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      To defeat Trump, Harris must talk more about the economy | Robert Reich

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      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

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      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

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      How a rightwing machine stopped Arkansas’s ballot to roll back one of the strictest abortion bans

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      Theresa Lee was 22 weeks pregnant last year when her doctor confirmed the news: she had no amniotic fluid and the baby she was expecting, who she had named Cielle, was not growing.In many states across the US, Lee would have been advised that terminating the doomed pregnancy was an option, and possibly the safest course to protect her own life.But in the state of Arkansas, Lee was told she had just one choice: wait it out.A doctor who had confirmed the diagnosis was apologetic but insistent: the state’s laws meant he could be fined or jailed if he performed an abortion. In the wake of the US supreme court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v Wade, Arkansas activated a so-called trigger law that made all abortion illegal except if a woman was in an acute medical emergency and facing death. There are no other exceptions: not for rape victims, minors or fatal fetal anomalies.For the next five weeks, on a weekly basis, doctors knew Lee – already a mother to one-year-old Camille at the time – was at risk because she had placenta previa, which could cause bleeding and death. But she returned regularly to her OB-GYN’s office to be scanned, waiting to hear if Cielle’s fetal heartbeat had stopped.“I was having to prepare for if I passed. Me and my husband had to have a lot of really tough conversations about all the outcomes, just to prepare in case I wasn’t going to be there for my husband and my daughter,” she said.Lee never seriously considered leaving the state to get an abortion because the cost seemed exorbitant, childcare would be an issue, and she was uncertain about whether she could face criminal charges once she came home. None of her doctors ever suggested it, either.“I would have had an abortion, 100%. I am very much a realist. I knew she was going to pass. Having to carry her week after week and knowing she was going to pass, it was a horrific waiting game,” she said.Once Cielle stopped moving, and no fetal heartbeat was detected, she traveled three hours to the UAMS hospital in Little Rock from her home in Fort Smith because doctors thought delivering at the larger hospital would be safer in case of complications.There, she was induced and delivered a stillbirth. Luckily, the labor proceeded without any incident.“When I came in they had blood ready just in case. I remember seeing it out of the corner of my eye,” Lee said.The delivery room seemed prepared especially for women like Lee. She saw signs on the wall that said her baby was in heaven.When she was told the cost of transferring Cielle’s remains back home would be more than $1,000, she opted to take her in her car by herself. She held the casket in her arms the whole way.A chance for changeVoters in 10 states will cast ballots next week to expand their state’s abortion protections or maintain the status quo. Arkansans won’t be among them.But for seven weeks this summer, it looked like Arkansas voters would have an opportunity to change the state’s constitution to roll back one of the strictest abortion bans in the country.There are few places in the US where it is more dangerous to be a pregnant woman than in Arkansas. The state had the worst maternal mortality rate in the country, according to data collected by the CDC from 2018-2021. It showed that about 44 mothers die for every 100,000 live births. An Arkansas maternal mortality review board, which reviews such data, found that 95% of pregnancy-related deaths in that period were considered preventable. The Guardian’s reporting has not identified specific cases in which the state’s ban on abortion has led directly to a death, but abortion rights advocates believe the risks are high.In July, a dedicated network of about 800 grassroots organizers in Arkansas had collected the necessary signatures to get a measure on the 5 November ballot that – if passed – would have changed Arkansas’s constitution to protect the right to abortion for any reason up to 18 weeks of pregnancy. It also would have legalized exceptions for abortion after 18 weeks, including in cases involving rape, incest, fatal fetal anomalies, and life and health of the mother.It would have saved a woman like Lee from facing potentially fatal outcomes, and emotional and financial distress.View image in fullscreenThe measure did not provide the same rights that existed under Roe – which protected abortion until viability, or around 24 weeks – a fact that organizers said kept national organizations like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU from getting involved in the effort. But organizers believed that it was a measure that even conservative voters would support. After all, voters in neighboring Kansas, another Republican stronghold, overwhelmingly voted to protect abortion rights when its ballot was put to voters in a referendum in 2022.To the dismay and shock of the grassroots organizers, however, the Arkansas initiative was ultimately quashed before it ever reached voters. A paperwork error by organizers prompted a legal challenge by Arkansas’s secretary of state, John Thurston, who rejected the abortion amendment. On 22 August, the Arkansas supreme court upheld his decision.For Arkansas women, there is no end in sight.A Guardian investigation into the ballot’s demise tells a more complicated story than just a bureaucratic screw-up, revealing a confluence of rightwing actors working in parallel to ensure it never got to voters: a reclusive donor who has helped shape the anti-abortion movement across the US; the inner circle of the Arkansas governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has proclaimed Arkansas “the most pro-life state in the country”; and judges who are supposed to be non-partisan but are deeply aligned with the state’s Republican party.“Everyone knew there was going to be a pretty organized and well-funded effort to keep it off the ballot, said Ashley Hudson, a rising Democratic star who represents west Little Rock in the Arkansas state legislature. “Is it collusion, directly? I don’t know. But I think there are a lot of people with aligned interests.”Changing the rulesThe atmosphere was euphoric on 5 July 2024 when grassroots organizers and activists marched into the domed capitol building in Little Rock armed with dozens of boxes of signed petitions. They had accomplished the seemingly impossible: collecting more than 100,000 signatures across 50 counties in Arkansas in support of getting the abortion rights measure on November’s ballot.For grassroots organizers like Kristin Stuart, the effort had been all consuming. Stuart had previously worked as an escort at Little Rock’s only surgical abortion clinic, helping patients get through the throng of protesters who were usually assembled outside. The clinic no longer performs abortions but is used as resource center for women looking for financial support or information about how to get abortion pills from out of state.She was motivated to try to change the state’s constitution because she believed the ban was deeply unjust. Stuart was particularly incensed by circumstances that are especially dire for poor women and children in Arkansas, like the fact that it remains the only state in the nation that has not expanded postpartum Medicaid coverage to give poor women health insurance for a year after they give birth.“There was a small group of us that worked it like it was a full time job,” she said. The campaign, led by Arkansans for Limited Government (AFLG), divided the state into 50 clusters. There were cluster leaders and county leaders. Volunteers were trained three times a week. For a signature to be valid, they needed a person’s name, address, birth date, the date they signed and city. They also had to make sure the signer was a registered voter.“We knew we had to be perfect. We knew we had to do everything correctly, because they would be looking for anything to disqualify it,” Stuart said.They sometimes faced harassment, including protesters who could be “loud and mean and scary” who tried to stop people from signing, Stuart said. There were moles in chat and message groups where hundreds of volunteers were communicating. Sometimes the locations where canvassers were planning to collect signatures would be published ahead of time by Arkansas Right to Life, the state’s leading anti-abortion group. Organizers had to adjust the ways they communicated to adapt.But what volunteers discovered, said Lauren Cowles, was that there were “blue dots” in even the reddest counties of the state.View image in fullscreen“We found people who were desperate to connect. There are a lot of people out there who believe women should have the right to choose,” Cowles said. Voters were also being educated. Many did not understand that the total ban did not include any exceptions, including for rape.“There were many months when I did not believe we could get enough signatures. The last few weeks before the deadline, we saw such a surge of urgency,” Stuart said.Hudson, the Democratic legislator, believes the Republican effort to stop the measure from succeeding began in 2023, when Republicans first proposed an amendment to the Arkansas constitution that would make it significantly more difficult to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot. Instead of calling for signatures to be collected from at least 15 counties, as is stated in the Arkansas constitution, Republicans wanted to increase the number to 50 counties. Voters rejected the proposal in a referendum. But the Republican legislature passed a law to that effect anyway.“That was done in anticipation of a ballot like this,” says Hudson. It was a difficult challenge but organizers got the signatures they needed. In a move that would later prove to be a fatal flaw, leaders hired paid canvassers in the final weeks of the campaign to help get the petitions over the line.The chicken tycoonRonnie Cameron, a poultry billionaire from Arkansas, is one of the most important rightwing power players you’ve never heard of. While Republican megadonors like Harlan Crow, Charles Koch and Dick Uihlein have become well known as big conservative donors, Cameron, a conservative evangelical Christian, has shied away from the spotlight, even as he has donated tens of millions of dollars to anti-abortion causes nationwide.According to public records, Cameron was the largest single donor in the fight against the abortion amendment, giving about $465,000 to groups that fought the initiative. This included $250,000 to a group called Stronger Arkansas, which was formed to fight the petition as well as a separate ballot initiative that would have increased rights to medical marijuana.Stronger Arkansas was run by Chris Caldwell, a consultant who is Sanders’s closest political adviser and served as her campaign manager in 2022. Two other officials with close ties to Sanders served as vice-chair and treasurer of the group.View image in fullscreenCameron, the chairman of the chicken company Mountaire Farms, also donated about $215,000 to Family Council Action Committee 2024, a group formed by Jerry Cox, the conservative head of the Arkansas Family Council, which is staunchly anti-abortion. The conservative advocacy group was accused in June 2024 of using intimidation tactics when it published a list of names of paid canvassers who were working on the abortion petition. The names were obtained after the Family Council obtained them via a freedom of information request.AFLG said in a statement at the time that the publication of canvassers’ names put its team at great risk for harassment, stalking and other dangers.“The Family Council’s tactics are ugly, transparently menacing, and unworthy of Arkansas. We won’t be intimidated,” it said.In a 2020 New Yorker report by the investigative journalist Jane Mayer, Cameron was described as a reclusive businessman who had donated $3m to organizations supporting Trump’s candidacy in 2016. The report found that Trump had weakened federal oversight of the poultry industry even as he accepted millions of dollars in donations from Cameron and other industry figures. Cameron, whose grandfather founded Mountaire, also served on Trump’s advisory board on the pandemic’s economic impact.Cameron and his wife, Nina, reportedly attend Fellowship Bible church, which the New Yorker called a hub of social conservatism that lists condemnation of homosexuality as a key belief. Cameron also founded the Jesus Fund, and is a funder of both that private group and another called the Jesus Fund Foundation. According to public records, the Jesus Fund has donated $159m over the last decade to the National Christian Foundation, a highly influential multibillion-dollar charity that is considered the largest single funder of the anti-abortion movement.View image in fullscreenAccording to Opensecrets, Cameron and his wife are considered the 28th largest contributors to outside spending groups in this election cycle. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the couple’s donations is the Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton, who has called for fetuses to be given constitutional rights. Cameron also donated $1m to the pro-Trump Super Pac Make America Great Again Inc in July.Nina Cameron was reached by the Guardian at her home but she declined to answer questions about her political activity.A spokesperson for Mountaire did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. A spokesperson for the Family Council did not respond to a request for comment.A staple and a photocopyFive days after grassroots activists celebrated their milestone on 5 July, reality hit.Thurston, Arkansas’s secretary of state, who had participated in the state’s March for Life, an anti-abortion rally on state grounds, and had won the endorsement of Arkansas Right to Life in 2022, challenged the legality of the petition. In a claim that would be hotly contested, Thurston said AFLG had not submitted the documents that were required to name the paid canvassers and confirm they had been properly trained. He rendered 14,143 signatures they had collected in the final stretch invalid, leaving the final count at 88,000. They were a few thousand short of the 90,704 they needed under Arkansas’s legal requirements. Thurston offered no “cure period” for organizers to fix the issue. Abortion was off the ballot.Thurston seemed to be quibbling over a staple and a photocopy: AFLG had already submitted the required paperwork related to training a week earlier, but it should have stapled a copy of it to the petition it submitted on the due date.Privately, some grassroots organizers seethed at what they saw as an unforgivable mistake by AFLG leaders following a grueling campaign. Others say that even if the paperwork had been perfect, Thurston would have found another issue to challenge.In legal briefs and statements, AFLG argued that the 2016 secretary of state had counted signatures for other ballot measures even after those organizers failed to submit some paperwork. Thurston’s personal views on abortion, they said, meant he was discriminating against them. They also claimed that they had been verbally assured by Thurston’s assistant director of elections, Josh Bridges, that their paperwork was in order.Sarah Huckabee Sanders seized on the decision. In a post on X, the governor posted a photograph of Thurston’s letter and wrote “the far left pro-abortion crowd in Arkansas showed they are both immoral and incompetent”.Then the matter went to court.The judgesJudges in Arkansas are supposed to be non-partisan. But when Sanders announced in June 2023 that Cody Hiland, a former US attorney who served as the head of the Arkansas Republican party, would be appointed to the state’s supreme court following a vacancy, she boasted that her pick would give Arkansas a “conservative majority” for the first time.“I know it will have the same effect on our state as it has had on our country,” she said at the time, in a reference to the US supreme court.View image in fullscreenHiland would become one of four justices to strike down the abortion amendment on 22 August. The majority decision, written by the justice Rhonda Wood – who counts Ron Cameron’s Mountaire as one of the largest individual donors to her election campaign and had months earlier been endorsed by Arkansas’s state Republican party – found that Thurston had “correctly refused” to count the signatures by paid canvassers because the organizers had failed to file the necessary training certificate.The August ruling faced strong criticism, including from an unlikely source: a Washington DC lawyer named Adam Unikowsky, a parter in the supreme court practice at Jenner & Block, and former law clerk to the late conservative supreme court justice Antonin Scalia.“The Arkansas Supreme Court’s decision is wrong,” Unikowsky wrote in a lengthy post on his legal newsletter. The majority’s decision, Unikowsky wrote, said that the allegedly missing paperwork had to be stapled to the organizers petition. Except, he said, Arkansas law does not say that.The three dissenting judges made the point in their dissent, saying Thurston had “made up out of whole cloth” that such a requirement existed. The dissenting judges said the majority’s endorsement of Thurston’s rationale was inexplicable.View image in fullscreenWhen AFLG argued that it had relied on Thurston’s office’s alleged verbal assurance that their paperwork was in order, the court rejected the argument in their majority opinion saying his comments did not change the law.Unikowsky also argued that Arkansas law made it clear that AFLG should have been offered time to correct its mistake. “Taking a step back, I have to dwell on the injustice of it all. Arkansans are being disenfranchised,” he wrote. He also noted that conservative groups who had made similar errors in their own ballot initiatives had not faced pushback.Sanders celebrated the supreme court’s ruling. “Proud I helped build the first conservative supreme court majority in the history of Arkansas and today that court upheld the rule of law, and with it, the right to life,” she said.The governor has long made touting the state’s so-called “pro-life” stance a priority. In March 2023 she signed a bill to create a “monument to the unborn” near the Arkansas state capitol.Shortly after the judges’ made their decision, the Pike county Republican committee issued a flyer for a political event in October. It featured a picture of Wood, the justice, alongside Thurston. They were both scheduled to appear at the Republican event. Wood reportedly “panicked” over the flyer and had the Republicans remove her picture but still planned to attend.Organizers say they will probably try again in 2026. Sanders will also be up for re-election that year.‘There is no way we can stay here’Looking back, Danielle – an Arkansas resident – realized she had eloped and closed on a house in Little Rock in June 2022, in the same week that Roe fell. A native of Philadelphia, Danielle (who asked the Guardian not to use her last name) and her husband, a doctor, moved to Arkansas so that he could work in underserved communities.They tried to conceive for months before turning to IVF. Danielle quit her job and commuted back and forth to Texas to receive treatment – her options were limited in Arkansas – and ultimately got pregnant. She was 18 weeks pregnant when a routine scan revealed that there was no fluid around the fetus, which also had no kidneys and no stomach. The pregnancy was not viable, even though the fetus had a heartbeat.When she was told by her doctor in Arkansas that her only option after the Dobbs decision was carrying the pregnancy to term, she and her husband knew they needed to find another solution. Even her IVF doctor in Texas urgently advised her to terminate the pregnancy. If she ended up needing a C-section during labor, it would take a long time before she would be physically ready to try again, he said.View image in fullscreen“My husband and I scrambled and got the earliest appointment in the closest place we could, which was in Illinois,” Danielle says. It was a six-and-a-half-hour drive and a two-day medical procedure. They stayed in a hotel for two nights.Danielle knows she was relatively fortunate to have the means to leave the state, unlike many women in Arkansas who lack resources. She and her husband also understood her life was at risk, even though it was never made explicitly clear. Her local hospital had only offered “palliative care” for the fetus, which meant scans every two-three weeks to check on its fetal heartbeat – not the kind of care Danielle knew she would need to avoid the risk of becoming sick and septic.After terminating her pregnancy in April 2024 and returning to Arkansas, Danielle got involved in the grassroots effort to collect signatures for the abortion ballot initiative. She remembers how one protester called her a “murderer” for collecting signatures. The person doing the shouting was an anesthesiologist she recognized who had attended one of her husband’s lectures and worked at the UAMS hospital in Little Rock.She went to the statehouse when the signatures were turned in, full of hope. She was photographed by a friend that day holding a sign that read: “I deserved better.”“We felt so accomplished when we turned those in. I was so excited. I felt very triumphant. We did this in a state where it’s really hard to do,” she said.When the supreme court of Arkansas ruled against them, Danielle knew she would have to leave. Then she became pregnant again with the one IVF-created embryo she had left.View image in fullscreen“I said there is no way we can stay here and my husband agreed. It’s not a safe place for me to be,” she told the Guardian. “We cannot raise a daughter here.”There were things about life in Arkansas – like their nice home – that she loved. But now they are moving back to Philadelphia.“I think I was naive moving from a big city where I never would have thought twice about what I could do with my own body. It’s a shame. It’s so sad.”Theresa Lee, the woman who was forced to deliver a stillbirth, echoed Danielle’s disappointment. “You want to believe that we as citizens have a chance at voting for what we believe in, but with the precedent set by the supreme court in the state of Arkansas, it’s clear we don’t,” she said.“I do not desire to have another pregnancy in Arkansas. I don’t feel safe and I don’t feel cared for as a woman in our state. What happened to me can happen to any woman and it has. Arkansas is a dangerous place to be pregnant.” More

