BAVUAL 2024 ELECTION BONUS ISSUE

BONUS ELECTION ISSUE

THE AFRICAN HERITAGE MAGAZINE

BAVUAL FALL 2024

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HARRIS VS. TRUMP ‘24 THE STAKES FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS AND ALL AMERICANS

09 27 05 ISSUES

MY TAKE DONALD TRUMP IS NOT THE FUTURE, A PROGRESSIVE SOCIETY IS

DONALD TRUMP WHAT’S ON THE LINE FOR ALL AMERICANS, INCLUDING BLACK AMERICANS

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KAMALA HARRIS

THE DRIFT WHY DEMOCRACY IS UNDER THREAT BY FASCISTS WORLDWIDE

A PROFILE OF THE 49TH VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

A PROFILE OF THE 45TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

33 HOW THEY VIEW AMERICA THE POLITICAL PARTIES’ VISION FOR THE FUTURE BAVUAL ELECTION 2024 | 3

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Bavual Vol. 3 Bonus Election Issue Fall 2024

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MY TAKE

Earl A. Birkett

DONALD TRUMP IS NOT THE FUTURE, A PROGRESSIVE SOCIETY IS For nearly 5,200 years of its civilized history, most of the Earth has been ruled by single rulers, nearly all of whom were patriarchal and, except for the occasional enlightened emperor, extremely tyrannical. They dominated the known world that consisted of Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, and were called pharoah, warlord, Caesar, king and dictator. Worshipped without question by their subjects, many of whom were enslaved, their word was final.

Dissent was quickly snuffed out.

The Greeks first gave the world democracy - a word they coined - in the 6th century BCE by forming the first city-state in Athens complete with a constitution, administrative and judicial offices and a legislative assembly chosen from all eligible citizens (which prophetically excluded women, slaves, foreigners and youth below the age of military service). Its unique feature is that no one was subject to rule by another power or a single person.

It was the Romans who introduced the concept of a Republic, a representative democracy where a small class of wealthy and noble families manipulated the voting system in such a way that only they were allowed to serve in the ruling Senate. The emperor, or Caesar, was usually chosen by the Senate, direct plebiscite, the army and even by lot.

Britain’s 13 increasingly unruly colonies in America, broke from the king and formed their own nation, the United States of America, in 1776. They adopted a Constitution in 1787, which set up a republican government consisting of an Executive, the President, a Legislature, the Congress, and a Judiciary, the Supreme Court. Each of the three branches were given checks and balances on each other so that none of them would emerge to rule absolutely over the other. To check the power of the President, the drafters gave Congress the power to impeach the executive whenever he exceeded his legal authority.

That power plus the creation of the Electoral College, designed to override the popular vote, and the belief that anyway the voters would never be so morally bankrupt as to actually elect a

demagogue to the office (after all George Washington, a patriot and public servant, was their model), no further protections were put in place. Also, political parties had not formed yet, so it was assumed that each branch would naturally want to maintain their independence. With some key adjustments along the way , including the Civil War debacle, the Constitution held for 237 years - until 2024, when it is being tested as never before.

The formal virus of Donald John Trump that was injected into the political bloodstream in 2015 gave the U.S. its first serious internal challenge to democracy ever, first with a cult-of-personality presidency from 2017 to 2021 and now the prospect of electing a dictator to rule a gangsterized police state beginning in 2025. It took America more than two centuries to rise from a paradise for wealthy white male slave owners to one that embraces all manner of people poor whites, freed blacks, ethnic minorities, women, non-Christians and finally the sexually different.

All this has made the shrinking white male evangelical Christian majority feel as if they are under threat of losing their economic, political and cultural dominance and privilege that they have enjoyed since America’s beginning and being replaced by everyone who isn’t them. They pretend to be superior, but in fact they feel deeply inferior and afraid and have coalesced around a crude, ignorant and amoral racist and misogynist, a civilly liable business fraud and rapist, a 34-count convicted felon, an ex-president deemed by health experts to be responsible for the deaths of 500,000 people to the covid virus and a traitorous demagogue/wannabe dictator who “promises” to permanently restore them to their former glory - yet another one of his more than 30,000 documented lies over his four years in office. Americans do not want a dictator, they want trusted leaders who will continue the long, difficult and successful march to what their forefathers promised them in writing: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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THE DRIFT

WHY DEMOCRACY IS AGAIN UNDER THREAT

BY AUTHORITARIANS WORLDWIDE It’s like the plot to a horror movie: you narrowly escape from the clutches of a deadly monster, maybe even kill him as well, and observe the carnage or the threat from the rearview mirror, only to straight ahead out of your front window only to see the fiend, even more threatening this time, coming right at you all over again.

elsewhere, faced the threat of revolution simmering just below the surface that would almost come to pass during the great Depression of the 1930s.

The trumph of democracy over dictatorship in World War II, followed by the liberation of nations primarily in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean that choked under the yoke of colonialism since the 19th century, and Such is the plight of the world in the first quarter of the granting of civil rights to American blacks, gave the 21st century, for it faces the same ominous humanity a collective freedom that it had never threats that it faced during the same period of the tasted before and determined never to lose it again.

20th century. It is a period that gave rise to revolution and a Stalinist dictatorship in a Russia That is, until 2024. transformed into the Soviet Union, samurai rule in Japan, authoritarian nationalism under Chang Kai- The Spanish-American philosopher George Shek in China, the gradual rise of fascism in Italy, Santayana’s timeless aphorism, that “Those who Nazism in Germany and the seeds of dictatorship in cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat regions as diverse as Cuba and the Philippines. it,” remains as true today as it was when he first Even the United States, suffering from decades of uttered it in one of his published works, Reason in Jim Crow segregation in the South and Common Sense, in 1905.

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Germany and Italy may have been defeated in 1945, but the heinous virus of authoritarianism, both communist and fascistic, that Hitler and Mussolini left in their wake remained airborne, metastasizing worldwide, and finding a permanent host in countries as diverse as Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, Maduro’s Venezuela, Orban’s Hungary, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Islamic Republic of Iran and, sadly, many countries in North, Central and Southern Africa. According to Pew Research, 59 of the world’s 195 countries - just over 30 percent - are governed by authoritarians.

Anti-democratic movements fester throughout Europe with varying degrees of success: victories in Italy and Hungary but defeats (thus far) in France and Germany. Pew identifies 24 democratic countries where a median of 31 percent of their citizens are supportive of some form of authoritarianism. Sentiment is highest in India, at 85 percent, and in two of the world’s six largest economies: the United Kingdom, at 37 percent, followed by the United States, at 32 percent.

The 2024 U.S. presidential election is a decision between an authoritarian Republican, Donald Trump, and a pro-democracy Democrat, Kamala Harris. As of this writing, polls show the race to be a tie with a slight edge to Harris.

It is harder now to identify wannabe dictators than it was in the mid-20th century as most no longer strut around in uniforms and make bombastic speeches like cartoon parodies. They wear business suits and, to many people, seem to be stable men and women making calm, reasoned arguments but which are, given slightly closer inspection, the same tyrannical demagoguery as dictators of old. A key example of this neo-dictatorial style is Vladimir Putin. Dictatorships can take many forms: military regimes, oligarchic, indirect military regimes, dominant party regimes, monarchies, and personalist regimes. Some authoritarians like Putin and Trump combine regimes such as oligarchic, dominant party and personalist.

Authoritarians take advantage during periods of economic stress, such as high inflation, recession or depression, and usually after a conflict like World War I or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, where the aggressor nation loses and its ruling government is blamed for the ruinous aftermath. It does not help that the government is also seen as weak and inept.

They have a knack of persuading intellectually weak and usually religious or superstitious individuals who fear that their supposedly privileged status is

eroding by blaming outsiders and/or the elite for their problems.

How does one spot an authoritarian in the making?

There are red flags: narcissists who display sociopathic signs in childhood, either as bullies or resentful for being bullied in school; suffer from abuse from one or both parents; harbor a lifelong resentment of authority; choose unsavory role models; and develop an unusual lust for status, dominance, greed, selfishness, and absolute loyalty and constant worship from others. They can either be brave in battle or cowardly armchair warriors, more often than not the latter.

Demagogues usually blame a single group as the culprits: religious, racial or ethnic minorities, immigrants, intellectuals, journalists, bankers, political opponents. These groups are demonized as objects of irrational hatred by the fearful masses who are thus brainwashed into voting against their own interests.

Trump blames immigrants largely from Mexico just as Hitler blamed the Jews in Germany.

Once in power, the authoritarian leader consolidates his power by staffing the government with his corrupt cronies, suppressing all opposition and dissent, manipulating or banning elections, demanding total loyalty from the military and police, seeking revenge on his enemies and forming alliances with fellow authoritarians. Under this rule, the only beneficiaries are the leader and his gang and perhaps the wealthiest elite, who must pay a tribute to Dear Leader to maintain their privileged status.

How does authoritarian rule end? Almost always tragically. Despots seldom resign peacefully for fear of the consequences before the courts or among the angry masses who realize they have been duped all along. They wage wars of survival, both external and internal, unleash the military on their own citizens, and if they cannot flee in time are killed in a bloody coup.

There is one time tested way to prevent the rise of such a megalomaniac, and that is for the majority to vote against him when he is running for office, before he is given power. Getting the despot out of office after he was assumed power is not impossible, but it very, very difficult to do by ballot and without a revolution that is almost always costly in lives lost and resources consumed.

Yes, Winston Churchill was right: democracy is indeed the worst form of government - except for all the other forms.

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THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION ELECTION DAY TUESDAY NOVEMBER 5, 2024

THE WINNER IS DECIDED IN THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE, NOT BY POPULAR VOTE TOTAL VOTES VOTES NEEDED TO ELECT THE PRESIDENT

538 270

VICE PRESIDENT COUNTS THE ELECTORAL VOTE JANUARY 6, 2025

Only two candidates are likely to appear on the ballot in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia: Vice President Kamala Harris, who was nominated for president by the Democratic Party after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race July 21 after having won the Democratic primary previously, and Donald Trump, whom the Republican Party designated as their nominee in their primary during the same period. The DNC formally ratified Harris’ nomination at their convention in Chicago in August. (Harris had already received enough votes to win the nomination from the party delegates earlier in the month.) Harris selected Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota to join her on the ticket as the vice presidential nominee. Previously, the RNC officially chose Trump as the nominee at their Milwaukee convention in July - in spite of his 34-count felony conviction in New York for business fraud to conceal wittholding information from voters in his 2016 presidential campaign.

Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio - who in 2016 called Trump “America’s Hitler” before seeking Trump’s endorsement in his 2022 Senate race - was nominated to be Trump’s vice presidential running-mate.

Because the U.S. electorate has been polarized along party lines due to cultural and economic differences since at least the 1990s, only a handful of swing states, whose votes are attainable by either candidate, will receive the bulk of their attention. They include New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. As of publication, televised debates between Harris and Trump, and also Walz and Vance, have not been determined.

Although several minor party and candidates, chiefly Libertarian Party nominee Chase Oliver, People’s Party nominee Cornel West and Green Party nominee Jill Stein, will be on a number of state ballots, none of them realistically has a chance at being elected. However, they could still draw enough votes in swing states in a close election to determine whether Harris or Trump prevails in the Electoral College.

Also at issue are expected attempts by Republican election officials in swing states to suppress Democratic voter turnout, especially in black and latino communities, and Trump supporters’ reaction to the election results should Harris win. Trump-led Republican insurrectionists could repeat the aftermath of the 2020 election, when they tried to overturn the election by both illegal and violent means.

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ISSUES WHAT’S AT STAKE FOR ALL AMERICANS, INCLUDING BLACK AMERICANS

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AT HOME THE RIGHT-WING THREAT TO DEMOCRACY Ever since the failed January 6, 2021, plot to steal the 2020 presidential election from the legal and valid winner, Joe Biden, by rogue Republican electors and MAGA* politicians and supporters, the last of whom stormed the Capitol to kill Vice President Mike Pence** and several Democratic leaders, there have been convincing signs that the Republican Party is continuing its intent to eliminate democratic government and replace it with authoritarian, even fascist, rule should they prevail in the November 5th election. The signs have only increased in this election year, with Trump expressing his desire to become dictator only on “day one,” his repeatedly expressed desire to punish his perceived Democratic and Republican enemies, especially the ones who initiated his numerous criminal indictments and civil suits, and the Trump inspired Project 2025, a plan developed by his GOP supporters to basically replace democratic government, which Democrats want to maintain, with a Christian nationalist and authoritarian regime. Voters will be asked to make a choice in the upcoming election. *Make America Great Again **Pence went again Trump’s wishes and certified Biden’s win in the Electoral College, thus endangering his life.

POLITICAL AND CULTURAL DIVISION The source of the Republican threat to democracy is the political and culture war that they have been fighting with the Democrats since the 1960s, which has only intensified ever since and reach a fever pitch with Trump’s MAGA following in the 2024 election season. It’s roots can be traced back to the 1912 presidential election, when the GOP split into two factions, the Progressives who supported Theodore Roosevelt and the conservatives represented

by President William H. Taft. The split allowed Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win the presidency for the first time in 20 years and veer the government toward economic and political reform.

Republicans took back the presidency in 1920 and adopted laissezfare approach toward business and the financial markets that were so lax that it brought on and increased the Great Depression of the 1930s, which the Democrats used as the catalyst for their return to power in 1932. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which introduced a social welfare safety net for the first time, were greeted well by Republican liberals like Nelson Rockefeller but were anathema to powerful conservative Republican business interests, which would coalesce around Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft, William’s son, and then Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964. Goldwater added reaction to social and cultural change as represented by the civil rights movement and youth culture to its economic conservatism.

His landslide loss to President Lyndon B. Johnson in that year’s election temporarily set back the conservative cause until Johnson’s pro-civil rights and social welfare legislation and the

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anti-war movement and hippie culture led Richard Nixon to adopt a 1968 campaign strategy of championing the “silent majority” of middle Americans, especially southerners who were attracted to George Wallace’s racist third-party candidacy. An even more conservative president, Ronald Reagan, doubled down on Nixon’s strategy in his two campaigns in 1980 and 1984. Though successful politically, social conservatism which racism as its key feature took hold in the GOP to such an extent that it consumed the entire party when the Trump/MAGA era arrived in the 2010s.The 2024 election is a referendum on whether America will become even more exclusive to non-white cultures or tolerate and include diverse cultures that vary from what is considered white male tradition.

WEALTH INEQUALITY There has not been a wider gap between the richest one percent and the 99 percent who range from the upper middle class to the poor since the Gilded Age of the 1890s. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the top 10 percent of U.S. families, or 12.9 million, owned 76% of the nation’s wealth as of 2021. The middle 40 percent - 51.5 million families - owned 22 percent, and the bottom 50 percent, comprised of 64.3 million families - owned just one percent. The last group has negative net worth; most do not have $400 in savings to fund an emergency. Median household income as of late 2023 was $70,784 . Meanwhile, it takes between $80,000 to $120,000 for a single person to subsist in most U.S. cities.

Half of this income goes toward rent for a studio or one bedroom apartment. Buying a house is increasingly beyond the financial means of Gen Z and millennials. Credit card debt is at a record $1.4 trillion and delinquencies hover around 9 percent.

The middle class, once the economic stratum of a clear majority of American adults, has steadily contracted in the past five decades.

The share of adults who live in middle-class households fell from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2021, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data. It has been accompanied by an increase in the share of adults in the upper-income tier – from 14 percent in 1971 to 21 percent in 2021 – as well as an increase in the share who are in the lower-income tier, from 25% percent to 29 percent.

Labor unions, first formed after the Civil War to shield farmers from predatory bankers, the inflationary gold standard and huge farm combines, gradually spread to urban industries and service workers, exemplified by striking auto workers in the 1930s. Unions, whose membership comprised 35 percent of the workforce in the 1950s, forced management concessions on a 40-hour day 5 days per week along with overtime and vacation pay, annual pay increases and retirement pensions and employee-paid health insurance that dramatically improved the standard of living for all Americans, especially the middle-class, and made it possible for one income to support an entire household.

Contraction of the U.S. economy due to recession in the 1970s took a severe toll on the business and political influence of unions . In 2023, only 10 percent of the workforce belong to a union. The presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s crippled unions and the steep tax cuts to large corporations and the wealthiest Americans when Republicans held Congress and the presidency, especially under Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, widened the wealth gap between the richest and the poorest to record levels.

The 2024 election will decide whether the richest one percent who support Republicans will continue to move the U.S. to a permanent oligarchy or if a Democratic victory can move the needle back to something approaching equitable wealth redistribution.

TRUMP’S DISASTROUS TARIFF PROPOSAL Virtually all economists consider Donald Trump’s drastic proposal to replace the U.S. income tax with a tariff on all imported goods to be an idea so disastrous that it will lead to widespread economic hardship, perhaps even another depression. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff, enacted by Republicans in Congress and signed by GOP President Herbert Hoover, hastened the Great Depression.

In order to protect American jobs as well as raise more revenue to offset an extension of his 2017 tax cuts, Trump wants to impose 10% across-the-board levies on all products imported into the U.S. from overseas. Trump also wants the tariff to replace the U.S. income tax, which would lead to a total economic collapse, economists say. They also say the tariff would likely backfire, effectively acting as a tax on U.S. consumers. With Trump also proposing a levy of 60 percent or more on Chinese imports , a typical middle-class household would face an estimated $1,700 a year in additional costs, thus triggering stagflation*, something not seen since the early 1980s, and a costly trade war.

TRADE WAR

STAGFLATION

*Stagflation is the simultaneous appearance in an economy of slow growth, high unemployment, and rising prices.

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ABORTION RIGHTS AND CONTROL OF WOMEN Abortion, which is merely a healthcare procedure, was once branded women with the scarlet letter of shame. Pregnant women who neither wanted nor could physically bring to term were forced into back alley coat hangers if they were poor or middle class or trips to Europe if they were rich. That is, until January 22, 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided, in Roe v.

Wade, that an abortion was a right for women protected by the Constitution. Subsequent decisions extended that right up to the 39th week of pregnancy Segregationists and evangelical Christians, having lost the fight to ban integration of public schools in the 1950s and 1960s, immediately turned to repealing the right to an abortion under the phony guise that they were protecting the unformed fetus. In fact, both groups had been seeking to snuff out the feminist movement that flowered in the early 1970s, at a time when a woman was not allowed to own a credit card or purchase real estate without her husband co-signing for her, because it threatened male dominance over women; adding opposition to abortion was a natural extension of this effort. At the time, many Republicans were not as extreme about abortion. Some were even in favor of adding the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution, offered to the states in 1972 but having never been passed by the necessary two-thirds of the states to be adopted. Christian conservatives, aware that Republicans were seeking a new voting bloc to propel them back into power after the Watergate scandal, reached out to support the GOP by forming the Moral Majority in 1979. This group gave its vigorous support to Ronald Reagan during his two successful presidential campaigns in 1980 and 1984, in hopes that he would join the anti-abortion cause, ultimately renamed the prolife movement to gain greater public support. Before its dissolution in 1989, the Moral Majority (reformed in 2004 as the Moral Majority Coalition) was successful in temporarily turning public opinion against abortion, eliminating Medicaid funding of abortions under the Hyde Amendment, and persuading many

Democrats to join the Republican Party. Successors like Pat Robertson and other evangelists, along with the newly formed Christian Coalition, carried on the work of the Moral Majority into the 1990s and 2000s. The gulf on the issue of abortion rights widened between Republicans and Democrats, whose position they dubbed as pro-choice and the Republicans as anti-choice. The GOP claimed that was murder, even in cases of rape, incest and endangering the life of the mother, while Democrats argued that abortion was safe, legal and rare. The final rift between the parties came on June 24, 2022, when the Supreme Court, in Dobbs v. Jackson - one of the most controversial and unpopular decisions in the court’s history - overturned the federal right to an abortion and left the decision in the hands of the states, 14 of whom that are under Republican control have banned the procedure entirely, while another three have limited it to it to six weeks, when most women don’t even know they are pregnant. In only two years, the ruling has produced a calamity for women, many of whom have turned away by their gynecologists in banned states and some forced to leave the state for the procedure to save their own life. Since 2022 voters in six states have weighed in on constitutional amendments regarding abortion, and the side favoring access to abortion prevailed in every state, even in GOPcontrolled Ohio, Kansas and Kentucky.

In the 2024 election, voters must decide on abortion amendments on up to 11 state ballot as well as a continuance of a Republican House, which if they are joined by a GOP president and Senate, plan on introducing a national amendment to ban all abortions.

ATTACKS ON EDUCATION AND WOKENESS The Republican war on education, expertise and wokeness (also known as political correctness) has a relatively recent start.

President George W. Bush, an anti-intellectual, and rightwing media propagandists led by Fox News, routinely derided teachers, academics, scientists and other intellectuals for espousing uncomfortable facts that were routinely at variance with often baseless conservative ideology. Especially after Barack Obama’s historic election as the first black president, and trivial and ridiculous matters like a phony war on Christmas and Obama wearing a tan suit regularly led the daily news on outlets like Fox News. The decibel level was ramped to absurd levels during and after Donald Trump’s one-term presidency, when wearing a face mask during the covid pandemic was considered un-American and “evil” and the teaching about race and racism, now banned in36 states, and denigrating diversity, 12 | BAVUAL ELECTION 2024

equity and inclusion (DEI) policies are somehow anti-white. Animosity from the far right has extended to calling public school teachers “groomers” for allegedly indoctrinating schoolchildren into the LGBTQ+ lifestyle and threatening physicians for adopting sensible public health measures during the covid crisis Many schools and libraries have banned books about black history, sex education and gender identification. The November election will decide whether or not Trump’s vision of a whitewashed and dumber America will prevail.

DISCONTENT OF YOUTH The generation gap between the Baby Boomers drafted to fight the unpopular and morally conflicted Vietnam War and their Greatest Generation parents who fought World War II is one of the defining advents of the pivotal 1960s. It defined the politics of that decade and beyond, what with sons and daughter, preoccupied with sex, drugs and rock-n-roll as a rebellion against their conformist and hypocritical fathers and mothers, turning to liberal and radical movements that would challenge Republicans and completely transform the Democratic Party by 1972. The Boomers would eventually make peace with their Swing-era parents, even morphing into their own brand of conformity. Some chose Republican conservatism, especially in the Reagan 1980s while others remained devoted to the more inclusive Democratic liberalism that they made possible in the 1970s. It is ironic that this bridge generation would be reviled by their own Gen X children, Gen Z grandchildren and millennial great-grandchildren who have derisively named them OK Boomer. As the World War II and Korean War generation are dying off, Boomers have replaced them as the ones running America. They are comprise the largest number of registered voters, at 77.9 percent* and hold the vast majority of elective and appointive offices in government, which they seem to cling to for dear life. Gen Zers and millennials, the latter compromising the least number of registered voters at 49.1 percent*, view Boomers negatively because they will not relinquish power and sopped

up nearly all the wealth for themselves, leaving virtually nothing in their wake for anyone else. In return, they have left a myriad of problems for the two generations to deal with: an unequal and inflationary economy which has led to lower wages, fewer educational and career opportunities and limited housing options for them; poorer health and less access to quality medical care, the result of a polluted physical environment and non-nutritious processed foods; learning within an underfunded, substandard school system; and social alienation in a callous digital world where everything appears to be a grift. These plagues have led them to harmful drugs like fentanyl, and computer gaming and social media, where they can lose themselves in fantasy, cyberbullying and loopy conspiracy theories of the far left and right. These activities only induce an atmosphere of hopelessness and low self-esteem. Clever politicians and political operators, mostly Republicans, have learned how to manipulate the weakest ones into joining the Trump MAGA cult.

Except on rare occasions, like 2008 when a charismatic candidate like Obama was running, or 2020 when Joe Biden inspired them with a platform emphasizing commitment to social justice legislation, younger voters have not turned out to vote in numbers that rival their older counterparts, especially seniors, who typically decide who wins elections. When, after the election, the legislation promised by Democrats like Biden fails to materialize, younger voters become cynical and more susceptible to sugary messages from demagogues like Trump. The 2024 election will determine whether Democrats, led

by Kamala Harris, can rekindle that hope for those 18 to 40.

*as per Statista.com

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SOUTHERN BORDER MIGRANTS America has a long history of abuse of migrants within its borders and immigrants from other countries, extending all the way back to President Andrew Jackson forcing native Americans on a Trail of Tears from Florida to the Far West beginning in 1830 and ending in 1850. The abuse extended to the Irish fleeing Ireland’s potato famine in the 1840s, Chinese workers who laid railroad tracks in the West, and those who fled war and political upheavals in eastern, central and southern Europe in the early 20th century. However, no ethnic migration in the past 70 years is more demeaning than that currently being suffered by Mexicans and Central Americans at the U.S. southern border. For centuries, Mexicans once owned and populated what became the American Southwest, compromising land from Texas to mid-California, before most of the area was lost to the U.S. after losing the Mexican War in 1848. Ever since, Mexicans have been secondclass citizens in their former land, a vast majority of which is still influenced by their customs, culture, architecture. Spanish is a dominant language in many regions. Constant political uprising, including the Mexican Revolution between 1910 and 1920, during which time the U.S. war with Mexico was also fought, forced many first-wave Mexicans to cross the border to escape death and destitution. The Mexican American community was largely ignored until the Zoot Riots in Los Angeles in June 1943. U.S. servicemen, resentful of Mexican youth who wore the baggy suits as a fad because the use of excessive cloth was considered unpatriotic in a time of world war, stripped them of their clothes and beat them.

The need for agricultural and other menial labor during and after World War II led many poor Mexicans to come to the U.S., both legally and illegally, as servants, workers in the expanding resort city of Las Vegas and to pick crops in the fertile fields of southern California. It wasn’t long before racist sentiment, mostly among Republicans, developed against them, especially after certain crimes committed were attributed to a small group of gang members. Ironically, then as now, it was American farmers and businessmen who hired the undocumented immigrants to because the low wages they were paid was kept off the books to avoid taxes. The upshot was the implementation of Operation

Wetback (real name), a mass military-style U.S. Border Patrol effort begun in 1954 during Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency that petered out eight years later while John F. Kennedy was president.

During its implementation, more than a million undocumented immigrants, as well as some legal citizens, were deported back to Mexico. The operation is considered the greatest domestic human rights abuse since the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II. In unison, the Bracero Program set up a system of legal migration of Mexicans to the U.S. to work as seasonal laborers. When these programs ended in the mid-1960s, Mexicans still came north illegally, concealed in trucks driven by Mexican profiteers called coyotes. The deaths of a score of illegal laborers in these trucks during the Nixon Administration led the border patrol to crack down on the coyotes. Finally, the war between the U.S.-backed rightwing Contras and the leftist Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s, which spread to surrounding countries like El Salvador, forced many central Americans to seek safety and asylum in the U.S. Some Salvadoran youth in Los Angeles would form a gang called MS-13, whose street crimes would form an inaccurate image of all Mexicans and central Americans trying to cross the border either legally or illegally as criminals, murderers and drug dealers.

Republicans have tried to exploit perennial border problems as political campaign fodder for decades, but it wasn’t until Trump’s presidential candidacy in 2016, which was successful, and his activities after losing the 2020 election, that the so-called “border crisis” - there is no actual crisis, just slow adjudication of asylum seekers due to understaffed judges -gained widespread appeal.

Trump, an open racist and xenophobe, ridiculously claimed that a huge long wall built by the U.S. and funded by Mexico would keep the immigrants out. He managed to perform none of these promises while in office.

Various immigration groups estimate that the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. is between 10.9 million and 16.8 million. Democrats, including Harris, prefer a compassionate approach, where the asylum process is streamlined, the border patrol is better funded to interdict fentanyl smuggling and human trafficking and a policy of gradual citizenship is enacted, including immediate citizenship for Dreamers, the children of undocumented who were raised in the U.S. Trump’s plan is more draconian: detention camps set up along the border, and mass 1950s-style deportations.

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CRIME AND GUN VIOLENCE U.S. law enforcement has always had a lopsided and sordid relationship with racial and ethnic minorities in urban communities. Policing arrived in colonial America from the British monarchy as an extension of their rule of force over their subjects in England. When the colonies became independent states of the USA after the Revolutionary War, the wealthy white property owners who ruled the new nation replaced the monarchy as the rulers and recipients of this exclusive citizen guard. Their mission was to protect the lives and property of the monied class - a role that never really changed after two centuries. In the antebellum South, that policing role was translated as capturing runaway slaves by private slave patrols (the forerunner of today’s bounty hunters) commissioned by plantation owners, while in the Northern cities police forces were formed and controlled by politicians to harass and detain the surging population of freed black people and immigrants who were deemed as threats to the lives and property of wealthy white men. These two classes were even hired to in effect police themselves, and patronage jobs as police officers were an effective means of big city Democratic Party bosses to maintain their power. The intimidating image of the police in their own ethnic neighborhoods was enhanced when they were granted to license to carry and use firearms and interrogate suspects at their own discretion, which they did with a vengeance by inventing the infamous “third degree.” While in theory at least the police were confined to arresting suspected criminals, it became the province of criminal courts to administer justice. As political appointees, both the police and judges were subject to being corrupted.

Reforms of many Democrat-controlled urban police departments and criminal courts in the 1970s and 1990s made modest gains in protecting the civil liberties of citizens.

At the federal level the U.S. Justice Department, managed by the attorney general, and its investigative arm, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), along with the U.S. Supreme Court and lower federal courts, performed the same role as the local and state police and judges, though with the authority to override them.

Like the them, the department heads and the justices and judges are politically appointed, in their case by the president. The attorney general was not immune from abusing his power. Past AGs imprisoned political dissidents and Americans unjustifiably

suspected of treason and the FBI illegally wiretapped citizens whose views and activities they disagreed with, whether justified or not. It took a more liberal Supreme Court presided by Chief Justice Earl Warren and reform-minded attorneys general under Democratic presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and now Joe Biden to attempt a clean up of these abuses. However, after many decades, law enforcement is still allowed to run rampant with few checks on its virtually unlimited authority.

The GOP has fashioned itself as the party that is unwaveringly proSecond Amendment and pro-law enforcement since the Reagan Administration and the preferred party of gun rights advocates like the influential National Rifle Association (NRA). Private gun ownership is a constitutionally protected right and guns have traditionally been cheap and easy to purchase except in cities and states were guns are banned or heavily restricted in their use. Their ownership became a political issue when black revolutionaries like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers began purchasing guns for protection in the 1960s, followed in the 1970s and beyond by racial and ethnic urban street gangs like the Cribs, Bloods and MS-13 who mainly used handguns to commit crimes and engage in turf wars. The introduction of high- powered automatic assault rifles like the AR-15, the preferred weapon of mass shooters whose numbers have exploded in the last 10-15 years, have added to the lethal mix.

Republicans like to claim that violent crime , especially gun murders, is rising in cities controlled by Democratic mayors and district attorneys who are too lenient on street criminals and are trying to defund the police, when in fact the crime rate in these cities has significantly fallen since the covid crisis eased in 2022. The death rate from violent crime is actually higher in states with Republican governors. The November election will be a contest between Harris, a former prosecutor with a reputation for being tough on street crime, and Trump, himself a convicted felon, who wants to give the police and the courts a free and even brutal hand to crack down on non-white collar offenders. .

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CORRUPTION AND UNEQUAL JUSTICE It has often been said, half seriously, the the U.S. has the finest system of justice that money can buy. Unfortunately, recent revelations about the business and political world and the criminal justice system have proven this adage to be truer than not. To paraphrase 1960s black militant H. Rap Brown, corruption and injustice is American as cherry pie. From the Civil War to 2024, politicians, judges , police and prosecutors in both parties have taken bribes, openly or in secret, legally and illegally, from the wealthiest financiers, industrialists and business executives to get the government to work to their advantage.

Outstanding examples (among many more) are the Robber Barons literally buying congressmen and senators to maintain their monopoly trusts at the turn of the century; the Teapot Dome oil leasing scandal uncovered after the death of President Warren Harding in 1923; organized crime figures and big-city political bosses colluding to pay off judges and the police during and after Prohibition; Republican Spiro Agnew pleading no contest in 1973 to receiving bribes while he was governor of Maryland and President Nixon’s vice president; the scandals surrounding the Watergate burglary that forced Nixon’s own resignation in 1974; felony convictions of governors and U.S. senators in states as diverse as Illinois, Tennessee, Connecticut, and New Jersey. In July, Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez (below, second from left) was convicted of of all 16 counts he faced, on charges including honest services wire fraud, bribery and extortion. Their verdict makes Menendez, who resigned in August, only the seventh sitting U.S. senator to be convicted of a federal crime. According to WorldPopulationReview.com, the U.S. has a corruption index of 67 out of 180 countries as of 2022. Countries ranked as less corrupt than the U.S. include France (69), the United Kingdom (77), Japan ( 74), Canada (77) and Germany (80).

As bad as corruption was in the past, it pales in comparison to current legal and ethical misdeeds committed by the most powerful Republicans in just the last few months and years. The U.S. Supreme Court, once the most-revered branch of government. A report by the watchdog group Fix the Court shows that, since 2004, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas (bottom, second from right) received $4,042,286 in 193 gifts since 2004, mostly from conservative Texas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow . Moreover, Thomas’ wife, Ginny, a Trump supporter, has been implicated in the ex-president’s plot to steal the 2020 election from the president-elect, Joe Biden. Democratic Rep. Alexandria 0casio-Cortez has introduced articles of impeachment

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against Thomas and Samuel Alito, who also received millions of dollars in gifts from individuals with businessbefore the court. Six of the nine justices appointed by Republicans, including three appointed by Trump, have consistently made rulings that favor Republicans and Trump in his court cases. Alito and his wife have also flown their U.S. flag upside down (bottom, far right) as a show of support to Trump and the January 6 rioters who attempted to overthrow the government. As of August, the average poll rating of the court is 36.6 percent favorable and 54.3 unfavorable.

And then there is Trump, who appears to be a one-man crime , sex offense and grifting wave. His rap sheet: four felony indictments and 88 charges in four state and federal jurisdictions, with a 34 count conviction in New York for business records fraud with in an attempt to commit election fraud (he is awaiting sentencing in September); two civil lawsuits for sexual abuse and defamation lost to E. Jean Carroll, who claims he raped her at a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s, and to whom he must pay $88.3 million in judgments; loss of a civil suit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James for business fraud for which he must pay $454 million in penalties. Rather hypocritically, Trump’s platform calls for a crackdown on black, latino and immigrant perpetrators by the criminal justice, even if it means using the violent methods of old. In the ultimate irony, he is running against Kamala Harris, a former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general with a long record of prosecuting white-collar felons just like Trump. The irony will likely not be lost on voters in the upcoming election.

THE GLOBAL THREAT FROM CLIMATE CHANGE There is no getting around it: the Earth is steadily burning up, and it is largely humankind’s fault. In terms of politics, man-made global warming, the root of climate change, has been accepted as a fact by almost the entire scientific community and virtually everyone else in the world except with the vast majority of Republicans in the United States. They either think, like Trump, that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by Democrats for profit and control of the populace, or that climate change does exist but it is caused by cow flatulence (we kid you not) rather than the fossils fuels that have been killing the Ozone layer for about a century. As with many aspects of science, the GOP has difficulty accepting basic scientific terms and their definitions, in this case that there is a difference between weather and climate. Because they see the normal change of seasons and the signs they bring - winter snow, spring bloom, summer heat, fall foliage - it is assumed that all is fine.

Their simplistic view of seasonal change motivates them to make silly statements and pull ridiculous stunts in Congress, like when GOP Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, appeared with a snowball on the Senate floor in February 2015 to demonstrate, once and for all, that climate change is a hoax.

Climate change , also known as global warming, is the term for the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. The current rise in global average temperature is primarily caused by humans burning fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuel use, deforestation, and some agricultural and industrial practices add to greenhouse gases. These gases absorb some of the heat that the Earth radiates after it warms from sunlight, warming the lower atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas driving global warming, has grown by about 50% and is at levels unseen for millions of years, and it accounts for deserts expanding and heat waves and wildfires becoming more common. Arctic warming has

contributed to thawing permafrost, retreat of glaciers and sea ice decline, forcing many species to relocate or become extinct. The resulting rise in sea level threatens to flood many land regions, including coastal regions in the U.S. (see maps below left) , making them permanently uninhabitable. Higher temperatures are also causing more intense storms, droughts, and other weather extremes, like broiling heat waves. These extremes will result in increased food and water scarcity, more disease, economic loss, and human migration and conflict. Even if efforts to minimize future warming are successful, some effects will continue for centuries. These include ocean heating, ocean acidification and sea level rise.[ Democrats have recognized the looming crisis as the threat to human survival that it is. In January 2021, President Biden reentered the U.S. into the the Paris Agreement, a climate treaty dedicated to lowering greenhouse gas emissions in more than 180 countries around the world. It was originally signed and negotiated during the final years of the Obama administration, but withdrawn from by President Trump in 2020. Biden has also committed the U.S. government to end purchases of gas-powered vehicles by 2035 in order to lower emissions and promote electric cars, and has set a goal for 50% of new car sales to be electric by 2030. Biden’s plan also includes subsidies to protect auto makers and attract battery production. (Major auto makers have responded by converting their cars and trucks to hybrid vehicles, run by a mixture of gas and electricity, until all-electric vehicles become more accepted by the auto-buying public.) In 2019 Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts co-sponsored the Green New Deal, a bill designed to address climate change along with achieving other social aims like job creation, economic growth and reducing economic inequality. The bill passed in the Democratic House but failed in the Republican Senate. Then President Trump likely would not have signed it anyway.

Meanwhile, Trump and the Republicans, still refusing to take global warming seriously and captive to money from the oil lobby, have doubled down on their desire to increase U.S. oil production, even though it is already at record levels under Biden, and discouraging all attempts at energy conservation and conversion to renewable energy sources like solar, wind and water.

The U.S. has little time to waste, as Earth is likely to cross a critical threshold for global warming by the early 2030s, and nations will need to make an immediate and drastic shift away from fossil fuels to prevent the planet from overheating dangerously beyond that threshold, according to experts.

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ABROAD

UKRAINE, RUSSIAN EXPANSION AND NATO The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 - a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which started in 2014 - is the largest conflict in Europe since World War II, and has also led to the greatest refugee crisis in Europe since the war. If Russia defeats Ukraine, the victory will encourage its expansionist leader, Vladimir Putin, to invade neighboring countries like Poland, obliging NATO to defend its member, and triggering a likely world conflict that would include the U.S., a charter member of NATO. To prevent this from happening, President Biden has sent $175 billion in direct and indirect aid to Ukraine, to the opposition of Republican leaders, including Trump, who believe that the U.S. should isolate itself from the world. Trump, who admires Putin and wants to ally with him, yearns for the U.S. to end its 75-year commitment to NATO altogether.

ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR The brutal attack on Israel by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas from its Gaza territory on October 7, 2023, sparked an escalation, mostly within Gaza, of Israel’s 16-year war with Hamas, so far resulting in less than 1,500 Israeli deaths and more than 37,000 Palestinian casualties, mainly of civilians within Gaza (many outside observers place Gaza’s death toll as high as 186,000).

Both sides have held Israeli, Palestinian and American hostages, some of whom have been released while the remainder are kept as negotiating pawns. The disproportionate response to the attack by the Israel Defense Force (IDF) among Palestinian innocents in Gaza, considered to be genocidal atrocities by much of the world, have led to calls for a ceasefire and negotiations to end the war.

President Biden, who has offered and endorsed peace proposals that have been rejected largely by Israel’s pro-war prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been severely criticized by fellow Democrats for giving his support to Netanyahu as well as military aid to Israel. Biden has also granted relief to Gazans. Harris has expressed far more skepticism of Netanyahu and U.S. involvement in the war given her limitations as vice president, whereas Trump and Republicans are completely supportive of Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza, for reasons of politics, evangelical Christianity and personal profit from the destruction of Gaza.

WAR CRIMES An offshoot of the horrors inflicted on Ukrainian civilians by Russian forces and on Gazan non-combatants by the IDF is the documentation of potential war crimes by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC). While the ICJ has stopped short of accusing Israel of war crimes, the court has admonished the government to increase measures to reduce civilian casualties. However, the ICC has issued an arrest warrant to Putin for war crimes in Ukraine and is seeking a warrant for Netanyahu - which both Biden and Republicans strongly oppose and Hamas’ leader, Yahya Sinwar. Neither court has the power to stop the wars or enforce arrest warrants.

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THE THREAT FROM CHINA

Russia is not the only world power with expansionist aims. China has been engaged with the U.S. and western powers in a de facto Cold War for global hegemony since at least the early 2000s.While China was never invited into the G7 the way Russia once was — Moscow joined the group in 1997 and was suspended when it annexed Crimea in 2014 — Beijing was often described as a “partner,” a supplier and, above all, a superb customer of everything from German cars to French couture. The U.S. has engaged in a mutually profitable trading relationship with China that began with a trade pact in 1979, one that has put American workers and many manufacturers at an economic disadvantage, as goods are made cheaper (and, some say, of lesser quality) in China and other foreign nations. In recent years, relations have grown more tense and competitive. China’s GDP has grown exponentially, to the point where it is (a still distant) second to that of the U.S. Wealth has enabled the country to buy up companies and real estate in the U.S. and spread its influence to Africa (see below). The Chinese government, under the leadership of its president-for-life Xi Jinping, threatens to invade Taiwan, a U.S. ally, at any moment, and Xi’s desire to control the entire South China Sea is of great concern to the Pentagon. Chinese intelligence seeks to gather as much information as possible on U.S. assets, which includes flying spy balloons over the U.S. Both countries compete with each other at cultural events like the Olympics for prestige.

China long ago abandoned strict adherence to communist ideology but has remained strictly authoritarian, suppressing the rights of political and religious dissidents, especially the Falun

Gong, and continuing its longstanding claim of sovereignty over neighboring Tibet. China’s human rights abuses have been condemned by the world diplomatic community. Biden has joined in that condemnation, while Republicans have largely remained silent.

Trump, who desires to be an authoritarian himself, personally admires Xi’s total rule over China. His family has profited from its business connections with China while Trump keeps up a pretense of calling the nation as a threat.

NEO-COLONIALISM IN AFRICA The quadrilateral competition between the United States, China and to a lesser extent Russia and Europe for control of Africa’s vast natural resources and the wealth that it would provide has been criminally overlooked by Democrats and Republicans in the 2024 campaign cycle, yet The Mother Continent looms over the horizon as one of the key regions that will dominate the remainder of the 21st century.

Africa is home to about 30 percent of the world’s mineral reserves, 12 percent of the world’s oil and eight percent of the world’s natural gas reserves. The continent produces almost one billion tons of minerals worth $406 billion annually. Minerals account for an average of 70 percent of total African exports and about 28 percent of gross domestic product. For the 15 most mineral-rich countries in sub-Saharan Africa, mining accounts for eight percent of government revenue. Any foreign power that controls that wealth will greatly enhance its own wealth and political status.

Africa possesses abundant mineral resources, rich with diamonds, sugar, salt, gold, iron, cobalt, uranium, copper, bauxite, silver, petroleum and natural gas, but also agricultural resources like cocoa beans, tropical timber and tropical fruit. Due to political instability and lack of internal expertise and equipment, many subSaharan nations have been forced to turn to more industrialized

countries for assistance. Such aid, however, comes with a cost: African states face the threat of being mere puppets manipulated by foreign powers while only keeping the façade of autonomy. In turn, the U.S., China and other powers get dibs on their resources, as in the past, only this time without the messiness of occupation - although that could return as well. Eventually, the wealth potential will become too difficult for either U.S. political party to ignore, and Republicans will ultimately have to deal with Africa for something other than a racist punching bag.

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BEWARE OF GOP DIRTY TRICKS

FAKE A.I. IMAGES AND MEDIA BIAS TOP THE LIST Like everything else in modern living, the Digital Aga has revolutionized the time-honored tradition of political dirty tricks.

During the early days of newspaper publishers and pamphleteers sought to discredit politicians in the eyes of the public, often for profit but also because of political bias. Race has always been a key factor in trying to influence voters. Thomas Jefferson was accused by the press of fathering children with his enslaved black woman, Sally Hemmings. Although modern DNA has proven that to be true, at the time the charge was intended to inflame southern white voters. While campaigning for president in 1920, Warren G. Harding, a pioneer supporter of black rights, was accused by a racist Ohio college professor of having black blood from his ancestors, some of whom he claimed were black. True or not, the charge was meant to anger the then politically powerful Ku Klux Klan, but did not seem to carry much weight in an election that Harding won in a landslide.

When racism began to fall out of favor with Barack Obama’s election as America’s first black president in 2008, slick white politicians suddenly found it beneficial to associate with black people. The first major pol to exploit this identification has been the most cynical. Donald Trump in the current election cycle has used the new tool of artificial intelligence (AI) to create fake pictures of him surrounded by smiling black supporters, like the picture below.

In addition to adopting traditional dirty tricks like questioning the Nevertheless, Trump and his cohorts have been successful in posting intelligence, accomplishment s, race and heritage of his current, phony AI images in social media of President Joe Biden, 81, as a dozing overwhelmingly popular Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, a and confused old man, which eventually helped lead to his decision to black and Indian woman. Unfortunately, Trump has been aided in quit the 2024 race in favor of Harris. Good or bad, AI as a campaign his lies by an acquiescent news media, both from the left and the and election tool is her to stay. Question everything you see. right.

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KAMALA HARRIS A PROFILE OF THE 49TH VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

By Kristen Jones

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FORMATIVE YEARS AND EARLY CAREER, 1964-2003 Kamala Harris’ rise almost to the very top of the U.S. power structure is literally the American Dream in human form. Very few individuals have had to overcome the barriers to her race and sex to consistently prove her skeptics wrong.

Kamala Devi Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California.

She is the product of the biracial professional middle-class. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a biologist who arrived in the United States from India in 1958 to study endocrinology at UC Berkeley, earning her PhD in 1964. Her 40-years of studying the progesterone receptor gene led to advances in breast cancer research. She died in 2009. Kamala’s father, Donald J. Harris, arrived in the U.S. from Jamaica in 1961. A UC Berkeleytrained specialist in development economics, Donald was the first black scholar to be granted tenure at the Department of Economics in Stanford University; he now has emeritus status there. Kamala Harris's parents met in 1962 and married in 1963. They divorced in 1971. Harris and her younger sister, Maya, were raised both parents, in job-related moves to college towns, and then by their single mother, who moved to Montreal, Quebec, to accept a medical school research position.

Family and friends claim to have seen Harris’ potential for achieving great things at an early age. She graduated from Westmount High School in Montreal in 1981, then worked summers at McDonalds while attending Howard University, a storied HBCU in Washington, D.C., where she earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and economics in 1986. She pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority in college. Harris then attended the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where she served as president of its chapter of the Black Law Students Association. She graduated with a Juris Doctor in 1989 and was admitted to the California bar after having passed the bar exam, one of the most difficult, on her second try.

In 1990, Harris was hired as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County, California, where she was described as "an able prosecutor on the way up".

She subsequently rose through several appointive positions on the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and California Medical Assistance Commission before being recruited as an assistant district attorney by San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan in 1998.

There, she became the chief of the Career Criminal Division, supervising five other attorneys, where she prosecuted homicide, burglary, robbery, and sexual assault cases—particularly three-strikes cases. In August 2000, Harris took a job at San Francisco City Hall, working for city attorney Louise Renne. Harris ran the Family and Children's Services Division, representing child abuse and neglect cases. Renne endorsed Harris during her D.A. campaign.

In 2002-23, Harris ran for District Attorney of San Francisco, running a "forceful" campaign and differentiating herself from Hallinan, her former boss, by attacking his performance. Harris won the 2003 election with 56% of the vote, becoming the first person of color elected district attorney of the city. She ran unopposed for a second term in 2007.

SAN FRANCISCO DISTRICT ATTORNEY, 2004-2010 As district attorney, Harris cleared cleared 27 of 74 backlogged homicide cases within the first six months of taking office; pushed for higher bail for criminal defendants involved in gun-related crimes, arguing that historically low bail encouraged outsiders to commit crimes in San Francisco (SFPD officers credited Harris with tightening the

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PARENTS DONALD (LEFT) AND SHYAMALA (MIDDLE); HOWARD UNIVERSITY GRADUATE (RIGHT)

loopholes defendants had used in the past); carried out her campaign pledge never to seek the death penalty; created a Hate Crimes Unit, focusing on hate crimes against LGBT children and teens in schools; an environmental crimes unit; expressed support for San Francisco's sanctuary city policy of not inquiring about immigration status in the process of a criminal investigation; and created the San Francisco Reentry Division. In 2006, as part of an initiative to reduce the city's skyrocketing homicide rate, Harris led a citywide effort to combat truancy for at-risk elementary school youth in San Francisco, which cut chronic truancy almost in half by 2009.

CALIFORNIA ATTORNEY GENERAL, 2011-2016 In the 2010 general election, Harris defeated Republican Los Angeles County district attorney Steve Cooley to become the first woman, the first African American, and the first South Asian American to hold the office of attorney general in California’s history.she was reelected against Republican nomine Ronald Gold in a landslide. Trump himself donated $5,000 to her re-election campaign.

Harris was a highly effective attorney general. Among the highlights: she obtained two of the largest recoveries in the history of California's False Claims Act over excess state Medi-Cal and federal Medicare payments; she leveraged California's economic clout to obtain better terms in the National Mortgage Settlement against the nation's five largest mortgage servicers, increasing the settlement from $5 billion to $20 billion; she worked with the state legislature to introduce the Homeowner Bill of Rights, considered one of the strongest protections nationwide against aggressive foreclosure tactics. In addition, she worked to protect LGBTIA rights, California’s coastline from oil spills, clean up the state’s backlogged DNA testing pipeline, introduce law enforcement reforms like mandatory body cameras on police, prosecute tech crimes, violent street gangs, fraud schemes and human and drug trafficking and smuggling. In 2015, Harris obtained a $1.2 billion judgment against for-profit Corinthian Colleges for false advertising and deceptive marketing targeting vulnerable, lowincome students and misrepresenting job placement rates to students, investors, and accreditation agencies.

THE D.A.

THE ATTORNEY GENERAL

Harris was not without her critics, who chided her for being too lax on bank executives like Steve Mnuchin of OneWest Bank, whose illegalities helped bring on and exacerbate home foreclosures during the 2007-09 Great Recession, her record on wrongful conviction cases, her unsympathetic views on prison overcrowding and reform, and her urging that parents be criminally prosecuted for their truant children, a measure that critics claim led to overzealous local prosecutions that hurt families.

U.S. SENATOR, 2017-2021 The 2016 election was a near-disaster for the Democrats, who not only saw the surprise election of Donald Trump to the presidency but the Republicans maintaining their control of the House and Senate in Congress. One of the few bright spots was Harris’ relatively easy election as U.S. senator from California, She would be the first black woman elected to the Senate since Carol Moseley-Braun in 1998. (MoseleyBraun served only one term and did not seek re-election in 2004, instead opting to run a losing campaign for president that year.)

Harris’ term as California’s junior senator was brief and highlighted by her assignment to the Senate Budget, Homeland Security, Intelligence THE SENATOR

VICTORY 2020

THE BIDEN-TRUMP TICKET EMERGED VICTORIOUS OVER TRUMP-PENCE ON THE NOVEMBER 3, 2020 ELECTION

VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE, 2020 On August 11, 2020, Biden, who won the Democratic nomination announced he had chosen Harris , the party’s consensus favorite, to be his vice presidential running mate, thus fulfilling a campaign promise to choose a black woman for vice president. She was the first African American, the first Indian American, and the third woman after Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin to be the vice-presidential nominee on a majorparty ticket. Harris is also the first resident of the Western United States to appear on the Democratic Party's national ticket.

My mother had a saying: 'Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you're not the last.’ and Judiciary Committees, where she earned a stellar reputation as a sharp inquisitor, lauded by fellow Democrats and feared by Republican opponents for her well-informed and intimidating style over witnesses, notably during Bret Kavanaugh’s nomination hearing for a Supreme Court associate justiceship, and Attorney General Bill Barr’s manipulation of the Mueller Report in President Trump’s favor. Harris voted no on Kavanaugh’s confirmation and called for Barr to resign as attorney general. In other Senate business, Harris opposed Trump’s Cabinet and judicial appointments, including two more Supreme Court nominations, spoke out against Trump’s family separation policy against undocumented immigrants at the southern border, supported the Green New Deal , sponsored an anti-lynching bill that classified it as a hate crime (it failed to pass the House in 2018 but was finally enacted as law in 2022) and voted in 2020 to convict Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in his attempt to influence the 2020 presidential by withholding arms to Ukraine until their government agreed to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, his likely opponent in 2020, for alleged crimes.

Kamala Harris Harris became the vice president–elect after Biden won the 2020 presidential election. After the major networks called the election for Biden and Harris, Harris was recorded calling Biden, saying: "We did it! We did it, Joe. You're going to be the next President of the United States." The video became one of the ten most-liked tweets of 2020. Biden and Harris were jointly named Time Person of the Year for 2020. Harris resigned from her seat on January 18, 2021, before taking office on January 20, and was replaced by California Secretary of State Alex Padilla. the VEEP WITH GOP SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON at BIDEN’S 2024 state of the union ADDRESS

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE, 2019 Harris’ first bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, announced on January 21, 2019 was initially greeted with great enthusiasm. However, she gradually lost support after other rivals like Joe Biden criticized, mainly inaccurately, her record as California attorney general, especially her tough-on-crime attitude against street crime. Citing lack of funds, Harris withdrew from the race on December 3 and endorsed Biden.

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VICE PRESIDENT, 2021Harris was sworn in as vice president on January 20, 2021, on two Bibles held by her husband, one belonging to Regina Shelton, a person important to her and her sister Maya Harris, and another belonging to former U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor administered the oath of office.

The vice president’s tenure has largely been one of of silent loyalty to President Biden, handling often undesirable assignments like factfinding immigration problems at the southern border.(Harris was not the border czar, as GOP critics claim.) When the Senate was divided 5050 between Democrats and Republicans after the 2020 election, Harris, as Senate president, set a record of 32 votes to break ties in the Democrats’ favor. Unknown to the public, Harris has played a role as one of Biden’s key advisors behind the scenes. Nevertheless, Republicans attacks on alleged high turnover of and complaints from her staff and the mocking of her grating laugh have hurt her public image. Before her sudden elevation as the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris had one of the lowest approvals of any major political figures.

DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE, 2024 President Biden’s shockingly bad CNN-sponsored debate performance against Trump on June 27th, where he appeared to be shockingly dazed and confused, triggered an astonishing and unpredicted series of events surrounding question over Biden’s age (he’s 81) and fitness, which led him to voluntarily withdraw his candidacy and almost immediately endorse Harris as his successor. Biden’s decision electrified the race and turned Harris, previously a vice presidential afterthought, into the most exciting and effective presidential hopeful since Obama in 2008, even surpassing him, in only three weeks. The ticket of Harris and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, has raised $540 million in campaign funds, attracted 400,000 volunteers and filled their rallies with crowds in the many thousands.

Many Americans Democrat, Republican and unaffiliated are drawn to the tickets message of optimism, joy and a progressive, inclusive future, making Harris at the moment the odds-on favorite to retain the White House for the Democrata in the election.

THE FIRST FAMILY?

DOUG

KAMALA ELLA

COLE

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MARRIAGE AND FAMILY Harris, a lifelong bachelorette until she married in 2014, has been disparaged by political opponents for her dating prominent male Democratic politicians such as California’s House speaker Willie Brown, implying that her political rise was somehow unfairly earned. That charge, mainly borne of jealousy, has never been proven true.

Harris met her future husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, through a mutual friend who set them up on a blind date in 2013. Emhoff, of Jewish heritage, was an entertainment lawyer who became partner-in-charge at Venable LLP's Los Angeles office. Harris, who married Emhoff on August 22, 2014, in Santa Barbara, California, is stepmother to Emhoff's two children, Cole and Ella, from his previous marriage to the film producer Kerstin Emhoff.

As of August 2024, Harris and her husband had an estimated net worth of $8 million. Harris is a Baptist and a member of The Links, an invitationonly social and service organization of prominent Black American women

HARRIS ON REPARATIONS Vice President Kamala Harris has expressed support for reparations for Black people as her presidential campaign kicks off in earnest.

Asked about the issue of reparations by black publication The Root, Harris, who is half Jamaican black and half Indian, threw her support behind the concept of measures aimed to atone for the United States ‘ legacy of slavery and discrimination against African Americans. "I think there has to be some form of reparations and we could discuss what that is,” she said. When pressed further, she agreed that if elected president, she would lead a conversation about what reparations for Black people would look like.

PRESIDENTIAL AGENDA, 2025-2029 THE NATION As president, Harris would be the first district attorney and the second state attorney general (Bill Clinton in Arkansas was the first) elected to the office, so her choice to be U.S. attorney general and the direction she will take the Justice Department will be of particular interest, especially regarding the two pending federal indictments against Donald Trump, her defeated opponent in the election, and the ongoing pursuit of African Americans to stop their abuse by law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Securing passage in Congress of the dormant George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act would help her secure the confidence of her fellow black Americans. Federal law enforcement and homeland security must also deal with militant white supremacist and Christian nationalist groups who seek to overthrow all government and disrupt American life.

Judicial progressives who seek to reform a corrupt and biased Supreme Court will want Harris to join and even lead their struggle.

Harris must address serious economic problems: the wealth gap between the richest 10 percent who control 78 percent of assets and the bottom 90 percent who control 22 percent, including 50 percent who possess only one percent of assets; workforce instability, where employers rely on short-term “gig workers” who receive no medical or retirement benefits rather than long-term hires who receive health and retirement plans; corporate resistance to unionizing workers; no regulations of businesses who engage in price gouging, a key source of inflation; conglomerates like Blackstone Group competing with consumer home buyers by buying up the available stock of houses, condominiums and apartment complexes across the U.S., then holding them to artificially create a shortage in order to jack up sale prices and rents; starving black farmers of federal-backed funds and forcing them out of existence; pharmaceutical companies raising prices of life-saving drugs; medical corporations acquiring hospitals and increasing prices at profitable ones and closing underperforming ones usually located in communities of color. During her brief campaign, Harris has thus far mainly proposed measures to limit price gouging and outlaw corporate landlords.

Women will expect Harris to get behind a either a bill or a constitutional amendment to restore the right to an abortion nationally and blacks will want her to back reparations for slavery and Jim Crow, rehab deteriorating inner city public schools and promote jobs and small business growth. All minorities will seek the government to enhance diversity, equity and inclusion.

The military, while well-funded, is facing a severe shortage of recruits, turned off by the low pay, inadequate benefits, bad leadership and the risk of going to war in an international climate filled instability. Reigniting a spirit of patriotism and unity of purpose will be necessary.

As for the GOP-alleged southern border “crisis” (it’s not) , Harris has already agreed to sign the bipartisan immigration bill passed by the Senate but rejected by the House.

THE WORLD With regard to foreign affairs, Harris has two top priorities. The first would be a conclusion to the nearly three-year-old war in Ukraine that

If she is elected the 47th President of the United States on November 5th, Kamala Harris will be the first woman and the first biracial woman to win the office. would entail Ukraine keeping its independence from Russian control and discouraging Russia’s authoritarian president Vladimir Putin from launching invasions of neighboring western European nations in the NATO alliance, which would trigger a wider war with NATO and draw the U.S. back into a European conflict for the first time since 1945.

Harris will also need to contend with regime change in Russia and Putin’s status as an accused war criminal.

The second priority , an end to the war between Israel and Hamas, waged in Palestinian Gaza, now more than a year old (assuming a peace agreement was not achieved by the outgoing Biden Administration), would be necessary to quell moral unrest among Americans angry at the suffering of innocent Gazans and the threat of a wider war in the Middle East after Israel’s assassination of Hamas’ political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Iran in July 2024. Longer term, the revival of talks to create an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank or both must be determined.

Harris has other hot spots to deal with, including a looming invasion of Taiwan by China, its expansionist goals in the South China Sea, its internal human rights abuses and its growing rivalry and spying war with the U.S. The two countries are also vying to influence Africa’s politics and control the continents’ valuable mineral and agricultural resources. Her presidency must also wage a fight in the United Nations and elsewhere against the increasing threat of authoritarian facing all nations.

Harris’ daunting agenda will be that much harder to fulfill without Democratic majorities in the Senate and House to back her plus elimination of the 60-vote filibuster. Otherwise, she faces resistence from obstructionist Republicans. She must also achieve enough meaningful progress such that she maintains the coalition that got her elected and keeps her a viable candidate for re-election in 2028.

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TIM WALZ

GOVERNOR WALZ

THE GUY PEOPLE LOVE TO LIKE

Unlike many politicians, Tim Walz, the teddy bear-like but enormously effective governor of Minnesota, never lusted after political power for its own sake, he just wanted to be a temporary custodian to improve the lives of his fellow Minnesotans. Because he was meek under unique circumstances, he stands to potentially co-inherit an entire nation.

Timothy James Walz was born on April 6, 1964, in West Point, Nebraska, to Darlene Rose Reiman, a homemaker, and James Frederick Walz, a teacher, school superintendant and Korean War veteran. Both come from farmers and shopkeepers. Walz is of German, Swedish, Luxembourgish, and Irish descent. He was raised a Catholic but is now Lutheran. Walz and his three siblings grew up in rural Valentine, Nebraska. The family later moved to Butte, Nebraska, where Walz graduated from Butte High School in 1982. He played football and basketball and ran track and enjoyed hunting with friends. When Walz's father died of lung cancer in 1984, his mother and younger brother depended on social security survivor benefits for support. Walz worked menial jobs before he earned a bachelor of science degree in social science education in 1989. He earned a master of science in educational leadership from Minnesota State University, Mankato, in 2001. He taught for one year in China, where he began a lifelong fondness for the Chinese people.

While teaching in Nebraska, he met and married Gwen Whipple, and the couple moved to Mankato, Minnesota, Gwen's home state, where Walz worked as a geography teacher and football coach at Mankato West High School. Within three years later, he took the team from 27 straight losses to its first state championship in 1999. Walz’ concern for his students, including those who were gay, made him a popular teacher. They even encouraged him to run for Congress, which he did in 2006, winning as an underdog Democrat against incumbent Republican Gil Gutknecht in a Republican-independent district. He held the seat for 12 years, and established himself as a moderate except for his advocacy of gun safety and a ban on assault rifles. His stand made him an enemy of the National Rifle Association, which had formerly supported him, and increasingly unpopular in his increasingly conservative district.

THE SECOND FAMILY?

tim

gwen

hope gus

24 | BAVUAL ELECTION 2024

In 2017 Walz decided not to seek a seventh House term and instead announced his candidacy for governor in the 2018 election. After defeating two Democratic primary opponents, one of whom, Erin Murphy, was the party’s endorsed candidate, Walz went on to defeat Republican nominee Jeff Johnson by a landslide. in the general election. Walz won a second term, also by a landslide, in 2022.

Walz’ five-year tenure as governor played a key factor in being chosen as the vice presidential nominee. His record is solidly progressive: signing bills on reforming the police; allocating $2.2 billion in additional funding for K-12 education, including free school meals for all children regardless of income; accessing reproductive health care including abortion at all stages, contraception, and fertility treatments; requiring Minnesota to obtain all of its electricity from wind, solar, and other carbon-free sources by 2040, phasing out the climate-warming pollution generated by coal and gas-fired power plants; spending $2.6 billion on infrastructure that will add union construction jobs focused on repairing roads, bridges, and other essential infrastructure; and legalizing recreational cannabis. Walz went viral when he appeared on cable TV news shows and called Republican extremists like Trump and Vance “weird.”

These guys are creepy and yes, just weird as hell.

Tim Waltz, on Republicans Harris is said to have chosen Walz as her ticket mate because of his record in Minnesota, his humble background and personable family, his decent, regular guy persona, and personal chemistry with the vice president. As a bonus, Walz turns out to be a powerful, rousing speaker, reminiscent of 1948 Harry Truman. Fellow veteran JD Vance has tried to smear his comment that he was carrying weapons “in war” as “stolen valor,” and avoiding service in Iraq, both serious charges that carry criminal repercussions. Walz’ comment was a minor misstatement at best, as his military service is quite honorable. He enlisted in the Minnesota Army National Guard at 17 in 1981 and served in the field artillery with distinction for 24 years, rising to the NCO rank of command sergeant major in 2005, months before his unit was deployed to Iraq. Red hearings like these falsehoods only seem to make Walz more popular and more determined to “Give ‘Em Hell,” as Republicans go. Win or lose, Walz is definitely an asset and someone with a future.

DONALD TRUMP A PROFILE OF THE 45TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

By Stephen G. Hall PhD

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FORMATIVE YEARS, 1946-1968 In his 78 years, Donald Trump has been the beneficiary of the luck of being born to a very rich man and the curse of being spoiled by that man and his wife, Trump’s parents, who indulged every one of his horrible excesses that would negatively affect and endanger the entire world to no definite end. His story is that of the making of a prototype fraud and despot.

For Donald John Trump , that dual luck and curse began with his birth on June 14, 1946, at Jamaica Hospital in Queens, New York City. His parents Fred Trump, multimillionaire real estate developer in the Outer Boroughs with racist views, and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, a Scots immigrant. He was the second youngest of five siblings, three brothers and two sisters.

Drumpf, the original family name, was changed to Trump when Fred’s father emigrated to the U.S. From the beginning, the Trumps found it difficult to discipline their bullying son, making it necessary to enroll him in New York Military School. (In later years, Trump would refuse to support them with financial aid when it fell on hard times.} After graduation, Trump spent two years at Fordham University before using his father’s pull to transfer to the realo estate program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1968. (To this day Trump has refused to release his school transcripts.) While in college, Trump was eligible for the draft , but avoided Vietnam by getting his doctor to certify that he had bone spurs in his foot.

MENTORED BY ROY COHN the ruthless mob lawyer and former counsel to red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy, Cohn schooled his close friend Donald Trump in the dark arts of business and political manipulation for 13 years. He died of AIDS in 1986.

REAL ESTATE AND BUSINESS CAREER AND CELEBRITY, 1968-2015 From the start of his career, Trump seemed to have something to prove, to himself and to his demanding, critical father Fred. As an outsider from Queens, he wanted acceptance by Manhattan’s corporate and social elite, which he never gained. Along the way, he acquired two questionable assets to get to the top: a tendency to brag and exaggerate to the extreme, perhaps an early trait of his latent narcissism, and tutelage from his lawyer and close friend Roy Cohn, from he learned the dark art of being ruthless. Above all, Trump is a lifelong deceitful liar and backstabber.

Trump’s first venture, one of many failures, was to produce a Broadway play in 1970 that soon closed. Thereafter, he devoted himself to managing his father Fred’s vast real estate holdings in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, which became the foundation of his Trump Organization group of enterprises. As its sole owner and head, Trump became the major celebrity in Manhattan of the 1980s, proving to be a master at self-promotion. However, except for his major real estate properties, which are mostly situated in Manhattan, his residence and club, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, and his golf courses in Florida, they have ended in failure and bankruptcy, notably his DC shuttle Trump Air and his three casinos in Atlantic City, which were either sold at a loss or demolished. He managed to recover when the banks to whom he owed billions took control of his company and straightened its finances and negotiating legal but unethical deals with foreign governments. Most of all, he personally benefitted financially, socially and politically as host of the TV reality series, The Apprentice, which ran on NBC from 2004-2017.

Since the early 1970s, Trump has attracted controversy and mockery for his deceitful business tactics, his misogyny and his arrogant, blustery and bigoted personality. He and his father was sued by the U.S. Justice Department for discrimination against blacks, his company is known for stiffing contractors and vendors for work performed, he took credit for achievements he never did, he had an unsavory friendship with fellow sex predator and abuser Jeffrey Epstein and he called for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, even after they were found innocent of rape.

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NEW YORK CITY REAL ESTATE PROMOTER AND ATLANTIC CITY CASINO OWNER IN THE 1980S (LEFT); NETWORK TV REALITY SHOW HOST IN THE 2000S (RIGHT)

CLOSE PALS JEFFREY EPSTEIN AND TRUMP, TWO KNOWN SEXUAL PREDITORS/ABUSERS (LEFT); THE 3 WIVES: MELANIA (LEFT, CURRENT), MARLA (MIDDLE, #2), IVANKA (LAST, 1ST); TRUMP TOOK OUT FULL-PAGE ADS IN THE NEW YORK TIMES CALLING FOR THE EXECUTION OF THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE, BLACK MEN WHO WERE FOUND INNOCENT OF A WHITE FEMALE JOGGER’S RAPE

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE, 2015-2016 Donald Trump declared his candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination on June 16, 2015, at Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan. It was the culmination of a soft effort that began in 1987, the year Trump first made his political hopes widely known. He teased a presidential candidacy for many years, coming closest in 2000 when he sought the Reform Party nomination but dropped out before the primary. Trump, until recently a registered Democrat, faced a field of 16 rivals, most of whom were more experienced and credible, yet Trump outmaneuvered them all to win the nomination by using schoolyard nicknames, insults, and false accusations, inventing a sense of inevitability, and spewing faux populism through a diabolically clever political marketing campaign under the redhatted Make America Great Again (MAGA) slogan, designed to appeal to lower-class and sexually frustrated white males, bigots, misogynists, xenophobes, know-nothings and the generally cruel.

Though Trump lost the popular vote by nearly three million to Democrat Hillary Clinton, the first female major-party nominee, the scheme was enough, along with his running mate Mike Pence’s Christian evangelical base, to win by 33 votes in the Electoral College.

U.S. PRESIDENT, 2017-2021 Trump’s nihilist presidency, which began with a peaceful transfer on January 20, 2017, and ended in the shadow of a violent attempt by Trump supporters to overthrow the election result by rioting at the U.S. Capitol, on January 6, 2021, exactly two weeks before Biden‘s Inauguration. It is considered by noted historians to be the worst in U.S. history. His governing style was abysmal, even monstrous. Trump was lazy and inattentive during briefings, never read important documents unless they included pictures and grade-school language and was clueless about how the government works. He set a record on lies told (30,000), constantly insulted and fired his own Cabinet, staff and military officials, alienated key foreign allies, threatened to defund or pull out of the NATO alliance, and cozied up to authoritarians in Russia, North Korea and the Philippines. Trump’s Muslim travel ban, struck down by the courts, and his family separation policy at the southern border - many missing children have never been found - made the U.S. a human rights pariah before the world. Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese crops that nearly wiped out small farmers, and his nearly $2 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans blew a hole in the federal budget and dramatically increased the national debt. He disparaged questioning from reporters, whom he called “enemies of the people” for not spreading his falsehoods, which his press secretary dubbed “alternative facts.” Trump was impeached twice, once for trying to fix the 2020 election and then for trying to steal it. The record listed here is far from complete and would fill volumes. Beyond the record, Trump used his bully pulpit and tweets on Twitter to create a gloomy mood of bigotry, hatred, division, gaslighting, intolerance and neo-Nazi violence. He turned the White House into a Trump family business, hiring his son Don Jr., daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner as key aides, all of whom were grossly unqualified and treated their positions as opportunities to make huge profits. Trump reluctantly left office without ever conceding the election to Biden or attending his successor’s Inauguration.

2020 ELECTION Trump’s disastrous handling of the COVID19 pandemic, begun in March 2020, led to deaths as high as 500,000 according to scientific researchers. He withheld aid to Democratic-leaning states simply out of politics, derided safety measures like short quarantines and wearing masks that could have saved thousands off lives and suggested drinking chlorine as a cure. Trump lost the November 3rd election to former vice president Joe Biden by seven million votes and 303-232 in the Electoral College

top: MAGA’S CULT LEADER 2ND FROM TOP”: PUTIN’S BUTT BOY 2ND FROM bottom: HOLDING UPSIDE DOWN BIBLE WHILE GASSING PROTESTORS BOTTOM: mob’s gallowS for mike pence

ABSENT: MELANIA

TRUMP 45

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POLITICAL REVIVAL, 2021For someone who was raised to be a winner by any means necessary, losing the presidency convincingly was tough to take, so tough that he simply denied that it happened and planned a behind-the-scenes plot to remain in office. It revolved around submitting an alternate slate of electors for certification by Congress on January 6, 2021 and to have his vice president, Mike Pence, accept his electors rather than Biden’s, thus throwing selection of the president into the House of Representatives. A large group of Republicans in Congress were involved in the plot. As added persuasion, a mob of extreme Trump supporters, part of his MAGA movement, surrounded the Capitol to intimidate the legislators. When Pence refused, the mob, egged on by Trump and his minions, violently stormed the Capitol building and briefly occupied it, threatening to hang Pence and take over the government by force. Before they were suppressed by the National Guard, both cops and supporters were injured; five had died, including a police officer. At first, everyone, even angry Republicans, wanted his head. Impeachment articles sailed through Congress but by the time they reached the Senate for trial, GOP senators discovered that Trump’s MAGA movement, now a cult beyond politics, was so intimidating that it threatened their election, so most of them voted to acquit. In doing so, they created a monster that within three years would consume the entire Republican Party and make it a wholly owned Trump subsidiary. From that moment onward, Trump has been consumed only by the desire to exact revenge against his perceived enemies and make everyone pay obeisance to him or suffer the consequences. That meant another run for president. He easily and quickly won the nomination in the GOP primaries . Even his opposition quickly joined his side, fearing his MAGA army. One of them, JD Vance, even agreed to be his running mate. Trump had the benefit of a re-match with President Biden, whom he could successfully paint as aged and confused (without seeing the irony), especially after their June 27th televised debate. Trump as of late August has still not gotten over the fact that, for the first time in his life, he was the one who had been suckered and by none other than Biden himself. Along the way, he discovered that the fantasy he has built in his mind that he is universally liked is untrue; Thomas Crooks, a 20-year-old Republican who fits the MAGA profile, was shot and killed by local cops and the Secret Service after he attempted to assassinate Trump.

Though displaying false bravado, it is clear that the attempt has affected him.

This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.

President Donald Trump From His Inaugural Address, 2017

LEGAL FRAUD AND RAPIST, CONVICTED FELON AND CRIMINAL INDICTEE, 2023Besides a near-psychotic desire for revenge and unearned supreme adulation, Trump has an added reason for being president again: he must escape the law that, after many years of skirting it, is closing in on him. This man of lifelong privilege never had any respect for anyone, not even those in service to him, which is why he could demean those whose only goal was not just the desire for money and power, like soldiers, public servants and now prosecutors and judges who seek to hold him accountable for his crimes and misdeeds.

While running for president, Trump was sued for operating a phony charity and for-profit college, and lost both times. He was banned from operating a charity in New York and paid a $25 million judgment for the college suit. During his current presidential campaign, Trump has been indicted on 88 felony charges in four separate cases: business fraud in aid of another crime (election tampering) in New York brought by District Attorney Alvin Bragg, theft of classified documents at his home, Mar-A-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, both brought by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith in Florida and Washington, D.C., and conspiracy to tamper with the election in Georgia brought in Atlanta by Fulton County Letitia James. So far, only the indictment in New York resulted in a conviction on all 34 counts - sentencing is set for September 18 - while two of the final three have been stalled and one, the documents trial, has been dismissed on shaky legal grounds. Smith has filed an appeal. Trump also faced three civil trials in New York, top: the TRUMP-VANCE TICKET middle: maga mob’s gallowS for mike pence two for sexually abusing (not tried has rape due to the statute of limitations) E. Jean Carroll, a writer, in the bottom: e. jean carroll, vindicated in court 1990s and later defaming her twice, and the third for real estate and business fraud brought by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James. Trump was found liable in all three trials and is facing $542.3 million in civil BELOW: ASSASSINATION SURVIVOR, OUTWARDLY DEFIANT, INWARDLY SCARED penalties. Like the felony conviction in New York, Trump is appealing all three judgments.

LETITIA JAMES

JACK SMITH

ALVIN BRAGG SHOT...

OR NOT?*

*THE FBI IS UNSURE

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Project 2025 Blueprint For A Trump Dictatorship?

Every candidate for office runs on a policy agenda that they wish to enact if elected. At the presidential level, party platforms have traditionally been taken for granted as marketing and PR sops to various voting blocs that the party seeks to appeal to, not actual governing policy, and certainly not so detailed and blatantly transparent as Project 2025, and its identical version for the Trump campaign, Agenda 47.

The idea for Project 2025, an expansive, 920- page plan for reshaping the U.S. government in a rightwing extremist mold, had been kicking around in Republican circles since at least the early 1990s when ultraconservative Pat Buchanan ran a losing primary race against President George H.W. Bush in 1992. These reactionary ideas gained steam when the GOP took control of Congress in the 1994 midterm election, and blossomed into outright hatred of relatively moderate Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama for reasons never quite understood. Extremist Republicans even turned against their own Republican president, George W. Bush, who agreed with much of their agenda but not their authoritarian approach. It took the one-term presidency of a charismatic demagogue, Donald Trump, to find a suitable host.

Trump was actually too politically and personally crude, unstable and incompetent to suit many Republicans, but proved he could attract enough white voters in order to be elected by appealing to their ugly dark side of bigotry against those who weren’t white, male and their blasphemous version of Christian and who blamed Democrats for their declining economic, cultural and social status. As president, Trump, a vain, shallow and ignorant man, proved that he could be easily manipulated, like a child through constant compliments and his own laziness, into endorsing or rejecting virtually anything - especially if you were the last person talk with him. While the ploy only worked once, in 2016 under extenuating circumstances, they nevertheless feel that exterior events are ripe in 2024 to defeat President Biden and return to power in 2025, this time with a ready agenda - until Biden flipped the script on the plotters on July 21st. But first, the plan itself.

Project 2025, also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, is a political initiative published by the Heritage Foundation that aims to promote conservative and right-wing policies to reshape the federal government and consolidate executive power if Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election. It was first published in 2023 as Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. The project, which has a budget of $22 million, was inspired by Trump’s speeches and views as president and prepared with input from Trump Administration officials and under the direction of Paul Dans, who served President Trump in the Office of Personnel Management. In August, Dans stepped down in an attempt to separate Trump from connection with what has become a highly unpopular proposal. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, took over as project director. Legally, Heritage cannot claim that the foundation is working directly for Trump, only that they have drafted recommendations for the next Republican president.

PAUL DANS

In fact, Heritage’s service to Trump goes much deeper than that, as they have compiled an extensive data base of approved personnel pre-screened for their loyalty to Trump that the prospective president-elect can use to staff his new administration. The project asserts a highly controversial interpretation of the unitary executive theory, according to which the entire executive branch is under the president's exclusive control. It proposes reclassifying tens of thousands of federal civil service workers as political appointees in order to replace them with people loyal to the president. Highlights of the project include: take partisan control of the Department of Justice (DOJ), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Commerce, Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), dismantle the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) abolish the Department of Education, whose programs would be transferred or terminated. cut Medicare and Medicaid and reject abortion as healthcare explicitly reject abortion as health care. criminalize pornography. remove legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. terminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and affirmative action by having the DOJ prosecute "anti-white racism". arrest, detention, and deportation of illegal immigrants. deploy the military for domestic law enforcement. undo "[al]most everything implemented" by the Biden Administration.

To read the plan in full go to www.project2025.org.

Critics have characterized Project 2025 as an authoritarian, Christian nationalist plan to steer the U.S. toward autocracy. Legal experts have said it would undermine the rule of law, separation of powers, separation of church and state, and civil liberties. Trump has tried to separate himself from the politically toxic project, but with so many former Trump officials involved in drafting it - including his own running mate, JD Vance, who has also written the forward to the upcoming book, Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, written by Heritage’s Roberts to augment the themes presented in Project 2025. One thing seems certain: the project is a detailed blueprint for a de facto and de jure American dictatorship under Donald J. Trump, which conceivably may never end.

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J.D. VANCE THE MAN PEOPLE LOVE TO HATE

Few candidates for office have had such a stark negative impression on the public right from their introduction than JD Vance. Ever since Trump selected Vance to be his vice presidential running mate, Vance has done his level best to alienate himself and the GOP ticket from most voters, regardless of party affiliation. Polls show that he has the highest negatives and lowest positives of any of the four major candidates in the presidential race.

James Donald Bowman was born on August 2, 1984, in Middletown, Ohio, to Beverly Carol (née Vance; born 1961) and Donald Ray Bowman (1959–2023). He is of Scots-Irish descent. His parents divorced when he was a toddler. After Bowman was adopted by his mother's third husband, Bob Hamel, his mother changed his name to James David Hamel to remove his father's name, but she used the name of one of her brothers to preserve his nickname, JD. He eventually settled on his mother’s family name Vance for a last name.

Vance has written that his childhood was marked by poverty and abuse, and that his mother struggled with drug addiction. Vance and his sister Lindsey were raised primarily by his maternal grandparents, James and Bonnie Vance , whom they called "Papaw" and "Mamaw".

His grandparents moved to Ohio from Kentucky's Appalachia. After graduating from Middletown High School in 2003,Vance served four years in the U.S. Marine Corps, making corporal and doing a six month tour in Iraq, where he wrote articles and took photos for the Public Affairs office. He said that he was "lucky to escape any real fighting."

Vance attended Ohio State University on the G.I. Bill, graduating summa cum laude with a bachelor of arts degree in political science and philosophy in only two years. He finished his formal education after earning a Jurie Doctor degree from Yale Law School in 2013.

Vance held brief jobs as a Republican U.S. senator’s aide, law clerk to a federal judge and corporate lawyer before moving to San Francisco and becoming a venture capitalist. He was a principal at Peter Thiel’s firm, Mithril Capital. Thiel would become a mentor political patron. As Vance found fame as an author (Hillbilly Elegy), he began to consider running for office. He moved back to Ohio in 2017 and won election to the U.S. Senate in 2022 with the crucial endorsement of Trump, whom he once called “America’s Hitler.”

Vance is now a Trump acolyte; as his running mate and heir apparent, he appears to have gladly subordinated his views and personality to that of Trump’s. His most controversial remark to date is calling single women “childless cat ladies” for refusing to marry. Social media trolls have mocked him relentlessly by claiming that he enjoys carnal relations with sofas.

HIS CLAIM TO FAME Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016), which recounts the Appalachian culture and socioeconomic problems of Vance's small-town upbringing, has been praised by some as an insightful view of Rust Belt decline and criticized by others as an insulting condemnation of people he grew up with. Regardless, the book put him the map and made him even more famous when it was made into a theatrical and Netflix film in 2020.

I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler. How's that for discouraging?

JD Vance, 2016 Text Message

THE VANCES: WIFE AND MOTHER usha; SON vivek, 4; JD; SON ewan, 7. DAUGHTER MIRABEL, 2, IS NOT SHOWN. ALL OF HIS CHILDREN ARE BIRACIAL (SCOTS-IRISH AND INDIAN).

THE SECOND FAMILY?

SENATOR VANCE

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HOW THEY VIEW

AMERICA THE POLITICAL PARTIES’ VISION FOR THE FUTURE

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THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

The Democratic Party is the world’s oldest active political party, formed in 1828 to aid the election of Andrew Jackson as president. At first it served the interests of southern slave owners, and the Civil War became loosely known as a conflict between southern Democrats and northern Republicans.

After Reconstruction ended in 1877, the party imposed its subjugation of freed blacks by legalizing segregation backed up with terror by the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups. Racial apartheid finally ended under President Lyndon B. Johnson, a southerner, in the mid-1960s, which gradually led to a mass exodus of the remaining racists, misogynists and xenophobes in the party over to the Republican Party, where they largely remain. The party’s agrarian roots gradually led it to adopt progressive policies that affected not only farmers but laborers, instituting worker and capitalism reforms that changed the living standards of the entire country. These reforms were enhanced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s.

Today’s Democrats are largely a coalition of racial, ethnic, religious and gender minorities, collegeeducated and suburban women, white liberals, educators, entertainers and much of the media, and labor unions returning to the fold after flirting in the past with Republicans. The party’s beliefs are itemized below:

PRESERVE DEMOCRACY The rise of demagogues like ex-President Donald Trump, who violated his oath of office by triggering an attempted coup of the incoming Democratic president on January 6, 2021, by using both intralegal and extralegal means emphasized the urgency among Democrats to preserve one-person one-vote and the rule of law, now under jeopardy of extinction depending on the outcome of the 2024 election. Joe Biden’s replacement as the presidential nominee by Kamala Harris has given the party new hope that democracy can be preserved and that responsible government can advance.

EQUALITY AND INTEGRATION Even when the party was influenced by southern segregationists, Democrats made great strides toward equality and integration for blacks from the 1930s through the 1970s under Democratic presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and Carter. Bill Clinton’s Administration in the 1990s made further strides that would help led to Barack Obama’s election as America’s first black president in 2008 and 2012. Unfortunately, envy among white Republicans to Obama’s election led to a backlash against progress of any kind, not just for blacks but women, gays, poor whites and latino , Muslin, Asian, African and Caribbean immigrants. Democrats have sought maintain Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs and the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and black, latino and indigenous history in the face of virulent rightwing attacks.

HUMAN SERVICES

A key difference between Democrats and Republicans has always been the former’s protection of the social safety net when people experience hard times, unexpected emergencies and retirement. The party is engaged in a constant battle with the GOP to keep Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Unemployment Insurance, Food Stamps, Headstart and other entitlements from being diluted or terminated by Republicans.

PROGRESSIVISM Social justice and governmental reform is a mainstay and a quest for the Democratic Party as far back as segregation and especially since the party structure was revamped in the early 1970s to traditionally disadvantaged and un-empowered groups. Democrats have always believed that an activist government is the best way to advance individual aspirations through Wilsonian reforms, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, Build Back Better and, in the future perhaps, the Green New Deal. Most of these programs came into existence as a consequence of war, financial and political strife and at times by rousing leadership. While there have been some mistakes made along the way, it is undeniable that they have led to greater opportunities and financial and technological gains for all Americans.

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THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

Founded in 1854 specifically as a party to abolish slavery in the southern states and in the westward expansion, the Republican Party, also known as the Grand Old Party (GOP) was dedicated to winning the Civil War co-waged by the party’s first president, Abraham Lincoln, and legalizing freedom and full citizenship to formerly enslaved blacks under Reconstruction, which the party abandoned in 1877.

Since the late 19th century, the GOP has been controlled first by northern Big Business interests that sought to crush labor and business monopolies and regulatory reforms and oppose taxes on the rich and corporations. In the 1912 election, the Republicans split into two factions, one progressive and the other conservative, the latter of which eventually gained complete control of the party beginning with racist white opposition to the civil rights movement’s gains under Democrats in the 1960s, forcing many of them to join the GOP, and Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980 and cemented under George W. Bush’s presidency in the early 2000s. The GOP made a sharp turn to rightwing extremism when Donald Trump’s authoritarian presidential candidacy prevailed over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016. Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in 2020 only provoked him to make a revenge-seeking comeback this year, aided by his Make America Great Again (MAGA) cult movement, now more fanatic than ever. The party’s agenda, outlined a plan called Project 2025, is as follows:

CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM What began as the Moral Majority Christian evangelical movement that help elect Ronald Reagan to two terms as president in the 1980s has morphed into Christian nationalism, a psuedo-religious political cult built completely around the ignorant, bigoted and hateful MAGA movement that Trump spawned in 2015. This mass cult envisions an America only for white male theocrats, to the exclusion of everyone else, whom they fear will replace them when non-whites become a majority in the next 15-20 years.

AUTHORITARIANISM Republicans have been persuaded by dictatorial regimes like Russia under Vladimir Putin and Hungary under Viktor Orban that democracy no longer works and should be replaced by an authorian police state under a single stern ruler and have designated Trump to be that ruler, perhaps for life. The GOP has even gone so far as to adopt Project 2025 as its covert/overt campaign platform. Its 900-plus pages, incorporating the ideas of Trump, J.D. Vance and others, is an extensive blueprint for a Fascist USA.

OLIGARCHY Ever since late 19th century robber barons came to power, control of America by huge corporate combines and monopolies has been a persistent pestilence. With their belief that unregulated, untaxed business and that their innate genius is superior to all others is best for America, corporate dynasts have bought mostly Republican politicians, and sometimes run for office themselves, to fulfill this greedy and selfish dream.

NEO-ISOLATIONISM One of the oldest tropes of at least half of the Republican Party, their concept of America First was born of the mass immigration of Eastern Europeans in the late 19th century and extending through migrations from Third World nations in the mid-1960s and Muslim and Central and South American arrivals. Many GOPers believe that their language and culture and tendency to commit crimes (which is false) will dilute their ideal of an ethnically “pure” America. Their antipathy toward globalism also carries with an ant-semitic twinge.

FEAR, HATRED AND REVENGE The fear that a changing economy is lowering their standard of living combined with resentment of socalled elites on the East and West Coasts who they believe looked down on them as inferior has stoked the hatred and desire for revenge among the undereducated, largely rural lower middle class. The GOP has encouraged their hatred for years to win elections, only to be outclassed and overtaken in recent years by an even bigger demagogue like Trump, who has added his own desire for revenge against his perceived enemies to this wicked brew.

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MINOR PARTIES AND CANDIDATES ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. - DROPPED OUT AUGUST 23, 2024 Next to Trump, the oddest candidate in the race was Independent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., 70-year-old son and namesake of Robert F. Kennedy, the celebrated Democratic politician who served as U.S. attorney general under his brother, assassinated President John F. Kennedy, and U.S. senator from New York before he was also murdered while running for president in 1968. Kennedy Jr., once an effective environmental lawyer who is chiefly known for his opposition to all vaccines, had demonstrated extremely erratic and suspicious behavior during his aborted campaign, from dropping out of the Democratic primary to ”suspending” his campaign altogether and endorsing Trump. Kennedy, whose comments and actions can minimally be described as eccentric, is currently seen as the most likely potential spoiler to Harris in the November election.

CHASE OLIVER Oliver, 39, is the nominee of the Libertarian Party, a 52-year-old party that culls its political beliefs from a mixture of mostly traditional conservative and some liberal ideals, including civil liberties, non-interventionism, laissez-faire capitalism, and limiting the size and scope of government. It generally gets between 1-3.5 percent of the votes in presidential election and has only one currently serving member in the Wyoming legislature, but has had a greater influence in the GOP. Chase, who was in the restaurant business before entering politics, was a record as a losing candidate in Georgia for U.S. House in 2020 and U.S. Senate in 2022.

INDEPENDENT ON THE BALLOT IN 18 STATES * (BEFORE DROPPING OUT)

ON THE BALLOT IN 40 STATES*

CORNEL WEST

West, a 71-year-old academic who has taught at Harvard University, Yale University, Union Theological Seminary, Princeton University, Dartmouth College, Pepperdine University, and the University of Paris, is a frequent and highly respected commentator on politics and social questions in many media outlets. He is a socialist with a long record of advocacy for social justice causes.

Despite his admirable reputation among progressives, West has attracted little attention or support for his novice presidential candidacy on the leftst People’s Party ticket.

JILL STEIN Dr. Stein, 74, is a longtime Boston -area physician, environmental activist and political candidate. Her local advocacy of health and environmental reform eventually led her to politics. Stein left the Democratic Party in 2002 after they killed campaign finance reform in the Massachusetts legislature and joined the Greens, having been attracted to their pro-environment and socially progressive stands. She ran losing campaigns for governor and president, the most controversial being in 2016, when she was accused of taking votes away from Democrat Hillary Clinton in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, helping Trump to defeat Clinton in the Electoral College and win the presidency. Stein is running again this year after Cornel West rejected the Green nomination.

ON THE BALLOT IN 4 STATES*

ON THE BALLOT IN 18 STATES*

*AS OF AUGUST 2024

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CONGRESSIONAL RACES

SENATE - 100 SEATS, 51 FOR A MAJORITY The Senate is one of two chambers, along with the House, that must pass all proposed legislation before it goes to the president’s desk for signature or veto. Senators have the added duty of approving Cabinet and subcabinet officials, foreign treaties and ambassadors and federal prosecutors and judges, including justices of the Supreme Court. They also try the president and other federal officials that have been impeached by the House of Representatives.

Each of the 50 states is represented by two senators for a term of six years and every two years a third of the Senate is up for election.

This year 34 seats are on the ballot . The Democrats have been in control of the upper chamber of Congress since 2021, with a 50-50 tie broken by Vice President Kamala Harris. In 2021, the Democrats increased their majority by one seat after the 2020 elections, eliminating the necessity for the vice president to break a tie in terms of party control. The party that controls the Senate has the upper hand in moving bills toward passage.

HOUSE - 435 SEATS, 218 FOR A MAJORITY The House of Representatives, the lower chamber of Congress, also must pass all proposed legislation before it reaches the Senate and subsequently the president for approval or denial.

Representatives have approval or denial power of federal appointments only in the case of a vacancy in the vice presidency.

House seats, which face election every two years, are apportioned for each state based on a formula determined by the U.S. census every ten years. Based on population change, states can gain or lose seats. These seats are gerrymandered, i.e., individual districts are drawn to give the greatest electoral advantage to each party, which can greatly affect control of the House, often in an unfair manner. Like the Senate, re-election rates are well over 90 percent, despite polls showing the popularity of Congress over time to be consistently in the teens.

Republicans narrowly took a four seat control of the House after the 2022 midterm election and immediately ran into problems

DEMOCRATS 47* CHARLES S. SCHUMER Majority Leader

REPUBLICANS INDEPENDENTS/ OTHER 49 4*

MITCH McCONNELL Minority Leader (RETIRING)

*4 senators caucus with the Democrats to give them a 51-seat majority.

Two black women, Democrats Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, stand a good chance of winning their Senate bids in the November election. Other key races that polls show will determine which party controls the Senate in January include: Arizona - Ruben Gallego (D) vs. Kari Lake (R). Gallego has the edge.

Montana - Incumbent John Testor (D) vs. Tim Sheehy (R). Tossup.

Ohio - Incumbent Sherrod Brown (D) vs. Bernie Moreno (R). Close.

Michigan - Elissa Slotkin (D) vs. Mike Rogers (R). Slotkin has the edge.

Florida - Incumbent Tim Scott (R) vs. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell(D).

Possible upset.

Texas - Incumbent Ted Cruz (R) vs. Colin Allred (D). Possible upset.

REPUBLICANS 220*

DEMOCRATS 212**

MIKE JOHNSON Speaker

HAKEEM JEFFRIES Minority Leader

*1 Republican resigned, a special will be held November 5th to fill his seat

**2 Democrats died, special elections will be held September 18th and November 5th to fill their seats

INDEPENDENTS/ OTHER 0

electing not one but two speakers in less than a year and blocking vital legislation, including the federal budget, from passing for many months, if at all. According to Politifact, the productivity of the 118th Congress in enacting bills is the lowest since at least the Civil War era.

Nevertheless, recent polls indicate that the race between Republicans and Democrats for control of the upcoming 119th Congress, which convenes in January 2025, can go either way and may be determined by only a handful of seats.

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STATE RACES In addition to the presidential and congressional races, a number of states are holding important statewide contests for governor and other officials and the state legislature. There are also direct referendums offered up for public approval or denial.

GOVERNOR Eleven of 50 governorships will be up for election in November, nine to a to a four-year term, and two - New Hampshire and Vermont - for a two-year term. Nearly all of them are expected to the party currently in office, with the lone exception being North Carolina, where the incumbent party’s candidate, state Attorney General Josh Stein, faces competition from a controversial MAGA Republican nominee, Lieutenant-Governor Mark Robinson.

STATE LEGISLATURE In the 50 states, there are 99 state legislative chambers altogether. Across 44 states, 85 of those chambers are holding regular legislative elections in 2024. These elections are for 5,793 of the country's 7,386 state legislative seats (78%). The general election for state legislative races is on November 5, 2024. Like the president, governors need these lawmakers to be of or close to their party affiliation in order to enact their agenda. These races should not be ignored.

OTHER OFFICES In addition to governorships, several other offices will face the voters in November. They include lieutenant governor, attorney general, treasurer, secretary of state, and superintendent of education, among others. Not only are these officials important in and of themselves but they often serve as stepping-stones to higher office, such as governor or U.S. senator. One race in North Carolina for schools superintendent features a Republican, Michele Morrow, who has called for public executions of prominent Democrats Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, for treason. Morrow also wants to eliminate the state’s Department of Education in order grant herself and the GOP-led legislature complete control of the public schools.

REFERENDUMS States also allow public policy decisions to be enacted or guided by ballot measures, provided that petitions with enough valid signatures can be presented to the secretary of state’s office, and based on other criteria, before the election. In the 2024 election cycle, 144 statewide ballot measures have been certified for the ballot in 39 states as of August 2024. The most controversial measures are the ones that will determine if abortion rights will be allowed to women in that particular state. Up to 11 states may have abortion measures on their ballot Abortion referendums approved in Arizona, Florida and Nevada may directly effect the outcome of the November presidential election.

GOV* WA GOV***

GOV**

MT

ND

GOV*** DE

GOV** VT

GOV** IN GOV** MO

*Term-limited or retiring Democrat **Term-limited or retiring Republican ***Republican incumbent

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NH GOV**

GOV* DE

GOV** WV GOV* NC