Evelyn Reynolds

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    How Trump’s nomination of Matt Gaetz unravelled in just eight days

    Donald Trump decided to nominate Matt Gaetz as attorney general last Wednesday, during a flight home from Washington, where the president-elect had visited Joe Biden at the White House. The pick proved as surprising as it was controversial. Just eight days later, after a week of relentless hullabaloo, Gaetz withdrew from contention.It was a Washington farce for the ages. But how did it happen?Gaetz, now 42, made his name as a far-right Florida congressman, a pro-Trump publicity hound and gadfly who in October 2023 made history by bringing down a House speaker: Kevin McCarthy, the first ever ejected by his own party.The seeds of Gaetz’s own downfall were to be found in that extraordinary episode.Ostensibly, Gaetz moved against McCarthy in order to install a speaker more amenable to rightwing threats to shut down the federal government over arguments about funding, and less likely to seek Democrats’ help in avoiding such outcomes.But McCarthy never believed that. He insisted Gaetz moved against him in order to block release of a House ethics committee report into allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use and other offenses.Gaetz vehemently denied – and still denies – wrongdoing but, nonetheless, when Trump nominated him for attorney general, he promptly resigned his seat in the House. According to precedent, that blocked release of the ethics report.The report duly became the hottest property in Washington, reporters chasing it, Democrats and some skeptical Republicans eager to find out what it contained. It promised sensational reading.Gaetz was initially investigated by the US justice department, in relation to the actions of Joel Greenberg, a Florida tax collector who in 2021 pleaded guilty to sex trafficking of a minor and agreed to cooperate in the investigation of Gaetz.Eventually, the justice department dropped that investigation. But the House ethics committee had been investigating Gaetz too, and in June it outlined the scope of its work: it was investigating claims the congressman “may have engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift”.Trump’s nomination of Gaetz was controversial for other reasons. There was Gaetz’s loud support for Trump supporters convicted in relation to the January 6 attack on Congress, and his promises to seek revenge against Trump’s political opponents. There was his almost complete lack of legal experience and expertise, having graduated from law school but practiced only briefly before entering politics.But in Washington, the ethics committee report remained the holy grail.Details began to leak, ABC News first to report that the committee had obtained records showing Gaetz paid more than $10,000 to two women who testified before the panel, with some of the payments being for sex.A lawyer for two women spoke to the media, saying one had been 17 – under the age of consent – when she was paid for sex with Gaetz.The Trump camp repeatedly pointed to the justice department’s decision to drop its investigation of allegations against Gaetz, without official reason but amid reports of concerns about witness credibility.On Wednesday, the House committee considered whether to release the report. The session ended in deadlock, five Democrats for release, five Republicans against it. In the House at large, Democrats introduced motions calling for a full vote to force the issue.Controversy switched to the Senate. As Democrats said they had asked the FBI for its files on Gaetz, the congressman himself climbed Capitol Hill, in the company of JD Vance, to meet the vice-president-elect’s erstwhile Senate colleagues and seek to convince them that Gaetz should be confirmed.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt did not go well. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, relative Republican moderates already used to saying no to Trump, at least some of the time, were not supportive.Gaetz found sympathy from others. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close Trump ally, said he would “urge all of my Senate colleagues, particularly Republicans, not to join the lynch mob and give the process a chance to move forward”. But plenty of other Republicans cast doubt on Gaetz’s chances of being confirmed.John Cornyn of Texas, a member of the judiciary committee, said any hearings for Gaetz would be like “Kavanaugh on steroids” – a reference to the tempestuous hearings in 2018 in which Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s second pick for the supreme court, angrily rejected accusations of sexual assault. In Kavanaugh’s case, the Capitol Hill circus proved controversial but survivable.But Gaetz would not be given a chance to pull off a similar escape. On Thursday, on social media, he said: “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as attorney general.”CNN subsequently reported that the woman who says she had sex with him when she was a minor told the ethics committee she had another sexual encounter with Gaetz, which also involved another adult woman.“After being asked for comment for this story,” the CNN report said, “Gaetz announced he was backing out as President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee.”However, a source familiar with Gaetz’s nomination process told the Guardian that privately confirmed opposition from four senators – enough to sink the nomination if no Democrats defected – was what pushed Gaetz to decide to withdraw, before the call from CNN.Murkowski and Collins were opposed. So was John Curtis, the senator-elect from Utah who will succeed Mitt Romney, another Trump critic, in the new year. The fourth voice set against Gaetz was an influential one: Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former Republican leader now beginning life back in the rank and file.In his announcement, Gaetz proclaimed his support for “the most successful president in history” and said he would “forever be honored” that Trump nominated him for attorney general.Elsewhere in Washington, it seemed safe to bet, politicians and reporters alike were reflecting on an extraordinary episode of near-unsurpassable Washington dishonor. More

