US Politics

This month, 13 House Republicans crossed party lines and voted in favour of Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill. This prompted anger from colleagues, voters and the former president Donald Trump. And the Republican leadership was slow to jump to their defence. Jonathan Freedland and Tara Setmayer discuss what this says about the direction for the party

How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

Send your questions and feedback to [email protected]. Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts. More

Lara Trump claims pricier turkeys are a liberal plot against ThanksgivingEx-president’s daughter-in-law tells Fox News leftwing Americans ‘don’t want us to have any shared traditions’ Lara Trump, the Fox News contributor and wife of Eric Trump, has bizarrely claimed that the rising cost of the Thanksgiving turkey is part of a liberal plot to “chip away” at American traditions.During a discussion on Fox News about inflation and its impact on Thanksgiving-related purchases, the former president’s daughter-in law claimed leftwing Americans “want to fundamentally transform America” and were using the humble Thanksgiving turkey as a vehicle for their nefarious plot.Yes, there will be enough turkeys for Thanksgiving – at a priceRead more“Well, how do you that? You have to change America from the inside-out. You have to take away our traditions. So it might seem a little funny and a little ridiculous. ‘Oh, don’t have a turkey, then people won’t come over.’”In the exchange with the Fox host Pete Hegseth, Trump was responding to comments made by the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, that inflation had pushed costs of the traditional Thanksgiving bird to about a dollar more for a 20lb bird.“It all goes to fundamentally transforming this country, and the way you do that is you make sure that we have no commonality whatsoever, no traditions as Americans whatsoever,” she said. “You start chipping away at that, and they don’t care that Thanksgiving costs a lot more.”A battle over turkey inflation has been brewing for weeks, with conservatives accusing liberals of attempting to quash holidays, including Halloween, as part of an effort “to divide Americans up”.“They don’t want us to have any common ground. They don’t want us to have any shared traditions like Thanksgiving. A lot of places last month actually did away with Halloween because they wanted to be inclusive of the people that didn’t celebrate Halloween,” Trump added.Last week, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) warned that costs of the traditional turkey feast has risen 14% over the past year. The cost increase, up from an average of $46.90 for a family group of 10 last year to $53.31 in 2021, works out at $6 a person.Within the overall 6.6% increase in the cost of the family sit-down, including stuffing, sweet potatoes, rolls with butter, peas, cranberries, a veggie tray, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and coffee and milk, the cost of the bird has increased more than any other factor – 24%.At the same time, Butterball, the North Carolina poultry giant that produces more than 1bn pounds of turkey each year, told the Guardian that it had been preparing for this Thanksgiving a year in advance and prices “remain roughly the same as previous years, and turkey is one of the most economical parts of the Thanksgiving meal”.But the tradition of a turkey dinner is under pressure from some other quarters, with some questioning why it is necessary for millions of turkeys to be slaughtered. In a punchy essay for the Cut, food writer Mia Mercado argued that side dishes are the true stars of the holiday sit-down.“I’m coming for your precious holiday bird. Turkey is not welcome at my Thanksgiving,” Mercado wrote.TopicsThanksgivingUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

Justice prevailed in the trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers. In America, that’s a shockMoustafa BayoumiThe jury reached the right verdict – even as the criminal justice system did everything it could to exonerate the three men It’s shocking that Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan were found guilty of murdering Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia. Yet the shock doesn’t stem out of any miscarriage of justice. On the contrary, the jury in Glynn county deliberated and reached the correct decision. Stalking an innocent Black man, chasing him, cornering him, and then killing him must come with criminal consequences in this country, and each of the three murderers now faces the possibility of a life sentence.But the shock is that justice was served in a case where it seemed the criminal justice system and substantial portions of media coverage were doing all they could to exonerate these men. In fact, everything about this case illustrates how difficult it is to get justice for Black people in this country, starting with how often Fox News and other media outlets referred to the case as “the Arbery trial”, as if Ahmaud Arbery were the perpetrator here and not the victim.Kyle Rittenhouse wasn’t convicted because, in America, white reasoning rules | Michael HarriotRead moreThe facts of the case have never been in dispute, and yet they were also often distorted or ignored to aid the defense. The McMichaels claimed they were trying to make a citizen’s arrest of Arbery, an avid athlete who had been out jogging a mere three miles from his home that day. Father and son McMichael found Arbery suspicious, they told police, because there had been “several break-ins in the neighborhood”. This statement has been repeated so often