Biden is right to praise the auto strike. His climate agenda depends on it
Joe Biden had to choose a side in the United Auto Workers’ contract fight with the “big three” American automakers, and he did. This week, he became the first US president to walk a picket line while in office when he joined strikers in Belleville, Michigan, offering enthusiastic support for their demands. Biden should be thanking the UAW for handing him a golden opportunity: to prove that the green jobs his administration is creating will be good, union jobs, too, and that climate policy will bear dividends for the working class.
Republicans cosplaying solidarity have tried to exploit the strike to score cheap political points. As Republican presidential hopefuls debated this week, Donald Trump told a rally at a non-union plant in Michigan that the strike wouldn’t “make a damn bit of difference” because the car industry was “being assassinated” by “EV mandates”. (Whether there were any union members or even autoworkers in the room isn’t clear.) Ohio senator JD Vance has similarly blamed autoworkers’ plight on “the premature transition to electric vehicles” and “Biden’s war on American cars”.
These are cynical, false talking points from politicians who couldn’t care less about autoworkers – but they aren’t going away. (Although similar lines are old hat in the US, they’re finding new purchase in places like 10 Downing Street: Rishi Sunak, the British prime minister, has recently taken a “U-turn” on climate goals, citing “unacceptable costs” for “hard-working British people”.) Optimistically, the UAW strike could be a chance to dismantle the rightwing myth that reducing emissions hurts working people – not by pointing to the jobs that will trickle down from the bosses of the energy transition, but by standing with the unions fighting to make those jobs better.
Being willing to go on offense against automakers’ bad behavior is a great start and a big shift. The Biden administration has routinelypraised car manufacturers as climate heroes poised to decarbonize the country and create millions of middle-class jobs along the way, turning the industry into a sort of mascot for its climate agenda. “You changed the whole story, Mary,” Biden told General Motors’ chief executive, Mary Barra, a frequent White House guest, in 2021. “You electrified the entire automobile industry. I’m serious.”
White House climate policy will be good for Barra and her colleagues at the top. The business-side tax credits and government-backed loans furnished by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are already helping the big three retool factories to produce EVs and their component parts. The IRA’s consumer-side subsidies for American-made electric cars – worth up to $7,500 – will boost demand.
Yet no one should confuse companies taking advantage of tax breaks with a commitment to the climate fight. The big three lag well behind their competition in the US and abroad; federal incentives are helping them play catch-up. They’ve lobbied to undermine fuel efficiency and clean car standards, including through front groups like the Automotive Alliance. Like oil and gas companies, GM and Ford knew for decades that their products fueled climate change, and proceeded to double down on gas-guzzling models and political attacks on laws and regulations that might hem in their emissions. They still bankroll the campaigns of Republicans dead-set on stopping climate policy.
Neither is it a given that EV subsidies benefiting companies will benefit workers there, too. Automakers are already using electrification as an excuse to supercharge attempts to ship jobs to less union-friendly states, and split workers off from their master agreement with the big three.
Biden’s decision to join the strike would be remarkable on its own. Beyond the obvious symbolism, his presence there lends tangible material support to workers’ demands, handing the union leverage over companies that might otherwise reasonably assume he’d have their backs.
It could also usher in a broader shift in the way he and other Democrats talk about climate policy. Impressive as the IRA is, its most direct benefits accrue largely to companies and consumers with enough cash on hand to afford upfront payments for big-ticket items like solar panels and heat pumps. Like Bidenomics more generally, its goal isn’t to reduce emissions so much as to build out domestic supply chains for clean energy goods, making US companies less reliant on and more competitive against Chinese firms in sectors that will be increasingly important over the coming decades.
Targeting climate policy at corporations and affluent consumers doesn’t make a great counterargument to Republicans eager to frame it all as elitist virtue signaling, and win elections accordingly. What the Republican party can be reliably expected to do, though, is side with the bosses. That’s where even self-professed “car guy” Joe Biden might be able to set himself apart – by being willing to offend the automakers so that the rewards of America’s green industrial policy aren’t hoarded at the top.
