Texas wasted no time escalating its attacks on transgender people as the state GOP prefiled 32 anti-trans bills on the first day of the 2025 legislative session’s prefiling period. In recent years, Texas has become a hotbed for anti-trans legislation, with each session delivering harsher crackdowns. Last session alone, the state passed six anti-trans laws, including a criminal ban on drag…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In the wake of the election — THE ELECTION, in capital letters and with strong emphasis — I have read many insightful and thoughtful assessments of how we have arrived at the point where Donald Trump was re-elected. I highly recommend the recent scathing essay by my colleague at Marxism-Leninism Today, Chris Townsend, on the crying need for an alternative to the two-party charade and the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party as a representative for working people.
But for every good analysis, there are a dozen awful commentaries that ultimately blame the voters’ judgment or endorse their worst fears.
However, if pressed for a simple explanation of the election results, one might consider the following:
Once again, offered the odious, devil’s choice between two candidates who are rich, elitist, and completely detached from “ordinary” people, the US voter chose a candidate who was rich, elitist, and completely detached from the lives and interests of most people.
Of course, people want to know why the voters chose this particular rich elitist at this particular time. That question calls forth both a specific, practical response and a far deeper, concerning answer.
Polls and disregarded economic data show that most voters have a profoundly negative and often painful relationship with their economic status– they are not doing well. They typically punish incumbents when under economic distress. This should come as no surprise. But the highly paid consultants of both parties– with approaching two billion dollars to spend– chose to press many other issues as well and deal with the economy only superficially.
But in the end, exit polls show that economic distress played a decisive role in shaping voters’ choices. Apparently, the pundits forgot how persistent, value-sucking inflation led to the election of Ronald Reagan forty-four years ago.
Again, like today, the 1970s were a period of realignment. The Democrats had lost the South to the Republicans over desegregation and the Civil Rights legislation. After the Nixonian scandals associated with the Watergate burglaries and other dirty tricks, the Democrats won over suburbanites disgusted with Republican chicaneries– a demographic thought by many functionaries to be the needed replacement for the lost South.
In 1976, the Democrats swept in with a squeaky-clean, untarnished candidate, James Carter. With the decade-long stagflation coming to a climax, the Carter regime was short-lived; despite a rightward turn on his part, Carter was beaten by an ultra-right movie star turned politician, Ronald Reagan. Reagan was the default choice for voters wanting change after a lost decade.
For those who like their history repeating from tragedy to farce, consider the transition from the self-righteous old red-baiter, Ronald Reagan, to the pompous, supercilious windbag, Donald Trump. History has a wicked sense of humor.
Few pundits acknowledge that Democratic Party strategists decided in the 1980s that the future of the party would be determined by the interests and concerns of metropolitan voters, especially those in the suburban upper-middle stratum who were “super voters,” economically secure, and attuned to lifestyle and identity liberalism. While they represented the legacy of “white flight,” the suburbanites contradictorily espoused the urbanity of tolerance and personal choice.
Coincident with the embrace of the suburban vote, Democratic Party strategists saw no need to attend to past central components of their coalition: the working class and multi-class Blacks. Loyal union leaders would corral the working-class vote and ascendant Black leaders would rally African Americans of all classes.
Besides, it was believed that neither had any other place to go besides the Democratic Party.
Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, revealed this thinking in 2016, when he said: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Even before that careless remark, both Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama– in moments of candor– revealed their contempt for working people outside of the metropolis.
This election stamped “paid” on this program, with nearly all the assumed components of the Democratic coalition drifting towards the Republicans.
The always insightful Adam Tooze, writing in The London Review of Books, concludes that the Democratic Party failings demonstrate “the high-achieving, insincere, vacuous incoherence that thrives at the top of the American political class.”
There is, however, a far deeper explanation of the Trump phenomenon seldom mentioned by mainstream commentators. Those who cite the specific issues of abortion rights, immigration, trans rights, crime, racism, etc.– issues that indeed played a role in the November election– neglect the fact that Trumpism is part of an international trend that infects the politics of such far-flung countries as India, Japan, and Argentina, as well as many European countries for often vastly different reasons. The rise of right populism in virtually all European countries– Orban’s Hungary, Meloni’s Italy, RN in France, AfD in Germany, Vox in Spain, Chega in Portugal, and similar parties in virtually every other European country– share one defining feature with the politics of India’s Modi and Argentina’s Milei: a rejection of centrist, traditional parties.
Right populism rises as a response to the ineffectiveness of the politics of normality. It reflects the dissatisfaction with business as usual.
For hundreds of millions throughout the world, the twenty-first century has brought a series of crises eroding, even destroying their quality of life. Ruling classes have stubbornly refused to address these crises through the indifference of traditional bourgeois political parties. Voters have punished these parties by turning to opportunist right-populist formations that promise to give voice to their anger. Of course, this often takes the form of ugly, reprehensible claims and slogans– appealing to the basest of motives.
But it is not enough to denounce these backward policies without addressing the desperation that unfortunately popularizes those policies. It is not helpful to righteously raise the alarm of “fascism” if we fail to offer an alternative that will answer the hopelessness and misery that serves as the fertile soil for reaction.
From the tragedy of the Reagan election to the farce of the Trump re-election, we have suffered from two sham parties taking turns representing the “people,” while neither did. Isn’t it time for an independent people’s party– a party of the working class majority– that addresses the twenty-first century economic crises and their aftermath, the acute environmental crisis, the broken public health and health care systems, the insidious impoverishment of inflation, the crumbling infrastructure, and a host of other urgent demands, a party dedicated to serving the working people of the US and not its wealthy and powerful?
The post Some Thoughts on THE ELECTION first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Lawmakers in the House are once again moving to pass a dangerous bill, nicknamed the “nonprofit killer” by opponents, that would give Donald Trump and future presidents wide leeway to attack nonprofit groups that the presidential administration views as ideological foes. The bill, H.R. 9495, is slated for a markup in committee on Monday that will likely be followed by a floor vote requiring a…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Though the election of Donald Trump has loomed over this month’s United Nations climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, Biden administration officials and prominent Democrats have given speech after speech pledging that the nation’s transition to renewable energy will continue. White House representatives have touted the economic benefits of the billions of dollars in climate-related subsidies in Biden’…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In a campaign plan released last year, President-elect Trump pledged that his administration would “stop the wave of frivolous litigation from environmental extremists.” That’s a reference to the dozens of state and local governments fighting to put Exxon and other oil companies on trial for spreading disinformation about their products’ harm to the climate. The first of those lawsuits were…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
It’s been a strange month for transgender political activists in the U.S., as the nation has witnessed a presidential election result with potentially dire consequences for trans rights, but also a number of surprising and historic political wins, including the election of the first-ever openly transgender member of Congress, Democrat Sarah McBride in Delaware. While much of the focus has…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Newsweek forecasted Donald Trump’s eventual victory. Its Nov 05, 2024 at 12:06 PM EST headline, “Kamala Harris Predicted to Win By Nearly Every Major Forecaster,” told the story.
As polls open, Vice President Kamala Harris is predicted to win the election by almost every major forecaster. Nate Silver’s latest forecast now gives Harris a slight edge in the Electoral College, projecting her with a 50 percent chance of victory compared to former President Donald Trump’s 49.6 percent. The model shows Harris securing 271 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 267.
Other aggregators echo the close race but similarly give Harris a small advantage. FiveThirtyEight currently projects her with a 50 percent chance of winning, forecasting 270 Electoral College votes for Harris to Trump’s 268.
Meanwhile, U.K. newspaper The Economist predicts that Harris will win 276 votes to Trump’s 262—a scenario also reflected by forecaster Larry Sabato, whose Race to the White House predicts she will win 275 electoral votes.
Just factor in that the polls, which also showed the race would be one of the closest in modern history, have been consistently wrong. After two previous elections, those reading the tea leaves should know that a portion of Trump supporters will not publicly admit they are goings to vote for the once convicted, twice impeached, and three times remaining defendant?
Plenty of afterthoughts of why Harris lost the election. Blame Biden for leaving the race too late. Blame inflation. Blame Harris remaining attached to Biden. Blame Harris remaining unknown. There is nobody to blame, and it’s best to look elsewhere. Caring, clean living, and people loving Vice President Harris had no chance against an electorate disillusioned with an outdated liberalism, and to the rough and tumble campaign of a notorious truth disabler.
The resurrected President of the United States (POTUS), Donald Trump, was the perfect candidate for a new Republican Party. The GOP drew voters who felt the Democrats had given excessive attention to identity politics and issues that did not favor the white working class — welfare state, international trade agreements, foreign interventions, human rights, minority rights, LGBT rights, immigration rights, gun rights, climate change, export of democracy, and diverse civil society. The caring programs of the Democrat Party no longer sat well with a non-caring public. Programs had become a repetitious sounding for attracting identity politics constituents, while offering no solutions to the problems. Despite the promises and the rhetoric, Fentanyl distribution, gun proliferation, and climate change continue and remain killers. African-American rights, LJBT rights and immigrant rights remain significant problems. The contrast between Democratic Party strong rhetoric and weak accomplishment bothered voters and left them with an impression of Democrats being hypocrites. Candidate Harris’ flipping on several issues, especially fracking, strengthened the hypocrisy charge.
The Republicans combined the marginal and disaffected voters with a candidate who favored Republican agendas of low taxes, deregulation, corporate protection, and increased isolation from foreign interventions. Mostly, they had a candidate who knew the American pulse and knew how to win. Together with Trump and his cohorts, Republicans established a political arrangement that was poised for victory. Salivating and exhilarating, they needed to find a few more votes to assure triumph ─ ballots signed by an uncommitted electorate that usually voted Democrat. The solution came from the Democrat strategists who championed Kamala Harris for Vice President in the 2020 election. By not considering the probability that Joe Biden would be unable to finish his term or stand for reelection, the Democrats failed to recognize they needed a vice-president who had more credentials and name recognition than Kamala Harris, and had the ability to serve as an heir to Joe Biden. Nor is it a coincidence that Trump defeated women candidates and not male candidates in his three election experiences. The sexist electorate is still not willing to have a female defeat a New York cowboy.
Remaining for all to ponder is, “How much did administration subservience to Israel and its military assistance that enabled the genocide contribute to the Democrat defeat? Accompanying the hypocrisy of liberal policies that promised everything and never fulfilled their purposes were larger hypocrisies that infuriated a part of the electorate.
The United States faces a political system in which its major political Party has lost much of its reason to exist and much of its constituency to maintain its existence. U.S. citizens face a government that is poised to operate from personal directives and eschew the trappings of government. The American people are faced with larger challenges, — demonstrating humanity and remaining human while their government protects the inhuman Israelis and allows them to destroy human existence in Gaza. How much longer will nationalist Americans permit a foreign Zionist lobby to control the mechanisms of their government? How much longer will humane Americans permit its government to sponsor genocide?
Chillingly, the 2024 Democratic Party resembles the Social Democratic Party of the Weimar Republic, which clung to government power until replaced by the Nazi Party in 1933.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
—James Madison
Power corrupts.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom, but concentrated power across all three branches is the very definition of tyranny: a dictatorship disguised as democracy.
When one party dominates all three branches of government—the executive, the legislative, and the judicial—there is even more reason to worry.
There’s no point debating which political party would be more dangerous with these powers.
This is true no matter which party is in power.
This is particularly true in the wake of the 2024 election.
Already, Donald Trump, who promised to be a dictator on “day one,” is advancing plans to further undermine the nation’s already vulnerable system of checks and balances.
To be fair, this is not a state of affairs that can be blamed exclusively on Trump.
America’s founders intended our system of checks and balances to serve as a bulwark against centralized power being abused.
As constitutional scholar Linda Monk explains, “Within the separation of powers, each of the three branches of government has ‘checks and balances’ over the other two. For instance, Congress makes the laws, but the President can veto them, and the Supreme Court can declare them unconstitutional. The President enforces the law, but Congress must approve executive appointments and the Supreme Court rules whether executive action is constitutional. The Supreme Court can strike down actions by both the legislative and executive branches, but the President nominates Supreme Court justices, and the Senate confirms or denies their nominations.”
Unfortunately, our system of checks and balances has been strained to the breaking point for years now, helped along by those across the political spectrum who, in marching in lockstep with the Deep State, have conspired to advance the government’s agenda at the expense of the citizenry’s constitutional rights.
By “government,” I’m not referring to the farce that is the highly partisan, two-party, bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.
This is exactly the kind of concentrated, absolute power the founders attempted to guard against by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches.
Yet as law professor William P. Marshall concludes, “The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance. The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”
The outcome of the 2024 elections is not a revolutionary bid to recalibrate a government run amok. Rather, this is a Deep State coup to stay in power, and Donald Trump is the vehicle by which it will do so.
Watch and see.
Remember, it was the Trump Administration that asked Congress to allow it to suspend parts of the Constitution whenever it deemed it necessary during the COVID-19 pandemic and “other” emergencies.
In fact, during Trump’s first term, the Department of Justice quietly trotted out and tested a long laundry list of terrifying powers to override the Constitution. We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die…
Bear in mind, however, that these powers the Trump Administration, acting on orders from the police state, officially asked Congress to recognize and authorize barely scratch the surface of the far-reaching powers the government has unilaterally claimed for itself.
Unofficially, the police state has been riding roughshod over the rule of law for years now without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts, the president, or the citizenry.
This is why the Constitution’s system of checks and balances is so critical.
Those who wrote our Constitution sought to ensure our freedoms by creating a document that protects our God-given rights at all times, even when we are engaged in war, whether that is a so-called war on terrorism, a so-called war on drugs, a so-called war on illegal immigration, or a so-called war on disease.
The attempts by each successive presidential administration to rule by fiat merely plays into the hands of those who would distort the government’s system of checks and balances and its constitutional separation of powers beyond all recognition.
In this way, we have arrived at the dystopian future depicted in the film V for Vendetta, which is no future at all.
Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta (written and produced by the Wachowskis) provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a totalitarian government that knows all, sees all, controls everything, and promises safety and security above all comes to power by capitalizing on the people’s fear.
Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) are established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.
In V for Vendetta, as in my novel The Erik Blair Diaries, the subtext is that authoritarian regimes—through a vicious cycle of manipulation, oppression and fear-mongering—foment violence, manufacture crises, and breed terrorists, thereby giving rise to a recurring cycle of blowback and violence.
Only when the government itself becomes synonymous with the terrorism wreaking havoc in their lives do the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny.
V, a bold, charismatic freedom fighter, urges the British people to rise up and resist the government. In Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, ironically enough the same day that Trump won his landslide return to the White House.
Yet there the comparison ends.
So, while we are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs, this year’s electoral victory for Republicans was no win for the Constitution.
Rather, it was a win for the very entrenched, hawkish, establishment power structure that has exhibited no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the Deep State works best through imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—who rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.
The post The Very Definition of Tyranny: A Dictatorship Disguised as Democracy first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
When Trump was elected in 2016, the ACLU’s website featured a photo of him and the words “We’ll See You in Court.” They also rolled out an online campaign asking people to take an oath pledging to defend the Constitution (no specifics about how to do that). It was a pivotal moment — so many people were newly afraid and angry, mobilizable — yet liberal organizations like the ACLU were…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
COMMENTARY: By Patrick Gathara
Anger and fear have greeted the return to power of former US strongman Donald Trump, a corrupt far-white extremist coup plotter who is also a convicted felon and rapist, following this week’s shock presidential election result.
Ethnic tensions have been on the rise with members of the historically oppressed minority Black ethnic group reporting receiving threatening text messages, warning of a return to an era of enslavement.
In a startling editorial, the tension-wracked country’s paper of record, The New York Times, declared that the country had made “a perilous choice” and that its fragile democracy was now on “a precarious course”.
President-elect Trump’s victory marks the second time in eight years the extremist leader, who is awaiting sentencing after being convicted of using campaign funds to pay off a porn star he had cheated on his wife with, has defeated a female opponent from the ruling Democratic Party.
Women continue to struggle to reach the highest office in the deeply conservative nation where their rights are increasingly under attack and child marriage is widespread.
This has prompted traumatised supporters of Vice-President Kamala Harris, who had been handpicked to replace the unpopular, ageing incumbent, Joe Biden, to accuse American voters of racism to sexism.
“It’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from Black . . . who do not want a woman leading them,” insisted one TV anchor, adding that there “might be race issues with Hispanics that don’t want a Black woman as president of the United States.”
Hateful tribal rhetoric
The hateful tribal rhetoric has also included social media posts calling for any people of mixed race who failed to vote for Harris to be deported and for intensification of the genocide in Gaza due to Arab-American rejection of Harris over her support for the continued provision of weapons to the brutal apartheid state committing it.
America Makes a Perilous Choice https://t.co/sKW5ZZa3Q3
— Xandre Rodríguez (@xandrerodriguez) November 6, 2024
“Victory has many fathers but defeat is an orphan,” goes the saying popularised by former US President John F Kennedy, who was shot 61 years ago this month.
The reluctance to attribute the loss to the grave and gratuitous missteps made by the Harris campaign has mystified America-watchers around the world.
As an example, analysts point to her wholesale embrace of the Biden regime’s genocidal policy in the Middle East despite opinion polls showing that it was alienating voters.
Harris and her supporters had tried to counter that by claiming that Trump would also be genocidal and that she would ameliorate the pain of bereaved families in the US by lowering the price of groceries.
However, the election results showed that this was not a message voters appreciated. “Genocide is bad politics,” said one Arab-American activist.
Worried over democracy
As the scale of the extremists’ electoral win becomes increasingly clear, having taken control of not just the presidency but the upper house of Congress as well, many are worried about the prospects for democracy in the US which is still struggling to emerge from Trump’s first term.
Despite conceding defeat, Harris has pledged to continue to “wage this fight” even as pro-democracy protests have broken out in several cities, raising fears of violence and political uncertainty in the gun-strewn country.
This could imperil stability in North America and sub-Scandinavian Europe where a Caucasian Spring democratic revolution has failed to take hold, and a plethora of white-wing authoritarian populists have instead come to power across the region.
However, there is a silver lining. The elections themselves were a massive improvement over the chaotic and shambolic, disputed November 2020 presidential polls which paved the way for a failed putsch two months later.
This time, the voting was largely peaceful and there was relatively little delay in releasing results, a remarkable achievement for the numeracy-challenged nation where conspiracy theorists remain suspicious about the Islamic origins of mathematics, seeing it is as a ploy by the terror group “Al Jibra” to introduce Sharia Law to the US.
In the coming months and years, there will be a need for the international community to stay engaged with the US and assist the country to try and undertake much-needed reforms to its electoral and governance systems, including changes to its constitution.
During the campaigns, Harris loyalists warned that a win by Trump could lead to the complete gutting of its weak democratic systems, an outcome the world must work hard to avoid.
However, figuring out how to support reform in the US and engage with a Trump regime while not being seen to legitimise the election of a man convicted of serious crimes, will be a tricky challenge for the globe’s mature Third-World democracies.
Many may be forced to limit direct contact with him. “Choices have consequences,” as a US diplomat eloquently put it 11 years ago.
Patrick Gathara is a Kenyan journalist, cartoonist, blogger and author. He is also senior editor for inclusive storytelling at The New Humanitarian. This article was first published by Al Jazeera and is republished under Creative Commons.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Trump has remade Americans, and to defeat Trumpism requires nothing less than the left doing the same.
This post was originally published on Dissent Magazine.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: As we continue to look at Donald Trump’s return to the White House, we turn now to look at what it means for the world, from Israel’s war on Gaza to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. During his victory speech, Trump vowed that he was going to “stop wars”.
But what will Trump’s foreign policy actually look like?
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Fatima Bhutto, award-winning author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Runaways, New Kings of the World. She is co-editing a book along with Sonia Faleiro titled Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, due out next year. She writes a monthly column for Zeteo.
Start off by just responding to Trump’s runaway victory across the United States, Fatima.
Fatima Bhutto on the Kamala Harris “support for genocide”. Video: Democracy Now!
FATIMA BHUTTO: Well, Amy, I don’t think it’s an aberration that he won. I think it’s an aberration that he lost in 2020. And I think anyone looking at the American elections for the last year, even longer, could see very clearly that the Democrats were speaking to — I’m not sure who, to a hall of mirrors.
They ran an incredibly weak and actually macabre campaign, to see Kamala Harris describe her politics as one of joy as she promised the most lethal military in the world, talking about women’s rights in America, essentially focusing those rights on the right to termination, while the rest of the world has watched women slaughtered in Gaza for 13 months straight.
You know, it’s very curious to think that they thought a winning strategy was Beyoncé and that Taylor Swift was somehow a political winning strategy that was going to defeat — who? — Trump, who was speaking to people, who was speaking against wars. You know, whether we believe him or not, it was a marked difference from what Kamala Harris was saying and was not saying.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Fatima, you wrote a piece for Zeteo earlier this year titled “Gaza Has Exposed the Shameful Hypocrisy of Western Feminism.” So, you just mentioned the irony of Kamala Harris as, you know, the second presidential candidate who is a woman, where so much of the campaign was about women, and the fact that — you know, of what’s been unfolding on women, against women and children in Gaza for the last year. If you could elaborate?
FATIMA BHUTTO: Yeah, we’ve seen, Nermeen, over the last year, you know, 70 percent of those slaughtered in Gaza by Israel and, let’s also be clear, by America, because it’s American bombs and American diplomatic cover that allows this slaughter to continue unabated — 70 percent of those victims are women and children.
We have watched children with their heads blown off. We have watched children with no surviving family members find themselves in hospital with limbs missing. Gaza has the largest cohort of child amputees in the world. And we have seen newborns left to die as Israel switches off electricity and fuel of hospitals.
So, for Kamala Harris to come out and talk repeatedly about abortion, and I say this as someone who is pro-choice, who has always been pro-choice, was not just macabre, but it’s obscene. It’s an absolute betrayal of feminism, because feminism is about liberation. It’s not about termination.
And it’s about protecting women at their most vulnerable and at their most frightened. And there was no sign of that. You know, we also saw Kamala Harris bring out celebrities. I mean, the utter vacuousness of bringing out Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé and others to talk about being a mother, while mothers are being widowed, are being orphaned in Gaza, it was not just tone deaf, it seemed to have a certain hostility, a certain contempt for the suffering that the rest of us have been watching.
I’d also like to add a point about toxic masculinity. There was so much toxicity in Kamala Harris’s campaign. You know, I watched her laugh with Oprah as she spoke about shooting someone who might enter her house with a gun, and giggling and saying her PR team may not like that, but she would kill them.
You don’t need to be a man to practice toxic masculinity, and you don’t need to be white to practice white supremacy, as we’ve seen very clearly from this election cycle.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, Fatima Bhutto, if you look at what Trump represented, and certainly the Muslim American community, the Arab American community, Jewish progressives, young people, African-Americans certainly understood what Trump’s policy was when he was president.
And it’s rare, you know, a president comes back to serve again after a term away. It’s only happened once before in history.
But you have, for example, Trump moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem. You have an illegal settlement named after Trump in the West Bank. The whole question of Netanyahu and his right-wing allies in Israel pushing for annexation of the West Bank, where Trump would stand on this.
And, of course, you have the Abraham Accords, which many Palestinians felt left them out completely. If you can talk about this? These were put forward by Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who, when the massive Gaza destruction was at its height, talked about Gaza as waterfront real estate.
FATIMA BHUTTO: Absolutely. There’s no question that Trump has been a malign force, not just when it concerns Palestinians, but, frankly, out in the world. But I would argue there’s not very much difference between what these two administrations or parties do. The difference is that Trump doesn’t have the gloss and the charisma of an Obama or — I mean, I can’t even say that Biden has charisma, but certainly the gloss.
Trump says it. They do it. The difference — I can’t really tell the difference anymore.
We saw the Biden administration send over 500 shipments of arms to Israel, betraying America’s own laws, the fact that they are not allowed to export weapons of war to a country committing gross violations of human rights. We saw Bill Clinton trotted out in Michigan to tell Muslims that, actually, they should stop killing Israelis and that Jews were there before them.
I mean, it was an utterly contemptuous speech. So, what is the difference exactly?
We saw Bernie Sanders, who was mentioned earlier, write an op-ed in The Guardian in the days before the election, warning people that if they were not to vote for Kamala Harris, if Donald Trump was to get in, think about the climate crisis. Well, we have watched Israel’s emissions in the first five months of their deadly attack on Gaza release more planet-warming gases into the atmosphere than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations release in a year.
So, I don’t quite see that there’s a difference between what Democrats allow and what Trump brags about. I think it’s just a question of crudeness and decorum and politeness. One has it, and one doesn’t. In a sense, Trump is much clearer for the rest of the world, because he says what he’s going to do, and, you know, you take him at his word, whereas we have been gaslit and lied to by Antony Blinken on a daily basis now since October 7th.
Every time that AOC or Kamala Harris spoke about fighting desperately for a ceasefire, we saw more carnage, more massacres and Israel committing crimes with total impunity. You know, it wasn’t under Trump that Israel has killed more journalists than have ever been killed in any recorded conflict. It’s under Biden that Israel has killed more UN workers than have ever been killed in the UN’s history. So, I’m not sure there’s a difference.
And, you know, we’ll have to wait to see in the months ahead. But I don’t think anyone is bracing for an upturn. Certainly, people didn’t vote for Kamala Harris. I’m not sure they voted for Trump. We know that she lost 14 million votes from Biden’s win in 2020. And we know that those votes just didn’t come out for the Democrats. Some may have migrated to Trump. Some may have gone to third parties. But 14 million just didn’t go anywhere.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Fatima, if you could, you know, tell us what do you think the reasons are for that? I mean, the kind of — as you said, because it is really horrifying, what has unfolded in Gaza in the last 13 months. You’ve written about this. You now have an edited anthology that you’re editing, co-editing. You know, what do you think accounts for this, the sheer disregard for the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza?
FATIMA BHUTTO: It’s a total racism on the part not just of America, but I’m speaking of the West here. This has been betrayed over the last year, the fact that Ukraine is spoken about with an admiration, you know, Zelensky is spoken about with a sort of hero worship, Ukrainian resisters to Russia’s invasion are valorised.
You know, Nancy Pelosi wore a bracelet of bullets used by the Ukrainian resistance against Trump [sic]. But Palestinians are painted as terrorists, are dehumanised to such an extent. You know, we saw that dehumanisation from the mouths of Bill Clinton no less, from the mouths of Kamala Harris, who interrupted somebody speaking out against the genocide, and saying, “I am speaking.”
What is more toxically masculine than that?
We’ve also seen a concerted crackdown in universities across the United States on college students. I’m speaking also here of my own alma mater of Columbia University, of Barnard College, that called the NYPD, who fired live ammunition at the students. You know, this didn’t happen — this extreme response didn’t happen in protests against apartheid. It didn’t happen in protests against Vietnam in quite the same way.
And all I can think is, America and the West, who have been fighting Muslim countries for the last 25, 30 years, see that as acceptable to do so. Our deaths are acceptable to them, and genocide is not a red line.
And, you know, to go back to what what was mentioned earlier about the working class, that is absolutely ignored in America — and I would make the argument across the West, too — they have watched administration after, you know, president and congressmen give billions and billions of dollars to Ukraine, while they have no relief at home.
They have no relief from debt. They have no relief from student debt. They have no medical care, no coverage. They’re struggling to survive. And this is across the board. And after Ukraine, they saw billions go to Israel in the same way, while they get, frankly, nothing.
AMY GOODMAN: Fatima Bhutto, we want to thank you so much for being with us, award-winning author of a number of works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Runaways and New Kings of the World, co-editing a book called Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, due out next year, writes a monthly column for Zeteo.
Coming up, we look at Trump’s vow to deport as many as 20 million immigrants and JD Vance saying, yes, US children born of immigrant parents could also be deported.
Republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The chickens that the Democrats hatched in 2016 came home to roost in 2024. Back then, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), representing the party’s establishment, promoted Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. They thought him to be an easy mark who would be opposed by both the Republican Party establishment and most US voters.
That stratagem turned out to be correct about the Republican establishment but wrong about the electorate. In any case, Trump went on to not only capture the GOP but the archaic Electoral College as well.
The DNC reprised that strategy with the same suicidal results this year, putting all their deplorable eggs into the one basket of running on a platform of “not-Trump.”
Trump campaigned on the gambit of asking whether Americans felt they were better off now after four years of Joe Biden. The populace roared back a resounding “NO.” Pitching to a disaffected and dispossessed citizenry, he threw them reactionary red meat, scapegoating immigrants and others.
Kamala Harris flew the blue banner but her woke message that she was “not Trump” was less convincing. A red tsunami has swept the Democrats not only out of the White House but congress and many governorships. Trump is on track to win the popular vote.
This “triumph of the swill,” borrowing from the Dead Kennedys, will have consequences for the Supreme Court and the larger makeup of the US politics going into the future. MAGA has now firmly infected the body politic and threatens to metastasize. Hillary Clinton’s smug words in 2016, “Trump is the gift that keeps on giving,” turned out to be unintentionally prescient.
Would it have been any different had the DNC not rigged the 2016 presidential nomination for establishment candidate Clinton by sabotaging Bernie Sanders, who campaigned on issues of empowerment and economic benefit that also appealed to Trump voters? For them, the fear that Sanders could activate and organize genuine grassroots discontent into a social movement was greater than the risk of a Trump presidency.
But the faux independent senator from Vermont had a fatal flaw – “though shalt not do anything that harms the Democratic Party.” This was all the DNC needed to crush his campaign. His “Our Revolution” was domesticated, while Bernie shepherded progressives into the big blue tent.
Green Party campaign manager Jason Call, speaking personally on election night, said it was better to vote for a third party candidate who was opposed to the genocide in Palestine. Even if one accepts the bogus argument that doing so throws the election to Trump, in the larger picture, that would still be preferable to telling the Democrats, who are the party in power, that their conduct is acceptable.
Democratic Party supporters, of course, disagree. They claim that Trump is even more pro-Zionist than their candidate, which may be true. Although today the Democratic Party is arguably the leading war party, we will have cold comfort with the Republicans in power. And domestically the Democrats spout a better line on some social wedge issues that don’t threaten elite rule, such as women’s reproductive rights, although their walk is not as good as their talk.
Yes, things will get worse under Trump. But things would also get worse under Harris. This is because the entire political discourse has been staggering to the right regardless of which wing of the duopoly is in power.
In contrast, the voting public is well to the left of them on almost every issue, from universal public healthcare to opposition to endless war. By any objective measure, Jill Stein’s Green Party campaign was middle of the road compared to her corporate party competitors.
The lesser-evil voting strategy itself bears some degree of responsibility for this reactionary tide. By unconditionally supporting the Democrats, progressive-leaning voters become a captured constituency to be ignored. They incentivize the Democrats to scurry even further to the right to try to pick up the votes of the undecided and to further cater to the class interests of their corporate funders.
Wednesday morning quarterbacks (election day is on Tuesday) are saying that the Democrats should have given more emphasis in their campaign messaging to economic issues affecting working people. This ignores the fact that Harris, and Biden before her, had claimed that they had turned the economy around.
The debate on how much better the post-Covid economy is and who benefited leads to a deeper question. The current incarnation of capitalism, what is popularly called “neoliberalism,” has failed to meet the material needs of working people. This structural problem, not simply a question of policy, begs for another economic model.
The now manifest failure of the Democrats to offer a platform beyond “not Trump” exposes their bankruptcy. They do not even pretend to have an agenda to address the underlying economic distress, because the limits of the economic system that they embrace provides no succor.
In fact, neither of the major parties offer an alternative to neoliberalism. Both duopoly wings tend to campaign on cultural rather than substantive economic issues precisely because neither have solutions to the erosion of the quality of life for most citizens.
The Republican’s capitalized on popular discontent with the incumbents. But come the mid-term elections in two years, the tables will be turned. This drama is being played out abroad with social democrats getting the boot in places like Argentina and Austria, part of a larger blowback filling the sails of an international far-right insurgence.
A major left-liberal concern is the supposed imminent threat of fascism. Their fear is focused on Trump’s dysfunctionality and his “deplorable” working class minions; not on the security apparatus of the state, which they have learned to love. However, fascism is not a personality disorder. The ruling class – whether its nominal head wears a red or blue hat – has no reason to impose a fascist dictatorship as long as people embrace rather than oppose the security state.
The New York Times reported: “US stocks, the value of the dollar, and yields on Treasury bonds all recorded gains as Mr. Trump’s victory became clear.” That is good for the ruling class but not so much for the rest of us.
Lesser-evil voting contributes to the rightward trajectory of US politics at this time when structural change is needed. Absent a third-party alternative, the two-party duopoly doesn’t even recognize existential threats, such as global warming or nuclear annihilation, let alone address them.
Meanwhile, the US military launched a test hypersonic nuclear missile right after the polls closed on November 5. The scariest thing about their “reassurance” to the American public regarding this practice run for World War III was that it was “routine.”
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
They attribute the famous quote ‘Let them eat cake’ to Marie Antoinette, Queen Consort of King Louis XIV of France. Apparently, she was told that the peasants did not have enough bread to eat. Her retort Let them eat cake, famous for all the Super Rich throughout history (and right smack dab into our present USA), shows the utter arrogance, indifference and lack of empathy for most of our low and middle income working stiffs. Last night’s disgraceful vote results to allow Trump back into power reveal just how far down the rabbit hole of immorality our nation has fallen! Why did this happen? The orchestrators of this scam called a ‘Two Party System’ have done a deed of no return towards our republic. Notice how I refuse to call what we have a democracy. To this writer a true democracy is when state power is vested in the people or the general population of that state. Sadly, what we have here in Amerika is moneyed interests AKA The Super Rich that control the ‘What and How’ people think.
One part of this scam calls itself Republicans or recently MAGA. They flood the media with half truths and outright lies to frighten the suckers… sorry, the voters. Fentanyl carrying illegal aliens AKA Brown skinned Latinos who wish to rob and rape our beautiful lily white women. Schools that groom little boys into becoming little girls. Librarians who stack those shelves with books promoting such behavior, along with anti white anger about not too important things like, duh, slavery. The other party, to these wonderful patriots, is nothing more than a bunch of Marxists and out and out Communists. Wow!
The equally reprehensible other half of the scam is the Democratic Party, once the party of FDR and progressive ideas. Not anymore. They have their own sponsors AKA donors who keep them on track to be ‘not so terrible’ as the other party. They say how terrible they feel for the low income and middle class as the Military Industrial Empire they too serve turns the screws. When it comes to issues like abortion rights and gay rights the Democrats are spot on. When it comes to workers and renters becoming Serfs in this new feudal miss mush they remain silent. Many times they actually agree on the basic crime of privatization of public means and services along with the party opposite. Isn’t democracy great?
Trump won because of a few main factors. Factor one is that most of the whites who voted for him just don’t like having blacks and browns living near them or attending school with their kids. Let’s just call a spade a spade, if you get my humor? Factor two is that his populist rhetoric received a warm reception, especially with so many working class whites who don’t have a pot to piss in. Imagine how he sold the illusion that HE was against the evil DEEP STATE, a place that he has made his home for his entire career! As this corporate empire keeps swallowing working stiffs up, one wonders how many MAGA non union workers (less than 10% of the private sector) will go to bed still thanking the Lord for Trump. Factor three are the millions of evangelical types (you know, the ones who think they own Jesus) who see abortion and LBGTQ as the first and second deadliest sins.
My query to all those seniors who voted for Trump and his party: When and If you become feeble and infirmed and need a nursing home, after the consistent cuts to Medicaid, will you have the $20k per MONTH to cover that cost? What if this new ‘Trump will fix it’ government decides to cut your Social Security and adds to your Medicare contribution? How about my query to those women who follow the leader Trump and his party: As abortion becomes either difficult or actually outlawed, what if you or your daughter or granddaughter goes out with a guy, has too many drinks and winds up becoming pregnant and he’s a ‘No show’? Now, as in the pre Rowe period, we know that a woman who had the money could always find a doctor who did the deed secretly. What if you are not that well off to afford such a fee, and it would be a pretty high one, because the doc has to be very very discreet? These are questions that need to be answered by you Trump (and Republican Party) supporters.
Finally, remember dear MAGA neighbors of mine, the old biblical saying: ” For they sow the wind and they will reap the whirlwind.”
The post Let Us Eat Cake! first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris on Tuesday night to become only the second president in US history to win two nonconsecutive terms. (The last one? Grover Cleveland in 1892.) Trump won the presidency following one of the most tumultuous election years in modern US history—one that included an incumbent president pulling out of his reelection bid, the vice president becoming the Democratic nominee a few short months before Election Day, and two assassination attempts on Trump.
A majority of voters elected Trump to return to the White House following a campaign often filled with violent rhetoric, misinformation, and disparaging comments about women, immigrants, and people of color. Harris was unable to build a coalition to defeat Trump, losing both the Electoral College and the popular vote after a campaign that initially energized Democrats around the country after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
“America has never had a Black woman governor,” says Mother Jones editorial director Jamilah King. “So the fact that America’s never had a Black woman president is not surprising. I don’t think we as a country were quite ready for it.”
In this Reveal podcast extra, host Al Letson sits down with King, as well as Mother Jones’ David Corn and Ari Berman, to break down how Trump won, why Harris’ campaign faltered, and where the nation goes from here.
Listen: Red, Black, and Blue (Reveal)
Read: America Meets Its Judgment Day (Mother Jones)
Read: Republicans Defeat Ohio Anti-Gerrymandering Initiative With Brazen Anti-Democratic Tactics (Mother Jones)
Read: Trump Wins the White House in a Political Comeback Rooted in Appeals to Frustrated Voters (Associated Press)
This post was originally published on Reveal.
The Tongan and Fijian prime ministers are among the first Pacific Island leaders to congratulate US President-elect Donald Trump.
Trump, 78, returned to the White House on Wednesday by securing more than the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency, according to Edison Research projections.
Tonga’s Hu’akavameiliku Siaosi Sovaleni, who is also the chair of the Pacific Islands Forum said on X, formerly Twitter, that he is looking forward to advancing Tonga-US bilateral relationship and the Pacific interests and initiatives.
Fiji’s Sitiveni Rabuka said it was his sincere hope and prayer that Trump’s return to the White House “will be marked by the delivery of peace, unity, progress, and prosperity for all Americans, and the community of nations”.
Rabuka also said Fiji was looking forward to deepening bilateral ties with America as well as furthering shared aspirations including, promoting peace and economic prosperity in the Pacific and beyond.
Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minsiter James Marape today congratulated Trump, saying: “We look forward to reinforcing the longstanding partnership between our nations, grounded in shared values and mutual respect.”
Marape also expressed gratitude for outgoing President Joe Biden’s service and Kamala Harris’s “spirited challenge” for the presidency.
Similar policies
Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown said both the Democrats and Republics had similar policies on the Indo-Pacific and he did not expect much change.
“The US has reengaged with the Pacific in terms of diplomatic representation and increased people-to-people engagements,” Brown was quoted as saying by Cook Islands News.
“From a bipartisan perspective I don’t see any drastic changes in US policy on what they have termed as the Indo-Pacific strategy.
“Both Dems and Reps have similar policies on the Indo-Pacific. I don’t expect much change.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
In public remarks, former President Donald Trump has repeatedly made unfounded claims about the threat of widespread voting by “illegal aliens” and noncitizens in the 2024 election. Away from the spotlight, though, at least one Republican National Committee official is telling volunteer poll watchers a completely different story: that such voting is close to impossible. In a private Oct.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
With much of the attention on the House gravitating towards the battleground states of New York and California, where Democrats are trying to push back GOP gains from 2022, a handful of races scattered around the country heading into Election Day could ultimately be the difference in which party holds the majority. Logan Phillips, the founder of Race to the WH, has his eyes on a handful of…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Kamala Harris is blasting Donald Trump for vowing to protect women whether they “like it or not” at the same time he is calling for Republican Liz Cheney to be shot in the face. We get response from The Nation’s abortion access correspondent Amy Littlefield and talk about 10 states with abortion rights on the ballot, including Arizona, Nevada, Florida, South Dakota and Missouri.
Republicans have ramped up an anti-transgender fear campaign for the 2024 election, hoping to sway voters in their favor. Many ads focus on incarcerated transgender individuals and gender-affirming care, with millions of dollars funneled into anti-trans messages during prime-time sporting events. Others target Democratic Senate and House candidates, claiming they would “allow men into women’s…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Photo credit: CODEPINK
On October 24, a U.S. presidential candidate told an interviewer, “Our day one agenda… also includes picking up the phone and telling Bibi Netanyahu that the war is over, because it’s basically our proxy war. We control the armaments, the funding, the diplomatic cover, the intelligence, etc., so we can end this in the blink of an eye with a single phone call, which is what Ronald Reagan did when Israel had gone into Lebanon and was massacring thousands of people. So we can do that right now. That’s day one.”
Tragically, the candidate who said that was not Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, but Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Most Americans have been persuaded that Stein cannot win the election, and many believe that voting for her in swing states will help elect Trump by siphoning voters from Harris.
There are many other “third-party” candidates for president, and many of them have good policy proposals for ending the genocidal U.S.-Israeli massacre in Gaza. As the website for Claudia de la Cruz, the presidential candidate for the Party of Socialism and Liberation, explains, “Our tax dollars should be used to meet people’s needs — not pay for the bullets, bombs and missiles used in the massacre in Gaza.”
Many of the principles and policy proposals of “third-party” and independent candidates are more in line with the views of most Americans than those of Harris or Trump. This is hardly surprising given the widely recognized corruption of the U.S. political system. While Trump cynically flip-flops to appeal to both sides on many questions, and Harris generally avoids committing to policy specifics at all, especially regarding foreign policy, most Americans understand that they are both more beholden to the billionaires and corporate interests who fund their campaigns than to the well-being of working Americans or the future of the planet.
Michael Moore has published a flier titled “This Is America,” which shows that large majorities of Americans support “liberal” positions on 18 different issues, from a ceasefire in Gaza to Medicare For All to getting money out of politics.
Moore implies that this should be reassuring to Democrats and Harris supporters, and it would be if she was running on those positions. But, for the most part, she isn’t. On the other hand, many third party and independent candidates for president are running on those positions, but the anti-democratic U.S. political system ensures that they can’t win, even when most Americans agree with them.
War and militarism are the most deadly and destructive forces in human society, with real world, everyday, physical impacts that kill or maim people and destroy their homes, communities and entire countries. So it is deeply disturbing that the political system in the United States has been corrupted into bipartisan subservience to a military-industrial complex (or MICIMATT, to use a contemporary term) that wields precisely the “unwarranted influence” that President Eisenhower warned us against 64 years ago, and uses its influence to drag us into wars that wreak death and destruction in country after country.
Apart from brief wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait, all now many decades ago, the U.S. military has not won a war since 1945. It systematically fails on its own terms, while its nakedly lethal and destructive power only fills graveyards and leaves countries in ruins. Far from being an effective vehicle to project American power, unleashing the brutality of the U.S. war machine has become the fastest, surest way to further undermine America’s international standing in the eyes of our neighbors.
After so many wars under so many administrations of both parties, neither Republicans nor Democrats can claim to be a “lesser evil” on questions of war and peace, let alone a “peace party.”
As with so many of America’s problems, from the expansion of corporate and oligarchic power to the generational decline in living standards, the combined impact of decades of Democratic and Republican government is more dangerous, more lasting and more intractable than the policies of any single administration. On no question is this more obvious than on questions of war and peace.
For decades, there was a small but growing progressive wing in the Democratic Party that voted against record military spending and opposed U.S. wars, occupations and coups. But when Bernie Sanders ran for president and millions of grassroots Democrats rallied around his progressive agenda, the Party leaders and their corporate, plutocratic backers fought back more aggressively to defeat Bernie and the progressives than they ever fought to win elections against the Republicans, or to oppose the war on Iraq or tax cuts for the wealthy.
This year, flush with blood money from the Israel lobby, pro-Israel Democrats defeated two of the most progressive, public-spirited Democratic members of Congress, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman.
On the Republican side, in response to the U.S. wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, the libertarian Republican member of Congress Ron Paul led a small group of Republicans to join progressive Democrats in an informal bipartisan peace caucus in Congress. In recent years though, the number of members of either party willing to take any kind of stand for peace has shrunk dramatically. So while there are now over 100 Congressional caucuses, from the Candy Caucus to the Pickleball Caucus, there is still not one for peace.
After the neocons who provided the ideological fuel for Bush’s catastrophic wars reconvened around Hillary Clinton in 2016, President Trump tried to “make America’s military great again” by appointing retired generals to his cabinet and characteristically staking out positions all over the map, from a call to kill the families of “terrorists” to a National Defense Strategy naming Russia and China as the “central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security,” to casting himself as a peacemaker by trying to negotiate a peace treaty with North Korea.
Trump is now running against Biden’s war in Ukraine and trying to have it both ways on Gaza, with undying support for Israel and a promise to end the war immediately. Some Palestinian-Americans are supporting Trump for not being the VP for Genocide Joe, just as other people support Harris for not being Trump.
But most Americans know little about Trump’s actual war policy as president. The unique value of a leader like Trump to the military-industrial complex is that he draws attention to himself and diverts attention away from U.S. atrocities overseas.
In 2017, Trump’s first year in office, he oversaw the climax of Obama’s war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, which probably killed as many civilians as Israel has massacred in Gaza. In that year alone, the U.S. and its allies dropped over 60,000bombs and missiles on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan,Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Somalia. That was the heaviest bombing since the first Gulf War in 1991, and double the destruction of the “Shock & Awe” bombing of Iraq in 2003.
Most chillingly, the Iraqi forces who defeated the last remnants of ISIS in Mosul’s Old City were ordered to kill all the survivors, fulfilling Trump’s threat to “take out their families.” “We killed them all,” an Iraqi soldier told Middle East Eye. “Daesh, men, women and children. We killed everyone.” If anyone is counting on Trump to save the people of Gaza from Netanyahu and Biden’s genocide, that should be a reality check.
In other areas, Trump’s back-pedaling on Obama’s diplomatic achievements with Iran and Cuba have led to new crises for both those countries on the eve of this election. By moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, bribing Arab despots with ‘Abraham’ deals, and encouraging Netanyahu’s Greater Israel ambitions, Trump primed the powder-keg for the genocide in Gaza and the new crisis in the Middle East under Biden.
On the other side, Harris shares responsibility for genocide, arguably the most serious international crime in the book. To make matters worse, she has connived in a grotesque scheme to provide cover for the genocide by pretending to be working for a ceasefire that, as Jill Stein and many others have said, the U.S. could enforce “in the blink of an eye, with a single phone call” if it really wanted to. As for the future, Harris has only committed to making the U.S. military even more “lethal.”
The movement for a Free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza has failed to win the support of the Republican or Democratic presidential campaigns. But this is not a failure on the part of the Palestinian-Americans we have listened to and worked with, who have engaged in brilliant organizing, gradually raised public awareness and won over more Americans to their cause. They are leading the most successful anti-war organizing campaign in America since the Iraq War.
The refusal of Trump or Harris to listen to the calls of Americans whose families are being massacred in Gaza, and now in Lebanon too, is a failure on the part of the corrupt, anti-democratic political system of which Trump and Harris are figureheads, not a failure of activism or organizing.
Whomever each of us votes for in the presidential election, the campaign to end the genocide in Gaza will continue, and we must grow stronger and smarter and more inclusive until politicians cannot ignore us, no matter how much money the Israel lobby and other corrupt interests throw at them, or at their political opponents.
Whomever we vote for, the elephant in the room will still be US militarism and the violence and chaos it inflicts on the world. Whether Trump or Harris is president, the result will be more of the same, unless we do something to change it. As legendary Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu famously said, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”
No American should be condemned for voting for a candidate of their choice, however successfully the Democrats and Republicans have marginalized the very concept of multi-party democracy that the U.S. claims to support in other countries. Whoever wins this election, we must find a way to put peace back on this country’s national agenda, and to make our collective voices heard in ways that cannot be drowned out by oligarchs with big bags of cash.
The post A No-Win Dilemma for US Peace Voters first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
I was disappointed to find two of my old comrades (avowed Marxists) distributing a video appeal to vote for Harris-Walz to save “American representative democracy” from the threat of Trump “fascism”. Whatever one believes about a possible 2nd Trump presidency, there are enormous defects in said video appeal (which largely repeats the same narrative as do other “Marxist” backers of the Harris-Walz campaign).
(1) It suggests that Trump, if he loses, will launch a second insurrection and attempt a military coup. In fact, Trump’s 2021 MAGA insurrection was possible only because he then was commander-in-chief. With Biden in the Oval Office until inauguration day on January 20, suggestion of a MAGA insurrection and coup is baseless fearmongering; any attempt would be an absolute fiasco (even more so than the one in 2021).
(2) It describes Trump as lacking respect for the rule of law. That is fair; but centrist Democrats, while less blatant, are not much better (and no better at all in foreign policy). In fact, said Democrats expose their own contempt for democracy, by acting to keep the actually progressive Green Party off the ballot wherever they can do so. Moreover, Democrat politicians portrayed Trump’s 2016 win and presidency as illegitimate because of “Russian meddling”, evading their candidate’s flaws and ineffective campaign. Congressional Democrats then conducted a purely partisan impeachment over his temporary hold on appropriated military aid for Ukraine, despite that the preceding Obama-Biden administration had done the same (even if not from such partisan motives). Trump is habituated to respond to attacks with counterattacks. Trump undoubtedly concluded that the Democrats were playing dirty, so why should he not do likewise!
(3) It reports Trump’s promise that he will build an “iron dome” anti-missile system over the US which would destabilizing nuclear deterrence and increase the threat of nuclear apocalypse. One of Trump’s multiple grandiose promises! The video evades the fact that Biden and Harris have already committed the US to a destabilizing nuclear-weapons modernization program [Xiaodon Liang: U.S. Nuclear Modernization Programs (Arms Control Association, 2024 Aug)] while aggressively provoking the other major nuclear power with a proxy war against it in Ukraine. The US has already abandoned crucial arms control treaties (ABM, INF, Open Skies) despite Russian objections; and Harris, like Biden, shows no interest in renewing them.
(4) It says that Trump would pour billions into military spending for the benefit of the merchants of death. He would, but the video minimizes the fact that Biden-Harris is already doing exactly that with their demands for ever increasing military spending, despite that the US is by far the world’s biggest military spender (38% of world total as of 2021 according to SIPRI, and, with other NATO added, it comes to 54%, while Russia’s share is 3.1%).
(5) It complains that Trump would attempt to impose a Pax Americana upon the world. It evades the fact that Biden and Harris are pursuing a new cold war against China as well as the one against Russia, while maintaining hundreds of foreign military bases on every populated continent and continuing the US pursuit of global “full-spectrum dominance”. Here the only meaningful difference between Harris and Trump is that Trump, unlike Harris, wants to end Biden’s new cold war against major-nuclear-power Russia.
(6) It notes that Trump is pro-Zionist and will back the Israeli genocide in Gaza and elsewhere. True, but it evades the fact that Biden and Harris have been funding and equipping said genocidal mass murder, and continue to do so, while vetoing UN resolutions and other efforts to stop it.
(7) It notes that Trump would reverse efforts to replace reliance upon fossil fuels thereby accelerating the coming of climate catastrophe. However, the video evades the fact that Biden-Harris and Harris-Walz have already committed to preserve reliance upon fossil fuels. Although the Biden-Harris regime provides incentives for clean energy (produced for profit by capitalist firms); it also continues existing subsidies for fossil fuels and refuses to take action to curb fossil-fuel extraction. In fact, the US is the world’s top producer of oil and natural gas; and the Biden-Harris team actively facilitates both drilling and fossil fuel exports [Allie Rosenbluth: “Biden’s fossil fuel hypocrisy is betraying the planet,” Al Jazeera, 2023 July].
(8) It speculates that Trump would prevent needed regulation of AI. It evades the fact that the Harris’ campaign platform is silent on this issue (and on much else, likely a concession to anti-Trump neocon Republicans whose votes they are pursuing).
(9) It says that a Trump-Vance administration will serve Wall Street thru deregulation of the economy and undoing of social welfare programs. On this point, Trump would no doubt be somewhat worse than Biden and Harris. He is a deregulator and backer of tax cuts especially for the rich. However, left unsaid is: that most Democrats in Congress and the Harris-Walz campaign are every bit as reliant upon corporate and billionaire donors as is Trump-Vance, and the resulting subservience to capitalist campaign funders is a bipartisan practice. In fact, Harris’ proposed tax reforms, if actually enacted, would be very modest. Moreover, the Keynesian policies of Biden and Harris invariably rely upon private enterprise and consistently avoid seriously offending powerful corporate profiteers.
(10) Omitted is any mention of Trump’s hostility to immigration by poor people of color fleeing impossible conditions resulting from past and current Western imperial interventions and impositions. Why the silence? Biden-Harris, in their 2020 campaign, promised a humane immigration policy in contrast to that of Trump. But, in his 1st year, Biden deported some 20,000 Haitians (more than his 3 predecessors combined over 20 years). The Biden-Harris regime continued Trump’s disingenuous Title 42 rule to shut the border to most would-be immigrants. In 2024, for the sake of political expediency, Biden and Harris capitulated to MAGA Republican demands in a failed bipartisan immigration bill (which Harris promises to resurrect). Biden then issued an executive order which effectively closes the border to most of the desperate migrants and denies access to hearings for nearly all asylum seekers; and Harris defends that action. Centrist Democrat politicians have no principles which they will not abandon for the sake of political expediency.
(1) In the video itself, JD Vance complains over the near total lack of oligarch support for the Bannon-Flynn-Thiel-Leo program. In fact, capital rules in this so-called “democracy”; and most capitalist oligarchs (while they may like Trump’s regulatory and tax policies) are not currently willing (unlike in capital-threatened 1920s Italy and 1933 Germany) to jettison pluralist liberal “democracy”.
(2) Trump is a notorious liar with both threats and promises (largely BS which his hardcore MAGA base loves to hear). He promises a massive increase in good jobs for workers; he will not deliver. He promises stable affordable prices for consumer essentials; but his promised tariffs would actually increase said prices. He threatens to veto a 15-week national abortion ban; who will trust that he would actually do so? Would he roll back some existing progressive reforms? He would try; but, absent a compliant Congress, not all that he threatens.
(3) Trump is a reactionary demagogue who has found success in pandering to bigotry. Nevertheless, his only real loyalty is to his narcissist self. He craves popular adoration. So, he would promptly abandon any policies which would bring strong and widespread public opposition (just as he has been wavering on the abortion issue). Moreover, institutional resistance would thwart any attempt to install a full-blown autocratic regime or all-out repression of dissent.
(4) Democrats have utterly failed, even when in control of Congress and the Oval Office, to prevent a considerable evisceration of such limited “democracy” as once existed in the US. They have taken no action to remake the rogue-dominated Supreme Court. Even with trifecta control of the federal government, they failed to enact needed legislation: for police accountability, for voting rights protections (including to stop gerrymanders or even to mandate proportional allocation of Presidential electors), for campaign finance (including legislative reversal of Citizens United), and so on. They refused (under Obama) to enact the pro-labor Employee Free Choice Act even when they had trifecta control of the federal government including filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate. Moreover, it is the effects of the Democrats’ decades of embracing neoliberal economic policy which created the level of popular discontent which Trump-MAGA reaction has successfully exploited. Furthermore, half the “states” have been captured by MAGA Republicans who have already taken advantage of federal government inaction and reaction in order to enact some bigoted and anti-democratic policies. Can anyone credibly show that a Harris-Walz administration would actually take the requisite measures (which Democrats failed to take during previous opportunities) in order to reverse much, if any, of that?
(5) Whatever Trump would do to suppress dissent would provoke a powerful popular resistance and thereby spur badly needed revolutionary organizing. Meanwhile, progressives’ reliance upon centrist Democrats effectively discourages organizing for revolution or even for decisive action against MAGA reaction.
(1) This “united front” rests upon unquestioning acceptance of the Democrat fearmongering campaign narrative. For reasons provided in 2 above, this a highly dubious premise.
(2) Given the Harris-Walz choice to ally with the rightwing neocon Republicans and spurn the anti-genocide social-justice voters; said united front, with its proponents’ refusal to condemn the Biden-Harris foreign policy and immigration practice, is a surrender to genocidal imperialism. In fact, many of the avowedly Marxist anti-imperialist organizations which are pressing for left unity behind the Harris-Walz campaign have actively embraced US imperialism as they also back Biden’s new cold war against Russia.
