US Politics

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Pennsylvania crucial to White House hopes, Trump says at campaign rally

      by

      Donald Trump returned to Pennsylvania, telling his rally attendees that their state was critical to his ability to win back the White House and encouraging them to turn out to vote, though he also called early voting “stupid stuff”.“If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing,” Trump said, soon after taking the stage more than 45 minutes later than scheduled. “It’s very simple.”Pennsylvania swung for Joe Biden in 2020, delivering its 20 electoral votes and helping Biden secure the victory in one of the few states that help decide US elections. This year, polls on average have shown Vice-President Kamala Harris with a slight lead over Trump – though the state is clearly in play, and both candidates are campaigning through it frequently in the final two months before November.Trump has held his signature rallies significantly less this year than he did in 2016, Axios recently reported, which said his campaign promises Trump will ramp up the rallies in the final stretch. Earlier in the day, Trump listened to farmers talk about the problems they’re facing and boosted his ideas about imposing tariffs on foreign countries as a way to improve economics in the US.While he’s on the road for large rallies less, he’s increasingly known for his frequent digressions, a longtime fixture of Trump’s speaking style that appear to be increasing this year. At the rally at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on Monday, he hopped around at breakneck pace and was difficult to follow. When coherent, he painted a dark vision of America under Democratic rule and starkly laid out what he would do if he won, including mass deportations.Trump has started defending his meandering rambles as a storytelling technique called “the weave” – a sign of his oratory brilliance. Critics say his tangents about bacon sales or Hannibal Lecter, and his defense of them as intentional and smart, show a salesman trying to rebrand his disarray.After starting on claims that Harris would turn the US into Venezuela at Monday’s rally, Trump then moved into “where they cure the tar”, saying: “For the environmentalists, you know where they cure the tar, where they take the tar and they make it into beautiful oil, Houston, Texas, and it all goes flying up in the air.”Trump joked that he nearly called Pennsylvania a “state” rather than a commonwealth, saving himself from a gaffe that he claimed would invite negative headlines. He caught himself before calling it a state, though, because “I’m cognitively very strong.” He also called Harris “a very dumb person”.“Winston Churchill was this great speaker – great,” he said at one point. “I get much bigger crowds than him, but nobody ever says I’m a great speaker.”Despite his nonstop verbal wandering, he bragged about his lack of a script: “Isn’t it nice to have a president that doesn’t have to use a teleprompter?”He repeated a spate of false claims, such as that crime is up. Crime is down. He alleged he won the 2020 election by millions of votes. He lost. He wove an alternate reality where wars between Russia and Ukraine and between Israel and Hamas do not exist because he had won in 2020.View image in fullscreenHe lashed out at Biden and Harris. He said he was again calling Biden “sleepy Joe”, regressing back to that insult instead of “crooked Joe” because he is not smart and is not acting as president any more. Harris, for her part, is a “very dumb person”, Trump said, and cannot answer basic questions.He brought up a recent interview Harris did with Oprah Winfrey, who Trump claimed “used to love me until I decided to run for politics”. He said some people believe former president Barack Obama, who Trump called Barack Hussein Obama with an emphasis on his middle name, is leading the country instead of Biden. And he surfaced the unproven claim that Harris did not actually work at McDonald’s as a student, something that recently has irked him as rightwing accounts spread rumors questioning her fast-food work history.“I’m going to go to a McDonald’s next week,” Trump said. “I’m going to go to a McDonald’s and I’m going to work the french fry job for about a half an hour. I want to see how it is.”He brought up abortion, a key liability for Trump and other Republicans after the overturning of Roe v Wade. Several states have direct ballot measures that would protect access to abortion, and Democrats have made abortion access a major plank of the 2024 race. He praised the US supreme court for overturning Roe, saying the decision took “courage”. He added that there should be unspecified “exceptions” to abortion bans.“That’s all they talk about. The country is falling apart. We’re going to end up in world war three, and all they can talk about is abortion,” he said.The stop in the critical swing state comes after two assassination attempts, including one in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July. Trump will be returning to Butler in early October, some news outlets reported Monday. He displayed the immigration chart that he says saved his life from the Butler shooter during Monday’s rally, joking that he “sleeps with that page” at night. “Immigration saved my life,” he said.Later in the speech, he again railed against immigration and migrants, bringing up towns that have received increases of people in recent years and saying those places are “lawless”, full of gangs and irreparably damaged. He promised that all migrant flights to Pennsylvania and elsewhere would be ended if he wins.“You have to get them the hell out,” Trump said of migrants. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Republican bid to change Nebraska voting rules to help Trump fails

