Kamala Harris

How Kamala intends to bring prices down

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By Robert Reich

Friends,

I don’t want to alarm you, but the Labor Department today revised downward its monthly payroll numbers over the past year by about 818,000 jobs: Employers added roughly 174,000 jobs per month instead of the previously-reported 242,000 — or about 28 percent fewer than thought.

I do want to alarm Jerome Powell and the Fed that they’ve been keeping interests rates too high. (Fed officials are set to convene in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for their annual meeting on Friday.)

Instead of lowering them by a quarter point in September, the Fed should lower them by half a percentage point.

A good rule of thumb is that the economy should produce around 200,000 net new jobs a month. If it’s been producing 174,000 jobs instead, the Fed has been putting too much foot on the brake.

Never forget that the first people drafted into the fight against inflation have the most tenuous hold on jobs. Their incomes and education tend to be lower than those of other workers. When job growth slows, they’re the first sacrificial victims.

Meanwhile, the administration should be using the threat of antitrust enforcement to force corporations in concentrated industries to lower their prices.

Biden’s trust-busters — Lina Khan at the FTC and Jonathan Kanter at the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department — have been doing excellent work but they need to do more targeting and threatening. This is the direction Kamala Harris wants to go.

Since the 1980s, after the federal government all but abandoned antitrust, two-thirds of all American industries have consolidated into a handful of giant corporations.

When four or fewer firms dominate an industry, it’s easy for them to coordinate price increases and prevent price cuts — which is exactly what’s been happening.

Last week, Kamala Harris announced she would go after corporate price gouging. Trump promptly accused her of seeking price controls. Much of the economic establishment — which justifiably believes price controls don’t work — went berserk.

But Harris is not advocating price controls. She’s advocating just the opposite (see my interview, below).

The entities now controlling prices are big corporations. She wants to prevent them from keeping prices high by restoring competition. She’s exactly right.

Source: How Kamala intends to bring prices down – Robert Reich

Kamala Harris Steps Up

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The future of American democracy now rests on the vice president’s shoulders. That’s why it’s more important than ever to understand who she is

By Joan Walsh

New York City—I sat down with Kamala Harris on a scorching June afternoon, one of a nearly week-long string of 90-degree-plus days. Staffers escorted me to a well-cooled hotel room that had been made over into an interview chamber. I sat at a spare table where a bed would normally be. It was draped in one of those forlorn table skirts and set with two empty glasses, and the window’s thick curtains were closed to the midday sun. It was a little bleak.

I heard the rapid staccato click of high heels. Harris walked in, greeted me warmly, and immediately yanked open the curtains. She was not afraid of the heat. She wanted sunshine in here.

She is about to get much more sunshine—and heat—than she asked for. A few days after our conversation, President Joe Biden had the worst debate performance of his career and sent the Democratic Party into a crisis over his ability to win the 2024 election against Donald Trump. Pundits and more than a few Democratic leaders clamored for Biden to step aside, as polling showed his path to a second term drying up. On July 21, Biden announced that he was suspending his campaign for president and endorsed Harris as nominee soon after. Prominent Democrats quickly lined up behind her as her work wooing Biden’s delegates began.

Harris and I spoke when she was still trying to win a second term for Biden, dispatched to reach voters who were among the most critical to his reelection. In the days before I met with her, I was repeatedly told: Do not suggest that she’s “found her voice” in the two years since the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, when the Supreme Court robbed American women of rights we’ve enjoyed for half a century—although she kicked off her Dobbs anniversary tour the day we spoke. Do not say that she’s “having a moment” on the 2024 campaign trail. Or ask if there’s any “daylight” between her and the president over Israel’s brutal retaliation against Hamas in the wake of the October 7 massacre. (On policy, there isn’t, though Harris has been more critical in public about the mercilessness of Israel’s response and the toll on Palestinian civilians than Biden has.) Do not ask whether anything “surprises” her after a long career as a district attorney, an attorney general, a senator, and now as the nation’s first Black, first Asian, and first woman vice president. This struck me as a defensive tic, a reaction to the feeling that she has repeatedly been underestimated. (That feeling simmers under the surface of our conversation as well.)

I was warned against going down these paths not just by her staff but by some of the friends who’ve known her for decades. They were not protecting her; they were protecting me—from her impatience with what she thinks are stupid questions she’s heard time and again.

So I struggled with how to phrase a question about whether Dobbs has given her a new mission. I think I maybe even used the dreaded word “moment.”

Read more

RUMBLE with Michael Moore: The U.S. has moved to the Left

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Does Trump even know what happened this week? Welcome to the New American Majority, Mr. Trump. There are more of us than there are of you! 79% of the voters in November will be either female, People of Color or under 39 yrs old — or a combination of all three! How are you doing with these groups of Americans? Well, enjoy the next 100 days!

Academy Award-winning filmmaker and political provocateur Michael Moore offers his subversive and humorous take on the issues of the day and talks to a wide range of people from comedians and politicians to the people who’ve tried to kill him. Plus various mischief with Mike’s friends, family and the neighbors who don’t work for the NSA.

Jennifer Aniston criticises JD Vance’s ‘childless cat ladies’ comment

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The Friends star has previously spoken about her struggles while trying to have children through IVF.

By Bonnie McLaren

Jennifer Aniston has criticised Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, for resurfaced comments calling Democrats a “bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives”.

The Friends actress, 55, posted a 2021 interview with Mr Vance that has been widely shared since his selection as Mr Trump’s running mate for November’s presidential election.

“I truly can’t believe that this is coming from a potential VP of the United States,” she wrote on Instagram.

“All I can say is… Mr Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day.”

Mr Vance has a two-year-old daughter, and two sons.

“I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option,” Ms Aniston wrote.

“Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”

The actress has previously spoken openly about her struggles while trying to have children through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF).

Last month, Mr Vance voted to block Democrat-proposed legislation to guarantee access to IVF nationwide.

Ahead of that vote, Mr Vance and the other 48 Senate Republicans signed a letter saying they supported IVF, but that the Democratic bill was overly broad and “false fearmongering”.

In the clip, Mr Vance criticised Vice-President Kamala Harris because she has no biological children.

Ms Harris is stepmother to her husband Doug Emhoff’s two children.

But Mr Vance told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson the US was run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too”.

“Look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he said.

“How does it make any sense we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

Kamala Harris’ stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff, posted a reaction to Mr Vance’s comments on Instagram on Thursday.

“How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like cole and I?” the 25-year-old daughter of Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, and his ex-wife, Kerstin Emhoff, wrote. Cole Emhoff is her 29-year-old brother.

The BBC has contacted the Trump-Vance campaign team for comment.

‘Heartbreaking setback’

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg also addressed the comments earlier this week, speaking about adopting twins with his husband, Chasten.

“The really sad thing is he said that after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey,” Mr Buttigieg told CNN’s The Source programme.

“He couldn’t have known that – but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children.”

There has also been backlash from fans of singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, who has no children – and three cats.

“It’s bold, for someone seeking votes, to hone in on ‘childless cat ladies’ when the leader of Childless Cat Ladies is Taylor Swift,” British writer Caitlin Moran posted on X.

Another X user shared the Time magazine cover where Swift posed with one of her cats, writing: “Hell hath no fury like a certain childless cat lady who has yet to endorse a presidential candidate.”

In 2022, Aniston told Allure she wished someone had told her to freeze her eggs.

“It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road,” she said.

“All the years and years of speculation… it was really hard.

“I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it.”

But she had “zero regrets”.

“I would’ve given anything if someone had said to me, ‘Freeze your eggs. Do yourself a favour.’ You just don’t think it. So here I am today,” she told the magazine.

“The ship has sailed.”

Source: Jennifer Aniston criticises JD Vance’s ‘childless cat ladies’ comment