A group of UN human rights experts is urging the U.S. Senate to block a bill that seeks to punish the International Criminal Court (ICC) and people affiliated with it after the body issued arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, condemning the bill as “dangerous” and against international law. “It is shocking to see a country that considers itself a champion of the rule of law trying to stymie…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The House has overwhelmingly voted to pass a bill to sanction the International Criminal Court (ICC) over its issuing of arrest warrants for Israeli leaders for their alleged crimes against humanity in Gaza, as the death toll from Israel’s genocide tops 46,000 people, with many more deaths likely going uncounted. The Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act passed 243 to 140…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On Wednesday, Republicans unveiled their first rules package for the upcoming Congress, setting the stage for a contentious legislative session. Much of the attention has focused on measures like increasing the difficulty of ousting the Speaker of the House and prioritizing a bill to sanction the International Criminal Court over its investigation of Israel’s actions in Gaza. However…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern said Wednesday that the House GOP’s newly released rules package for the incoming Congress shows that Republicans are “doubling down on their extremism” by moving to further diminish the power of the minority party and paving the way for a legislative agenda that rewards billionaires and large corporations. McGovern (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the House…
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A key GOP lawmaker made clear in an interview published Thursday that Republicans plan to push for a pair of their voting-related bills when they take control of both chambers of Congress and the White House next month. Congressman Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), who campaigned for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), chairs the Committee on House…
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Democrats at the federal and state levels are pushing to pass bills protecting sensitive reproductive health data before Republicans take control of key legislative chambers. Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts plans on Tuesday to reintroduce legislation that would put guardrails on the largely unregulated industry buying and selling consumer data, her office shared first with…
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One month after Missouri voters approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion, Republican lawmakers in the deeply red state are already working to overturn it — or at least undermine it. One measure would ask voters to amend the state constitution to define life as beginning at conception, declaring that embryos are people with rights to life, liberty and the pursuit…
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In the US presidential election on 5 November 2024, American voters provided people in the United States and elsewhere a stupendous gift: the ouster of the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration. Simultaneously, the voters bequeathed fellow Americans and people of the world the nightmare of four more years of Donald Trump.
Prior to the election, I asked whether Americans would vote for genocide? Clearly, if a voter was paying attention, which is, arguably, a sine qua non for a person about to responsibly cast a vote, then a voter would have been aware that a genocide was (and still is) being perpetrated by the Jewish State against Palestinians, and that this genocide was (and still is) being abetted by the US government. The Democratic administration headed by proud Zionist Joe Biden (aka Genocide Joe) and his partner in genocide, Kamala Harris, have been integral to the carrying out of the genocide. The main opponent, or the only opponent as the US monopoly media portrays it, was another arch Zionist, Donald Trump of the Republican Party who pledged to support Israeli war aims.
Was it damned if you do and damned if you don’t?
No. As pointed out previously, a voter could have selected a candidate opposed to horrific Israeli war crimes against Palestinians; for example, Cornel West, Libertarian Chase Oliver, and candidate Jill Stein.
So, Americans did not have to cast a vote for a candidate who backs genocide.
Given the overwhelming casting of votes for the genocide-abetting Harris and Trump, one possible conclusion is that Americans were ignorant of the consequences of what their vote would support. More sinister is that Americans knew that their vote would further the Jewish Israeli genocide of Palestinians. If so, this would, arguably, signify that Americans voters have a lack of compassion for other humans, insouciance for the Other, or a hatred of the Other. It might be argued that Americans merely voted for the candidate who they considered would be best for the economy and a better life at home in the US. However, were that so, it would still be damning, as it would indicate their personal economic fortunes take precedence over their country destroying the lives and economy of other human beings.
The US election produced a damning result. And with Trump loading his incoming cabinet with Zionists this augurs poorly for a peaceful and loving world.
Given the composition of many western governments which are indifferent to the plight of Palestinians, it can be surmised that the voting class of such countries display likewise, a lamentable ignorance or insouciance.
The post American Voters: Ignorant, Insouciant, or Both? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
One of the most-used libelous labels of establishment Democrats is “Russian asset”, a term used to disparage those on the right and on the left opposed to continuing U.S. support for the war in Ukraine. Like many liberal conspiracy theories, such as the now-debunked Russiagate theory, which posited that Russia successfully interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to help Donald Trump win, the “Russian asset” trope was, unsurprisingly, the brainchild of one Hillary Clinton. First used to attack Jill Stein following her 2016 campaign for President on the Green Party ticket, Clinton reused the same tired diatribe to attack Tulsi Gabbard, who sought the Democratic nomination for President 2020. Now, after Donald Trump’s announcement that he has selected Gabbard to serve as his Director of National Intelligence, this same attack has captured the headlines of corporate media once again.