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      How Trump’s racist talk of immigrant ‘bad genes’ echoes some of the last century’s darkest ideas about eugenics

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      Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly denounced immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally and the danger he says that poor immigrants of color pose for the U.S. – often using hateful language to make his point.

      In early October 2024, Trump took his comments a step further when he questioned immigrants’ faulty genes, saying without support that “Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they are now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

      It was far from the first time Trump has invoked eugenics – a false, racist theory that some people, and even some races, are genetically superior to others.

      In 1988, for example, Trump told Oprah Winfrey during an interview: “You have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.”

      In 2016, Trump said that his German roots are the reason behind his greatness:

      “I always said that winning is somewhat, maybe, innate. Maybe it’s just something you have; you have the winning gene. Frankly it would be wonderful if you could develop it, but I’m not so sure you can. You know, I’m proud to have that German blood, there’s no question about it. Great stuff.”

      And in 2020, Trump again alluded to his belief that bloodlines convey excellence:

      “I had an uncle who went to MIT who is a top professor. Dr. John Trump. A genius. It’s in my blood. I’m smart.”

      Trump’s repeated and countless comments about white people’s racial superiority to people of color have prompted some comparisons to the Nazis and their ideology of racial superiority.

      The Nazis are indeed the most infamous believers of the false idea that white, blue-eyed, blonde-haired people were superior to others – and that the human population should be selectively managed to breed white people.

      But the Nazis didn’t originate these ideas. In fact, the Nazis were so impressed with many American eugenic ideas that they incorporated them into their racist, antisemitic laws.

      Root of eugenics

      The British scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of the evolutionist Charles Darwin, first developed the theory of eugenics in the 1860s, and it gained a foothold in the U.S. and Britain around this time.

      Eugenics sets racial identity, and especially white identity, as the most desirable and worthy.

      By the dawn of the early 1900s, much of the American eugenics scholarship looked down on American immigrants from any place other than Scandinavia, thus coining the term “Nordicism.”

      In the late 19th and early 20th century, immigration to the U.S. was at its peak. In 1890, 14.8% of people living in the U.S. were immigrants. Many people felt concerned about immigration in the U.S., and there were many prominent eugenicists in America. Two of the most famous were Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.

      Both were avowed white supremacists who advocated for scientific racism. They wrote popular and widely read books that helped shape American and German law in the 1920s and 1930s.

      Grant, Stoddard and other theorists in the U.S. embraced eugenics as a way to justify racial segregation, restrict immigration, enforce sterilization and uphold other systemic inequalities.

      Stoddard attacked the United States’ immigration policies in his 1920 book, “The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy.” He wrote: “If the present drift is not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed. … We now know that men are not, and never will be equal. We now know that environment and education can only develop what heredity brings.”

      Another prominent eugenicist was Harry H. Laughlin, an educator and superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, a now-defunct research group that gathered biological and social information about the American population.

      Laughlin wrote an influential 1922 book, “Eugenical Sterilization in the United States,” which included a chapter on model sterilization laws. The Third Reich used his book and laws as a template when implementing them in Germany during the height of the Nazi period.

      Laughlin also regularly testified before U.S. Congress, with this 1922 testimony representative of his message to lawmakers: “Immigration is essentially and fundamentally a racial and biological problem. There are many factors to consider, but, from the standpoint of the future, immigration is primarily a long time national investment in human family stocks.”

      Eugenicists, including Laughlin, have long been specifically preoccupied with Norwegian genetics – believing that America is under attack when immigration occurs from non-Nordic countries.

      In November 1922, Laughlin said, “Some of our finest and most desirable immigrants are from Norway.”

      In 1924, Congress approved the Immigration Act, which severely limited immigration to the U.S., established quotas for immigrants based on nationality and barred immigrants from Asia.

      It was only following the end of World War II and the Holocaust that eugenics fell out of favor and lost its prominence in American thinking.

      Trump’s recycling of history

      Fears over foreign immigrants weakening the U.S. were popular a century ago, and Trump and many of his followers still embrace them today.

      Trump has promised that he will carry out mass deportations of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, forcibly detaining immigrants in camps and removing 1 million people a year.

      In April 2024, Trump used dehumanizing language to express his apparent belief that immigrants are unworthy of empathy. “The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals.’”

      Trump has also promoted eugenicists’ obsession with Scandinavia and the superiority of white people.

      In 2018, Trump spoke about immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa, saying “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”

      In the same meeting, Trump also reportedly suggested that the U.S. should instead draw in more people from countries like Norway.

      In April 2024, Trump again embraced this idea of Scandinavian superiority, saying that he wants immigrants from “Nice countries. You know, like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”

      A dangerous flash to the past

      A person running for president in 1924 would seem more likely than a candidate in 2024 to espouse this now-discredited point of view.

      President Calvin Coolidge ran for election on an “America First” platform in 1924, with the slogan only falling out of favor after groups like the Ku Klux Klan embraced it around the same time.

      The idea of America First, at the time, denoted American nationalism and exceptionalism – but also was linked to anti-immigration and fascist movements.

      When Coolidge signed the heavily restrictive 1924 Immigration Act into law he stated, “America must remain American.”

      One hundred years later, Trump calls to mind an America First mentality, including when he regularly reads the lyrics to a song called “The Snake” during his rallies as a way to explain the dangers of welcoming immigrants into the U.S. The civil rights activist Oscar Brown wrote this poem in 1963, and his family has said that Trump misinterprets the song’s words.

      ‘I saved you,’ cried that woman.

      ‘And you’ve bit me even, why’

      ‘You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die.’

      ‘Oh shut up, silly woman,’ said the reptile with a grin,

      ‘You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.’ More

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      ‘I’ve lost friends’: in bitterly divided Georgia, can Democrats score another win?

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      Mary Holewinski lives in Carrollton, Georgia, home turf for the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. But Holewinski is a Kamala Harris supporter and has a sign in her yard. It draws some nasty looks, she said. “I’ve lost neighbor friends.”It helps that Carrollton is a college town, and discussing politics is possible – to an extent. “I feel like the people I live around, you can sit down and have a conversation with them, and they are willing to listen … but not everybody. There are some people who don’t want to hear your side of it.”These tensions are ratcheting up, because for voters in Georgia, it can feel like the entire US election is on the line. The state went for Biden in 2020 by 11,779 votes, out of 5m ballots cast – the first time since 1992 that the state turned blue. Its 16 electoral college votes were a bulwark – psychological as well as practical – for Democrats, illustrating the nation’s rejection of Donald Trump, however slim.Georgia has personal significance for Trump, and his war on the 2020 election results. The former president still faces charges in an election interference case in Atlanta’s Fulton county, after he made what he described as a “perfect phone call” to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find” another 11,800 votes. A Georgia win would represent belated validation for the former president.Now the question is which Georgia will turn out in greater force this year: the Democratic-leaning Georgia represented by the burgeoning Atlanta suburbs, or the Georgia where conservatism holds sway in its smaller towns and rural regions. Polling suggests that Trump has a lead of one to two points, well within the margin of error.The election is already under way. About 7 million Georgians are registered to vote and about 3 million voters – more than 40% of the electorate – have already gone to the polls, setting early voting records each day.Both Harris and Trump may as well have leased apartments in Buckhead, an upscale part of Atlanta, for all the time they are spending in Georgia in the last-minute election push. Earlier this month, Trump rallied at a sports arena in the northern Atlanta suburb of Duluth, in the middle of one of the most diverse areas of the state. Harris appeared on Thursday with Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen.View image in fullscreenSuburban moderates in the Atlanta region turned on Trump in 2020, and he appears to have done little in the years since to win their favor. Much has been made of Republican hopes of targeting Black men – about 1 million of Georgia’s 7 million registered voters – as a potential swing bloc for votes. The difference between a Democrat winning 80% and 90% of their votes will probably be larger than the overall margin of victory.But Georgia is no longer a state defined by Black and white voters. Asian and Latino population growth has changed the political landscape in suburban Atlanta, which helped drive the Biden victory there in 2020. Turnout in that voting demographic has been a challenge for both parties.The politics of Georgia are a delicate dance of cooperation between Atlanta, which tends Democratic, and the rest of the state. More than half the state’s population lives in the metro area of Atlanta. Music by Atlanta’s hip-hop artists has long dominated the charts. Marvel films its movies on Atlanta’s streets. Dozens of Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in the Atlanta area, from Home Depot, UPS and Southern Company to mainstays Coca-Cola and Delta.

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      Outside Atlanta, Savannah and pockets of Black voters in south Georgia’s historic Black belt, Georgia is solidly conservative. The Republican governor, Brian Kemp, remains the most popular political figure in the state. Moderate liberals approve of how he handled Trump’s election interference claims. Even Maga Republicans grudgingly acknowledge that his resistance to pandemic closures and libertarian gun position matched their interests.Rural, conservative Georgia is more likely to be religiously fundamentalist, less diverse and occasionally reactionary. Georgia has a six-week abortion ban because even the business wing of the Republican party in Georgia, which is solidly in charge of the state’s government, crosses evangelicals on that issue at its peril.The party’s challenges are exemplified by Rabun county, in Georgia’s picturesque, tourist-friendly mountains on the border of North Carolina. Here, and elsewhere, it is attempting to heal the standing conflict between conventional conservative Republicans and the Maga insurgency on the right.Rabun county Republicans have hosted a range of events, from a traditional low-country boil to a firearm raffle and screenings of a Reagan biography at the last remaining drive-in, said Ed Henderson, secretary of the Rabun county Republican party. Local Republicans have established a detente between the Maga wing and traditional conservatives, he said.“We’re not imposing purity tests on candidates,” Henderson said. They also don’t view Democrats as an existential threat. “They’re not demons with horns on their head, or Satan worshippers. They’re the opposition.”People from traditionally Democratic areas began moving into Rabun county during the pandemic, attracted by its lower cost of living and extraordinary natural beauty. The area historically favors Republicans by about four to one.But in a close race, chipping away at that margin may make the difference, said Don Martin, chair of the Rabun county Democrats. “If we can get Republicans down to 70% here, we will win the state.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBoth parties now see early voting as key. Trump has reversed his skepticism of early voting and absentee ballots, a posture that may have made the difference between winning and losing in 2020. His repeated refrain on the road in Atlanta is for turnout to be “too big to rig”, falsely suggesting that Democrats stole the 2020 election and intend to steal this one.View image in fullscreenHistorically in Georgia, Democrats have been more likely to vote early than Republicans. But Trump has pointedly instructed his supporters to vote early in person in Georgia, and many appear to be doing just that. So far this year, there’s little difference in turnout between metro Atlanta counties with large Democratic voting majorities and Republican-heavy rural counties.Ralph Reed, director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and a venerable figure on the Christian political right, made a point of telling conservative voters to vote early at a recent faith town hall in Zebulon, about 90 minutes south of Atlanta.“We cannot and must not wait until election day to vote,” he said. “If you let them dominate the early vote for two or three weeks and run up a million- or a million-and-a-half-vote margin, then we are like a football team trying to score three touchdowns in the fourth quarter … If you want the texts and calls to stop, you need to vote, and you need to vote early.”And early concerns about Hurricane Helene disrupting the election appear to be unfounded so far. Turnout in areas affected by the devastating September storm is only slightly below that of the rest of the state.Gwendolyn Jordan lives in Grovestown, two and a half hours east of Atlanta and in the damage zone of Hurricane Helene. Two weeks ago, as early voting started, some residents were still without power, she said.Yet early turnout in her county is very slightly above the state average. Though Columbia county went almost two to one for Trump in 2020, Jordan is a Harris supporter. The role of the federal government and the competence of a presidential administration is no abstraction in the wake of a hurricane, she said.“I believe there’s going to be a big difference, because Kamala Harris is more for the people under the $400,000 income range, the people that really need the help,” Jordan said. “You know that’s who is struggling right now. We just had a hurricane that did a lot of damage to people.”In 2020, it took two weeks for Biden’s victory in Georgia to be confirmed. This year there was the prospect of other delays, after an effort by the Trump-aligned state board of elections to allow local elections officers the right to withhold certifications, to conduct open-ended investigations into poll irregularities and to mandate hand-counts of ballots on election night.But two superior court judges ruled the changes unconstitutional and the state’s superior court let the rulings stand pending appeal, which will not be heard until after the election.Georgia’s wounds from the fight over the election results in 2020 haven’t completely healed. And people are preparing themselves for a fresh round after voting concludes in November.“I could care less about whether you like [Trump] or not. It’s not a popularity contest,” said Justin Thompson, a retired air force engineer from Macon. “It’s what you got done. And he did get things done before the pandemic hit. And the only reason why he didn’t get re-elected was because the pandemic hit.” More

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      Kamala Harris to urge voters to ‘turn the page’ on era of Trump

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      With the presidential race deadlocked a week before election day, Kamala Harris will call on voters to “turn the page” on the Trump era, in remarks delivered from a park near the White House where the former president spoke before a mob of his supporters stormed the US Capitol in a last effort to overturn his 2020 loss.The Harris campaign has described the remarks as a major address that will underline the vice-president’s closing message, in a location she hopes will remind voters precisely why the electorate denied Trump a second term four years ago. She is expected to cast Trump as a divisive figure who will spend his term consumed by vengeance, leveraging the power of the presidency against his political enemies rather than in service of the American people.“Tomorrow, I will speak to Americans about the choice we face in this election—and all that is at stake for the future of this country that we love,” she wrote on X.Although the vice-president frames the stakes of the 2024 election as nothing less than the preservation of American democracy, her speech is anticipated to strike an optimistic and hopeful tone, standing in stark contrast to the dark, racist themes that animated Trump’s grievance-fueled rally at Madison Square Garden.In New York on Sunday, Trump repeated there that the gravest threat facing the US was the “enemy within”. In recent days, Harris has amplified warnings of her opponent’s lurch toward authoritarianism and open xenophobia. Her campaign is running ads highlighting John Kelly, a marine general and Trump’s former chief of staff, saying that the former president met the definition of a fascist. Harris has said she agrees.“Just imagine the Oval Office in three months,” Harris said, previewing her message at a rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Saturday. “It is either Donald Trump in there stewing over his enemies’ list, or me, working for you, checking off my to-do list.”

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      In her remarks, Harris will attempt to balance the existential and the economic – focusing on the threat Trump poses to American institutions while weaving in the Democrat’s plans to bring down costs and build up the middle class. She is expected to cast Trump as a tool of the billionaire class who would eliminate what is left of abortion access and stand in the way of bipartisan compromise when it does not suit him politically.Polls consistently show the economy and the cost of living are the issues most important to voters this election. Protecting democracy tends to be a higher priority for Democrats and voters planning to support Harris.In the final stretch of the campaign, Harris has emphasized the breadth of her coalition, especially her endorsements from a slew of former Trump administration officials and conservative Republicans such as Liz Cheney and her father, the former vice-president, Dick Cheney.Trump has sought to rewrite the history of 6 January, the culmination of his attempt to cling to power that resulted in the first occupation of the US Capitol since British forces set it on fire during the war of 1812. Trump recently declared the attack a “day of love” and said he would pardon the 6 January rioters – whom he has called “patriots” and “hostages” – if he is elected president.Hundreds of supporters have been convicted and imprisoned for their conduct at the Capitol, while federal prosecutors have accused Trump of coordinating an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. Trump maintains that he played no role in stoking the violence that unfolded, and still claims baselessly that the 2020 election was stolen from him.Harris’s campaign has sought to lay out the monumental stakes of the election while also harnessing the joy that powered the vice-president’s unexpected ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket.In an abbreviated 100-day campaign that Harris inherited from Biden after he stepped aside in July, the Democratic nominee has unified her party, raised more than a billion dollars, blanketed the airwaves and blitzed the battleground states. And yet the race remains a dead heat nationally and in the seven swing states that will determine who serves as the 47th president of the United States.After her speech, Harris will return to the campaign trail, where she will keep a frenetic pace until election day. More

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      Pennsylvania: anger among Puerto Ricans in key swing state after racist remarks

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      On Sunday evening, the Philadelphia council member Quetcy Lozada was attending a campaign event with Vice-President Kamala Harris at a local restaurant, as the Democratic presidential candidate unveiled a new economic proposal for Puerto Rico.Lozada is of Puerto Rican descent and represents the seventh city council district in Philadelphia, made up of over 50% Latino, predominantly Puerto Rican, residents.As Lozada left the campaign event, her phone began blowing up. Contacts began sending her texts with the video of racist remarks by a comedian, during a Trump rally in New York.“I got in the car, I looked at the video, and I had to play it multiple times in order to make sure that I was hearing what I was actually hearing,” Lozada said in an interview. “I was absolutely frustrated, I was angry – but I was not surprised.”As the Harris campaign was announcing her policy proposals for Puerto Rico, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe was opening for a Trump campaign rally in New York. Hinchcliffe, during his introduction, made racist and disparaging remarks about Puerto Ricans.“There’s a lot going on. I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” said Hinchcliffe, a comedian and host of the popular podcast and stand up comedy show Kill Tony.The racist comments spread like wildfire, leading to anger and indignation in Pennsylvania, one of the most important battleground states in the US election which many experts think is crucial to any attempt to win the White House. There are over 472,000 Puerto Ricans in the state of Pennsylvania, according to the US census bureau.A Puerto Rican voter, Yemele Ayala, who was also at the Harris campaign event in Philadelphia, found Hinchcliffe’s comments disturbing.“We should take this at face value – people’s behavior does tell the truth about themselves,” Ayala said. “And this is not the first time that our Puerto Rican community feels disrespected.”As Ayala, a Harris supporter, watched the video of the racist remarks, her first thoughts were: “We still have more work to do.”The backlash against the racist comments has led to Democratic party leaders to denounce the Trump campaign, seizing the opportunity to mobilize voters among Latino communities. On Monday morning, Lozada joined the Harris campaign in a press conference, denouncing the racist comments.The Guardian spoke with Puerto Rican community leaders and voters, who have expressed anger at the racism and who hope will motivate people to vote for Harris in the crucial state.Lozada said the racist comments were representative of the Trump campaign’s outlook on immigrant communities “Today, the Puerto Ricans are the topic of conversation. Not long ago, it was Venezuelans, it was Mexicans – it’s immigrants in general.”View image in fullscreenDuring the Trump rally, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz, and New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez live-streamed their reaction to the racist comments.“Who is that jackwad?” Walz asked, then adding: “There are hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans across, in battleground states, that we need to send them a message: you’ve gotta vote.”In response, the comedian, Hinchcliffe, published a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, saying that the Democratic party has “no sense of humor”.“I love Puerto Rico and vacation there,” the comedian added. “I made fun of everyone … watch the whole set. I’m a comedian Tim … might be time to change your tampon.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Trump campaign, on their end, attempted to distance itself from Hinchcliffe’s comments. “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” a Trump campaign adviser said in a statement to Fox News. Other Republicans also attempted to distance themselves from racist remarks, including the Florida senator Rick Scott.Puerto Ricans on the island, despite being US citizens, are not eligible to vote. However, those based in US states are able to vote.After the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico became a US territory. In 1917, Puerto Ricans became US citizens. But because of the island’s status, Puerto Ricans on the island do not pay federal income tax and do not have political representation in Congress, aside from a non-voting representative.In 2006, a major recession hit the island. The Puerto Rican government borrowed so much money to combat the economic problems that it led to a tremendous debt crisis. In 2016, Congress passed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act, which established a financial oversight board known as “La Junta”, in order to manage the island’s budget to pay back Puerto Rico’s creditors. The financial oversight board has put in place austerity and privatization programs to incentivize investors to flock to Puerto Rico.On Sunday, the Harris campaign announced a new economic plan for Puerto Rico. If elected, Harris promised, will push forward an “Opportunity Economy” for the island.“Working with the private sector, the Puerto Rican government, municipalities, and other stakeholders, they will fight to strengthen the energy grid, make Puerto Rico a hub for industries of the future, and uplift the island’s role as a vibrant economic and cultural center,” the Harris campaign said in a fact sheet published on the campaign’s website.During the Trump administration, events in Puerto Rico placed the island in further turmoil. In 2017, a catastrophic hurricane struck the island, leading to deaths and tremendous devastation in Puerto Rico. After Hurricane Maria, Trump considered the idea of selling Puerto Rico. Later, a report found that the Trump administration delayed over $20bn in hurricane relief aid to the island following the hurricane. And during a visit to Puerto Rico, Trump faced backlash when he tossed paper towels at a crowd in need of supplies.“Giving this person an opportunity to lead our country could be disastrous,” Lozada said. “At the end of the day, they have just helped us – they have helped the Democratic party for where we will be on Nov 5, with this last incident.”Ayala, the Puerto Rican voter , agreed. The racist remarks from Sunday night, Ayala said, underestimated “the power we have, in numbers, in this country.“America and the current state of this country has been built on the sweat, blood and shoulders of our community,” Ayala added. “We’re not taking that lightly.” More