We are one day away from the election, and too much is at stake for Black people. The questioning around Vice President Kamala Harris' Blackness and misconceptions about her plans for Black people continue to distract voters from the far-right, destructive manifesto fueling Donald Trump’s agenda, Project 2025: a dangerous declaration of oppression that risks civil rights and the democratic fabric of our nation.

Project 2025 details a disturbing vision for the future of Black people in this country: One where we have no rights, no control of our bodies, none where we can’t afford groceries, we can’t afford housing, where our children can’t even learn their own history because it is erased and whitewashed, and where politicians can spread dangerous lies about Black people without recourse. This manifesto seeks to erode the authority of vital government agencies, giving unprecedented power to the executive branch, leaving so many Black communities devastated. By threatening discrimination laws and targeting initiatives promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, Project 2025 will unravel decades of hard-fought civil rights progress.And with little to no federal oversight historical patterns of discrimination against Black communities will also worsen.

Black communities know what it’s like to be at the hands of a government without checks and balances and no accountability.

One of the key civil rights standards Project 2025 seeks to eliminate critical safeguard that addresses unintentional discriminatory practices, is a backbone of civil rights protections. This is the disparate impact standard in discrimination cases. In 2013, in one of the largest fair lending cases in the DOJ’s history, Black customers in the Chicago area brought a large lawsuit against Wells Fargo after they paid $2,937 more in broker fees for their homes than similarly situated white customers. Without the disparate impact standard, the federal government would have been unable to demonstrate that Black communities had suffered disproportionate harm at the hands of Wells Fargo. At a time when the nation is grappling with a housing crisis, eliminating the disparate impact standard would exacerbate existing disparities and leave Black communities vulnerable to discriminatory housing and lending practices.

Project 2025 also seeks to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in our schools and businesses. In June, a U.S. federal court of appeals court deemed an Atlanta private equity fund unconstitutional for providing grants to women-owned and Black-owned companies, ignoring the systemic barriers that have historically excluded Black women from investment funding. And following the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, conservatives attacked critical programs designed to increase the number of Black medical doctors. In a world where Black mothers are dying more than anyone in childbirth, the need for Black doctors is needed more than ever. The Project 2025 manifesto seeks to take this further and delete all references to diversity, equity, and inclusion from in our federal regulations and legislation. But let’s be very clear about what this will mean: these efforts will sabotage contracts, harm Black-owned businesses, and perpetuate historical injustices within Black communities.

Project 2025's agenda will wreak havoc on Black communities in a way we haven’t seen since Jim Crow. Black communities know what it’s like to be at the hands of a government without checks and balances and no accountability. As we are one day out from the election, Black people must vote in mass. We must recognize the urgency of this threat to our democracy and lean on tangible solutions to defend our rights for many generations. It’s time to take back our power, and let our voices be heard. Vote like your life depends on it because it does. We need all hands on deck to protect our future.

In communities across the nation, millions of immigrants are living in harmony with native-born residents, with neighbors, coworkers, and friends collectively caring for each other. Yet we rarely see those stories uplifted on the nightly news or on the front pages of local newspapers; those stories never go viral on social-media platforms. That’s because these kinds of stories don’t help the politically powerful in our country, and they don’t boost the profits of corporate media empires.

Instead we see, on repeat, the lie that noncitizen immigrants are voting in droves. People with millions of followers—like Elon Musk—are routinely spreading this lie on social media.

We see hateful rhetoric about immigrants of color. During a Univision town hall last month, Donald Trump re-upped the notorious lie about Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian community.

Our nation has yet to reckon with the deadly role our media system has played in the creation and distribution of narratives that have harmed countless people, including Ohio’s Haitian community.

We see coordinated campaigns to dissuade Black and Latino voters from participating in our democracy, with baseless claims that the U.S. election might not happen, or that police will be monitoring polling stations to round up voters who lack the “proper” documentation.

The intent of this rhetoric is to scare voters of color from going to the polls, to pander to anti-immigrant sentiments, to stir up fear and hysteria, to drive voter turnout of white people who are scared about the changing demographics of this country, and to legitimize authoritarian power grabs based on lack of trust in our electoral process.

And our nation’s dominant media and tech companies are complicit in all of this.

Far-right figures, including Ohio’s junior senator, continue to spread the falsehood that Springfield’s Haitian immigrants are eating pets. Both traditional and social media have amplified this conspiracy theory—and an entire community of innocent people continues to live in fear.

Many of us understand that these are outlandish lies—yet they are resonating with people who have fallen prey to anti-Haitian, anti-Black, and xenophobic talking points that are disseminated on media outlets like Fox News or on social-media platforms. This is part of a pattern in media coverage that stretches back hundreds of years.

The nation’s earliest newspapers supported enslavement by profiting off ads promoting the sale of enslaved people and the recapture of those who fled for freedom. In the ensuing years, powerful media institutions supported lynching and racial segregation.

More recently, several newspapers apologized for their histories of supporting segregation and white supremacy. But these outlets have yet to redress the harm they’ve caused or their roles in supporting racial hierarchies. Meanwhile, local-TV newscasts dehumanize communities of color through their crime coverage, reporting that has long proven lucrative for media conglomerates.

It’s not surprising that most people in the United States know very little about immigrants of color since the dominant narrative in corporate media portrays immigrants as criminals who are dangerous invaders.

The sober truth is that racism is profitable for social and traditional media companies alike. If-it-bleeds-it-leads coverage and “copaganda” serve as strategies to attract larger audiences. And powerful media figures are happy to look the other way if it means this incendiary rhetoric will help their companies’ bottom lines. Former CBS chairman and CEO Les Moonves admitted this when discussing the 2016 Trump campaign at an investor conference:

“Who would have thought that this circus would come to town?” said Moonves. “But, you know, it may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. The money’s rolling in.” Never mind the harmful impacts that Trump’s white-nationalist screeds were having on Black and Brown people across the country.

Many media executives share this sentiment, which helps explain why so little coverage illustrates the humanity of people who are forced to leave their homes and loved ones to escape violence and political instability stemming from histories of colonialism, and environmental destruction resulting from climate change. It explains why there are so few stories on people who are seeking employment and a better life for their families.

Even less coverage focuses on how U.S. foreign policy has economically, politically, and socially destabilized countries in the Americas like Haiti—and prompted thousands to flee their homelands. Despite our country’s long history of interventionist policies in Haiti—which has included an occupation and the support of deadly dictatorships—the public knows very little about the country, and the people we are told to fear.

“Haiti has been and continues to be the main laboratory for U.S. imperial machinations in the region and throughout the world,” University of British Columbia Professor Jemima Pierre wrote last year.

University of Toledo Professor Ayendy Bonifacio’s article “Tracing the Anti-Haitianism Behind the Springfield Scapegoating” explains that when Haitians overthrew their colonial enslavers to form the world’s first Black republic in 1804, it struck “fear into the hearts of slaveholders and their political allies, who wielded considerable influence over the nation’s major newspapers.”

Bonifacio notes that “during and after the Haitian Revolution, the U.S. press frequently reported on the supposed barbarism and primitiveness of Haiti and its people. Indeed, stories have circulated about Haitians eating animals and practicing cannibalism since the country’s founding.”

This anti-Haitian—and anti-Black—rhetoric has extended to other communities of color. In recent years, the Asian American Pacific Islander community has suffered from an increase in xenophobic news coverage that has criminalized both immigrants and U.S.-born residents. Reporting that fomented anti-Asian hate played a significant role in the adoption of racist policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. The Los Angeles Times and The Seattle Times issued apologies over the past decade for supporting the imprisonment of Japanese Americans.

Meanwhile, hateful government policies and the media coverage that propped them up resulted in the deportation of more than 1 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the early 1930s—and then again in a 1954 campaign with the racist name “Operation Wetback.” The latter received supportive coverage from papers like the Los Angeles Times, which acknowledged in 2020 that the publication had served as an “uncritical mouthpiece for Washington.”

Our nation has yet to reckon with the deadly role our media system has played in the creation and distribution of narratives that have harmed countless people, including Ohio’s Haitian community.

We need government policies that support the development of a new media system that redresses this history of racism and xenophobia—a system where journalism supports the realization of a multiracial democracy rather than one that undermines it.

Most people I know seem to be holding their breath right now. There is, of course, an uncertain and deeply consequential election right around the corner. And a vast swath of the country is grappling with loss after two huge climate-exacerbated hurricanes. Many places, including my home state of Vermont, are struggling with the aftermath of less well-publicized climate disasters that are no less devastating for those in their epicenter.

Questions abound. Will the election results affect my Social Security? Will the hurricanes disrupt critical supply chains? Can my dad’s farm recover from the storm damage?

And, most of all: What’s coming next and how can we be ready?

Of course I don’t have a crystal ball. But, having worked with governments and civil society trying to head off the worst of climate change for more than 20 years, I’m certain of the trend: more destabilization, not less. Tougher shocks in more rapid succession.

The exact timing, degree, and location of those shocks is hard to predict. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do to prepare. Uncertain times are uniquely suited to an approach I call “ multisolving”—acting in service of multiple goals with a single action. For example, multisolvers plant orchards that feed people and cool cities; they design solar panels that provide clean energy and habitat for native plants. Their work has shown me that some types of action are likely to be beneficial no matter what comes next. Here are five:

1. Nurture connections. The surprises to come are more likely to be complex than simple. For example, Covid-19 affected health, labor policy, supply chains, education, and more. No single person or entity can predict—or address—such far-reaching impacts. But, by building trusted connections among healthcare, labor, educators, community groups, and others, we have better odds of navigating an emergency together. And reports from places like western North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene show how connections between neighbors can be a source of vital assistance during disaster recovery. What connections in your world could use a little more tending?
   
2. Prioritize health, defined broadly. If you knew that tomorrow was going to be a challenging day, but you weren’t sure if the challenge would be a math problem, an interpersonal conflict, or a flat tire on a busy road, you could still prepare. You might make it an early night, eat a solid breakfast, and drink plenty of water. Attending to your basic health is worth it even when you don’t know exactly what you will face. And that applies beyond our individual bodies. A healthy forest can withstand stronger storms, new pests, or a dry summer better than a weakened one. An organization that’s invested in good communication and trust can pull together better in a crisis than one with simmering tensions. Boosting the health of the systems you are a part of is almost always worth it.
   
3. Invest in equity. An equitable society is better able to respond to emergencies. If all workers had paid sick leave, it would be easier to limit the impact of the infectious diseases made more likely by climate change. If communities situated near chemical plants had the power to influence health and safety policies for those industries, the air and water we all depend on would be safer. No matter what crises loom, there are always ways to stand up for equity. Vote for candidates who prioritize it. Donate to organizations that embody it. And lift your voice in support of it.
   
4. Simplify, slow down, and build in some slack. Figuring out ways to live a little more lightly and slowly can be a wise reaction to tumultuous times. If your schedule has a little space, there’s more flexibility when shocks hit. Same if your bank account has a little surplus. If your pantry has a little extra, there’s more to share with a neighbor in need. If your team sets less ambitious quarterly goals, you’ll all be a little less stressed when bad weather shuts down your supplier. And, since the economy’s ravenous use of energy and materials is destabilizing the planet’s natural systems, every time you can slow down and consume less makes future shocks a little less likely. We don’t all have equal power to create space and slack, so ask how you can give more space to members of your community. Give a generous tip at the cafe, watch the neighbor’s kids for an afternoon, and know you are contributing to a more resilient system.
   
5. Get good at learning and sharing what you’ve learned. In unpredictable times, everyone must learn and adapt. The question is whether we can do so quickly and gracefully. Can we let go of old thinking about what’s safe or what’s feasible? Can we try a few options and pay careful attention to what works best? Are we willing to admit, even loudly, when something was a bad idea? I hope so because we just don’t have time to repeat each other’s mistakes.

In offering this list, I don’t mean to imply that I think the coming years will be easy or even safe for all of us. There’s good reason to expect difficulty, loss, and suffering that wiser, earlier action could have averted.

But I also try to remember that uncertainty cuts both ways. We don’t know what dangers are lurking, nor do we know what new possibilities might open up, some of them spurred by how people respond to the dangers. Here’s some good news: Connecting, fostering health, prioritizing equity, building in slack, and getting good at learning are excellent preparation for moments of opportunity too. In the shadow of uncertainty, let’s invest in the actions that enable us to both cope with crises and step into opportunities. I predict the future will be rich with both.

With just a few days left until Election Day, the fact that the race to the White House between U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump remains extremely tight is truly mind-boggling. Reason dictates that the Democrats should be set to win a landslide, but what could very well happen instead is the return of Donald Trump to the White House.

Unfortunately, there are some good reasons why this is a tightly fought election. First, the cold truth is that Kamala Harris is not an inspiring leader. What’s even worse is that she is a flip-flopper. She’s changed her position on fracking and on the infamous border wall (she is now against fracking natural gas bans and seems to be leaning in favor of building more border wall) and hasn’t done enough to explain her policy positions on several issues, including Medicare for All. Rational voters would not fail to take notice of such shortcomings in a presidential candidate.

Second, Kamala Harris represents a party that has lost the working class and is perceived as being one with the elites. Harris’ own campaign has been too focused on winning over wavering Republicans, preferring to share the stage with Liz Cheney and billionaire Mark Cuban over progressive icons like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez (D-N.Y.), and attacking Trump as a threat to democracy.

Neoliberalism is incompatible with democracy as it alters society’s balance of power overwhelmingly in favor of big capital, transforms citizenship into an exercise of consumer choice, and undermines policy initiatives aimed toward the common good.

Both strategies appear to have backfired. First, because working-class people represent a much larger segment of the electorate than wavering Republicans, and because cozying up to anti-Trump Republicans and receiving the endorsement of the warmongering Cheneys has alienated progressives. Second, exhorting citizens to vote for the Harris-Walz ticket because Trump represents a threat to democracy isn’t making inroads with average folks who are mainly concerned with how to make ends meet. Most adult citizens have no confidence in U.S. institutions and in fact mistrust the electorate system, which is why millions of citizens do not bother to vote and the voter turnout in the U.S. trails that of many other Western countries.

Third, Harris has not distanced herself from the Biden approach on Israel and Gaza, which has been nothing short of a moral catastrophe, and has subsequently alienated the young, progressive and non-white voters who overwhelmingly sided with President Joe Biden in 2020. Not only that, but she and the Democrats have managed to create the impression among a large swath of voters that they are now the real warmongers, which is not far from the truth.

In the meantime, Trump’s support has remained stable and defined in spite of what he says. Trump exerts a cult-of-personality influence over his followers like no other populist leader in the Western world. Of course, this is the result of the ongoing erosion of the political culture in the U.S. under neoliberalism, which has essentially become the dictatorship of big financial capital. Neoliberalism is incompatible with democracy as it alters society’s balance of power overwhelmingly in favor of big capital, transforms citizenship into an exercise of consumer choice, and undermines policy initiatives aimed toward the common good.

Neoliberalism must be understood not only as an economic project, but also as a political and cultural project. And nowhere else in the Western world is civil society’s neoliberal transformation so pronounced as it is in the United States. Even the right to unionize, a fundamental human and civil right, faces massive challenges due to the political power of the corporate world. This is because democracy in the U.S. has always been of a very fragile nature and the consolidation of democratic ideals has faced resistance and opposition down to this day. Under such circumstances, the rise of the authoritarian strongman government that Donald Trump represents must be seen as an inevitable outcome.

Indeed, the unwavering appeal of Donald Trump among his supporters, in spite of all his crimes and scandals, speaks volumes both about the nature and scope of the cultural divide in the U.S., as well as about the political and economic effects of neoliberalism. This is the only way to understand why the white working class and less-educated voters, the traditional base of the Democratic Party, have flocked to Republicans in recent decades and now represent Trump’s base. White working-class and less-educated voters broke ranks with the Democratic Party when the New Democrat faction severed completely its ties with the “New Deal” policies and embraced in turn economic policies that are the backbone of the neoliberal project.

By the same token, the old stereotype of the Republicans as the party of the rich and the elite no longer holds sway with many voters. And there is ample evidence to explain why this is the case. Virtually all of the wealthiest congressional districts across the country are now represented by a Democrat, while it is the Republicans who claim to represent the people who struggle.

In the end, it is probably not mind-boggling at all that election polls show a very close race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, more than 80% of registered voters said that the economy is the most important issue for them in the 2024 presidential election. And in a final Financial Times poll, voters expressed preference for Trump over Harris to lead the economy.

Of course, analyses that expose Trump’s myths about the economy and warnings by experts that his own economic plans would worsen inflation and wreak havoc on U.S. workers and businesses while increasing the gap between the haves and the have-nots either do not reach his supporters or simply leave them unfazed. In either case, indifference to truth is a symptom of our extremely polarized times and, in a society that has lost its vision for the common good and has allowed in turn the rich to hijack the political system, all that matters now is that people believe in their own reasoning. Demagogues like Trump are fully aware of the existing social realities and not only exploit the available circumstances but make an art out of the belief that reality is what you make of it.

As sad as it may be, the 2024 presidential election is a choice between neoliberal fascism and neoliberal business as usual. Some would say there is still a difference between the two options; others might call it irredeemable politics. But these are the only two choices that U.S. voters have.

For seniors and their families, the choice in this election couldn’t be clearer. Before Donald Trump took office, our organization did not endorse candidates for president of the United States. But Trump was such a four-alarm fire for us and our members (older Americans across the country), that we felt a duty to endorse Joe Biden in 2020, breaking with nearly 40 years of precedent. This cycle, we have endorsed Kamala Harris as the candidate who will genuinely protect seniors’ interests, including the two programs in our organization’s name, Social Security and Medicare. We have also endorsed scores of candidates for House and Senate as “champions” for older Americans.

From a policy standpoint, this is a no-brainer. Kamala Harris, like Joe Biden, has pledged to protect Social Security and Medicare from Republican proposals to cut both programs—by raising the retirement age, means testing, and reducing COLAs. But she also has endorsed the idea that the wealthy should begin contributing their fair share in payroll taxes, which would go a long way toward safeguarding the financial health of both Social Security and Medicare. With additional revenue flowing in—plus billions of dollars in savings on prescription drugs from the Inflation Reduction Act—we could not only strengthen, but expand, seniors’ earned benefits.

In October, the vice president laid out a plan to expand Medicare to cover long-term, in-home care for seniors (and people with disabilities). That is a historic proposal. Under the current system, seniors must impoverish themselves in order to qualify for long-term care under Medicaid—and may well end up in nursing homes. Otherwise, the main alternative is for families to provide home care, often at a high financial and personal cost.

Kamala Harris also wants to expand traditional Medicare to include hearing and vision coverage. We have been fighting for the enhancement of benefits for decades, because seniors’ health and safety depends on proper hearing and vision care. These coverages were part of President Biden’s original Build Back Better plan, a noble effort that can be revived with a new Democratic president and Congress.

On the other hand, it’s almost laughable that anyone would think Donald Trump is the better choice for seniors and their families. Trump is unserious about policy, except insofar as it helps him score political points. He knows that Social Security and Medicare are tremendously popular, so he claims he will protect them, while embracing proposals that could devastate both programs.

Many of Trump’s public statements over the years do not inspire confidence. He once called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” comparing America’s most successful social insurance program with a petty criminal enterprise. This year, he said he’d be “open” to cutting “entitlements,” a comment his campaign tried to walk back in the face of understandable backlash.

Each year that Donald Trump was president, he submitted White House budgets that would have cut Social Security and Medicare by billions of dollars. He recklessly suspended the FICA payroll tax during the pandemic and said that he hoped it would be “eliminated” entirely, never mind that this is Social Security’s main funding source. Now, he proposes to repeal taxes on Social Security benefits that were put in place during the 1983 reforms (signed into law by President Reagan) to help fund the program.

The Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, hardly a liberal group, estimates that Trump’s plans would cost Social Security up to $2.75 trillion over ten years—and would accelerate the projected depletion of the program’s trust fund reserves by three years. That’s just six years from now!

In the end, though, this election comes down to values. Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz came from the middle class and understand the struggles of working Americans. Harris was raised by a single mother in a modest Oakland neighborhood and cared for her aging mom when she was dying of cancer. Tim Walz lost his father at age 19, and credits Social Security survivor benefits with keeping his family from falling into poverty. These candidates’ lived experiences inform their policies affecting seniors and families.

The Harris/Walz ticket reflects the preferences of most Americans across when it comes to seniors’ earned benefits. Public opinion surveys consistently show that bipartisan majorities of Americans oppose cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and agree that the wealthy should begin contributing their fair share. On the other side, the now-infamous blueprint for a second Trump term, Project 2025, calls for radical changes to Medicare that would end the program as we know it. Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation, which authored Project 2025, has advocated raising the Social Security eligibility age and other cuts to the program.

Donald Trump has (unconvincingly) attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, but he is a member of an elite financial class that focuses on lining the pockets of the already wealthy and powerful. It’s no coincidence, perhaps, that the GOP has recruited millionaire candidates for Senate in key battleground states who, unlike their Democratic rivals, do not represent the interests of working people. Many of these candidates have supported raising the retirement age and privatizing Social Security, while championing more tax cuts for the rich. Their hostility to the interests of seniors is apparent. The GOP Senate contender in Wisconsin even suggested that nursing home residents aren’t truly capable of voting.

This election will determine whether current and future seniors—and their families—can count on the government to keep the promises of Social Security and Medicare and to improve eldercare. Growing old in America is increasingly costly. Without these bedrock programs, not only seniors, but their family members in the “sandwich generation” will find it even harder to navigate the cycles of life. In this clarifying light, the choices for President and Congress shouldn’t even be close.

On Tuesday evening October 29, 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at the Ellipse, supplanting—with unifying oratory— Donald Trump’s divisive rhetoric that prompted an attack on the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. Advocating a platform that both protects and expands freedoms, Harris has donned the mantle of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

During the 2024 Democratic National Convention, most media interpreted the repetition of “freedom” as a reclamation of that word from the Republican Party. But what I heard was FDR’s "Four Freedoms Speech," and I still do. That speech was President Roosevelt’s State of the Union address presented to a joint session of Congress on January 6, 1941. Yes, precisely 80 years prior to Donald Trump’s Outrage on the Ellipse and inside the selfsame Capitol Building where MAGA followers tried violently to usurp power. In addition to defining democratic freedoms, Roosevelt denounced dictatorial tyranny in his address, making his words from that January 6th resonate today as a rebuttal to Trumpism.

Before naming freedoms that unite and protect people, Roosevelt painted a picture of the irrational fears that divide. Unlike most State of the Union Addresses, FDR concentrated not on the internal condition of our union but on threats to all democracies. The President broadened his framework because he spoke at a dire moment: Hitler had conquered most of continental Europe and was terrorizing England. In the speech, Roosevelt never names Hitler and Nazism or Mussolini and Fascism but speaks of “dictators” and “tyranny,” making his warnings easily applicable to our own time.

Roosevelt emphasized that dictators succeed by attacking “…the democratic way of life …[with] poisonous propaganda to destroy unity and promote discord,” a prescient portrait of Trump’s language. Autocrats do not offer policies for debate in a public forum; instead, they fill their audience with fear. “Fear” already had a prominent position in Roosevelt’s rhetoric. He had powerfully laid claim to that word in his first Inaugural on March 4, 1933 when he proclaimed that “…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror….” In 1933, fear resulted from the Great Depression—a fear of unemployment, of homelessness, of starvation, of bank failure. By 1941, that fear had extended to “…assailants [of democratic life] still on the march.” Fear remains today, and Trump uses it to promote a mythic past with restricted liberties, which provides a narrative to the MAGA mythology.

FDR realized that fear obstructs progress and, in his January 6th, 1941 address, cautioned that it “… paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Paralyzes!

FDR spoke from intimate experience of how paralysis limits motion. As an antidote, FDR prescribed expanding freedoms. His 1941 State of the Union defined four broad and basic human rights, now known as Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. While FDR’s first two Freedoms were established in the First Amendment, the latter two, “from want” and “from fear,” evoked either the expansions granted by his New Deal (such as Work Projects, Unemployment Insurance, and Social Security, all of which alleviated both want and fear) or FDR’s intentions for further augmentation (such as increased medical coverage, job opportunity, and pay equity). Roosevelt believed his “vision [was not for] a distant millennium… [but] attainable in [his] own time….” Part of what makes his address painfully relevant today is that many of Roosevelt’s goals for further rights remain unfulfilled in this new millennium.

Kamala Harris has now revived those goals. Her policies heed FDR’s warning against tyranny by amplifying his call to expand liberties. Like President Roosevelt, Vice President Harris believes in democratic progress.

On January 6, 1941, Roosevelt described American history as “…a perpetual peaceful revolution … adjusting itself to changing conditions … [as] today’s best is not good enough for tomorrow.” But now we must recognize that 1941’s tomorrow is today. Harris’s enlarged Freedom from Want includes freedom for reproductive health, home ownership, and caregiving, while her aspirations to protect Americans from gun violence, climate change, and voter suppression fall under Freedom from Fear. Kamala Harris could lead our democracy towards a better tomorrow if we the people show up for our “…rendezvous with destiny,” as FDR also once said. To give her that opportunity, it's up to us to elect her—along with a Democratic Congress—on November 5, 2024.

During my childhood, one consistent theme was bragging to family and friends out of state about Michigan’s lakes, great and small. I remember being horrified when I got to college in Chicago and met a Minnesotan who was equally proud of her lakes and believed they had more lakes and better hockey.

Eventually, I got over the lake contest to focus on protecting freshwater for everyone, but in 2023, I became green with envy for what Minnesota has anew.

Under Gov. Tim Walz, Minnesota passed one of the most impressive legislative packages in the United States, developed by a diverse coalition of climate experts, transit activists, union leaders, and racial justice organizers over years.

When I think of Minnesota today, I think of learning from them about the future we deserve.

I want to achieve what Minnesota signed into law with a one-seat Democratic majority in Michigan—and I believe it’s possible if we elect the Harris-Walz ticket on November 5.

Gov. Walz signed a renewable energy standard into law in Minnesota, even while supporting the best green bank law in the country, with strong labor and environmental justice standards, to implement and maximize the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law by U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. As our air is sullied by Canadian wildfires and our water is threatened by agricultural runoff, Michigan needs stronger standards too.

Thanks to Walz’s leadership, no kid in Minnesota is hungry at school, with free breakfast and lunch guaranteed to students. Some don’t need it and bring their own lunch, but guaranteeing full bellies will keep kids healthy and help them learn. No student in Michigan should be hungry during math class either, and Harris has already put forward policy proposals. That would be an excellent start at reducing food prices.

Minnesota has also passed arguably the best transportation policy in the country, pushed by legislators and advocates for safe streets and celebrated and signed by the governor. This bill would prioritize projects that protect clean air, expand freedom of movement, and reduce traffic too.

Imagine if Michiganders could take a reliable train home from the bar or have the option to take a speedy bus to work if a car was in the shop. We need policies like this that benefit people in Michigan and across the country. Harris was inspired by these efforts and picked Walz in part to invest in clean transportation and safe streets.

Minnesota also legalized marijuana, and under Gov. Walz’s leadership, they didn’t stop there. They created an office to expunge records of people impacted by over-criminalization of weed and provided incentives and benefits for impacted families to get a head start in the legal marijuana business. Our state incarcerates far too many of our neighbors, and many more would be supportive of recreational use and growing the tax base. Vice President Harris has echoed that she would support legalization, and creative public policy work like that in Minnesota is what will be needed to do so in an equitable way in states like ours.

I certainly do not agree with Harris and Walz on every issue, but since electing them is one step closer to climate progress, free school lunch, fast trains, and legal weed, I will be voting for them on November 5.

I still brag about Michigan and Detroit-style pizza to anyone who listens, and I still play pond hockey in February with my siblings when I can. I’m even still riding our Lions’ win over the Vikings to be first in the conference.

But we all deserve healthy kids and safe streets, so when I think of Minnesota today, I think of learning from them about the future we deserve—and I believe it is within reach.

William Jacob Parsons was arrested recently in North Carolina on charges of appearing at a FEMA office carrying a semi-automatic handgun and making threats against employees.

According to the Washington Post:

Parsons said he was motivated by social media reports claiming that FEMA was withholding supplies from hurricane victims in western North Carolina. Such false claims are part of a wave of misinformation that has hampered hurricane recovery efforts across the Southeast. ‘I viewed it as if our people are sitting here on American soil, and they’re refusing to aid our people,’ Parsons told FOX8.

A ”wave.” The phenomenon sounds beyond human control, like the waves caused by the hurricane itself.

Only a few paragraphs down does the story mention that there is a politics here: “As the country digs out, false claims about the storms have divided the Republican Party. While Donald Trump and his allies have spread the falsehoods, other GOP lawmakers and officials have sought to counter these rumors without directly criticizing the former president.” It turns out that it was Trump and his allies who caused this “wave.” Even here, the reporter needs to emphasize that “other GOP lawmakers and officials have sought to counter these rumors without directly criticizing the former president.” What is not said: these officials, like Republican office holders throughout the country, continue to support Donald Trump as he runs a campaign centered on lies, threats, and promises to use coercive force to deal with immigrants, suspected criminals, and various “enemies from within”—the same types he described only a few months ago as “the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

Focusing on the lone wolf rather than the rabid wolf pack led and incited by Trump, and exaggerating the extent to which anyone in the GOP is constraining him in any way, this piece exemplifies the widespread tendency of so many journalists and commentators to downplay the threat that Trump’s rhetoric and his promises poses to so many people—federal workers, election workers, Haitians, anyone suspected of a crime, and pretty much all people on the left.

Robert Pape is a highly respected political scientist at the University of Chicago, and the Chicago Project on Security and Threats that he founded and directs is a major source of data on political violence. In recent weeks he has weighed in on the current U.S. political situation, in a Foreign Affairs essay entitled “Our Own Worst Enemies: The Violent Style in American Politics,” and in a New York Times op-ed entitled “I Study Political Violence. I’m Worried About the Election.” Unfortunately, Pape furnishes the downplaying of Trumpist violence with a patina of “scientific” credibility.

Pape begins by noting that “As we approach the presidential election next month, our election sites and officials may be in considerable physical danger.” He proceeds to note the most obvious source of concern: “Over the past four years, an alarming number of election officials and workers nationwide have been intimidated or threatened by people who appear to believe the widespread lies about voter fraud and rigged voting machines that supposedly helped steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump.”

But as the empirical scientist of politics that he is, he seeks to go beyond the obvious. And the point of his interventions is to share the “worrisome evidence” of his center’s survey research: “we found disturbingly high levels of support for political violence. Notably, this attitude was bipartisan. Nearly 6 percent of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the ‘use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.’ A little over 8 percent agreed or strongly agreed that ‘the use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.’ These results reflect a relatively stable pattern over the past year.”

The upshot is clear: both sides of the political divide display troubling support for violence, and we are, as his essay says, “our own worst enemies.” His recommendation: Republican and Democratic Governors, especially in swing states, should make a joint public statement condemning violence, and dedicate resources to election security, so that both election officials and the broad public can feel safe and confident about the election.

The closing words of Pape’s op-ed underscore that the source of his urgent worry is even-handed and not partisan:

If we had not recently witnessed some of the worst election-related violence in modern American history — the Jan. 6 riot, the attempted kidnapping of Speaker Nancy Pelosi before the 2022 midterms and the two attempted assassinations of Mr. Trump — it might make sense to take more modest precautions. But the past four years have shown that we live in a dangerous new world.

Unfortunately Pape, the prisoner of his data, downplays the Trumpist danger no less egregiously than the many journalists who lack his scientific authority. And the problem is not in his data. It is in the lack of political judgment that he brings to it.

For it is quite obvious that not a single instance of violence that he references has anything to do with the left.

The January 6 insurrection, the attacks on Pelosi (and violent threats against many others, from AOC to General Mark Milley and Georgia Republican Brad Raffensperger), the threats to election officials—all of these things, like the threat to FEMA, come from the right and are indeed directly promoted and incited by Donald Trump. Even the two assassination attempts on Trump had nothing to do with the left—though Trump and Vance continue to lie about this. The first accused assassin was a registered Republican with obvious mental problems. The second was a disgruntled former Trump supporter who actually wrote a book explaining his disillusionment and calling for Trump’s assassination. Both assailants were products of the cult of violence produced by Trump (in a recent Atlantic piece, “The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator,” David Frum points out that Trump was the victim of his own rhetoric).

There is no obvious reason to doubt Pape’s survey results. There are people on the left who hate Trump as much as people on the right hate Democrats, and many of those on the left might be as willing to say “yes” to a survey question about violence as those on the right.

But all of the threats and the actual violence that Pape notes, and that are so obviously so very dangerous right now, have come from the right.

Not a single Democratic leader has done anything to justify or incite violence or question the legitimacy of the electoral system or describe J-6 insurrectionists as “us” and police as the “they” who had weapons at the Capitol. Only one of the two major parties has unreservedly supported a candidate whose entire campaign has centered on vindicating the insurrection and promising to “eradicate” an opposition that he describes as “vermin,” going so far as to propose using federal troops to repress them. Retired Generals Mark Milley and John Kelly—both former Trump appointees, and neither a member of Democratic Socialist of America– have publicly declared that Donald Trump is a fascist. A fascist. Has any serious military official outside of the deranged Michael Flynn said anything like this about Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or any Democrat? No. Because no Democrat is a fascist.

There may be some symmetry in the way “extremists” on both sides of our polarized politics poll as “sympathetic to violence.”

But as serious political scientists have long known, filling out questionnaires is one thing, and politics is another. Only on the Trumpist right is there an organized campaign to demonize opponents and to incite and justify violence, and only on the Trumpist right are there many thousands of armed individuals—some organized as “patriot” paramilitary groups, some as lone wolves—who have acted on the incitement to violence. Is there a single election official, anywhere, who fears that there are leftist activists who threaten them because they believe that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats, liberals, progressives and Marxists, and that “we need to take our country back” from the “lunatic communists?”

“There is violence on both sides,” or “we are our own worst enemies”—such rhetoric is stupid and grievously misleading as we approach a truly watershed election in which, to use the words of Trump critic, conservative Republican jurist J. Michael Luttig, democracy itself is “on a knife’s edge.”

There is no symmetry when it comes to the danger of political violence.

We are not our own worst enemies. Trump is the worst enemy of every one of us—from Liz Cheney to Bernie Sanders– who cares about constitutional democracy, and he makes no bones about saying so. He is retribution. He is vengeance.

Trumpism is the source of the violence that threatens to engulf us.

And the solution is simple: Stop Trump!

We have no time to waste.

Over the years, the Democratic Party’s blunders, arrogance and dependence on commercial campaign money and corporate-conflicted political/media consultants have put the two-party duopoly races for the Presidency, the Senate and the House next week into razor-thin elections.

The polls show Democrats in neck-and-neck races with the worst GOP since its creation in 1854. The GOP is led by a delusionary, daily lying, violence-inciting, bigoted, misogynist, serial election denier, convicted felon, and wannabe dictator, Donald Trump, who can’t process information but has openly boasted that he knows more than everybody.

The Party of the Donkey deteriorated years ago and opened the door to unnecessary close cliff-hanger elections. The Dems wrote off nearly half of the country (the red states) to the Republicans. This abandonment included the prairie states (North and South Dakota) and the mountain states that used to have many Democratic Senators. Now they have only three Senators from seven states.

The next Democratic party blunder was not to support the National Popular Vote drive to overcome the Electoral College. (See: nationalpopularvote.com). This is the anachronism that cost the Democrats two presidential losses — one in 2000 and one in 2016 — even though the Democratic presidential candidate handily won the national popular vote.

Third, the Democratic Party decided to robustly compete with the GOP and dial for the same business campaign cash in return for relenting from progressive policies.

Fourth, the Dems lost the gerrymandering drive in 2010 when they were caught napping against a vigorous GOP drive to control key state legislatures like Pennsylvania and get more GOP members in the House of Representatives.

What should the Dems do for the people in the next four days? Bernie Sanders is the most popular elected politician in the country. Why? Because Sanders, two-time presidential candidate, wants social safety net policies that are well received by working families where they live, work, and raise their families. He has urged Kamala Harris to authentically campaign to raise the federal minimum wage frozen at $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour for over 25 million workers, raise Social Security benefits, frozen for over 50 years for over 60 million elderly, and raise taxes on the undertaxed wealthy and big corporations (for a hike supported by 85% of the people.) These three measures also appeal to many self-described conservative voters.

So, what does Harris do? She does not campaign with the popular Bernie. She advertises heavily and campaigns instead with Liz Cheney who supported the war criminals Dick Cheney and G.W. Bush in their criminal invasion and sociocide of Iraq taking over one million innocent Iraqi lives and leaving that country in ruins. Liz Cheney, an avowed Republican opponent of Trump, is also a confirmed corporatist. Forgetting Sanders and heralding Cheney is not the way to turn out low-wage voters who make up a good portion of the expected 85 million eligible non-voters in next Tuesday’s election.

Unable to adjust, the Democratic Party keeps pouring billions of dollars into the same mediocre ads showing Trump to be unfit for office. These repetitive video spots by now have reached diminishing returns, as a vote-getter. Almost everyone has already made up their mind on Trump’s deficiencies.

The ads should shift quickly to overcoming an astonishing amnesia by a majority of voters who think they were better off economically under Trump’s term than under Biden’s. They have forgotten Trump’s closing down any efforts to secure full Medicare for All, enact higher minimum wages, and initiate enforcement efforts against corporate crooks squeezing money from the American people. All the while he was early mocking the oncoming Covid-19 pandemic and calling intense climate catastrophes “a hoax.” His deadly delays regarding Covid led to the preventable loss of some 300,000 American lives and worsened the associated recession. The Democratic Party ads have been largely AWOL on this abysmal record while focusing expensively on Trump personally.

Instead of aligning with worker unions and progressive civic groups working to benefit all people, Harris ogles up to big business bosses, thereby jettisoning media and video opportunities to be with pro-party groups with millions of members.

Harris has learned little from Hillary Clinton’s disastrous loss to Trump in 2016. She continues to be supportive of the U.S. Empire and, despite more dulcet tones, is aligned with Bibi-Biden’s massive weapons and diplomatic engagement with mega-terrorist Netanyahu’s genocide of the Palestinians and now the Lebanese.

She cannot even get herself to propose immediate peace negotiations over the Russian/Ukrainian war bogged down month after month with large casualties on both sides. These stands would separate her a little from Biden which would help identify her as her own person.

Vice President Hubert Humphrey, running for the presidency in 1968, declined to break with President Johnson on the Vietnam War. Analysts believe that cost him in the tight race against Richard Nixon because many Democratic voters stayed home.

There is still time to highlight Bernie Sanders’ protections for the people. There is still time to recognize the millions of midnight shift workers who do not see a candidate and would welcome recognition by Democratic candidates – local, state, and national. (See: winningamerica.net/midnightcampaigning).

There is still time to pledge compliance with six federal laws being violated by unconditional weapons shipments to Israel’s war in Palestine. Backed by majority public opinion, she should strongly DEMAND an immediate ceasefire, entry of U.S. humanitarian aid trucks to the starving, dying innocent people of Gaza, and a cessation of the Palestinian Holocaust by the Israeli regime that has already taken at least 400,000 Palestinian lives, mostly children, women and elderly.

If Harris doesn’t advance these policies, she’ll be telling people that she will just be an extension of the Biden presidency. These actions may not be enough to bring out the stay-at-home voters who in the past had voted for the Democratic candidate, but they have a higher probability than just staying the cursed course.

The recent BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia should mark the end of the Neocon delusions encapsulated in the subtitle of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 book, The Global Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. Since the 1990s, the goal of American foreign policy has been “primacy,” aka global hegemony. The U.S. methods of choice have been wars, regime change operations, and unilateral coercive measures (economic sanctions). Kazan brought together 35 countries with more than half the world population that reject the U.S. bullying and that are not cowed by U.S. claims of hegemony.

In the Kazan Declaration, the countries underscored “the emergence of new centres of power, policy decision-making and economic growth, which can pave the way for a more equitable, just, democratic and balanced multipolar world order.” They emphasized "the need to adapt the current architecture of international relations to better reflect the contemporary realities,” while declaring their “commitment to multilateralism and upholding the international law, including the Purposes and Principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations (UN) as its indispensable cornerstone.” They took particular aim at the sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, holding that “Such measures undermine the UN Charter, the multilateral trading system, the sustainable development and environmental agreements.”

Time has run out on the neocon delusions, and the U.S. wars of choice.

The neocon quest for global hegemony has deep historical roots in America’s belief in its exceptionalism. In 1630, John Winthrop invoked the Gospels in describing the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “City on the Hill,” declaring grandiosely that “The eyes of all people are upon us.” In the 19th century, America was guided by Manifest Destiny, to conquer North America by displacing or exterminating the native peoples. In the course of World War II, Americans embraced the idea of the “American Century,” that after the war the U.S. would lead the world.

The U.S. delusions of grandeur were supercharged with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. With America’s Cold War nemesis gone, the ascendant American neoconservatives conceived of a new world order in which the U.S. was the sole superpower and the policeman of the world. Their foreign policy instruments of choice were wars and regime-change operations to overthrow governments they disliked.

Following 9/11, the neocons planned to overthrow seven governments in the Islamic world, starting with Iraq, and then moving on to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. According to Wesley Clark, former Supreme Commander of NATO, the neocons expected the U.S. to prevail in these wars in 5 years. Yet now, more than 20 years on, the neocon-instigated wars continue while the U.S. has achieved absolutely none of its hegemonic objectives.

The neocons reasoned back in the 1990s that no country or group of countries would ever dare to stand up to U.S. power. Brzezinski, for example, argued in The Grand Chessboard that Russia would have no choice but to submit to the U.S.-led expansion of NATO and the geopolitical dictates of the U.S. and Europe, since there was no realistic prospect of Russia successfully forming an anti-hegemonic coalition with China, Iran and others. As Brzezinski put it:

“Russia’s only real geostrategic option—the option that could give Russia a realistic international role and also maximize the opportunity of transforming and socially modernizing itself—is Europe. And not just any Europe, but the transatlantic Europe of the enlarging EU and NATO.” (emphasis added, Kindle edition, p. 118)

Brzezinski was decisively wrong, and his misjudgment helped to lead to the disaster of the war in Ukraine. Russia did not simply succumb to the U.S. plan to expand NATO to Ukraine, as Brzezinski assumed it would. Russia said a firm no, and was prepared to wage war to stop the U.S. plans. As a result of the neocon miscalculations vis-à-vis Ukraine, Russia is now prevailing on the battlefield, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dead.

Nor—and this is the plain message from Kazan—did U.S. sanctions and diplomatic pressures isolate Russian in the least. In response to pervasive U.S. bullying, an anti-hegemonic counterweight has emerged. Simply put, the majority of the world does not want or accept U.S. hegemony, and is prepared to face it down rather than submit to its dictates. Nor does the U.S. anymore possess the economic, financial, or military power to enforce its will, if it ever did.

The countries that assembled in Kazan represent a clear majority of the world’s population. The nine BRICS members (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa as the original five, plus Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates), in addition to the delegations of 27 aspiring members, constitute 57 percent of the world’s population and 47 percent of the world’s output (measured at purchasing-power adjusted prices). The U.S., by contrast, constitutes 4.1 percent of the world population and 15 percent of world output. Add in the U.S. allies, and the population share of the U.S.-led alliance is around 15 percent of the global population.

The BRICS will gain in relative economic weight, technological prowess, and military strength in the years ahead. The combined GDP of the BRICS countries is growing at around 5 percent per annum, while the combined GDP of the U.S. and its allies in Europe and the Asia-Pacific is growing at around 2 percent per annum.

Even with their growing clout, however, the BRICS can’t replace the U.S. as a new global hegemon. They simply lack the military, financial, and technological power to defeat the U.S. or even to threaten its vital interests. The BRICS are in practice calling for a new and realistic multipolarity, not an alternative hegemony in which they are in charge.

American strategists should heed the ultimately positive message coming from Kazan. Not only has the neocon quest for global hegemony failed, it has been a costly disaster for the US and the world, leading to bloody and pointless wars, economic shocks, mass displacements of populations, and rising threats of nuclear confrontation. A more inclusive and equitable multipolar world order offers a promising path out of the current morass, one that can benefit the U.S. and its allies as well as the nations that met in Kazan.

The rise of the BRICS is therefore not merely a rebuke to the U.S., but also a potential opening for a far more peaceful and secure world order. The multipolar world order envisioned by the BRICS can be a boon for all countries, including the United States. Time has run out on the neocon delusions, and the U.S. wars of choice. The moment has arrived for a renewed diplomacy to end the conflicts raging around the world.

In 1968, I was a full-time anti-Vietnam War organizer and voted for a third-party candidate. I now regret that protest vote, which has led me to think differently this time around.

I certainly sympathize with many progressives who intend to either sit out this election or vote for the Green Party’s Jill Stein or Cornel West. Kamala Harris’s continuing support for Israel’s war on Gaza and now Lebanon is abhorrent to anyone opposing war. For the past year the Biden-Harris administration has functioned as a willing ally and enabler of Israel’s genocide. Though not a self-proclaimed Zionist like the president, Harris parrots Israel’s talking points and lies about the war on Gaza. At the Democratic convention, she didn’t even permit a Palestinian representative to speak for five minutes from the platform.

But come election day, I won’t be casting a protest vote as I did in 1968 — even though I see so many parallels with the choice we faced then.

Like Harris, that year’s Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, served as vice president, standing loyally by as Lyndon Johnson sent more than a half-million U.S. troops to Vietnam, hundreds of whom were dying every week in 1968. Far from distinguishing himself from the war hawks, Humphrey made speeches supporting the U.S. and its South Vietnamese allies as thousands of American soldiers were killed and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were slaughtered.

When it comes to radically transforming the two major political parties it’s going to take a lot more than one election cycle.

Adding to this outrage, Humphrey was nominated at the infamous Democratic convention in Chicago where the local cops brutally assaulted antiwar demonstrators in what was later described as a “police riot.” I was one of those protesters and was jailed for my efforts. Many antiwarriors demonstrated against Humphrey during the subsequent campaign, often chanting “Dump the Hump.” So, when election day came, I just couldn’t bring myself to vote for someone I considered a war criminal and cast my ballot for comedian Dick Gregory, who was running on a third-party ticket.

What I did not consider, however, was Humphrey’s opponent — Richard Nixon. At the time, I considered the parties as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Both seemed indistinguishable on Vietnam. And both reflected the same Cold War anticommunist mentality that underlay the American imperialist project and the growing military-industrial state.

I ignored, however, the profound differences between the two candidates on a host of other issues. For example, Nixon’s campaign revolved around what he called a Southern strategy. By using thinly disguised racist “law-and-order” rhetoric, he hoped to peel away white Southern and Northern white working-class voters from the Democrats. Ronald Reagan and later Republican administrations have solidified their appeal to white voters to effectively roll back the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement, especially on voting rights.

Today, the differences between the two parties are even more stark on a wide variety of issues – from women’s and LGBTQ+ rights to the climate and consumer protections to electoral integrity. The evidence can be found in Project 2025, the Republican blueprint for a new Trump presidency. Or in what Trump proclaims at his rallies. Earlier this month, he declared that he intends to use the military against protesters whom he considers “the enemy within.”

This kind of authoritarian rule is happening around the world, including Erdogan’s Turkey, Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia. There is very little to protect it from happening here. We certainly can’t rely on the current Supreme Court.

In the face of such a prospect, shouldn’t we do whatever is possible to forestall an autocratic regime? I no longer see casting a symbolic protest ballot — or sitting on the sidelines — as an act of conscience. Real acts of conscience imply taking a risk and being willing to accept the consequences.

Still, some might argue that it’s worth voting for the Green Party’s Jill Stein to send a message to the Democrats that they can’t literally get away with murder in Gaza. But would it convey that message?

In 2016, when Stein last ran for president, she received more votes than Trump’s margin of victory in three key states: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In this election, that could be enough to help him retake the White House. Trump’s solution to the Gaza war: Netanyahu should “finish the job.” Is that something that would help the Palestinians?

More than anything, they need us to continue challenging the U.S.-Israeli genocide by street actions, by supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, and by educating our fellow citizens about the reality of the Zionist settler-colonial project. When it comes to radically transforming the two major political parties it’s going to take a lot more than one election cycle. It will require building powerful movements that address systemic issues like racism, poverty, ecological devastation, and war and militarism.

In the final days of clashing election campaigns, a U.S. senator rides a groundswell of support as the world falters during a global nuclear crisis.

In our novel, first drafted years ago, the character is Senator Elaine Adams, an African American woman from Chicago’s south side, the leading Democrat in a presidential campaign against a swaggering autocratic Republican who revels in name-calling and vulgar nicknames—“Insane Elaine” in our story. We called him President Richard Waller.

While the comparisons with former President Donald Trump and his “lunatic Harris” insults may ring a bell, this is not what worries us, as authors of this fictitious story.

At this very moment, over 3,000 “accountable” nuclear warheads are currently deployed by the U.S. and Russia on land-based and submarine-launched ballistic missiles and bomber bases, according to the Federation of American Scientists. This number comes from the New START agreement, signed in 2010 by U.S. and Russia Presidents, Obama and Medvedev. Key word: Accountable. Over 12,000 nuclear weapons are spread across the globe, per official estimates.

We thought we wrote fiction, but we are now terrified about the unfolding crisis of our nuclear weapons policy—and a growing but misguided call for a renewed arms race that will continue to push our civilization to the brink—of survival.

But this last nuclear agreement, like a bridge burning on both ends of diplomacy, expires in the spring of 2026, thanks to the Trump administration’s refusal to accept an extension. The next President of the United States will be in charge of both modernizing our nuclear arsenal and renegotiating it with Russia, China and six other nuclear countries.

Freeze that frame with this image at a global arms conference: The next President of the United States will ultimately decide our fate as the “Doomsday Clock” remains at 90 seconds before midnight. UN chief Antonio Guterres added his own metaphor this summer, that humanity is now on the “knife’s edge” of nuclear annihilation.

This election has forced us, a film director and a cultural historian, to come from behind the camera and between library stacks to put our storyline on the table with an unabashed message. In a world in the midst of indiscriminate warfare from the Ukraine to Sudan to the Middle East, in an age of super sophisticated high-tech weaponry, including laser weapons and nuclear-tipped hypersonic missiles, we need a President who doesn’t declare, as Trump did on the cusp of his presidency in 2016, “let it be an arms race.” Or worse: A repeat of a Trump administration that gutted or abandoned virtually every arms control treaty, while viciously attacking the one treaty that attempts to save humanity from itself: the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

We thought we wrote fiction, but we are now terrified about the unfolding crisis of our nuclear weapons policy—and a growing but misguided call for a renewed arms race that will continue to push our civilization to the brink—of survival. Let us not forget why the Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded this year to the organization of survivors of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nihon Hidankyo, for their efforts “to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.”

A crisis is never a crisis until it is validated by disaster. In our research, that theme permeated the storylines, as it has with movies by Andrew Davis for the past thirty years. When the New York Times reviewed the film Under Siege for “blending art and action,” he reminded them that his intent was to raise “provocative questions” about nuclear arms.

Today we write about hypersonic missiles, which are being deployed by Russia in Ukraine, that travel 5-25 times the speed of sound. These missiles now have the capacity of being equipped with nuclear warheads. Likewise, laser weapons, seemingly out of “Star Wars,” are being deployed in the Middle East.

A crisis is never a crisis until it is validated by disaster.

This is not fiction: The illusory age of fail-safe systems has come to an end. Miscalculations have always been part of the nuclear past, and yet fate has remained on the side of humanity. The explosion of a B-52 bomber carrying two nuclear bombs came one switch away from detonating in North Carolina in 1961. Three decades later, Russian president Boris Yeltsin activated the nuclear briefcase, only to pull back when the perceived threat was discovered to be a Norwegian rocket studying the northern lights.

In our novel, we posit the rise of a new president, in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster. We bring the story back to Chicago, and we ask this provocative question: If the Atomic Age truly began in the afternoon of December 2, 1942, at the University of Chicago with Enrico Fermi’s team, who created the first controlled chain reaction in a secret location under the old Stagg Field stadium stands, could a new age of a world without nuclear weapons unleash its own chain reaction of peace here at McCormick Place in Chicago?

In 1955, author William Faulkner confronted his native South to "speak now against the day" of segregation; to not wait until the evitable questions over denial arose in another generation: “Why didn’t someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time!”

The nuclear bomb has come full circle. It’s time to elect a president who will bring disarmament to the global agenda—and put an end to this new nuclear arms race.

Picture this: shimmery sunlight dancing on water. Deep blue crests over seafoam green before dissipating as waves meet the shore. The Chicago skyline gazes from a distance.

Running along Lake Michigan is one of my favorite pastimes at Northwestern University. We pride ourselves on having not one, but two beaches on campus that showcase the lake. The body of water is so wide it feels more like an ocean. The sound of the waves crashing onto the sand reminds me of the beaches back home in the San Francisco Bay Area.

But in the heart of the Great Lakes—where Lake Michigan meets Lake Huron—America’s most dangerous crude oil pipeline threatens 700 miles of coastline and our climate future.

By incorporating pipeline shutdowns in her climate platform, Harris can send a clear message that our future doesn’t rely on fossil fuels and that people can raise their families and thrive in the Great Lakes region.

Growing up in the Bay Area showed me that addressing the climate crisis is my generation’s mission. When I was a junior in high school in 2020, California experienced the worst wildfire in state history. Orange haze blanketed everything. With the air quality index skyrocketing, I did not dare go outside. Friends had to evacuate their homes, and a teacher of mine saw their house burn down. I knew I wanted a career focused on the environment when I realized our wildfires would grow worse every year without action.

Coming here for college, I was excited to explore a new part of the country and catch a break from the wildfire season. People tout the Midwest as a haven from the climate crisis, but environmental issues are aplenty here as well.

As the presidential election date gets closer with states in the Midwest crucial for the Harris-Walz ticket to pick up, looming threats to our Great Lakes should gain wider attention, all because of North America’s most dangerous fossil fuel pipeline. The Great Lakes hold one-fifth of the world’s available fresh water supply, but under it lurks an oil pipeline called Line 5, operated by Canadian oil corporation Enbridge, which could ruin millions of people’s drinking water, mar Lake Michigan’s beauty, and devastate our communities.

Right in the heart of the Great Lakes, the Line 5 oil pipeline is accelerating our climate crisis as we speak. Seventy-one years ago, Enbridge built Line 5 right through Michigan and Wisconsin and in some of the most sensitive areas in the Great Lakes as a shortcut to reach Ontario, Canada. A spill from Line 5 could reach the Lake Michigan shoreline where myself and hundreds of thousands of people live and walk by everyday.

Enbridge has a sordid history when it comes to pipeline infrastructure. They are responsible for one of the largest inland oil spills in United States history from another pipeline they operate in Michigan. They didn’t shut the valve for 17 hours, and remediation efforts took five years. A similar spill from Line 5 would significantly threaten the Great Lakes and the people who call this region home. When burned, the oil in Line 5 contributes more greenhouse gas emissions than the three most polluting coal-fired power plants in the country combined

With a major election this year, young voters across Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota will be a crucial voting bloc. For many of us—myself included—it’s going to be our first time voting in a presidential election. Taking action for the environment is at the forefront of my generation’s concerns, which means that delivering a tangible victory to protect our climate and Great Lakes is absolutely necessary. Enbridge’s Line 5 must be shut down and decommissioned. While a Harris-Walz administration can deliver by making this action happen, U.S. President Joe Biden can do so now by revoking this outdated pipeline’s permit.

The Great Lakes aren’t just the source of drinking water for over 40 million people. They’re our identity, creating a major reason why many of us live in the Midwest to begin with. When governments are putting more energy toward keeping fossil fuel pipelines in the Great Lakes than preserving the water we drink from, swim in, and fish from, it gives the impression that our natural resources aren’t worth saving. We cannot afford to be complacent in a time of crisis, and we must do better.

Indigenous Tribes, environmental groups, small businesses, and local residents across the Great Lakes have been fighting Enbridge’s Line 5 for over a decade because of the severe risks it poses to our air, land, water, and health. Enbridge has been operating illegally in Michigan since Gov. Gretchen Whitmer took action to stop the pipeline in 2020. And since 2012, Enbridge has been trespassing on the Bad River Band’s reservation in Wisconsin.

People are taking action against Line 5 by signing petitions, attending rallies in the U.S. and Canada, writing to their legislators, and emailing administration officials like U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg for a shutdown. Volunteers have organized local businesses, faith communities, and Native Nations to attend teach-ins and community events and share information on Line 5’s dangers.

With Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket now, shutting down Line 5 should be a key issue in her policy platform. Gov. Whitmer won reelection handily after calling for a shutdown order, which shows that moving away from fossil fuels and decommissioning unsafe pipelines can be a winning electoral issue. Prioritizing a Line 5 shutdown could show that Harris can be one of the most pro-environment presidents in American history—her track record from California and her time in the Senate suggests that she prioritizes environmental policies like this. Shutting down the pipeline can set the stage for a new climate champion government.

A Line 5 shutdown is an achievable, easy win with real advantages. If climate is on the agenda for young voters in key Midwest states, Line 5 should be on the list of the vice president’s campaign priorities. By incorporating pipeline shutdowns in her climate platform, Harris can send a clear message that our future doesn’t rely on fossil fuels and that people can raise their families and thrive in the Great Lakes region. Young voters from the Midwest, like me, are firmly uniting behind one key message: Shut down Line 5.

Today is Michigan. Yesterday was Wisconsin. Tomorrow is Ohio. I’ve been traveling on the road with Protect Our Care on a big blue bus for six weeks with an important message. The Affordable Care Act saved my life, and we're not going back.

Back in 2017, I walked into a doctor's office with a cough, and walked out with a cancer diagnosis. I thought I was a healthy 40-year-old small-business owner, but was stunned to learn I had stage 4 Hodgkin lymphoma. Thankfully my insurance covered the treatments that have me in remission today.

White-knuckle days of chemotherapy and nights of after effects for a grueling six months, then many weeks of radiation followed. Surviving and recovering should have been my sole focus. But instead I had to drag myself through treatments, then to rallies and press conferences: begging former U.S. President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress not to strip away the insurance I needed to save my life.

Nearly a decade after Donald Trump promised us a healthcare plan, he only has "concepts of a plan". Neither doctors nor hospitals accept concepts in lieu of payment.

The day after my first chemotherapy session, while I was on the couch trying not to die, MAGA Republicans in the U.S. House egged on by Trump voted to repeal Obamacare. And then threw a party to celebrate.

We cannot go back.

So we're rolling forward on the Care Force One bus: traveling the country and sharing our healthcare stories, and coming to a city near you in these final days.

We will not go back to the terror that 135 million Americans with preexisting conditions felt in 2017 under the first year of Trump's rule, knowing that we could lose access to care at any moment without the protections of the ACA. Will we not go back to annual or lifetime limits on care. Being denied an insurance policy because of our past medical history. Kids under 26 relying on insurance through their parents' plans could lose it. Over 10 million of us (including me) had insurance directly through the health insurance marketplace. And over 15 million of us had insurance through Medicaid expansion in our states—also a part of the ACA.

Since the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, America has made further healthcare advances—including the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 solely thanks to President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Democrats in Congress. This law caps insulin copays for people on Medicare at $35 a month, provides subsidies for health insurance for middle class families, and finally allows Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices.

Checking the news every morning back during Trump's first term led to a sense of dread at whatever cruel back-of-the-envelope plan that Trump or Republicans would produce that day. These "plans" never expanded our healthcare or made it better, just threw vulnerable Americans to the wolves to pay for tax breaks to rich people. We cannot go back to that chaos and terror.

Nearly a decade after Donald Trump promised us a healthcare plan, he only has "concepts of a plan". Neither doctors nor hospitals accept concepts in lieu of payment.

His running mate JD Vance spilled the beans: The "concepts" include letting insurers cover only young and healthy people, and sending everyone else back to high-risk pools, which were notoriously underfunded and unable to protect people who need it most. And now Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) promises "No Obamacare."

It's like they don't understand the basic idea of insurance: everybody in one risk pool together, so that costs don't spiral out of control for the people who need it. If you stop covering people as soon as they get sick, of course insurance gets cheaper. This is like only offering blizzard damage insurance to Floridians, or hurricane damage insurance to Midwesterners–it's missing the entire point.

Republicans want to repeal and replace the Inflation Reduction Act now too.

We've seen the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 healthcare agenda, and it's not pretty. In the absence of plans of his own, will Trump and the entire Republican party just follow their playbook? That's what it was designed for, a detailed blueprint for the next Republican president starting on Day 1.

Whereas the Kamala Harris healthcare agenda would build on the gains of the Affordable Care Act and Inflation Reduction Act. Her administration would expand health coverage to more Americans, and lower drug prices for everyone.

We know what the candidates want to do and who their priorities are for. The choice is yours to make this fall: do we go forward, or do we go back?

Paulo Paulino Guajajara looks down and off to one side, the Amazon forest lush and dense behind him.

His voice thickens; he clears his throat. “My mother, she’s unwell. She told me to stop doing this work,” he says, and presses the heel of his hand against his eye to stop a tear.

He looks into the camera, “I told her I’m not scared, that she should let me fight. Because I have a son. And he will need the forest.”

Lobo once said, “Even if they kill me, I won’t stop fighting.”

Paulo, an Indigenous Amazon Guardian, was shot dead five years ago today (November 1, 2019) in the forest he loved—the Arariboia Indigenous Territory, in the Amazon’s northeast.

I was on the other side of the camera when he spoke of his mother’s fears. He wanted the world to know his people, his land, were under threat. He knew illegal loggers were paying gunmen to kill Guardians like him, but he continued to track them, leaving his infant son, wife, and his mother at home.

The Guardians are Guajajara people who protect Indigenous land. They confront illegal loggers, force them to leave, then destroy their camps. They do it to protect their families and for the Awá people, their neighbours who share the territory and some of whom shun all outside contact. Paulo admired the Awá. They are completely self-sufficient in their forest, but cannot survive without it.

Paulo and I met in 2017 when we recorded his video. In 2019 I went on a Guardian patrol as a researcher with Survival International, the global movement for Indigenous and tribal peoples’ rights. It was on that journey, deep in the rainforest, that Paulo and I became friends—and he asked me to call him by his Guardian name, Lobo (‘Wolf’ in English). The group assigns a name that reflects a Guardian’s personality and his place. It binds them together, protects their anonymity.

The Guardians gathered in a clearing to prepare for our patrol. They brought several motorbikes and a quad bike. About 15 men chatted casually as they honed their machetes, checked motorbike chains, and calculated how much petrol to take. They wrapped and stowed a big piece of meat—food for the journey. One man drew a map in the earth with a stick and pointed to the illegal logging camp—the object of our patrol. Well-worn bulletproof vests were distributed, then we got on the bikes and headed into the forest.

Lobo was quiet and focused, pitching in with an easy smile. He insisted I travel with him and his cousin on the more comfortable quad bike. As we rode dirt trails into the thickening forest, he taught me words in Tenetehar, his Indigenous language. He pointed and said, “foot,” “hand,” “elbow.” I repeated, worked to get my mouth around the unfamiliar syllables. Later, I proudly spoke the words he’d taught me, and the Guardians guffawed. I was saying, “ blue foot,” “fat elbow,” “laughing hand.” Lobo just grinned.

We gathered around a fire that night, kept small to prevent detection. The meat was cooked, and Lobo offered it to me on a skewer. He drew his machete, elegantly ran it down the meat’s edge, and urged me to pull away a thin, sinewy slice. It was a welcome treat, dipped in crunchy cassava farinha.

Lobo admired a woolly hat I’d brought from London, so I gave it to him. He cut eye holes and wore it pulled down over his face to keep his identity secret and protect him from the hired assassins. The group spread out and settled on the cold forest floor, wrapped in darkness and sound—the buzz of cicadas and trills of crickets, descants over the rumbling bass line of amorous bullfrogs.

The next day we travelled on foot. The Guardians inspected every snapped twig—evidence loggers were nearby. They examined tire tracks, noting their age and direction of travel. Tension rose as we got closer. We passed a pile of stacked logs and arrived at the camp—an oval-shaped clearing where blue and black tarps sheltered cooking and seating areas.

But the loggers had fled. We ate their breakfast—eggs and a pot of pumpkin they’d left cooking on their fire. And when we discovered a barrel of fresh water, Lobo insisted that I be the first to bathe.

He was angry though, disgusted at the loggers’ intrusion, the theft of trees, the destruction of the forest. And he was frustrated they’d escaped. “I want to burn and destroy this camp,” Lobo said, holding his lighter to a tarpaulin’s edge. “We don’t want anything of theirs in our territory.”

Lobo was out hunting when he was ambushed—shot and killed. Beside him, his friend and fellow Guardian Tainaky Tenetehar was also hit. The impact bent Tainaky over in pain. Straining with every part of his body, he straightened up and ran as blood poured from his right shoulder. Lobo lay dead on the forest floor, still wearing the hat that could not protect him.

Lobo was the sixth Guardian killed by loggers in the Arariboia forest. News of his death went round the world. Despite that, none of the killers have been caught or tried. And on this fifth anniversary of his killing, everything Lobo sought to protect is in greater peril—particularly the uncontacted Awá. They are among more than 150 uncontacted Indigenous peoples around the world—the most self-sufficient and most vulnerable peoples on the planet. Survival International is fighting to stop miners, loggers, ranchers, other extractive industries, and criminals stealing their territory and resources. The loggers are still there, while the Brazilian government fails the Awá by not upholding its own and international laws that require their land be protected for their exclusive use.

When I think of Lobo, I remember his easy laugh, the grin that spread slowly across his face. He always carried a pen drive loaded with his tunes. That smile grew ever wider when his favourite came on: Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” He would close his eyes and hum along.

Lobo once said, “Even if they kill me, I won’t stop fighting.”

His fight continues; for there is a little boy growing up without his marvellous father. And he still needs the forest.

Freedom is a blazing centerpiece of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. She tagged it nine times in her closing argument at the Ellipse in front of the White House this week. The contrast is fascism, which Donald Trump’s former top advisors warn us that he embodies, from Joint Chiefs of Staff chair General Mark Milley to White House chief of staff General Mark Kelly.

Her main focus on freedom is women’s constitutional reproductive rights, as decimated by the Supreme Court in its 2022 Dobbs decision, and the resultant threats to IVF (recently upheld by the Supreme Court!), contraception and marriage equality.

But she’s also passionate about freedom from gun violence, freedom to marry, freedom to enjoy clean air and water, freedom from climate pollution, and freedom to vote, as laid out in her convention speech.

Nearly a century after FDR took office at a fearful time with a joyous promise of “nothing to fear but fear itself,” Trump seeks the same office with a dark promise of everything to fear...

Our ancestors—President Franklin Roosevelt and his longest-serving cabinet members—in addition to winning the worldwide war against fascism, created the New Deal, which broke new ground in guaranteeing fundamental freedoms to help Americans recover from the devastation of the Great Depression.

To us, both fascism and freedom are on the ballot this November.

As for freedoms, let’s start with freedom for seniors to retire with a measure of economic security and dignity, as guaranteed by Social Security (which Trump has called a “Ponzi scheme” and promised to privatize or cut, and to terminate its basic funding source, the payroll tax, and Trump’s top benefactor Elon Musk now proposes to destroy).

As for FDR’s freedom for workers to organize and collectively bargain, to be guaranteed a livable minimum wage and unemployment insurance—it’s the opposite of Trump’s historically anti-union, anti-worker record—recently praising the firing of striking workers.

Freedom to have decent health care? Trump says the ACA “sucks” and should be “terminated,” and his plan to terminate the payroll tax would be devastating for Medicare.

Freedom from fascism? It was temporarily vanquished in 1945, but is now bizarrely resurgent, both abroad and in America. Vice President Henry Wallace presciently warned us about “American Fascism” in 1944 – predicting Trump to a “T.”

FDR valued freedom above all else. In 1941, he proposed the most expansive vision of freedom ever, encompassing freedom not only of religion and expression, but also freedom from want, and from fear. During the war, he framed the struggle as essential to lasting peace and security at home and abroad. He paved the way for freedoms yet to come.

Only later came the freedom to vote regardless of one’s skin color, the freedom for women to open a bank account, and the freedom to marry without regard to one’s skin color or gender. And for half a century, the freedom for women to make their own reproductive-health choices was an established constitutional right until Trump’s Supreme Court appointees suddenly decided to kill it.

The first woman presidential cabinet member, Frances Perkins, is shown greeting President Franklin D. Roosevelt upon his return to the White House from the 1943 Tehran Conference. Frances Perkins was US Secretary of Labor under Roosevelt from 1933 to 1945, longer than any other cabinet member has held the post. She died of a stroke at midtown Hospital on May 14, 1965.

Vice President Kamala Harris is picking up the mantle of freedom this election—all the freedoms we expect from good government to empower Americans to pursue individual happiness in life.

Sadly, convicted felon Donald Trump only cares about one person’s freedom: his own. A disgraced and convicted felon terrified of going to prison, he seeks the power to quash all criminal proceedings against himself. He proposes to weaponize the Justice Department, and even the military, against American citizens who displease him—“the enemy within”, expressly including domestic “Marxists and communists and fascists” like Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Trump's ignorance of the role of our Armed Forces is mind-blowingly dangerous. They are trained to kill, not to suppress dissent or enforce U.S. criminal laws.

Nearly a century after FDR took office at a fearful time with a joyous promise of “nothing to fear but fear itself,” Trump seeks the same office with a dark promise of everything to fear—from immigrants and crime, to a rigged justice system, our professional civil service, the news media, windmills, Haitians eating your pets, Obamacare, vaccines, and America’s untrustworthy elections. His pals at Project 2025 have helpfully fleshed out the details.

On the other hand, Kamala Harris joyously challenges us to “show each other—the world—who we are. And what we stand for. Freedom. Opportunity. Compassion. Dignity. Fairness. And endless possibilities.”

Every freedom that touches us personally is on the line on November 5—most fundamentally, freedom from fascism and the freedom to vote to protect our freedoms. Our revered ancestors are screaming at us from their graves.

The scariest thing at Trump’s quasi-fascist Madison Square Garden rally was not the vulgar and offensive rhetoric by surrogates like unfunny comic Killer Tony’s comments about Puerto Rico being a “floating island of garbage” and Black Americans carving watermelons for Halloween, as disgusting as they were.

No, it was Trump’s threat that he and GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson have “a little secret” to upend the results of the election. As Rep. Dan Goldman warned, Trump and Johnson may try to go to the House and throw out the certification of the electoral vote and turn it over to the Republican House majority who would hand the election to Trump.

Here’s how it could go down: MAGA operatives in swing states could challenge the allocation of electoral votes with the goal of making it impossible for one or more counties or states to certify the electoral vote on time, block both candidates from receiving the necessary minimum of 270 electoral votes, and throw it into the House for a so-called “contingent election” where each state gets one vote and Republicans are likely to have the edge with a majority of 26 state delegations unless Democrats flip this in the upcoming election.

Faithless Electors

Although most states award their electoral votes to the candidate who received the most popular votes in their state, the Constitution does not require them to do so. According to Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, each state has the right to decide how to appoint its electors. In many states, this would allow one or more electors (so-called “faithless electors”) to cast their vote for a candidate other than the one who received the most popular votes in their state. This has happened nearly 100 times in history, although so far it has not changed the ultimate results. It could be different this time.

According to various state laws in 15 states, a faithless elector’s vote isn’t counted and a replacement is named. But in 19 states, their votes would count. Some of these states have enforcement mechanisms, but others, including Pennsylvania, do not.

In July 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Chiafalo v Washington that a State may "penalize an elector for breaking his pledge and voting for someone other than the presidential candidate who won his State's popular vote." But it doesn’t require them to do so.

Let’s say Harris carries all the safely Blue states plus only the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. That would give her 270 electoral votes to Trump’s 268, the bare minimum for her to win. But let’s say there’s a faithless elector from one of the states that permit it, or a court challenge voids some electoral votes as discussed below. Then neither candidate would have an electoral college majority, which would throw the choice of the next president to the House of Representatives. Each state gets one vote and unless this election changes it, Republicans hold a majority of the states. So the House Republicans hands the election to Trump.

Court Cases that could flip the electoral vote from Harris to Trump

Meanwhile, there are several court cases that could flip the electoral college, particularly if the election is so close that it comes down to Pennsylvania.

In Republican National Committee v. Wetzel, the ultra-right wing 5th Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled that a state may not legally count a ballot mailed before election day that arrives for counting afterwards. As Mark Joseph Stern argued in Slate: “18 states and Washington, D.C., accept late-arriving ballots; the 5thCircuit’s reasoning would render all these laws illegitimate and void, nullifying hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of ballots.” SCOTUS could affirm or overturn the 5th Circuit. Although there’s probably no time to do so before election day, if it affirms the 5th Circuit between the election and the final certification of the electoral vote by Congress, it could disqualify the votes of countless Harris voters.

Meanwhile, in Genser v. Butler County Board of Elections the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that voters whose mail-in ballots contained a technical error (they were not placed in a second “security envelope”) would be permitted to submit a second provisional ballot that could be counted.

The Republican Party filed a motion for the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene and bar provisional ballots from being counted. If SCOTUS rules in their favor, it could disqualify thousands of Pennsylvania votes. Remember that in 2000, Bush defeated Gore by only 537 votes in Florida, when SCOTUS stopped the vote count.

With a 6-3 extreme right majority, SCOTUS could again hand the election to the Republican, Donald Trump.

Vote for a Democratic House

The only way to guarantee that the Trump/Rogers “secret plan” is to flip a couple of House delegation majorities from Red to Blue. That’s why it’s vitally important for Harris voters to vote in every state and cast their vote for the Democratic House candidate.

There is an outstanding plan for the next Presidential administration to fix our housing crisis. This plan would go a long way toward helping the nine million households behind on their rent and nearly 700,000 people living unhoused. But the plan does not come from either of the two major presidential candidates.

It is not that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are ignoring housing. They are well aware that three-quarters of swing-state voters say that housing costs are the biggest economic stressor in their lives, and that young voters rank housing costs as their number one issue. So both candidates have housing plans.

Of the two, Harris’s is far better, of course. Trump, who has a long and sordid history of discrimination and unlawful behavior as a landlord, mostly uses the housing crisis as a platform for demonizing immigrants, pledging that his plan of mass deportation will reduce housing demand and costs.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan for another Trump presidency proposes catastrophic housing ideas like privatizing public housing, gutting the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and undermining fair housing protections.

Harris’s plan features proposals to increase the supply of housing through expanded and new tax credits and relaxing regulations on home building. Harris also proposes down payment assistance to first-time homebuyers and limiting tax breaks now enjoyed by corporate landlords.

That’s all OK, as far as it goes. The problem is that it doesn’t go very far.

Every week, my students and I represent low-income tenants being forced from their homes in Indianapolis eviction courts. Building more market-rate housing, especially since most of that new building is focused on higher-end housing, doesn’t help them at all. They are facing eviction because low wages, disability, family crises, child care obligations, etc. mean they already can't afford market rate housing.

This is true across the country. “The most effective housing assistance for low-income households is not found in building more units but in helping low-income households afford the units that already exist,” Alex Schwartz, New School professor and author of the seminal Housing Policy in the United States, and Kirk McClure, professor emeritus in urban planning at the University of Kansas, have written. Alan Mallach, senior fellow at the Center for Community Progress and the National Housing Institute, agrees, bluntly titling one of his articles, “Rents Will Only Go So Low, No Matter How Much We Build.”

The good news is that there is a serious, detailed plan that our next president and Congress can implement to address the needs of our clients and the millions of others like them. It comes from the tenants themselves. Specifically, the plan is provided by the national Tenant Union Federation, which includes local unions like Bozeman Tenants United, the Louisville Tenants Union, and KC Tenants, the latter of which is currently engaged in an historic rent strike.

As Tara Raghuveer, Tenant Union Federation director says, “We can build, build, build as much as we want, but without federal rent caps and protections for tenants, people will continue to be priced out of their homes and the economy will continue to suffer.”

Social movement historians would not be surprised that tenants are taking the lead. Time and again, the most impactful reforms are the ones pushed not by elected officials but by those directly affected by the targeted injustice.

So the tenant union proposal for the next presidential administration, a twelve-page, 59-footnote Tenant Policy Agenda supported by three dozen other housing advocacy organizations, includes:

• Building and preserving twelve million units of permanently affordable housing
• Rent caps imposed as a condition of landlords receiving federal financing
• A Tenant Bill of Rights to guarantee both safe and healthy housing conditions and tenants’ rights to organize
• Reinvestment in existing public housing and the Section 8 voucher program

These needed housing reforms won’t be cheap, but the Tenant Union Federation rightly points out that we already use our tax code to generously reward corporate landlords, speculative homebuying practices, and uber-wealthy home purchasers. The next iteration of Washington leaders can change that. “Congress should ensure that the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share while raising significant revenue for robust public investments in permanently affordable, decommodified, climate resilient housing,” the Agenda states.

One hundred million people in the U.S. live in renting households. We can tell you first-hand that many of them are struggling right now. For now, the most complete and compelling plan to address that struggle is coming from the tenants. But hopefully the plan will be embraced by the next president.

“Tenants need a fighter in the White House who will champion tenants’ rights and usher in a new era of housing stability,” the Tenant Union Federation agenda states. “With record homelessness, unaffordability and coordinated rent gouging rampant in the rental market, it’s high time for the most pro-tenant administration in American history.”

On October 24th, a U.S. presidential candidate told an interviewer, “Our day one agenda… also includes picking up the phone and telling Bibi Netanyahu that the war is over, because it’s basically our proxy war. We control the armaments, the funding, the diplomatic cover, the intelligence, etc., so we can end this in the blink of an eye with a single phone call, which is what Ronald Reagan did when Israel had gone into Lebanon and was massacring thousands of people. So we can do that right now. That’s day one.”

Tragically, the candidate who said that was not Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, but Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Most Americans have been persuaded that Stein cannot win the election, and many believe that voting for her in swing states will help elect Trump by siphoning voters from Harris.

There are many other “third-party” candidates for president, and many of them have good policy proposals for ending the genocidal U.S.-Israeli massacre in Gaza. As the website for Claudia de la Cruz, the presidential candidate for the Party of Socialism and Liberation, explains, “Our tax dollars should be used to meet people's needs -- not pay for the bullets, bombs and missiles used in the massacre in Gaza.”

Whoever wins this election, we must find a way to put peace back on this country’s national agenda, and to make our collective voices heard

Many of the principles and policy proposals of “third-party” and independent candidates are more in line with the views of most Americans than those of Harris or Trump. This is hardly surprising given the widely recognized corruption of the U.S. political system. While Trump cynically flip-flops to appeal to both sides on many questions, and Harris generally avoids committing to policy specifics at all, especially regarding foreign policy, most Americans understand that they are both more beholden to the billionaires and corporate interests who fund their campaigns than to the well-being of working Americans or the future of the planet.

Michael Moore has published a flier titled “This Is America,” which shows that large majorities of Americans support “liberal” positions on 18 different issues, from a ceasefire in Gaza to Medicare For All to getting money out of politics.

Moore implies that this should be reassuring to Democrats and Harris supporters, and it would be if she was running on those positions. But, for the most part, she isn’t. On the other hand, many third party and independent candidates for president are running on those positions, but the anti-democratic U.S. political system ensures that they can’t win, even when most Americans agree with them.

War and militarism are the most deadly and destructive forces in human society, with real world, everyday, physical impacts that kill or maim people and destroy their homes, communities and entire countries. So it is deeply disturbing that the political system in the United States has been corrupted into bipartisan subservience to a military-industrial complex (or MICIMATT, to use a contemporary term) that wields precisely the “unwarranted influence” that President Eisenhower warned us against 64 years ago, and uses its influence to drag us into wars that wreak death and destruction in country after country.

Apart from brief wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait, all now many decades ago, the U.S. military has not won a war since 1945. It systematically fails on its own terms, while its nakedly lethal and destructive power only fills graveyards and leaves countries in ruins. Far from being an effective vehicle to project American power, unleashing the brutality of the U.S. war machine has become the fastest, surest way to further undermine America’s international standing in the eyes of our neighbors.

After so many wars under so many administrations of both parties, neither Republicans nor Democrats can claim to be a “lesser evil” on questions of war and peace, let alone a “peace party.”

As with so many of America’s problems, from the expansion of corporate and oligarchic power to the generational decline in living standards, the combined impact of decades of Democratic and Republican government is more dangerous, more lasting and more intractable than the policies of any single administration. On no question is this more obvious than on questions of war and peace.

For decades, there was a small but growing progressive wing in the Democratic Party that voted against record military spending and opposed U.S. wars, occupations and coups. But when Bernie Sanders ran for president and millions of grassroots Democrats rallied around his progressive agenda, the Party leaders and their corporate, plutocratic backers fought back more aggressively to defeat Bernie and the progressives than they ever fought to win elections against the Republicans, or to oppose the war on Iraq or tax cuts for the wealthy.

This year, flush with blood money from the Israel lobby, pro-Israel Democrats defeated two of the most progressive, public-spirited Democratic members of Congress, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman.

On the Republican side, in response to the U.S. wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, the libertarian Republican member of Congress Ron Paul led a small group of Republicans to join progressive Democrats in an informal bipartisan peace caucus in Congress. In recent years though, the number of members of either party willing to take any kind of stand for peace has shrunk dramatically. So while there are now over 100 Congressional caucuses, from the Candy Caucus to the Pickleball Caucus, there is still not one for peace.

After the neocons who provided the ideological fuel for Bush’s catastrophic wars reconvened around Hillary Clinton in 2016, President Trump tried to “make America’s military great again” by appointing retired generals to his cabinet and characteristically staking out positions all over the map, from a call to kill the families of “terrorists” to a National Defense Strategy naming Russia and China as the “central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security,” to casting himself as a peacemaker by trying to negotiate a peace treaty with North Korea.

Trump is now running against Biden’s war in Ukraine and trying to have it both ways on Gaza, with undying support for Israel and a promise to end the war immediately. Some Palestinian-Americans are supporting Trump for not being the VP for Genocide Joe, just as other people support Harris for not being Trump.

But most Americans know little about Trump’s actual war policy as president. The unique value of a leader like Trump to the military-industrial complex is that he draws attention to himself and diverts attention away from U.S. atrocities overseas.

In 2017, Trump’s first year in office, he oversaw the climax of Obama’s war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, which probably killed as many civilians as Israel has massacred in Gaza. In that year alone, the U.S. and its allies dropped over 60,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan,Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Somalia. That was the heaviest bombing since the first Gulf War in 1991, and double the destruction of the “Shock & Awe” bombing of Iraq in 2003.

Most chillingly, the Iraqi forces who defeated the last remnants of ISIS in Mosul’s Old City were ordered to kill all the survivors, fulfilling Trump’s threat to “take out their families.” "We killed them all," an Iraqi soldier told Middle East Eye. "Daesh, men, women and children. We killed everyone." If anyone is counting on Trump to save the people of Gaza from Netanyahu and Biden’s genocide, that should be a reality check.

In other areas, Trump’s back-pedaling on Obama’s diplomatic achievements with Iran and Cuba have led to new crises for both those countries on the eve of this election. By moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, bribing Arab despots with ‘Abraham’ deals, and encouraging Netanyahu’s Greater Israel ambitions, Trump primed the powder-keg for the genocide in Gaza and the new crisis in the Middle East under Biden.

On the other side, Harris shares responsibility for genocide, arguably the most serious international crime in the book. To make matters worse, she has connived in a grotesque scheme to provide cover for the genocide by pretending to be working for a ceasefire that, as Jill Stein and many others have said, the U.S. could enforce “in the blink of an eye, with a single phone call” if it really wanted to. As for the future, Harris has only committed to making the U.S. military even more “lethal.”

The movement for a Free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza has failed to win the support of the Republican or Democratic presidential campaigns. But this is not a failure on the part of the Palestinian-Americans we have listened to and worked with, who have engaged in brilliant organizing, gradually raised public awareness and won over more Americans to their cause. They are leading the most successful anti-war organizing campaign in America since the Iraq War.

The refusal of Trump or Harris to listen to the calls of Americans whose families are being massacred in Gaza, and now in Lebanon too, is a failure on the part of the corrupt, anti-democratic political system of which Trump and Harris are figureheads, not a failure of activism or organizing.

Whomever each of us votes for in the presidential election, the campaign to end the genocide in Gaza will continue, and we must grow stronger and smarter and more inclusive until politicians cannot ignore us, no matter how much money the Israel lobby and other corrupt interests throw at them, or at their political opponents.

Whomever we vote for, the elephant in the room will still be U.S. militarism and the violence and chaos it inflicts on the world. Whether Trump or Harris is president, the result will be more of the same, unless we do something to change it. As legendary Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu famously said, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”

No American should be condemned for voting for a candidate of their choice, however successfully the Democrats and Republicans have marginalized the very concept of multi-party democracy that the U.S. claims to support in other countries. Whoever wins this election, we must find a way to put peace back on this country’s national agenda, and to make our collective voices heard in ways that cannot be drowned out by oligarchs with big bags of cash.

Every parent voting in the November 5 U.S. election should ask themselves: How will this presidential election affect my child’s health?

Concern is rising about the avalanche of toxic chemicals in our kids’ food and environment—and recently these issues gained more attention amid Bobby Kennedy, Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign for former U.S. President Donald Trump.

While RFK, Jr. speaks of the need to end “corporate capture” over government policy (indeed a serious problem), enforcement of food and drug safety protections plummeted under Trump.

Regardless of one’s political stance, people are right to be concerned about the proliferation of harmful chemicals linked to serious health impacts, from cancer to ADHD. But, there’s a big elephant in this room: Project 2025, the right-wing policy platform crafted by many top former Trump administration officials for the deeply conservative Heritage Foundation. While Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, evidence shows the right-wing platform will guide Trump’s policies if he’s elected in November.

The Heritage Foundation agrees, claiming that “during Trump’s last term, he embraced two-thirds of their policy proposals within his first year in office.” In 2022, Trump said of the Heritage Foundation’s plans: "They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do."

Project 2025 would threaten our children’s health, our food safety, and the environment in many disturbing ways. The right-wing Republican platform takes a wrecking ball to crucial protections from toxic pesticides and other harmful chemicals, and undermines consumer food safety, and access to child nutrition and clean air and water.

While RFK, Jr. speaks of the need to end “corporate capture” over government policy (indeed a serious problem), enforcement of food and drug safety protections plummeted under Trump, who appointed an unprecedented number of industry lobbyists and executives to key high-level positions, worsening this corporate capture.

Endangering Food Safety

The food we consume every day is often laden with toxic chemicals that harm our health, particularly for children who are developing their minds and bodies. Project 2025 would make our food supply more unsafe and unhealthy by giving Big Food, Big Ag, and Big Chemical corporations free rein to maximize profits and cut regulatory corners at the expense of our kids’ well-being.

By aggressively deregulating pesticides and chemicals, Project 2025 would allow far more toxics in our food supply, air, and water, putting our children in harm’s way. This would include rolling back vital, hard-won protections from highly toxic pesticides like dacthal (linked to irreversible harm to unborn babies’ developing brains) and PFAS, aka, “forever chemicals”—linked to kidney or testicular cancer, and damage to the liver and immune system—which the Biden-Harris administration recently addressed.

While Kennedy stresses the need for consumer protections and labeling of GMO products, Trump gutted these protections in his first term, prompting a lawsuit by farmers and conservationists.

Project 2025 dangerously calls for removing federal inspection for meat and poultry processing plants, leaving required inspections up to the states, which vary widely and often provide meager protections for consumer health and safety. When we’re seeing massive recalls of tainted chicken and outbreaks of E-coli illnesses from fast food, the last thing consumers need is less protection from our federal government.

This Trump-allied policy blueprint also urges the undermining or even outright elimination of the USDA’s science-backed Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA), which have been improved in recent years to address diet-related health crises. These vital guidelines are intended to ensure that the billions of taxpayer dollars spent on federally supported feeding programs, like school meals, align with scientific nutritional guidance.

Also troubling is the Project 2025 plan to further deregulate GMOs in our food supply, including removing hard-won GMO labeling requirements that protect our right to know what’s in our food. Slashing consumer protections on GMOs and food labeling should worry everyone, particularly supporters of RFK, Jr.’s “MAHA” campaign for Trump. While Kennedy stresses the need for consumer protections and labeling of GMO products, Trump gutted these protections in his first term, prompting a lawsuit by farmers and conservationists.

Slashing Child Nutrition and Healthcare

Equally disastrous are Project 2025’s plans to slash government food assistance to low-income and working-class people through SNAP (once known as “food stamps”) and the Women, Infants, and Children program (WIC), which provides critical nutrition for millions of children. This Republican plan also seeks to eliminate the Head Start program, which served 833,000 children in 2022, and universal free school meals that provide food security to millions of children.

Cutting school meals for kids in need would cause serious harm. As First Focus on Children explains, Project 2025’s cuts to food assistance “would significantly increase hunger for millions of children, spike nutrition-related diseases, and eliminate the safety regulations on baby formula.” If implemented by Trump, Project 2025 would eliminate healthy school meals for 20 million American children in lower-income schools.

Eliminating and Gutting Environmental Protections

Regulations protecting clean air and water are critical to our health. Project 2025 would harm our kids’ health by demolishing vital environmental protections that help keep our water and air clean, and diminish our exposure to toxic pesticides and chemicals. Project 2025’s calls for gutting the EPA including eliminating legal and regulatory enforcement and compliance offices, curtailing environmental review, and diminishing scientific credentials for EPA science advisors. Project 2025 also aims to severely weaken the Endangered Species Act and reduce the influence of EPA science on whether pesticides are approved for use—opening the door to many more toxic pesticides that could harm our health and environment.

According to former Acting Deputy EPA Administrator Stan Meiburg, “Project 2025 is just full of recommendations that would essentially eviscerate EPA. They would turn it into a shell of what its true mission is.”

In stark contrast, Vice President Kamala Harris has consistently acted to protect our kids’ health.

These policies reflect the same agenda implemented by the first Trump administration, which rolled back more than 100 environmental protections. Numerous reports confirm that the Trump administration pressured EPA officials to back away from environmental regulation and enforcement—allegedly retaliating against EPA scientists who warned about harm from chemicals. As ProPublica reported, “If Trump fulfills even some of the promises made in Project 2025, job security for the whistleblowers—and all EPA scientists—will become much more tenuous.” Mirroring this Trump agenda, Project 2025 “specifically calls for new chemicals to be approved quickly and proposes that all employees whose work touches on policy in federal agencies would become at-will workers, allowing them to be fired more easily.”

For anyone hoping that a Trump administration might “Make America Healthy Again,” as RFK, Jr. has insisted, evidence makes clear that Trump’s entire record completely contradicts these important goals. As president, Trump expanded Americans’ exposures to toxic pesticides and chemicals and gutted our consumer health protections. Meanwhile, the Republican Party platform doesn’t say one word (not even one) about protecting our health from pesticides and other toxic chemicals. Trump’s past and future plans are a continuation of decades-long efforts by Republicans to weaken and often eradicate vital environmental protections.

In stark contrast, Vice President Kamala Harris has consistently acted to protect our kids’ health. After Trump reversed a hard-won ban on the highly toxic pesticide chlorpyrifos, Biden-Harris restored that ban to protect our health. Biden-Harris issued the first-ever drinking water standard for “forever chemicals,” investing more than $1 billion to protect Americans from these deadly chemicals.

When we vote for our children’s health and our own, the choice is crystal clear: Trump and Project 2025 would give corporations free rein to poison our environment and our food. Vice President Harris will strengthen and expand vital protections for our kids, and for all of us.

This piece was first published by Friends of the Earth Action.