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    RFK Jr sexual assault accuser says she chose to speak out after Super Bowl ad

    A woman who publicly accused Robert F Kennedy Jr of sexual assault when she worked for him as a babysitter said she was motivated to do so when he released a campaign ad based on a famous advertisement for his uncle, President John F Kennedy.“I literally was just watching the Super Bowl and saw the ad and thought, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me,’” Eliza Cooney told USA Today.Released when Kennedy was running for president as an independent, the ad attracted criticism from members of the famous Democratic political family. Kennedy Jr apologized – but kept the ad online.Nine months later, after dropping out of the presidential race and backing Donald Trump, Kennedy is Trump’s nominee for US health secretary.A hugely controversial choice given his promotion of vaccine conspiracy theories and other disputed health claims, Kennedy is also one of a number of Trump cabinet picks to be accused of sexual misconduct.Cooney initially told Vanity Fair about how she went to work for Kennedy in 1998, when she was 23 and he was a 45-year-old environmental attorney. Describing a series of unwanted advances, she said Kennedy ultimately “came up behind her … and began groping her, putting his hands on her hips and sliding them up along her rib cage and breasts”, before being interrupted by someone walking into the room.When Kennedy was asked about Cooney’s allegations, he told the BreakingPoints podcast he was “not a church boy … I have so many skeletons in my closet”, but refused to comment further.In the USA Today interview published on Wednesday, Cooney said: “I know that there are hard-working people who don’t have skeletons in their closet. And I wish we were electing people with fewer skeletons in their closet.”In July, it was widely reported that Kennedy sent a text to Cooney after the Vanity Fair story was published.He wrote: “I read your description of an episode in which I touched you in an unwanted manner. I have no memory of this incident but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings. I never intended you any harm. If I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so.”Cooney told USA Today: “I don’t know if it’s an apology if you say, ‘I don’t remember.’ In the context of all his public appearances, it seemed a little bit – it didn’t match. It was like a throwaway.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUSA Today said it had contacted a lawyer for a Kennedy non-profit and Trump’s transition team for comment.Perhaps busy dealing with allegations of sexual misconduct against Pete Hegseth, the nominee for defense secretary, and Matt Gaetz, then the nominee for attorney general, the Trump transition did not immediately respond. The next day, Gaetz withdrew from consideration for a cabinet post.Cooney said she was not speaking out about Kennedy “to try to stall his nomination or upend the confirmation”, but was “just doing it for the public record”, having first told people of the alleged assault during the #MeToo movement, beginning in 2017, when many women named their sexual abusers.Saying that for a long time she “brushed this off a little bit”, seeing sexual assault as “just the price of doing business”, Cooney added: “It’s remarkable that it’s as prevalent as it is. And I just wonder – have we made any progress? This is like a rewind.” More

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    ‘Government by the worst’: why people are calling Trump’s new sidekicks a ‘kakistocracy’

    Matt Gaetz chosen to run the justice department. Fox hosts in charge of the Pentagon and transportation. Elon Musk as head of layoffs. And Robert F Kennedy Jr and Dr Oz overseeing the nation’s health.Some have likened Donald Trump’s administrative picks to a clown car; others are calling our incoming leadership a kakistocracy, or “government by the worst people”, as Merriam-Webster puts it.The word has been trending online, with a burst in search traffic in recent weeks and a new dedicated subreddit. It’s not the first time Trump has (accidentally) made the term famous; many discovered it in his first term. But even after Gaetz’s departure, the kakistocracy of 2016 looks like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood compared with the president-elect’s new batch of sidekicks.It’s not the first time a president has popularized the term. Trump would be horrified to know he shares this distinction with several of America’s least-discussed presidents, including Rutherford B Hayes, James Garfield and Chester A Arthur. This trio – somehow forgettable despite the fact that the middle one was assassinated – led the US from the late 1870s to the early 1880s, a period following Reconstruction that saw the expansion of Jim Crow laws and segregation, as well as another election in which the parties clashed over the results. That span saw a surge in the use of the word, as Kelly Wright, assistant professor of language sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, points out based on Oxford English Dictionary data. “Hayes’ term was absolutely being described as a kakistocracy,” she says. (1880 was also a general election year in the UK, another country known for its contributions to the English language. That year, William Gladstone became prime minister for the second time; perhaps his opponents were among those giving the word a boost.)In fact, as André Spicer wrote in the Guardian in 2018, the term has been around since at least 1644, during the English civil war, when a sermon warned of “a mad kinde of Kakistocracy” looming.Its roots, of course, go back even further – it’s borrowed from the Greek kakistos, or “worst”, which itself probably comes from the Proto-Indo-European word kakka, meaning “to defecate”.In other words, as Nancy Friedman wrote at her Substack on language in 2016, “you could say that kakistocracy is ‘government by the shitty’.”The term resurfaced on both sides of the Atlantic in the 19th century. Initially it tended to refer to government by the “unskilled, unknowledgeable and unvirtuous”, rather than the infallible aristocracy, Spicer wrote, but by the 20th century, it referred more to government by the corrupt. Today, Friedman’s definition seems most apt.But why does a word that is rarely used in common speech have such longevity? Nicole Holliday, acting associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, likens the term’s use to identifying a disease: “Some of this is about there being a diagnosis, and if there’s a diagnosis, then maybe there’s a treatment,” she says.Wright agrees. Those embracing the term, she says, may be thinking: “I didn’t know there was a word for this, and now that I do it helps me understand what’s going on.”Americans, Holliday says, love labels. “We like having words for things, because then they seem like they’ve been en-thing-ified” – in what sociolinguists call “enregisterment”, kakistocracy becomes an identifiable phenomenon. “Language is social,” Holliday notes, and when we have “conventionalized ways of talking about things, it makes us feel less alone” – especially when other ways of describing the situation feel inadequate.Of course, it’s not just the modern American left that uses the word; another ex-Fox host, Glenn Beck, used it during the Obama years; Boris Yeltsin also received the distinction. In fact, Wright says, usage has been fairly stable for five centuries.“We have no real opposite of kakistocracy, because competency is assumed to be the normal order of things,” Holliday says. “It’s not notable that the government is being run by the most competent people, because, indeed, that’s what you think should be happening. It’s only notable when it’s not.”

    This article was updated on 21 November 2024 to reflect Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration for attorney general. More

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    The Democrats must radically rethink foreign policy | Anatol Lieven

