US elections 2024

Subterms

    More stories

    • 200 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden: the ultimate daddy projection screen | V (formerly Eve Ensler)

      by

      I went to the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. Or I tried to. I wanted to see it, to feel it, to know it. I spent two hours smushed in a crowd of thousands, waiting in the cold, unable to move, in the midst of belligerent conversations, alcohol consumption, rantings and racist posturings. There were older Jewish men, Black families, Asian couples and young Latina women. I heard south Asian men calling Kamala Harris hateful slurs, others saying women needed to just shut up and listen to men. I saw working men showing off their jackets with artistic renderings of Trump as bullfighter slaying the deep state dragon. What I mainly heard and felt was grievance.I’ve always thought America was a mean place. And what I mean by that is that it’s structured for meanness. It’s a place of winners and losers, people who matter and those who can be disposed of, a country built on violent theft of Indigenous lands and hundreds of years of enslavement of millions of Black people. It’s a place where when a person rises in status, they show it off to those who have less, rather than bringing them along. Where the rich and famous flaunt their wealth and clothes and fabulous lives every single day, and watching is a national past time. A place where most people get lost or abandoned, forgotten or judged. Where an ambitious few can turn that suffering into gold, but most get swallowed in self-hatred and despair.We’re almost 250 years into this American experience and I would say the one common thing that this patriarchal racist capitalism has wrought is a primal insecurity that what you have can easily be taken away and who you are can be suddenly and forever erased.And that insecurity is the rub.For when fascists come, when those narcissistic tyrannical daddy figures arrive looking bigger than life, they instinctively know how to manipulate that insecurity. They usually do it by creating a class of people or a group of people who are less, who are othered, making the majority feel special, superior and safe. It’s the oldest, but most effective trick in the fascist handbook. Externalize the abstract self-hatred and insecurity, turn it into a real enemy and blame everything on them.This demonization was over the top at Madison Square Garden. Whether it was a comedian talking about Puerto Rico “as a floating island of garbage” or suggesting Jews were cheap and Palestinians were rock throwers, or Tucker Carlson deriding Harris – the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father – with a made-up identity saying she was vying to become “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor to ever be elected president”. Or for that matter almost every speaker mispronouncing Kamala’s name.Then there was Trump rambling on and on for almost an hour, calling those seeking refuge and survival savages, animals, horrible people occupying America, invading it, as if he’d forgotten that except for the Indigenous people who were here and the African Americans who were dragged here in chains, every single other person is an immigrant who came in search of survival, safety and a new life.I’ve always somehow understood the banal evil of Donald Trump. It goes back as far as 1989. That was around the time he was turning a 14-story apartment building in New York City into luxury condos for the rich, attempting to force tenants out of the building by turning off hot water and heat in the middle of winter. We organized an event called Brunch at the Plaza and invited Trump, who at the time owned the hotel. We bussed in hundreds of homeless people and served them brunch on the Plaza lawn. The demand was simple. Give 1.3% of your net income to specific organizations developing housing for the poor. Trump did not attend. Cut to 2015. Months before he declared he was running for office, with a few activists, we invited people to my apartment to see if we could launch Stop Hate Dump Trump. A campaign to stop him from getting traction running for president. Many told us we were crazy and extreme, they told us that no one would ever take that buffoon seriously.Perhaps my own childhood with that same kind of narcissistic, abusive, seductive father was what gave me eyes to see Donald Trump, to understand that he was not necessarily dangerous in what he was (if you emptied that piggy bank nothing would be inside), he was dangerous for what he wasn’t – a shiny American hologram, an all too familiar dream or daddy just out of reach, totally disassociated except when he suddenly exploded with disappointment and rage. This daddy has come home indeed, home to roost, home to turn the house into chaos and terror, home to compare his children with one another so there’s always someone on top and someone stuck on the bottom, creating violent competition and hatred among his children so they never learn cooperation and solidarity, but fight instead with each other for his approval.All night long Trump’s surrogates spun us into an opposite world. They spoke of Trump as a man of peace and love, you know, one of the flawed ordinary people like most of us, an endless victim who has survived lawsuits and impeachment, being thrown off Twitter with no mention of a reason why any of this might have happened. Truth that night was as dispensable as the lives of immigrants, pregnant women, trans kids, critical race theory and our nation’s history. There’s plenty of blame to go around for how we got here. A racist colonialist history that has never been reckoned with, the Democrats settling for the most rudimentary approach to identity politics rather than seeing it as an entryway to an intersectional analysis of race and class. The list goes on.We are a nation of the lonely and abandoned, desperate for belonging and worth. Many have been seduced by Trump. They can’t believe this rich mogul and TV celebrity would actually care about them. And they’re right because there is absolutely no indication that he would ever invite most of the people in the New York crowd to his mansion or golf club. Remember reports of him talking of his followers as “basement dwellers”. He told the packed house on Sunday night that he could be sunning himself on the beach or playing golf at Turnberry in Scotland, but he chose to be there with them as if the act of running for president was the highest form of altruism and not a total power grab. Oh dear generous daddy.But there’s always the real story lurking on the edges, always the corruption and theft and dirty deals, always the sexual violence. A man told a woman I was with that she didn’t look like a typical Trump type. She was an older woman, he said, and most older women don’t like Trump. My friend asked him why he thought that was and he said something about it having to do with sexuality and my friend asked: “You mean because Trump’s a rapist?”But in a land of mirages and heroin dreams, he’s the daddy projection screen. Terror and protector. Killer and fixer. Longed-for object and rapist. In the end thousands of us didn’t get into the Garden. In hindsight I realize I wouldn’t have lasted a minute before getting found out. I wouldn’t have been able to handle the metastasized energy of a nationalistic, racist, misogynist mob in service of its daddy lord.As we walked away, Rudy Giuliani, a major felon and disgrace, barking madness on the jumbotron, a young woman doing an enthusiastic cheerleading act for “daddy Don” with red pompoms, I know more deeply than ever that it’s not enough to get rid of Trump, although that will be a very good thing. We have to devote ourselves to changing the conditions that gave birth to him.

      V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a playwright and activist and the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Mystery artist leaves neo-Nazi tiki torch ‘tribute’ to Trump near White House

      by

      The unknown artist or artists who fashioned a swirled bronze piece of feces on a replica of the former US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk – and placed it on the National Mall recently – appear to have struck again.This time, the artistic-political commentary is focused not on the 6 January 2021 US Capitol attack carried out by Donald Trump supporters, when a participant did indeed defecate on Pelosi’s desk. Instead, the display satirically evokes the notorious white nationalist Unite the Right tiki torch parade through Charlottesville’s University of Virginia campus in August 2017, with some marchers chanting: “Jews will not replace us”.A tiki torch statue titled The Donald J Trump Enduring Flame was placed on display in Washington DC’s Freedom Plaza, a few blocks from the White House, on Monday. The plaque beneath the piece alludes to how the former president referred to “some very fine people on both sides” at the rally, which led to the murder of a counterprotestor demonstrating against white supremacy.“This monument pays tribute to President Donald Trump and the ‘very fine people’ he boldly stood to defend when they marched in Charlottesville, Virginia,” the plaque reads.Alluding to remarks from Trump at the time that the media had treated people at the rally “absolutely unfairly”, the plaque adds: “While many have called them white supremacists and neo-Nazis, President Trump’s voice rang out above the rest to remind all that they were ‘treated absolutely unfairly’. This monument stands as an everlasting reminder of that bold proclamation.”View image in fullscreenThe timing and placement of the scatological and torch works come as artists have sought ways to interpret the moment through satire. In September, a vast model of a naked Trump was placed on a highway outside Las Vegas, prompting complaints from local Republican officials supporting his second run for the presidency in the 5 November election against Kamala Harris.But the tiki torch is a more direct commentary on political undercurrents that have resurfaced in the closing days of the 2024 election, with the vice-president and her Democratic allies warning that a return to the White House for Trump risks a slide into authoritarianism.Torchlight parades were a feature of German national socialism in the 1930s. After a spell that returned the tiki to non-political purposes, including lighting summer barbecues and repelling mosquitoes, the Charlottesville rally reimbued them with sinister connotations.After the deadly Unite the Right rally, Tiki Brand Products of Wisconsin put out a statement that the brand “was not in any way associated with the events that took place in Charlottesville and … deeply saddened and disappointed.“We do not support their message or the use of our products in this way,” the company added.Civic Crafted LLC, the maker of the desk and tiki torch pieces, was granted a temporary license for display by the US park service. The agency said last week that when issuing permits it “does not consider the content of the message to be presented”.Vandals removed Pelosi’s name from the desk and poop piece soon after it was installed and drew crowds. An inscription on the piece said it was meant to honor “the brave men and women who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6 2021 to loot, urinate and defecate throughout those hallowed halls in order to overturn an election” that Trump lost to Joe Biden.For its part, the 9ft tiki torch went largely unnoticed after it was put up, according to the Washington Post.“I think it’s a perfect piece of satirical sculpture in its placement, in its timing, in its execution,” Eric Brewer, 56, told the Post. “It may be a warning sign of what could be to come.”The park service permit allows the tiki torch work to remain in place until Thursday. More

    • 188 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      The Washington Post is a reminder of the dangers of billionaire ownership | Siva Vaidhyanathan

      by

      Last week the Washington Post refrained from endorsing a candidate in the presidential race for the first time in 36 years. The decision was reportedly ordered by Jeff Bezos, the Post’s owner and one of the richest men in the world. The Seattle billionaire, who owns Amazon, purchased the flailing newspaper in 2013 in a rare fit of civic duty.The blowback was immediate and substantial. Within 48 hours of the announcement as many as 200,000 paying readers cancelled their subscriptions to the already money-losing news organization, according to reporting by NPR.Such withholding of revenue is usually more a symbolic message than a real threat to the viability of a company. But for the Post, which has been teetering for decades, any loss in subscribers is threatening. Hundreds of good journalists who had no influence on Bezos’s decision remain unsure of the viability of their employer. Residents of the District of Columbia and much of Virginia and Maryland also rely on the Post for coverage of state and local issues, culture and sports. All of this is threatened by Bezos’s decision and the public uprising against it.Some angry citizens also cancelled their subscriptions to Amazon Prime, the service that provides free shipping for many Amazon products and access to video and music streaming.While a widespread Prime resignation would not damage the public sphere or the prospects for democracy and good government the way that hurting the Washington Post does, it’s still a futile gesture that probably will not alarm or injure Bezos in the slightest.That’s because Prime is a classic loss-leader feature: Amazon uses the service to crush competitors by offering cheaper goods and services while the company makes its money elsewhere. Prime has about 180 million members in the United States, so if a few thousand quit, Amazon would hardly notice and Bezos hardly care.Amazon and Bezos are far more powerful than most people realize. The company’s power is deep, broad and largely invisible. The books and dog toys we buy through Amazon remind us of its public face and original mission. But it’s not 2004 any more.Amazon is not a normal retail company or a normal company in any way; it’s a sprawling leviathan wrapped around the essential processes of major governments, commerce and culture of most of the world.Amazon’s major source of revenue and profit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is the leading provider of computing and data services in the world, ahead of Microsoft and Alphabet. AWS hosts the sites and data of more than 7,500 governmental agencies and offices in the US alone, including those of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Reserve.Just about everything a 21st-century state or firm might want to do probably goes through Amazon and makes Bezos wealthier and more powerful in the process. All of this happened over the past 20 years as we enthusiastically chose convenience and mobility over all other human values. We clicked Bezos into power – and not by buying things through Amazon retail; we did it by choosing the internet again and again.In blocking the Washington Post endorsement, Bezos is not acting cowardly as much as slyly. Secure in his fortune and status regardless of the potential rise of fascism in the US, he has some more selfish concerns about the nature of the next administration.One potential Bezos-centric consequence of the election on 5 November is that Donald Trump will prevail over a bacchanal of greed and corruption, potentially opening federal contracts to all sorts of favored players and – more importantly – stifling investigations and prosecutions into firms and people Trump might favor.The other possible consequence is that a Kamala Harris administration would continue the aggressive and much-needed investigations into the ways internet companies like Amazon have restrained trade, concentrated wealth and solidified power by leveraging networks and scale.Bezos also founded and owns Blue Origin, a rocket and space technology firm that has many government contracts. Limiting the government’s regulatory oversight over space technology or contracting is in Bezos’s interest, which might explain why Blue Origin staff met with Trump around the same time as the Post announced its decision not to endorse. It’s also likely Bezos would like to muscle out Trump’s pal Elon Musk and his company, SpaceX, for what is to come.Given all this, it makes sense that Bezos, who is generally liberal and supports Democratic candidates, would try to limit how much Trump hates him (and Trump has long hated Bezos – a lot), if there is a small chance to curry favor with the once and future president. Perhaps Bezos figures his newspaper should not help Harris more than it already has by reporting the basic news.So there are many reasons to fear a Bezos-Trump rapprochement. Still, it does not make much sense to cancel a Post subscription or Prime membership. Neither would hurt Bezos at all.Most boycotts, especially when they are tiny, disorganized, ad-hoc, emotional and aimed at enormous, global companies, are mere expressions of self-righteousness. They have no significant influence on the world but they can make the boycotter feel a bit better for a few days. What’s worse, they often distract energy from real political action that might curb the excesses of the companies in question.Here is the problem: billionaires are mostly immune to consumer pressure. That’s how they became and remain billionaires.So how do we solve a problem like a billionaire? First, we must be blunt about the nature and scope of their power. It’s not a matter of describing their wealth, which flashes before us in numbers we can’t properly grasp or feel. We must describe their influence and how they control things in the world.Second, we must find ways to limit their wealth by taxing the various ways they accumulate and hide it.Third, we must be enthusiastic about breaking up big companies that do too many things in too many markets and thus crush or purchase potential competitors and insurgents. It’s not about prices. It’s about power.Most of all, we should do our best to elect leaders who are not beholden to billionaires, but actively seek to turn them back into millionaires.

      Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Giuliani’s book is silent on $150m award for defamation but noisy on election lies

      by

      In a new book, Rudy Giuliani claims his extensive legal problems and those of Donald Trump are the results of persecution by “a fascist regime” run by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden – all while avoiding mention of a $150m defamation award against him won by two Georgia elections workers and repeating the lies about electoral fraud which saw him lose law licenses in New York and Washington DC.Giuliani’s book also ignores the widely reported autocratic tendencies of Trump, which have triggered numerous warnings, including from former staffers, that he is a fascist in waiting, should he return to the White House.The New York mayor turned Trump lawyer even avoids mention of fascistic sympathies in his own family, specifically those harbored by his mother, whose own sister-in-law said she “liked Mussolini”, the dictator who ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943.Giuliani’s book, The Biden Crime Family: The Blueprint for their Prosecution, is released in the US on Tuesday. The book’s title betrays the reason for its delayed release – it is largely a propagandistic election-season attack on Biden, the president who stepped aside in July, amid concern that at 81 he was too old for a second term, ceding the Democratic nomination to Harris, his vice-president.Giuliani’s book is finally released a week from election day but even he may not have foreseen it landing amid explosive debate over whether Trump is a fascist himself.Mark Milley, formerly the chair of the joint chiefs of staff under Trump, and John Kelly, another retired general who was Trump’s second White House chief of staff, have said Trump deserves the label.Speaking to the reporter Bob Woodward, Milley said Trump was “fascist to the core”. Last week, Vice-President Harris said: “It is clear from John Kelly’s words that Donald Trump is someone who, I quote, ‘certainly falls into the general definition of fascists’, who, in fact, vowed to be a dictator on day one and vowed to use the military as his personal militia to carry out his personal and political vendettas.”On Sunday, outside a Madison Square Garden Trump event many observers compared to a Nazi rally at the same New York venue in 1939, Giuliani told reporters Trump was “the furthest from a fascist imaginable”.On the page, Giuliani’s case against Biden is undercut by omission of inconvenient details – as in the passage in which he complains of persecution by a “fascist regime”.“They … have sued me, sent me to bankruptcy court, and tried to force me to sell my homes,” Giuliani writes – not mentioning that such dire financial straits are the result of being ordered to pay around $150m for defaming Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, the Georgia elections workers, while pushing Trump’s lie about voter fraud in the 2020 election. This week, Giuliani was ordered to give the women control of his New York apartment, his Mercedes-Benz, several luxury watches and other assets.Giuliani was disbarred in Washington DC and New York. Claiming such moves were politically motivated, he nonsensically claims: “I have never been disciplined by the bar association and my record is unblemished.” His legal troubles, he insists, are the result of being “but one” political opponent of Biden and Harris.“They’ve indicted and attempted to disbar legal friends and colleagues like John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark for their work on trying to correct the stolen election results,” Giuliani writes, of disgraced lawyers who also worked on Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.“Others, like [Trump advisers] Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, actually had to serve four months in federal prisons for misdemeanor of contempt of Congress – while their cases were on appeal!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist, was released from prison in Connecticut on Tuesday. He provides a short introduction for Giuliani’s book.Giuliani also cites court cases involving “a Florida social media influencer … arrested by eight FBI and other law enforcement agents for the ‘crime’ of posting memes mocking Hillary Clinton supporters on Twitter” and a “75-year-old grandmother with a medical condition sentenced to jail for two years for protesting outside an abortion center”.“These are the actions of a fascist regime,” Giuliani writes, adding, “So is the lawfare leveled against President Donald J Trump”, in reference to 88 criminal charges, 34 having produced guilty verdicts regarding hush-money payments, the rest remaining outstanding as election day nears.Giuliani does admit in his book to having “some criminal issues in my family background” – namely his father’s 1930s conviction and prison time for robbery, an uncle’s work as a loan shark, and a cousin who “turned out to be head of an auto-theft ring and died in a shootout with the FBI”. Such ties are well known but tellingly, in light of his accusation of “fascist” behavior by Biden and Harris, Giuliani chooses not to mention another famous family detail: his mother’s liking for Mussolini.In 2000, the Village Voice published an examination of Giuliani’s family background by Wayne Barrett, the legendary New York investigative journalist. Entitled Thug Life, the extract from Barrett’s biography of the then New York mayor told the story of Giuliani’s criminal father, including his work as a mafia enforcer. But Barrett also described conversations around the dinner table during the second world war.“The fact that their homeland was an Axis country did not diminish Helen Giuliani’s sense of patriotism,” Barrett wrote of the future mayor’s mother. “‘Helen was a little sticking up for the Italians, a little on the Italian side,’ recalled Anna, Rudy Giuliani’s aunt.“‘She liked Mussolini and things like that.’” More

    • 213 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Hulk Hogan once endorsed Barack Obama. How did he become a big Maga mascot? | Arwa Mahdawi

      by

      It was less WWE, more WTF. On Sunday night, Terry Gene Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan, strutted on stage at Madison Square Garden to speak at a Donald Trump rally. Wearing tiny yellow sunglasses that looked as if they’d been nicked off a toddler, Hogan attempted to rip his shirt off. It took a bit of struggling, but eventually the 71-year-old wrestling legend managed it.The high jinks continued: Hogan treated the crowd to a dance. Notably, Hogan’s dance moves are just like the ones Trump has shown off at numerous rallies. A lot of arm-pumping; kinda looks like they’re milking a cow. (That said, my own dancing looks like a penguin being caught in an earthquake, so I’m not judging.)“You know something, Trumpmaniacs?” Hogan said, after his jig was up. “I don’t see no stinking Nazis in here.” The wrestler was referencing the fact that the Trump event had drawn numerous comparisons, including from Tim Walz, to a Nazi rally held in 1939 at an earlier iteration of Madison Square Garden. Not an outrageous comparison, considering the 2024 rally was full of racism and nativist language, with former Trump aide Stephen Miller saying things such as: “America is for Americans and Americans only.” As for Hogan, while World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) once fired him for using the N-word, his rally speech wasn’t overtly racist. However, he did appear to make a disgusting oral sex joke about Kamala Harris.Hogan’s campy costumes and corny catchphrases may make him seem a bit of a joke, but he’s had a serious impact on the political landscape in recent years. Hogan may not have been able to see any “stinking Nazis” in Madison Square Garden, but powerful men with darkly authoritarian views sure seem to see a useful ally in him.Hogan was certainly instrumental in helping billionaire Peter Thiel kill the media organisation Gawker – a long and sordid saga that started in 2006, when Hogan had sex with the wife of his friend, a radio personality called Bubba the Love Sponge. Bubba filmed the encounter and, in 2012, the tapes got leaked (possibly by a rival DJ) to Gawker. They published the video with the headline: “Even for a minute, watching Hulk Hogan have sex in a canopy bed is not safe for work but watch it anyway”.Watching closely was Thiel, who had held a grudge against Gawker ever since it published a post with the headline: “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people” in 2007. A book about the lawsuit by Ryan Holiday claims that an acquaintance of Thiel, aware of this grudge, gave him the idea to take Gawker down in 2011. When the Hogan tape came out, Thiel had the perfect opportunity to exact revenge: he secretly bankrolled the wrestler’s lawsuit against the company. Because Thiel has unlimited funds, the lawsuit was dragged out to ensure Gawker hemorrhaged money. Which wasn’t necessarily great for Hogan, who had to make his private affairs very public. Things were even worse for Gawker, though, which was driven to bankruptcy.Gawker was a brilliant site, but it also did a bunch of indefensible things, outing someone and publishing a sex tape without their consent being prime examples. Nevertheless, an aggrieved billionaire suing a publication into oblivion set a chilling precedent. It ushered in a United States where, as Tom Scocca, a former Gawker writer, put it, “a billionaire can put a publication out of business”.Hogan, who once endorsed Barack Obama for president, clearly got a taste for hanging around vengeful billionaires after the lawsuit. He’s been a prominent fixture in the Trump campaign for the past few months and had a primetime speaking slot at the Republican national convention in July. Like every aggrieved rich guy in America, Hogan has also flirted with the idea of a political career: if Trump wins, there is a non-zero chance he might get some sort of official position.But while it may be notable that Hogan has got more Trumpy over the years, perhaps what’s most glaring here is how much Trump’s GOP has become like the WWE. It’s shed any pretence of respectability, morphing into a violent theatre of the absurd, full of caricatures and cheap gimmicks. Unlike wrestling however, the only people really getting hurt are the public. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

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

      by

      I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling more anxious about the outcome of the upcoming election. I’m still nauseously optimistic, but the nausea is growing.I’m as skeptical of polls as any of you, but when all of them show the same thing – that Kamala Harris’s campaign stalled several weeks ago, yet Donald Trump’s continues to surge – it’s important to take the polls seriously.The US vice-president will give her closing message to the American people on Tuesday at a rally on the Ellipse on the Washington mall.Over the last several weeks she’s focused on a woman’s right over her body and the rights of all Americans to a democracy. Obviously, Trump threatens both.Tuesday night, though, she needs to respond forcefully to the one issue that continues to be highest on the minds of most Americans – the economy.She must tell Americans simply and clearly why they continue to have such a hard time despite all the economic indicators to the contrary. It’s because of the power of large corporations and a handful of wealthy individuals to siphon off most economic gains for themselves.Most Americans are outraged that they continue to struggle economically at the same time as billionaires are pulling in ever more wealth. Most know they’re paying too much for housing, gas, groceries and the medicines they need. They also know that a major cause is the market power of big corporations.They want someone who’ll stand up to big corporations and the politicians in Washington who serve them.They want a president who’ll be on their side. A president who will crack down on price-gouging, who will bust up the monopolies and restore competition, who will fight to cap prescription drug costs, who will get big money out of politics and stop the legalized bribery that rigs the market for the rich and who will make sure corporations pay their fair share and end tax breaks for billionaire crooks.A president who will put working families first – before big corporations and the wealthy.Harris needs to say she will be this president.Her policy proposals suggest this. She’s committed to strong antitrust enforcement – cracking down on mergers and acquisitions that give big food corporations the power to jack up food and grocery prices, prosecuting price-fixing and banning price gouging. She needs to remind voters of this.She also says she’ll raise taxes on the rich, provide $25,000 in down-payment assistance to help Americans buy their first home, restore the expanded child tax credit to $3,600 to help more than 100 million working Americans, and implement a new $6,000 tax cut to help families pay for the high costs of a child’s first year of life.All should be parts of her speech this Tuesday about why she will be the champion of working people.She wants to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, make stock buybacks more expensive and expand Medicare to cover home healthcare – paid for with savings from the expansion of Medicare price negotiations with drug manufacturers.She needs to frame all of this as a response to the power of big corporations and the wealthy – and say in no uncertain terms that she’s on the side of the people, not the powerful.If she fails to do this in her closing argument, Trump’s demagogic response will be the only one the public hears – that average working people are struggling because of undocumented workers and the “enemy within”, including Democrats, socialists, Marxists and the “deep state”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris should fit her message about democracy inside this economic message. If our democracy weren’t dominated by the rich and big corporations, fewer of the economy’s gains would be siphoned off to them. Average working people would have better pay, more secure jobs, and be able to afford homes, food, fuel, medicine, childcare and eldercare.A large portion of the public no longer thinks American democracy is working. According to a new New York Times/Siena College poll, only 45% believe our democracy does a good job representing ordinary people. An astounding 62% say the government is mostly working to benefit itself and elites rather than the common good.In her closing argument, Harris should commit herself to reversing this, so the government works for the common good.Harris started her campaign in July and early August by emphasizing these themes about the economy and democracy. But in more recent weeks, she’s focused on Trump’s threat to democracy. Her campaign seems to have decided that she can draw additional voters from moderate Republican suburban women upset by Trump’s role in fomenting the attack on the US Capitol.That’s why she’s been campaigning with Liz Cheney, and gathering Republican officials as supporters. And why she has chosen to give her closing message on the Ellipse – where Trump summoned his followers to march on the Capitol on 6 January 2021.But when she shifted gears to Trump’s attacks on democracy, Harris’s campaign stalled. I think that’s because Americans continue to focus on the economy and want an answer to why they continue to struggle economically.If Trump gives them an answer – although baseless and demagogic – but Harris does not, he may sail to victory on 5 November.Hence, in her closing message she must talk clearly and frankly about the misallocation of economic power in America – lodged with big corporations and the wealthy instead of average Americans – and her commitment to rectify this.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More