      by

      A Republican attempt to change the electoral system in Nebraska to give Donald Trump a possible advantage in the event of a tied presidential election has been rebuffed after a state legislator refused to back the plan.Mike McDonnell, a former Democrat who crossed to the Republican party this year, said he would not vote to change the midwestern state’s distribution of electors to the same winner-takes-all process that operates in most of the US.His decision followed intense lobbying from both Republicans and Democrats, who anticipated that a change in the allocation of Nebraska’s five electoral college votes could have have a decisive impact on the outcome of the 5 November poll.It reduces the possibility that the former president and Kamala Harris could be tied on 269 electoral college votes each, a scenario that would throw the final say on the election’s outcome to the House of Representatives.A tie scenario could have arisen if Trump earned five electoral votes – rather than four, as expected under the present set-up – from winning Nebraska, then won the four “Sun belt” states of North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, while the vice-president carried the northern battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.US presidential elections are not decided by the popular vote nationwide but by which candidate wins a majority of 538 electoral college votes, usually awarded to the winner of the popular vote in each state.Nebraska’s Republican legislators, egged on by Republicans on Capitol Hill, proposed to change the distribution of electors to ensure that Trump would be awarded all five electoral votes if, as expected, he wins the solidly pro-Republican state.That would have upended the status quo under which Nebraska, unlike every other state apart from Maine, splits its allocation to give two to the presidential candidate that wins the popular vote while awarding the other three on the basis of who prevails in each of its three congressional districts.The state’s second congressional district, covering its biggest city, Omaha, was won by Joe Biden in 2020, a feat Harris hopes to emulate.The spotlight had fallen on McDonnell, a former firefighter and the chair of Omaha’s federation of labour, because his support would have provided the two-thirds majority needed in the state legislature to change Nebraska’s distribution system law, which has operated since 1992.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a statement, McDonnell, who had seemed to wavering in recent days from his earlier vow not to vote to restore the winner-takes-all system, made it plain that he had not moved from his original position.“Elections should be an opportunity for all voters to be heard, no matter who they are, where they live, or what party they support,” he said. “I have taken time to listen carefully to Nebraskans and national leaders on both sides of the issue. After deep consideration, it is clear to me that right now, 43 days from election day, is not the moment to make this change.”His announcement came despite a meeting with the Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, who travelled to Nebraska last week to lobby local legislators, and appeared to end plans by Jim Pillen, Nebraska’s governor, to call a special legislative session to change the law.“With Mike McDonnell being an absolute no, that kind of closes the lid,” the Republican state senator Loren Lippincott told the Nebraska Examiner newspaper.McDonnell’s stance won praise from a former ally, Jane Kleeb, the chair of Nebraska’s Democrats, who hailed him for “standing strong against tremendous pressure from out-of-state interests to protect Nebraskans’ voice in our democracy”. More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      US Congress agrees to funding deal to avert shutdown in blow to Trump

      by

      US congressional leaders have agreed to a short-term funding deal in a move that averts a damaging pre-election government shutdown and also amounts to a snub for Donald Trump.The prospect of a shutdown at the expiration of the current government funding on 30 September had been looming after Republicans insisted on tying future funding to legislation that would require voters to show proof of US citizenship – known as the Save Act and backed by Trump but opposed by Democrats.After weeks of backroom maneuvering, the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, announced a compromise that provides funding for another three months while decoupling it from the Save Act. Any other path would have been “political malpractice”, he added.The new package continues present spending levels while also giving $231m in emergency funds to the beleaguered Secret Service to enable it to provide added protection for Trump – the Republican presidential nominee, who has been the subject of two failed apparent assassination attempts – as well as his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, before the presidential election on 5 November.It represents a climbdown for Johnson, who had previously adhered to Trump’s demand that government funding be conditioned on passing the Save Act. The bill – has become an article of faith for the former president and his supporters due to their belief, unsupported by evidence, that electoral fraud is rife.Writing to congressional colleagues, Johnson made it clear he was bowing to the inevitable.“While this is not the solution any of us prefer, it is the most prudent path forward under the present circumstances,” he wrote. “As history has taught and current polling affirms, shutting the government down less than 40 days from a fateful election would be an act of political malpractice.”The temporary settlement – known as a continuing resolution and which will have the effect of postponing haggling over spending until after the presidential election – was welcomed by Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader, who nevertheless said it could have been reached earlier.“While I am pleased bipartisan negotiations quickly led to a government funding agreement free of cuts and poison pills, this same agreement could have been done two weeks ago,” Schumer said. “Instead, Speaker Johnson chose to follow the Maga way and wasted precious time.”Trump is believed to have been in favour of provoking a shutdown by insisting on the Save Act’s passage – believing that the Biden administration, including Harris, the vice-president, would be blamed, as he was for a five-week closure when he was president in 2018.Johnson held talks with Trump, even visiting his club in Mar-a-Lago in Florida, over how to resolve the impasse.The compromise “officially defies” Trump, Politico wrote in its Monday Playbook column, noting that the ex-president had not, at the time of publication, responded to Johnson’s move.The website Punchbowl argued that Johnson and Trump had been guilty of a political misjudgment in pushing the Save Act, suggesting that the speaker had weakened his position in the process.“The Save Act hasn’t been the political hammer that Johnson or Trump hoped it would be,” it wrote. “Thus Johnson ends up with little here. Not empty handed but close. And he’ll be negotiating a spending deal during a lame-duck session held in what’s certain to be a highly polarised post-election period with his own political future on the line.” More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Top staffers on Mark Robinson campaign quit after reports of offensive remarks

      by

      Several top employees on Mark Robinson’s campaign to become North Carolina’s next governor have quit their posts after a media report found compelling evidence that the Republican candidate previously described himself as a black Nazi, spoke favorably of reinstating slavery and shared other disturbing thoughts on a porn message forum.The departures announced on Sunday include the campaign’s senior adviser, campaign manager and finance director, among others. “I appreciate the efforts of these team members who have made the difficult choice to step away from the campaign, and I wish them well in their future endeavors,” Robinson said in a news release.One of the departing officials, Conrad Pogorzelski III, a senior adviser, helped Robinson win election as North Carolina’s lieutenant governor in 2020. Pogorzelski later became Robinson’s chief of staff and said that he “along with others from the campaign have left of our own accord”.The resignations came three days after CNN reported that Robinson had apparently authored porn forum posts which expressed a preference for Adolf Hitler over the president at the time, Barack Obama. He also reportedly called Martin Luther King Jr “worse than a maggot” and said he would “certainly buy a few” enslaved people if, as he wished, slavery were reinstated.Robinson denied that he was author of the posts and described them as “salacious tabloid lies”. He did not appear with Donald Trump at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Saturday and avoided the subject during a campaign appearance later that day at a race track in Fayetteville.Polls show that Robinson is trailing his Democratic opponent, Josh Stein, in polls. But in a statement on Sunday, Robinson said that the surveys had “underestimated Republican support in North Carolina for several cycles”.“I am confident our campaign remains in a strong position to make our case to the voters and win” in the 5 November election, he added.Stein appeared on Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union and asserted that Robinson was “utterly unqualified, unfit to be the governor of North Carolina”.Lindsey Graham, Republican US senator of South Carolina, said on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press that Robinson deserved a chance to defend himself against the reporting from CNN. But Graham called Robinson “a political zombie if he does not offer a defense to this that’s credible”.Senior state legislative leaders are concerned that any association with Robinson could affect their polling in November. Yet further up the political scale, those who on Sunday attended a rally in support of Donald Trump appeared to be unmoved, even as the former president endorsed Robinson as he pursues a return to the White House.Bob Judson, a 70-year-old unaffiliated voter, told the Washington Post he “didn’t put much credence” in the allegations against Robinson. “We’ve all done things in our past that we’re sorry for,” Judson said. “Some of the things are crazy.”Rose Cannon, 69, told the outlet that Robinson was a “very positive, strong man”.“Now that this has happened, I don’t know,” Cannon said. “We’ll hear through it, and see what we think.”While Trump has not responded to CNN’s claims about Robinson, his running mate, JD Vance, said it was better “to let these things play out sometimes in the court of public opinion”.Vance is due to hold a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Monday as the Republican presidential ticket hopes to move on from the Robinson episode. On Sunday, the Ohio US senator posted a comment on social media that sought to blame inflation on Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Democratic presidential nominee, saying that was “my comment on Mark Robinson”.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Amazon, Tesla and Meta among world’s top companies undermining democracy – report

      by

      Some of the world’s largest companies have been accused of undermining democracy across the world by financially backing far-right political movements, funding and exacerbating the climate crisis, and violating trade union rights and human rights in a report published on Monday by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).Amazon, Tesla, Meta, ExxonMobil, Blackstone, Vanguard and Glencore are the corporations included in the report. The companies’ lobbying arms are attempting to shape global policy at the United Nations Summit of the Future in New York City on 22 and 23 September.At Amazon, the report notes the company’s size and role as the fifth largest employer in the world and the largest online retailer and cloud computing service, has had a profound impact on the industries and communities it operates within.“The company has become notorious for its union busting and low wages on multiple continents, monopoly in e-commerce, egregious carbon emissions through its AWS data centres, corporate tax evasion, and lobbying at national and international level,” states the report.The report cites Amazon’s high injury rates in the US, the company challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), its efforts in Canada to overturn labor law, the banning of Amazon lobbyists from the European parliament for refusing to attend hearings on worker violations, and refusal to negotiate with unions in Germany, among other cases. Amazon has also funded far-right political groups’ efforts to undermine women’s rights and antitrust legislation, and its retail website has been used by hate groups to raise money and sell products.At Tesla, the report cites anti-union opposition by the company in the US, Germany, and Sweden; human rights violations within its supply chains; and Elon Musk’s personal opposition to unions and democracy, challenges to the NLRB in the US, and his support for the political leaders Donald Trump, Javier Milei in Argentina and Narendra Modi in India.The report cites Meta, the largest social media company in the world, for its vast role in permitting and enabling far-right propaganda and movements to use its platforms to grow members and garner support in the US and abroad. It also cited retaliation from the company for regulatory measures in Canada, and expensive lobbying efforts against laws to regulate data privacy.Glencore, the largest mining company in the world by revenue, was included in the report for its role in financing campaigns globally against Indigenous communities and activists.Blackstone, the private equity firm led by Stephen Schwarzman, a billionaire backer of Donald Trump, was cited in the report for its roles in funding far-right political movements, investments in fossil fuel projects and deforestation in the Amazon.“Blackstone’s network has spent tens of millions of dollars supporting politicians and political forces who promise to prevent or eliminate regulations that might hold it to account,” the report noted.The Vanguard Group was included in the report due to its role in financing some of the world’s most anti-democratic corporations. ExxonMobil was cited for funding anti-climate science research and aggressive lobbying against environmental regulations.Even in “robust democracies” workers’ demands “are overwhelmed by corporate lobbying operations, either in policymaking or the election in itself”, said Todd Brogan, director of campaigns and organizing at the ITUC.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is about power, who has it, and who sets the agenda. We know as trade unionists that unless we’re organized, the boss sets the agenda in the workplace, and we know as citizens in our countries that unless we’re organized and demanding responsive governments that actually meet the needs of people, it’s corporate power that’s going to set the agenda.“They’re playing the long game, and it’s a game about shifting power away from democracy at every level into one where they’re not concerned about the effects on workers – they’re concerned about maximizing their influence and their extractive power and their profit,” added Brogan. “Now is the time for international and multi-sectoral strategies, because these are, in many cases, multinational corporations that are more powerful than states, and they have no democratic accountability whatsoever, except for workers organized.”The ITUC includes labor group affiliates from 169 nations and territories around the world representing 191 million workers, including the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US, and the Trades Union Congress in the UK.With 4 billion people around the world set to participate in elections in 2024, the federation is pushing for an international binding treaty being worked on by the Open-ended intergovernmental working group to hold transnational corporations accountable under international human rights laws. More

    • 225 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      View politics critically but charitably and with good old common sense: cowboy commentator Will Rogers’ wisdom for 2024

      by

      For those trying to come to terms with a particularly tumultuous election year full of deep divisions, ideological invective and personal insults, guidance can come from a historical figure whose insights into American politics still prove useful.

