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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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      Pelosi’s ‘reckless’ Taiwan visit deepens US-China rupture – why did she go?

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      Pelosi’s ‘reckless’ Taiwan visit deepens US-China rupture – why did she go? The speaker insisted she was promoting democracy but critics suggest a last hurrah before she loses the gavel in NovemberRoy Blunt lived up his surname when he said this week: “So I’m about to use four words in a row that I haven’t used in this way before, and those four words are: ‘Speaker Pelosi was right.’”The Republican senator was praising Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, the first by a speaker of the US House of Representatives in a quarter of a century.But not everyone was so sure. In poking the hornets’ nest and enraging China, which claims the self-governing island as its territory, Pelosi deepened a rupture between the world’s two most powerful countries – and may have hurt the very cause she was seeking to promote.On Thursday, China fired multiple missiles into waters surrounding Taiwan and began a series of huge military drills around the island; the White House summoned China’s ambassador, Qin Gang, to protest. On Friday, China said it was ending cooperation with the US on key issues including the climate crisis, anti-drug efforts and military talks.It was yet another moment of peril in a world already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s war in Ukraine and mass food shortages.So why did Pelosi go? The speaker is a fervent defender of Taiwan and critic of China’s human rights abuses. During the visit, she pointed to a global struggle between autocracy and democracy, a favourite theme of Joe Biden’s, and told reporters in Taipei: “We cannot back away from that.”But the 82-year-old may also have been rushing for a last hurrah before November’s midterm elections in which she is expected to lose the speaker’s gavel. Her televised meetings in Taiwan, sure to have registered in Beijing, appeared to some like a vanity project.Writing just ahead of the trip, Thomas Friedman, an author and New York Times columnist, described Pelosi’s adventure as “utterly reckless, dangerous and irresponsible”, arguing that Taiwan will not be more secure or prosperous because of a “purely symbolic” visit.Friedman warned that the consequences could include “the US being plunged into indirect conflicts with a nuclear-armed Russia and a nuclear-armed China at the same time”, without the support of European allies in the latter.Biden himself had publicly admitted that the US military felt the trip was “not a good idea right now”, not least because President Xi Jinping is preparing to secure a third term at the Chinese Communist party’s national congress later this year.In a call last month, the White House has said, Biden sought to remind Xi about America’s separation of powers: that he could not and would not prevent the speaker and other members of Congress traveling where they wish.But Biden and Pelosi are close allies from the same political party, a different scenario from 1997 when Democrat Bill Clinton was president and Republican speaker Newt Gingrich went to Taiwan. Pelosi, second in line to the presidency, flew into the island on a US military aircraft with all the government heft that implies.It was perhaps telling that Biden and Democrats remained mostly silent, whereas the speaker’s loudest cheerleaders were rightwing Republicans and China hawks including Gingrich.Some commentators believe that a superpower conflict between America and China over Taiwan or another issue is one day inevitable. White Pelosi may have shaved a few years off that forecast, it could be argued that Biden himself has supplied some of the kindling.For months the president has sown doubts about America’s commitment to the “One China” policy, under which the US recognises formal ties with China rather than Taiwan. In May, when asked if the US would be get involved military to defend Taiwan, he replied forcefully: “Yes. That’s the commitment we made.”Although America is required by law to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself, it has never directly promised to intervene militarily in a conflict with China. This delicate equilibrium has helped deter Taiwan from declaring full independence and China from invading. But some worry that Biden is supplanting this longstanding position of “strategic ambiguity” with “strategic confusion”.Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States thinktank in Washington, told a Council on Foreign Relations podcast this week: “There has been a lack of clarity, consistency, a lack of discipline, shall we say, and even a lack of coherency, I think, in US policy statements.“The Biden administration continues to say that the United States has a One China policy, that the United States does not support Taiwan independence, but then there are other things that the US does, which from China’s perspective and using their language, looks like we are slicing the salami. We are heading towards supporting a Taiwan that is legally independent.”Glaser added: “So Speaker Pelosi going to Taiwan doesn’t really, I think, in and of itself cross a red line, but I think the Chinese see a slippery slope … And then on top of all this, we have President Biden talking about policy toward Taiwan in confusing ways.”Other analysts agreed that, once news of Pelosi’s plan to visit Taiwan emerged, it would have been impossible to back down without handing Beijing a propaganda victory.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank and former policy adviser to Clinton, said: “I can see the arguments on both sides. Argument on one side, this was probably an ill-timed gesture on her part. Argument on the other side, once the issue was joined, allowing the Chinese to bully her out of the trip would would have been a really bad sign to the region.“If she hadn’t put the issue on the table, that would have been one thing. But once she did and once it was clear that she was pretty firm in doing it, it would have been a mistake, say, for the president to put a lot of pressure on her not to go. That would have been both a substantive mistake and a political mistake.”Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank in Palo Alto, California, wrote in an email: “Pelosi wanted to convey our commitment and resolve. I respect her for that. However, I still think the trip was a mistake. It provoked a serious escalation of Beijing’s military intimidation without really doing anything to make Taiwan more secure.“What Taiwan really needs now is more military assistance, especially a large number of small, mobile, survivable and lethal weapons, like anti-ship missiles. To paraphrase [Ukraine’s Volodymyr] Zelenskiy, they don’t need more visits, they need weapons. And they have to do a lot more themselves to prepare for a possible attack.”TopicsNancy PelosiUS politicsUS foreign policyChinaTaiwanAsia PacificnewsReuse this content More

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      Republican who voted to impeach Trump projected to win primary

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      Republican who voted to impeach Trump projected to win primaryDan Newhouse, one of 10 members of Congress to vote for impeachment, set to beat Trump-backed Loren Culp in Washington state Dan Newhouse, one of the few Republican House members to vote in January in favor of the impeachment of Donald Trump, is poised to move forward to the general election in Washington state, according to a projection by the Associated Press.Viktor Orbán turns Texas conference into transatlantic far-right love-inRead moreNewhouse was one of 10 Republicans who voted in January to have Trump impeached, even ahead of explosive revelations about the former president’s support and endorsement of the January 6 riots just a year prior.This victory comes on the heels of another fellow Republican supporter of the impeachment, Peter Meijer, losing his votes in Michigan.Republican Loren Culp, who has been backed by Trump in the election, was a close second to Newhouse in Washington’s fourth congressional district, garnering the second highest number of Republican votes in four out of the eight counties. In some of the counties where Newhouse won, however, he received almost double the number of votes as Culp.Sign up to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every weekday morning at 7am BSTCulp was up against six other Republican candidates, and will face Doug White, the district’s only Democratic candidate, in November for the general election.Despite his victory, the journey has rarely been smooth for Newhouse. Following his vote for impeachment in January, six Republican leaders in his district demanded his resignation.He defended his position, claiming he “made a decision to vote based on my oath to support and defend the constitution”.On 2 August, he had majority votes in three out of those six counties that had voted for his resignation.TopicsRepublicansUS politicsWashington stateDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

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      in World Politics

      Saudi Arabia and Lebanon: A Tale of Two Economies

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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

    • 125 Shares99 Views

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      Indiana assembly passes anti-abortion bill, governor signs it into law

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      Indiana assembly passes anti-abortion bill, governor signs it into lawState becomes the first in the US to pass new laws removing Roe rights after Eric Holcomb’s assent Indiana’s state legislature has become the first in the US to pass new legislation restricting access to abortions since the federal supreme court overturned Roe v Wade.The bill went to the state’s Republican governor, Eric Holcomb, who signed it into law on Friday night.Indiana was among the earliest Republican-run state legislatures to debate tighter abortion laws after the supreme court ruling in June that removed constitutional protections. It is the first state to pass a ban through both chambers.The Indiana senate approved the near-total ban 28-19, hours after house members advanced it 62-38. It includes limited exceptions, including in cases of rape and incest, and to protect the life and physical health of the mother. The exceptions for rape and incest are limited to 10 weeks post-fertilization, meaning victims could not get an abortion in Indiana after that. Victims would not be required to sign a notarized affidavit attesting to an attack.The Kansas victory shows that Democrats can fight for abortion rights and win | Moira DoneganRead moreOutside the house chamber, abortion rights activists often chanted over lawmakers’ remarks, carrying signs like “Roe roe roe your vote” and “Build this wall” between church and state. Some house Democrats wore blazers over pink “Bans Off Our Bodies” T-shirts.Indiana lawmakers listened to testimony over the past two weeks in which residents on all sides of the issue rarely, if ever, supported the legislation. Abortion-rights supporters said the bill went too far, while anti-abortion activists said it did not go far enough.In advocating against the bill, Rep Ann Vermilion condemned her fellow Republicans for calling women who obtained abortions “murderers”.“I think that the Lord’s promise is for grace and kindness,” she said. “He would not be jumping to condemn these women.”The house rejected, largely on party lines, a Democratic proposal to place a non-binding question on the statewide November election ballot: “Shall abortion remain legal in Indiana?”The Indiana house speaker, Todd Huston, said that if residents were unhappy, they could vote for new lawmakers.Kansas voters already resoundingly rejected a measure that would have allowed the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to tighten abortion in the first test of voters’ feelings about the issue since Roe was overturned.Indiana’s proposed ban also came after the political firestorm over a 10-year-old rape victim who traveled to the state from neighboring Ohio to end her pregnancy. The case gained attention when an Indianapolis doctor said the child came to Indiana because of Ohio’s “fetal heartbeat” ban.Democratic Rep Maureen Bauer spoke tearfully before Friday’s vote about people in her South Bend district who oppose the bill – the husbands standing behind their wives, the fathers supporting their daughters – as well as the women “who are demanding that we are seen as equal”.Bauer’s comments were followed by raucous cheers from protesters in the hallway and subdued applause from fellow Democrats.“You may not have thought that these women would show up,” Bauer said. “Maybe you thought we wouldn’t be paying attention.”West Virginia legislators on 29 July passed up the chance to be the first state with a unified ban after its lower house refused to concur with senate amendments that removed criminal penalties for physicians who performed illegal abortions. Delegates instead asked for a conference committee to consider the details between the bills.TopicsAbortionRoe v WadeIndianaUS politicsReuse this content More

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      Democrats reach deal to pass major climate bill after Sinema says yes – as it happened

