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Mystery artist leaves neo-Nazi tiki torch ‘tribute’ to Trump near White House
The unknown artist or artists who fashioned a swirled bronze piece of feces on a replica of the former US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk – and placed it on the National Mall recently – appear to have struck again.This time, the artistic-political commentary is focused not on the 6 January 2021 US Capitol attack carried out by Donald Trump supporters, when a participant did indeed defecate on Pelosi’s desk. Instead, the display satirically evokes the notorious white nationalist Unite the Right tiki torch parade through Charlottesville’s University of Virginia campus in August 2017, with some marchers chanting: “Jews will not replace us”.A tiki torch statue titled The Donald J Trump Enduring Flame was placed on display in Washington DC’s Freedom Plaza, a few blocks from the White House, on Monday. The plaque beneath the piece alludes to how the former president referred to “some very fine people on both sides” at the rally, which led to the murder of a counterprotestor demonstrating against white supremacy.“This monument pays tribute to President Donald Trump and the ‘very fine people’ he boldly stood to defend when they marched in Charlottesville, Virginia,” the plaque reads.Alluding to remarks from Trump at the time that the media had treated people at the rally “absolutely unfairly”, the plaque adds: “While many have called them white supremacists and neo-Nazis, President Trump’s voice rang out above the rest to remind all that they were ‘treated absolutely unfairly’. This monument stands as an everlasting reminder of that bold proclamation.”View image in fullscreenThe timing and placement of the scatological and torch works come as artists have sought ways to interpret the moment through satire. In September, a vast model of a naked Trump was placed on a highway outside Las Vegas, prompting complaints from local Republican officials supporting his second run for the presidency in the 5 November election against Kamala Harris.But the tiki torch is a more direct commentary on political undercurrents that have resurfaced in the closing days of the 2024 election, with the vice-president and her Democratic allies warning that a return to the White House for Trump risks a slide into authoritarianism.Torchlight parades were a feature of German national socialism in the 1930s. After a spell that returned the tiki to non-political purposes, including lighting summer barbecues and repelling mosquitoes, the Charlottesville rally reimbued them with sinister connotations.After the deadly Unite the Right rally, Tiki Brand Products of Wisconsin put out a statement that the brand “was not in any way associated with the events that took place in Charlottesville and … deeply saddened and disappointed.“We do not support their message or the use of our products in this way,” the company added.Civic Crafted LLC, the maker of the desk and tiki torch pieces, was granted a temporary license for display by the US park service. The agency said last week that when issuing permits it “does not consider the content of the message to be presented”.Vandals removed Pelosi’s name from the desk and poop piece soon after it was installed and drew crowds. An inscription on the piece said it was meant to honor “the brave men and women who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6 2021 to loot, urinate and defecate throughout those hallowed halls in order to overturn an election” that Trump lost to Joe Biden.For its part, the 9ft tiki torch went largely unnoticed after it was put up, according to the Washington Post.“I think it’s a perfect piece of satirical sculpture in its placement, in its timing, in its execution,” Eric Brewer, 56, told the Post. “It may be a warning sign of what could be to come.”The park service permit allows the tiki torch work to remain in place until Thursday. More
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The Washington Post is a reminder of the dangers of billionaire ownership | Siva Vaidhyanathan
Last week the Washington Post refrained from endorsing a candidate in the presidential race for the first time in 36 years. The decision was reportedly ordered by Jeff Bezos, the Post’s owner and one of the richest men in the world. The Seattle billionaire, who owns Amazon, purchased the flailing newspaper in 2013 in a rare fit of civic duty.The blowback was immediate and substantial. Within 48 hours of the announcement as many as 200,000 paying readers cancelled their subscriptions to the already money-losing news organization, according to reporting by NPR.Such withholding of revenue is usually more a symbolic message than a real threat to the viability of a company. But for the Post, which has been teetering for decades, any loss in subscribers is threatening. Hundreds of good journalists who had no influence on Bezos’s decision remain unsure of the viability of their employer. Residents of the District of Columbia and much of Virginia and Maryland also rely on the Post for coverage of state and local issues, culture and sports. All of this is threatened by Bezos’s decision and the public uprising against it.Some angry citizens also cancelled their subscriptions to Amazon Prime, the service that provides free shipping for many Amazon products and access to video and music streaming.While a widespread Prime resignation would not damage the public sphere or the prospects for democracy and good government the way that hurting the Washington Post does, it’s still a futile gesture that probably will not alarm or injure Bezos in the slightest.That’s because Prime is a classic loss-leader feature: Amazon uses the service to crush competitors by offering cheaper goods and services while the company makes its money elsewhere. Prime has about 180 million members in the United States, so if a few thousand quit, Amazon would hardly notice and Bezos hardly care.Amazon and Bezos are far more powerful than most people realize. The company’s power is deep, broad and largely invisible. The books and dog toys we buy through Amazon remind us of its public face and original mission. But it’s not 2004 any more.Amazon is not a normal retail company or a normal company in any way; it’s a sprawling leviathan wrapped around the essential processes of major governments, commerce and culture of most of the world.Amazon’s major source of revenue and profit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is the leading provider of computing and data services in the world, ahead of Microsoft and Alphabet. AWS hosts the sites and data of more than 7,500 governmental agencies and offices in the US alone, including those of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Reserve.Just about everything a 21st-century state or firm might want to do probably goes through Amazon and makes Bezos wealthier and more powerful in the process. All of this happened over the past 20 years as we enthusiastically chose convenience and mobility over all other human values. We clicked Bezos into power – and not by buying things through Amazon retail; we did it by choosing the internet again and again.In blocking the Washington Post endorsement, Bezos is not acting cowardly as much as slyly. Secure in his fortune and status regardless of the potential rise of fascism in the US, he has some more selfish concerns about the nature of the next administration.One potential Bezos-centric consequence of the election on 5 November is that Donald Trump will prevail over a bacchanal of greed and corruption, potentially opening federal contracts to all sorts of favored players and – more importantly – stifling investigations and prosecutions into firms and people Trump might favor.The other possible consequence is that a Kamala Harris administration would continue the aggressive and much-needed investigations into the ways internet companies like Amazon have restrained trade, concentrated wealth and solidified power by leveraging networks and scale.Bezos also founded and owns Blue Origin, a rocket and space technology firm that has many government contracts. Limiting the government’s regulatory oversight over space technology or contracting is in Bezos’s interest, which might explain why Blue Origin staff met with Trump around the same time as the Post announced its decision not to endorse. It’s also likely Bezos would like to muscle out Trump’s pal Elon Musk and his company, SpaceX, for what is to come.Given all this, it makes sense that Bezos, who is generally liberal and supports Democratic candidates, would try to limit how much Trump hates him (and Trump has long hated Bezos – a lot), if there is a small chance to curry favor with the once and future president. Perhaps Bezos figures his newspaper should not help Harris more than it already has by reporting the basic news.So there are many reasons to fear a Bezos-Trump rapprochement. Still, it does not make much sense to cancel a Post subscription or Prime membership. Neither would hurt Bezos at all.Most boycotts, especially when they are tiny, disorganized, ad-hoc, emotional and aimed at enormous, global companies, are mere expressions of self-righteousness. They have no significant influence on the world but they can make the boycotter feel a bit better for a few days. What’s worse, they often distract energy from real political action that might curb the excesses of the companies in question.Here is the problem: billionaires are mostly immune to consumer pressure. That’s how they became and remain billionaires.So how do we solve a problem like a billionaire? First, we must be blunt about the nature and scope of their power. It’s not a matter of describing their wealth, which flashes before us in numbers we can’t properly grasp or feel. We must describe their influence and how they control things in the world.Second, we must find ways to limit their wealth by taxing the various ways they accumulate and hide it.Third, we must be enthusiastic about breaking up big companies that do too many things in too many markets and thus crush or purchase potential competitors and insurgents. It’s not about prices. It’s about power.Most of all, we should do our best to elect leaders who are not beholden to billionaires, but actively seek to turn them back into millionaires.
Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy More
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Giuliani’s book is silent on $150m award for defamation but noisy on election lies
In a new book, Rudy Giuliani claims his extensive legal problems and those of Donald Trump are the results of persecution by “a fascist regime” run by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden – all while avoiding mention of a $150m defamation award against him won by two Georgia elections workers and repeating the lies about electoral fraud which saw him lose law licenses in New York and Washington DC.Giuliani’s book also ignores the widely reported autocratic tendencies of Trump, which have triggered numerous warnings, including from former staffers, that he is a fascist in waiting, should he return to the White House.The New York mayor turned Trump lawyer even avoids mention of fascistic sympathies in his own family, specifically those harbored by his mother, whose own sister-in-law said she “liked Mussolini”, the dictator who ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943.Giuliani’s book, The Biden Crime Family: The Blueprint for their Prosecution, is released in the US on Tuesday. The book’s title betrays the reason for its delayed release – it is largely a propagandistic election-season attack on Biden, the president who stepped aside in July, amid concern that at 81 he was too old for a second term, ceding the Democratic nomination to Harris, his vice-president.Giuliani’s book is finally released a week from election day but even he may not have foreseen it landing amid explosive debate over whether Trump is a fascist himself.Mark Milley, formerly the chair of the joint chiefs of staff under Trump, and John Kelly, another retired general who was Trump’s second White House chief of staff, have said Trump deserves the label.Speaking to the reporter Bob Woodward, Milley said Trump was “fascist to the core”. Last week, Vice-President Harris said: “It is clear from John Kelly’s words that Donald Trump is someone who, I quote, ‘certainly falls into the general definition of fascists’, who, in fact, vowed to be a dictator on day one and vowed to use the military as his personal militia to carry out his personal and political vendettas.”On Sunday, outside a Madison Square Garden Trump event many observers compared to a Nazi rally at the same New York venue in 1939, Giuliani told reporters Trump was “the furthest from a fascist imaginable”.On the page, Giuliani’s case against Biden is undercut by omission of inconvenient details – as in the passage in which he complains of persecution by a “fascist regime”.“They … have sued me, sent me to bankruptcy court, and tried to force me to sell my homes,” Giuliani writes – not mentioning that such dire financial straits are the result of being ordered to pay around $150m for defaming Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, the Georgia elections workers, while pushing Trump’s lie about voter fraud in the 2020 election. This week, Giuliani was ordered to give the women control of his New York apartment, his Mercedes-Benz, several luxury watches and other assets.Giuliani was disbarred in Washington DC and New York. Claiming such moves were politically motivated, he nonsensically claims: “I have never been disciplined by the bar association and my record is unblemished.” His legal troubles, he insists, are the result of being “but one” political opponent of Biden and Harris.“They’ve indicted and attempted to disbar legal friends and colleagues like John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark for their work on trying to correct the stolen election results,” Giuliani writes, of disgraced lawyers who also worked on Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.“Others, like [Trump advisers] Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, actually had to serve four months in federal prisons for misdemeanor of contempt of Congress – while their cases were on appeal!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist, was released from prison in Connecticut on Tuesday. He provides a short introduction for Giuliani’s book.Giuliani also cites court cases involving “a Florida social media influencer … arrested by eight FBI and other law enforcement agents for the ‘crime’ of posting memes mocking Hillary Clinton supporters on Twitter” and a “75-year-old grandmother with a medical condition sentenced to jail for two years for protesting outside an abortion center”.“These are the actions of a fascist regime,” Giuliani writes, adding, “So is the lawfare leveled against President Donald J Trump”, in reference to 88 criminal charges, 34 having produced guilty verdicts regarding hush-money payments, the rest remaining outstanding as election day nears.Giuliani does admit in his book to having “some criminal issues in my family background” – namely his father’s 1930s conviction and prison time for robbery, an uncle’s work as a loan shark, and a cousin who “turned out to be head of an auto-theft ring and died in a shootout with the FBI”. Such ties are well known but tellingly, in light of his accusation of “fascist” behavior by Biden and Harris, Giuliani chooses not to mention another famous family detail: his mother’s liking for Mussolini.In 2000, the Village Voice published an examination of Giuliani’s family background by Wayne Barrett, the legendary New York investigative journalist. Entitled Thug Life, the extract from Barrett’s biography of the then New York mayor told the story of Giuliani’s criminal father, including his work as a mafia enforcer. But Barrett also described conversations around the dinner table during the second world war.“The fact that their homeland was an Axis country did not diminish Helen Giuliani’s sense of patriotism,” Barrett wrote of the future mayor’s mother. “‘Helen was a little sticking up for the Italians, a little on the Italian side,’ recalled Anna, Rudy Giuliani’s aunt.“‘She liked Mussolini and things like that.’” More