      As I chronicle in my new book, “Citizen Cowboy: Will Rogers And The American People,” Will Rogers stood as perhaps the most influential commentator on public affairs in the United States a century ago. Born in Oklahoma, he had risen to fame as a cowboy humorist in vaudeville, the Ziegfeld Follies, Broadway shows and silent movies, and he earned public acclaim with his shrewd, folksy and witty observations on American life and values.

      By the 1920s, this led to a syndicated column Rogers wrote for over 300 newspapers, a stream of magazine articles and essays, and steady appearances on the national lecture circuit. He hosted a national radio program and had starring roles in several Hollywood “talkie” movies.

      Rogers became the most beloved figure in America until his death in 1935. As I discovered in my research, a flood of eulogies appeared in newspapers and magazines following his passing. Typical was this one appearing in the Minneapolis Journal: “We all loved Will Rogers … . Poets we have had, and philosophers, and humorists of note; but not one among them all so endeared to the heart of the whole people. None was ever mourned with such genuine grief, none will be so missed from our common life.”

      Especially fascinated by the nation’s politics, Rogers often trained his humor on its foibles and achievements alike. Three touchstones guided his commentary: a genial skepticism about politics as usual, a belief that politics must be subsumed within a broader perspective on life and, above all, an insistence that political discussants honor a code of civility.

      Will Rogers sends up politics and politicians in this radio broadcast from 1924.

      ‘I just … report the facts’

      Rogers got most of his laughs from skeptical jabs at the system. He gleefully skewered the “bunk” of American politics, his favorite word for politicians’ shameless hypocrisy, bombastic rhetoric, inflated egos and shady deal-making. Both Democrats and Republicans stood guilty of peddling bunk.

      “You know, the more you read and observe about this politics thing, you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other,” Rogers said. “It is getting so that a Republican promise is not much more to be depended on than a Democratic one. And that has always been considered the lowest form of collateral in the world.”

      The Oklahoman poked fun at the political system’s grandiose rituals and fumbling institutions. He wrote of a benumbing presidential convention in 1924 that took three weeks and 103 ballots to nominate a nonentity: “In number of population the convention is holding its own. The deaths from old age among the delegates is about offset by the birthrate.”

      Rogers pilloried governmental ineptness in Washington, D.C. One year, when Congress reconvened after a round of egregious bickering and inaction, he joked, “Let us all pray: Oh Lord, give us strength to bear that which is about to be inflicted upon us. Be merciful with them, Oh Lord, for they know not what they do.”

      He claimed a simple approach: “I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.”

      ‘Critical yet charitable’

      Yet Rogers insisted that political disputation should be kept in perspective. He urged his fellow citizens to avoid politicizing every public issue and instead concentrate on more meaningful endeavors – family, friends, community and work.

      Despite the dire warnings of political zealots, he said, “There is no less sickness, no less Earthquakes, no less Progress, no less inventions, no less morality, no less Christianity under one (president) than the other.”

      But for Rogers, the ultimate guarantee of stability came from the mass of workaday American citizens seeking commonsense solutions to public problems. What Rogers called the “Big Honest Majority” lived simply and worked hard, wanted a good life for their families and pursued their own version of happiness.

      The average citizen, Rogers believed, had solid judgment and “was not simple minded enough to believe that EVERYTHING is right and doesn’t appear to be cuckoo enough to believe that EVERYTHING is wrong.”

      Finally, Rogers urged an approach to politics that was critical yet charitable, principled yet magnanimous. A connoisseur of civility, he insisted that political disputants were opponents, not enemies, and that contrary viewpoints deserved respect.

      The humorist set the example: “I haven’t got it in for anybody or anything.”

      Will Rogers dining with Oklahoma Gov. Bill Murray on Feb. 3, 1931, in Oklahoma City. Murray had his usual meal of hard-boiled eggs and milk; Rogers chose fried chicken.
      Associated Press

      Surviving overwrought partisanship

      Even as he pilloried politicians’ shortcomings, he never made it personal. Despite their faults, Rogers wrote, “the Rascals, when you meet ’em face to face and know ’em, they are mighty nice fellows.” He declared famously, “I’ve joked about every prominent man in my time but I never met a man I didn’t like.”

      Determinedly nonpartisan throughout most of his career, he leaned toward the party of Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression while jesting, “I don’t belong to any organized political faith; I’m a Democrat.” The cowboy humorist saw politics as an endeavor for genial discussion, not a blood sport.

      Rogers’ political axioms of healthy skepticism, perspicacity and civility remain useful guides for surviving even the most sordid electioneering.

      So when you hear overwrought partisans lamenting “the end of democracy” or “we won’t have a country left anymore,” take a deep breath and consider Will Rogers’ calmer, wiser approach to presidential elections a century ago. Remember his conclusion that America won’t be ruined “no matter who is elected, so the Politicians will have to wait four more years to tell us who will ruin us then.”

      Then you can adopt his sage advice that when dealing with a political adversary, “don’t disagree with him looking at him; walk around behind him and see the way he’s looking.” More

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Jane Fonda rallies disaffected young US voters: ‘Do not sit this election out’

