that its benefits are too low. By expanding those modest Social Security benefits, we are increasing the security of all of us.

In recognition of Social Security’s increasing importance for workers and their families, several bills have been introduced during this Congress to expand Social Security’s modest benefits, and the Biden-Harris administration has said it supports those efforts.

Representative John Larson’s (D-CT) Social Security 2100 Act, which has over 185 cosponsors, would increase benefits across-the-board for all current and future Social Security beneficiaries. It would improve the annual cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) to better match the true costs that seniors and people with disabilities face. The bill would improve benefits for widows and widowers, students, children living with grandparents, public servants, the most elderly Americans, lower-income seniors, those with disabilities, students, and more. And it pays for all of this by making the wealthy finally pay their fair share.

Similarly, Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have introduced the Social Security Expansion Act. Their proposal would increase Social Security benefits across-the-board by $200 a month and update the way that COLAs are determined to better reflect the costs seniors and other beneficiaries face. Further, it would update and increase the minimum Social Security benefit and restore student benefits. Again, it would pay for all of these increases and restore Social Security to long-range actuarial balance by requiring millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share.

Additional bills that would make positive changes to Social Security have been introduced as well. All of these bills not only address our nation’s looming retirement income crisis, but other challenges the nation faces, including rising income and wealth inequality. In fact, rising inequality has cost Social Security billions of dollars each year. Those are billions of dollars that should go to expanding Social Security.

In short, Democrats want to expand Social Security and ensure that all benefits can be paid in full and on time for the foreseeable future, by requiring billionaires and other uber-wealthy to start paying their fair share.

In stark contrast, Republican politicians see Social Security not as the solution it is, but as a threat. On top of that, Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress want to give even more tax breaks to the uber-wealthy. They certainly don’t want to force their plutocrats to pay their fair share to Social Security.

Republicans want to slash Social Security benefits—or worse–because they don’t believe in it. In fact, at its start, they called it socialism and voted against its creation. Today, it puts the lie to their view that government is the problem, not the solution.

Consistent with that antipathy, when Trump was president, he included, in every one of his four budgets, proposals to cut Social Security and Medicare. When he couldn’t get the cuts enacted, he employed the old tactic of “starve the beast.” Figuring tax cuts are easier to enact than benefit cuts, he cut income taxes which are used to fund Medicare and Medicaid, and sought to defund Social Security, which has its own dedicated revenue.

To advance his goal of undermining Social Security, Donald Trump grabbed the questionable power to go after its dedicated revenue unilaterally—something without precedent. Because Trump was limited to executive action, he was able to only defer the revenue, but he made clear that he would not just defer the revenue, but push to eliminate it, if he were re-elected. And, he has stated that Social Security cuts are on the agenda if he is elected to a second term.

That is the choice in November: Trump-Vance and their Republican colleagues want to cut Social Security and give handouts to the wealthiest. Harris-Walz and their Democratic colleagues want to expand Social Security’s modest, but vital benefits, while requiring those with incomes above $400,000 to pay their fair share.

Indeed, Harris and Walz have advocated this for a long time. Vice President Kamala Harris was an original cosponsor of the Social Security Expansion Act when she was in the Senate. And when her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, was in Congress, he was an original cosponsor of the Social Security 2100 Act.

Every generation has built on the strong foundation laid down 89 years ago, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt—and his Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins (the first woman ever to serve in a presidential cabinet)—shepherded Social Security into law. But it was not without a fight.

For those who believe in the value of Social Security and the freedom that economic security brings, let's honor our working families this Labor Day by doing what we can to ensure that the party that created Social Security, and has always protected and expanded it, wins big this November.

Echoing Biden, Kamala Harris seems determined to go as long as possible into the general election without holding a press conference or granting a real interview to a journalist willing to challenge her deflecting answers to questions. Can she, like Biden, make it all the way through the presidency without any substantial interaction with the press?

The post Kamala, We’ll Never Know Ye first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

It wasn’t until the final night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention that pandering to military power took the stage. Until then, conventioneers were insulated from possible second thoughts they might have had about the party’s role in the constructing, maintaining, and expanding of what is in truth an Empire.

The run up to U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’ acceptance speech included tough talk from former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who celebrated America’s “warriors,” and by a parade of members of Congress who have served in the military: Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. With the exception of celebrating the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, there were no references to those wars, nor to the president’s role as “nuclear monarch” with the sole authority to launch an omnicidal nuclear war. References to what former President Dwight D. Eisenhower initially termed the military-industrial-congressional complex and the party’s integration with it were missing in action. So too were any references to the deployment of a new generation of nuclear weapons in Europe or President Joe Biden’s recent insistence that Chancellor Olaf Sholtz accept deployment of U.S. dual capable tomahawk intermediate range missiles in Germany capable of reaching western Russia.

But, as the conservative journalist David Brooks observed, Harris concluded her rousing acceptance speech with “an aggressive picture of America in the world.” She built on her commitment to maintain the world’s “most lethal” military, with the promise to lead in the space and artificial intelligence arms races, and promised that “America—not China—wins the competition for the 21st century,” a euphemistic reference to the struggle for hegemony. Echoing the Biden paradigm and the commitment to new Cold Wars, and omitting embarrassing references to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and more than a few other U.S. allies, she told her audiences that she knew where she and the country stand in the “enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny.”

Seeking to prevent an election shattering of the Democratic Party’s coalition, Kamala Harris has attempted to have it both ways on the Gaza genocide.

Harris came to the Senate in 2017 with little foreign policy knowledge or experience, but contrary to former President Donald Trump’s accusations, she is anything but a foreign and military policy ingenue. The Biden White House downplayed her foreign and military policy roles, but once she emerged as the Democrats’ presidential nominee, it was reported that she participated in nearly every Biden-era National Security Council meeting, where U.S. foreign and military policies are made. Similarly, she has been involved in almost every one of the President’s Daily Briefs, the intelligence community’s daily super-secret briefings about threats, developments, and opportunities around the world. Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff, said that Harris came to the intelligence briefings as the “best prepared, ready with questions, having already reviewed the written intelligence and ready to help ask hard questions.” The journalist Fred Kaplan put it differently: her presence in these briefings “exposed her to more information… than any newly elected president has ever had, coming into office, in more than a century.” As vice president, she visited 21 nations on 17 foreign trips and met with more than 150 foreign leaders. In three of the past four years, she led the U.S delegation to the Munich Security Conference.

We should expect Harris to hew to the trajectory of Biden’s foreign and military policies. Along her way, she has recruited a cadre of traditional national security advisers. As vice president, her first national security adviser was Nancy McEldowney, a career U.S. diplomat and former director of the Foreign Service Institute. McEldowney was succeeded by Philip Gordon, Harris’ current and very influential foreign policy adviser, who served on former President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council staff and as an Obama European and Middle East specialist. Gordon’s deputy has been Rebecca Lissner, formerly of the Naval War College and the woman who oversaw the development of the Biden National Security Strategy. Recall that the strategy declares that the post-Cold War era is over, that the struggle with China—Washington’s only peer competitor—to shape what follows is under way. And it reiterated the United States’ commitment to its first-strike nuclear arsenal and warfighting doctrine.

According to a Wall Street Journal report that Harris blames National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan along with Secretary of State Antony Blinken for failing to contain Israel in Gaza, Gordon will likely be appointed to succeed Sullivan. Gordon was a career diplomat who is seen as a “pragmatic internationalist” rather than a progressive. He served as former President Barack Obama’s first assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs and later as his special assistant to the president and White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf Region.

Gordon’s decisive worldview reorientation reportedly came in response to former President George W. Bush’s regime change war in Iraq, which led him to understand that the U.S. is not always a force for good or on the right side of history. Bush’s wars, he understood, left that country shattered and squandered the United States’ reputation and legitimacy. As a review of the books written by Gordon explains, he believes that “the institutions of U.S. power are not in themselves wrong; it is the people who run them who make them fall short of their promise.” Staff them with better leaders he argues, and the U.S. can play its historical role as a “catalyst for democracy.” Recognizing that regime change doesn’t work, the U.S. he argues must act judiciously with the means consistent with the ends.

Gordon is seen as a Europeanist and as the E.U.’s man in Washington. Norbert Rottgen, a Christian Democratic German parliamentarian, has commented that Gordon believes that “European security is the cornerstone of U.S. global power,” and he is probably correct. Gordon has been a hardliner opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and criticized Sholz for resisting pressure to send German long-range Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine. But Gordon can be a subtle strategist, as demonstrated in his not being threatened by calls for a more autonomous Europe and his belief that a strong Europe is in the United States’ interest.

“Europeanist” though he may be, Camille Grand, the former NATO assistant secretary general, tells us that Gordon recognizes that Europe is “no longer the alpha and omega of American’s foreign policy.” There is of course China, the new “alpha and omega” of U.S. foreign, military, and economic policies, and with the exception of his deputy Linsser’s China containment work on the Biden National Security Strategy, Gordon’s fingerprints on Harris’ approach are hard to find.

Consistent with Biden, Trump, and the etiquette of U.S. political discourse, in Harris’ acceptance speech there were no references to U.S. imperial wars, coups, or provocative shows of force with which Washington won its Indo-Pacific Empir

Seeking to prevent an election shattering of the Democratic Party’s coalition, Kamala Harris has attempted to have it both ways on the Gaza genocide. In her acceptance speech, she honored the growing Democratic majority who have been outraged by Israel’s indiscriminate and devastating destruction of Gaza and its people. Possibly speaking from her heart, Harris reiterated the call for a cease-fire and stated that “what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating…The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.” She then stated her ostensible commitment to the Palestinians’ ability to “realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination” and to the long disregarded and fading possibility of a two-state solution.

But, like Biden, the leverage she pledged to exercise was to enhance Israel’s military power, not to achieve a cease-fire. As she said, “Let me be clear, I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.” Like Biden, her campaign has been clear in refusing to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his extremist partners by withholding shipment of bombs and other weapons to Israel. And, as the Israeli leader’s campaign of assassinations in Iran and Lebanon have taken us to the brink of regional war, Harris pledged “to defend our forces,” who for reasons she didn’t dare to state find themselves deployed across southwest Asia, “and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.”

Harris has been a hawk on Ukraine in its war of resistance against Russia, providing Kyiv “full-throated support.” We should expect her to continue unwavering support for NATO and U.S. dominion over Europe. In introducing herself in Chicago, she boasted that “Five days before Russia attacked Ukraine, I met with President Zelensky to warn him about Russia’s plan to invade. I helped mobilize a global response—over 50 countries—to defend against Putin’s aggression. And as president, I will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.”

Largely unknown prior to the convention was that in February 2022, when the U.S. intelligence community first reported that Russia’s illegal and brutal invasion of Ukraine was imminent, Harris pressed for the super-secret intelligence to be shared with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It was Harris who was then dispatched to meet with Zelensky in Kyiv to share the detailed intelligence and Washington’s perceptions of his options. She has since met Zelensky five times.

There has been no daylight between Harris and Biden in their support for Zelensky’s “peace diplomacy” that unrealistically demands return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders. (Worth noting is the Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko’s assertion that, before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, most Ukrainians were willing to be done with turmoil in the eastern 20% of Ukraine and accept its succession to Russia.) There has been no indication that in future negotiations Harris would accept a neutral Ukraine with credible security guarantees or to putting the questions of Crimean, Donetsk, and Luhansk sovereignty to fair referenda or onto the diplomatic shelf for later resolution.

And, like Biden, at Munich Security Conferences Harris has preached that the “backbone” of preservation of Western principles and security is NATO—“the greatest military alliance the world has ever seen.”

Amid growing international demands to cut military spending by at least 10%, there has been no hint of Harris objecting to Biden’s massive military spending increases.

Consistent with Biden, Trump, and the etiquette of U.S. political discourse, in Harris’ acceptance speech there were no references to U.S. imperial wars, coups, or provocative shows of force with which Washington won its Indo-Pacific Empire, nor to the region spanning Biden-Harris lattice-like network of tripartite and bilateral U.S alliances, nor to global NATO’s new roles in the campaign to contain China.

In her acceptance speech, Harris mentioned China only once, and then only in relationship to the contest for supremacy in space and AI. These, not incidentally, are at the defining edges of 21st-century military power. Elsewhere Harris has been critical of Beijing’s repression of human rights and warned about the Chinese “threat” to U.S. interests and to Washington’s allies in the Asia-Pacific. Following China’s simulated blockade of Taiwan in response to Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) counterproductive and unwanted 2022 trip to Taiwan, Harris also traveled to Asia. There, in meetings with allies and some of the 55,000 U.S. troops based in Japan, she reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to deter China. She has not been shy in condemning China’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea where it seeks to challenge the Seventh Fleet’s dominance in what has been an America Lake since the end of the Pacific War. And as Beijing has encroached on what are obviously Philippine territorial waters, she has played a key role in facilitating Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s (the former dictator’s son) reaffirmation and deepening of the U.S.-Philippines alliance after his predecessor’s flirtations with China.

Assuming that her audiences either don’t know or disregard the past and present practice of U.S. imperialism, Harris asserts that she is committed to the misnamed “rules-based order” and to a “free and open Indo-Pacific” to ensure stability and commerce. She warns that Beijing is unique as it “continues to coerce, to intimidate, and to make claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea.” Rather than pursue common security solutions to the dilemmas presented by Taiwan, she repeats Washington’s unofficial commitment to defend Taiwan, including the Pentagon’s first-strike doctrine which serves as the foundation of that commitment.

In these regards we have to hope that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will be more than wallpaper as vice president and that he finds ways to influence a Harris administration with his understanding that the storied China threat is “hyperbole” and the need to build on the two powers’ shared interests.

Amid growing international demands to cut military spending by at least 10%, there has been no hint of Harris objecting to Biden’s massive military spending increases. That said, if she is elected, we should not expect her to match Trump’s call for gargantuan increases in Pentagon spending.

What else might we expect from Kamala Harris if she prevails between now and November 5? Given that Africa is projected to have a quarter of the world’s population by 2050, and the markets for goods and services that go with that, as well as its stores of commercially essential natural resources, a Harris administration will likely pay greater attention to U.S. relations with the African continent than we have seen in recent years. Similarly, given her Caribbean roots, its resources, markets, and most of all its Monroe Doctrine geopolitical relationship to the United States, greater attention will likely also be paid to Latin America.

All of which brings us back to where we began. Harris remains the uncertain bastion in the struggle to defend constitutional democracy. The outcome of the election cannot be accurately predicted, and we have been sobered by the reminder that only once has a sitting vice president prevailed in an election. Between now and then Harris will be pressed to become more forthcoming about her policy commitments and how they can be achieved. Unless the Democrats win control of one or both houses of Congress, and with right-wing extremist control of the Supreme Court, only minimal progress will be made on the Harris-Walz domestic agenda. And as Harris or Trump aggressively challenge the world, each in her or his unique ways, our work to end and prevent catastrophe remains ahead of us.

Someone once asked labor leader Samuel Gompers, "What does labor want?" His response is often misquoted, limited to one word: "More." By doing so, that one-word answer makes the labor movement seem narrow and selfish. What Gompers (who lived from 1850 to 1924) actually said reflects his vision that a very different kind of society was possible and that the labor movement could play an important role in shaping that vision into reality. What Gompers actually said (in the sexist language of that era) was the following:

“What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.”

Gompers' statement should inspire us to ask: What kind of society do WE want, today and in the future? What do we mean by a "decent" and "humane" society? Here's my answer.

A humane and decent society provides people with the opportunity to fulfill their potential and find happiness and meaning, including meaningful work. These cannot be guaranteed but they can be made more likely by two key ingredients: shared prosperity and robust democracy.

Shared prosperity means that everyone in society has the basics: a well-paying job, safe workplaces, access to health care (including health providers and medications, and mental health services), affordable housing, accessible parks and playgrounds, safe streets and neighborhoods, decent schools and libraries, access to transportation by car, bus, and/or train, clean air, and leisure time.

These things should be available to people regardless of where they live, their income, race, gender, religion, or ethnicity. It doesn’t mean that everyone in society has the same level of income and wealth, that everyone can live in a mansion or take lavish vacations. But it does mean that these things are considered “public goods” that are basic rights for all. They are a floor below which people should not fall in a humane society.

A decent and humane society seeks to limit various forms of inequality and segregation in terms of income, wealth, race, gender, schools, work, housing, and health.

Compounding these inequalities is geographic inequality and segregation, which makes it more difficult for our society to create both shared prosperity and robust democracy. A great deal of research shows that in an unequal society, where you grow up and live has a profound influence on opportunities to live a fulfilling life. Poor ghettos are the flip side of rich ghettos. Poverty is the flip side of super-wealth. The growing geographic segregation of America’s wealthy, middle class, and poor people is not the inevitable result of human nature, but a legacy of attitudes and policies that can be changed. In the pursuit of shared prosperity and robust democracy, place matters.

The provision of “public goods” requires a robust, efficient, and effective government. It requires government to establish strong rules and provide support to people and places. It imposes limits on market forces and businesses that seek to make excessive profits – for example, by protecting people from corporate practices that pollute the environment, pay low wages, sell unsafe products, profit from the proliferation of assault weapons, or charge high prices for basic necessities, such as medicine, apartments, water, electricity, and food.

Only government can provide parks and playgrounds, schools, and libraries, roads and buses, safe streets and public safety departments (police and fire) that are available to everyone, regardless of wealth or income.

A decent and human society requires government run by people who believe in the power of laws and rules that apply to everyone. Only government can make possible the conditions that allow businesses to thrive—schools and universities that train the future workforce, public transportation (cars, buses, trains, ports, and airports) that allows the movement of goods, public safety that permits companies and other employers to conduct business, and a military and diplomatic corps that protects the country from invasion and allows the flow of goods, services, people, and ideas across borders.

We pay taxes so that government can adopt policies and provide services and subsidies that make our society more livable and more fair. These include up-to-date fire trucks and other equipment, minimum wages, emergency assistance for victims of hurricanes and earthquakes, funds for public schools and playgrounds, financial aid for college students, funds to upgrade roads and bridges, laws that protect consumers and workers, rules that set standards for safe workplaces, food stamps to reduce hunger, housing subsidies to help families pay rent, funds to help parents pay for child care, and rules that limit discrimination and abuse by landlords, police, banks, employers, and others. Taxes should be based on income and wealth. They should be progressive, so people and corporations pay their fair share.

A robust democracy means that people have a voice in their government and have access to information so they can make good choices. This involves voting rights, election laws, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, laws regulating and limiting the use of private wealth in elections, laws protecting workers’ right to join unions, and laws protecting people’s right to peacefully protest without intimidation.

Throughout human history, people have organized social movements to try to improve their lives and the society in which they lived. Examples include labor, civil rights, feminist, gay rights, disability rights, environmental, peace, farmer populism, and others. Powerful groups and institutions have generally resisted these efforts in order to maintain their own privilege, although there are always people from privileged backgrounds who join forces with the oppressed and less powerful.

Back in 1900, people who called for women’s suffrage, laws protecting the environment and consumers, an end to lynching, the right of workers to form unions, a progressive income tax, a federal minimum wage, old-age insurance, dismantling of Jim Crow laws, the eight-hour workday, and government-subsidized health care and housing were considered impractical idealists, utopian dreamers, or dangerous socialists.

Now we take these ideas for granted. Many of the so-called “radical” ideas of one generation have become the common sense of subsequent generations. History reveals that change that improves the lives of most Americans is possible.

In many ways, the U.S. is a more humane and democratic society than it was in the early 1900s or even the 1960s. Many obstacles to democracy and fairness have been removed or weakened. More Americans have the right to vote, including people of color and those between 18 and 21, despite conservative efforts at voter suppression. Gay couples have the right to marry. Cars, trucks, factories and other facilities have to control toxic emissions. Corporations have to provide warning labels on consumer products and medicines. Banks, landlords, developers, and employers face penalties if they are caught engaging in racial or gender discrimination. Workplaces are safer, thanks to government regulations. These laws and rules only matter if they are enforced, and that remains a challenge.

Since 1961, the number of African American members of Congress has increased from four to 59. Since 1985, the number of Hispanics in Congress has grown from 14 to 52. Since 1977, the number of women in Congress has grown from 18 to 150. The current Congress has 12 openly LGBT members — an all-time high. There are similar trends among local and state elected officials.

This is cause for celebration but not cause for self-satisfaction or apathy. Many other countries do better than the U.S. at both robust democracy and shared prosperity.

There is much more to do, many more struggles to fight. We have a long way to go to achieve shared prosperity and a robust democracy.

Over

3,000 migrants fleeing from poverty and conflict, the Council on Foreign Relations recently noted, died last year trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe.

Those deaths made barely a ripple in most of the world’s major news media. But this summer one single tragedy on the Mediterranean has been making globs of global headlines.

On Monday, August 19, amid a fearsome sudden storm, a boat deemed “unsinkable” sank off the coast of Sicily’s Palermo. Seven of the 22 people on board perished.

What made this sinking so newsworthy? The ship that sank just happened to be a luxury sailing yacht that sported the world’s tallest aluminum mast. And the casualties from that superyacht’s sinking just happened to include the high-tech CEO once hailed as the “British Bill Gates.”

That chief exec, the yacht’s owner Mike Lynch, had envisioned this voyage as a celebration over a decade in the making. Just weeks earlier, after years of legal battling, a federal jury in Northern California had acquitted Lynch and one of his VPs on charges they had artificially inflated the value of Lynch’s software company. That inflating, prosecutors charged, had sealed the firm’s 2011 sale to Hewlett-Packard for over $11 billion, a deal that netted Lynch personally about $800 million.

But within a year after the sale the value of Lynch’s company had tanked by some $8.8 billion, and H-P was referring allegations of accounting improprieties against Lynch to the British Serious Fraud Office and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The referrals would eventually produce a civil-suit victory for H-P and a 2019 criminal conviction of a key exec at Lynch’s firm.

The 59-year-old Lynch and his finance VP Keith Chamberlain would have much better luck in their own criminal trial on similar charges. Unfortunately for them, they’ll never get to enjoy their acquittal. Lynch drowned in the sinking of his yacht, as did Lynch’s top trial lawyer and the chair of financial giant Morgan Stanley’s international arm, a star witness for Lynch’s defense.

What made this Lynch yacht sinking particularly irresistible for the world’s media? On the same day as the sinking, reports surfaced that Lynch’s acquitted co-defendant Chamberlain had just died after a car ran him over while he was jogging. A sheer coincidence? And how could the captain of Lynch’s superyacht and all but one of his crew escape the boat’s sinking alive while Lynch and six other passengers perished? Such juicy meat for endless conspiracy speculation!

But we need not resort to conspiratorial theorizing to understand why Lynch’s $25-million yacht sank so quickly that stormy night. That blame belongs in no small part to climate change, not some cabal of his billionaire corporate rivals.

By this past June, points out a new Financial Times analysis, water temperatures in the Mediterranean had been rising for 15 straight months. Higher water temperatures invite ever more extreme weather events. One such event — a tornado-like waterspout with “ferocious winds” howling at nearly 70 miles per hour — hit right near where Lynch had last anchored his superyacht.

Only 16 minutes passed between the moment those harsh winds first hit the yacht and the moment the yacht sank. That “rapid sinking of such a large, modern and well-equipped yacht,” adds the Financial Times, “has raised concerns over marine safety as extreme weather events occur with more frequency and intensity.”

In other words, the superyachts that typically spend summers in the Mediterranean and winters in the Caribbean better beware.

But the mega-rich who own these yachts have, in one sense, no one to blame but themselves. Our globe remains in overall climate-crisis denial in no small part because our wealthiest have so much to lose if our world gets serious about ending the profligate corporate practices now driving our planet’s climate collapse.

The ranks of these richest include, of course, the fossil-fuel industry’s top execs and investors. But all our super rich, not just the kings of Big Oil, have a vested personal interest in “calming” climate anxiety. Coming to grips with the chaos fossil fuels have already created — and speeding a worker-sensitive transition to a carbon-free future — will take enormous financial resources. The world will only be able to raise those resources if the rich and their corporations start paying their fair tax share.

A tax of between a mere 1.7 and 3.5 percent on the wealth of the world’s richest 0.5 percent, suggests the UK-based Tax Justice Network, could annually raise $2.1 trillion. Most of the world’s richest nations, notes the Tax Justice Network’s Alison Schultz, are shying away from that suggestion.

Notes Schultz: “This needs to change now — the climate can’t wait, and nor can the people of the world.”

Can politics be equal to the deepest of who we are? Can humanity evolve beyond war?

Such questions — I know, I know — are never officially asked during a presidential campaign. That’s not the point of the election: to plunge philosophically and spiritually into who we are. And thus, as the Trump-Harris race proceeds, not too many people (besides me) will be bringing up Pierre Teilhard de Chardin — Jesuit priest, theologian, scientist, best known as the author of The Phenomenon of Man — who died seventy years ago.

But I can’t tolerate the clichés of state! So let me sneak a dozen or so of Teilhard’s words into the present moment: “Love is the only force that can make things one without destroying them.”

Love? To those who are beginning to feel their cynicism percolate, I ask you to bear with me, at least for a moment. We’re stuck with that word, “love,” to describe humanity’s sane and positive reach; its understanding that we’re connected to the whole planet, as well as to each other, and a social structure that blows off this truth is certain to bring about its own collapse. Doesn’t it make sense to talk about this, right now, as we’re forging tomorrow politically?

Here’s another Teilhard quote. This one is pretty well known: “Some day, after mastering the wind, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of Love, and then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

Harness the energies of love? What in God’s name could this mean, especially in Teilhard’s context: that doing so would have evolutionary significance? I fear we don’t have a word that gives adequate impact to his words.

OK, in her acceptance speech as presidential nominee, Kamala Harris did toss in some love:

“So, fellow Americans. Fellow Americans. I — I love our country with all my heart. Everywhere I go — everywhere I go, in everyone I meet, I see a nation that is ready to move forward. Ready for the next step in the incredible journey that is America.”

Basically, she’s saying that she feels love for an abstraction, defined by random border lines on a map, created via several centuries of land and people theft and is now, wow, richer and more powerful than any other abstract political entity on the planet. To “love America” requires, I fear, instantly creating an us-vs.-them world.

Yes, she adds, this is “an America where we care for one another, look out for one another and recognize that we have so much more in common than what separates us. That none of us — none of us has to fail for all of us to succeed.”

OK, wonderful, but all this empathy stops at the border, right?

“And America, we must also be steadfast in advancing our security and values abroad. As vice president, I have confronted threats to our security, negotiated with foreign leaders, strengthened our alliances and engaged with our brave troops overseas. As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

America’s president can’t just be lovey-dovey. But what if Teilhard is right: “Love is the only force that can make things one without destroying them.” This is where I fall off the edge of American politics. We have, in essence, a trillion-dollar annual military budget. We’ve played war or proxy war all over the planet throughout my lifetime, including right this moment, as we give Israel the means and freedom to wipe Gaza off the map (otherwise known as “defend itself”). This is not questioned in the halls of power. This is not questioned in the American electoral system.

What if, as a nation — as residents of Planet Earth, as caring participants in humanity’s creation of tomorrow — we . . . uh, meditated? What if we dug, collectively, deep into the human soul? Not possible, the cynics cry, the snarks hiss! But I refuse to believe them. We cannot continue to evolve if we don’t know who we are, and that includes knowing who we are politically. We are not the clichés of state. We are not its lies and atrocities. We — all of us — are participants in deep, profound change.

So let me take a moment to offer, to candidate Harris and even that other guy, this tiny treasure I came upon in the wake of my wife’s death from cancer twenty-six years ago and my brief foray into Eastern religion: the blue pearl, a term I came across in a book by Swami Muktananda. Basically, it’s your innermost reality. While practicing meditation in my own so-so way, I was certain this was something I’d never find. But after my wife’s cancer diagnosis, it suddenly seemed as though it had found me. Some years ago I wrote in a column:

“The blue pearl is mortality’s unit of currency. It’s passed between the wounded like a secret handshake — secret only because the polite constructs of everyday life require discretion, averted eyes and an allegiance to the fiction that we’re strangers. The blue pearl has no tolerance for this, because the truth is, we’re ‘strange’ to each other only on the surface.

“Thus, when my wife was diagnosed with cancer, I noticed a charged change in conversations. For instance, here was my friend Herb, constructor of crossword puzzles, divulging that he’d lost his son in an accident some years earlier. I was his editor; we talked routinely on a weekly basis, but not till now had there been room for such a disclosure in our amiable chats. His telling me this was like a warm hand on my shoulder — ‘Yes, I too am mortal’ — and gave me courage. This is the blue pearl.”

I’m certain the blue pearl is more than just a personal discovery. As Swami Muktananda has put it: “After the Blue Pearl stands steady for a while, it explodes. Then its light spreads throughout the universe and you can see it everywhere.”

This is the tomorrow that’s at stake today.

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

Forty days after becoming the de facto nominee of the Democratic Party, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz have finally held their first interview, with Dana Bash of CNN in Savannah, Georgia. Scott disagrees with Ted’s assessment that Harris’ performance was a disaster. Ted Scott handicap the upcoming debate on September 8th, wondering what Trump can do to counter Harris despite her interview.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is still struggling to find his sea legs regarding Harris. Most problematic for him, abortion has surpassed the economy as the number-one issue for voters in key battleground states. Desperate for votes, Trump is even endorsing federal subsidies for in vitro fertilization, which is anathema to pro-life Republicans.

Watch the Video version: here.

The post DMZ America Podcast #162: Kamala’s Big First Interview a Flop? & Trump Tries to Abort His Abortion Problem first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.