    In domestic political terms, the foreign policy of the Biden administration has proved almost unimaginably successful – for Donald Trump, whom it enabled to run for president as the representative, however mendaciously so, of foreign policy restraint. A deep and searching debate on the Democratic party’s approach to foreign affairs is now essential.Since the second world war there has only rarely been a significant difference between the Democrats and Republicans on foreign policy. The most significant divergence around the time of the backlash against the Vietnam war (initiated by a Democratic administration) and Watergate. This, however, lasted barely a decade.After the end of the cold war, Democrats wholeheartedly adopted the “Wolfowitz Doctrine”, whereby the US should aim to be a hegemon not just in the world as a whole, but in every region of the world: in effect, an extension of the Monroe Doctrine to the entire planet. Barack Obama tried, to a limited extent, to push back against this, but was largely frustrated by the US foreign and security establishment – the so-called “Blob”.Can the Democrats break free from the hold of the Blob? If they were guided by US public opinion, it should be easy for them to do so. According to a recent poll, only 56% of Americans think that the US should play an active role in world affairs – among the lowest level recorded since the end of the Vietnam war. Only a third of Americans overall, and only a minority of Democrats, believe that spreading human rights and defending other nations are important goals. Large majorities in both parties prioritise domestic spending over foreign commitments.And indeed, responding to this public mood, Biden ran in 2020 on the slogan “A foreign policy for the middle class”. Very soon, this joined George Bush’s promise in 2000 to pursue a more modest and restrained foreign policy in the dustbin of history, and Biden was quoting Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, about America being “the indispensable nation”.Three overarching principles need to shape a new Democratic party approach. First, US policy needs to prioritise common threats to humanity, climate change first among them and international cooperation to address these threats. Second, to achieve such cooperation, the US needs to abandon its messianic strategy of spreading “democracy” through US power, which has become in practice little more than a means of trying to undermine rival states.Instead, it should return to relying on the force of US democratic example – if that example can in fact be renewed. There is after all a certain contradiction in Democrats calling the new US president a fascistic would-be dictator elected by a majority of illiterate bigots, and telling the rest of the world to adopt the US system.Third, the US needs to pull back from the pursuit of domination in every region of the world and instead adopt a limited and realistic strategy of defending America’s position on the world stage as a whole. In Europe, this means accepting a peace deal with Russia (if Trump can achieve one), abandoning Nato expansion and shifting the chief responsibility for European security on to the Europeans, with the US military functioning only as an ultimate backstop.In the far east, this involves drawing a lesson from the defeat of Russia’s Black Sea fleet by land-based missiles and drones and recognizing that the US navy will soon be incapable of defeating China close to China’s shores – though on the other hand it remains entirely capable of maintaining US dominance of the world’s oceans. This means that the US will need to share power with China and commit itself to the reunion of China and Taiwan, albeit only at some distant point in future.Finally, there is Israel and the Middle East. A progressive party seeking votes from the young cannot succeed without at least some measure of idealism. The sight of a Democratic administration supporting mass murder and ethnic cleansing abroad, while clubbing, arresting and expelling US students protesting against these crimes, will not persuade idealistic young Americans to vote Democratic. What it will do and has done is to persuade even more of them to do what many were doing already: to stay at home, in a mood of nauseated contempt for the entire US political system. The very least the Democratic party should do is to return to the policies of previous US administrations in setting limits to Israeli aggression.Such changes in their approach to the world would be extremely painful and difficult for the Democrats, but the deepening crisis of the western democracies demands radical new thinking. And if an electoral defeat this shattering does not lead Democrats to rethink some of their basic policies, then nothing will.

    Anatol Lieven is director of the Eurasia programme at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author of Climate Change and the Nation State: The Realist Case More

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    Hear me out: RFK could be a transformational health secretary | Neil Barsky

    Among the cast of characters poised to join the Trump administration, no one is as exasperating, polarizing or potentially dangerous as Robert F Kennedy Jr. But in a twist that is emblematic of our times, no single nominee has the potential to do as much good for the American people.Bear with me. RFK Jr has been rightly pilloried for promoting a litany of theories linking vaccines with autism, chemicals in the water supply to gender identity, how people contract Aids and saying the Covid-19 vaccine, which in fact stemmed the deadliest pandemic of our lifetimes, was itself “the deadliest vaccine ever made”. He claimed Covid-19 was meant to target certain ethnic groups, Black people and Caucasians, while sparing Asians and Jewish people.In normal times, these notions would be disqualifying. Spouting unfounded scientific claims is corrosive to a functioning democracy. It weakens the bonds of trust in our public institutions, and feeds the rightwing narrative that all government is illegitimate. This is why, writing in the Guardian this September, I dismissed the prospect of RFK Jr, saying his “anti-vaccine work is more likely to make America have measles again”.But these are not normal times. RFK Jr is Donald Trump’s pick to run our country’s health and human services department. He will have a massive impact on our broken, expensive and largely ineffectual delivery of healthcare services. How shall we deal with this?On one hand, RFK Jr’s anti-vaccine views are beyond the pale. To obtain Senate approval, I think he will have to repudiate the unproven assertion that the Covid-19 vaccine was harmful, and embrace the scientific reality that vaccines for measles, smallpox, coronavirus and other contagious diseases are in fact modern medical miracles that spared the lives hundreds of millions of people. And here is where I will part company with many of my Trump-fighting friends: should RFK Jr be able to abandon his numerous conspiracy theories about vaccines, he can be the most transformative health secretary in our country’s history.This is because RFK Jr has articulated what our Democratic and Republican leaders have largely ignored: our healthcare system is a national disgrace hiding in plain sight. He recognizes the inordinate control the pharmaceutical and food industries over healthcare policy, and the revolving door that exists among congressional staffers, pharmaceutical lobbyists and corporate executives. In testimony during hearings chaired by the Republican senator Ron Johnson this past September, Kennedy offered a lucid analysis of what is making America metabolically sick; he railed against big pharma and big food, and drew links between the damage done by ultraprocessed foods such as seed oils and sugars to our health, as well as the efforts of the food industry to come up with chemicals that make these foods addictive.He advocates banning pharmaceutical advertising on television, and wants to clamp down on the corporate ties to federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and National Institute of Health. (To my knowledge, he has not spoken out against the egregious cost of life-saving drugs or unequal access to medical treatment, but hopefully he will get around to that as well.)We spend $4tn on healthcare annually, and lead the world in spending more than $12,000 per person, 50% more than Switzerland, which is the second biggest spender per capita. American doctors dominate the Nobel prizes for medicine, and our medical schools are considered the best in the world. Yet we appear incapable of stemming the epidemic of chronic diseases. A staggering 73% of us are obese or overweight and more than 38 million people suffer from diabetes.This issue hits home for me, as I was diagnosed with severe type 2 diabetes in 2021, and – after receiving terrible medical advice to rely on insulin and metformin – reversed my condition by adopting a diet low in carbohydrates. This year, I published a “follow the money” series for the Guardian, Death By Diabetes, in which I highlighted the heavy influence of big pharma and big food on the American Diabetes Association (ADA). The ADA is a so-called patient advocacy group that sets the standard of care for diabetes treatment in this country, and yet it accepts money from food companies such as the makers of Splenda and Idaho potatoes – two products which have been found to increase people’s risk of getting diabetes.I subsequently wrote about amputations, and the reality that African Americans with diabetes are four times more likely to endure that grim procedure than white people. I view nutrition and metabolic health as a matter of racial and economic equity. I am clear-eyed, I think, of the serious risks to public health that RFK Jr’s unfounded anti-vaccine views pose. But so long as we still have a voice and can find a drop of hope in these terrible times, I think we should try to tilt policy toward the public good where we can. To that end, here is the game plan I believe RFK Jr should pursue.

    Lose the conspiracies and stick to the science. RFK Jr is right, and there is more than ample research to focus on the deleterious impact of sugars and seed oils. Following the money has always been a valuable strategy. Let’s start there.

    Lean on the vast ecosystem of committed researchers, clinicians and writers who have devoted their career to promoting metabolic health, even while knowing they would forfeit access to government and pharmaceutical grants. Many of these mavericks come from top medical schools, but they are a decided minority on their faculties. They include clinicians such as Georgia Ede, Mariela Glandt, Tony Hampton, Eric Westman, scientists such as Benjamin Bikman, Ravi Kampala, Cate Shanahan, and writers such as Gary Taubes, Nina Teicholz and Casey Means. These are heroic people who, in getting to know them and reading their work, I have found to be intellectually honest health practitioners.

    Appoint a diabetes czar to come up with proposals to once and for all fix this deadly and utterly reversible disease. I choose this particularly chronic ailment because it is ubiquitous, ruinously expensive, a disease that disproportionately afflicts the poor, is closely connected to our obesity epidemic, and utterly reversible through diet. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could finally reverse type 2 diabetes in our lifetime?

    Increase federal funding of nutrition studies. The FDA and NIH historically have tilted the research scales in favor of studies that might produce the next blockbuster drug. In reality, we still do not understand why we get fat and why we have seen an increase in chronic (non-contagious) diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Crohn’s.

    Severely regulate the ability of cereal companies to market their sugary wares to children, and the ability of pharmaceutical companies to barrage the rest of us with advertisements. Will a Republican-controlled Congress allow for more government regulation – even if it saves lives?
    RFK Jr’s ascent represents a tricky issue for people like myself who strongly supported the election of Kamala Harris. Healthcare is far from the only issue I am committed to, and I am disgusted by the Trump administration’s plans to deport millions of undocumented people, its attack on democratic institutions, and possible abandonment of Ukraine and the Nato alliance. While I disagreed with Liz Cheney about many, if not most, issues, I also embraced her apostasy when it came to the election – I adhere to the approach of not interrupting people you disagree with while they are doing the right thing.After writing something unkind about RFK Jr in the days leading up to the election, I received a private note from Jan Baszucki, a prominent metabolic health advocate I have come to admire over the past year. “With all due respect,” she wrote. “I am a big fan of your reporting on type 2 diabetes. But your comments about RFK Jr … are not helpful to the cause of metabolic health, which is only on the national agenda because he put it there.”Leading up to the election, I believed RFK Jr was fair game. I was, and remain, particularly concerned that his fringe ideas about vaccines and poisons would get conflated with his excellent perspective on metabolic health, and hurt the cause. Now I think we should be constructive where we can advance the public good.The larger question hanging over RFK Jr’s term as HHS secretary is whether Donald Trump will back him up when he takes on the pharmaceutical and food industries. The US’s health is not an issue the president-elect has evinced an interest in in the past. And his embrace of corporate executives such as Tesla’s Elon Musk suggests crony capitalism could be the dominant theme of the second Trump administration. But if we know anything about what makes Trump tick, we know that he responds to positive reinforcement.After all, it was the criminal justice advocates such as Van Jones and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who coaxed him into supporting the First Step Act, a significant piece of criminal justice reform (and one which Trump now forswears). As founder of the Marshall Project, the non-profit journalism organization that covers the US criminal justice system, I believe criminal justice reform should also be a matter of national urgency, yet at the time, I was ambivalent about efforts to work with the administration. In retrospect, whatever harm Trump might have otherwise inflicted, I would say we are a better country for the First Step Act.We are in a similar dilemma with respect to healthcare today: the system is ruinously expensive and inhumane. If there is someone in the administration who wants to make things better, let’s not interrupt him.

    Neil Barsky, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and investment manager, is the founder of the Marshall Project More

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    As we wait for national legislation, let’s launch a Green New Deal from below | Jeremy Brecher

    As Trump and Trumpism devastate the American political landscape, how can people counter this destructive juggernaut? For the past five years, I have been studying how people are actually implementing the elements of the Green New Deal through what has become a Green New Deal from Below. This framework, which ordinary people are already putting into practice, is an approach to organizing that can form a significant means for resisting and even overcoming the Trump agenda.The Green New Deal is a visionary program designed to protect the Earth’s climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice and eliminating poverty. The Green New Deal erupted into public attention as a proposal for national legislation, and the struggle to embody it in national legislation is ongoing.But there has also emerged a little-noticed wave of initiatives from community groups, unions, city and state governments, Indigenous American tribes and other non-federal actors designed to contribute to the core principle of the Green New Deal: to use the necessity for climate protection as a basis for creating good jobs and social justice. The US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who helped start the campaign for a Green New Deal, has called it “a Green New Deal from Below”.My new book, The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy, details more than a 100 such initiatives in over 40 states. Some of these initiatives use names like “The DeKalb Green New Deal” and “The Green New Deal for Education”; others don’t use the moniker but apply the same principles. Here are some examples.In DeKalb county, Georgia, on 17 September, the DeKalb Green New Deal presented a 100% clean energy and transportation transition plan. Since it started in 2020, the DeKalb Green New Deal has passed 20 climate action policies, resolutions and initiatives. A local official, Ted Terry, told a news outlet: “Our Green New Deal is specifically a DeKalb Green New Deal – it’s what we think we can do with our own resources, our own land, our own people.”On New York’s Long Island, a co-op led by women of the Indigenous American Shinnecock Nation have fought for and are now exercising their traditional right to cultivate and harvest kelp in Long Island Sound. Their ocean farming extracts carbon and nitrogen from the polluted waters of Long Island Sound and produces an environmentally friendly alternative to fertilizer derived from fossil fuel. It is also producing jobs for impoverished tribal members. This and similar programs are often referred to as a “Blue New Deal”.In Minneapolis, unionized workers who clean downtown commercial office high-rises struck to demand that their employers take action on climate change. The janitors, members of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) local 26 who are mostly immigrants and women, won a green education initiative that includes training in climate-friendly cleaning and building management, funded by their employers.In Illinois, the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, promoted by a broad coalition of labor and community groups, sets the state on a path to a carbon-free power sector by 2045 with the nation’s strongest labor and equity standards. The bill will slash emissions, create thousands of new clean energy union jobs, expand union apprenticeships for Black and Latino communities and increase energy efficiency for public schools. It also contains a transition program for families and communities currently reliant on jobs in the fossil fuel industry. Journalist Liza Featherstone has called the legislation a “miniature Green New Deal” for Illinois.In southern states like Texas and Virginia, the Green Workers Alliance has organized poorly paid solar panel installers to establish “a strong, worker-led movement that supports the Green New Deal and a just transition to a renewable economy”. They have connected with hundreds of workers in Facebook groups and listening tours. They have won back lost wages, organized struggles against temp agency abuses and campaigned to pressure large utility companies to transition to renewable energy.With Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of Congress we can still create local programs like the DeKalb Green New Deal with its comprehensive municipal plan for clean energy and its score of concrete climate initiatives. We can still create co-ops like the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers that protect the environment, eliminate carbon pollution, create jobs for deprived communities and increase the power of those marginalized in our political system. Workers like the union janitors in Minneapolis can organize, strike and win both better working conditions on the job and demands that their employers protect the climate.States can follow the lead of Illinois and pass legislation to transition to carbon-free power while creating union jobs for those who need them most and providing a just transition for workers transitioning out of the fossil fuel economy. Workers in the still-burgeoning green industries can organize both to challenge employer abuses and to fight to expand renewable energy to create good jobs and protect the climate.One of the leading proponents of a Green New Deal from Below is Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston. Her programs have included solarization and resilience in poor neighborhoods, a massive construction program called the Green New Deal for Boston Public Schools, a Youth Clean Jobs Corp, and provision of free, nutritious breakfasts and lunches to all of Boston’s 50,000 public school students, prepared by an employee- and Black-owned food service company.Wu has already shown how action by a Green New Deal from Below can resist the coming Trump onslaught. On 12 November she told the Boston Globe that the city’s authorities will not assist federal law enforcement in any mass deportation efforts and pledged to fight the fear that might take hold among some Bostonians when President-elect Donald Trump takes office.The role of the Green New Deal from Below in the Trump era can go beyond such defensive measures. To paraphrase Wu, the impact of the Green New Deal has been to “expand the sense of what is possible”. A core goal of Trump and Trumpism is to obliterate that sense of possibility – the knowledge that through collective action people can improve their lives and their world. The Green New Deal from Below resists that obliteration, with people organizing to build the blocks of possibility right in their own backyards.

    Jeremy Brecher is the author of the new book The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy. He is the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements and the co-founder and senior advisor of the Labor Network for Sustainability More

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    What’s behind the escalating situation in Ukraine? – podcast

    Tuesday marked 1,000 days of the Ukraine war – a conflict that for months had seemingly no end in sight. Russia has been advancing, but its progress has been grindingly slow, with Ukraine’s resistance struggling with a lack of weapons and aid. Both sides have had problems with morale and recruitment.Over the past week, things have changed. Russia has drafted in North Korean troops, while Ukraine has hit Russia with long-range missiles provided by the US. Dan Sabbagh is in Ukraine and explains how hits to the energy grid could make the difference on the ground, and how important the use of North Korean troops could be given the lack of willing Russian conscripts.Looming over it all, Dan tells Michael Safi, is the impending Trump presidency and the expectation that making “a deal” would be his priority. Is the recent increase in violence a sign that both sides are jockeying for a more powerful negotiating position?Support the Guardian today theguardian.com/todayinfocuspod More

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    US Senate rejects Bernie Sanders effort to block arms sales to Israel

    The US Senate has blocked legislation that would have halted the sale of some US weapons to Israel, which had been introduced out of concern about the human rights catastrophe faced by Palestinians in Gaza.Senator Bernie Sanders had introduced what are called joint resolutions of disapproval, seeking to block the Biden administration’s recent sale of $20bn in US weapons to Israel.Moves to advance three resolutions all failed, garnering only about 20 votes out of the chamber’s 100 members, with most Democrats joining all Republicans against the measures.The Senate was to vote later on Wednesday on two other resolutions that would stop shipments of mortar rounds and a GPS guidance system for bombs.Sanders introduced the measures in September as Israel continued its assault on Gaza – which has killed at least 43,000 people.“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government has not simply waged war against Hamas – it has waged war against Palestinians,” Sanders said a press conference held on Tuesday ahead of the vote.“Much of what’s been happening there has been done with US weapons and American taxpayer support,” Sanders continued, adding that the US has provided more than $18bn in military aid to Israel and delivered more than 50,000 tons of armaments and military equipment.“The United States of America is complicit in these atrocities. This complicity must end.”The Sanders-led effort to stop the flow of arms to Israel came after the country failed to meet the US-imposed deadline of 12 November to increase humanitarian aid and allow at least 350 trucks into Gaza a day. Despite Israel’s failure, the US took no action.Under US law, military assistance must not be given to foreign security forces that have committed human rights violations. However, the Biden administration has largely refused to stop the transfer of weapons to Israel, despite persistent accusations of war crimes from human rights experts.Senator Elizabeth Warren had vocalized support for the resolutions and condemned the Biden administration for not taking action against Israel for failing to meet its deadline for aid into Gaza.“The failure by the Biden administration to follow US law and to suspend arms shipments is a grave mistake that undermines American credibility worldwide,” Warren said in a statement. “If this administration will not act, Congress must step up to enforce US law and hold the Netanyahu government accountable through a joint resolution of disapproval.”It is not the first time Sanders has led such an effort, and this one was not expected to pass. But backers hoped significant support in the Senate would encourage Israel’s government and Joe Biden’s administration to do more to protect civilians in Gaza.The Democratic senator Jeff Merkley, who co-sponsored the resolutions, said he opposed the transfer of offensive weapons used for bombing, which has “produced massive deaths, massive injuries, massive destruction”.“I stand before you today as someone who has spent a lifetime advocating for Israel’s economic success and for their security in a very difficult part of the world,” Merkley said, adding: “But the Netanyahu government has taken policies that are out of sync with American values.”More than 65% of housing, schools and healthcare facilities have been destroyed by Israeli forces, according to UN data. All 12 universities in the territory have been damaged or destroyed, according to Wafa, the Palestinian news agency. The UN also estimates that about 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians have been displaced. Humanitarian groups on the ground have reported malnutrition and starvation and global food security experts say famine in northern Gaza is imminent.A spokesperson from Oxfam, a British non-governmental organization that has been providing aid to the displaced in the region, said: “The Senate must vote to finally end arms transfers to Israel, as we see the crisis continue to escalate with warnings of imminent famine and entire communities being permanently erased in North Gaza governorate.“Israel is blocking humanitarian aid, and is meanwhile using US weapons in attacks that have killed thousands of children, aid workers, and journalists, destroyed schools, hospitals, vital infrastructure for clean water and more, and displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, where there is nowhere safe.”It has been more than a year since Hamas’s surprise and deadly attacks last 7 October. Negotiations for a ceasefire and hostage deal between Israel and Hamas have repeatedly failed.AFP and Reuters contributed reporting More