Actor and activist Jane Fonda took aim at Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump and his climate-wrecking plans in comments published Monday from her wide-ranging conversation with CBS News, The Guardian, and Rolling Stone.
The interview with Fonda, which took place in California earlier this month, was coordinated by Covering Climate Now and is set to air on "CBS Saturday Morning" on September 28. It comes as she travels the country to support climate champions including Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democrats taking on Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) in the November election.
Trump "invited all the CEOs of the fossil fuel industry to Mar-a-Lago" and promised to roll back the Biden administration's progress on the climate crisis for just $1 billion in campaign cash, Fonda highlighted, warning that "the future of the planet is at stake."
"This is a collective crisis, and it requires a collective solution," she continued. "[Trump] wants to do away with all regulations and open up the floodgates for the fossil fuel industry and the nuclear industry. So the choice is very clear, do we vote for the future, or do we vote for burning up the planet?"
"We have the solution to the climate crisis, why don't we employ it, instead of allowing a bunch of rich people to destroy everything that's been created by humankind?"
The longtime activist, who is taking time off from acting to focus on this year's elections, acknowledged that some voters who lean toward Democrats, particularly younger people, are angry with Harris, especially over U.S. support for Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip. However, she argued, "to sit this out or to vote for a third-party candidate, is to allow fascism."
"That will elect somebody who will deny you any voice in the future of the United States," Fonda stressed. "Vote for a voice if you really care about Gaza, vote to have a voice so that you can do something about it, and then be ready to turn out into the streets by the millions and fight for it… If the young people stay home, we're going to lose."
"Every candidate has issues. Nobody's perfect, but the Harris-Walz ticket is the ticket that will allow us to fight, to get the solutions that climate scientists are saying we need," she said. "They give us a chance, at least, to fight. They give us a platform on which we can try to pressure."
Overall, the 2024 edition of Princeton’s REPEAT Project report estimates that these [Biden administration] laws got us about halfway to America’s stated climate goal of a 50 percent reduction in emissions (from the peak in 2005) by 2030 and thence to net zero by 2050.
Yet all those accomplishments are under threat. Should Donald Trump win another term, he would likely do serious damage to this climate policy framework, and potentially engender so much economic chaos that the entire planet’s climate efforts would be greatly set back. On the other hand, if Kamala Harris wins, she at least will have another four years to cement her predecessor’s legacy—and should the Democrats win control of Congress at some point during her presidency, she would get a chance to build on Biden’s foundation.
Trump has at various points promised to repeal the IRA; re-withdraw from the Paris climate accords that Biden rejoined; revoke Biden’s regulations on power plant pollution, vehicle emissions, and fuel efficiency; revoke his limitations on oil and gas drilling; and much else. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump term, overwhelmingly written by former Trump staffers and associates, is much more specific and extreme, essentially arguing for a wholesale gutting of the government’s capacity to protect the environment in any way.
As usual with Trump, it’s anybody’s guess what he would actually do in office. In April, he openly attempted to shake down a group of oil executives for a $1 billion campaign contribution, promising just about everything on the Big Oil wish list in return. Trump has long nurtured a bizarre prejudice against renewable energy, especially windmills, which he has claimed produce “tremendous fumes” and kill whales, without evidence. (Apparently, this goes back to a wind farm built near Trump’s golf course in Aberdeen, Scotland; he thought it ruined the view.)
Volunteer-led groups of disability activists are rallying around the Harris-Walz campaign like none before: Disabled Voters for Harris. Disabled Folks for Kamala. DisCo4Harris (Disability Coalition for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz). Disabled leaders are personally stumping for the candidates, too, and the Democratic National Convention Disability Caucus and the Young Democrats of America Disability Caucus are working within the Democratic party. In sharp contrast, the Republican party has yet to announce any disability leaders or organizations campaigning for Trump-Vance.
Why this grassroots boost of energy behind the Democratic presidential candidate?