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      For the past week, just about everybody in Washington politics has been asking the same question: will Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema vote for her party’s plan to fight climate change and lower health care costs?The Arizona lawmaker is known for her opposition to changing the tax code, as the bill – known was the Inflation Reduction Act – does to fund its programs. In the end, she did demand changes to how the legislation is paid for, but they weren’t especially big.With her support, Democrats have all 50 votes they need to get the bill through the evenly divided Senate. There’s not much Republicans themselves can do to stop them, so, instead, they’re hoping that Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough intervenes. The Democrats hope to pass the legislation via the reconciliation procedure, which requires only a simple majority of votes, but there are only certain types of changes to the law they can make that way. MacDonough is to decide whether they followed proper procedure, and as Politico reports, Republicans hope she’ll strike certain provisions from the bill – which could upend the delicate compromise Democrats have forged among themselves, and jeopardize the bill entirely.The pieces have been set in motion for the Senate to convene this weekend and begin voting on Democrats’ plan to fight climate change and lower inflation, which the party appears to have the support necessary to pass. At the White House, Joe Biden cheered yet another month of healthy job growth as he looks for ways to revitalize his dismal approval ratings.Here’s a look back at what happened today:
      Republicans plan to frustrate Democrats in the Senate during votes on amendments to the spending plan, known as the Inflation Reduction Act.
      Donald Trump is reportedly negotiating with the justice department amid the ongoing criminal probe into the January 6 insurrection.
      United Nations chief António Guterres warned that there is “no way to solve the most pressing problems of all the world without an effective dialogue and cooperation” between the United States and China – which are currently feuding over US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit this week to Taiwan.
      Scientists are warning that climate change is driving increased lightning strikes, after two were killed and two critically injured during storms near the White House yesterday.
      Biden’s recent string of political victories has generated a meme: “Dark Brandon”.
      China is furious over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan earlier this week, and today, Beijing cut off cooperating with the United States on fighting climate change, and some military communication.But at a briefing, US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said China and the United States’ military leaders still have some ways of communicating:.@WHNSC’s John Kirby says China did _not_ cut all mil-mil-mil comms: “These channels they took down don’t eliminate the opportunity for senior members of the military to communicate.” Translation: Chairman/Minister level channels still open.— Nick Schifrin (@nickschifrin) August 5, 2022
      He did, however, condemn Beijing’s decision to stop collaborating on ways to lower emissions:.@WHNSC’s John Kirby on Beijing pausing climate change dialogue: “We believe this is fundamentally irresponsible. China is not punishing just the US. It’s punishing the whole world.”— Nick Schifrin (@nickschifrin) August 5, 2022
      Kirby later adds: “One of the areas that was ripe for collaboration was climate. They think they are punishing us. They are punishing the whole world.”— Nick Schifrin (@nickschifrin) August 5, 2022
      United Nations chief António Guterres had said much the same earlier in the day.China halts US cooperation on range of issues after Pelosi’s Taiwan visitRead moreReuters reports that the White House will soon send $1 billion in aid to Ukraine, including armored medical transports and the types of long-range weapons that have allowed Ukraine to regain momentum recently against the Russian invaders.Citing three sources familiar with the matter, Reuters says president Joe Biden hasn’t authorized the weapons yet, but could do so as soon as Monday. The package would be one of the biggest aid packages since the war began and is expected to include more munitions for the Himars rocket system Ukraine has deployed to great effect recently, as well as Nasams surface-to-air missiles.The weapons could be used in Ukraine’s expected offensive to recapture Kherson, a southern city that’s one of the largest under the control of the Russians.Can Ukrainian forces recapture Kherson from Russia?Read moreDoug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, is threatening to back out of testifying before the January 6 committee unless he can record the interaction, Politico reports.Mastriano “has legitimate concerns that your committee may attempt to influence the outcome of the Pennsylvania state elections through the dissemination of disinformation,” his lawyer told the House panel investigating the insurrection, according to Politico.His resistance could lead to a court fight between the lawmakers and Mastriano, a state senator and 2020 election denier whom Donald Trump backed in the Pennsylvania gubernatorial primary. While some acolytes of the former president have spoken to the committee, others have resisted – to their peril. Top Trump adviser Steve Bannon was found guilty of contempt of Congress last month for defying subpoenas from the panel, and former trade adviser Peter Navarro is facing similar charges.Threatening Washington’s top public health official has real consequences, as a West Virginia man found out today:A federal judge sentenced a West Virginia man to three years in prison by for sending intimidating emails to public health chief Anthony Fauci, including threats to kill the US’s top infectious disease official over his handling of the Covid pandemic.US district judge Paula Xinis in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Thursday sentenced Thomas Connally, 56, of Snowshoe, West Virginia, to 37 months in federal prison and another three years of supervised release after he pleaded guilty in May to a federal charge of making threats against a federal official.In one email, Connally threatened that Fauci and his family would be “dragged into the street, beaten to death, and set on fire,” prosecutors said.Man who threatened to kill Anthony Fauci given three-year prison termRead moreCNN has a bit more detail on the Inflation Reduction Act’s path to enactment in Congress: the House won’t be back in session until next Friday, giving the Senate plenty of time to approve the bill.House will return August 12th to give final passage to the Senate reconciliation bill, per Hoyer— Manu Raju (@mkraju) August 5, 2022
      Senators will convene on Saturday to vote on the bill, which is a major priority for the Biden administration and allocates money to fighting climate change and lowering health care costs.A day after ordering Alex Jones to pay $4.1 million in compensatory damages for spreading conspiracy theories about 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, CNN reports a Texas jury has begun deliberating over how much to make Jones pay in punitive damages – which could greatly enhance the financial pain resulting from his defamation trial:The jury in the Sandy Hook trial is now deliberating on punitive damages.— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) August 5, 2022
      The Guardian’s Ramon Antonio Vargas has the latest on the trial, which has been more dramatic than most:A financial expert testifying for the parents of a child killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting has estimated that Alex Jones and his media company are worth between $135m and $240m as they seek punitive damages beyond the $4.1m they secured a day ago for the US conspiracy theorist’s falsehoods about the massacre.The expert, Bernard Pettingill, said from the witness stand in an Austin courtroom that Jones and his Free Speech Systems company earned more than $50m annually between 2016 to 2021 – even as popular social media companies banned him from promoting himself through them – due to his “rabid following” of millions.Pettingill added that it was difficult to get an exact read of Jones’s financial outlook because he used a web of shell companies that own nothing and employ no one to move money belonging to him around.Alex Jones worth up to $240m, expert says, as family seeks punitive damagesRead moreJoe Biden’s been on something of a roll lately, and the internet appears to have noticed, gifting the 79-year-old president with a meme: “Dark Brandon”. While its origins are on the right, the moniker has been reclaimed by Biden’s supporters and spread on Twitter just as the Democratic president wracked up a number of wins in Congress and elsewhere.For example: Cutting the deficit, reducing prescription drug prices, investing in domestic energy production. pic.twitter.com/e0XQCP5hQv— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 5, 2022
      Or perhaps:Our hero in the shadows… #DarkBrandon pic.twitter.com/ChDLenuIMB— JumboPosterInChief (@ChiefJumbo) August 2, 2022
      Like many meme origin stories, that of “Dark Brandon” is lengthy and packed with references to other memes and internet trends. One of them is “Let’s Go Brandon”, the sanitized version of “Fuck Joe Biden” that became popular among his detractors last year. On Twitter, Biden’s supporters are using it to refer to several recent success stories for the White House, including the killing of top al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri this past weekend, the breakthrough on Democrats’ climate change and health care bill days later and the passage of another measure to spur semiconductor production late last month. Slate has published some thoughts on what Dark Brandon’s arrival heralds:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;} The term “Dark Brandon” first surfaced in early 2022 as part of the usual gamut of memes and burns deployed by America’s extremely online socialists—especially those who’ve found themselves feeling euphorically apocalyptic in the face of unchecked climate change, a theocratic Supreme Court, and Joe Manchin’s seemingly insurmountable veto power. For them, “Dark Brandon” was a way to lean into despair. The invaluable resource Know Your Meme delved into the paper trail and uncovered a trove of extremely dark viral tweets from the spring, where Dark Brandon could be found, say, pointing a gun into a woman’s mouth in a Photoshop or overseeing public executions in a Twitter user’s ironic fantasy. The idea here is that Joe Biden was not the fuddy-duddy centrist he appeared to be and instead represented some sort of satanic, Revelations-esque figure, way worse than anyone can imagine.
      It’s an aesthetic that mirrors the related Dark MAGA trend, in which alt-right dead-enders and QAnon veterans have adopted an increasingly occultist tone to sheathe their reactionary beliefs. (Here, for instance, is an image of Jordan Peterson with the same facial tattoos as the rapper 6ix9ine.) The difference is that Dark MAGA posters fantasize about the return of an even-more-unhinged, gloves-off Trump, out for revenge. Dark Brandon, on the other hand, was the creation of people without much hope at all.
      We can debate over whether it’s foolish to assign any intellectual significance to the tweets made by weirdos on the internet, but I do think that both Dark Brandon and DarkMAGA were interesting artifacts of America’s superheated political environment. The country does feel like it’s perched on the precipice of some sort of prophetic rebirth, and perhaps, as our institutions erode into the sea, Dark Brandon is the harbinger of that final judgment. Meanwhile, because Trump does feel like he might come back, more vengeful than before, DarkMAGA’s attempts to speak that into existence feel like a warning.In a speech at the White House, Joe Biden praised the July jobs numbers, which came in much better than expected. He also hailed the Inflation Reduction Act that’s making progress in the US Senate and is on what Democrats hope is the final stretch before making it into law.“We are on the cusp of the most important step we can take to help Congress lower inflation,” he said, speaking outside and sporting his trademark aviator sunglasses because he was still isolating due to his Covid-19 diagnosis.He talked of the ongoing decrease in gas prices over the past month-and-a-half, noting fuel was available for “less than $3.99 a gallon at more than half the gas stations in North America”, Biden also touted the speed of the labor market’s recovery, after more than 20 million people lost their job when Covid-19 broke out.“That’s why the strength and the pace job of the recovery is so important. In the past, it’s taking years for Americans to recover from an economic crisis. When that’s happened, millions of people suffer from years and years just trying to get back to where they were before, just trying to get back on their feet. And that didn’t happen this time”, Biden said.Joe Biden is about to sign a couple of bills at the White House and we’ll have an ear out for any relevant remarks. It’s a relatively lively Friday, given that the House and Senate are out, and we’ll have more, so stay tuned.Here’s where things stand.
      There is “no way to solve the most pressing problems of all the world without an effective dialogue and cooperation” between the United States and China, a spokesman for United Nations chief António Guterres said.
      Scientists are warning that climate change is driving increased lightning strikes, after two were killed and two critically injured during storms near the White House yesterday.
      Joe Biden cheered the better-than-expected employment data released by the Labor Department this morning, saying it shows the success of his administration’s plan to help Americans.
      Kyrsten Sinema, conservative Democratic US Senator of Arizona, is on board with the Inflation Reduction Act legislation now pending at the door of the Senate, in another breakthrough for Democrats and Joe Biden’s domestic agenda.
      Meanwhile, if you want some up-to-the-minute international developments, follow either of our global live blogs, on the geopolitical fall-out from Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, and on the war in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February.Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz is busy entertaining the peanut gallery at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) event in his home state.Cruz was revving himself and the crowd up now by roundly mocking everything Democrat, also masks against the spread of coronavirus, presidential health adviser Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, “communist, woke professors”, etc, etc.He just promised that in November, south Texas “will turn red” and elect Republican members of congress in Rio Grande Valley on the US-Mexico border.And, nationally, Cruz is forecasting “not just a red wave but a tsunami” of GOP victories at the midterm elections.On the subject of the polite modern habit of specifying one’s preferred pronouns, Cruz shrieked to whoops: “My pronouns are ‘kiss my ass’.” “We are on the cusp of something amazing in this country,” Cruz tells the crowd. Alarming might be more accurate.The right-winger is exiting the stage now, to soaring rock music.Well my name is Ted Cruz And my pronouns are kiss my ass pic.twitter.com/M0wVzR7ZRv— 🔥⭐️Edwin⭐️🔥 (@Edwin07011) August 5, 2022
      There is “no way to solve the most pressing problems of all the world without an effective dialogue and cooperation” between the United States and China, a spokesman for United Nations chief António Guterres said today, Reuters writes.This followed the Chinese government in Beijing halting climate talks with Washington, Reuters writes.Tackling climate change has been a key area of cooperation between the two superpowers.But China has suspended talks as part of its escalating retaliation over House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan earlier this week.If you want to read our global live blog on all the developments in geopolitics as a result of Pelosi’s visit to the Taiwanese capital, Taipei, you can do so here.Guterres last month warned that wildfires and heatwaves wreaking havoc across swathes of the globe show humanity facing is “collective suicide”, as governments around the world scramble to protect people from the impacts of extreme heat.Pelosi is currently on the Japan leg of her Asia tour, which would not have been especially controversial if it had not been for her insistence on visiting Taiwan, the independent island nation over which the People’s Republic of China has claimed sovereignty since nationalists fled there to escape the communist mainland takeover in 1949.President Joe Biden remains positive for Covid-19, but is otherwise doing almost fine, the White House announced.According to a letter from his doctor Kevin O’Connor, Biden’s “cough has almost completely resolved”, though his continued positive test means he will have to “continue his strict isolation measures”.You can read the full update here.The REPEAT Project, a Princeton University and Dartmouth College initiative to evaluate federal policies’ impact on emissions and climate change, has done a quick analysis of the climate change provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act.It’s a dense read, but it confirms the potency of the proposal, which would get the United States close, but not all the way, to meeting its targets for lowering emissions. Here’s a summary of its findings:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The Senate Inflation Reduction Act would:
      • cut annual emissions in 2030 by an additional ~1 billion metric tons below current policy (including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law)
      • close two-thirds of the remaining emissions gap between current policy and the nation’s 2030 climate target (50% below 2005)
      • get the U.S. to within ~0.5 billion tons of the 2030 climate target
      • reduce cumulative GHG emissions by about 6.3 billion tons over the next decade (through 2032).Republican state treasurers are coordinating efforts to retaliate against financial institutions that have taken steps to mitigate climate change, according to an investigation published today by The New York Times.While they still do plenty of business with oil companies, major asset managers like BlackRock and banks like Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase have signaled a desire to support the transition from fossil fuels. But Republican officials are trying to use their states’ financial heft to get the financial institutions to change course.Here’s more from the Times’ report:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;} Last week, Riley Moore, the treasurer of West Virginia, announced that several major banks — including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo — would be barred from government contracts with his state because they are reducing their investments in coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.
      Mr. Moore and the treasurers of Louisiana and Arkansas have pulled more than $700 million out of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment manager, over objections that the firm is too focused on environmental issues. At the same time, the treasurers of Utah and Idaho are pressuring the private sector to drop climate action and other causes they label as “woke.”
      And treasurers from Pennsylvania, Arizona and Oklahoma joined a larger campaign to thwart the nominations of federal regulators who wanted to require that banks, funds and companies disclose the financial risks posed by a warming planet.
      At the nexus of these efforts is the State Financial Officers Foundation, a little-known nonprofit organization based in Shawnee, Kan., that once focused on cybersecurity, borrowing costs and managing debt loads, among other routine issues.
      Then President Biden took office, promising to speed the country’s transition away from oil, gas and coal, the burning of which is dangerously heating the planet.
      The foundation began pushing Republican state treasurers, who are mostly elected officials and who are responsible for managing their state’s finances, to use their power to promote oil and gas interests and to stymie Mr. Biden’s climate agenda, records show.President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Kentucky on Monday, August 8, to survey damage caused by catastrophic flooding in the eastern part of the state, the White House announced.The death toll from the floods has hit 37, while hundreds remains missing. Scientists have linked the severity of the storm to climate change.Kentucky grapples with effect of climate crisis as floods leave trail of devastationRead moreRepublicans are on the defensive in Congress after Democrats coalesced around the Inflation Reduction Act and announced plans to begin voting on the marquee spending measure over the weekend.That doesn’t mean they don’t have a plan to try to stop it. Senators will get to offer amendments to the bill and CNN reports Republicans Lindsey Graham and John Thune have signaled they want to make that process, known as “vote-a-rama” as painful for Democrats as possible:“What will vote-a-rama be like? It will be hell” Graham told me of the marathon voting session on reconciliation. Thune promises “hard” votes. Goal for Republicans: Try to win a vote on the floor that will change the bill and convince Manchin and Sinema to tank it— Manu Raju (@mkraju) August 5, 2022 More

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      The Guardian view on the Kansas abortion vote: voice of America | Editorial

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      The Guardian view on the Kansas abortion vote: voice of AmericaEditorialThis week’s vote to defend women’s rights mirrors US opinion on the issue more generally and may shape the midterm elections Nearly 20 years ago, the political writer Thomas Frank authored a bestseller to which he gave the title What’s the Matter with Kansas? It was one of the first books of the post-Bill Clinton era to try to nail the rightwing populism redefining middle America. Mr Frank, who is himself from Kansas, chose the title deliberately. Despite an earlier history of grassroots antitrust activism, 20th- and 21st-century Kansas had dug in ever deeper against progressivism; no Democratic presidential candidate has now won there since 1964. Donald Trump, who epitomises everything about which Mr Frank wrote, carried Kansas with ease in 2016 and 2020.At the heart of Mr Frank’s argument was the view that culture war campaigns on abortion and gay equality have been crucial in persuading economically insecure Kansas voters to move ever more solidly rightwards. Much of the book focuses on how the Democratic party itself contributed to the shift. The consequence of this process seemed to reach an even darker place in 2009 when the pro-choice doctor George Tiller was murdered in the Kansas city of Wichita.Yet on Tuesday voters in Kansas chose to make a stand. In an unexpectedly high turnout contest, they voted to uphold the state’s abortion rights by a 59% to 41% margin. They did this in the face of the widely held view that the US supreme court’s decision to overturn the Roe v Wade judgment has reset America’s political landscape more conservatively. They also defied the expectation that Republicans, not Democrats, would be more energised by the campaign.It is possible that there were special local factors at play in Kansas. The voting paper was confusingly written; abortion rights supporters had to vote “No” not “Yes” to keep the state’s protections. Tuesday was also a day in which hardline conservatives, supporting and supported by Mr Trump, scored well in other states, such as Arizona. Caution is therefore in order in extrapolating too recklessly from the Kansas vote. Nevertheless, the vote was a rallying call. If 59% of the people can vote for abortion rights in Kansas, the likelihood is that at least 59% will vote for them in many other states too, perhaps in at least 40 of the 50. It is also very much in line with national polling showing 57% national disapproval after the supreme court’s ruling. President Biden was right to emphasise in his reaction to the Kansas vote that the majority of Americans support women’s abortion rights.In Kansas at least, the justices have not, after all, had the last word. Most of all, this vote was important for the women of the state. But it has two wider implications. The first is that democracy has hit back, not just at the supreme court ruling, but also at the false idea that the court should have the final say in American politics. The second is that abortion rights may prove to be a potent mobilising issue in the November midterm elections more generally, which indeed they should be. It is high time that Democrats realised they do not have to campaign on economic issues alone and instead took the fight for abortion rights to the Republicans. The Kansas vote should embolden them to do so.TopicsAbortionOpinionHealthWomenUS politicseditorialsReuse this content More