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      While Biden is tackling inflation and shaping a green economy for the US, Britain is being left behind | Carys Roberts

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      While Biden is tackling inflation and shaping a green economy for the US, Britain is being left behindCarys RobertsThe Inflation Reduction Act is a big win for jobs and the environment, but Truss and Sunak have nothing similar to offer Over the weekend, US Democrats overcame months of political struggle to pass the Inflation Reduction Act in the Senate, marking a major victory for the president, Joe Biden, and for “Bidenomics” before the US midterms.The bill makes the single largest climate investment in US history, with $369bn for climate and clean energy. It is expected to enable the US to get two-thirds of the way towards its Paris agreement commitments while reducing energy costs. It lowers health costs for millions of Americans. It seeks to tackle inflation by directly reducing costs for individuals and by reducing the deficit through closing tax loopholes and increasing tax on corporates and the wealthy.The act is far from perfect. It is the diminished descendant of the failed Build Back Better Act, a $2tn package that would have radically extended childcare, free community college and subsidised health insurance, but which ultimately failed to secure the support of the Democrat senator Joe Manchin (a necessity given the evenly divided Senate). Winning political support for the act has required rowing back on climate ambition and more extensive plans to reduce costs for families; allowing further drilling for fossil fuels; and carve-outs to protect private equity profits from the corporation tax element of the act. For this reason, the act will and already has come under intense criticism from activists and climate groups.However, in the face of fierce political opposition it is a major – even landmark – achievement. It is also a win for the activists and economists who have been persistently pushing and providing ideas for the Biden administration to pursue an alternative approach to the economy and environment: market-shaping green industrial strategy to create good, green jobs; social investment; worker power and incentives for employers to offer decent pay, apprenticeships and profit-sharing with communities; higher taxes on the wealthy to reduce inflation and contribute to the costs, including through a new tax on share buybacks which only serve to boost investors’ incomes. These ideas are no longer stuck on the bench.Historically the US and UK have taken a shared, leading role in the intellectual development and political implementation of new ideas and policy paradigms. Whether we think about the postwar Keynesian consensus, the neoliberal revolution of Thatcher and Reagan or the third way politics of Clinton and Blair, both countries have tended to move in lockstep. Yet right now, in the context of the Inflation Reduction Act in the US and the Conservative party leadership race in the UK, our policy paths are diverging.The US has further to go than the UK when it comes to reducing climate emissions and building economic justice. The US has significantly higher levels of emissions (on an absolute and per capita basis) than the UK and the US is also the world’s biggest producer of fossil fuels. Similarly, inequality in the US is starker, and poverty deeper than in the UK. Put simply: the land of opportunity is not delivering for too many American citizens.But Democrat leaders are pushing through a bold agenda to break through deep political polarisation and reset the shape and direction of what US economic success looks like. The irony when we compare this with the UK is that the conditions are far more favourable here for action commensurate to the scale of the climate and nature crisis, an economic strategy that prioritises everyday people and places over wealth and profits, and for extending collective provision of the things and services we all rely on. We have a head start in terms of the social democracy basics. In sharp contrast to the US, there is more consensus across parties on the need for the government to take action on the climate and nature crises. Action taken now would be far less likely to be wiped away by an opposition win than the fragile progressive gains in the US.Biden can still stop Trump, and Trumpism – if he can find a bold plan and moral vision | Robert ReichRead moreThe Conservatives, who have held power for more than a decade, have in recent years flirted with some of those ideas – from May’s mission-oriented industrial strategy to Johnson’s net zero and levelling up pledges – recognising the electoral benefits of doing so. Yet at this moment, the Conservatives are plunging in the opposite direction to their US counterparts, and debating – in the middle of sharply rising inflation and a cost-of-living emergency – policies that are catnip for the Tory membership such as grammar schools and corporation tax cuts, rather than looking around the world or at the evidence on how to address the pressing problems of our time. Truss, widely seen as the frontrunner, has fallen back on outdated tropes of financial support as handouts and has virtually nothing to say on how she would achieve net zero, both for its own sake and as a response to the cost-of-living crisis. Nothing of substance is being suggested to address the creeping, real privatisation of the NHS as those who can go private rather than languish on a waiting list.It would be wrong to point at the US and claim it has its house in order or that lessons can be read in a simplistic way. But Biden and the activists and researchers around him are ambitiously forging a new kind of economic policymaking that seeks to rapidly decarbonise, reduce pressures on family purses through collective provision, and tax wealth and profits to fund this and quell inflationary pressures. The UK government – whoever it is headed by – should take note of the new economics rather than be left behind.
      Carys Roberts is executive director of the Institute for Public Policy Research
      TopicsEconomicsOpinionUS politicsJoe BidenConservativesClimate crisiscommentReuse this content More

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      Al-Zawahiri’s Killing Will Increase Global Chaos and Insecurity

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      Landmark US climate bill will do more harm than good, groups say

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      Landmark US climate bill will do more harm than good, groups sayBill makes concessions to the fossil fuel industry as frontline community groups call on Biden to declare climate emergency The landmark climate legislation passed by the Senate after months of wrangling and weakening by fossil-fuel friendly Democrats will lead to more harm than good, according to frontline community groups who are calling on Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency.If signed into law, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) would allocate $369bn to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions and invest in renewable energy sources – a historic amount that scientists estimate will lead to net reductions of 40% by 2030, compared with 2005 levels.Democrats celebrate as climate bill moves to House – and critics weigh in Read moreIt would be the first significant climate legislation to be passed in the US, which is historically responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than any other country.But the bill makes a slew of concessions to the fossil fuel industry, including mandating drilling and pipeline deals that will harm communities from Alaska to Appalachia and the Gulf coast and tie the US to planet-heating energy projects for decades to come.“Once again, the only climate proposal on the table requires that the communities of the Gulf south bear the disproportionate cost of national interests bending a knee to dirty energy – furthering the debt this country owes to the South,” said Colette Pichon Battle from Taproot Earth Vision (formerly Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy).“Solving the climate crisis requires eliminating fossil fuels, and the Inflation Reduction Act simply does not do this,” said Steven Feit, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law (Ciel).Overall, many environmental and community groups agree that while the deal will bring some long-term global benefits by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, it’s not enough and consigns communities already threatened by sea level rise, floods and extreme heat to further misery.The bill is a watered-down version of Biden’s ambitious Build Back Better bill which was blocked by every single Republican and also conservative Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who have both received significant campaign support from fossil fuel industries. West Virginia’s Manchin, in particular, is known for his close personal ties to the coal sector.“This was a backdoor take-it-or-leave-it deal between a coal baron and Democratic leaders in which any opposition from lawmakers or frontline communities was quashed. It was an inherently unjust process, a deal which sacrifices so many communities and doesn’t get us anywhere near where we need to go, yet is being presented as a saviour legislation,” said Jean Su, energy justice program director at the Center for Biological Diversity.The IRA, which includes new tax provisions to pay for the historic $739bn climate and healthcare spending package, has been touted as a huge victory for the Biden administration as the Democrats gear up for a tough ride in the midterm elections, when they face losing control of both houses of Congress.The spending package will expedite expansion of the clean energy industry, and while it includes historic funds to tackle air pollution and help consumers go green through electric vehicle and household appliance subsidies, the vast majority of the funds will benefit corporations.A cost-benefit analysis by the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), which represents a wide range of urban and rural groups nationwide, concludes that the strengths of the IRA are outweighed by the bill’s weaknesses and threats posed by the expansion of fossil fuels and unproven technologies such as carbon capture and hydrogen generation – which the bill will incentivise with billions of dollars of tax credits that will mostly benefit oil and gas.“Climate investments should not be handcuffed to corporate subsidies for fossil fuel development and unproven technologies that will poison our communities for decades,” said Juan Jhong-Chung from the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, a member of the CJA.The IRA is a huge step towards creating a green capitalist industry that wrongly assumes the economic benefits will trickle down to low-income communities and households, added Su.Many advocacy groups agree that the IRA should be the first step – not the final climate policy – for Biden, who promised to be the country’s first climate president.People vs Fossil Fuels, a national coalition of more than 1,200 organisations from all 50 states, recently delivered a petition with more than 500,000 signatures to the White House calling on Biden to declare a climate emergency, which would unlock new funds for urgently needed climate adaptation in hard-hit communities, and use executive actions to stop the expansion of fossil fuels.Siqiniq Maupin, executive director of Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic, said: “This new bill is genocide, there is no other way to put it. This is a life or death situation and the longer we act as though the world isn’t on fire around us, the worse our burns will be. Biden has the power to prevent this, to mitigate the damage.”TopicsUS politicsClimate crisisDemocratsRepublicansJoe BidennewsReuse this content More

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      White House warns of ‘intensifying impacts of climate change’ as Biden tours flood-hit Kentucky – as it happened

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      On Joe Biden’s visit to flood-ravaged eastern Kentucky today he is not just viewing the effects through the lens of a disaster needing federal assistance but also through the lens of the climate crisis that is making events like this more intense, more common and more deadly, in America and around the world.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre addressed the issue in her media briefing aboard Air Force One en route to Lexington with the US president and first lady Jill Biden a little earlier.“The floods in Kentucky and extreme weather all around the country are yet another reminder of the intensifying and accelerating impacts of climate change and the urgent need to invest in making our communities more resilient to it,” she said.Kentucky was hit by massive flash flooding in the last two weeks that killed 37 people and caused mass destruction. The atypical rain storms followed eight months after tornadoes killed almost three times that many people in western Kentucky and many parts of the country are suffering record heatwaves, drought and wildfire after an extreme 2021 in the American west.Jean-Pierre of course emphasized the importance of the Senate vote yesterday to pass the historic climate action bill , which she called “so vital” alongside previous infrastructure legislation.“Over the long term, these investments will save lives, reduce costs and protect communities like the one we are visiting today,” she said. Biden is due to land in Kentucky about now.
      Amidst the flood damage, Joe Biden reiterated his commitment to Kentucky and seeing the areas impacted by the catastrophic flooding that has killed at least 37 set back to rights. “Everybody has an obligation to help. We have the capacity to do this. It’s not like it’s beyond our control,” Biden said. “The weather may be beyond our control for now, but it’s not beyond our control and I promise you, we’re staying, the federal government, along with the state and county and the city, we’re staying until everybody is back to where they were.”
      Two years’ worth of text messages exchanged by right wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones have been turned over to the House select committee tasked with investigating the 6 January attack on the US Capitol, according to CNN. The texts had come out after Jones’ attorneys “messed up” and inadvertently sent the text messages to the plaintiffs’ attorney during a defamation trial in which Jones has been ordered to pay nearly $50m over his repeated claims that the deadly Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.
      The Biden administration has pledged another $1bn in military aid for Ukraine, the largest promise of rockets, ammunition and other arms to Ukrainian forces. This brings the total US security assistance committed to Ukraine by the Biden administration to roughly $9bn since Russian troops invaded in February.
      Rudy Giuliani, lawyer for Donald Trump, was caught in a lie when he tried to argue that he couldn’t travel to Atlanta to appear before a special grand jury investigating whether Trump and others illegally tried to interfere in the 2020 general election in Georgia. Giuliani said he couldn’t travel because of a medical procedure but Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, pulled up a tweet of his showing that he had gone to New Hampshire recently, as well as evidence that he had purchased airline tickets to Rome and Zurich that were meant for use between 22 July and 29 July, after his medical procedure.
      The photos everyone is talking about today are the ones published by Axios purportedly backing up the claims that Donald Trump periodically blocked up White House and other drains by flushing documents.The photos show folded-up paper, marked with Trump’s telltale handwriting in his favored pen, a Sharpie, submerged at the bottom of various toilet bowls.Read more about it here:Photos suggest Trump blocked toilets with ripped-up White House documentsRead moreRon DeSantis, the governor of Florida who is widely seen as a potential leading Republican presidential contender, will campaign this month for Donald Trump-endorsed party candidates in key swing states for the 2024 White House race, Reuters is reporting.DeSantis, who is currently running for re-election in Florida, will speak at “Unite and Win” rallies on behalf of congressional and gubernatorial candidates in Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio and Pennsylvania later this month, his campaign and rally organizer Turning Point Action said today.“He’s a wildly popular political figure and I think he can really make a difference for some of these candidates,” said Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point Action, which is the political arm of the conservative school campus group, Turning Point USA.Joe Biden promised the crowd he spoke to before a toppled building in Lost Creek, Kentucky that even with the at least 37 killed and the substantial flood damage, “we’re going to come back better than we were before”. “We’re the only country in the world that has come out of every major disaster stronger than we went into it,” Biden said. “We got clobbered going in, but we came out stronger. That’s the objective here: not just to get back to where we were, but to get back to better than where we were.” He said with the bipartisan infrastructure bill – the feather in his legislative agenda – “we have the wherewithal to do it now”. Biden said that because of the bill, now when crews are replacing damaged water lines, municipalities have the funds to also lay down high-speed Internet at the same time. “I don’t want any Kentuckian telling me you don’t have to do this for me,” Biden said. “Oh yes we do. You’re an American citizen. We never give up. We never stop. We never bow. We never bend. We just go forward and that’s what we’re going to do here. And you’re going to see.”Joe Biden has taken to the podium in Kentucky, where he is touring flooding damage from the catastrophic flooding that has killed at least 37 and displaced hundreds. “The people here in this community are not just Kentuckians, they’re Americans,” Biden said. “This happened in America. This is an American problem. Everybody has an obligation to help. We have the capacity to do this. It’s not like it’s beyond our control. The weather may be beyond our control for now, but it’s not beyond our control and I promise you, we’re staying, the federal government, along with the state and county and the city, we’re staying until everybody is back to where they were.” Rudy Giuliani was among the many allies of Donald Trump that were subpoenaed by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, in her investigation into whether Trump and others illegally tried to interfere in the 2020 general election in Georgia.A judge ordered Giuliani to appear before a special grand jury in Atlanta this month, and today he made an emergency motion to postpone his scheduled deposition. Rudy GIULIANI has made an emergency motion to postpone his scheduled Fulton County deposition. A hearing on his motion is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. pic.twitter.com/hltHbN2Odn— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) August 8, 2022
      Giuliani’s excuse was that he had a recent medical procedure that left him uncleared to fly. He was willing to appear virtually and is prepared to testify, but the district attorney is insisting he appears in person. UPDATE Giuliani’s motion to delay his grand jury appearance seems to be medical — he says a recent procedure has left him uncleared to fly. He says he is prepared to testify and even willing to appear virtually but DA has insisted he appear in person. https://t.co/DAPhXqXDp7— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) August 8, 2022
      The Fulton county district attorney’s office quickly countered with a tweet of Giuliani’s that showed he had traveled out of state – Giuliani said he had traveled to New Hampshire by car. But the district attorney also found evidence that he had purchased airline tickets to Rome and Zurich that were meant for use between 22 July and 29 July, after his medical procedure. The DA says it has obtained records that show Rudy purchased air travel tickets meant for use between July 22-29. They also included a tweet showing Giuliani had traveled (he says by car) to NH last week. https://t.co/y0HVyd3cZl pic.twitter.com/KkSKY1lsgo— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) August 8, 2022
      Amazing. Giuliani said a recent heart procedure meant he couldn’t travel to ATL out of state …so the Fulton DA’s office found a tweet of Giuliani apparently traveling out of state. pic.twitter.com/LZONxwDxZz— stephen fowler (@stphnfwlr) August 8, 2022
      CNN is reporting that two years’ worth of text messages exchanged by right wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones have been turned over to the House select committee tasked with investigating the 6 January attack on the US Capitol. News: The Alex Jones texts have been turned over to the 1/6 committee, I’m told. https://t.co/s1kQg6AT1g— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) August 8, 2022
      During Jones’ defamation trial, in which Jones has been ordered to pay nearly $50m over his repeated claims that the deadly Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, an attorney for the plaintiffs revealed that Jones’ attorneys had “messed up” and inadvertently sent him the two years of text messages. The House select committee was immediately interested: Jones’ rhetoric is popular among those who swarmed the Capitol that day, and he was on the grounds in the lead-up to the attack, riling up the crowd. However, according to CNN, Jones claims he tried to prevent people at the Capitol from breaking the law, and has rejected any suggestion that he was involved in the planning of violence. “Well, we know that his behavior did incentivize some of the January 6 conduct and we want to know more about that,” congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who sits on the committee, told CNN this weekend. “We don’t know what we’ll find in the texts because we haven’t seen them. But we’ll look at it and learn more, I’m sure.” Jones’ attorney had asked the judge to order Mark Bankston, the attorney who represented the two Sandy Hook parents who successfully sued Jones, to destroy the texts and not transmit them to the House committee.“I’m not standing between you and Congress,” Judge Maya Guerra Gamble told Bankston. “That is not my job. I’m not going to do that.”The Biden administration has pledged another $1bn in military aid for Ukraine, the largest promise of rockets, ammunition and other arms to Ukrainian forces.This brings the total US security assistance committed to Ukraine by the Biden administration to roughly $9bn since Russian troops invaded in February.“At every stage of this conflict, we have been focused on getting the Ukrainians what they need, depending on the evolving conditions on the battlefield,” Colin Kahl, undersecretary of defense for policy, said in announcing the new weapons shipment.New today: US announces another $1 billion military package for Ukraine including more ammo for HIMARS. And USAID announces $4.5 billion in economic aid to the Ukrainian government— Josh Lederman (@JoshNBCNews) August 8, 2022
      Greetings all – Vivian Ho here, taking over the blog from Joanna Walters. Over in Kentucky, Joe Biden kicked off his tour of the catastrophic flooding that has killed at least 37 people with a briefing. Touring flood damage in eastern Kentucky – @POTUS participates in briefing at Marie Roberts Elementary School in Lost Creek KY. @AndyBeshearKY welcomes the group – confirms 37 Kentuckians have died in the storm. Adds there are still 2 missing people. pic.twitter.com/Wed6Bei500— Julia Benbrook (@JuliaBenbrook) August 8, 2022
      Hello, live blog readers, with the climate crisis as a powerful undercurrent to Joe Biden’s visit to flood-ravaged eastern Kentucky today, we’ll bring you more news on that and all the developments, as they happen.My colleague Vivian Ho will take over the blog after this and keep you up to speed for the next few hours.Here’s where things stand.
      White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre addressed the climate issues in her media briefing aboard Air Force One en route to Lexington with the US president earlier. “The floods in Kentucky and extreme weather all around the country are yet another reminder of the intensifying and accelerating impacts of climate change and the urgent need to invest in making our communities more resilient to it,” she said.
      During his time in the Oval Office, Donald Trump wanted the Pentagon’s generals to be like Nazi Germany’s generals in the second world war, according to a book excerpt in the New Yorker. Peeks of Susan Glasser and Peter Baker’s new book The Divider have more on some of those screaming matches in the White House between the-then president and senior aides.
      Joe Biden is visiting eastern Kentucky to tour areas inundated and families devastated by the terrible flooding a week ago that killed dozens of people. Biden is expected to make public remarks (around 2pm ET) as well as talking with relatives and officials in private, and he and the first lady will return to the White House this evening.
      The US president said “I’m not worried, but I am concerned” about China’s aggression towards Taiwan in its live-fire military exercises that lasted for the last four days and menaced the island democracy, whose capital, Taipei, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi controversially visited early last week.
      Joe Biden is touring flood damage in eastern Kentucky with state governor Andy Beshear.The state’s lieutenant governor, Jacqueline Coleman, earlier told CNN that in one county, 50 bridges had been wrecked by the floods that have devastated the region in late July-early August.“The infrastructure needs are monumental,” she said.Coleman described the rains that hit the area.“It happened so fast and it happened overnight and that’s the reason folks were trapped in their homes,” she said, often in areas of mountainous terrain.Asked if, with the climate crisis, this kind of extreme weather is going to become the new normal, she remarked: “I hope this is not the new normal, for sure.”The 700-plus-page inflation reduction bill moving through the US Congress would steer significant new funds toward battling wildfires and extreme heat – climate change-related risks that are wreaking havoc across the country this summer, Reuters reports.The legislation, pared down from earlier versions, would direct approximately $370 billion toward a range of climate and energy initiatives, including renewable energy tax credits, backing for electric cars and heat pumps, and environmental justice..css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}This is going to, if passed, be the most action the United States has ever taken on climate. Will there be more that we need to do? Absolutely. But this is just so significant and [it’s] so important that we get this over the finish line,” said Christina DeConcini, director of government affairs at the World Resources Institute, a global research group.As drought-fueled wildfires spread out of control in the western United States, lawmakers want to direct about $2 billion toward hazardous fuels reduction.The money in the bill, formally known as the Inflation Reduction Act, could go toward measures like clearing brush through prescribed burns or mechanical thinning so when fires do occur they’re not as intense.The bill also earmarks funds to combat increasingly extreme heat as the United States – and much of the world – grapples with record-shattering and increasingly deadly temperatures this year.For example, there is $1.5 billion in grant funding through the US Forest Service for initiatives such as helping cities plant trees, which provide natural cooling and can improve air quality.The bill aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% below 2005 levels by the end of the decade through other spending on clean energy tax incentives and electric vehicle credits.Sponsors of the bill say more than $60 billion in measures included are directed toward “environmental justice” initiatives intended to help communities that have disproportionately borne the brunt of poor air quality and pollution.But that amount isn’t nearly enough, said Anthony Rogers-Wright, director of environmental justice at the nonprofit New York Lawyers for the Public Interest.You can read the full Reuters report here. More

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      Biden can still stop Trump, and Trumpism – if he can find a bold plan and moral vision | Robert Reich

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      Biden can still stop Trump, and Trumpism – if he can find a bold plan and moral visionRobert ReichThe US president has been struggling and his divisive rival still has the Republican party in his grip. But there are reasons for hope Will Joe Biden be re-elected in 2024? With his current approval rating in the cellar, most pundits assume he will be toast by the next presidential election. At 81, he would also be the oldest person ever elected president, slightly exceeding the typical American’s lifespan.So, the conventional thinking goes, Biden will be demolished by Donald Trump (or a Trump surrogate such as the Texas senator Ted Cruz or the Florida governor Ron DeSantis), thereby subjecting the US and the world to an even crazier authoritarian than Trump 1.0.But that’s way too simplistic. In reality, Biden’s current approval rating isn’t much different from Ronald Reagan’s about this point in his presidency when he was grappling with inflation and the inevitable buyer’s remorse that voters feel a year and a half into a presidency. Two and a half years later, Reagan had won 49 states in his re-election bid against Walter Mondale. (Reagan was then 73, just short of the typical American’s lifespan at the time.)Trump’s popularity has plummeted since the 2020 election – a casualty not just of most Americans’ outrage at his big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him and his role in the January 6 insurrection, but also of the poor showing (and terrifyingcharacteristics) of many of his endorsees in recent Republican primaries. The televised hearings by Congress’s select committee investigating January 6 have also reduced Trump’s standing with most voters.Meanwhile, Biden is scoring some legislative victories, including a major bill to subsidise semiconductor chip making in the US. And now, following a hard won Senate vote at the weekend, Biden has substantial bragging rights over a much larger bill to slow climate change, lower the cost of prescription drugs and make health insurance more affordable.​The president ​has also been getting kudos for the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaida successor to Osama bin Laden, in a spectacularly discreet US drone strike that resulted in no other casualties.Yet a basic problem ​remains ​for Biden. ​The Democratic party he knew when he was elected to the Senate 50 years ago, from blue-collar, working-class Delaware, is not the Democratic party that elected him in 2020. It’s now largely composed of young adults, college-educated voters and people of colour.In the intervening years, many working-class white voters who were once loyal Democrats joined the Republican party. As their wages stagnated and their jobs grew insecure, the Republican party skilfully and cynically channelled their economic frustrations into animus toward immigrants, Black people and Latinos, LGBTQ people, and “coastal elites” who want to control guns and permit abortions.These so-called culture wars have served to distract such voters from the brute fact that the Republican party has zero ideas to reverse the economic trends that left the working class behind.The wars have also distracted attention from the near record shares of national income and wealth that have shifted to the top; as well as the Republicans’ role in tax cuts on the wealthy, their attacks on labour unions and refusals to support social benefits that have become standard in most other advanced nations (such as paid sick and family leave, universal healthcare and generous unemployment insurance).During his 36 years in the Senate, followed by eight as Barack Obama’s vice-president, Biden surely became aware of the loss of these working-class voters. And he must have known of the Democrats’ failure to reverse the trends that left them behind and regain their loyalty.Democratic administrations expanded public health insurance, to be sure. But they also embraced global trade and financial deregulation, took a hands-off approach to corporate mergers, bailed out Wall Street and gave corporations free rein to bash labour unions (reducing the unionised portion of the private-sector workforce during the past half century from a third to 6%). It was a huge error – politically, economically and, one might even say, morally.What accounted for this error? I saw it up close: the Democratic party’s growing dependence on campaign money from big corporations, Wall Street and wealthy Americans – whose “donations” to both parties soared.Bill Clinton styled himself a “new Democrat” who would govern from above the old political divides – “triangulate”, in the parlance of his pollster, Dick Morris. In practice, he auctioned off the White House’s Lincoln bedroom to the highest bidders, made Wall Street’s Robert Rubin his chief economic adviser, advocated and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, opened the US to Chinese exports and cleared the way for Wall Street to gamble.Obama brought into his administration even more Wall Street alumni and made Larry Summers his chief economic adviser. Obama promptly bailed out the banks when their gambling threatened the entire economy, but asked nothing of them in return. Millions of Americans lost their homes, jobs and savings, yet not a single top Wall Street official went to jail.Small wonder that by 2016 two political outsiders gave dramatic expression to the populist bitterness that had been growing – Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right. At the time, they even spoke the same language – complaining of a “rigged system” and a corrupt political establishment, and promising fundamental change.Biden saw all this unfold. He came to publicly regret his vote to ease banking rules. He never celebrated the virtue of free markets. He has been far closer to organised labour and more comfortable with non-college working-class voters than either Clinton or Obama. “I am a union man, period,” he has repeatedly said.He’s no free trader, either. Biden proposed relocating supply chains for pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and medical supplies to the US, and imposing tax penalties on companies that relocate jobs abroad and credits for those that bring them home. He has kept in place most of the trade restrictions that Trump placed on China.During the 2020 presidential campaign Biden was billed as a “centrist” seeking bipartisan solutions. But he had big, non-centrist ambitions. Seeking to be a “transformative” president, he openly sought a New Deal-style presidency. Once in office, he proposed the largest social agenda in recent American history.That Biden failed to get much of this agenda passed in his first term was due less to his own inadequacies than to the Democrats’ razor-thin congressional majorities, and the party’s own compromised position within the power structure of the US.But Biden’s and the Democrats’ deepest challenge was, and continues to be, voters’ distrust of the system. All political and economic systems depend fundamentally on people’s trust that its processes are free from bias and its outcomes are fair. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him has contributed to the distrust but is not responsible for it. Only about a third of Americans believe him.The real source of distrust is the same force that ushered Trump into the White House in 2016: four decades of near stagnant wages, widening inequality, a shrinking middle class, ever more concentrated wealth at the top and growing corruption in the form of campaign cash from the wealthy and corporations.If Democrats retain control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections (possible but unlikely, given the usual pattern in which the party in control loses it), Biden could still become a transformative president in the last two years of his first term if he focuses like a laser on reversing these trends. Even if Democrats do not hold on to Congress, Biden could be a moral voice for why these trends must be reversed and the system transformed. It is the president’s best hope for being re-elected in 2024.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley
      TopicsUS elections 2024OpinionUS politicsJoe BidenDonald TrumpcommentReuse this content More

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      If Democrats want votes, they should rain fury on union-busting corporations | Hamilton Nolan

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      If Democrats want votes, they should rain fury on union-busting corporationsHamilton NolanWe supposedly have the most pro-union US president of our lifetimes. Let’s see him act like it In June, workers at a Chipotle restaurant in Augusta, Maine, became the first in the company’s history to file for a union election. Less than a month later, the company closed the store. In shutting down a location that was set to unionize, Chipotle was keeping company with Starbucks, which has suddenly undertaken a campaign to shut down several unionizing locations from coast to coast due to “safety” issues, and the health food company Amy’s Kitchen, which last month closed an entire factory in California where workers were organizing. It is, of course, impossible to “prove” that these companies closed these locations to try to crush the union drives, in the same sense that it is impossible to prove that a schoolyard bully meant to punch you in the face: he claims that he was merely punching the air while you happened to walk in front of his fist. Who’s to say what’s true in such a murky situation?Delta flights attendants race to unionize: ‘We’re the people behind the profits’Read morePlausible deniability aside, this is an extremely serious problem. Not just for the underpaid, overworked employees at all of these low-wage jobs, desperately hanging on to financial survival by their fingernails, but for all of us. America is mired in a half-century-long crisis of rising inequality that has been fueled, above all, by the combined erosion of labor power and the growth of the power of capital. The American dream enjoyed by the lucky baby-boom generation – buying a home and sending your kids to college on one income – is dead and gone, replaced by a thin crust of the rich sitting atop a huge swamp of once-middle-class jobs that no longer offer enough to sustain a middle-class lifestyle.The power of workers relative to the power of the investment class must be rebalanced. Rebuilding the power of unions is the only way out of this trap, unless you are credulous enough to believe that we will all be rescued by the sudden radicalization of the tax policymakers on the House ways and means committee. If you ever want to live in a country where the American dream is more than a cruel, tantalizing joke, you have a stake in the revival of organized labor.So when you see a big company closing down operations because workers there want to unionize, you should be pissed. Such coldhearted retaliation against people exercising a fundamental right on the job goes to the very heart of how we got all this inequality in the first place. It is meant not just to derail one union drive, but to strike fear in all the other workers who see it happen: if you ask for what you’re worth, this could happen to you. Shut up and eat your gruel, and be happy that the kindly billionaire CEO is allowing you to earn enough not to starve today. Even if you don’t work at a fast-food outlet or a factory, this should enrage you, as a human being. It is an assault on human dignity.America’s convoluted and hostile labor laws actually do allow a business to shut down in response to unionization, unless (and this is important) the company is doing so in order to scare its remaining employees out of unionizing – in other words, exactly what big employers like Chipotle and Starbucks would be doing by closing stores where workers have organized, as workers at many other stores across the country looked on. (Government regulators have not yet ruled on the legality of the recent closures by those companies.) Unfortunately, the evil, high-priced union-busting attorneys these companies hire are well aware that the gears of justice in labor law grind so slowly that even on the off chance that they were found to have closed the stores illegally, it would be far too late for it to mean anything to the workers who were laid off and forced to go find other jobs. The scary, unsubtle message to the company’s workforce would have already been sent.That’s why this stuff is not really a question of law, but of power. The working class, galvanized by the near-death experience of the pandemic, is busily organizing in new industries across the country; the labor movement today is as energized as it has been in two generations. Corporate America is determined to stop this. In the mid-1950s, one in three Americans was a union member; today, that figure is one in 10. Companies know that their ability to extract excess profits will go down as union density goes up. This is going to be a hard, nasty fight. As all of those recently laid-off Chipotle and Starbucks and Amy’s Kitchen workers know, it already is.It is also a golden opportunity for a Democratic party that has spent the last six years wringing its hands about losing working-class voters to the pseudo-populist (and racist) appeal of Trumpism. Want to get working people enthusiastic about Democrats again? Then the Democrats should help working people. National Democratic politicians should be holding press conferences decrying the greedy chief executives closing these stores just because workers tried to stand up for themselves. Joe Biden should be screaming his head off about billionaire Starbucks chief Howard Schultz’s disgusting union-busting at the same volume that Ron DeSantis is blathering about “woke corporations”.Republicans are insincere ghouls who want to harvest working-class votes while their policies stab working-class people in the back – but Democrats are ceding the terrain to these scumbags by failing to match their fervor. We don’t need our politicians making anodyne statements about how unions are nice. We need a rain of zeal and fury emanating from Washington, to terrify companies away from closing down their union stores with threats of merciless retributions from the state.History shows that organized labor thrives when it has the government’s support, and suffers without it. We are supposedly living under the most pro-union president of our lifetimes. So? Let’s hear some damn fire, man. The only reason companies feel so free to abuse their workers is that they don’t believe anyone will make them pay for it.
      Hamilton Nolan is a writer based in New York
      TopicsDemocratsOpinionUS unionsUS politicsJoe BidenStarbuckscommentReuse this content More

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      Climate bill could slash US emissions by 40% after historic Senate vote

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      Climate bill could slash US emissions by 40% after historic Senate voteInflation Reduction Act could put US within striking distance of Biden’s goal of halving emissions by 2030, analysis suggests The US is, following decades of political rancor and fossil fuel industry obfuscation, almost certain to make its first significant attempt to tackle the climate crisis. Experts say it will help rewire the American economy and act as an important step in averting disastrous global heating.Independent analysis of the proposed legislation, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, shows it should slash America’s planet-heating emissions by about 40% by the end of the decade, compared with 2005 levels.This cut would bring the US within striking distance of a goal set by Joe Biden to cut emissions in half by 2030, a target that scientists say must be achieved by the whole world if catastrophic global heating, triggering escalating heatwaves, droughts and floods, is to be avoided.On Sunday, the US Senate passed the legislation and though it still has to be approved by the House, its passage is now virtually assured.Line chart showing the ranges of projected emissions reductions for current policy and the Inflation Reduction Act“This is a massive turning point,” said Leah Stokes, a climate policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “This bill includes so much, it comprises nearly $370bn in climate and clean energy investments. That’s truly historic. Overall, the IRA is a huge opportunity to tackle the climate crisis.”The climate provisions in the legislation – totaling $369bn, to be exact – are pared back from what Biden initially wanted. Excruciating negotiations with Joe Manchin, the coal company-owning West Virginia senator and a swing vote for the bill, ended up in a reduced compromise.But its heft can still, argued Brian Schatz, another Democratic senator, be considered “by far, the biggest climate action in human history”. Biden said the bill was a “huge step forward”.Democrats mustered all 50 of their Senate votes to pass the bill – and Vice-President Kamala Harris’s casting vote – to overcome uniform Republican resistance to acting on the climate emergency. Billions of dollars will go towards investments in renewable energy such as wind and solar, rebates for people wishing to buy electric cars and support for households to make them run on clean electricity and become more energy efficient.In sum, the bill will cut US emissions by between 31% and 44% below 2005 levels by 2030, according to Rhodium Group, a non-partisan research firm. A separate analysis by Energy Innovation, another research house, has found a similar reduction, of between 37% and 41% this decade. In total, around 1bn tons of greenhouse gases, which is more than double the total annual emissions of the UK, would be eliminated in this timeframe.The range of estimates depends on factors such as future economic conditions, but experts say the bill will set off a cascade of positive impacts, pushing fossil fuels out of the energy grid, dampening America’s thirst for oil and making wind and solar, which have already plummeted in cost in recent years, even cheaper.“This bill will really turbocharge that transition to clean energy, it will transform markets where already solar PV, wind and batteries are in many cases cheaper than incumbent fossil fuels,” said Anand Gopal, executive director of policy at Energy Innovation.“This is a dramatically large climate bill, the biggest in US history if it passes. It doesn’t mean the US won’t need to do more to achieve its emissions goals but it will make a meaningful difference.”The bulk of the bill is composed of tax credits aimed at unleashing a boom in clean energy deployment, along with payments to keep ageing nuclear facilities and other sources of low-carbon energy online. A new system of fees will be imposed to stem leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas drilling operations. The vast fleet of trucks used by the US Postal Service would go electric.Consumers will be able to access a rebate of up to $7,500 for a new electric vehicle, or up to $4,000 for a used car, along with up to $8,000 to install a modern electric heat pump that can both heat and cool buildings. Further rebates are also on offer, such as $1,600 to insulate and seal a house to make it more energy efficient.Table showing the projected effects of the Inflation Reduction act through 2030These actions would cut emissions while having other significant benefits. As many as 1.5m jobs would be created in new clean energy roles, according to Energy Innovations, while Rewiring America, another research firm, has forecast that households that install a heat pump, rooftop solar and use an electric car would save $1,800 a year on energy bills.Meanwhile, thousands of deaths would be avoided, predominantly among people of color who have to suffer air pollution from nearby fossil fuel infrastructure. “If you live next to a power plant that is pumping out toxins, that is the primary concern for you here, not climate change,” said Gopal.The legislation is also an attempt to wrest momentum back from China, which has become the world’s leading manufacturer of solar panels, batteries and other clean energy materials. There are billions of dollars in incentives for the US domestic production of wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, carbon capture and storage and other technologies.This, in turn, would help proliferate these technologies in the US and make it easier for federal agencies to issue stricter pollution rules for cars, trucks and power plants. Meanwhile, the international effort to prevent the world warming by more than 1.5C (2.7F) beyond pre-industrial levels, hampered so far by a patchy American response to the climate crisis, would receive a major boost.“You’ll have a lot of mutually beneficial impacts,” said Gopal. “This should change the way the US is viewed on the global stage and will encourage better pledges from other large emitters such as China and India. Increasingly I’m more optimistic that keeping the temperature rise under 2C (3.6F) is more reachable. 1.5C is a stretch goal at this point.”Climate advocates have criticized elements of the bill, such as Manchin’s successful insistence that oil and gas drilling leases in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico are included, along with a stipulation that millions of acres of federal land and water are opened up for fossil fuels if they are to be also accessed by solar and wind developers. Such a deal is a “climate suicide pact”, according to Brett Hartl, a campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity.But the Energy Innovation researchers insist the clean energy benefits of the bill easily outweigh any extra emissions from new drilling, with every ton of new emissions offset by at least 24 tons of emissions avoided by other provisions. The US would, much later than most other large economies, finally have a long-term climate roadmap.“I wouldn’t have put those leases in the bill but the climate side comes out way ahead,” said Gopal.“Is this legislation the size of what we need for the climate? No. Is it extraordinary given the politics and the Senate we have? Yes, it’s incredible. We can’t make up for the lost time of US inaction – we can see the price the world is paying for that right now – but it’s not too late. This can make a massive difference.”TopicsClimate crisisUS domestic policyUS politicsJoe BidenanalysisReuse this content More

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      in World Politics

      Saudi Arabia and Lebanon: A Tale of Two Economies

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