Fundamentally, liberals have failed in their attempt to disparage Tulsi Gabbard. Instead of banishing Tulsi Gabbard from the national stage through their fallacious attacks, Clinton and her ilk have crowned Tulsi Gabbard as a fighter against an elite political class whom most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, despise. It seems that, even after losing the 2024 election, Democrats have not learned that parading around Liz Cheney instead of reaching out to working class Americans is a recipe for failure. To be criticized by unpopular members of the “swamp” like Hillary Clinton and Neoconservatives like John Bolton is seen as a populist rite-of-passage. Liberals have failed to make any of their criticisms of Tulsi Gabbard stick because they simply cannot understand that their criticisms are amplifying the most popular political opinions of an otherwise unpopular politician.
Democrats have for years adopted a strategy of “running to the right” when it comes to electoral politics in the hope that they can reach the elusive “center” of American politics. Unfortunately for the Democrats, they have sacrificed pursuing popular policies in favor of attempting to appeal to the “large, unspoken center” which, frankly, does not exist. This strategy is what ultimately led to Donald Trump “winning” in the eyes of the American people on the issue of foreign policy. In a poll conducted in September of 2024 by the Cato Institute, it became clear that most Americans in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin believe that the United States is “too involved” in the affairs of other countries and is rapidly approaching World War Three. Similarly, Gabbard stated that one of the reasons why she left the Democratic Party was because she believed that the Democrats were leading America towards nuclear annihilation. When Gabbard announced that she was joining the Republican Party at a Trump rally in October, she stated that she was “joining the party of the people… led by a president, who has the courage and strength to fight for peace”.
The Democrats failed to turn the American people away from Tulsi Gabbard because they have positioned themselves as the party of war. While Bill Clinton was lecturing Muslims in Michigan and imploring them to “vote blue no matter who”, Donald Trump was making the case for why he would be more likely to end the war in Gaza. If Democrats truly want to make the case for why the American people should reject Tulsi Gabbard, they must first become the party of peace. This is because Tulsi Gabbard is not truly anti-war or “America First”. While Tulsi Gabbard has led a crusade against continuing the war in Ukraine, she has remained loyal to the state of Israel even if she occasionally expresses minor disagreements with Netanyahu’s extremist government. Gabbard has even criticized Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for not being pro-Israel enough and has opposed a ceasefire.
The best argument against Tulsi Gabbard is that she is incapable of applying her “America First” critique of U.S. support for Ukraine to Israel. Gabbard is nearly identical to her new Neoconservative colleagues, who she supposedly despises, such as “little” Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik and Pete Hegseth. Nevertheless, Democrats have conceded this argument through their embrace of deeply unpopular RINOs who endorsed Harris by the hundreds and their snubbing of the antiwar progressive movement. In truth, Democrats have aligned themselves with the Bush-Cheney faction of the Republican Party in order to stop Donald Trump, who they lampoon as a “fascist”. However, it was not Donald Trump who spied on American people via the Patriot Act or led the nation into a war in the Middle East under false pretenses; that was Bush. Democratic hypocrisy when it comes to embracing the war hawk leftovers of previous Republican presidential campaigns and administrations has created the perfect political conditions for a Democratic defector like Tulsi Gabbard to gain prominence.
If Democrats truly want to throw Tulsi Gabbard onto the garbage heap of history, the party must evolve quickly. If people like Hillary Clinton are allowed to dictate the direction of the party, it will be the Democratic Party itself thrown onto the garbage heap of history. To all liberals: if you want Tulsi Gabbard to be elected President in 2028, keep doing what you are doing. But if you want to lead America forward, start by listening to its people. The choice is yours, and the clock is ticking.
The post Why Establishment Democrats Keep Getting Tulsi Gabbard Wrong first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
In his 1959 classic book, The Sociological Imagination, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote that ordinary people are often reduced to moral stasis and feel trapped and overwhelmed by the glut of information that is available to them. They have great difficulty in an age of fact to make sense of the connections between their personal lives and society, to see the links between biography and history, self and world. They can’t assimilate all the information and need a “new” way of thinking that he called “the sociological imagination” that would allow them to connect history and biography, to see the connections between society and its structures. He wrote:
What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summation of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves.
That was long ago and is obviously much truer today when the Internet and digital media, not the slow reading of books and even paper newspapers and magazines, are the norm, with words scurrying past glazed eyes on cell phones and computers like constantly changing marquees announcing that the clowns have arrived.
In an era of soundbites and paragraphs that have been reduced to one sentences in a long campaign of dumbing down the public, it may seem counterintuitive to heed Mills’ advice and offer summations. However, as one who has written long articles on many issues, I think it is a good practice to do so once in a while, not just to distill conclusions one has arrived at for oneself, but also to provoke readers into thinking about conclusions that they may question but may feel compelled to reconsider for themselves. For I have reached them assiduously, not lightly, honestly, not guilefully.
With that in mind, what follows are some summations.
• With the musical chair exchanges between Democratic and Republican administrations, now from Biden to Trump and previously the reverse, we are simply seeing an exchange of methods of elite control from repressive tolerance (tolerant in the cultural realm with “wokeness” under the Democrats) to tolerant (“promotion” of free speech, no censorship) repression under the Republicans. Under conditions of advanced technological global capitalism and oligarchy, only the methods of control change, not the reality of repression. Free elections of masters.
• The exertion of power and control always revolves around methods of manipulating people’s fear of death, whether that is through authority, propaganda, or coercion. It takes many forms – war, weapons, money, police, disease (Covid-19), etc. Threats explicit and implicit.
• Contrary to much reporting that Israel is the tail wagging the U.S. dog, it is the U.S. dog that wags Israel as its client state, doing what is best for both – control of the Middle East. Control of the Middle East’s oil supplies and travel routes has been key to American foreign policy for a very long time.
• There is no deep state unless one understands that the U.S. government, which is an obvious and open warfare state, is the “deep” state in all its shallowness and serves the interests of those who own the country.
• The CIA’s public assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, sixty-one years ago to the day as I write, is the paradigmatic example of how the power elite uses its ultimate weapon of coercion. Death in the public square for everybody to see together with the spreading of fear with all its real and symbolic repercussions.
• The mass acceptance and use of the cell phone by the public has exponentially facilitated the national security state’s surveillance and mind control. People now carry unfreedom in their pockets as “the land of the free” has become a portable cage with solitude and privacy banished. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? the 1930s popular radio show’s “Shadow” once asked – now the phone knows and it is shadowing those who carry it.
• The power of art and the artist to counter and refuse the prevailing power structure has been radically compromised as alienation has been swallowed by technology and dissent neutralized as both have become normalized. The rebel has become the robot, giving what the system’s programmers want – one dimensional happy talk.
• Silence has been banished as ears have been stuffed with what Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 called seashells (earbuds). Perpetual noise and screen-watching and being watched have replaced thought in a technopoly. Musing as you walk and dawdle is an antique practice now. Smile for the camera.
• The U.S. wars against Russia, China, and the Palestinians have been waged for more than a century. Like the slaughtered native peoples, American black slaves, the Vietnamese, Iraqis, and so many others around the world, these people have been considered less than human and in need of elimination. There is no end in sight for any of this to change. It is the American Way.
• The pathology of technophilia is connected to the quantification of everything and the transhumanist goal of making people into dead and inert things like the consumer products that are constantly dangled before their eyes as the next best secret to happiness. I have asked myself if this is true and the answer that came back is that it is a moot point with the margin of error being +/- 11.000461 %.
• Then there is the fundamental matter of consciousness in a materialist society. When people are conditioned into a collective mental habit of seeing the outside world as a collection of things, all outsides and no insides, contrary to seeing images with interiors, as Owen Barfield has written in History, Guilt and Habit, they are worshiping idols and feel imprisoned but don’t know why. This is our spiritual crisis today. What William Blake called the mind-forg’d manacles. Those manacles have primarily been imposed on people through a vast tapestry of lies and propaganda directed by the oligarchs through their mass media mouthpieces. Jim Garrison, the former District Attorney of New Orleans who brought the only trial in JFK’s assassination, called it “the doll’s house” in which most Americans live and “into which America gradually has been converted, [where] a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.” There are signs that some people are awakening to this fact, with the emphasis on “some.” It will take the use of all the sociological and spiritual imagination we can muster to get most people of all political persuasions to recognize the trap they are in. Barfield writes: “It sounds as if it ought to be easy enough, where the prison in question is not made of steel and concrete, but only a mental habit. But it is not. Remember it is not just my mental habit, or your mental habit. It is our mental habit. . . . [a] collective mental habit, which is a very different matter.”
But I am getting wordy and drifting from Mills’ advice to create lucid summations, some of which I have listed above.
So let me just quote a few true words from Pete Seeger:
We’re — waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on
Bad advice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Former Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz on Thursday withdrew from consideration to lead the U.S. Justice Department under the incoming Trump administration, saying in a social media post that his “confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction.” Gaetz, who lasted just a week as President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general pick, didn’t mention that his nomination was facing close…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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’…
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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.