      by

      Young people’s understandable unhappiness with the Biden administration’s record on oil and gas drilling and the war in Gaza should not deter them from voting to block Donald Trump from again becoming president of the United States, the Hollywood actor and activist Jane Fonda has warned.“I understand why young people are really angry, and really hurting,” Fonda said. “What I want to say to them is: ‘Do not sit this election out, no matter how angry you are. Do not vote for a third party, no matter how angry you are. Because that will elect somebody who will deny you any voice in the future of the United States … If you really care about Gaza, vote to have a voice, so you can do something about it. And then, be ready to turn out into the streets, in the millions, and fight for it.’”View image in fullscreenFonda’s remarks came in a wide-ranging interview organized by the global media collaborative Covering Climate Now and conducted by the Guardian, CBS News and Rolling Stone magazine.Making major social change requires massive, non-violent street protests as well as shrewd electoral organizing, Fonda argued. Drawing on more than 50 years of activism, from her anti-Vietnam war and anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s to later agitating for economic democracy, women’s rights and, today, for climate action, Fonda said that: “History shows us that … you need millions of people in the streets, but you [also] need people in the halls of power with ears and a heart to hear the protests, to hear the demands.”During the Great Depression, she said, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed with helping the masses of unemployed. But FDR said the public had to “make him do it”, or he could not overcome resistance from the status quo. “There is a chance for us to make them do it if it’s Kamala Harris and Tim Walz [in the White House],” she said. “There is no chance if Trump and Vance win this election.”View image in fullscreenScientists have repeatedly warned that greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by half by the next decade, Fonda noted, so a President Harris would have to be pushed “to stop drilling, and fracking, and mining. No new development of fossil fuels.” Trump, on the other hand, has promised to “‘drill, baby, drill.’ For once, let’s believe him. The choice is very clear: do we vote for the future, or do we vote for burning up the planet?”Fonda launched the Jane Fonda Climate political action committee three years ago to elect “climate champions” at all levels of government: national, state and local. “The Pac focuses down ballot – on mayors, state legislators, county councils,” she said. “It’s incredible how much effect people in these positions can have on climate issues.”Forty-two of the 60 candidates the Pac endorsed in 2022 won their races. In 2024, the Pac is providing money, voter outreach and publicity to more than 100 candidates in key battleground states and in California, Fonda’s home state. California is “the fifth-biggest economy in the world, and an oil-producing state”, she explained, “so what happens here has an impact far broader than California”.Fonda is also, for the first time in her life, “very involved” in this year’s presidential campaign, “because of the climate emergency”. She plans to visit each battleground state, she said: “And when I’m there, we give our schedule to the Harris campaign. Then they fold in Harris campaign [get-out-the-vote events], volunteer recruitment, things like that … and then I do them for our Pac candidates” as well.View image in fullscreenHer Pac has a strict rule: it endorses only candidates who do not accept money from the fossil fuel industry. The industry’s “stranglehold over our government” explains a crucial disconnect, Fonda said:polls show that most Americans want climate action, yet their elected officials often don’t deliver it. In California, she said, “we’ve had so many moderate Democrats that blocked the climate solutions we need because they take money from the fossil fuel industry … It’s very hard to stand up to the people that are supporting your candidacy.”Fonda also faulted the mainstream news media for not doing a better job of informing the public about the climate emergency and the abundance of solutions. Watching the Harris-Trump debate, she thought that “Kamala did very well”. But she “was very disturbed that the No 1 crisis facing humanity right now took an hour-and-a-half to come up and was not really addressed”, she added. “People don’t understand what we are facing! The news media has to be more vigilant about tying extreme weather events to climate change. It’s starting to happen, but not enough.”Given her years of anti-nuclear activism – including producing and starring in a hit Hollywood movie, The China Syndrome, released days before the Three Mile Island reactor accident in 1979 – it’s perhaps no surprise that Fonda rejects the increasingly fashionable idea that nuclear power is a climate solution.“Every time I speak [in public], someone asks me if these small modular reactors are a solution,” she said. “So I’ve spent time researching it, and there’s one unavoidable problem: no nuclear reactor of any kind – the traditional or the smaller or the modular, none of them – has been built in less than 10 to 20 years. We don’t have that kind of time. We have to deal with the climate crisis by the 2030s. So just on the timeline, nuclear is not a solution.” By contrast, she said: “Solar takes about four years to develop, and pretty soon it’s going to be 30% of the electricity in the world.”The reason that solar – and wind and geothermal – energy are not prioritized over fossil fuels and nuclear, she argued, is that “big companies don’t make as much money on it”. Noting that air pollution from fossil fuels kills 9 million people a year globally, she added: “We’re being poisoned to death because of petrochemicals and the fossil fuel industry. And we [taxpayers] pay for it! We pay $20bn a year [in government subsidies] to the fossil fuel industry, and we’re dying … We need that industry out of our lives, off of our planet – but they run the world.”The two-time Academy Award winner’s decades as one of the world’s biggest movie stars has given her an appreciation of the power of celebrity, and she applauds Taylor Swift for exercising that power with her endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket.“I think she’s awesome, amazing and very smart,” Fonda said of Swift. “I’m very grateful and excited that she did it, and … I think it’s going to have a big impact.”“My metaphor for myself, and other celebrities, is a repeater,” Fonda added. “When you look at a big, tall mountain, and you see these antennas on the top, those are repeaters. They pick up the signals from the valley that are weak and distribute them so that they have a larger audience … When I’m doing the work I’m doing, I’m picking up the signals from the people who live in Wilmington and the Central valley and Kern county and are really suffering, and the animals that can’t speak, and trying to lift them up and send [their stories] out to a broader audience. We’re repeaters. It’s a very valid thing to do.”View image in fullscreenClimate activism is also “so much fun”, she said, and it does wonders for her mental health.“I don’t get depressed anymore,” she said. “You know, Greta Thunberg said something really great: ‘Everybody goes looking for hope. Hope is where there’s action, so look for action and hope will come.’” Hope, Fonda added, is “very different than optimism. Optimism is ‘everything’s gonna be fine’, but you don’t do anything to make sure that that’s true. Hope is: I’m hopeful, and I’m gonna work like hell to make it true.”

