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    Yes, Bidenomics is working here in Pennsylvania. But it might not be enough to win the White House | JoJo Burgess

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    Where I come from, “the economy” isn’t just about lines on a graph or numbers on a screen. It’s about how much money people have in their pockets and how much their groceries cost. It’s about how many shops are shuttered on their high street and whether they can afford to make the rent.In Pennsylvania, when voters go to the polls next week, the economy will be weighing very heavily on their minds. Our state will probably decide who becomes the next president of the US, and how we vote will also be a test of Joe Biden’s policies. The economy is one of the top issues for voters in our state. Many of them will be asking: am I in a better place now, compared with where I was four years ago?I come from a family of steelworkers near Pittsburgh. My father was a steelworker in the city, and so is my son. I’m also a rep for United Steelworkers, one of the largest unions in our country. As you can imagine, the most important issue in town right now is the steel deal. The Japanese steelmaker Nippon has been trying to buy US Steel for the past year, and though the company has promised to honour US Steel’s agreement with our union, we have many reasons to be doubtful.Not only is steel integral to our national security, raising questions about foreign takeovers, but there’s nothing to stop the company from cutting union jobs a few years down the line. The CEO of US Steel stands to walk away with $70m (£54m) if the deal completes. It’s the same pattern that repeats again and again: the money stays at the top, while people at the bottom are forgotten about.I’m glad that Kamala Harris has committed to blocking the sale. And I’m glad that the Biden administration has questioned the value of takeovers like these. Look at the Chips Act, or the Inflation Reduction Act: both were about spurring investment in our economy and building up productive capacity in the US.For too long, globalisation has meant a race to the bottom, with firms outsourcing labour and offshoring production to the places where it’s cheapest. Most employees have been working harder but getting paid less: from 1973 to 2013, the hourly wage for a typical worker rose just 9%, while productivity increased by 74%. No wonder so many people are exhausted and struggling to keep their heads above water.Here’s the thing: Donald Trump says he gets it, but he doesn’t. He talks about inflation killing our country under Biden, but he never says that record corporate profits are one of the drivers of inflation. He talks about the housing crisis, but then he blames the lack of affordable housing on immigrants. He is a master at spinning simple answers to complex problems, but he has no real solutions.I think most people are smarter than Trump gives them credit for. Most people have a sense that the reason daily life has become so expensive isn’t just because of the war in Ukraine or supply-chain bottlenecks. It’s because corporations got greedy, and started using inflation as cover to raise prices. If I can sell you a cup of water for $10, why would I drop the price to $7? The Democrat Pennsylvania senator Bob Casey has been campaigning explicitly on “greedflation”.It feels as though the message is cutting through, but I know plenty of steelworkers will still vote Trump, though almost all the unions have backed Harris. Where I live is rust belt territory. It’s a place that once boomed on coal, steel and cars. It’s a place that struggled to reinvent itself after the decline of the manufacturing industries, and lost a lot of jobs.View image in fullscreenSince the pandemic, we’ve been suffering. I live in Washington, a town south of Pittsburgh, where I’m also the local mayor. I’ve seen how the shift towards working from home has damaged some of our small businesses, and how our healthcare workers suffered from Covid-19.But I can also see the positives that “Bidenomics” has brought to our community, and I’m hoping these will cut through. One of the biggest complaints I hear now from residents is: “Why is there so much construction? We can’t cross the road!” Thanks to a huge boost in federal spending, with the Inflation Reduction Act earmarking billions of dollars to support infrastructure projects, there are many more cranes than there used to be.I always say, that’s infrastructure money working for us. When the Fern Hollow bridge collapsed in Pittsburgh, it was rebuilt in record time. Pennsylvania is particularly well placed to benefit from federal investment because it’s the second largest producer of energy in the US after Texas, and we need that climate spending if we’re going to transition to a clean energy economy. I’m just hoping that other voters feel the same way.

    JoJo Burgess is a steelworker in Pennsylvania and a member of the United Steelworkers union. He is also the mayor of Washington, Pennsylvania

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      Pennsylvania steel workers, wooed by Harris and Trump, remain skeptical: ‘I don’t trust either one of them’

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      The Monongahela River winds through the tight Mon Valley south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, creating a main artery in the nation’s industrial heart, where the steel and coal industries have driven the region’s economy and shaped political landscapes since the late 19th century.In the weeks preceding the election, the region is once again playing an outsize role in determining the nation’s political future. A controversial Biden-Harris administration plan to kill Pittsburgh-based US Steel’s proposed sale to Japan’s Nippon Steel is viewed in part as an election-year strategy to shore up critical union support in a must-win swing state.On the ground in and around the city, evidence suggests the move may just work – unions oppose the sale and the administration’s position is at the very least maintaining recent Democratic gains in the tug-of-war for swing voters in the nation’s steel capital.Anecdotal evidence and polling point to Harris gaining momentum here.“I’ve learned not to be comfortable with any election because we didn’t think Trump could win in 16 … but I think people are going to vote more common sense this year,” said Keli Vereb, a steelworker union rep and Lincoln borough council member.Unusually in these fractious times, both presidential candidates oppose the deal, backing United Steelworkers International union members across the political spectrum who are determined to thwart a deal they see as a job killer that puts their pensions at risk.Recent memories of supply chain issues have also hardened US resolve to protect vital industries such as steel.Still, politics are omnipresent, and the deal undoubtedly will play a role in determining the next president. It comes eight years after blue-collar workers here defected from the Democratic party en masse when then candidate Hillary Clinton said during a debate that she would put coalminers out of business.Some union leaders say the comment may have cost her Pennsylvania, which Donald Trump won by 0.7%. After four years of pro-labor policies from Joe Biden, the party has begun to win back some who left, and with Trump proposing to block the US Steel sale if he were elected, Democrats risk a 2016 repeat if it is allowed to proceed.“Trump would pounce on them if they let [the sale] go,” said Allen George, a lifelong Democrat who worked in unions adjacent to the steel industry.The companies are making a powerful argument that the deal is vital to US Steel’s survival. US Steel claims it will be forced to cut Pennsylvania jobs and move its headquarters out of Pittsburgh if Biden blocks Nippon’s $14.1bn bid, while it has promised to invest $2.4bn in its facilities if the sale goes through. The company’s “scorched earth” public relations campaign on the factory floors has at least some rank and file supporting the sale, said Bernie Hall, Pennsylvania director for USI.“Some are scared and think: ‘We should just take this and live to fight another day,’ and that’s natural,” Hall said.Many more, however, oppose the sale. The union’s contract is up in 23 months and they fear a Nippon-US Steel would cut jobs, or continue to send them to non-union states. They point to Nippon’s long history of “dumping” steel in the US, which has cratered prices and cost American jobs, and many fear the purchase is a ploy to continue the practice.US Steel’s record of closing factories and failing to keep promises has generated a deep mistrust and disdain for the company, workers told the Guardian on a recent Monday afternoon outside the Harvey Wilner’s pub in West Mifflin, just south of Pittsburgh. They rattled off a list of facilities that have closed over the decades.“Nippon can have at it,” said Barry Fez, who has worked in manufacturing in the region for decades, but, he says, in a few years he expects they will go back on their word.But that sentiment is colliding with Wall Street and Beltway support for the deal. The latter argue that the administration’s protectionist plan would run counter to international trade norms because Japan is an ally and close economic partner.The idea that trade decorum with Japan is more important than Pennsylvania union members’ security drew scoffs from some workers.“And then they’ll wonder why they lost an election,” said Mike Gallagher, a retired union member.‘They lie all the time’Banking legend JP Morgan created US Steel in a mega-merger in 1901. It grew to be the largest US producer, employing more than 340,000 people at its second world war peak. Today, it is a shadow of its former self, has closed many of its Mon Valley facilities, and now employs about 4,000 people, although the company says it indirectly supports 11,000 jobs and generates $3.6bn in economic activity annually.In the face of waning American steel power, the company has looked for a buyer, and many feel a US-Japan alliance makes sense in countering increasing Chinese domination of the industry.But the union is opposed, and in Pennsylvania, 25% of the electorate is unionized, making it a formidable bloc intensely courted by both political parties.Trump in January said he would stop the deal. Biden has said the same, including in a private meeting with steel workers in April, when the president insisted “US steel will stay US-owned”, according to Don Furko, president of Local 1557 in Clairton. “He said he ‘guarantees’ it.”The administration’s decision on whether the deal should be blocked largely lies with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which is made up of Biden’s cabinet members and other appointees. It can veto mergers and acquisitions it finds present a national security risk.CFIUS was expected to issue an opinion on 21 September, but the administration punted until after the election. Union members say they aren’t worried.“President Biden and Vice-President Harris have been pretty clear and they will follow through,” Hall said.Harris has got the message: “US Steel should remain American-owned and American-operated,” she told a rally in Pittsburgh earlier this month.David Burritt, the CEO of US Steel, has warned of consequences if the deal is blocked. He says the company would “largely pivot away” from its blast furnace production in the region, and move its headquarters out of Pittsburgh.“We want elected leaders and other key decision makers to recognize the benefits of the deal as well as the unavoidable consequences if the deal fails,” Burritt said last month.That threat has further inflamed tensions. Furko said it reminds him of his young son flipping over the Monopoly board when he loses: “That’s really what’s going on here – if this deal doesn’t go through, then they’re going to flip over the Monopoly board.”Asked about US Steel’s claims that it will revitalize the region if the sale goes through, workers told the Guardian that there are no guarantees that the investment will be in Mon Valley. People would be “foolish” to believe that, Vereb said.That was echoed outside the Wilner’s pub. Fez recalled the pub’s heyday, when “you couldn’t get in there at 7am because it was so packed”, and the floor was littered with quarter wrappers from the slot machines.On a Monday afternoon around shift change time, a group of about a dozen retirees sat around the bar. They blamed US Steel for the region’s slowdown, and while they say they do not expect Biden or Trump to save the city, they have even less confidence that US Steel and a Japanese company will turn it around.“They lie all the time, and I don’t trust either one of them,” said Jack, a retiree who worked for US Steel for more than 30 years, who declined to use his last name.‘He gets credit for that’The political price that the Biden-Harris administration could pay for allowing the deal to go through can be seen in the 2016 election’s wake.Before 2016, the region was largely Democratic. But when Clinton made the comment about the clean energy industry putting coalminers and barons out of business, “Things turned on a dime,” Vereb said. Her borough of 900 was once about 80% Democrats. It’s now about 75% Republican, she estimates.About 75% of those working at US Steel’s Clairton Mill Works, several union leaders estimate, support Trump, and there is little Democrats can do to win back many of them.The situation is also complicated by US Steel’s intense campaign to convince workers that the sale will save their jobs. The company sends regular emails, holds meetings, takes out ads in newspapers and makes their case to reporters.“They say: ‘If you don’t support us, then we’re gonna shut this place down, and if that happens you can thank your union leadership,’” said Rob Hutchison, president of Local 1219. “When [rank and file] have that threat in their face eight to 12 hours per day, then it starts to become something they think about.”That also presents another political risk: if the Biden-Harris administration were to block the deal, and US Steel shuts down a plant, Democrats may again lose some voters.However, so far, the controversial move seems to be paying dividends.“I don’t know if the average Joe is thinking about CFIUS or is that in the weeds, but I think from a macro level, people see it, that it’s Biden supporting the union workers, and he gets credit for that,” Hall said. More

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      The Stakes: how JD Vance’s home town has won millions in climate investment that he calls a ‘green scam’

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      This is the first part of the standfirst This is the second part of the standfirst Headline what’s at stake?
      View image in fullscreenA hulking steel plant in Middletown, Ohio, is the city’s economic heartbeat as well as a keystone origin story of JD Vance, the hometown senator now running to be Donald Trump’s vice-president.Its future, however, may hinge upon $500m in funding from landmark climate legislation that Vance has called a “scam” and is a Trump target for demolition.In March, Joe Biden’s administration announced the US’s largest ever grant to produce greener steel, enabling the Cleveland-Cliffs facility in Middletown to build one of the largest hydrogen fuel furnaces in the world, cutting emissions by a million tons a year by ditching the coal that accelerates the climate crisis and befouls the air for nearby locals.View image in fullscreenIn a blue-collar urban area north of Cincinnati that has long pinned its fortunes upon the vicissitudes of the US steel industry, the investment’s promise of a revitalized plant with 170 new jobs and 1,200 temporary construction positions was met with jubilation among residents and unions.“It felt like a miracle, an answered prayer that we weren’t going to be left to die on the vine,” said Michael Bailey, who is now a pastor in Middletown but worked at the plant, then owned by Armco, for 30 years.“It hit the news and you could almost hear everybody screaming, ‘Yay yay yay!’,” said Heather Gibson, owner of the Triple Moon cafe in central Middletown. “It showed commitment for the long term. It was just so exciting.”This funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the $370bn bill to turbocharge clean energy signed by Biden after narrowly passing Congress via Democratic votes in 2022, has been far less thrilling to Vance, however, despite his deep personal ties to the Cleveland-Cliffs plant.View image in fullscreenThe steel mill, dating back to 1899 and now employing about 2,500 people, is foundational to Middletown, helping churn out the first generations of cars and then wartime tanks. Vance’s late grandfather, who he called Papaw, was a union worker at the plant, making it the family’s “economic savior – the engine that brought them from the hills of Kentucky into America’s middle class”, Vance wrote in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.But although it grew into a prosperous All-American city built on steel and paper production, Middletown became a place “hemorrhaging jobs and hope” as industries decamped offshore in the 1980s, Vance wrote. He sees little salvation in the IRA even as, by one estimate, it has already spurred $10bn in investment and nearly 14,000 new jobs in Ohio.When campaigning for the Senate in 2022, Vance said Biden’s sweeping climate bill is “dumb, does nothing for the environment and will make us all poorer”, and more recently as vice-presidential candidate called the IRA a “green energy scam that’s actually shipped a lot more manufacturing jobs to China”.America needs “a leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s green new scam and fights to bring back our great American factories”, Vance said at the Republican convention in July. “We need President Donald J Trump.”Republicans in Congress have repeatedly attempted to gut the IRA, with Project 2025, a conservative blueprint authored by many former Trump officials, demanding its repeal should Republicans regain the White House.Such plans have major implications for Vance’s home town. The Middletown plant’s $500m grant from the Department of Energy, still not formally handed over, could be halted if Trump prevails in November. The former president recently vowed to “terminate Kamala Harris’s green new scam and rescind all of the unspent funds”.Some longtime Middletown residents are bemused by such opposition. “How can you think that saving the lives of people is the wrong thing to do?” said Adrienne Shearer, a small business adviser who spent several decades helping the reinvigoration of Middletown’s downtown area, which was hollowed out by economic malaise, offshored jobs and out-of-town malls.“People thought the plant was in danger of leaving or closing, which would totally destroy the town,” she said. “And now people think it’s not going anywhere.”Shearer, a political independent, said she didn’t like Vance’s book because it “trashed our community” and that he had shown no alternative vision for his home town. “Maybe people who serve with him in Washington know him, but we don’t here in Middletown,” she said.View image in fullscreenClimate campaigners are even more scathing of Vance. “It’s no surprise that he’s now threatening to gut a $500m investment in US manufacturing in his own home town,” said Pete Jones, rapid response director at Climate Power. “Vance wrote a book about economic hardship in his home town, and now he has 900 new pages from Trump’s dangerous Project 2025 agenda to make the problem worse so that big oil can profit.”Local Republicans are more complimentary, even if they differ somewhat on the IRA. Mark Messer, Republican mayor of the neighboring town of Lebanon, used the vast bill’s clean energy tax credits to offset the cost of an upcoming solar array that will help slash energy costs for residents. Still, Vance is a strong running mate for Trump and has “done good for Ohio”, according to Messer.