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Hulk Hogan once endorsed Barack Obama. How did he become a big Maga mascot? | Arwa Mahdawi
It was less WWE, more WTF. On Sunday night, Terry Gene Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan, strutted on stage at Madison Square Garden to speak at a Donald Trump rally. Wearing tiny yellow sunglasses that looked as if they’d been nicked off a toddler, Hogan attempted to rip his shirt off. It took a bit of struggling, but eventually the 71-year-old wrestling legend managed it.The high jinks continued: Hogan treated the crowd to a dance. Notably, Hogan’s dance moves are just like the ones Trump has shown off at numerous rallies. A lot of arm-pumping; kinda looks like they’re milking a cow. (That said, my own dancing looks like a penguin being caught in an earthquake, so I’m not judging.)“You know something, Trumpmaniacs?” Hogan said, after his jig was up. “I don’t see no stinking Nazis in here.” The wrestler was referencing the fact that the Trump event had drawn numerous comparisons, including from Tim Walz, to a Nazi rally held in 1939 at an earlier iteration of Madison Square Garden. Not an outrageous comparison, considering the 2024 rally was full of racism and nativist language, with former Trump aide Stephen Miller saying things such as: “America is for Americans and Americans only.” As for Hogan, while World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) once fired him for using the N-word, his rally speech wasn’t overtly racist. However, he did appear to make a disgusting oral sex joke about Kamala Harris.Hogan’s campy costumes and corny catchphrases may make him seem a bit of a joke, but he’s had a serious impact on the political landscape in recent years. Hogan may not have been able to see any “stinking Nazis” in Madison Square Garden, but powerful men with darkly authoritarian views sure seem to see a useful ally in him.Hogan was certainly instrumental in helping billionaire Peter Thiel kill the media organisation Gawker – a long and sordid saga that started in 2006, when Hogan had sex with the wife of his friend, a radio personality called Bubba the Love Sponge. Bubba filmed the encounter and, in 2012, the tapes got leaked (possibly by a rival DJ) to Gawker. They published the video with the headline: “Even for a minute, watching Hulk Hogan have sex in a canopy bed is not safe for work but watch it anyway”.Watching closely was Thiel, who had held a grudge against Gawker ever since it published a post with the headline: “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people” in 2007. A book about the lawsuit by Ryan Holiday claims that an acquaintance of Thiel, aware of this grudge, gave him the idea to take Gawker down in 2011. When the Hogan tape came out, Thiel had the perfect opportunity to exact revenge: he secretly bankrolled the wrestler’s lawsuit against the company. Because Thiel has unlimited funds, the lawsuit was dragged out to ensure Gawker hemorrhaged money. Which wasn’t necessarily great for Hogan, who had to make his private affairs very public. Things were even worse for Gawker, though, which was driven to bankruptcy.Gawker was a brilliant site, but it also did a bunch of indefensible things, outing someone and publishing a sex tape without their consent being prime examples. Nevertheless, an aggrieved billionaire suing a publication into oblivion set a chilling precedent. It ushered in a United States where, as Tom Scocca, a former Gawker writer, put it, “a billionaire can put a publication out of business”.Hogan, who once endorsed Barack Obama for president, clearly got a taste for hanging around vengeful billionaires after the lawsuit. He’s been a prominent fixture in the Trump campaign for the past few months and had a primetime speaking slot at the Republican national convention in July. Like every aggrieved rich guy in America, Hogan has also flirted with the idea of a political career: if Trump wins, there is a non-zero chance he might get some sort of official position.But while it may be notable that Hogan has got more Trumpy over the years, perhaps what’s most glaring here is how much Trump’s GOP has become like the WWE. It’s shed any pretence of respectability, morphing into a violent theatre of the absurd, full of caricatures and cheap gimmicks. Unlike wrestling however, the only people really getting hurt are the public. More
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To defeat Trump, Harris must talk more about the economy | Robert Reich
