US Politics

The recovery in the US jobs market collapsed in December, the last full month of Donald Trump’s presidency, as coronavirus infections soared across the country.The US lost 140,000 jobs in December, down from a gain of 245,000 in November, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The loss ended seven months of jobs growth with the leisure and hospitality sector once again bearing the biggest losses.The unemployment rate stayed at 6.7%, close to twice as high as it was in February before Covid-19 hit the US. It is also three percentage points higher than the 4.5% rate Trump inherited from his predecessor Barack Obama.Some 372,000 jobs were lost in food services and drinking places, offsetting gains in other areas, as Covid-19 infections and deaths rose sharply across the country. “The decline in payroll employment reflects the recent increase in coronavirus (Covid-19) cases and efforts to contain the pandemic,” the BLS said.Four million Americans have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more – technically defined as long-term unemployed – accounting for 37% of those out of work. Unemployment rates for black (9.9%) and Latino (9.3%) workers remained sharply higher than for white Americans (6%).After months of wrangling Congress passed a $900bn stimulus package in December but the relief came too late for many. Joe Biden has pledged more aid for those hit by the pandemic’s economic fallout but areas like hospitality are likely to continue suffering until the virus is under control.Friday’s latest jobs report comes after months of worrying signs in the jobs market. On Thursday the labor department said another 787,000 people had filed first-time claims for jobless benefits in the week ending 2 January. The figure was slightly lower than the previous week but remained more than twice as high as pre-pandemic levels.On Wednesday ADP, the US’s largest payroll supplier, said the private sector had shed 123,000 jobs from November to December, the first decline since April 2020. Losses were primarily concentrated in retail, leisure and hospitality – all areas that suffered heavy losses in the first wave of the pandemic. On the same day minutes from the last Federal Reserve meeting showed policymakers expected the escalating number of coronavirus cases “would be particularly challenging for the labor market in coming months”.The crisis has left millions of Americans facing food shortages and homelessness as unemployment officers across the country have struggled to keep up with the huge numbers of claims.According to the Associated Press only three states, North Dakota, Rhode Island and Wyoming, have met the federal standard of getting benefit payments out to successful claimants within three weeks for 87% of applicants. More

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Wednesday was supposed to be a day of jubilation for organizers in Georgia.
Early that morning, news organizations projected that the Rev Raphael Warnock, a Democrat would win an upset victory over Senator Kelly Loeffler, making him the first Black senator ever elected from the state. Jon Ossoff was on the verge of defeating David Perdue in a second runoff. It was a dual result that would give Democrats control of the US Senate, and the first Democratic win for Georgia in decades.
After years of meticulously registering and organizing the state’s growing population of minority voters, Black voters turned out in droves and were responsible for powering Democrats to victory. It was a payoff years in the making.
But as the day wore on, those same organizers watched with horror as a pro-Trump mob took over the US Capitol in Washington, bypassing law enforcement officers and forcing lawmakers to evacuate. By the time the Associated Press formally declared Ossoff the winner in his race by mid-afternoon, it was no longer the biggest story of the day.
Felicia Davis, an organizer who is the convener of the Clayton county Black Women’s Roundtable, said her feelings shifted from when she woke up in the morning.
“I woke up feeling joy, I then went into a state of anxiety, and then finally I ended up horrified,” she said.
Deborah Scott, the executive director of Georgia Stand-Up, one of the groups that helped mobilize voters, said she and other organizers left their office on Wednesday morning on a high note, but the mood shifted just hours later. “It definitely was overshadowed,” she said. “You look at the paper today, and the election is almost an afterthought. I think that’s what they want, they want chaos.”
Watching the images on television, Scott said she couldn’t help but think of how much more aggressive police were towards Black Lives Matter protesters.
“Most Black people saw that and watched in horror and said it would be such a different thing if it was us,” Scott said. “It kind of took away from the feeling of ecstasy, like the people won, they chose who they wanted.”
Warnock’s Twitter feed underscored the whiplash of the day, the New York Times noted. At 1.55pm he sent out a tweet celebrating the historic nature of his win. His next tweet, less than two hours later, quoted Martin Luther King Jr and condemned the violence in Washington.

Senator-Elect Reverend Raphael Warnock
(@ReverendWarnock)
Georgia, we made history. I am forever grateful. pic.twitter.com/hQfCYKEo3q

January 6, 2021

Senator-Elect Reverend Raphael Warnock
(@ReverendWarnock)
In this moment of unrest, violence and anger, we must remember the words of Dr. King, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” Let each of us try to be a light to see our country out of this dark moment.

January 6, 2021

It had been a victory in Georgia that was made possible by months of methodical canvassing on display even in the final days of the race. In a final push early on Monday morning, canvassers with Georgia Stand-Up worked in pairs in a quiet suburban neighborhood, quickly placing leaflets on doors with information telling people how they could vote. Their goal was to knock on just over 6,000 doors in the final day, bringing their statewide total to 100,000.
On Wednesday evening, after the violence at the Capitol unfolded Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic candidate credited with leading efforts to mobilize minority voters, tweeted a reminder of that work, and the historic achievement in Georgia.

Stacey Abrams
(@staceyabrams)
While today’s terrible display of terror and meanness shakes us, let’s remember: @ossoff, Jewish son of an immigrant & @ReverendWarnock, first Black Senator from Georgia, will join a Catholic POTUS & the first woman, Black + Indian VP in our nation’s capital. God bless America.

January 7, 2021

The attack on the Capitol also took place as Republican lawmakers, led by Donald Trump, pushed forward with their effort to undermine confidence in the results of the 2020 race. Even though courts across the country have universally rejected Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud, Republicans in Congress objected on Wednesday to the counting of electoral votes from swing states Joe Biden won in November.
Though the challenges were ultimately unsuccessful, they were still a form of voter suppression, said Helen Butler, executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, a civil rights group that also helped register voters.
“They’re trying to put doubt in our process and they’re trying to make sure that certain people don’t vote, it’s not counted,” she said. “Kind of putting water on fire, kind of dampening spirits. But we’re resilient and we’re not going to let that stop us. Because we intend to protect the right to vote.”
Scott said her group had already received calls from people in other southern states – North Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi – seeking to learn and replicate strategies in Georgia in their states.
“By the end of [the day] it was like ‘OK, we know more work has to be done now,” she said. “It’s gonna make us stronger. I see this, particularly the Georgia win, as a tipping point for the rest of the south.” More

Democrats may have reclaimed control of the Senate with two victories in Georgia but their majority is slim and will herald an era where every senator wields an inordinate amount of power over the vital upper chamber.In other words, every senator will be the deciding vote in a situation that has happened only a few other times in the chamber’s history and is likely to prove a tricky challenge for the incoming president, Joe Biden – albeit one preferable to dealing with continued Republican control.That dynamic is a shift from recent years in which control of the chamber has been more concretely with Republicans or Democrats. But the addition of the incoming senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock of Georgia means that the Senate will be split evenly 50-50, a divide that’s happened only three times in American history.Democrats control the chamber only through Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris who will act as the tie-breaking vote when she is sworn in on 20 January. Her replacement in her California senate seat, Alex Padilla, will join the chamber quickly after that so Democratic control starts on 21 January.The split means any senator can gum up legislation making its way through the chamber by withholding a vote, possibly until other tweaks have been made.“It only takes one senator to object and that doesn’t mean that you’re going to have the power to ultimately stop something, but being in control of how much time something takes gives you enormous power,” said Joe Britton, a former Senate Democratic chief of staff. “Especially at 1pm on a Thursday afternoon.”For Democrats, that’s the best outcome after disappointing results in a handful of Senate races they had thought they would win in the November elections. It means, though, that two separate groups of Republican and Democratic “moderates” are likely to command significant attention.Looming over the chamber’s business will be elections in 2022 in which two senators, Mark Kelly of Arizona and Raphael Warnock of Georgia are up for re-election after just two years as they are completing their predecessors’ term. Because they will have to run in conservative-leaning states early in their Senate careers they are likely to steer clear of supporting very liberal legislation making its way through the chamber. Both are expected to fall among the more moderate wing of the party alongside Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia.If any senator gained influence from the even Senate split it’s Manchin, the most conservative member of the Democratic caucus. Manchin offered a preview of how he planned to navigate the Senate.“For the sake of the country we all love, we must commit to solving the serious problems facing our nation,” the West Virginia senator said in a statement on Wednesday. “Above all, we must avoid the extreme and polarizing rhetoric that only further divides the American people – I will work tirelessly to make sure we do. It is time for Americans to move closer together.”Besides Warnock and Ossoff, the incoming senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado styled himself as a moderate Democrat during his short-lived 2020 presidential campaign and his time as governor before that. Biden’s incoming administration has also indicated plans to focus initially on a Covid relief bill and a large bipartisan infrastructure bill – not non-starters for liberals but hardly proposals from a progressive wishlist.“You’re not going to see the [supreme] court expanded. You’re probably won’t see the legislative filibuster ended and those kind of things,” said former senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, who represented the moderate wing of the Democratic party during his time in the Senate.All legislation in the Senate except for reconciliation bills – which are meant to deal with tax and spending issues – need a filibuster-proof 60 votes to pass. So the question for most legislation is how many more additional senators beyond 50 can a proposal get.Defections and bipartisan support have become rare in Congress and usually only a few senators are even willing to openly discuss bucking their party. With his slight majority, the incoming majority leader, Chuck Schumer, of New York will still have to keep all or most of his caucus in line and win over a few Republicans.“I think Chuck Schumer has the capacity to be the savviest legislative leader since [Lyndon Baines Johnson],” Bayh added. “But even LBJ had more than a 50-50 split to work with so if anyone can make it work it’s Chuck. It’s going to be really difficult when you have the left pushing the envelope, but in a world where the Republicans are unlikely to give you any votes for what the left wants, you can’t lose a single vote.”And then there’s the next presidential election in 2024.Senators and their staffs are bracing for 2024 Republican presidential hopefuls in the chamber to try to position themselves to run in a large and unwieldy Republican primary. Democrats could also have a divided primary contest in the next presidential election cycle if Biden decides not to run, although Harris would be the heavy favorite in that scenario.After the Republican senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri led a revolt against certifying Biden’s victory, it’s unclear if either of them will be able to position themselves as frontrunners in a Republican primary. Both have been mentioned as potential candidates. The revolt resulted in a swath of rioters breaking into the Capitol.“You’re going to have all these people that are just posturing and maneuvering and each one of them is either a dealbreaker or an arsonist in the mode of Ted Cruz when Obama was president,” said a former Republican chief of staff. “And so you’re going to have all these little arsonists asking ‘how can I make a name for myself?’ and there’s going to be less Lindsey Grahams from the Obama time. There’s no John McCains. Mitt Romney will try. There’s going to be less of those guys.” More

As Susan Bro watched the footage of a mob of white Trump supporters breaking into the US Capitol and halting the official count of the 2020 election results, she was “mad as hell”, but she was not surprised.
Bro’s daughter, Heather Heyer, was murdered in 2017 while protesting against neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia. Donald Trump had responded to Heyer’s death by saying there were “very fine people on both sides”.
On Wednesday, Trump responded to open insurrection in the halls of Congress, which left at least four people dead, by repeating false claims about having the election stolen from him and telling the mob: “Go home. We love you. You’re very special.”
“This path has always been predictable,” Bro said from her home in Virginia. “For people to now go, ‘I never knew this would happen,’ why not? How would you not see this happen?”
“This is sort of an inevitable conclusion,” she added. “It’s been coming, at least openly, for months, but the trajectory was set years ago.”
The playbook for the Maga invasion of the nation’s Capitol building on Wednesday has been developing for years in plain sight, at far-right rallies in cities like Charlottesville, Berkeley, and Portland, and then, in the past year, at state Capitols across the country, where heavily armed white protesters have forced their way into legislative chambers to accuse politicians of tyranny and treason.
“No one should be surprised,” said Sarah Anthony, a Black state lawmaker who was on the legislative floor in Michigan’s Capitol on 30 April when hundreds of anti-lockdown protesters, including white militia members with guns, tried to force their way inside. “This has been escalating in every corner of our country for months.”
From screaming matches in the lobby of the state house in Michigan to looting the office of speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi, the demonstrators have grown bolder and their aims more ambitious.
But many elements of these incidents repeat each time: the chaotic mix of well-known extremists and unknown Trump supporters who showed up to participate; the strikingly soft and ineffectual response from the police; the expressions of shock from Republican lawmakers that any of their supporters would take action in response to the lies they had been repeating; and of course, the behavior of Trump himself, who first openly incites the violence, and then, when it spirals out of control, praises it instead of condemning it. More

A US Capitol police officer has died of injuries suffered during the attack led by a pro-Trump mob, the force said in a statement late on Thursday.The officer, Brian Sicknick, had been with the US Capitol Police (USCP) since July 2008, and most recently served in the department’s first responders unit.Sicknick became the fifth person to die in the attacks. Among the four others killed was a demonstrator shot by authorities. Three died in what police called “medical emergencies”.Wednesday’s breach of the building came as Congress was certifying the victory of President-elect Joe Biden.“Officer Sicknick was responding to the riots … and was injured while physically engaging with protesters,” police said in a statement.He died on Thursday after being taken to hospital following his collapse upon returning to his divisional office, it added.Metropolitan homicide officials, along with the USCP and its federal partners, will investigate the death of Sicknick, police said.Democratic leaders of the House appropriations committee said the “tragic loss” of a Capitol police officer “should remind all of us of the bravery of the law enforcement officers who protected us, our colleagues, congressional staff, the press corps and other essential workers during the hours-long takeover of the Capitol by pro-Trump protesters”.More than 24 hours after he incited a mob to attack the US Capitol, Donald Trump urged an end to the violence and acknowledged there would be a new administration on 20 January.With Reuters and Associated Press More

Publishers have cancelled a planned book by Senator Josh Hawley, who objected to Joe Biden’s presidential election win and backed baseless claims that the vote was stolen.Thousands of Trump supporters gathered in Washington on Wednesday and many ended up storming into the Capitol building and occupying it for hours, resulting in four deaths and delaying the certification of Biden’s win. A widely seen photo, taken before the occupation, shows Hawley raising a fist in solidarity to the crowd.In a statement on Thursday, Simon & Schuster announced: “After witnessing the disturbing, deadly insurrection that took place on Wednesday in Washington DC, Simon & Schuster has decided to cancel publication of Senator Josh Hawley’s forthcoming book, The Tyranny of Big Tech.“We did not come to this decision lightly,” the publisher added. “As a publisher it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and viewpoints: at the same time we take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens, and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy and freedom.”The Missouri Republican called the decision “Orwellian” and vowed to fight it in court. Hawley has often cited as a possible future presidential candidate and his book was an intended forum for a favourite theme: the undue power of Google, Facebook and other internet companies. Soon after news broke that his book was dropped, Hawley tweeted, and tagged his comments directly to Simon & Schuster, that he was being unfairly censored and punished: “I was representing my constituents, leading a debate on the Senate floor on voter integrity, which they have now decided to redefine as sedition.“This could not be more Orwellian … Let me be clear, this is not just a contract dispute. It’s a direct assault on the First Amendment … I will fight this cancel culture with everything I have. We’ll see you in court.”Simon & Schuster quickly issued another statement: “We are confident that we are acting fully within our contractual rights.”Simon & Schuster has had numerous clashes with Trump and his supporters. It called off a deal with the far-right writer and commentator Milo Yiannopoulos and published several anti-Trump best-sellers, including niece Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough and former national security adviser John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened.New York publishers had already expressed wariness about taking on a post-presidential memoir by Trump, whose book Crippled America was published by a Simon & Schuster imprint in 2015, and this week’s events make a deal with them far less unlikely.A Simon & Schuster spokesman declined comment on whether the publisher would be interested in a new Trump book. Messages left with Penguin Random House, publisher of Trump’s bestselling The Art of the Deal, and HarperCollins Publishers were not immediately returned. More

Several months into the pandemic, a friend drove us away from the southern California coast into barren, dun-colored mountains, where roadside signs were riddled with bullet holes. We came across an abandoned service station with the windows blown out and an American flag, faded by the desert sun, painted on the front. We entered the ruins. On the back wall was a graffito: fucked at birth.“I knew you’d like that,” my friend said as I took photos of the words that encapsulated what I’d been trying to say for the past 40 years in my work as a journalist documenting the ever-expanding class chasm in America.In the early 1980s, I believed awareness would instigate political and social change. Now, after so many articles and books, I felt that they were like some tired country ballad playing in a honky-tonk where everyone is drunk and not listening to the music. I was done with the work.So when my friend suggested the scrawl as a title for my next book, I blew her off – I was tapped out.In the coming days, however, I was haunted by the juxtaposition of the flag and the spray-painted words. It was time to change the song. I decided to drive across America and visit homeless encampments, meatpacking towns, crippled onetime industrial cities, showing people a picture of the gas station’s exterior and what was inside, and let those I encountered tell me what it meant. The responses always came fast.In Sacramento, John Kraintz, who had been homeless: “In the Declaration of Independence, they said all men are created equal. That was the first big lie. If you’ve got money, they care about you.”In Denver, the Black Lives Matter activist Terrance Roberts: “You ask me about being fucked at birth? I mean, I’m an African American male.”In New York City, my former student Megan Cattel: “That’s the millennial rallying cry.”That journey convinced me of the need for the title. Sales representatives from middle America told my publisher it would be difficult to place the volume in stores; a professor friend wrote that her community college bookstore in California “warned me that they might not carry it because of the title”.The words – fucked at birth – are perhaps harsh. But what is far more harsh and unpleasant is the fact that they are simply reality for ever-increasing numbers of Americans.The stark title is the least part of changing the song. I also came away from my recent cross-nation reporting tour convinced that the 2020s are going to be this century’s 1930s. The stock market – fueled by low interest rates and a record three-fourths of a trillion dollars of borrowed money – is by one metric overvalued more than any time since 1929. Amid this, the Eviction Lab at Princeton University fears as many as 30 to 40 million people face being thrown out of their rental homes when the various moratoriums end, which seems destined to create an unprecedented wave of homelessness.Don’t be fooled by what’s going to happen later this year: when the vaccines are widely distributed, the top two quintiles of the American population will start spending money. A lot of it. But this won’t immediately translate into good times for the bottom three quintiles. Tens of millions of the precariat were already living in a de facto Great Depression before the pandemic, and many working-class jobs will not return in the short term – if ever. This widening disparity creates a level of rage among voters that inexplicably continues to evade Beltway journalists’ understanding.It’s not that difficult to grasp meaning. Just look to the past. I’ve long been a student of the 1930s – fascism was on the rise in the US throughout the Great Depression. It’s something that never went away; it’s part of the American DNA. Many of the 74 million who voted for Donald J Trump in 2020 would be quite happy with authoritarian leadership. They aren’t going to vanish with the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.In early 1939, a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden drew 20,000 peopleWe think of social media, Fox News and the One America News Network as being drivers of QAnon or the Proud Boys, amplifying feelings and actions that heretofore would have remained in the shadows. But long before there was an internet and television, fascist ideas thoroughly infiltrated American culture. An early activist who recognized this was the Reverend LM Birkhead, a Unitarian minister. In 1935 Birkhead traveled to investigate the authoritarian governments of Italy and Germany. In 1938, he released a list of 800 “antidemocratic” organizations in the United States that were aligned with the Nazis and fascism. He believed that one out of every three Americans was being reached by fascist materials.In early 1939, a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden drew 20,000 people. The rising authoritarian movement was the subject of a 9,000-word 1940 Harper’s magazine article, The American Fascists, by Dale Kramer.In the modern era, the Youngstown State labor studies professor John Russo recognized early that anger over the loss of good jobs was leading to a resurgence of fascism. When I interviewed him in 1995, he foresaw the emergence of a Trump-like figure. When I went through Ohio recently on my cross-country journey, John doubled down on his 1995 prediction; he feels that the threat from the far right will not abate. Trump lost “and the thing I say is, ‘So what?’ Right now we are at a tipping point in terms of what the American economy is going to look like, what the American social structures are going to look like,” Russo told me. “2024, that’s going to be the seminal election.”Russo says there will be “contested terrain”, a fight between progressives and rightwing authoritarianism between now and 2024. If a smarter, more effective Trump comes along, he or she could eclipse the threat that Trump presented to American democracy.The fascist inclinations of the 1930s were simply stalled by the New Deal and postwar economy. The final paragraph of Kramer’s 1940 Harper’s article, though off in timing by seven or so decades, serves as a warning for 2024:“It will take time for a powerful movement to organize itself out of the confusion caused by the war. But the [technique] of prejudice politics has been so well learned that should economic insecurity continue there can be no doubt that the American people during the next decade will be forced to deal with powerful ‘hate’ movements. Great vigilance will be required to preserve our liberty without giving it up in the process.”Adapted from Fucked at Birth: Recalibrating the American Dream for the 2020s (Unnamed Press, 12 December)
Dale Maharidge is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism More

Donald Trump acknowledges in a video released on Thursday night that a ‘new administration’ will be inaugurated on 20 January, one day after he repeated baseless claims at a Washington DC rally that the election had been stolen. The rally became a precursor for a violent attack on the US Capitol that appalled the nation. In his video, Trump went on to say the rioters ‘do not represent our country’ and that those who broke the law would pay.
Trump finally acknowledges ‘new administration’ and urges end to violence that he incited – live More