(3) The united front with Harris et al to block Trump from regaining the Presidency is a tactical move, but one whose proponents evidently have not connected to any strategic plan, certainly none which its proponents (so far as I have seen) have presented. They do not explain how blocking Trump will eliminate MAGA reaction or other obstacles in the way of advance toward revolutionary people power, or even securing basic democratic civil liberties (which have also come under attack from Biden and other Democrat office-holders: witness repression of campus protests, prosecutions of journalists and whistle-blowers, refusal to pardon unjustly-held political prisoners). They seem not to recognize that tactics divorced from strategy is a recipe for ultimate failure. Suppose Harris wins; will MAGA go away? What will prevent the MAGA party, led by a more astute and articulate Vance, from winning in 2028 or 2032? The anti-Trump obsessives do not even raise the question. Neither do they say how they will get the Democrats to actually act to roll back MAGA power in the red states or in the Supreme Court. They evidently have no strategic plan. They simply obsess over the odiousness of Trump and the bigotry of his MAGA base while unquestioningly accepting liberal Democrat fearmongering that he will exercise unconstrained repression against the left. In fact, unless Democrats obtain decisive control of both houses of Congress (very unlikely) along with the Presidency, they will continue to be too weak and too indecisively fickle to be able to undo MAGA rule in the red states or in the Supreme Court.
(1) Any strategy must be formulated in accordance with the ultimate objective. For revolutionary socialists the ultimate objective is comprehensive social justice (economic, environmental, civil rights, human rights, international). That will require replacing the capitalist social order (in which the prime societal imperative is the selfish pursuit of private gain and the accumulation of private wealth by predatory means, producing a ubiquity of social evils). The needed replacement is a progressive social order (socialism wherein the societal imperative will be the satisfaction of human and social needs).
(2) The long-term strategic plan under pluralist liberal capitalist pseudo-democracy must be to build a revolutionary social justice movement to force concessions (progressive reforms) from the capital-subservient regime. Priority must be: for reforms to empower the people (the working class and its allies) and to impose constraints upon the exercise of power by capital, not for liberal-reformist ameliorative measures to keep down discontent and the populace politically passive. These struggles for concessions must be used to draw people into struggle against the capital-serving regime so as to educate them as to the obscured realities of capitalism and thereby build a growing revolutionary social justice movement.
(3) Also necessary are temporary and limited alliances (tactical united fronts) with capitalist political factions (centrist liberals and sometimes with illiberal reactionaries [*]) on issues where said ally is actually committed to the fight for some useful enactment.
[*] Example. The anti-imperialist left should ally with Trump and his MAGA Republicans in advocating for cutting off US funding for Biden’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
(4) Even if a strategic united front against MAGA fascism were appropriate, its proponents’ current practice is fundamentally wrong. Our task can never be to build a progressive voter constituency for capital-serving centrist Democrat politicians. It must always be to build/organize the independent (of all capital-serving parties) revolutionary social justice movement fighting for its current strategic objective whether that be: (a) preventing or undoing fascistic repression, or (b) obtaining people-empowering and capital-constraining reforms so as to enable the people (the working class and its allies) to eventually seize state power.
(5) Even if backing Harris-Walz-Cheney-Bolton were truly necessary and appropriate, then the correct policy would be to inform our listeners as to the capital-subservient genocidal-imperialist perfidious nature of said centrist party while also explaining why and how its election would contribute to our cause. When one goes silent on imperialism while backing extreme imperialist politicians, one abets their imperial crimes against humanity. If we do not tell the truth (the whole truth) to our listeners, they will eventually stop listening thereby leaving us with no following. Dimitrov, laying out policy for the popular front against fascism [in his Main Report delivered at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International” (1935)] noted that “Communists, of course, cannot and must not for a moment abandon their own independent work of Communist education, organization and mobilization of the masses.” And as Mao stated [in On Policy (1940)], “United Front policy is neither all alliance and no struggle nor all struggle and no alliance, but combines alliance and struggle”.
In my opinion, the liberal “socialist” assertion, that a Trump win in November will be the end of progressive political activism and anti-capitalist resistance in the US, is mistaken. It is what centrist Democrats (and their rightwing Republican allies) want us to believe. Nevertheless, we should take precautions. Accordingly, my prescription is to oppose both lawless ultra-reactionary Trump and genocidal imperialist Harris for commander-in-chief (by voting for genuine progressive Jill Stein). Democrats are already vilifying Stein and her voters as facilitators of a possible Trump win. In fact, if the Democrats lose because of the numbers of progressives voting for a real progressive, it will be their own fault on account of their genocidal and other anti-people policy choices. Moreover, it will send them a message that they need to actually earn the votes of progressive left voters rather than continue to take those votes for granted. As for precautions, I advocate asking people to vote for all Democrats (however genocidal, imperialist, and capital-subservient) in Congressional races so as to deny Trump and his MAGA Republicans complete domination of the federal government. Given the anti-people policies of both major parties, a largely ineffective divided federal government is somewhat to our advantage.
The post The Harris-Walz-Cheney-Bolton-“Socialist” United Front against Trump first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
As the U.S. presidential election goes into its final sprint, efforts to portray one candidate or the other in a good or bad light are increasingly evident. In this vein, we see Donald Trump called a fascist, including by Kamala Harris and John Kelly, former Trump chief of staff. Meanwhile, Harris is doing her utmost to disassociate herself from the Biden presidency. This is so even though what she stands for is essentially the same as what both Biden and Trump stand for. Namely, to strengthen the police powers at the disposal of the president to provide U.S. control of unfolding events both at home and abroad. As we see in Palestine, Lebanon, on the U.S. southern border and even in the crude assaults on civil rights — all in the name of national security and maintaining the kind of order the U.S. stands for — this is giving rise to the use of extreme violence. Both within the U.S. and across the entire world, the peoples reject not only the use of violence to solve problems but, most definitively, the use of extreme violence which is abhorrent.
Due to the people’s rising consciousness about all of this, a consciousness which exists independent of their individual wills, a feature of this election is the failure of the “Vote for the Lesser of Two Evils” argument. This is the argument routinely used to promote the view that the only choice citizens have is one despicable candidate over the other. For some time, the argument has been an integral part of state-organized disinformation to stop the people from setting their own agenda and plan.
It is interesting how in this election there is no attempt to even present these candidates as representatives of the people, though they claim to be “for the people.” Instead, they are presented as the agents of change. It is even said that this one or that one provides “more space for resistance.”
Everything is done to avert any discussion on what kind of change the people need and what kind of change these candidates stand for. To be debated is what either one may or may not do and say but not what they are already doing and what this tells of where the rulers as a class and the country are headed.
Everyone is to be diverted from thinking and action, analyzing how best to advance and unify the movements of the peoples for change which favours their interests. It shows that establishing the starting point for discussion among the people is key if change is not to be a casualty in this election once again.
In this regard, the idea that the role the U.S. working class and people can play is to choose the “lesser of two evils” is not catching fire as it did in the 2016 election where one candidate, Trump, was painted as a “fascist” and the other, Hillary Clinton, was painted as a “progressive,” her use of extreme violence abroad completely silenced. Those pushing this campaign were clearly shocked when Clinton lost the election to Trump following which they declared the “uneducated white working class” to be racist, fascist, homophobic and many other slanders. It was an attempt to further divide working people from coast to coast.
The more the peoples’ movements tackled the blatant injustices on all fronts, the more attempts to divide the people by those claiming to be progressive and “politically correct” were left behind. All of this is now to be dismissed. The advances and increased unity of the peoples’ movements are to be ignored. Kamala Harris is to be the people’s champion now, a champion promoted and backed by the same ruling factions which supported Hillary Clinton against Trump in the 2016 election and Biden against Trump in the 2020 election.
Unfolding events and unity in action of the peoples from all walks of life exposed these various efforts of the rulers as false and disinforming, designed by those with state-backing to split the peoples’ ranks. Instead of stopping their attempts to label people on a racist and false basis, now the notion of “voting blocs” is promoted night and day. The claim is individual votes can somehow be aggregated into blocs — the Black vote, the Latinx vote, the youth vote, the women’s vote, the racist voters, the homophobic voters, the LGBTQ2S+ votes, the progressive voters and so on.
The promotion of “voting blocs” and how they will line up, and organizing on this basis continues but is such a fraud that it does not hold sway. The promotion of the fraudulent idea of “voting blocs” is linked to the promotion of “issues” the rulers declare the people of the United States care about. The existence of these “voting blocs” has been proven to be a figment of the imagination of the rulers and their candidates and elections time and time again but, nonetheless, they persist in declaring what the “issues” are and linking these “issues” to “voting blocs.” They do not permit the people to play any role in deciding anything.
Workers, women and youth and the forces fighting against racial discrimination and for justice over the past decades especially are fed up with these efforts to divide the people on a racist and fabricated basis and secure support for aggression and wars abroad and repression at home.
To deal with this, in this election a diversion is to present “extremes” as a problem and measures are consistently taken to criminalize those seen to be extremist when they uphold the rights of the peoples. According to Trump, the extreme “left” is a menace while the Harris forces say the danger comes from Trump and his right-wing “extremists.” And Trump himself is again called a fascist while Harris, who supports genocide in Palestine in the name of Israel’s right to self-defence is not.
Harris is presented as a “new way forward” even though she espouses what is essentially the worn out neo-liberal “third way” as originally presented by Tony Blair and his New Labour in Britain, and taken up by the Clintons and others who have caused disasters both at home and abroad. So too Barack Obama, the Liberals in Canada headed by Justin Trudeau, and liberal think-tanks and pundits desperately try to block change by claiming they stand for change, women’s rights, human rights, a green environment and more.
A key part of this “third way” is the promotion of the view that the executive power knows what is and is not good for the country and the entire world. Under its aegis, political parties have been destroyed and everyone must fend for themselves. In the name of defending human rights, free speech and democracy, “colour revolutions” for regime change are organized when countries uphold their sovereign right to determine their own affairs. This “third way” is the same old way of preserving the existing state structures which keep the people out of power.
The peoples are demanding and fighting for change in their favour and striving to ensure the election does not divert and disrupt this striving and their growing unity. Campaigns like “No Votes for Genocide” and “Abandon Killer Kamala” are evidence of this, as are continuing actions on campuses, in cities and towns, large and small, in support of Palestine and for an arms embargo and ceasefire now. The issue of U.S./Zionist genocide remains front and center.
Workers from all sectors of the economy are bringing forward answers, as they did during the COVID-19 pandemic, as strikes by health care workers, Boeing workers and East Coast longshoremen indicate. Working people can better govern the country but political power is kept out of their hands. Elections are designed to hide this while ensuring power and institutions of government remain in the hands of the private oligopolies with their pro-war, anti-social agendas.
It is the U.S. working class and people continuing their battles for the rights of all, at home and abroad that represent the modern democracy needed today. Refusing to be drawn into the pro and con debates of the election campaigns and advancing the fight for empowerment by persisting in defiantly speaking in our own name and refusing to allow the rich and their candidates to speak for us — will carry forward the fight for change that favours the people.
Boeing workers strike rally, October 15, 2024, day 33 of their strike.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
For several weeks, Jamie Boyle of Virginia has been checking to see if the ballots she and her husband mailed on October 4 to an elections office in Pennsylvania have been processed. As of late October, she’s still waiting. Now Boyle, whose husband serves in the Army, is worried about a series of lawsuits filed by Republicans, including the Republican National Committee…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Every four years, the presidential election brings with it a perennial question about an essential voting bloc: Who will Black voters turn out for?
Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes has spent months on the campaign trail talking to Black voters about how they see the goals and limits of their own political power. He paid special attention to Black Republicans and a new crop of Black supporters of former President Donald Trump.
This week on Reveal, we hear from voters at the Republican National Convention, a graduate from a historically Black university whose star is rising on the right after appearing in a viral video hugging Trump at a Chick-fil-A, and a Republican organizing other Black voters to turn out for Vice President Kamala Harris.
This post was originally published on Reveal.
2024 presidential candidates: Former President Donald Trump (left) and current Vice President Kamala Harris IMAGE/ABCNews
When faced with two adverse unethical options, a person may try to avoid the more harmful immoral choice. This is ancient strategy people have talked and written about, and applied in various situations. In the US political parlance, the term “lesser of two evils,” is choosing the evil that will be less damaging.
There is talk about voting for the “lesser of two evils.” The rationale behind this thinking is to prevent the greater “evil” from gaining power and thus causing more havoc. This is an intelligent thing to do especially in countries where million of peoples’ future is at stake — but when the United States is involved, the well being of the entire planet is at stake.
In the US, it is understood by many that the greater evil is the Republican Party or the proverbial Charybdis. Noam Chomsky once said, “Republican Party is the most dangerous organisation in human history.” The lesser evil’s title goes to the Democratic Party or the proverbial Scylla.
In dire situations, one could accept voting for the lesser evil – Democrats. But when the Democrats don’t want to address the root causes then voting for them election after election turns into a futile exercise, while the sick state keeps on deteriorating. This is a serious problem. It’s like a person who has a tumor that in initial stages is ignored due to carelessness. However, a timely realization as to the consequences rushes in emergency for treatment as if he/she had not headed for the doctor, the malignancy would have proved fatal.
The above example is equally applicable to the United States — a Sick Empire — physically, that is, in economic decline and mentally, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” to use Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s words spoken on April 4, 1967. The US has steadfastly held on to the title of “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” as if it doesn’t want to prove Dr King wrong in his assessment.
The Republican Party openly supports the capitalist class by lowering taxes for the rich, opposing unions, resisting pay raises, waging foreign wars or domestic ones, such as “war against drugs,” etc. In return, they get favors and election campaign contributions.
But there is something to be said about the lesser evil of the two choices.
Democratic Party is not that naked — it uses a fig leaf to cover up its hypocrisy, it pretends to be what it is not; it claims it is working for the common folks, complains about rich not paying taxes (but does not do anything), and so on. In reality, they do very little for the general public because they too get lots of money from the big donors to contest elections. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman (worth $2.5 billion), in 2024 gave $10 million to Biden-Harris campaign donated another $7 million to Kamala Harris (after Biden quit the presidential bid and nominated Harris as the Democratic candidate, without any intra-party election). Hoffman wants Harris to fire Lina Khan, the FTC chair who is fighting big corporate mergers and monopolistic corporate practices. This is what Hoffman said:
“I do think that Lina Khan is a person who is not helping America in her job in what she’s doing. And so, I would hope that Vice President Harris would replace her.”
Expedia Chairman Barry Diller (worth $4.5 billion) called Khan a “dope,” but then he said he misspoke; he wants her fired. Who knows, may be Harris would listen to her paymasters, as has been the custom.
It is sad that people like Lina Khan, who are honest, incorruptible, and are working for the welfare of the majority, and are rare to find in government, have to face so much opposition from the billionaire class. Lina Khan and people like her are hated by the rich, like Hoffman because they try to enforce laws which assist most people rather than fattening the already obese (financially) like Hoffman and his ilk.
The Young Turks put it rightly: “… we don’t have a democracy. We have an open auction 100%.“
Biden, when he was running for president, had told the wealthy donors:
“I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money.” “The truth of the matter is … nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.”
One cannot not sympathize with the Democratic presidential candidates who are (or aiming to be) multimillionaires, who hobnob with billionaires, are mostly interviewed by anchors making millions of dollars, who have to feign they are for ordinary people, in order to get their vote.
But the problem with this line of strategy is that it is simply prolonging the onset of the overdue implosion rather than trying to eliminate the rot in the system. If you watch or read the news and various commentaries or watch late night shows in the liberal news media, many a times they are making fun of Donald Trump, his wife and children and portray him as an evil person and thus imply Biden/Harris are virtuous people. (In the mid 1980s, then President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” hinting that the US is a sanctimonious entity.) These same people never accuse Biden or his cabinet, as bloodthirsty murderers.
So why go for the lesser evil?
The Democrats and the Republicans are almost twins,1 as far as warring against foreign countries or overthrowing their governments is concerned. It’s within the US, where the slight difference comes into play. Democrats would not want to go total fascist at home — they permit some freedom to maintain the facade of the US being “the greatest democracy.” On the other hand, the Republicans want to treat, actually mistreat, most people indiscriminately, within and without the US, in the same fascist manner. Many people in the US don’t mind foreign countries becoming victim of US imperialistic fascist policies, either due to their ignorance or indifference or are misled by Republicans’ and Democrats’ warmongering or news media’s and think tanks’ fear inducing presentation etc. On the other hand, many people are frightened now that, it seems if Trump wins, fascism is going to hit most people in the US. That’s why most people prefer the lesser evil.
Mind you, fascism has never been absent in many people’s life in the US, such as incarcerating a huge segment of population, people who are victims of police violence (injured or killed), PTSD-(Post traumatic stress disorder) traumatized soldiers returning from fabricated bloody wars, homeless people, and so on. Most Democrats haven’t created meaningful improvement in the lives of these people.
The Democrat and Republican led governments have overthrown many governments and are still trying to overthrow many more but Democrats don’t want Trump to do that in the US, such as the purported January 6, 2021 attempt.2 It was an unorganized, clumsily executed foolish attempt. Trump should have consulted the experienced hands from both parties and also the CIA before the January 6 attempt. He would have succeeded, for sure.
Is there a difference between Trump and Harris etc.?
Without a second thought, one has to admit that Trump’s virile oral member is long and ejects idiocies and hate on a non-stop basis. Trump is a very cruel person, indeed. But the question is: are Biden, Harris, Anthony Blinken, Lloyd Austin, Harris’ supporter greater evil Dick Cheney any less cruel?
No.
In fact, they are more cruel and have excessively more blood of innocents on their hands than Trump has, that is, until now. His next term will be full of vengeance and who knows, greater bloodshed. Isn’t Biden too full of hate for Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians or anyone fighting for their rights and want to go their separate ways? Biden, a grandfather, who still grieves for his son Beau Biden’s death in 2015 due to glioblastoma has neither shed a tear nor has grieved for the 42,511 Palestinians (including 16,660 children) plus 1974 [A Lancet article from 10 July 2024 reported a much higher estimate: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” — DV ed.] (which includes 127 children) Lebanese killed by Israel with US encouragement, arms and ammunition, money, personnel, and intelligence –without which Israel could not have caused such incredible loss of lives. The opposition to war within the US is squashed by the Israel Lobby.
At this juncture in human history, who deserves more loathing, Trump or Biden and Harris? Of course, today the answer is the Biden/Harris team.
ENDNOTES:
The post Is the “Lesser Evil” Really Less than the “Greater Evil?” first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
State Republican lawmakers’ years-long efforts to deregulate housing in North Carolina likely played a major role in the scale of Hurricane Helene’s destruction, a new report highlights. At least 227 people have died as a result of the storm, with an unknown number still missing or unaccounted for. The storm is the deadliest to hit the country since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In New York’s Hudson Valley region, first-term GOP Rep. Mike Lawler is vying for reelection by saying he will never vote for a federal abortion ban and will fight to “preserve access to mifepristone,” one of two drugs commonly used for medication abortion. In Southern California, where Matt Gunderson is challenging three-term Democratic Rep. Mike Levin, the Republican car dealership owner is…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