I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling more anxious about the outcome of the upcoming election. I’m still nauseously optimistic, but the nausea is growing.I’m as skeptical of polls as any of you, but when all of them show the same thing – that Kamala Harris’s campaign stalled several weeks ago, yet Donald Trump’s continues to surge – it’s important to take the polls seriously.The US vice-president will give her closing message to the American people on Tuesday at a rally on the Ellipse on the Washington mall.Over the last several weeks she’s focused on a woman’s right over her body and the rights of all Americans to a democracy. Obviously, Trump threatens both.Tuesday night, though, she needs to respond forcefully to the one issue that continues to be highest on the minds of most Americans – the economy.She must tell Americans simply and clearly why they continue to have such a hard time despite all the economic indicators to the contrary. It’s because of the power of large corporations and a handful of wealthy individuals to siphon off most economic gains for themselves.Most Americans are outraged that they continue to struggle economically at the same time as billionaires are pulling in ever more wealth. Most know they’re paying too much for housing, gas, groceries and the medicines they need. They also know that a major cause is the market power of big corporations.They want someone who’ll stand up to big corporations and the politicians in Washington who serve them.They want a president who’ll be on their side. A president who will crack down on price-gouging, who will bust up the monopolies and restore competition, who will fight to cap prescription drug costs, who will get big money out of politics and stop the legalized bribery that rigs the market for the rich and who will make sure corporations pay their fair share and end tax breaks for billionaire crooks.A president who will put working families first – before big corporations and the wealthy.Harris needs to say she will be this president.Her policy proposals suggest this. She’s committed to strong antitrust enforcement – cracking down on mergers and acquisitions that give big food corporations the power to jack up food and grocery prices, prosecuting price-fixing and banning price gouging. She needs to remind voters of this.She also says she’ll raise taxes on the rich, provide $25,000 in down-payment assistance to help Americans buy their first home, restore the expanded child tax credit to $3,600 to help more than 100 million working Americans, and implement a new $6,000 tax cut to help families pay for the high costs of a child’s first year of life.All should be parts of her speech this Tuesday about why she will be the champion of working people.She wants to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, make stock buybacks more expensive and expand Medicare to cover home healthcare – paid for with savings from the expansion of Medicare price negotiations with drug manufacturers.She needs to frame all of this as a response to the power of big corporations and the wealthy – and say in no uncertain terms that she’s on the side of the people, not the powerful.If she fails to do this in her closing argument, Trump’s demagogic response will be the only one the public hears – that average working people are struggling because of undocumented workers and the “enemy within”, including Democrats, socialists, Marxists and the “deep state”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris should fit her message about democracy inside this economic message. If our democracy weren’t dominated by the rich and big corporations, fewer of the economy’s gains would be siphoned off to them. Average working people would have better pay, more secure jobs, and be able to afford homes, food, fuel, medicine, childcare and eldercare.A large portion of the public no longer thinks American democracy is working. According to a new New York Times/Siena College poll, only 45% believe our democracy does a good job representing ordinary people. An astounding 62% say the government is mostly working to benefit itself and elites rather than the common good.In her closing argument, Harris should commit herself to reversing this, so the government works for the common good.Harris started her campaign in July and early August by emphasizing these themes about the economy and democracy. But in more recent weeks, she’s focused on Trump’s threat to democracy. Her campaign seems to have decided that she can draw additional voters from moderate Republican suburban women upset by Trump’s role in fomenting the attack on the US Capitol.That’s why she’s been campaigning with Liz Cheney, and gathering Republican officials as supporters. And why she has chosen to give her closing message on the Ellipse – where Trump summoned his followers to march on the Capitol on 6 January 2021.But when she shifted gears to Trump’s attacks on democracy, Harris’s campaign stalled. I think that’s because Americans continue to focus on the economy and want an answer to why they continue to struggle economically.If Trump gives them an answer – although baseless and demagogic – but Harris does not, he may sail to victory on 5 November.Hence, in her closing message she must talk clearly and frankly about the misallocation of economic power in America – lodged with big corporations and the wealthy instead of average Americans – and her commitment to rectify this.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More
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‘Biden has failed me’: at a Michigan soup kitchen, people are torn between Harris and Trump
People on the east side of Saginaw city are more used to seeing buildings come down than go up. Bulldozers have erased houses, schools, department stores and factories over recent years as jobs disappeared and the population plummeted.But builders will soon be at work in one corner of the Michigan city constructing a sprawling extension to Saginaw’s largest soup kitchen after demand soared through the Covid-19 pandemic and then as rampant inflation hit a community where many people live on the edge financially.The East Side Soup Kitchen now serves meals to more than 800 people a day, double the number provided during the pandemic, which itself was up on previous years. It also distributes food to children through local youth clubs and churches.Few of those who use of the kitchen think that whoever is elected as president next week will slow the demand in a city with a 35% poverty rate, but that does not mean they don’t think it will make a difference. And their votes, too, are up for grabs in a bellwether county that Joe Biden won by just 303 votes in 2020.On the day that Harris campaign canvassers visited the soup kitchen, Angelica Taybron was eating lunch with her three-month-old daughter, Tyonna, sleeping at her side. Taybron, who is unemployed, could not say enough good things about the kitchen.“They really help me out here with my baby. They helped with formula and Pampers when I need it. They help me provide for my daughter,” she said.Help, said Taybron, is what she’s looking for in a president and so she’s voting for Kamala Harris.View image in fullscreen“She’s gonna help the people that’s lower. Trump is for people that’s higher. Kamala is for the people that’s struggling,” she said.Taybron’s partner, Darshell Roberson, also relies on the food kitchen as she struggles to find work. She sees it differently.“I voted for Biden but I really feel like Biden has failed me. I trust Donald Trump. In the last election I didn’t vote for him. I was kind of scared of him a little bit, but once I really got to watch him and look at him I liked him,” she said.The soup kitchen’s director, Diane Keenan, said those who arrive for a hot meal each day, and cake for dessert, come from every walk of life. Sitting at the large round tables dotting the dining room are elderly people struggling to get by on small pensions and those driven into debt by medical bills alongside former prisoners rebuilding their lives, and the unhoused, some of them brought down by drug addiction.“Many are working but they’re working poor,” said Keenan. “They work but they just don’t make enough money to make ends meet with the cost of food, the cost of gas, rent, mortgage payment, insurance, that type of thing. We have a lot of senior citizens and elderly come through. They’re on a limited income and sometimes they have to choose, do I get my medicine or can I get some food?”The need is so great that earlier this month the state donated $1m to help fund an expansion to the soup kitchen with a larger dining hall and kitchen, freezers big enough for forklifts to drive into.In a city with one of the highest crime rates in the US, Keenan is trailed by two security guards as she walks around the outside of the building to describe the closure of a neighboring road to provide a covered area for people to pick up meals by car.The drive-through began when the dining hall closed during the pandemic. Keenan kept it going because she said there are people in need of food who are too embarrassed to come into the building or are not well enough to do so.Keenan described the kitchen is “felon-friendly”, helping to provide a fresh start for those who have been in prison.View image in fullscreenStanley Henderson served 30 years for a non-violent robbery. After his release in 2015, he worked at a steel mill known for employing former prisoners and then volunteered at the soup kitchen. A couple of years later, he was taken on as a worker and is now in charge of providing coffee and soft drinks.Henderson has watched demand for the soup kitchen rise as Saginaw’s factories closed and jobs were lost. He hasn’t seen a notable improvement in economic conditions under the US president.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The minimum wage isn’t enough for people to sustain themselves through a whole month. We see people coming in when their money runs out for groceries,” he said.The vice-president is promising to make the economy work better for ordinary Americans if she’s elected. Henderson is sceptical.“I am hesitant to say that she will because I don’t know. I just don’t know whether there’s more jobs under a Republican or Democrats. I don’t know if the job environment is going to improve. It’s possible it will improve up under the Republicans. They may push employment harder than the Democrats,” he said.For all that, Henderson said there was “no question” that he will vote and that it was going to be “straight Democrat” because he believes the party does more to look after people living in poverty. He said his friends and neighbours were paying attention to the election in an area of the city with traditionally low turnout, and that he thinks most of them will vote.View image in fullscreenHenderson, who is Black, also thinks Harris’s race will bump up turnout in his part of the city, although not like for Barack Obama’s election.“She might encourage people to vote who don’t normally want to. I’d say about 5% more,” he said.But there are those who do not see the point in voting.Auralie Warren is retired and struggling financially after working at KFC for much of her life. Inflation has hit her limited income hard as she helps raise her grandchildren after her eldest daughter died of a brain tumor in February and her youngest daughter was diagnosed with stomach cancer.“It’s getting harder out there. Food prices are going up. [The soup kitchen] helps me because I’ve got a fixed income. So when I eat here it saves money on food that I can then spend looking after the grandkids,” she said.“I also come to mingle with people and then I get clothing for my grandkids. If you ask for something, like my daughter needed earmuffs because she has cancer and her ears get cold, they make sure to add them.”But Warren has never voted in her 76 years and has no plans to do so. Politics didn’t seem worth her time or effort.“Whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen. I figure, even if I go [and vote] it won’t make no difference. I mean, it’s shocking but I just never did. I got so busy, I just don’t bother myself, I guess,” she said. More
