Kamala Harris will serve all Americans with dignity & honor
I am worried for my country. I also have deep faith in the ability of a free people to choose right, when the pressure is on.
This year’s election could set the nation on course for sanity, liberty, and sustainable shared prosperity, or it could destabilize the instruments of self-government and unleash climate chaos, autocratic political violence, and pervasive corruption. Future generations will look on our choice with deep gratitude or shock and disdain.
The democratic republic known as the United States of America needs a head of government who recognizes service as a high ethical calling, who understands the personal sacrifices needed to serve with honor and dignity, and who is willing to put the good of others over personal pecuniary interest. The President must be a person of character, wisdom, grace, and no-nonsense problem-solving. There is only one candidate on the ballot this November that meets those standards.
Kamala Harris is the President for this crucial time in American history. Not only has she served skillfully and honorably throughout her career in public service; she has done so with a conscious and explicit devotion to the infinite worth of all human beings. That, more than anything, is what is needed now, as the American people find themselves facing complex, compounding, and pervasive challenges.
Human rights and personal freedom
Kamala Harris believes all people are of infinite, incalculable worth, and are entitled to have their humanity, their dignity, and their rights protected. She has prosecuted predators and fraudsters and held criminals to account, in defense of the rights and freedom of everyone else. She also understands that when public officials take away the rights of 170 million women and girls, they are signaling the end of all human rights and personal freedom.
She will make sure women and girls have open, fair, unfettered access to the best quality of medical care, and that doctors do not fear for their freedom or their lives for providing life-saving care. This is why an unprecedented alliance of pro-choice and pro-life women has come together to support Vice President Harris, because the Trump abortion ban plot will be devastating to the health, freedom, and opportunity of all women, to families, and to future generations.
It is not coincidence that the same deeply flawed human being who wants to use the Presidency to reduce women’s access to healthcare also wants to emulate dictators, sell official actions, and jail and murder his critics. Your access to the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights depends on making sure a candidate like Trump, who wants to take away freedoms to rule over others with impunity, loses the vote resoundingly.
Inflation
Donald Trump lies about inflation, because it is easy. That is how he operates. He wants Americans to be confused, so he can do as he pleases. The inflation experienced by Americans over the last six years began because of Trump’s policies on trade, energy, taxes, human rights, and security. It worsened when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted supply chains across the world.
The American COVID catastrophe was his doing. Not only did he botch the response and spread dangerous lies about virtually every aspect of the pandemic emergency; he spent years sabotaging America’s pandemic preparedness and monitoring efforts, diverting funds and resources to other interests, even where he did not have discretionary authority to do so.
Trump’s giveaway of trillions of dollars in most Americans’ hard-earned money to the ultrawealthy and global elites undermined local economies, stressed public budgets, cut into public investment in economic development, and allowed transnational corporate interests to separate their pricing considerations from the everyday consumer. His energy policies favored oil-dependent dictators, who manipulated production to drive up prices, which raised the price of everything else.
Since the Biden-Harris administration took over, the US has fared better against post-pandemic inflation than any other wealthy industrialized economy. That is because their policies were not oriented toward enriching the rich, but building a middle class economy “from the bottom up and the middle out”. That rhetoric was backed up by real investments and tax breaks that work for most families. The result has been persistent job creation and a stable overall economy, despite the background of global threats Trump had handled so badly.
Trade
Kamala Harris understands trade is a way to make middle class economies, where information, innovation, and prosperity are open to all, more common. That doesn’t mean corporate interests should be able to move to any jurisdiction that will allow them to ignore basic responsibility to the public good, or cut costs by eliminating compliance with the rule of law. That kind of trade is neither free nor freedom-building.
But trade conditionalities have to be carefully managed. Trump’s idea of using tariffs to “punish China” has already resulted in problematic disruptions of everyday goods and services and increased costs for all Americans. His idea of doing this to all nations would effectively isolate the American consumer and hand over to other nations the long-term benefits of what was once the American middle class economy, while leaving Americans unable to afford most of what they are used to having.
Climate risk and resilience
Kamala Harris understands that the climate system is a planet-wide system of energy exchange that makes life as we know it possible on planet Earth. She understands that we are disrupting the climate system, but that making it do our bidding is not so simple. Once disrupted, powerful geophysical forces we cannot control will bring risk, harm, and cost to communities of all kinds, in all regions.
Trump thinks climate disruption can be ignored; he treats America’s climate readiness the way he treated the balance sheet of his businesses. To him, going bankrupt is always an option, so long as someone is there to give him cash after he kills the enterprise everyone else depended on. The climate is not a casino; it is not the plaything of people who use gold-plated toilets. It is what makes life possible on our planet. The climate bankruptcy he is pushing toward will devastate the US in unprecedented ways.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Financial Stability Oversight Council have both found unchecked climate change will collapse the US financial system and destroy its ability to support the wider economy. Estimates for the cost of unsustainable activities between now and 2070 range from $178 trillion to $700 trillion. Already, the US is experiencing total costs from single storms that approach 1% of GDP. This is a sign of financial and fiscal unraveling to come.
Electing Trump will set the United States on a course for chaos and chronic impoverishment. Electing Harris will give us our best chance to build the climate-resilient future economy that is needed if human freedom, vibrant local community life, thriving rural economies, and national security as such, are to remain possible and real. This isn’t just about rhetoric; it’s about real-world investments we have already seen in action.
The Biden-Harris administration is restoring American leadership on climate crisis response, positioning the US to be a leader in finance and investment, innovation and exports, climate-smart trade, and climate-related peace and security. Tens of thousands of young people are joining the effort, through volunteerism, public works, and training programs aimed at making climate-smart practices the mainstream norm. Communities are seeing resilience-related investments in infrastructure and innovation that will reduce risk and cost and secure their futures.
Security
On security, there could hardly be a more stark contrast. Kamala Harris understands that Vladimir Putin’s mafia government is fascist in nature, expansionist, and a threat to all people everywhere. He will not stop with Ukraine, and is already working to subvert democracies in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere. A President Harris will defend allied democracies against the lawless and bloodthirsty Putin regime. Trump has said he would surrender America’s closest allies to evil, while praising their attacker.
This same stark divide applies to domestic security. Trump lies about crime statistics, because he always has, because he is racist, and because he likes to terrorize those who listen to him. Violent crime is lower now than when Trump was in office. One reason is the way in which security is handled. The right investments in the right kind of local interventions can bolster the rule of law, reduce the need for violent confrontations, and disincentivize the use of violence in petty crime.
As an experienced prosecutor, Kamala Harris knows what works and what doesn’t. She knows you prosecute offenders and support communities. Trump wants to go to war with American communities. He wants to deploy the military to attack protesters and abduct his critics. He has insinuated he wishes to see critics brought before firing squads. His view of policing is not about crime; it is about cruelty and autocracy.
The United States needs a Harris-Walz administration to continue the work of rebuilding a strong middle class, open to all people, regardless of race or national origin, where informed citizens manage self-governing communities. Letting Trump back into the White House would replace that national project with one of violent authoritarian centralization.
Education and health
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz grew up in working families and understand the power of education and healthcare to build opportunity for families and communities. The most important thing to a free society of self-governing people is that citizens be informed. Education needs to be a diverse process of inquiry into all that the human mind can do. It cannot make lives better if core elements of history are filtered out to provide a biased view of the past.
Trump’s obsession with eliminating all education about the history of enslavement from American classrooms is nothing less than an effort to undermine the American mind, to make people weaker and less able to engage in the intricacies of self-government. His affinity for book bans, his menacing threats against educators, critics, whistleblowers, and the free press, are indicative of his disdain for the freedom, rights, and dignity of all Americans.
Put another way: If a candidate tells you that you should not have access to a particular kind of information, they are telling you that you should not have the freedom to decide for yourself what is good and decent or what is dehumanizing and wrong. They are telling you that you should not be a free person and they do not believe you should have any moral agency.
Kamala Harris has built her campaign around Freedom for a reason, because it is the most succinct distilling possible of the core of the policies and initiatives she proposes to improve lives in real ways, in the short term and far into the future. When Trump talks about retuning to some “great” time in the past, he means to a time when freedom was less available to most people and the powerful could get away with what they wanted.
This same standard applies to health — not just healthcare, but the actual health and wellbeing of Americans.
- Trump talks about fentanyl, but his actions did more to expand its proliferation than any other factor. His obscene and dehumanizing border policies and lawless approach to combat weapons helped narco-terrorist gangs and human trafficking networks expand their reach, become far more dangerous, and push poison-for-profit into American communities.
- His sadistic approach to policy in general has coincided with an explosion of preventable deaths by firearm, by overdose, by vehicle, and by the novel coronavirus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Trump’s plans to eliminate healthcare coverage for tens of millions of people, his lies about science and medicine, including the very vaccines he once celebrated, his plans to eliminate all environmental regulations, which protect your lungs, heart, and nervous system from deadly pollutants — all of these would be devastating to human health in the United States.
- And of course, we must come back to the first point: His plan to strip women of full legal personhood and deny them access to life-saving medical care, that is more than an attack on women or on women’s health; it is an attack on the right of American families to build safe, happy, thriving futures.
Trump is a fascist who disdains democracy
Then, there is the simple fact that Trump’s own former top aides describe him as a dangerous corrupt autocrat who is “fascist to the core”. These are not the words of liberal critics or the opposing campaign. This is what the former Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, the nation’s highest ranking military officer, said of him. Another retired general, his former White House Chief of Staff, said he fits the definition of a fascist and that he never accepted that he did not have unfettered power.
His former Vice President refused to endorse him, not only because Trump cheered on a mob that was hunting him, but because Trump wanted to be above the Constitution, above the rule of law. He noted that no person who would put himself above the Constitution should ever be President. Trump incited a paramilitary assault on the United States Congress, in hopes of seizing power after the American people had voted him out of office, and now he menaces those who sought to hold him accountable.
Trump is a predator & a felon
Donald Trump was found civilly liable for sexual assault—a fact which seems to have escaped many of his religiously minded supporters. His violent, dehumanizing attitude toward women has been on persistent display since he entered American political life. He routinely insults women more aggressively than men and publicly shares disturbing violent fantasies that would disqualify a person from the most menial job.
His bizarre lust for violence against innocent and vulnerable people has shown through in other ways. The policy of separating families arriving at the southern border of the United States to request asylum—a right guaranteed by both US and international law—was found to constitute torture by medical experts. Many will remember the horrific images of babies thrown on concrete floors in metal cages. There was evidence from White House meetings that the intent was to produce emotional trauma to terrorize people across the Americas.
He has also been found guilty of 34 felonies for an illegal manipulation of financial transfers intended to skirt campaign finance laws—effectively laundering money to influence the 2016 Presidential election. The range of tax-related and business fraud allegations against him is staggering. In a clear show of intent to corrupt abuse of the powers of public office, Trump told a gathering of fossil fuel exectives he would gut environmental protections if they gave him $1 billion.
We must not go back
The one resounding hallmark of the last nine years of American politics is the need to reiterate, time and time again, that Donald Trump is grossly unfit to hold public office. Trump continues to use overtly violent rhetoric; he continues to insinuate lethal violence should befall his critics. He does this because he has nothing of value to offer the American people — only the tired awful spectacle of his horrid self-obsession and vehement disdain for the rest of us.
Kamala Harris will be a President for all Americans. She will lead with dignity and grace; she will value evidence and truth; she will consult with people affected by policy and keep the needs and aspirations of real people top of mind. We know this, because this is what people she has served in public office say about her. She will be a servant leader for Trump voters and rural communities that opposed her, because that is the right thing to do for a democratic republic she loves and wants to see prosper.
Vote for Kamala Harris, because she will do what is right.
- Vote for Harris, so the United States and the rest of the world can begin to forget about the amoral horror show that is Donald Trump.
- Vote for Harris, because being free means putting the future of freedom above your own ideology and snap judgment.
- Vote for Harris, because the future you want for those you love depends on her winning this election and becoming the 47th President of the United States.