Over 70 Million Potential Voters
“In 2022, the CDC reported that one in four Americans has a disability. This translates to over 70 million people who will be impacted by the upcoming election,” says Cassidy Huff, a social media influencer and co-founder of Disabled Voters for Harris (along with Zibora Gilder). “Every vote in this election matters—your vote is crucial for protecting your individual rights and the rights of every disabled person in this country…In some areas of the country, it comes down to just a handful of votes.”
Leslie Templeton, one of the organizers of Disabled Folks for Kamala, agrees. Templeton, also the Chair of The Young Democrats Disability Caucus and The Massachusetts Young Democrats Disability Caucus says, “Across the nation we’re seeing that candidates who are engaging the disability vote are winning. When we feel like someone wants to speak with us, wants to hear us, wants to advocate for us, and wants to represent us in a dignified and just way, we’re going to come out. And we’re not going to come out in the dozens. We’re going to come out in droves.”
[ . .]
Kamala’s Commitment to the Community
The organizations are also eager to amplify Harris’ commitment to the disability community. “She is a strong advocate for lowering prescription drug costs, making housing affordable, ensuring safe and accessible healthcare, and protecting reproductive freedoms—all of which will significantly benefit disabled individuals across the nation,” Huff says.
Other leaders also touted Kamala’s record of protecting Social Security and Medicare; her advocacy behind the changes to regulations that create better access for people with disabilities to healthcare, transportation, and digital education; her willingness to meet with disabled leaders, and the steps her campaign has already taken to include the disability community.
“We feel like the campaign wants to interact with our community,” Templeton says, who also points to the campaign‘s appointment of a Disability Engagement Director, Anastasia Somoza. Though former campaigns have utilized disability policy advisers, the new director is the first one specially tasked with connecting with the community.
Janni Lehrer-Stein, disability rights advocate, Vice chair of the DNC Disability Caucus, and DisCo4Harris supporter, also applauds the campaign’s commitment to accessibility. “When Alex Hornbrook was named as CEO of the (Democratic National) Convention,” she says, “one of the first things he said (to the Finance Committee) was that they were determined to make this the most accessible convention ever.” Lehrer-Stein also participated on the accessibility task force for the Democratic convention—and was able to sit alongside her delegation for the first time ever.
Despite Trump’s drumbeating for economic nationalism, the tariffs he slapped on Chinese and other imported products during his presidency did nothing to jump-start a return of American manufacturing. To the contrary, it was President Biden’s turn to industrial policy that prompted the first measurable increase in factory construction that the nation has seen in decades. The tax credits going to companies that mean to build electric vehicles or computer chips or other elements of a green economy increased domestic factory construction by more than 70 percent over previous years.
Likewise with infrastructure. Despite Trump’s annual proclamations of “infrastructure weeks,” the dollar amounts he asked Congress to provide for rebuilding roads, bridges, airports, and the digital infrastructure were so meager that Congress could never construct a plausible program with them. Biden, by contrast, won sizable bipartisan support for the massive repair job that the nation needs, and without which a renewed industrial sector (or any economic sector, for that matter) cannot flourish.
Debates over whether Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s economic proposals constitute Communist price controls or merely technocratic consumer protections are obscuring a more insidious thread within corporate media. In coverage of Harris’s anti-price-gouging proposal, it’s taken for granted that price inflation, especially in the grocery sector, is an organic and unavoidable result of market forces, and thus any sort of intervention is misguided at best, and economy-wrecking at worst.
In this rare instance where a presidential hopeful has a policy that is both economically sound and popular, corporate media have fixated on Harris’s proposal as supposedly misguided. To dismiss any deeper discussion of economic phenomena like elevated price levels, and legislation that may correct them, media rely on an appeal to “basic economics.” If the reader were only willing to crack open an Econ 101 textbook, it would apparently be plain to see that the inflation consumers experienced during the pandemic can be explained by abstract and divinely influenced factors, and thus a policy response is simply inappropriate.
For all the hubbub about Harris’s proposal, the actual implications of anti-price-gouging legislation are fairly unglamorous. Far from price controls, law professor Zephyr Teachout (Washington Monthly, 9/9/24) noted that anti-price-gouging laws
allow price increases, so long as it is due to increased costs, but forbid profit increases so that companies can’t take advantage of the fear, anxiety, confusion and panic that attends emergencies.
Teachout situated this legislation alongside rules against price-fixing, predatory pricing and fraud, laws which allow an effective market economy to proliferate. As such, states as politically divergent as Louisiana and New York have anti-price-gouging legislation on the books, not just for declared states of emergency, but for market “abnormalities.”
But none of that matters when the media can run with Donald Trump’s accusation of “SOVIET-style price controls.” Plenty of unscrupulous outlets have had no problem framing a consumer protection measure as the first step down the road to socialist economic ruin (Washington Times, 8/16/24; Washington Examiner, 8/20/24; New York Post, 8/25/24; Fox Business, 9/3/24). Even a Washington Post piece (8/19/24) by columnist (and former G.W. Bush speechwriter) Marc Thiessen described Harris’s so-called “price controls” as “doubling down on socialism.”
What’s perhaps more concerning is centrist or purportedly liberal opinion pages’ acceptance of Harris’s proposal as outright price controls. Catherine Rampell, writing in the Washington Post (8/15/24), claimed anti-price-gouging legislation is “a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food…. At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding.” Rampell didn’t go as far as to call Harris a Communist outright, but coyly concluded: “If your opponent claims you’re a ‘Communist,’ maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls.”
Donald Boudreaux and Richard McKenzie mounted a similar attack in the Wall Street Journal (8/22/24), ripping Harris for proposing “national price controls” and thus subscribing to a “fantasy economic theory.” Opinion writers in the Atlantic (8/16/24), the New York Times (8/19/24), LA Times (8/20/24), USA Today (8/21/24), the Hill (8/23/24) and Forbes (9/3/24) all uncritically regurgitated the idea that Harris’s proposal amounts to price controls. By accepting this simplistic and inaccurate framing, these political taste-makers are fueling the right-wing idea that Harris represents a vanguard of Communism.
To explicitly or implicitly accept that Harris’s proposal amounts to price controls, or even socialism, is inaccurate and dangerous. Additionally, many of the breathless crusades against Harris made use of various cliches to encourage the reader to not think deeper about how prices work, or what policy solutions might exist to benefit the consumer.
Kennedy indicated in court filings that he has rented a room in the home from a childhood friend and stayed overnight on one occasion. His attorneys noted lower courts “did not find that anyone was misled,” insisting that taking him off the ballot was irrevocably depriving Kennedy’s New York supporters of their right to vote for him.
“The address on Kennedy’s petition was and is entirely immaterial — both to voters and to New York,” his attorneys wrote in their request.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Hi, guys.
Well, you’ve probably heard I would like another debate. So, I’m hoping the former president will agree to that, but we have a lot more to discuss.
Q You — you raised $27 million from this fundraiser. That’s the largest since you raised — since you were at the top of the ticket. That’s a lot of money. How are you feeling about that?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, it — it’s showing that there’s a lot of support for our message and — and what we need to do in terms of, you know, moving forward and charting a new way forward and dispensing with all of the attempts to divide our country and — and to just, you know, really —
The — the problem, I think, on the other side is that there is a — a devaluation of who the American people are. They just don’t really understand that we’ve got a lot of good people in our country who want to work hard and do well and want a leader who believes that we are, you know, in this together — and I do.
Q Are you giving an economic speech this week, Madam Vice President?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes.
Q Can you tell us anything about what that’s going to be about? Any preview?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: So, I’m going to be giving a speech this week that is really to outline my vision for the economy.
As you’ve heard me talk about, I believe in what we can create in terms of opportunity for the American people. I’ve named it an “opportunity economy,” which really, in short form, is about what we can do more to invest in the aspirations, the ambitions, and the dreams of the American people while addressing the challenges that they face, whether it’s the — the high price of groceries or the difficulty in being able to acquire homeownership because — for a number of reasons, including we don’t have enough housing supply.
Q Will the care economy be part of this?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I will touch on it for sure, yeah.
Q And your message to Donald Trump as you call for a second presidential debate? I know you told your donors that he’s looking excuse or a reason not to. So, what’s your message to him?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Join me on the debate stage. Let’s have another debate. There’s more to talk about, and the voters of America deserve to hear the conversations that I think we should be having on substance, on issues, on policies, what’s your plan, what’s my plan. And — and we should have another one before Election Day. So —
Thank you all.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.
With just about 40 days until the presidential election, Georgia’s State Election Board voted 3 to 2 to approve a controversial new rule that will require counties to hand-count the ballots cast election night, which could delay the reporting of results in the key battleground state, and that means for the nation. The proposal was spearheaded by the board’s pro-Trump majority, will require the hand count in addition to the customary machine count in each of George’s precincts. Trump praised the electoral board members last month as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.”
For more, we’re joined by two guests. We;re going to start with Sara Tindall Ghazal, a member of the Georgia State Election Board who opposed the measure. She’s also an election law attorney.
Welcome to Democracy Now! I know you just have a minute. Can you explain how this vote took place and what it means?
SARA TINDALL GHAZAL: Certainly. We received a petition from a member of the public who is a well-known election denier a few months ago that would require the counties to hand-count the ballots. Now, this is not a tabulation. This is simply counting the number of ballots that were scanned on the day of the election. We have another one that would have applied to early voting. That one, fortunately, did not pass. Rather than using the normal rule-making procedures of working together, having a board draft the rules, this was one of dozens of petitions that came from election deniers, and they’re motivated by people who believe the 2020 election was stolen.
Now, mind you, there are multiple cross-checks on the number of ballots that get scanned through. There’s a counter on the tabulator. The tabulator tapes have the number of ballots cast. The number of voters who checked in are already going to be cross-checked with the number of ballots printed and the ballots scanned. But this adds, at really the 11th hour, another layer of confusion, because the counties have already hired all their poll workers, they’ve trained their poll workers, and they will have been working for 14 hours, and now they have to hand-count stacks of ballots that are — it’s not like they’re neatly stacked like a ream of paper. They’re all going to be — they have to pull them out of the scanners, and rather than seal them up with a numbered seal that is a security seal, now they have to stack them up, count them three times — not just once, not twice, three times. If there’s a single discrepancy, they have to start over again.
And one of the arguments that my fellow board members made was, “Well, why are you sacrificing accuracy for speed?” That is a policy choice that the Legislature made three years ago when they passed the laws, that had very strict reporting deadlines, which are now at risk of being violated.
The counties are being set up for failure, but to me the most — one of the most troubling aspects of this whole thing is we were told by our attorneys, the state attorney general, that we don’t have the legal authority to even do this, that this is untethered to statute, and yet my colleagues decided to go ahead and pass a rule that they don’t have the legal authority to pass, according to the Attorney General’s Office. That, to me, is the most troubling part of this.
AMY GOODMAN: I know you’re rushing to get to the Election Board meeting. What do you expect to come out of it? And what’s it like to be the only Democrat on this Election Board?
SARA TINDALL GHAZAL: Sometimes it can be pretty lonely. I have to be willing to be the unwelcome voice. It’s not just that I’m the only Democrat. I’m also the only attorney and, apparently, the only one, aside from the chairman, who feels constrained by the rule of law. Today we’re looking at more issues that we don’t have jurisdiction to be looking at. So, it’s not going to be a fun morning for me.
AMY GOODMAN: And can this count delay the national count for who is elected president of the United States?
SARA TINDALL GHAZAL: Unfortunately, there is every chance that because the counties will not — some counties will not be able to transport those memory cards with the vote totals back to their headquarters to be uploaded for the rest of the nation to see until this hand count has been completed.
AMY GOODMAN: Sara Tindall Ghazal, I want to thank you for being with us, a member of the Georgia State Election Board, the only election law attorney on that five-person board.
In 2020, Georgia was at the center of Trump’s false claims of election fraud as he attempted to overturn his election loss to Biden. Trump at the time told Georgia’s Raffensperger in a phone call, quote, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.” Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger refused, but many warn Trump is now laying the groundwork for another attempt at manipulating and undermining voting results in Georgia this November. Democratic Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock said Trump supporters are, quote, “trying to set up a scenario in which they could refuse to certify an election whose results they don’t like.”
This comes as Trump allies in Nebraska are ramping up efforts to change the state’s Electoral College process to grant all votes to the statewide winner. Nebraska and Maine are the only states that split their electoral votes by congressional district.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, the state Supreme Court ruled Friday nearly 98,000 people whose citizenship documents hadn’t been confirmed can vote in state and local races.
For all of this, we’re joined by Ari Berman, voting rights correspondent, Mother Jones magazine.
Talk about the significance of Georgia, and then just race through everything else, if you will, Ari.
ARI BERMAN: Well, what Republicans are trying to do, Amy, is to, at the 11th hour, rig the voting rules to benefit their side in a really unprecedented way. In Georgia, they’re laying the groundwork not to certify the election if Kamala Harris wins the state, through a series of rule changes that the Trump-aligned Election Board have made.
In Nebraska, they are trying to, quite literally, rig the Electoral College so that Trump wins or there’s a tie, and the election gets thrown to the House of Representatives, because the fact is that the Electoral College is already biased towards Trump, because it favors small states and whiter, more Republican battleground states. But they want to shift this one district in Omaha that could vote for Harris. They want to shift it back towards Trump, so that either Trump wins or, if Harris wins the blue wall of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, the election could be tied. There could be no majority in the Electoral College. The election would then be thrown to the House, where a majority of state House delegations, not state members overall, would choose the president. And that would be an incredibly undemocratic scenario in which a candidate who lost the popular vote, who did not win the Electoral College, could still be installed as president by House Republicans, who would have the power to do so through gerrymandering and other manipulations of the democratic process.
AMY GOODMAN: And Maine?
ARI BERMAN: It’s too late for Maine to fight back. That is the problem. Maine also is one of two states that splits up its Electoral College votes. But Maine has to pass these kind of changes 90 days before the election, or they need a two-thirds supermajority in the Legislature to do it, which they don’t have. So, right now I think the problem is it feels like the Trump side is doing everything they can to manipulate the rules, and Democrats don’t have the same ability to fight back. And Trump’s side may have indeed waited in Nebraska for Maine to be unable to retaliate, in order to put this 11th-hour change to the Electoral College through.
AMY GOODMAN: And Arizona, Ari Berman?
ARI BERMAN: So, what happened in Arizona was the Supreme Court, very late in the day, said that people who don’t show proof of citizenship when they register to vote can only vote in federal races, not state races. There were 100,000 ballots that were at issue in terms of people who the state claimed did not have this proof of citizenship. But the Arizona Supreme Court said that they actually can cast both federal and state ballots. And the interesting thing is, these voters who supposedly lack proof of citizenship, they were disproportionately likely to be Republicans. So, it just goes to show you that when you try to suppress voting rights — and they’re trying to suppress the voting rights of Democrats and voters of color — there can also be collateral damage that hurts Republicans, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, go back to Georgia, where we began, and the overall significance of this for the federal election.
ARI BERMAN: What’s happening in Georgia is incredibly disturbing, because the MAGA-aligned Election Board, really at the 11th hour, is passing not one, not two, but three or more rule changes that could lead Republican county boards not to certify the election if a Democrat wins. That could plunge the state into chaos. Trump could then weaponize that disinformation. There’s a lot of unpredictable outcomes there. That could also delay the counting of votes, which could send the election to the House.
So, right now we’re just witnessing all of these really disturbing efforts very late in the game to try to manipulate the democratic process to Republicans’ benefits. And they’re basically using all the tools they have to essentially rerun the 2020 playbook to try to steal the election, but this time they’re running it before the election.
AMY GOODMAN: Ari Berman, I want to thank you for being with us, voting rights correpondent for Mother Jones magazine. We’ll link to your articles.
Happy belated birthday to Jackie Sam! I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.
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