P.E.I. Witch Market promotes positivity, acceptance over scares
CBC
Sun, October 27, 2024
'Have an open mind when you come here,' says P.E.I. Witch Market organizer Blair Holloway. (Stacey Janzer/CBC - image credit)
Spooky dolls, magical supplies and oddities were all on offer over the weekend at the P.E.I. Witch Market.
But as the 17 vendors at The Guild in Charlottetown will tell you, having a safe space to celebrate all things witchy and occult isn't just about Halloween.
"It's honestly the only place I can show my things without being severely judged and feel like I can be 100 per cent myself," said Natasha Clayton, a vendor with White Witch Cottage.
"Most people are just really nature-centred and willing to help people. Whatever they do is just based on that practice of love and self-acceptance and just goodness."
Natasha Clayton says she's not afraid to be herself at the witch market. (Stacey Janzer/CBC)
Saturday's market was themed on the television anthology series American Horror Story, which featured a coven of witches prominently in its third season.
Customers could discover what their future holds via crystal ball, astrology, palm reading or bone-throwing — think tea-leaf reading, but with small skeleton pieces.
The crafts include knitted eyeballs, the candles feature macabre designs, and the porcelain dolls could have a starring role in a horror movie should they happen to come to life.
But like most everything at the witch market, the dolls are less about creating scares than they are about allowing folks to let their "weird" show.
Vinnie, left, and Lilie Love show off the macabre doll creations at Belladonna of Magic. (Stacey Janzer/CBC)
"When we think of dolls, we think of something perfect. We used to think that they have to be well-dressed, well-behaved, they need to have perfect hair, perfect skin," said Vinnie Love, the doll maker behind Belladonna of Magic.
"It's really easy to love the good parts … but it's harder to let yourself be who you are. I wanted to create something symbolic of that."
If you missed this weekend's market, the good news is there's plenty of opportunities to prep for Halloween next year.
In fact, the witch market thrives in the summer months, said organizer Blair Holloway. The event will be held again next year in May, June, July and October.
"Have an open mind when you come here," Holloway said. "Every vendor is very friendly and we are all open about talking about our craft… and we do not bite."
The event will be held again next year in May, June, July and October.
Miscarriages due to climate crisis a ‘blind spot’ in action plans – report
Damian Carrington Environment editor
Mon 28 October 2024
Potential collapse of the Amazon rainforest, Atlantic currents and urban infrastructure were dangers also cited. Photograph: Sergei Grits/AP
Miscarriages, premature babies and harm to mothers caused by the climate crisis are a “blind spot” in action plans, according to a report aimed at the decision-makers who will attend the Cop29 summit in November.
Potential collapse of the Amazon rainforest, vital Atlantic Ocean currents and essential infrastructure in cities are also among the dangers cited by an international group of 80 leading scientists from 45 countries. The report collects the latest insights from physical and social science to inform the negotiations at the UN climate summit in Azerbaijan.
“The world faces planetary-scale challenges, from the rise of methane emissions to the vulnerability of critical infrastructure,” said Prof Johan Rockström, a co-chair of Earth League, one of the groups behind the report. “The report shows that rising heat, ocean instability and a tipping of the Amazon rainforest could push parts of our planet beyond habitable limits. Yet it also provides clear pathways and solutions, demonstrating that with urgent, decisive action, we still can avoid unmanageable outcomes.”
The report follows an ultimatum from the UN secretary general, António Guterres, on the climate emergency: “We’re playing with fire, but there can be no more playing for time. We’re out of time.” He said global heating was supercharging monster hurricanes, bringing biblical floods and turning forests into tinderboxes, and said governments had to rapidly wean the world off its fossil fuel addiction.
Related: Heatwaves increase risk of early births and poorer health in babies, study finds
Increasing climate extremes are causing more lost babies, premature births and cognitive damage to newborns, the report said. For example, a study in India found a doubled risk of miscarriage in pregnant women suffering heat stress, while another in California found a significant association between long-term heat exposure and stillbirth and premature birth.
Flooding is responsible for more than 100,000 lost pregnancies a year in 33 countries in South and Central America, Asia, and Africa, according to another study, with the danger highest for women with lower income and education levels. Rising heat also increases the intimate partner violence suffered by women, a south Asian analysis found.
However, only 27 out of 119 national climate plans submitted to the UN include action related to mothers and newborns, making this a major “blind spot”, the report said.
“Global temperature records continue to break, exacerbating threats to maternal health,” said Prof Jemilah Mahmood at the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health in Malaysia. She said the breakdown of healthcare services, sanitation and food supplies during extreme weather compounded the problems for pregnant women.
“Preparedness for heat extremes, including early warning systems, must be a priority,” she said. “Without action, the consequences could be catastrophic.” The report cites recent analysis that found global heating would drive billions of people out of the “climate niche” of habitable temperatures in which humanity has flourished for millennia.
Related: Rising temperatures causing distress to foetuses, study reveals
Fossil fuel emissions are still rising, heating the land and oceans to record highs in the last year, the report said. This heating appears to be making El Niño events more intense, it said, with the impacts potentially causing damage of $100tn by the end of the century.
Recent research on the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation has documented its slowdown and suggested the system of ocean currents could collapse much sooner than previously estimated. “Such an event would have truly catastrophic consequences for our societies,” the report said.
Similarly, the report said, the resilience of the Amazon rainforest was being eroded, increasing the risk of large-scale collapse, when it would flip from being a sink for climate-heating carbon emissions to a source. Cop29 must bring progress on Brazil’s proposed $250bn-a-year Tropical Forests Forever fund, as well as increased law enforcement against illegal loggers and miners and support for Indigenous peoples, the report said.
The report also cites rapidly rising levels of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, as an urgent issue for Cop29. It said cost-effective solutions existed to stop the leaks from fossil fuel exploitation, but enforceable policy was largely missing.
Today’s infrastructure, including transport, energy and water supplies, healthcare, communications and waste collection, were all built for a climate that no longer exists, it said. Significant funding is needed to prepare this infrastructure for worsening extreme weather, particularly in the global south, and joined-up planning is required. The report also said artificial intelligence could help deliver more robust, more efficient and better-adapted solutions.
The key goal of the Cop29 summit is to agree a new target for the finance available to countries to cut emissions and to deal with the ever-growing damage caused by global heating, with many nations calling for a goal of $1tn a year.
The fast-growing demand for the energy transition metals essential for clean energy technology is highlighted in the report. Mining and supply of the metals, such as copper, lithium, cobalt and rare earths, needs better governance to protect people and the environment, it said.
The final factor emphasised by the researchers is fairness in climate policies. The rich produce far greater emissions than the poor, and policies that seem unfair often meet with resistance and fail, the report said, such as the fuel tax rises that prompted the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests in France in 2018.
“Ignoring citizens’ readiness and needs when designing and implementing climate policies will ultimately lead to many missed opportunities,” said Prof Joyashree Roy of the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand.
SLAVO UKRIANA
'Wiped off the face of the Earth': How Russia erased a Ukrainian city
Boris BACHORZ
Sun 27 October 2024
Part of the ruined centre of Ukrainian city of Vovchansk in mid-September (Handout) (Handout/Armed Forces of Ukraine/AFP)
"It barely exists anymore," said the mayor of Vovchansk, an industrial town razed by a Russian onslaught shocking even for the killing fields of eastern Ukraine.
Vovchansk has no great history but its geography could not be more tragic. Just five kilometres (three miles) from the Russian border, drone footage from the Ukrainian military this summer shows a lunar landscape of ruins stretching for miles.
And it has got worse since.
"Ninety percent of the centre is flattened," said mayor Tamaz Gambarashvili, a towering man in uniform, who runs what is left of Vovchansk from the regional capital of Kharkiv, an hour and a half's drive away.
"The enemy continues its massive shelling," he added.
Six out of 10 of Vovchansk's buildings have been totally destroyed, with 18 percent partially ruined, according to analysis of satellite images by the independent open-source intelligence collective Bellingcat. But the destruction is much worse in the city centre, which has been levelled north of the Vovcha River.
AFP and Bellingcat joined forces to tell how, building by building, an entire city was wiped off the map in just a few weeks -- and to show the human toll it has taken.
The sheer pace of the destruction dwarfed that of even Bakhmut, the "meatgrinder" Donbas region city where some of the most brutal killing of the war has been done, a Ukrainian officer who fought in both cities told AFP.
"I was in Bakhmut, so I know how the battles unfolded there," Lieutenant Denys Yaroslavsky insisted.
"What took two or three months in Bakhmut happened in just two or three weeks in Vovchansk."
- Invaded, then freed -
Vovchansk had a population of about 20,000 before the war. It now lives only in the memories of the survivors who managed to flee.
Beyond its factories, the city had a "medical school, a technical college, seven schools and numerous kindergartens," Nelia Stryzhakova, the head of its library, told AFP in Kharkiv.
It even had a workshop that made "carriages for period films. We were even interesting, in our own way," insisted Stryzhakova, 61.
Add to that a regional hospital, rebuilt in 2017 with nearly 10 million euros ($10.8 million) of German aid, a church packed for religious feasts, and a vast hydraulic machinery plant. Once the town's economic lifeblood, its ruins are now being fought over by both armies.
Vovchansk was quickly occupied by the Russian army after it invaded Ukraine in February 2022, but was then retaken by Kyiv in a lightning counter attack that autumn.
Despite enduring regular Russian bombardment, it was relatively calm. Then something very different happened on May 10.
- Badly defended -
Exhausted after weeks of hard fighting 100 kilometres to the south, the Ukrainian 57th Brigade was regrouping near Vovchansk when one of its reconnaissance units noticed something strange.
"We spotted two Russian armoured troop carriers that had just crossed the border," recalled Lieutenant Yaroslavsky, who was leading the unit.
They were the advance guard of one of the most intense Russian offensives since the beginning of the war, with Moscow throwing several thousand soldiers at the city.
"There were no fortifications, no mines" to slow down their advance, Yaroslavsky said, still furious at the "negligence or corruption" that allowed this to happen.
Some "17,000 people lost their homes. Why? Because someone didn't build fortifications," fumed the 42-year-old officer.
"We control the city today, but what we control is a pile of rubble," he added bitterly.
President Volodymyr Zelensky cancelled an overseas trip to rush to Kharkiv, admitting that the Russian army had pushed between five and 10 kilometres into Ukraine.
The people of Vovchansk, meanwhile, were living a nightmare.
- 'Drones like mosquitoes' -
"The Russians started bombing," said Galyna Zharova, who lived at 16A Stepova Street -- an apartment building now reduced to ruins, as images analysed by Bellingcat and AFP confirmed.
"We were right on the front line. No one could come and get us out," added the 50-year-old, who now lives with her family in a university dormitory in Kharkiv.
"We went down to the cellar. All the buildings were burning. We were crammed into basements (for nearly four weeks) until June 3," her husband Viktor, 65, added.
Eventually, the couple decided to flee on foot. "Drones were flying around us like wasps, like mosquitoes," Galyna remembered. They walked for several kilometres before being rescued by Ukrainian volunteers.
"The city was beautiful. The people were beautiful. We had everything," sighed librarian Stryzhakova. "No one could have imagined that in just five days, we would be wiped off the face of the Earth."
The 125,000 books in the library she had run at 8 Tokhova Street went up in smoke.
More than half of the families in eastern Ukraine have relatives in Russia. In Vovchansk, before the war in the Donbas region began in 2014, people crossed the border daily to shop, with Russians flocking to the city's markets.
"There are many mixed families," said Stryzhakova. "Parents, children, we're all connected. And now we've become enemies. There's no other way to put it."
The Russian defence ministry did not respond to AFP's questions asking for its account of what happened in the city.
Mayor Gambarashvili, who was hit in the leg by shrapnel as he oversaw the city's evacuation, shook his head when asked to estimate the number of civilian casualties.
Dozens, no doubt. Perhaps more. There were still around 4,000 people in Vovchansk on May 10, mostly older people, since most families with children had been evacuated months earlier.
- Families divided by war -
Kira Dzhafarova, 57, believes her mother, Valentina Radionova, who had lived at 40 Dukhovna Street in a small house with a charming garden, is likely dead.
Their last phone conversation was on May 17. "At 85, I'm not going anywhere," her mother insisted. Satellite images and witnesses have since confirmed that the house was completely destroyed.
"Since then I know it's over," sighed Kira, who provided DNA for identification, if and when the fighting ends.
In a particularly cruel irony, her mother, a Russian national, had moved to Vovchansk so she could be equidistant between her two children, who had fallen out.
Kira has lived in Kharkiv for 35 years and became officially Ukrainian two years ago. Her older brother, who she believes supports Russian President Vladimir Putin, remained in Belgorod, the family's hometown and the first big Russian city on the other side of the border.
Kira, a psychiatrist, now only refers to him as her "former brother".
AFP was unable to contact him directly.
Volodymyr Zymovsky, 70, is also missing. On May 16, he decided to flee the bombardment in a car with his 83-year-old mother, his wife Raisa, and a neighbour. Zymovsky and his mother were both shot dead, "most likely by a Russian sniper", Raisa said.
Amid the hail of bullets, the 59-year-old paediatric nurse had barely got out of the car when she was grabbed by Russian soldiers and held for two days. She managed to escape, hid in a neighbour's cellar for a night, and eventually fled through the forest.
She recounted her harrowing odyssey in a calm, measured voice. One thing alone seems to matter to her now: finding the bodies of her husband and mother-in-law and giving them a proper burial.
- 'They took my son' -
A rumour has circulated among the survivors that the bodies that littered the streets of Vovchansk for days were thrown into a mass grave. Where and by whom, no one knows.
A handful of civilians still remain in Vovchansk. Oleksandre Garlychev, 70, claims to have seen at least three when he returned to his former apartment on a bicycle in mid-September to retrieve belongings.
Garlychev lived at 10A Rubezhanskaya Street, in a southern part of the city that was relatively spared. He only left on August 10.
Vovchansk's survivors -- and even a few of its officials -- quietly wonder whether it will ever be rebuilt given its proximity to the border, regardless of how the war ends.
Asked whether she could ever forgive her husband's killer, Raisa Zymovska fell silent for a long time. Then, in a whisper, she replied: "I don't know, I really don't. As a Christian, yes, but as a human being... What can I say?"
As for the librarian Stryzhakova, she can no longer bring herself to open a Russian book, even the classics, since her only son Pavlo was killed in the Battle of Bakhmut.
"I know that literature is not to blame, but Russia, all of it disgusts me. They took my son, it's personal."
Faithful try to keep flame of flattened Ukraine city alive
Boris BACHORZ
Sun 27 October 2024
Father Igor and his flock outside their church in Vovchansk before it was razed (-) (-/HANDOUT/AFP)
Vovchansk's copper-domed basilica was always packed at feasts like Easter, with worshippers overflowing out into the Ukrainian city's central square.
But Father Igor Klymenko's displaced congregation -- forced from their homes by a Russian onslaught that has pounded their border city to dust -- was reduced to just nine on the autumn morning AFP caught up with them in the nearest big city, Kharkiv.
"The strongest people, truly the strongest, stayed" in Vovchansk, said the bear-like bearded cleric. "They are there behind me," he added, gesturing to the few women in headscarves and white-haired men, heads bowed in prayer behind him.
"And they too left after May 10," when Russia launched a military assault of rare ferocity even for the killing fields of eastern Ukraine.
Ninety percent of central Vovchansk has been razed, according to the city's mayor -- worse even than the destruction of the "meat grinder" that was Bakhmut -- and the shelling is still going on.
Even so in June, the orange-bricked mass of the Myrrh Bearers Church still stood stubbornly intact amid the devastated centre of the city, where 20,000 people once lived.
No longer. Little more than a few charred walls are visible in satellite imagery this month analysed by Bellingcat, the open-source investigative collective that has been working alongside AFP to see what has happened to the city.
- Sliced by shrapnel -
Ever since Father Igor was made parish priest in October 2022 when Vovchansk -- which is only five kilometres (three miles) from the Russian border -- was briefly retaken by Ukraine, he has lost count of the number of his flock who have perished.
The first was Olga, "killed by shrapnel in our vegetable patch on a Sunday."
It was on October 8, 2023. "She had gone to fetch carrots to bring them back to the church, when shrapnel sliced into her."
Father Igor -- a cheery man with a striking resemblance to the famously humble Orthodox saint Seraphim of Sarov -- is not originally from Vovchansk.
He was parish priest in the neighbouring village of Rubizhne, where he also ran a farm.
"I had a horse, two bulls, two sows, 12 piglets and hens. We had to abandon Rubizhne on May 22 when it was our turn to be bombarded. We left everything behind. All I was able to take were the holy books and objects from the church," he said.
- 'Pray for us, it is hell' -
Father Igor is 55, "but everyone thinks I'm 70", he laughed.
He gave his last sermon in Vovchansk on May 5. He was to return as usual the following Sunday, "but on the night of Thursday May 9 to May 10, everything began.
"Raisa (one of his parishioners) messaged me in the middle of the night. 'Father, pray for us, because here it is hell,'" she told him.
"She called me back in the morning and I could hear shells bursting, bursting," he recalled, emotional at the memory.
Raisa Zymovska's husband Volodymyr was killed, most likely by a Russian sniper, during their attempt to flee Vovchansk by car on May 16.
Father Igor recently celebrated a funeral mass "in absentia" at a Kharkiv cemetery -- a rite that offers a symbolic burial for the soul -- for all the dead whose bodies were left behind.
- Humble endurance -
The cleric belongs to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which answers to the Moscow Patriarchate which has blessed the invasion.
An Orthodox Church of Ukraine independent from Moscow was created in 2018 -- and the schism is an extremely sensitive subject. Father Igor begged not to talk about such "politics" in a region where people have relatives on both sides of the border.
His parishioners have lost everything in Vovchansk. But have kept their deep faith, their sense of solidarity and their staggering endurance.
Seventy-year-old Oleksandre Garlychev risked his life to briefly return to his home last month "to collect parts for my car", a 44-year-old Soviet GAZ-24 Volga, he said with a smile.
"But mainly for my hymn book, which I have used for 24 years. We need more goodness, more compassion between us," he said.
bb/ju/fg
Harris Is Struggling With Blue-Collar Union Members. This Union Is Doing All It Can To Change That.
Daniel Marans
Sat 26 October 2024
Members of building trades unions listen to labor leaders speak at the painters' union hall in Big Bend, Wisconsin, on Oct. 19, before heading out to knock doors for Kamala Harris. Daniel Marans/HuffPost
SOUTHEAST WISCONSIN — Flanked by several leaders of the 13 building trades unions whose members are constructing a massive artificial intelligence data center in a rural area south of Milwaukee, Mitch Landrieu, the co-chair of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign and former White House infrastructure czar, had what looked like an easy task before him.
The hundreds of hard hat-clad union members gathered in the dining hall, now eating bagged lunches courtesy of the Harris campaign, held some of the thousands of jobs that sprang indirectly from President Joe Biden’s investments in infrastructure and his commitment to using union labor. Landrieu was there to remind them of that.
The soon-to-be-running data center — whose construction was commissioned by a multinational corporation that did not grant permission for a reporter to be present at the luncheon — sits next to a complex of facilities run by Chinese electronics giant Foxconn, a company whose history in Wisconsin attests to former President Donald Trump’s shortcomings as a champion of manufacturing. Despite major state and local government incentives, the company reduced its planned investment in the site from $10 billion to $672 million, and much of the facilities it has completed remain empty.
Landrieu stopped short of an explicit call to vote for Harris. But he emphasized the White House’s commitment to union labor, recalling how whenever “the word ‘jobs’ was mentioned” in meetings with Harris and Biden, they would insist on not just jobs but “high-paying union jobs.”
After that line, and again at the close of his remarks, Landrieu got at least some applause from the assembled union members.
Mitch Landrieu, who shepherded the implementation of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, emphasized that and other bill's impact to Wisconsin union members. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
But amid the din of chatter following Landrieu’s remarks, one union member got up from his table and chanted in a singsong tone, “Fuck Joe Biden!”
No one joined in. Before walking off, the worker muttered, “I don’t believe any of this bullshit.”
That outburst, however modest, illustrates the frustrating quandary facing many Democrats this election cycle: Despite all that Harris and Biden have done for unions ― tapping pro-union government officials, boosting legislation that grew union jobs ― a national Pew Research poll shows Harris on track to best former President Donald Trump among union members by just seven percentage points. That’s a worryingly low margin for the Democratic nominee among a traditionally Democratic constituency.
Worse still, two of the country’s largest unions, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the International Association of Fire Fighters, have declined to endorse in the presidential election, citing their members’ divided views.
Even as Harris hopes to improve on Biden’s margins with moderate Republicans and independents in the college-educated suburbs of Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia, she has little room to spare when it comes to their non-college-educated counterparts.
Voters without a college degree, whose exodus toward the Republican Party accelerated under Trump, are still more likely to vote for Democrats if they belong to a union. Biden, a native of blue-collar Scranton, Pennsylvania, won in 2020 thanks in part to an improvement in his performance with union members relative to 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton.
If Harris fails to match Biden’s marks with unions, it could easily cost her the presidency.
A defeat for Harris could in turn both jeopardize the gains that the labor movement has accrued in the past four years and plunge the Democratic Party into an identity crisis about its ability to win over working-class voters altogether. Biden’s pivot toward aggressively supporting organized labor, which marked a break with a business-friendly shift in the party that had held sway since Bill Clinton’s nomination, was born out of sincere policy convictions, but also of a theory that Democrats could undermine Trump’s appeal by championing workers’ rights.
Jimmy Williams, general president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, address union members at a canvassing kickoff in Big Bend, Wisconsin. Daniel Marans
Paying It Forward
The heavily male, blue-collar labor unions working overtime to convince their more conservative members to vote for Harris understand that the gains they have made in the past four years, in terms of both dollars and political power, hang in the balance.
“The last four years, this union and all of our unions combined have had more influence over the federal government than at any other time in my lifetime,” Jimmy Williams, general president of the 120,000-member International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, said in an Oct. 19 speech in Big Bend, Wisconsin.
“We cannot go backwards!” he told the crowd of more than a hundred politically active union members from Wisconsin and neighboring Illinois who were set to knock on fellow members’ doors that day for the Harris campaign.
Williams shared how he makes his pitch for Harris: “You’re either going to be at the table or you’re going to be on the outside looking in. And for the last four years, we’ve been able to create policies that help our members.”
At the entrance of the IUPAT District Council 7 union hall, a neighbor's Trump sign is visible behind the union's signs for Harris and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.). Daniel Marans/HuffPost
The IUPAT's District Council 7 union hall doubles as a training center for union apprentices learning how to paint, finish drywall, install glass and display signs, among other skills. Daniel Marans/HuffPost
Williams, who also introduced Landrieu at the data center construction site on Monday, was visiting the IUPAT’s District Council 7 as part of a month-long tour of swing states. He’s been road-tripping in a van wrapped in the IUPAT’s black-and-yellow colors and decorated with its slogan: “One union, one family, one fight!”
District Council 7 has 2,000 members across Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, including commercial and industrial painters, drywall finishers, glaziers, sign and display installers, and paint makers. The large Harris and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) campaign signs at the entrance of the council office, which doubles as a massive training facility for trades apprentices, make the facility stick out alongside its neighbors. Visitors arriving at the union hall after descending I-43 from Milwaukee must pass a row of properties festooned with pro-Trump signs and flags before reaching this Democratic outpost.
Leaving from the union hall, Williams, a fourth-generation IUPAT member from outside Philadelphia, got in a van to knock on members’ doors in southwestern Waukesha County and northeastern Jefferson County. He recounted why he thinks many unions are so committed to Harris’ campaign, even as they struggle to get some of their rank-and-file members on board.
IUPAT General President Jimmy Williams has been touring swing states in a van to rally union members behind Harris and other Democratic candidates. Daniel Marans/HuffPost
Williams, right, and Jennipher Neduzak, communications director for IUPAT District Council 7, approach the home of union members with a Donald Trump sign on their lawn. Daniel Marans/HuffPost
When Biden got into office, it finally felt like Democrats were returning to their pre-1980s roots as a firmly pro-labor party, according to Williams. Biden has shown solidarity with organized labor through his bully pulpit — he became the first president to walk a picket line when he joined striking United Auto Workers members in Michigan in Sept. 2023 — and through his picks for federal agencies.
He appointed Marty Walsh, a former building trades union leader, as his first secretary of labor. Jennifer Abruzzo, Biden’s appointee as general counsel to the National Labor Relations Board, has used new tools to punish union-busting employers and protect workers trying to organize. Under Abruzzo and the NLRB’s other pro-union officials, the success rate of union recognition elections has gone up significantly, prompting a historic surge in petitions for such elections.
Biden’s legislative priorities have been even more important to cementing his legacy as a champion of organized labor. He oversaw the inclusion of upwards of $65 billion into the American Rescue Plan Act to bail out the troubled pension funds of more than 1 million union members. Then he passed a series of union-friendly public investment bills — the bipartisan infrastructure law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act — that spurred a union jobs bonanza, especially for the building trades.
The IUPAT alone has seen its membership grow by 3,500 people, bringing it to the highest level since before the 2008 financial crisis, when the union had 140,000 active members, according to Williams.
Backing Harris, who kicked off a national abortion rights tour at the DC 7 facility in January, was not a hard choice, Williams said.
“How could you not support the person who was with him the most on all these issues that have been great for our members and great for our union?”
Explaining The Disconnect
To Williams, Harris and Biden’s embrace of union priorities is all the more important because it follows the more business-friendly Obama and Clinton administrations, when organized labor often had to settle for table scraps. He winced at the memory of Barack Obama shelving the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill to make union organizing easier, early on in his presidency.
One reason union members might still be skeptical of Democrats, despite what Biden and Harris have done, is because of those decades of accumulated distrust, Williams argued.
“It was like the choice of the lesser of two evils when it came to union membership, the working-class issues that the union movement values,” Williams said of the pre-Biden era.
Democrats “never did anything, and that’s part of the reason why we’re playing an uphill battle right now politically with our members. They know that. They felt it,” he added. “I personally believe that part of Trump’s ability to cut into the working class is because the Democratic Party really never delivered for working people for two generations.”
Other labor movement veterans had different theories about working-class people’s motivations for voting Republican.
Williams, left, and Jeff Mehrhoff, business manager for IUPAT District Council 7, walk back to the van after knocking on a member's door. Daniel Marans/HuffPost
“A lot of it is misogynistic — she’s a woman,” said Jeff Mehrhoff, the business manager for IUPAT DC 7, who went door-knocking with Williams. “And let’s be real: Wisconsin is a pretty white state — a lot of old white people here — and it’s race. I hate to say it, but I think it’s pretty true.”
Mike Mikus, a Pittsburgh-based Democratic strategist who works closely with unions, wishes the Biden administration had done a better job promoting its achievements for workers earlier and more consistently. “It’s almost like Democrats don’t want to brag about anything,” he said.
And Williams maintains that the Harris campaign’s message about middle-class tax cuts and various targeted loans for small businesses and first-time home buyers don’t resonate as much with his members, who are concerned about decent jobs first and foremost.
“You’ve got to get to the core group of what the American working class really needs, which is security — retirement security, health care security,” he said. “All the things that we represent have to be at the center of what her economic message is from today.”
He also acknowledged his concern that Harris’ courtship of the business community, as embodied by the hearty endorsement of billionaire Mark Cuban, among others, might signal a reversion to the Democratic Party mean. “It’s a nod back to what the Democratic Party was before Biden,” he said.
Diminished Influence
In addition to highlighting Biden and Harris’ achievements for union members, organized labor is warning its members about Project 2025, a governing blueprint for Trump’s second term drafted by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.
The think tank’s labor policy recommendations include doing away with a law requiring construction companies contracting with the federal government to pay the “prevailing wage,” and adopting a law allowing employers to grant limited time off in lieu of time-and-a-half overtime pay.
“Trump says, ‘No tax on overtime.’ You know, he’ll keep that promise. A lot of our members think that’s a good thing,” Dan Bukiewicz, president of the Miwaukee Building & Construction Trades Council, said at Saturday’s canvassing kickoff.
“Can I tell you what? You ain’t going to have any overtime. You’re going to be all working for straight time, regardless of the day or how many hours you are there. Just plain and simple, it’s easy not to tax it when it doesn’t exist and will go away.”
Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025, but his ties to its architects run deep.
And during Trump’s last term, he demonstrated little willingness to break with free-market conservative dogma outside of trade and immigration policy. Trump’s Department of Labor, in particular, was as anti-union as they come. Among other steps, his administration undid Obama’s expansion of overtime eligibility and tried, unsuccessfully, to strip building trades unions of their monopoly on federally-recognized apprenticeship programs.
IUPAT and other building trades members from Wisconsin and Illinois pose for a group photo with Williams, Mehrhoff, and Stephanie Bloomingdale, president of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO. Daniel Marans/HuffPost
But the union officials who riled up the crowd of canvassers on Saturday were speaking to members who are already committed political volunteers.
The broader membership of the individual building trades unions is naturally much more varied in its views — and less acquainted with union leaders’ ways of looking at politics.
Sure enough, the IUPAT members at the data center construction site who expressed ambivalence about Harris cited something unrelated to unions: the inflation that had eroded their earnings in recent years. Food prices in particular went up nearly 26% from Nov. 2020 to March 2024.
While inflation has been a global problem since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and most experts believe Biden’s policies have had only a marginal impact, voters often blame the party in power for economic troubles that occur on their watch, regardless of their underlying causes.
Hunter Proft, an undecided first-year IUPAT apprentice who has never voted before, does not think Trump is being entirely honest when he lays the blame for inflation at Biden’s feet. But his own experience with inflation still made him receptive to the Republican nominee’s pitch.
“The four years [Trump] was in office, I didn’t really see much change in my lifestyle,” Proft said. “Since [Biden] was president, I’ve felt a decline in me being able to support my family and stuff.”
Alesha Smith, another first-year IUPAT apprentice from Racine who voted for Biden in 2020, likes Harris and her proposals, but isn’t sure if she can trust her to follow through.
“Inflation and everything go up — it’s harder to just find simple things than it should be,” Smith said. “She had the power to change some stuff while she was there. She hasn’t.”
Alesha Smith, a first-year IUPAT apprentice from Racine, Wisconsin, voted for Joe Biden in 2020, but is still undecided this year. The photo is blurry because HuffPost did not have permission to portray the construction site. Daniel Marans/HuffPost
Outside the PPG Industries paint coating factory in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, IUPAT members who said they were backing Harris often first invoked Trump’s character and authoritarian tendencies, rather than his labor policies, to explain their aversion to him.
“One’s a liar and he’s going to do what he wants to do. The other one, she hasn’t done much,” said Rudy Villalobos, a Franklin resident and veteran of the U.S. Marines. “I’ll still vote for her, because Trump said he wants to be a dictator.”
Asked whether the union’s endorsement of Harris made a difference, Villalobos said, “The Trump people, they’re not union. They don’t care about the middle class or the lower class at all.”
Villalobos’ ex-wife and daughter are supporting Trump, however, because of their belief he’d be better for small businesses.
One Trump voter leaving the PPG plant, who refused to provide his name because “liberals are crazy,” said that while he is a committed union member, even paying dues in a state where he’s allowed to opt out of them, he has always ignored union leaders’ political advice.
“I don’t pay it no mind,” said the Glendale resident. “They always support the Democrats. I don’t know why.”
He said he’s backing Trump because he believes excessive immigration is “lowering our wages.”
The same labor unions that were once so influential they could deliver entire states to Democrats — from West Virginia to Michigan — on the strength of their membership alone now have neither those decisive numbers nor as much sway over their remaining members.
Prior to the country’s anti-labor turn in the late 1970s, unions played a more central role in not just the economy and politics but in working-class social and cultural life, anchoring the drinking clubs and charitable organizations in industrial towns. Members at that time might also have personal memories of a more precarious life before the New Deal, when the federal government extended its protective might to the labor movement, prompting the country’s first — and only — Golden Age for organized labor.
But in an era where unions must compete for attention with the likes of megachurches and social media influencers, union members are more apt to see their relationship to the union through a transactional lens — union dues for higher pay and benefits, politics be damned.
What’s more, while unions’ influence has slowed the drift of their non-college-educated, white male members to the right, no American is immune to the effects of political and demographic polarization. And aside from law enforcement unions, members of the building trades unions — which are overwhelmingly male and largely white — are typically among the labor movement’s most conservative members. A number of lunch boxes at the data center job site were plastered with National Rifle Association stickers, for example.
“They’re all the demographic that votes for Trump,” Mikus said.
These building trades union members’ conservatism, in turn, sometimes feeds a cycle where union leaders take a less aggressive approach to political education for fear of alienating the members who elect them to their posts.
“If you’re in a local with two-thirds of your members that don’t agree with your endorsement, it’s going to be difficult for you to stand out there on a ledge,” Williams said. “This is how I say it to members: ‘You pay me to tell you the truth in regards to labor policies, that’s my job. You don’t have to listen to me. You don’t have to agree with me.’”
Williams, the IUPAT general president, takes a smoke break between canvassing stops. He goes through about one pack of American Spirit cigarettes a day. Daniel Marans/HuffPost
A Path Forward
IUPAT is widely considered the most progressive of the building trades unions. The group connects its members’ interests to other social causes, including by marching with the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and commemorating the Juneteenth holiday. It was the first building trades union to elect a Black leader, former general president Kenneth Rigmaiden. The union has set a long-term goal to have 20% of its members be women, and has begun recruiting heavily among Black and Latino workers, who had not always been welcome.
Regardless of the election’s outcome though, Williams is committed to communicating with members more regularly about how the IUPAT fits into the broader sweep of labor history and the ways in which political choices, however remote they may feel, affect members’ lives.
“Every time you just keep coming to them around elections, you get further and further from what’s really driving them on a day-to-day basis,” Williams said. “This has to be done, but it can be done so much easier when you’re talking to your members every day or every week. And then you add into it, after you’ve already built that trust back, and after you’ve built that type of relationship with them: ‘Hey, we also need you to vote.’ It’s such an easier conversation. It just is.
Five ways a Trump presidency would be disastrous for the climate
Oliver Milman
Mon 28 October 2024
Donald Trump’s climate denialism could exacerbate the already-devastating impact of wildfires.Composite: Getty Images, AP
The climate crisis may appear peripheral in the US presidential election but a victory for Donald Trump will, more than any other issue, have profound consequences for people around a rapidly heating world, experts have warned.
During his push for the White House, Trump has called climate change a “hoax” and “one of the great scams of all time” while vowing to delete spending on clean energy, abolish “insane” incentives for Americans to drive electric cars, scrap various environmental rules and unleash a “drill, baby, drill” wave of new oil and gas.
Such an agenda would be carried out over a four year-period that nearly rounds out a crucial decade in which scientists say the US, and the world, must slash planet-heating pollution in half to avoid disastrous climate breakdown.
Already, major emitters such as the US are lagging badly in commitments to cut emissions enough to avoid a 1.5C (2.7F) rise in global temperature above the pre-industrial era. With just over 1C in average warming so far, the world already has record heatwaves, a rash of wildfires, turbocharged hurricanes, plunging wildlife losses, a crumbling and increasingly green Antarctica, the looming collapse of the oceans and a faltering ability of forests, plants and soil to absorb carbon.
“We’ve got to get off fossil fuels as quickly as possible,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s hard to see that happening in the event of a Trump victory.” Mann added that “a second Trump presidency is game over for meaningful climate action this decade, and stabilizing warming below 1.5C probably becomes impossible”.
So what would a Trump election triumph mean for the environment?
A dangerous and uncertain future
Amid the frenetic bombast of politics, it is easy to overlook the long legacies of electoral decisions. Action or inaction on the climate crisis in the span of just the next few years will help decide the tolerability of the climate for generations not yet born.
“We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives,” as a recent paper authored by more than a dozen scientists warned. “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt.”
There is enough momentum behind the record growth of clean energy that it won’t be utterly derailed by a Trump presidency. But a Trump White House would still have a tangible impact, adding, by some estimates, several billion tonnes of heat-trapping gases that wouldn’t otherwise be in the atmosphere, gumming up the international response, subjecting more people to flood or fire or toxic air. It would help prod societies ever closer to the brink of an unlivable climate.
Kamala Harris has declined to lay out much of a vision on how she would tackle the climate crisis, and barely even mentions it on the campaign trail, but to some experts the stakes are compellingly clear. “With Kamala Harris, there’s a good chance we can avert truly catastrophic global climate impacts,” said Mann. “With Trump there is not. It’s night and day.”
Climate denialism would return to the Oval Office
A new Trump administration would bring a jarring rhetorical shift. Unlike almost every other world leader – such as Joe Biden, who has called the climate crisis an “existential threat” – Trump dismisses and even mocks the threat of global heating.
In recent weeks, the former president has said that climate change is “one of the great scams of all time, people aren’t buying it any more” and has falsely claimed the planet “has actually got a bit cooler recently”, that rising sea levels will create “more oceanfront property”, that wind energy is “bullshit, it’s horrible” and even that cows and windows will be banned by Democrats if he loses.
Trump has coupled this with demands for unfettered oil and gas production in all corners of the US and has actively courted industry executives for donations. “He wholeheartedly believes we should produce our own energy sources here in the US, there’s no grey area there,” said Thomas Pyle, president of American Energy Alliance, a free market group.
“President Trump marches to the beat of his own drum, he’s his own man. He is instinctively in the right place on these issues – he wants to see more energy production across the board and less government intervention in the cars we drive and the stoves we have.”
Related: What’s at stake for the climate if Trump wins? – podcast
Others see signs a second Trump presidency will be even more extreme on climate than the first iteration. “The style, the indifference to empirical evidence and the bold sweeping gestures are familiar,” said Barry Rabe, an energy policy expert at the University of Michigan. “But this sequel will be an aggressive, revenge-based repudiation of anyone who has challenged him in the past.”
Clean energy policies unpicked
A primary target for a new Trump administration would be the landmark climate bill signed by Biden that is pushing hundreds of billions of dollars to renewable energy deployment, electric car production and battery manufacturing.
Trump has promised to “terminate Kamala Harris’s green new scam and rescind all of the unspent funds”. In its place, oil and gas production, already at all-time highs, will be boosted by opening up Alaska’s Arctic to drilling and ending a pause on liquified natural gas exports to “cut the cost of energy in half within the first 12 months of taking office”.
Achieving a full repeal of the climate bill, named the Inflation Reduction Act, will hinge upon the composition of Congress. Even if Republicans won both the House of Representatives and the US Senate, as well as the White House, there would still be some pushback from conservative members who have seen a disproportionate torrent of clean energy investment and jobs flow to their districts.
“I don’t think we will see the Inflation Reduction Act fully overturned, it will be more surgical than that,” said Kelly Sims Gallagher, an environmental policy expert at Tufts University. “The US is already a top oil and gas producer but what would likely change is the companion investment in low-carbon energy. That seems less likely under a Trump administration.”
Without Congress, Trump will still be able to slow the rollout of spending and demolish regulatory actions taken under Biden, such as rules cutting pollution from coal-fired power plants, cars and trucks and efforts to shield disadvantaged communities from pollution. Penalties for leaking methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is rising at a galloping pace, will also be targeted following complaints from some of Trump’s top oil industry donors.
In his first term, Trump squashed more than 100 environmental rules but the courts halted much of his agenda. This time, a more ruthlessly efficient and prepared operation is expected, backed by a conservative-aligned judicial system, including the supreme court itself. “He will work quickly, I think, to dismantle the Biden approach,” said Pyle.
A purge of science
A far more ideological slant on science and expertise is likely to emerge should Trump win office, with Project 2025, the conservative manifesto authored by many former Trump officials, calling for civil servants to be replaced by loyal political operatives.
Mentions of the climate crisis were sidelined or erased during Trump’s last term and a repeat is widely expected. Climate considerations for new government projects will likely be ditched, states will get less help to prepare for and recover from disasters and public weather forecasts will be privatized, Project 2025 has suggested.
Scientists, who remember research being buried and Trump publicly changing an official hurricane forecast map with a Sharpie pen during his first term, fear a reprise. “The United States will become an unsafe place for scientists, intellectuals, and anyone who doesn’t fit” with the Republican agenda, Mann said.
Trump has said that “nuclear warming”, which seems to be a reference to nuclear war, is a greater threat than global warming and that while he likes the idea of clean water and air “at the same time you can’t give up your country, you can’t say you can’t have jobs any more”.
When disasters, driven by a warming world, do hit the US, Trump has signaled he will withhold federal aid to places that didn’t vote for him in return for unrelated concessions. The former president did this multiple times when in office, his ex-staffers have revealed, and recently threatened California with a repeat.
International relations shaken
As president, Trump took several months to decide to remove the US from the Paris climate agreement. “This time I think he would do that on the very first day, likely with a lot of dramatic flourish,” said Rabe.
With the US, again, out of the international climate effort, American aid to developing countries vulnerable to floods, droughts and other disasters would also be slashed, along with cooperation with nations on other initiatives, such as cutting methane and curbing deforestation.
Trump’s fixation upon tariffs, meanwhile, would probably stymie the import of clean energy components to the US. Retaliatory tariffs, including penalties for carbon-intensive goods, could follow. “I’d expect an aggressive ‘America first’ role which will be a very interesting moment for the European Union with their carbon border adjustments – how will they respond to a more bullying America?” Rabe said.
As in Trump’s first term, US disengagement would raise fears that other countries will also withdraw from the climate fight, causing global heating to spin out of control. China, the world’s leading emitter, has retained a level of cooperation with the Biden administration on climate despite an overall strained relationship with the US, but this faces rupture if Trump wins.
“It’s safe to assume there won’t be any climate engagement between Beijing and Washington,” said Li Shuo, a China climate policy specialist at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “It would be negative for the US and for the world. The US still looms large on the global stage, so I’d expect Trump would sow greater resistance to a climate agenda in China. We will see that commitment to climate start to crumble.
Filling in the Blanks on Kamala Harris’ Climate Agenda
Jennifer A Dlouhy and Ari Natter
Mon 28 October 2024
(Bloomberg) -- Kamala Harris hasn’t laid out a detailed vision for addressing climate change and energy if she’s elected president — but she’s already getting plenty of advice.
Most Read from Bloomberg
The Tartarian Candidate
Booming Cambridge Exposes England’s Widening Wealth Gap
A Courtyard Apartment Building Designed for Southwest Sprawl
Robotaxis Are No Friend of Public Transportation
Argentina Drug Trafficking Hotspot Sees Murders Plunge
Environmentalists and former advisers have outlined their prescriptions for ways a victorious Harris could build on Biden-era climate initiatives — including the sweeping Inflation Reduction Act — to drive more US clean energy deployment and winnow planet-warming pollution worldwide.
“The Inflation Reduction Act was just a down payment on the climate crisis,” said Leah Stokes, an environmental politics professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “There is lots more to be done.”
And some climate activists are pushing a harder line, quietly developing blueprints for Harris to stifle flows of US oil and gas if the Democrat prevails over Republican Donald Trump.
The lobbying portends an agenda that could be a tailwind for clean energy technology companies and renewable project developers — as well as a hindrance to fossil fuel interests.
Harris, who battled oil companies and championed environmental justice long before she became vice president, has made clear that, like President Joe Biden, she’ll promote emission-free energy as a way to trim utility bills and drive economic growth. A campaign policy outline stresses that she and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, will “work to lower household energy costs” and create “the well-paid union jobs of the future” while responding to the climate crisis.
Paul Bledsoe, a former White House official under President Bill Clinton who lectures on environmental policy at American University, said he expects Harris to stick with this economic messaging. “If there is one theme she keeps coming back to,” he said, “it is climate policy should help keep costs down.”
Here’s a closer look at three areas where climate advocates see room for major action from a Harris White House.
1. Getting to IRA 2.0
Unlocking the full potential of the IRA is a multi-year task, bedeviled by permitting delays, domestic supply chain constraints and long waits to connect power projects to the grid. Fixing some of these bottlenecks would require action by Congress.
“Permitting reform” has become a catch phrase in Washington — a kind of shorthand for the broader set of obstacles the US must address in order to realize the full benefits of low- and zero-emission technology. And while there’s bipartisan consensus that current rules hold back all sorts of energy development, there’s little agreement on an approach for revamping them. Many environmentalists slammed a permitting bill advanced in July by Senators John Barrasso, a Republican, and Joe Manchin, an independent, saying it made too many concessions to the oil and gas industries.
Biden has put in place fundamental policies needed to decarbonize the US economy, said Bob Keefe, executive director of the E2 advocacy group. But “we need to focus on implementation and speeding up even more.” That’s something Harris could prioritize.
If Harris is elected but Republicans have control of any part of Congress, she’ll have far less room to maneuver. But if Democrats win a trifecta, that could present an opportunity to expand the IRA’s domestic energy manufacturing incentives, potentially reaching further up the supply chains for solar panels and other technology. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has already committed to taking another bite at the climate apple and has said he’s eyeing the same procedural gambit that helped produce the IRA in 2022.
Lawmakers could work with Harris to deliver on her promise of lower energy costs for homeowners by expanding tax rebates tied to the installation of heat pumps and other equipment. The rebate money provided by the IRA is “a small fragment of what we need,” Stokes said.
Environmentalists are encouraging Congress to revive some proposals that didn’t make it into the IRA the first time around. One contender: a so-called Clean Electricity Performance Program that would have used grant money to entice electric utilities to hit annual targets for emission-free power generation while hitting the laggards with fees.
An IRA 2.0 also could open a window for factoring carbon intensity into trade policy — an approach that offers a competitive advantage to US exports made with a smaller environmental footprint than their foreign rivals. Biden’s senior adviser for international climate policy, John Podesta, already proposed a new trading system that prices in the greenhouse gas emissions embodied in various goods, and announced a task force focused on the idea. As president, Harris could take some steps to advance the approach administratively, but far more could be done in collaboration with Congress, where the idea has drawn some Republican support.
Brian Deese, a former White House official now advising the Harris campaign, has pitched an even bolder strategy. A clean energy Marshall Plan would use US financing to encourage other countries to deploy clean energy using made-in-America technology, presenting an alternative to China’s manufacturing might. The approach, which Deese outlined independent of the campaign, would allow the US “to help others while helping itself,” effectively putting its own industries front and center in the energy transition while aiding developing countries that “need access to cheap capital and technology” to quickly shift away from fossil fuels.
“One of the biggest opportunities — but also urgent priorities — that we have is putting in place a more credible regime to accelerate the energy transition globally,” Deese told Bloomberg. “That can be done in a way that becomes high opportunity.”
2. Tackling industrial and gas power plant emissions
If elected, Harris would inherit a suite of unfinished environmental policy tasks from Biden. Among them is reducing pollution from the industrial sector, which is responsible for about a quarter of US greenhouse gas emissions today. Further investments in decarbonizing heavy industry could be paired with new regulatory limits on emissions from steel mills, concrete plants and other facilities.
“We would love to see cutting-edge policy attention” on industrial emissions, said Lena Moffitt, executive director of the advocacy group Evergreen Action. That could take the form of “a Day One executive order saying we are going to lead the world in creating the clean tech” necessary to clean up the sector, she said.
The Biden administration already imposed limits on greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s coal power plants. But under Biden, the Environmental Protection Agency is still working to develop a rule targeting the nation’s existing fleet of gas-fired power plants, which may be summoned into more service to meet a surge in electricity demand tied to manufacturing and artificial intelligence. That regulation won’t even be proposed before Inauguration Day, adding to the to-do list that could await Harris.
3. Curbing oil and gas
Some environmental activists are drafting blueprints for Harris to take a more aggressive stance clamping down on fossil fuels. But in a shift from their approach to Biden four years ago, they’ve largely held their fire in public and haven’t pushed Harris to commit to policy positions that could alienate undecided voters in key battleground states.
Still, they’re developing ideas that Harris could advance through executive power, setting them in motion as early as Day One. Top targets include limiting liquefied natural gas exports and shutting down Energy Transfer LP’s Dakota Access Pipeline, which carries oil from North Dakota to Illinois, taking advantage of a federal court ruling that required more environmental analysis of the project.
Earlier this month, environmentalists pushing for a swift end to oil and gas production laid out other demands, including using special emergency authority to bar crude exports and to curb US public investment in foreign fossil fuel projects. And they encouraged Harris to draw on her experience tangling with oil companies as California’s attorney general by prodding a federal investigation of the industry’s approach to the climate crisis. “An investigation into the oil and gas majors by the Department of Justice is long overdue,” the groups, including Zero Hour, told Harris.
If elected, Harris would face the same political sensitivities around the cost of gasoline that have stymied similar efforts to restrict supply. And on the campaign trail, she’s taken pains to highlight surging US oil and gas production that’s hit record levels under her and Biden’s watch.
Still, if she wins, activists have made their expectations clear.
“We need more than platitudes,” said Collin Rees, with Oil Change International. “We’re looking for specific pledges: a permanent halt to new LNG exports, a rejection of the disastrous Dakota Access Pipeline and a clear plan to phase out fossil fuel production and end environmental injustice.”
Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek
Many Republicans take a tough line on China despite their own business ties to Beijing
Martin Pengelly in Washington
Mon 28 October 2024
David McCormick, the Republican nominee for US Senate in Pennsylvania, at a campaign event in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on 25 April 2024.Photograph: Marc Levy/AP
In testimony to Congress last year, David McCormick, now the Republican candidate for US Senate in Pennsylvania, said that as CEO of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world, he “held deep reservations” about “the moral and patriotic hazards of doing business in China”.
As CNN reported, between 2017 and 2021, such qualms did not stop McCormick overseeing an increase in Bridgewater’s Chinese holdings from $1.6m to $1.77bn. Nor, according to Bloomberg, did Bridgewater flinch from significant investments in companies that supply the Chinese military. It has also been reported that McCormick oversaw investment in a Chinese fentanyl producer and, as HuffPost put it, “profited from China trade policies he helped shape” as a deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs under George W Bush.
Denying wrongdoing, McCormick throws claims of hypocrisy back at his opponent, the incumbent Democrat Bob Casey, over his own investment links to companies from China and other countries.
As election day nears, with Senate control up for grabs in such battleground-state races, both parties are seeking to emphasize China’s threat to the US economy and national security. But a review of reporting and documentation reveals many other Republicans taking a tough line on China despite their own business and investment links to Beijing.
Related: Republican Senate candidate’s hedge fund managed $415m in Russian debt
In Wisconsin, Eric Hovde, a banker, has said that if he was in the Senate, “I’d be very focused on what China is doing and why we are allowing them to come to our communities and buy up our land, especially around military bases.” He has also accused his opponent, Tammy Baldwin, of failing to address a fentanyl addiction crisis fueled by Chinese imports.
According to the Daily Beast, before entering politics, Hovde’s family tried to launch an investment vehicle in China. A spokesperson for Hovde insisted he was not involved.
In Michigan, the former US House intelligence committee chair Mike Rogers says he was “among the first to sound the alarm on the economic and national security danger posed by China” – while the Detroit News reports that Rogers and his wife “have gained hundreds of thousands of dollars in wealth through companies that have partnered with Chinese firms”. Heartland Signal has highlighted Rogers’ ties with Nokia, a Finnish telecoms firm that “has conducted extensive business deals with Chinese tech companies like Huawei”, which is subject to US sanctions.
Rogers denies wrongdoing – and attacks his opponent for a Senate seat, congresswoman Elissa Slotkin, alleging she signed an NDA concerning a planned electric vehicle battery plant in Big Rapids to be built by a company connected to the Chinese Communist party. Slotkin denies that, and says she “worked to bring manufacturing back to the United States” while Rogers “supported trade deal after trade deal – including Nafta – that helped ship jobs to places like China”.
Meanwhile, Montana is no Rust-belt battleground but it is a rare Republican-dominated state represented by a Democrat in a Senate split 51-49. The Republican candidate, the US Navy Seal turned businessperson Tim Sheehy, has called for the US to “get tough” on China while attacking the incumbent, Jon Tester, as “weak” on the issue.
Last December, HuffPost reported that Sheehy “sold off shares in the Chinese tech giant Tencent, earning between $200 and $1,000 in dividends, according to his Senate campaign financial disclosure”. The same report said Sheehy maintained significant investments with financial institutions with “deep ties to China”.
Sheehy responded by attacking Tester for getting “six times richer as a career politician hobnobbing with lobbyists in Washington for nearly two decades”. Sheehy’s own wealth comes from Bridger Aerospace, a company dedicated to fighting forest fires. Heartland Signal reported that Sheehy “endorsed and attempted to utilize Chinese drones built by a company which was sanctioned by two administrations for leaking American data to the Chinese Communist Party”. Sheehy did not comment.
In Ohio, where the Democrat Sherrod Brown is seeking to keep his seat, China is an issue too, if over thousands rather than millions of dollars. The Republican candidate, auto salesperson Bernie Moreno, has claimed to have refused to sell a Chinese-made SUV. Spectrum News showed that Moreno did sell such vehicles. A spokesperson said Moreno stopped selling them after a local plant closed down.
Related: ‘He’s lying’: Ohio Senate candidate blames staffers and family for errors
And in Florida, Democrats dream of defeating Rick Scott, the former healthcare executive and governor who won his seat narrowly in 2018. Earlier this year, Mother Jones reported that though Scott has urged voters to “stop buying [Chinese] stuff[,] stop helping them[,] stop investing in China”, because “you don’t do business with your enemies,” he “has a long record of supporting Chinese investment in the United States and personally making money off Chinese commerce”.
The magazine laid out such links. A Scott spokesperson attacked the outlet and said the senator would be “happy to put his record up against” Democrats “pushing [Joe] Biden’s pro-China agenda”.
The Guardian asked the National Republican Senatorial Committee for comment about Republican candidates voicing bellicose campaign rhetoric about China despite reported ties to Beijing. It did not reply.
