The sky had not yet begun to brighten on a chilly February morning in 1911 when the first workers arrived at the seafood cannery in Biloxi, Mississippi. Slipping in after them was a slender man carrying cumbersome camera equipment. Photographer Lewis Hine was not allowed in the cannery. But he had no qualms about sneaking in at five in the morning, as he knew the managers would not arrive until hours later. He would return again at noon in a rowboat, tying up to the cannery dock, to get within striking distance of his subjects.

One was Manuel, who, at just five years old, was already a veteran shrimp picker. In the photograph taken by Hine, Manuel is round-cheeked and round-tummied, with a serious expression. Barefoot, he stands facing the camera, dressed in a checkered shirt, short pants, and a soiled apron, wearing a fisherman’s cap on his head. In each hand he holds a strainer pot. Behind him is an immense mound of oyster shells.

Hine had traveled to Biloxi on behalf of the National Child Labor Committee, a group formed in 1904. One of the greatest documentary photographers, Hine journeyed to factories, mills, fields, and mines to document how America’s children toiled. His images played a major role in the enactment of child labor laws in the United States.

Hine—who was born 150 years ago, on September 26, 1874—pioneered the use of photography as part of crusades for social reform. Now is a good time to recall Hine’s efforts as part of the broader movement to improve the conditions of children at work, in school, and in housing. In the past few years, America’s business lobby has sort to reverse that progress and roll back protections, according to the Economic Policy institute. This year alone, six states—Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, and West Virginia, enacted legislation to weaken child labor protections, despite an increase in child labor violations. These and other states have been trying to roll back rules that deal with youth work permits, work hours and rest breaks, and protections from hazardous work in response to lobbying campaigns by the restaurant, construction, hospitality, grocery, and farm industries. Other states, however, are pushing to strengthen laws.

Interior of tobacco shed, Hawthorn Farm. Girls in foreground are 8, 9, and 10 years old. The 10 yr. old makes 50 cents a day. 12 workers on this farm are 8 to 14 years old, and about 15 are over 15 yrs. (Photo: Lewis Hine / Library of Congress)

Lewis Hine was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, above a popular Main Street restaurant that his parents owned. His father died when Lewis was seventeen years old. He worked as a hauler at a furniture factory, toiling thirteen hours a day, six days a week, to help support his mother and sister. But in 1893, during an economic downturn, the factory closed. He picked up odd jobs, splitting firewood and making deliveries. (Delivery boys were later a favorite subject in his work.) When he was hired as a bank janitor, he studied stenography at night and was promoted to secretary.

Hine’s life began to change when he met Frank Manny, who became his mentor, introducing him to the ideas of John Dewey and, later, Felix Adler, the founder of the Ethical Culture movement. Hine enrolled at the teachers’ college in Oshkosh, where Manny taught, and then spent a year at the University of Chicago. When Manny became superintendent of the Ethical Culture School in New York City, he offered Hine a job teaching geography and natural history. While teaching, Hine completed his degree in education at New York University.

The Ethical Culture School, founded by Adler, was progressive and experimental. It based its curriculum on humanist values that helped lay the groundwork for Hine’s future work. Although Hine had never picked up a camera before, Manny suggested he become the school photographer. He took pictures of school activities, set up a dark room, and started a camera club.

Manny used Hine’s emerging photography skills to teach students about social conditions, in particular the conditions facing the waves of immigrants coming through Ellis Island. Manny urged Hine to portray the dignity and worth of the newcomers, in part to help counter a growing anti-immigrant sentiment. Hine, with Manny as his assistant, lugged his rudimentary photography equipment to Ellis Island. He never photographed people without their permission, and in the cacophony of languages, he had to pantomime his requests to take a picture. Using an old box camera, glass-plate negatives, and magnesium flash powder that he had to ignite manually, he managed to capture beautiful images of people just arriving from Europe. He returned to Ellis Island many times over the coming years, taking 200 photographs in all.

After graduating from New York University, Hine began graduate studies in sociology at Columbia University. This prepared him for an assignment with Arthur and Paul Kellogg, who ran the reform-oriented magazine Charities and The Commons (later renamed Survey). They asked Hine to take pictures for the Pittsburgh Survey, a pioneering six-volume sociological study of conditions in that urban industrial city funded by the Russell Sage Foundation.

Hine followed in the footsteps of documentary photographer Jacob Riis, who captured the squalid conditions of New York’s tenements in his 1890 masterpiece How the Other Half Lives. But whereas Riis photographed his subjects as helpless victims, beaten down by an oppressive system, Hine sought to present his subjects as people with pride and dignity, often tough and defiant, who held out hope for a better world. Hine was known for inviting his subjects to reveal what they wished of themselves rather than trying to catch them or coax them into wearing expressions of anguish or emptiness. Historian Robert Westbrook credits Hine with engaging his subjects with “decorum and tact,” rarely taking candid shots but instead encouraging eye contact with the camera lens.

Jewel and Harold Walker, 6 and 5 years old, pick 20 to 25 pounds of cotton a day in Comanche County, Oklahoma. (Photo: Lewis Hine / Library of Congress)

Hine worked with advocacy organizations that were trying to ban child labor. One of his pictures is of a mother and her four children sitting around the kitchen table, in a New York tenement lit by an oil lamp, all making paper flowers. “Angelica is three years old,” he noted. “She pulls apart the petals, inserts the center, and glues it to the stem, making 540 flowers a day for five cents.”

In 1908 the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC)—led by prominent reformers like Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and Florence Kelley—offered Hine a full-time job as an investigative photographer. He traveled around the country, photographing doffer boys in cotton mills, cigar makers, coal breakers, cannery workers, berry and tobacco pickers, laundry workers, even glassworkers—all under the age of sixteen. To gain access to factories and mills, he would pose as a fire inspector, a Bible salesman, or an industrial photographer. When that failed, he would linger at plant gates, asking children if he could take their picture. His years of teaching, combined with a gentle demeanor, allowed him to connect well with youngsters.

In a speech to the National Conference of Charities and Correction in 1909 entitled “Social Photography: How the Camera May Help in the Social Uplift,” Hine argued that “the great social peril is darkness and ignorance.” Social reformers, he said, need to expose the terrible living and working conditions that are invisible to many Americans. “The average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify. Of course, you and I know that this unbounded faith in the integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.”

Hine was a stickler for individual details, recording whenever possible children’s names, ages, working hours, and wages. He was particularly moved by the young boys laboring at coal mines. Of their work, he wrote, “It’s like sitting in a coal bin all day long, except that the coal is always moving and clattering and cuts their fingers. Sometimes the boys wear lamps in their caps to help them see through the thick dust. They bend over the chutes until their backs ache, and they get tired and sick because they have to breathe coal dust instead of good, pure air.” While he was at a Pennsylvania mine, two boys fell in the chute and were smothered to death.

Leo, 48 inches high, 8 years old. Picks up bobbins at 15 cents a day in Elk Cotton Mills. (Photo: Lewis Hine / Library of Congress)

Hine’s photographs made visible the long-ignored plight of working children. They were used in brochures and booklets, news and magazine articles, exhibits and public lectures. His work played an important role in the movement to enact state and federal child labor laws (which were often paired with compulsory education laws to keep children in school), In 1912, the movement persuaded Congress to create the federal Children’s Bureau. President William Howard Taft appointed Julia Lathrop, a well-known activist who was part of the Hull House settlement in Chicago, as its first director. Over the next decade, Lathrop – the first women to head a federal agency -- directed research into child labor, infant mortality, maternal mortality, juvenile delinquency, and mothers' pensions. Using the bureau’s research findings and Hine’s photographs, the NCLC pushed Congress to pass further legislation, including the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act of 1916 and the Sheppard-Towner Act, a 1921 law that gave the Children’s Bureau the authority to conduct research and pay for services to combat maternal and infant mortality. The movement to end child labor abuses culminated in 1938 with the Fair Labor Standards Act, which included strong protections for children.

In 1918 Hine left the NCLC and went to work for the American Red Cross, traveling to Europe to document the lives of refugees who were uprooted during World War I.

During the 1920s, wanting to focus on more-uplifting subjects, he began a series of portraits honoring American workers. His final major project was to document the construction of the Empire State Building. Although by then in his mid-fifties, he scrambled to dizzying heights to photograph work that he felt captured the uplifting nature of the human spirit. These photos were published in his 1932 book, Men at Work.

From the book, Men at Work, a workman on the framework of the Empire State Building, New York City, 1931. (Photo: Lewis Hine)

In 1936 Hine was appointed head photographer for the National Research Project of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. But the next year, when the Farm Security Administration hired photographers to document the working and living conditions of poor and working-class Americans, Hine was not among those hired. The project director, Roy Stryker, said that Hine was difficult to work with. In addition, Hine’s approach of allowing his subjects to pose for the camera may not have been in sync with the other photographers’ notions of documentary social realism.

Hine’s life ended in misfortune. Viewed as outmoded in a time when candid shots were in vogue, he could not find work. He lost his home and ended up on welfare, dying in poverty within a year of his wife’s death. Only after his death was his work once again appreciated. Along with Riis, he is recognized as the father of documentary social photography, an inspiration to many younger photographers—including Paul Strand and others who joined the radical Photo League, as well as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Gordon Parks, and Milton Rogovin, who all used the camera as a weapon in the struggle for social reform. Today thousands of Hine’s images have been preserved at major institutions, including the Library of Congress.

Israel’s violence toward its neighbors, long out of control in its destruction of Gaza, now threatens to open new fronts, involve new nations, and even drag the United States into direct conflict. Promises of a cease-fire from the Biden administration have come to nothing. Soft behind-the-scenes diplomacy has failed to achieve peace.

In response, “Cease-fire,” the first demand of the peace movement since Israel’s destruction of Gaza began, has evolved. The actions of the Israeli military and government, the indiscriminate killing of women and children with U.S. weapons, and appropriate frustration from activists in the street have created a new demand: an American arms embargo against Israel. For U.S. President Joe Biden and his administration, it may be the only way out of a new quagmire in the Middle East.

But instead of deescalating the war and reaching a lasting peace with the Palestinian people, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government is expanding the war to new fronts. On September 23, the Israel Defense Forces launched a barrage of attacks on Lebanon, killing over 600 people and wounding thousands. It is now threatening a ground invasion. The previous week it simultaneously detonated electronic devices across Lebanon, killing dozens and maiming thousands, including civilians and children. Commenting on that attack, former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said, “I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism.” These terror attacks in Lebanon were perpetrated just one day after a senior Biden adviser warned Netanyahu not to expand the war.

President Biden’s strategy to achieve a cease-fire and end the destruction of Gaza has, so far, failed. His strategy to prevent a wider war in the Middle East is currently failing. It’s time for a tougher, clearer tack.

These are only the latest examples of a pattern of escalation by Israel. In January an Israeli strike killed a top Hezbollah commander in Beirut, Lebanon. In April Israel destroyed the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria. In late July they assassinated the political leader of Hamas, and lead negotiator in the cease-fire talks, in Tehran, while he was attending the inauguration of Iran’s new president. Israel has also escalated the scale of violence in the West Bank, killing over 500 civilians in the past year and launching a major military operation there in August.

Israeli officials have recently described their strategy of expanding the war to include Lebanon as “deescalation by escalation”—an oxymoron that flies in the face of the Biden administration’s long-stated goal to prevent a wider, regional war. This diplomatic failure on the part of President Biden and his foreign policy team threatens to drag the United States into another war in the Middle East. The Pentagon announced that the U.S. is sending additional forces, adding to the 40,000 U.S. servicemen and women already in the region. Another aircraft carrier, the USS Truman, and accompanying ships is now headed to the area to join the USS Abraham Lincoln, sending thousands more sailors to the region as well, at considerable expense.

More direct U.S. involvement in Israel’s wars threatens not only those U.S. personnel, but also the political situation at home. A major foreign policy failure so close to the November presidential election could have the effect of bolstering former President Donald Trump’s bid to retake the White House. Trump has consistently criticized Biden for not supporting Israel enough, saying he should let them “finish the job” in Gaza. No friend to the Palestinians, Trump even used the term “Palestinian” as an insult and slur on the debate stage with Biden. Despite repeated signs that the Israeli PM is not a trustworthy partner for peace, President Biden has failed to use his leverage to rein him in. In a recent statement Netanyahu declared he will not entertain diplomatic ideas on Lebanon and will not engage in cease-fire talks for 45 days. The fact that the statement came 45 days before the U.S. presidential election is a clear signal of Netanyahu’s political desires and motivations.

So what can Mr. Biden, his administration, and presidential hopeful VP Kamala Harris do? They can change course and finally put their foot down with Netanyahu and his right-wing government. The introduction of Joint Resolutions of Disapproval by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont provides an opportunity to do so. These privileged resolutions requires the U.S. Senate to take a vote on the sale of $20 billion dollars of military equipment to Israel. Over $18 billion comes in the form of high tech F-15 fighter-bombers, but the sale also includes tank munitions, mortar shells, and precision bombs. Biden could preempt the vote by announcing a pause to at least some weapons to Israel in light of the expanding war he has long opposed publicly. This move could also shield the Biden administration from forthcoming reports from inspectors general investigating human rights violations committed by Israel using U.S. weapons, a breach of US law.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has certainly given President Biden cause to stop sending U.S. arms to his right-wing government. The assault on the people of Gaza is nearing its one year anniversary. Tens of thousands of Israelis are protesting their government’s failure to get back hostages taken by Hamas during its attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Former Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert have criticized Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war and blamed him for strategic failures that led to October 7. President Biden could embrace these more reasonable forces in Israel, framing his arms stoppage as a message to Netanyahu personally and an effort to retrieve the hostages.

He’s done it before. In one of President Biden’s first foreign policy moves as president he announced a pause in offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia. The kingdom had been using such weapons to destroy its neighbor to the south, Yemen, since 2015. Biden’s move helped pave the way for negotiations leading to a cease-fire in Yemen that has largely held since 2022. His example of presidential leadership, while not perfect, illustrates a clear road map. There’s historical precedent too. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush also leveraged U.S. arms to Israel. Want a cease-fire to end or prevent humanitarian disaster? Stop providing the fire.

President Biden’s strategy to achieve a cease-fire and end the destruction of Gaza has, so far, failed. His strategy to prevent a wider war in the Middle East is currently failing. It’s time for a tougher, clearer tack. There is still time to prevent the complete destruction of Gaza and to avert another disastrous regional war. There is time for Biden to avoid a political blunder that will permanently damage his legacy as president. There is time to energize young voters and Arab-American and Muslim-American voters who fear a return of Trumpism but can’t stomach a vote for an administration they see as complicit in genocide.

But there isn’t much time.

The Not Another Bomb Campaign, launched by the Uncommitted movement that successfully mobilized over 700,000 voters to express their discontent with Mr. Biden’s Gaza policy in the Democratic Primary, has the correct framing. “It is crystal clear: In order to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza, the U.S. must immediately stop arming Israel.” Satisfying this new demand can also stop the expansion of violence into Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, preventing the loss of American lives. Heeding it might be the only way to stop the horror.

Europe is the biggest market for U.S. fracked gas exports. This fracked gas is liquefied—turned into LNG—and then shipped to the E.U.’s shores. Once regasified it runs in pipelines to fuel industry processes or heat homes or food. While it was enthusiastically titled “Freedom Gas” in 2019, when the E.U.-U.S. LNG deal was forged, more and more Europeans realize today that this gas comes with a very bitter aftertaste, concerning both our planet’s climate and the environment as well as human rights and the health of impacted communities.

This spring, I had the opportunity to meet Corpus Christi and Southern Louisiana inhabitants and learn firsthand about the devastating impact that the LNG industry, on top of all other polluting industries impacting the community, has on people and their health, water, air, and livelihoods.

Industry operations in petrochemical and LNG export locations in the U.S. Gulf Coast are linked with heart, lung, and kidney diseases; significantly lower life expectancy; water and air pollution; loss of biodiversity; and structural human rights violations as well as structural environmental racism. It becomes more and more clear to any remotely responsible energy user that all this is what Europeans are importing when they import LNG, molecule by molecule, vessel by vessel.

More and more LNG export facilities—and E.U. import facilities for that matter—will become stranded assets, and the money invested in them, which should have been invested in renewable energy and energy efficiency, will be lost.

The U.S. Gulf Coast is not only hit by reckless fossil fuel industry activities, but also regularly hit by major hurricanes—and finds itself in the middle of an active hurricane season right now. Increasingly damaging hurricanes are only one of many consequences of the climate crisis. We all experience one heat record after another, floods, droughts, and the world has probably surpassed the 1.5°C threshold already. LNG is fossil methane and has a global warming potential over 100 times higher than that of carbon dioxide in the next crucial decade. LNG leaks methane all along the supply chain.

This should be shocking for any European—and American—to hear, given in the past two years, Europe swallowed over 60% of all LNG that the U.S. exported. After Europe has been scrambling to get off Russian gas, U.S. LNG made up for over 46% of the gas in the E.U. in 2023, and almost all of it is fracked—making the LNG’s climate impact even worse.

Now there are gigantic further LNG plans in the making: Massive LNG export capacity increases are planned in the Gulf Coast. But even notwithstanding the fact that people and the planet can’t afford even more LNG, this buildout does not make sense: The E.U.’s gas demand has already decreased by 20%, and will decrease further if we take our climate commitments seriously. Austria’s fossil gas demand has decreased by 25% since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, we are still heavily dependent on Russian gas. In March of 2024, 93% of our gas imports came from Russia—and this too is a shocking truth. So while we may need LNG from other countries in the short-term in order to diversify our gas imports, we would be putting ourselves between a rock and a hard place if we were to replace Russian gas with fracked LNG from the U.S. and Canada. There is no lesser of two evils. This is exactly why it is so important that we phase out fossil gas and transition to sustainable alternatives in those industries that will still depend on gas in the future.

But there is no doubt about our long-term trajectory. We agreed to achieve climate neutrality by 2040. This will be the end date for any use of fossil gas in Austria. The European Union aims for climate neutrality 10 years later than we do. In any case, the bottom line is that we will be phasing out the use of fossil gas in the next 25 years in Europe—which should not be ignored by our transatlantic partners. If we all take our international commitments seriously—commitments that were strengthened at the last climate conference in Dubai—we must not invest in the long-term expansion of ever more LNG capacity. There is no alternative to a fossil fuel phaseout.

In addition to that, more than 40% of the E.U.’s LNG import capacity has been idle last year and the bloc’s LNG demand is expected to peak very soon—possibly already this winter. More and more LNG export facilities—and E.U. import facilities for that matter—will become stranded assets, and the money invested in them, which should have been invested in renewable energy and energy efficiency, will be lost.

Rather than channeling support into fossil giants like LNG export plants—fuming, polluting, and venting sometimes more than 90 hours straight—we need a transatlantic strategy to get off fossil fuels, as fast and fairly as possible.

“The greed of the John Deere company is giving President Biden the perfect opportunity to win back working-class voters. All he needs to do is put up a major fight to stop Deere from shipping U.S. jobs to Mexico.”

I wrote that on June 12, 2024, and the Democrats ignored me. Donald Trump did not. He just called for a 200% tariff on all John Deere imports if the company exports U.S. jobs to Mexico.

How have the Democrats responded to Trump? In the worst way possible. They got billionaire Mark Cuban to say that Trump’s clumsy effort to save 1,000 jobs is “insanity… ridiculously bad and destructive.” Cuban didn’t even mention the plight of the workers.

Cuban’s argument is nothing short of embarrassing. He says that since the proposed tariff on Deere is higher than the one proposed on Chinese imports, Deere will be unable to compete with Chinese tractors and farm equipment. This will potentially lead, he said, to the “destruction of one of the most historied companies in the United States of America.”

The Democrats must decide, and soon, whether they really are the party of the working class. If they are then they must fight hard to save worker jobs from unabated corporate greed.

What exactly is so insane? Trump’s goal isn’t to tariff John Deere out of business. His goal is to keep Deere from exporting 1,000 jobs. Why is it insane to preserve those 1,000 decent-paying unionized U.S. jobs?

Cuban ignores the question of why Deere feels the need to ship jobs to Mexico. Deere argues that it must do so in order to stay competitive. That leads to a Catch-22 proposition: If Deere moves jobs to Mexico and faces a stiff tariff, it will go under. And, if it doesn’t move the jobs to Mexico, it will become uncompetitive and also go under. Cuban is in line with how Deere justifies layoffs to workers: If we don’t cut 1,000 jobs now and move to Mexico, more jobs will be cut later.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

The big, bigger, and biggest problem is that the Democrats and Cuban are unable to put workers and their livelihoods front and center. They are unable to mouth these words: The 1,000 Deere workers should keep their jobs precisely because Deere, one of the greediest companies on Earth, is loaded with profits and is pouring billions upon billions into stock buybacks. Which is flat-out true.

Last year, Deere recorded $10 billion in profits and it’s CEO was paid $26.7 million. The company also spent $12.2 billion on stock buybacks that enriched its top officers as well as the big Wall Street funds that own loads of Deere stock. (What are stock buybacks? A way for a company to boost the price of its shares by buying them on the open market—a blatant form of stock manipulation that was illegal until deregulated by the Reagan administration.)

And here’s the simple truth: The move to Mexico is designed to cut labor costs in order to finance those stock buybacks. It has nothing to do with competition, Chinese or otherwise. As any Deere worker would tell us, it’s all about greed. The sad thing is that Cuban, a critic of stock buybacks, knows this as well, but refuses to call out Deere.

Mass Layoffs Are Destroying the Democratic Party

My book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, conclusively shows that from 1996 to 2020, as the mass layoff rate rose in any given county in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the Democratic vote declined. In the rural counties, on average, one-third of the workforce suffered through mass layoffs. Losing your job in a county that has few decent employment alternatives does not lead to positive feelings about the party that is supposed to be the defender of the working class.

Trump’s intervention in 2017 to stop Carrier from moving an Indiana plant to Mexico was “wildly popular.” And yet the Democrats remain tone deaf to the plight of mass layoff victims.

The question is why?

The answer involves understanding what John Kenneth Galbraith called “the conventional wisdom.” There’s an entrenched sense within the Democratic Party of what kinds of interventions are acceptable in financialized capitalism and which are not. Here are a few of the internalized rules:

• It’s OK to tax stock buybacks, but it’s not OK to outlaw them.
• It’s OK to raise taxes on corporations, but it’s not OK to interfere with their power to lay off workers at will.
• It’s OK to provide taxpayer funds to subsidize corporations to make investments, but it’s not OK to tell corporations that they can’t use taxpayer funds to lay off taxpayers or conduct stock buybacks.
• It’s OK to regulate new technologies so consumers don’t get ripped off, but it’s not OK to protect worker livelihoods from such technologies.
• It’s OK to bail out private big banks with taxpayer funds, but it’s not OK to turn them into public banks.
• It’s OK to go after monopoly price gouging, but it’s no OK to stop monopoly mass layoffs.
• It’s OK to ask for 60-day notice for mass layoffs, but it’s not OK to stop compulsory layoffs when they are used to jack up CEO pay, service harmful leveraged buyout debts, or fund stock buybacks.

On a deeper level what ties all this together is a profound faith in corporate power and efficiency. It will be for the better for all of us if billionaire CEOs are free to run their corporations as they see fit. That faith includes protecting the right of corporations to hire and fire at will. After all, new technologies and globalization inevitably involve the churning of jobs, don’t they? Trying to stop or slow down that process would only cripple the economy, wouldn’t it? And we certainly don’t want a country where government officials tell billionaires what to do, do we?

Therefore, a sober, realistic Democratic Party, trapped in its conventional wisdom, will refuse to intervene in corporate hiring and firing. Instead, they travel down the uninspiring and unconvincing path creating an “opportunity economy,” growing new jobs for the future from taxpayer subsidies to chipmakers and the like.

Not so with Trump. He swings a wrecking ball at the conventional wisdom. He acts as if he actually believes that jobs should not be exported to lower-wage countries, and that puts him in tune with nearly every U.S. industrial worker. To be sure many Democrats believe the same. The difference is that Trump has no built-in guard rails about intervening in corporate decision-making. You move jobs to Mexico, he bellows, and we’ll slap a tariff on your butt that is so high that it will be much cheaper for you to keep the jobs here.

That has to be music to the ears of every Deere worker facing the axe, and it certainly will get the attention of millions of workers who have seen their jobs shipped abroad.

It’s Not too Late for the Democrats to Act

Because Trump has difficulty focusing on a coherent message, the field is still open for the Democrats to put forth a new policy that directly affects the jobs of millions of workers. I’m a broken record on this because it’s so very simple. Harris should give a primetime talk and focus on the $700 billion in tax payer money that now goes to private corporations for goods, services, and subsidies: Here’s the line she should stress:

No taxpayer money shall go to corporations that lay off taxpayers or conduct stock buybacks.

To clarify the point, she should add some pragmatic flexibility:

For those companies receiving taxpayer money, layoffs must be voluntary, not compulsory, as is already the case for many white-collar employees.

That would seem fair and just to millions of workers, even if Wall Street would find it “insane.”

The Democrats must decide, and soon, whether they really are the party of the working class. If they are then they must fight hard to save worker jobs from unabated corporate greed.

Is that really too much to ask?

There seems to be quite a bit of confusion as to what a Trump victory in the November election portends. There has been talk of a Trump coup since the 2020 election, with January 6th serving as one of the main events in that narrative. In their efforts to understand and explain, observers have called that event an attempted coup. Recently, Donald Trump referred to the effort to get Biden to step aside as a coup. Such confusion.

In a recent Portside article, Jonathan Winer, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement, details three phases of mischief-making on the part of Trump and his minions. Winer characterizes the MAGA effort to implement Project 2025, should Trump win, as a "coup." However, most activities that Winer discusses in his article take place before the winner is certified. All that pre-certification activity involves legislative, electoral, and judicial maneuvering and mischief—but precedes actual office holding. It seeks to influence who wins electorally and that is not the process that one follows in a coup.

A coup is a militarized assault on the institutions of power. It seeks to overthrow through violent means what is recognized as a legitimate government. It involves organized force, capture of key institutions, including the military, security establishment, Information institutions, media outlets, executive); and removing incumbent officials (legislators, judges, administrative personnel, military, and security leaders). These are summary dismissals; they do not come about through an orderly process. Some come with additional burdens that might include imprisonment, exile, or execution. It also involves suspension and/or rejection of the existing constitution and governing structure. It usually results in a military-led administration and governance by decree. That is not what we are considering here.

The mob on January 6th did not seem to have meaningful plans to take over the government, or much of an idea of what they would do on day two. Nothing they did extended beyond Congress. What little coordination there was did not include mobilizing an armed force to overthrow the government, nor did they have any plan for governing. They clearly did not have the support of the military leadership and, bluster and bravado aside, they did not have the wherewithal to withstand a frontal military assault. Their main goal seems to have been to disrupt the legislative process which was to confirm the winner of the election. It was disruptive of congressional business. It was, no doubt, an insurrection, which is a violent uprising against the government. That concept suffices to characterize the January 6th events.

Once the authoritarians have taken power, they use their democratic legitimacy to justify a series of restrictions on democratic forms of governance, such as voter and polling restrictions.

With the coming election we are hearing commentators refer to the Project 2025 document as a prescription for a coup. I find this conceptualization to be problematic. We are witnessing political developments that may have never occurred before in this country. We have no ready ways of conceptualizing those events, so, like Procrustes, we fit them into preexisting conceptual categories. This is what I see happening with the effort to understand what a second Trump administration might portend.

If Trump wins the election and proceeds to implement Project 2025 it will be via the existing political process, even if they massage, manipulate, misinterpret, and cajole to get the results they seek. And they will. Observers cannot accept that the political system can produce outcomes such as those that Project 2025 promises because that would require condemning a flawed process—one that is open to manipulation. This would be a process that can produce an elected administration, however controversial, with a different (and dangerous) policy agenda. Understanding this process requires seeing that such a power grab can happen in the system through its normal workings.

So long as they stay within the operational framework that requires Congress to codify and fund their initiatives, and a Supreme Court to sanction what they do, they will be a legitimate, if not popular, government. We might not like what they do but it will fall within the framework of the American constitutional order.

It is important to be clear about what we are confronting—which is an attempt to consolidate Authoritarianism through the mechanism of State Capture.

We are witnessing an attempt to capture the instruments of the government to institute policy and personnel changes that will resonate for decades.

Contemporary Authoritarian regimes concentrate power in a leader or an elite to undermine democratic institutions to the extent that those institutions become more performative than substantive. Once the authoritarians have taken power, they use their democratic legitimacy to justify a series of restrictions on democratic forms of governance, such as voter and polling restrictions. They neuter the political order while allowing a level of social and economic freedom. These regimes will tolerate social and economic institutions not directly under governmental control so long as they stay in line. The practice of authoritarian regimes is to rely on resignation in the face of lawful, though repulsive measures, and passive mass acceptance rather than active popular support. So long as Trump is in play, authoritarianism will have a populist cast. Thereafter, right-wing Authoritarian forces expect to have their dominance institutionalized through State Capture.

A simple definition of State Capture assumes that elections occur, and officials hold office. It is a matter of how and who. State Capture is a systematic process to advance narrow group interests by taking control of the institutions and processes that produce and implement public policy. Once in control they proceed to direct policy away from the public interest and instead begin to shape policy to serve their own interests more effectively.

We are dealing with a process that has antecedents in Hungary, Türkiye, India, and elsewhere where an authoritarian regime captures the government through formal channels and then begins to populate the administrative structure with partisans, preferably in secure civil service positions. They then implement policies that further consolidate their power. We are witnessing an attempt to capture the instruments of the government to institute policy and personnel changes that will resonate for decades.

The make-up and character of these “narrow interest groups” can differ from case to case. So, in India it can be Hindu nationalists, capitalists, and the landed gentry. In Türkiye, Islamists, and capitalists. In South Africa party cadre, domestic and international capitalists and landed interests. The one thing they all have in common is that capitalists always factor. The narrow interests served by a Trump presidency includes the monopoly sector, neoconservatives, white nationalists, Christian evangelicals, and isolationists. Regimes on the right exist, as in this case, to advance the interests of Capital.

The make-up and character of these “narrow interest groups” can differ from case to case... The one thing they all have in common is that capitalists always factor.

We see the phenomenon of winning elections to legitimize authoritarian regimes on both the right and the left. The difference being that the regimes on the left are doing so under extreme duress from covert destabilizing forces, in the face of punishing international sanctions, and as acts of survival. It does not excuse them, but it does place them in a different context. Among them are regimes that came to power through other means such as coups and revolutions. In those cases, they already have control of the state. The goal is to continue in power.

The main similarity is that State Capture regimes deploy the electoral process to maintain their positions and power. The process of gaining and staying in power involves winning elections. Much can be said about the veracity of those elections. No matter how flawed they may be, though, the regime still gets to check the Democracy box. That is what will happen with Trump if he wins- they will modify the instruments of the state to remain in power and serve capital...forever, if possible. That plan can be delayed but not derailed by the outcome of the November election.

The U.S. is on the brink of making a major climate misstep.

According to a new Center for International Environmental Law analysis, planned petrochemical projects across the U.S. could add a staggering 153.8 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent (CO₂e) emissions annually. This is equal to the emissions of nearly 40 coal power plants or all U.S. domestic commercial aviation emissions. The implications for climate change are dire, with the petrochemical sector set to become an even larger contributor to the country’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

In a time when decisive climate action is needed more than ever, building more petrochemical plants is a monumental mistake the U.S. cannot afford to make.

Already responsible for 5.2% of the U.S.’ 6.3 billion metric tonnes of annual CO₂e emissions, the petrochemical industry is poised for massive growth. A total of 118 petrochemical projects—ranging from the expansion of existing plants to the construction of entirely new plants—are either planned or already underway and could add the equivalent of 2.4% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. If this buildout proceeds, more than 7% of U.S. GHG emissions could come from the petrochemical sector.

A Growing Climate Threat

Petrochemical plants manufacture products like plastics, ammonia, and other chemicals, and have a typical lifespan of about 30 years. This means that the fossil-fueled emissions from these facilities will persist for decades, hindering the U.S.’ ability to meet its climate targets. Globally, the petrochemical sector is already a major climate problem, responsible for around 10% of total GHG emissions. Plastic production alone contributes 5.3% of global emissions, while synthetic nitrogen fertilizers add another 2.1% of global emissions.

In a recent analysis, the International Energy Agency projected that 85% of the growth in oil demand will come from petrochemical production by 2030. In the U.S., the planned petrochemical buildout will only make this worse. Our analysis not only reaffirms what we already know about the petrochemical industry’s impact but also highlights new and concerning developments.

Environmental Injustice Amplified

The environmental impact of the petrochemical buildout extends far beyond its contribution to climate change. The petrochemical buildout will deepen environmental injustices in communities that already bear the brunt of industrial pollution. The vast majority of planned petrochemical projects are sited in communities that already experience detrimental environmental and health impacts of living on the fence line of the fossil fuel industry, particularly in the Gulf South and Ohio River Valley.

In Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” a region between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, 26 new petrochemical projects are planned. This area is already home to more than 200 fossil fuel and chemical facilities where residents face some of the highest cancer rates in the country. In St. John the Baptist Parish, around halfway between the two cities, lifetime cancer rates are 800 times the U.S. average, according to an estimate from the Environmental Protection Agency. The expansion of petrochemical plants in these communities will only deepen the public health crisis.

Surprising Findings

Megaprojects Make Up Most of the Emissions

One of the most alarming revelations from our analysis is that just 10 megaprojects account for half of the potential emissions from the petrochemical buildout. The fate of just a handful of projects will have a massive impact on the U.S.’ ability to meet its climate targets.

Plastic Production Is Facing Serious Roadblocks

Nearly 60% of planned plastic production projects, calculated based on potential emissions, are on hold. This suggests that investors are already assessing significant risks around the future of plastic production. The growing awareness of the environmental damage caused by plastics, community opposition to these plants, and a global overcapacity of plastic production may be giving investors pause.

Ammonia, A Huge Growth Sector

Ammonia, primarily used in fertilizers, is emerging as a concerning climate problem. More than a third of the projected new emissions come from planned ammonia production. Companies behind projected projects are pitching ammonia not just for fertilizers but as a clean “fuel of the future.” findings reveal that these projects are anything but “clean,” with 95% of proposed U.S. ammonia production being derived from methane gas, which undercuts its supposed climate benefit.

Taxpayers are Footing the Bill

Adding insult to injury, many of these projects are being subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. Planned ammonia and methanol plants stand to benefit from U.S. government incentives like 45Q tax credits, which provide generous handouts to companies using carbon capture systems (CCS) despite carbon capture’s long record of failure.

A Look at the Math

To work out emissions from these planned petrochemical projects we dug through companies’ websites, press releases, and investor communications as well as consulted the Environmental Integrity Project’s comprehensive Oil and Gas Watch database to find the potential production capacity of new petrochemical projects. We used “emissions factors” published by academics at the Universities of Cambridge, Bath, and Sheffield to turn those production numbers into an estimate of emissions, and incorporated the expected emissions from fertilizer decomposition and plastic incineration.

Despite our careful math, we know our calculations underestimate the true climate harm these projects could bring. A few factors contribute to our conservative figures. First, we were only able to estimate emissions from two-thirds of the potential projects. Second, the models we use rely on the U.S. Department of Energy’s estimate of methane leakage, but recent studies suggest that methane leaks are three times higher than this figure. Finally, we cannot quantify some of the potential impacts that plastic pollution or overuse of fertilizers might be having, but there are worrying studies suggesting that both could have deep climate impacts.

The Bigger Picture

Having just experienced the warmest summer on record, the need to phase out fossil fuels has never been more clear. The US petrochemical buildout is a leap in the wrong direction—one that will lock in fossil fuel demand at a time when we should be transitioning away from them.

The decisions made about these projects will have far-reaching consequences. Our analysis reveals the high stakes and urgent need to question whether these projects should be allowed to move forward.

The U.S. is at a crossroads. Policymakers, investors, and communities must confront the reality that the continued expansion of petrochemical infrastructure is incompatible with a sustainable future. The fate of these projects will not only shape the U.S.’ climate trajectory but also have global repercussions in the fight to curb fossil fuel emissions and protect communities vulnerable to the compounding impacts of the petrochemical buildout.

In a time when decisive climate action is needed more than ever, building more petrochemical plants is a monumental mistake the U.S. cannot afford to make. The time to act is now.

In recent days, former U.S. President Donald Trump and his Republican running mate, JD Vance, have doubled down on their false and defamatory claims about legally admitted Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, thus churning up widespread fears, bomb threats, and school evacuations. Claiming that these migrants were destroying the American “way of life,” Trump promised that, if elected, he would order massive deportations. This statement echoed his astonishing promise, made during the 2024 campaign and previously, to seize and deport between 15 and 20 million immigrants.

Nativist agitation has a long, sordid history in the United States. In the 1850s, large numbers of American Protestants rallied behind the Know Nothing movement and its political offshoot, the American Party, ventures centered primarily on opposing the influence of immigrant Catholics. In the latter part of the 19th century, hostility toward Chinese immigrants (“the yellow peril”) and, later, Japanese immigrants led to lynchings, riots, and legislation that barred virtually all immigration from the two Asian nations.

During the early 20th century, American xenophobia focused on the alleged dangers provided by the “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe, predominantly Catholics and Jews. Such people, it was claimed, had a higher propensity for moral depravity, feeble-mindedness, and crime, and were polluting the “Nordic race.” As a result, many “old stock” Americans championed changes in immigration law to sharply reduce the number of these allegedly inferior people entering the country. Adopted in legislation during the 1920s, a new, highly discriminatory national origins quota system did, indeed, largely restrict their ability to enter the United States, leaving millions to perish in Europe after the onset of the Nazi terror.

Although nativism has been mobilized by political parties and movements of varying political persuasions, it has appeared most frequently on the right.

Of course, many Americans, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, welcomed the arrival of people from foreign lands. And, in line with their views, U.S. immigration law was significantly liberalized in 1965.

We should also recognize that the United States was hardly unique in undergoing surges of anti-immigrant nativism. Indeed, over the centuries, recent arrivals in many countries experienced rampant xenophobia—including “Paki-bashing” in Britain and violence against Turkish immigrants in Germany. Recently, in fact, intense opposition to immigration and immigrants provided a key factor behind British public support for Brexit and the startling rise of previously marginal, hyper-nationalist parties in Europe.

What has inspired this hostility to people coming from other lands?

Many individuals, it seems, feel uneasy when confronted with the unfamiliar. Thus, they sometimes find differences in skin color, religion, language, or culture to be disturbing. Although some people can―and often do―find these things a welcome addition to their lives or, at least, interesting, others become uncomfortable. In these circumstances, immigrants are easily added to other disdained minority groups as victims of widespread misinformation, mistrust, and prejudice.

Unfortunately, this unease with human differences provides a ready-made opportunity for political exploitation. As many a demagogue or unscrupulous politician has learned, fear and hatred of the “other” can be effective in stirring up a mob or winning an election.

Although nativism has been mobilized by political parties and movements of varying political persuasions, it has appeared most frequently on the right. Fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s focused heavily on the supposed glories of their nation and the ostensible biological inferiority of people from other lands. This xenophobia provided a rightwing ideological component in numerous countries, including the United States, where groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Silver Shirts, the Nazi Party, and the America First movement lauded a mythical “Americanism” and assailed the foreign-born.

More recently, too, anti-immigrant sentiment has played a central role in Europe’s parties of the far right, such as France’s National Front (now the National Rally), Alternative for Germany, the Swiss People’s Party, Hungary’s Fidesz, the Party of Freedom of the Netherlands, the Brothers of Italy, and numerous others of their stripe. Meanwhile, in the United States, anti-immigrant sentiment has thrived in the increasingly right-wing Republican Party. Trump’s adoption of an anti-immigrant approach as a central theme of his MAGA movement, like his promise of building a wall between Mexico and the United States, is no accident, but part of a political strategy to ride xenophobia to power.

A key reason that nativism has become a staple of the right is that, with the advent of democratic institutions in many nations, the right has faced a difficult situation. Before the commoners gained the vote, their opportunities for effectively challenging economic and social inequality were limited. But, armed with the ballot, masses of people had the power to elect governments that would implement more equitable policies, such as sharing the wealth. This could be accomplished in a variety of ways, including taking control of giant corporations and estates, heavily taxing vast fortunes, raising workers’ pay, reducing the workday and lengthening vacations, building inexpensive housing, and establishing free education and healthcare. Worst of all, from the standpoint of the right, such leveling measures, advanced by a burgeoning left, had significant popular appeal.

Faced with this dilemma, the economically and socially privileged and their political parties on the right recognized that, to defeat the drive for the expansion of economic and social equality, it would be useful to fan the flames of popular prejudices (among them, hostility to immigrants), as this would divide the mass base of the left and put it on the defensive. Consequently, they gravitated toward this divide and conquer strategy―a strategy that sometimes worked.

Will it work again in the 2024 U.S. presidential and congressional elections? With the poll numbers so close, it’s hard to say.

Meanwhile, though, it’s worth noting how ironic it is that, in the United States―a nation populated almost entirely by immigrants and their descendants―anti-immigrant sentiment, whipped up by Trump and Vance, has once again come to the forefront of American politics.