Jeff Bezos is chickens**t, but we’re not; here’s our presidential endorsement

Last week, Pittsburgh Union Progress editors discussed whether our strike publication should endorse one of the two major presidential candidates.

We’d be following a hallowed tradition. Newspaper opinionators love to huddle in their offices for high-minded conversations about policy and politics. The goal is to sculpt an opinion out of whatever material is floating around in the writers’ giant brains. That opinion is later revealed in an editorial, or maybe a newspaper column that includes a picture of the smiling writer. (Why are newspaper employees smiling these days?!)

After publication, these pieces of wizened theorizing are entered in contests, and someone actually reads them. Once the contest judges wake up, they give the editorial writers a gold star. Thus spins the world of opinion journalism.

Of course we want to play this game. Who doesn’t want a gold star?

Then along came Jeff Bezos.

Bezos is brilliant. Because of him, we can order a 10-pound box of Tostitos, and someone will place that box on our front porch by noon tomorrow. This made Bezos a billionaire. Then he bought Whole Foods to secure our supply of cauliflower steaks and organic water. And to prove he’s a good guy who wouldn’t cut out his mother’s heart for a buck, he bought the Washington Post with the goal of making sure the lights were shining brightly when democracy croaks. Beleaguered journalists at sinking newspapers across the country yelped out garbled cheers. The mother ship has been saved!

Everything there seemed fine until a few weeks ago, when Bezos stuck his nose in the business of the Washington Post’s high-minded opinion sculptors. They’d planned to endorse Kamala Harris for president, but Bezos wasn’t having it. A Harris endorsement could anger the wrong person and cost money, right? Think about all those government contracts. Bezos claims money wasn’t the reason he nixed the endorsement, but we’re skeptical. The thing with billionaires is this: They really care about their billions.

A similar story played out at the Los Angeles Times, also owned by a skittish billionaire. We wondered, how many other, smaller news organizations have succumbed to such pressure?

That’s where we come into the picture. We don’t have a billionaire owner. We don’t even have a millionaire owner. There’s no one here to stomp into our nonexistent newsroom, hurl insults, wave his arms around and demand we keep our worker opinions to ourselves. There’s no one here even to pay us. So it falls on PUP to uphold the newspaper tradition of writing an endorsement everyone will ignore.

But who should we endorse? Hmmm. Let’s consider the events of last week. It started off with a professional yukster at a Trump event calling Puerto Rico a floating pile of garbage. Whooo boy! That rally was a doozy. Trump loyalists spewed all kinds of crazy stuff. They called Harris the devil, the Antichrist and a prostitute. This went on for something like four hours.

A few days later Joe Biden called Trump’s supporters “garbage.” This was stupid. Harris, meantime, has been remarkably disciplined. Judging by the reaction, though, Biden’s comment not only disqualifies Harris from ever holding public office, but also she should never be allowed to even go grocery shopping.

In response to Biden’s flub, Trump did a Gene Kelly two-step as he climbed into a garbage truck with “Trump” plastered on the side. We don’t need “The Simpsons” anymore — we have political campaigns. 

Presidential politics has, since 2016, devolved into a cartoon. We would laugh if it wasn’t so dangerous. When we heard Trump say a few days ago that people should point guns at Liz Cheney, we couldn’t take it anymore. It keeps getting worse.

What happens when people armed to the teeth become caught in an ever-escalating cycle of rage? What’s the endgame? What happens when a powerful country experiences a complete collapse of trust in its institutions and leaders? What happens when lies so dominate public and private discourse that common ground vanishes and even basic communication becomes impossible? What happens when people find no empathy for those outside of their own small select group?

Do the politicians and media folks fomenting this chaos have a plan to bring everyone back together at some point? Or are they just relishing the moment for some short-term gain and damn the consequences, someone else can clean up the mess and pay the bill?

As always, the United States has real problems. Our elected leaders are paid to solve them. But those problems are now a commodity with more value than solutions. Better to leave the wound open and rake in the support. Where does that leave us as citizens who have to deal with these problems every day?

We don’t want to be too dire. No matter who wins this race, good people will continue to do the necessary work of bringing our communities together, of reaching out to our most vulnerable citizens. Ethical people and organizations will continue to push back against corrupt officials and companies that damage our communities in their reckless pursuit of profits. Depending on the election’s outcome, however, that work may become much more difficult, and more urgent.

We’re two days from the election. We’ve heard all the TV commercials, all the pitches, all the promises. This isn’t our first election cycle; we know all about election promises. Only one phrase resonates with us: “Let’s turn the page.”

So here’s the line, if anyone is still reading: PUP is endorsing Kamala Harris for president.

It’s the only choice for us. We’re a publication produced by working people on strike — for more than two years, now — and the first Trump term was not good for working folks. (The Economic Policy Institute has the details.) We expect a second term would be worse.

But the big reason for our endorsement: The level of our dysfunction is getting out of hand. It’s going to kill our communities. And it’s happening because one person wants it that way. We can begin the long process of cooling down on Tuesday.

That’s our endorsement. Someone wake up and give us a gold star.