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CaliforniaGavin Newsom will remain California governor after handily defeating recall attemptCalifornia voters resoundingly reject choice to replace Democratic governor, who faced a battle for his political life01:48Maanvi Singh in Oakland@ More
OpinionAlexandria Ocasio-CortezAOC’s guide to getting noticed at parties: drape yourself in the garments of class warVan BadhamThe backlash to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Tax the rich’ Met Gala dress was instant and glorious Wed 15 Sep 2021 00.42 EDTLast modified on Wed 15 Sep 2021 00.48 EDTAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not the only celebrity to take a political statement as her date to the Met Gala. The actor Cara Delevingne celebrated the “American Independence” theme of the visually dazzling annual ball in a vest that read “Peg the Patriarchy”. The US congresswoman Carolyn Maloney was resplendent in a “suffragette gown” made of trailing “Equal rights for women” banners. The actor Dan Levy donned Aids-era queer art. The Trump-baiting football megastar Megan Rapinoe carried a dainty purse embossed with the words “In gay we trust”.‘Medium is the message’: AOC defends ‘tax the rich’ dress worn to Met GalaRead moreBut it was AOC in a slyly bridal white Aurora James dress who made the most impact of the evening. James is an immigrant to the US, a black woman who built her brand from hard-work beginnings, selling her clothes in Brooklyn’s neighbourhood markets. Yet the congressional representative from New York’s 14th district bared her shoulders above James’ orchid-like couture creation not merely as a celebration of local effort and enterprise. The back of AOC’s gown came adorned with the words TAX THE RICH in the red Pantone shade “Beheaded Capitalist”.The backlash was instant and glorious. It was something of a delight to watch the US right prioritise a conniption about economic redistribution over so many immediate visible opportunities to be sexist and homophobic. Then again, the theme of “America” has always been implicitly twinned with “money” and, while capitalism happily finds markets to exploit among girls and queers, collectivised wealth has never been the radical chic it prefers to embrace.A symbolic case in point is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the host and beneficiary of the Met Gala. It’s a taxpayer-funded institution, legislated into existence to serve a century-old mission to “be kept open and accessible to the public free of all charge throughout the year”. Yet its famous Costume Institute must fundraise for itself, hence seeking voluntary contributions from rich people in the form of $35,000-a-head tickets to this disgusting, decadent, fabulous Met Gala annual party. This week’s event raked in $16.75m.There are those who condemn the fatuous, end-of-empire-level-indulgence event that sees Debbie Harry turn up as a floating ribcage while the more-money-less-talent Kardashian women conspicuously underwhelm on the couture front every year. I am not one of them. I say let the rich eat all the cake they want if paying for it means a kid from a poor community can experience, for free, the transformative joy of an accessible art museum. Or get care in a hospital. Or go to school. Find any way at all to squeeze the money out of them – indeed, this is the very principle of taxation.How lovely to see in the photography of a celebrity gala event that it’s a principle shared by AOC, whose dress was not actually a performance of faux activism but a press release in the form of wearable art summarising the activism she has made meaningful where it matters. The seismic leftward shift she’s effected on Democratic party politics and the political discourse beyond it has provided Joe Biden the vanguard for leftist policy ambition unthinkable to decades of party predecessors. It was the new US president – not AOC – who published on social media on Tuesday: “A teacher shouldn’t pay more in taxes than an oil company. We’re going to cut taxes for the middle class by ensuring the wealthy and large corporations pay their share.”The Met Gala 2021: eight key moments from fashion’s big nightRead moreI adore AOC. Not merely for her meticulous congressional preparation and policy work, her skilled questioning, or her Jacinda Ardern-like ability to calculate the most impactful ratio of ideological purity to ruthless pragmatism – remember, AOC did not waste her radical progressivism on a doomed minor-party project, but brought it with her to the centre of real power. I also adore her because she pre-empted criticism of her Met Gala appearance with a quote from Marshall McLuhan, the brilliant Canadian media theorist who predicted the internet back in the 1960s. Those awed by AOC’s adept use of social and other media to brand, communicate and radicalise others may wish to consider that she may have absorbed something of use from the man who pointed out “sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal hoard”.In this way, she imparts in her person a specific instruction to urban young women desperate to be noticed, and yet overwhelmed by inaccessible standards of celebrity glamour, surgical beauty and unaffordable livery on show at the Met Gala. It’s “before you order the dress, do the reading”.There’s always one surefire way to get noticed at parties and it isn’t rocking up in a dress made from sequinned pantyhose, or aping the style of one of those 1970s dolls with big skirts that used to decorously cover the toilet paper. It’s to arrive AOC-style – in the blood-spattered garments of fighting class war.TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezOpinionMet Gala 2021US politicsDemocratscommentReuse this content More
CaliforniaLarry Elder: leading California recall challenger takes a page from Trump’s big lie playbookThe rightwing radio host has already spread rumors of election fraud and has told reporters there might be elections ‘shenanigans’ Dani Anguiano and agencies@ More
OpinionUS politicsCongress is on the cusp of passing the most pivotal bill in years – if we make themRebecca SolnitThe dull-sounding ‘budget reconciliation’ may provide universal childcare and preschool, repeal fossil fuel subsidies and create a Climate Conservation Corps Tue 14 Sep 2021 06.15 EDTLast modified on Tue 14 Sep 2021 09.04 EDTWhat if the fate of the world was complicated and also, to most people, a bit boring? What if we got a chance to change the world or even save it, and hardly anyone noticed? I hardly dare to start this essay with the phrase “budget reconciliation” lest you be inspired to click elsewhere right away, but stick with me. This is important and also includes a Britney Spears sighting. Because the budget reconciliation bill is maybe the most important thing happening right now, in the long run, but the least dramatic, at least in how it’s being reported. By important I mean significant, for all of us, for the long-term future, for the lives of ordinary people and for the climate.Republicans once called government the problem – now they want to run your life | Robert ReichRead moreWhen it comes to news, interesting and important are too often adversaries. Maybe it’s partly about human nature. We evolved to pay attention to sudden and dramatic action and small groups and charismatic individuals, to violence and threat and tangible stuff, not to policy maneuvers and pie charts and economic indicators. Or maybe it’s that the news media knows how to cover wars and explosions and scandals and football scores better than legislation that might change the world or meaningful shifts in beliefs and practices. The sudden wins out over the slow, the simple over the complex, the concentrated over things diffused over large areas.I wrote here about the way the collapse of one building in Florida seemed to get more coverage than the heat dome covering much of North America for a few deadly days in July, during which well over a thousand people died, shellfish by the billion died along the north-west coast, fires broke out, a town burned down, millions suffered and records were broken by leaps and bounds. It was too dispersed and too complex a story to be told in the quick, compact formats of the news. The heat dome was not just a huge disaster, but a sign that the climate was getting more chaotic faster than anticipated.So wherever you were, at least by implication, it affected you. But it was drowned out by stories that didn’t. Some stories about a famous or intriguing person do have wider repercussions – Britney Spears’s recent struggle for self-determination has given us all a crash course in how abusive the US conservatorship system can be, and how well that intersects with everyday misogyny. Better yet, celebrities like Jane Fonda can function like spotlights, directing our attention to inherently important things, in her case via her Firehouse Fridays, to climate issues and how to do good work on them.By important I mean things that affect us – us the readers, us the public, us the life on Earth, now and to come. By that measure climate is more important than anything else. When it comes to climate, the stuff that will affect your life and mine and ours is often quite complicated, which can segue smoothly into byzantine or dull, which can merge into the overlooked and ignored. Or it’s slow-moving and undramatic, like the amount of clean power installed and the price of solar panels and the bits of legislation, say, banning gas hookups in new construction or mandating energy efficiency. Every once in a while, it’s like the Line 3 conflict, with an obvious villain in the pipeline company, heroes in the form of the indigenous-led water protectors, and a lot of dramatic action. But a lot of times it is legislation and incrementalism and budgets and big data.The budget reconciliation bill could be the single most important piece of climate legislation to date in this country, and it’s not certain whether it will pass or what exactly will be in it. Public pressure matters, which is why its low profile is maddening. The budget reconciliation bill is a cornucopia. It will probably include universal childcare and preschool! Medicare expansion! Raising taxes on the wealthy! Gobs of climate action that generates heaps of jobs! Possibly a Climate Conservation Corps, if, as Katie Porter pointed out in a recent talk, people demand it loudly and strongly enough! Repealing fossil fuel subsidies! None of this matters if it doesn’t pass (and there is some drama in the ways Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin are making themselves into obstructionists demanding to be placated).The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, says that the climate provisions in the bill would reduce US greenhouse gas emissions 45% below 2005 levels by 2030, doing most of the heavy lifting to get us back in line with our 2015 Paris climate pledge. It’s kind of a Green New Deal and it’s a big deal and it’s complicated, and there should be riots in the streets to support it and push it through. If the colossal carbon-dioxide contributor that is the USA finally gets it together, other nations are likely to follow (though of course many are already far ahead of us).Even though there are a lot of solid articles on the budget reconciliation process and its goals and obstacles and I get some mail from politicians – notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – about it, I see very little talk about it among the people I know and the people I follow. Maybe we’re telling the story wrong. Maybe we need more pieces about how the US Chamber of Commerce and fossil fuel industry would like your grandmother to die of heatstroke and the fossil fuel industry is conspiring for your cousin to drown in a subway. Legislation is what will keep them from doing so.The budget reconciliation doesn’t fix all our woes. But it does tremendous work, and there is hardly a better place for public attention right now – or a more alarming shortfall of same.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist and the author of Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
TopicsUS politicsOpinionUS CongressDemocratscommentReuse this content More
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez‘Weird, patronizing behavior’: AOC lets rip at Manchin’s ‘young lady’ remark Democratic senator referred to congresswoman as ‘young lady’ Intra-party fight over $3.5tn social spending bill gets personal Lauren Gambino in Washington@ More
US SenateJoe Manchin insists he ‘can’t vote for’ $3.5tn spending billModerate Democrat who is the Senate swing vote says cost is too high and efforts to speed bill’s passage too hasty Richard Luscombe@ More
CaliforniaCalifornia’s recall election: the frontrunners in a field of 46 candidatesFor only the second time in the state’s history, voters will decide if Gavin Newsom should keep his job Maanvi Singh@ More