Standing alongside Biden in Belleville this week, the UAW president, Shawn Fain, offered as good a framing for that approach as any. “This industry is of our making,” he said. “When we withhold our labor, we can unmake it. And as we’re going to continue to show: when we win this fight with the big three, we’re going to remake it.”
Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at the New Republic and the author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet – And How We Fight Back
GM and Ford knew for decades that their products fueled climate change, and proceeded to double down
his eldest sons of inflating the value of their business to defraud banks and insurers. Judge Engoron agreed, saying that financial statements submitted by Trump “clearly contain fraudulent valuations”. Among the 10 businesses listed as fraudulently overvalued are Trump Tower in Manhattan, Mar-aLago in Florida, and that golf club in Scotland.
An appeal will get under way. In the meantime, the judge took the unusual step of ordering Trump’s business certificates, without which he can’t operate, buy real estate or take out a loan in the state of New York, to be cancelled. There is some confusion about how this may play out in reality and there was no timeframe attached to the judgment. You can force closure on a golf club overnight, but you can’t evict tenants from Trump Tower and, if a caretaker authority is to be installed, who are tenants to pay rent to in the meantime?
And so the sick feeling returns, that familiar sense of euphoria as Trump’s end seems once again to hove into view, swiftly followed by plunging disappointment in case it’s a mirage. Trump’s lawyers called the ruling an effort to “nationalize” his business, while Trump popped up to call Judge Engoron “deranged”, something that won’t help him when the trial goes ahead, next week, to ascertain the size of the penalty (Letitia James is seeking $250m). In the meantime, let’s enjoy this brief period when we may, unfettered, imagine a future in which New York exists without Trump’s name stamped anywhere upon it.
It’s the toughest call of the week, but one we must make in the interests of fairness: if you had to – if there was a gun at your head – who would you choose, Dan Wootton or Laurence Fox? This is speculation courted by the gentlemen themselves, of course, who on Tuesday night opened the debate about sexual allure with a conversation on GB News about the relative attractiveness of a female journalist. “Who’d want to shag that?” said Fox and Wootton chuntered in amiable agreement.
In relation to the two men, then, let us consider that question. Laurence Fox, who looks like an unoccupied Scream mask or a wet towel hanging on a door knob, might, I guess, have some Inspector Lewis anecdotes to distract one from his more obvious shortcomings. Dan Wootton, who looks like a man who came second in X-Factor in 2005 and has been to some very dark places since then, reminds me, oddly, of a papier-mache head we made in primary school and that was discreetly put in a cupboard after we’d finished. Anyway, Dan might be less chatty than Fox, who is a very chatty Cathy, isn’t he, and that would be a mercy. Since their conversation on Tuesday night, both men have been suspended from GB News and Wootton has lost his column in MailOnline, and, honestly, between the two of them, I can’t make the call. You’d take the veil first, of course.
Wednesday
Held up against Wootton and Fox – they sound like a failed building society – Matt Hancock starts to look almost appealing. Well, not appealing, obviously, but sort of harmless, like a character Kenneth Grahame cut from Wind in the Willows for being too implausibly damp. On Wednesday, Hancock appeared on TV after submitting himself for money to the kind of grilling he has somehow evaded in more formal journalistic or committeeroom settings, in Channel 4’s SAS-based reality show, Who Dares Wins. Sweating gently, skin aglow, Hancock mumbled and fumbled through a line of tough questioning by a man pretending to be Liam Neeson in one of those kidnap movies.
“I fell in love with somebody ... and had to resign from government,” said Hancock, skipping a few key moments in his tenure as health secretary, and mistaking the mood of the British public post-pandemic to that of an audience watching Four Weddings and a Funeral. The SAS guy wasn’t buying it. “You think you’re gonna break the rules here, break the rules there. As far as I’m concerned, you showed weak leadership.” Then someone came in, put a bag over Hancock’s head and cemented his reputation as a man for whom no level of debasement is too great for the money.
Thursday
There are so many stories I love about Michael Gambon, whose death at the age of 82 was announced on Thursday. I love the one in which he took his friend, Terence Rigby, who was afraid of flying, up in a light aircraft and pretended to have a heart attack at the controls. I love the one in which he tampered with various scripts to troll pompous playwrights; and the one in which, when an American journalist asked him what he thought his character in Samuel Beckett’s, Eh Joe, who is silent throughout the play, was doing up on stage, replied “watching East Enders”.
My favourite Gambon story, however, is one he told years ago in the course of an interview. He found pomposity unbearable, possibly as a hangover from working with Laurence Olivier back in the day. At the Hayon-Wye literary festival once, Gambon found himself in the audience of what he described to me as a “quite heavy” talk by David Hare. During questions, Gambon raised his hand and, asked, archly, “David, in all your years in showbusiness, have you ever met Diana Rigg?” It brought the house down and Hare “was quite cross”, said Gambon. “Good question, wasn’t it? ‘Showbusiness’ – that would’ve hurt.”
Friday
Not enough praise has been directed towards Dannii Minogue, one of the few people who can hold her head high in relation to where she stood on Russell Brand 15 years ago. The sorts of people who loved Brand back then would, I suspect, not have loved Dannii Minogue, but here she is in 2006, talking to the Mirror and referring to Brand as a “vile predator” who made “shocking remarks that I can’t even repeat”. This position would’ve been considered embarrassingly unfun back then, but Dannii wasn’t having any of it. Discussing it with an Australian friend this week, she pointed out, correctly, that you can’t get one over a Minogue and in a vernacular, I never fail to find charming, mused, “Dannii’s told him to rack off.” Quite so.
miership that only offers more of the same unpalatable post-Thatcher remedies may not be sustainable for long.
There are intermittent signs that at least some of the shadow cabinet realise this. In recent weeks, Ed Miliband’s defence of Labour’s still relatively bold climate strategy, Angela Rayner’s promise of “a new deal for working people”, and Starmer’s surprisingly frank declaration that Labour “don’t want to diverge” from the EU on “environmental standards, standards for people that work, food standards and all the rest” have suggested that there are limits to how far the party will follow the Tories rightwards. It’s just possible that from such principles a new kind of Labourgovernment could be constructed: less deferential to the right and more confident about standing up for centre-left values and interests.
Then again, the current unpopularity in the US of Joe Biden’s administration, which is just such a centreleft project, and has had major legislative successes, shows the difficulty of remaking social democracy in a time of cynicism and crisis. Just because many voters have had enough of rightwing parties and policies, for the time being at least, does not mean that they will appreciate, or necessarily even notice, the achievements of busy governments of the centre-left. Like Biden, Starmer may govern in a volatile climate of high expectations, scepticism and general impatience.
Meanwhile, the Conservative party could reinvent itself once again. Powerful forces will seemingly always support it, whatever direction it takes. To an extent, its latest transformation is already under way. Throughout Sunak’s brief and underwhelming leadership, schemes to replace him after a general election defeat – or even before the election – have been evident wherever discontented Tories meet, in person, online or in print. Braverman’s attention-seeking speeches are only the most blatant example of this.
Right now, with the home secretary and her party held in such widespread contempt, it’s hard to envisage a rapid Conservative comeback. Nor is there much sign, yet, of the fresh Tory thinking that such revivals usually need. So the first attempt at creating the new kind of politics that many Britons are waiting, even yearning, for is likely to be made by a Starmer government.
But that change will need to begin quickly, while enough voters still give him the benefit of the doubt, and be presented much more appealingly than he has managed so far. Otherwise, his tenure may leave little trace. And then the right will get the chance to define Britain’s next political era, as it has defined so many before.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist