The “Party of Lincoln,” as Republicans call themselves, seems intent on undermining just about everything President Abraham Lincoln lived and died for. This includes Republican efforts to upend the way elections are run, by restricting who gets to vote, how voting is conducted, and how votes are counted and certified.

The outcome of the tight presidential race between former U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris will hinge on the votes in a handful of swing states. From Georgia to Arizona, Nevada to Michigan, Republicans are mounting an all-out assault on the election process that journalist Ari Berman refers to as a “five-alarm fire for democracy.”

“It appears that Georgia Republicans are laying the groundwork not to certify the presidential election if Kamala Harris wins,” Berman said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “They’re doing exactly what Trump wanted them to do in 2020. Trump made Georgia the epicenter of the attempt to try to overturn the election. He asked local and State Board of Elections and election officials not to certify the election. They refused to do so; they followed the law. It seems like in 2024 they’re going to extraordinary lengths to try to implement the measures that failed in 2020, to try to rig the election for Trump.”

The Republican Party of today, desperate to suppress the votes of people of color, could not be further from the Party of Lincoln.

Georgia Republicans altered how counties count and certify votes. The Democratic Party of Georgia, the Democratic National Committee, and 10 Democratic county election officials from across Georgia have sued, seeking to roll back the changes. Their lawsuit argues, “Georgia’s State Election Board has passed a host of last-minute rules that threaten to sow chaos and impede the vote-canvassing process.”

Berman warns: “These state and local election boards have been taken over, in some cases, by election deniers, by MAGA extremists…The administration of elections matters so much because you can cast a vote, you can have your vote counted, but it doesn’t actually matter until votes are certified.”

In Texas, the Republican-controlled state government has for years tried to restrict voting in districts where Democratic candidates do well. Donald Trump won Texas by over five percentage points in 2020, but President Joe Biden won the cities of Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, and El Paso as well as the Rio Grande Valley.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced this week that he has purged over 1 million voters from Texas voter rolls. This increasingly common tactic inevitably removes legally-registered voters, often through faulty data screens that target likely Democratic voters.

Meanwhile, Texas’ Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’s currently agreed to do community service to avoid a felony criminal securities fraud trial, and survived an unrelated impeachment trial in the Republican-controlled state senate, has been raiding nonprofit organizations that provide services to immigrant and Latino communities.

Last week, under Paxton’s orders, the homes of a dozen members of LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens, were raided and searched by Texas authorities, including SWAT teams. One activist’s door was broken down. Texas House candidate Cecilia Castellano, running for an open seat to represent Uvalde, the town devastated by one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history, had her home raided. Government agents took her cell phone and, weeks ahead of election day, threw her campaign into chaos.

LULAC said in a statement, “Attorney General Paxton’s actions clearly aim to suppress the Latino vote through intimidation and any means necessary to tilt the electoral process in favor of his political allies.” LULAC has called on the Justice Department to investigate Paxton over the raids.

Juan Proaño, CEO of LULAC, said on Democracy Now!, “In the last U.S. Census, they reported 12.1 million Latinos in the state of Texas. For the first time, Latinos actually outnumber non-Hispanic whites, which is at 12 million. When you take into account not just the Latino population in the state of Texas, but the African American and Asian population… the minority community in Texas now stands at over 60%. Texas is and has been a majority-minority state. So, we see these, effectively, as tactics for the Republicans to actually stay in control of the government in Texas.”

If further evidence of Republican attempts to subvert the will of the voters were needed, Pluribus News, a nonprofit news organization, reports that Republican-controlled state governments are altering language on progressive state ballot initiatives to confuse or mislead voters. Arizona, for example, inserted “unborn human being” in place of fetus or embryo in the ballot initiative intended to guarantee the right to an abortion. Voters in Florida and Ohio will face similar confusing language in their ballot initiatives.

In President Lincoln’s final public address, three days before his assassination, Lincoln advocated that the right to vote be granted to formerly enslaved Black men (as only men could legally vote, until 1920). The Republican Party of today, desperate to suppress the votes of people of color, could not be further from the Party of Lincoln.

We are weeks away from the seminal U.S. election which will determine if the U.S. opts for a counterrevolutionary white, Christian nationalist, and plutocratic dictatorship or a compromised version of social democracy. After the month-long torment of the nation twisting in the wind as U.S. President Joe Biden resisted pressures to step aside following his disastrous debate performance, the torch of leadership of the Democratic Party has been passed to Vice President Kamala Harris.

Underlining the stakes of the election, more than 200 Republican former staffers for either former President George W. Bush, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), or Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) have endorsed Harris, saying, “Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable.”

Between Biden’s withdrawal and election day, there has been little time for either the Democratic Party or former President Donald Trump to define Harris. As The New York Times reported, “Harris does not have a policy page on her campaign website… [she] has been running mainly on Democratic good feelings.” More defining than the vague insistence of “FREEDOM” at the Democratic Party’s convention were the impassioned chants of “Not Going Back!,” or forward, to Trumpian racism, assaults on democracy and climate, or the romances with Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jung-Un.

Trump’s promises to punish his political opponents; to deport up to 20 million immigrants, which would require the creation of a police state; and his Project 2025 developed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation together provide the road maps to trash constitutional democracy and impose a racist and plutocratic dictatorship.

Despite having served as a senator and vice president, Harris remains a largely unknown quantity. During the Democratic Party’s convention, she was reintroduced as a caring, competent, and tough-minded happy warrior and source of hope. But little is to be learned from what was the Biden-Harris 2024 Democratic Party Platform. Written in anticipation of President Biden’s campaign for reelection, it reads as a defense of Biden’s presidency covering no new ground. Anxious to maintain as much ambiguity and freedom of action as possible, the Harris campaign opted not to make updating the platform a priority. And, although her party’s vacuous platform allocated nearly 20 pages to “Strengthening American Leadership Worldwide,” its fleeting and ritual adoption didn’t disturb the convention’s feel good vibes with any references to competition with China for hegemony, military alliances, or “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and its delivery systems.

During the convention, Cleve Wootson Jr. of The Washington Post wrote an illuminating story about the reinvention of Kamala Harris. He explained in 2020 Harris was uncomfortable campaigning in primaries as the party was moving to the left, and that she endured a “harrowing” first year as vice president when she was poorly supported and isolated by the administration’s senior leadership. That changed when the administration moved to change her image. With support from Biden, she “began focusing less on perilous political tasks like tackling the cause of immigration and seized instead on issues such as abortion and racism, which played to her rhetorical strengths.” And, as we saw in Harris’ acceptance speech and given the framing of the election as being between a prosecutor and a felon, expect Harris to campaign most comfortably on issues of criminal justice.

After blessings from the Obamas, for whom she campaigned during the 2008 primary campaign, she brings the excitement of African American and South Asian accents to her campaigning, signaling support for greater social and economic justice, while committing to history’s most powerful military force, including military alliances, and harping on inflated Russian and Chinese threats.

Worth noting was the scholar Peter Beinart’s observation that there was a false and potentially crippling ring to the convention’s central theme of FREEDOM. Israeli and Jewish pain were legitimately placed on prime time display with the speech by the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American who was wounded and taken hostage in Hamas’ despicable October 7 massacre. But amid protests over the failure of the Biden administration to exercise the leverage it has over Israel to force a cease-fire, the Harris-Walz camp refused to similarly humanize and display Palestinian pain amidst Israel’s genocidal war against Gazans. That. Beinart noted, gave lie to the party’s commitments to equality and could cost it votes in this critically important election.

Not to be forgotten, the shadow of Trump’s January 6, 2021 failed coup and the danger of the Gaza War becoming a region-wide configuration, hang over the election. We cannot assume election fairness. Trump’s election deniers are again in positions to certify false election results. Cadres of attorneys have been lined up to dispute or defend election returns. Should he lose, Trump predicts a “blood bath,” with the possibility of another attempted coup d’état. Meanwhile, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been murderously doing all that he can to entice Iran into triggering a catastrophic regional war with its tectonic impacts on the U.S. election.

The Biden-Trump Context

For the past year it has been apparent that the only way to prevent a Trump dictatorship is to prevent his return to the White House. With the Supreme Court now fully controlled by extreme right wing—racist and fascist operatives who on July 1 granted presidents near-total immunity from prosecution—it has been clear that our constitutional guardrails are insufficient to contain Donald Trump and the counterrevolutionary MAGA movement. Despite his historic legislative successes in rebooting the U.S. economy, the obvious decline of Biden’s physical and intellectual facilities generated severe doubts among many Democrats that President Biden could prevent a Trump-MAGA political tsunami. Only Dean Phillips, a little known Democratic congressman, had the gumption to state that the emperor had no clothes and to, Don Quixote-like, challenge him in primary elections. Many hoped and did what little they could to encourage the Democratic Establishment to intervene and replace him as the party’s candidate while celebrating Biden’s undeniable economic and social policy accomplishments.

That didn’t happen.

Despite our movements’ challenges to Biden’s embrace of Netanyau amid the Gaza genocide, his refusal to force a cease-fire in Ukraine and negotiations with Russia for a neutral and secure Ukraine, and his ratcheting up of the military and economic confrontations with China, a Biden election victory was seen by many as the desperately needed compromise to avoid a Trump dictatorship. In a period reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s, Trump’s promises to punish his political opponents; to deport up to 20 million immigrants, which would require the creation of a police state; and his Project 2025 developed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation together provide the road maps to trash constitutional democracy and impose a racist and plutocratic dictatorship.

As the political coup progressed, there was talk of an expedited primary election to identify Biden’s successor and to use the primary to build loyalty and excitement for the substitute candidate. That was not to be.

Thus, it was with a mixture of foreboding and a modicum of hope that many tuned into the June 27 televised Biden-Trump debate.

Worst fears were confirmed in the first minutes of the debate. Age had obviously taken its toll. Biden repeatedly lost his train of thought, and his stammering and fading voice generated immediate despair. Trump’s dictatorship, and all that it implies, appeared inevitable.

Fortunately, that despair triggered the revolt within the Democratic Party Establishment, in the liberal press, among major donors, and beyond to those who had been missing during the primary season. The campaign by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the Obamas, and congressional leaders to force Biden to retire was on.

As the political coup progressed, there was talk of an expedited primary election to identify Biden’s successor and to use the primary to build loyalty and excitement for the substitute candidate. That was not to be. Harris, then best known for failing to stem the flow of immigrants from the Global South and for her sputtering 2020 presidential primary campaign, quickly consolidated her hold on the nomination and generated unanticipated excitement and momentum in the Democratic Party’s base.

Harris’ Ascent

On the eve of the Democratic Party’s convention, The New York Times reported that “the vice president remains largely undefined.” Despite her and the party’s efforts to reintroduce her as forward thinking in comparison to Trump’s obsessions and commitments to a mythic past, with vague tweaks to Biden’s economic policies, as the Times later reported, Harris “is not offering sweeping change in policy. She is at heart an institutionalist… focused on granular impacts over broad society shifts.” She represents continuity of the Biden administration in the tradition of the Clinton-Obama neoliberal trajectory. In terms of foreign and military policies, her refusal to oppose massive new weapons shipments to Israel in the face of the Gaza genocide gives much of the game away. She will do what she can to maintain U.S.-led liberal internationalist hegemony.

Kamala Harris was born in 1964 to Donald J. Harris, an economics doctoral student from Jamaica, and Shyamala Goplan, who at age 19 came to the University of California in Berkeley from India to study nutrition and endocrinology. Contrary to Donald Trump’s calumny that Kamala only recently “turn[ed] Black” for political purposes, she is, like many Americans, multiracial and multicultural. At the University of California, her parents were described as a “power couple” in the school’s civil rights movement, her father being Black and her mother welcomed as a person of color. Donald and Shyamala wed in 1963 and divorced in 1972. Kamala and her younger sister Maya were raised primarily by their single, gritty, and loving mother, who continued her close ties to her family in India. Kamala visited her father on weekends.

She ran unsuccessfully in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, during which her most stunning moment came when she questioned Biden’s associations with segregationists and his early opposition to bussing to desegregate the nation’s schools.

Harris studied political science and economics at Howard, the elite historically Black university in Washington, D.C., graduating in 1986. There she was on the debate team and, signaling her political ambitions, was elected to the student council. From Howard, she returned to California, where she earned her law degree at the University of California’s premier Hastings College of the Law in 1989. The following year, she became deputy district attorney in Oakland, California, near San Francisco, and from 1990 to 1998 developed “a reputation for toughness as she prosecuted cases of gang violence, drug trafficking, and sexual abuse.” She became district attorney in 1998. In 2010 she narrowly won election as the state’s attorney general, becoming the first woman, African American, and South Asian to hold that office. As attorney general, she won a signal court battle with state banks over unfair practices in which she won roughly $20 billion in mortgage relief for homeowners. Her refusal to defend Proposition 8, which banned same sex marriage in California, led to that law being overturned.

Harris, who had campaigned for Obama in Iowa during the 2008 presidential primary, became a nationally influential political figure when she was invited to speak in the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Recognized as a “rising star,” she was elected to the Senate in 2016. There she served on the Select Committee on Intelligence, on the Judiciary Committee, and joined the Congressional Black Caucus. She gained national attention for her “prosecutorial” style in questioning witnesses, especially then Attorney-General Jeff Sessions, a close Trump ally, during investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. She ran unsuccessfully in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, during which her most stunning moment came when she questioned Biden’s associations with segregationists and his early opposition to bussing to desegregate the nation’s schools. She said, “That little girl [on the bus] was me.”

Harris failed in 2020 due to uninspired campaigning and criticisms that as California attorney general she failed to investigate police misconduct, including police shootings. Those criticisms fell aside after she became a leading advocate of reform after the brutal police murder of George Floyd that triggered massive and sometimes violent nationwide protests and demands for change.

In the wake of the powerful Black Lives Matter protests, Joe Biden recognized his need to choose a Black woman as his vice presidential running mate if he was to win the critical support of Black women voters. Harris was recruited, and was elected the first woman of color to become vice-president. After the Supreme Court’s antediluvian ruling on abortion, Harris became the administration’s leading advocate of women’s and reproductive rights. She was also tasked with addressing the forces fueling migration from Mexico, protecting voting rights being undermined by racist Republican forces, and, in her role as a serious Washington insider, she set the record for the most tie-breaking votes in the Senate by a vice president.

The Harris-Walz Social and Economic Policy Agenda

Not since the Vietnam War have foreign and military factors been determinative in the outcome of U.S. national elections. True, deep schisms in the Democratic Party over support for Israel’s Gaza genocide threaten to fracture the Democratic coalition, but the most salient issues in the election are domestic: the economy, the struggle for racial justice and against white supremacy, related issues of immigration, constitutional democracy, and reproductive rights.

The U.S. Civil War’s “Lost Cause” of white supremacy ideology remains a driving force in U.S. political culture. We saw this when Donald Trump blessed the “very fine people” in the notorious 2017 Charlottesville neo-Nazi march and again when Confederate flags led the January 6 failed coup d’etat. From Jim Crow apartheid, the near slavery of Southern sharecropping, and Ku Klux Klan terrorism (Trump’s father was detained at a Klan rally) to systemic racial ballot box obstacles and discriminatory immigration and economic policies, campaigning to entrench white supremacy and the struggle to overturn it have profoundly defined U.S. politics. The modern version didn’t begin with Trump. Recall Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”; Ronald Reagan campaigning on “states’ rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of 1960s assassinations of civil rights activists; and George H.W. Bush’s racist Willie Horton television ads.

In an era of economic insecurity, aggravated by the export of U.S. jobs to low-wage platforms from China and Vietnam to Mexico, Donald Trump has generated cult-like white working class support with unvarnished divide and conquer calls and policies promoting white Christian nationalism: “Our inner cities, African Americans, Hispanics are living in hell.” He has charged that Former U.S. President Barack Obama isn’t American. Immigrants, he wailed, are “animals.” Biden would “hurt God” and target Christians, and the list goes on. The most obvious determinant of who supports Trump is whether he or she is racist.

These are the issues on which what may prove to be the nation’s most important election will be fought and won.

It was in these contexts—economic insecurity, racism, misogyny, and increasing authoritarianism—that Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz developed their domestic policy priorities. Still vaguely defined commitments to a “caring” or “opportunity economy” and advocacy of abortion rights are in the fore. In the wake of Biden’s massive post-pandemic restructuring of the U.S. economy, Harris and Walz seek to do little more than fine-tune Bidenomics.

Campaigning with the slogan “She’s for the middle class because she is from the middle class,” Kamala gave her “big” economic policy speech days before the Democratic convention. While Trump responded that Harris and Walz are “communists” and The Washington Post editorialized that her plan is little more than “populist gimmicks,” the Nobel economic laureate Paul Krugman wrote that they had “staked out a moderately center-left position, not too different from President Biden’s original Build Back Better agenda.” Most important are her calls for restoring the now expired expanded child tax credit, which early in the Biden administration reduced child poverty by nearly half. In the midst of the national housing crisis, the Harris-Walz economic plan calls for tax incentives for home builders and support for first-time home buyers. This may prove to be modestly helpful, but it fails to address the central cause of the housing shortage: zoning laws that block new housing construction. Harris’ call for legislation to ban grocery price gouging—a major driver of inflation—has been misrepresented by Republicans committed to the freedom to exploit and by much of the press as “price controls,” but we still await explanations about how the ban would be implemented.

Harris’ other tax policies include reversing the 2017 Trump trillion dollar a year tax cut for the wealthy, increasing the corporate taxation rate from 21% to 28%, her pledge not to raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 a year, and joining Trump’s pledge to end federal taxation on tips, a commitment that could contribute to winning Nevada’s electoral votes.

Even as Trump has dominates plutocratic billionaire support, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, of Yale University’s School of Management, argues that there are reasons why “CEOs are excited about Kamala Harris.” For them she represents fidelity to the rule of law and thus would be a bastion against Trump again “inserting himself into private business and regulatory processes to inflict personal vendettas.” Harris is less committed to antitrust court challenges than Biden. Unlike Trump, Harris’ tax policies don’t promise massive increases in the national debt that would generate economic instability. Immigrant reform would provide corporations needed access to skilled immigrant workers, not to mention that currently half of all billion-dollar startups have been initiated by former immigrant students. And, having cut her political teeth in the San Francisco Bay area, including Silicon Valley, Kamala Harris has deep ties to a significant number of the nation’s most influential corporate leaders.

Women’s energy is the driving force of the Harris-Walz campaign. More important than shattering the glass ceiling—the centerpiece of Hillary Clinton’s stem-winding convention speech—has been resistance to the extremist Supreme Court’s overturning of women’s right to abortion in 2022, termed “reproductive freedom” in the Harris campaign. Access to abortion is now dependent on state, not national, legislation, and it has been seriously curtailed or outlawed in 22 states. More restrictions are on the drawing boards. Alabama’s MAGA supreme court is leading the charge with its decision that embryos are “unborn children” and its banning of in vitro fertilization (IVF). U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thomas recently signaled that legal access to contraceptives may be next to be challenged. And both JD Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, and Trump’s Project 2025 advocate policies akin to relegating women to a 21st century version of being barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.

Rallying for the right to choose has been a powerful driver of recent women’s political engagement and a winning formula for Democrats. In every state where referendums to restore the right to abortion have been held, including conservative states like Kansas, pro-choice advocates have prevailed. Kamala Harris has been a leading force within the Biden administration in pressing for the restoration of the Roe vs. Wade right to abortion, saying among other things that “this generation now has fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers.” These commitments were on display during the first night of the convention when delegates were brought to tears by Hadley Duvall’s testimony about being denied an abortion as a 12 year old after having been raped by her stepfather, and by Amanda Zurawski and Kaitlyn Joshua who testified about being denied abortions during dangerous failed pregnancies.

Adding to the campaign’s bona fides on reproductive freedom is former football coach Walz. We have been reminded of his history as a strong advocate of abortion rights, including his participation with Vice President Harris in a March 2024 visit to a Planned Parenthood health center that provides abortions.

And then there is race. Since her college days and driven by her experiences as a woman of color, Harris has been a dedicated advocate of civil rights. Like Biden and Obama, Harris correctly warns that freedom in the U.S. is “under profound threat.” In a recent keynote address to the South Carolina chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she urged resistance to Republican and Supreme Court assaults on voting and reproductive rights, the denial of Black history, and book bans that have become rampant in Republican-controlled states and communities. And, like Barack Obama, to avoid further aggravating national racial and gender divisions, Kamala Harris underplays her precedent-breaking roles as the first woman and person of color to be vice-president and to lead a major party ticket for the presidency. Others do that for her.

Contrary to Republican charges, Vice President Harris is hardly responsible for the continuing tide of immigration across the U.S. southern border. Not the country’s “immigration czar” as the Republicans charge, in 2021 she was assigned the role of addressing the “root cause” of immigration to the U.S. from Central America and Mexico. In that role she secured $4.2 billion in private funding for job creation in Central America, and controversially in Guatemala she told Central Americans, “Do not come. Do not come… If you come to our border, you will be turned back.”

Not an anti-immigrant bigot, Harris supported President Biden’s efforts to negotiate a bipartisan border security and immigration deal with Republicans. That effort was blocked by Donald Trump when he sought political advantage by sowing further chaos. Harris has signaled a somewhat harder line on border control, matched with a still-to-be-defined “path to citizenship” for at least some immigrants who are already in the country. Should Democrats regain control of Congress, we should expect renewed efforts for immigration reform, especially as the U.S. remains in need of skilled and unskilled workers.

When it comes to the existential climate emergency, Reuters reports that “opinion polls show broad support for tackling climate change, especially among younger voters.” But unfortunately, the Harris-Walz campaign seeks to avoid alienating anyone. Several aides describe Harris’ plan on controversial energy issues as one of “strategic ambiguity.” Walz did win meaningful improvements in Minnesota’s pollution standards for automobiles, and as a Senator Harris sought to address deadly and disproportionate levels of pollution in Black and Hispanic communities. But to protect jobs and win votes in Pennsylvania and several Midwestern states, Harris has reversed her earlier support for a ban on fracking to produce more oil. As a member of Congress, Walz voted to complete construction of the deeply controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline and pushed for the lifting of Minnesota’s moratorium on building nuclear plants. Not an encouraging record.

There are just over 10 weeks before now and election day. Developments in the Middle East and Ukraine War or an October surprise could change the equation. But these are the issues on which what may prove to be the nation’s most important election will be fought and won.

Watch tomorrow for Part II: Who Is Kamala Harris? Aggressive Foreign and Military Policies.

With Labor Day 2024 upon us, it is important to critically reflect on the current state of the U.S. labor movement and the challenges that it faces in an environment where Big Business dominates the economy and mainstream society continues to abide allegiance to the values of a Lockean political culture in which ruthless individualism reigns supreme. To put it mildly, without a strong labor movement and a public spirit guiding our institutions, the country will never succeed in realizing the vision of a just and fair society.

However, the news on the labor front is not very encouraging. The share of U.S. workers who belong to a union has been declining since the early 1980s—an era which coincides with the full swing of the neoliberal counterrevolution and deindustrialization. In 1983, the first year for which comparable data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and declined to 11.1 percent in 2015.

In 2021, the union membership rate was 10.3 percent and dropped to 10.1 percent in 2022. In 2023, union membership declined even further to 10.0 percent, which is a historic low.

The irony is that the United States has seen a “union boom” over the last couple of years. Thousands of employees at Starbucks stores across the country have voted to unionize and workers at Amazon warehouses and Trader Joe’s, grad students, and Uber and Lyft drivers also joined the unionization fight. But the data, as cited above, tells a different story. The share of U.S. workers belonging to a union continues to decline and is now at the lowest rate in history. Today, organized labor in the United States is dominated by public-sector employees, which is more than five times higher than the 6 percent rate of private-sector employees.

In the U.S., it is politics—manifested in the form of a vicious class struggle orchestrated from the economic elite and its supporters—that keeps workers from joining or creating a union.

The United States is near the bottom among industrialized democracies when it comes to union membership rates. The average level of union membership across the European Union (EU) is 23 percent, but the average is held down by relatively low levels of membership in some large EU states, such as Germany with 18 percent and France with 8 percent. However, even in countries where union density is lower, such as in France, virtually all workers are covered by a collective bargaining agreement. In Denmark, Sweden and Finland, union density is 70 percent. Incidentally, the Nordic countries consistently rank among the happiest nations in the world. In the latest World Happiness Report, the United States doesn’t even make the top 20 list. Trade union density is even higher in Africa and most parts of Asia than it is in the United States.

Why is union membership in the United States so low? This is something of an anomaly considering the fact that polls consistently reveal that majorities of U.S. adults see the decline in union membership as bad for the country and for working people. It is mostly ultra-conservatives and reactionary think tanks like the Hoover Institution that believe that the decline of unions is good news.

Globalization, technology, and the transformation of an industrial economy into a service-oriented society are the most common reasons offered for the decline of U.S. unions. However, these explanations, even when put together, are not sufficient in explaining why the U.S. has one of the lowest union membership rates in the world. Europe is much more open than the United States, according to the International Monetary Fund. Thus, globalization alone cannot be an explanation for the general decline in unionization in the U.S. Europe’s technology lags behind the U.S., but it is not technology but rather institutional arrangements and intentional policy decisions that succeed in altering in significant ways the balance between capital and labor that can explain why union membership has plateaued at 10 percent among workers in the United States. We must acknowledge that neoliberalism itself is not a monolithic process; rather, it is affected by a variety of domestic pressures and thus plays out differently in different national contexts.

In the U.S., it is politics—manifested in the form of a vicious class struggle orchestrated from the economic elite and its supporters—that keeps workers from joining or creating a union. The basic rights of U.S. workers to unionize and engage in collective bargaining have been under attack throughout the history of U.S. capitalism. Strikes figured prominently during the height of the industrialization era and well into the twentieth century, with immigrant workers from Ireland, Italy and Germany being at the forefront of labor radicalism, but so did employer and government violence directed against striking workers. The U.S. has the most violent labor history in the western world. The U.S. government may be the only government in the industrialized world that has engaged in systematic massacres of striking workers.

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), also known as the Wagner Act, was passed in July 1935. The Act, whose broad intention was to guarantee employees “the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid and protection” was probably instrumental in the dramatic increase in unionization rates that was witnessed from the late 1930s to the 1950s, hitting its apex at 32 percent; yet, its failures are well established and can, conversely, be attributed to the decline in private sector unionization rates that started taking place following their peak in the late 1950s. In fact, NLRA, however ironic this may sound, may be responsible for the creation of “a vibrant non-union sector instead.”

The Supreme Court, of course, has also been instrumental in creating a “vibrant non-union sector.” The Court has consistently made decisions that limit union power, including the right to strike. Rather typical here was the stance taken by the union-busting Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor when she said that employees who strike in support of union bargaining “gamble” their jobs.

In no other country in the western world is anti-union consulting as huge of an industry as it is in the United States.

Indeed, in no other country in the western world has the right to strike been as severely undermined as in the U.S. In fact, U.S. labor law is an outright failure when it comes to safeguarding one of the key International Labor Organization (ILO) principles, which is to guarantee the right to strike, as it allows employers to enjoy the right to replace workers who strike for better wages and conditions.

Indeed, in no other country in the western world is anti-union consulting as huge of an industry as it is in the United States. As shocking as it may sound, it’s estimated that employers spend more than $400 million per year in hiring “union-avoidance” consultants.

Moreover, “the party of the people” is equally guilty for throwing U.S. workers under the bus. All three living Democratic presidents (Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton) let down unions and certainly were no friends to working people. In fact, they worked ceaselessly to promote neoliberalism and overall policies that were a disaster for labor, with Clinton leading the pack.

But no narrative for the dismal state of unionization in the U.S. can be fully complete if the role that unions themselves played in undermining the vision and the goals of the labor movement can be left out. As David N. Gibbs points out in his outstanding book The Revolt of the Rich, the largest union in the country, the AFL-CIO, “was conceived on very conservative terms as an institutional reaction against leftist strains within the labor movement” and one of its main activities was working with the Central Intelligence Agency in fighting communism both at home and abroad. Getting rid of class struggle unionism was a primary objective of the AFL-CIO even when the union had begun its steady decline. Worse still, the ties between mafia and labor unions, which go back to the early 1930s, had reached such a high point by the late 1950 that government investigation on labor racketeering got underway that in the ensuing decades would lead to convictions of major labor leader and mob figures. As James B. Jacobs argues in Mobsters, Unions, and the Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement, “labor racketeering” was a major feature of U.S. organized labor and contributed in a very big way to the decline of U.S. trade unionism.

We need unions as they are absolutely a critical force in the struggle to create a fair and just society.

The U.S. labor movement has been experiencing a renaissance of sorts over the last few years, although the truth of the matter is that union membership remains stagnant. The challenges ahead are indeed immense as there is no alternative left party in the U.S. and no social democratic traditions which rely on trade unions for softening the injustices inflicted by the capitalist system. U.S. capitalism is brutal and the reactionary forces, which lead all the way up to the Supreme Court, are extremely powerful, well organized, and massively funded.

Yet, we need unions as they are absolutely a critical force in the struggle to create a fair and just society. We need to rebuild the labor movement, and that means not going back to the kind of unions that existed in the postwar era. We need unions with a radical vision, unions that exert power in the workplace and society. There is no reason why a service-based economy, which is mainly associated with low wages and insecure employment, should offer less opportunities for union membership. In this context, there is much to learn from the experience of the Union of Southern Service Workers, a union that doesn’t shy away from taking militant action on the job against low pay and dangerous work conditions and to demand a seat at the table.

Rejecting business unionism and renewing in turn labor militancy is the only way to increase union membership and fight back labor exploitation and inequality.

No matter what his advisers caution, Donald Trump cannot resist giving negative, insulting nicknames to his opponents and critics. Nor can the mass media resist reprinting them in CAPITAL LETTERS, without giving the named persons a right of reply. He gets a free ride day after day, month after month, year after year.

Trump and his pollsters think the nicknames stick in enough people’s minds to make this an effective rhetorical tactic. Trump’s favorites include “crooked Joe Biden,” or “Lying Ted Cruz,” or “Crazy Nancy Pelosi.”

The targeted politicians have chosen not to respond with their own nicknames for the mega-slanderer-in-chief, not wanting to lower themselves into his mud pile. Nor do they ask their allies to hurl similar invectives that would be compelling because they would be so accurate.

The old saying that you have to give a bully his own medicine is an “evergreen” because it works. Would the New York Times continue to repeat Trump’s slurs if he immediately got slurred back in kind? Would the television networks keep conveying Trump’s insulting nicknames were he to become enmeshed by others mocking him and hurling insults with similar frequency?

It is astonishing how lacking in introspection the mainstream media has been about being so used, so frequently by this failed gambling tsar who took them for such a ride in 2016.

Not likely. Pretty soon Trump would realize that his foul-mouth utterances are buying a torrent of nickname backlashes. He is, you may recall, notoriously sensitive to personal criticism. Thin-skinned, he is.

One episode illustrates what can happen with a tit-for-tat response. When Trump was president, he went to a Washington Nationals baseball game, and a crowd started chanting “Lock him up.” This was after he would exhort his mass rallies to chant “Lock her up” Interestingly, the crooked Hillary chants ceased during his following rallies. Trump got a dose of his own medicine.

Without such neutralizing reciprocity, Trump will intensify his personal epithets against Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz in the remaining weeks before the November 5th election. Such a demeaning repetitive tactic is also an insult to most voters, who want candidates to focus on ways and means to improve their livelihoods, further their aspirations, and be more honest.

It is astonishing how lacking in introspection the mainstream media has been about being so used, so frequently by this failed gambling tsar who took them for such a ride in 2016. (See, NationalPopularVote.com).

Maybe some suggested nicknames will stimulate the media to stop playing his game, as it reports his regular contempt, just to get more ratings or readers. Think of our Founding Fathers and their wishes for elevated discourse.

Accurate nicknames Donald Trump will Dislike:

1. Dumb Donald
2. Convicted Crook Donald Trump
3. Lying Donald
4. Delusional Donald
5. Dangerous Donald
6. Disgusting Donald
7. Serial Law-breaker Donald
8. Deceiver Donald
9. Loser Donald
10. Trump-serial abuser of women
11. Lazy Donald
12. Violence Inciter Donald
13. Trump-obstructor of Justice
14. Dictator Donald
15. Dictator-lover Donald
16. Weak Donald
17. Dishonest Donald
18. Deadly Donald – Early Covid Denier
19. Fake Donald
20. Tax Escapee Donald
21. Unstable Donald
22. The Lyin’ King
23. Cheating Donald
24. Low IQ DONALD
25. Racist Trump
26. Know-Nothing Donald
27. Know It All Trump
28. Insecure Donald
29. Don the Con
30. The Incompetent Trump
31. Trump the Grifter
32. Betrayer Trump
33. Greedy Trump
34. Pardon Myself Donald
35. “I am the Law” says Lawless Donald
36. Corrupt Don
37. Ignorant Don
38. Bragging Trump
39. Trump Fantasy Land
40. Daily Lawbreaking Donald
41. Egomaniacal Donald
42. The Trump Dump

There is an important utility to such nicknames. They start reminding people of what Trump did to America in his four nightmarish years at the White House. The Democratic Party still has not reminded a voting bloc with short memories about Trump’s daily lies and sugarcoating of his record – from deadly early Covid denial to corruption and self-enrichment to promoting Wall Street over Main Street to Big Business runaway controls over Americans, to climate-violence-denial, to bashing the rights of consumers and workers, to giant tax cuts to the super-rich like him, to thumbing his nose at the Constitution and the rule of law, to obstruction of justice “as a way of life” in the White House, in the words of his former aide John Bolton.

Replaying that record is a must to dissolve the fantasies Trump weaves about his glorious four-year service.

The motivating, readable, relevant book for this critical voter education is “WRECKING AMERICA: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All” (2020) – the most usable book on Trump’s nightmarish term in office. Mark Green and I also wrote this paperback for any return engagement. “Lest we forget.”

During a week of action focused on United Nations potential to end Israel’s genocidal attacks, I was part of a coalition that met with 12 different permanent missions to the U.N. We urged that if countries that are parties to the Genocide Convention or the Geneva Conventions stop trading with Israel as international law demands, (cf. the July 19 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice), the genocide will end quickly.

In each encounter at a Permanent Mission to the U.N., its staff asked if we, as U.S. citizens, have addressed our government’s unwavering support for the genocide against impoverished and forcibly displaced people.

It was a deeply meaningful moment when the Irish Ambassador to the United Nations showed our delegation a miniature replica of John Behan’s poignant statue depicting the Irish exodus—it showed weary, hungry people disembarking from a boat after a stormy ocean voyage.

“You have to see each one of these as a human being,” he said.

The U.S. government is complicit in genocide, and we, in whose name it is acting, are also complicit if we remain silent.

My mother was an Irish indentured servant first in Ireland and then in England. As things go, she was among the more fortunate. She never endured being chained day and night in the Middle Passage of a slave ship carrying captives here, or in a human trafficker’s overcrowded, lethally airless truck container. Nor did she have to cling to the remains of an overcrowded ship to keep from drowning after it capsized in the Mediterranean.

Life in Gaza is a desperate moment-to-moment ordeal of clinging to such wreckage, trying to stay above water, to stay alive, while both major U.S. political parties struggle to push you under.

In an article published by The Guardian, Israeli-American Omer Bartov, an eminent Holocaust historian and expert on genocide, lamented the unwillingness of many Israelis—some of whom are his friends, neighbors, colleagues, and even former students—to see Palestinians as human beings. He comments: “Many of my friends… feel that in the struggle between justice and existence, existence must win out… it is our own cause that must be triumphant, no matter the price… This feeling did not appear suddenly on 7 October.”

Is it futile to ask Israelis to reconsider this vengeance—avenging hundreds of civilians with several hundred thousand, half of them children—while the U.S. continues to arm Israel for the task?

Bartov continues:

By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that… Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocidal actions… the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words… as the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention puts it… Israel was acting “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part,” the Palestinian population in Gaza, “as such, by killing, causing serious harm… inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction.”

How can United States citizens cope in a nation not just gone mad on war, but gone mad on genocide? We do not have to cope with lingering, state-enforced starvation or the memory of our lifeless children pulled from under rubble. But we must cope with our complicity.

When we can, we must act.

We cannot say we did not know. The United Nations member states watch the entire edifice of international law crumble as a genocide is broadcast across our screens. Israeli military forces may have killed close to 200,000 Gazans although only 40,000 bodies have been recovered for counting. The Israeli government’s siege is starving Palestinian children and has brought Gaza to the brink of a full-blown famine. Meanwhile, polio has made a return.

From September 10 to September 30, World BEYOND War, Code Pink, Veterans For Peace, Pax Christi, and other coalition partners will leaflet, demonstrate, and nonviolently act to expose and oppose Israeli and U.S. actions that flout international law. We will gather before both the United States’ U.N. Mission and the Israeli Consulate demanding both nations desist from further massacres, forcible displacement, and the use of starvation and disease as weapons.

We will remind people that Israel possesses thermonuclear weapons but refuses to acknowledge this fact and thereby avoids any assessment or safeguards by the International Atomic Energy Association and any involvement in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

We will express earnest concern both for Hamas’ prisoners and the more than 3,000 Palestinians incarcerated without charge by Israel, including women and children.

Currently, the United States and Israel have effectively decided on death for the remaining hostages rather than a settlement that would free Palestinian women and children. In a reckless bid to spark a U.S.-Iran war, Israel recently assassinated, in Tehran, the chief Hamas negotiator for a hostage release.

And still the U.S.’ arms flow continues.

Last week, the world watched as the Democratic Party leadership, at its convention, squelched voices of the Uncommitted delegates. DNC speakers repeated the lie that their party was seeking a cease-fire, while flatly refusing to stop replacing the guns and missiles Israel has used to shed blood and destroy infrastructure.

We all should rely on the covenant virtues of traditional Judaism, those virtues celebrated as essential for survival: truth, justice, and forgiving love. We should appeal to secular and faith-based people across the United States as we face precarities of nuclear annihilation and ecological collapse. Securing a better future for all children requires bolstering respect for human rights, searching always for ways to abolish war.

The U.S. government is complicit in genocide, and we, in whose name it is acting, are also complicit if we remain silent.

It is time for the United Nations to liberate itself from a Security Council structure giving five permanent, nuclear-armed members a vise-like grip on the world’s ability to counter the scourge of war. We must join with the call of the South African government, which bravely upheld international law. We must clamor for the General Assembly to enact the “Uniting for Peace” resolution.

As the forthright Jewish delegate at last week’s DNC, after he and two others unfurled a banner reading “STOP ARMING ISRAEL,” said, “Never again means never again!”

We invite you to join us. https://events.worldbeyondwar.org/

On the first night of the Democratic convention, United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain showed how to build working class support for the Harris-Walz ticket. And it wasn’t his “Donald Trump is a Scab” line and t-shirt.

It was his discussion of corporate power:

“Corporate greed turns blue-collar blood, sweat and tears into Wall Street stock buybacks and CEO jackpots.”

As far as I know, Fain was the only convention speaker who mentioned stock buybacks. He also zeroed in on job instability, as he called out Stellantis for refusing to honor its contract commitment to reopen a plant in Michigan.

And then he called out Trump for gloating over the firing of striking workers—a reference to Trump’s recent interview with Elon Musk, during which Trump said:

Well, you, you’re the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in and you just say, “You want to quit?” They go on strike. I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, “That’s okay. You’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone,” and you are the greatest. You would be very good.

Fain knows that Trump is not just praising Musk for illegally firing workers who want to organize a union. “Greatest cutter” also refers to the tens of thousands of workers Musk slashed from Twitter’s headcount to reduce costs to cover the debt service of his purchase. Trump showed his true affinity to corporate greed as he relished being with “the greatest cutter,” a man who knows how to get richer by slashing jobs.

Trump showed his true affinity to corporate greed as he relished being with “the greatest cutter,” a man who knows how to get richer by slashing jobs.

Fain also understands the intimate connection between stock buybacks and job insecurity. All too often mass layoffs are used to finance stock buybacks, the corporate method of choice for moving tax-free money into the coffers of Wall Street investors and CEOs. (A stock buyback is a form of stock manipulation. A corporation uses its revenues to buy back its own shares, reducing the number of shares available, thereby raising each share’s price. This increases the value of the stock incentives owed to corporate executives as compensation and to Wall Street investors, who own most of the corporate stock. The increased value is eventually subject to the capital gains tax, which is only owed when the stocks are sold, and is taxed at a lower rate than regular income, including dividends.)

The Democratic Party platform mildly addresses stock buybacks by proposing to raise the tax on them from one percent to four percent. It also comes very close to adopting a proposal I have been hawking over the past year: that tax-payer money awarded through federal contracts (about $700 billion per year) should not be used to lay off taxpayers and finance stock buybacks. The language in the platform states, “Taxpayer money should not be used to pay out dividends, fund stock buybacks, or give raises to executives,” (p 12). Unfortunately, the reference covers only past Covid-19 relief funds and not all federal contracts.

More importantly, the platform does not make the all-important connection between stock buybacks and mass layoffs. In fact, the 91-page platform avoids any mention at all of mass layoffs. Instead, it features “Building a Stronger, Fairer Economy,” which includes “Investing in the Engines of Job Creation.” That’s because it’s easier to talk about providing corporate incentives to create jobs in the future, rather than stopping corporations from slashing jobs to finance stock buybacks right now.

But Fain knows that the working class needs the Democrats to stop financialized mass layoffs. Hardly a day goes by without another corporation announcing layoffs while also engaging in stock buybacks. It’s a disease.

Hardly a day goes by without another corporation announcing layoffs while also engaging in stock buybacks. It’s a disease.

Most importantly Fain is telling the Democrats that job stability is the key to what “the economy” means to working people. In our society, if you don’t have a job, you have next to nothing. Studies show that losing your job is one of the most traumatic experiences anyone can experience. Sure, if you are highly skilled and plugged into elite networks, you can easily if not painlessly find new employment. But if you live in a rural area and a facility shuts down, you and a thousand of your neighbors will be scrambling to land the last jobs at the Dollar Store and Walmart.

It's not too late for the Democrats to attack Trump and Vance with one simple proposal—no compulsory layoffs at any corporation that conducts stock buybacks. If the corporation has the money to return to Wall Street and CEOs, then corporations have more than enough money to fund a program of non-compulsory layoffs. That means reductions in the workforce would only be achieved voluntarily through corporate offers of pay and benefit packages. No one would be forced to leave. In fact, many corporations already use non-compulsory buyouts for their higher-level employees.

Think for a second about how that might work. Some workers, especially those nearing retirement or who have sufficient savings, might jump at the offers. So might those who already were eyeing new careers. But workers in more difficult economic situations would still have their jobs and avoid the painful hardships associated with mass layoffs. This proposal is more than affordable considering the hundreds of billions of dollars that go to stock buybacks each year—$773 billion in 2023 alone. Let’s see some of that go into the pockets of workers, rather than exclusively to executives and shareholders.

This proposal is more than affordable considering the hundreds of billions of dollars that go to stock buybacks each year—$773 billion in 2023 alone.

Trump and Vance, for all their talk about supporting working people, could never support such a program. Their Wall Street backers and corporate sponsors would go bonkers. Their unimaginable wealth was built stripping money out of the system, not investing in it. That leaves the door wide open for the Democrats to follow Fain into the heart of the working class, especially in the all-important states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

But it won’t be easy for many Democrats to break free from the debilitating fatalism that layoffs are just a natural part of capitalism, more like a law of nature that cannot be controlled. It means breaking away from the notion that the unstoppable march of new technologies like AI and trade are the real job killers. They are not. It means waking up to acknowledge what we all sense—corporate greed is destroying job stability, and it’s got to stop.

            The U.S. government wastes approximately $4.5 trillion each year. “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money,” Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, an Illinois Republican, famously said, and said often. In this case, you’re talking about thousands of billions. ($4.5 trillion is the sum total of annual military spending that exceeds what we need to defend the United States homeland, the higher interest paid on the national debt due to the Fed’s attempts to fight inflation, federal subsidies paid to people and companies who don’t qualify for them, uncollected taxes the IRS doesn’t even attempt to get and foreign aid, much of it to rich countries.)

            So much money, so little imagination.

            The 2024 presidential campaign highlights the small-bore thinking that dominates electioneering and journalistic punditry. Trump and the Republicans called for eliminating taxes on tips; Harris and the Democrats followed suit. If enacted, this change would only affect 2.5% of wage earners.

GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance suggested a $5,000 increase in the earned income tax credit; Harris called and raised to $6,000. Only 13% of taxpayers qualify for that benefit.

Harris wants to pay a subsidy to first-time home buyers. Good news: it would apply to roughly one out of four people buying a house or condo in the next few years. Bad news: the idea is dead in Congress, and not only because of intransigent Republicans.

And that’s assuming those ideas don’t wither on the vine. Americans are broke, angry, resentful and worried sick, but those who want to lead them don’t seem to have any interest in directly addressing their concerns. In their first sit-down interview with a journalist, Harris and her running mate Tim Walz refused to name a single thing they would do on day one.

            Candidates are nibbling around the edges of big systemic problems like the unaffordable rents and mortgages and ignoring others, like the existential threat to humanity presented by climate change, entirely. The political system is unresponsive to our wants and needs, and we know why. Lobbyists and big corporate donors with a vested interest in the status quo pay to install cooperative candidates who promise that nothing will fundamentally change and to oppose and remove those who resist them and their interests. Educational institutions purge and blacklist teachers who challenge the dominant corporatist narrative. The news media are loathe to challenge the half-dozen corporate leviathans that own them and do not hire new investigative reporters or rebellious outsiders who threaten to rock the boat. Citizens, surveying this bleak landscape of conformity and corruption, have concluded that the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon. Voters feel trapped, forced to choose between two nearly identically unpalatable parties; they opt out entirely or cast hate votes against the party and candidate they despise most.

            There could be a better way.

Americans consume politics passively. During election campaigns, those of us who take an interest in politics tune in to check what the two major parties and their candidates have to offer. If we’re really engaged, we volunteer to phone bank and talk to our neighbors on behalf of a contender. We may pay out a donation. But we don’t exert political pressure. Politics is a section of the newspaper, a subject link on a website or an app, a form of entertainment delivered in the same format as sports, traffic, weather and streaming movies.

It is different in many other countries. Politics are an activity, something you participate in personally. Protest marches, national strikes and other forms of direct action in the streets are not considered outlandish alternative forms of politicking outside the normal system, as they are here. These tactics, which can shut down cities and might even bring down a government, are legitimate forms of confrontation that can force changes that an ossified electoral democracy would otherwise never consider. At their best, they are so dangerous-seeming that the mere fear of provoking a riot can prompt the ruling class to yield to the people’s demands without anyone having to draw up a picket sign or throw a Molotov cocktail.

In the absence of a revolutionary leftist organization, the periodic spasms of activism we see in the United States—Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, the Battle of Seattle—rarely result in lasting improvements in people’s living and working conditions. We absolutely need such an organization. Such an organization would, in most countries, come up with a list of demands it would use to recruit members and set standards for what the elites would need to concede should they desire to remain in power with the active consent of the governed. But there are currently too many obstacles in our duopolistic political culture to allow such a formation to gain traction.

So let’s start with demands. The first step of radical organizing is to examine the structure of society and its structure as it is and to imagine how they could be reordered and the fruits of its labor redistributed in a fairer, more equitable and more just way. What and how much do we have? How are we spending and dividing these items? How could we do it better?

What should be clear to everyone is that the current rubric, in which we send billions of dollars to foreign countries at the same time American citizens sleep out in the street and go bankrupt from paying medical bills and can’t go to college because it’s too expensive is stupid, rotten and ridiculous. The fact that neither major political party and neither major presidential candidate is willing or able to even begin to think about a different set of policy priorities that addresses the everyday concerns of the vast majority of people is the ultimate evidence of their illegitimacy. Fortunately, we don’t need them. We can figure out what we want and need.

We can demand improvements that, if the system chose to grant them, are realistic and viable. And if (when!) they deny us the better lives we deserve, we can build that revolutionary party we need to seize power and make it happen.

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

The post We Have Big Problems. The Parties Offer Tiny Solutions. first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

I’m pretty sure this newsletter will be obsessing over the American election between now and November—it is the most crucial contest in the crucial years, after all. But this has already been a year of democracy around the globe with half the world’s people going to the polls, and the results have so far been not as bad as they might have been—Prime Minister Narendra Modi rebuked in India, the far right checked in European elections and in France, and a smashing victory for Labour in the U.K., which is already yielding serious climate benefits.

On Wednesday Ed Milliband, the new Labour energy secretary, announced that the government would not back the companies that want to develop two huge new North Sea oilfields. This takes a bit of explanation, so bear with me. Oil giants Shell and Equinor want to develop the vast Jackdaw and Rosebank oil fields. The Tory government backed these projects, even though it led former Energy Secretary Chris Skidmore to resign from the party. In June, a court ruled that the environmental review for the projects was insufficient, because, crucially, the companies had failed to account for the emissions not just from the oil wells themselves, but from the eventual combustion of that oil in cars around the world. These so-called Scope 3 emissions are obviously the key problem with new gas and oil projects, but the industry has worked hard to keep them off the table—and after the court ruling the then-Tory government announced they would back those companies in court. Now the new sheriff, veteran environmentalist Milliband, has said no.

The fight isn’t over—the companies are appealing the court rulings. But here’s my prediction: This will be one of the first large oilfields that humans decide to leave in the ground because of climate concerns.

I say this because Labour has just won its massive majority, and can now govern for as much as five years before they have to face the voters again. Let’s say they don’t call a new election along the way and govern until 2029; with the massive growth in renewable energy now firmly underway, I don’t think that there will be the appetite among financiers for new oil fields then. They’ll certainly try—as Desmog Blog pointed out Thursday, a leading candidate for the new head of the beleaguered Tory party, Tom Tugendhat, has been merrily collecting money from various oil interests and is plumping for new North Sea drilling. But I think that by the time he or someone likes him returns to 10 Downing Street, the moment will have passed.

Here’s how the Tory MP for East Surrey and shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho put it on Twitter Thursday morning:

The final blow for the North Sea. No other major economy is taking this approach to its domestic energy supply.

She’s right that it’s groundbreaking, but she’s wrong that it’s entirely novel. Yes, too many rich countries continue to pump out hydrocarbons for export—tiny Tuvalu called out its Pacific neighbor Australia today for its endless willingness to serve as coal and gas merchant to the world. But there are signs of seismic shift. Remember that last fall in Dubai the world’s governments agreed in Dubai that the time had come to “transition away” from fossil fuels. A few weeks later the Biden administration paused approval of new LNG export terminals, which if it became permanent would in effect keep some serious portion of the gas in the Permian Basin of the southwest permanently underground. That is an even bigger climate bomb than North Sea oil, and though the pushback from fossil fuel interests has been fierce the White House has so far kept its nerve—and the basic issue (along with the ferocious justice impacts on Gulf communities) is the same Scope 3 emissions. It’s just too much carbon and methane to let loose in the atmosphere.

I fear that America’s noble stand may not last. In the wake of the Harris victory I’m working hard to help achieve, I think a lame duck session of Congress might well adopt the proposal from Big Oil Sens. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) and John Barasso (R-Wyo.) to trade permitting reform that will help expand renewables with new permits for those LNG facilities. I hope they don’t; important as those permitting reforms are, this one is a bad deal, as a new Sierra Club report released Thursday makes clear:

The LNG projects that would likely be immediately subject to the 90 day review deadline if this bill passes would have climate-damaging emissions equivalent to 154 coal-fired power plants. For comparison, as of August 2024, there are 145 coal plants left in the entire U.S. that don’t have a retirement date by 2030. When looking at all the projects that DOE is likely to review in the coming years, the climate toll goes up to that of 422 coal plants.

There are, again, two equally important and interlinked parts of the climate fight: keeping fossil fuels in the ground, and building out renewable energy to replace that locked-away coal, gas and oil. And the fight is unavoidably global.

Time is running out for Kamala Harris to distance herself from U.S. policies that enable Israel to continue with mass murder and genocide in Gaza. Polling shows that a pivot toward moral decency would improve her chances of defeating Donald Trump. But during her CNN interview Thursday night, Harris remained in lockstep with President Biden’s unconditional arming of Israel.

Two weeks ago, YouGov pollsters released findings in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania, three swing states now on a razor’s edge between Harris and Trump. “In Pennsylvania, 34 percent of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if the nominee vowed to withhold weapons to Israel, compared to 7 percent who said they would be less likely. The rest said it would make no difference,” the new journalism site Zeteo reported.

Results in the two other states were similar. “In Arizona, 35 percent said they’d be more likely, while 5 percent would be less likely. And in Georgia, 39 percent said they’d be more likely, also compared to 5 percent who would be less likely.”

But on CNN, Harris stuck to echoing Biden’s rhetoric—calling for a ceasefire while dodging the reality that the U.S. government could force one by implementing an arms embargo on Israel.

Huge U.S. shipments of weapons and bombs to Israel keep allowing it to massacre and starve civilians of all ages while violating federal statutes as well as international law. Days ago, Biden approved sending arms to Israel worth upwards of $20 billion. The transfers were called “sales,” but as policy analyst Stephen Semler pointed out, “most if not all of this matériel is paid for by U.S. taxpayers—Israel uses much of the military aid Congress approves for it effectively as a gift card to buy U.S.-made weapons.”

Just listening to Harris during her CNN interview, you’d be clueless about the realities that the UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, spelled out in a statement midway through August: “The people of Gaza are now grieving 40,000 Palestinian lives lost, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Most of the dead are women and children. This unimaginable situation is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war. On average, about 130 people have been killed every day in Gaza over the past 10 months. The scale of the Israeli military’s destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and places of worship is deeply shocking.”

Notably, Harris gave no indication of the number of Palestinian lives lost—while she did say that 1,200 Israelis, including “many young people,” lost their lives on October 7. That most of the Palestinians who died were children and women went unmentioned.

While the vice president said that Israelis were “massacred,” she relied on passive voice to say only that too many Palestinians “have been killed.”

After recording the interview, I transcribed it in full:

CNN’S Dana Bash: “President Biden has tried unsuccessfully to end the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. He’s been doing it for months and months along with you. Would you do anything differently, for example would you withhold some U.S. weapons shipments to Israel? That’s what a lot of people on the progressive left want you to do.”

Harris: “Let me be very clear. I am unequivocal and unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defense and its ability to defend itself, and that’s not gonna change. But let’s take a step back. October 7. Twelve hundred people are massacred, many young people who are simply attending a music festival. Women were horribly raped. As I said then I say today, Israel had a right, has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. Far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed, and we have got to get a deal done. We were in Doha, we have to get a deal done, this war must end --”

Bash: “And in the meantime --“

Harris: “And we must get a deal that is about getting the hostages out. I’ve met with the families of the American hostages. Let’s get the hostages out. Let’s get the ceasefire done.”

Bash: “But no change in policy? In terms of arms and so forth.”

Harris: “No. We have to get a deal done. Dana, we have to get a deal done. When you look at the significance of this to the families, to the people who are living in that region, a deal is not only the right thing to do to end this war, but will unlock so much of what must happen next. I remain committed, since I’ve been on October 8, to what we must do to work toward a two-state solution, where Israel is secure and in equal measure the Palestinians have security and self-determination and dignity.”

When I heard Harris say “I remain committed,” I felt sure that the phrase “two-state solution” could not be far behind. For U.S. politicians and pundits, it has become a handy slogan to assert virtuous intent—rendered more and more absurd as Israel’s terroristic ethnic cleansing persists in Gaza and escalates in the occupied West Bank. And as genocide continues to gain momentum.

There is every reason to believe that Donald Trump—who said this summer that the president should let Israel “finish the job”—would be even worse than Biden as an accomplice to Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian people. But that’s no reason to evade the unconscionable complicity of President Biden in the daily mass atrocities.

There is every reason to believe that Donald Trump... would be even worse than Biden as an accomplice to Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian people. But that’s no reason to evade the unconscionable complicity of President Biden in the daily mass atrocities.

A suction tube of euphemisms and evasion has captured many a partisan mind. And so it was from the podium of the Democratic National Convention, when the usually admirable Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez descended into making the groundless claim that Harris “is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing the hostages home.”

In sharp contrast, with horrors in Gaza continuing, fellow Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib has never taken the easy way out. As she has done countless times since last fall, on Thursday she sent out a truthful and disturbing message.

“Palestinian Americans feel invisible, with our trauma and pain unseen and ignored by both Democrats and Republicans,” Tlaib wrote. “We want action to stop the horrific massacres of our families and polling shows that, regardless of political party, the majority of Americans are with us. . . . Yet, even after over 600 weapons shipments since October, including fighter jets, high explosive mortars, and more, the Biden administration has approved another $20 billion in weapons for the Israeli military to commit well-documented war crimes and continue to murder Palestinian children and civilians.”

And Tlaib wrote: “An arms embargo to stop the genocide is not just the moral, just, and right thing to do. It is also good politics.”

Whether Kamala Harris will ever really get the message is unclear.

By Ralph Nader August 30, 2024 No matter what his advisers caution, Donald Trump cannot resist giving negative, insulting nicknames to his opponents and critics. Nor can the mass media resist reprinting them in CAPITAL LETTERS, without giving the named persons a right of reply. He gets a free ride day after day, month after…

I was honored to be at the White House this month for the Inflation Reduction Act anniversary event, featuring Americans sharing their stories of saving money and saving lives.

Thank you to the millions of people fighting every day for lower drug prices, to Congress for passing the Inflation Reduction Act, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris for casting the deciding vote in the Senate, and President Joe Biden for signing it into law.

Meet Bob Parant, from New York. He’s a 71-year-old man who has been living with type 1 diabetes for over fifty years. He lost his leg in 2010, and became eligible for Medicare. Before the Inflation Reduction Act, the last price Bob paid for a vial of insulin was $580, which was “horrendous.”

We have made so much progress on healthcare. But as everyone reading this knows, there is so much more to do.

Listen to Pam Parker, from Maryland: She’s a retired electrician, 62 years old, and has been diabetic since she was 30. “I had to decide, a lot of months, between mortgage, groceries, utilities, and other things… I would juggle my expenses, and really juggle my healthcare.. I would eat less, or ration my insulin to make it last.. I had high blood pressure, I fell into a coma, my kidneys failed… they told me I coded.”

Learn from Robin Craycroft, from Missouri: When she turned 65 and had access to Medicare, the pharmacist told her that one insulin for three months was $3,000. “Everything that we had planned, cancelled, and our life just changed. And I felt such guilt over that… We’re gonna spend $2,000 a month (two insulin vials) to keep me alive. You start going through, am I worth it? Should I do that to [my husband]?”

Hear Steven Hadfield, from North Carolina: “Before the $35 cap, sometimes you had to skip a dose, sometimes you had to not test yourself, watch what you eat because you couldn’t afford it…”

The $35 insulin co-pay cap for people on Medicare is just one of the health-changing and life-changing parts of the Inflation Reduction Act.

This year, people on Medicare have their out of pocket Part D drug costs capped at around $3,500. And next year, the maximum drops down to $2,000. This means seniors on a fixed income won’t have to choose medicine over food or housing or anything else. Also recommended adult vaccines such as the new shingles vaccine are now free for Medicare recipients.

Pharmaceutical companies that raise their prices higher than inflation are required to pay Medicare a rebate, to encourage them to stop price gouging patients. And in 2026, price negotiations for the first 10 drugs under Medicare go into effect: lowering the costs of those drugs for millions of Americans. The savings will continue for patients and taxpayers as more drug prices are negotiated each year.

But the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t just help people on Medicare. Over 21 million Americans like me get their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces. When I was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in 2017, I did not qualify for financial help for insurance. Thankfully I was able to afford a plan anyway, and to pay the maximum deductible for that year. A bargain compared to the over half a million dollars it cost to save my life.

I am so grateful to still be here, and for the Affordable Care Act made truly more affordable to millions of working Americans like me.

The American Rescue Plan, and then the Inflation Reduction Act, provided financial help for health insurance to many more who needed it. This law caps the cost of premiums at no more than 8.5% of your income, meaning people—especially older folks who face higher premiums, or people in more expensive healthcare markets—don’t get penalized, and can still afford the care they need.

We have made so much progress on healthcare. But as everyone reading this knows, there is so much more to do.

First, we have to defend the advances in the Inflation Reduction Act. A new administration and a new Congress next year means everything we’ve gained could be on the chopping block.

Second, the health insurance tax credits piece expires in 2025. Without that renewal, millions of Americans would go back to being priced out of health insurance.

Third, the Medicare provisions such as the $35 insulin cap, the drug price negotiation, and more, need to be expanded to everyone.

We are grateful to still be here, and to keep fighting until every American can get the healthcare they need. We cannot go back.

Every presidential campaign showcases the direction in which a candidate’s party is heading. This year’s choices of running mates are prime examples. Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s selection of Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate demonstrates the Republican Party’s desire to further its image as a populist, working-class party. And for her part, Vice President Kamala Harris sidestepped a centrist in Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in favor of a progressive populist in Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The fact is that, policy wise, Walz’s populist bona fides are quite real whereas Vance’s are largely manufactured. But still, this much is clear: Both campaigns appear to recognize that the key to winning in November will be building trust with an electorate that increasingly sees both parties as elites, out of step with the concerns of ordinary working people.

To be sure, Americans’ distrust of elites is reaching a boiling point. Institutions of power—from Congress to the media to the corporate sector—maintain little of the public’s confidence. Among voters in both major parties, trust in government is at its lowest level since the 1950s. More Americans than ever view both Democrats and Republicans unfavorably, and a quarter do not feel represented by either party. Instead, most now believe that lobbyists and big donors, as well as big business, wield too much influence over politics. And an overwhelming majority of the U.S. public believes corporations are becoming too powerful in our economy.

Once we look beyond rhetoric and campaign promises, the party with the more credible claim to economic populism ought to still be the party of the New Deal.

This breakdown in the relationship between the mass public and elites is occurring alongside the march of class dealignment. That is, the Democratic Party’s base has steadily shifted from the working class toward upper-middle-class suburbanites—to the point that Republicans, for the first time in a half-century, can dispute Democrats’ claim as the party of working America. After all, the country’s richest areas are now blue, and the richest voters roughly split across the aisle. Sadly, at a moment when public disdain for the elite is reaching its peak, the Democrats are arguably becoming as much of an elite party as the GOP.

In many ways, the Democratic Party is uniquely positioned to benefit from anti-elite attitudes. After all, although populist sentiment has found putative champions on both sides of the aisle, not all these appeals are equally sincere. While Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats, has pushed to increase taxes on corporations and the rich, Donald Trump signed a historic giveaway for the wealthy and corporate America. While the Biden administration has strengthened organized labor, Republican judges and legislators have chipped away at the union movement. Once we look beyond rhetoric and campaign promises, the party with the more credible claim to economic populism ought to still be the party of the New Deal.

But Democrats can’t take for granted that voters will see the party that way. For that to happen, they have to embrace their role as defenders of the ordinary worker against the predations of a wealthy upper class. And so it bears asking: Are Democrats embracing this role? How many Democrats are employing populist rhetoric, by explicitly raising up workers, or by calling out economic elites? And is it working?

In our latest report, the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) sought to answer these questions and more. In order to get a sense of where Democratic messaging stands, we conducted a comprehensive quantitative analysis of the campaign rhetoric of Democratic candidates for Congress in 2022.

While our complete study contains a wealth of important findings, our results with regards to economic populism are less than encouraging. We find that while anti-elite rhetoric is indeed effective at winning over working-class voters, very few Democratic candidates actually deploy it. By and large, Democratic rhetoric is not rising to meet our moment of mass distrust of elites.

To examine the communication strategies employed by Democrats, the CWCP collected the text from the websites of nearly 1,000 Democratic candidates running in the 2022 House or Senate elections. Our analysis provides significant insight into the promise of economic populism. We looked for two components of populism in candidates’ rhetoric. The first component raises up workers, casting them as the engine that keeps the economy running, and as deserving of a decent standard of living. This was commonplace: Over 70% of candidates spoke positively of workers. That said, less than half mentioned labor unions, so even here there is a great deal of room for improvement.

Harris and other Democrats should instead recognize populism for what it is—a powerful egalitarian sentiment promising to lift up the many over the few—and give voice to it.

The second component of populism, conversely, points the finger at economic elites as responsible for “mucking up” the engine—that is, for mass economic woes, for standing between workers and the quality of life they deserve. This type of rhetoric was much rarer: Less than 20% of candidates went after large corporations, billionaires, Wall Street, or price gouging in this manner. Less than 15% attacked corporate money in politics, and less than 5% of candidates went after the top 1%, corporate greed, or big banks. A separate analysis of television ads found that only about 15% of candidates called out economic elites in any way, even in competitive races, where such rhetoric was found to be most effective. This result may not be so surprising: It’s easy, after all, to speak positively about one group, but harder to actively antagonize another—especially when the other makes up a large chunk of the donor pool.

The lack of anti-elite rhetoric wouldn’t be so concerning if not for another important result: Candidates who employ such rhetoric perform better than other candidates in highly-working-class districts—to the tune of two to three percentage points. Crucially, this relationship persists after we control for relevant candidate and district factors that influence elections, across a range of statistical specifications. This is consistent with findings from our previous experimental research, as well those of other pollsters.

Nor will mere rhetoric be enough: As we’ve demonstrated elsewhere, politicians’ words must be backed up with an ambitious policy agenda that addresses working-class grievances in order to be taken seriously.

If Democrats hope to win back working-class voters in an environment of elite distrust, which they should, more of them will have to acknowledge and validate that distrust. This is a tall order, as there are major forces militating against them. Party messaging naturally caters to the base, so deploying anti-elite rhetoric has only become more difficult as Democrats have begun to transform into an upper-class party. Wealthy donors from elite and corporate backgrounds continue to fund Democratic campaigns. And the upper class also works overtime to make populism the object of widespread fear: In media and intellectual circles, a torrential ideological current frantically sounds the alarm against mob rule, against anti-intellectualism, against “the paranoid style” of the masses—against, in short, a bevy of bogeymen that have been called on to disparage populist movements since the 1890s.

But unlike these imagined evils, the dangers of shooing away economic populism are all too real. The GOP is embracing populism, at least in name—in the selection of Vance, in hosting Teamsters President Sean O’ Brien at the Republican National Convention, and in the party’s changing language. Ceding that ground to Republicans, in this moment of fluid coalitions, could cement Democrats’ role as being seen as the elite party—and potentially help usher in a second Trump term that promises to be disastrous, especially for working people.

Harris and other Democrats should instead recognize populism for what it is—a powerful egalitarian sentiment promising to lift up the many over the few—and give voice to it. It would be a profound mistake to miss this opportunity.

With the race for the White House heating up, a curious policy idea appeared seemingly out of nowhere: ending federal taxes on tips. While this policy shift may have wide appeal—most people aren’t going to say no to a tax cut—it would not translate into real benefits for workers struggling to make ends meet. In fact, it could do harm, and it may even deliver a new tax perk to the rich.

“No taxes on tips” makes us think it would benefit certain workers: the restaurant server pulling a double shift to pay the rent or a member of the cleaning staff at a major hotel chain. Surely these workers deserve better—and what could be better than giving them a chance to save on their tax bill?

It’s not so simple. For starters, tip workers make up a small fraction of the U.S. workforce—about 2.5%—and more than one-third of them do not even earn enough to pay income taxes in the first place. Cutting the federal tax does nothing for this group, except reduce the amount that they contribute to Social Security. Some of these workers could also lose out on other vital programs, like the Earned Income Tax Credit.

While there are still almost no details about how a tax-free tips policy would work, there is the very real possibility that wealthy earners would take advantage of any new system to shield their earnings from federal income taxes.

There are better options than a poorly designed “no tax” gimmick that leaves behind the majority of tipped and other low-wage workers. To win better pay for workers, we could start with raising the 15-year-old $7.25 federal minimum wage to at least $15 an hour. This would provide a more significant boost; about 1 in 8 workers earn less than $15, and most are in the states that have a $7.25 minimum wage.

What’s worse, tipped workers may be paid a subminimum cash wage by their employer that is as low as $2.13 per hour, an amount frozen in place in 1991 at the federal level. This is designed to benefit employers, not workers; the $5.12 difference between the federal minimum and subminimum wages is known as the “tip credit.” In effect, this is the portion of workers’ wages subsidized via customer tips.

These tip credits across the United States are at least $9 in nine states, and more than $11 in Delaware and Maryland. They represent enormous wage subsidies to employers for each and every hour a tipped worker works. It’s no wonder that consumers are showing signs of being “tip-tired”—it is past time to phase this policy out.

While there are still almost no details about how a tax-free tips policy would work, there is the very real possibility that wealthy earners would take advantage of any new system to shield their earnings from federal income taxes. Without adequate safeguards, some high earners would simply reclassify a portion of their income as tips. This would represent one more avenue for the wealthy to avoid paying their fair share.

Historically, the tipping economy has always been about denying workers a fair wage. It is a practice that dates back to the feudal systems of the Middle Ages and the post-Civil War period here in the United States, when white employers used it to deny formerly enslaved Black workers a fair wage for their labor. Today, tipped workers are often forced to deal with unexpected fluctuations in pay and scheduling and often lack access to employer-provided healthcare, paid sick leave, or holiday pay.

There are plenty of policies that would improve the lives of low-wage workers—raising the federal minimum wage, for starters, and ending the subminimum wage for tipped workers is a good place to start.

Wanted: Incredible aquatic athlete and international man of mystery!

The post Have You Seen V.Z.? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Republicans have pulled off a coup against an entire branch of government, and nobody seems to have noticed. But if you pay attention, it’s shocking.

Sometimes you can learn as much from attending to what Republicans suddenly stop saying as from what they are talking about. In this case, it’s their half-century-long obsession with convening a constitutional convention to rewrite the U.S. Constitution. Under Article V of our Constitution, when two-thirds of the states formally call for a “con-con” to rewrite our nation’s founding document, it officially comes into being.

They can then make small changes like enshrining the right of billionaires and corporations to bribe judges and politicians, or insert the doctrine of corporate personhood into the document, or simply throw the whole thing out and start over. Many on the right are hoping to insert a national ban on abortion into a new constitution; others want to end the right of women to vote, do away with all antidiscrimination laws, outlaw labor unions, or return the selection of senators to the states.

So far, 19 Republican-controlled states have signed on to a call for for a convention under Article V. The project, heavily funded by righ-twing billionaires, even has its own website: conventionofstates.com. Consider just a sampling of recent GOP supporters of the project:

• Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.): “One of the things I’m going to do on my first day in office is I will put the prestige and power of the presidency behind a constitutional convention of the states.”
• Texas Gov. Greg Abbott: “We need a Convention of States to restore the rule of law in America.”
• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis: “An Article V Convention of States is the best way to bring power back to the states and the people.”
• Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas): “We need to go back to our founding document, back to our Constitution, and put the restraints on Congress that our founders intended.”
• Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas): “An Article V Convention of States is a powerful tool given to us by the founders to rein in the federal government.”
• Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.): “I’m a big fan of the Convention of States project. I think it’s the solution to Washington’s overreach.”

But over the past year, Republicans have suddenly fallen silent on the issue. Project 2025, for example, the all-encompassing wish-list for the GOP and its billionaire owners, lacks even one single mention of a constitutional convention.

Why would this be?

The simple and obvious answer is that Republicans are rewriting the Constitution right now, this year and last, through their proxies among the six corrupt Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Having succeeded in seizing the court, the GOP has been able to relax about their plan to call a convention. So far, just in the past two years, Republicans on the court have taken an ax to the Constitution. They have:

• Turned presidents who are inclined to break the law into kings or monarchs who are no longer accountable to police, courts, or juries, essentially rewriting Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution.
• Ended the constitutional rights of women to their own bodies, ignoring or rewriting the 1st, 4th, 9th, and 14th Amendments to the Constitution.
• Gutted the power of federal agencies to protect consumers and our environment, essentially rewriting Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution.
• Fully legalized the bribery of politicians so long as the bribes are paid after the deed is done (making it a “tip”) rather than before (which the court said would still be a bribe) overriding multiple constitutional prohibitions on bribery.
• Overturned parts of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act to legalize racially discriminatory gerrymandering where it benefits Republicans.
• Rewritten the Second Amendment and legalized bump stocks to put functionally fully-automatic weapons of war on our streets.

And, it appears, they’re just getting warmed up. Next year could see an end to gay marriage, contraception for single people, the abortion pill, the right to possess pornography (which they get to define) or read “banned” books, any meaningful regulation of billionaire-owned social media, further gutting of union rights, and the insertion of religion into schools nationwide… among other things.

Given how radical and willing they are to overturn established law, constitutional doctrine, and to create new law or constitutional doctrine out of thin air, it’s easy to see why Republicans would shift their efforts away from trying to rewrite the Constitution and toward supporting their shills on the court.

This has not gone unnoticed by U.S. President Joe Biden and his Democratic colleagues. Last month, when the six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that presidents can commit crimes without consequences if they call them “official acts,” President Biden spoke out with an uncharacteristic ferocity:

This decision today has continued the court’s attack in recent years on a wide range of long-established legal principles in our nation, from gutting voting rights and civil rights to taking away a woman’s right to choose to today’s decision that undermines the rule of law of this nation.

Two weeks later, The Washington Post reported:

President Biden is finalizing plans to endorse major changes to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks, including proposals for legislation to establish term limits for the justices and an enforceable ethics code, according to two people briefed on the plans.

With Vice President Kamala Harris having replaced President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, and the House still under the control of extremist Republicans under Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), it appears that President Biden’s Supreme Court agenda has receded into the background.

But Vice President Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz should be (and almost certainly are) putting considerable attention and work into how to restrain the Supreme Court from doing further violence to our constitutional system of government once they’re in office.It must be, in fact, their first order of business, for two major reasons.

The first is that several of the rulings by Republicans on the court have had the effect of amplifying and solidifying Republican control over the nation. By single-handedly overturning the voting rights act and legalizing bribery by billionaires, they’ve created a political imbalance that fails to represent the people of our country and instead just does what their favorite billionaires and giant corporations want.

As Michael Moore reports, multiple polls have found in recent years:

• 90% of Americans want stronger gun control laws.
• 89% want an end to partisan and racial gerrymandering.
• 84% want free pre-kindergarten.
• 79% want the morbidly rich and corporations to pay their damn taxes.
• 76% want a higher minimum wage.
• 73% want an end to student debt and free college.
• 72% want action on the climate crisis and money out of politics.
• 71% want an end to union-busting.
• 70% want marijuana legalized nationwide.
• 69% want to maintain gay marriage and abortion rights.
• 65% want to end the electoral college and put term limits on SCOTUS justices.

None of these things are happening because of the Republican lock on the Supreme Court, the third and unelected branch of government which is today only beholden to whichever billionaire offers individual members the best gifts, goodies, and expensive vacations.

Had the actual winners of the national vote become president in 2000 and 2016, the only Republican on the court today would be Clarence Thomas, and America would be a very different nation.

Instead, we’ve had two illegitimate Republican presidents who essentially packed the court. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was clear about why she cast the tie-breaking vote to hand the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000: She told friends she didn’t want her replacement to be chosen by Al Gore. And, of course, Donald Trump would never have become president without help from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

These Republicans on the Supreme Court, 5 of the 6 appointed by presidents who lost the national vote, are the main reason why Americans can’t have nice things—from a national healthcare system to free college to a functioning democracy that does what the majority of its citizens want—like every other democracy in the world.

The second reason Harris and Walz should be preparing to act immediately after they’re sworn into office on January 20 of next year (G-d willing!) is that a president’s power is at its peak the moment she takes office. After that, it’s largely downhill, as opposition politicians and the press pile on and even members of their own party begin to highlight cracks in the new administration’s policy chops.

This is why FDR, LBJ, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and Biden all got so much done in their first 100 days. If they hadn’t started out with their top and most controversial priorities, they never would have been able to get to them.

And, because the cancer at the heart of our democracy is currently centered in the Supreme Court, it’s why President Harris and Gov. Walt must focus their energy and political capital on taking on this out-of-control Supreme Court’s power as soon as they take office.

On this episode of The Final Countdown hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discuss top news globally and nationwide, including the kickoff of the Harris/Walz bus tour in Georgia.    The show is joined by the Chairman of the New Journey PAC and author Autry Pruitt discussing the latest out of the Harris/Walz campaign, the much-awaited CNN interview, and the latest polling numbers.    Then, political analyst, Host of ‘Pasta 2 Go,’ and co-host of ‘The Convo Couch’  Craig ‘Pasta’ Jardula joins the show to share his perspective on Telegram founder Pavel Durov’s charges in France and also weighs in on Brazil threatening to shut down X.     Later, professional educator J.C. Bowman joins the show to weigh in on a case involving the expulsion of a 10-year-old from a Tennessee school.  The show closes with international relations and security analyst Mark Sleboda sharing his analysis on the latest out of the battlefront in Donbass.         The post The Final Countdown – 8/29/24 – Harris and Walz Launch Georgia Tour Ahead of Eagerly Awaited Interview  first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The Lowe’s home improvement store spent $43 billion on stock buybacks over the past five years. With that sum, the big box chain could’ve given each of its 285,000 employees a $30,000 bonus every year between 2019 and 2023.

The extra cash would’ve meant a lot to Lowe’s workers—half of whom make less than $33,000 per year. Meanwhile, the retailer’s CEO, Marvin Ellison, raked in $18 million in 2023.

The evidence is stark. CEOs of leading U.S. corporations are focused on short-term windfalls for themselves and wealthy shareholders rather than on long-term prosperity for their workers—or their companies.

Another sign of Lowe’s skewed priorities? The company plowed nearly five times as much cash into buybacks as it invested in long-term capital expenditures like store improvements and technology upgrades over the past five years.

Lowe’s ranks as an extreme example of a corporate model focused on pumping up CEO pay at the expense of workers and long-term investment. But such skewed priorities are actually the norm among America’s leading low-wage corporations.

The Low-Wage 100

This year’s edition of the annual Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report finds that the 100 S&P 500 firms with the lowest median wages, a group we’ve dubbed the “Low-Wage 100,” blew $522 billion over the past five years on stock buybacks. Nearly half of these companies spent more on this once-illegal financial maneuver than they spent on capital investment vital to long-term competitiveness.

Why the fixation on buybacks? This is a CEO pay-inflating financial scam, pure and simple. When companies repurchase their own shares, they artificially boost share prices and the value of the stock-based compensation that makes up about 80% of CEO pay. An SEC investigation confirmed that CEOs regularly time the sale of their personal stock holdings to cash in on the price surge that typically follows a buyback announcement.

Our Executive Excess report also looks at low-wage corporations’ expenditures on employee retirement security. The answer? Peanuts, compared to their buyback outlays.

The country’s 20 largest low-wage employers spent nine times as much on stock buybacks as on worker retirement plan contributions over the past five years. Many of these firms boast of their “generous” matching benefits, typically a dollar-for-dollar match of 401(k) contributions up to 4% of salary. But matching is meaningless for workers who earn so little they can’t afford to set aside anything for what should be their “golden years.”

Take Chipotle, for instance. The Mexican fast food chain spent over $2 billion on stock buybacks over the past five years—48 times as much as the firm contributed to employee retirement plans. Meanwhile, 92% of Chipotle workers who are eligible to participate in the company’s 401(k) have zero balances. That’s hardly surprising, since the chain’s median annual pay is just $16,595.

The evidence is stark. CEOs of leading U.S. corporations are focused on short-term windfalls for themselves and wealthy shareholders rather than on long-term prosperity for their workers—or their companies.

As UAW President Shawn Fain put it in his primetime DNC convention speech: “Corporate greed turns blue-collar blood, sweat, and tears into Wall Street stock buybacks and CEO jackpots.”

Solutions to Executive Excess

Public outrage over CEO shakedowns helped the UAW win strong new contracts last year with the Big Three automakers. Support for policy solutions is growing as well. The Democratic Party platform calls for quadrupling a new tax on stock buybacks. And a recent poll shows huge majority support among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike for proposed tax hikes on corporations with huge CEO-worker pay gaps. The Executive Excess 2024 report offers an extensive menu of additional commonsense CEO pay reforms.

It’s important to remember that it hasn’t always been this way. Forty years ago, big company CEO pay was only about 40 times higher than worker pay—not several hundreds of times higher, as is typical today. And just 20 years ago, most big companies spent very little on stock buybacks. At Lowe’s, for example, buyback outlays between 2000 and 2004 were exactly zero.

Corporate America’s perverse fixation on enriching those at the top is bad for workers and bad for the economy. With pressure from below, we can change that.

Former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin has embraced his new role as head of defense business at the controversial Silicon Valley tech firm Palantir with relish, promising to use his connections in government to make it easier for emerging military tech firms to thrive, in large part by securing more of your tax dollars.

Senior government officials passing through the revolving door to cash in on lucrative jobs in the arms industry is not a new phenomenon. In a study I did last fall, we found that 80% of the three and four star generals who left government service in the past five years went to work in the arms sector in one way or another. And a 2023 report by the office of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) found that at least 700 former senior Pentagon and other government officials now work for one of the top 20 weapons contractors.

At the time of the report’s release, Warren argued that “[w]hen government officials cash in on their public service by lobbying, advising, or serving as board members and executives for the companies they used to regulate, it undermines public officials’ integrity and casts doubt on the fairness of government contracting. This problem is especially concerning and pronounced in the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and the United States’ defense industry.”

The prospect of automated warfare fueled by Palantir’s products could lead to a world in which our ability to curb conflict and prevent large-scale slaughter is even more difficult than it is now.

Powerful members of Congress also regularly go through the revolving door, including most notably former House Armed Services Committee Chair Buck McKeon, whose lobbying shop has represented both arms contractors like Lockheed Martin and arms buyers like Saudi Arabia.

But Gallagher’s case is particularly egregious, given the central role he will play in his new firm’s business and lobbying strategies. Palantir’s ambitions go well beyond the kind of favor seeking in government weapons buying that Sen. Warren has described. Its goal is to shape the overarching U.S. national security policy that may determine what military technology the U.S. invests in for the next generation. The Gallagher hire fits perfectly with that plan.

Judging from his record as the preeminent China hawk on Capitol Hill during his tenure in Congress, and as chair of the China-bashing House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, Gallagher’s views are remarkably close to those of his new employers.

For example, Palantir CEO Alex Karp has said the United States will “likely” go to war with China and that the best policy is to “scare the crap out of your enemy”—no doubt in part by wielding systems built by Palantir.

Palantir’s bread and butter is the supply of advanced computing and data management, which it has employed to help the Army share data across the service, from bases in the U.S. to commanders on the battlefield. The firm also does research for the Army on future uses of AI, and on targeting, in a project known as Tactical Intelligence Target Access Node (TITAN).

Palantir’s products are also front and center in the two most prominent conflicts of the moment. The company’s Artificial Intelligence Platform, described by Bloomberg as "an intelligence and decision-making system that can analyze enemy targets and propose battle plans," is currently in use in Ukraine. And in January of this year, Karp and Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, traveled to Israel where they forged an agreement with the Israeli government “to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions.” This reportedly includes using Palantir’s AI-based systems to select targets in Gaza.

Karp’s views about how to intimidate adversaries like China may be good for his company’s bottom line, but they are an extremely reckless guide to U.S. policy toward China. The most likely result of his counsel would be a staggeringly costly arms race which would make a U.S.-China war more likely. And even if such a war did not escalate to the nuclear level, it would be a strategic, economic, and humanitarian disaster for all concerned. The point is to prevent a war with China, not predict and profit from it.

Karp and Gallagher are virtually brothers in arms with respect to their views on China. Gallagher co-authored a recent article in Foreign Affairs entitled “No Substitute for Victory: America’s Competition With China Must Be Won, Not Managed.” In it, Gallagher and his co-author Matthew Pottinger assert that the United States needs to “put in place a better policy: one that rearms the U.S. military, reduces China’s economic leverage, and recruits a broader coalition to confront China.”

In service of this goal, they advocate ratcheting up Pentagon spending to as much as 5% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, which would push the Pentagon’s base budget to over $1.2 trillion. Gallagher and Pottinger give no clue as to how this enormous sum would be spent, or why a rapid military buildup would somehow bring Beijing to heel rather than stimulating an equally furious buildup by China. They wrongly analogize the current situation between the U.S. and China to the one facing former U.S. President Ronald Reagan vis-a-vis the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. But China has a much more vibrant, technologically sophisticated society and a much larger place in the global economy than the USSR did at the end of its reign.

China isn’t going anywhere, and the idea that arms racing and trade wars will change that basic reality is wildly unrealistic.

While Washington and Beijing don’t need to be best friends, they do need to set parameters around their relationship to prevent a catastrophic war. They also need to find ways to cooperate, despite their differences, on addressing existential global challenges like climate change and pandemics. And while it is important to help Taiwan build up its defenses, it is even more important to engage in diplomacy and reassurance to avoid a U.S.-China military confrontation over the island.

The path advocated by Gallagher and Pottinger would destroy any possibility of reaching such common ground, and would likely lead to a dangerous state of permanent antagonism.

Gallagher is just the latest addition to Palantir’s growing web of influence. As the world now knows, Thiel was both a mentor and a donor to Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance. In 2017, before Vance entered politics, Thiel hired him to work at his global investment firm, and then donated $15 million to Vance’s 2022 run for the Senate.

Meanwhile, Palantir CEO Alex Karp has reached out to the other side of the aisle, albeit on a smaller scale, telling The New York Times that he gave $360,000 to Biden’s campaign before the president announced that he would not be running for reelection.

It would be one thing if Palantir were the nimble, cost effective producer of indispensable next generation technology it purports to be, but its bulked up political machine and hawkish rhetoric suggest that it is far more than that.

And as for its technological prowess, it remains to be seen whether all the emerging technologies championed by Thiel and his cohorts will work as advertised, and if so whether they will make future conflicts more or less likely. But one thing is clear: If operatives like Gallagher and Karp have their way, the odds of an unnecessary and devastating conflict with China could increase considerably.

Last but certainly not least, the prospect of automated warfare fueled by Palantir’s products could lead to a world in which our ability to curb conflict and prevent large-scale slaughter is even more difficult than it is now. All the more reason to take their claims to be new age patriots, poised to restore American global dominance through the wonders of technology, with an enormous grain of salt.

Regardless of who wins in November, the last thing we need is a Palantir-inspired foreign policy.

It has been two years since the U.S. Supreme Court blew up federal protection for abortion, handing states the power to enact abortion bans and realizing the decades-long fever-dream of anti-rights actors.

Though a minority in the U.S., these extremists are loud and determined and won’t stop at our borders. Their plans for the future are outlined in Project 2025, which is already being implemented in the U.S. and abroad through anti-abortion and anti-LGBTIQ+ initiatives and would be fully executed if radical conservative forces reclaim the White House.

While political ads have featured Project 2025, no one is talking about the profound global impact of this manifesto. It would revive anti-gender U.S. human rights policy frameworks like the Commission on Unalienable Human Rights and the Geneva Consensus Declaration, favoring anti-rights alliances and networks with other authoritarian regimes. Essentially, this amounts to a gutting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the cornerstone of multilateral engagement for the past 76 years.

Imagine the impact globally if foetuses are given the same rights as women.

Project 2025 would also reinstate and expand the anti-abortion foreign policy known as the Global Gag Rule (GGR) to all U.S. foreign assistance. The rule, which was repealed in 2021, bans foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that receive U.S. global health assistance from providing legal abortion services or referrals and advocating for abortion law reform.

This implicates upwards of $51 billion, assuming U.S. foreign assistance holds somewhat stable, which is not guaranteed. The architects of this agenda would take a transactional and punitive approach to multilateralism, putting at risk the U.S.’ entire $18.1 billion contribution to the United Nations. Particularly vulnerable are the U.S.’ $122 million contribution to the World Health Organization and $32.5 million to the United Nations Population Fund—which aims to improve reproductive and maternal health worldwide—as well as other U.N. agencies that were targeted by the 2017-2021 administration.

“Protecting life,” according to Project 2025, “should be among the core objectives of the United States foreign assistance.” It goes on to urge the United States Agency for International Development to stop “supporting the global abortion industry.”

Project 2025 seeks not only to reinstate the GGR—which is also known as the Mexico City Policy—but to expand it so that it also applies to multilateral organisations, foreign governments, and U.S.-based NGOs. This would be the most significant expansion of the GGR since it was enacted 40 years ago during the Reagan administration.

This would all be on top of the existing Helms Amendment, which is particularly egregious and has been in place since 1973. Though the Helms Amendment prohibits only the use of U.S. foreign aid for abortion as a “method of family planning,” the policy has in many countries been used to implement a total ban on abortion services, including in instances of rape, incest, and life endangerment even in humanitarian settings.

Helms has contributed to maternal deaths that disproportionately impact women of colour, and to the stagnation of maternal mortality rates globally. According to a Guttmacher Institute analysis, there could be approximately 19 million fewer unsafe abortions and 17,000 fewer maternal deaths each year if Helms were repealed.

The thing is, Project 2025 isn’t something that will happen in the future. As Robin Marty, who runs a clinic that had been the main abortion provider in Alabama, told The New York Times: “...That is what is happening here. We are Project 2025.” And no matter who wins the election, Christian nationalism is growing within the United States, and this has global repercussions. We ignore it at our peril.

The fall of Roe v. Wade was an extreme example of what a very loud minority has been working toward for decades—limiting access to abortion, taking away bodily autonomy, and undermining human rights.

This same extremism is exported around the world and just like in the U.S., it is forcing people to endure even greater hardships just to access essential healthcare. It is costing lives, risking health, and compromising people’s futures. Imagine the impact globally if foetuses are given the same rights as women.

As former U.S. President Barack Obama said at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week about the U.S. Presidential election: “The world is watching.”

Reproductive justice is a global, human rights issue, and the U.S. shares space with nearly 200 other nations. What happens here matters to the planet. And while the world doesn’t vote in U.S. elections, there is, and will be, a rippling international impact.

As we fight for reproductive freedom for all in the U.S., so must we fight for reproductive freedom for all around the world.

To Whom It May Concern:

Because I have twice visited the West Bank and know the personal stories of 40 year-old Palestinian men who were imprisoned as boys for simply yelling at Israeli soldiers—and beaten and dehumanized for months before being released without trial;

And because I now know that those horrific, forever haunting experiences were and remain commonplace for Palestinian youth and are symptomatic of a world where, “we (Israelis) believe they are worth more than they” (Palestinians);

And because by paying close attention to non-main-stream American and foreign media I know the horrific truth of Gaza;

And because I have a good sense that when thousands are killed under months of ceaseless bombing and thousands more remain buried under the rubble yet to be found, the crime rises beyond war to become, inarguably, a “genocide”;

And because I know of the influence of AIPAC and U.S. defense industry corporations on U.S. Congress members and, hence, on American foreign policy;

And because I know well that the siege of Gaza could not continue without U.S. cover and support;

And because, as not much more than an adolescent, as a consequence of the fiction fed me by a conventional education, I volunteered to go off to Vietnam;

And because I know that, as a consequence of that war of choice, two to three million Vietnamese were killed in defense of their country---and that 2-3 million others are institutionalized today unable to take care of themselves as 2nd and 3rd generation victims of Agent Orange;

And, because I also mourn the 58,281 Americans commemorated on “the wall”, lost in that war, generally, perhaps, believing the same fiction I had;

And because I know that millions, yes millions, of innocents have died in my lifetime, arguably victims of American wars of choice, endorsed and promoted by the American defense industry, in Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Panama, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Syria, Yemen, etc., (hardly an all-inclusive list);

And because I and others, on many occasions since the Berrigan brothers, in a Prince of Peace Plowshares action on February 12, 1997, have returned again and again to protest other
christenings” at Bath;

And because we strongly believe, nay absolutely know, that the U.S. does not need more warships, but rather that General Dynamics ought to be “converting” to the manufacture of “green” technologies.

It is for these reasons, in the spirit of the “Plowshares” movement, we chose to inconvenience the so-called “christening” attendees on July 27th—that they might give pause to consider the merits of our actions. That they too, might join us in a virtual revolution—to turn away from violence, to demand that our country do the same, to be a force for cooperation among the brotherhood of nations, rather than endorsing endless militarism.

For these reasons I chose to join like-minded fellow citizens in our efforts to make more widely known our nation’s reckless conduct. I proclaim my innocence and will be very pleased to have the opportunity to defend that position in court.

Not in my name!

Dud Hendrick
Deer Isle, Maine
USNA Graduate —1963
USAF Officer — 1963-1967