in the last year that it has assumed the status of fact.And yet, according to the local Brunswick News, there had been just one burglary reported to county police between 1 January and 23 February 2020, the day of Arbery’s murder. That singular incident referred to property taken from a Satilla Shores vehicle – Travis McMichael’s truck. (McMichael reported a theft because, after he left his truck unlocked, his gun had been taken, he said at trial.) While surveillance video also captured an unidentified white couple possibly taking some property belonging to Larry English, a man building a home in the area, English testified that nothing had been stolen from the construction site of his second home, where Arbery stopped directly before being chased by the McMichaels. And during the trial, we heard that in all of 2019, there had been only four reported car break-ins. So, yeah, hardly a runaway crime spree.Then why did it keep getting reported this way?There’s more, of course. It took almost three months for the Georgia bureau of investigation, which took over the case, to arrest Travis and Gregory McMichael. (Bryan was arrested months later.) The elder McMichael had been a police officer and investigator for the district attorney’s office. The favoritism shown the men ran deep, so deep that the Brunswick district attorney, Jackie Johnson, who first oversaw the case, was later indicted on charges of violating her oath as a public officer and obstructing a police officer, as she was accused of “showing favor and affection to Greg McMichael during the investigation”, according to the indictment.Like Johnson, the next prosecutor, George E Barnhill, was also forced to recuse himself from the case. His son had previously worked with McMichael in what again was a clear conflict of interest. Barnhill wrote a letter to the police department explaining his recusal. “It appears Travis McMichael, Greg McMichael, and Bryan William [sic] were following, in ‘hot pursuit’, a burglary suspect, with solid first-hand probable cause, in their neighborhood,” he wrote. We now know just how completely and utterly false this account of events was. By the time the trial began, jury selection was also looking highly problematic. The population of Glynn county is over a quarter Black, and yet the seated jury for the trial was overwhelmingly white, with only one Black juror selected. Even the judge acknowledged the appearance of “intentional discrimination” in this outcome, as defense attorneys struck virtually every Black potential juror from serving on the jury.Defense attorneys also used every tool at their disposal to dehumanize Ahmaud Arbery. Laura Hogue, lawyer for Greg McMichael, characterized Arbery as a “recurring night-time intruder” whose presence was “frightening and unsettling”, as if adopting every stereotype of “the dangerous young Black man” she could find. It got even worse when she told the jury that Arbery had “long, dirty toenails”.What a morally bankrupt and shameless statement, but such are the lengths that this system will go to preserve its ill-gotten power. Any honest student of the history of this country will recognize what was happening in this case and in this trial. On display was nothing short of an American fear in all its guises.First, there is the irrational and racist fear of Black people that has motivated so much white vigilantism. It’s no mere coincidence that Georgia’s (now-defunct) self-defense statute dates to the civil war era. As Carol Anderson, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and many others have shown, the violence at the heart of the American system begins with a fundamental fear of Black and Indigenous people.Then there’s the establishment’s fear that its power will be exposed for what it too often is, a precarious system that serves and protects not the public but its own interests through its prejudices and favoritisms. And finally, there’s the fear that those who don’t look like us will stand in judgment. Thus a system of power built on racial hierarchy will seek its own self-preservation.The good news, heard in the courtroom, is that the rest of us are not afraid. The mostly white jury was not afraid to return the proper verdict. The assistant district attorney Linda Dunikoski was not afraid (and was completely convincing) in her prosecution. The attorney S Lee Merritt was fearless and eloquent in his advocacy for justice. But the bravest, most fearless, most admirable person in this saga has to be Wanda Cooper-Jones, Arbery’s mother.It’s hard to believe that justice would have prevailed here were it not for Cooper-Jones’ indefatigable efforts to push and challenge prosecutors like Johnson and Barnhill and the whole damn system at every turn. She pushed Georgia’s legislature to pass a hate crimes bill. She filed the federal lawsuit against the men now convicted of killing her son. She even met with the then president Donald Trump to discuss police reform.Cooper-Jones is a real hero, both for her son and in the fight for a truly just society. She was willing and able to fight a system that, if the past be a guide, was more than willing to exonerate itself.But here’s the problem: what happens when there is no Cooper-Jones? Why should our rights depend on grieving mothers fighting for the rights of their murdered children? What kind of justice system is that?I’m thankful that people like Wanda Cooper-Jones exist, but what we really need is more than that. We need a justice system that isn’t afraid of power. We need a justice system that isn’t afraid of doing what’s right. What we really need is a justice system that doesn’t depend on grieving mothers at all.
