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Kamala Harris won the debate. People being bombed in Gaza did not.

 The banner headline across the top of the New York Times home page -- “Harris Puts Trump on Defensive in Fierce Debate” -- was accurate enough. But despite the good news for people understandably eager for Trump to be defeated, the Harris debate performance was a moral and political tragedy.

 In Gaza “now an estimated 40,000 Palestinians are dead,” an ABC News moderator said. “Nearly 100 hostages remain. . . . President Biden has not been able to break through the stalemate. How would you do it?”

One evening in early September 1964, a frightening commercial jolted 50 million Americans who were partway through watching “Monday Night at the Movies” on NBC. The ad began with an adorable three-year-old girl counting petals as she pulled them from a daisy. Then came a man’s somber voiceover, counting down from ten to zero. Then an ominous roar and a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb explosion.

 The one-minute TV spot reached its climax with audio from President Lyndon Johnson, concluding that “we must love each other, or we must die.” The ad did not mention his opponent in the upcoming election, Sen. Barry Goldwater, but it didn’t need to. By then, his cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons was well established.

Most of us believe in fair pay for honest work. So why aren’t low-wage workers better paid?

After 30 years of research, I can tell you it’s not because employers don’t have the cash. It’s because profitable corporations spend that money on their stock prices and CEOs instead.

Lowe’s, for example, spent $43 billion buying back its own stock over the past five years. With that sum, the chain could’ve given each of its 285,000 employees a $30,000 bonus every year. Instead, half of Lowe’s workers make less than $33,000. Meanwhile, CEO Marvin Ellison raked in $18 million in 2023.

The company also plowed nearly five times as much cash into buybacks as it invested in long-term capital expenditures like store improvements and technology upgrades over the past five years.

Lowe’s ranks as an extreme example, but pumping up CEO pay at the expense of workers and long-term investment is actually the norm among America’s leading low-wage corporations.

“He said, ‘Help me! Help me!’ and he stuck his hand inside his coat.  When I tried to help him, he pulls out a gun. That’s when he told me to get on the ground.”

Mark Anthony Aguirre, a vigilante vote-fraud hunter, ran an air-conditioning repair truck off the road. Then Aguirre put a gun to the repairman’s head—and demanded the driver, David Zuniga, open up the back of his truck. Aguirre believed that Zuniga was smuggling 750,000 forged absentee ballots, all “voting” for Biden, enough to win Texas.

Zuniga, rightly frightened for his life, opened the back of his A/C repair truck to reveal…A/C ducts and pipes. No forged ballots.
 
The gunman was not some lone crazy: In October 2020, he was paid a stunning $266,400 by a right-wing Texas billionaire, Steven Hotze, who had hired dozens of vigilantes in the hope of proving that Joe Biden was trying to steal the election by stuffing ballot boxes with forged ballots.
 
In Houston, I met with the man who supposedly forged these 750,000 ballots, Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis. Harris County is better known as Houston, Texas.