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United States
8/15/2024 Independent presidential candidate Kennedy Jr. sought a meeting last week with Democratic nominee Harris to discuss the possibility of serving in her administration, perhaps as a Cabinet secretary, if he throws his support behind her campaign and she wins, according to Kennedy campaign officials. Harris and her advisers have not responded with an offer to meet or shown interest in the proposal. At the moment, Kennedy says he is continuing to campaign with the expectation that he will defeat both Trump and Harris, making regular interview appearances, planning upcoming rallies in states such as Arizona and Nebraska and releasing an “America Strong” plan for bipartisan governance. But he has also left open the possibility of bowing out of the race if he finds another way to bring about the change he seeks in the country, his advisers say. “From the beginning of this campaign, we were saying people should be talking to each other,” Kennedy said Wednesday in an interview. “That is the only way of unifying the country.” „I think it is going to be a very close race.” The latest round of outreach follows earlier efforts to convince Democrats that Kennedy would make a better candidate on their ticket than Biden. Even after Kennedy left the Democratic nomination fight to pursue an independent campaign for president last November, his advisers continued to press the case privately that he could replace Biden as the Democratic nominee. Kennedy, the campaign manager and daughter-in-law to the candidate, argued in an April email to Democrats, that Biden could not win the race. “As things are, Biden is going to lose. If Bobby were to drop out, Trump would win by an additional two states,” she wrote. “If Biden were to drop out, Trump would lose. Only Bobby can win this.” She argued that Democrats had to make sure a president is elected who could handle the responsibility of managing the nuclear arsenal. “I don’t want a president obsessed with the size of his crowds to be given that sacred charge. My bomb is bigger than your bomb is no path to peace,” she wrote. “Nor do I want to entrust my children’s lives to the alertness of a president who, despite honorable service and due to the natural toll of age, I wouldn’t leave babysitting my two-year-old while I went to the movies.” Democrats have for months attacked Kennedy because Mellon, a scion of a Pittsburgh banking family, is a top donor to both an independent group supporting Kennedy and a separate group supporting Trump. Kennedy’s campaign reached out this summer to Democratic intermediaries, including Hollywood talent agent Emanuel and director Reiner, in hopes of starting a dialogue with Democratic officials. No meetings resulted. One day after Biden had a disastrous performance in a June debate with Trump, Kennedy campaign staff contacted a relative of Airbnb founder Gebbia in an effort to get a message to Klain, a longtime Biden adviser, who had recently been hired by Airbnb as chief legal adviser. “The Dems should nominate Kennedy. He is the only candidate under consideration who can beat Trump,” the message read. Klain said Wednesday that he heard secondhand that the Kennedy campaign was trying to reach him, but that he did not respond to the request. A person spotted Kennedy at a hotel this week in West Palm Beach, Fla., not far from Trump campaign headquarters and Trump’s Florida home. Trump campaign advisers said they are still in touch with Kennedy and his senior team, and some of the advisers are expecting Kennedy to drop out and endorse Trump. In his pitch to Trump in Milwaukee, he also discussed a Cabinet-level job. Since Biden exited the race in July, Kennedy’s standing in national polls appears to have declined, suggesting that Harris has been able to attract some of his previous supporters. In July when Biden was still in the race showed Kennedy polling at about 9 percent. Since Biden dropped out of the race, the same average shows Kennedy polling at about 5 percent nationally. Kennedy said Wednesday that he had not had any contact with the Democratic Party since launching his campaign. The Democratic National Committee has launched an aggressive legal and political effort to diminish the appeal of Kennedy and other third-party contenders. “The only contact I have with the DNC is them suing me through intermediaries,' Kennedy said. (Source: MSN / The Washington Post = U.S.)
August 15, 2024 Vance has climbed to his current position as former President Trump’s running mate, in part, by selling himself as a hillbilly, calling on his Appalachian background to bolster his credentials to speak for the American working class. “I grew up as a poor kid,’ Vance said on Fox News in August 2024. “I think that’s a story that a lot of normal Americans can empathize with.” Indeed, the book that brought him to public attention was his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” In that book, he claims his family carried an inheritance of ’abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma.’ Created mainly by middle- and upper-class people for like-minded readers, long line of novels, films and plays can end up spreading harmful stereotypes about poor people. When you think about novels and films about the poor, you come upon the great classics: Dickens’ “Oliver Twist,” Zola’s “Germinal,” London’s “The People of the Abyss” or Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” Though these works are sometimes crafted with good intentions, they tend to focus on violence, drugs, alcohol, crudeness and the supposed laziness of poor people. These monuments to the suffering of the poor were written by authors who were not poor. Most of them had little to no knowledge of the lived experience of poor people. At best, they were reporters whose source material was meager. At worst, they simply made things up, recycling stereotypes about poverty. Steinbeck had some contact with poor people as a reporter. But as he wrote about migrant camps for “The Grapes of Wrath,” he relied heavily on the notes of Babb - herself poor and formerly homeless – who traveled to migrant camps throughout California for the Farm Security Administration. Babb’s boss – a friend of Steinbeck’s – had secretly shown the author her notes, without her permission. Babb would go on to also write a novel based on her experiences, which was bought by Random House. But the publishing house killed it after “Grapes of Wrath” came out, and it wasn’t published until 2004, when the author was 97 years old. Then there’s London, whose “The People of the Abyss” is seen as a faithful portrayal of the lives of the British poor. But London, who went “undercover” to craft a sordid account of England’s urban poor, nonetheless maintained a comfortable apartment. He kept a stash of money sewed into his ragged coat and conveniently escaped for a hot bath and a good meal while pretending to pass as a pauper. The result is a book laden with put-downs of the English working class, who are cast in eugenicist terms as a degenerate race. When you look at the books or films created by people who grew up poor, the tone and focus often shift dramatically. Instead of a fixation on the tawdry side of life, you see works that explore the things that bind all people together: family, love, politics, complex emotions and sensual memories. You only have to open Wright’s “Black Boy,” Gold’s “Jews Without Money to see their protagonists’ appreciation of beauty and ability to experience profound pleasure – yes, all while experiencing poverty. Wright recalls how, as a child, he would play in the sewer, where he would spend hours fashioning all manner of detritus into toys. And Gold sings a paean to an empty, garbage-strewn lot in his neighborhood that doubled as his beloved playground. Vance, on the other hand, fills his book with selections from the hits of violence, drugs, sex, obscenity and filth. But Vance himself was never actually impoverished. His grandfather, grandmother and mother all had houses in a suburban neighborhood in Middletown, Ohio. He admits that his grandfather “owned stock in Armco and had a lucrative pension.” He introduces himself to his Yale classmates as “a conservative hillbilly from Appalachia.” Over the course of the book, he confuses himself – and the reader – by variously saying that he is middle class, working class and poor. Vance did come from a troubled family. His mother was – like so many Americans, whether they’re poor, middle class or rich – addicted to painkillers. In the book, Vance searches for an explanation for his traumatic relationship with his mother, before hitting on the perfect explanation: His mother’s addiction was a consequence of the fact that her parents were “hillbillies.” The reality – one that Vance only subtly acknowledges in his memoir – is that he is not poor. Nor is he a hillbilly. He grew up firmly in Ohio’s middle class. In the forthcoming book, “Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those without It,” I detail how Vance’s work is actually part of a genre. In developing his grand theory, Vance takes readers very close to the now-debunked notion of a culture of poverty, in which the poor are responsible for their situation and their attitude toward work is passed along from one generation to the next. A dependence on government handouts, according to the theory, undergirds this culture. His neighbors in Middletown had lost – thanks to the welfare state – “the tie that bound them to their neighbors’. Vance’s dilemma: Are these people simply lazy? Or are they the victims of a system that encourages them to watch TV and eat bad food as they collect welfare or disability checks? Several times he refers to people who live on welfare as ’never [having] worked a paying job in his life.’ He seems to fully buy into the notion that people are poor because they are lazy freeloaders, they got there because of ’bad choices.’ and life will improve only through better decisions. The issue here is “representation inequality”: one identity group - in this case, poor people - don’t get to represent themselves. In the 'elite capture,' those with cultural capital and power assume the right to speak for and represent the powerless. In so doing, stereotypes and tropes get developed with serious political consequences. Our political and educational system elbows out most poor people. As political scientist Carnes points out in his 2018 book “The Cash Ceiling,” only 2% of congressional lawmakers worked in manual labor, the service industry or clerical jobs before getting involved in politics. In July 2024, The New York Times reported that Vance’s Yale law professor and author Chua read an early version of what became “Hillbilly Elegy,” one that was more geared to an academic audience and grounded in political theory. She prodded Vance to change his manuscript, telling him that “this grand theory [about America] is not working.' His “grand theory about the poor" doesn’t work, because the poor – unlike many other identity groups – don’t have a platform to articulate and promote their own needs and political vision. Instead, we’re stuck with people who offer bromides at best and fatalistic narratives of doom at worst. (Source: CounterPunch – U.S. / The Conversation – Melbourne, Victoria, Astralia)
By Davis, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, an American specialist in disability studies.
August 15, 2024 The Cult of Military Service: Walz as soldier-teacher. Soon after Vice-President Harris introduced Minnesota Governor Walz as her running mate, the attacks on his military record began. Debating the finer points of Walz’s military record misses the larger point that the cult of military “service” in the United States is a widespread and dangerous one. Responding to attacks from Republican Presidential candidate Donald's Vice-Presidential candidate JD, Walz told a campaign rally filled with enthusiastic hospitality workers in Las Vegas all of the boxes for one kind of Democratic presidential campaign: Small Nebraskan town America, Family tradition, Military service, Teaching, and Football. My dad was a chain-smoking Korean War-era veteran who, two days after my 17th birthday, took me down to sign up to join the National Guard. And I have to tell you, like my dad before me and millions of others, the GI Bill gave me a shot at a college education, Waltz said. The message was pretty clear that military service was the natural and honorable stage in one’s life from a nobody to a somebody in the Great American community. One of first pictures of Walz that was widely circulated was a stern-faced, seventeen years old version of himself in 1981-era combat fatigues holding an M-16. Walz was by many accounts a popular teacher with his students and liked by his colleagues. But, the role model of the Soldier-Teacher ’is not a good one, especially for young men’. Connecting military service to teaching: high schools across the country are one of the main recruiting grounds for the U.S. military. Young people, especially high school age boys, can be easily impressed by the glamour of the uniform and combat through films, television, and video games. This was particularly true during the 1980s and 1990s, when political leaders and their friends in Hollywood spent a lot of time rehabilitating the military following the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, along with demonizing the Vietnam Anti-War movement. Walz joined the National Guard in 1981, the first year of Reagan’s presidency that saw the beginning of a massive military build-up and a resurgent anti-Communism and U.S. imperialism. It wasn’t until the end of the decade, however, before the U.S. could once again, send large numbers of ground troops to fight wars in far-flung corners of the globe; Panama, the first Gulf War, and after 9-11, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq - the latter two dubbed the ’Forever Wars.’ The disastrous results for the countries that the U.S invaded and the large numbers of U.S. soldiers suffered debilitating physical and mental health conditions are still with us. Walz was deployed only once overseas to Italy during the Forever Wars and saw no combat. He spent seven months abroad before he returned home. Others from Minnesota? More than eight thousand Minnesota National Guard soldiers and Airmen were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 to 2011. Sixteen members of the Minnesota died in Iraq. Nearly one hundred soldiers with some connection to Minnesota were killed in combat during the Forever Wars. Walz retired from the National Guard in May 2005, he was elected to Congress during the Democratic sweep in 2006. During the debate over the surge, Walz voted to force the U.S. military to withdraw from Iraq within 90 days. Yet less than five months later, he voted to continue funding the war. It was a position that put him at odds with a majority of his Democratic colleagues. Throughout Walz’s congressional career, Walz often voted to repeal the War on Terror-era authorizations for the use of military force (AUMFs), while also voting against restrictions or cuts to military funding. Another aspect of the military service cult is never to discuss what the military actually does beyond blandishments of “serving” or “protecting” our nation. Walz spent his entire military career in the Minnesota National Guard. It’s not a good history from suppressing the Dakota uprising in 1862 to defending the 2008 Republican convention from demonstrators. When Walz was Governor of Minnesota he deployed National Guard troops to Minneapolis during the rebellion following Floyd’s police murder. Minnesota is quite proud of the National Guard’s role in foiling ’domestic unrest’. The National Guard in many states recruit soldiers by emphasizing the heroic role they play during natural disasters. The National Guard are sold as do-gooders or “citizen-soldiers” who rarely if ever see combat, but the post-Cold War reorganization of the U.S. military has meant that the National Guard is more integrated into U.S. military operations abroad, in sharp contrast to the Vietnam War era. The cult of military service has sprouted in the era of the volunteer army, and while it means that professional politicians like Walz may ride this into the White House with Harris, it is a road to the graveyard for many others. (Source: CounterPunch - U.S.)
by Allen, the author of The Package King: A Rank and File History of United Parcel Service.
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