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
TopicsAhmaud ArberyOpinionUS justice systemGeorgiaRaceUS politicscommentReuse this content More

This is justice of a kind. But don’t forget Ahmaud Arbery’s killers almost got awayAkin OllaThe verdict is welcome, but it rings hollow given the underlying systems of white supremacy that have long justified the vigilante actions of Arbery’s attackers The three white men who hunted down Ahmaud Arbery in a neighborhood in Glynn county, Georgia, have been found guilty in court. The US held its breath as the jury deliberations entered their second day this Wednesday. Travis McMichael, who fired the shots that killed the 25-year-old Black man, his father, Greg, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan were all convicted of the 23 February 2020 murder. While the verdict is a welcome one, it rings somewhat hollow given the recent not guilty verdict in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse and the underlying systems of white supremacy that have long justified the vigilante actions of Arbery’s attackers.How the murder of Ahmaud Arbery further exposes America’s broken and racist legal systemRead moreDespite the trial’s outcome, the actual process of the case was steeped in various justifications of the killers’ actions, from the racially-tinged fearmongering of the defense attorneys to the fact that the killers were arrested 74 days after Arbery’s murder. Justice cannot be served as long as the current system remains, and it seems unlikely that even this verdict will dissuade future vigilantes.A defense attorney must, of course, make the best case for their client. It speaks volumes about our country that much of what could be mustered during this trial were attempts to attack Arbery as a person – a tactic commonly deployed to justify the murders of Black Americans. The judge dismissed attempts by the defense to introduce prior acts by Arbery into evidence, and a move to include the fact that trace amounts of THC were found in his system when he was killed. After those failed efforts, the defense moved to disparage the young man’s body, telling jurors that Arbery had “long, dirty toenails”, and criticizing the shorts that he wore the day he was shot – as if Arbery had called this crime on to himself for the way he dressed; as if the McMichaels and Bryan were aware of anything about him before they decided to chase him down and execute him; as if it was Arbery’s toenails that caused Travis McMichael to exclaim “fucking nigger” above the dying man.Though many of the defense’s attempts to use racist dog-whistles were defeated in pre-trial decisions by the presiding judge, they were still successful in ensuring that the jury would be nearly all white, despite the county itself being about 27% Black. This effort is not uncommon among attorneys and is seeped in a larger system of racism that leads to underrepresentation of people of color on juries.There were many others who participated in the process of justifying the vigilante behavior of the father-and-son duo and their neighbor, who captured it all on video. The police who arrived at the scene took the word of the murderers and did not place them under arrest. The officer accepted their story of self-defense, that these men were simply defending the neighborhood from a Black burglar. Greg Michael had, luckily for their little lynch mob, served as a county police officer for seven years and 30 as an investigator for the local district attorney’s office. The same district attorney’s office was later accused by county commissioners of preventing the arrests of the killers. According to Allen Booker, commissioner: “The police at the scene went to [district attorney Jackie Johnson], saying they were ready to arrest both of them … [s]he shut them down to protect her friend McMichael.” The district attorney shifted blame to police and claimed that they could have used their own discretion to make the arrest.After the video of Arbery’s death went viral and fueled protests demanding action, it still took two months for police to arrest his killers. This bias in favor of police officers and former police officers is all too common in the US, and definitely not rare in Glynn county, known for allegations of officers being shielded from consequences.While crimes like this allow us to focus on the individual white vigilantes, it is important to zoom out and see the many others – from the defense, to the district attorney, to the arresting officers and the institutions they influence and control – who are implicated. Arbery’s murder was of a pattern with a history. It is rooted in the segregation and violent racism that shaped the borders of towns and countries across the US. It is rooted in the legacies of the mobs that killed 14-year-old Emmett Till and overthrew the government of Wilmington, North Carolina, in a white supremacist coup. It is also reflected in other modern examples, like the “Karens” who unleash police officers onto their Black neighbors, or Rittenhouse, who was recently found not guilty of a crime not so different from that committed by the McMichaels and Bryan.Like Rittenhouse, this was a case of white Americans taking up arms to protect what they perceived as Black threats against property. Although the people whom Rittenhouse shot were white, he chose to arm himself during an uprising following the shooting of a Black man, and it is difficult to believe that stereotypes about violent Black looters and killers did not play a role in his perceptions of the uprising – the same kinds of stereotypes that fueled the attack on Arbery.Much like Rittenhouse’s case, the defense lawyers of Arbery’s three assailants claimed their clients engaged in self-defense. Despite showing up to the scene with weapons, Rittenhouse and the men who killed Arbery thought they were the ones under threat. The verdict against the McMichaels and Bryan may feel like a victory, but Rittenhouse’s verdict has done more than enough to justify future vigilantism by white men deeply fearful that somewhere out there Black people might be disrupting the status quo.The verdict here matters for the family. Arbery’s father, Marcus Arbery, reacted to the verdict saying: “We conquered that lynch mob.” This case exposed the various layers of the justice system that work in tandem to justify murders committed by white men on a political mission. But justice cannot be truly served until this entire system is ripped down and built anew. Rittenhouse’s claims of protecting property are already being used by the defense attorney of a member of the far-right Proud Boys group. And despite the scrutiny the Proud Boys received for participating in the 6 January riot in Washington DC, the organization has begun showing up at rightwing marches and protests claiming to be there for security purposes.While the desire to celebrate the Arbery verdict is understandable, the decision will not stop white men from murdering Black people and others they deem to be a threat to property or the political order. It will take a movement to do that, a movement that will have to overcome the violence of white vigilantes and an entire system held up by their atrocities.
Akin Olla is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian
TopicsAhmaud ArberyOpinionRaceUS politicsGeorgiacommentReuse this content More

InterviewCongresswoman Jackie Speier: ‘Republicans are about doing what’s going to give them power’Joan E Greve in WashingtonThe Democratic congresswoman talks about her effort to censure Paul Gosar, her retirement and the shifting dynamics of the House For Jackie Speier, the growing threat of political violence in America is personal.Before becoming a member of the House of Representatives in 2009, Speier served as a staffer to congressman Leo Ryan. When Speier joined Ryan for a 1978 trip to Guyana to investigate the Jonestown settlement, she was shot five times.Speier survived the attack, but Ryan and four other members of their delegation did not.So when one of her Republican colleagues recently shared a threatening video about the president and another House member, Speier knew she needed to act. The Democratic congresswoman spearheaded an effort to censure Paul Gosar, who had tweeted an altered anime video showing him killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking Joe Biden.‘Inciting violence begets violence’: Paul Gosar censured over video aimed at AOCRead moreThe censure resolution passed the House last week, in a vote of 223 to 207. All but three House Republicans voted against the resolution, with the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, condemning the measure as a Democratic “abuse of power”.The Guardian spoke to Speier to discuss the censure resolution, her coming retirement and the shifting dynamics of the House as lawmakers face more threats of violence. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.Why was it so important for the House to censure Gosar?The ramping up of vitriol on the House floor has been demonstrable for a number of years now. It was like a match got lit during Donald Trump’s presidency, and it was seen as benefiting members to be provocative and then fundraising off of statements they made on the House floor.It’s very clear that, if you are silent about a member of Congress wanting to murder another member of Congress, even in a “cartoon”, you are inciting violence. And if you incite violence, it begets violence.So that’s why I felt so strongly that we had to draw the red line. This has got to be a red line. And obviously my colleagues agreed, and we passed the resolution.We saw some of your Republican colleagues either trying to justify Gosar’s behavior or downplay it. Do you feel like some of your colleagues have not learned the lessons of the Capitol insurrection, when we saw that violent rhetoric can escalate to potentially deadly violence?The facts don’t matter. That’s the problem. The facts don’t matter. I heard one of the Republicans on a show this morning say she thought it was reprehensible, but she voted against the censure because it also stripped him of his committee assignments. So they always will come up with a rationale to allow them to continue to follow the lead of former President Trump or Kevin McCarthy. It’s not about doing what’s right any more. It’s about doing what’s going to give them power.Specifically in terms of Kevin McCarthy, do you think that his rationalization for this behavior makes it inevitable that this is going to happen again?He’s got a number of radical extremists in his caucus that are very effective communicators to the right fringe, and he can’t really rein them in because reining them in means they will attack him. So they have become the face of the House Republicans. You might as well put a brass ring in Kevin McCarthy’s nose because they’re pulling him around.Politics is politics, but we’re talking about taking the life of another member of Congress. How is that not appropriate for censure?Does it feel like there’s a disconnect between Republicans’ rationalizations and the very real violence we saw earlier this year [during the Capitol insurrection] that could have resulted in the death of a member?Not to mention the fact that they’re eating their young. They’ve got one member, one of these fringe rightwing members, who was giving out the telephone numbers of members who voted for their districts and voted for what is a bipartisan infrastructure bill, and [Republican congressman Fred] Upton gets death threats.You’ve got to have an alligator’s skin to do this job. We know that. I’ve been doing this for 38 years. I’m very accustomed to it. I’m also accustomed to getting death threats. And some are seen as credible, and some are not.So that happens. There has to be a repercussion for that. And, as someone said, if in corporate America, you put out an animated video killing one of your co-workers, you would be fired.There’s a lack of reality in Congress right now. And anything goes. The more hyperbolic you are, the more extremist you are, the more successful you are because it’s all about raising money. Raising money gets you clout and power within the caucus.They have made Minority Leader McCarthy impotent in terms of disciplining anyone in his caucus who strays, who crosses that red line.What is your response to suggestions that Republicans will strip Democrats of committee assignments when they come back into power?If one of my colleagues put up an animated video or a tweet that said they wanted to kill a Republican colleague, I would introduce a censure motion for that. You cannot excuse away that kind of conduct. Someone is going to get injured or be killed. That’s how serious that conduct was.You have been in and around the House for decades now. Do you think that the increased number of threats against members has changed the dynamics of the House in any way?I think it’s become a bloodsport. And if a bipartisan bill like the infrastructure bill that had bipartisan support in the Senate and has bipartisan support in the House is then turned on the members that worked in consensus-building, then that suggests that we don’t want to legislate any more.I know that you announced your retirement this week. As you prepare for your next steps, would you say that this resolution was one way to protect the House as an institution?I love this institution. It’s such a privilege to serve. And I think when you’re in the heat of doing your everyday job here, you might lose sight of the fact that this is such a privilege. We’re given the opportunity to fashion legislation to make lives better for the American people. And that’s what we should be doing.When we get sidetracked into wanting to just disparage each other, then we’re not doing our jobs.I introduced the resolution because it just hit me so dramatically. And it’s yet again another example of women becoming the subject of attacks – physical attacks, psychological attacks – women of color in politics even more. I’ve worked on this issue for years now. And I see it as a way of silencing women and discouraging women from running for office.So for all those reasons, it was really important to take action.TopicsUS politicsHouse of RepresentativesAlexandria Ocasio-CortezRepublicansCaliforniainterviewsReuse this content More

Former Trump adviser claims to ‘expose unvarnished truth’ of Covid in new bookScott Atlas resigned after four months but blames Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx for ‘headline-dominating debacles’ In a new book, former Trump adviser Scott Atlas blames Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci for “headline-dominating debacles” about quack cures for Covid-19 – but omits to mention the chief proponent of snake-oil treatments, including hydroxychloroquine and disinfectant, was the US president he loyally served.US hospitals prepare for influx of Covid patients as millions travel for ThanksgivingRead moreAtlas, a radiologist, is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, California, specializing in healthcare policy. He became a special adviser to Donald Trump in August 2020, five months into the pandemic, but resigned less than four months later after a controversial spell in the role.His book, A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop Covid from Destroying America, will be published on 7 December. Its publisher is Bombardier Books, an imprint of PostHill Press, a conservative outlet that will also publish a memoir by Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s fourth press secretary.Speaking to Fox News, Atlas promised to “expose the unvarnished truth” about Trump’s Covid taskforce, including “a shocking lack of critical thinking about the science … a reckless abuse of public health and a moral failure in what should be expected from public health leaders”.Birx, an army physician, is a longtime leader in the fight against Aids. Fauci has served seven presidents as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Both were senior members of Trump’s Covid taskforce. Atlas’s book is replete with attacks on both.Describing the fight against Covid before he came to the White House, Atlas accidentally sideswipes Trump when he writes: “Birx and Fauci stood alongside the president during headline-dominating debacles in the Brady Press Room about using hydroxychloroquine, drinking disinfectant, ingesting bleach and using UV light to cure the virus. They were there as the sole medical input into the taskforce, generating the entire advisory output to the states.”Hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial, was touted as a Covid treatment by non-governmental voices including two billionaires, Elon Musk and Larry Ellison.Fauci said repeatedly such claims should be treated with caution. But Trump himself proved an enthusiastic advocate, disagreeing with his senior scientist and asking the public: “What do you have to lose?”Trump even took the drug himself, before the Food and Drug Administration revoked emergency use authorization, citing concerns about side effects including “serious heart rhythm problems” and death.Atlas’s reference to “drinking disinfectant, ingesting bleach and using UV light” is to the events of a memorable White House briefing when again it was Trump’s pronouncements that went wildly awry – not those of his officials.On Thursday 23 April 2020, William Bryan, undersecretary for science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security, discussed a study of effects on the coronavirus from sun exposure and cleaning agents – as applied to surfaces, not the human body.Trump said: “And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.“So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful.”As the Guardian reported, Birx “remained silent. But social media erupted in outrage.”Trump asked if sunlight might work, saying: “Deborah, have you ever heard of that? The heat and the light relative to certain viruses, yes, but relative to this virus?”Birx said: “Not as a treatment. I mean, certainly fever is a good thing. When you have a fever, it helps your body respond. But, I’ve not seen heat or light as a –”Trump interrupted: “I think that’s a great thing to look at. OK?”The president subsequently claimed to have been “sarcastic”.01:58In his book, Atlas treats Birx and Fauci’s work for a taskforce he says Trump “never once” met or spoke to with sarcasm, criticism and disdain.Seven doctors contract Covid after attending Florida anti-vaccine summitRead moreHe accuses Birx of “volatile behavior” and “interrupting all who challenged her” but says vice-president Mike Pence decided removing her was “simply not worth the risk to the upcoming election”.Among criticisms of Fauci, Atlas echoes Trump in complaining about his profile.“Dr Fauci kept on interviewing, of course,” Atlas writes, “positing the ever-present, potentially negative turn of events that never happened.”A year after Atlas’s resignation, more than 772,000 Americans have died of Covid-19.TopicsCoronavirusDonald TrumpAnthony FauciUS politicsPolitics booksRepublicansTrump administrationnewsReuse this content More

What is happening with inflation in the US, and how worried should you be?Why prices are rising, how long this might last, and why inflation is a psychological as well as an economic phenomenon Jobs are coming back, wages are rising, stock markets are hitting record highs. In many ways, the US economy is booming. And yet as we officially enter the holiday season, consumer confidence is at its lowest level in a decade. The reason? Inflation.The US inflation rate in October was the highest it has been since the early 90s, when Nirvana released Smells Like Teen Spirit and the Gulf war was just beginning.But should we really be worried? The Federal Reserve, and the Biden administration, think rising prices are “transitory” – caused by the hangover from the pandemic. Their critics are less sure.Inflation, especially during a global pandemic, is complicated. Here is what we know about inflation in the US.What is inflation?Inflation describes a general rise in the level of prices of all consumer goods and services. It is not specific to a particular good or service; rather it is a measure of when, broadly, things are more expensive than they were before.There are a handful of ways inflation is measured, though the Consumer Price Index (CPI) measured by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is the most common system used to gauge inflation. The index looks at the prices of goods and services in cities and suburbs across the country, weighted depending on the proportion a good or service has in overall consumption. For example, food and housing is weighted more than clothing in the index.What’s happening with inflation?According to CPI numbers released in mid-November, prices in the US rose 6.2% in October compared with where prices were the same time last year. US core inflation, which does not include goods like energy and food whose supply is susceptible to external events, was 4.6% in October, its highest since 1991.Prices broadly increased in energy, housing, food, used and new vehicles and recreation. Price decreases for airline fares and alcoholic beverages were among the few price declines seen last month.The US is not the only country experiencing inflation – the UK, China and Germany have all also reported rising inflation in the last few weeks.The Fed has already taken steps to reduce inflation, ending some of its stimulus programs that saw it buying bonds to stimulate the economy. But the central bank has held off on its main tool to control inflation – adjusting interest rates – probably because doing so runs a higher risk of starting an economic recession.How worried should Americans be about inflation?Some economists have been pointing out that the inflation we are seeing now is just one piece of the pandemic’s impact on the economy, which overall has not been terrible.“There’s a lot of uncertainty. We don’t know what happens next. The past two years have been unprecedented and painful,” said Claudia Sahm, a senior fellow at the Jain Family Institute and a former Federal Reserve economist. “We’re going to have a bumpy ride.”Even though inflation was high in October, other figures like the strong increase in jobs and the surge in retail sales point to an overall good month for the US economy.“My baseline scenario is that as the pandemic is contained, which is happening as we get more vaccines out there, we will see inflation move back down to something that is very close to before Covid,” Sahm said. “I don’t think Covid has changed the underlying structure of the US economy.“I do take a lot of comfort that many people have the money to weather this storm, at least for now,” she said, citing the direct aid Americans got through stimulus checks and the child tax credit. “It really is upsetting to pay more for your groceries, but it’s really upsetting not to be able to walk home with the groceries in your cart.”Why is inflation happening?The pandemic has touched every inch of the US economy and has affected every American in some form, so there is no single reason inflation is happening.“When you look under the hood of the top-line numbers, there are a lot of stories,” Sahm said.The supply chain crisis has led to a shortage of cars, clogged shipping ports and overstuffed warehouses. Meanwhile, consumer demand has surged after plummeting in the early days of the pandemic.For example, a shortage of microchips has led to a slowdown in car manufacturing, which increased the sales – and ultimately prices – of used cars, Sahm said. Housing prices have gone up because renters feel comfortable moving again and rental owners feel comfortable charging higher rents.Some companies have not been hesitant to reap the benefits of increased consumer spending during the pandemic, raising prices and paying record compensation for the country’s top chief executives.Throughout the pandemic, the federal government boosted the economy through multiple trillion-dollar stimulus packages that gave money directly to families and employers, and the Federal Reserve policy lowered the interest rates and purchased bonds.What are the effects of inflation?The most obvious impact is that Americans are seeing higher prices whenever they go to the store, make investments in a house or car or pay their medical expenses. Some economists believe that the higher prices mean that some households will start slowing their spending as goods take up a larger portion of their budget.Inflation’s impact on people’s budgets will depend on whether wages can keep up with the rate of inflation. So far, it seems that wages are not keeping up with inflation, though industries that are recovering from severe pandemic losses, like hospitality, are seeing wage increases on pace with inflation.Inflation can also have a profound impact on politics as voters tend to blame the party in power for rising prices. So far, Republicans have been eager to blame Joe Biden for inflation, condemning him for overspending on government aid.“It’s a direct result of flooding the country with money,” the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, told reporters in October.Democrats have taken the defensive, emphasizing that experts at the Federal Reserve believe the inflation will be short-lived and that pandemic assistance was necessary for the health and wellbeing of Americans during a crisis.“We are making progress on our recovery. Jobs are up, wages are up, home values are up, personal debt is down and unemployment is down,” Biden said the day October’s inflation numbers were released. “There is no question the economy continues to recover and is in much better shape today than it was a year ago.”How will it end?That’s the big question. Earlier this month the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, conceded that inflation had been “longer lasting than anticipated” and it was “very difficult to predict the persistence of supply constraints or their effects on inflation”. Economists expect the central bank to start raising rates next year in an attempt to tamp down price rises.But inflation is a psychological as well as an economic phenomenon. Fear of rising prices is already affecting consumers and could, perversely, lead to more price rises as consumers snap up goods fearing yet more rises in a market that is still constrained by supply chain problems.We will probably continue to be haunted by inflationary fears unless the price hikes do prove “transitory”. As the old economist joke goes: the best rate of inflation is the one no one notices.TopicsInflationEconomicsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Joe Lieberman on Biden, Trump and centrism: ‘It’s a strategy for making democracy work’The Democratic ex-senator preaches a deeply unfashionable gospel of compromise in a country paralysed by civil war A friend once joked to Joe Lieberman, former senator and vice-presidential nominee, that the Democratic party was like his appendix: it was there but not doing much for him.“It’s a funny line,” he says by phone from his law office in New York, “but the truth is that it’s more than that because I feel good physically when the Democrats do well – in my terms – and I do get pain when they go off and do things that I don’t agree with.”Lieberman may be in for a world of pain now. The other Joe – also 79, also a Democratic ex-senator – was expected to share his centrist convictions as US president. Instead Joe Biden as president has surprised friends and foes alike with the scale, scope and audacity of his multi-trillion-dollar agenda.The Democratic party itself has moved left over the past decade, making it an increasingly awkward fit for Lieberman, who voted for George W Bush’s Iraq war, endorsed Republican John McCain over Barack Obama for president and is still close friends with South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, the quintessential Republican apologist for Donald Trump.So it was that in a recent appearance on C-Span to promote his new book, The Centrist Solution, Lieberman was assailed by a caller from Oregon over his “archaic” views and policies that “have done nothing for the poor and the working class”. Another, from Connecticut, upbraided him for the prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the deregulation of Wall Street and a crime bill that “put so many Black and Brown people in this country in jail”.Yet he remains unbowed and undeterred by political currents. Lieberman, co-chair of No Labels, a group focused on bipartisanship, continues to preach a deeply unfashionable gospel of compromise working across the aisle in a country that seems paralysed by a cold civil war.When he joined the Senate in 1989, he recalls, a typical vote would see around 40 conservatives on one side, 40 liberal on the other, and 20 that were an unpredictable mix. By the time he left in 2013, there was no Democrat with a more conservative voting record than any Republican, and no Republican with a more liberal voting record than any Democrat.He attributes the polarisation to the gerrymandering of congressional districts, which makes incumbents risk averse, the increasing influence of money in politics – “they expect you to do ideologically what they want you to do” – and the partisanship of both cable news and social media, which encourages politicians to play to their echo chambers.Lieberman recounts from his Senate experience: “We would want to be able to go home at election time and say, ‘My friends, here’s what I got done for us’. But now people tend to want to go home and say, ‘Oh, here’s what I tried to do except for those bastards in the other party’. That’s a really vicious cycle that takes the country nowhere. The public, certainly the broad middle, is sick of all this.”This disaffection, Lieberman believes, helps explain why, in 2016, millions of Americans decided to blow it all up by electing an outsider, celebrity businessman Trump. Evidently it did not work as Washington became more poisonous and polarised than ever.Does the “centre ground” mean anything any more when one party, the Republicans, has veered into far right extremism, for example by embracing Trump’s “big lie” about a stolen election and failing to condemn the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol?Lieberman’s answer will strike some as out of touch and trafficking in false equivalence: “The divisive forces in both of our two major parties have moved further away from the centre. But I believe those more extreme segments of both parties are in the minority in both parties.”“The majority, I’d say, in the Republican party is centre right and in the Democratic party is centre left, and it’s quite possible for them to make their way to the centre and negotiate and come up with centrist solutions. In the book, I’ve tried very hard to distinguish centrism from moderation. Centrism is not an ideology. It’s a strategy for making democracy work.”He continues: “It takes leaders who are willing to work together across party lines to get something done and, if that doesn’t work, it takes voters who I think are in the majority, certainly the plurality, to demand at election time that the candidates they vote for will work across party lines.”To many bruised by years of Washington gridlock, this will sound naive.Lieberman’s support for the 60-vote filibuster, a Senate procedural rule, as one of the last remaining incentives to bipartisanship is out of touch with a new generation of progressives who regard filibuster reform as essential to protecting voting rights and democracy itself.But he does allow the possibility that the two-system party might no longer be fit for purpose – and that the long awaited, much derided case for a viable third party might become irresistible.“If one could imagine the Republicans nominating Donald Trump again the president and the Democrats – assuming for a moment that Joe Biden doesn’t run again – nominate somebody further to the left, which is possible as a result of Democratic primaries, wow, there’s going to be a big space in the middle open and somebody will take it,” he says.“The conditions now are unprecedented in American history. The degree of partisanship and the degree of effective control of the political system by minorities to the right and left in both parties really may open the door to a successful third party campaign for president, perhaps as early as 2024.”Lieberman has reason to be a student of third party candidacies. In 2000 Ralph Nader’s Green Party polled at less than 3% but was widely blamed for depriving Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore and running mate Lieberman of critical votes in their narrow defeat by Bush and Dick Cheney.The losing vice-presidential candidate himself, however, is philosophical: “I never blamed Nader because he had the legal right to do what he did and there was some interesting post-election polling that surprisingly indicated that the Nader vote would have divided between Bush and Gore.”He describes the supreme court’s ruling in favor of Bush in the disputed election as a “miscarriage of justice”, however. A Gore-Lieberman administration is now one of the great historical what-ifs, an alternate timeline that could have shaped the 21st century very differently.For example, Lieberman points out, Bush oversaw a big and unnecessary tax cut that put America back in deficit territory after three surpluses in a row under Bill Clinton. “I’m confident that President Gore would have felt a responsibility to go into Afghanistan, from which we were attacked [on 11 September 2001], but would he have gone into Iraq? I doubt it. That would have changed history a lot.”“The other major change would have been obviously that Al Gore was the leading American champion for doing something about climate change. We would have pushed through some reactions to climate change which would have put us in a better, safer situation now.”Criticized for his resistance to withdrawing from Iraq, Lieberman lost a Democratic primary election for his seat in Connecticut in 2006 only to win election as an independent. Two years later, he again marched to the beat of his own drum by endorsing his old friend McCain, a Republican senator for Arizona, rather than Democratic senator Obama, the first African American nominee of a major party.He insists: “Surprisingly, neither Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, both of whom I really knew well, ever asked me for my support. McCain did and I thought, what the hell? He’s my friend, totally capable of being president, and so I don’t regret at all supporting him.”“We had great areas of agreement on foreign and defense policy but we disagreed a lot. I consider myself a centre left Democrat. He’s a conservative Republican but a maverick so he broke on climate change, he broke for a while on campaign finance reform.”It later emerged that McCain had wanted Lieberman as his running mate, believing the country ready for a bipartisan ticket, only to be persuaded by his staff to go for the inexperienced, rabble rousing Sarah Palin instead. Another crossroads of history. McCain later admitted it had been a mistake.Lieberman, the nearly man for a second time, comments: “If McCain had been able to have me as his running mate, I have confidence that we would have done better than he did with Governor Palin. But it’s hard to say that we would have won. Obama was just walking on the mountaintop at that point and Bush 43 was unpopular and the economy was in bad shape, so people really wanted a change.“And not only was Obama a change in party but he was African American. It was a breakthrough moment for America. I think a lot of people voting for him felt not only that he was the change and capable but that we were going to prove again what we are as a country. So it was an extraordinary moment.”The close friendship between Lieberman, McCain, who died in 2018, and another senator, Graham of South Carolina, saw them dubbed “the three Amigos”. But where McCain evidently loathed Trump, Graham has defended the former president’s indefensible actions while enjoying his hospitality on the golf course. Does Lieberman ever call him and say, snap out of it?“Well, we talk a lot. Lindsey will always try, by his nature, to be where he feels he can be effective and so you’ve watched him sometimes be quite close to Trump and at other times be critical. We remain friends. I have nothing negative to say about him because he is my friend but I do think that his great skill ultimately – and I watched it while I was in the Senate – is to be a bridge builder, a bipartisan centrist problem solver.“At the right moment he will be, I hope, part of the sort of restoration of the Republican party in which he grew up and where his really dear friend – and mine, of course – John McCain was ultimately the nominee. That’s the Republican party Lindsey most naturally fits into.”It is a party that can still be saved, Lieberman insists. “I don’t think Trump is going to win in 2024 and Republicans who are not tied to him will see that increasingly and people will challenge him, including some who will go back to the regular conservative Republican party, not the party that was so extreme and nasty and willing to ignore the law of the United States.“I don’t know who it will be. A lot of people are looking at taking him on. It will take some guts. There’s something brewing out there. So, am I optimistic that the more mainstream centrist elements in the Republican party will take over again? I am.”For their part, Republicans have condemned Biden for campaigning as a centrist but governing as what they perceive as a radical who pushed a $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill, $1.2tn infrastructure deal and $1.75tn social and climate spending package.Lieberman, who worked with him in the Senate for 24 years, says: “The squad, the further left in the Democratic party, seems to be having influence that is taking him, at least in public perception, further to the left than I certainly thought he was and I’m confident he is now.“It may be understandable because we’ve just come through an unprecedented crisis because of the pandemic and he wanted to do everything he could to get us back on track. So the bills he supported were bigger than any I ever voted for or that he voted for in the 24 years. But I think we we saw him at his natural best on the bipartisan infrastructure reform bill that just passed and he signed.”Ever hopeful, Lieberman notes that the president defied progressives by nominating Jerome Powell for a second term as chair of the Federal Reserve. He adds: “Biden is solid. He sees the world realistically and he knows he can’t be Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson now in part because he doesn’t have the great Democratic majorities that they had.“And the country, thank God, is not where it was in the Depression, as bad as the pandemic was. The old Joe, which is the real Joe, will be dominant in the next three years of his presidency.”TopicsUS newsThe US politics sketchUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsUS SenateanalysisReuse this content More