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      ‘Democrats are losing’: a battle on EVs could cost Kamala Harris votes in Michigan

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      As the critical swing state of Michigan hangs in the balance, experts warn that Democrats’ poor messaging over the shift to electric vehicles could lose them the state in November’s election.“I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day one, thereby saving the US auto industry from complete obliteration, which is happening right now,” Donald Trump told the Republican national convention in a speech this summer that would reach tens of millions of people.Despite his burgeoning friendship with Tesla’s Elon Musk, Trump has remained a consistent critic of EVs and battery-powered vehicles more generally. The messaging has resonated with many United Auto Workers (UAW) members, eroding Joe Biden’s support among union members in Michigan by as much as 25 points since the 2020 election.The claim that EVs require less labor is probably not true: multiple studies and industry executives have said it takes about as much or more labor to produce EVs. Still, the Biden-Harris campaign has not pushed that essential point, and in the process is losing the messaging war over EVs, imperiling Democrats’ chances in tightly contested Michigan as union support sputters, according to Bernie Porn, an Epic-MRA Michigan pollster.“Biden and Democrats are doing a lousy job on messaging [on EVs],” said Porn. “Democrats are losing support … but they’ve been silent.”Autoworker votes are critical to Michigan and other must-win upper midwest industrial swing states – Trump won there by a narrow 10,000 votes in 2016.Biden retook the state with broad union support four years later, but by late 2023, union members here preferred Trump over Biden by a 47-40 margin, Epic-MRA found. Following the UAW endorsement early this year, Biden’s support among unions bounced up to 52% – but still 13 points below the last election.About 55% of state residents are also opposed to the EV transition, polling found.Trump’s claim that the EV transition represents the US auto industry’s death knell began to deeply worry union members as Biden guided the nation into the EV transition via the billions of dollars of investment in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and Inflation Reduction Act.Trump regularly claims EVs require up to 40% less labor to make than gasoline cars, a statistic repeated by Brian Pannebecker, who backs Trump and is a former UAW member.Even with the evidence that EVs take the same or more time to produce, skepticism among many autoworkers persists, he said.“Of course we’re not going like that,” Pannebecker said. “We’d be suicidal or stupid if we did.”But Trump’s claims are not true, and the job-creating power of EVs is “the biggest secret in politics”, said Mike Murphy, a Republican with the EV Politics Project, a non-profit that pushes for stronger EV policy.Its recent focus groups and polling found people across the political spectrum are more supportive of EVs when they learn that it creates jobs, and EV Politics Project is planning to air a television commercial that hits on that point in the coming weeks.“I don’t know why the Biden-Harris administration has been so bad at telling the story,” Murphy added. “They need to go on the offense.”Democrats could point to recent General Motors statements on the issue.“We’ve done our own analysis at General Motors, and there are other studies that have affirmed that the employee base needed in the future for EV production is very similar to what’s needed for a comparable [internal combustion] vehicle today,” GM executive Gerald Johnson said.GM is building a massive new battery plant in Michigan, which has the most announced battery production nationwide. At least seven plants have opened or are in the works, and UAW leadership has been supportive of the EV expansion.A spokesperson for UAW said support for the EV transition among union members was strong, dismissing opposition within its ranks as rooted in partisan politics.Parsing EV productionThe idea that EV production requires fewer hours can be traced back to several out-of-context comments made by auto executives and companies underestimating the time demands in 2017, a Heatmap analysis found.Trump has run with the comments, and the messaging has bounced around the echo chamber without much media scrutiny. On its face the claim makes sense – EVs require fewer parts in their powertrain, so it takes less time to assemble.The powertrain is what propels the car, and in gas-powered vehicles it contains over 1,000 parts that make up the engine and transmission. An EV powertrain is seemingly simpler – just a few hundred components with batteries, electric motors and power management systems.But industry observers say the claims about labor hours seem to omit battery packs. And when every component and the complexity of the EV powertrain production process is factored in, it takes about the same or more time to put it together, a recent Carnegie Mellon study found.The research used shop floor level data and interviews with autoworkers at nine plants to determine how long it takes to make each EV powertrain part. The researchers found EV powertrains require about two to three times more labor to produce than gas – up to 11 worker hours per gas powertrain compared with up to 24 worker hours for a battery powertrain.“You need to unpack the black box of the production process to figure out whether the assembly time reduction was outweighed by an increase in fabrication complexity,“ said Christophe Combemale, a study co-author. “We can say very strongly at the moment the evidence suggests it takes as many or perhaps more labor hours to produce [an EV powertrain].”Recent University of Michigan research took a different approach. It examined output at three factories where EV production replaced gas production. It found output is higher at gas plants, meaning more hours are required to build EVs – a former California GM/Toyota plant produced 80 vehicles per person per year, while a Tesla plant now in the facility averages 30.Researchers at the Boston Consulting Group came to a similar conclusion in an analysis that looked at an entire car’s assembly. It also noted time-consuming complexities in EV production, like the battery pack’s heavy weight, which requires the rest of the car to be much lighter than a gas-powered vehicle. The Tesla Model S battery pack weighs more than half a ton, which is offset by using aluminum instead of steel, as is standard with gas vehicles, the paper notes.However, aluminum is “trickier to work with in a factory” because it is comparatively weak, the paper states, demanding expensive adjustments like spot welding to shore up its strength. The installation of the charging unit, additional wiring, battery loading and alignment all require time not needed in gas assembly.“This is a significant change for an industry that has spent more than 100 years developing and improving engine manufacturing and vehicle assembly to the highest degrees of efficiency,” the paper states.CaveatsAs the nascent EV production process matures, automakers will find efficiencies that will reduce the manufacturing time. Meanwhile, while the EV market is growing, sales have been slower than expected, and some Michigan plants have recently laid off workers or scaled back employment figures.In his critique of EVs, Pannebecker, the Trump-backing former UAW member, pointed out the most obvious caveat to research showing they take more hours: batteries and their components largely are not made in the US at the moment, so they are not of use to the UAW.“No matter which way you look at it, it’s a losing proposition for autoworkers,” Pannebecker said.As much as 80% of lithium ion batteries are estimated to be produced in China, but that is changing. A slew of battery plants are scheduled to come online in the US in the coming years in addition to more than 30 already operating, and five of those will be in Michigan.Even if those plants are built, Pannebecker noted, many of them are not unionized and only pay $15-$18 an hour. Near Youngstown, Ohio, an Ultium battery plant near the once-storied GM Lordstown plant suffers from high turnover because of the low pay that workers there say is in line with a local Waffle House.But that is also changing. Late last year and early this year the UAW made battery plants a priority in its negotiations with automakers, and the plants’ workers can now unionize.Meanwhile, the Chips and Science Act aimed at reshoring the semiconductor industry that produces critical components to EVs is also helping shift component production to the US. Combemale said there is some potential for autoworkers to be retrained or take on jobs in semiconductor plants or other higher tech settings than a shop floor.Still, this broad narrative does not seem to be reaching many Michiganders, whether in a union or not. The most recent polling shows only 56% of Michigan union members approve of the EV transition – far below the 74% of Democrats who approve of it. Meanwhile, union members’ families disapprove by a 51-45% margin, and support among independent voters is even lower.But it’s not too late to change the messaging for this election, and into the future, said EV Politics’ Murphy. Part of the problem may be generational within union ranks – older guys are less supportive because they won’t be around as the EV transition progresses, Murphy said.Democrats need to stop making EVs an environmental issue, which will “divide the voters in half”, Murphy said, and instead push the job creation narrative. His focus groups found an up to 19-point improvement on EV approval rating when messaging focused on the latter.“It’s a very powerful way to reframe the argument,” Murphy said. “It’s one of the best bragging rights they’ve got. This isn’t hard, it’s just a story no one knows.” More

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      Price-gouging is illegal in 37 US states. Let’s make it 50 | Bob Casey

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      Over the past few years, Erin Wiggle has approached every trip to the grocery store with a sense of dread. During each visit, the retired army veteran, small business owner and mother from Worcester Township, Pennsylvania, has seen her budget stretched thinner and thinner as prices keep ratcheting up for the goods her family relies on. Erin’s burden has grown heavier despite pandemic-related supply chain issues subsiding, and she has a growing sense that the companies making the products she needs are padding their profits at the expense of her family.Erin is right. Under the cover of inflation, companies have raised the prices of everyday household items to rake in record profits at the expense of American families. As my investigation into what I’ve called “greedflation” shows, from mid-2020 to mid-2022, corporate profits rose by 75% – five times as fast as inflation. In fact, corporate profits jumped so much that they played a major role in causing inflation – according to the Federal Reserve, corporate profits accounted for all the inflation from July 2020 through July 2021 and 41% of all inflation from July 2020 through July 2022.We should not let powerful corporations use a crisis to jack up prices way beyond what is necessary to make a profit. In fact, many states across the country have already steeled themselves to fight the most egregious examples of this shameful practice. Laws against price-gouging are on the books in 37 states and the District of Columbia, giving state attorneys general the power to investigate and prosecute companies that excessively raise prices during emergencies. In the US Senate, I’ve introduced legislation with my colleagues Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin to give the federal government power to do the same.In recent weeks, after Kamala Harris embraced our bill as a part of her economic agenda, the legislation has come under fire from various defenders of corporate greed. These critics appear to have missed the fact that the federal legislation is modeled on laws that are already in effect across the nation, where capitalism is still alive and well. In Texas, for example, where the attorney general has the power to take on companies that unfairly exploit state residents, the governor regularly touts the state as the best place to do business in the country.Similarly, the critics are ignoring the very real protections these laws have offered for consumers. In Pennsylvania, where a price-gouging ban was enacted in 2006, the office of the attorney general investigated hundreds of cases of businesses taking advantage of Covid-19 to price-gouge desperate consumers. The investigations ultimately led to fines and to restitution for many consumers who were taken advantage of in the early days of the pandemic, including hundreds of thousands from just one seller alone.Bans on price-gouging protect victims from companies that would take advantage of different crises to rip off scared consumers. In New York, the state was able to punish Walgreens for taking advantage of customers during the infant formula crisis when supply chain issues reduced the availability of baby formula across the country. In North Carolina, the attorney general won a series of cases against companies that gouged consumers following hurricanes. In both Kentucky and Idaho, companies were held accountable for artificially forcing up gas prices in the wake of pipeline closures.These laws don’t just prevent price-gouging on a case-by-case basis; they also send a message to companies about where and when to draw the line. In the 37 states with price-gouging bans, companies can still raise prices, and they can still bring in a healthy profit for their shareholders. It’s only when they seek to take advantage of a crisis to fleece consumers that they can expect the government to step in and stop them. Our bill would apply this standard to massive corporations that exploit consumers while specifically protecting small businesses under $100m in earnings that don’t have the same power to set prices.There are multiple factors that contribute to the high cost of living, but there is no question that corporate greed plays a role. While companies have a right to turn a profit – even a substantial one – American consumers deserve to pay fair prices. That means holding giant corporations accountable when they go too far to make a buck.Giving the federal government the power to investigate and prosecute large companies that price-gouge isn’t a campaign gimmick, nor is it the beginning of the end of capitalism in America. It’s simply a way of ensuring that when corporations are using a crisis as an excuse to jack up prices on consumers, we will not surrender – instead, we will fight back.

      Bob Casey is a US senator representing the state of Pennsylvania More

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      The US right keeps accusing Democrats of ‘communism’. What does that even mean? | Jan-Werner Müller

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      The Trump campaign, flanked by an army of online trolls commanded by Elon Musk, has been struggling to settle on an attack line against the Democratic ticket. Of course, a decade or so ago no one would have thought a candidate unable to think of nasty nicknames had a problem; but Donald Trump has made us all ask stupider questions and have stupider thoughts. If in doubt, though – and no matter what any Democrat actually does or says – the Republican party will level the charges of “socialism” and “communism” against them.To state the obvious: free lunches – ensuring that poor kids won’t go hungry – are not communism. The one time in recent history that the US clearly resembled the Soviet Union – empty shelves and long lines outside shops – was under Trump; to be sure, other countries also had supply chain problems during Covid-19, but the former president proved exceptionally irresponsible and incompetent. But there’s another, less obvious similarity with the late Soviet Union in particular: the experience of being at the mercy of bureaucrats. No, not the DMV, but vast private corporations with quasi-monopoly power, something with which Trump’s Republican party, unlike the Biden administration, is evidently fine.Ever since the New Deal, the US right has relied on an ideological mixture as incoherent as it is toxic, with charges of communism freely interspersed with accusations of fascism. Into that mixture, US reactionaries sprinkle what is politely called “anti-elitism” but often enough amounts to thinly disguised antisemitism. Musk and the Republican ideologues now regularly portray Kamala Harris as controlled by secret “puppetmasters”, the Soroses (son and father) in particular, bent on advancing a “globalist” or “cultural Marxist” agenda.Most rightwingers would struggle to explain what these terms really mean; but then again, for many of them politics is not a philosophy exam, but a contest over what can incite fear and hatred of dangerous Others threatening supposed “real Americans”. One fairly simple, almost intuitive throughline, however, is the notion that Real America wants individual freedom, while Real America’s enemies are collectivists bent on creating all-powerful bureaucracies whose business is not business, but telling people what to do. (That is also why, when pressed, rightwingers will inevitably identify “bureaucrats” and the “managerial class” as core members of the “liberal elite”.)The truth is that much of day-to-day life in the US is horrendously bureaucratic: filling out “paperwork”, spending hours on hold, being at the mercy of individuals who might be reasonable when they have a good day (and respond to the plea “Can I talk to you like a human being?”) or simply use discretion to say no when they happen to have a bad day. Europeans never believe this could be the reality in the land of the free, because European pro-business parties like to sell them the story that every day in the US, somebody starts the equivalent of Microsoft in their garage.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, plenty of Americans do not see that US businesses can be bureaucratic nightmares because, to be blunt, they know nothing else. Often unable to travel for financial reasons, they accept red scare tales about countries they’ve never seen. Democrats are complicit in encouraging a nationalism that makes the case for reform unnecessarily difficult: if people are constantly told by both parties that theirs is the greatest country ever, why mobilize for fundamental change?Capitalist bureaucracies are maddening, but the madness has a method: it’s driven in part by fear of liability (something Democrats are reluctant to address properly) but above all by the hope that frustrated customers will eventually just give up and let the insurance claim go, rather than spend another two hours on the phone listening to the automated message: “Your call is important to us.” Corporate power has increased enormously in recent decades, partially based on the rightwing doctrine that monopolies are OK as long as they benefit consumers. Bureaucratization has also increased in areas where the state, driven by neoliberal ideology, has tried to engineer competition in public services – in the process creating ever-larger bureaucracies devoted to measuring and surveillance. George W Bush’s No Child Left Behind is a prime example.The Biden administration has at least tried to change course on monopoly power, under the leadership of Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, whose career started with an attack on the mistaken pro-monopoly theory. The government has gone after “junk fees” such as exorbitant credit card late fees; most recently, with its Time is Money initiative, the White House is confronting predatory capitalists using red tape to extract time and, ultimately, money from powerless customers unable ever to “speak to a representative”. Meanwhile, just as with the upside-down reasoning about monopolies, distinguished defenders of the little guy such as Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina have twisted themselves into justifying junk fees.True, daily indignities and frustrations in dealing with private-sector bureaucrats are trivial compared with the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism. But it’s not trivial to want to make life just a little fairer by reducing the power of private actors to behave like dictators.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and a Guardian US columnist More

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      Trump appears to tie high bacon prices to ‘horrible’ wind energy

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      Donald Trump revived questions about his mental acuity after appearing to say that wind energy was to blame for the increased price and decreased consumption of bacon.The former president’s bizarre remarks came at a town hall-style campaign gathering in Wisconsin on Thursday, when an audience member asked the Republican nominee for November’s White House election what he would do to help bring inflation down.Trump delivered a lengthy answer, apparently saying that he blamed wind power for bacon being more costly and therefore eaten less.“You take a look at bacon and some of these products – and some people don’t eat bacon any more,” Trump said. “We are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down, you know … this was caused by their horrible energy – wind. They want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow, we have a little problem.”Video clips of Trump’s comments quickly made the rounds online and brought out critics in full force. Some detractors dismissed his answer as “incoherent” and “word salad”.On Friday, Mehdi Hasan – a broadcaster and author and a Guardian US columnist – posted the video of Trump’s remarks on X and asked whether his answer would draw the same level of editorial scrutiny as comments from Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris or her running mate Tim Walz.“Will any of the army of factcheckers obsessed with Tim Walz’s dog or Kamala Harris’s McDonald’s summer job be giving any attention to Donald Trump suggesting windmills cause high bacon prices?”In another post featuring the video clips, Hasan argued that Trump should face the same kind of media pressure to end his run for president that preceded Joe Biden’s decision to halt his re-election campaign after a poor performance at a 21 June debate.Hasan wrote: “Historians will scratch their heads about 2024, in which 1 candidate was forced to quit the race for being old & having a bad debate while the other candidate said mad, rambling stuff like this & not only stayed in the race but didn’t get pressured to step aside by the media.”In what seemed like a reference to Trump’s recent comments about bacon, a Thursday night cooking-themed virtual Harris campaign fundraiser hosted by the Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell featured some recipes with bacon.Swalwell on Friday sent out an email touting the success of the cooking call, which included some well-known chefs, and a “notable moments” list conspicuously mentioned the bacon recipes. More

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      No tax on tips fires up Nevada hospitality workers: ‘I want that!’

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      Kristine serves gamblers playing countertop video poker screens at the center bar of Las Vegas’s Ellis Island casino. She declines to share her last name for privacy reasons, but is not timid about her support for Donald Trump when asked about his campaign promise to end federal taxation on tips.“I want that!” Kristine says as she fulfills cocktail waitresses’ orders. “Our tip compliance is too high. They take so much from our paycheck.”Tip compliance – the tax process for expected earnings from tips – has become a political football in Nevada, with federal lawmakers from both parties piling in to co-sponsor bills or present their vision for how tax exemption for tips should work.The push for tax relief for a specific sector of wageworker may seem out of the blue if the idea wasn’t so brazenly opportunistic. According to state employment figures, one in four jobs in this crucial swing state are in leisure and hospitality, many if not most of which are tip-earning positions at bars, restaurants, casinos, spas and hotels in Las Vegas and Reno.The frenzy over the issue started in June, during a Trump rally in Las Vegas, where he surprised supporters, press and members of his own party, saying: “Hotel workers and people that get tips, you’re going to be very happy because when I get to office we are going to not charge taxes on tips.”It was a “wild-ass promise”, says Ted Pappageorge, treasurer for the Culinary Union Local 226, which represents 60,000 hospitality workers in Nevada.He points out that during Trump’s four years in office and the four years since, the union’s heard “not a peep out of him” regarding overtaxed wage workers. Indeed, Trump’s signature legislative achievement as president was a tax cut that mainly benefited corporations, real estate developers, and billionaires and millionaires transferring wealth to their scions. “One of the problems is Trump lies, and he lies a lot,” Pappageorge said.But, Pappageorge added, Trump’s comments created an opening. “There’s actually a requirement now to have a discussion and an opportunity for us to wedge into the discussion, to make it real.”The union is now seeking tip compliance relief for their members while also advocating to raise the federal sub-minimum wage, which allows employers in some states to pay tipped earners as little as $2.13 per hour.Trump’s opponents have been listening. In Kamala Harris’s first Las Vegas rally as the presumptive Democratic nominee, she announced that she wouldas also pursue no taxes on tips, delighting rank-and-file Democrats who had become intrigued with the proposal, and irritating Trump supporters who wanted him to have the policy all to himself.“Why is she copying him?” says Kristine, the Ellis Island bartender. She voted for Trump in the last two election cycles and will again this fall. “I believe in women power, but I feel like we need a better president, like a strong personality, a tough one, to put [things] back to normal.”Wistful for the pre-pandemic economy, before food, fuel and housing prices shot up, Kristine says it would be nice if people could afford to enjoy themselves again: “Go on vacation again, because everything we make goes to bills, that’s it, and it’s not enough still. Everything is so expensive and you’re making the same money.”Southern Nevada’s vulnerability to economic slumps has led to two local sayings: the region is “the first to suffer, last to recover” because “when the economy gets sick, Las Vegas catches pneumonia.”The city was hit hard by pandemic-era travel restrictions. Since then, resorts have recovered strongly, reporting record profits from gaming each of the past three years. In resorts and casinos that are unionized (Ellis Island is not), the culinary union leveraged these historic profits to negotiate higher wages for their members.Still, many workers say their tip earnings have remained stagnant.Machines such as the Smarttender beverage-mixer and screen-based ordering systems have depressed tip earnings by dehumanizing the experience and distorting the scale of service, says Sheri Earl, 51, a cocktail waitress at Mandalay Bay. “It looks like a lot of the servers are bringing out so many drinks, but we’re not being tipped on all of those.View image in fullscreen“Also,” Earl adds, “people just aren’t tipping the way that they used to because they don’t have the money. I noticed when I’m serving, more people will give $1 for four drinks, whereas it used to be $1 per drink, so I’m serving more drinks, but bringing back less money.”A lifelong Democrat, Earl’s loyalty to the party had wavered in recent years, and her conversations in the employee break room suggest that many her colleagues will support Trump out of nostalgia for how they thrived before Covid.But Harris’s candidacy has reaffirmed her allegiance to the Democratic ticket, Earl says. “She’s very optimistic about changes that she wants to do as a female president, and a lot of the tax cuts for the working class helps.“Now, I don’t think there will ever be no taxes on tips,” Earl clarified. “I expect to pay it, but not at rates where it’s unrealistic, or I can’t support my family, or I can’t pay my bills at the end of the month.”Others were less inspired.“It’s a ‘so you vote for me’ promise,” says Samantha, a blackjack dealer at Ellis Island. “I don’t think Congress will let it happen. [The candidates] can say it, and they can hope that because they said it, you’re going to vote for them, but it isn’t going to happen.” Shrugging, she says she does not intend to vote. “Unfortunately, I don’t believe that my vote matters.”Democratic presidential candidates have enjoyed a winning streak in Nevada that goes back four cycles from Biden’s narrow 2020 win, to Hillary Clinton’s 2.4% margin over Trump, to Barack Obama’s victories in 2012 and 2008. Survey averages currently show Trump leading Harris by 2 to 3 percentage points.Before Biden dropped out, Trump led by 9 points in Nevada. Harris has rejuvenated Democratic enthusiasm and made strides to corral the unwieldly coalition that defeated Trump four years ago, but Nevada is proving to be a different beast. It’s one of the few swing states in which Trump continues to lead in most major polls. But her canny decision to jump on the no tax bandwagon may help.Badass Tax Guys, a tax preparation company in Henderson, Nevada, has hundreds of tip-earning clients, and many have mentioned to owner Robert Wagner that the proposal, while intriguing, seems too good to be true.“‘We see all the upside, and we love keeping our money, but what’s the catch potentially?’ is what I’m hearing right now,” he paraphrases while warning that it would be exploited if not written carefully to solely target those who need relief.“I would put a tip jar on my desk, you know what I mean?” Wagner quips. “I’ll charge lower fees and you can throw the difference in the tip jar. All of a sudden, my income is to going to go down quite a bit. I generally like the idea overall, but if you’re going to do that there needs to be a way to stop Wall Street from taking advantage of it.” More

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      Black US voters’ economic priorities revealed in new advocacy agenda

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      Black Americans strongly support initiatives that would increase the minimum wage to $17, make affordable housing more accessible and create an equitable tax system, according to Black to the Future Action Fund, a political advocacy thinktank. On Thursday, the group released a 55-page economic agenda based on its 2023 survey of 211,219 Black people across all 50 states. The organization hopes that the report will serve as a roadmap for elected officials to address policy holes, and for advocates to generate campaigns that hold politicians accountable.“We have to start imagining what it is that we want and not be so afraid to break out of what is,” said Alicia Garza, founder and former principal of Black to the Future Action Fund, at a Thursday symposium in Atlanta.The agenda suggests a range of policy shifts around worker protections, housing, healthcare, childcare, higher education and taxes, along with examples of successful models already implemented by some state governments and municipalities. “Economic insecurity experienced by Black communities cannot be resolved solely by individual actions like working more hours, getting a college degree or saving money to buy a home,” the agenda’s authors wrote. “These issues are systemic, and government intervention is required to eliminate these inequities and improve outcomes for our people.”Along with increasing the minimum wage to $17, the authors also recommended that elected officials pass labor protections for domestic workers, many of whom are Black women. The expansion of paid family and medical leave laws would help workers care for their household. And on the topic of affordable housing, the thinktank recommended laws that ensure rent payments are incorporated into credit scores so that renters have greater access to obtaining home mortgages.Another suggestion for affordable housing included the development of shared equity programs, which use public or private investments to build or buy homes that are then sold at a reduced rate to low-to-moderate income homebuyers. There are currently 250,000 shared equity models mainly in New York City, according to the agenda. Christopher Towler, a political science associate professor at Sacramento State University and director of the Black Voter Project, called the programs “a really good model to try and get people into the housing market for there to be more first-time homebuyers”.The origins of the US’s persistent racial wealth can be traced back to the transatlantic slave trade, when enslaved Black people were barred from accessing capital generated by their forced labor. During the Reconstruction period after the civil war, then president Andrew Johnson rescinded the 40 acres (16 hectares) of land promised to formerly enslaved Black people.When Black communities did secure economic freedom, they were sometimes violently attacked by angry white mobs, including during the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, where an estimated 300 people were killed. Additionally, banks often denied home loans to Black Americans from the early 20th century until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that outlawed housing discrimination.View image in fullscreen“The failures of Reconstruction have yet to be made up,” said Towler. “And a large part of that is the continued residential segregation and how Black Americans have been locked out, not only of the housing market, but of the resources, the wealth, the opportunity that comes along with where you live and your access to community.”The legacy of systemic inequality has a continued impact on Black workers today, who earn less than US workers overall, according to 2022 Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited by Pew Research Center. The median weekly earnings of Black full-time wage and salary workers is $878, compared to $1,059 for all US workers, according to Pew.During Thursday’s symposium, the actor and activist Kendrick Sampson, the singer and songwriter Trae Crockett, and the digital storyteller Conscious Lee spoke with Garza about the need for Black communities to brainstorm needed solutions and to band together to effect political change.“When it comes to healthcare,” said Lee, “a lot of us … have internalized the Black inferiority when it comes to that industry. So for me, it’s really reimagining what it looks like for my grandma to get affordable insulin.”Black census respondents listed a lack of affordable healthcare as their fourth most immediate economic concern. Expanding Medicaid to the 10 states that have not done so under the Affordable Care Act could help keep rural hospitals open. “The communities most affected when these rural hospitals close often have significant Black populations,” the report stated, “and closure means rural residents must drive 25 or more miles to access medical care.”While Towler lauded the agenda as the first one he’s seen that addresses the concerns of Black communities nationwide, he believes that it will be a “tough sell” to mobilize Black voters. “Any sort of policy promises right now are going to be looked at with some hesitations, simply because the Biden administration’s policy agenda, although very numerous in its accomplishments, is still in some ways misunderstood,” said Towler. “There’s not a lot of knowledge with the common voter about how the policies that Biden passed have actually affected their individual lives.”According to his research, Towler said that people are encouraged to be civically engaged when they’re taught how political institutions uphold the status quo to resist change: “If you even want there to be a possibility of reparations, we have to continue to vote, continue to be active and continue to put in place policy makers and legislators that are working towards that.”At the end of the symposium, organizers asked participants to share the agenda with their network and elected officials. In the eyes of the Black to the Future Action Fund, the electorate is capable of shifting policy through mass mobilization.“We are the power,” Sampson said toward the end of the symposium. “If we all are in alignment and we go in the same direction, now we are more powerful.” More

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      Venture capitalists including Mark Cuban back Kamala Harris’s campaign

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      A group of more than 100 Silicon Valley investors, including Mark Cuban, the TV host and NBA owner, and Reed Hastings, a co-founder of LinkedIn, launched a website in support of Kamala Harris.A statement said vcsforkamala.org expressed support for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee from “venture capital investors, founders and tech leaders who pledge to vote for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election”.It added: “We spend our days looking for, investing in and supporting entrepreneurs who are building the future. We are pro-business, pro-American dream, pro-entrepreneurship, and pro-technological progress.”The statement did not name the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, or running mate JD Vance.But it pointed to Democratic concerns about the former US president’s and the Ohio senator’s authoritarian impulses on issues including immigration, crime and reproductive rights, and what a second Trump presidency might do to the US’s standing in the world.“We also believe in democracy as the backbone of our nation,” the investors said.“We believe that strong, trustworthy institutions are a feature, not a bug, and that our industry – and every other industry – would collapse without them.“That is what’s at stake in this election. Everything else, we can solve through constructive dialogue with political leaders and institutions willing to talk to us.”It is a little more than a week since Joe Biden withdrew from his re-election campaign after a disastrous debate against Trump fueled concerns that at 81, he was too old to effectively run and serve.Since then Harris, 59, has transformed the presidential race, driving $200m in fundraising with eye-catching big name endorsements including those of Mark Hamill, best known as Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movie saga, and Jeff Bridges, aka Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski.The arrival of VCs for Kamala also pointed to growing rifts among the giants of Silicon Valley, where Vance worked for Peter Thiel, a leading donor to Republicans and propagator of “new right” political thought notable for its authoritarian bent.VCs for Kamala followed Tech for Kamala, an open letter seeking contributions and orchestrated by “technology leaders and innovators”.The Tech for Kamala letter said: “We acknowledge there are a few people in tech with very loud microphones who support a very different vision of the future. But as the names on this letter show, they do not at all represent the entire tech community.“In Vice-President Harris, we choose the future over the past, stability over chaos, a hopeful America with expanded opportunity over an extreme agenda that drags us backward.”On Wednesday, Leslie Feinzaig, founder of the venture capital firm Graham & Walker and a lead organiser of VCs for Kamala, told the New York Times that rightwing, pro-Trump tech moguls such as Thiel, David Sacks and Elon Musk “don’t speak for me”.“They don’t speak for most of us,” she added. “And they don’t speak for the founders.” More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Your body is completely drained’: US workers toil in heatwaves with no protections

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      On 23 June, Shae Parker had to leave her shift early at a gas station in Columbia, South Carolina, to go to the emergency room due to heat exhaustion; she wasn’t paid for missing the rest of her shift. The air conditioning at her work has been on the fritz for weeks, she said, and her station heats up easily as the sun beams through its large windows.“I got nauseated, overheated, lightheaded,” she said. “We don’t have free water, we don’t have a water level on the soda machine, the ice machine is broken, so we have to buy water. The last few weeks it’s been extremely hot. It’s very hard to breathe when you’re lightheaded and experiencing dizziness. The fatigue is like 10 times worse because your body is completely drained. I had to get two bags of fluid from being dehydrated even though I was drinking water.”Millions of Americans faced dangerous temperatures earlier this month as a heat dome blanketed the midwest and eastern US. The National Weather Service issued a heat advisory for much of South Carolina as temperatures hit the 90sF (32C).Yet, workers across the country who toil in the heat both indoors and outdoors have to get through the summer without any heat protections in the workplace. Like Parker, many workers are left to try to treat their heat stress symptoms on their own.This past June was the hottest month of June on record worldwide, while July 2023 to June 2024 have been the hottest 12 months on record, with 2024 on pace to break 2023 as the hottest year on record.The Biden administration announced the proposal of an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) rule to protect 36 million US workers from the heat on 2 July. But implementation won’t likely occur for several more years as the release of the rule proposal is just the third of seven steps in Osha’s rule-making process. It could face challenges in courts, causing further delays, or be derailed altogether if Donald Trump wins the 2024 election. The rule provides more robust rules and higher fines on employers to protect workers.View image in fullscreenDestiny Mervin, a restaurant worker in Atlanta, Georgia, and member of the Union of Southern Service Workers, said she has been constantly sweating during work and has had to change shirts during her shift because of how hot she has been.“Someone fainted two weeks ago and the week before that, someone had a seizure,” Mervin said in a press release. “A worker shouldn’t have to die for Popeyes for employers to take unbearable heat seriously.”In 2023, an estimated 2,300 people in the US died from heat-related illness, the highest record of heat-related deaths in 45 years.“The excessive heat the US has experienced in the last month is particularly dangerous to the people who have to work in it – hundreds of thousands of workers succumb to heat-related illness, injury and death each year,” said Rebecca Dixon, president and CEO of the National Employment Law Project.“The risk of workplace heat dangers is especially acute for workers of color, who are more likely to work in jobs that expose them to excessive heat as a result of occupational segregation,” Dixon said.” “As human-caused climate change produces more extreme temperatures, the need for strong federal heat protections is becoming more urgent every summer.”Priscilla Hoyle, an airplane cabin cleaner at Charlotte Douglas international airport, has gotten sick and had to go home twice in the past year due to heat exhaustion, with the most recent incident just a few weeks ago. Both times she wasn’t provided any medical treatment when she got sick on the job.“I got really sick, I could hardly breathe, I had to run off the plane and I was standing on the side throwing up,” Hoyle said. “It’s very draining, it’s very tiring. You have to walk from concourse to concourse in nothing but heat. You’re dripping in sweat and you can’t hydrate.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDamarkus Hudson has also worked as an airplane cabin cleaner at Charlotte Douglas international airport in North Carolina for two years where he is constantly exposed to the heat without adequate protections or support, he claimed.Last year, Hudson passed out on the job due to heat exhaustion and was offered no medical treatment. He was instead only given time to drink water and cool down until his shift ended shortly after the incident.“The break room was full and I tried to go outside to get some fresh air, but there wasn’t any breeze and I just passed out, I couldn’t cool down,” Hudson said.View image in fullscreenHe noted a coworker poured water on him to cool him down, which sent him into shock, and that other workers have experienced similar symptoms on the job.He cleans four to five planes an hour in the sweltering heat, often walking long distances between concourses in the airport, and he said the air conditioning in the vehicles they travel in between planes doesn’t always work.“We’re always exposed to the heat. Working in the heat, you get nauseated, feel sick, and fatigued,” he added. “We don’t get enough water and when we do, it’s usually not cold water, and we don’t get extra breaks to cool down.”LaShonda Barber, a trash truck driver at Charlotte airport, said heat issues impact airport workers across the US. She claimed the trucks they use don’t have working air conditioning, that she and her workers are rarely provided water or rest breaks, which makes the heat impact even worse as the job is already physically demanding when its not hot outside.“There are a lot of people who have been hospitalized, passing out from this heat,” said Barber. “We’re sweating so much. We’re not getting time to get water into our bodies. We’re human – the same way you get hot, we get hot.” More