“My focus is my constituents and doing what’s best for them – how else will this empty floodplain produce $1m for people in our town?” Messer said. “Nothing is going do that but solar. I’m happy to use the IRA, but if I had a national role my view might be different. I mean printing money and giving it away to people won’t solve inflation, it will make it worse.”Some Middletown voters are proud of Vance’s ascension, too. “You have to give him credit, he went to [Yale] Law School, he built his own business up in the financial industry – he’s self-made, he did it all on his own,” said Doug Pergram, a local business owner who blames Democrats for high inflation and is planning to vote for Trump and Vance, even though he thinks the steel plant investment is welcome.This illustrates a problem for Democrats, who have struggled to translate a surge of new clean energy projects and a glut of resulting jobs into voting strength, with polls showing most Americans don’t know much about the IRA or don’t credit Biden or Harris for its benefits.Ohio was once a swing state but voted for Trump – with his promises of Rust belt renewal that’s only now materializing under Biden – in the last two elections and is set to do the same again in November. Harris, meanwhile, has only fleetingly mentioned climate change and barely attempted to sell the IRA, a groundbreaking but deeply unsexy volume of rebates and tax credits, on the campaign trail.View image in fullscreen“Democrats have not done well in patting themselves on the back, they need to be out there screaming from the rooftops, ‘This is what we’ve done,’” said Gibson, a political independent who suffers directly from the status quo by living next to the Middletown facility that processes coke coal, a particularly dirty type of coal used in steel production that will become obsolete in the mill’s new era.“The air pollution is horrendous, so the idea of eliminating the need for coke, well, I can’t tell you how happy that makes me,” said Gibson. The site, called SunCoke, heats half a million short tons of coal a year to make coke that’s funneled to the steel plant, a process that causes a strong odor and spews debris across the neighborhood. Gibson rarely opens her windows because of this pollution.“Last year it snowed in July, all this white stuff was falling from the sky,” Gibson said. “The soot covers everything, covers the car, I have to Clorox my windows. The smell is so bad I’ve had to end get-togethers early from my house because people get so sick. It gives you an instant headache. It burns your throat, it burns your nose. It’s just awful.”The prospect of a cleaner, more secure future for Middletown is something the Biden administration tried to stress in March, when Jennifer Granholm, the US energy secretary, appeared at the steel mill with the Cleveland-Cliffs chief executive, union leaders and workers to extol the new hydrogen furnace. The grant helps solve a knotty problem where industry is reluctant to invest in cleaner-burning hydrogen because there aren’t enough extant examples of such technology.View image in fullscreen“Mills like this aren’t just employers, they are anchors embedded deeply in the community. We want your kids and grandkids to produce steel here in America too,” Granholm said. “Consumers are demanding cleaner, greener products all over the world. We don’t want to just make the best products in the world, we want to make sure we make the best and cleanest products in the world.”Lourenco Goncalves, chief executive of Cleveland-Cliffs, the largest flat-rolled steel producer in North America, followed Granholm to boast that a low-emissions furnace of this size was a world first, with the technology set to be expanded to 15 other company plants in the US.Republicans elsewhere in the US have jumped onboard similar ribbon-cutting events, despite voting against the funding that enables them, but notably absent among the dignitaries seated in front of two enormous American flags hanging in the Middletown warehouse that day was Vance, the Ohio senator who went to high school just 4 miles from this place. His office did not respond to questions about the plant or his plans for the future of the IRA.Bailey, a 71-year-old who retired from the steel plant in 2002, said that as a pastor he did speak several times to Vance about ways to aid Middletown but then became alarmed by the senator’s rightwards shift in comments about women, as well as his lack of support for the new steel mill funding.“JD Vance has never mentioned anything about helping Middletown rebound,” said Bailey, who witnessed a “brutal” 2006 management lockout of workers during a union dispute after which drug addiction and homelessness soared in Middletown. “He’s used Middletown for, in my view, his own personal gain.“Somewhere in there, JD changed,” he added. “He’s allowed outsiders to pimp him. This guy is embarrassing us. That’s not who we are.” More

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      Senator John Fetterman vows to block ‘outrageous’ $14.9bn US Steel sale

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      The US senator John Fetterman has vowed to block the multibillion-dollar sale of US Steel to the Japanese company Nippon Steel, calling the potential deal “outrageous”.The former mayor of the south-west Pennsylvania town of Braddock, which is home to a major US Steel plant, Fetterman has long advocated for the rights of American steel workers and positioned himself as a pro-union Democrat.In the video posted to X and taken from the roof of his house in Braddock, which overlooks the plant, Fetterman criticized the proposed $14.9bn sale, decrying US Steel for selling itself “to a foreign nation and company”.“Steel is always about security,” Fetterman said. “And I am committed to anything I can do, from using my platform or my position, in order to block this.“I’m going to fight for the steelworkers and their union way of life here as well, too.”The acquisition was announced on Monday and saw US Steel’s stock price jump 25%. The company confirmed the deal in a statement on Tuesday, saying its board unanimously approved the acquisition and calling Nippon Steel “a global leader in steelmaking, innovation and decarbonization”.The United Steelworkers (USW) union, meanwhile, denounced Nippon Steel for agreeing to an acquisition deal without prior approval from the union, Axios reported.David McCall, the president, called the deal “greedy” and a “violation” of a union agreement that requires any buyer of US Steel to agree to a new labor agreement prior to any sale.“Neither US Steel nor Nippon reached out to our union regarding the deal, which is in itself a violation of our partnership agreement that requires US Steel to notify us of a change in control or business conditions,” McCall told Axios, calling the sale “shortsighted”.A previous buyout offer in August, worth $7.3bn, by rival company Cleveland Cliffs, was rejected by US Steel. That offer did have the support of the USW union, which praised the Ohio-based Cleveland Cliffs as being “in the best position to ensure that US-based manufacturing remains strong in this country”, and noted it didn’t cut jobs during previous acquisitions in 2019 and 2020. More

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      Malcolm Turnbull on Donald Trump: 'You don't suck up to bullies'

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      Malcolm Turnbull on Donald Trump: ‘You don’t suck up to bullies’ Donald Trump and Malcolm Turnbull meet for the first time onboard the USS Intrepid in New York in May 2017. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images In this extract from his memoir, the former Australian prime minister recounts his deals and negotiations with the US president […] More