      Mark Hertsgaard is the environment correspondent for the Nation and the executive director of the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now More

    • 213 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      As the election looms, can Harris’s campaign juggle joy with a sense of gravity? | Osita Nwanevu

      by

      While presidential campaigns always distort and distend time in strange ways, this election already feels like it’s stretched on surreally for eons – long enough that several distinct and quite different feeling periods have been pressed into the fossil record.Recall for instance, if you can, the Republican primary. For many months, Republican insiders who should have known better and were paid handsomely to know better pushed the idea that Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, or even one of his lesser-known and lesser-resourced rivals, stood a real chance of defeating Donald Trump for the nomination – even as the former president remained firmly at the top of the polls and his challengers struggled to articulate a rationale for their campaigns to a still staunchly pro-Trump base. There were never any real grounds for this, but the press mocked up a race for DeSantis and his fellow also-rans anyway, complete with the most irrelevant series of debates in the history of American presidential politics.Then there were the doldrums of July, after a debate that wound up being extraordinarily consequential. Joe Biden’s shockingly poor performance finally made his age unignorable as an issue in the race – despite the best efforts of many Democrats and their unhinged hangers-on to ignore it. They manufactured an impressive amount of nonsense in his defense – their baseless warnings about Republican ballot shenanigans that never materialized, for instance, or the insistence that wanting Biden off the ticket was an expression of white male privilege, a glittering idiocy that should be long remembered.All that gave way predictably and immediately to unbridled enthusiasm for Kamala Harris once Biden stepped away, of course. And already in the brief and bewildering time she’s been on the ticket, Harris has essentially run two different campaigns.The first campaign, in those early days and weeks after she stepped into the race, was defined by relief and exuberance, bundled up into the repeated invocations of “joy” – a word that established an immediate contrast between Harris and both Biden and Trump. Both had staked their campaigns on a sense of gravity – Trump’s morbid and ludicrous vision of an America being undermined and invaded by dangerous foreigners and Biden’s well-founded warnings that Trump remained an existential threat to the American republic.The first Harris campaign didn’t depart from Biden there, but it did begin communicating with voters in a different register – Trump was to be feared, yes, but could also be mocked jovially. “You know it, you feel it,” Walz told a Philadelphia crowd in early August. “These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell.” There was something thrillingly barbed underneath that folksiness and his avuncular affect – a hostility towards the Republican party beyond Trump that turned the page from Biden’s forlorn appeals to the right of the past and was grounded by invocations of Project 2025, surely by now the most infamous policy document the conservative movement has ever produced.Project 2025 still figures heavily in Harris’s messaging, and Oprah Winfrey herself talked up the merits of political joy in an appearance with Harris this week, but the campaign overall has plainly changed – the affective contrasts with the right are being replaced with affective and substantive moves in its direction. Consider Harris’s references to her gun ownership – “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot, sorry,” she told Oprah with a laugh – or her promises, before national audiences at the Democratic national convention and during this month’s debate, that she’ll command “the most lethal” military in the world as commander-in-chief. More substantively, the predictable backtracks from positions on energy, criminal justice and other issues she took during the 2020 Democratic primary have been joined by a departure from the Biden administration’s own tax policy – she’s pointedly proposing a smaller increase in the capital gains tax rate – and more criticisms of Trump’s sabotage of the Republican senator James Lankford’s bipartisan but remarkably conservative border bill.Obviously, to win the election, Harris will have to spend the next several weeks convincing the voters who matter most in this country – swing state swing voters who might loosely be described as center-right to the extent that they have coherent and categorizable views at all – to see her as something other than the generically liberal Democratic woman of color from California she’s been on most issues for most of her career. But she needn’t throw everything her campaign can think up at the wall to that end. It’s doubtful that many votes – or more relevantly, that many donations – are going to hinge on the difference between Harris’s capital gains tax increase and Biden’s; appealingly tough talk on hypothetical home invaders does not have to be paired with a substantive retreat from, say, eliminating the death penalty.Moreover, ridicule should remain an important part of the campaign’s playbook – ideally, the more time Harris spends framing the right as bizarre and culturally alien, the less time she’ll spend implicitly, and wrongly, conceding that they might be right on an issue like immigration, where a panic over immigrants stoked by the mainstream and conservative press alike has finally and inevitably curdled into the execrable campaign against the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio. The garbage about barbecued cats isn’t something to be laughed off. The immigration discourse of the last several years has already produced multiple massacres and promises still more violence; polls show most Americans have now been frightened into nativism. All the talk and positioning of the moment aside, what would Harris do to pull those numbers back down? How much courage can we expect from Harris and the party she now leads, more broadly, should she win? At the moment, the campaign is doing everything it can to ensure only time will tell.

      Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist More